John C. Dvorak.

Over time national elections in the USA have evolved into serving two distinct functions. The first is obvious, it’s to re-elect representatives. The other, less obvious, is to finance mass media with infusions of advertising dollars. The second, less apparent function, is why campaign finance reform will never get very far. And it’s why the Electoral College will be eliminated in the years ahead.

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HR is not your friend. HR is there to support the company. If you are not the company, they are not going to be there to support you.

HR boils down to paid witnesses in some cases. It changes it from a “you said, the boss said” thing to two-on-one (or worse). They just pay attention and maybe give a sworn statement down the road if things turn truly nasty.

Who else operates like that? Mall cops and security guards. They don’t have guns. They have phones and notepads. So, it’s really mall cops, security guards… and HR.

Want to make an HR person wet his/her pants? Ask: “Who is the company’s agent for service of process?”

Read it.

Note-taking is fast, uses the original author’s language, and generally feels easier. The issue is the content is often poorly assimilated and easily forgotten. In contrast, note-making is slower, more involved, and uses our own language. As a result, the content is easier to understand and remember.

The generation effect is the underlying process which supports note-making. It’s the phenomenon where information is better remembered if it is actively created from your own mind rather than simply read in a passive way. By taking the time and making the effort to rephrase the content you are consuming, you are more likely to commit the information to your long-term memory.

Useful advice.

Severian is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Hollywood doesn’t care what you want. I doubt if Hollywood has ever cared what you want, but if they ever did, that time probably ended in tandem with Clara Bow’s career. Hollywood wants what they want, and so will you, because whaddaya gonna do, not watch it? The reason they made all those “classic literature” films in the 1990s, then, wasn’t because they thought we wanted (or needed) some cultural uplift.

Indeed they don’t.

Read it.

Although fires can happen anywhere, they become critical and dangerous when e-vehicles are involved. An affected battery acts as a powerful fire accelerant due to a chain reaction and must also burn out completely, which can take as long as two days. In February, Kulmbach in Bavaria became the first German city to close underground garages to e-cars as a result.

Severian has a few.

Contrast this to the Current Year, where, much like breakfast food, what seems to be a bewildering variety of lunacy can be boiled down to just a few basic types. “Wokeness” is a madlib with just two variables: ____ is either racist or sexist, pick one. (I suppose you can combine them, but you’ll notice that doesn’t happen nearly as often as you’d predict, because the blacks hate the gays and the feminists hate everyone, so going full retard ends up getting you in a lot of trouble with your coreligionists).

…

If you still think you can design a historical system, well, have you ever met a shrink’s kid? How about a minister’s daughter, or the son of a preacher man? Those folks think they know exactlyhow to raise kids, get it?

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Maybe it is just the summer doldrums setting in early, but life seems boring of late. Part of it is the media is busy making the Vegetable-in-Chief sound like a statesman, which is far less exciting than it sounds. The novelty of having a dementia patient in the White House has worn off and we are left with the reality.

That reality is that there was never any reason for Biden to be president, other than he was the only option they had to replace Trump. Once he scrawled what he thinks is his name on the executive orders they put in front of him, there was nothing left on the agenda. The long temper tantrum no longer has a reason, so the stasis of late empire decline is back, which means nothing happens.

The only potential for something interesting to happen is if they snuff out the vegetable and install Harris. She is revealing herself to be dumber and shallower than anyone imagined. She is fumbling the softest of questions from the most obsequious of reporters. It seems impossible, but she may have less cognitive function than her boss and he is close to brain dead.

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students, took Tyler Dixon by surprise.

Along with wearing masks and social distancing, students living on campus would be expected to wear a coin-size “BioButton” attached to their chests with medical adhesive. It would continuously measure their temperature, respiratory rate, and heart rate, and tell them whether they’d been in close contact with a button wearer who’d tested positive for Covid-19. In conjunction with a series of daily screening questions, the button would let them know if they were cleared for class.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Rapid City, South Dakota held elections for its school board this week. The result? Two incumbents, including the school board president, went down to defeat. Insurgent candidates won all four contested seats

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

Way back in the golden times, when Barack Obama was president, it became obvious that Team Obama had no affirmative reason for his administration. Everything they did was tied to some past grievance. It was like they were working form a long list of boo-boos the Left had suffered going back to Reagan. Every initiative seemed to be linked in some way to what the Left perceived to be a failure. It was as if they had a secret list of grudges that they were determined to avenge.

