5th August 2023
Quillette.
I’ve worked as a professor in an English department for the last 15 years, and I spent the 10 years prior to that as a student in English. Over the course of that time there was never a period when the English major wasn’t in decline. For the first half of the 20th century, English departments occupied a critical and celebrated position in the American university. But by the time of Sputnik and the beginning of the space race, the field had begun a long slide into obscurity.
Today, most people who take English departments seriously are English professors and the handful of students who still choose the major. Current university administrators see the English department as serving a gatekeeping role: the required freshman-level courses generate massive enrollment, mostly from students who are not prepared for the demands of college writing. Thus, in the eyes of the administration, the job of the English department is remedial—getting those students “up to speed” so that they can do the writing required by their majors (which are overwhelmingly housed in other departments). Liberally educated professors in other disciplines often have a nostalgic reverence for the humanities and humanistic knowledge, but they know that English professors no longer serve as guardians of that tradition. In fact, it’s common knowledge that the vast majority of English faculty are resolutely opposed to traditional notions of humanistic inquiry. For that reason, they have become a parody of the erudition that used to be synonymous with literary study.
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5th August 2023
Fortune.
Stakhanov’s personal striving, commitment, potential and passion led to the emergence of a new ideal figure in the imagination of Stalin’s Communist Party. He even made the cover of Time magazine in 1935 as the figurehead of a new workers movement dedicated to increasing production. Stakhanov became the embodiment of a new human type and the beginning of a new social and political trend known as “Stakhanovism”.
That trend still holds sway in the workplaces of today – what are human resources, after all? Management language is replete with the same rhetoric used in the 1930s by the Communist Party. It could even be argued that the atmosphere of Stakhanovite enthusiasm is even more intense today than it was in Soviet Russia. It thrives in the jargon of Human Resource Management (HRM), as its constant calls to express our passion, individual creativity, innovation and talents echo down through management structures.
But all this “positive” talk comes at a price. For over two decades, our research has charted the evolution of managerialism, HRM, employability and performance management systems, all the way through to the cultures they create. We have shown how it leaves employees with a permanent sense of never feeling good enough and the nagging worry that someone else (probably right next to us) is always performing so much better.
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5th August 2023
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5th August 2023
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Three years have passed since the city of Beirut was nearly turned to rubble by history’s biggest non-nuclear explosion, which killed well over 200 people and injured thousands. In the intervening time, no official has been held accountable for allowing a vast stockpile of industrial chemical ammonium nitrate to be haphazardly stored in the heart of Beirut for seven years.
The dangerous chemicals ignited on August 4, 2020, creating a massive shockwave that tore through several neighborhoods, causing over $15 billion in damage. According to experts, had the blast not happened by the sea, the entire city of Beirut would have been wiped off the map, as the shockwave was felt as far away as Cyprus.
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5th August 2023
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Anti-Christian hatred and attacks are becoming more and more common in Israel, as some are calling the levels of violence a “crisis” for the conservative government led by Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu.
The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Archbishop and soon-to-be Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, has spoken out regarding the growing anti-Christian attacks in Israel in a recent interview with Vatican News.
“Let us say that these clashes, these spats, these accusations, these insults, are not new. But the exponential increase in these phenomena, especially in the Jerusalem area, in the Old City, has become a matter of concern and an issue on the agenda that worries both the Christian community and the Israeli authorities,” Archbishop Pizzaballa said.
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4th August 2023
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4th August 2023
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4th August 2023
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Through a string of unchecked acquisitions over 30 years, Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS USA Holdings, and National Beef have gained control of roughly 85% of the total hog, cattle, and poultry processing market. For brevity, we’ll call these four meat processing corporations “BigAg” (or “the cartel”).
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3rd August 2023
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2nd August 2023
John Hinderaker at Power Line.
Why do electric car batteries frequently burst into flame? In my opinion, EVs are essentially an obsolete technology even without this glaring flaw. But those who are trying to force them down our throats should be made to explain why this isn’t a serious issue.
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1st August 2023
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31st July 2023
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31st July 2023
The Antiplanner.
