First He Came for Cancel Culture. Now He Wants to Cancel Smartphones - The New York Times - "He found that young people were experiencing a tidal wave of anxiety, self-harm and suicide. Major depressive episodes have roughly doubled for teenagers since 2010, according to Mr. Haidt’s research. Parents and teachers sometimes explain this by noting that Gen Z is facing disasters that would make anyone depressed: climate change, school shootings, threats to democracy. But Mr. Haidt argues that young people historically drew a deep sense of purpose when facing thorny challenges, whether World War II or the movement against the war in Vietnam."
The West has forgotten the art of strategy - "World-class chess players know the difference between strategy and tactics better than politicians do. To win in chess you need to start with a strategy — a long-term plan that gets you to a position of superiority. Then you close in with a sequence of tactical moves. As Max Euwe, the Dutch chess grandmaster of the 1930s, once observed: “Strategy requires thought. Tactics require observation.” The West is all tactics. The East is mostly strategy. You need both because even the most brilliant short-term moves do not add up to a strategy. Just look at the history of US military intervention since World War II. Each of them had their short-term rationale, even Iraq. But has it made the US safer? Has it made the world safer? Has it brought democracy? Has anyone become more civilised as a result?... I lost respect for virtually every single Russia or China expert in prominent think-tanks because they kept on misjudging this key element of China’s and Russia’s strategy. They still tell us that China and Russia will never align, or that China would step in and stop Putin from using a nuclear bomb. The misjudgements continue on all levels. The previous US administration misjudged the dynamics of the semiconductor ban, through which they hoped to keep China in the digital dark ages for a little while longer. They expressed surprise when Huawei succeeded in integrating a state-of-the-art chip into one of its latest models. The semiconductor ban is a classic case of the unintended consequences of sanctions. China learned how to make semiconductors, and the Russians learned how to build a payment system. Officials in the US State Department think of the dollar as a political weapon through which they can force their will on others. They got bad advice from macroeconomists who told them that no other currency in the world could ever challenge the dollar. They are not telling the whole story. What is true is that no other official currency will challenge the dollar. The euro started as the world’s second-largest currency for foreign exchange reserves and has now been pushed into third place by gold. Where the observation goes wrong is that it fails to see the true threat. It comes from alternative payment systems, crypto currencies and blockchain technologies that allow other countries to diversify away from the US without having to create new currencies of their own. Macroeconomists still live in the world of fiat money and central banks — all creations of modern industrial society. But China and Russia are changing the game. It’s not cricket anymore. The trouble with our misjudgements is they have no corrective mechanism. If you are a financial trader, your misjudgements cost you money. You cannot keep getting everything wrong and expect to stay solvent. That is not the case in foreign policy, because the people who keep on making those serial misjudgements are not the same people who are paying the price. It is also why dysfunctional economic theories persist even if there is no empirical evidence that supports them. Economists, State Department officials and journalists live in a space of mutually reinforced misjudgements. They celebrate each tactical victory — and never win wars. The West did have a strategy once, which is what put us into the position of superiority in the first place. It originated in science and was leveraged by smart political decisions. But it all happened a long time ago. The Second World War was the beginning of a breathtaking series of innovations that started with the Manhattan Project and that were co-sponsored by the US Army: the transistor, the semiconductor, the integrated circuit, the personal computer, the internet, and now AI. It was technology that gave the West a strategic advantage. European integration was in that category of big strategic moves until it turned into a sprawling mess with EU enlargement."
Mexican cartels are killing influencers live on camera - "Experts point to increasing links between content creators and powerful organised criminal gangs, which often use them to launder money or to promote their groups. In return, influencers gain notoriety for providing insight into a drug trade that has long fascinated outsiders."
Sex doll in suitcase prompts murder investigation - "Disposing of a sex doll is a difficult task, as any reader of Tom Sharpe’s novel Wilt will recognise. But cramming one into a suitcase and dumping it by the side of a road in the Australian wilderness – with it still wearing a wig, nose piercing and clothing – has to be one of the most incongruous ways to do so. The doll was so lifelike that New South Wales police launched a murder investigation hours after it was discovered by a couple on the outskirts of Oallen on Sunday."
