These Precious Days

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/01/these-precious-days-ann-patchett-psilocybin-tom-hanks-sooki-raphael/

I can tell you where it all started because I remember the moment exactly. It was late and I’d just finished the novel I’d been reading. A few more pages would send me off to sleep, so I went in search of a short story. They aren’t hard to come by around here; my office is made up of piles of books, mostly advance-reader copies that have been sent to me in hopes I’ll write a quote for the jacket. They arrive daily in padded mailers—novels, memoirs, essays, histories—things I never requested and in most cases will never get to. On this summer night in 2017, I picked up a collection called Uncommon Type, by Tom Hanks. It had been languishing in a pile by the dresser for a while, and I’d left it there because of an unarticulated belief that actors should stick to acting. Now for no particular reason I changed my mind. Why shouldn’t Tom Hanks write short stories? Why shouldn’t I read one? Off we went to bed, the book and I, and in doing so put the chain of events into motion. The story has started without my realizing it. The first door opened and I walked through.

But any story that starts will also end. This is the way novelists think: beginning, middle, and end.

The Dance that Sculpts Society

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/the-dance-that-sculpts-society

Yet for all of these advantages, the right cannot stop the left, they can only hope to contain them. Sure, the right might win a skirmish here or a battle there. They might even string together a series of victories. But the left always wins the war. Always. Young people are collectively more open to change than older folks, more likely to embrace new ideas. It’s true that most people drift rightward as they age. But the shift is rarely total — some portion of one’s views are usually carried from their youth. As the generations change, conservatives die of old age, to be replaced by young leftists who retain some of their progressive views throughout their life. Most of the left’s ideas permeate and percolate through society in this way until time has laundered them of their unfamiliarity, complexity, and radicalism — at which point they become mainstream.

The left endeavors to speed this process along with political activism and by leveraging their cultural dominance. Left thinking naturally aligns with art and creativity, and every generation’s storytellers and cultural influencers end up doing more than political activists to advance left-leaning ideas and sentiments. The task then falls to the right to either hold the line or attempt the roll back the clocks if they can, and to obstruct and stymie the left if they cannot. As the left (and the right, for that matter) rarely controls majorities of political power or public opinion commanding enough to unilaterally pass their agenda, the right, even when in the minority, can successfully stand in the way of change. The ensuing war of ideas, cultural back and forth, and political negotiations serve to moderate and soften change. This is the ebb and flow, the give and take, that is needed for the stable, sustainable, long-term health of a society. 

I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated

 https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/i-refuse-to-stand-by-while-my-students

The head of the high school responded to me that “people like Loury’s lived experience—and therefore his derived social philosophy” made him an exception to the rule that black thinkers acknowledge structural racism as the paramount impediment in society. He added that “the moment we are in institutionally and culturally, does not lend itself to dispassionate discussion and debate,” and discussing Loury’s ideas would “only confuse and/or enflame students, both those in the class and others that hear about it outside of the class.” He preferred I assign “mainstream white conservatives,” effectively denying black students the opportunity to hear from a black professor who holds views that diverge from the orthodoxy pushed on them.

A Failure in Generalship

http://armedforcesjournal.com/a-failure-in-generalship/

The need for intelligent, creative and courageous general officers is self-evident. An understanding of the larger aspects of war is essential to great generalship. However, a survey of Army three- and four-star generals shows that only 25 percent hold advanced degrees from civilian institutions in the social sciences or humanities. Counterinsurgency theory holds that proficiency in foreign languages is essential to success, yet only one in four of the Army’s senior generals speaks another language. While the physical courage of America’s generals is not in doubt, there is less certainty regarding their moral courage. In almost surreal language, professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters. Now that the public is immediately concerned with the crisis in Iraq, some of our generals are finding their voices. They may have waited too long.

Neither the executive branch nor the services themselves are likely to remedy the shortcomings in America’s general officer corps. Indeed, the tendency of the executive branch to seek out mild-mannered team players to serve as senior generals is part of the problem. The services themselves are equally to blame. The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. Officers rise to flag rank by following remarkably similar career patterns. Senior generals, both active and retired, are the most important figures in determining an officer’s potential for flag rank. The views of subordinates and peers play no role in an officer’s advancement; to move up he must only please his superiors. In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.

If America desires creative intelligence and moral courage in its general officer corps, it must create a system that rewards these qualities. Congress can create such incentives by exercising its proper oversight function in three areas. First, Congress must change the system for selecting general officers. Second, oversight committees must apply increased scrutiny over generating the necessary means and pursuing appropriate ways for applying America’s military power. Third, the Senate must hold accountable through its confirmation powers those officers who fail to achieve the aims of policy at an acceptable cost in blood and treasure.

