Read it.

Here’s how it usually starts. You’re standing in line for coffee and run into someone from finance. A little small talk, a joke or two, and then they mention it’s tax season. They’ve hired a student to shuffle CSV files from one server to another by hand.

You blink. By hand? Why not automate it? You recall that Michelle from development built a similar integration recently, maybe you rope in a business analyst. Very quickly, what began as a casual exchange becomes the start of a new project. And a brand-new team.

This team doesn’t exist on any org chart. It emerges organically, based on who knows whom.

And once you’ve been part of a team like that, something else happens: the next time finance hits a snag, your name will be the first one they remember.

Communication patterns don’t just influence software design; they determine how teams themselves are formed.

This has nothing to do with politics (I think) but it’s a very significant insight for anybody who works for a living.

Read it.

The End of Woke, subtitled How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution, (Constable, 2025), Andrew Doyle’s 450-page tome with 80 pages of notes, is probably the best explanation of what woke really is—and that, despite the title, it is far from over. The book is replete with examples of the excesses of woke culture: the cancellations, character assassinations, and reputations ruined by those who think they are on the right side of history and the way to deal with opposition is to silence it.

Read it.

The long-standing “de minimis” exemption, which allowed small packages valued less than $800 to enter the U.S. duty-free, officially ended Friday. This closes the dark chapter on an era when China flooded America with cheap junk (think $10 Bluetooth wireless speakers) and, according to many in the America First movement inside the White House, helped flood the nation with fentanyl precursor chemicals – if not fentanyl itself – and fueled the drug-death crisis unlike anything this nation has ever seen. Think of it as a modern-day reverse Opium War (hybrid warfare by the CCP).

For those with a background in Latin, “de minimis” translates to “too small to matter.” But that’s certainly not the case. Since 2015, the number of packages entering the U.S. under this exemption has surged from 134 million packages per year to 1.36 billion by 2024. Much of this flood originated from Chinese e-commerce giants, including SheIn Group and Temu.

The decade-long tsunami of small packages flooding the U.S. didn’t just undercut domestic small businesses. It also created a backdoor for illegal drugs and fentanyl precursor chemicals from China to slip in undetected, fueling the drug-death crisis now killing more than 100,000 Americans every year.

Quillette.

One of the most viral memes of recent months is the image of the Andy Byron, the CEO of the company Astronomer and Kristin Cabot, the firm’s head of HR, caught on film embracing each other at a Coldplay concert. As the illicit lovers scrambled to hide themselves, the announcer remarked that they seemed like people who were having an affair. Indeed, they were. After the footage was leaked online, their lives were thrown into turmoil. That this irrelevant affair generated such a frenzy shows, as Matthew Gasda recently wrote in Unherd, that “our culture is obsessed with shame, surveillance, and control” and has a “desperate need for a new ethic of privacy.”

In her new book Strangers and Intimates, cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins provides a number of instances of people whose lives were similarly turned upside down by revelations of their private doings. She cites the example of British police officer James Watts, who in 2020 posted a series of racist memes to a WhatsApp chat group that included several of his former colleagues from his time serving as a prison guard. One meme showed an Islamic prayer mat printed with the face of George Floyd. Another featured a white dog in a Ku Klux Klan costume. Watts received a twenty-week prison sentence and a lifetime ban from holding any policing role.

What these cases have in common is the way they blur the distinction between the public and private realms. Can criminal prosecution be justified for sending messages, however odious, to specially invited members of a private chat group? Don’t we all utter things in private that we wouldn’t—and perhaps shouldn’t—utter in public? The treatment of retired police officer Julian Foulkes is another case in point. Foulkes received a visit from the police, who barged into his house and rummaged through his bookshelves searching for suspicious material after someone complained about a tweet he had posted. As someone whose personal library contains books by all sorts of figures, both Left and Right, who might be deemed extreme by some, the prospect of being shamed by the police for the books I privately read is chilling. Such encroachments on private life seem on track to become normal and thus banal. This is the urgent central message of the book Strangers and Intimates.