A few years ago the New York Times was praising Portland as the “city that loves mass transit” (meaning it loved to spend money on mass transit, not actually ride it) and the city where people were willing to live lightly in 400-square-foot apartments. How the mighty have fallen: Last Saturday, Portland rated most of the top half of the Times front page with an article about homelessness, drug addiction, and death.
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30th July 2023
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30th July 2023
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“The twin gods of Smooth Traffic and Ample Parking have turned our downtowns into places that are easy to get to, but not worth arriving at.” The quote is from urban designer Jeff Speck. It’s hard to think of a pithier one to describe the parking pandemic blighting America’s city centers — except perhaps the title of a Bloomberg article on the same topic: “Parking has eaten America’s cities”.
That article cites a 2018 study of the space and money devoted to parking in five American cities. In that year, both Seattle and Des Moines had 1.6 million parking spaces. New York City had 1.85 million, and Philadelphia 2.2 million. Tiny Jackson, Wyoming had 100,000 parking spaces, roughly one for each inhabitant.
Seattle had 30 parking spaces per acre, roughly five times the number of residential units. In Des Moines, the parking-to-housing ratio per acre was around 20 to 1. Only New York had more housing units than parking spaces per acre. That worked out to 0.6 parking spaces per household (but then again, only 45% of New York households own a car).
On average, about one-fifth of all land in city centers is dedicated to parking. But what’s the actual harm being done by all that parking space? For one, city centers that are more “parkable” become less walkable. In other words, fewer things are casually accessible.
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29th July 2023
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28th July 2023
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Tom Lewis is among America’s most generous philanthropists. Over more than 20 years, his T.W. Lewis Foundation has funded causes helping children and families, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations like The Heritage Foundation.
But he’s now taking a different approach with colleges and universities after a controversy at Arizona State University. Lewis pulled his funding following the school’s mishandling of an event with Charlie Kirk and Dennis Prager in February.
The Arizona State event was hosted by the university’s T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development. It sparked outrage from professors and accusations of censorship from the center’s former executive director.
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28th July 2023
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It was a strange experience watching the House hearing in which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was testifying. The topic was censorship and how and to what extent federal government agencies under two administrations muscled social media companies to take down posts, ban users, and throttle content. The majority made its case.
What was strange was the minority reaction throughout. They tried to shut down RFK. They moved to go to executive session so that the public could not hear the proceedings. The effort failed. Then they shouted over his words when they were questioning him. They wildly smeared him and defamed him. They even began with an attempt to block him from speaking at all, and 8 Democrats voted to support that.
This was a hearing on censorship and they were trying to censor him. It only made the point.
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27th July 2023
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27th July 2023
Rod Dreher.
is unlikely that Europeans will understand the controversy over Jason Aldean’s No. 1 country music hit “Try That In a Small Town,” and why it matters. But it really does matter, and you can’t really understand what’s happening in the U.S. culture war unless you take the Left’s smear of Aldean seriously.
Jason Aldean is a popular country music singer who, this past May, released a song called “Try That In a Small Town.” It’s a bog-standard country tune, undistinguished musically or lyrically. The song is a taunt to criminals and violent protesters, of the sort that flooded American cities during the Summer of George Floyd in 2020, and afterward. It tells them that if they try to get away with crime, or violently disrespecting authority, in a small town, they will be met with violence. Aldean has a line referring to the fact that small town people are armed.
…
When leftist ideologues constantly excuse criminality and other anti-social behavior, or even (as with violent and misogynistic rap lyrics) celebrate it, and at the same time damn white conservative males as bigots for writing songs defending law and order, and affirming the morality of violence to stop criminals—well, this is how Trump voters are made.
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27th July 2023
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26th July 2023
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26th July 2023
John C. Wright.
The idea is that the smartest kids are admitted to the best schools, where they’re taught by the top minds in the sciences, philosophy, law, medicine, and the arts. They therefore possess both the highest degree of natural aptitude, and have been provided with the best possible training, meaning that they are naturally the most suited to take society’s reins.
What universities really sell isn’t an education: it’s the credential.
Credentials are meant to serve a crucial social function. They’re supposed to be a guarantee that a potential employee or professional has mastered the skills for which his services are being retained.