Abysmal and Inconsolable: A Day in the Life of A Lebanese Resident

https://www.beirutista.co/2021/08/abysmal-and-inconsolable-day-in-life-of.html

Every facet, every thread of every fabric of what once comprised Lebanon, has been torn asunder, crumbling conspicuously beneath our feet. Parents had been looking forward to schools reopening this autumn, thanks to the en-masse vaccination of teachers and personnel. But how can any institution hope to prop open its doors when there are long power outages? Even virtual learning is not viable. So what recourse, if any?

Have I managed to horrify you? Are you feeling the injustice, the rage, the terror, the curse of what it means to be in Lebanon at this day and age? Lebanon has become infernal. Nothing affords pleasure anymore. We’ve been plunged into a sea of suffering, of sadness, of destitution, and we are inconsolable. I kept hearing things would get exponentially worse. Well, the cynics were spot-on. With every new low we attained, we naively thought we’d hit rock bottom. The worst is that we probably still have not.

Silly me. Did I fail to mention that the entire population has, to add to all the foregoing woes, been robbed of their bank deposits? In a span of two weeks during October 2019, when banks closed unprecedentedly, we were forcibly untethered from our life savings, our hard-earned livelihoods, our pensions, our “rainy day” cushions. Today, they are siphoned to us in tiny capped amounts. And if you hold foreign currency deposits (e.g., USD), they are exchanged at a fixed rate of 3,900 LBP, whereas the market rate is at least five times that. Alas, that’s the haircut our state leaders promised we’d never be subjected to. But it’s more than just a haircut. It’s us balding. We have been stripped naked, thrown into the pothole-ridden unlit streets, and left to the hyenas.

God help Lebanon. For it is evident at present that nobody else can. 

How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/marriage-college-status-meritocracy/618795/

The most practical thread in this literature proposes reforms. Really untangling the college plot—for students and for schools—will require reaching beyond education to reduce social and economic inequalities writ large. Although reforms can’t end with schools, they might start there. The top schools can’t just admit a few more underprivileged students, as if a small number of exceptions might launder a dirty rule. Instead, they can vindicate their core educational values only by becoming, simply, less elite. I have proposed that exclusive schools—from preschool through graduate school—should double or even triple their enrollments, and diversify them, on pain of losing their tax exemptions. This would immediately dampen admissions and rankings competition and soon, by increasing the supply of graduates, reduce the competitive value of “elite” degrees. Others have suggested that once candidates’ credentials cross a relatively modest threshold, keyed to the capacity to do the academic work, schools should admit them by lottery. These ideas have in common the desire to save education’s true value from its competitive role.

What Bobby Mcilvaine Left Behind

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/twenty-years-gone-911-bobby-mcilvaine/619490/

Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11

Why a Masculine Ministry Rose and Fell

https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/why-a-masculine-ministry-rose-and

I’ve written a considerable amount about the secular war against so-called “toxic masculinity,” and while I recognize that toxic masculinity does exist, its definition often sweeps way too broadly. As I wrote in one of my first Sunday French Press essays, the American Psychological Association’s 2019 declaration that “traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful” represented a formal manifestation of a misguided cultural trend.

Look at the list of characteristics above. Aside from “dominance,” the characteristics above can be vices or virtues depending on the context. Stoicism can be harmful, yes, but (as I’ve argued before) it can be indispensable to helping a man “navigate the storms of life with a calm, steady hand.” 

Aggression seems like a vice, right up until the moment when you need a good man to stop an evil man in his tracks. A competitive spirit can be harmful, but it can also build companies, institutions, and even nations. It can inspire extraordinary innovation. 

No, you don’t want to jam any person into the masculine stereotype and demand that they exhibit the characteristics above, but when those characteristics are present—and they are in many, many men—the challenge is to channel them into virtue, temper them away from excess, and ultimately subordinate them to the way of the cross. 

PigfartsOnMars on working in a COVID ICU

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalHumor/comments/oslcew/qrazy/h6qw53l/?context=1

Been working the covid ICU for over a year now, and I'm so sick to death of all the antivaxxers arguing while sick in bed with covid that they don't have covid. I'm sick to death of being run into the ground every shift because so many nurses have quit for how horrendously we've been treated plus the rising surge of the unvaccinated coming in with covid. I'm angry for the immunocompromised who come into my unit with covid because these ignorant assholes won't step up to help protect them. I'm tired of being screamed at by countless family members about how useless masks are and no they won't wear one and I can't make them. I'm done with the constant yell-in-my-face attitude these family members have about every single intervention I try to do in order to save their loved one. I'm tired of the burnt out doctors taking their rage out on me because they've had it and their compassion for their patients is being scrounged from the bottom of an empty barrel. I'm sick of every preventable death that occurs and the mental toll it takes to pick myself back up and fight for the next patient. If healthcare workers had a dollar for every time we've had to say "I'm so sorry for your loss", we could fund a cash incentive for the antivaxxers to get the damn shot already.

