Read it.

Ah, the beauty of two nations divided by a common language. When Brits say “Asians,” they formally mean anybody from the whole bloody continent of Asia (but probably not Russians except for those of the Russian Far East), but typically they mean Pakistani men of military age.

Of which the UK is now chock-full, due to Tony Blair’s attempt to import a permanent Labour majority.

When Americans say “Asians,” we formally and typically mean orientals, that is the CJK crowd and anybody else with stereotypically fair (“yellow”) skin and an epicanthic fold (part of the “slanted eyes” feature). We have different terms for Pacific Islanders, Southeast Asians, Central Asians (The Stans), Indo-Paki types, Middle Easterners, and the Turk.

Typically divided between “East Asians” and “South Asians”.

Read it.

While informative, this does not prove aspartame is safe. Biology is crazy. But it should inform our priors. Speaking for myself, my previous model was that consuming aspartame would result in a crazy unknown synthetic chemical circulating around my body and doing god-knows-what. My updated model is that consuming aspartame results in slightly larger amounts of some totally normal chemicals.

Check it out.

I am not making this up.

My late first wife was a compulsive accumulator of restaurant condiments packets. McDonald’s nugget barbecue sauce was a favorite.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

This week I thought it would be useful to talk about the Supreme Court case regarding affirmative action in college admissions. As I pointed out on Gab and Twitter, the ruling is a big nothing burger when you read it. Schools cannot come right out and say they are not taking Whites or Asians, but they can still discriminate to their heart’s desire as long as they frame as a character evaluation.

 

The American Mind.

Why is the transgender issue so hot? Much of it has to do with the reality that sex and race are not merely very different things, but also they are different kinds of things. Sex is a biological reality; race is largely a cultural phenomenon. The trouble is that our civil rights laws—and the culture that follows from those laws—are uncomfortable with that reality. It is not that we never allow discrimination on the basis of sex—otherwise there never would be any single-sex bathrooms or colleges. But we have a strong bias against allowing sex to matter. Our fights over transgender athletes bring this reality into stark relief.

ZMan says the quiet part out loud.

The crisis of competence has been a popular topic in dissident circles but largely ignored by mainstream politics. Human intelligence is a dangerous subject in this increasingly primitive time because it points to immutable differences in human beings, which contradicts the new religion. If who we are is determined by our genes, then many of the popular social fads are invalid. This makes discussing the declining competency of Western societies difficult.

Even so, the reality of the situation is hard to ignore, and we are seeing more mainstream writers notice the topic. Here is a post in the Claremont Review of Books discussing one cause of the decline. While the article focuses on how civil rights theology has warped the law, this warping of the legal system is having a deleterious impact on society by reducing competence to happy accident. When vague notions of social justice are primary, competence is an afterthought.

The most recent Budweiser panic is a good example. The ethic inside the company was built around notions of representation and equitable outcomes. These magic phrases did not spring from nothing. They are rooted in the same civil rights theology as the legal mechanism that enforce diversity quotas. It is a straight line from expecting equal outcomes to thinking you need to market cheap beer to crossdressers in order to make sure everyone is represented in your marketing.

Charles C. W. Cooke.

Which “society” would that be, exactly? Who believes that “diversity” as achieved by affirmative action is a “fundamental American value”? What is this “face of an America whose cries for equality resound”? To read Sotomayor, you’d assume that racial discrimination in higher education was popular. But it’s not. It’s extremely unpopular.

Sarah Hoyt

… the tendency for any human institution to perpetuate itself, no matter how stupid or harmful its purpose, because it is the job of the persons running it.

Suppose tomorrow there was a plague that rotted infants from the toes up, so that if you didn’t immediately cut an infants’ toes off, they would die sometime before five. An organization would be formed to cut infants’ toes off, and develop all sorts of branches and sub-organizations. Then twenty years later, someone discovered that a simple antibiotic stopped the death. Do you think the infant-toes-cutting-off bureaucracy would go away? Really? Why?

I bet you they would come up with a million reasons why cutting off day-olds’ toes was better for the baby, and stridently refuse to disband and/or change policy.

This is sort of how we got here.

Wisdom. Attend.

FiveThirtyEight.

