The Guardian.

A chunky grey staircase thrusts out from the side of a new office tower in Los Angeles, lunging towards a rail line before jerking back on itself and lurching up the building in jagged twists and turns. It crashes into a warped lattice of bands that wrap around the glassy hulk, swooping past corner windows that jut in and out like broken teeth. This is (W)rapper, “an outrageous creative office tower”, in the words of its leasing agents, set to “reawaken the Los Angeles skyline”. It is also the bombastic tombstone of a bygone era, a carbon-guzzling monument to a time when architectural ego trumped the interests of people and planet.

It is, of course, endemic to writers for proglodyte publications that they equate their preferences with ‘the interests of the people and planet’. That arrogance is their signature characteristic. Kind of like vegans.

Newsweek.

The question is, will people be working fewer hours? I am dubious. If the choice is between five days of eight hours versus four days of ten hours, a lot of salaried folk (who are now working fifty or sixty hours in in a nominal 40-hour week) will jump at it. It’s not clear how blue-collar workers (like policemen, firefighters, and factory workers) who depend on overtime to achieve a middle-class lifestyle will react.

Read it.

It seems that Progressives have a harder time having personal relationships with people with whom they disagree than do conservatives. Why?

In this post, I am using “Progressive” as shorthand for a broad range of left-ish people and policies on ideological, political, and cultural issues because that seems to be the term the people with those views prefer, even though the true definition may be narrower. And I’m using “conservative” as shorthand for a broad range of right-ish people and policies even though there is lots of debate about who and what is properly covered by that word.

Surveys and anecdotal stories seem to show that if a friendship or interaction with a family member is ended over ideological, political, or cultural differences, the ending is more likely because the Progressive (or leftist or modern liberal or Democrat) does the ending. Democrats say they are less likely than Republicans to be willing to initiate a friendship or to date a person of the other political party.

Are “Progressives” really quicker to sever personal ties over ideological differences than do “conservatives”? If so, why?

Progressives are generally fascist assholes, that’s why. That’s my guess.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Like so much from the 20th century, The Troubles has largely been forgotten, despite the fact it loomed large in the last half the century. It is a good example of how the cultural shadow of the Global American Empire warped everything. Meddling by important people in the empire played a huge role in the conflict. It was also one of the justifications for flinging open our borders.

Then all of a sudden, the conflict ended. Right around when the Cold War ended, the two sides decided it was time to get on with making peace. Just like that this generational event disappeared from our consciousness. Ireland quickly moved to the “Celtic Tiger” stage and then to the bust-out stage. Now Ireland is just another node on the Global American Empire trying to commit suicide.

Interestingly, The Troubles are a good example for dissidents trying to figure out how to combat the metastasizing blob that is the managerial state. It is not a perfect analogy, but it is a good example of a long running revolt against a cultural force. The British were not in it for the money. They were motivated by cultural factors and the Irish, for their part, rallied to their cultural banners in resistance.

New York Times.

The corporate culture wars have reached a turning point: A number of companies that once championed social justice and equity seem to be beating a hasty retreat.

You’d think thry’d learn.

Walgreens is trapped in a political firestorm. The pharmacy chain, which had sought certification so its stores could fill prescriptions for the abortion medication mifepristone, announced last week that it will not dispense the pill in the 21 states where Republican attorneys general have threatened legal action. Walgreens, which said it came to this conclusion before the threats began, won’t dispense the drug in several G.O.P.-controlled states where abortion remains legal. There was a swift backlash, with Gov. Gavin Newsom announcing that California would not renew a multimillion-dollar contract with Walgreens and others calling for a nationwide boycott. The hashtag #boycottwalgreens has taken off on Twitter.

But apparently not.

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Washington is not alone. Most of the nation’s major cities face a daunting future as middle-class taxpayers join an exodus to the suburbs, opting to work remotely as they exit downtowns marred by empty offices, vacant retail space and a deteriorating tax base.

Apparently the Blue states are having a hard time reproducing themselves. I guess Nature doesn’t like socialism.

