Today at Burnham-on-Sea

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Another heatwave and the seaside seemed to be the safest bet. Having parked the car on the promenade road shortly after 11 am we walked the High Street - parallel with the seafront and one block in. I really think Burnham is gentrifying slowly. Some of the shops on the High Street seemed newly redecorated and spruced up, and there are less charity shops.

In one estate agent's window I spotted a detached, four bedroomed house for less than £400,000 - we could afford that! I tried to tempt Clare in that direction - "The grandchildren would love it!" But she remained unmoved.

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JD Vance: Towards a Catholic Political Economy? (via GPT5.5)

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JD Vance: Towards a Catholic Political Economy?

JD Vance’s reception into Catholicism has supplied a moral language for an economic politics he was already developing. In his new book, Communion, and his public speeches, he rejects the assumption that an economy can be judged chiefly by GDP, consumer prices and aggregate efficiency. Work forms character, production sustains communities, and families depend upon secure employment, housing and social continuity. This is closer to Catholic Social Teaching than Reaganite market individualism. It also recovers the valid post-Marxist insight that relations of production shape culture, family life and political allegiance.

Vance’s practical answer is a national developmental capitalism: tariffs, reshoring, restrictions upon cheap imported labour, inexpensive energy, deregulation and technological investment. His strongest argument is that deindustrialisation never merely transferred routine production to cheaper locations. It also transferred skills, supplier networks and production knowledge. The countries that manufacture products become increasingly capable of designing them - China being exhibit A here. 

From a Schumpeterian perspective, an economy that stops making things may eventually lose the capacity to invent the next generation of things. Vance’s proposed combination of tariff protection, robotics and higher labour productivity is therefore more serious than simple nostalgia for lost blue-collar factory jobs.

The conventional objection is that protection creates vested interests and preserves inefficient firms. True, but incomplete. Free trade also creates organised beneficiaries: importers, financial institutions, multinational supply chains and professional elites. Olson’s lesson is not that government intervention uniquely produces capture, but that every durable economic settlement generates coalitions able to defend it. Onshoring may consequently be justified despite some loss of immediate efficiency where national security, technological sovereignty or supply resilience are involved.

Vance’s real weakness lies in institutional design. Protection should create capabilities, not pensions for incumbents. Tariffs, subsidies and tax privileges should be conditional upon investment, productivity, training, domestic supply chains and technological advance, with expiry dates and clawbacks. Procurement should remain open to new entrants, while competition policy restrains protected firms from converting strategic support into monopoly rents. Trusted-allied supply chains will often provide greater resilience than national autarky - no one-size-fits-all architecture works well here. Creative destruction must continue inside the protected space.

The same qualification applies to labour. Catholic teaching rightly insists that workers are to be considered persons rather than disposable inputs, but unions themselves easily become Olsonian organisations defending obsolete jobs, restrictive practices and privileged insiders - indeed that is their default position.

The objective should be to protect workers through economic change, not to protect every existing job from change. Portable benefits, wage insurance, retraining targeted to real vacancies, relocation assistance, employee profit-sharing and broad social insurance serve workers’ collective long-term interests better than simply strengthening established unions. Catholic Social Teaching supports worker association, but places it within the wider principles of human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity and the common good.

Vance’s achievement is to have broken with the fiction that markets are socially neutral: they are not. His weakness is that he still relies too heavily upon superficial solutions: tariffs, patriotic employers and moral exhortation.

A mature Vance programme would discipline both capital and organised labour, support innovation without abandoning communities, and require every protected interest to continue earning its privileges. That would join Catholic moral purpose to Schumpeterian dynamism and Olsonian realism: not the preservation of an inherited industrial order, but the construction of institutions through which workers and communities can prosper amid continual economic transformation.

