The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The next Carrington Event would hit a very different world New calculations show a major solar storm could trigger cascading failures across GPS, communications, and navigation. A NASA image of a solar flare. As 2025 comes to a close, the conversation about collapse — when it might happen and what might be the trigger — seems to be heating up. Some say the “climate crisis” will push us over the edge. Others argue that supply chains, economics, and politics are bigger threats. You know who doesn’t care about these minuscule debates? The sun. A  new scientific paper , which has yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests a major solar storm could disable Earth’s satellite infrastructure and push the globe into a major crisis in less than three days. That margin has narrowed dramatically in recent years, the researchers say. In 2018, when roughly 4,000 satellites occupied low-Earth orbit, operators would have had months to maneuver and prevent cascading collisions if they lost control. T...

  Cognitive Collapse: A First Reconnaissance As most of my readers know by now, when there are five Wednesdays in a month, it’s up to the readers to suggest and then vote on the theme for the post I put up on the final Wednesday. Sometimes most of my readers vote for a single theme, sometimes there’s a quiet little contest among an assortment of themes. Then there was this month, where three topics broke from the pack early on, a lot of people who rarely or never vote in these contests flung themselves into the fray, and all three of the leading topics got more votes than most winning topics do. Since I have the best as well as the most eccentric commentariat on the internet, I decided promptly enough that the only sensible thing to do was to do posts on all three. This week’s post, accordingly, is on the topic that nosed ahead in the final days of the contest and won the contest. Some weeks ago, in the course of the ongoing discussion of Situationism on this blog, I noted that the...