Read it.

Or you could just buy a gun and defend yourself — if the government will let you.

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Shhh…quiet. Can you hear that? Listen closely. That’s the sound of backpedaling. Beautiful, isn’t it? The left’s panic is conspicuous as their woke figureheads try to reverse course on the lockdowns.

The real unraveling began on Thursday morning when the New York Times ran a piece headlined ‘President of Key Teachers’ Union Shares Plea: “Schools Must Be Open” in Fall’. This ‘plea’ came from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. It likely came as quite a surprise for parents across America. After all, they had been pleading with the AFT’s head honcho to open schools for over a year now. But Weingarten was too busy flying all over the United States on Boutique Air flights to worry about valid concerns from desperate families.

Zman’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

A topic I keep returning to is how the new fads sweeping our elites are like primitive rituals rather than old time ideology. The Marxists really thought their economic policies would result in plenty. On paper at least, their plans made some sense. The new stuff is all mystery and magic. If people chant certain things at certain times or places, then something magical will happen. There is no attempt to create a logic that connects the dots or explains the logic. They just believe.

That is what lies behind the critical race theory business. Read through it and you see there is no plan of action or set of standards to be met. There is no list of things that need to be done or not done. It is a blend of graduate school jargon and feminized encounter sessions. If everyone sits in the room and hears the gibberish from the lecturer, somehow the fog of racism will lift. Or maybe it will never lift, and the struggle will continue forever. No one knows or thinks about it.

…

Antiracism is a mystery cult. The insiders have learned the language and those who refuse to learn the language are the outsiders, the bad people stuck in the white supremacist mindset. That is the appeal of antiracism for the white people joining it. It is grace on the cheap. Learn some catchphrases, attend a seminar, and show some enthusiasm. The prize is you get a black person to bless you and bestow forgiveness. It is the prefect bourgeois religion.

Read it.

‘Food desert’ is Woke-speak for ‘I can only get groceries from a Korean-run convenience store’.

The problem, of course, is finding BIPOCs who are willing to work at raising food rather than just going out and stealing it.

Read it.

Spare a thought for the joyless malcontents over at the Intercept, a website that once proudly defended journalists and fought government interference in the everyday lives of American citizens. Now the Intercept gleefully smears reporters who have dared to cover the protests-cum-riots of the past few years.

The site’s senior writer Robert Mackey and video producer Travis Mannion bothered to make a 25-minute-long video scrutinizing the coverage of ‘the Riot Squad’, a group of young journalists and videographers who film the violent aftermath of Black Lives Matter and antifa protests — among other riots. Some of these young reporters are, gasp, conservatives.

The Intercept is the org that Glenn Greenwald bailed from recently. Apparently they were too Woke even for him.

ZMan does some analysis.

Often, the natural confluence of events results in something so elegant or complex that people see the hand of design behind the result. Even though the odds of there being a secret conspiracy or master chess player behind the result are very low, that just seems better than the odds of chance getting the result. Most conspiracy theories rely on this sort of logic. The official explanations seem so unlikely that they must be part of some conspiracy to shield the truth from the public.

A good example of this is the last election. No sitting president has seen a double digit increase in his vote, but still lose. In fact, no one has been able to find an example like this in other elected offices. That’s how rare it is. This once in forever thing could be accepted in isolation, but it is just one of such things. There are so many unexplained anomalies that people are naturally skeptical. The invisible hand of design, even without hard proof, seems like the more likely explanation.

…

The question is, why? The fact is there is no market for fake meat. Dozens of efforts to create one, including the current fake burger idea, have flopped. The fact is the public is not going to voluntarily start eating bugs and grass clippings just because the climate loons say Gaia commands it. If the choice is between a real burger and the artificial alternative, people choose the real burger. In other words, there is no business opportunity here that the oligarchs are trying to exploit.

That is, unless the government plans to ban meat. Despite the organized media campaignby the regime to claim otherwise, the regime is plotting to ban meat. They will not do it outright, but instead regulate it out of existence. In the name of climate change, they will make the sale and production of meat products increasingly expensive. This is why the billionaires all see fake meat as an opportunity. It is also why recipe sites are now removing meat recipes from their websites.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was a Massive Sand Crisis.

Severian points out some inconvenient truth.

