WHEN GIANTS ROAMED THE EARTH:

New England stone walls lie at the intersection of history, archaeology, ecology and geoscience, and deserve a science of their own (Robert M. Thorson, December 15, 2024, The Conversation)

Stone walls can be found here and there in other states, but only in New England are they nearly ubiquitous. That’s due to a regionally unique combination of hard crystalline bedrock, glacial soils and farms with patchworks of small land parcels.

Nearly all were built by European settlers and their draft animals, who scuttled glacial stones from agricultural fields and pastures outward to fencelines and boundaries, then tossed or stacked them as lines. Though the oldest walls date to 1607, most were built in the agrarian century between the American Revolution and the cultural shift toward cities and industry after the Civil War.

The mass of stone that farmers moved in that century staggers the mind – an estimated 240,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) of barricades, most stacked thigh-high and similarly wide. That’s long enough to wrap our planet 10 times at the equator, or to reach the Moon on its closest approach to Earth.

FREAKY FARM WIVES:

Is the Tradwife just a kink? Don’t underestimate the happy housewife’s power (Poppy Sowerby, December 30, 2024, UnHerd)

The “traditional-wife” lifestyle has recently become a cultural juggernaut. Born of the reactionary idea that women must stay at home to care for children and the household, it teenaged into an aspirational trend which involved everything the dream Fifties stay-at-home mum did plus a soupçon of farmgirl hardiness (the most viral tradwives are those who run homesteads, muddy, ruddy and graceful). In 2024, she came of age, with Mormon model Nara Smith becoming one of TikTok’s top influencers by baking in exquisite ballgowns, baby perennially on the hip. Hannah Neeleman (or “Ballerina Farm” on Instagram), then broke the internet in July. An article in The Sunday Times profiling this “queen of the tradwives” crystallised the fantasy. It kept X busy for at least two weeks, as commentators argued over whether the newspaper had unfairly implied that Neeleman was oppressed. For part of the fascination these women hold is the conviction that beneath their mild and milky exterior, torment and frustration must surely lurk. As a result, the article focused heavily on Neeleman’s pre-trad career as a ballerina at Juilliard; look what you could have been, the piece seemed to say — and you packed it all in… for this? Feminists have, after all, been trained by Betty Draper, Mrs Robinson and the Stepford wives to spy the Prozac-popping crackpot beneath the painted-on smile; exposing the tradwife’s purgatorial “real life” has become a favourite pastime of internet curtain-twitchers — not out of concern, but prurience.

But speculation that these influencers are trapped by male fantasies is all part of the grift: it is no coincidence that Neeleman wore the infamous milkmaid dress on the cover of Evie last month, with the headline “The New American Dream”. Flirting with the aesthetics of Simone de Beauvoir’s archetypal housewife — a woman condemned to “immanence”, a passive and internal state of drudgery — is a deliberate provocation by influencers like Neeleman: dressing like a milkmaid transfigures the common-or-garden microcelebrity into both a sex symbol and a challenge to modern feminism. This is the secret to their success.

Inevitably, then, pulling off the “homesteader” vibe has become the focus of a multimillion-dollar industry, with blogs and books springing up left, right and centre — well, mostly on the Right. But the guides betray an irony of this trend: the real tradwives aren’t just about frilly dresses — there is a serious and sober set of moral values at the core of trad ideology, one shot through with puritanical and paranoid beliefs about the state, Big Pharma, the food industry and so on interfering with the closed, controlled unit of the family. This, after all, is why Nara Smith spends four hours making her kids cinnamon-toast-crunch cereal from scratch. Being this evangelical takes dedication. So the delusion that young mums can dip into this aesthetic without engaging with the conservatism at its foundations is worth a lot of money.

There’s a reason that the tradwife’s appeal has endured — it has, let’s remember, been a trend for a decade or more. It’s partly because the media adores the whiff of oppression that clings to her, hence the Ballerina Farm hysteria. She is also an ideal foil for feminism — beautiful, natural and meek, she is everything conservative men love, and everything radfems hate: perfectly poised for virality. And that’s because her role as a lifestyle guru means that her actual values — though generally Mormon, conservative and modest — are mysterious and therefore intriguing. Her fans are not looking for direct precepts; being told that abortion is wrong, or that premarital sex makes you worthless, would not be appealing. Instead, they want to cosplay a nebulously traditional woman by baking rye bread in a long dress.

