Read it.

The media consensus here in the UK is very much that everyone involved in the event is an extremist. Trying to determine that for oneself is rather hard. For one thing, the opinions of the majority of my parent’s generation would now be considered incredibly extreme, as indeed is anyone who upholds even the mildest version of, say, traditional religious ethics and orthodoxy. What is extreme is shifting every year, and you can join the ranks of extremists just by pausing too long on the path of inexorable progress.

Read it.

David Horowitz authored this essay on the progressive mind. Too many conservatives fail to appreciate the radical evil that lies at the heart of progressivism by, e.g., giving progressives credit for good intentions and assuming that the disasters caused by their policies are inadvertent. David disagrees.

Read it.

National Conservatism, if people have heard of it at all, is regarded by many in the English-speaking press as an extremist ideology. In 2020, when the first conference was held in Rome, Daniel Kawczynski MP was furiously criticised by the press for appearing at a conference that also included Victor Orban. Resentment at the hostility of the Anglo-American media still lingered, and I heard from multiple people who felt their movement had been cynically misrepresented by a journalistic establishment that is ideologically hostile to nationalism, even when nationalism is wedded (as many speakers suggested) to civil liberties, democracy, and anti-racism.

Big enough to drive a truck through.

Read it.

Memorization means purposely learning something so that you remember it with muscle memory; that is, you know the information without needing to look it up.

Every educator knows that memorization is passé in today’s day and age. Facts are so effortlessly accessible with modern technology and the internet that it’s understanding how to analyze them that’s important. Names, places, dates, and other kinds of trivia don’t matter, so much as the ability to logically reason about them. Today anything can be easily looked up.

But as I’ve gotten older I’ve started to understand that memorization is important, much more than we give it credit for. Knowledge is at our fingertips and we can look anything up, but it’s knowing what knowledge is available and how to integrate it into our existing knowledge base that’s important.

Read it.

The blight that is wheat took root 10,000 years ago, when Triticum aestivum, or bread wheat, was domesticated from wild grasses in the “Fertile Crescent” of the Middle East. Initially, the local Neolithics cultivated wheat alongside traditional hunter-gathering and incipient pastoralism (livestock farming). But wheat is a slave-master, demanding in its specific and daily needs, not least the endless — or so it seems to us who have ever grown the stuff — weeding. Wheat locked us into a seasonal cycle of planting, weeding and harvesting from which we have been unable to escape ever since. It also made us more sedentary, both in terms of chaining us to static settlements, and becoming less active. Guarding a wheat field from wild boar requires less energy than hunting wild boar; the lineal ancestor of the couch potato was the campfire bun.

“Carbs! Carbs will kill ya, kid! Stay away from carbs! You’ll thank me.”

How Russian oligarchs are finding safe havens outside the West (Washington Post)  All oligarchs, all ghd gimd.

Who is Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich? (Washington Post) All oligarchs, all the time.

Has the Ukraine war saved Orbán?

The Frozen Russian Superyachts (And Those That Got Away)  All oligarchs, all the time.

The war in Ukraine may have only just begun

Troll Farms Aren’t Actually as Strategic of a Weapon as the Kremlin and New York Times Assumed

Behind the Ukraine war  Lefty SF writer Charlie Stross has some thoughts.

IMF Warns That Sanctions Against Russia Threaten To Weaken The Dominance Of The Dollar

Gazprom Halts Gas Shipments To Europe Via Critical Pipeline

Unless democracies defend themselves, the forces of autocracy will destroy them (The Atlantic)

Roman Abramovich’s $1 Billion Five-Yacht Fleet Exposed  All oligarchs, all the time.

Ukraine Announces Million Dollars Reward Per Russian Helicopter, Fighter Jet, Warship

Putin’s Game Ends

China Accused Of Massive Ukraine Cyberattack Days Before Russian Invasion  We’ll get by with a little help from our friends….

Pope Frances For 1st Time Denounces Putin As “Potentate” Fomenting “Savage War” – Mulls Ukraine Trip

Google Threatens To Demonetize Publishers Over Ukraine Views

Foreign Threats Demand a Muscular Domestic Response

Read it.

There is a famous Wizard of Id cartoon in which the king is sitting on his throne when a messenger rushes in to say ‘The moat monsters are starving!” The next panel shows the king and the duke looking down into the moat from the top of a wall when another messenger rushes in to say “The peasants are revolting!” The king turns to the duke and says something on the order of “I think this could work out.”

