We are preparing to storm positions that we should already be occupying

August 22nd, 2025

In doctrine, dogma dies hard:

Nowhere is this more evident than in NATO’s enduring obsession with the offense, particularly in the terrain of the urban environment. Despite being a fundamentally defensive alliance, most NATO exercises, training courses, and operational plans focus on seizing ground, breaching defenses, and clearing strongpoints. The result is a dangerous conceptual imbalance: armies that are prepared to attack in cities but not to defend them. In reality, they will likely have to do the latter before they ever do the former.

This is not an abstract concern. If conflict erupts in NATO’s sphere of interest, the first units to make contact will almost certainly be defending, not attacking. An adversary is likely to have the important first-mover advantage, seizing the initiative by making the opening moves. Initial objectives in such conflicts will undoubtedly include those large urban areas that straddle the main transportation infrastructure leading farther toward the adversary’s objectives. Potential adversaries know this in advance. They will plan to mass fires, integrate uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) with thermobaric payloads, and conduct urban shaping operations before launching a combined arms assault. They will not wait for NATO to organize a counterattack. War will come to the defenders.

Why, then, are NATO militaries still preparing to assault someone else’s trenches instead of holding their own?

The roots of this imbalance lie in what can only be described as a cult of the urban offense. It is baked into NATO doctrine, into training centers, and into the very language of tactical education. Urban warfare is taught almost exclusively through the narrow lens of clearing buildings, breaching doors, assaulting intersections, and suppressing enemy strongpoints. The imagery is kinetic, aggressive, and built around a World War II model of urban combat that focuses almost entirely on the tactical level.

Most of that sounds more like Delta Force’s hostage-rescue tactics trickling down through the Rangers to Big Army.

That model is outdated. NATO instructors still teach tactics developed to defeat Axis defenders in fortified cities. But modern adversaries are not relying on bunkers and machine gun nests. They are using thermobaric weapons, precision-guided bombs, loitering munitions, tandem-charge rocket-propelled grenades, and multispectral UAV reconnaissance. A shoulder-fired rocket that once might have created a breach in a wall now flattens a room, an entire floor, or even a whole building. In Ukraine, even basic UAVs are delivering thermobaric payloads through second-story windows.

Yet our tactics have not caught up. NATO battalions in the Baltics still train to assault trench lines. But whose trenches? If Russia crosses the border, NATO’s first mission is to hold ground, not to seize it. We are preparing to storm positions that we should already be occupying.

The problem runs deeper than doctrine. The way we train shapes the way we think. When soldiers spend months rehearsing assaults but never practice layered defense or mobile delay operations, they internalize a false belief that success only comes from attacking. Urban exercises often end at the point of entry (the break-in), not with the enemy’s inevitable counterattack. There is little emphasis on hasty defense after seizure, even though many major urban battles such as Stalingrad, Ortona, Aachen, Grozny, Fallujah, Mosul, Marawi, and Sieverodonetsk required forces to shift from offense to defense, sometimes repeatedly.

Urban training environments make this worse. Most NATO sites are sterile and overly simplified. They consist of a few one- or two-story buildings arranged in a grid, with no interior clutter, no civilian presence, no collateral damage, and no realistic fire effects. These facilities are useful for rehearsing movement drills but do not prepare troops to survive real contact. No NATO unit trains under thermobaric blasts crashing through upper floors or autocannon fire ripping through multiple walls. No site simulates the violence of joint fires in dense terrain or the intensity of enemy shaping operations that strike everything around a defensive position.

[…]

This failure to replicate real-world conditions reinforces outdated thinking. If soldiers only train in sanitized environments, they will not learn how quickly a position can be located, targeted, and destroyed. If they never experience fire effects such as rounds passing through concrete, they will not understand the limits of cover or the importance of dispersion, concealment, and movement.

The lack of depth also prevents defenders from practicing fallback routes, alternate positions, and layered deception. Units become conditioned to static defense. And yet, many NATO militaries still express confidence in their ability to conduct urban operations at scale.

[…]

First, defending forces must limit the attacker’s options. One of the defender’s most pressing challenges in urban terrain is poor situational awareness in the surrounding environment. Line of sight is limited, and urban clutter obscures movement and intent. While this affects both sides, attackers often retain the initiative and usually enjoy better intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance coverage from the outset. This gives them more options for break-in points than most defenders can realistically cover.

