GIVEN THAT THEIR iDENTITARIANISM IS THE DISEASE…:

America Needs a Conservative Party: To defend the free world, free enterprise, and free thought (Robert Zubrin, Nov 22, 2024, The Cosmopolitan Globalist)

Trump is fine with baseball and apple pie. But his prescription for group identity—nativism—while more traditional, is equally toxic. As Friedrich Hayek explained in his seminal work The Road to Serfdom, there is no contradiction between nationalism and socialism. On the contrary, invoking the tribal instinct is the key to arouse the passion necessary to realize the full collectivist agenda.

While it has been assigned the designation “right-wing,” nativism is not a conservative orientation. It is not conservative, because it is anti-free enterprise, anti-Judeo-Christian, opposed to America’s founding proposition, and opposed to the traditions that built America. So it is not conservative at all. On the contrary, it is a form of radical tribal collectivism.

This is the deepest problem. Collectivization of property is very bad. Collectivization of minds is even worse. It is worse because it requires the abandonment of individual reason and conscience, the very essence of what makes us human. Conservatives viscerally opposed to what the Democrats have to offer are being told they need to board the Trump train and leave their minds behind on the station platform.

…our Identitarianism is not the cure.

THERE BE DRAGONS:

In the Heart of the Bear (Richard Farr, 11/21/24, 3Quarks)

Here, for me anyway, was a strange and arresting new experience of wilderness. I’d started out in full Delusional Romantic mode — a Paddler in a Sea of Fog, full of myself for appreciating my own insignificance in these almost limitless spaces. But in all this vastness there was a kind of claustrophobia to be found. You camp on one of the beaches and the sand is pleasantly soft underfoot. Maybe the sun has come out too and is applying a little warmth and UV to your damp malodorous gear. You look around, breathe deeply, and… you can’t visit the land. Beyond the sand, behind the tent, there’s an almost impenetrable green wall.

Almost: rarely, very rarely, there are short rough paths into the forest that previous visitors have created. One of these, three hundred yards long perhaps, connects two beaches across an isthmus. Trying to follow it makes me feel like a creature out of Tolkein: I have to clamber over branches larger than ordinary trees; I fall into pools of mud; I’m not sure I’m still going the right way; I find myself in mossy deeps where strange fungi loom out of the dark and whisper at me. Then, off to one side, I glimpse that especially eye-popping red cedar.

Wanting to get closer, I leave the path through a rat’s nest of salal and climb onto a trunk that has fallen in the right direction. An elevated highway! But the wood is slick and I manage only a couple of dozen small nervous steps before I see that a drop is opening up on either side: five feet, ten, fifteen, into a shadowy chaos of bark, loam, and leafy understory. I have the sensation that there is no forest floor, that the abyss of dying plant matter might go down forever. Ahead of me, across the trunk, the way is blocked by another trunk and its attendant wreckage. I prod, hesitate, back out and try a second route. Then a third, during which I’m attacked by killer brambles and twist an ankle during my escape. No ‘exploring in the forest’ here. The density is like nothing I’ve ever encountered. There’s no way through.

Robert Falcon Scott was right: “It is good to know that there remain wild corners of this dreadfully civilised world.” But after getting back to our narrow beach and failing to find any other paths, I thought: I don’t belong here. This place belongs to the trees, which are lending it to the bears and the wolves. The forest is saying: ‘Now that you’ve seen this, and appreciated what it really is, don’t come back.’

Later, I wondered if that was just a different kind of Romanticism.

NOT JUST SHOWER CURTAIN RINGS?:

New 3D Bioprinter Could Build Replicas of Human Organs, Offering a Boost for Drug Discovery (Margherita Bassi, November 19, 2024, Smithsonian)

Currently, scientists have only limited ways to create tissue for testing pharmaceutical therapies, such as using lab-grown samples or by relying on traditional 3D bioprinting, per Popular Science’s Andrew Paul. However, cultivating organs in a lab is complex and expensive—and printing them is currently slow and prone to errors, such as positioning cells incorrectly.

“Incorrect cell positioning is a big reason most 3D bioprinters fail to produce structures that accurately represent human tissue,” David Collins, head of the Collins BioMicrosystems Laboratory at the University of Melbourne and a co-author of the study, says in a statement.

“But with our new approach,” Collins and two other researchers write in an article for Pursuit, “not only can we position cells with precision, we can also fabricate at a scale of single cells.”

THAT WAS EASY:

Techno-optimism: clean and free energy (jan Bosch, 18 November 2024, Bits & Chips)

First, renewable energy. Sometime in recent years, we crossed the point where solar energy became the cheapest form of energy. Cheaper than oil, gas and any other non-renewable energy source. This is quite incredible as it means that research has been driving down the cost per watt incredibly fast. In fact, the price of solar panels measured in watts per dollar follows Moore’s Law, meaning that the cost of solar energy is halved every 18 months.