What is the basic difference between an authoritarian regime and a totalitarian regime? The first leaves you along as long as you follow the rules, however onerous those rules might be; the second does not, and attempts to root out ThoughtCrime. Many hand-wringers would say that this is a distinction without a difference, but it’s not; it’s the difference between Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Germany, and that difference is highly significant. (Hitler died in a bunker, Franco died in his bed.)

Many books that deal with the topic of privacy have the disadvantage of being boring. They often read like meandering legalistic treatises on how to protect your personal information in an online age. One of the immediate strengths of Jenkins’ study is it doesn’t focus on data and digital security, but on a much broader social conception of the distinction between private life and the public sphere—and it is anything but boring.

We live in a world of exteriority–people don’t deal with the world from themselves, but rather through an artificial self or persona that represents who they would like to be or who they want others to think they are. They are always worrying about what others think, and adjust their personalities accordingly.

I’m sure you’ve met people, as I have, who upon meeting you immediately start telling you all about themselves and their life story, whether you want them to or not. I suspect that the reason for this is  that they want you to see them as the person they want you to see, which they can (to a degree) control, rather than the person they actually are (which they can’t control as much and which they may not really like). The best way to stop this process in its tracks is not to tolerate it: “Why are you telling me this?” is rude but sometimes that’s what you have to do. Such a person has no respect for their own privacy and I’m willing to bet no respect for your privacy as well.

One of the worst aspects of Wokeness is its totalitarian nature. William F. Buckley was fond of saying that a liberal is somebody who reaches into your shower to adjust the water temperature.

The American Prospect, a Voice of the Crust.

The National Labor Relations Act—that pillar of American democracy that gives workers the right to bargain collectively with their employers—was enacted 90 years ago this summer. Its constitutionality was upheld two years later by the Supreme Court, and no successful challenge to its constitutionality has been brought in the subsequent 88 years. Until last week, when the avowedly far-right Fifth Circuit decided otherwise.

To the Left, there is no right but the ‘far-right’. Savor the irony of a ‘pillar of American democracy’ that involves ‘collective’ bargaining–i.e. you have to join the collective (or at least pay them) whether you like it or not, because you are ‘enjoying’ the purported benefits that a union brings you. Even if it costs you your job because the union insists on wages+benefits that the company can’t afford to pay.

Today, the NLRA hovers somewhere between de facto and de jure nullification. It’s been slowly eroding for at least half a century, as employer resistance to it has heightened, and as the penalties to employers for violating its terms have weakened. Currently, the fact that the five-member National Labor Relations Board is down to just two members—not enough to constitute a quorum—means the Board can make no rulings. This enables employers who’ve been found to have violated workers’ rights by lower NLRB administrative courts to appeal those findings and penalties to the Board, which cannot rule on anything—essentially, giving those employers leeway to keep on doing what they’re doing, however illegal it may be.

Ponder the nature of a governmental organization that is specifically designed to favor one side of a ‘negotiation’ over another. Check out the history of the ‘Department of Labor’.

Ponder the existence of ‘administrative courts’ with no basis in the judicial provisions of the Constitution. Read Philip Hamburger’s seminal book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

Ponder a system in which ‘workers’ have rights but employers apparently do not. That’s ‘American democracy’ for you.

The reason America is NOT a democracy, but rather a representative republic, is precisely this sort of democratic tyranny–in Jonah Goldberg’s pithy phrase, democracy means that 51% of the population can pee in the soup of the other 49%, and there is no recourse. This is not a new thing; Thucydides is full of instances where democratic Athens indulges in atrocities and pursues policies that can change from day to day because of the whims of their ‘democratic’ government.

Read it.

The GOP announced the plan Wednesday as its response to Democrats’ congressional redistricting efforts.

“I want to take a step back from all of the chaos we had and talk about the forgotten people of California,” Assembly Minority Leader James Gallagher said, presenting a map during a news conference in Sacramento.

