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

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.

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.

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.

Theodore Dalrymple.

Last week I reviewed a book published by an American academic press—it hardly matters the title or author, for in the respect to which I wish to draw your attention they are almost all the same these days. With few exceptions, they capitalize the word black when it refers to a person, while keeping white (or brown) in the lower case.

This is no doubt a fashion, but it does not seem a purely spontaneous one. If there is no central enforcement, there might as well be one. The presses have been invaded by the termites of wokeness so thoroughly that there is no need of central direction.

It is unlikely in any case that the authors put up much of a fight, if any, against the imposition; most of them probably don’t even see it as an imposition. I suspect, however, that any author who did want to resist the fashion would soon be faced by a stiff fight, which he would probably lose. His desire to be published would overcome his scruples on a matter of principle.

The American Mind.

Former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump pledged to end birthright citizenship in a recent campaign announcement, promising to sign an executive order on his first day in office to prevent “the future children of illegal aliens” from receiving automatic citizenship. The proposal promises to clarify at least a century of constitutional ambiguity on the subject of American citizenship and its automatic bestowal upon anyone born on the soil of the nation. Immigration has emerged as the most important domestic issue in the 2024 election cycle, with estimates of upwards of ten million illegal aliens flooding the country under the Biden regime. The magnitude of the ongoing crisis far surpasses the number of illegal border crossings in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, when then-candidate Trump first proposed the idea in response to a crisis whose scale was itself unprecedented for the time. Nearly a decade later, the problem has only worsened. The need for dramatic action—even more than in Trump’s first term—is palpable.

The idea that the Fourteenth Amendment does not license birthright citizenship based on its proper, constitutional interpretation has found support from both legal scholars and political historians. The text of the amendment itself reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Of controversy is whether the phrase “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” should be read in conjunction with—“and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” As scholars John Eastman and Michael Anton, as well as others, have persuasively argued, the plain meaning of the text itself requires that both elements of that constructive phrase be satisfied in order to qualify for the fruits of citizenship. In other words, a person must not only be born “in the United States”—i.e., the geographical region over which the laws of the United States apply—but also be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” To fully qualify for citizenship, a person born within the United States must owe no allegiance to any other sovereign—he or she must, in other words, exclusively qualify under the laws of the United States alone.

Read it.

Unless there’s a war going on, developing new or improved military equipment or weapons is delayed by bureaucrats more concerned about avoiding mistakes than getting the job done. This leads to lots of delays. The Ukraine War has changed that for NATO nations and Russia. While the Ukrainians develop a lot of their own weapons, and always have, they need more and that is what their NATO allies are supplying. With a war going on in Ukraine, it’s easier for the NATO defense procurement officials to say yes. With their nation under attack, Ukrainian developers are coming up with new weapons and equipment as well as upgrades for items they have received from NATO nations. Ukraine can put new or improved systems to the test quickly. Sometimes the Ukrainians don’t tell their NATO allies about new items used or produced in Ukraine because the NATO countries are more likely to publicize that. The Ukrainians are more discreet, realizing that what the Russians don’t know about will hurt them more. At the start of the war the Russians underestimated Ukrainian weapons and military equipment and the Ukrainians’ ability to use it effectively. This continues to supply the Russians with unexpected and unpleasant surprises.

Read it.

A dozen years ago, National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood posed the provocative question: Could science leave the university?

Wood framed his question in practical terms. There has always been a bargain of sorts between universities and their science faculties. Universities provide the means for scientists to do science—laboratories, students, bookkeepers, etc. Scientists hustle the grant monies not only to do their work, but also to pay for universities’ costs. Wood argued that the bargain works mostly in favor of the universities, because they ride along on the substantial streams of research revenues their scientists bring in. While scientists were not exactly disadvantaged thereby, Wood suggested that they could prosper as much outside the university as in, raising the question that logically follows: who needs whom?