At some point over the last generation, the ruling class shifted its emphasis from competence to ideological loyalty.
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25th July 2023
Quilette.
Fake reviews, vindictive editors, ignorant reviewers, “moderation” without reading, rejections for want of “a critical theory lens,” retention of submissions for a year without review, and defamation. If you think I gathered these abuses of peer review in only “woke” fields, think again. They’re problems in the hardest of sciences. And if you think academics can avoid these abuses by keeping out of politics, think again. Submissions are being rejected for their subjects or conclusions.
I received more stories of abuses than were released for publication, because of fears of professional retaliation. I will publish here only stories from academics prepared to go on the record, including myself.
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25th July 2023
The Antiplanner.
As if the 15-minute city wasn’t bad enough, planners are now promoting what they call the 20-minute suburb. According to its supporters, suburbanites are fed up with driving everywhere and are demanding that the suburbs be rebuilt at higher densities with lots of “town centers” so that everyone can walk to a shop in 20 minutes.
How do planners know this? Because during the height of the pandemic, a lot of people bought bicycles causing, for a brief time, a bicycle shortage. Based on this and similar anecdotal information, planners agree that the time is ripe to completely rebuilt the nation’s suburbs by eliminating single-family zoning and building lots of dense mixed-use developments.
These are not new ideas. Instead, like the 15-minute city, these are just the same tired old New Urbanist ideas with a catchy new name.
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24th July 2023
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23rd July 2023
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23rd July 2023
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From the Great Recession to 2020, Yellow nearly went bankrupt four times. In each episode, the trucking giant was saved — thanks to concessions from lenders, the Teamsters union, the federal government or often all three.
As a result, some of Yellow’s 30,000 employees weren’t too scared when the company began warning this summer that the end times were coming again. “It’s like crying wolf at this point,” Yellow mechanic Brian Atchely told FreightWaves earlier this month.
Now — as a strike looms, customers begin to pull freight and the Teamsters union refuses to meet — industry watchers are on alert that the trucking fleet may finally shutter. Ahead of a federal court hearing on Friday, Yellow said a work stoppage could force the company into a Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy proceeding.
Truck drivers are grappling with the idea that they could lose their jobs. Some 22,000 Teamsters members work at Yellow.
Look for … the Union label….
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23rd July 2023
Wall Street Journal.
The ongoing saga of the severely mentally ill in America is stirring attention again in a sadly familiar way. In Los Angeles in early 2022, a 70-year-old nurse was murdered while waiting for a bus, and two days later a young graduate student was stabbed to death in an upscale furniture store where she worked. That same week in New York City, a 40-year-old financial analyst was pushed onto the subway tracks as a train was arriving, killing her instantly.
All three assaults, random and unprovoked, were committed by unsheltered homeless men with violent pasts and long histories of mental illness. In New York, the perpetrator had warned a psychiatrist during one of his many hospitalizations of his intention to commit that very crime.
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22nd July 2023
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21st July 2023
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20th July 2023
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19th July 2023
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“It’s only ‘democracy’ if your side is winning,” the managing editor of this publication is prone to muttering. She is referring, of course, to the hypocrisy of our managerial elites. They bleat loudly about the ‘dangers to democracy’ posed by right-wing populist movements—but silence anyone in the public square with whom they disagree. In the name of ‘protecting’ democracy, our elites operate anti-democratically—like dockside bullies.
They do this by blocking accounts, cancelling contracts, disinviting people, shutting down servers—or through vandalism and violence. With these tactics, progressives have achieved a near-total stranglehold on communications, entertainment, media—and, thus, on our culture and even our very minds. Additionally, manipulative campaigns and a constant flow of media disinformation have created a ‘false consciousness’ among the unwitting public. This leads them to believe that conservatives really are ‘fascists,’ that abortion somehow does preserve women’s dignity, and that the ubiquity of rainbows is a sure sign of our moral emancipation.
Naturally, the surveillance state is employed to track and monitor any dangerous idea that contradicts this state of affairs. Anyone who resists or violates the ever-shifting ‘community guidelines’ is punished. The rest of us learn to do what they tell us. We learn to obey.
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18th July 2023
The American Mind.