Innocent shopper kicked out of Sainsbury’s after facial recognition error - "A shopper was thrown out of Sainsbury’s after staff incorrectly identified him as an offender flagged by its facial recognition software. Matt Arnold, a promoter at Dulwich Hamlet Comedy Club, had been waiting to pay at a store in East Dulwich, south-east London, when he was swarmed by security and told to leave."
Spain’s socialist leader pushes Europe to the edge - "the sight of tens of thousands of people streaming across Europe’s only land border with Africa prompted an extraordinary, critical response from 22 of the 27 European Union bloc members, who blamed Sánchez’s migration policy. It was just the latest controversy for the socialist Spanish leader, who finds himself increasingly isolated on the world stage. Sánchez’s opposition to Donald Trump’s war against Iran and his condemnation of Israel over the conflict in Gaza have alienated him from his counterparts in Berlin, Rome and other European capitals. The Spanish prime minister has also created divisions within the 32-nation Nato military alliance by refusing to raise defence spending beyond 2.1pc of GDP, well short of the 5pc demanded by Trump by 2035. Germany and many Nordic countries, conscious of the Russian threat closer to their borders, have promised to find the cash. Others have paid lip service to pledges to raise defence spending, concerned that angering Trump might prompt further US tariffs against the EU. Sánchez’s response to perhaps the biggest migration crisis to hit Europe in years speaks volumes about his inability to read the room. Instead of staying in the red-brick Moncloa Palace, the prime ministerial residence in Madrid, to deal with Ceuta and its aftermath, Sánchez jetted off on holiday. To the astonishment of many Spaniards, Sánchez even took the time to share his summer playlist of hits that he would listen to on the beach, including the likes of Charli XCX and Madonna. Since coming to power eight years ago, Sánchez has notched up considerable gains for Spain. The economy is on a roll and the Socialist leader can claim credit for defusing the Catalan independence crisis that caused the worst political division since the failed 1981 military coup. He has also become a darling of the European Left, both at home and abroad. As well as taking on Trump and Israel, he has announced windfall taxes on banks and energy companies, introduced rent controls and passed legislation allowing anyone over 16 to change their gender... Even former Socialist party supporters accuse him of selling out to Basque and Catalan separatists over a series of concessions to keep his minority coalition administration clinging on to power. Opponents from the Right-wing People’s Party and the far-Right Vox have demanded he step down, as corruption scandals involving his wife, brother and close aides have embroiled his government. They have all denied wrongdoing... During the pandemic, Sánchez was among five Left-wing leaders in Europe. Today he is the only social democrat remaining on the Continent, apart from the leaders of Malta and Denmark... Relations between Spain and Israel have never been good. Madrid was the last European nation apart from the Vatican City to recognise Israel in 1986, a condition of it joining the EU. This was largely owing to the close ties between Spain and the Arab world during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, who died in 1975 after nearly 40 years in power... there have been seven migration amnesties in the past 40 years, but none have addressed the underlying problem of illegal immigration... Carlos Miranda, a former Spanish ambassador to the UK and the United Nations, believes Sánchez’s policy towards Nato is mistaken. “His attitude towards Nato is not correct,” he says. “The Americans have been asking for more support not only during Trump’s time but for 20 years. “If Europe does not support Nato then the Americans will get fed up and it will collapse. It is not a matter of being nice towards Trump, it is a matter of being prudent.”
Mexico deploys military to save avocados - "Mexico has deployed more than a thousand troops to protect its £2.2bn avocado industry from being decimated by cartel violence after Washington halted imports of the fruit over security concerns for US agricultural inspectors. Around 1,500 Mexican soldiers are being stationed across the embattled state of Michoacán to protect agricultural workers who provide the US with two-thirds of its avocado supply."
