Elon Musk @elonmusk, "My biggest concern is that if there is a clean sweep by Democrats of the House, Senate and Presidency in 2028, they will: 1. Make DC and Puerto Rico states to gain a strong majority in the Senate. 2. Open the borders and legalize everyone living in America illegally to cement a permanent majority. 3. Increase the size of the Supreme Court to gain an immediate majority. This would result in America becoming a permanent one-party state and the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word. All that is needed to ensure this doesn’t happen is 51 Republican senators in 2029. That is why you should vote for Republican senators this election. Other reasons are irrelevant compared to this one."
Data collected by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and Old Dominion University in September 2026 showed that the volume of hypoxia —waters with less than 2 mg/l of oxygen— was larger than average that month. Out of 42 sampling years, only two yielded higher hypoxic volume in September.
Observed hypoxia was confined to Maryland, but the timing of sampling notably impacted the results. Maryland waters were sampled before a passing Nor’easter. Virginia waters were sampled afterwards when waters were mixed and temperatures decreased.
September had 0.30 cubic miles of anoxia—waters with less than 0.2 mg/l of oxygen, which was slightly more than was observed in August, and three and a half times the September historical average.
I can't really think of anything unusual in late August and September that could have increased the hypoxia, but the answer is almost certainly weather related, by then, most of the nutrients to the bay had already been delivered.
But, if you squinch your eyes and look at curves in the graph above, they're not nice sinusoidal humps, but look like there are "side humps" on the spring and fall sides on all three of the long term lines.
Since this data was taken, we've had another near miss from a nor'easter, with extremely strong winds, and high tides. I assume that whatever remaining hypoxia has been mixed away.
Will Smiley never set out to grow oysters anyone would order off a menu. For years, the resident ecologist at The Tides Inn worked Carter’s Creek in Irvington with a different aim entirely—using oysters as machinery rather than food, seeding them reef by reef to strain the water and coax a tired stretch of the Chesapeake back to life.
The turnaround was years in the making. After a teaching career at Christ Church School, where he developed a marine science curriculum and was the sustainability coordinator, he joined The Tides Inn and took on the resort’s 2021 Shoreline Restoration Project—a Tang family vision he helped steward—which has turned the creek into a genuine comeback story. The proof shows up in the water itself: Widgeon grass reappeared, and a creek that was once mud and stillness now runs clear.
Smiley is quick to explain why that matters so much. When European colonists arrived in the 1600s, the Chesapeake held somewhere between tens and hundreds of billions of oysters, piled into reefs so vast they broke the surface and menaced passing ships—Capt. John Smith described navigational hazards where there should have been open water. At that density, the oysters filtered the Bay’s entire volume in roughly three days. Then came the reckoning: Centuries of mechanical dredging, overfishing, disease like Dermo and MSX, and fouling water pulled the population down to something under one to three percent of its pre-colonial abundance. The great multilayered reefs are mostly gone, and the oysters that remain need far longer to do the same work.
The Widgeon Oyster is a bit smaller than a typical oyster
on the half shell. The crop served at The Tides Inn
is about 2 years old. Photo courtesy of The Tides Inn
Clean water is exactly what made oysters in Carter’s Creek possible, specifically the inn’s own varietal: the Widgeon Oyster. It’s the first batch Smiley has grown to be eaten rather than deployed—raised at a site near the mouth of the creek and shucked to order only at Salt & Meadow, the resort’s waterfront restaurant.
For Managing Director Edward Villafane, the oyster is the moment two separate missions finally land on a single plate. “Our Shoreline Restoration Project was never just about restoring our waterfront, but also about honoring the legacy of the Chesapeake Bay and the local watermen who have sustained it for generations,” Villafane says. “With the Widgeon Oyster, we are thrilled to offer our guests a truly unique, hyper-local culinary experience where every bite directly connects to our ongoing mission of ecological restoration and regenerative hospitality.”
What sets the Widgeon apart was never the species. The eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica, is a single animal that ranges the length of the Atlantic seaboard—biologically identical whether it’s pulled off Maine, the Chesapeake, or the Gulf beyond Florida. What changes is the water. Oyster people borrow a term from wine and call it merroir: the way a particular patch of bottom writes itself into the flavor. A saltier reach of the Bay turns a shell sharply briny, while the same animal farther north can come up sweet; grow one beside a marsh and it picks up an earthy note, raise it off a rocky shoreline and the finish leans mineral. It’s why the Bay’s hundreds of aquaculture farms each bottle a different place—from Shooting Points to Pleasure House and now the Widgeon—and why the Widgeon tastes the way it does: There is nowhere else it could have come from.
So, no, I didn't miss anything. The "Widgeon" Oyster is just a plain old Eastern Oyster grown by aquaculture in a particular creek, and harvested and consumed smaller than the law requires wild harvested oysters to be, a rule that was instituted to protect the oysters (some), back in the bad old days of oyster mining. Do oysters from different areas taste and smell different? Probably, but I don't claim a trained palate to discern the difference. As with beer, my favorite oysters are free. I used to be able to get them occasionally as a perk of my job.
PJM's Matt Margolis sees Trump Made Democrats Look Stupid Again, over the new helipad he had built to keep Biden's helicopters from burning the White House lawn. "It was also obviously necessary, just like the White House ballroom project was necessary and even wanted by previous administrations. Democrats chose knee-jerk opposition anyway, because opposing Trump is the only move they have left, even when he's right."
Elon Musk@elonmusk, "The NGOs end up increasing the number of homeless people they manage, because that’s the only way to increase their revenue! Incentives drive outcomes. “Homeless” is a propaganda word used to describe people on the street who are mentally ill or severely addicted to drugs. The word implies that this is someone who fell a little behind on their mortgage payment and they’re one job offer away from getting back on their feet, which is obviously false if you’ve ever tried talking to a “homeless” person in SF, LA, NY, Austin or anywhere else. The honest reality is that we need to bring back asylums for extreme mental illness or drug addiction for those who are a serious danger to themselves or others." Quote Arthur MacWaters @ArthurMacwaters, "Incentives determine outcomes If you give an NGO a certain number of dollars per homeless person, they will never solve homelessness." When India put a bounty on cobras, Indians started cobra farming.
Sister Toldja at RedState sees a Plot Twist: A Surprising Source Defends Vance After Schumer Attacks Him Over Obamacare Fraud News. WaPoo ed board, JD Vance is not ripping away anyone’s health insurance coverage "All 760,000 of the ACA plans that were canceled this week met five criteria. ... First, none of the accounts had a Social Security number or an immigration identification number. Second, all of the accounts had premiums covered 100 percent by taxpayers. That makes it easier for fraudsters to sign up unknowing enrollees, who don’t see money leave their bank accounts. Third, the plans had not been used. No claims had been filed. And finally, the insurer offering the plan never had contact with the enrolled individual."
At the Chronic, Mark Judge remembers how Elena Kagan Predicted Why We Would Hate the Media "A main reason why we hate the media so much, and the reason they have earned that ire, is rooted in New York Times vs. Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court decision that held that media companies cannot be found guilty for anything they report unless there is evidence of “actual malice” on their part. In 1993, a University of Chicago law professor named Elena Kagan wrote an academic article for the Chicago Law Review that perceptively examined the reality of the new post-Sullivan press freedom:" It may be a particular gripe of his, but there are plenty more reasons to hate the media.
.jpg)