December 9, 2025

“FISHING”:

For those still harboring any doubts about those high-speed “fishing” boats in the Caribbean.

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green

JUST DON’T MENTION THE WAR:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPACE: This supermassive black hole flung out matter at 134 million mph: ‘On a scale almost too big to imagine.’

Astronomers using XRISM first spotted a brief but intense burst of X-ray radiation erupting from the area around the black hole. A few hours later, XRISM picked up the blast of wind unleashed from the same area racing outward at 134 million miles (216 million kilometers) per hour. XRISM’s instruments measured the speed and structure of the wind and pinpointed its source, while instruments on the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope helped measure the extent of the cosmic storm. Space Research Organization Netherlands astrophysicist Liyi Gu, who is another author of the study, and colleagues say the process that spawned the storm is not much different from the process that causes solar flares and coronal mass ejections from our own sun — just on a gargantuan scale.

“The winds around this black hole seem to have been created as the active galactic nucleus’s tangled magnetic field suddenly ‘untwisted,'” said Guainazzi.

The magnetic field around our sun is a restless thing. It’s constantly in motion, and sometimes its magnetic field lines snap and then reconnect. That violent severing and rejoining kicks off a solar flare, a short burst of radiation from the sun’s surface. The same process often flings a massive glob of plasma (electrically-charged gas particles) out into space.

But the supermassive black hole lurking at the core of NGC 3783 is 30 million times the mass of our humble sun, and the magnetic field writhing around is millions of times stronger, so when its lines snap and reconnect, the resulting flare is an eruption of almost unfathomable power.

Attempt no landings there.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

HOW TO DEFINE ACADEMIC FREEDOM? The UNC system faculty is–get this!–actually thinking through it. I know, I know, professors being professor-y seems old-fashioned these days, but I feel like Americans like it when higher ed sounds like a place where smart people consider things thoughtfully.

Posted at 3:45 pm by Robert Shibley

GAVIN MORTIMER: Yes, Europe’s civilization is being erased.

Last week the Trump administration expressed its fear that Europe faces “civilizational erasure.” Its concern was articulated in a 33-page National Security Strategy that outlined Donald Trump’s world view and how America will respond economically and militarily.

The sentence that caused the most reaction on the other side of the pond was the assertion that, if current trends continue, Europe will be “unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” Those trends are mass immigration and what conservative French commentators call the “Islamification” of Europe. If Europe doesn’t address these trends, the Trump administration predicts the continent’s “civilizational erasure.”

Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul issued a tetchy response to the Security Strategy report, claiming his country does not need “outside advice.” Is he sure about that? Last year the chief of police in Berlin, Barbara Slowik, warned Jews and gays to hide their identity in the city’s “Arab neighborhoods.” In France, Jews have been leaving the country in large numbers: 60,000 between 2000 and 2020, which is more than ten percent of the French Jewish community. Since 2023, acts of anti-Semitism have soared by 300 percent, including the burning of synagogues and the beatings of rabbis.

The “civilizational erasure” is also to a large extent self-inflicted, and it is particularly noticeable at this time of year.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

IT IS TIME FOR US TO DO WHAT WE HAVE BEEN DOING. AND THAT TIME IS EVERY DAY:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

JIM GERAGHTY: Hollywood Only Has Itself to Blame for Industry Woes.

Speaking of superhero blockbusters, we should take a moment to stare in amazement at how Disney has managed to take not one but two of the all-time most popular franchises, a pair of toy- and merchandise-selling golden geese, and run both of them into the ground. There was a time not that long ago — 2019, when Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame was released — when it looked like the Marvel superhero movies and the Star Wars films would make billions, year after year, for the foreseeable future.

Chalk it up to the “M-She-U,” or the retirement of popular characters and actors, or the rapid proliferation of Marvel shows on Disney Plus, but the magic is gone; there’s nowhere near the sense of a Marvel movie being a must-see as there was before the Covid-19 interruption.

Your mileage may vary, but I actually feel like Marvel has enjoyed a comeback in quality this year with Thunderbolts and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. By the standards of other movies, they did okay; Thunderbolts is the 12th highest-grossing movie of 2025 with $190 million in the domestic box office, and Fantastic Four ranks 7th at $274 million. But by the standards of previous Marvel movies, they’re flops.

Star Wars hasn’t released a movie in theaters since before the pandemic. In May, we will get The Mandalorian and Grogu, featuring characters from a Disney Plus television show that was beloved by fans for about two seasons, then bizarrely careened off the rails in its third. Again, your mileage may vary, but the trailer for the forthcoming movie looks astonishingly “meh” for a Star Wars movie.

Finally, this complaint is the most nebulous, but I feel like the entire storytelling culture of Hollywood’s creative class is broken. This tweet from Riley Hale spoke to me:

Hollywood removed the hero’s journey, masculinity, redemption, sacrifice, and beauty standards in 2025, then wondered why global box office fell 18 percent and no film cracked $1 billion. . . . The same industry that spent a decade lecturing audiences on “problematic” tropes now releases 400 movies a year that nobody wants to watch. They didn’t just kill the blockbuster. They sterilized the entire reason humans ever told stories in the first place.

I notice that Amazon’s Reacher was one of the biggest streaming hits of the year, and in a lot of ways, it’s an “old-fashioned” show. A big burly hero, played with a lot of charm by Alan Ritchson, gets ensnared in a mystery and constantly runs into thugs and villains who look at the 6’3”, 240-pound former military police investigator Jack Reacher and think, “Oh yeah, I can take this guy in a fistfight.” As you can imagine, it almost never goes well for them.

So, yes, Hollywood and the movie business have a lot of problems. But one of the biggest and most glaring ones is that they stopped making movies that people enjoy watching.

Marvel and Star Wars at Disney, and Star Trek at Paramount, are reminders of how badly the producers of these originally male-oriented franchises absolutely hate their core audiences with a white-hot passion…

…And then they feign cluelessness when the feeling is mutual:

Click to enlarge.
Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

PEOPLE: WHY IS SCIENCE SO MUCH LESS RESPECTED NOW?

“Science” in Nature: Crip guts, stomas, and the violence of ‘returning to normal’: a feminist queer crip approach to the gut.

Related:

Posted at 12:47 pm by Glenn Reynolds