So I see this article and think of the Amazon workers in New York who just voted to join a union. “I think this could work out.”

Can’t say he’s wrong.

Read it.

It is now apparent that the oligarchy has authorized the truth about Hunter Biden, and hence “the Big Guy”, to come out. One can see the end game: no re-election campaign for sure, but resignation a real possibility.

The key is timing. Is there any reason why the MSM acknowledgement of the truth that they buried could not remain buried? They still haven’t done an expose on the Russia hoax and various other slanders. Even the Durham investigation isn’t stampeding them. So it doesn’t seem that the timing is designed to get out in front of something momentous. It just seems that somebody has a plan that has been put into effect.

ZMan does a deep dive.

Regime-ology is a new field of study so the practitioners are still working out the tools and methods for interpreting regime activity. Unlike Kremlinology, on which regime-ology is modeled, the focus is not on a hierarchical structure. The Soviet empire was run by a vertical organization that operated like a corporation. The American empire is a horizontal organization modeled on the Mafia. It is a collection of elite gangster organizations jostling for power within the elite.

Read it.

Psychedelics catalyze the invention of better forms of life, imaginary and real. That was not just the hope of the 1960s counterculture but also of the scientists and activists who have paved the way for the current renaissance of hallucinogen research. But what counts as a better form of life?

Today, the classmate who gave me my first LSD trip for my eighteenth birthday does what he can to limit social inclusion of immigrants in Germany. He came to represent the far-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland in the parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia. Consciousness expansion and rightist thought have never been mutually exclusive and they are currently reconnecting.

All You Need To Know About The Starstreak Missiles Now In The Hands Of Ukrainian Troops

Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Chief Says “Total Guerrilla Warfare” Coming Next

Chinese drone-maker DJI denies aiding Russia’s Ukraine invasion

“Going Dark” Is How Russian Ships Evade Sanctions   As an old Gunnery Sergeant once explained to me, ‘If they can’t find you, they can’t hurt you’.

Nuclear War Survival Skills

Kaspersky is declared a US national security threat and is banned by the FCC

Biden Reveals The US Is Training Ukrainian Troops In Poland

So Why Is it Called “The Ukraine”?

Kremlin Warns Biden’s ‘Emotional’ Rhetoric Could Lead To “Something Irreparable & Dangerous” For Whole World

As Sanctions Bite, Average Russians Turn To Gold

Ukraine’s Inescapable Trade-Offs?

Taiwan Will Defend Differently Than Ukraine In Event Of Chinese Invasion: Expert

Letters of Marque and Reprisal  Emphasis on the ‘reprisal’.

Read it.

1. Prioritization(1): Ordering a todo list. You make a giant list of things you could do, things you should do, things you’d like to do… and then you put a unique number next to each item. Now it’s an ordered list.
2. Prioritization(2): Only doing the top item on the list. You already have a giant todo list. Which thing are you actually going to finish?

The Antiplanner peeks behind the curtain.

Now that the war in Ukraine has revealed that Europe is even more dependent on foreign oil than the United States, Americans can smugly sit back and say, “If only those Europeans acted more like, you know, Europeans, they wouldn’t be in this fix.” Because, as everyone knows, Europeans travel mostly by electric public transit and high-speed trains, so they aren’t dependent on oil to get around by car or airplane.

The Antiplanner makes an obvious suggestion.

The recent earthquake off the coast of Japan derailed a high-speed train and forced East Japan Railway to shut down the rail line. Fixing the line, the company admitted, may take “a considerable amount of time.”

Read it.

Traditional weights and measures emerged organically as responses to the requirements of human life. Just as scientific hypotheses are proposed to answer intellectual questions, so too are forms of life developed to answer the needs of life. In a reverse Gresham’s law, the good drive out the bad.

The foot, the mile and the pint are all human measures, emerging either from a human reference or for an understood human need. Unlike decimal systems, which can only be divided by 2 & 5, the old shilling — being 12 pennies — could be divided by 2, 3, 4 or 6. Such measures exist at the scale of daily life, and in a world increasingly alienated and atomised they help to bind us to the notion of place and dwelling. The pint is not simply an abstraction of fluid quantity: it’s a social activity, an anticipation and a pleasure.

