Whatever happened to FEE’s Fresh States Project?

Here’s the original mention of Glenn Reynold’s using Fresh States to implement his Welcome Wagon project in Instapundit.

Here’s the most recent live page grab in the Internet Wayback Machine.

The current website yields 404 page not found at time of writing.

FEE’s search engine doesn’t yield any relevant results for either fresh start or welcome wagon.

Has this morphed into something else or should I go live with something less likely to die on the vine?

Folkways

Not much to do with the title of this post, save that when I began writing it, the local classical station is playing Bela Bartok’s version of three Romanian folk dances. I was reflecting on how much fun it was, two weekends ago, to be with my books at the Folkfest in New Braunfels to sit under the trees by the white building that houses the museum of hand-crafted furniture, listening to the music from the pavilion across the way … everything from traditional German songs, to country-western, and covers of rock music by a local teenage band. There were animals on display a whole farmyard of them, and a pair of camels, as well. Reenactors came and went, demonstrating their craft, and their mastery of black-powder gun and cannon-fire, as well as simply astounding displays of bladed weaponry. It was all very reassuring, watching the families, the parade of children in costumes on Sunday afternoon, led by an accordion player in lederhosen and an honor guard of Scouts with flags. The children’s masquerade march was a custom first established by the schoolmaster of New Braunfels’ public school more than a hundred and sixty years ago. Life goes on in the Shire, from day to day; much has it always has done.

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Random Pic


A Visit To Wendover Field

The Wendover Base Operations Building with restored Control Tower. Today a sleepy airport, 80 years ago a very busy place

I have always enjoyed seeing places of historical importance, with their evidence of importance hidden in plain sight. Virginia City, Nevada is such a place. To most of the visitors, it is simply an old western town whose shops now sell ice cream and T Shirts.

For those who know the history, it’s where Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain. It’s a place that produced so much silver that it built San Francisco, and was the beginning of a few major corporations today.

The Wendover Airfield is another such place. My curiosity about it was built over some years. On a past cross country trip of some years ago, I stopped there and saw dozens of old wooden buildings whose condition reminded me of the Bodie State Historic Park, which is kept in “arrested decay”.  And there was a huge hanger just to the east of the main facility. It looked a bit different from a typical hanger, as it had offices or workshops all along the sides.

Hidden in plain sight.

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Worthwhile Reading

Cable news…past and future

The Golden Age of Substack.   Basically, a revitalization of long-form blogging.

Earth Day as a formal religious holiday?   (It strikes me that this fits right in with energy secretary Granholm’s call for electrification of all military vehicles by 2030.   This is so disconnected from any military or technical rationale that it can only be religiously motivated)

Absence of maternal warmth in childhood has some serious long-term implications.

The Golden age of Aerospace:

Aerospace is one of the deepest branches of humanity’s technological tree. It is a telling fact that more countries have produced a nuclear bomb than mass-produced a jet engine. Recent history illustrates how hard it is to build these capabilities.  

China is recruiting former air force pilots from the West.   And see this post about Jeffrey Katzenberg (Dreamworks), Joe Biden, and China.   More here.

Black Powder.   Still militarily important, though as an initiator for more-powerful explosives rather than as a primary explosive in its own right.   The US was dependent on one.single.factory to manufacture this substance.   It blew up.

Fiction as simulation:

Much like the way a differential equation can summarize the properties of a pendulum, fictional literature abstracts, summarizes, and compresses complex human relations by selecting only the most relevant elements. This abstracted level of comprehension also enables one to see how these principles apply elsewhere and how they may be generalized…Like mathematics, narrative clarifies understandings of certain generalizable principles that underlie an important aspect of human experience, namely intended human action.