Three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote and hybrid work are as popular as ever. Only 6 percent of employees able to do their jobs remotely want to return to the office full time, according to a Gallup survey published in August. The vast majority of “remote-capable” workers1 want to spend at least some of their workdays at home. When they’re forced to return to an office, they’re more likely to become burned out and to express intent to leave, according to Gallup.

But that’s not all. The pandemic, combined with a strong labor market where workers have persistent power to demand the kinds of work cultures they want, means even more changes could be coming. After years of advocacy, many U.S. states are moving towards mandatory, paid family and sick leave for all workers. Meanwhile, companies are flirting with a four-day workweek in pilot programs worldwide, including in the U.S.

Policies like these have conventionally been seen as good for workers’ personal lives but bad for business. But thanks to the massive, sudden changes brought on by the pandemic, we now have more data than ever, and it shows that assumption is mostly wrong. Overall, policies that are good for employees’ personal lives are, when enacted correctly, good for their work lives, too. In fact, they seem to be good for everyone. The only question is whether we’ll start to see more companies adopt them.

UPDATE: Bosses face losing ‘key’ workers after forcing a return to office

John C. Wright.

My Comment: this is not the half of it.

I can double this list, off the top of my head, of things denounced as conspiracy theories later admitted or proven true.

• CIA involvement in JFK assassination
• Manmade origin of COVID in Chinese lab
• Fauci funding thereof
• FBI false flags framing Trump supporters
• January 6th being a riot
• January 6th being an insurrection
• January 6th being an insurrection lead by Trump
• Operation MK Ultra
• Operation Mockingbird
• Atrazine turning the Frogs gay
• Antifas being real
• BLM being not real
• Replacement Theory
• Arizona Election Fraud
• 2000 Mules
• Chinese influence over Hollywood

These are just those either admitted or proved beyond reasonable doubt.

I will not list climate hoaxes, overpopulation hoaxes, or various Green New Deal scares, because despite the fact that the Ice Cap did not melt in AD 2000, nor did India starve to death in AD 1990, nor did human life end in AD 2015, the perpetrators of these hoaxes have not stopped, nor even slowed, their well-funded efforts.

The American Mind.

Amendment, saying that they’d need F-16 fighter jets to take on the U.S. government.

Put aside for a moment the deeply disturbing thought that an American president would have recurring thoughts of using the most deadly weaponry in the history of the world against his own citizens. Put aside the equally disturbing thought that the true spirit of the Second Amendment as framed by the founders is lost on an American president.

President Biden’s own recent history as Commander in Chief provides evidence that even if you accept his bizarre premise, he is still wrong.

The Foundry.

Las Vegas police are withholding details about what looks like a classic “good guy with a gun” scenario in which someone carrying a firearm prevents what could have turned into a mass shooting.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department won’t identify anyone involved in an incident Friday in which a helmet-wearing man with what appeared to be a semiautomatic rifle shot out windows at a high-rise condominium before being shot himself.

Local media reports say that residents of the condo complex, Turnberry Towers, hailed a building employee, possibly a security guard or mailroom worker, as a hero for shooting and stopping the gunman before he fired on anyone.

A video circulating on social media does appear to depict a case of defensive gun use to protect others.

What he said.

Read it.

Finland has started construction of a fence along its border with Russia, the Finnish Border Guard (RAJA), announced on February 28th.

Finland shares the longest border with Russia of any EU-member state, stretching approximately 1,300 kilometres on a mostly north-south axis.

Construction will begin “with forest clearance and will proceed in such a way that road construction and fence installation can be started in March,” RAJA said in a press release.

Can’t say that I blame them.

NewsMax.

When millionaire Steve Fossett’s plane went missing over the Nevada range in 2007, the swashbuckling adventurer had already been the subject of two prior emergency rescue operations thousands of miles apart.

And that prompted a prickly question: After a sweeping search for the wealthy risktaker ended, who should foot the bill?

In recent days, the massive hunt for a submersible vehicle lost during a north Atlantic descent to explore the wreckage of the Titanic has refocused attention on that conundrum. And with rescuers and the public fixated first on saving and then on mourning those aboard, it has again made for uneasy conversation.

