Read it.

Humans born in 1900 witnessed a startling stream of technologies that transformed their everyday lives and their understanding of the universe. Cars, telephones, and the internet overturned where we lived, how we worked, and whom we knew. Other scientific feats took the breath away by their sheer might—most of all, the atom bomb and a man on the Moon. Whatever else, rapid innovation ensured that the 20th century was never boring.

But those witnesses’ grandchildren have seen comparatively little change, as all that dynamism has devolved into stagnation and repetition. Infinite digital novelty distracts from the lack of progress in the physical world; look up from your phone, and everything is in stasis, or even decay. Energy density, transportation speed, and crop yield have hardly budged in half a century. Scientific productivity has declined, and we haven’t gone to the Moon in decades, let alone Mars. Our culture is worn out, too, hooked on sequels and reboots. Is there a way out of this endless present?

Watch it.

The best advice for the new year.

ZMan:

What the internet reveals is that there is a sizable portion of the population, even in high trust societies, that need rules and a firm hand to have socially productive lives. Left to their own devices, their idle hands start doing the Devil’s work. They find ways to undermine order and make themselves an irritant to the rest of society. It is their nature. … All this is a reminder that there is nothing new under the sun. More precisely, there are no new ideas, just new ways of stating old ideas. One of those old ideas is that human society is only possible with order and order is only possible when it is imposed and enforced, with the general consent, on the portion of the population that needs that order imposed on them the most.

New York Times.

Today, farms are growing saffron in California, Washington, Texas, Pennsylvania and Vermont. Martha Stewart (of course) has saffron planted on her farm in Katonah, N.Y. And the Philipps have sold more than $1 million worth of corms to 24,000 customers.

Saffron’s fragrant, crimson threads have played a key role in many of the world’s great cuisines since ancient times. They add a golden color and subtle bass note to Indian sweets, Moroccan tagines, Spanish paellas, French bouillabaisse and tachin, a classic Iranian rice dish layered with meat and dried fruit. Today, Iran is the largest producer of saffron in the world, but because of trade restrictions, shoppers in the United States will find the spice imported from countries like Spain, India and Afghanistan.

The perfect term for January 3d.

ZMan looks ahead.

One of the challenges with making predictions the last few years was that every year seemed to be wilder than the last. It was tempting to hope that crazy things you want to see happen would happen. This year, it feels like we are headed to a more normal time, but that probably means we see some important things begin to happen, now that the crazies are going into hibernation. This could turn out to be a less dramatic year than 2024, but a much more substantial one.

Every year there is an important topic that is bubbling under the surface, either in the ruling class or amongst the rabble, that suddenly breaks through. In 2024, we moved from “securing the border” to “mass deportation now” as the growing sentiment against immigration of all types finally broke through. The 2025 issue will be the collapsing birth rates around the world. It is a thing that gets discussed in certain circles, but 2025 will be the year it goes mainstream.

We will have to suffer from the usual slop from the commentariat, who will try to make money applying the old slogans to this issue. The public nuisances we call influencers will pollute the waters too. But by the end of the year, the educated debate will settle on the four D’s of human destiny. Diet, Development, Divinity and Deracination will be the focus for what is causing the fertility collapse. The most important issue in the world will suddenly become import…

Astral Codex Ten.

What is the H5N1 bird flu? Will it cause the next big pandemic? If so, how bad would that pandemic be?

Scott Alexander is an Actual Doctor.

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The New York Times just published a “Scientific 7-minute workout” claims:

“In 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort — all of it based on science.”

“Based on science” is a great term, isn’t it? A bit like the “based on a true story” claim we see in many blockbuster movies.  When you read this piece please remember the notion that “based on a true story” and “true story” are very different.

…

Beyond the cautions that the creators of the protocol posted (please take these seriously if you’re considering this!), there is another aspect of this workout that I don’t care for: the exercise selection itself. In an ideal world, your workout would include a balance of exercises that will help to keep your body…balanced. I won’t even claim that to be “based on science” because it’s just sensible. Although it is also “based on science”. In fact I would even go as far as to say it is science.

What does it mean to have balance of exercises? There are many ways to look at this, but my preference is to approach it with movement-based exercise selection instead of muscle-based. I wish I could remember which great trainer I learned this concept from, but basically the notion is: If you train muscles, you’ll probably forget some; if you train movement, you’ll be covered.

Read it.

