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Gardening is often pitched as a relaxing, therapeutic activity—and it is relaxing and therapeutic! But it’s also a sign of how advanced society has become that we can regard growing food as a charming hobby instead of an absolute necessity. On the one hand, that’s a clear sign of mankind’s mastery over the world. On the other, it’s left us remarkably dependent on a system of farming and delivery logistics that has been shown to be distressingly fragile.

Anyone who has ever successfully grown a tomato plant in their backyard has wondered if they could go “off-grid,” grow their own food, and be done with their local supermarket. The answer is yes, but that’s the wrong question. The question isn’t whether it’s possible—the question is how. It’s all about the logistics: How much space do you need to grow enough crops to feed you and your family?

“The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society… The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.” 

— Thomas Jefferson in his 1813 letter to John Adams

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We’ve all heard of the five tastes our tongues can detect—sweet, sour, bitter, savory-umami, and salty. But the real number is actually six, because we have two separate salt-taste systems. One of them detects the attractive, relatively low levels of salt that make potato chips taste delicious. The other one registers high levels of salt—enough to make overly salted food offensive and deter overconsumption.

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English- speakers now tend to associate words drawn from Germanic roots with the ordinary and everyday, not the theoretical and academic, however technical their original usage might have been. Trying to use them as scientific vocabulary sounds folksy and quaint, so earthlore was never likely to catch on. Perhaps the most familiar form of lore, folklore, was coined in 1846 deliberately to evoke these associations: the word’s inventor wanted what he called a ‘good Saxon compound’ to describe the oral traditions of ‘the People’. Ironically, that’s not what lore would have implied to an Anglo-Saxon at all. The lore/ology distinction follows this well-established pattern: lore suggests oral, not written; anecdotal, not source-based; intuitive, not scientific. Where two bodies of knowledge about the same topic co-exist, the distinction can be a useful one. Think for instance of the difference between meteorology and weather-lore, the scientific study of weather versus knowledge about the subject gathered through experience and passed down through tradition. Information in the category of weather-lore might not meet scientific standards for verifiability, but may still have a cultural value that makes it worth transmitting.

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Another indicator that the worm is turning.

U.S. Department of Energy issued a final rule effective November 30, 2020, that will once again permit American households to purchase dishwashers that actually clean dishes, as they had done for most of the machine’s 130 year history.

The October 30 final rule does not force anyone to change their currently installed dishwasher. And new machines will not be available for this year’s Thanksgiving meal, as future rulemaking is contemplated and manufacturers must produce the new class of machine. But the Department of Energy is giving consumers the choice to buy dishwashers that clean again while using less energy and less water.

Some might think it crazy that the federal government regulates dishwashers?

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They just don’t get it….

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Not long ago, people could only dream of the foods we have today. Tasty, cheap, and ready to eat. They last forever, look great, and come in endless varieties. Ultra-processed foods are a dream come true.

I make it a general policy not to buy products that contain ingredients I can’t pronounce.

“In fact, this is the pattern we see in foreign policy. They never think about what comes next or they just assume what they want will happen as if by magic. The West’s handling of the Ukraine war has been a case study in this form of one-dimensional chess. They dream up a narrative, make the first move and then assume the rest follows. When it fails, they dream up a new narrative. This may be what we are seeing here with Biden. They just assume he steps aside.”

— ZMan

We have all observed this sort of process on the part of progressives: “I will do what I want to do and it will have the exact effect I desire it to have, no more and no less.” And it never works and they’re always So Surprised.

The Economist.

Twelve European countries plan to phase fossil fuels out of the heating of buildings, and air-source heat pumps have emerged as the best alternative. These extract ambient heat from the outside air, even when it is below freezing, and concentrate it to warm inside spaces. Heat pumps are far more efficient than boilers, in terms of the amount of energy used per unit of heat generated. Lately, however, they have become a symbol of the obstacles that await as countries try to decarbonise. Until recently, green policies had seldom required private citizens to roll up their sleeves and make big, disruptive changes to their lives. Now they are starting to, and many people do not like it.

