If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
HOW LAB-GROWN DIAMONDS UPENDED THE INDUSTRY AND COULD END UP CHANGING THE WORLD (Matthew Hart, 6/20/24, CrimerReads)
Rarity is the basement attribute that supports the diamond industry. Without that concept, the whole idea of a jewel is under threat. That threat became real when a virus invaded the sparkling domain of diamonds, destroying the very idea of rarity. The virus was lab-grown diamonds.
Pity the poor Malthusians.
Paying reparations for slavery is possible – based on a study of federal compensation to farmers, (Linda J. Bilmes & Cornell William Brooks, 6/19/24, The Conversation)
In 1988, for example, the U.S. government paid reparations to Japanese Americans – and in some cases, their descendants – who were forced into internment camps during World War II.
In another example, starting in the 1990s, Congress passed a series of laws to compensate people in 12 western states and the Marshall Islands who were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation from the government’s nuclear testing program that occurred in the 1940s and 1950s. Since 1990, these programs have compensated some 135,000 victims and paid out US$28 billion to these victims and to some of their heirs.America has paid compensation to coal miners who have contracted lung diseases, farmers who have endured crop failures and fishermen facing depleted fish stocks.
The federal government has also paid compensation to victims of terrorism, wrongful convictions and natural disasters.
It also has paid partial restitution to thousands of descendants of Native American tribes, whose tribal land earnings were stolen or mismanaged dating back to the 1880s.
Indeed, the federal government has long attempted to compensate individuals – and in certain cases entire communities – through a combination of restitution, financial benefits and rehabilitation.
These programs cost billions of dollars annually and are funded in a variety of ways, including specific excise taxes, the use of government trust funds and subsidized insurance policies.
We have determined that the diversity, scale and complexity of federal programs and beneficiaries show that reparations are administratively feasible. While only a few of these programs address racial injustice, they all demonstrate the government’s capacity to administer large-scale programs of compensation for those directly and indirectly harmed.
Energy-positive laser fusion approach heads toward commercialization (David Szondy, June 19, 2024, New Atlas)
Since 2022, the Denver-based company has been working to turn the laser fusion concept into a practical source of power. The goal is to produce a new krypton-fluoride laser installation that generates 10 times higher laser energy at 10 times higher efficiency and over 30 times lower cost per joule than the NIF.
Using technology first developed for the US Strategic Defense Initiative (nicknamed the Star Wars program) in the 1980s, the Xcimer installation will use a laser system producing over 10 megajoules of energy. This will be focused on larger deuterium/tritium pellets that are easier to make and handle, and produce more energy when ignited.
Producing energy is useless if it isn’t harnessed, so the fusion chamber has molten lithium salts flowing through it, not only to protect the wall from neutrons, which reduces maintenance, but to absorb the energy and carry it away to generate power.
The idea is that the lasers will stand at a distance of 164 ft (50 m) and focus their beams through two small holes to reach the target pellet. The system is designed to ignite only a small amount of the fuel, which produces the energy needed to ignite the remainder like a match set to paper. This is more efficient and economical.
“The benefits of fusion for humanity have never been more clear or more necessary,” said Mark Cupta, Xcimer board member. “Xcimer has developed a game-changing approach to inertial fusion and assembled a team of the brightest minds in the industry to execute on it. I’m confident that with Xcimer leading us on this path, the world will see this transformative source of energy finally deployed at commercial scale.”
Thanks, Gipper!
Juneteenth: A Jubilee of Freedom (Andy Craig, June 19, 2020, Cato)
Aside from its anti‐slavery origins, the popular adoption of Juneteenth over other possible dates serves as an example of culture and tradition arising organically rather than from official recognition, which only began in recent years. Today, forty‐nine states (all except Hawaii) have made some form of official recognition for Juneteenth and there is a movement urging Congress to adopt it as an official national holiday. [Juneteenth became a federal holiday on June 17, 2021.] That would be fitting.It might be a symbolic gesture but symbolism matters. The abolition of slavery and the suffering and contributions of black Americans deserve a prominent place in our national narrative. The festive, celebrative spirit of Juneteenth is particularly appropriate for this. The triumph of hope over adversity and liberty over slavery is very much worth celebrating.