Like every American-American (that’s my new hyphenated victim group name for “normal White people”) who has at least one ancestor from The Auld Sod, I have an uncle whose hobby is Irishness. Uncle Paddy, as we’ll call him, can be a real nosebleed about it; I’m still banned from certain family gatherings for having set him off by mentioning a few jejune truths about 19th century European history. Nonetheless, so long as you don’t step too hard on sore toes, Uncle Paddy is loads of fun. He’s easy to shop for at Christmas, at least. In short, he’s the best kind of “Irishman” — the kind who only believes his own blarney when he wants to.* It keeps him occupied in his golden years, and so long as you can keep yourself from laughing whenever he goes into ecstasies over his beloved Fighting Irish football team signing a not-exactly-Hibernian running back with a name like Cthulhuvious Smith III, it’s all harmless…

…but it’s harmless because, and only because, everyone knows where Uncle Paddy’s realloyalties lie. Like every other “Irish” hobbyist I’ve met in America, he has no idea who the political leadership of Ireland are, and the idea that he’d take orders from some gay Pajeet (or whoever the PM is now) is ludicrous. Ditto the Pope — though Uncle Paddy is, of course, the kind of “Irish Catholic” who hangs a photo of JFK meeting St. John XXIII in the kitchen (then remarks how nice it was of His Holiness, to let the Bishop of Rome be in the picture like that), the idea of Uncle Paddy going against one of the family on the orders of that goddamned Marxist Bergoglio is even more laughable.

Read it.

Over the weekend the Los Angeles Times detailed the tearful struggle of being grotesquely obese in the age of COVID-19. ‘Chrystal Bougon cried after the needle went into her arm. Not because her first dose of the Moderna vaccine hurt. But because, finally, being fat actually paid off,’ the article begins. ‘Her experience with medical providers has been one incident of size stigma after another, she said, like the time she went in with a scratched cornea and was told to lose weight. She fears being hospitalized with COVID-19 and unable to advocate for herself.’

Severian is delightfully dyspeptic today.

If the Covidians were really freaking out about COVID, then, I’d expect one of two broad types of reaction: Either party-hearty midlife crisis mode, or a new determination to get on with whatever’s left of life. Obviously neither of those are true, and I just can’t grasp it — these might be your last few weeks on Earth, and that’s how you’re going to spend them? Sitting in your apartment like a sheep, wearing a mask and eating takeout, glued to a computer screen?

Read it.

The studies are all part of a political science cottage industry that purports to “measure” democracy, often with support from government-funded NGOs. Freedom House and the Polity Project—funded by Congress and the CIA respectively—have both devised widely used indexes for quantifying democratic performance, as has the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute. Linking these indexes together is the idea that democracy is not just in the eye of the beholder; it’s something scholars can measure empirically.

But in practice, most political scientists just seem to be measuring their own biases, which are then passed off as impartial, statistical truths. Beneath each metric of democracy is an implicit definition of it, an account of what democracy is or should be. And when the media report on these metrics, they often omit the assumptions and values underpinning them—reinforcing the veneer of objectivity the metrologists project.

The Other McCain decides to vent a little.

One of the phrases I hate is “working mothers,” which is often deployed in such a way as to stigmatize stay-at-home mothers. Ever since the rise of the feminist movement in the late 1960s, liberals have promoted the idea that women must have careers — not just jobs, but professional careers — in order to deserve admiration or praise. In order to have a career, it follows logically, women must go to college and ever since the late 1970s, women have been a majority of college students and are now about 56% of undergraduate enrollment. The result has been a disaster in demographic terms because, as the old saying goes, “Fertility delayed is fertility denied.” That is to say, from the day a girl reaches menarche, she has a fixed number of potential reproductive opportunities — in a healthy female, 12 cycles a year for about 25 years from ages 15 to 40, or roughly 300 lifetime chances to become pregnant. If she does not become a mother as a teenager (and middle-class America adamantly believes that teenage motherhood is the worst of all possible fates), this means her reproductive opportunities are reduced to about 240 — 12 menstrual cycles per year for about 20 years. Thus, every year that she delays motherhood represents a reduction in her total fertility.

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The dismissive attitude scientists have toward psychologists isn’t rooted in snobbery; it’s rooted in intellectual frustration. It’s rooted in the failure of psychologists to acknowledge that they don’t have the same claim on secular truth that the hard sciences do. It’s rooted in the tired exasperation that scientists feel when non-scientists try to pretend they are scientists.

 

Read it.

When? the Ever Given wedged itself into the side of the Suez Canal on 23 March, many, many people were annoyed and upset. The ship’s as yet unnamed captain and all-Indian crew, for a start: it’s going to be interesting to see what the inquiry concludes not just about the grounding, but also about the giant penis the Ever Given drew on satellite tracking before sailing into the canal. It was also a definitively bad day for the Egyptian pilots who were in charge of the ship during its passage through the canal. Also annoyed and upset: everyone stuck on board the several hundred ships waiting to go through. Everyone worried about the stupefyingly diverse cargo on board all these ships: oil, of course, but also many tons of the world’s most mined commodity (can you guess? It’s sand); and, of course, everything else, from widgets to trainers to computers, from coffee to consoles, from plastic crap of all types to medicines to, well, everything. Since 12 per cent of global trade passes through the canal, the economic damage caused by its closure was significant: a boggling $9.6 billion a day.