GODSPEED:

Jimmy Carter’s Boyhood Fishing Memories (Jimmy Carter, December 29, 2024, Garden & Gun)

About once a year my daddy took me on a fishing trip to a more distant place, usually farther south in Georgia. We made a couple of such visits to the Okefenokee Swamp in the southeastern corner of our state, near the Florida line and not far from the Atlantic Ocean but cut off from the east coast by sand hills. The swamp is a shallow dish of six hundred square miles of water and thousands of islands, mostly of floating peat, on which thick stands of cypress and other trees grow. These peat islands are the “trembling earth” from which the area got its Indian name. Stained with tannin, the water has a reddish-brown color, but was considered by all the fishermen to be pure enough to drink.

We stayed at the only fish camp around the western edge of the swamp, owned by a man named Lem Griffis. His simple pine­board bunkhouses, with screens instead of windowpanes, could accommodate about twenty guests. As we sat around an open fire at night, Lem was always eager to regale us with wild tales about the biggest bear, the prettiest woman, or a catch of so many fish they had to haul in water to fill up the hole left in the lake. His stories were honed by repetition so that the buildup and punch line equaled those of any professional entertainer. We listened and laughed for hours even when we were hearing the same yarn for the second or third time. His regular guests would urge, “Tell us about the city lady who thought her son might drown.”

Lem would wait awhile until enough others joined in the request, and then describe in vivid and heart-rending tones the anguish of a mother who was afraid to let her only child near the swamp. “I finally said, ‘Ma’am, I can guarantee you the boy won’t drown. I’ve been here all my life and never heerd of anybody drowning in this here swamp.’ The lady was quite relieved. There was always a long pause, until Lem finally added, “The gators always get them first.”

IT’S ALWAYS CUTE…:

The Great MAGA Immigration Meltdown (John Ganz, Dec 29, 2024, Unpopular Front)

While Elon Musk and his tech oligarch cohort have revealed themselves to be pro-immigration—at least,t for the type of skilled workers that they need for their businesses—the national populists of MAGA are up in arms about what they feel is a betrayal of the fundamental anti-immigration principle of the movement. These objections have been articulated in terms that range from putatively colorblind civic nationalism to raging racism and antisemitism, with the predictable specter of Jewish capitalists importing pliant ethnic hordes—a Great Replacement—being raised. It’s descended into name-calling with the pro-immigration business lords calling MAGA types “retards” and the MAGA types responding with other slurs that I will not repeat. For those of us who wish ill on all these characters, the battle has been amusing to watch. If only Bannon, Musk, Loomer, and Vivek could somehow all lose. It’s also pretty funny to see the racism machine that Musk built blow up in his face, although we all now have to live with the fallout.

As might be expected, Trump, himself an employer, has deferred to the power of money—the only force he respects—and come out in favor of the H-1B program.

This is not a debate about policy as such—in fact, many of the people doing the argument seem to have a very vague idea about how the program works—but, as the antagonists realize, about the ideological content of MAGA.

..when MAGA pretends it’s the illegality they object to

THE ANGLOSPHERIC DIFFERENCE:

Rediscovering David Hume’s Wisdom in the Age of AI (Joy Buchanan, EconLog)

In his groundbreaking work A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume asserted that “All knowledge degenerates into probability.” This statement, revolutionary in its time, challenged the prevailing Cartesian paradigm that held certain knowledge could be achieved through pure reason.

BRINE BUSHES:

‘One of the most amazing things in terms of food in this country’ — How a tower of thorns makes salt (Ben Lerwill, February 27, 2024, Country Life)

On the west coast of Scotland, facing out across the Firth of Clyde towards the Isle of Arran, there stands a wall of thorns. It is manmade, but otherworldly, like a vision from a Gothic fairy tale. Its dark tangle of barbs reaches up to a height of 30ft and stretches more than 100ft across. Is it an art installation? A giant instrument of torture on the outskirts of Ayr? The correct answer is far simpler: it makes salt.