Latin is useful, however; and unlike the sciences, it is not only useful to those who practise it. Indeed, Latin is useful to anyone who wishes to learn another language, or to anyone who hopes to become a doctor or a lawyer. It is useful to anyone who simply wants to improve their mental faculties, or expand the horizons of their perception, and that is without making the oft-repeated case – as I have avoided doing – that a knowledge of Latin deepens one’s understanding of Western culture, of art, philosophy and literature. If, as Phillipson maintains, students ought to “get a richer, broader, cutting-edge school experience”, the solution is to expand, rather than curtail, access to the world’s most influential language. We may not have the same use for Latin as the Romans did, but we can still make immense use of it nonetheless.

I’ve used my high-school Latin far more than I’ve ever used my high-school physics or chemistry or (dare I say it) math.

UPDATE: The Value of Latin Best Appreciated Sub Specie Aeternitatis

“Scientific truths and natural laws exist independent of researchers’ identities. The distribution of prime numbers does not change as a function of whether the mathematician is a white heterosexual Christian man or a transgendered, Muslim, differently sized (obese) individual. The periodic table of elements is not dependent on whether a chemist is a Latinx queer or a cisnormative Hasidic Jew. … [S]cience is liberating precisely because it does not care about your identity. It is the epistemological means by which we seek to understand the world using evidentiary rules that are unbiased. There is no other game in town, no other way of knowing.”  —  Gad Saad, The Parasitic Mind

Read it.

For years, I understood advertising was designed to manipulate behavior. As someone who studied the mechanics of marketing, I considered myself an educated consumer who could navigate rational market choices. What I didn’t grasp was how this same psychological architecture shaped every aspect of our cultural landscape. This investigation began as curiosity about the music industry’s ties to intelligence agencies. It evolved into a comprehensive examination of how power structures systematically mold public consciousness.

What I discovered showed me that even my most cynical assumptions about manufactured culture barely scratched the surface. This revelation has fundamentally altered not just my worldview, but my relationships with those who either cannot or choose not to examine these mechanisms of control. This piece aims to make visible what many sense but cannot fully articulate – to help others see these hidden systems of influence. Because recognizing manipulation is the first step toward resisting it.

This investigation unfolds in three parts: First, we’ll examine the foundational systems of control established in the early 20th century. Next, we’ll explore how these methods evolved through popular culture and counterculture movements. Finally, we’ll see how these techniques have been automated and perfected through digital systems.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Cedar Sanderson.

Before I was a writer, I was a reader. I was also, for a time somewhat congruent with becoming a writer fledgling, a librarian. I am now in possession of a small personal library, a modest collection after all these years and many moves have cost me more volumes than I care to think about.

I have tried, in the past, and at least once with the help of my enthusiastic teens, to create a library catalog of my own books. This isn’t as easy as it sounds – a video recently floated through my streams of a kid who was very excited to catalog his library by… scanning all his books. This only works, you know, if your books are young enough to have a barcode. Many of mine are older than ISBNs, let alone barcoding. Some of mine have ISBNs which were reassigned to other titles decades after their publication, which was interesting to discover when we were working on the library project. Still, somehow, I’d like to get an inventory of my books. For one thing, having that would hopefully keep me from acquiring too many duplicates. For another, it might help me find gaps in the library when I’m wandering about looking at books and wondering ‘do I really need this?’ and ‘have I already got three Greek cookbooks, do I need another?’ or even ‘ooh, Thriftbooks has a sale on!’

Know the feeling.

Bummer.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

ZMan sees that things have loosened up.

Over the last thirty years America has been flooded with migrants from almost every nook and cranny of the globe. Most noticeable are those from South America because of their numbers. In the summer, every business park and suburban neighborhood is littered with Hispanics cutting the grass. The next most noticed group is the South Asians.

Despite their small numbers, relative to Hispanics, South Asians stand out because of their jarring alienness and their reason for being here. Employers import Indians to depress middle class wages and displace American tech workers. As a result, middle-class white people notice them and unlike Hispanics, who white people tend to admire for their work ethic, the Indians have a very negative reputation. Not even the most deluded immigration romantic likes South Asians.

This has come as a great shock to Elon Musk and his tech bros. For some reason he decided to use Christmas Day to announce that he wants Trump to fill your neighborhood with Indians so he can win something. This set off a multi-day firestorm over the topic of Indian immigration. The tech bros were poleaxed by the reaction, as they had no idea how much the average American dislikes Indians. So much so that even yelling “racism” has no impact.

This is the saddest cartoon I have ever seen.

