Mimsy Were the Borogoves

“Christopher Ludwick was a true hero of the American Revolution. A German immigrant, he made his fortune in part by baking gingerbread in Philadelphia, and then used his baking knowledge, patriotic spirit, and all of his fortune to aid the American cause.”

Contributions to the 2026 Semiquincentennial are beginning to appear. Max Miller here accompanies a 1773 gingerbread with a short history of the amazingly patriotic baker Christopher Ludwick. He served under Washington both as a military baker and as a spy.

“Google is pushing a new stricter default for the Referrer-Policy header under the veil of privacy. Not only have they implemented this default in Chrome, they are also lobbying for everyone to configure it in their web servers… This article is a plea not to blindly follow suit by nailing shut the referrer header in every possible case, because that may do more harm than good.”

‘…it is an act of carpet-bombing the entire Internet with a measure that protects visitors only in a very limited set of situations, while in many other situations it only harms everyone in the long run. First the smaller websites because this new default increases their isolation, then the visitors who get jailed into a limited ecosystem of mainstream websites because the smaller websites die off or are hampered in their means to improve upon their content.

“I do not like this trend of the Web transitioning from what used to be a forum open to everyone, towards a collection of walled gardens, gated communities where everyone is utterly paranoid and sour, and expects to be exploited in every possible way if they don't sell their soul to a big tech company.”

Voting reform has been an 80/20 issue—or higher—for decades. But it’s a 1/99 issue in the beltway.

Trump voters are not Republican voters. For several months after November, it seemed that beltway Republicans and even otherwise-smart bloggers chose to ignore this. They seemed to think that Trump’s victory was a new era for Republican dominance. I didn’t understand this. Not only was there no evidence for it, there was a lot of evidence in that election against it.

Now that it’s becoming more obvious that Trump voters are not Republican voters, people are starting to write about it. But they haven’t yet progressed to asking why. Why did voters who do not identify as Republican—and may even disdain Republican politicians—vote for Trump? Because I’m pretty sure that many of the voters who voted for Trump don’t see themselves or Trump as Republicans.

Instead, they blame Trump for not trying hard enough to convince his voters to also vote for Republicans.

And the problem continues to be that Trump attracted a lot of blue collar voters who, unfortunately, are not likely voters and who also do not show up to vote for other Republicans. They like Trump, seeing him as a different kind of Republican who appeals to union hall Democrats, but they do not like other Republicans, and Trump has never been able to convince them to vote for other Republicans.

I don’t think he tries hard enough. I think he has to make the case, in a major national campaign, that it is absolutely necessary for Trump’s personal political fortunes that he doesn’t have a Congress controlled by “lunatic left-wing Democrats” impeaching him every five minutes like he did from 2019-2020.

This is beltway-class advice, not worthy of Ace. Ace misses two very important points in this summation. First, and most importantly, Trump owns no voters. Those voters aren’t his to command. He is theirs. Trump is the voters’ candidate, not the other way around.

This is just a quick update on why “engagement algorithms” really mean farming anger: that is, what the financial stakes are that encourage artificially inflating engagement. Or at least, it started as a quick update. It quickly went off into the fields of effective advertising, and the ancient debate over eyeballs vs. sales.

Several social media sites reward people for delivering eyeballs—that is, for drawing in viewers and readers. Just as Facebook has discovered, one of the easiest ways to get eyeballs and to keep eyeballs is to encourage rage and hatred. The common term for this is “rage baiting”. It’s become such a common practice that it’s already progressed, language-wise, to a single-word contraction, “ragebaiting”.

This is what Facebook’s algorithm is designed to encourage, and this example (from X, not Facebook) is the first concrete example I’ve been blessed to find describing how much money is involved. I couldn’t find anything like this when I wrote Facebook is designed to kill relationships.

The wages of ragebait.

When you look at these numbers, remember that they are basically affiliate payments. When affiliates are linked directly to sales, such payments run from a fraction of a percent to, at the very high end, four percent, which would mean multiplying by anywhere from twenty-five up to two hundred to get the actual gross profits involved. But social media posts aren’t generally tied directly to sales, only indirectly as delivering eyeballs of potential sales.

Much as the purpose of television shows on broadcast television was to draw in viewers to watch television ads, the purpose of posts on social media is to draw in readers to watch Internet ads. Very few of the viewers or the readers actually convert into buyers. So you’d have to multiply again by two and probably much more for the actual figures involved on X’s side of the ledger.

The first line is on the wall far above the altar at our local church.

In a recent issue of Benedictus—a word I’ll be talking about in this post, as it happens—I ran across the following question about Latin masses, quoted from the Tradivox Catholic Catechism Index vol. 14:

Why is the Mass said in Latin?

1) Because this language comes from Rome, whence we received our faith; 2) because, being a dead language, it does not change in the course of time like living languages, and 3) because thereby the unity and uniformity of the Church, even in her public service, is represented and preserved.

That was written back when most masses were celebrated in Latin. There’s a lot to be said for the unity and precision that comes with presenting the Mass worldwide in a single, unchanging language. In the modern era, the near-complete lack of comprehension of that language is probably an insurmountable obstacle.