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Does this sound familiar? You can’t focus. You’re bored one minute, overwhelmed the next, and stressed either way. You make mistakes you shouldn’t and then dwell on them for hours. When you try to be productive, you can’t go five minutes without checking your texts, dreading some future engagement, or walking into another room to check on … something. (What was it again?)

Neuroscientist Amishi Jha opens her book, Peak Mind, with this vignette to illustrate an important truth: You’re not alone. Most people can’t go three minutes at work without being interrupted by a chatty colleague, and students cite the allure of social media and other digital distractions as a major disruptor to their studies.

“I’ve seen certain universal patterns in the way all of our brains function — both how powerfully they can focus, and how extraordinarily vulnerable they are to distraction — no matter who you are or what you do,” Jha writes.

New York Times.

Videos on TikTok with the #foodtok hashtag have been viewed more than 64 billion times. But cooking videos are not only an unavoidable part of being online — they’ve also infiltrated physical spaces. TikTok-esque cooking videos air on large vertical screens on New York City subways and on iPad-size displays in the back of cabs, in the lobby of the Department of Motor Vehicles and the waiting room at the doctor’s office. They are everywhere.

And not just Tik Tok–cooking videos are thick on the ground on YouTube, and for people who are interested in cooking (and, in some cases, to lazy to, you know, actually cook, like me) they are an endless source of fascination.

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Conservative commentator and filmmaker Robby Starbuck conducted an intensive three-week investigation into Tractor Supply, revealing and sharing on X how the US retailer, known for selling farm goods to rural Americans (mainly freedom-loving Republicans), has been donating to woke radical leftist causes that do not resonate with its customer base. The retailer, in response, abruptly scrapped its climate targets and diversity, equity, and inclusion fantasies late Thursday, preventing itself from getting ‘Bud Light’d’ by its customer base.

The Atlantic.

These days, every trip to the grocery store makes me second-guess myself. Lined up next to the bottles of basics such as canola, vegetable, and corn oil are relatively exotic—and expensive—options: grapeseed oil, pumpkin-seed oil, walnut oil. Some are labeled with technical-sounding terms such as “high-oleic,” “cold-pressed,” and “expeller-pressed.” There’s “hexane-free” coconut oil and “naturally refined” avocado oil—if you can make any sense of what these labels mean. Picking an olive oil alone is like trying to plan a European vacation: Greece, Italy, or Spain? Or how about a Mediterranean blend?

Peggy Noonan remembers that she was once a Republican.

I suppose this is about being an honorable combatant in the middle of a culture war, which entails seeing the humanity of your perceived foe and, in the seeing of it, preserving your own.

The story, which you’ve already heard, is that a left-wing activist who calls herself an “advocacy journalist” went to the June 3 dinner of the Supreme Court Historical Society, a 50-year-old organization whose declared mission is to unearth and preserve the court’s history. During what appears to have been the drinks portion of the evening the activist, called Lauren Windsor, secretly taped private conversations with Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann. Ms. Windsor dishonestly presented herself as a conservative Christian. She goaded and baited the Alitos, hoping to get them to say extreme and stupid things, which she would later disseminate on social media.

The Foundry.

Let the spin begin!

UPDATE: Trump vs. Biden: 4 Highlights From the First Presidential Debate (The Foundry)

UPDATE: Joe Biden Mumbles and Stumbles the Democrats Into Crisis (Daily Beast)

UPDATE: Biden makes stunning omission while claiming no troops died ‘anywhere in the world’ on his watch (Fox News)

UPDATE: WATCH: Biden Malfunctions, Claims He ‘Beat Medicare’ (Washington Free Beacon)

UPDATE: CNN PANIC: Biden was ‘Dismal,’ ‘Not Coherent,’ Dems Want New Candidate (Newsbusters)

UPDATE: Dems freak out over Biden’s debate performance: ‘Biden is toast’  (Politico)

UPDATE: MSNBC’s JOY REID PANICS: Biden ‘Extremely Feeble’, ‘Weak’, Had One Job (Newsbusters)

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Legislation, mostly. A lot of it winds up on fashion runways. And don’t get me started on Hollywood….