“Five people have just lost their lives and to start talking about insurance, all the rescue efforts and the cost can seem pretty heartless — but the thing is, at the end of the day, there are costs,” said Arun Upneja, dean of Boston University’s School of Hospitality Administration and a researcher on tourism.

The Critic.

William Brown, Richmal Crompton’s “Just William”, faces a telling-off from a teacher for not paying attention. A hundred years ago, the 1920s teacher remarks, he might have been made to crawl up chimneys for a living instead of being educated, so he should consider himself jolly lucky to be in school. To which William replies that crawling up chimneys sounds pretty interesting, at least compared to having to sit behind a desk all day listening to said teacher banging on. Crompton, a feisty, disabled spinster, was a true subversive and she wasn’t going to let her fictional teacher get away with that crude application of the Whig theory of history.

From its inception the positive value of compulsory state education has been a nearly unchallenged orthodoxy. It wasn’t entirely unchallenged. The borough of Royal Leamington Spa, where I have lived for the great majority of my adult life, petitioned parliament to be excluded from the Education Act of 1870. The petition conceded that they could understand how it would be of benefit in the manufacturing districts if the working people could read and write and do arithmetic, but claimed that such training was an expensive irrelevance for the domestic servants of the Spa. They were given short shrift, of course. Then there was my grandfather’s village, Staithes, on the North Yorkshire coast. Nowadays it’s a famous tourist attraction, but in the 1870s it was a remote fishing village more easily accessed from the sea than the land. The first schoolteacher there reported that it was nigh on impossible to persuade the local children to turn up on time or sit behind desks all day. It worked in the end, and there is a rather staged photograph taken by the pioneering photographer Frank Meadow Sutcliffe in about 1880 of a small boy, explaining to several of my ancestors that they have misspelt the name on the prow of their boat.

Read it.

In her latest book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, bestselling author Heather Mac Donald skewers the ideology of “disparate impact”—a “once obscure legal theory that is now transforming our world.”

According to Mac Donald, disparate impact—in which any negative or disproportionate outcome impacting black Americans is declared to be a “tool of white supremacy”—has been deliberately developed and leveraged as a cultural tool, targeting “the very fundamentals of a fair society.”

Today, she argues, meritocracy, fealty to the rule of law, and even respect for our civilizational inheritance stand in the way of achieving so-called racial justice.

The Atlantic.

Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington. The words these guides recommend or reject are sometimes exactly the same, justified in nearly identical language. This is because most of the guides draw on the same sources from activist organizations: A Progressive’s Style Guide, the Racial Equity Tools glossary, and a couple of others. The guides also cite one another. The total number of people behind this project of linguistic purification is relatively small, but their power is potentially immense. The new language might not stick in broad swaths of American society, but it already influences highly educated precincts, spreading from the authorities that establish it and the organizations that adopt it to mainstream publications, such as this one.

Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people. They are handed down in communiqués written by obscure “experts” who purport to speak for vaguely defined “communities,” remaining unanswerable to a public that’s being morally coerced. A new term wins an argument without having to debate. When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors replaces felon with justice-involved person, it is making an ideological claim—that there is something illegitimate about laws, courts, and prisons. If you accept the change—as, in certain contexts, you’ll surely feel you must—then you also acquiesce in the argument.

John C. Wright.

Let us ponder if there is an argument to repeal women’s suffrage.

Follow the science1

The ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Whenever I do a show on the new religion, I am struck by the stupidity of the claims made by these people, but also the radicalism of it. The people pushing this stuff are not just attacking the Western idea of individual rights. They are attacking the notion that you are an individual with some control over your life. Essential to the social justice cause is the assertion that you are a product of social forces.

Because your protestations against the various social pogroms that come out of the new religion are the result of your conditioning, the social justice warrior sees your resistance as proof of her claims. The more you try to explain why you do not want to submit to the new rules, the more certain she is that she is right. It is why these people are always on the attack. They need the feedback.

NBC News.

Here’s a picture of a standard pistol target:

Antigone.