[…]

Second, dispersion within the local urban environment must be maximized. NATO forces must abandon the one building, one squad mentality. Instead, available construction and fortification materials should be used to reinforce a distributed network of mutually supporting buildings. This creates layered strongpoints that can deliver interlocking fields of fire, absorb attrition in stages, and delay the enemy’s tempo.

Defenders should prepare loopholes for overlapping fires, establish mouseholes for concealed movement and fallback, and construct alternate positions that are ready for rapid displacement. These routes should be obscured from overhead observation to reduce vulnerability to UAV detection and indirect fire. Camouflage and concealment remain essential. Avoiding enemy intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance entirely is all but impossible, so survivability depends on signature reduction so fighting positions are not targetable or worth the attacker’s munition.

Posted in War | 2 Comments »

The astronomer, like the Shinto priests, must climb his mountain

August 21st, 2025

Percival Lowell (1855 – 1916), the founder of the Lowell Observatory, inspired Martian romances like A Princess of Mars in multiple ways:

Lowell, the liberally bankrolled son of a New England manufacturing dynasty, led an eccentric but not unproductive life, devoting himself in his twenties and thirties to the study of Far-Eastern religious practices and in the last half of his life to the study of the planet Mars. More people know of Lowell’s Martian obsession than know of his interest in the shamanic practices of the Koreans and Japanese, but the earlier fascination thoroughly informs the later one. Lowell’s theory of the fourth planet as the home of an immensely ancient and philosophical civilization in turn informs the generic Martian Romance, beginning with Burroughs’ “John Carter” trilogy, whose writer-imitators found their venues in the pulpy purveyances of commercial fiction, the bright covers of which would beckon to hungry souls from the display rack. Lowell wrote up his ethnological forays in a series of books, among them Chosön – the Land of Morning Calm (1886), Noto – an Unexplored Corner of Japan (1891), and Occult Japan – Shinto, Shamanism, and the Way of the Gods (1894). Occult Japan begins with Lowell’s first-hand description of a shamanic ritual at the crater-edge of Ontake, a dormant volcano in Kagoshima prefecture. Two young monks help a third to enter a trance whereupon an ancestral spirit possesses and speaks through the medium. “The veil was thrown aside,” Lowell writes; “we stood face to face with the gods.”[xii] Occult Japan ends with a long chapter, “Noumena,” wherein Lowell goes in quest of “that innermost something that each of us calls ‘I,’” “the essence of the Ego,” or “the Self.”[xiii] Perhaps the gods and the Self are, in fact, one.

The symbolic features of the Shinto landscape recur in Lowell’s books about Mars. Lowell built his observatory in 1894 on what came to be known as Mars Hill in the then non-populous desert-town of Flagstaff, in the Arizona Territory. The astronomer, like the Shinto priests, must climb his mountain. He must, as well, alter his perspective. In The Evolution of Worlds (1910), Lowell writes that, whereas “astronomy is usually thought of as the study of the bodies visible in the sky” and is thought to concern itself only with “the present state of the universe”; the astronomer in fact “attempt[s] to peer into [the universe’s] past and to foresee its future.”[xiv] The astronomer deals, counter-intuitively, less with the visible than with “the contemplation of the invisible” through apperception “by the mind’s eye.”[xv] In Mars and its Canals (1906), having proven by his own lights the inhabited status of that world, Lowell writes that the Martians must qualify as “life of a high order,” in that “where the conditions of life have grown more difficult, mentality must characterize more and more its beings in order for them to survive.”[xvi] A certain rather Puritanical attitude might, Lowell grants, determine that “the very strangeness of Martian life precludes for it an appeal to human interest,” but quite the opposite is the case: “The less the life there proves a counterpart of our earthly state of things, the more it fires fancy and piques inquiry as to what it be.”[xvii] It matters little to Lowell whether the intellectual establishment acknowledges his argument. He quite candidly reveals himself as more the seer and adventurer than the staid man of science. It might be significant that in his youth, before his independence, he spent six years running a cotton-mill for his father. Lowell declares, and in so doing fuses himself with the science-fiction aficionado transfixed by a magazine cover on a high rack, that, in aging, “we but exchange… the romance of fiction for the more thrilling romance of fact,” and “the stranger the realization the better we are pleased.”[xviii]

Posted in Media, Policy, Science | 3 Comments »

Is air travel getting worse?