Book Review: “The Conservative Futurist” by James Pethokoukis: A Visionary Journey toward Tomorrow (Brent Orrell, June 17, 2024, AEI)
To some, “conservative futurism” will ring oxymoronic; but the future Pethokoukis is eager—“faster, please” —to usher in is conservative in the sense that it seeks to respect individual liberty and the free market and, following Burke’s vision of society as a “multigenerational partnership,” extend our moral and social concern concern to our children and grandchildren.
Resisting the stereotype that conservatism is inherently backward-looking or resistant to change, Pethokoukis’ conservatism centers individual liberty in the quest for progress. His project has much in common with Hayek’s, especially in the latter’s memorable essays “The Use of Knowledge in Society” and, ironically, “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (the meaning of the term has evolved: what Pethokoukis seeks to conserve is not natural hierarchies and the status quo, but classical liberalism, which increasingly finds itself under threat).
German Study: Vast Majority of People Will Grow Out of Transgenderism Within 5 Years (Ben Johnson, 6/16/24, Daily Signal)
A massive, yearslong study shows the overwhelming majority of young people who identify as transgender will grow out of the diagnosis within five years.
A similar supermajority of trans-identifying people suffered from at least one other psychological condition, found researchers, who tracked all children and young adults diagnosed with gender dysphoria over a nine-year period.
It’s ideology, not medicine.
UNIVERSAL DARKNESS: On the definition of film noir. (Stanley Fish, 6/10/24, The Lamp)
Next year I shall be teaching a course in film noir for the first time, and I thought it might be useful to set down my thoughts about the genre. Definitions and lists of characteristics are not hard to come by. Many websites will tell you that film noir movies were shot in sharply contrasting black and white, made liberal use of flashbacks, and flourished between 1940 and 1958 with a number of “neo-noir” films, some in color, appearing even to the present day; that film noir heroes or anti-heroes are cynical, world-weary, bitter, and vulnerable to the seductive wiles of sensual and duplicitous women; that these men and women play out their doomed lives in a landscape of corruption, betrayals, double crosses, and plans gone awry; that everyone and everything in the film noir universe is at the mercy of chance, accident, and a general, even miasmic, malevolence; that these movies were especially appealing in the context of the pessimism generated by World War II and a post-war malaise brilliantly documented in a film that is not noir but has noir touches, William Wyler’s masterpiece The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).But for my money, this list of noir elements casts too wide a net. As far as I am concerned, it’s not noir unless at its center is a moment when a line is crossed and someone, almost always a man, starts on a path that leads inevitably not only to his own destruction but to the destruction of everyone and everything he touches. It is tempting to speak of this moment as a choice, but it is better characterized as a slide, a slide from what had been a more or less ordinary existence to a toboggan ride down to hell with no hope of a reversal of motion. Edward G. Robinson’s Barton Keyes (Double Indemnity, 1944) puts it best when he says of the lovers-murderers he has not yet fully identified, “It’s not like taking a trolley-ride together where they can get off at different stops. They’re stuck with each other and they’ve got to ride all the way to the end and it’s a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery.”
The Hays Code gave us great art.
Electric Flying Taxis Are Quietly Sneaking Up on Us (STEVEN ASHLEY, 6/14/24, Scientific American)
When the electric air taxi revolution arrives, you probably won’t it hear coming. A remarkable feature of an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft is how quietly it flies, scarcely noticeable amid typical city traffic sounds. Unlike a helicopter, there’s no pounding, 90-decibel “thwop, thwop, thwop.” In contrast, eVTOL aircraft use multiple small propellers that spin half as fast as a chopper’s rotor—avoiding the annoying, low-frequency sound pulses created by the big whirling blades.