I'm so tired.

Focus Group: Vaccine-Hesitant Republicans Want Facts, Not Emotion

https://debeaumont.org/news/2021/focus-group-vaccines-republicans/

Key takeaways included:

• Politicians are ineffective messengers — the mistrust of government and political leaders is significant, so it’s important to decouple science and politics.
• Unknown side effects are a major concern.
• Good stories help.
• The ability to travel is a strong motivator for getting a vaccine.
• These participants were more interested in facts and data than emotional arguments — and they don’t want to be told what to do. As one of them said, “We want to be educated, not indoctrinated.”

Hearing simple facts from Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC. Here are his five facts:

1. If you get infected with the virus, it will go all over your body and stay there for at least a week and be much more likely to cause you long-term problems than the vaccine.
2. If you get the vaccine, it will prime your immune system, but then the vaccine is gone. It will not be with you anymore.
3. More than 90% of the doctors who have been offered this vaccine have chosen to get it.
4. The more we vaccinate, the faster we can get back to growing our economy and doing the things we want to do.
5. If people get vaccinated, we’re going to save at least 100,000 lives of Americans who would otherwise be killed by COVID.

we'll explore why our eyes are unable to focus on the color blue, and how we see with our brain as much as with our eyes

https://calebkruse.com/10-projects/seeing-blue/

I think this concept is amazing. Our brain extracts some color information from the blue channel, but delegates sharpness to the red and green channels which are in focus. The result is so astonishing, that I have to wonder if there is something that may go awry from modifying and displaying these images on a computer. If you have any theories beyond chromatic aberration and focusing of the eye, let me know.

u/xain_the_idiot on life post-transition

https://www.reddit.com/r/MensLib/comments/oj6x7h/how_do_we_benefit_from_the_patriarchy/h50jhx3/

A lot of people have mentioned things like safety, and yes that is a big difference. But it's really the implications behind it. People do still stare at my body and sometimes objectify me, but they tend to do it in a way where I still feel like I have autonomy. I can make the choice to walk away, say no, etc. Before, I used to struggle to get rid of creepy men even when I called the police on them or threatened them with physical violence. I'm the same size roughly as I was before. So why do people suddenly see me as capable and autonomous? Why don't they still threaten and bully me to try to get their way? It's because women aren't seen as people by many men. They're seen as property, prizes to be won, or basically slaves who owe everything to men. I never have to feel that way when I'm passing as male. Nobody will ever make me feel like I'm worthless, subservient and inhuman just for being a man. That feeling of self ownership is so valuable to a human being. It's detrimental to the world, that so many women go about their daily lives being made to feel less than human.

All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with huge consequences.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

Morawska had spent more than two decades advising a different branch of the WHO on the impacts of air pollution. When it came to flecks of soot and ash belched out by smokestacks and tailpipes, the organization readily accepted the physics she was describing—that particles of many sizes can hang aloft, travel far, and be inhaled. Now, though, the WHO’s advisers seemed to be saying those same laws didn’t apply to virus-laced respiratory particles. To them, the word airborne only applied to particles smaller than 5 microns. Trapped in their group-specific jargon, the two camps on Zoom literally couldn’t understand one another.

When the call ended, Marr sat back heavily, feeling an old frustration coiling tighter in her body. She itched to go for a run, to pound it out footfall by footfall into the pavement. “It felt like they had already made up their minds and they were just entertaining us,” she recalls. Marr was no stranger to being ignored by members of the medical establishment. Often seen as an epistemic trespasser, she was used to persevering through skepticism and outright rejection. This time, however, so much more than her ego was at stake. The beginning of a global pandemic was a terrible time to get into a fight over words. But she had an inkling that the verbal sparring was a symptom of a bigger problem—that outdated science was underpinning public health policy. She had to get through to them. But first, she had to crack the mystery of why their communication was failing so badly.

The climate crisis is a political economy problem.

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-newsletter-24

The result is striking: Of the increase in global emissions between 1990 and 2015 half is accounted for by China. Two thirds of that is due to the Chinese middle class. One third down to the Chinese top 10 percent. Those are by far the most dynamic elements in the global emissions map. Other hot spots include the top 10 percent of the population in the Middle East and North Africa and the same group in North America. Rising emissions in India and the rest of Asia contribute almost a quarter of the overall growth but growth is spread across the income distribution.