Since 2011, academic scientists have largely stayed put in the universities. “Who cares what universities charge for their services, as long as we are left alone to ‘do science,’” was the prevailing sentiment. Such a blasé attitude is no longer viable. While scientists busied themselves at their benches, the terms of the bargain have been steadily shifting to scientists’ disadvantage. The unique attractions of academic life are relentlessly, if slowly, falling away. Tenure is on its way out. Freedom of inquiry is increasingly constrained. Pushy administrators presume to dictate hiring, promotion, and curricular decisions that should sit squarely in scientists’ hands. Faculty governance has become mostly performative, with no power to make decisions stick—particularly budgetary and personnel decisions, which have become concentrated in the hands of administrators, governments, and favored political activists. Accreditation boards brazenly impose political agendas on faculties of science and engineering. Challenging the new racial / gender / sexual orthodoxies can snuff out careers in the blink of an eye.

Freeberg nails it.

The older people get, the more they see conservatism is the right way to go. Liberals protest that’s because old people find comfort in old things and are afraid to try anything new. The truth is, when something new works, that’s an exception and it’s rare. As a general rule, if it worked we’d already be doing it. And it’s the older people who can see it because this is a pattern of averages, and it takes time to see it. You have to watch a few plans put into practice, notice across the years what succeeds and what doesn’t.

Now obviously, if we accepted “new things are no good” as policy to be implemented and enforced across the board, in all contexts, without any exceptions asked for or granted, it would be counterproductive. But guess what? We don’t. Nobody advocates for such a thing. A conservative is not an unreasoning, strident extremist lobbying for the patent office to be shut down because everything worth inventing has been invented. Rather, a conservative asks questions. He refuses to grant the new thing the benefit of the doubt.

It is the liberal who is the strident, unreasoning extremist. “A new thing! Let’s get behind it!”

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

The most obvious response to school shootings is to allow teachers and other employees who are licensed to carry firearms to do so. Would-be mass murderers are drawn to schools largely because they are usually “gun-free zones,” which means the shooter’s gun will be the only one on the scene. But some have questioned whether many teachers would actually be willing to arm themselves, so as to make this a practical solution.

The Rand Corporation conducted a nationwide survey of nearly 1,000 teachers, which is reported on by Catrin Wigfall. Most teachers are liberals these days–no surprise, given the far-left orientation of universities’ education programs and the teachers’ unions. So 54% of Rand’s respondents said they thought arming teachers would make schools less safe.

More to the point, however, 19% of those surveyed said that if they were authorized to bear arms at their school they would do so.

History teaches us that the solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, be it a police officer or a public-spirited citizen. All of the handwavium in the Narrative media can’t obscure that simple truth.

The American Mind.

To many on the Left, the group known as “Patriot Front”—known for its surprise marches while wearing a uniform of khaki pants, blue t-shirts, and white balaclavas, displaying American flags and banners reading “Reclaim America” or similar sentiments—is a terrifying example of how rapidly fascism is metastasizing across American conservatism. Miles of column inches have been written about the group, both by professional “hate-watchers” such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and by various fear mongering journalists at Slate, Daily Beast, and the like, nearly all of whom exclusively cite and quote these so-called experts.

Meanwhile to the Right, given that Patriot Front dresses like cannon fodder for COBRA—the eternal (and always incompetent) enemy in the cartoon TV series G.I. Joe—the group is regarded as an FBI office costume party. Patriot Front, from this perspective, is a thinly-disguised “op” to trap foolish right wingers into supporting a criminal conspiracy in order to meet the Bureau’s statistical need for white supremacist terrorist arrests. According to FBI whistleblowers, special agents can receive substantial cash bonuses for hitting white supremacist arrest targets, so official perfidy seems plausible.

As a wise old Gunnery Sergeant once told me: “If they can’t find you, they can’t hurt you.”

NewsMax.

The King James Bible is being removed from elementary and middle school libraries in Davis County, Utah, after a complaint that it contained passages describing sex and violence.

For once, the Left has no complaint to make. Children with the Bible in their homes, of course, may consult it freely.