One of the joys of being an American is that you don’t need to use the fucking metric system unless you choose to do so.

I think he was right the first time.

After crippling rounds of sanctions, these are the oligarchs who are (and aren’t) speaking out against Russia’s war (CNN) All oligarchs, all the time.

The Purges in Putin’s Shrinking Inner Circle (The New Yorker)

That was then, this is now, again Russia/Ukraine edition

Russian Superyachts ‘Go Dark’ To Avoid Tracking

NATO Doubles Battlegroups In ‘Eastern Flank’ States: Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania & Slovakia

US DoJ reveals Russian supply chain attack targeting energy sector

Visualizing The EU’s Energy Dependency

Russia’s Top Space Official Says No More Launching European Satellites

Oil Prices Tumble After EU Fails To Agree On Russian Import Ban

Russia Signals It Will Limit Scope To “Complete Liberation Of Donbas” – Says “No Progress” In Talks

Stinger, Javelin production can be increased, with congressional support: Army official

That was then, this is now: Russia/Ukraine edition

10 Unintended Consequences Of A Protracted Russia/Ukraine War According To JPMorgan

Ukraine: Fighting in Nemishaeve?

Joel Kotkin.

Perhaps nowhere is the gap between America’s cognitive elite and its populace larger than in their preferred urban forms. For nearly a century—interrupted only by the Depression and the Second World War—Americans have been heading further from the urban core, seeking affordable and safe communities with good schools, parks, and a generally more tranquil lifestyle. We keep pushing out despite the contrary desires of planners, academic experts, and some real estate interests. In 1950, the core cities accounted for nearly 24 percent of the U.S. population; today, the share is under 15 percent, according to demographer Wendell Cox. Between 2010 and 2020, the suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas gained 2.0 million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million.

This is less a growth in “bedroom suburbs,” supplying workers to the urban core, but one that serves multiple employment centers and commercial development. The latest edition of Commuting in America estimates that almost 70 percent of metropolitan-area workers now live and work in the suburbs; trips within suburbs or suburb-to-suburb commutes constitute more than double the commutes with a central business district as the final destination.

Freeberg nails it.

Obama said the question of when life begins, is above His pay grade.

Judge Jackson said she can’t define the word “woman” because she’s “not a biologist.”

Weird that liberals know so much that the rest of us don’t know, until a question emerges with some clear practical ramifications to it. Then suddenly, they can’t answer the basics.

Check it out.

Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects. This is an unusual way to think about writing notes: Most people take only transient notes. That’s because these practices aren’t about writing notes; they’re about effectively developing insight: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”. When done well, these notes can be quite valuable: Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work.

Joel Kotkin.

With the seeming deconstruction of the Biden Administration proceeding at a rapid clip, many on the right hope for an end to the conscious stoking of class resentments that has characterized progressive politics. Yet despite the political meltdown, America’s class divides have become so wide, and so bitter, that Biden’s presidency may prove more a prelude than a denouement for the future of class warfare.

Under both parties, American society, traditionally egalitarian, at least in theory, has become ever more divided by financial class. Today, the Federal Reserve demonstrates that the top one percent have more assets than the 60 percent who occupy the middle rungs. The remarkable rise of the tech oligarchy has paced this change, creating a gusher of wealth for the chosen few, including youthful, unproven start-up CEOs turned instant billionaires—as well as an unprecedented boom on Wall Street. The pandemic has accelerated this trend, vastly enriching the elites, and raising executive salaries to the highest ever. Meanwhile much of the working and middle classes may become increasingly dependent on what Marx called “the proletarian alms bag.”

 

Read it.

Like a hunter/gatherer stashing their prey, the ideas and the links we stumble upon feel valuable, rare, something worth saving. We ascribe value to the time we spend discovering things online. Surely that time wasn’t in vain.

Then we’re burdened with our findings. It’s tough to focus on something new when you’re still holding the old in your mind.

So we write things down. Bookmark them. Add them to our reading list. Highlight our findings. Make long lists and check them twice. We need a cave, a storehouse, somewhere to stash our findings.

Joel Kotkin.

Once working-class protests were often organised by leftists or even Communists, but many of today’s working-class radical movements take on a different, more populist and distinctly anti-statist character. One can question the positions adopted by protesters, particularly on vaccines, but also recognise that the new wave of working-class unrest, whether in Canada or among the gilets jaunes in France, reflects a deep-seated frustration with diktats issued from above by an increasingly authoritarian state.

