Last month, American missionaries went to clean up a village in a Third World nation. The volunteers picked up 50 tons of garbage in this backward land. Nowhere is the gap between the rich and the poor greater. The poor live in tents, while the rich reside in the most expensive houses in the world.
The poor face typhoid and other debilitating diseases that were eliminated in civilized nations. People poop in the street for lack of indoor plumbing.
Instead of meeting the basic sanitation needs of its cities, the corrupt, one-party government squanders billions on an unneeded high-speed train. It will never be built but contracts are awarded to political insiders for work that will never be done. Because of this corruption, President Donald John Trump wants to curtail U.S. aid to the land.
What is maddening is this land has the world’s fifth largest economy. It could easily take care of its needs without outsiders coming in to save them out of pity.
Something must be done to save this land from itself. Taking over this backward Third World nation would be easy. We already have troops stationed there. Its army consists of a national guard and police.
But that would mean spending trillions on another foray into nation building.
As a teenage girl, Françoise Sagan read Rimbaud, lying on the beach one morning, and experienced a life-changing moment.
Someone had written this, someone had had the genius to write it, the joy of writing it; it was beauty incarnate, definitive proof, all the evidence I ever needed of what I had suspected since I’d read my first unillustrated book – that literature was everything. It was sufficient unto itself; and if others have blindly strayed into business, or into one of the other arts, and didn’t know it yet, well at least I now knew. Literature was everything: the best and the worst, fatality; and once you knew this there was no alternative but to grapple with it, with words, literature slaves, our masters. You had to run with it, strain to leap up to it no matter how high it was. I felt this even after having read what I’d just finished reading, which I would never be able to write myself, but which impelled me by its very beauty to run in the same direction.
In any event, what place was there for hierarchies? If a house is in flames, it’s not just the most agile and the fastest who are needed to put out the blaze. When there’s a fire, all hands carry water. As if it mattered that the poet Rimbaud had galloped past right at the start… Since reading Illuminations I have always thought of literature in terms of there being a fire somewhere, everywhere, which I had to put out. And no doubt that’s why I’ve never been able to muster total contempt for even most calculating, mediocre, cynical, vulgar, stupid and glib writers, living or dead. I know that they too heard the alarm sound one day, and that from time to time they cannot help but run in desperate haste toward the fire; and as they stagger around it that they burn themselves just as badly as those who hurl themselves into it. In short, that morning I discovered what it was I loved, and would continue to love above all else, for the rest of my life.
The oldest written copy of part of the 11th-century Japanese epic The Tale of Genji, has been found in the home of a Tokyo family with ancestral ties to a feudal lord.
Seen as the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji was completed around 1010 by a woman of the 11th-century Heian court of Japan, who was later given the name Murasaki Shikibu by scholars. It centres on the fortunes – amorous and political – of Genji, the son of an emperor. The original manuscript of the story no longer exists, with the oldest versions of the story believed to have been transcribed by the poet Teika, who died in 1241.
Until now, just four chapters of the 54-chapter story are confirmed to be Teika’s transcriptions, but now a fifth chapter, which depicts Genji’s encounter with the girl who becomes his wife, Murasaki, has also been identified as Teika’s. The manuscript had been kept in an oblong chest in a storeroom at the Tokyo home of Motofuyu Okochi, a descendant of the former feudal lord of the Mikawa-Yoshida Domain in Aichi Prefecture, the Japan Times reported.
Experts at Reizeike Shiguretei Bunko, a foundation for the preservation of cultural heritage, have now confirmed its authenticity, with the handwriting of the text, and the cover of the manuscript, identical to other Teika manuscripts. The foundation said although the newly-found manuscript “mostly†matches the common version of the story, there are some grammatical differences.
According to the Asahi Shimbun, family records show the manuscript has been in the hands of the Okochi family since 1743, when it was handed down from the Kuroda family of the Fukuoka feudal domain.
Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction, 1833-1836, New York Historical Society.
Victor Davis Hanson observes Contemporary Progressive “progress” and finds it rather lacking in comparison the past which it always sneers at and condemns.
In terms of learning, does anyone believe that a college graduate in 2020 will know half the information of a 1950 graduate?
In the 1940s, young people read William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck. Are our current novelists turning out anything comparable? Could today’s high-school graduate even finish “The Good Earth†or “The Grapes of Wrath�
True, social media is impressive. The internet gives us instant access to global knowledge. We are a more tolerant society, at least in theory. * But Facebook is not the Hoover Dam, and Twitter is not the Panama Canal.
