Interview with Scott Siskind/Alexander; the most interesting part is at the end, his reponse to the question "Who are you?"
Despite the dangers, thousands of Russians showed up for the funeral of dissident Aleksei Navalny; many chanted "No to war." (NY Times, NPR)
Red-crowned and lilac-crowned parrots are threatened in their native Mexico, but feral populations established by escaped pets are thriving in Los Angeles.
Amazing collection of underwater photographs.
Why have two recent lunar spacecraft tipped over? Well, for one thing, the lower gravity makes tipping much easier. (X/Twittter, NY Times)
Review of a new biography of the painter Gaugin, oft-cancelled for his colonialism and fascination with Polynesian girls.
Philosophers are looking to expand their canon, to which Abigail Tulenko asks, why not considier folktales as philosophical texts?
Kevin Drum on Yondr, a system for keeping schools phone-free.
Winners of the 2023 Bulwer-Lytton contest.
Via Tyler Cowen, a Tweet wondering why Taylor Swift – a "good girl" who says she adores her parents and dates a football player – is perceived as leftist, while Lana del Rey, who sings about being a drug-abusing whore, is perceived as right-wing. These words have acquired strange meanings.
One Ukrainian export that's popular in the rest of Eastern Europe is socks depicting the Kremlin on fire.
Study of ten skeletons from one Mesolithic community in coastal France finds little evidence of inbreeding, suggesting that they had cultural mechanisms to bring in outside spouses and avoid marrying relatives.
According to this article, antidepressant prescriptions for young Americas are way up, even though they are trending downward for young men, which means antidepressant use among young women is soaring.
Fabulous Tyler Cowen post on which Europeans say their culture is superior to others.
And Cowen on big firms in small countries, like Nokia in Finland or Novo Nordisk in Denmark. On the one hand, they are great for the economy, but on the other that's a lot of eggs in one basket and that may give those firms great political power.
While they were still part of the Warsaw Pact, Poland supplied weapons to the mujahedin who were fighting Russia.
According to this story, Albania is planning to use ChatGPT to rewrite its legal code to EU standards, to speed its EU entry.
Of the seven most valuable companies in the world, six are American tech firms. I just saw the list because Nvidia has passed the only non-American firm on the list, the Saudi oil company Aramco, for third place.
German archaeologists investigating a Roman fort from the first century AD found sharpened stakes still in place at the bottom of the surrounding ditch.
What was in a package seized by the Royal Navy form a Danish ship during the Napoleonic wars.
Videos showing another Russian ship sunk by Ukrainian naval drones, the small patrol ship Sergei Kotov. And a video shot from the landing ship Cesar Kunitov during its attack by drones on February 14; you can see that at least one drone was destroyed by fire from the ship, but several others got through.
Special issue of the British Army Review with a detailed looked at what they call the Battle of Irpin River, which kept Russia forces from reaching Kyiv in February-March 2022. Most detailed analysis I have seen. How did the first troops at the Irpin get ready to receive a Russian attack? "If a position had a Javelin, one soldier dug a hole while the other watched a YouTube video on how to fire it." The Russians' fundamental problem was that they expected to drive into a city already at least partially controlled by their airborne and special forces, so they were not, at first, prepared to assault strong Ukrainian positions; by the time they understood what they were up against the Ukrainians had broken dams, flooded the countryside, blown the bridges, and brought up reinforcements.
3 comments:
One Ukrainian export that's popular in the rest of Eastern Europe is socks depicting the Kremlin on fire.
They appear to depict St. Basil's Cathedral on fire, not the Kremlin.
An extremely common mistake made by us Westerners - the Cathedral is located nearby, but is entirely outside the Kremlin itself.
That was actually a purposeful decision made when it was built, serving as a symbolic rejection of the Boyar nobility and an embrace of the common class. If anything, the institution of St. Basil's has a history of actively hating autocratic elite figures like Putin - it's mostly modern figures like Kiril who have embraced such monsters, largely because of the church's modern decline in power and relevancy.
Via Tyler Cowen, a Tweet wondering why Taylor Swift – a "good girl" who says she adores her parents and dates a football player – is perceived as leftist, while Lana del Rey, who sings about being a drug-abusing whore, is perceived as right-wing. These words have acquired strange meanings.
A leftist position would traditionally argue that both images are acceptable and valid - that people are free to be themselves, and society shouldn't tell them to conform to one image and shun the other.
A right-wing position is traditionally the opposite - there is only one acceptable image, and deviance from that is treated is immoral and tantamount to apostacy.
From where I'm sitting, there's no contradiction of values to view a "good girl" as leftist - Leftism has always permitted both images.
But there's absolutely a contradiction of values to view a "bad girl" as right-wing - they've always traditionally rejected that sort of idea, and it is only modern shifts in Conservative thought which have allowed that sort of hypocrisy (and a hundred other kinds as well).
The most you can say about "the Culture Wars" aspect of things is that the Conservatives have flipped from being Institutionalist to being a bunch of disparate nutjobs and psychopaths whose only uniting commonality is Anti-Establishment rhetoric (which is just that - rhetoric).
Meanwhile, the Liberals have by default become the new Establishment, as they still believe in things like elections determining who is in power rather than coups; supreme court members being appointed without blatant corruption and nepotism; etc.
Conservatives went from wanting to Conserve things, to wanting to tear everything down; while the Liberals stayed more or less where they always were, and have now become "Pro-Establishment" purely in comparison to the wild swing of the Right toward a weird kind of Anarcho-Libertarianism.
Study of ten skeletons from one Mesolithic community in coastal France finds little evidence of inbreeding, suggesting that they had cultural mechanisms to bring in outside spouses and avoid marrying relatives.
The two classic "cultural mechanisms" I can think of would be buying brides from outside settlements via dowry, or seizing them by force, depending on how warlike a group was.
In societies that treated women as property, it's fair to say they were treated much the same as cattle. To avoid inbreeding your herds, you either bought or stole animals from others.
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