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Casual introduction to the uncertainty principle from quantum mechanics and how it leads to neutron stars and superfluids

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

ZMan watches them squirm.

Just a few months ago, Western media was hailing the wonderfulness of their bosses in the political class over the decision to send tanks to Ukraine. The West was going to send modern battle tanks. The first batch would be Leopard II tanks from Germany followed by Abrams tanks from America. On top of that, the Poles donated their Patriot system to Ukraine. This would cure the missile problem. Maybe F-16’s were not far behind, the media told us.

Here we are entering the spring and the mood has shifted. This story in the Washington Post would have been called Putin propaganda a few months ago. It explains the terrible condition of the Ukrainian army. Six months of Russian grinding with artillery and now air power has killed tens of thousands of Ukraine’s best soldiers. This story published in Politico is about the growing troubles in the collective West over how to go forward with the Ukraine war.

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The readings from gauges planted throughout the company’s twin wells showed that pressure quickly began to build, as water that had nowhere else to go actually flexed the rock itself. When they finally released the valve, the output of water surged and it continued pumping out at higher-than-normal levels for hours.

The results from the initial experiments—which MIT Technology Review is reporting exclusively—suggest Fervo can create flexible geothermal power plants, capable of ramping electricity output up or down as needed. Potentially more important, the system can store up energy for hours or even days and deliver it back over similar periods, effectively acting as a giant and very long-lasting battery. That means the plants could shut down production when solar and wind farms are cranking, and provide a rich stream of clean electricity when those sources flag.

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Car engines, bespoke medicines, organs for transplant, food, fashion and now even a whole street of houses… Is the all-conquering promise of 3D printing finally coming true?

Usually, when people sit down with a good book like this, it’s the Bible.

Read it.

Cowless dairy is here, with the potential to shake up the future of animal dairy and plant-based milks

Maybe for some.

The Economist.

The marines are training for a war with China, probably precipitated by an invasion of Taiwan. Their base in Okinawa, at the southern end of the Japanese archipelago, is just 600km (370 miles) from Taiwan. The two islands are part of what American military planners call the “first island chain”: a series of archipelagoes and islands, big and small, that stretches from Japan to Malaysia, impeding naval passage from China to the Pacific. Whether by harrying Chinese ships from a distance or—much less likely—by deploying to Taiwan to help repel a Chinese landing, the marines will be early participants in any conflict.

The hardest part, says Lieutenant-Colonel Jason Copeland, Darkside’s commanding officer, would be dealing with “an adversary that’s coming at you in mass”. As China’s military power grows, predicting how a war over Taiwan might unfold, and thus improving the odds of fending China off without unleashing a nuclear calamity, is getting ever harder. The only certainty is that, even if all nuclear weapons remained in their silos, such a conflict would have horrific consequences, not just for the 23m people of Taiwan, but for the world.

Read it.

Sunday, as I was preparing to write about the Silicon Valley Bank situation, I sent an email to Professor Lawrence H. White of George Mason University, who really knows this stuff. I invited him to respond to some of the points made by Bill Ackman, who was arguing for a government rescue of depositors.

White very generously sent along some slides he uses in his undergraduate course on money and banking; they are embedded below. White also responded to Ackman’s argument that understanding a bank’s riskiness or safety was too much to ask of depositors. “Nobody is asking households with insured deposits to shop around for a safe bank,” White wrote. “With deposits insured up to $250,000, the current system is only asking people with uninsured deposits, like corporations with payrolls to meet, to hire a professional money manager who can evaluate the safety of banks versus other places to park large sums of cash. That doesn’t seem unrealistic.”

Write went on: “Silicon Valley Bank took excessive risk by carrying a huge duration gap, and didn’t hedge that risk, leading to its insolvency when interest rates rose. The current system relies on uninsured depositors shopping around for a safe bank to incentivize bank prudence (regulators being often unaware of how close a bank is to insolvency were assets marked to market) by making risky banks pay a premium for uninsured deposits. If the government lets uninsured depositors off the hook this time, moral hazard intensifies yet again. Not closing insolvent banks promptly is what made it so costly to eventually resolve the S&L crisis in the 1980s.”