Our ancestors were builders and pioneers and mostly fearless. We are regulators, auditors, bureaucrats, adjudicators, censors, critics, plaintiffs, defendants, social media junkies and thin-skinned scolds. A distant generation created; we mostly delay, idle and gripe.
As we walk amid the refuse, needles and excrement of the sidewalks of our fetid cities; as we sit motionless on our jammed ancient freeways; and as we pout on Twitter and electronically whine in the porticos of our Ivy League campuses, will we ask: “Who were these people who left these strange monuments that we use but can neither emulate nor understand?â€
The NY Post reports that, these days, you can’t even try to get an alligator drunk without getting arrested and fined.
A Florida man was reportedly arrested for trying to get an alligator drunk after his pal captured the reptile.
Timothy Kepke, 27, of Hobe Sound allegedly fed some beer to the animal, which also bit him, on Aug. 26 in Palm City, according to a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission report obtained by TC Palm.
Moments earlier, Kepke told police, Noah Osborne, 22, caught the gator with his bare hands, the report said.
Kepke told authorities he had consumed a few beers that day, but claimed he wasn’t intoxicated during the incident.
After the beer feeding, which was recorded, the duo released the animal back into the wild, Kepke told officers.
Authorities obtained the video, though it’s unclear how, and on Sept. 17 confronted Kepke at his home, where he copped to the crime.
Erick Erickson finds that advertising poses are cheap and by no means necessarily sincere.
Late last week, Apple removed an app from its App Store that allowed people in Hong Kong to see where the police were or where tear gas lingered. They then added the app back to the store. But now, after vocal criticism from China, Apple has formally caved to their communist overlords and deleted the app from the App Store.
Apple, of course, has bet big on the Chinese market for iPhones and cannot afford to anger China. It has completely capitulated against a totalitarian regime all while its CEO continues to lecture Americans on social justice in this country.
Tim Cook is willing to file legal briefs on behalf of all sorts of causes in the United States and is outspoke on all sorts of social issues here. But in China, he is a stooge for the communists and no voice at all against injustice.
The gun that fired the first shot at the Battle of Bunker Hill is heading for sale Morphy Auctions in Denver later this month.
The Revolutionary War musket belonged to John Simpson, a Private in the 1st New Hampshire Regiment who fought during the historic battle in Charlestown, Massachusetts on June 17, 1775.
As the British troops advanced, Simpson fired his weapon prematurely – disobeying the famous order given to American soldiers not to fire “until you see the white of their eyesâ€.
Having been passed down by Simpson’s descendents for almost 250 years, the historic weapon will now be offered for sale for the first time, and is expected to sell for up to $300,000. …
Following the battle, John Simpson was the only American soldier court martialed for disobeying an order and firing too early.
However, he was only lightly reprimanded and went on to serve with distinction during the war, rising to the rank of Major before returning home to his family farm in New Hampshire.
His trusty musket was then passed down through generations of his family, creating a remarkable unbroken line of ownership, and has been described as “arguably the most significant, positively identified Revolutionary War long arm in existenceâ€.
Not only is John Simpson’s name forever linked with the Battle of Bunker Hill, but his descendents played an even greater role in shaping the history of the nation.
Simpson’s grandson was Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War hero and 18th President of the United States; and his great-grandson was Meriwether Lewis, who explored the Western territories of the country as part of the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Somebody posted the above photograph in the Vintage Firearms Discussion Group on Facebook (the link probably won’t work if you aren’t a member), and a lengthy argument ensued. I’m afraid the skeptics won.
“Cheap Army Surplus Jeeps! You can buy a brand new jeep in a crate for $50!” Ads with headlines like this ran for decades in the back of Boy’s Life, Popular Mechanics, and several other magazines I used to read as a kid in the 1960’s (and those ads probably ran in the 1940’s and 1950’s as well). The ads promised to tell you how to buy Willys MB and Ford GPW jeeps and other government surplus for extremely low prices. They charged a fee for sending you this information. You mailed in your payment and waited for the postman to deliver the pamphlet that would divulge the secrets of buying tools, equipment, jeeps, trucks, etc. etc. on the cheap for “your fun and profit”.
Wired explains why there has recently been a huge exodus of Astrophysicists out of Academia and into Silicon Valley where they are highly paid for studying consumer preferences instead of Stellar Dynamics.