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Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith - JD Vance

Amazon

JD Vance: Faith, Family and Power

JD Vance is Vice-President of the United States and one of the more controversial figures in the Trump administration. Strong feelings about that administration make dispassionate judgement difficult. His new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, must therefore be read both as a personal account of his Catholic conversion and as a public declaration by a politician who may eventually seek the presidency.

Vance first became famous through his autobiographical book Hillbilly Elegy. Raised in an unstable Ohio household with family roots in Appalachian Kentucky, he served in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University and attended Yale Law School. His memoir examined the poverty, addiction, fierce loyalties and chaotic family life of the community from which he came. Its publisher expected modest sales.

Then Donald Trump unexpectedly won the 2016 presidential election, forcing the American political and media establishment to ask how such an outcome had become possible. Vance, an educated member of the elite who understood Trump’s working-class supporters from within, was suddenly treated as their interpreter. Hillbilly Elegy became a guidebook to an America its readers had scarcely deigned to notice, and Vance its tour guide.

Communion follows a different journey. The evangelical Christianity of his childhood faded during his military service and gave way to atheism. Academic success, Yale and a lucrative career offered achievement which he came to see as without purpose. Influenced partly by Peter Thiel, Vance gradually returned to Christianity and was received into the Catholic Church in 2019.

His wife and children are central to this account. Vance writes with evident devotion to his wife, Usha, and presents their marriage as the foundation of his adult life. Family is not, for him, merely one source of personal happiness among others. Marriage, children, mutual obligation and continuity between generations are among the principal goods for which a society and an economy should exist.

Contemporary culture, he argues, tends to treat them as inconveniences - obstructing education, careers, mobility and personal autonomy. His own large and growing family can be understood as something almost countercultural.

Catholicism gave intellectual form to these convictions. Its teaching on human nature, family, work, duty and the common good offered an alternative both to progressive individualism and to the moral vacuum of market economics. Work must sustain families and communities; an economy which destroys stable employment cannot be justified merely because it produces cheaper goods. Marriage, children and unborn life are public goods, not simply private, disposable preferences.

The book is stronger on these moral intuitions than on political analysis. Vance is intelligent and widely read, but more a synthesiser than an original thinker. His criticisms of meritocracy, globalisation and economic abstraction often ring true, yet Catholic social teaching does not by itself determine policy. It identifies human ends and moral limits; government must still exercise prudential judgement among competing policies.

Communion is plainly intended to shape Vance’s public identity. Yet its Catholicism is too definite, too demanding and sometimes electorally inconvenient to dismiss as campaign packaging.

Vance insists that faith cannot be confined to Mass or purely private life but must be the foundation of everything you do. He expects to be judged not by whether Catholicism colours his rhetoric, but by whether the power he exercises is recognisably governed by it.

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"The Killing Star" - weapon effects

Amazon

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The Killing Star, by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski, was published in 1995. I reread it for the second time back in 2007 and posted my thoughts here. I also wrote about the effects of relativistic impact weapons here, back in 2015. But the AIs are better now, so I thought I would ask GPT5.5 for a more up-to-date analysis of the weapons effect of such an alien attack (reminiscent of the 'Dark Forest' scenario in 'The Three-Body Problem') - and here it is.

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It is one of the bleakest treatments of the Fermi paradox in modern science fiction. Its premise is simple: any civilisation capable of interstellar expansion may rationally conclude that other emerging technological species are future existential threats. The safe policy is therefore not contact, diplomacy or curiosity, but pre-emption. The novel follows the aftermath of such an attack on Earth. Humanity is not invaded. It is to be deleted.

The weapon chosen is not a death ray or antimatter bomb, but matter moving at relativistic speed. Each projectile is only a few tonnes in mass, but travels at roughly ninety-two percent of the speed of light. At that velocity the kinetic energy of a single object is equivalent to hundreds of gigatons of TNT. The novel envisages 65,536 such impactors arriving almost simultaneously. Collectively, they deliver energy comparable to several years of all the sunlight normally falling upon Earth, but concentrated into seconds.