Punitive Intolerance Is No Way to Preserve Pluralism

https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/punitive-intolerance-is-no-way-to

 The actual facts of the case cry out for patience and tolerance. Barronelle had long served a gay customer named Rob Ingersoll. Their relationship spanned almost 10 years, and she’d designed a number of custom-designed floral arrangements to commemorate milestones in his life. Then, in March 2013, Ingersoll asked Barronelle to “do the flowers” for his wedding to his fiancé.

Barronelle, a Christian who believes God ordained marriage as the union of a man and a woman, had never been asked to design floral arrangements for a gay wedding. After thinking through the matter and praying with her husband, she decided that couldn’t in good conscience use her artistic gifts to celebrate a union that she believed to be scripturally wrong. 

Here’s what happened next, according to Barronelle’s petition to the Supreme Court:

When Robert returned to the shop, Barronelle walked with him to a quiet corner, “gently took his hand, looked him in the eye, and told him that [she] could not do his wedding”—or “be a part of his event”—because of her “relationship with Jesus Christ.” Robert testified that she took no “joy or satisfaction” in having to tell him that. Robert said he understood, and they discussed his engagement and wedding plans. Barronelle gave him the names of three nearby floral artists she knew would do a good job. They hugged, and Barronelle expected they would remain friends with a disagreement about marriage. 

After Ingersoll’s fiancé posted about the matter on Facebook, Barronelle’s decision not only gained media attention, it resulted in an outpouring of support for Ingersoll and his fiancé. They received enough offers of free floral services that they “could get married about 20 times.”

Let’s pause here for a moment. In a tolerant and decent pluralistic society, this is where the matter should have ended. Barronelle acted in accordance with the dictates of her conscience, she helped Ingersoll obtain all the floral services he needed, and he was flooded with public support. There was no real harm. 

But no: The attorney general of Washington on his own filed suit against Barronelle, and did so in a particularly pernicious way—seeking damages and attorneys fees from Barronelle’s business and from Barronelle personally.

Even the Defenses of Anti-CRT Speech Codes Show the Problems With Anti-CRT Speech Codes

https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/even-the-defenses-of-anti-crt-speech

I can’t say that I know Cameron Hilditch, but he penned a lengthy endorsement of anti-CRT laws that nonetheless contained this rather amusing line: “It’s true that the laws in question could have been drafted better, but it is better to have them on the statute book than to have none whatsoever.”

Finally, Dan McLaughlin weighed in again, this time pointing readers to my friend Greg Lukianoff’s outstanding, extended discussion of the topic. Dan repeats Greg’s warning “that poorly-drafted laws can end up banning the teaching of things that the legislators never intended to ban, and can lead to confusion and discord at the school level.”

I think my point is clear at this point. The defenses of anti-CRT laws are time and again running aground on the rocky shoals of ... the actual anti-CRT laws.

How Both Sides Distort the Debate Over Critical Race Theory

https://thedispatch.com/p/how-both-sides-distort-the-debate

After the civil rights movement achieved its legislative goals in the 1960s, formal, legal racism was largely abolished. Yes, there was cleanup work to do in various states. But broadly speaking, deliberate discrimination was no longer protected by the law. There was still cultural racism, of course—and there still is. But looking at the big picture, the tumor of deliberate racism has shrunk on a staggering scale. 

This was the result of a massive legal, social, and educational effort. And it was a huge success that all Americans should take pride in. Racism isn’t an American phenomenon; it’s a human one that exists everywhere. But few societies have worked as hard to battle it as the United States has over the last half-century. 

And yet, disparities persist. Black Americans comprise 13 percent of the population but fall short of that percentage in a number of important areas—the ranks of affluent, the college educated, and a large number of professions we normally associate with affluence and education. 

CRT, structural racism, institutional racism, etc., represent efforts to explain why. 

It’s no accident that law schools and lawyers were at the vanguard. If you wanted to sue a business or agency for “disparate impacts”—e.g., the underrepresentation of minorities in certain jobs or unequal lending by banks—you needed to show that these disparities were the result of deliberately bigoted policies. The problem: Evidence of the disparities remained abundant while evidence of racist intent largely vanished. 

How Desi Invented Television

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/959609533

GLINTON: OK, so the first brilliant idea that Lucy and Desi came up with involved the technology of television. They had learned on tour that comedy, if it's going to be done well, had to be captured live in the moment in front of an audience.

SMITH: Desi says, we want three cameras, which was unheard of at the time. We want three cameras to be rolling to capture all of the reactions and the ad libs and the hat flying off the top of my head, just like they had done on tour.

GLINTON: And those cameras with the three operators, they said, we don't want that grainy kinescope stuff. We want luxurious, beautiful 35 mm film like they use in motion pictures.

SMITH: The three-camera sitcom shot on film is a standard today. Think of it. In the early 1950s, in one big leap, "I Love Lucy" suddenly looked and felt modern.