To understand what’s driving astrophysicists into consumer product startups, consider the recent explosion of machine learning. Astrophysicists, who wrangle massive amounts of data collected from high-powered telescopes that survey the sky, have long used machine learning models, which “train†computers to perform tasks based on examples. Tell a computer what to recognize in one intergalactic snapshot and it can do the same for 30 million more and start to make predictions. But machine learning can also be used to make predictions about customers, and around 2012, corporations started to staff up with people who knew how to deploy it.
These days, machine learning drives everything from Stitch Fix’s curated boxes of clothes to Netflix’s personalized movie recommendations. How does Spotify perfectly predict the songs that will surprise and delight you in its weekly personalized playlists? That’s machine learning at work. And while machine learning now constitutes its own field of study, because scientists from fields like astrophysicists have been working with those kinds of models for years, they’re natural hires on data science teams.
“We were already in Big Data before Big Data became a thing,†says Sudeep Das, an astrophysicist who now works at Netflix.
Das got his PhD at Princeton, where he researched cosmic microwave background—basically the electromagnetic radiation left over from the Big Bang. Afterward, he spent a few years studying data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile. The telescope collects nearly a terabyte of data from the cosmos every night, and from this massive data set, Das detected an elusive astrophysical signal. It was a rare payoff after years of painstaking work. The discovery earned him the attention of the University of Michigan, which offered him an assistant professorship.
But Das turned it down and moved to Silicon Valley instead—first to work as a data scientist at Beats Music, then at OpenTable, and now at Netflix.
The decision to leave academia came down to a few factors: The pay was certainly better, and the jobs were more plentiful. “There’s a bottleneck of getting into tenure-track positions,†he says. And being in the Bay Area meant he and his wife—who is also an astrophysicist—would never have to worry about both finding jobs. But the real surprise, he says, was that the work in tech companies was actually interesting. At Beats, he says, he found “like-minded people who were working on problems that didn’t take away the intellectual high.†Same math, different application.
Das says he’s noticed that more and more physicists are trading the difficult slog of academia—which can involve a decade of financially dicey postdoctoral work—to take cushy jobs in tech. “Only two people from my PhD batch at Princeton are not working in industry,†he says. “You have to be a die-hard academic to stay.â€
This big bang extends across the industry. “Astrophysics is our number one domain,†says Eric Colson, Stitch Fix’s chief algorithms officer emeritus. “Most folks have a PhD in a quantitative field, but if we did a histogram, I think astrophysics is number one. They teach math really well—a lot of physicists are better mathematicians than mathematicians. They also teach coding well. They’re better computer scientists than most computer scientists.†…
In academia, astrophysicists can spend years stuck on a singular problem. And many of the exciting problems have already been solved, says Amber Roberts, a former astrophysicist who now helps academics transition to industry at Insight Data Science. “We discovered the size of the universe. We measured the speed of light. We found pole stars. We found black holes,†she says. “A lot of those big things, like understanding how space-time works or how gravity distorts, are what get people interested in the study of space and cosmology. But what you’re really doing is contributing to a very small subfield where you’ll work about three years on a paper that about 10 people in the world are going to read. You’re not going to be Carl Sagan.â€
The always intellectually provocative, and ever so prolix, Mencius Moldbug returned recently, after several years, with further doses of Dark Enlightenment.
[W]hen we think of historical Nazism, Stalinism or Maoism, we think of wartime or warlike atrocities. When we look at Czechoslovakia in the ’60s, Germany in the ’30s, even China today, we see far fewer atrocities. Yet we still see the same structure of hierarchical control, with one person or a small team unilaterally directing the entire state.
This structure is clearly absent in the Western democracies.
Whatever our “regime†may be, it has nothing remotely like the Chinese Communist Party or Chairman Xi. It has no hierarchy. It has no center. It has neither leader, nor politburo, nor cadre. Maybe it’s not real democracy; it’s not a monarchy or a dictatorship.
A…distributed despotism? Is a decentralized Orwellian regime possible? If we can say no, we’re done. It seems impossible. Can we show that? We can’t, so let’s try to design one.
Maybe there are two kinds of Orwellian regimes—like two-stroke and four-stroke engines. Neither cycle is inherently better. A four-stroke leafblower is excessive; a two-stroke car, primitive.
Maybe a four-stroke regime is decentralized; a two-stroke regime, centralized. One is a reptile; the other, a mammal. One is a fish; the other, a whale. Both rule by shaping public opinion. Two-stroke regimes design their stories. Four-stroke regimes have no dictator, so they have no designer; their stories must evolve.