Of course, if that canal were in a First World country, it would long since have been widened so that such a thing was less likely to happen. Unfortunately, it is being run by Turd World rent-seekers who couldn’t build such a thing if their lives depended on it, but can only profit from the efforts of ‘colonialists’ from 150 years ago.

And then there’s a smaller community of people who, while not exactly glad to hear about the Ever Given, welcomed the opportunity it presents for consciousness-raising. This is the group who see shipping as the great ignored subject at the centre of the global economy. The truth is that shipping is responsible, as Rose George put it in the subtitle of her classic 2013 book on the subject, for ‘90 Per Cent of Everything’. It is the physical equivalent of the internet, the other industry which makes globalisation possible. The internet abolishes national boundaries for information, news, data; shipping abolishes these boundaries for physical goods. The main way it does this is by being almost incomprehensibly efficient and cheap. As George points out, if you’re having a sweater shipped from the other side of the planet, the cost of shipping adds just a cent to the price. Another way of putting it would be to say that shipping is, in practice, free. This has had the effect of abolishing geography and location as an economic factor: moving stuff from A to B is so cheap that, for most goods, there is no advantage in siting manufacturing anywhere near your customers. Instead, you make whatever it is where it’s cheapest, and ship it to them instead. As Marc Levinson wrote in The Box (2006), his unexpectedly thrilling book about the container industry, shipping is so cheap it has ‘changed the shape of the world economy’.

Read it.

First implemented in London in 1853, the technology quickly spread. Berlin began its Rohrpost in 1865, Vienna in 1867, and Marseilles in 1894, followed by most other major European cities. Brazil, Argentina, and Australia introduced tubes not long after. Philadelphia and New York implemented pneumatic tube service for first-class letters in 1893 and 1897, respectively, and a pneumatic tube line ran over the Brooklyn Bridge. Urban pneumatic tube installations existed for a surprisingly long time, remaining in opera- tion until 1953 in New York and even 2002 in Prague (where the system was taken out of service only after a flood destroyed much of the tube infrastructure). They have also long operated as internal conduits for paper and other material in post offices, department stores, and warehouses, and are still manufactured and used for this purpose today in hospitals, banks, stores, and libraries. (In fact, in a particularly serendipitous moment, some of the research requests for this very article trav- eled by pneumatic tube in the New York Public Library.)

I remember, growing up in the ’50s, visiting a department store in the local Big City in the train of my mother and seeing paper being shuffled around via pneumatic tubes.

Read it.

The spinelessness of the American Roman Catholic hierarchy with respect to nominal Catholics who publicly espouse policies flatly contrary to Catholic moral teaching has been egregious ever since it started in the wake of the ‘modernization’ following the Second Vatican Council. I am not the only cradle Roman Catholic who has left because of this scandalous history.

Read it.

The treatment of Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., by her fellow House Republican leaders and colleagues “simply for having a contrary opinion” on former President Donald Trump is appalling, and late President Ronald Reagan would never have approved, presidential historian Craig Shirley wrote in a new opinion piece.

“Cheney’s only crime of course is her belief that the GOP needs to wash its hands of Donald Trump,” Shirley, a biographer for late President Ronald Reagan, wrote for Townhall. “Otherwise, she’s a tried and true conservative. And our movement is big enough to accommodate personal opinions.”

Shirley mistakes the times. When Reagan was President, there was a broad consensus across both parties as to what constituted the national interest and how far government power could legitimately go in pursuing partisan interest. There is now no such consensus and no acknowledgement by the Democrats regarding any limit under government power when they administer it. It is therefore incumbent upon all persons purporting to be Republican to support those who, whatever their personal characteristics may be perceived to be, have demonstrated in their actions that they support and promote the principles and policies that Republicans have historically espoused. Trump does that. One need not like him, or approve of his public performance, to see that he has tremendous support in the country and a firm commitment to peace in the world, economic sanity in the country, and individual liberty, not to mention his pursuit of smaller government and respect for Constitutional rights.