Electric motors, which are quieter than helicopters’ turbine engines, also help keep any racket to a minimum. “The latest air taxi designs, such as those from leading builders like Joby and Archer, deliver a 20- to 25-decibel reduction in noise levels compared to helicopters,” says Mark Moore, the trailblazing engineer who led the development of NASA’s X-57 Maxwell electric airplane. That means that eVTOLs could be four or five times less noisy to nearby listeners. Beyond offering quieter flights, these new machines should also be significantly safer, greener and cheaper to fly than helicopters. Moore maintains that electric air taxis are uniquely suited for what the aviation industry calls urban air mobility (UAM) services, enabling normally gridlocked travelers to “take advantage of the third dimension to escape the ant trails on the ground.”
More than two dozen major eVTOL builders have been founded in the past decade, and a few are nearing commercial certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration or its European counterpart, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).
The future always happens faster than you expect it to.
A Book Club of Two: The Time I Started a James Joyce Reading Group in College (Kristopher Jansma, June 14, 2024, LitHub)
Our professor seemed unsurprised that we weren’t getting into it, even after he gave us a schema that explained the themes and explained that Joyce’s contemporaries had been similarly puzzled, until he’d given them this guide. We settled in with these charts that paralleled the chapters back to Homer’s Odyssey, and perused the maps with the paths of the characters throughout Dublin on the day—June 16th—now known as “Bloomsday” in honor of this wonderful novel. He brought out a big green Gifford annotation and had us read it alongside the original text so that we could see all that was wrapped up inside.
But I couldn’t get into it. An international holiday was nice, I conceded, but what the hell is the point of a 768-page book that even the author’s closest friends needed to read with a cheat key?
it’s a fascistic exercise in an author controlling rather than entertaining his “readers’. (No one has ever actually read it)
The Neo-Brandeisians Are Half Right (Kevin Frazier, 6/13/24, Law & Liberty))
American firms pay upwards of $300 billion a year to comply with the latest rules and regulations. Some firms, though, pay far more than others. The extent of the disparities in compliance costs by the size of the firm requires thinking through how firms actually go about complying with the latest government mandate. More than 90 percent of compliance costs are tied to labor. An accurate assessment of a regulation’s compliance costs, then, should turn on analysis of the labor hours and wages required to toe the new line. Based on that framework, economists estimate firms with around 500 employees incur nearly 50 percent more in compliance costs than smaller firms (fewer than 50 employees), but they also pay almost 20 percent more than large firms (more than 500 employees). By taking a labor-focused approach to analyzing regulations, this disparity might be lessened. This approach should also cause Neo-Brandeisians to pause before rushing ahead with regulations meant to bring down corporate giants that, once implemented, only serve to entrench and expand their bigness.
A more expansive administrative state benefits big businesses that can afford to capture staffers and submit comment after comment in rulemaking processes. A look back at the informal meetings held by EPA staffers from 1994 to 2009 reveals that industry groups were almost always the other attendees—in comparison to public interest outfits, industry groups tallied 170 times more informal communications with the agency. In addition to holding a near monopoly over staffers’ time, industry groups fill up an agency’s record in the rulemaking process by submitting the vast majority of comments during notice and comment periods. When the EPA sought input from the public on an air pollutants rule, industry groups filled the information void—submitting more than 80 percent of the comments received by the agency.
Increased regulation and, consequently, a larger administrative state undermines the democratic ideals that Neo-Brandeisians allegedly seek to advance. Congress alone, per Alexander Hamilton, must “prescribe[] the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated.” Though Congress is far from a perfect institution—it’s the institution the Framers intended to wield legislative power because its members are directly accountable to the people. Administrative agencies, in stark contrast, cannot claim to operate with the elective consent of the people.
What’s the point of encouraging people to vote and lowering barriers to the ballot if the people’s representatives are simply going to hand their legislative powers to unaccountable bureaucrats?