When I started to learn Latin at school in the 1990s, the idea that the spoken form of the language should be used as part of its teaching barely arose. Certainly, we were encouraged to read gobbets of text aloud before translating them to appreciate their auditory effects: for instance Virgil’s sound-painting of a storm or the hissing of snakes. But the language played little part in active communication. One teacher would bellow sedete! (“sit down!”) after he entered the room, and call us lumbricus terrestris (“earthworm”) if he found our homework less than impressive. However, beyond this, the language in those times remained firmly on the printed page.

Yet, in recent years, the discipline of Classics has shown itself to be far more open to trying out different methods of teaching. The use of spoken Latin is becoming increasingly popular. In the UK, various groups at Oxford are in the forefront of using the ‘Active Method’ to teach not just Latin, but also Ancient Greek and other early languages. I recently visited Oxford to attend a Dies Latinus et Graecus (“Latin and Greek Day”), designed amongst other things to show teachers and students how this method may be used practically.

Wasthington Free Beacon.

What happened: A hero chef has banned all vegans from his restaurant for “mental health reasons.”

• The aptly named John Mountain said he was “absolutely done, done, done with vegans” this week after an obnoxious diner at his Fyre restaurant in Perth, Australia, complained on social media about her vegan meal and lamented the lack of vegan options.

What they’re saying: “Sadly All Vegans are now banned from FYRE (for mental health reasons),” the restaurant posted on its Facebook page. “We thank you for your understanding.”

“Please go find another kebab shop somewhere that’s happy to give you that plastic rubbish that you enjoy to eat so much,” Mountain said in an interview with CNN.

Q: How can you tell a vegan?
A: You don’t. A vegan tells YOU.

99% Invisible.

After World War I, in Frankfurt, Germany, the city government was taking on a big project. A lot of residents were in dire straits, and in the second half of the 1920s, the city built over 10,000 public housing units. It was some of the earliest modern architecture — simple, clean, and uniform. The massive housing effort was, in many ways, eye-poppingly impressive, with all new construction and sleek, cutting edge architecture. But one room in these new housing units was far and away the most lauded and influential: and that was the kitchen.

Many consider the Frankfurt Kitchen to be nothing less than the first modern kitchen. A few of these kitchens still exist, some in museums. And it’s strange to see one there, because to modern eyes, it doesn’t appear to be high art. It just looks like a kitchen.

ZMan looks behind the Narrative curtain.

The managerial class looks at the masses as a cult. The people who vote for the wrong candidate in elections are not acting from rational self-interest. They are not even acting from subjective preference. They are irrationally lashing out out of fear and anger for no reason at all! The role of the managerial class in the great narrative of life is to impose their rules on these people. Those wreckers and deviationists are cast into a role that supports the narrative.

We see this with the holiday of Juneteenth. If you lived in some parts of the South, you may have known about this event prior to now. Most black people did not celebrate the holiday, contrary to the current narrative. In fact, most black people heard about it when most white people heard about it a few years ago. As part of the ongoing pogroms against white people, the managerial elite decided to take this obscure regional event and turn it into a national holiday.

Of course, this holiday is part of a narrative that has been central to the managerial class since the middle of the last century. The great struggle is one of the main plot lines in the story that justifies the existence of the managerial elite. The struggle is against those backward, recalcitrant bad white people who tirelessly work to turn back the clock and overturn progress. As Joe Biden likes to say, those bad whites want to put black people back in chains.

Read it.

China has delivered its first smart floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) with land-sea integrated operation system, marking a breakthrough in the country’s application of the digital twin technology.

The offshore oil and gas FPSO with a storage capacity of 100,000 tons is the first of its kind in China and employs diverse cutting-edge technologies including artificial intelligence (AI), edge computing, cloud computing, big data and the internet of things (IoT). The ship can process oil and gas on the sea thus eliminating the need for piping from offshore rigs to onshore factories.

The ship is equipped with more than 8,000 sensors that monitor temperature, pressure and liquid level data and transmits it to the server room. In addition to the on-board system, China has also built a digital twin of the ship onshore in the smart control center in Shenzhen City, a full 1,000 kilometers away from the real ship. The digital twin, a virtual replica of the offshore ship, will be used to monitor the production process in real-time.

Well, there ought to be.

Read it.