Gallagher and his co-authors are proposing Assembly Joint Resolution 23, also known as “The Two State Solution.” It would allow the creation of the state under Article, Section 3, of the U.S. Constitution and would require approval by the state Assembly and Senate as well as Congress. Democrats hold supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature, meaning Republicans would have to sway a number of Democrats to back it.

As I wrote earlier, this will never happen. (1) No state will give up any of its territory unless (like Virginia) it is engaged in a civil war and loses; (2) California Democrats wouldn’t split the state east-west, because it would allow Republicans some power in the state, and they will resist that to the death.

I have no idea what these people are attempting to accomplsh, unless it’s just making a lot of noise because that’s all they can do.

Bloomberg, a Voice of the Crust.

(a) This will never happen, certainly not at the instigation of a Republican.

(b) If California does split, it will be east to west, not north to south; Democrats aren’t going to do anything that will give non-proglodytes ANY increase in political power. A North California around San Francisco and a South California around Los Angeles will merely give Democrats two more Senators to beat Republicans with.

Read it.

Time to Pick a Nit: Such people are not ‘tradesmen’ unless they own a firm.

‘Tradesmen’ are people engaged in ‘trade’, i.e. trading goods for money.

People who trade services for money are ‘mechanics’ (or, I suppose nowadays, ‘technicians’). You can look it up (if you can find a dictionary that doesn’t just follow what people do as opposed to what they ought to do).

I believe that this is the fundamental premise of the book The Millionaire Next Door, which came out in 1996. So it’s been a long time coming, but it’s still good to see that the trend is continuing.

One hopes that eventually young people will realize this, get back into vocational training, and we can all watch colleges shrink back to where they ought to be.

Read it.

new study has re-examined the famous “Wow!” signal, finding that it likely has an extraterrestrial origin after all, and may have been even more intense than previously believed.

On August 15, 1977, at the Big Ear radio telescope observatory at Ohio State University, a narrowband radio signal was received. A few days later, astronomer Jerry Ehman reviewed the data and noticed the signal sequence, which lasted for a full 72 seconds. In the margin next to the printout, he simply wrote “Wow!”, and thus the puzzling signal had a name that would stick for the next 43 years at least.

The signal has, so far, defied explanation, and that’s not for a lack of trying. Researchers argued the case for it being a comet passing through the area Big Ear was listening to, only for that to be completely refuted about two days later by the team that detected the Wow! signal in the first place, as a comet would have produced a diffuse signal given the large area they cover, rather than the abruptly cut-off signal that was received.

The signal has been a source of speculation in the “aliens are out there” community, and not without reason. No other signal like it has been detected before or since. It was in a range of frequencies close to the hydrogen line, which is relatively free from background noise, making it a good range to pick were we to try and communicate with other civilizations ourselves. On top of that, the team themselves believed it to be a good candidate for extraterrestrial life.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

Japan has opened its first osmotic power plant, in the south-western city of Fukuoka.

Only the second power plant of its type in the world, it is expected to generate about 880,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year – enough to help power a desalination plant that supplies fresh water to the city and neighbouring areas.

That’s the equivalent of powering about 220 Japanese households, according to Dr Ali Altaee from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), who specialises in the development of alternative water sources.

While it is still an emerging technology being used only on a modest scale as yet, it does have an advantage over some other renewable energies in that it is available around the clock, regardless of the wind or weather or other conditions.

It relies simply on the mixing of fresh and salt water, so the energy flow can continue day and night, providing a steady source of electricity.

Quillette.

Civilisations seldom collapse because of a single drought, battle, or angry god. Such events dominate chronicles because they are spectacular, but they are more symptom than cause. What usually undoes a complex society is the loss of surplus energy—the margin that makes coordination across distance possible and that keeps interdependent parts working in sequence. When that margin narrows, systems fray first at the edges and then at the centre, until the framework that once held them together can no longer carry the weight of its own complexity.