Read it.

No pressure, but….

Just sayin’.

John Stossel.

The movie “The Matrix” gave us the “red pill” and the “blue pill.” The red wakes you up to reality; the blue keeps you indoctrinated.

Internet culture then invented a black pill. Those who take it think the world is doomed.

So, podcaster Michael Malice wrote the book “The White Pill,” calling it a “symbol of hope.”

Read it.

Communities throughout the United States are debating the pros and cons of fluoridated water.

It’s a bit of a shock because the issue has been present in the underground of American political life for many decades. Community water fluoridation was an early example of using public services for the purpose of mass medicalization. The science was never there, however, and there is a growing awareness that the critics were always correct.

If you want fluoride, you can get your own, without mass dosing of the population without consent.

And apply it directly to your teeth, where it does some good, rather than ingest it into your whole body, where apparently it caues problems.

Read it.

President-elect Donald Trump seems poised to revive the Monroe Doctrine, signaling a renewed focus that the US will continue Western Hemisphere domination for decades and will no longer tolerate any other competition in controlling strategic maritime chokepoints or natural resources in the region.

On Saturday evening, Trump vented on Truth Social how “President Jimmy Carter foolishly gave away” the Panama Canal for one dollar. He explained, “It was solely for Panama to manage, not China or anyone else.”

The core issue is that China now controls two of the five ports adjacent to the canal: Balboa on the Pacific and Cristobal on the Caribbean. While the US spent three decades engaged in nation-building activities across the Middle East, China transformed Panama into a geographic and commercial hub, strategically positioning itself for political, economic, and military advancement.

Read it.

Reading the history of science and technology, one is struck by how important two branches of physics are: electricity and magnetism, and thermodynamics. The former is mostly how we conveniently pipe energy around. The latter is …. how we get the energy in the first place, as well as making most of chemistry possible. Even humble inventions such as the small electric motor had enormous implications in how things get done. Before the invention of small electric motors, for example, machine shops or printing presses were powered directly by thermodynamics and mechanical connections: usually leather belts driven off a line shaft. Other sorts of mechanical connections were also used: wire rope systems (elevators still use them which is kind of an odd anachronism) or hydraulics. Now we pipe electricity around and electric motors turn the power into motion. Must have seemed like magic at the time; it is pretty cool when you stop to think about it. Burn something in one place, pipe the energy via thin bits of metal into little motors which do useful work right where you need it. Much better than strapping leather belts to the output shaft of a steam engine, with dudes shoveling coal into it in another room.

Thermodynamics is how we get power from heat. It is also how we design chemical reactions to make useful substances. I could imagine a modern world without modern chemistry (there would be fewer people without the Haber-Bosch process); even without electricity (certainly without computards: life was more fun without them), but not without thermodynamics and heat engines. Human standards of living are essentially proportional to the amount of heat converted into power which humans can use to do useful work. Without heat engines and the science which drove their creation and perfection, we’re back to Renaissance or Roman times where virtually everything is moved and built with muscle. It is now possible to get electricity directly from the sun and we’ve had wind and water mills for millennia. There are exotic ways of extracting electricity directly from heat: magnetohydrodynamics for example: still thermodynamic ultimately. Most accessible human power comes from thermodynamics. We live in a thermodynamic age: without it, we go back to subsistence farming and chattel slavery.

 

Read it.

Hidden above the stone vaults of Notre-Dame de Paris, the 13th-century timber structure that once supported the cathedral’s steep lead roof was so extensive it was known as “the forest”. When the cathedral caught fire in 2019, the flames spread quickly through the lattice of oak beams, each one hewn from an individual tree by medieval carpenters. Around two-thirds of the roof was destroyed in the blaze.

By March 2024, the entire roof frame—la charpente in French—had been identically reconstructed by a small army of 21st-century carpenters trained in the traditional technique of working freshly harvested “green wood” by hand with an axe. (This time, however, the frame is protected against fire risks by an automatic misting system, thicker roof battens and fire-resistant trusses separating the spire from the nave and choir on either side of it.)

After generations of mechanisation, this ancient skill had almost disappeared in France when an association called Charpentiers Sans Frontières (Carpenters Without Borders) began promoting its revival in 1992. The movement’s workshops now attract volunteers from around the world. Among their members are father and son Rémy and Loïc Desmonts, whose specialist family business in Normandy shared the winning bid to restore Notre-Dame’s charpente with Ateliers Perrault, a large carpentry company near Angers with a track record of restoring historic monuments.

