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.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

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.

Read it.

Bill Maher may be a malicious Leftist, but he’s an entertaining malicious Leftist.

Look at the word order of what he says and tell me I’m wrong.

ZMan does some sociology.

In the 20th centur,y as the country transformed from a republic into a social democracy, the franchise quickly started to expand to include all men, then women, then blacks. Now we are extending the vote to criminals, foreigners, and the imaginary.

One reason for this is the very nature of democracy. In a world of fifty percent plus one there will always be a large minority unhappy with the result. In order to avoid conflict, the natural elites form parties, which allows them to form a consensus around a set of compromises on the important issues. This is something that was the norm in the 20th century, whether it was in multi-party parliamentary systems or the two-party bicameral system in America. Liberal democracy was about consensus.

While that greatly reduces the number of people who feel left out of the result, it creates a new problem. Reformers now need to break the consensus in order to get the changes they think are required. That is difficult, so they instead look to increase the number of those outside the consensus. Put another way, the reformer looks for new voters, rather than trying to challenge old voters. Get enough new voters and the outsiders can challenge the prevailing consensus.

Steve Sailer.

There’s been a horrible workplace shooting in a San Jose railyard. There appear to be eight dead, including the gunman killing himself. No word on wounded, but assuming it’s less than the dead, I will bet, in accord with Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings that the shooter was nonblack. (Other tells besides more dead than wounded: workplace, daytime, shooter didn’t get away, and witnesses are talking to the cops.)

Read it.

The human body is not a machine to be toyed with, and biological sex is not an accidental feature, like hair length or nail color, to be stripped away or altered at will. Our physical identity as male or female affects every aspect of our health and biological development. Therefore tampering with biological sex, as trans extremists regularly do, has devastatingly harmful consequences. These interventions are particularly frightful—and reprehensible—in the case of children.

Severian indulges in a little sociology.

The white pill in all of this, comrades, is that thanks to social media, pretty much all prefab identities are starting to work like that… except one. It’s possible to fake being a member of pretty much every single behavioral subgroup out there, with almost-nonexistent actual risk. It’s more expensive to fake “biker” than “Mob guy,” and “Mob guy” is more expensive to fake than, say, “SJW,” but all of them amount to little more than clothes, tats, and lingo. Indeed, the signal for “SJW” is so far decayed that being #woke is nothing more than a Twitter purity spiral — “Titania McGrath” is a parody, I’m told, in the vein of “Godfrey Elfwick,” but really, who can say? The signal has been completely lost in the noise, and almost all behavioral subgroups are suffering the same fate in the social media age…

…except one. You can change your clothes, comrades. You can certainly change your “gender,” and you can even change your “sex.” But one thing you absolutely cannot change is your skin color. Real blacks, like real bikers or Mob guys, have known this for a long time, which is why guys like Obama and Colin Kaepernick are so obnoxious — they’re not really black, and they know it, because the real blacks themselves let them know, every minute of every day. So, too, soon enough with the other skin color.

ZMan visits the zoo.

The way to think of the media is not so much as a sentient organicism playing a complex game of politics, but as a mindless organism that responds to the stimuli applied by a small group of people. This is the part missing from this otherwise excellent post about CIA manipulation of the media. The CIA can influence the media narrative by simply turning a relatively small number of journalists. They do not control it in an absolute or direct sense. They just control some influencers.

The CIA is not the only part of the managerial state playing this game. The major Wall Street players use access journalism to promote their interests. The FBI sends dozens of retired people into media jobs every year. The corrupt agents involved in the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election landed in the media. The cable channels alone have over one hundred retired FBI people employed. Then you have the revolving door between the media and presidential administrations.

I’ve known people like that. But not for long.

Read it.

The current scene keeps bringing back to mind the old saying attributed (incorrectly) to Mark Twain: history doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes. Right now the country seems to be repeating the cycle of the 1960s, when liberals in power gave us reckless spending that stoked inflation, social engineering like “model cities” and busing, degraded law enforcement with soft-on-crime policies contributing to a massive crime wave, and race riots that elicited ritual confessions of liberal guilt (i.e., the Kerner Commission report of 1968). By the time the cycle was done in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon piled up a 49-state landslide—a repudiation of liberalism that carried through Reagan’s landslides in the 1980s.

Today is the day
That the masks go away
In Texas.

The gas station on the corner by my house has taken down its plexiglas shields and no longer pleads with you to wear a mask and maintain ‘social distancing’. (Their staff quit wearing masks a while ago.)

My local public library no longer has its WEAR A MASK YOU FARGIN SCIENCE DENIER signs, although the library staff (being Servants of the State) still wear theres.

I think that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Jean-Louis Gassée.

Ordinarily I find Gassée’s comments illuminating, and he does some of that here, but I was disappointed to learn that he has sipped the KoolAid of wokeness, in his apparent belief that uttering a negative opinion about some women somewhere means that one hates all women everywhere. I found Garcia Martinez’s comments about women in Silicon Vally harsh but by no means ‘misogynistic’; he just painted what he saw, and (from what I’ve seen with respect to Silicon Valley) I have no trouble believing that he saw what was actually there. In any event, his opinion is based on experience, not prejudice, and calling it ‘misogynist’ is a stretch too far. But go read his book.