The history of salt production in Scotland dates back almost a millennium. Before the arrival of refrigeration, the mineral gave a vital means of preserving meat and other foodstuffs. Sea salt was, therefore, harvested along both coasts of the country — using salt pans, shallow containers in which seawater could be heated by fire and evaporated — and, by the end of the 18th century, the commodity had become Scotland’s third most valuable export, behind only wool and fish. Then came a steep decline, as demand waned and the market was overtaken by cheaper rock salt. The last Scottish salt-pan works was closed in 1959.

Back to the present-day Ayrshire coast, where Gregorie and Whirly Marshall are quietly changing the narrative.

TAXES WHAT YOU DON’T WANT, NOT WHAT YOU DO:

Trump Should Finish What He Started (Jason Harrison, Nov 26, 2024, Cremieux Recueil)

Back in 2005, the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform, established by President George W. Bush, rolled out proposals that echoed the principles underlying the DBCFT. Their plans included lowering marginal tax rates, eliminating certain deductions, and promoting saving and investment—concepts that resonate with the DBCFT framework. Interestingly, aspects of this tax reform have found nods of approval from both sides of the political aisle. Jason Furman, who served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, has highlighted the merits of specific components, particularly those that promote simplicity in the tax code and encourage economic growth. In fact, many Democratic lawmakers and advisors, whether openly or in quieter conversations, have also recognized the value of this approach, underscoring their bipartisan appeal. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017, the eventual enacted policy born out of “A Better Way” and signed by President Donald Trump, included provisions that have been recognized for their positive impact and could serve as common ground for future bipartisan tax policies. It’s true, parts of the TCJA genuinely are worth hanging onto.

When you peel back the layers, the tax reform plan put forth by the Republicans that was later embodied in the TCJA isn’t so much a radical leap into the unknown as it is the culmination of a long journey through scholarly research and policy evolution. It reflects a convergence of ideas from economists, policymakers, and bipartisan commissions, all wrestling with the never-ending challenge of designing a tax system that promotes efficiency, fairness, and growth. In an era where the United States faces increasing competition from countries like China, mounting national debt, and the challenges of profit shifting by multinational corporations, the urgency of effective tax reform is undeniable. A tax system that enhances international competitiveness, supports long-term wage growth for workers, and simplifies the complex web of current tax regulations is essential, and the DBCFT offers a compelling framework to address these issues.

Advocacy for a Destination-Based Cash Flow Tax is really advocacy for consumption taxation in disguise, so it makes sense to first actually address what consumption taxes are, or, more importantly, what people mistakenly think they are (spoiler: they’re not just taxes on your latte habit.)

When you peel back the layers, the tax reform plan put forth by the Republicans that was later embodied in the TCJA isn’t so much a radical leap into the unknown as it is the culmination of a long journey through scholarly research and policy evolution. It reflects a convergence of ideas from economists, policymakers, and bipartisan commissions, all wrestling with the never-ending challenge of designing a tax system that promotes efficiency, fairness, and growth. In an era where the United States faces increasing competition from countries like China, mounting national debt, and the challenges of profit shifting by multinational corporations, the urgency of effective tax reform is undeniable. A tax system that enhances international competitiveness, supports long-term wage growth for workers, and simplifies the complex web of current tax regulations is essential, and the DBCFT offers a compelling framework to address these issues.

Advocacy for a Destination-Based Cash Flow Tax is really advocacy for consumption taxation in disguise, so it makes sense to first actually address what consumption taxes are, or, more importantly, what people mistakenly think they are (spoiler: they’re not just taxes on your latte habit.)

The future al every policy is the past of W, in this case Neoconomics.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

The poison of white identitarianism (Inaya Folarin Iman, Dec. 22nd, 2024, spiked)

A mishmash of primarily online political subcultures have emerged over the past few years, vociferously defending white identity. It shares striking similarities with woke identitarianism. These advocates share so-called progressives’ racial essentialism, their obsession with identity and their conspiratorial mindset. Some have called this emerging movement the ‘woke right’, others the Very Online right. Either way, anyone who values liberal principles should be concerned.