Generally, the two-stroke regime relies more on hard repression; the four-stroke regime relies more on soft illusion. But both, as we’ll see, can and do use both stabilization tools.
The two-stroke regime is a one-story state. Everyone has to believe one narrative—one official history of the present.
This worked as well for Amenhotep as Chairman Xi. The two-stroke is an especially good fit for centralized monarchical regimes. It also fits the canonical cliche of Orwellian totalitarianism.
The one-story state is efficient, but unstable. Its chronic problem is that people hate being told what to believe. They often cause trouble even when the story is true!
Anyone who’s been to China has seen how efficiently classic totalitarianism can execute…in both senses. Not only does the PRC make all consumer goods, it’s also the top destination for transplant tourism. Maybe you don’t really want that Chinese two-stroke SUV, even if it does pop like a dirtbike.
Without oil in its gas, a two-stroke engine overheats. In the end it catches fire. Without active practice in hard repression, without serious enemies at home or abroad, the classic one-party state weakens. It rots from excessive success. In the end it is overthrown by little girls with flowers.
The ideal state might be a one-story state where the story was 100% true. But this is a dangerous level of idealism. (Nor would it repeal these axioms of regime stabilization.)
The four-stroke regime is a two-story state. When people hear one story, they tend to ask: is this true? When they hear two stories, they tend to ask: which one of these is true? Isn’t this a neat trick? Maybe our whole world is built on it. Any point on which both poles concur is shared story: “uncontroversial, bipartisan consensus.â€
Shared story has root privilege. It has no natural enemies and is automatically true. Injecting ideas into it is nontrivial and hence lucrative; this profession is called “PR.â€
There is no reason to assume that either pole of the spectrum of conflict, or the middle, or the shared story, is any closer to reality than the single pole of the one-story state.
Dividing the narrative has not answered the old question: is any of this true? Rather, it has… dodged it. Stagecraft!
This is even better than supposing that, since we fought Hitler and Hitler was bad, we must be good. These very basic fallacies, or psychological exploits, are deeply embedded in our political operating systems. Like bugs in code, they are invisible until you look straight at them. Then they are obvious.
The key feature of the two-story state is much less reliance on hard repression. As in the four-stroke engine, the cost of the feature is a pile of parts and a drop in performance. The fundamental engineering problem of the two-story state is to contain the active, but innocuous, political conflict which distracts its subjects out of any real democratic power.
The modern two-story democracy contains two power cores: a civic core and a political core. The trick is: in theory, the political core is stronger than the civic core. In practice, the civic core is stronger than the political core.
A stable regime must maintain this power inversion. If stability is lost, the political core takes control. For an instant, the engine becomes a real democracy—then it turns into something else, or just catches fire and explodes. Think Germany in 1933.
Yet the “inversion†is, at bottom, a lie. The political core is presented as the ruler. The civic core is presented as the tool. The real flow of power is the opposite of the apparent flow.
Public opinion does not direct the civic core; the civic core guides public opinion. The one-story state needs continuous repression; the two-story state needs continuous stagecraft. Of course, the former can still lie, the latter still repress.
In current language, the positive label “democracy†signifies the civic core. We must all defend “democracy†from “politics,†a negative label. People really believe this newspeak. Since it is dangerous to reverse the power flow, they may even be right. …
It’s interesting to compare Western civil society to an Eastern ruling party. Both are organs outside the civil service proper. The latter is truly centralized; the former, decentralized.
Civil society has no single point of failure. That’s cool. Yet it is impossible not to notice three disturbing facts about it. We’ll have to leave these phenomena as mysteries for now.
One: it has no arbitrary center, but its reputation system seems arbitrary, or at least static. The prestige of prestigious universities, newspapers, etc., does not seem to change. These institutions must be either impeccable, or unaccountable.
Two: some mysterious force seems to ideologically coordinate this system. All these prestigious institutions, though organizationally quite separate, seem to magically agree with each other. When they change their minds, all change together, in the same direction. We cannot say that Harvard is on one side of Yale; we can say the Harvard of 2019 is on one side of the Harvard of 1989. This force is not centralized, but works like a center. It could just be a totally sick level of collective wisdom. But is it?
Three: one tendency of this mysterious force is reinforcement of effective political formulas. Somehow civil society prefers to think thoughts that make civil society stronger. It is still a marketplace of ideas; it also prefers to think thoughts that are true. These preferences are not always aligned.
If we can explain all these phenomena, we can explain how a decentralized civil society, effectively protected from democracy, can, does, and indeed must become a distributed Orwellian despotism.