During the first microseconds, the impact is not meteor physics. It is high-energy physics. Atmospheric molecules meet the leading surface of the projectile at energies measured in billions of electron volts per particle. There is no time for ordinary heating, deformation or aerodynamics. The collision region becomes a violent particle cascade: electrons, positrons, gamma rays, X-rays, neutrons, nuclear fragments and secondary showers pour out of the interaction zone.

The atmosphere briefly becomes the target chamber of a planetary particle accelerator. Hard gamma rays couple not only to electrons but, at sufficiently high energies, to atomic nuclei. Nitrogen and oxygen nuclei are shattered by photodisintegration and nuclear spallation. Pair production, bremsstrahlung and hadronic showers occur in a dense, expanding plasma column. The air is not merely heated. It is ionised, transmuted and explosively reorganised.

The projectile does not reach the ground as an intact metal object. It is progressively converted into radiation, plasma and relativistic debris. A narrow atmospheric track becomes an incandescent column at temperatures of millions of degrees. The earliest radiation is hard, dominated by gamma rays and X-rays, but the atmosphere rapidly absorbs and reprocesses much of that energy into ultraviolet, visible light, infrared and blast. The first visible sign would be a flash of appalling brilliance. The first physical consequence would be a moving line of atmosphere turned into explosive working fluid.

Then comes the mechanical catastrophe. Shock waves expand from the plasma channels. Ground impacts excavate craters. Ocean impacts produce colossal steam explosions, salt aerosol injection and tsunamis. Cities are destroyed by blast, fire, ground shock and infrastructure collapse. Power grids, communications, water systems, transport, hospitals, refineries and ports fail not sequentially but almost everywhere at once. The event is closer to tens of thousands of simultaneous asteroid strikes than to any human war.

Yet Earth itself survives easily. The attack does not melt the crust, boil the oceans away or disturb the planet's orbit. Its energy is immense by biological standards but trivial by planetary standards. This is precisely the point. The attackers are not trying to destroy Earth. They are trying to remove a dangerous surface phenomenon: intelligent life.

The longer-term effects are decisive. Dust, soot, vapourised rock, nitrates, salt aerosols and combustion products are driven high into the atmosphere. Sunlight at the surface falls for months, perhaps years, below the level needed to sustain normal plant growth. Photosynthesis collapses. Agriculture fails. Forests burn, then starve. Soils are poisoned, frozen, eroded or buried. Rivers and lakes receive ash, acids and toxins. Marine ecosystems dependent on sunlight suffer catastrophic decline.

The survival of a few well-protected or lucky humans after the first hours is not the same as the long-term survival of the species. Many people might initially live: in mines, bunkers, submarines, tunnels, caves, polar stations or remote regions. But they would emerge into a world without functioning agriculture, industry, medicine, transport, communications or stable climate. Stored food would run out. Fuel would degrade or be exhausted. Spare parts would disappear. Disease, cold, darkness, contaminated water and social breakdown would finish what the impacts began.

Most land-based complex life would probably die. Large mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians depend on food webs too fragile to survive a multi-year collapse of photosynthesis. Insects, fungi, seeds, spores, roots, burrowing animals and dormant life stages might persist in places. Microbial life would certainly survive. Deep-ocean and subterranean ecosystems would be the great refuges. The biosphere would not be sterilised. It would be decapitated.

The likely end state is therefore not a dead planet, but a planet from which humanity has largely vanished. A few protected groups might survive for months or years. A fantastically well-prepared underground facility with power, stored supplies, artificial agriculture, medical capacity, technical personnel and long-term social stability might last longer. But this is a much narrower possibility than mere initial survival. The attack is engineered to prevent recovery, not merely to obliterate humanity.