GLINTON: But it was not cheap. Desi and the studio got into this huge fight over who was going to pay for those three cameras, three cameramen and all that rolling film. Eventually, Desi made an offer. He'll pay for the filming, but he and Lucy will own the film reel, the actual shows themselves. 

A Michigan Republican spent eight months searching for evidence of election fraud, but all he found was lies.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/06/michigan-republican-truth-election-fraud/619326/

“It’s easy to look at the current status of American culture, American politics, the American church, and be really apoplectic right now. It’s very easy to give in to that sense of panic,” McBroom told me. “But we go through different cycles in this country. I’m hoping we’re in a cycle of riots and demonstrations on and off, [and not] the cycle where we end up in civil war. I’ve encountered some folks who are like, ‘Maybe it’s time to rise up’—you know, ‘refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots,’ that stuff. And I say to them, ‘Are you seriously going to go looking for people with biden signs in their yards? I mean, is that what you’re going to do? Make a list? Is this what this is coming to? You’re ready to go out and fight your neighbors? Because I don’t think you really are. I think you’re talking stupid.’”

McBroom closed his eyes and took a heavy breath. “These are good people, and they’re being lied to, and they’re believing the lies,” he said. “And it’s really dangerous.”

Biden Gained With Moderate and Conservative Voting Groups, New Data Shows

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/us/politics/pew-election-2020.html

The Pew data, released on Wednesday, is the latest and perhaps the last major tranche of high-quality data on voter preference and turnout in the 2020 election, bringing analysts close to a final, if still imperfect, account of the outcome.

The data suggests that the progressive vision of winning a presidential election simply by mobilizing strong support from Democratic constituencies simply did not materialize for Mr. Biden. While many Democrats had hoped to overwhelm Mr. Trump with a surge in turnout among young and nonwhite voters, the new data confirms that neither candidate claimed a decisive advantage in the highest turnout election since 1900.

Instead, Mr. Trump enjoyed a turnout advantage fairly similar to his edge in 2016, when many Democrats blamed Hillary Clinton’s defeat on a failure to mobilize young and nonwhite voters. If anything, Mr. Trump enjoyed an even larger turnout edge while Mr. Biden lost ground among nearly every Democratic base constituency. Only his gains among moderate to conservative voting groups allowed him to prevail.

The Bias Narrative versus the Development Narrative: Thinking About Persistent Racial Inequality in the United States

https://quillette.com/2021/06/27/the-bias-narrative-versus-the-development-narrative-thinking-about-persistent-racial-inequality-in-the-united-states/

“Hands up, don’t shoot.” That narrative was heard frequently after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, abetting the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. This was a singular event in the history of racial conflict in America. It would appear that, actually, there was no validity to the “hands up, don’t shoot” story. Rather, Brown attacked the police officer who, fearing for his life, then shot him. Independent investigations by local authorities and the US Justice Department concluded as much. Eyewitnesses have testified to this effect. The fact of the matter is that “hands up, don’t shoot” never happened.

But it did happen virtually. It happened in effect. It happened because of the force of the narrative: a black man brutalized by overbearing, vicious, and racist state power. For many, that story overwhelmed all the facts in the case. There is a documentary by filmmaker Eli Steele, narrated by his father, Shelby, called What Killed Michael Brown? The film reviews the Michael Brown case and concludes that “hands up, don’t shoot” is what Shelby Steele calls a “poetic truth”—an account so powerfully resonant with a narrative paradigm that it may as well be true. Once it gets out there, many will have a hard time believing that it is not true because the power of the narrative is so great. For many, stories about bias against African Americans have this allure. This has become a problem.

INSIDE A XINJIANG DETENTION CAMP

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/inside-xinjiang-detention-camp

This massive detention center, the size of 13 football fields, is a cog in the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities in the world since World War II, in which 1 million or more Muslims, including Uighurs, Kazakhs, and others, have been rounded up and detained in China’s western region of Xinjiang. Publicly, China has claimed that Muslim detainees have been freed. Yet an ongoing BuzzFeed News investigation, based on dozens of interviews with survivors and thousands of satellite images, has exposed how China has built a vast and permanent infrastructure for mass detention in Xinjiang, marking a radical shift away from the government’s makeshift use of preexisting public buildings at the beginning of the campaign. Using the same techniques that revealed the scale of China’s expanding network of detention centers, BuzzFeed News can now expose the inner workings of one such compound. The Mongolküre facility is one of at least 260 newly built sites bearing the hallmarks of long-term detention centers capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people in total servitude to the state.

Until now, relatively little has been known about what happens inside these forbidding compounds. Rarer still have been details about any single detention center. One reason is terror: The overwhelming majority of camp survivors still live in Xinjiang under constant surveillance and the threat of incarceration, as do their families and the wider Muslim population in the region. Many of those detained who have been able to speak out simply don't remember where they were held, having been taken from home with hoods around their heads and shuttled from camp to camp.