August 20th, 2025

Is air travel getting worse? Yes, Maxwell Tabarrok reports, in some important ways:

  • Long delays have become much more common. A 3-hour delay is 4x more likely in 2024 than in 1990, but airlines have masked this increase by padding scheduled flight times.
  • Air travel remains safe; accidents are still on a slow downward trend
  • Airfare has become much cheaper over the past 10 years

Posted in Business | No Comments »

Consumerism and sports fandom may be enough to keep this country together

August 19th, 2025

In his commencement address at Portland State University in 1998, President Bill Clinton told the crowd, “Within five years, there will be no majority race in our largest state, California“:

“In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude over so short a time.”

[…]

The white majority crowd cheered at this statement, apparently thrilled at the prospect of living in a country that was no longer theirs. The clip shocked conservative X users. It seemed so brazen for the president and his audience to celebrate the Great Replacement. Nearly 30 years later, America is bearing out the truth in Clinton’s observations. It’s most likely that America will be minority white sooner than 2050, and whites are already a minority in several states.

[…]

While immigration has certainly changed much, it hasn’t quite “Balkanized” the country. One reason is that immigrants are now everywhere. One can encounter Hispanics and Indians in rural Arkansas. They’re too dispersed to form something along the lines of a Spanish or Hindi Quebec. They’re also too inclined to assimilate to America’s modern consumer identity.

[…]

“Demographics is destiny” became a powerful catchphrase to warn conservatives of what the future will look like without a white majority. Both liberals and the “far right” believed that demographic change would lead to a permanent Democratic majority. It was expected that non-whites would band together as a rainbow coalition against whiteness. That hasn’t panned out. Trump did extraordinarily well among minorities in the last election — while running on one of the most-race charged platforms in recent memory.

[…]

White nationalists were once confident that a diverse America would make whites embrace racial consciousness. That event has yet to happen. Just 15 percent of whites say their racial identity is important to them, which stands in stark contrast to the majority of every other group who say that identity is important to them. Nearly 95 percent of Americans approve of interracial marriage.

[…]

As [Pat Buchanan] acknowledged in a conversation with Ralph Nader 14 years ago, consumerism and sports fandom may be enough to keep this country together even with dramatic demographic change and a declining quality of life.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

We really don’t know what it would be like to live in a red city in a red state

August 18th, 2025

When his best friend in Austin quips, “It’s great living in a blue city in a red state,” Bryan Caplan is tempted to reply, “ We really don’t know what it would be like to live in a red city in a red state — or even a red city in a blue state.”

Why? Because they barely exist. Zero cities with over one million people currently have Republican mayors.

From the standpoint of the textbook Median Voter Model, this is awfully puzzling. Even if urbanites are extremely left-wing, you would expect urban Republicans to move sharply left to accommodate them. Once they do so, the standard prediction is that Republicans will win half the time. But plainly they don’t.

One possibility is that Republican politicians are too stubbornly ideological to moderate. But the idea that virtually no one in the Republican Party is power-hungry enough to tell urban voters what they want to hear is deeply implausible.

The better explanation, as I’ve explained before, is that urban voters have party preferences as well as policy preferences. They don’t just want left-wing policies; they want left-wing policies delivered by the Democrats.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | 3 Comments »

They would become the middle class

August 17th, 2025

In Western Europe, Peter Frost notes, a consensus emerged on the need to execute violent males so that law-abiding people could live in peace:

By the Late Middle Ages, courts were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1% of all men in each generation, with perhaps just as many dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication or extreme stress. As a result, the homicide rate fell from 20–40 homicides per 100,000 in the Late Middle Ages to 0.5–1 per 100,000 in the mid-20th century.

People could now get ahead through trade and work, rather than through theft and plunder. This new, pacified environment favored the growth of the market economy and the success of those who possessed the necessary skills, especially literacy, numeracy and budgeting. They would become the middle class.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Science | 2 Comments »

A committee of three was ideal

August 16th, 2025

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. GrovesSecretary of War Henry Stimson told General Groves that the Manhattan Engineer District should be overseen by a committee of nine or possibly seven men, as Groves explains in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project:

I objected quite vigorously on the grounds that such a large committee would be unwieldy; it would cause delays in taking action; and some, if not the majority, of its members would tend to treat it as a secondary responsibility, to the detriment of our progress. I felt that a committee of three was ideal and that any more members would be a hindrance rather than a benefit. I pointed out that I could keep three people reasonably well informed on our major problems, and, furthermore, that I would be able to obtain advice from them much more readily than I could from a larger group. In the end, my views were accepted.