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From the way the barbs were wrapped around and woven through the horizontal strands, the ranchers could tell at a glance if the land and animals enclosed within belonged to them — I call them “signature barbs” — sort of like a premodern QR code.

When people started settling the Great Plains, there was nothing out here but millions of buffalo and some scattered Indians. There were no land divisions, no fences, no houses, no roads, no towns…. Moreover, since the land was so inhospitable, most people were intent on going further westward — even to the coast.

The first barbed wire was invented in 1867 by Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio, which is 32 miles from my home in Osnaburg, Ohio. That changed everything. Wooden fences were vastly more expensive (there were very few trees out here then), difficult to install, and hard to maintain — plus they weren’t as effective as barbed wire. So the barbed wire fences started to impose some order on the Great Plains.

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The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, better known as Project 2025, is the effort of a broad coalition of more than 100 conservative organizations working together to ensure a successful new presidential administration begins Jan. 20.

Project 2025, spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation, seeks to restore democracy, to loosen it from the grip of the political elites in Washington, D.C.

But the fiercest attackers of Project 2025 are lining up to protect the deep state. In recent months, the project has faced outlandish, hyperbolic attacks.

UPDATE: TRUMP ALLIES’ 920 PAGE PLAN TO GIVE TRUMP MORE POWER OVER YOUR DAILY LIFE, GUT DEMOCRATIC CHECKS AND BALANCES, AND CONSOLIDATE POWER IN THE OVAL OFFICE.

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“Once you really know how to diagram a sentence really know it, you know practically all you have to know about English grammar”, Gertrude Stein once claimed. “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. . . . I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves.” While one student’s lexical excitement is surely another’s slow death by gerund, Stein cuts to the heart of the grammatical pull. Is grammar prescriptive and conventional, something one learns to impose on language through trial and error? Or do sentences, in a sense, diagram themselves, revealing an innate logic and latent structure in language and the mind? More than a century before Noam Chomsky popularized the idea of a universal grammar, linguists in the United States began diagramming sentences in an attempt to visualize the complex structure — of seemingly divine origins — at their mother tongue’s core.

I remember diagramming sentences in elementary school – I could probably still do it if I had to (although I would need to stifle the impulse to put it in Backus-Naur format).

Commonweal.

Maybe parking really does explain the world.

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Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. The speakers of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, for example, use the same word hunden, meaning “the dog,” to communicate that the dog is in the house or that someone found the dog or gave food to the dog. In Icelandic, on the other hand, three different word forms would be used in these situations, corresponding to the nominative, accusative, and dative case respectively: hundurinn, hundinn, and hundinum.

Icelandic is essentially Old Norse–Icelanders can read sagas from around 1000 AD with no difficulty–thus illustrating the surprising fact that languages on the fringes of a linguistic area tend to retain archaic features. The French spoken in Quebec is closer to the French of the 17th century than modern French, as the English spoken in Appalachia is closer to the English of the 17th century than modern British English.

Steve Graham.

Why was I too blind to see this? Apparently, the Global Jewish Conspiracy is stealing elections from liberals now.

Isn’t this the same Global Jewish Conspiracy that makes about 90% of American Jews vote for liberals? It sounds like someone forgot the mission statement.

Sarah Hoyt is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Lately I’ve become an awful old woman. My reaction, during the con, to the little card hotels leave in your bathroom, in the hopes that you’ll save them laundry money — you know the one that says that if you want to help save the Earth or the Environment (I don’t remember which, precisely, these pagan divinities all run together in my head) you’ll hang up your towel and use it another day — was to sigh and say: Deary, the Earth has been here for billions of years before I was born. It will be here for billions of years before my very atoms have been dispersed in its general Earthness. I can’t save it. There isn’t a tupperware large enough. And besides where would I put it? Who would dust it?

