Charles Cornish-Dale

Charles Cornish-Dale runs the X account Raw Egg Nationalist (@Babygravy9).

Saturday

Charles Cornish-Dale

The ‘paranoid style’ is back in American politics

From our US edition

Scarcely had the last warmth drained from Charlie Kirk’s body than the theories began to take shape. It wasn’t a leftist killing, as common sense and all the recent evidence would tell us: it was something else entirely. In the 11 months since, an entire Charlie Kirk-truth industry has sprung up; a whole ecosystem of podcasters, armchair theorists, exaggerators, suspicious and conspiratorial fantasists, all trading in tendentious, half-baked, outlandish fairy tales about how and why the most important young conservative in America was murdered in cold blood. With freedom and the march of progress, anger and resentment don’t diminish.

paranoia

Saturday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Why Anthony Bourdain’s shows leave a bitter taste

From our US edition

The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, never knew of Anthony Bourdain, I’d guess, but he understood his type well. Bourdain, who died in 2018, was an oversocialized leftist. A man who, to avoid a deep sense of guilt and worthlessness, overidentified with the system and presented conformity with its values as a kind of rebellion. That might sound complicated, but it’s really not. “Generally speaking,” Kaczynski once wrote, “the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.

bourdain

Wednesday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Death of a looksmaxxer

From our US edition

Is the looksmaxxer a morality tale for our time – a sort of Hogarthian parable about everything, or at least some of the main things, that ail us as a society in 2026? After all, could there be a greater indictment of the vanity of the vainest society in history than a young man who devotes his entire waking life to improving his appearance, and not only that, documents every second on camera for a legion of adoring fans and imitators? An otherwise perfectly handsome, fortunate young man obsessing so much over his looks that he spends a portion of each day hitting his face with a small rock hammer.  The modern individual is concerned with optimizing himself without limits, without any goal beyond optimization itself There are other, darker, interpretations of looksmaxxing.

Clavicular

Tuesday

Charles Cornish-Dale

France’s hidden immigration reality

From our US edition

A people was there, stable, occupying the same territory for fifteen or twenty centuries. And suddenly, very quickly, in one or two generations, one or more other peoples substitute themselves for it. It is replaced, it is no longer itself. Those are the words of Renaud Camus, France’s most controversial living intellectual. They describe a process he’s called “the Great Replacement.” He coined the term in 2010. Since then, the term has been bitterly disputed. Now, though, it’s becoming harder and harder to deny.

immigration
antidepressants
Charles Cornish-Dale

Are antidepressants making Americans violent?

From our US edition

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered Columbine High School in Colorado, armed to the teeth, and set about murdering their fellow classmates and teachers. When the shooting was over, 12 children and one teacher lay dead. Harris and Klebold were dead, too, and 20 others were wounded. Within a little over a week of the atrocity, there was already speculation that psychotropic drugs might have been a factor, specifically the powerful and relatively new antidepressant Luvox (fluvoxamine), which Harris was known to have been taking. Fluvoxamine is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), a class of antidepressant medication that was first trialed in the 1970s and then brought to market in  the US in the late 1980s.

Friday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Could too little cholesterol be the cause of autism and ADHD?

From our US edition

In September last year, shares in Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, plunged when Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the results of an investigation into the environmental causes of autism. One of the causes discovered, RFK Jr. said, was Tylenol use by pregnant women. Studies positing a link had already been used in lawsuits by hundreds of parents who believed acetaminophen – the drug’s medical name – had caused their children to develop autism or ADHD. Now, Kennedy said, the FDA had even more robust data to support that link. Kenvue has since lobbied the FDA to prevent new warnings about the risk of using Tylenol during pregnancy from being added to its product.

Tuesday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Iran is winning the meme war

From our US edition

The opening strikes on Iran forced the country’s military to operate without a centralized command structure. Despite this enormous setback, something like a unified approach has emerged, and nowhere is that more evident than on social media.  Iran’s embassies have become meme factories, centers of information warfare churning out images and videos designed to do just one thing: mock the US and Israel and, in particular, Donald Trump. Courtesy of Iran’s overseas missions, we’ve now seen Donald Trump as a minion from Despicable Me; a Lego man fleeing a Lego Jeffrey Epstein; and a Pirate of the Caribbean trying, and failing, to hijack the Strait of Hormuz.

Saturday

Charles Cornish-Dale

The peptides market is exploding – but are they safe?

From our US edition

Two weeks before the 2024 presidential election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeted that “the FDA’s war on public health is about to end.” He then listed a host of treatments, all of which he claimed had been “aggressively suppressed” by a corrupt Big Pharma system. Two Ps – psychedelics and peptides – featured on that list of treatments, one more familiar than the other. You could be forgiven for thinking that peptides are a recent creation but they’re not. They’ve been around for a long time, but they’ve gained huge attention due to Wegovy and Ozempic.

peptides

Thursday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Jeffrey Epstein’s testosterone problem

From our US edition

Jeffrey Epstein was a sick man. That’s hardly news. But a new dimension has been added to our understanding of him by the latest batch of files released by the Department of Justice. Physically, not just mentally and morally, Jeffrey Epstein was very, very unwell. For the better part of a decade, despite having billions of dollars and access to some of the world’s greatest practitioners of medicine, Epstein’s health only got worse. We can now follow his physical decline in depth – via emails and text messages, magazine clippings, scientific reports and website articles he saved – which is exactly what a number of internet sleuths have been doing.