[…]

There followed some general conversation, in the midst of which, and with no small amount of embarrassment on my part, for I was by far the most junior person present, I asked to be excused if I were no longer needed, for I wanted to catch the train to Tennessee and inspect the proposed production plant site, so that the land acquisition could proceed. With this, the meeting broke up. I was a bit relieved when Somervell told me several days later that my request could not have been better timed, because it convinced everyone that he had not overemphasized my urgent desire to get a job moving.

Posted in Policy, War | 7 Comments »

Sparkling Protein sounds like a joke

August 15th, 2025

Sparkling ProteinAs an experienced whey protein consumer, I was surprised to hear that Sparkling Protein was a thing, but I can now confirm Cremieux Recueil’s assessment that it does in fact look and taste like diet soda:

The development process for clear whey is fascinating. I’m going to stylize it, so bear with me.

A beverage team wanted protein that could disappear in a fruit drink—no milkiness, no haze (i.e., low turbidity)—at a tart pH. But there’s a problem with most protein sources, and it’s that they clump and throw a fog at the pH fruit drinks live at, around the protein’s isoelectric point. So in the early development of clear whey, everything looked like watered-down yoghurt.

So, researchers worked the problem the way any process-oriented person would: they tightened the loop between hypotheses, trials, and measurements, and gave the whole thing a few passes.

In the first pass, they swapped the protein. Whey protein concentrate was out because it had too many minerals and residuals that encourage haze. Whey protein isolate was swapped in— it’s cleaner, lower ash—and this helped, but only a little. Turbidity meters still screamed “cloudy” and the human eye could usually tell, too.

In the second pass, they controlled the ions. They dialed down calcium and phosphate, tested deionized water, played with ionic strength… clarity improved, but still not enough.

In the third pass, they changed when the acid hits. Dumping citric or malic acid into a neutral protein slurry was creating localized pH shocks and microaggregates that never fully redispersed. Pre-acidifying the protein and then spray-drying it—so the powder arrived ‘at pH’—produced a much better first mix. You might actually drink this stuff at this point.

In the fourth pass, the researchers tried to tame the heat. Heat is required for safety (see: pasteurization), but it denatures and links proteins. This isn’t a bioavailability issue, but more of a clumping one. They mapped time-temperature curves, shaved seconds off of their high-temperature short-time pasteurization steps, minimized hold times, and did anything they could to avoid shear/heat combinations that built up irreversible aggregates.

In the fifth pass, they fine-cut the protein itself. Light enzymatic hydrolysis (peptide cuts!) knocked down viscosity and reduced the tendency to form visible aggregates, but made the mix more bitter. That forced a second project: set a narrow ‘degree of hydrolysis’ window and pair it with flavor systems that mask any remaining protein notes without slipping into clearly ‘diet drink’ aftertastes.

In the sixth pass, the idea was to stress the mixture like the real world: run centrifuge clarity checks, catalogue particle-size distributions, do cold/ambient/40C holds, freeze-thaw, check carbonation compatibility, and do bottle trials. If the mixture had sufficiently low turbidity with meaningful protein load and stability for a few weeks, it would be ready to go. Fail, adjust, and repeat this process until the goal is achieved.

At the end of the day, clear whey was the product of a robust process window and an iterative discovery process. Since the discovery was trial-and-error with a clear goal in mind, it might even be more appropriate to say that clear whey wasn’t discovered, but was instead, ‘de-risked’: a finicky protein had its manufacturing controls tightened until it started behaving like a cooperative beverage input. Huzzah!

I preferred it watered down with unsweetened (but flavored) sparkling water.

Posted in Science | 6 Comments »

The North Sea and the Baltic form the core zone of certain tendencies

August 14th, 2025

DNA from human remains is showing us how different populations have evolved over time, Peter Frost explains, not only during prehistory but also well into recorded history:

This evolution has affected a wide range of mental and behavioral traits: cognitive ability, time preference, propensity for violence, monotony avoidance, rule following and empathy, among others.