The decline usually begins with smaller problems in daily life: first, deliveries arrive late; then they stop; then workshops fall idle for lack of fuel. In tightly coupled economies built on just-in-time logistics, one interruption can bring transport to a standstill and darken cities. The crisis is not only material—it touches institutions like law and bureaucracy, which also rely on steady flows of energy to function.

The Bronze Age Collapse, which occurred around 1200 BC, involved not only the fall of cities but the unravelling of an entire way of life, as palaces burned, trade networks across the Aegean and Near East dissolved, and populations fragmented into modest rural settlements. For centuries afterwards, much of the Eastern Mediterranean retained only a much smaller repertoire of skills and a more rudimentary set of institutions, which is why archaeologists have traditionally described the period as a “dark age.”

Watch it.

Explains a lot.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Embattled incumbent John Cornyn is gaining steam in the Texas Senate primary, and an internal memo obtained by POLITICO shows Republican leaders want donors to pump money into the race to help the incumbent Senator edge out his rival, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a top Senate GOP super PAC that drew up the document dated Aug. 26, concedes Cornyn “continues to be a weak candidate who puts the Senate seat at risk in a general election,” but it also said he has considerably closed the gap with Paxton. Previous polling showed him down by an average of about 17 points in public polling.

Polls conducted by Texas Southern University, Emerson College and Echelon Insights show Paxton now has a modest 5 to 8 percentage point advantage. SLF’s latest polling, which was conducted from Aug. 17 to 19, shows Paxton is now leading Cornyn by 8 percentage points.

Paxton comes with a lot of baggage, and people don’t so much like him as they hate the RINO that Cornyn had become. I predict that Cornyn will squeak by, now that he’s had a sufficiently thorough scare.

Read it.

The grassroots movement Operation Raise the Colors, which started in Birmingham, has since spread to Norwich, Bradford, Newcastle, Swindon, and London—among other towns and cities. The patriotic organization is encouraging people in the UK to fly their Union Jacks and St. George’s Crosses and be proud of their country as a protest against the leftist liberal agenda.

Flags have appeared on lampposts and motorway bridges and have even been painted onto roundabouts. But as quickly as the banners go up, local councils are taking them down, often citing health and safety concerns. Birmingham’s Labour-run council, for example, claimed flags fixed 25 feet in the air put “motorists and pedestrians at risk.” The same authority has allowed Palestinian flags to remain in place since October 7, 2023, and even lit the city library in Pakistani colors for Independence Day.

Tower Hamlets in East London, run by the pro-Gaza Aspire Party, has also promised to strip Union Jacks and St. George’s Crosses from council infrastructure “as soon as possible.” Officials there acted far faster to remove British flags than they did Palestinian ones.

Read it.

The cash is burning, too.

Millions of dollars raised to help victims of the 2025 California wildfires have ended up in the coffers of unrelated nonprofits pushing a variety of progressive causes, a Washington Free Beacon review found. Some of the groups that have received funds explicitly exclude white people from their services, while others advertise programs for illegal aliens.

Read it.

When the feared firestorm hit Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena in Southern California last January, the Los Angeles mayor was MIA, the “public safety” guy in charge—the vice mayor—was on home confinement for making an anti-Israel bomb threat on city hall, fire fighters were not pre-deployed, there was no water in the reservoir, and fire hydrants went dry in the Palisades.

Soon came vows by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and elected officials in Malibu, Altadena, and the Palisades to streamline the rebuilding and permitting, which turned out to be a joke. Now, amid bad leadership, virtue signaling masquerading as help, incinerated FireAid money, and promises in name only, comes the fire sale.

In early August came word from an exclusive story in Realtor.com that foreign investors were buying up prime lots in the burned-out area of an iconic Malibu beach.

They will be disappointed when the city comes by and expropriates it to build ‘affordable housing’.

On the other hand, Democrats can always be bought, so maybe they know something we don’t.

Read it.

After decades of King Log, having King Stork is rather refreshing.

The New Neo (whose blog is highly recommended)

One of the main tasks of a blogger is deciding what topics to cover. It’s not as simple as it may seem.