Read it.

Well, that’s what happens when you start admitting based on qualifications rather than skin color.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The final show of the year is a double album set. That means two hours of the dulcet sound of my voice jumping through twenty topics. There were a lot of good questions this time, so rather than try to figure out which ones were the best, I decided to do a two hour show and cover them all. There were some left out only because they were duplicates or not appropriate for a family show.

A few will become full shows in the new year. While I was talking about Strauss it occurred to me that it would make for a good trio of shows. One hour on Strauss, one hour on the neocons and one hour on Claremont. All three are tangled up together and all three are relevant to the next administration. There are more than a few people from the Jaffa cult in the Trump team.

Another thing that occurred to me while doing the show is a good feature of the new site would be a way to submit show ideas and questions/topics for these multi-topic shows that people seem to like. Over the holidays I am hoping to make some progress on the new site and maybe have it done next month. If anyone has ideas feel free to post them up in the comments

Otherwise, this is the final show of the year, other than the green door show. There will be a Sunday show and maybe some video experiments. That is another project on the drawing board. I did some experiments from the back of the truck the other day, so I might test those out over the holiday break. On the other hand, if they are terrible, I might save myself the trouble and scrap the idea.

Read it.

Name a female billionaire (or even centimillionaire) who earned her own money.

Go ahead, take all the time you need. I’ll wait.

Interesting Engineering.

A team of researchers from the University of Rochester, Yale University, and Princeton University has made a big stride in neuroscience.

They have shown a method to induce learning through the direct manipulation of brain activity patterns.

This technique uses real-time brain imaging and neurofeedback. It bypasses learning processes that require effort, study, or practice.

“With our method not only can we nudge complex patterns around in the brain toward known ones, but also—for the first time—write directly a new pattern into the brain and measure what effect that has on a person’s behavior,” said Dr Coraline Iordan, lead author of the study and assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester.

Read it.

Sometimes in science you have to step back and take another look at underlying assumptions. Sometimes its necessary when progress stalls. One of the foundational questions of our day concerns the Fermi Paradox, the contradiction between what seems to be a high probability of extraterrestrial life and the total lack of evidence that it exists.

What assumptions underlie the paradox?

The Fermi Paradox is based on the fact that our galaxy is home to hundreds of billions of stars, with many or even most of them likely hosting multiple planets. The sheer number of planets urges us to conclude that life should be abundant, and that some of this life must have evolved into sentiency like us. Even if only a small percentage become technological space-faring civilizations, there should still be many of them. The paradoxical part is that if this is true, there should be evidence. We should see some indication that they’re out there, or they should’ve even contacted us by now. But we don’t.

Feel free to read the rest of the article, but be aware that this is an example of The Aggregation Fallacy–treating a huge amount of instances as just ‘data’ and drawing conclusions from correlations without taking into account the variations in the underlying instances.

It is entirely possible that higher-order life on Earth is unique because of two highly improbable occurrences: The cell nucleus and mitochondria. Investigate those two and I think you’ll agree.

Read it.

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…because he thought the apocalypse was coming.

Like many of his contemporaries, Columbus believed that the Earth was supposed to last for 7,000 years total, with only ~150 years remaining. More importantly, God had left us a list of things he wanted us to get done before he returned, which included “convert everybody to Christianity,” and “rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.” Columbus saw himself as critical to achieving both goals: he would discover new sea routes to speed up the evangelization of the world, and his success in that mission would prove he was also the man to tackle the temple job.

So the most pivotal voyages in history happened because one guy wanted to tick some things off the divine to-do list before Jesus returned to vaporize the sinners and valorize the saints. But that’s not the weird part.

Read it.

Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second. However, our bodies’ sensory systems gather data about our environments at a rate of a billion bits per second, which is 100 million times faster than our thought processes. This new study raises major new avenues of exploration for neuroscientists, in particular: Why can we only think one thing at a time while our sensory systems process thousands of inputs at once?

Read it.

While Trump and his aides have expressed that the top priority for deportations is illegal immigrants with a criminal record, they claim that all other illegal residents, including peaceful immigrants like Grandma, will follow. But instead of conducting the “largest deportation operation in history,” President Trump should conduct the largest legalization effort that would create many millions of new legal American residents.

The problem of criminality among illegal immigrants has been blown out of proportion. The crime rate for illegal immigrants is reportedly lower than that of native-born Americans. Still, those who engage in violent crimes should face the criminal system, and it is appropriate that noncitizens who commit crimes in America be deported.