[…]

Why did the North Sea overtake the Mediterranean in international trade? Certainly, the latter region was adversely affected by the Arab conquests of the Middle East and North Africa. But the economic decline began much earlier. Shipwrecks on the bottom of the Mediterranean have been dated overwhelmingly to the time between the first century BC and the first century AD. Silver mining in Spain and Cyprus likewise fell sharply after the first century AD, as shown by lead contamination of Greenland’s ice sheet.

This decline occurred not only before the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, but also before the barbarian invasions of the fourth and fifth and the Imperial Crisis of the third. And it seems inconsistent with modern economic thinking: bigger markets should create economies of scale, as well as a better match between supply and demand. So what caused things to go wrong?

[…]

One cause was the low level of social trust. People trusted only their close friends and relatives, keeping everyone else at arm’s length. As a result, economic activity was bottled up within family networks, the major exception being physical marketplaces where buyer and seller could meet face to face. Because the market principle remained trapped within small pockets of space and time, it could not generalize to all transactions in Roman society. An economy of markets never evolved into a true market economy.

[…]

One [other cause] was a deterioration of physical health, as indicated by the length of long bones belonging to over 10,000 adult men and women born between 500 BC and 750 AD. The data show a steady decrease from the second century BC, reaching a low point in the second half of the first century AD, followed by a slow recovery and then a dramatic recovery from the fifth century AD.

[…]

The study’s authors concluded that the Romans created not only an integrated Mediterranean economy but also “the first integrated disease regime”.

[…]

The other cause was a decrease in average cognitive ability. Fewer people could master the skills of numeracy, literacy and budgeting that are so essential to economic activity.

This decline was driven by an uncoupling of reproductive success from economic success—as I argued in a previous article. The wealthy were no longer using their wealth to bring children into the world. A rich man might prefer to leave his wife for a younger woman of low social status, often adopting her children. Or he might never marry. The resulting fall in cognitive ability can be seen in DNA retrieved from the human remains of that period.

[…]

The North Sea and the Baltic form the core zone of certain tendencies that, for at least a millennium, have prevailed north and west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg, i.e., the “Hajnal line.” These are tendencies toward individualism, the nuclear family, late marriage and solitary living, as well as a greater willingness to trust strangers and form bonds of impersonal prosociality.

Such tendencies didn’t come into being with the market economy — they arose long before for an unrelated reason. But they did provide the best behavioral conditions for a market economy once the possibility of creating one emerged.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Science | 1 Comment »

Skilled immigrants often constitute an espionage risk

August 13th, 2025

Given the reality of mixed loyalties, Arctotherium notes, it shouldn’t be surprising that skilled immigrants often constitute an espionage risk:

Take the infamous Pakistani nuclear physicist AQ Khan. In 1961, he moved to West Berlin as a foreign student, then to the Netherlands and finally Belgium to finish his education, graduating with a Doctorate in Engineering in 1972. Khan was undoubtedly among the best and brightest of Pakistan, the sort of high-agency STEM genius that brain drain advocates hold up as America’s greatest strength. Was allowing A.Q. Khan into the West a good decision? No.

Khan got a position at the Physics Dynamics Research Laboratory, a Dutch firm specializing in uranium enrichment via centrifuge. He stole centrifuge designs and blueprints, and after returning to Pakistan set up an international network of illicit suppliers for centrifuge parts using his contacts, leading to the 1998 Pakistani nuclear bomb. From there, he diffused nuclear technology further. The North Korean, Iranian and Libyan nuclear programs all trace back to A.Q. Khan. Pakistan has had multiple serious nuclear war scares with India in the last five years. North Korea, which has a history of doing things like axe-murder Americans, can act with relative impunity thanks to its nuclear arsenal, and Israel and the US recently bombed Iran over their nuclear program.

There are many examples from the US. For instance, Noshir Gowadia, an Indian Parsi designer of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, and Chi Mak, who worked on nuclear submarines, both sold secrets to China.