These new rightists’ nihilistic resentment, indeed their racial identitarianism, is in danger of being passed off as a ‘legitimate grievance’ by the broader right – as an understandable response to successive governments’ failures on immigration; as of a piece with more general public concerns. At the very least, there is a hesitance among some conservatives to call out these toxic views. […]

But identitarian rightists are not expressing legitimate concerns about immigration, governance, the economy, fairness and social cohesion. They are criticising immigration on the dubious grounds that it is a means to dilute white British culture, through the sheer weight of non-white numbers. This is the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory – a crackpot fixation once found only in the darker corners of the internet that is now being increasingly mainstreamed. Indeed, one proponent of right identity politics delivered a public lecture earlier this year, presenting migration as the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of white Brits and warning that they are due to become ‘a minority in their own homeland’. […]

[T]o dismiss the emergent identitarian right as an insignificant minority would be to make the same mistake as many liberals and leftists once did. They dismissed wokeness as being limited to pesky, pink-haired university students, and subsequently proved unable to resist its mainstreaming.

The obvious difference between woke and MAGA is, obviously, that we actually subject black to systemic discrimination.

A REAL CHILL DUDE:

‘Look out! Look out! Jack Frost is about!’ (Deborah Nicholls-Lee, December 21, 2024, Country Life)

Depictions of Jack Frost might vary, but all evoke the wonder of the mysterious crystalline carpet that appears overnight on our lawns and sugarcoats our trees and shrubs. This glittery covering is simply ice crystals formed by water vapour coming into contact with a surface that’s below freezing, but its sudden arrival can feel otherworldly and curious legends have been attached to it.

Some believe that Jack Frost may originate from a character, also called Father Frost, in the Russian fairy tale Morozko. He rescues a young girl abandoned by her wicked stepmother and cuts a benign, elderly figure with a cloak and a long, soft beard. Others look to Norse mythology, where fantastical frost giants roam an icy realm and Kari, a wind god, sires sons named Jokul and Frosti.

In other folklore, Frost is closely connected with autumn. In a 1922 drawing by American cartoonist John T. McCutcheon, he perches on a maple branch painting autumn leaves with a palette of warm shades. It’s a depiction that echoes Birdie and his Fairy Friends (1889), by Margaret Canby. In ‘The Frost Fairies’ chapter, set in ‘a cold country far to the North’, the clumsy fairies spill colourful jewels belonging to the king, Jack Frost, all over the trees. An initially angry Frost is soon taken with the effect and determines, once a year, to paint the trees ‘with the brightest layer of gold and rubies’.

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES:

The Grating Roar: a review of How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold: Tale of a Redemption, Philipp Felsch (Theodore Dalrymple, 8/02/24, The Lamp)

At the start of his essay on André Malraux, the great Belgian-Australian sinologist and literary essayist Simon Leys tells a most amusing story. A stranger to a village attends Sunday Mass, the local priest being famous for his eloquence. After the service, all the congregation except the stranger have been moved to tears. Asked why he was not similarly moved, the stranger replies, “I am not of this parish.”

Leys said that he was not of Malraux’s parish either: he did not admire him. When it comes to Nietzsche, I am not of this parish.

I grant that Nietzsche was brilliantly clever and was possessed of certain important insights, psychological and sociological, sometimes expressed with wit and pithiness reminiscent of La Rochefoucauld. His main insight was that the loss of religious belief would entail philosophical, social, and psychological problems more severe than most people realized at the time, but as far as I am aware he provided no new philosophical arguments against the existence of God, nor was he the first person to question the metaphysics of morality in a world without transcendent meaning. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” was written when Nietzsche was a very young boy:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full . . .
the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Of course, Nietzsche proposed a solution to this existential impasse, though again, he was far from the first to do so; but I do not think that he can be absolved entirely from the accusation that his solution, if taken to mean what it appears to mean, could serve as a pretext for the worst imaginable conduct. Between what he sometimes wrote and what Himmler said in his infamous speech about the S.S.’s glorious work of mass extermination there is, as Wittgenstein might have put it, a family resemblance (though of course Nietzsche cannot be held responsible for all that was done by his most brutish of admirers). His exegetes in turn accuse those who take him literally of being unsophisticated and incapable of understanding his depths; but this reminds me of attempts to turn the seventy-two virgins into seventy-two raisins.