But the vast majority of illegal immigrants present in America (around 11 million in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center) are peaceful people who have come here to work and build a better life. These immigrants associate with Americans by trade, family, or both: Many of them work in construction, hospitality, and agriculture, and many live in households with American citizens.

Read it.

“It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to deport every undocumented immigrant in our country,” Senator Dick Durbin warned.

After losing the open borders debate and the election, Democrats and their media stopped arguing that mass migration is a right and that mass deportations violate human rights.

6 out of 10 registered voters were polled in favor of deporting illegal aliens. The American people had spoken.

So Democrats and their media instead argued that mass deportations would be too expensive. The American Immigration Council, an immigration lawyers lobby group funded by the Ford Foundation, Soros and other open borders groups, was quoted in the media as warning that mass deportations might cost $88 billion a year. None of the media outlets citing the AIC have reported what it is and who it represents, but have taken its $88 billion figure as fact.

This would still make a year of mass deportations cheaper than California’s $128 billion light rail to nowhere. And unlike the light rail to nowhere, the deportations would actually go somewhere.

Mass deportations would end cartel violence and restore national security making it a far better investment than the California train that the Biden administration had decided to fund again.

Simplifies life amazingly.

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Scientists from the Kavli Institute of Delft University of Technology and the IMP Vienna Biocenter have discovered a new property of the molecular motors that shape our chromosomes. While six years ago they found that these so-called SMC motor proteins make long loops in our DNA, they have now discovered that these motors also put significant twists into the loops that they form.

Chris Arnade:

So Trump’s embrace of McDonald’s becomes a political twofer. It shows he’s one of you: He is a back-row guy at heart. But it also shows that while he should be a member of the front-row, given his education and wealth, he’s not, because such people despise him for many of the same reasons they look down on you: for what he eats, how he talks, for what he believes in, and for how he arrives at those beliefs, which isn’t by spending years reading through approved syllabi, but having gone out into the world and learned from it, one mistake after the next.

Daily Mail (UK).

Follow The Science: Until it’s wrong, as pretty much always happens.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Sometime around 2012 or ’13, my daughters stopped speaking in Konkani, our mother tongue. It isn’t entirely clear what provoked it; perhaps it was a teacher at their Mumbai school encouraging students to speak more English at home. Or perhaps it was something else. It doesn’t matter.

What did matter was that our home became an almost exclusively English-speaking household, with the occasional sporadic Konkani conversation. We were not alone. Clustered throughout the affluent sections of urban India are many families such as ours, speaking predominantly English and not the tongues they grew up speaking in.

Some of these families, or at least parents in these English-speaking households do make an attempt to speak their mother tongue as much as they speak in English. But even in these bilingual households, English still dominates. It takes an effort for the kids to speak in the Indian tongues, beyond a few simple phrases. English on the other hand comes naturally to them; the larger vocabulary they possess in English helping them express complex thoughts and propositions far easily.

I have been looking for a term, an acronym or a phrase that describes these families who speak English predominantly at home. These constitute an influential demographic, or rather a psychographic, in India – affluent, urban, highly educated, usually in intercaste or inter-religious unions. I propose to call them Indo-Anglians.

UPDATE: India’s New ‘English Only’ Generation (New York Times)

ZMan cuts to the chase.

An interesting subtext to the election of Donald Trump is one that has been largely ignored by the usual sources. It was not cultural issues, foreign policy or the ineptitude of Kamala Harris that drove the election. It was the economy. Widespread anxiety over the economy is what drove down support for Harris, despite the billion-dollar campaign and the billions spent in media gaslighting. No amount of jawboning could convince the public that the economy is doing as good as claimed.

There is a good reason for this. As some have predicted, inflation has been creeping back up after having moved down for a period. The American economy is experiencing what happened in the 1970’s. Contrary to popular belief, inflation did not rage for the entire decade but ran in spurts. There were periods where inflation rose, plateaued and then fell to a tolerable level. The latest data on the CPI and the PPI indicate the current economy is stuck in a similar pattern.

Regime media dismisses this as a minor blip in an otherwise glorious economy, managed by the wise and noble Biden administration, but that has not convinced anyone who buys things. The government does not measure inflation the same way it used to measure it in the 1970’s, so no talk of stagflation. If they used the old methods, inflation would be a daily feature. Of course, you also have the fact that the government now lies about all of the economic data.