Posted in Policy, Science, Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Immigration fractures national markets

August 12th, 2025

If you want to join Britain’s thriving cocaine smuggling industry, Arctotherium notes, you have to be Albanian:

There’s no a priori reason why this should be the case. Albanians do not have a racial, cultural, geographic or political affinity for Colombian narcotics. A reasonable and informed observer in 2000 would not have predicted that they would come to dominate the industry. Yet such an obsever would have predicted that some ethnic minority would because organized crime is almost always organized along ethnic lines. This is true even when the ethnic minority is less criminal on average than society at large, as with the Jewish mafia in early 20th century America.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to criminal enterprises. Chaldeans control 90% of the grocery stores in Detroit. 40% of the truck drivers in California are Sikh, and about a third of US Sikhs are truck drivers. About 95% of the Dunkin’ Donuts stores in Chicago and the Midwest are owned by Indians, mostly Gujarati Patels. In New England and New York, 60% of Dunkin’ Donuts stores are operated by Portuguese immigrants. 90% of the liquor stores in Baltimore are owned by Koreans.

[…]

The key point is that immigration fractures national markets. Once a niche is taken over, outsiders can no longer compete in that niche.

There is still competition within ethnic groups inside the niches, but these groups are tiny fractions of the population and often have informal institutions and kinship structures that allow them to act as cartels.

[…]

Cambodians run about 80% of the donut shops in Southern California (despite being only 0.17% of the state’s population). The Cambodian donut empire got its start with refugee Ted Ngoy, who first learned the trade thanks to an affirmative action program to increase minority hiring at Winchell’s Donuts. The Cambodians were able to completely dominate this traditional American culinary sector through a mix of extended family credit and the use of tong tines, an informal lending club.

[…]

This ability to borrow money cheaply made financing much easier for them than for their American competitors. Once the business was purchased, Cambodians could also keep operating costs down through informal employment of family labor, allowing them to get around expensive income taxes, not to mention labor laws and regulations — including ones around child labor.

[…]

Gujaratis, mostly with the surname Patel, run an estimated 42% of the hotels and motels in the United States — despite being only 0.3% of the US population (and an even lower percentage back in 1999 when this was first noticed). Their dominance rises to 80–90% of motels in small town America. The Patel motel cartel got its start with an illegal immigrant, Kanjibhai Desai, in the 1940s. The initial attraction for Patels was that motel ownership did not require English proficiency, and as with the Cambodians, Patel motel owners were able to use informal ethnic loan networks and immigrant family labor brought in via family reunification to undercut their American competitors. Patels now totally dominate the hospitality industry in the US outside of the big chains.

Over half the nail salons in the US are run by Vietnamese, which rises to more than 80% in California (they are only 0.7% of the US population). Just like the Patels and the Cambodians, Vietnamese immigrants were able to finance nail salons more easily than American competitors because they had access to below-market credit from family and friends.

[…]

After the ethnic network was established, Vietnamese owners gained another advantage over non-Vietnamese competitors: better access to workers and training. The language barrier is part of this; once most salon owners spoke primarily Vietnamese, prospective workers had to as well, and cosmetology schools began teaching courses in Vietnamese rather than English.

Posted in Crime, Policy | 2 Comments »

Dungeons & Dragons enters its stadium era

August 11th, 2025

Dungeons & Dragons started with small groups of friends playing at home, but now it is entering its stadium era:

But in the past decade or so, D&D has emerged as a popular form of spectator entertainment, with comedians, actors and podcasters playing the game for other people to watch. “Actual play,” as it’s known, has attracted millions of viewers online and has even spilled out into the real world, with D&D shows playing in movie theaters, touring globally and selling out stadiums.

One of the most iconic examples of this phenomenon came earlier this year when the show Dimension 20 sold out Madison Square Garden in New York. Roughly 20,000 fans showed up to watch seven comedians perform D&D, with a few rock show flourishes — like gouts of butane fire around the stage to simulate the wrath of the dragon Kalvaxis, the big villain of the night.

[…]

In 2018, Mulligan and six other comedians launched Dimension 20 on the streaming platform Dropout. The stories they tell are mashups: Game of Thrones meets Candyland, Lord of the Rings meets The Breakfast Club, Jane Austen meets A Court of Thorns and Roses.

[…]

That first episode, which is nearly two hours long, has 7.7 million views on YouTube. A representative for Dropout says its subscribers number “in the mid-6 figures,” and that Dimension 20 is one of its most watched shows.

[…]

Fans of D&D started recording their games in the early 2000s, but actual play didn’t pick up as a genre until around a decade later.

The Adventure Zone, which launched in 2014, featured the hosts of the popular advice podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me playing with their dad. In 2015, a group of voice actors started posting their home D&D games online as the show Critical Role. The first episode of Critical Role on YouTube has nearly 25 million views today.