In the event, the only audience for my musings was my husband who consented to chuckle at it, as he went on. And we didn’t hang up the towels. We might have, had they made a sensible business appeal “if you save us money, we’ll be able to keep our prices lower” but we’re not at home to religious pandering to religions not our own. As far as I’m concerned they might as well ask me not to use electricity so as to spare the feelings of Zeus, god of thunderbolt.

So, yes, you see, I have become an awful woman. Or if you prefer, I’ve become a fool or a sadist in Heinlein’s definition of such: Someone who tells the truth in social situations.

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In the middle of a war, Israel’s government is wobbling. Not because of the policy failures that led to the country’s worst disaster ever when Hamas invaded on October 7, 2023; not because of the slow progress of the war, its high human cost or its failure to recover the hostages; not even because of the looming threat of a major escalation in northern Israel and Lebanon. No, the threat to the stability of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition comes from within, after the Supreme Court ruled that the government must start drafting Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) men into the Israeli Defense Forces.

In 1948, as the newly-formed state of Israel fought for its independence against the invading armies of its Arab neighbors, David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, made a fateful decision: the 400 Haredi men studying in religious seminaries would be exempt from military service. Seen by many as a dying relic of an old world, these few dozen students would be permitted to duck the draft and devote themselves to the full-time study of the Talmud.

Today, there are 63,000 young Haredi men who, were it not for Ben-Gurion’s decision, would be eligible to be drafted. Many of these men are effectively stuck studying, unable to join the workforce because leaving the seminary before the military exemption age of twenty-five would mean they’re obliged to join the IDF. Others, possibly thousands, are fraudulently claiming to be studying while they work “off the books” and avoid service.

Power Line.

Today the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals decided Cajune v. Independent School District 194. That school district is immediately adjacent to the one where my kids went to school, and plaintiffs were represented by the Upper Midwest Law Center, on whose board I serve and which has often (albeit wrongly) been described as an “arm” of the policy organization that I run. Briefly, plaintiffs claimed that the school district engaged in viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment when it posted “Black Lives Matter” posters in classrooms, but refused a request to also post “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” posters.

The 8th Circuit reversed the trial court’s Rule 12 dismissal of plaintiffs’ case, and remanded the case for further proceedings. So plaintiffs haven’t won yet. The school district’s principal defense is the “government speech doctrine,” which seems to post-date my law school training. The government speech doctrine holds that a governmental unit can engage in endless propaganda, as long as it is speaking on its own behalf. The remedy is at the ballot box.

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China stands accused of wholesale theft of intellectual property, cited in Senate, House, and Administration reports, at a cost estimated by the FBI at $225 to $600 billion a year. Nonetheless, American corporations with the most to lose from IP theft are eager to augment their research presence in China. Take for example Intel Corp’s new chip innovation center here in Shenzhen, or Big Pharma, which lives and dies on patent protection. Nokia, one of the two main Western competitors to China’s telecom giant Huawei, conducts most of its R&D in Shanghai Bell Labs, one of the 10 largest corporate research centers in the country. The Chinese government counts 531 foreign-funded R&D centers in Shanghai alone. US companies spent $8.2 billion on R&D in China in 2019.

A visit to Huawei’s 2,000-acre campus in Shenzhen helps make sense of this cognitive dissonance, in which corporate America makes enormous bets on IP in a country that the FBI claims is stealing IP from them. The simple answer is that Chinese R&D is very good and getting better fast. More critically, Chinese IP theft isn’t simply a matter of this or that technological advancement. It’s much deeper and broader than that: it’s about claiming and replicating the source of innovation. China is engaged in what might be termed the boldest act of IP theft in world history, or to borrow a Woke expression, the most egregious act of cultural appropriation ever. It is “stealing” Western high culture.