Wheat has corrupted humanity - "wheat is a slave-master, demanding in its specific and daily needs, not least the endless — or so it seems to us who have ever grown the stuff — weeding. Wheat locked us into a seasonal cycle of planting, weeding and harvesting from which we have been unable to escape ever since. It also made us more sedentary, both in terms of chaining us to static settlements, and becoming less active. Guarding a wheat field from wild boar requires less energy than hunting wild boar; the lineal ancestor of the couch potato was the campfire bun. Crop-watching may demand little energy, but it is demanding of time. With fewer hours to hunt and to forage, we settled for a restricted diet. At Abu Hereyra in Syria, archaeology records this shift: when the occupants were hunter-gatherers, they consumed 150 wild plants; as arable farmers, they ate just a handful of crops. Human health deteriorated; the human body changed. Singularly, the jaw shrunk, since the new wheaty diet required less chewing than meat. Human teeth did not reduce proportionately to the smaller jaw, so dental crowding ensued. The diet of starch — wheat’s principal component — caused cavities. And the dietetic value of wheat, which was anyway only modestly nutritious, has declined by as much as 30% under contemporary industrialised agriculture. The intriguing question is: if wheat-growing altered our corporeal structure, did it alter our brain? Did the systematic rituals and requirements of planting and harvesting wheat change our brains to make us more docile? Organised? Cooperative? Disconnected from nature? Did it turn us away from animism to praise of Ceres, goddess of grain crops, and then to an abstract, monolithic God of whom we ask our daily bread. What wheat certainly did do was facilitate the rise of the state. As James C. Scott, co-director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, explains in Against the Grain, wheat became the best way to tax the people: “The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable’.” Wheat-fields are fixed and surveillable; livestock moves about. Counting sheep is easy in bed but for a state flunky on an arid hillside, the accurate checking of ovines (which are, anyway, easy to transport, and therefore to hide) is all but impossible. Similarly, communities reliant on tubers or root vegetables such as yams as their staple were more able to evade taxation since the crop can be left in the ground and harvested when the tax collector has gone home. Such societies rarely developed into states. But where you have wheat, historically, you have state control or its like. The taxing of wheat enabled the emergence of non-productive elites, who required an armed wing to defend their regime. The food that fuelled the necessary population increase to staff the army, the fist of the state? Wheat. Nutrient poor but energy dense, fodder for the masses, it provided just enough energy and health to work, breed, fight. The early grain states were “population machines” (Scott again), domesticating people as the farmer domesticates the cow herd... To prevent the enslaved fleeing the dirty work, law and policing were invoked, even invented. The legal Code of Hammurabi (c1750 BC) has six clauses to punish the escape of slaves. Western society was eventually organised around the production and consumption of wheat. And so it became the ultimate political tool. Communism’s iconography of a hammer for the proletariat and a wheat-cutting sickle for the peasantry turned out to be one of history’s crueller ironies. The hammer was taken to the workers, the sickle to the peasant. As well as being easy to tax, wheat is easy to confiscate. And since wheat is a subsistence crop, remove it and you have starvation. During the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3, Stalin deliberately deprived the country’s population — who lacked sufficient ardour for rule from Moscow — of wheat. Some 3.9 million Ukrainians, about 13% of the population, perished... Since the Second World War, the chief agricultural aim of government (and transnational governments such as the EU) has been productivity: quantity over quality. Wheat farming has become a yield-obsessed industry dependent on labour-reducing but expensive technology. Unsurprisingly, it has become a cereal-killer of small, family farms: a brand-new combine harvester can cost £100,000. Farmers who do fork out for one become indentured to an agribusiness complex, which oversees their production of wheat from cultivation to sale... Although the lobbyists and the apologists of agribusiness insist that pesticide use has declined over the last quarter of a century, this is not the case when it comes to wheat. Between 2000 and 2016, average spray passes (applications) over wheat increased from 5.5 to 6.6, while the active substances in sprays went from 14.7 to 20.5... Yearly planting requires yearly tilling and this constant churning of earth kills the soil’s living organisms, spumes CO2 from soil-stored carbon, and exacerbates climate change. And I have not even mentioned the negatives of nitrogen as industrial wheat’s mainstay artificial fertiliser, what with its polluting run-offs and its release of nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas which, pound for pound, warms the planet 300 times as much as carbon dioxide... Why not grass over swathes of the arable prairies of East Anglia — and Ukraine — and stock them with free-range cattle and sheep? Grass requires no lashings of chemicals, and livestock dung is excellent at restoring soil fertility and biodiversity; a single cow can feed 2.2 million insects per year, which means snacks galore for the birds and the bats... An outdoor cow, on established grass, with methane-reducing seaweed supplement and low stocking density, is actually sequestering carbon. So, bovines are less of a climate problem than synthetic clothes, given that trainers alone cause 1.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. One can only presume that the Oxford councillors who took the decision recently to go “meat free” are nudists. Or stupid. Or anti-nature. Or all three."