BuzzFeed News initially learned of the Mongolküre site thanks to three former detainees who have fled the country and have spoken about the conditions inside despite the risk to themselves and their families. That testimony, combined with an architectural analysis of satellite photos dating back to 2006, allowed BuzzFeed News to digitally reconstruct the prison to understand its purpose and scope.

Embrace the Grind

https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/embrace-the-grind/

For example, I once joined a team maintaining a system that was drowning in bugs. There were something like two thousand open bug reports. Nothing was tagged, categorized, or prioritized. The team couldn’t agree on which issues to tackle. They were stuck essentially pulling bugs at random, but it was never clear if that issue was important.. New bug reports couldn’t be triaged effectively because finding duplicates was nearly impossible. So the open ticket count continued to climb. The team had been stalled for months. I was tasked with solving the problem: get the team unstuck, get reverse the trend in the open ticket count, come up with a way to eventually drive it down to zero.

So I used the same trick as the magician, which is no trick at all: I did the work. I printed out all the issues - one page of paper for each issue. I read each page. I took over a huge room and started making piles on the floor. I wrote tags on sticky notes and stuck them to piles. I shuffled pages from one stack to another. I wrote ticket numbers on whiteboards in long columns; I imagined I was Ben Affleck in The Accountant. I spent almost three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized.

The trend reversed immediately after that: we were able to close several hundred tickets immediately as duplicates, and triaging new issues now took minutes instead of a day. It took I think a year or more to drive the count to zero, but it was all fairly smooth sailing. People said I did the impossible, but that’s wrong: I merely did something so boring that nobody else had been willing to do it.

A WARNING FROM EUROPE: THE WORST IS YET TO COME

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/poland-polarization/568324/

Lenin’s one-party state was based on different values. It overthrew the aristocratic order. But it did not put a competitive model in place. The Bolshevik one-party state was not merely undemocratic; it was also anticompetitive and antimeritocratic. Places in universities, civil-service jobs, and roles in government and industry did not go to the most industrious or the most capable. Instead, they went to the most loyal. People advanced because they were willing to conform to the rules of party membership. Though those rules were different at different times, they were consistent in certain ways. They usually excluded the former ruling elite and their children, as well as suspicious ethnic groups. They favored the children of the working class. Above all, they favored people who loudly professed belief in the creed, who attended party meetings, who participated in public displays of enthusiasm. Unlike an ordinary oligarchy, the one-party state allows for upward mobility: True believers can advance. As Hannah Arendt wrote back in the 1940s, the worst kind of one-party state “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

IT IS OBSCENE: A TRUE REFLECTION IN THREE PARTS

https://www.chimamanda.com/

In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

I find it obscene.

AnathemaMaranatha's army story

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryStories/comments/2rl4td/bushhappy_boonie_rats_command_control/

The Top about-faced and stood at attention in front the company formation. I could see the grunts from where I was. Here and there, you’d see a soldier’s expression go from bored, to puzzled, to Holy shit!, to suppressed laughter. I was watching them pop off one by one.

And one by one, they were met by the cold, hard stare of a First Sergeant demonstrating, without a word or a motion, the finest example of military command and control I have ever seen. It was magnificent. One by one, as grunts in formation twigged on to what was happening, the Top stared them back into silence and back into military bearing. No sniggering. No laughter. Nothing.

Some things don’t change, even if you add helicopters and radios. Command and control is a personal thing. It doesn’t automatically come with rank. It isn’t always augmented by technology. A Roman Legionnaire would have recognized the First Sergeant’s look. And obeyed.

About now I should give a lecture on command and control, how it isn’t just yelling orders, how it’s a personal trait that cannot be instilled but can be trained... Nuh uh. I know it when I see it. That’s all I got.

mythoughtsforapenny on the state-sponsored hijacking of the flight over Belarus

 https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/nm2c7c/bomb_threat_that_justified_belarus_hijacking_came/gznmbq8/?context=3

Another difference is that the countries that refused passage to President Morales didn't lie about a bomb threat. Belarus's actions possibly violate the Convention for the suppression of unlawful acts against the safety of civil aviation. Article 1.1(e) forbids any person from communicating "information which he knows to be false, thereby endangering the safety of an aircraft in flight". Belarus is a party to this treaty. So there need to be serious consequences for what Belarus did on Sunday.

Finally, Belarus's actions wouldn't be justified, even without the false bomb threat, and even based on its authority over its own airspace, which is technically unaffected by the IASTA. Unlike the countries that refused passage to President Morales in 2013, Belarus waited until the RyanAir flight was about 30 minutes from exiting its airspace. Those countries denied passage to President Morales before his flight entered their airspace.

