Source: LifeSite.

As my wife and son are converts to Catholicism and attend the Latin Mass in a parish affiliated with the Fraternal Society of St. Peter, I’d say that FBI surveillance has reached directly into my home. I don’t care for it.

But I’m not surprised. We have become a nation of witch hunters.

Source: Seymour Hersh.

This story inspires many questions.

• How was the journalist able to source it?
• What will the legal, even Constitutional, consequences be?
• Is the timing meaningful?

Curious.

Source: The Wall Street Journal (free link).

Here is the existential question: Turkey and Syria are enemies of the U.S. They have been hurt by an act of God. Do we help them?

I say yes. Let’s send all the food, clothing, shelter, doctors and nurses we can. Lets even coordinate with Russia and China to save and rebuild lives.

The writer explores a contrarian hypothesis.

The conspiracy theories have it exactly backward. The real threat isn’t coming from outer space, but from across the water. The military isn’t trying to start a war, it’s frantically trying to stop one. And if that means passing off Chinese spy gear as UFO’s, it’ll be far from the first time.

Continue reading “The UFO Craze is a Chinese Spy Balloon Crisis” →

Source: American Thinker.

This story is of interest for symbolic reasons more than practical ones, although the practicalities certainly deserve attention.

Continue reading “FBI to get massive new edifice” →

I didn’t know Miley Cyrus could sing, but here you go.

Continue reading “Look What They’ve Done To My Song, Ma” →

The standard model of human prehistory goes something like this: Early humans were hunter-gatherers who organized into small nomadic or semi-nomadic groups. Then one day humans discovered agriculture and became stationary farmers. Farming communities needed fortifications in which to store their produce. These fortifications became cities, which gave rise to political administration, military technologies and (eventually) organized civilizations.

Continue reading “Some History of Cities” →

Source: The Washington Post via MSN.

Stories about this balloon popped up this morning like mushrooms after a spring rain all across the web sites I habitually visit. I’m not sure what to make of it.

Are we under attack? Is psychological manipulation involved? Should Stumble Joe have shot the thing out of the sky? Could he?

More basic: How do we know the balloon is Chinese? And, how do we know it is spying on us?

I’m not inclined to worry about it much, as I have no particular animosity for China. I just hope this story is not — literally — a trial balloon for new impending hostilities.

Source: HistoryNet.

This story is a gobsmacker. The standard chronology for the origins of writing systems begins about 5,000 years ago, but now we have a strong hypothesis for the possibility that human writing began many thousands of years before then.

This discovery accords with my view that human beings have been what we are today for at least 200,000 years. That is: just as intelligent, possessing a comparable volume of practical knowledge and dealing with the same interpersonal and social issues as we do.

A big mystery for me, though, is why did people 50,000 years ago crawl on their naked bellies deep into cave systems to draw pictures on the walls? What in the world were those Upper Paleolithic Einsteins thinking?

Source: Marginal Revolution.

I agree with the observations in Tyler Cowen’s note.

For more than 20 years as a proposal writer I contended with dreamers who claimed that proposal writing soon would become automated. They had a point: Most winning proposals contain chunks of re-usable content. If only those chunks could be stored in a database and made easy to retrieve and re-assemble, the dream of push-button proposal writing could be achieved. Simple.

And yet every project I ever saw that attempted to create the dream application failed.

Continue reading “Commercial applications for ChatGPT” →