Read it.

I don’t care. I ain’t driving no Hindenburg with wheels.

If we want Hammer tech, we’ve got Tesla.

Read it.

The cyber attack that shutdown the Colonial pipeline causing a gas panic and stoking fears of gasoline shortages, didn’t actually shut down the pipeline. It impacted the billing system at the Colonial Pipeline Co., which shut it down because they were worried about how they’d collect payments.

Yes, the fuel-carrying pipeline was shut down last week in order to prevent a company that is entrusted with what should be a public utility from enduring an accounting headache.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

Under “progressivism,” anything old is suspect and if there is the slightest hint of incorrect thinking about it, then it certainly must be denounced if not destroyed.

Progressives believe that progress is inevitable; so long as things are allowed to change, time T+1 will inevitably be better than time T.

Hence, for any time T there was a time T-1 that represents Less Progress and is ipso facto Less Good. So the older something is, the less progress it embodies, and this is the very definition of inferiority.

Read it.

Plexiglass — or, rather, Plexiglas® — is one of several trade names for acrylic, shorthand for polymethyl methacrylate, a thermoplastic that can be molded at high temperatures but hardens upon cooling. 9 Transparent, lightweight, and shatter-resistant, the material derives from natural gas, and was developed in the late 1920s and ’30s as a safety glass for automobiles, an alternative to silica-based glass. German chemists Otto Röhm and Walter Bauer trademarked a version as Plexiglas® acrylic; British chemists Rowland Hill and John Crawford of Imperial Chemical registered their product under the name Perspex; and E.I. du Pont Nemours & Company, based in the U.S., introduced Pontalite, later renamed Lucite. 10 Acrylic proved useful for many wartime applications, including submarine periscopes, aircraft windshields and canopies, and gun turrets. 11 Moreover, acrylic, like all plastic, affords formal variety, and after the war it was put to myriad commercial uses: bulletproof “glass,” picture “glass,” ice-hockey-rink walls, aquarium walls, salad-bar sneeze guards, surgical instruments, storm doors, paint, jewelry, dentures, and housewares in exciting curved and folded shapes. Acrylic rods became “crystal” chandeliers and towel holders and stands for scale models. Acrylic tubes were bent into point-of-sale displays, decorative furniture, bulk-food dispensers.

Look but don’t touch.

ZMan takes a look under the covers.

In a world where the end always justifies the means, even when the end is not achieved, truth must always be a secondary consideration. In fact, the truth is often the enemy, as it serves the interests of your opponents. By attacking the truth of something, or even the concept of truth itself, you take away the legitimacy of the opposition to you and your schemes. When morality is determined by who wins, rather than by some objective standard, partisanship is the new morality.

This is the modern age. You see it in the language. The public space is full of people juggling neologisms that have a nice ring to them as a replacement for old words or labels. They sound better and the best people always love hearing new ways of saying old things. It makes them feel smart and sophisticated. The intellectual in a liberal democracy is primarily concerned with appearing to be unconventional and heterodox, so the new words and phrases quickly become popular.

Popularly used smears are ready to hand. ‘Price gouging’. ‘Profiteering’. ‘Robber baron’. ‘Windfall profit’. ‘Pay your fair share’. ‘Oligarch’. ‘Racist’. ‘Sexist’. ‘Bigot’. ‘Homophobe’. ‘Islamophobe’. ‘Denier’. ‘Black market’.

The Other McCain spreads the love.

In response to that threat, we organized “Everybody Blog About Rebekah Jones Day.” For a while, it seemed that our efforts to publicize this situation had little impact, but Hoge kept pounding away at the story, and earlier this month, a Maryland judge dismissed the Jones v. Pushaw case.

Then last week, Charles C.W. Cooke did a National Review article about Jones that got widespread attention, including from The Daily Caller (“The Media Elevated A COVID-19 Conspiracy Theorist To Hurt Ron DeSantis”). So now everybody knows the story — demonstrating again how “The Streisand Effect” operates. The truth is great and will prevail.

Shucks, I missed it.

Read it.

The Explanation of ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems (1985) was based on the insight that the world map of communism corresponded extremely closely with a specific family system, that of the exogamous communitarian family. Following Walt Rostow, the Kennedy intellectual, Todd argued that the violent process of modernization exposed societies to communist subversion in a brief window when the traditional institutions, such as the authority of the landlord, have decayed but new institutions and higher standards of living are still not in place. Todd’s corollary to Rostow’s dictum was that, while all societies are traumatized by the process of modernization, some societies were more exposed to communist subversion than others. And what determined this conditional exposure to the risk of communism subversion was a specific sort of traditional family system where marriage was exogamous (cousin marriage was taboo) and there was coresidence of the father and all his married sons.

