Earlier today Jeffrey Tucker asked on Twitter “In theory, the higher end your status and the more protected your position, the more you are willing to tell the truth. In practice, it seems to be the opposite”. As I pointed out in my replies, there’s … Continue readingAccident of Birth: A Feature, Not a Bug?
Boy, they’re going full-bore with the Obama era nostalgia this year. For 2022 this is even extending to bringing back talking points for Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, really. For Thanksgiving 2013, the earliest example I have in my records, Reverend Al Sharpton posted these “turkey tips”. … Continue readingRevenge of the Thanksgiving Dinner Talking Points
What is a “planet”, anyway? A perhaps surprisingly contentious question, that extends far beyond the most recent flare-up of controversy, which centered around Pluto’s status in the planetary club, and despite the pretenses of the International Astronomical Union the jury’s still out on that one. … Continue readingWorldbuilding the Definition of Planet
When researching for my post “The Final Frontiers of the Periodic Table” it struck me how dull the names of most of the chemical elements are, “something-something-ium”, a trend of uncreativity that’s worsened with the more recent discoveries of the transuranic and superheavy elements. Now, … Continue readingOn Etymologies of the Elements
I’ve touched on this topic before on here, but I find my mind often wandering to what the development of drugs, especially medicinal drugs, might look like in a science-fictional alternate-history timeline like mine that diverges around 1900 and has had a century for all … Continue readingTherapeutics of my Alternate History
Quite a few things about new home construction, and indeed some of our ideas of what a single-family home should be like, bug me. For instance, I’ve noticed that ever since I was a kid in the 2000s traipsing about the wooden shells that were … Continue readingBuilding a Better House
Fundamentally there are three schools of thought for spacecraft that enter and exit planetary atmospheres (spacecraft that stay in space have their own design considerations, and in any case can get much wilder): capsules, spaceplanes, and lifting bodies. Anybody who’s even passingly familiar with spaceflight … Continue readingCatching a Lift
No doubt prompted by the ongoing war scare between Russia and Ukraine, I’ve been idly thinking about geopolitics, alternate histories, possible futures, borderline utopian visions. And about aspects of discourse that have long bugged me, such as how “Europe” as a geopolitical entity is very … Continue readingIdle Geopolitics
Novak Djokovic’s case, and especially his recent reversal at the hands of a regime who obviously hate him personally and want to turn (what they no doubt consider to be) a filthy unvaccinated Serb untermensch into an example of their power for the undesirables to … Continue readingA Stream of Thoughts Against Lockdown
The other day on the road, which was lined with garbage and litter, I saw groves of trees being cleared, leaving poor little raccoons homeless, to build “luxury housing”…but not luxury enough to keep any of the woods it seems. That arouses several thoughts in … Continue readingGermanic America’s Strange Dearth