Tyler Cowen.

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, induced by a timely tweet by Conor Sen. It turns out the state of Maryland is abolishing the four-year college degree requirement for many state jobs. In Missour, neither the governor nor the lieutenant governor have a four=year college degree, so perhaps they should follow suit?

Read it.

Researchers at the University of Washington reckon handset lidar can determine fluid properties, sparing you from having to use expensive lab gear. The amount of liquid needed for a smartphone lidar test is significantly less than that for a medical lab, too, they said.

One application of lidar would be testing blood for coagulation. The researchers also found their method was able to determine the fat properties of milk and whether the liquid had been adulterated, and to identify a particular liquid from among ten samples.

Read it.

Lou Zocchi is a man who cares deeply about dice. Zocchi’s well practiced speech on on dice quality is famous. It’s fairly entertaining if you have 20 minutes to spare. Part of his argument is the above photograph. Zocchi stacked twenty-sided dice from several companies. Each stack places the same numbers on the top and bottom. For example, one stack might have 1 placed on top of 20 repeatedly, while the next stack might have 9 placed on top of 12 repeatedly. Based on the height of the stacks, it appears that everyone’s dice are irregularly shaped. Everyone’s, except for Zocchi’s.

The western elite is preventing us from going after the assets of Russia’s hyper-rich (The Guardian) Thomas Piketty wants to be the European Krugman.

A Russian oligarch’s superyacht is stuck in Norway because no one will sell it fuel Do you get a special ID card if you’re a ‘Russian oligarch’?

Nordic countries wonder if they are next on Putin’s list (CNN) All Putin, all the time.

Anonymous declared a ‘cyber war’ against Russia. Here are the results

China Praises Ukraine Resistance, Pledges Economic Support

Putin only understands strength so it’s time for free world to ‘step up’ and meet this moment: Fmr VP Pence All Putin, all the time.

Andrea Mitchell Hopes War In Ukraine ‘At Least Is Helping the Democrats’

Flotilla Of 12 Tankers Carrying Russian Oil Approaching The US

International army of hackers joins Ukraine’s cyberwar

Ukraine: Yet Another Russian General Killed as Invasion Week Three Concludes

‘Effects of Aggression’ Will Last, Nonprofits Aiding Ukraine Say

Ukraine’s Corn Harvest May Plunge By A Third, Estimates Show

“Mounting Difficulties Replacing Combat Losses”

Soros Worries About Putin-Xi Partnership, Hopes They Can Be Stopped “Before They Destroy Our Civilization”  We must make the world safe … for Soros.

‘Russia–Ukraine War Would Have Never Happened Under Trump’: Rep. Hice

The West is still betraying Ukraine

She Was in Kyiv the Day Russia Invaded Ukraine. Here’s What She Saw.

Should America Enact a No-Fly Zone in Ukraine?

“What I Understand About Ukraine”

Why Russians are fleeing to Armenia

Ruhle: It’s a ‘Far-Right Narrative’ to Say US Isn’t Helping Ukraine

Ukraine War Is Leading To Massive US Military Buildup In Europe

The Nuclear Reactors of the Future Have a Russia Problem

Kremlin: Reports Of Major Progress In Ukraine Talks “Wrong” – Biden’s Putin Remark “Unforgiveable”

U.S. intelligence estimates that 7k Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine

Wimbledon May Force No. 1-Ranked Russian To Denounce Putin

Free Speech and Power in the Time of Ukraine

Always a good policy.

Read it.

So many actions that then (in my childhood) branded my family as “cheapskates” are now lauded as “environmental responsibility.” Same actions. Different social status.

Read it.

Call it the paradox of meritocracy. When talent is given space to flower, if barriers to success are pushed aside, what happens if success does not come? When society lifts external weights from the shoulders of the downtrodden, a new set of weights inevitably settles in people’s hearts and minds. That deadweight belief, however unrealistic: this is down to me. I failed not because of the system, the man, the establishment, but because of my inadequacy.

No wonder people turn to conspiracies or theories of identity oppression.

Read it.

Around a third of Ukrainian refugees arriving in France are actually economic migrants from other areas of the world, mostly North Africa and the Middle East, according to an investigation by newspaper Le Figaro.