Don’t ever say we don’t deal with Really Obscure Shit here.

Read it.

The power is not in the device, for it merely channels, dowsers say; the power is out there, and an attuned hand and quieted mind can discern it.

Whenever I go dowsing for stupidity, the rod aways dips toward Washington.

Freeberg nails it again.

The Internet is a raucous and noisy place, because people have this need to defend the indefensible, and when that germinates into a need to do some arguing when they don’t know how to argue, they use these templates. The templates exist on what might be thought of as a sort of tree, just like a tree you’d find in a redwood forest, or — forgive me, it’s become part of my vocational discipline to see things this way — a sort of class-inheritance tree you’d find in an application or module written in an object-oriented language. “You see” is at the root. Some well-known and often-seen you-see stuff includes

1. Gender is nothing but a social construct
2. Mankind is a poison on the planet
3. Capitalism is the disease and socialism is the cure
4. “Robber Barons” blah blah blah…

Freeberg nails it.

I’m celebrating Liz Cheney’s defrocking by thinking about her constituents, and I don’t mean Wyoming people. I mean her real constituents. The #NeverTrump types can see with their own eyes that someone’s performing competently at a job, and still wish to replace him because they don’t like his vibe. They’d rather let a building burn to the ground than call a fireman who happens to chew tobacco, or use profanity, or skip Church, or watch Beavis and Butthead, or, or, or…

…

They hate Trump because they don’t value what he did. They’ve never had to count on a job actually getting done right, never lost anything because it didn’t happen. They don’t even understand the concept of “an important job”; to their way of thinking, a job is important when it’s a job done by a person who is important, and what makes a person important is their power over you. Their parents paid their college tuition, and to this day, they’re not too sure of how it got done. Their graduation was a ritual and everything after that has been a ritual. You can explain to them until you’re blue in the face that they’re safe because hard men protect them, and are unafraid of doing terrible things, and they’ll nod and agree like they understand. But they don’t. There’s no reason.

Severian is ready to give up.

When it comes to philosophy, at least, the idea’s the thing, not the prose, a few obvious exceptions like Nietzsche aside. It’s important that you know what e.g. Kant and Hegel said, not how they said it, and since any competent “intro to” book will give you both the “standard” (consensus) view and the most common alternate readings, you really don’t have to plow through The Critique of Pure Reason or, God help us, The Philosophy of History. Intros are fine*, and they’re especially fine for guys like Marx, whose Collected Works with Engels run at least fifty (!) big honking volumes.

…

Just as Cultural Marxism was nothing more than question begging, a smokescreen of ponderous Teutonic prose to keep Marxists from believing their own lying eyes, so #Woke is an increasingly unhinged attempt to convince the True Believers that a society which is actually pretty fucking great for almost everybody is, in fact, a benighted hellhole of oppression. We’ve all seen it, so a single example will suffice: I’ve met three trannies in my life. One of them was in India, where there’s apparently some kind of sub-caste ritual thing they do, which though fascinating in itself isn’t germane.

Read it.

And if you believe that one they’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

way since that Stanford-modified Volkswagen Touareg won the first DARPA Grand Challenge back in 2005, but we’ve still got a long way to go before full Level 5 autonomy. No matter what anyone says. In case you don’t believe me, why not check out this video of a Waymo robotaxi getting very confused by some traffic cones and causing all kinds of trouble, including escaping from Waymo’s own support team.

Read it.

First, beyond a few spats that make headlines, it’s getting harder to detect any serious division among rank-and-file Republicans. In Congress, and at the grassroots, the dominance of Donald Trump over the party is more or less total. The small handful who denounced the former president for his massive lies about the election and his seeding of an insurrectionist riot are now either silent, or have embraced a mealy-mouthed argument for “election integrity.” The same state officials who pushed back against Trump’s attempt to overturn November’s results have embraced a series of restrictive voting measures ostensibly designed to combat non-existent “fraud,” all aimed at hobbling voters inclined to vote for Democrats. Mitch McConnell, who denounced Trump’s behavior in high-minded tones in the aftermath of the riot, also—on the exact same day—voted to exonerate him of wrongdoing.

 

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

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.

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.

Read it.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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.