Read it.

Arizona entered the union as the 48th state on Valentine’s Day, 1912, which completed the American jigsaw puzzle that spans the continent. Almost 50 years later, in 1959, Congress admitted Alaska and Hawaii as the final two states. And as when the Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation from the Isle of Patmos, the canon was closed. The union was complete.

Now Democrats are champing at the bit to replay the 1850s and have a fight over admitting two more states to the union. Democrats wrap themselves in the lofty-sounding rhetoric of liberalism when talking about statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, but they are motivated by the same destructive political calculus of the antebellum era: admit the territories as states that will give you control of the senate so that you can dominate your political enemies. It’s a high-stakes gambit that didn’t end well last time.

The proper thing to do with D.C. is to give it back to Maryland, as the Virginia portion was back in the day. This would answer all of the legitimate grievances of D.C. residents. But that’s not what Democrats want. (I think the capital ought to be moved back to Philadelphia.)

The proper thing to do with Puerto Rico is independence, whether they want it or not. They have never been American in any meaningful sense of the word. (Or maybe give them to Mexico. Or even Cuba.)

One of the most frustrating aspects of the Democrat push to create new states is that it’s backwards looking. They have no ideas for how to make America better—they just want to play the greatest hit from a bygone era, to get the last squeeze out of the lemon. That’s evidence of political and cultural decay.

Yup. If you want new real states, cut California, Oregon, and Washington in half north-to-south. Or New York horizontally right above Duchess County.

Michael Anton at The American Mind.

To recap briefly (but read the whole thing!), the book explains how every prominent and powerful American institution, including the federal government, has been taken over by a hostile elite who use their vast powers to attack, despoil, and insult about half the nation. In the sixth chapter (excerpted here), I outline what I think America will look like if the present ruling class refuses to moderate, cannot be forced to share power, and has the wherewithal to keep its regime going. In the seventh chapter, I sketch several possibilities—from secession to Caesarism to collapse—that might result if it turns out that our overlords are a lot less competent than they think. And in the final chapter (excerpted here), I offer policy and other ideas that might enable America to avoid those fates….

Just think of it as ‘self-gerrymandering’.

UPDATE: Meet Greater Idaho

Tanner Greer of THE SCHOLAR’S STAGE continues his observations. Recommended.

Let me restate my central thesis sans these ideologically charged terms: The New Right vision of politics is unapologetically elitist, hierarchical, and communitarian. The right-wing base, in contrast, is rebellious, egalitarian, and individualist. The New Right and the right base are united in their hatred for the meritocratic striver culture of America’s bicoastal elites. But their attitudes towards elite politics are fundamentally different.

The New Right wants to replace America’s failed leadership class with something better (e.g. themselves). The right base does not want a new elite, but less elite. New Right intellectuals deeply care about what is being taught at Yale; the right-wing base wants to live in a world where they never have to care about what is being taught at Yale. The New Right wants to restore or revitalize an “American way of life;” the Trumpy base wants to ban all outsiders from telling them how to live their lives. The New Right smiles on phrases like “we live in a society” and “politics of the common good.” The right-wing base is attracted to slogans like “don’t tread on me” and “I will not be masked, tracked, or tested.”

ZMan peeks at modern mythology.

The term “standing head” is a newspaper term that goes back to the days when the papers were printed by typesetters. It means regular or recurring content, such as the headline for a feature like “Box Scores” in the sports section or “aspiring rapper” in the crime blotter. The term is used to so often that the old typesetters would have it as a block ready to use when needed. It also came to be known as a trope, stereotype, or a euphemism that was commonly used in the news.