That is the cold force of the novel's premise. The relativistic impactors are civilisation-killers first, species-killers second, planet-killers not at all. They leave Earth intact because destroying a planet is energetically challenging and not required. What matters is eliminating the thin layer of intelligence, culture, cities, crops, machines and language spread across its surface. The Earth remains in orbit around the Sun. Evolution will continue. But the human episode is most likely over.

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The Balance Sheet on Iran: GPT 5.5

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Iran, Nuclear Thresholds and the Future of War

Much commentary on Iran begins from the assumption that Tehran was either relentlessly pursuing a nuclear bomb or, conversely, that its programme was entirely civilian. The evidence points to something more subtle than this. For many years Iran appears to have pursued a threshold strategy: accumulating the technology, enriched uranium, scientific expertise and industrial infrastructure necessary to build nuclear weapons, while stopping short of openly crossing the line.

This approach offered advantages. It increased Iran's regional influence, complicated military planning for its opponents, and provided bargaining leverage in negotiations, all without incurring the full diplomatic and economic costs of becoming an overt nuclear weapons state. The model was closer to a latent nuclear capability than to North Korea's explicit nuclear posturing.

The weakness of the strategy became apparent when Iran discovered that being close to the threshold does not necessarily deter attack. The United States and Israel appear to have concluded that Iran's growing stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and increasingly sophisticated infrastructure posed an unacceptable future risk. The result was a campaign aimed not at occupying Iran but at degrading its capabilities, damaging its infrastructure and eliminating key personnel. The objective was to change the strategic orientation of its governing elite, not least by eliminating the most committed or operationally dangerous elements of that elite.

The objective was never in reality regime change. That would require a military commitment which neither Washington nor the European capitals were willing to make. Iran is not Iraq. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is deeply embedded within the state, the economy and the security apparatus. It resembles less a conventional military organisation than a ruling caste. Decapitation strikes can disrupt and rebalance such a structure, but they cannot eradicate it.

But why the restraint? Why stop short of attacking Iran's economic lifelines, particularly Kharg Island, through which much of the country's oil exports pass?

The answer lies in the difficulty of calibrating coercion. Too little damage and Tehran concludes that it can continue its existing strategy - even claim victory. Too much damage and the regime may conclude that it has nothing left to lose, or even collapse altogether, causing regional havoc.

Destroying the country's principal source of revenue might have accelerated internal instability, but it could equally have encouraged escalation, regional conflict and a renewed dash towards nuclear weapons. Iran would have had covert help.

The dilemma facing Western policymakers is therefore not how to destroy Iran but how to alter its strategic calculations.

Complicating matters further is Iran's self-image. The Islamic Republic is not merely an ideological regime. Beneath the revolutionary rhetoric lies a much older Persian civilisational identity. Iran sees itself not as a minor regional actor but as a natural centre of power with a history stretching back millennia. Such states rarely accept permanent strategic marginalisation. The desire for influence is not simply a product of the current regime; it's woven into that deeper national identity.

The longer term challenge facing Iran may be one where nuclear posturing does not help.

The most significant military development of the coming decade is likely to be the growth of autonomous and semi-autonomous warfare. Advances in AI, robotic systems and automated battle management are steadily reducing the costs of persistent military pressure. 

Prospective American casualties may no longer be the limiting constraint in future ground warfare.

Iran's existing strategy relies heavily on concealment, proxies, dispersed infrastructure and asymmetric warfare. A future battlefield dominated by automated sensing and engagement threatens those strengths; they become easier and cheaper to locate and attack.

Traditional concepts of victory and defeat begin to blur. Instead of occupying hostile states, great powers mow the lawn.

Nuclear weapons can deter invasion. Not so much constant technological attrition. Iran may still be thinking in terms of nuclear thresholds and imperial recognition. Its enemies will be thinking surveillance and permanent attrition - at little cost to themselves.

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War: what is it good for?

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War is one of those human activities that everyone condemns and almost every society practises. From hunter-gatherer bands to modern nation states, organised violence is never completely absent.