This Engineer Is Preparing to Feed a World Without Sunlight - "David Denkenberger wants to build a system to feed eight billion people in a world without sunlight. His inspiration: the humble mushroom. In 2011, Denkenberger was reading a scientific paper that suggested that after such a catastrophe, humans would die out, while mushrooms would thrive in the dark. According to Denkenberger, his reaction was, “Well, why don’t we just eat the mushrooms and not go extinct?” A sunless future is more possible than you might think. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists calls the world’s current risk of nuclear war “urgent.” Massive supervolcano eruptions, though rare, have threatened life on earth before. In both scenarios, the biggest threat to human survival comes not from the original explosion, but from the resulting blanket of soot that would cover the earth, blocking all or most sunlight. Without the ability to engage in conventional agriculture, common wisdom holds, billions of people would starve. Yet according to Denkenberger’s estimates, with proper planning, technological development, and international cooperation, up to 80% of the world’s current population could survive in a world without sun. To make this preparation a reality, Denkenberger, an engineer and assistant professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, co-founded the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED). Their focus on alternative food sources has led them to leaves and wood that would be left from dying forests, protein-rich single-cell bacteria that could be farmed in methane, and “weird” deep-ocean fish that would survive from nutrients in the water."
Best Friends Turned Killers - The Murder of Skylar Neese - "Skylar Neese disappeared from her home in Star City, West Virginia at around midnight on the 6th of July, 2012. She was murdered by two girls she considered to be her best friends... Her two best friends were Rachel Shoaf and Shelia Eddy... Best Friends Turned Killers - The Murder of Skylar Neese One night during a sleepover, Skylar witnessed Rachel and Shelia having sex. She would later write about this event in her diary and relay it to several friends. Feeling as though Skylar was “in the way” of their relationship and becoming bored of her being around, Rachel and Shelia decided they would kill Skylar... Before Skylar died, she uttered the words “why?” When Rachel confessed to the murder, she claimed “they didn’t want to be friends with Skylar anymore.”... In the days leading up to the murder, Skylar’s Twitter account indicated that something had gone awry. Two days before her murder, she tweeted: “it really doesn’t take much to piss me off” and “sick of being fucking home. Thanks “friends,” love hanging out with you all too.” Then just the day before her slaying, she tweeted: “you doing shit like that is why I can NEVER completely trust you.”"
Crémieux on X - "I like using murder rates from medieval Europe to get at how insanely violent places American cities are. Baltimore has a similar homicide rate to... Italy, during the time of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, when Italy was a bunch of intermittently warring states."
Finally, an advantage to having big breasts - " In a tale that brings together sport, physics and a dash of seaside-postcard cheer, a spat has broken out ahead of the Tour de France, with female riders accused of inflating their assets to gain an aerodynamic advantage. Before Tuesday’s trials, officials frisked female competitors for breast padding, after being alerted that some upfront effrontery might be going not so much down as up, up and away. Bra boosting or “chest fairing” is not about the psychological advantage of looking buxom on a bike, but increasing the surface area of the upper body to influence airflow. By artfully moulding chest wadding, the rider’s front becomes rounder and smoother, providing a sort of fairing that strategically steers air about the body. Experts maintain that this can speed matters up by 0.78 seconds per kilometre. Across a 21-mile block, this should allow at least a 16-second edge. What is happening to our sporting world? Barely are we over the Winter Olympics’ “penis-gate” outrage, when contestants were banned for bolstering their wedding tackle for more impressive results, when a new high-camp hotspot has been declared. The situation is straight out of ‘Allo ‘Allo, peopled by Gallic bombshells all friskily plantureuse. All that is needed is a bloke in a beret to exclaim: “Oh là là, les gros lolos!”... biologically speaking, an hourglass physique is still said to reign supreme. Its proportions were established by psychologist Dr Devendra Singh at the University of Texas back in 1993. To create what the willowy Japanese wistfully refer to as a “bon-kyu-bon” (big-small-big) figure, a waist-hip ratio of 0.7 (a waist circumference 70 per cent of the circumference of one’s hips) is required, the cherry on top being the requisite rack. The effect of such extravagance can be seismic. Richard Burton’s description of his first encounter with a swimsuit-clad Elizabeth Taylor was notoriously rhapsodic: “Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires down before they withered. Indeed, her body was a miracle of construction and the work of an engineer of genius… I can think of no other word to describe a combination of plentitude, frugality, abundance, tightness. She was lavish. She was a dark unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much.”"
