Why are Our Vocabularies Shrinking?

 From Country Life:

We can’t go back in time, but there is a way of inoculating ourselves against this deadening algorithmic creep. As a nation, we not only used to read more, but more widely and with greater courage. A glance at the 1956 O-level English Literature syllabus is salutary: how many of us now would be willing to give Francis Bacon’s 1626 utopian fever-dream The New Atlantis a go?

This is the National Year of Reading, ‘a UK-wide campaign designed to inspire more people to make reading a regular part of their lives’. Children who have been turned off it by relentless exams are a focus, but most of us could do with reminding ourselves of the magic of getting lost in a world built entirely from words.

Swapping a screen for ink and paper can get around digital distractions, but it isn’t mandatory: listening to an audiobook counts, ditto reading e-books (and, of course, magazines — including digitally). (Read more.)

Share

"Captivating Novel"

 A review of My Queen, My Love from Kathleen Van Lierop: 

Due to my interest for royal history, I was very keen to read "My Queen, My Love: A Novel of Henrietta Maria" written by Elena Maria Vidal. The book didn't let me down, it captivated me from the beginning  to the end, although I knew how the story continued...The author wrote this book very well and she painted a perfect picture from the 17th. century. It was very nice to read. So without no doubt, I recommend this book to all royal history lovers. I hope to read more books written by Elena Maria Vidal. I'm very pleased to give a 5 star rating for this captivating novel. (Read more.)

Share

DOGE Achieved More than You Think

 From City Journal:

The media often portrayed DOGE as a way for Donald Trump to get back at agencies he disfavored and social programs he disliked. It would surprise many to learn that the biggest workforce reductions came at the former Department of Defense, now the Department of War. The department has over 85,000 fewer employees than it did at Trump’s inauguration, down more than 10 percent. The Trump administration and the Republican Congress have showered the department with largesse and expanded military purchases, but that hasn’t stopped DOGE and Trump from trimming its civilian headcount.

Though liberal-leaning agencies like Health and Human Services saw larger proportional shrinkage, every agency across the federal government took cuts. The Department of Veterans Affairs, another agency favored by Trump and Republicans, has 27,000 fewer employees today than it did pre-inauguration.

Looking beyond departments to the types of jobs eliminated, the biggest group by far, at over 43,000, consisted of general administration, management, and “program analysis” positions—the sorts of middle-management jobs that previous government-slimming efforts have targeted. Other positions that saw large cutbacks included general attorneys, HR officials, clerks, and general business managers, each losing roughly 7,000 workers. If you wanted to trim fat, these are the positions you’d start with.

DOGE also made smaller cutbacks across hundreds of types of federal positions, adding up to significant numbers. The government has eliminated 1,000 or more positions among public-affairs specialists, logistics managers, financial administrators, accountants, budget analysts, social-science analysts, and grants managers. It also lost about 100 interior designers and creative-arts therapists. (Read more.)

Share

Love Bytes

 From Claremont Review of Books:

A recent survey of American teens found that 42% of boys aged 13 to 17 are now using A.I.-powered apps to create their own pornography. Thirty-two percent have created “deepfake” porn of girls their own age, then shared those images with others. In my work as a family physician and researcher, I have talked with these boys. One told me it’s almost magical: he speaks his fantasy, and—poof!—20 seconds later, there it is: professional-grade pornography, spun up in an app such as Seedream or Nano Banana. And this boy is 15 years old. He has never kissed a girl. A growing number of boys describe themselves not as heterosexual but as “pornosexual.” In my experience, a significant minority of these young men are virgins. They say that they prefer porn to the real thing. But they have never experienced the real thing.

Unfortunately, the elderly—by which I mean people over 40 years of age—often have no idea what is going on. A 16-year-old boy was suspended at a school I visited for creating deepfake porn of a classmate, then sharing those images with other boys at the school. When the parents were told what their son had done, they could neither believe nor understand what had happened. They had no idea such a thing was possible. They didn’t think their son was even looking at porn, much less producing and distributing it.

In the new edition of my book Boys Adrift, published this year, I explore how A.I.-generated seductresses are derailing many boys. But we now have a book which explores in depth how A.I.-powered apps are changing the lives of girls, too. Freya India, author of GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, was born in 1999. Her book is an extension of her popular Substack page of the same name. In both, she explores first-hand how digital technology has transformed the experience of young women. A native of England, she has recently relocated to Washington, D.C. She is careful to cite examples and data from both the United Kingdom and the United States, but she makes clear that there is little difference between our two countries on most of the topics she addresses. Her book shows that, whereas boys are prone to inventing and micro-editing their imagined partners, girls have tended to turn their tech inward to “perfect” themselves. The consequences are profound. (Read more.)

Share

Light Upon the Lost Mission of La Pérouse

 

From The Guardian:

As he prepared to climb the scaffold to be publicly executed by guillotine on 21 January 1793, Louis XVI is reported to have asked: “Is there news of Monsieur de la Pérouse?”

He was referring to Jean-François de Galaup, the count of Pérouse, a naval officer and navigator whom the French king had dispatched in 1785 on a round-the-world scientific mission to rival discoveries made by the English explorer Captain James Cook.

The two ships under La Pérouse’s command, La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, disappeared three years later after leaving Botany Bay in Australia. The wrecks were only formally identified in 2005 and exactly what happened to them remains a mystery to this day.