I deny that Cheney is a ‘tried and true conservative’. She’s better than Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, but so is Vladimir Putin. A brief glance at Cheney’s biography on Wikipedia reveals that she  has spent most of her life in ‘government service’ (or with organizations whose dealings are primarily with government); she is a creature of the Deep State with little or no demonstrable connection to the people of the state she pretends to represent in Washington, or discernible acquaintance with either their concerns or their interests. She is a typical Child of the Crust who has never had a Real Job in her life. She has been less successful in dissembling her real status and opinions, and the Powers That Be need to take advantage of this opportunity to flush her out of the garbage chute of political life.

I expect Shirley will be making excuses for the likes of David French next.

Read it.

Even simple tweaks to the order of items on the menu or the typeface used can have a significant impact on people’s choices. There is now an entire industry known as “menu engineering”, dedicated to designing menus that convey certain messages to customers, encouraging them to spend more and make them want to come back for a second helping.

Read it.

Unfortunately,  this article confuses ‘number of people voting’ with ‘number of people who could have voted’. The fact that a whopping percentage of people voted in a certain election, which percentage was greater than anyone would have predicted, doesn’t address the question of how many people were eligible to vote but were somehow (circumstance unspecified) not able to.

It’s ‘analysis’ like this that is causing people’s brains to rot. Spakovsky ought to be ashamed of himself.

Read it.

From its fused inception, rock ‘n’ roll was already a racially integrated American invention being blasted in teenage bedrooms as early as 1955, but as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum going into 1960, the genre was being commercially segregated, on the sly, into white (British Invasion) and black (soul) music by the (WASPy) establishment.

I still remember being pissed off by the way the British Invasion groups, like the Beatles and the Stones, yanked all of the attention away from the native American rock, like the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean.

If rock & roll is dead, it’s a very healthy corpse. I was getting my hair cut the other day and the radio they were playing in the shop, in addition to the modern WOE-OH WOE-OH nonsense, played Styx and Journey — songs from fifty years ago, yet apparently intended to be familiar (and pleasing) to modern young people. What would people my age have thought, in the ’70s, of a modern music station playing something that was popular from the ’20s? The question answers itself.

Read it.

“The placenta is essentially a fascinating organ because it allows for two human beings that are genetically very different. Because half of the fetus is maternal, but the other half is paternal, and yet the pregnancy can go on for nine months without the mom’s body destroying it,” Barroeta said. “And that, from an immune standpoint, is fascinating, because if you were to receive a piece of someone else and insert that under your skin, that would not last there for three days, your body will actively reject it.”

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

I have a segment on Liz Cheney. Her life may as well have been lived in another solar system. Technically, she is supposed to be representing the interests of Wyoming in the people’s house. In reality, she is the Cloud People’s representative to the Dirt People of Wyoming. She may as well correspond with them via video link, like the alien overlords in sci-fi movies. “People of Wyoming, this is your humanoid representative. Obey and listen to instructions.”

And that says pretty much everything you need to know about Liz Chaney.

Again, all societies, regardless of the form of government, have a ruling elite that is often at odds with and out of touch with the people. That is why there are subsystems that provide feedback to the decision makers. That is the problem that parliaments are supposed to solve. How best to keep the rulers and the ruled in communication so both sides understand the other enough to avoid conflict. Today, those feedback loops no longer exist. The political system operates in isolation from us.

And that says pretty much everything you need to know about modern politics.

Read it.

Across the country, restaurant operators are reporting steep staff shortages, and are struggling to hire both cooks and wait staff. While some of the hiring crunch may be temporary, alleviated with time or more enticing pay and perks, industry insiders also see potential for challenges to persist as restaurant expansion exceeds workforce growth.

Read it.

Not me.

Vice President Kamala Harris is not historically very popular. Her approval rating rarely topped 40 percent during her campaign in the Democratic presidential primary. Her poll numbers sagged in her home state of California. It wasn’t until Biden chose her as his running mate that Harris enjoyed consistently higher approval ratings, but even as of April of this year, her unfavorability ratings were just about as high.

Despite being pretty unlikable (and as that nervous laugh suggests, awfully inauthentic), Harris has managed to maneuver herself into arguably the most powerful position in the country. If she does eventually run for president, who would be her base? Who actually likes Kamala Harris?

I’m sure Trump does. I’m sure he’s praying that she runes for President.

Read it.

Blair Whitten, a 28-year-old Minnesota resident, tried to run over funeral attendees with her SUV on Saturday at Riverside Cemetery in Fargo, North Dakota, according to KVRR. Witten managed to miss every single mourner but has been charged with aggravated reckless endangerment, the outlet reported.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

… or does Melinda Gates look like a transgender?  I must say that I would never consider marrying anybody who looked like that.

ZMan turns critic.