Blue States every one.

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At the bottom of the copyright page of the latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books, a new notice now appears. “Words matter … The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters.”

On the surface, it seems whimsical and innocuous. However, it signals a recent effort carried out by his publisher, Puffin, to rewrite his classic texts to make them less “offensive.” Words like “fat” and “ugly” have been culled, whole phrases rewritten, and, of course, gender-neutral terms have been added in places.

While highly reported on in the media, this rewriting of classic literature is just the most recent manifestation of a central facet of the new dangerous trend to label language as a form of violence, under the guise of the very mantra that introduced the new bastardization of Dahl’s work: Words Matter.

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At a restaurant in Miami last month, dining beside my husband, I examined the women around me for what people refer to as Instagram Face. The chiseled nose, the overfilled lips, the cheeks scooped of buccal fat, eyes and brows thread-lifted high as the frescoed ceiling. Many of the women had it, and thus resembled each other. But not all of them. Not, for example, me.

Critics call this trend just another sign of our long march toward a doomed, globalized sameness. A uniform suite of cosmetic procedures, popularized by social media, apps and filters, accelerated by both natural insecurity and injectables’ dropping costs. One by one, they hint, women will give in and undergo them. Until we all look identical, just like our restaurants do, and our hotels, and our airports, in our creep toward homogenization which we’ve somehow mistaken for a worthwhile life.

They’re wrong, because in their focus on uniformity, they’ve forgotten the premise of cosmetic work in the first place. Distinction. Good face, like good taste, has a direction: downward. The success of Instagram Face, its ubiquity, isn’t the start of cyborg aesthetics. It’s the end of it. Because what might save us from such apocalyptic beauty is something almost too ugly to say out loud: When in history have rich women ever wanted to look like regular ones?

…

Instagram Face goes with implants, middle-aged dates and nails too long to pick up the check. Batting false eyelashes, there in the restaurant it orders for dinner all the food groups of nouveau riche Dubai: caviar, truffle, fillers, foie gras, Botox, bottle service, bodycon silhouettes. The look, in that restaurant and everywhere, has reached a definite status. It’s the girlfriend, not the wife.

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ast week came some stern words for millennial women: egg-freezing may not be all it’s (excuse the pun) cracked up to be. That was the advice of Professor Imogen Goold, who warned at the annual conference of the fertility charity Progress Educational Trust, that clinics may be “preying on women being anxious about having children by getting them to throw money at the problem”. The chances of using eggs to have a baby, said the professor, were as low as three per cent for eggs frozen when women were aged 36 to 39.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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I like fusion, really. I’ve talked to some of luminaries that work in the field, they’re great people. I love the technology and the physics behind it.

But fusion as a power source is never going to happen. Not because it can’t, because it won’t. Because no matter how hard you try, it’s always going to cost more than the solutions we already have.

I suspect this mirrors similar arguments concerning railroads, steel ships, and various other technological tricks that were uneconomical when first developed but ultimately became so once associated technologies became sufficiently advanced. I expect that eventually we will have fusion power, although I don’t expect it any time soon–but I’d be very much surprised if it weren’t available a hundred years from now.

Read it.

The start of daylight saving time is upon us again, meaning almost all Americans – Hawaii and parts of Arizona don’t observe DST – are setting their clocks ahead one hour. Some, however, are calling for the bi-annual changing of the clocks to come to an end.

But could we really “lock the clocks” soon?

Lawmakers – both at the state and federal levels – are hoping that’s the case.

Don’t hold your breath.

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With great interest for sailing, boatbuilding and vikings the project to build and sail the greatest viking ship of modern times started. The curator of the project, Sigurd Aase, wanted this extraordinary ship to follow in the wake of one of the most challenging viking explorations – the Viking discovery of the New World.

It always warms my heart to hear of things like this, apparently of no practical utility, being done just because people find it interesting.

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What happened: Max Boot, the Washington Post columnist who wears a fedora to conceal his agonizingly hairless dome, formally renounced his neoconservative affiliation on Friday.

And there was much rejoicing.