Sometimes there are stories so huge they cry out for coverage, even if everyone else is writing about the same thing. Sometimes there’s just a quirky idiosyncratic topic that strikes my fancy. Sometimes I choose a story to which I think I can bring an unusual angle. Certain themes keep attracting me, although they aren’t current, such as ballet.

I’m only one person here, so I can’t do what Instapundit or RedState or other group blogs do, which is to cover all the stories or most of them, and keep churning out many posts each day. What I usually end up doing is writing about what most interests me, and what I think might interest my readers. Sometimes I guess right and sometimes I guess wrong.

I am in the same position, and follow more-or-less the same policies. I don’t break news; if the news is big enough, people will find out. I focus on things I find interesting (whether you do or not), and things that I believe my followers ought to know. That results in a pretty eclectic mix, as you may have noticed. The comment section isn’t very active, nor do I care very much that it is not; I write this stuff to get it off my chest rather than to attract ‘engagement’. My core audience are my family and friends; others a welcome to tag along for the ride.

Power Line.

Rita Panahi has a show on Sky News Australia that includes a wildly popular “Lefties Losing It” segment. I was part of that segment last night. Rita and I talked about the New York Times analysis that shows Democrats losing ground to Republicans in voter registration; whether socialism can be the salvation of the Democratic Party; redistricting and gerrymandering; President Trump’s role on the international stage; and whether peace can be achieved in Ukraine. Quotable quote: “No one wants to mess with the United States Air Force.”

The New York Times, paper of record for the Deep State.

Through recessions, wars, financial crises and political turmoil, the U.S. economy has maintained its reputation as the safest place in the world for investors to put their money and for entrepreneurs to build their businesses.

That has given the United States a nearly incalculable economic advantage, allowing it to borrow more cheaply, grow more quickly and emerge from downturns more successfully than nearly any of its global peers.

President Trump may be chipping away at that advantage.

This proceeds from the statist assumption that a managed economy is stronger than a free economy, and since a managed economy needs metrics by which it can be managed (“You can’t manage what you don’t measure” my Business School teachers ceaselessly droned), Trump’s actions (which, according to the Narrative, impair that measurement) are striking at the foundations of the managed economy. Orange Man Bad.

A good case can be made, however, (and has been by Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and others) that a managed economy is weaker than a free economy because the metrics that it uses for such management are inaccurate and incomplete compared to the totality of the knowledge available on a distributed basis (what the modern world calls “crowd-sourcing”) to the population as a whole. This is the whole basis of the fight between free-market people and managed-market people (communists/socialists, Keynesians, and Modern Monetary Theory people like Paul Krugman).

Quillette.

Fascism remains the bogeyman of modern Western political culture. As historian Stanley G. Payne observes, “No major modern political phenomenon has been so thoroughly discredited and obliterated as European fascism was in the 1940s. Yet the f-word was never buried, for it had achieved a demonic status like no other, making it very useful in partisan polemics.” To label someone a fascist is to disqualify them from civil discourse entirely.

Despite its comparable—or in some respects greater—destructiveness, communism is rarely invoked with the same moral urgency. Given that fascism and communism represent the most extreme manifestations of Right and Left respectively, and that both left deep scars on the European continent, it is unsurprising that many politicians and intellectuals retain historical or nostalgic affiliations with one or the other. Such sentiments rarely carry serious implications for contemporary politics. Apologists for communism are unlikely to advocate reopening the gulags, nor do fascist nostalgists intend to implement racial laws against Jews.

The party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Fratelli d’Italia, is often described as “post-fascist.” Similarly, coverage of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale often highlights the fact that among the party’s founders was former Waffen-SS member Pierre Bousquet. Yet how often have you heard that Meloni’s principal rival, the Democratic Party, traces its lineage back to the Italian Communist Party, which was once faithful to Stalin? How frequently is it mentioned that French President Emmanuel Macron has cooperated with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a man with a Trotskyist past? Mélenchon’s coalition contains a variety of explicitly communist parties, yet this causes no scandal.