The magazine-article explanation is intrinsic aggression. Human beings, particularly young men, are capable of extraordinary violence. Aggression explains why wars can be fought but not why they are repeatedly chosen.

Start with economics. In the agrarian economies of antiquity and within feudalism, wealth consisted of land, livestock, slaves, tribute and control of territory. Acquiring resources by conquest was frequently easier than creating them. War was often the quickest route to enrichment for a ruling elite.

Factories are generally more valuable intact than looted. Within capitalist societies, where the state enforces property rights and monopolises violence, intra-elite violence becomes expensive and counterproductive. Markets absorbed many competitive impulses that previously found expression through force.

Yet war itself remains stubbornly present. States like to maximise security and revenue. Their freedom of action depends upon the resources of the economies beneath them: bigger is usually better.

(I say 'states' but of course, that's an abstraction: better to say that the material interests of very large numbers of people correlate with the size, power and resources of their own state apparatus.)

Not everyone sees this.

Much of the intelligentsia in advanced capitalist societies adopts a quasi-pacifist outlook. Media, academia, religious institutions and the cultural sector benefit enormously from internal peace and stability. Their members are largely insulated from the direct pressures of inter-state competition, concluding that war is simply a misunderstanding that wiser people (people like themselves) would transcend.

SF author Isaac Asimov: "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent."

States inhabit a different world from individuals. Within societies there are courts, police and governments and politics. But no world authority possesses a monopoly of force: a state's military power is its decisive last resort.

War will evolve. Humans may increasingly disappear from the sharp end of the battlespace, replaced by machines acting under human direction. Incentives, however, remain unchanged. As long as resources are scarce, states will compete and war will remain.

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Math teachers: here's an end-of-term puzzle for your class!

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The Four Fours Puzzle by ChatGPT (v. 5.5 thinking)

As the summer term came to an end, Nigel, in his teaching days, found that the puzzle below got a maths class interested very quickly, especially when tackled collaboratively in pairs, groups or competing teams.

The problem is simple to state. Can you make every whole number from 1 to 100 using exactly four 4s and standard arithmetic operations? 

For example, 2 can be made as:

4/4 + 4/4 = 2

Every expression must contain exactly four 4s. The operations may include addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, brackets, square roots, powers, factorials, decimal points, recurring decimals and joining two 4s together to make 44.

In the solutions below, 4! means 4 factorial, so 4! = 24. A dot above a 4 means that the 4 recurs: for example, .4̇ means 0.4444..., and .44̇ also means 0.4444..., but uses two written 4s.

