Monday evening reading - May 12, 2025
More goodies from the stack of stuff I read on a daily basis here on Substack.
When I get to between six and eight posts (or so) I think are worth sharing, you’ll get Monday evening reading. It won’t be every week, but likely more often than not. There’s nothing wrong with link love! Once again, I culled this down from about 15-20 posts to the ones you see here, all (but one) from authors to whom I subscribe (and maybe you should too.)
Go ahead and read these pieces, then come back and see what I have to say.
Patriotism isn’t just restricted to Americans, as we find out from
at Rocking the Suburbs. She’s Aussie through and through, and in the same manner we celebrate our fighting men (and women) on Memorial Day, in Australia their similar celebration - with the flavor of our Independence Day thrown in - is ANZAC Day, to commemorate their invasion of Gallipoli in the first World War back in 1915.
However despite the failure of the military campaign, Gallipoli became significant because it has become a foundational symbol of national identity for Australia and New Zealand. It represents the birth of Australian and New Zealand national consciousness and established the Anzac legend, characterised by courage, endurance, ingenuity, mateship, and a sense of humour.
To understand the legend of the Anzac spirit is to understand what it means to be Australian.
Worth noting: they were in WWI before we were, since we didn’t send our troops for just shy of two years afterward (we declared war on April 6, 1917.)
keeps it in that same warlike analogy with his piece, but the battle in this case is Trump v. the Deep State.
Faddis compares our current situation to being an hour into a daylong battle, and I concur. He also has another interesting piece on internal strife that’s worth reading, so he gets the double dip this time.
They may be up in the Northwest now, but it wouldn’t shock me to have them show up at a city near you this summer.
Or, as
details, they may already be among us.
Jeff is usually an upbeat guy with his Coffee & Covid morning news digests, so when he grabs a topic like this and gives it singular focus, it convinces you to pay rapt attention.
Perhaps the previous two links make a little more sense when viewed in the context of how kids are often being educated and parented these days. I don’t (yet) subscribe to Scriptorium Philosophia, but a lot of others do, and in part it’s because of this piece I ran across.
- an obvious pseudonym if I ever saw one - is a college professor, so he (or she) knows of what he speaks.
Moving down the west coast,
answers his own question about homelessness.
Land costs in California are over three times the Texas average. Costs related to improving land are 2.2 times those in Texas. California's soft costs, including financing, architectural and engineering fees, and development fees charged by local governments, are 3.8 times the Texas average.
But it’s not just California.
I drive through an industrial area to get to work, and lately I’ve been stopped a few times by a school bus. There are no houses nearby, but what is close by that part of town is a wooded area known as a location for homeless people to camp out. The bus stops at a corner for two kids, and mom and dad are there to see them off before walking back down the side road toward the woods. Sad to think they’re living in a tent or out of their car, but that’s a local reality where I live. Salisbury has many of those same issues as California does, despite the fact it’s a smallish metropolis in a mostly rural region.
Another issue we hope not to have is a blackout like Spain recently went through. But as the
detail, there’s a nonzero possibility as long as we keep thinking green energy is the way to go.
The sudden loss of large-scale solar generation in southwestern Spain caused a sharp drop in system frequency, which in turn triggered protective mechanisms in other generators’ under-frequency protection relays across the system. These protection mechanisms automatically caused other generators, namely Spain’s nuclear and other thermal plants, to trip offline, which you can see in the graph below, and contributed to the cascading failure that caused the widespread blackout.
Imagine a severe storm rolled through Delmarva and that’s a scenario which could cause a massive regional failure. But the key is cycling action, which is present in a natgas or nuclear plant. Because of that, the system would be able to shrug that disruption off quickly, meaning only the local infrastructure would be affected, not the source. It’s not foolproof - I remember the 2003 East Coast blackout, which reached as far west as Toledo where I lived at the time - but the nature of its generation makes a large-scale failure less likely.
As I roll toward the close, I want to present some hope and one good source is a book review of sorts by
of an old tome called Three Men in a Boat.
You have to read the piece, and if so inclined, read the book.
Finally, let’s talk about one of my new (to Substack) old writer favorites,
. She gives us the good news that Mike Rowe (best known for Dirty Jobs and pithy commentary) is back telling stories again.
As she writes:
For Rowe, Dirty Jobs worked for so long because it was one of the few topics that hadn’t been completely owned by one side or the other.
“It’s the dignity of work. It’s the fun of making a buck. We had 2 million people on the Returning the Favor page who were literally watching the show on the edge of their seat every single week. They programmed everything. It was the most engaged group I ever saw,” he said.
When it was canceled, Rowe said it took him a while to accept that fact. But viewers let him know he needed to find a way to bring it back.
“I would receive calls constantly asking to please bring it back. Or ask what am I waiting for because the country needs it. So we changed the name, figured out a budget because there is no big sponsor, or network, or studio behind us, and I called my friend Sarah, who produced the show in the past, and now she’s sort of my co-host on camera,” he said.
You know, I’m amazed that she only has about 125 more subscribers than I do. We have to do something about that.
Regardless, despite the fact that I overshot “6-8 posts” and made it too long for e-mail, all that should keep a good reader going and thinking for awhile. It’s a good way to start the week, right?
In the meantime, though, you can Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now.
Another excellent selection Michael. Thanks.