In the modern age, the word “hacked” has become a standing head, in that it is something like a catchall answer for all sorts of things. If a celebrity gets drunk and posts N-bombs on Twitter, she claims she was hacked. If a company loses customer information, they claim it was hackers. Whenever someone does not want to take responsibility for their own mistakes, they fob it off on hackers. Hackers are the digital version of Loki the trickster.

Read it.

Inflation isn’t observable in technological fields – anything attached to the internet becomes deflationary over time through Moore’s law. Yet, inflation’s nightmarish effects exist and its worrisome presence is seen in commodities, namely through the price of food. Even though agricultural technology has reshaped the way farms work, the nominal price of food has exploded at a machine-gun clip, making subsistence living soon-impossible for much the world.

 

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Under the reductionist malady of Trump Derangement Syndrome, facts and logic did not matter. Instead, anything not said or done in opposition to Trump empowered the supposed existential Trump threat. Ironically, some of the most deductive and reductionist Trump haters were supposedly professionals, the highly educated, and the self-proclaimed devotees of the Enlightenment. And yet in their uncontrolled aversion and detestation, they suspended all the rules of empiricism, logic, and rationality—and people died as a result.

Steve Sailer.

Perhaps the 1993 sci-fi satire film Demolition Man with Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, and Rob Schneider?

Read it.

Doing work Americans won’t do.

John Derbyshire.

Earlier this year I read Christopher Caldwell’s very striking book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. Caldwell argued that the reforms of the 1960s, which seemed necessary and humane at the time to correct obvious injustices, had serious negative consequences, leading eventually to many of the issues that so divide and anger us today. A powerful and brilliant essay by political scientist Richard Hanania has just followed up on this insight.

Read it.

Workforce scholars find that employees are feeling burned over broken work-from-home promises and corporate culture ‘BS’ as employers try to bring them back to the office.

The Pandemic Panic has had the effect of a war — the economy was dislocated, and how is resurging in a substantially different form, workplaces have changed and are resurrecting also in a substantially different form, people have had their political sensibilities hammered, and basically things have taken a sharp turn in a new direction.

Read it.

Ars Technica is yet another Woke tech ‘news’ site.

I have never understood that assertion that ‘gerrymandering’ (i.e. drawing districts so that people who presumably vote one way will all be in the same district) is somehow ‘undermining democracy’.

Which is a better implementation of ‘democracy’,  a district where the elected representtaive gets 51% of the vote or one where the elected representitive gets 65% of the vote? Who is more ‘disfranchised’, the 49% who aren’t represented by the guy they voted for (and are ‘represented’ by the guy they voted against) in the former case or the 25% in the latter case?

I should think that ‘democracy’, if it means anything other than ‘we’ll pretend to listen to the voters’, would best be served by maximizing the vote that one side will get in any given election. After all, it’s not as if anybody cares about the candidate more than they care about the Side that the candidate represents….

UPDATE: Is Gerrymandering About to Become More Difficult?

I suspect not, as long as it is in the hands of politicians or their tools.

Read it.

I wonder if that applies to the guys who live in campers in the parking lot because they can’t afford an apartment in Cupertino?

Read it.

The pandemic created a new, more diverse, more connected crop of homeschoolers. They could help shape what learning looks like for everyone.

WIRED is allegedly a tech news site, but they plush Wokeness along with the rest of the Narrative media. So factor in that bias as you read.

Read it.

The “pandemic” is officially over: Walmart has removed the “stay six feet apart” decals on the floor of its checkout lines. Governor Ralph “Coonman” Northam, in his infinite wisdom, decreed the end of social distancing restrictions last week, and Walmart jumped right on board. If Walmart is no longer following the protocols, the pandemic doesn’t exist. Period.

I posted my last mask report a couple of weeks ago after my trip through the deplorable hinterlands of Virginia. The farther away from the cities and larger towns, the less residue of the Coronamadness was to be found. I mentioned that a diner in a remote rural area was totally without masks, and had abandoned the social distancing restrictions even before the governor allowed them to.

