Joel Kotkin.

In his drive to conquer China, Mao Zedong and his most famous general, Lin Biao, stoked “a peasant revolution” that eventually overwhelmed the cities. In those days, most Chinese toiled on the land, a vast manpower reservoir for the Communist insurgency. Today, in a world where a majority lives in urban settlements, such a strategy would be doomed to failure.

The small percentage of rural and small-town residents in most advanced countries — generally under 20 percent — lack the numbers to overwhelm the rest of society. Political and economic elites feel free to ignore the countryside, but they may find they do so at their peril. Although now a mere slice of the population, rural areas remain critical suppliers of food, fiber (like cotton), and energy to the rest of the economy.

Residents in agricultural areas have good reason to feel put upon. Their industries are often targeted by regulators and disdained by the metropolitan cognoscenti. They may not be hiding in the caves of Yan’an, but farming communities from the Netherlands to North America are rebelling against extreme government regulations, such as banning or restricting critical fertilizers or the enforced culling of herds. Meat and dairy producers are assaulted in a hysterical article in the New York Times that predicts imminent “mass extinction” caused by humans and suggests that to keep the planet from “frying” we will need to reduce meat and dairy consumption in short order.

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Sophie Lehman departed her job as Contra Costa County’s manager of elections operations last June. Several months later, Lehman was the point of contact for what eventually would be a $2 million election grant for the California county going into the 2024 election cycle.

Today, Lehman is associate director of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which became well known in 2020 for doling out $350 million in election administration grants funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.

The nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life went on to establish the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, which includes a partner organization funded last April by liberal donor Arabella Advisors.

Zuckerberg no longer is funding election administration through donations, after almost half the states enacted bans or restrictions on such private money and members of Congress introduced legislation to restrict private money from paying for election administration.

Babylon Bee.

Local man Todd Longwood, 40, was shocked to discover that the list of side effects from the new drug Relievitol perfectly described a typical day in his life.

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These guys have different priorities than I do. The only reason I take a shower is I’m too impatient to wait for a tub to fill up. I want hot water on my body, not ‘mist’.

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I was, in my youth, enamored of geodesic domes. Then I grew up and figured out why we build our buildings out of boxes.

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TMC the metals company Inc. (Nasdaq: TMC) (“TMC” or the “Company”), an explorer of the world’s largest estimated undeveloped source of critical battery metals, today announced that its subsidiary NORI and offshore partner Allseas have successfully concluded the first integrated system test in the Clarion Clipperton Zone of the Pacific Ocean since the 1970s, achieving all significant pilot milestones while collecting approximately 4,500 tonnes of seafloor polymetallic nodules. Over 3,000 tonnes were transported up a 4.3km-long riser system to the surface production vessel, Hidden Gem, while the additional 1,500 tonnes of nodules were purposely left behind on the seafloor as part of the trials.

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We are losing our sense of wonder about capitalism. We take the miracles of infrastructure for granted. We are not sufficiently in awe of the man made marvels of our daily lives. To remedy this, let us start by praising elevators.

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Unfortunately, no mention of The Big Lebowski.

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The EU gives reduced tariffs to 49 developing countries, including Mali, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan: major sources of illegal migration to Europe. Under the new system proposed by the EU Council, these tariffs would only be given if these nations helped in the deportation of their citizens who are in Europe illegally.

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Conjuring up the wrath of a progressive digital swarm is analogous to launching a war. As such, doxxing, if done without reference to a set of moral principles, can be a fundamentally unjust act.

…

The severe consequences of a dox demand that a rigorous set of moral principles be employed before the dox is initiated. The rubric used for evaluating a just war is a natural place to start. A doxxing should have a just cause—i.e., there should be sufficient evidence to substantiate the public initiation of the dox. Harsh and predictable consequences make doxxing akin to a criminal sentence, and therefore an evidentiary standard comparable to “beyond a reasonable doubt” seems appropriate. The person initiating the dox needs to have legitimate authority to do so, and this must involve something more than individual judgment or taste. Otherwise, the tremendous powers and consequences that follow from a dox will be wielded as a vigilante power. Finally, a dox should not be done publicly if less destructive means are available, as in raising concerning information privately with churches, employers, or other parties to whom the target is accountable.

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The best case for memorisation is not pedagogical. Rather, it is about what it means to be fully human, and how we can make ourselves members of a continuing civilisation rather than a load of individual units who happen to briefly be in the same place at the same time.

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If you don’t furnish your own mind, someone else will do it for you, probably without your even noticing. Nature abhors a vacuum. If your mind is not full of fragments of poetry, passages from plays and the melodies of the great composers, it will be filled with the half-witted slogans of contemporary politics, the canting jargon of frauds and grifters, and the banal pop music of your youth.

 

New York Post.

“Dates feel more like job interviews now. Much more like ‘What can you do for me and where is this going?’” said Ian Breslow, a 28-year-old high school teacher who lives in Astoria.

Sounds about right to me. I have always considered a ‘date’ to be a species of ‘job interview’.

Babylon Bee.

Which is why I never go to the gym. (To be fair, the gym never goes to me either.)

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The retirement of Gore-Tex Shakedry is just the tip of the iceberg.

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I was devastated when Google Reader shut down. I loved it as much as I love Microsoft Excel, and for the same reason: it gave me a superpower. With Reader, I could discover and stay on top of the latest information across the internet, no matter how frequently or infrequently a person posted.

I’ve watched many beloved Google products get shut down: Wave, Inbox, My Maps, Stadia. The list goes on and on. It’s gotten bad enough that people widely believe the shutdowns damage Google’s brand.