The anti-car blob is out of control. It’s trying to make driving impossible - "Lynda La Plante, one of Britain’s greatest crime writers, this month lost her licence after being caught driving between 24 and 27mph several times in a 20mph zone. Her defence was the “very confusing” nature of the signs signalling a switch from 30 to 20mph near her home in south-west London. That is now the norm for British motoring. You often no longer know when you’ve committed an offence. You find out about it in the post weeks later... it is all too easy to get it wrong, for the roads have been captured by a bureaucracy that is now out of control in creating completely unreasonable complexity: cycle and bus lanes, LTNs, different charging schemes, constantly switching speed limits, junctions that look like an Escher painting, and proliferating signage with the text density of a 17th-century Bible. It’s the cameras and automated enforcement that enable all this. No wonder the anti-car lobby loves them. None of this has happened by chance. It’s happening because the transport bureaucracy and its charity offshoots want it to happen. They actively want to make many car journeys slow and frustrating so you give up and get a bus or bike instead. Maybe that’s just about manageable if you live near a main route into a city. But if you have a complicated route to your weekly shop, your work, or your kids’ school, tough luck. All this stems from deliberate national policy, and both the previous Tory and current Labour governments have had basically the same approach. National legislation such as the 2015 Infrastructure Act requires the Government to deliver cycling and walking strategies. Active Travel England (ATE), an agency of the Department of Transport, controls much of the funding and helps shape policy. Government money flows to huge advocacy charities such as the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust (formerly Sustrans) or Living Streets. And behind it all, of course, sits net zero and the Climate Change Act, the justification for so much craziness. The institutional opposition to this is incredibly weak. The AA and RAC Foundation put up no ideological resistance. Car companies keep their heads down. The SW1 think tanks have too strong a London-centric perspective. The opposition is made up of a few shoestring-funded groups and angry residents. No wonder nothing gets better. In fact things get worse. Next month Oxford will finally bring in its much-derided traffic chicanes, road blocks normally only seen in areas under military occupation. Mere visitors from outside Oxfordshire will not be allowed to pass through them at all. Oxford residents will be allocated passes to do so – but only for 100 days a year. No one, of course, is suggesting you should be able to drive around the Radcliffe Camera as you could in the 1960s. But there is a happy medium. Oxford’s policy now works in the interests of well-heeled residents who live near the centre and of students. That’s not enough to sustain a city centre economically, as any visitor to Oxford can see for themselves, provided of course they have their papers in order. Bath, where the Liberal Democrats’ traffic policy is ruining a beautiful city, is heading in the same direction. But it’s not just nutty local councils. Last month Active Travel England – a government body, remember – published its Rural Design Guide, an appalling document which deserves a full read by anyone who wants to understand why getting around Britain is becoming so difficult outside cities as well as within them. Notably, it says that “where people walking, wheeling and cycling share space on country lanes with motor traffic, traffic speed should be no more than around 20mph”. Few rural roads don’t meet this criterion nowadays. Wait for those 20mph limits in the countryside, too. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the people in charge of transport policy in this country think that private car use is intrinsically harmful, morally suspect, and should be progressively made harder everywhere until it is a marginal mode reserved for specific essential trips. To them, the value of freedom to travel, to go where you wish without having to do so on a state-approved public transport route, is simply terra incognita... Millions of people intensely resent the current approach. They are waiting for a party prepared not merely to complain about the war on drivers, but to dismantle the machinery behind it. Whoever offers a credible programme for doing so may discover that mobility is a more powerful political issue than SW1’s cyclists imagine."
The war on the car proceeds apace. Left wingers just want to control people
Helicopter rescues British hikers who pushed prams down Alps - "A group of nine British walkers, including babies and toddlers in pushchairs, had to be rescued after straying from a path in the Austrian Alps. The Britons were among a group of 36 walkers who embarked on a walk above the resort town of Sölden. They took the Wildspitz cable car up to the top of an 8,694ft-high mountain and had planned to walk back down to the town. But they took the wrong path during their descent and soon found themselves in steep, exposed terrain at an altitude of 7,628ft... One rescuer said the group was woefully equipped for such tough terrain. The suitability of their footwear and clothing was “equal to zero”, he said. Babies in prams were being pushed along a trail that mountain rescue officials described as “completely unsuitable for strollers”."