If you only have time to read one explainer for the current state of global political economy make sure this is the one. You won’t find a more succinct encapsulation for the fulcrum of economic and political forces shaping our contemporary condition in the 21st century.
There are about 18,000 species of wasps in North America. Roughly 20 of them can hurt you.
The wasps people fear are all from one family: Vespidae. They make up less than 1% of wasp species on the continent. They build the visible nests, they defend them aggressively, and they're the ones you remember from a bad encounter.
The other 99% live solitary lives and ignore humans entirely. Many can't sting at all. Many more have stingers but never use them on people because they don't have a nest to defend.
What they do instead is hunt other insects. A single mud dauber stocks her nest with paralyzed spiders, including widows and recluses. A braconid wasp lays eggs in tomato hornworms. An ichneumon wasp parasitizes wood-boring beetles that kill ash trees. A cuckoo wasp infiltrates the nests of other wasps and bees. Some species control aphids; others control caterpillars, beetle grubs, or flies.
Most agricultural pest insects in North America are controlled, in part, by parasitic wasps that almost no human ever sees. There are over 25,000 species of ichneumon wasps alone, and they keep entire orders of insects in check.
The five or so wasp species that ruin a picnic in late August are real. The 17,995 species that are running the pest control infrastructure of an entire continent get almost none.
We Now Have Early Warning Signal Of Ocean Current (AMOC) Collapse
One of the most vital systems of ocean currents - needed to keep life in northern Europe stable - is at risk of collapse. And now we can predict when it’s going to happen.
Credit: Alec Luhn ― New Scientist
You say that post-Floyd DEI training created the policing culture that killed Henry Nowak. This is testable. If you're right, the pattern should begin after 2020. It doesn't.
Christopher Alder, 1998. Falklands veteran. Dragged handcuffed and unconscious into a Hull custody suite. Left face down on the floor. Officers stood around while he choked to death. Ten minutes before anyone helped. Inquest: unlawful killing. Five officers charged. All acquitted.
Sean Rigg, 2008. Schizophrenic man, died at Brixton police station after restraint. Inquest found "unsuitable and unnecessary force" and police failings "more than minimally" contributed to his death.
Robert Edwards, 2011. Died in a Suffolk cell. The IPCC found police "failed to take appropriate care" and didn't carry out proper welfare checks. The coroner said he should never have been deemed fit for detention.
Wayne Couzens, 2015–2021. Reported for indecent exposure in 2015. Kent Police had his name, address, and plate number. The investigating sergeant knew his brother, also a police officer. No action. Failed vetting twice, still became a Met officer. Exposed himself days before murdering Sarah Everard. The investigating officer lied about CCTV. Three forces had twenty years of red flags. Nothing to do with DEI
Post-Floyd, still no DEI involvement: Stephen Reardon, 2023, had seizures in a police van while the officer said he was "playing games". Died. Jerome Cowan, 2022, found unresponsive in a library, officers failed to provide first aid. Died. A man at St Erth, 2022, left drunk and vulnerable outside a railway station on a cold night, officers drove past without stopping. Died. All officers dismissed or facing gross misconduct.
Same pattern every time. A person in distress needs help, officers dismiss it or walk away. It happened in 1998, 2008, 2011, 2022, 2023, and 2025. DEI didn't create it. It predates it by a generation.
You also claim "determined, institutional silence". The Speaker acknowledged the case on 1 June. The Home Secretary called it "a horrifying act" and Digwa's false accusation "an evil act" in an oral statement to the Commons on 2 June. Debated in both Houses. Starmer and Baddenoch clashed over it. Front-page news for a week. There is no silence. You invented it because your baseless argument needs it.
You ask pretentiously what you call a system where a dying teenager's word counts for less than his killer's.
I'd ask you: what do you call a system where Christopher Alder choked to death on a custody floor in 1998 while officers stood around, and twenty-seven years later Henry Nowak bled to death saying the same words?
That is an ideology. But not the one you're describing. It's an institutional ideology of indifference to people in police custody, and it has been killing people for decades.
Blaming a training course that's existed for five years for a rot that's existed for hundreds of years isn't analysis. It's a deflection that protects the actual dangerous ideology.
being a high functioning stoner is WILD because I’m not trying to “escape reality” - I simply want to soften the sharp edges of existing inside a brain that never stops fucking thinking.
Whoever told me the ADHD hack of putting the directions into GPS and leaving it up while you get ready to watch the arrival time, you are a genius and a lifesaver. Actual game changing ADHD advice
2 billion years ago, a nuclear reactor geologically self-assembled and turned itself on.
No humans were involved. Only rock, groundwater, & natural uranium.
It ran intermittently for hundreds of thousands of years.
Here's the story of Oklo (not the company, but the place!):🧵