This installment, I’m going to decipher the Sanctus. That is, the Holy, Holy, Holy that comes at the start of the Eucharistic Prayer.

Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus

It’s obvious enough from the identical repetition in both versions that sanctus means “holy”. How does it get there, however? Sanctus actually means a whole bunch of things in Latin, and several of them are likely play into the full meaning of the word in the prayer. Consecrated, sacred, divine, and just are all possible meanings along with holy.

This Australian cookbook is deceptively old-fashioned.

Community cookbooks are notorious for not including any indication of when they were printed. I’ve just published a list of cookbooks on the Padgett Sunday Supper Club where I’ve had to guess at the year. This is both to help others who might have the same cookbook and wonder when it was made, and in the hope that someone may remember when the book was published either because they’re in it or an ancestor was in it—or they were part of the organization that published it. If you’re among the latter, please write!

This list should automatically update. Whenever I’ve had to guess what year a book was published, that book should automatically show up in the list.

Many people attempt to use graphic design clues as a guide to a cookbook’s date. I see Glen Powell do this all the time, for example, and while I understand that his extensive experience gives him a better sense than I about the relationship between era and design, I never trust that kind of estimate. Changes in style can take decades to completely spread across North America and the United Kingdom. There were some people still typing their cookbooks well into the seventies and the eighties, and others producing what appear to be quality, modern finished products as early as the thirties.

I have an Australian community cookbook, for example, that looks to me like it was from the fifties, maybe early sixties, and possibly even earlier. The graphic style, the writing style, even the measurements and oven “temperatures”, all scream mid-twentieth century. But it has advertisements from businesses that weren’t in business at their advertised location until 1969. From the advertisements, I’m dating that book between 1969 and 1976.

Reprints can also cause problems with dating. I have a Pennsylvania Dutch cookbook from Culinary Arts Press that lists itself as being from 1936; I am nearly certain it’s a facsimile reprint, but it might not be. Culinary Arts Press is one of those organizations that was often ahead of its time in graphic design—and then kept using a similar design aesthetic well into the fifties. Of course, if it is a reprint, I have no idea when it was reprinted. I can only hope that it’s a facsimile reprint so that the date of 1936 at least can be reasonably applied to the recipes.

In this business, you never really know.

The Legend of Affordable Healthcare in America: If you want single payer, you must believe in magic.

I’ve written a lot about how science is becoming indistinguishable from magic in the minds of so much of the beltway crowd and the anointed—and not in the good science fiction way. Science is not something to be believed in, like religion, or voted on like politics. Science is the scientific method, nothing else. To paraphrase Feynman, if it disagrees with the scientific method it is wrong. That is the only key to science.

Science is not legislating the value of π or calling a council of the wise. That’s religion. Science is acknowledging the ignorance of experts, not their expertise. Every time you hear about science being “settled” or about a “consensus”, what you’re hearing is little more than a cargo cult religion wearing a cheap suit of scientific trappings and buzzwords.

One of the worst places for this substitution of magic for science is in medicine. Without the scientific method, medicine will kill both directly, through action, and indirectly by inaction. Nothing illustrates the cargo cult in medicine as clearly as this meme about health care that I ran across last year on a gaming group. The text specifically called out Americans:

The Legend of Affordable Healthcare: An adventure specifically designed for American D&D players.

To someone who both plays D&D and has done some thinking about health care and health insurance, the accompanying image is both profoundly weird and revelatory. For those not familiar with D&D’s iconography, the image pictured under the text “affordable healthcare” is of a priest—a “cleric” in D&D parlance—using magic to heal a sick or injured character.

Not a doctor. Not a scholar. A wielder of magic. This is neither an appeal to logic nor for better science. This is a religious tract.

It isn’t in any way necessary or even likely that a D&D-related affordable health care joke has to involve magic spells. D&D has had non-divine, completely non-magical medicine since at least the advent of its fifth edition, which was well over a decade ago. The skill “Medicine (Wis)” is literally on every character sheet. It’s on the character sheet of warriors and rogues as well as of wizards and priests.

A Wisdom (Medicine) check lets you try to stabilize a dying companion or diagnose an illness.

Veteran’s Day, once Armistice Day, is this coming Tuesday. But the armistice that ended the Great War is not the only thing that happened on November 11 in our history. Among the most barbaric was the 1778 massacre by English troops at Cherry Valley, a village now in Otsego County, New York.

The Cherry Valley massacre is an obscure part of the American Revolution to anyone but the residents of Cherry Valley, who remembered it at least up to the release of The Patriot in 2000.

The English employed Iroquois—in this location, Seneca and Mohawks—in their attempts to quell the American rebellion. The Iroquois were paid to attack under the direct command of British officers as well as to attack independently of English control. In response mostly to those independent raids, Continental soldiers had destroyed several Iroquois towns, hoping to end the many raids that had come from them earlier in the year. All accounts that I’ve seen say that the Continentals destroyed lodgings and provisions—not people. The direct antecedent to the massacre, the destruction of the Iroquois villages of Unadilla and Onaquaga, had by all accounts been empty at the time of the Continental raids.