Watch it.

Rory Sutherland does what he does best.

The Foundry.

It’s a tale fit for a thriller novel or action movie: planes on the tarmac waiting to take members of a violent gang to a foreign prison, lawyers rushing to the courthouse to stop them, presidential proclamations, and a judge on a mission to impose his own brand of justice. But this drama isn’t made up—it’s very real, and it’s playing out right now in Washington, D.C.

Leading the cast is President Donald Trump, who wants to rid the country of a violent gang. The legal backstory for his actions has three parts.

The first is the Constitution, which the Supreme Court has long held gives the president authority over matters involving international relations that exceeds that permitted in domestic matters.

The second piece is the Alien Enemies Act, enacted in 1798. It authorizes the president to apprehend and remove the natives, citizens, or subjects of a hostile foreign government if that government attempts or threatens an “invasion or predatory incursion” against the U.S.

Third, the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes the secretary of state to designate as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, or FTOs, groups that engage in terrorist activity and threaten the safety of Americans or the United States.

Watch it.

An extended interview with Rory Sutherland, who is one of Britain’s great national treasures and whose insights into life and commerce are among the most original I’ve ever encountered. One of those people who’ll say something and make you sit up and say, “Wow. I never thought about it that way…” It’s not often that I come out of a YouTube podcast with half a dozen book titles that I need to read, but this is one of them.

In every life there comes a time when you have to deal with the question “Should we put the band back together?”

Read it.

The mother of a Washington, D.C., murder victim cried when President Donald Trump mentioned her son’s killing while announcing a federal takeover of law enforcement in the district.

The president on Monday said he was putting Washington’s police department under federal control and ordering the National Guard to deploy to the nation’s capital to combat what he said is a wave of lawlessness.

Trump cited the death of 21-year-old Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, who was killed in a June 20 drive-by shooting while working a summer internship at the office of Rep. Ron Estes, R-Kan.

You will note that the bottom of the list are all of the Muslim terrorist regimes.

Read it.

Gerrymandering, the political practice of carving up awkward-looking legislative districts to benefit one party’s political power, has slithered into the public conversation once again.

…

Why has the discussion roared into the public consensus this time? It started with the Texas legislature’s efforts to redraw its state’s districts after a request from the Trump Administration to review the fairness of the districts.

Yes, there is gerrymandering in Texas, but not the way that liberal reformers want to portray the problem. Consider some of the urban, Democratic Congressional districts in Texas: the 29th, 32nd, and 33rd, for example, are obscenely drawn. These contortions are examples of race pandering, or “race-mandering,” which result from the tortured misuse of the Voting Rights Act and fears of ongoing legal challenges from left-wing legal activists demanding more majority-minority districts. This kind of lawfare recently forced Alabama and Louisiana to create gerrymandered districts.

Texas is not alone in this fight, either. Ohio has to redraw its Congressional districts. This opportunity could create three more Republican-leaning Congressional seats, while the Texas legislature advances a map creating five more GOP seats. Of course, Governor Abbott and the Republican leadership have floated increasing the GOP advantage to six to eight seats if absent Democrats refuse to come back to work in their vain efforts to break legislative quorums. Democrats have not helped their cause by fleeing to Illinois, whose districts are so gerrymandered that even Stephen Colbert poked fun at them.

For the record, I’m not against gerrymandering–in fact, I favor it over the alternative, which is having up to half of a District’s population not represented by someone whose views they share. The news media, of course, prefer ‘competitive districts’, because the ‘horse race’ makes for more exciting coverage, i.e. coverage that earns them eyeballs, clicks, and money.

Read it.

We were walking to watch the sunset when a dog started barking at us from a porch. From inside, a voice called out: “Don’t worry, he won’t leave the porch. The electric fence hasn’t worked in years, but he still won’t go past it.”

I stopped mid-step.

A dog, imprisoned by a fence that only exists in his memory.

The next question changed how I see everything: What electric fences do we have in our lives?