It would be bad enough for a country to give a flight permission to enter its airspace with the intent of revoking that permission before the flight can actually complete its journey over the country. Even if a country does revoke permission of a flight after the flight has already entered its airspace, however, that revocation only means the flight has to leave the country's airspace as quickly as possible. Revoking a flight's permission to be in a country's airspace does not mean that the flight has turn around and land an airport of that country's choosing

The Planning of an Insurrection.

 https://venne1138.medium.com/the-planning-of-an-insurrection-4131bdf332a2

How Trump supporters used TheDonald.win to plan to overturn the election through violence, force, and murder.

Don’t Let Fear of ‘Wokeness’ Close Hearts and Minds

https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/dont-let-fear-of-wokeness-close-hearts

Yet as a proud parent of an adopted black daughter (as most readers know, our beautiful youngest daughter is from Ethiopia), I agree with Bethany that it can be harmful to children for parents to walk into adoption with a purely colorblind philosophy. As much as we might want to live in a world where race doesn’t matter, and we’re all one human family, it’s a simple fact that children of color face different challenges from white children as they navigate our culture and as they’re raised in white families. 

And while I’m a firm supporter of transracial adoption, I also think that a true “best interests of the child” adoption standard should include an analysis of whether the family is thoughtfully approaching the unique challenges that will face their adopted kids.

The Secret Life of H.G. Carrillo

 https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/h-g-carrillo-hache-identity-herman-glenn-carroll-afro-cuban-1120491/

A celebrated writer and professor, he challenged his students to take hold of their own narrative. But the truth came out — his life story, like his works, was a work of fiction

Abuse, Apologies & Accountability

https://loriannethompson.com/2021/05/11/abuse-apologies-accountability/

We cannot demand accountably in verbally abusive and humiliating ways. To confront is not to condemn. To demand is not to dehumanize or demean.

On Identity

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/magazine/cherokee-native-american-andrea-smith.html

More than a decade ago, a prominent academic was exposed for having faked her Cherokee ancestry. Why has her career continued to thrive?

https://againstpoliticsofdisposability.wordpress.com/

I am not interested in entertaining silly online identity attacks that seem to consume your academic careers in order to make you feel personally more authenticated as Indigenous persons, HOWEVER, Andrea Smith is a long time dear friend of my family and your actions are beyond offensive and belittling to someone we deeply care about. Thus, I wish to lend my support to Andy by speaking truth while you all continue to act as bullies and process your own insecurities.

I want to point out that my family has long visited Cherokee ceremonial grounds (quite regularly during some seasons) to lend support in participation just as Cherokee ceremonial practitioners have long done the same during our Muscogee ceremonial dances. I have never seen any of these Andrea Smith-attackers in attendance at Cherokee ceremonies; none of them are Cherokee speakers nor are they ceremonial practitioners; most of these folks are of minimal blood quantum and look white. In fact, these very kind of identity police are who traditional ceremonial practitioners get a good laugh at.

How to Get Rich

https://nav.al/rich

Status is your rank in the social hierarchy

There are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play. One is the money game. Money is not going to solve all of your problems; but it’s going to solve all of your money problems. I think people know that. They realize that, so they want to make money.

At the same time, deep down many people believe they can’t make it; so they don’t want any wealth creation to happen. They virtue signal by attacking the whole enterprise, saying, “Well, making money is evil. You shouldn’t do it.”

But they’re actually playing the other game, which is the status game. They’re trying to be high status in the eyes of others by saying, “Well, I don’t need money. We don’t want money.” 

Status is your ranking in the social hierarchy.

Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Everybody in the world can have a house. Because you have a house doesn’t take away from my ability to have a house. If anything, the more houses that are built, the easier it becomes to build houses, the more we know about building houses, and the more people can have houses.

Wealth is a very positive-sum game. We create things together. We’re starting this endeavor to create a piece of art that explains what we’re doing. At the end of it, something brand new will be created. It’s a positive-sum game.

Status is a very old game

Status, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game. It’s a very old game. We’ve been playing it since monkey tribes. It’s hierarchical. Who’s number one? Who’s number two? Who’s number three? And for number three to move to number two, number two has to move out of that slot. So, status is a zero-sum game. [...]

I don’t think capitalism is evil. Capitalism is actually good. It’s just that it gets hijacked. It gets hijacked by improper pricing of externalities. It gets hijacked by improper yields, where you have corruption, or you have monopolies.

u/womangirl on attention from older men

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/nexzzl/what_are_some_pieces_of_mysterious_lost_media/gyjhfou/

Back then, whether you were a famous actress or a young girl in a relatively small town, it was not only not so out of the ordinary for older people to party with and come on to younger girls (and I imagine boys as well), but also a LOT easier for them to do so without repercussions from the kind of media we have now and with the education that young kids get regarding these situations.