We also have wind power, tidal power and several other forms of renewable energy. The cost per watt for all of them is dropping rapidly as well. Although humans naturally think linearly instead of exponentially, the cost of these renewable sources of energy is dropping exponentially toward zero due to technological innovation and economies of scale.

The main challenge is of course energy storage. Progress in battery technology is rapid but slower than for generation. But also here, the rapid electrification of vehicles is driving economies of scale that are driving down the cost of storage as well. Already now, battery systems are becoming available for stationary purposes that often have had a previous life as part of a vehicle. This allows for high cost-effectiveness as the economic life of batteries is extended significantly.

This brings us to the second main development in energy: nuclear is on the way back. New generations of nuclear reactors are available that are truly safe, much smaller and much more cost-effective than the traditional reactors. According to the research I’ve seen, nuclear actually has the lowest environmental impact of all energy sources, including solar and wind, and the lowest number of attributable deaths. Using nuclear to fill the gaps in energy generation by renewables and to address the storage challenges will be critical if we want to stop using fossil fuels.

Kind of amusing that MAGA think they can make everyone spend more on energy in perpetuity just because that hate Greens.

AT THE eND OF hISTORY OUR MAIN “PROBLEM”…:

The real story of inflation (Peter R. Orszag, November 14, 2024, Washington Post)

The results show that supply-chain variables directly accounted for 79 percent of the rise in underlying inflation in 2021. These effects then continued into 2022, with ongoing supply issues directly explaining 60 percent of the rise in inflation that year. The rest was more than accounted for by spillovers from the 2021 supply-driven inflation. All of which leaves only a modest role for demand-driven effects like the covid relief package.

Why did these effects play out over such a long time? At the start of the pandemic, Americans shifted their spending from services (like travel, eating out and going to the movies) to goods (like computer hardware and exercise equipment) — just as a snarled supply chain caused those goods to be in short supply. This caused prices to spike.

…is having too much money to spend. Tax consumption.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably (Nature, Nov. 14th, 2024)

[…] the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.

SURVIVOR:

How György Ligeti soundtracked 2001, inspired Radiohead and composed music like ‘a knife through Stalin’s heart’ (Gillian Moore,7/03/23, The Guardian)

With Ligeti, however, tragedy is never far away. In his Poème Symphonique (Symphonic Poem) from 1962, 100 mechanical metronomes are set out on the stage in the formation of a symphony orchestra, each one solemnly wound up and set in motion at different speeds by a performer wearing formal evening dress. Ligeti was inspired at the time by the Fluxus movement and it is often billed as a “fun” piece. When the metronomes are let loose, the aural effect of this weird, mechanical orchestra is like rain on a roof or swarms of loud insects. As they gradually wind down, intriguing patterns, rhythms and ticking melodies emerge. By the end, there are only three, then two and then just one solitary metronome – the survivor – ticking away on the stage until it too falls silent. I always find it devastating.

HE’S LUCKY HE HAD THE FED:

Voters blamed Biden and Harris for rising costs. Was that fair? We asked economists. (Daniel de Visé, 11/15/24, USA TODAY)

The pandemic shut down much of the global economy in 2020. When the world reopened, consumers found many products running short. Demand outstripped supply, the classic formula for inflation.

“The COVID shutdowns were the biggest, sharpest economic collapse in modern history,” said Joshua Gotbaum, scholar in residence at the center-left Brookings Institution. “And it was followed by the biggest inflation in 40 years.”

In March 2021, President Biden signed a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, directing payments of up to $1,400 to pandemic-stricken Americans. The Trump administration had already sent two rounds of stimulus checks, in March and December of 2020.

Some economists pilloried Biden at the time, saying the third round of stimulus relief was unnecessary, excessive and likely to overheat the economy. Many more economists say that now.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

People prefer AI-generated poems to Shakespeare and Dickinson (Jeremy Hsu, 14 November 2024, New Scientist)

Most readers can’t distinguish classic works by poets such as William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson from imitations generated by artificial intelligence. And when asked which they prefer, they often chose the AI poetry.

“Over 78 per cent of our participants gave higher ratings on average to AI-generated poems than to human-written poems by famous poets,” says Brian Porter at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

IT WAS THE BIDEN/HARRIS INFLATION…:

The Threat Trump Poses Is Real, but Democrats Must Learn Through Defeat (Danny Postel, November 6, 2024, New/Lines)

The Democratic Party was in a structurally bad position in 2024. Very bad. As the political scientist John Sides, who has been called “probably the leading authority on campaigns in the United States,” recently pointed out on our podcast, The Lede, “If you were imagining a year in which the Democrats were fighting into some headwinds in terms of [President Joe] Biden’s low popularity, the shadow that inflation may continue to cast in people’s assessments of the economy, it’s easy to see this as a year that would be a comfortable win for the Republicans.” The election was a toss-up only because of Donald Trump’s huge negatives, Sides noted.

..and they nominated Joe and then Kamala.