Politico.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and his wife are moving their family back to Marin County, an exclusive pocket of Northern California with rolling hills and redwood groves that’s across the bay from San Francisco, POLITICO has learned.

The Newsoms will hold onto their six-bedroom property in the eastern Sacramento suburb of Fair Oaks, and the governor and first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom will spend some nights there. But they are relocating their four children back to Marin County, where they will stay with extended family and enroll in school for the fall semester, according to two people familiar with their plans, who were granted anonymity to convey private conversations.

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Gee, I wonder why?

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Intermittent fasting (IF) is currently one of the most popular health and fitness trends. But, as with anything popular, it has its nay-sayers. So, we looked at the science that backs up what these kinds of diets can do and busted some myths in the process.

Orthodox Christians fast every Wednesday and Friday–no meat or animal products (i.e. strict vegan)–and have been doing so for over a thousand years.

Sometimes the old ways are best….

Read it. And watch the video.

I think languages are really interesting but I’m also really bad at them. I cannot hack the memorization. I’ve mostly avoided conlangs (that’s Constructed Languages, like Esperanto or Klingon) because like, oh no, now there’s even more languages for me to fail at memorizing. So like, a language so minimal you can almost learn it by accident, suddenly my ears perk up.

Toki pona is really interesting, on a lot of different axes. It’s a thought experiment in Taoist philosophy that turns out to be actually, practically useful. It’s Esperanto But It Might Actually Work This Time¹. It has NLP implications— it’s a human language which feels natural to speak yet has such a deeply logical structure it seems nearly custom-designed for simple computer programs to read and write it². Beyond all this it’s simply beautiful as an intellectual object— nearly every decision it makes feels deeply right. It solves a seemingly insoluble problem³ and does it with a sense of effortlessness and an implied “LOL” at every step.

So what toki pona is. Toki pona is a language designed around the idea of being as simple as it is possible for a language to be. It has 120 words in its original form (now, at the twenty year mark, up to 123), but you can form a lot of interesting sentences with only around twenty or thirty (I know this because this is roughly the size of my current tok vocabulary).

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In the ninth instalment of an ongoing Quillette series on the history of Canada, Greg Koabel describes how the late 16th-century fur trade developed amid a disrupted Indigenous geopolitical landscape.

Fascinating stuff. Lots of good maps.

UnHerd.

In a short story published in 1955, Isaac Asimov imagined America’s Presidential election day in 2008. Amid intense excitement, the entire world watches on as an ordinary citizen is led forward to cast his vote — the only vote needed in the entire country, since he had been chosen by a supercomputer to be the completely representative citizen that year.

Asimov was inspired by CBS News’s Remington Rand UNIVAC I computer, which correctly predicted a landslide for Eisenhower on election night 1952 after only 3 million votes had been counted and Adlai Stevenson was ahead. It was the first instance of what has become a familiar feature of US elections, to the degree that most people treat the “calling” of the result early in the evening by the networks as the actual outcome of the election.

Asimov’s fantasy was a prophetic reductio ad absurdum of something which has played a steadily increasing role in modern politics: the idea that citizens can be represented by a carefully designed system in which they play no active role. The vogue for citizen juries is an illustration of this, while a number of theorists have gone even further and proposed that actual legislative assemblies should be chosen through some kind of lottery — what is technically termed “sortition”. The processes of voting and elections, on this account, are messy and corruptible: far better to have a system which is genuinely representative of public opinion. And a citizen jury will represent the population better than a committee of elected legislators scrutinising the same material.

