The Last Ephor

Demographic Inversion In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so. NB: Most white populations in large cities are liberals so blame the liberals for pushing the brown people out of range of their jobs and making their life more difficult for their own convenience. A large proportion of the city's 600,000 residents, especially those with money, want to live downtown... No American city looks like Vancouver at the moment. But quite a few are moving in...

The Brits are fond of decrying the US for, well, pretty much everything. We were alternately lambasted or laughed at for our mission orientation during patrols in the Sunni Triangle and elsewhere while the Brits were patrolling the Shia zones with a much lower security profile. The Americans were depicted as bullies and ignorant bulls in the china shop. The Brits were so much more sophisticated and tempered by their experience in Northern Ireland that they didn’t need to wear helmets etc. Now it looks like there may be more to that than meets the eye. This article says that the Brits, at the highest levels, struck a deal with Mookie to keep their own safe. They stayed on the sidelines during the assault on Basra and Mookie’s boys wouldn’t try to kill them. There’s a word for this; betrayal. Our oldest, staunchest ally has cut a deal with the enemy behind our back. To me, the “ special relationship ” has suffered a serious blow. Gordon Brown has hard questions to answer. If ...

A seminal work on trolls. I question the story though. Is the whole story one big troll? I think the guys in question are, in fact, trolls and rejoice in it. That doesn’t mean the rest of the article lines up. The bit about making $10 MM a year doesn’t pass the smell test. Identity thieves can be brazen but anyone jacking that kind of cash isn’t going to poke their head up like this. The Rolls Royce thing is a bit of theater too if you ask me. There are undoubtedly people online who are sociopaths who hurt others for fun. Hell, I went to high school with people like that. Fortuny’s claim of abuse could well be true and would explain his pathological need to lash out and hurt anyone he can. Anyone with deep seated issues like that is bound to react in the same way until they get some very serious help. (Forgive me for straying into club chair psychoanalyst mode) I think the there are two things here that stand out as worthy of mention: 1. Trolls only go way when you ignore ...

Lord Nelson may hold the key to understanding climate change It seems Jack Tar was big on recording data. Anything that would help with navigation would be a great advantage for the British Navy. Weather is, of course, very important. A preliminary study of 6,000 logbooks has produced results that raise questions about climate change theories. One paper, published by Dr Dennis Wheeler, a Sunderland University geographer, in the journal The Holocene, details a surge in the frequency of summer storms over Britain in the 1680s and 1690s. Many scientists believe storms are a consequence of global warming, but these were the coldest decades of the so-called Little Ice Age that hit Europe from about 1600 to 1850. Heresy! Global warming is irrefutable! Any deviation from orthodoxy and you will be ostracized. Wheeler and his colleagues have since won European Union funding to extend this research to 1750. This shows that during the 1730s, Europe underwent a period of rapid warming simila...