THE ENEMY WITHIN: Photo surfaces showing TikTok executives posing with communist flag.
Viking society wasn’t homogeneous. They had dealings with many different cultures and they lived in varied environments, from Danish and Swedish pasture to the sub-Arctic tundra of Norway and Iceland. In the early 11th century the best-travelled woman in the world must have been Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, whose remarkable journeys demonstrate the great distances the Vikings covered. She gave birth to a child in North America, met people of the First Nations and ate grapes in Vinland, made a pilgrimage to Rome and drank wine in Italy, and died as a nun in Iceland. Vikings lived in close contact with the Sámi people, whom they called Finns. In his earlier book, The Viking Way, Price pointed out that Norwegians and Swedes, at least, might be regarded as in some ways similar to the ‘circumpolar’ cultures which stretch from Greenland to Siberia, notably in what looks like shamanistic behaviour.
~ Tom Shippey’s excellent LRB Vikings book review
Finland shows the rest of the world how to work remotely
That is (Finntopia: What We Can Learn From the World’s Happiest Country* ) the new book by Danny Dorling and Annika Koljonen, and I opened randomly to a page and saw a chart for Total Fertility Rate in Finland, 1900-2018. The numbers keep on falling off a table, without even the promise of an asymptote toward the end of the series:
Both supporters and critics of the Finntopia can cite those numbers.
The book has a few pages on immigration policy, but no serious discussion of how scalable the Finnish model might be. Surely that matters for judging a utopia?
And that is my review, of both the book and the country.
Superseding Indictment for Former Harvard Chair on Tax and FBAR Crimes
Key excerpts from the announcement are:
What Are Stingrays and Dirtboxes?Intercept
Beware of find-my-phone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, NSA tells mobile users ars technica
Samuel D. Brunson (Loyola-Chicago), Mormon Profit: Brigham Young, Tithing, and the Bureau of Internal Revenue, 2019 BYU L. Rev. 41:
Since the enactment of the modern federal income tax, churches have been exempt from taxation. But that exemption is neither necessary nor inevitable. In fact, at the end of the 1860s, the Bureau of Internal Revenue decided that tithing received by the Mormon church was taxable under the Civil War income tax.
The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple
Jennifer Doleac with Rob Wiblin podcast on crime and police reform
Chinese hackers have pillaged Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. “Operation Skeleton Key has stolen source code, SDKs, chip designs, and more.”
Is there less “prolific cronyism” in economics?
U.S. Covid death count starting to turn down again, let us hope this trend continues
Short immune system explainer (Atlantic)
Nathan Law Fled Hong Kong With a Mission—Harden the West Against China.
The current coronavirus situation in the UK. And some more detail on the Russian vaccine
NASDAQ CLEARS 11,000 AS APPLE NEARS $2T MARKET VALUE
Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation by John Lewis.
Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.
It Is Wacky To Think That Writing For Adults Is Better Or More Important Than Writing For Kids
Author Robin Stevens on writing for kids: “What book changed your life? What stories made you think about the world? I couldn’t tell you much about what was in most books I read last month but I can tell you every character in Howl’s Moving Castle. Eva Ibbotson’s morality has become mine, Diana Wynne Jones has influenced how I write, the way Terry Pratchett talks about society helped me think about all those things.”- The Guardian (UK)
The polity that is Germany: “Light traps for insects are to be banned outdoors, while searchlights and sky spotlights would be outlawed from dusk to dawn for ten months of the year.’
Is the precautionary principle being applied to herd immunity claims? And other interesting points on related matters
Canadians taking revenge against visiting Americans (NYT.
Peptide antidotes, another promising treatment area
Summary of the UK planning changes
John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World. Although it has a stereotypically bad subtitle, this is an excellent book. It clarifies exactly where the Freemasons came from (dissident thought connected to James II), its connection to actual masons, how the movement got routed through Scotland, its prominence to the Enlightenment, its African-American component (Martin Delany), how it influenced Joseph Smith and Mormonism, why Castro tolerated it and the Shah of Iran encouraged it, and much more. Not in the book, but did you know that the Freemasons claim Shaquille O’Neal? Shaq confirms