Listen to it.

When I was working, I would listen to Mike Gallagher every morning on the way to work.

I’ll read anything written by Victor Davis Hanson that I can.

Highly recommended.

Check it out.

This is an excellent analysis by people learned in the law and well worth listening to, repeatedly if necessary. It admirably demonstrates what lawyers being lawyers can do when at the top of their game.

Read it.

Not ought they.

Freeberg has a bone to pick.

I’m not in favor of replacing the word “liberals” with “leftists.” It is true that much of the criticism we have for the liberals should more fairly be redirected toward dedicated leftists, and in a lot of cases it is true that the real problem is there, with leftism. But not all the criticism, and not all the cases.

That’s why I rarely use the term ‘liberal’. Gladstone was a liberal; Ted Kennedy was a progressive, and rather tediously so. And AOC is a proglodyte, quite obviously.

Read it.

For decades, studies have shown that boys and girls generally prefer playing with toys typically associated with their biological sex: toy trucks for boys and dolls for girls, to give a rough example.

Gee, one might almost suspect that the reason toys became gender-typical because people observed gender-typical behavior on the part of children.

Bethany Mandel.

The pandemic is quickly coming to a close thanks to herd immunity brought on by vaccines and infections. It’s a tough pill to swallow for those who want to live in “forever pandemic” land, wearing masks and social distancing into the rest of the decade, but for those of us who actually enjoy living, it’s a welcome development. But here’s the problem with our return to normalcy: There are people who are trying to hold us back in “forever pandemic” land, due to either their own paranoias or opportunism.

Read it.

In his 1944 lecture “The Inner Ring,” C. S. Lewis made a profound observation about social exclusivity, one applicable to today’s institutions of higher learning. Exclusion, Lewis explained, is not an evil in and of itself; it can be “accidental” to groups dedicated to substantive activity. But a problem arises when an exclusive dynamic exists for its own sake, when elitism develops in the absence of substance. “Your genuine inner ring,” Lewis stated, “exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion [for the inner ring] is no accident: it is the essence.”

Read it.

Five Oregon counties approved measures Tuesday to secede and join Idaho, despite the chances of it actually becoming a reality.

Voters in Lake, Grant, Baker, Sherman and Malheur counties approved measures requiring county officials to take steps to secede and move the Idaho border further west in order to encompass the counties, according to The Hill. Two other counties, Jefferson and Union, voted in favor of the measure back in November.

Severian is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is one of those books everyone knows, but no one has read (I haven’t). It’s quite a trick, really, to have something so “in the air” like that, such that nobody actually has to read it. If you’ve been to college, or read even a BoomerCon or CivNat site, you know it, in the same way everyone who has been to college knows stuff like Orientalism and Manufacturing Consent. But in case you’ve forgotten, Putnam’s thesis is that social cohesion is real, it’s important, and it is rapidly degrading. His metaphor is bowling leagues — these things used to be everywhere (I was in one in junior high, meaning, the phenomenon was so widespread they could have youth leagues); now they’re not.

…

Mandatory, government-sponsored fun has been on the European Left’s agenda practically since the Estates General. All of that stuff — hiking clubs, guitar clubs, model this-and-that clubs — falls under “building Socialism,” and the idea is either to totally replace a community’s organic ties with State-mandated bonds, or to restore a community’s organic ties via State-mandated bonds, depending on whether the “Socialism” you’re building is of the Soviet or Nazi variety.

Read it.

Glad I got rid of mine.

Read it.

The Associated Press reported in late April that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) will hold a national meeting in June where the bishops will decide whether to tell the president, and other high profile Catholic politicians like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, not to receive Communion at Mass if they continue to publicly advocate for abortion.

Severian peers behind the curtain.

The great thing about industrial work, though, is that you don’t have to be particularly bright to do it. There’s always going to be a fraction of the population that fails the IQ test, no matter how low you set the bar, but in the early Industrial Revolution that bar was pretty low indeed. So much so, in fact, that pretty soon places like America were experiencing drastic labor shortages, and there’s your history of 19th century immigration. The problem, though, isn’t the low IQ guys. It’s the high-IQ guys whose high IQs don’t line up with remunerative skills.

My academic colleagues were a great example, which is why they were all Marxists. I make fun of their stupidity all the time, but the truth is, they’re most of them bright enough, IQ-wise. Not geniuses by any means, but let’s say 120 IQ on average. Alas, as we all know, 120-with-verbal-dexterity is a very different thing from 120-and-good-with-a-slide-rule. Academics are the former, and any society that wants to remain stable HAS to find something for those people to do. Trust me on this: You do not want to be the obviously smartest guy in the room when everyone else in the room is, say, a plumber. This is no knock on plumbers, who by and large are cool guys, but it IS a knock on the high-IQ guy’s ego. Yeah, maybe I can write you a mean sonnet, or a nifty essay on the problems of labor over-supply in 16th century England, but those guys build stuff. And they get paid.