As part of its “celebration of Pride Month,” the Biden-Harris Administration announced that the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) will “appoint a new coordinator to address the growing threat that book bans pose.” The White House alleges that “book bans” can “create a hostile school environment [that] may violate federal civil rights laws.”
The creative new strategy has already been tested in Forsyth County, Georgia, where a federal government investigation found that district-level discussions about not including certain books in school libraries can create a hostile environment for students who associate with the identities portrayed in the materials being challenged. The Biden Administration’s new book czar is likely to launch similar investigations around the country. This will lead to a new level of federal micromanagement of K–12 education, undermining local school districts’ ability to curate educational resources that align with local priorities and sensibilities.
What activists deceptively characterize as “book bans” amount to routine decisions about what to teach or what books to include in school libraries. Asking whether materials are age-inappropriate is the basic, commonsense place to start when curating a library collection or developing a curriculum. Those decisions inevitably lead to including some materials and excluding others. Just as we do not teach calculus to third graders, materials that are pervasively vulgar or developmentally inappropriate for young children should not be acquired in the first place. The limited space on school shelves should be filled with materials that area families believe convey maximum educational benefit to students.
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18th July 2023
Erick Erickson.
Inflation numbers are out. Living costs are decreasing, but that does not mean things are cheaper. It just means things are not getting more expensive as quickly as they were. The cost of living is still high, and rental and mortgage prices continue to rise. During these times, the Biden administration has found a new target for their ire: airplane bathrooms.
Over the past few years, morbidly obese and mentally ill TikTok “influencers” have raised a ruckus on airplanes because the aisles are not wide enough, the seats are not big enough, and the bathrooms are not expansive enough for them. In the past few years, airlines have made bathrooms uncomfortably small. But they did so for a specific reason: They needed more seats.
Every seat added to a plane is a reduction in price for travelers. In the ‘70s and early ‘80s, only the rich and business travelers could afford to fly. People dressed up. Meals were served. It was an experience and one that cost a pretty penny. Today, thanks to former President Ronald Reagan’s deregulation plans, air travel has been democratized. It is more cramped. It is more crowded. It has few amenities. But a family of four can now take a trip without taking out a second mortgage. The trade-offs have reduced ticket prices.
The Biden administration, with Vice President Kamala Harris as the frontwoman, wants to mandate larger bathrooms for the small contingent of inconvenienced TikTok influencers of America. Doing so will price the middle class out of air travel. It is all part of the plan. The Biden administration and the Left, in general, are at war with the middle class.
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17th July 2023
Minn AG Keith Ellison compares Justice Clarence Thomas to house slave character in blockbuster hit
WATCH: Far-Left Minnesota AG Compares Clarence Thomas to House Slave From ‘Django’
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17th July 2023
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17th July 2023
Steven Hayward at Power Line.
John noted yesterday Jen Rubin’s astonishing faceplant in the Washington Post about net migration to Florida, and this is a subject we keep up with closely, so let’s see the latest about California, which may just supply the next Democratic candidate for president.
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15th July 2023
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14th July 2023
Dennis Prager.
There is a pandemic in the Western world — especially, but not only, in America — that few are talking about, let alone addressing.
This pandemic doesn’t actually kill people. But it does destroy people, ruin lives, crush families and cause permanent, debilitating pain — far more than have the vast majority of cases of COVID-19.
This pandemic consists of adult children who have decided never again to speak to one or both of their parents. The vast majority of these people were never sexually or physically abused. In fact, nearly all were loved by their parents.
So, then, why have these people decided to hurt their mother, their father or both in one of the worst ways possible?
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13th July 2023
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12th July 2023
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12th July 2023
The Foundry.
Republicans can only imagine what it would feel like to win four national elections in a row—wielding executive and legislative power for more than a dozen years.
Franklin Roosevelt, who died early in his fourth presidential term, had that kind of tenure. He used it to build the modern welfare state.
What could conservatives accomplish with an opportunity like that?
The answer from across the Atlantic is: not much, if Republicans make the mistakes Britain’s Conservative Party has made since 2010.
Britain’s ‘Conservative’ party isn’t, really, any more.
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11th July 2023
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