1	44/44
2	4 × (4/(4 + 4))
3	(4 + 4 + 4)/4
4	4 + 4 × (4 − 4)
5	(4 + 4 × 4)/4
6	4 + (4 + 4)/4
7	44/4 − 4
8	4 + 4 + 4 − 4
9	4 + 4 + 4/4
10	(44 − 4)/4
11	44/√(4 × 4)
12	(4 + 44)/4
13	√4 + 44/4
14	4 + 4 + 4 + √4
15	4 + 44/4
16	4 + 4 + 4 + 4
17	4 × 4 + 4/4
18	44/√4 − 4
19	4! − 4/4 − 4
20	4 × (4 + 4/4)
21	4! + 4/4 − 4
22	√4 × 44/4
23	(4 × 4! − 4)/4
24	4 + 4 + 4 × 4
25	(4 + 4 × 4!)/4
26	4 + 44/√4
27	4 + 4! − 4/4
28	44 − 4 × 4
29	4 + 4! + 4/4
30	4 × (4 + 4) − √4
31	4! + (4 + 4!)/4
32	4 × 4 + 4 × 4
33	4 + 4! + √4/.4
34	√4 + 4 × (4 + 4)
35	4! + 44/4
36	44 − 4 − 4
37	4! + (√4 + 4!)/√4
38	44 − √4 − 4
39	44 − √4/.4
40	44 − √(4 × 4)
41	(.4 + 4 × 4)/.4
42	√4 + 44 − 4
43	44 − 4/4
44	4 + 44 − 4
45	44 + 4/4
46	4 − (√4 − 44)
47	√4 × 4! − 4/4
48	4 × (4 + 4 + 4)
49	4/4 + √4 × 4!
50	4 + √4 + 44
51	((4! − √4)/.4) − 4
52	4 + 4 + 44
53	44 + 4/.4̇
54	44 + 4/.4
55	(44/√4)/.4
56	4 × (4 × 4 − √4)
57	√4 − (√4 − 4!)/.4
58	(44 − 4!)/4
59	4!/.4 − 4/4
60	44 + 4 × 4
61	4/4 + 4!/.4
62	4 × 4 × 4 − √4
63	(44 − 4)/4
64	(4 + 4) × (4 + 4)
65	(4 + 44)/4
66	√4 + 4 × 4 × 4
67	√4 + (√4 + 4!)/.4
68	4 + 4 × 4 × 4
69	4 + (√4 + 4!)/.4
70	√4 + 4! + 44
71	(4! + 4.4)/.4
72	4 + 4! + 44
73	(√(.4̇) + √4 × 4!)/√(.4̇)
74	4 + (4 + 4!)/.4
75	(4 + √4 + 4!)/.4
76	4 × (4! − 4) − 4
77	(√(4/.4̇))4 − 4
78	4 × (4! − 4) − √4
79	4! − (√4 − 4!)/.4
80	4 × (4 + 4 × 4)
81	(4 − 4/4)4
82	√4 − 4 × (4 − 4!)
83	4! − (.4 − 4!)/.4
84	√4 × 44 − 4
85	(4! + 4/.4)/.4
86	√4 × 44 − √4
87	4 × 4! − 4/.4̇
88	44 + 44
89	4! + (√4 + 4!)/.4
90	√4 + √4 × 44
91	4 × 4! − √4/.4
92	4 + √4 × 44
93	4 × 4! − √(4/.4̇)
94	√4 + 4 × 4! − 4
95	4 × 4! − 4/4
96	√4 × (4 + 44)
97	4/4 + 4 × 4!
98	4 − (√4 − 4 × 4!)
99	4.4/(.4̇ − .4)
100	4 × (4! + 4/4)

Some numbers are easy to construct, others bafflingly hard - tell them not to try working through 1-100 in order, go for the low-hanging fruit first.

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DARPA's future model of combat computing

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DARPA's recent RFI on low-resource computing rethinks computation under battlefield conditions: scarce power, unreliable components, limited communications, cramped physical space and little opportunity for maintenance. Welcome to the burgeoning world of the sensor, drone, robotic scout and autonomous battlefield node.

This resembles the constraints that shape biological evolution. Living systems operate under severe energy budgets. Their components are noisy and failure-prone. They rely on local decision-making, tolerate damage, and continue functioning despite incomplete information; resilience matters more than perfection.

Future military systems will exhibit characteristics familiar in nature: distributed intelligence, local sensing and action, redundancy, graceful degradation and adaptation to specialised roles. An unattended sensor, a reconnaissance drone and a robotic logistics vehicle will look like different species occupying different ecological niches.

Natural selection optimises for survival and reproduction while military systems must remain understandable, controllable and trustworthy to their human operators. But it's going to be an SF jungle out there - it already is.

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No Business Case for a Lunar Colony but...

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No Business Case for a Moon Colony, But America Should Still Go For It

There is no compelling business case for a permanent Moon colony - private corporations won't pioneer the way.

Tourism? The Moon is not a holiday destination. It is a hostile industrial environment involving radiation, dust, confinement and a three-day journey each way. Orbital hotels around Earth would be easier, safer and cheaper for a very long time - whether enough customers are willing to pay for weightlessness and nausea remains to be seen.