Now rare letters written by an illustrious scientist who perished in 1788 have resurfaced, giving a new and personal account of the voyage. They are described as veiled love letters addressed to the married daughter of an aristocratic family, and were discovered hidden in a book of engravings being examined in preparation for auction.

Ludovic Miran, a book and manuscript expert for the auctioneers selling the letters next month, described the find as “a miracle”.

“We have a certain number of documents from the expedition but they are almost all scientific, so these personal letters are extremely rare,” Miran told the Guardian. “They throw a completely new light on what is in France an extraordinary scientific and historical event.” (Read more.)

Share

How Biological Weapons Could Nearly Wipe Out the Human Race

The Nazis wanted to use biological warfare but had no way of keeping it from killing their own people. From John Hawkind at Culturcidal:

If I were currently picking the three most likely bets to destroy human civilization, the first would be AGI. Building an intelligence far smarter than we are, along with automated factories, militaries, and robots it could control, is likely a very dangerous endeavor. I always think of it as like chimpanzees inventing human beings, giving us machine guns, and telling us to get them more bananas. Yeah, you’ll probably be rolling in bananas, but things may also potentially get very dangerous down the road.

My third pick is the classic one people have been worried about for the last few decades: nuclear war. If enough missiles were to start flying, it might not only devastate the countries being hit by them, but it could potentially cause a nuclear winter that essentially stops food production for a decade and starves our species down to nearly nothing.

My number 2 pick is one I think most people underestimate: That is biological warfare.

Why? (Read more.)

Share

The Giant Problem of Tolkien’s Legendarium

 From Visions of Middle-Earth:

Giants actually occur in several of Tolkien’s works. Although we never learn a great deal about them, tracing Tolkien’s changing ideas about giants reveals a fascinating corner of his creative process and raises an intriguing question: if giants really exist in Middle-earth, what exactly are they?

Giants are among the most widespread creatures of traditional folklore and mythology. As John D. Rateliff notes in The History of the Hobbit, ‘giants have a long, long tradition in folklore of being extremely dangerous if not downright wicked.’ Tolkien encountered them in many of the traditions he knew well, from Classical mythology to the powerful jötnar of Jötunheim in the Old Norse sources.

So giants were hardly an out-of-place idea for a mythology-minded writer like Tolkien. No more than dragons, dwarves, great eagles, or walking trees. And Tolkien clearly found the idea appealing. Throughout the development of his legendarium, he repeatedly experimented with giants and different roles they might play.

In this essay, I want to follow that history and explore where giants appear across Tolkien’s writings. In a follow-up to this article, I will look at the major theories about their identity and ask which explanation best fits the evidence. (Read more.)

Share

The Medieval Mystical Concept of “Natur Naturans”

 

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

In the 13th century, Latin translations of Aristotle flooded European universities. Aristotle wrote extensively about physis (nature) as an intrinsic, active principle of motion and change within the material world. The idea was, broadly, that the physical world was not inert or lifeless. Each natural thing possesses an internal principle governing its characteristic movement and development.

Going back to the simple little grazing rabbit or the bird tending its nest, according to Aristotle’s physis, natural things possess their own principles of movement and development. And you can see this principle at work. An acorn looks nothing like an oak tree, but it grows into an oak because it contains the principle of “oakness” and its nature is to grow into the fulfilment of that principle.

When Aristotle became the foundation of Christian philosophy, thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure had to find a way to understand this in a way that did not end in Pantheism. The obvious question had to have a coherent Christian answer: If nature itself is imbued with an active energetic force that creates, shapes and moves things, does that mean nature has its own independent power separate from God? If nature does all the work, does that mean God is relegated to being a passive bystander, perhaps something like what later thinkers would call the “watchmaker” deity who made everything like a machine that runs on its own, and then left?

The solution was obvious: God’s power of creation is combined with His will to sustain everything that exists in existence from moment to moment. And everything He created is endowed with an inherent nature and functions according to that nature. Everything has characteristic powers, activities or behaviours and ways of developing inherent to it. The rabbit grazes and burrows; the bird builds its nest and sings; the acorn develops into an oak because they were all created with those powers and instincts. (Read more.)

Share

Trump Has Delivered on the Economy, the Drive-By Media Simply Won't Report on It

 From The Enterprise:

Trump’s policies give manufacturers reasons to build here. Tariffs make domestic production more attractive relative to shipping goods into the country, while the tax law restored 100% expensing for equipment and extended it to new factory construction. Expensing lets a business deduct qualifying costs upfront rather than spread the deduction over time. That changes the calculation for a company deciding where to put its next plant.

A chip fab takes four years from permit to wafer; a petrochemical plant takes five. The wait is real, and a pledge is no guarantee of completion. Yet the same reporters who dismiss Trump’s commitments as vapor celebrated every Biden CHIPS Act press release as a manufacturing renaissance, including projects since shelved. Apply the same scrutiny to both. One-directional skepticism is partisanship with a notebook.

The habit predates the factory announcements. In 2021 and 2022, the Biden administration called inflation “transitory,” and the drive-by media repeated it for most of a year as inflation climbed from 5% to 9%. When a Fox reporter asked Biden about inflation in January 2022, the president answered with an obscenity on a hot mic and the press corps chuckled. When gasoline crossed $5, CNN supplied silver linings. When two consecutive quarters of negative growth arrived that summer, the White House redefined recession and the networks adopted the definition within a news cycle. (Read more.)

Share