[…]

They’re also touring globally — Critical Role has performances scheduled at London’s The O2 and Edinburgh Castle in Scotland next year. Fans who can’t make it can watch the live games in around 800 movie theaters in North America. After Madison Square Garden, Dimension 20‘s tour continued on to Los Angeles and Seattle. A show is planned for Las Vegas later this year

Posted in Games | 1 Comment »

Stymie

August 10th, 2025

If you look up the word stymie, Google will tell you that it means prevent or hinder the progress of — no surprise there — and it will show you a small graph of its use over time:

Stymie use over time

So, it’s a relatively new word that peaked in popularity in the early 1950s before growing again. Why would that be? Wikipedia explains:

A stymie was a situation in greens play in golf where one player’s ball blocked the path of another’s to the cup, governed by a now obsolete rule of golf. Formerly, the blocked player was not afforded relief, and had to chip over or putt around the obstructing ball. Today, the blocking ball is temporarily removed to afford a clear line to the hole without penalty to the putter or advantage to the player whose ball is moved.

Various changes to the stymie rule were attempted or enacted by the United States Golf Association (USGA) between 1920 and 1941. Finally, in 1952, the stymie was eliminated when the USGA and Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews (R&A) established a joint set of rules.

Posted in Linguistics | 1 Comment »

Groves was too aggressive and might have difficulty with the scientific people

August 9th, 2025

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. GrovesVannevar Bush headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War 2, and General Groves admits that Dr. Bush was quite disturbed at Groves’ appointment as head of the Manhattan Project, as he explains in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, because he felt Groves was too aggressive and might have difficulty with the scientific people. After their first inauspicious meeting, Groves went back to his office:

Finding my secretary, Mrs. O’Leary, there, I told her I was being reassigned and that if she wanted to come along, I would be glad to have her. I added, in what proved to be a great understatement, that this would be a very quiet and easy job for her and she should be sure to bring along some knitting to keep herself occupied. This prediction proved valid for about two days.

When I returned home that evening I told my wife and daughter and wrote to my son, a cadet at West Point, that I had a new job, that it involved secret matters and for that reason was never to be mentioned. The answer to be given if they were asked what I was doing was, “I don’t know, I never know what he’s doing.” To my son, I added, “If it is an officer who knows me well, and he is persistent, you can add, ‘I think it’s something secret.’”

[…]

Unlikely as it may seem to many people, they first learned of the nature of my assignment at the same moment, three years later, that the bombing of Hiroshima was announced to the rest of the world.

Posted in Crime, Policy, Technology | No Comments »

Is warfare becoming more performative?

August 8th, 2025

Is warfare becoming more performative?

In the span of three weeks this June, the world witnessed three extraordinary military operations: Ukraine’s decimation of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, Israel’s sweeping overnight key leader and air defense neutralization in Iran, and America’s ultra long-range bunker busting at Fordo and other Iranian nuclear sites. Each operation shared commonality in audacity, scale, and something surprising: detailed and immediate operational disclosure. These weren’t the limited scope press briefings or carefully circumscribed military reports seen in other high profile missions, like the raid that killed Osama bin Laden or the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani. Instead, presidential statements were quickly augmented by comprehensive overviews from that nation’s senior defense officials, complete with easily distributed media: drone footage, confirmational imagery, and mission graphics.

[…]

Like the “shock and awe” of the 2003 Iraq War or CNN’s coverage of the first Gulf War, the June operations captured global attention using novel tools — social media, real-time distribution, and comprehensive disclosure.

[…]

While precedents like Desert Storm showed conflict in real time, they did not bring the viewer into the metaphorical planning room. The June operations showed both conflict and the means and methods used to wage it. Details disclosed were not guessed at by talking heads or pundits, but were officially relayed by the highest levels of national authority. Rather than achieving tactical objectives through one channel and strategic communication through established signaling formats, Ukraine, Israel, and the United States integrated tactical execution with strategic messaging into single operational frameworks.

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Ukraine, Israel, and the United States all sacrificed valuable military information — details that might limit similar methods, capabilities, and flexibility in future missions — in exchange for immediate strategic communication gains.

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In many ways, the evolution of performative warfare is predictable within modern information operations. Even highly successful influence campaigns face the challenge of retaining attention in today’s saturated information environments, and the natural method of recapturing audience focus is through increasingly dramatic and credible demonstrations.

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