Friday

Charles Cornish-Dale

‘Corporate agriculture’ is wrong about cows and methane

From our US edition

In the 1960s, scientists discovered that halogenated compounds such as chloroform and bromochloromethane could inhibit methane-generating microorganisms, also known as methanogens. This was important because agricultural scientists were trying to make livestock farming more efficient. Ruminants (cows, sheep, goats, deer, giraffes) produce the gas methane when they digest plant matter. Scientists reckoned between 2 and 12 percent of all the energy from feed was being lost as gas. If they could reduce methane production, they could increase yields of meat, milk and other products. In one experiment, feeding chloroform to sheep reduced their methane emissions by between 30 and 50 percent. The results were even more dramatic with bromochloromethane: a reduction of 70 percent.

Tuesday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Why are we so obsessed with Hitler’s penis?

From our US edition

We care about Adolf Hitler’s penis, as a society. Quite a lot, it seems. A British documentary claims, finally, to have solved the mystery of the Nazi leader’s schwanz – was it big or was it small? – and to have proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the famous chant of “Hitler’s only got one ball,” a favorite among British soldiers, wasn’t just an idle insult. The key evidence is genetic: a blood-stained piece of fabric from the Hitler bunker. The documentary filmmakers tested it against a sample from one of Hitler’s closest living relatives to make sure the blood was his. And it was. That meant his genome could be sequenced and then analyzed for genetic clues about his personality, health and, of course, his manhood.

Hitler

Thursday

Charles Cornish-Dale

The Will Stancil Show is art

From our US edition

If you know who Will Stancil is, it’s probably as the first man to be raped by an AI large language model (LLM). Yes, you read that right. Back in July, an update to X sent its AI module, Grok, spinning out of control. “We have improved Grok considerably,” Elon Musk proudly told the world.  “You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions.” And what a difference. Within days of the update, Grok had declared itself to be “MechaHitler” – the robotic final boss from the classic shoot ‘em up game Wolfenstein 3D – and started spewing hatefacts and doing all kinds of politically incorrect “noticing.

will stancil show

Tuesday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Is ‘carbon butter’ really good for us?

From our US edition

All butter is made from carbon, but not all butter is carbon butter. This is the name being given to a new environmentally friendly, 100 percent ethical lab-made food product. There’s not an udder, churn or milkmaid in sight. Carbon butter is yet another one of those foods of the future we’re told about, with wide-eyed, breathless enthusiasm, that will transform the way we eat as well as our health, save the planet and make sure there are enough calories to go round when the world hits a population of 10 billion, at some point in the next decade or two. A few years ago, it was cockroach milk – four times more nutritious than cow’s milk, said Bloomberg, excitedly – plant-based meat and “cultured oil.” Now, it’s the turn of carbon butter.

butter

Wednesday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Whatever happened to the Panther Den Show?

From our US edition

“The laughter of children is like the blossoming of a flower,” wrote French poet Charles Baudelaire. “It is the joy of receiving, the joy of breathing, the joy of opening out, the joy of contemplation, of living, of growing. It is the joy of a plant.” Conservatives and most right-wingers have a hard time understanding laughter, I’d vouch, especially the laughter of children – by which I mean the laughter of zoomers and their even younger peers, Generation Alpha. But laughter is an increasingly powerful political tool, one that has the ability to mobilize the young even as it confounds and confuses older generations. Today’s conservative establishment ignores laughter at its peril. Laughter is a vital force propelling the right to new success. Just look at Donald Trump.

panther den

Saturday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Who is Katherine Long?

From our US edition

Marko Elez. If that name means anything, you might spend a little too much time on the internet. Elez is a whizz kid at DoGE, the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, which is currently taking a flamethrower/bazooka/heavy weapon of your choice to whole departments of the federal government. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth from politicians, journalists and common-garden liberals everywhere. On Thursday, a Wall Street Journal article uncovered some embarrassing tweets Elez had made on an anonymous account, and he was forced to resign his post. What Elez said was no doubt offensive to some — “I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity,” “normalize Indian hate” — but isn’t that always the way?

elez

Thursday

Charles Cornish-Dale

How to turn eggnog into a superfood

Recently, scientists were baffled by the discovery that ice cream is a superfood. Yes, that’s right, people who eat ice cream tend to be healthier than those who don’t. A lot healthier. It’s ‘nutrition science’s most preposterous result’, according to the Atlantic. In fact, there’s nothing preposterous about it, if you actually know anything about the ingredients that go into ice cream. You’ve got high-quality milk protein and fat, sugars and a whole lot of vitamins and minerals. The fats make the protein and the vitamins and minerals more bioavailable – meaning you can absorb more – and they slow the digestion of the sugars, so you don’t get a massive sugar spike, just a gentle release of energy. The same could be said of eggnog.