So why do they keep doing it?

The Long Now.

This problem of long-term digital storage seemed a crucial hurdle for any civilization trying to act generationally. How could a society think in terms of centuries unless there was a reliable way to transmit and store its knowledge over centuries? This puzzle was the focus of a conference hosted by Long Now in 01998, dedicated to technical solutions for Managing Digital Continuity. At this meeting Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive suggested a new technology developed by Los Alamos labs, and commercialized by Norsam Technologies, as a solution for long term digital storage. Norsam promised to micro-etch 350,000 pages of information onto a 3-inch nickel disk with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years.

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Sanctions have failed to break Putin, and the West is running out of missiles and bullets.

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Churchill was an incredible war leader and a great international statesman. Economic policy was not his strong point, however. Churchill had led Britain back to the Gold Standard with disastrous results. He was also an unrepentant free trader, despite the fact the whole world had put up protectionist tariffs against imports, leaving Britain dangerously out of line with global trading conditions. Fundamentally, on the economy, Churchill was an orthodox liberal. It is his outlook which has shaped the Conservative Party’s economic philosophy ever since.

Churchill was also responsible for delivering Eastern Europe into the hands of Stalin.

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We’ll miss it, now that it’s gone.

20 October 2022 is a date I shall not forget. It’s the day when Liz Truss stood outside Downing Street to announce her resignation — the fourth Conservative prime minister to be hounded from office by their own party in six years. It was also the day when I was to lecture at the Danube Institute in Budapest on “British Conservatism post-Boris Johnson”.

If I had stuck to my original title, my lecture — on the future of a Party which seems to have decided that it doesn’t want one — would have been almost as short as Liz Truss’s statement. Instead, I decided to take refuge in its past.

Invoking Hegel’s dictum that “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk”, I declared that the current death spiral of the Party was the perfect opportunity to retrieve its history. And indeed that the crisis demands it, since the Party’s almost total loss of its historical tradition is the principal reason for its present plight.

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Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a preeminent source of ancient myth. The escapades of men, gods, dryads, nymphs, and centaurs hold within their fantastical plots “story that incarnates great values and eternal truths.” This enchanted world, far removed from our own technological frenzy, holds insight into human joys and agonies today. An exploration of this poet’s myth often reveals that the personal and cultural crises we face are not new, although they are expressed in uniquely modern ways.

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Similar in approach to the Russian Ekranoplan.

Washington Post.

The Biden administration envisions dozens of ‘modular’ nuclear plants sprouting across the country. Why coal communities are so eager to be the staging ground for the risky endeavor.

 

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On the Carthusian monks’ decision to limit production of their famed liqueur and what it says about quality and scale in our soul-crushing modern world.

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Anglish is a kind of English which prefers native words over those borrowed from foreign languages. Anglish is linguistic purism applied to English.

Tolkien would have loved it.

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I would have titled this piece ’40 Useful Concepts You REALLY REALLY NEED to Know’.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Proponents claim that plastic roads offer major improvements in design, cost, and quality while also serving as an outlet for waste plastic. Critics argue that plastic roads are empty ‘green’ hype or can’t compete with the benefits of traditional asphalt. The truth is most likely that using plastics in road building does have real environmental, cost, and structural benefits. But, outside of niches like bike paths and pedestrian paths, innovations still have yet to reach the scale and capabilities of the traditional asphalt road.

Wally is my hero.

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The first rule of politics is to never give government powers that you would not trust in the hands of your worst political enemy.

If there is one government institution that has proven this correct, it is the European Union. Born out of the Cold War, forged in the uncertainty of its ending, and built during the peaceful, prosperous 1990s, the EU was originally meant to be an enabler of freedom, commerce, and human ingenuity. In 1995, as an EU-skeptical candidate for its parliament (while still living in my native Sweden), even I could appreciate the virtues of facilitating the mobility of resources across national borders within the union.

Since then, the EU has been completely transformed. Today, it is an increasingly totalitarian entity, trying to force moral values upon its member states—values that are at odds with core conservative principles. To take a well-known example, the tensions between Brussels on the one hand and Warsaw and Budapest on the other would not have existed if the EU had stayed true to the purpose that gave birth to the union in Maastricht in 1992.

Interesting Engineering.

Can you dig it?

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Daisugi is an ancient Japanese forestry technique in which planted cedars are pruned in a special way to produce “shoots” that eventually become perfect, straight, knot-free lumber.

This is an ancient method, developed in the 14th century, which was originally used by people living in the Kitayama region of Japan because saplings were lacking.

The terrain in the region is very mountainous, and the steep slopes make planting and caring for trees very difficult, so arborists used the daisugi technique not only to reduce the number of plantations but also to produce denser wood in a much shorter time.

Brink Lindsey

No, the revolution I’m talking about can be described as the anti-Promethean backlash — the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world. The quest to build bigger, go farther and faster and higher, and harness ever greater sources of power was, if not abandoned, then greatly deprioritized in the United States and other rich democracies starting in the 1960s and 70s. We made it to the moon, and then stopped going. We pioneered commercial supersonic air travel, and then discontinued it. We developed nuclear power, and then stopped building new plants. There is really no precedent for this kind of abdication of powers in Western modernity; one historical parallel that comes to mind is the Ming dynasty’s abandonment of its expeditionary treasure fleet after the voyages of Zheng He.

WIRED.

Vertical farming will remain only a niche hobby until it can provide one of the global master crops–wheat, maize, or rice–in a cost-effective fashion.

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As do I.

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Sounds about right.

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Researchers at the University of Bristol have found why zebra fur is thinly striped and sharply outlined.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.