Peter the Great wrote daily letters to his wife (“my beloved heifer”) while on his grand tour of Europe. In one, he congratulated himself for not farting even once during a fancy state dinner. It is amusing to think of that giant hurricane of a man, the absolute ruler of a large sprawling nation still feeling compelled to conform to societal expectations and good manners.

The sneaky and relentless Gramscian revolution in the West has replaced the notion of manners (and the humanistic concepts and mutual respect that underpin them) with ideology. It is more acceptable to castigate a stranger for openly doubting the likelihood of imminent catastrophic global change, noting that young black men kill many times as many black people as do cops or, God help us, wearing a MAGA hat, than it would be to criticize an offensive, aggressive street dweller. Society as a whole can no longer bring itself to demand civilized behavior on subways and sidewalks nor require that organized demonstrations remain expressly non-violent and respectful of persons and property.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The funny thing about conspiracy theories is they are a fairly good measure of both social trust and trust in civic institutions. In societies with low trust and corrupt government, people tend to assume things are not as they seem. In high trust societies, people tend to accept things at face value. They also tend to accept what is told to them by the authorities, rather than assume they are lying.

Before the Russian revolution, conspiracy theories were common. Of course, lots of people were conspiring to topple the system, but people assumed that the system itself was not as it was presented. Of course, the Great Fear was a period in the French Revolution where rumors and conspiracy theories about the aristocracy ran wild, ultimately leading the storming of the Bastille.

We seem to be entering a similar phase. People are more likely to believe a rumor about Biden taking bribes than to believe anything he says. For a growing portion of the public, it is assumed that everything that comes from the regime is a lie. The use of the word “regime” is a huge change. It is a word that implies rule by men rather than rule by a system of laws, customs, and institutions.

Read it.

California began a soft secession when it banned cooperation with immigration authorities. Since then other states run by Democrats, including Colorado, Illinois and New Jersey, have declared war on ICE. The movement to make it impossible for ICE, an arm of the federal government, to operate in Democrat states has largely been successful.

Some Republican states, like Tennessee, Texas and Florida, have responded by ordering law enforcement to cooperate with ICE. And while this is important in limiting the spread of illegal aliens in their states, it may also be time for them to consider their own forms of soft secession.

Democrat states targeted ICE, Republican states could single out other arms of the federal government that are ideologically alien and hostile to conservative areas for a policy of non-cooperation. Obvious examples are the Department of Education, the EPA and the IRS.

Called ‘nullification’, this was one of the primary rights claimed by the states that eventually became the Confederacy. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.

Andy McCarthy.

It’s becoming the lowest of pejoratives. For the Left, if you compare the way conservative politicians are treated to progressive ones, you’re rationalizing. You’re making excuses.

If you use your brain the way thinking people do, you’re not really thinking.

You are a cowardly MAGA-hack who is throwing up a smokescreen to camouflage the unique, sui generis evil that is — all together now — Donald Trump.

I know the feeling.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Last week we passed along the stunning news that two of the largest hotels in San Francisco have decided to walk away from their investment entirely, defaulting on $725 million in debt on the properties. Today the Wall Street Journal follows up with some comparisons with other cities. Short version: hotel traffic in other major cities has recovered, while hotel traffic in San Francisco has not….

Read it.

The fact of the matter is that we aren’t immune: Right now, today, each and every one of us is caught up in a cargo cult of some variety, going through pointless motions that we’ve been told (or that we’ve told ourselves) will lead to desirable outcomes. This occurs in business, in finance, in romance, and even in science… but one of its most insidious and impactful manifestations lies in entertainment and how we consume it.

Strategy Page.

Threatened by North Korean nuclear weapons and communist Chinese conventional air and missile fires, South Korea has decided to spend serious money on an old but often spurned military concept: the arsenal ship.

The concept is simple. Take a very large but comparatively inexpensive civilian commercial ship. Oil supertankers and huge container carriers fit the profile perfectly — they’re inexpensive when compared to navy warships.

Now pack the ship with vertical launchers and several hundred long- and mid-range missiles capable of destroying enemy shore targets and perhaps enemy surface ships. Add short-range air and missile defense weapons and presto, enormous sea mobile firepower bang for the buck, or in South Korea’s case, bang for their wons.

Wall Street Journal.

I am not making this up.

Washington Post.