John C. Wright.

It’s always fun to revisit predictions made by prominent science fiction writers and see how they held up.

Both Heinlein and Asimov made predictions. I’ve not seen an analysis like this one for Asimov’s picks. That would be well worth reading.

My Go-To Guy when I Need To Know.

Read it.

In 1978, a dredging gang working for British Waterways was struggling with a problem. They were trying to clear obstacles on the Chesterfield Canal so they could stabilise a concrete wall — not an easy day’s work. But what really had them stumped was a heavy iron chain on the canal bottom. After various attempts, they hooked the chain to their dredger. That did the trick. A firm pull removed the chain and the block of wood on the end of it. The gang took a well-earned break for tea.

The tea break was rudely interrupted by a policeman in a state of some excitement. He had been passing the normally tranquil waterway when he could not help but notice a large whirlpool. By the time the crew returned to the scene, the canal had gone. “We didn’t know there was a plug,” protested one workman. And, in fairness, the canal was two centuries old, and so was the plug. Whatever records there may have been had been destroyed in the Blitz. The moral of the story: institutional memory is valuable, and if an organisation starts forgetting important matters (such as the existence of the plug) bad things happen. Expertise drains away alarmingly fast if not refreshed by activity.

Sometimes the old ways are best–if someone remembers them.

Los Angeles Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Democratic Congress members visited an ICE processing center that has been criticized for crowding, food scarcity and lack of medical attention for detainees.

Only two people were in the center, leading the Congress members to accuse ICE of sanitizing conditions.

Of course they did. When reality doesn’t match their fantasy, then it’s the result of a Republican conspiracy.

Read it.

Calling a story a “myth” is too often taken to mean it is a lie: I don’t use it that way. Mircea Eliade argued that a mythos is a story that, true or not, functions to form and shape society and social behavior.

Out of all the stories that could be told from any epoch, some are chosen for inclusion in a culture’s memory. And—yes—edited too, whether for “clarity” oractual clarity. Myths encode, and it is in this sense that the Bible is filled with myths, inevitably and necessarily.

Whether this or that event “actually happened” or occurred precisely as described in the Bible is, and has to be, unimportant. We are not living in the event or interacting in real time with the forces and persons involved. Until someone builds a time machine–perhaps even then!–our relationship with ourselves as a species is, inescapably, a relationship with stories.

Read it.

As the group of amateur archaeologists sifted through tiles, animal teeth and pottery fragments buried within an ancient Roman pit in eastern England, one of them encountered something unusual last June.

It was a cast bronze object, hollow in the middle, flat along 12 faces, about the size of a clenched fist. Only one of the diggers — all members of Norton Disney village’s archaeology society — recognized the discovery: It was a Roman dodecahedron, likely to have been placed there 1,700 years earlier.

“You’re looking at a very strange and bizarre object,” Richard Parker, secretary of the Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group, said in a telephone interview.

At first glimpse, the dodecahedron looks more like a sci-fi illustration than it does an ancient Roman relic. Each of its pentagon-shaped faces is punctuated by a hole, varying in size, and each of its 20 corners is accented by a semi-spherical knob.

D12. Ask me a hard one. As Gary Gygax once famously said, “No pirate ever role-played as a marketing consultant.”

Larry Correia brings the heat.

Internet Zoology Time: You have all heard my Three Cooters Theory of Internet Discourse, but I need to add a corollary. THE REVERSE COOTER.

The Three Cooters Theory is that most of the time when the media starts going off about how conservatives/republicans/MAGA is outraged about something which only racists/morons/misogynists would be outraged about, and there’s hundreds of articles about this outrage, when you delve into it the actual outrage can be traced back to three guys named Cooter complaining on twitter. Then the left runs with this, acts like 3 Cooters=3million people they don’t like, and turns into a huge story so they can once again go HA HA LOOK AT THE DUMMIES.

Last time I delved into this we came up with dozens of examples of manufactured outrage.

Take it from an Irishman, this is God’s own truth.