Mining? The Moon contains useful materials, but so does Earth. Most lunar mining proposals require demand from a future space economy that at best will be generations in the making.

Instead, consider Antarctica.

Antarctica is accessible - people do actually live there. There are airfields, research stations and supply chains. Yet there are no cities, no normal economy and no self-sustaining settlements.

The Moon will turn out to be much the same: a place for scientists, engineers, the military and government-funded installations. Antarctica with lower gravity and no air.

So why go?

Suppose China establishes a permanent lunar presence and the United States does not. China gains decades of experience operating people, machinery, communications and logistics beyond Earth. It develops procedures, institutions and technical standards. It learns what works and what doesn't.

Modern military power depends on communications, surveillance, navigation, logistics and industrial capacity. A nation that routinely operates thousands of kilometres beyond Earth acquires capabilities that can't be learned from simulations and clever strategy documents. It also acquires prestige, which is simply another form of power.

Apollo proved that Americans could reach the Moon. It demonstrated a capability but did not create an embedded capability. Artemis may be founded on the belief that the rest of the economy has finally caught up. Perhaps we finally have a space-competent economy which just needs a challenge? 

But the Moon will remain a net cost-centre for centuries.

There is no business case for a Moon colony, but best not let a strategic rival become the only power with a permanent foothold there.

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The Peak Before the Plateau

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The Peak Before the Plateau

There is a difference between demonstrating a capability and possessing it.

A demonstrated capability says: this can be done, once, under exceptional conditions, with enough money, urgency, ingenuity and institutional force.

The military call it a raid.

An embedded capability says something quite different: this can now be done repeatedly, economically and without drama.

In military terms it's the follow-up invasion.

The first is a peak; the second is a plateau.

Apollo was the peak before the plateau. The United States placed men on the Moon not because lunar travel had become a natural extension of its economic and technological life, but because the state concentrated intense resources on a politically defined objective.

The result was magnificent, but brittle. Once the political pressure had subsided, the capability largely disappeared. America had proved that it could go to the Moon. It had not created a civilisation for which going to the Moon was normal or had a point.

The medieval cathedral has the same structure. A society of limited transport, low productivity and fragile institutions could still raise Chartres or Salisbury. Those stones really stood but the building was a vertical extrusion from a very narrow base: craft, faith, patronage and multi-century patience had been lifted far above the everyday productive forces of the society around it.

The same thing can happen to a person.

When I first started fingerstyle lessons with Stewart, I had prior teenage familiarity with chords and playing lead breaks across the fretboard. But I had never attempted the intricate motions of thumb and fingers for fingerpicking.

As an experiment, Stewart gave me a Grade 3 fingerstyle piece.

It was impossible: my right hand was uncoordinated, the left hand - fretting the chord shapes - was always in the wrong posture. Eventually by obsessional perseverance I managed to get a passable performance. But it was not generalisable, it was a performance assembled by rote. 

Looking back now, after seven months of daily practice, I can deconstruct that hard piece into constituent skills, each of which I have internalised to some degree and which therefore transfers.

I now have a general capability: what was once a peak has become part of the plateau.

Spectacular achievements are often misleading, flattering our sense of possibility while concealing the conditions of their reproduction.

Some current projects have this character.

Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most obvious. Large language models already produce Q&A performances which look uncannily like high-intelligence. But many organisations trying to use them seriously discover that their data, processes, governance, incentives, systems integration and human judgement are just not ready.

Artemis, NASA's return to the Moon, is another. Its real problem is not whether astronauts can be landed there again - Apollo answered that. The question is whether lunar access can become sustained, repeatable and industrially normalised. That requires not another heroic spike, but a plateau of launch systems, landers, suits, habitats, logistics, finance and political patience.

(But China is driving the programme, not a sound business case).

Achievement peaks are seductive, fooling us that the future has already arrived. A peak can only be reached by intense and narrow focus; a plateau gets built by holistic organic development. Only the latter anchors real progress.

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