One of the stranger things about the political system that has evolved since the end of the Cold War is the declining reality of politicians. No, not their declining grasp on reality, which is a real thing. It is the fact that our politicians are less and less like normal human beings and more like sketches of human beings. As the role of politician has become more of a role, performed by someone good at public performance, their back stories have grown smaller and less important.

Go back to the last two Cold War presidents and you see men with long and detailed back stories that were relatable. Reagan was the midwestern guy who went to Hollywood to become a star. He ended up on television as a pitchman but became the head of the actor’s union. Poppy Bush came from an old blue blood family. He was in the war and then had a life in politics. He was even the head spy for turn. We knew a lot about these men before they entered the White House.

The first post-Cold War president was a different matter. We know a lot about his time in Arkansas, mostly because of he and his wife’s personal corruption, but none of that was known before he hit the national stage. It was only after he was in the White House that his backstory came into focus. How much of it is true and how much of it is missing is something we will never know. Bill Clinton was the first president who started out as mostly an idea, a sketch of a man, rather than a real person.

Read it.

Sustainable is the new black.

Victor Davis Hanson.

What ultimately ended the nihilist Soviet system?

Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin’s lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives?

Here are 10 symptoms of Sovietism. Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition.

Read it.

Stomp it into the ground until it is nothing but bits of plastic and metal. If you can salvage the battery, use it in something constructive, like a smoke alarm or a car key fob.

ZMan looks at the economy.

Inflation is one of those things that everyone feels. Even if you are a rich guy, you notice that steak is more expensive. The money is meaningless to you, but the price hike does not go unnoticed. Poor people, of course, feel it straight away. As a result, everyone starts to notice things in the market, like the shrinkflation, for example. A pint of ice cream is 14-ounces now. The potato chip bag is much larger, but there are fewer chips inside the bag. This stuff gets more obvious in bad times.

The thing is, prices going up because of demand or shortages is an honest result that people may not like, but they can accept. Changing the shape of containers to make it look bigger, but reducing the contents is dishonest. It is a fraud. Inflation will bring new scrutiny to this practice that has become common. This sort of institutional fraud is everywhere, but it has gone unnoticed for decades. With inflation, people will start noticing and they will not like it.

Scott Johnson at Powerline.

I have posted two previous editions of footnotes to our coverage of the trial of Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd. My purpose here is to provide background on the legal issues in the case for those who seek to understand them. If you are certain that the issues constitute nothing more than a smokescreen for a predetermined outcome, these footnotes are not for you.

Scott is an actual Minnesota attorney.

Read it.

More than 180 years ago, John Quincy Adams gave a speech to mark 50 years since the presidential inauguration of George Washington. “If the day should ever come, (may Heaven avert it) when the affections of the people of these states shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or collisions of interest shall fester into hatred,” he told a New York audience, “far better will it be for the people of the disunited states, to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.” Collisions of interest festering into hatred? That sounds familiar. The Trump years were famously light on fraternal spirit and, as the divisions deepened, “parting in friendship” started to look awfully attractive to a growing number of Americans.

Read it.

Grind it under your heel until it is nought but bits of metal and plastic. If you can salvage the battery and use it is something more useful, like a smoke alarm or a car key fob, even better.

Read it.

It is only fair to wish the administration well in its efforts. However, Biden officials are more likely to succeed if they correctly diagnose the problem. And while it is common to speak of North Korea’s “threat” to America, what precisely is the danger?

Although North Korean leaders have been commonly tagged as crazy, ready to launch a suicidal attack on America, only Kim Jong-un’s late father, Kim Jong-il, looked the part with oversize glasses, bouffant hair, and platform shoes. In fact, all three ruling Kims behaved rationally, playing a weak hand well, turning a small, impoverished, and isolated nation into a global cause celebre.

Read it.

More and more the woke pandemic afflicting our elites and causing them to mask their racism is reminding me of forced busing back in the late 1960s and early 1970s—a project to which liberals (and compliant federal judges) were fiercely dedicated (even as rich liberals sent their own kids to private schools), and which was hugely unpopular.

Then, as now, many Republicans spoke in subdued tones about their opposition to busing for fear of being called “racist,” and the most vocal and direct critics of busing were Democrats like Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. That kind of Democrat is long gone, of course, though you hear faint echoes from time to time, such as James Carville’s recent comments reported here that “wokeness is a problem, and everybody knows it.”

Read it.

Romney has to realize that he’s not in Taxachusetts any more.

Read it.

This may seem like an odd and uninteresting article, but if you persist to the end, you will find that it raises some disturbing issues.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

(Florida has pythons. Texas does not. Take whatever action you think is appropriate.)