ZMan reads the tea leaves.

The regime has already begun to let the court know that they better rule the correct way, or their will be consequences. Senator Blumenthal from Connecticut is the first out of the gate threatening the judges. It will not be long before he is joined by other prominent Democrats, as well as the media. Then you have the extortion rackets run by the FBI and other players. The odds of the court ruling in favor of the civic nationalist position are very low, but their expectations are very high.

This is shaping up to be one of those unforced regime mistakes that seem to characterize every revolution. The abortion case in particular is the one that could radicalize a lot of civic nationalists. Christian conservatives are already on the edge, given the overtly anti-Christian pogroms run by the ruling class. If the court finks on them in the fall, it could be the last straw. They will conclude that there is no path forward in conventional politics and begin to organize outside of the system.

Read it.

A hybrid workforce is typically described as having both in-house and remote talent. The assumption is that productivity and communication tools are the foundation of this new world of work, but connecting distributed teams and building collaborative thought requires a much deeper effort and understanding.

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Denmark must be doing something right, because both the United Nations and the European Union oppose its plan to move its asylum application facilities to the African continent.

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Democrats and much of the media are pushing to make permanent the extraordinary, pandemic-driven measures to relax voting rules during the 2020 elections—warning anew of racist voter “suppression” otherwise. Yet democracies in Europe and elsewhere tell a different story—of the benefits of stricter voter ID requirements after hard lessons learned.

A database on voting rules worldwide compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I run, shows that election integrity measures are widely accepted globally, and have often been adopted by countries after they’ve experienced fraud under looser voting regimes.

Of 47 nations surveyed in Europe—a place where, on other matters, American progressives often look to with envy—all but one country requires a government-issued photo voter ID to vote. The exception is the U.K., and even there voter IDs are mandatory in Northern Ireland for all elections and in parts of England for local elections. Moreover, Boris Johnson’s government recently introduced legislation to have the rest of the country follow suit.

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A nonbinding, off-season ballot initiative in rural Oregon isn’t normally the most viscerally exciting of events, couched as they generally are in terms agonizing over whether to ‘note’ or ‘reaffirm’ a past proposal, or to ‘endorse’ or ‘refer’ a more recent one for further consideration. But just the other day, out of the tepid depths of yet more interminable debate on local timber-harvest regulations, or supplemental sport-fishing laws, something of genuine significance happened. The voters of five Oregon counties let it be known that they would like to secede from their state and join Idaho instead.

ZMan sings you the truth.

A fetish of the modern Right in America has been complaining about and denouncing partisanship in Washington. In fairness, the Left will indulge in this on the rare occasions when the Republicans do something for their voters. Mostly it is a conservative fetish, as it is the Left that drives the debate. The Right needs to maintain the fantasy that republican virtue still matters, so they regularly complain about the Left acting in their narrow interests, rather than in the interests of the country.

In theory, the conservatives are correct. Partisanship is the great bane of a republic, as it subverts the very basis of a republic. What is necessary to maintain a republic is what Montesquieu called republican virtue, the willingness to put the interests of the system ahead of personal or factional interests. For example, you must respect the office, even if you have no respect for the man holding the office. This shows up in our military culture where you do not salute the person, you salute the rank.

The trouble with the conservative approach is we have not lived in a republic for a very long time, so they are playing make believe. We live in a liberal democracy that is decreasing liberal with each turn of the wheel. In democratic systems, the ends justify the means, so partisanship dominates. It replaces republican virtue in favor of subjective moral certainty. This is one of the reasons that conservatism is worthless in a democracy of any sort. It prohibits victory as defined by the rules.

Read it.

I’m sure you’ve been on the edge of your chair.

“Short words are best, and old words, when short, are best of all.”

Read it.

Throughout history, there have been numerous accounts of segmented sleep, from medical texts, to court records and diaries, and even in African and South American tribes, with a common reference to “first” and “second” sleep.

Medieval monks would use this period to sing the canonical hour of Matins.