Read it.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the U.S.-Mexico border, at this point, is one of the most chaotic, overtrafficked, and outright dangerous borders in the world. Vicious cartels, such as Sinaloa and Jalisco, engage in gang shootouts in outlaw fashion, with nary a Mexican law enforcement agent in sight—and even those in sight are more likely than not to be bribed and in the cartels’ pockets.

Human trafficking rings, often working hand in hand with the cartels and opportunistic “coyotes” who promise to smuggle vulnerable migrants into the U.S., parade hordes of Central American and Caribbean migrants through the Mexican interior and right up to the border. The humanitarian conditions on these migrant “caravans” are typically abysmal: Drugs are rampant, children are exploited, and far too many women are raped.

Drugs flow across the border like never before. The U.S. drug-overdose crisis, which is primarily a fentanyl crisis, is nearly exclusively a phenomenon of the cartels. Drug-overdose deaths in America last year reached an unconscionable 106,000-plus, or more than 290 daily. That is the functional equivalent of a midsize commercial airliner falling out of the sky each day, and here, as is the case with fentanyl, those proverbial airliners falling out of the sky would be predominantly packed with those under the age of 35.

This tragedy is America’s single greatest humanitarian failing at the present time.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the on again, off again debates on this side of the divide is about what to call the current system and how we got to this point. The old language is either inadequate or loaded with moral connotations. Calling the Biden people fascist is not entirely wrong, but not entirely accurate either. That and the word fascist comes with so much baggage that its descriptive value is completely lost.

The same can be said for words like communist and authoritarian. Even the term managerialism has been abused to the point where it often just means “bad” rather than a specific sort of organizational outlook. One of the weird parts about being trapped in the 20th century, as is the case with the West, is we are left to use moral language that no longer works in this century.

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It is commonplace for politicians and scholars alike to refer to “history” (or sometimes a more solemnly invoked “History” with a capital H) as the final arbiter of political actors and of history and statecraft more generally. Let History Judge, as the dissident Soviet Marxist historian Roy Medvedev called his massive indictment of Stalinist terror published in the West in 1971. But what does this appeal to the judgment of history finally mean? In some larger philosophical or ontological sense, it is a non sequitur since history in and of itself judges nothing. Human beings make history, but history as an impersonal process (or as one event after another) itself is bereft of any capacity for moral or civic judgment. When people evoke the judgment of history, they mean the judgment of future generations, or even the reigning consensus among (often small-souled) academic experts and specialists. They should hardly be confused with Thucydides, Plutarch, Macaulay, or Henry Adams, who were capable of exercising judgment in a manner both sublime and judicious.

‘History’ is from the Greek word for ‘research’ (thank you, Herodotos), and so ‘history’ merely means ‘information that somebody has dug up’.

Is the judgment of future generations always superior to those who had a direct experience of men and events, who immediately saw what was at stake in the great and enduring drama that is the sempiternal rivalry of men, regimes, nations, and parties? With good reason, Aristotle insisted that the spoudaios, “mature” or “serious” men (and we would add women) informed by the full range of the moral and intellectual virtues, should set the tone for moral and civic judgment and for decent political life more fundamentally. Without prudence, discernment, courage, and moderation, the fashionable preferences of academics and academic historians are hardly worthy of having pride of place when it comes to serious and sustained historical and political judgment.

Steve Sailer.

As I may have mentioned once or twice before, Australia used to have a big shortage of Aboriginals in esoteric jobs like astrophysicist or conceptual artist. But once a judge ruled in the Bolt case that nobody is allowed to publicly question assertions of aboriginalness, that problem has been rapidly disappearing.

A trend not confined to Australia–half of the Congressional Black Caucus look whiter than I do.

Not a problem for some of us.

Read it.

In the Good Old Days, a town had to have a cathedral to be eligible to be named a city. Nowadays, of course, everybody gets a Participation Trophy.

They passed up a wonderful opportunity to name the new arrival “Mitt”. Pity.

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.

Read it.

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’.

Check it out.

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.

Read it.

Read it.

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.

…

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.