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The analogy of mitochondria as powerhouses has expired. Mitochondria are living, dynamic, maternally in- herited, energy-transforming, biosynthetic, and signaling organelles that actively transduce biological infor- mation. We argue that mitochondria are the processor of the cell, and together with the nucleus and other organelles they constitute the mitochondrial information processing system (MIPS). In a three-step process, mitochondria (1) sense and respond to both endogenous and environmental inputs through morphological and functional remodeling; (2) integrate information through dynamic, network-based physical interactions and diffusion mechanisms; and (3) produce output signals that tune the functions of other organelles and sys- temically regulate physiology. This input-to-output transformation allows mitochondria to transduce meta- bolic, biochemical, neuroendocrine, and other local or systemic signals that enhance organismal adaptation. An explicit focus on mitochondrial signal transduction emphasizes the role of communication in mitochon- drial biology. This framework also opens new avenues to understand how mitochondria mediate inter-organ processes underlying human health.

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Just as society today grapples with the implications of AI, ancient philosophers such as Epicurus and Lucretius explored innovation, disruptive technologies, their impact on human life, and the ethical considerations of employing then-new tools in society.

Lucretius’ work not only preserved and clarified Epicurean philosophy, but also delved into the implications of technological advancements. By examining how Lucretius addressed the benefits and risks of new technologies, we can use his thinking to navigate the moral and existential questions posed by modern AI.

There is nothing new under the sun.

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Well, that’s good enough, as far as it goes, and probably a step in the right direction – but I notice that, of the four kids shown in the picture, not one is a white male child. So I’m curious as to what their ‘target demographic’ might be.

When my parents were teens (during the Great Depression, I might point out), high school was widely recognized as the terminal educational institution that most kids would attend, and so it had vocational training like Shop and domestic training like Home Ec to prepare kids to go out and get a job and start a family, which is what most of them were going to do.

By contrast, when I was in high school, it was all about going to college, and if you weren’t headed toward college they didn’t have all that much interest in you. (I remember one class where we were told to come prepared to discuss  five colleges where we intended to apply.)

So that really represents a regression to pre-industrial-revolution times in which  you only went to school if you were going on to university; otherwise, you were on your own.

Naval Gazing.

The basic case for missile defense is quite simple: nuclear weapons aren’t something you want detonating in your country, and shooting them down seems like a good idea. But as appealing as this is, it is usually countered by a pair of counterarguments, that it’s far too hard to shoot down all incoming missiles, and that it would be destabilizing if it was possible. But this relies on the basic premise that any missile defense system which can’t shoot down all missiles is useless, and there’s no reason that would be true unless someone was smuggling it in to defeat missile defense for other reasons. (We’ll come back to that in a bit.) A system which stops 50% of incoming missiles means that only half as many people will die in a nuclear war,1 obviously a desirable result.

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Costco wants to build a new store in Los Angeles’ Baldwin Village neighborhood. The problem with that is the same problem with building anything in California: years’ worth of process and public hearings, as well as the threat of after-the-fact lawsuits. Fortunately for Costco, YIMBYs in California have been chipping away at all this and there are now ways to bypass the legacy review process.’

Note how there is no suggestion that the process might have the wokery accretions that decades of public busybodiness have loaded onto modern life scraped off, or even lightly pruned.

No, no, no! Right-Thinking People must preserve and defend their indefeasible power to stick their noses into everybody else’s business! What’s Wrong With You!?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Sometimes the old ways are best. (Shit, man! Do you want to return to The Fifties!? Goddamned right I do–I lived in The Fifties, and I would rather live there than here.)

Read it. And watch the video.

I’d pay big bucks for a fridge thus equipped.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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The Chinese aren’t exactly being subtle about what they are trying to do. Today, they own more than 300,000 acres of farmland inside the United States, and they have been specifically targeting areas that are located near important military bases. As you will see below, the Chinese now own farmland very close to 19 different U.S. military bases. How in the world could our leaders have allowed this to happen? Foreign adversaries should not be allowed to purchase farmland at all, and yet somehow they have been able to acquire land that is ideal for spying on our military bases over and over again.

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I know that they do something, I’m just not entirely sure what it is, and I don’t really miss them when I run out. Yet I keep buying them, because this what humans that cook do. They buy bay leaves and put them in things.