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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.

Read it.

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.

 

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.)

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

 

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it. 

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.

Read it.

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?

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.

Read it

As do I.

Read it.

Sounds about right.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

• Introduction
• How did the term come about & become a tool for defamation?
• A German journalist spills the beans
• Same Playbook, Different War
• The Council on Foreign Relations conspiracy
• Conspiracy Theories that turned out to be true
• Notable Unresolved Conspiracies
• Conspiracies to Watch
• Mini-Guide to Investigating Conspiracies
• Conclusion

I am willing to use my own shoe on such people pro bono publico.

Read it.

People typically think of food as calories, energy and sustenance. However, the latest evidence suggests that food also “talks” to our genome, which is the genetic blueprint that directs the way the body functions down to the cellular level.

This communication between food and genes may affect your health, physiology and longevity. The idea that food delivers important messages to an animal’s genome is the focus of a field known as nutrigenomics. This is a discipline still in its infancy, and many questions remain cloaked in mystery. Yet already, we researchers have learned a great deal about how food components affect the genome.

Read it.

Critically, the language one speaks or signs can have downstream effects on ostensibly nonlinguistic cognitive domains, ranging from memory, to social cognition, perception, decision-making, and more.

The over-reliance on English in the cognitive sciences has led to an underestimation of the centrality of language to cognition at large.

ZMan does some dusting.

Last month Paul Gottfried wrote a brief note in Chronicles about an event hosted by The Philadelphia Society. The event was a virtual debate between Christopher Owen and Glenn Ellmers on the topic of which is the more important founding document, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Presumably, this is some sort of old person role playing game where the two men reenact the debates between Harry Jaffa and Willmoore Kendall from half a century ago.