I know that there were not just 1 or 2, but MANY men aged 20 - 40 who willingly bought alcohol for or drank alcohol with, smoked pot with/sold pot to, sold cocaine to/offered free cocaine to me and/or my friends when we were between 12 and 16 years old.

Those things, alcohol/drugs, sometimes led to those men also flirting with, coming on to, feeling up (breasts and more), attempting to have sex with and, in some cases, succeeding in having sex with girls who were anywhere from 10 to almost 30 years younger than them.

And most of the time none of those girls told any parent or adult with the authority to do anything about it, for fear of getting in trouble themselves, social repercussions, or the fact that many times if they did, it was brushed off, blamed on themselves, or swept under the rug.

Secret Sharers: The Hidden Ties Between Private Spies and Journalists

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-private-spies-news-media.html

The dossier’s latest blow came last year when the identity of Mr. Steele’s collector was revealed. He turned out to be a Russian-born lawyer, Igor Danchenko, who now lived in the United States. Mr. Danchenko, like others in the private intelligence business, had stumbled into it after other pursuits failed. His contacts within Russia appeared to be not Kremlin A-listers but instead childhood friends, college buddies or drinking pals.

In 2017, Mr. Danchenko claimed to the F.B.I. during a secret interview that Mr. Steele had “misstated” the information and had “exaggerated” its reliability. But after that interview was released in 2020, Mr. Danchenko flip-flopped. He told one newspaper that he stood by the dossier; he told another newspaper that he wasn’t so sure about it.

By then, a few reporters who had written about the dossier had backed away from it. “Some people have wanted to maintain that the dossier is checking out when, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t,” said Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News. He was in the minority. When Erik Wemple of The Washington Post wrote a series of columns about the media infatuation with the dossier, most journalists he contacted either defended their work or ignored his inquiries.

In an article for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi cast the media’s handling of the dossier as a replay of a press disaster: the reporting before the Persian Gulf war, which claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. “The W.M.D. affair showed what happened when we don’t require sources to show us evidence, when we let political actors use the press to ‘confirm’ their own assertions,” Mr. Taibbi wrote. “Are we never going to own up to this one?”

Matt Gallagher on "Cherry" and the Media's Flattening of Trauma

 

https://battleborne.substack.com/p/matt-gallagher-on-cherry-and-the

There’s a constant desire throughout the process of turning a real life event life to book to movie of wanting to have things both ways. And that's disingenuous. It's trying to blur the line between reality and entertainment for the very cynical reason that it will make money.

There was a more complicated way to do this. I think, you know, it's Walker story, his book, really. There's this point in my piece I quote from Walker’s lawyer, who in petitioning the court for a compassionate release, says, you know, “This is not a story about a bank robbery." And there's real truth to that. But “Cherry” has certainly been packaged, marketed and sold multiple times over as a story about armed bank robbery.

I wanted this to be a story about storytelling itself. And in my research I couldn’t find anyone who went on public record to acknowledge the weight of the story, except for the actor who played walker, Tom Holland. He realized that, “Hey, this was based on a real event and pointing a gun at somebody said has serious consequences.” And you can watch that. And he's not bullshitting. Maybe it's because he was the first person in all of this that actually had to physically act out what that looks like.

Forced to Choose Between Trump’s “Big Lie” and Liz Cheney, the House G.O.P. Chooses the Lie

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/forced-to-choose-between-trumps-big-lie-and-liz-cheney-the-house-gop-chooses-the-lie

Cheney’s rupture with the House Republican Conference has become all but final in recent days, but it has been months in the making. Edelman revealed that Cheney herself secretly orchestrated an unprecedented op-ed in the Washington Post by all ten living former Defense Secretaries, including her father, warning against Trump’s efforts to politicize the military. The congresswoman not only recruited her father but personally asked others, including Trump’s first Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, to participate. “She was the one who generated it, because she was so worried about what Trump might do,” Edelman said. “It speaks to the degree that she was concerned about the threat to our democracy that Trump represented.” The Post op-ed appeared on January 3rd, just three days before the insurrection at the Capitol.

What Substack Is Really Doing to the Media

https://slate.com/business/2021/04/substack-media-new-york-times-subscriptions-poaching.html

A key to understanding Substack’s impact on the news is to recognize that the kind of journalism that tends to thrive there—so far, at least for the most part—is not actually news. It’s commentary and analysis, aimed at the chattering classes.

Leading newsletters such as Heather Cox Richardson’s Letter From an American, Roxane Gay’s the Audacity, and Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten are wildly diverse in their perspectives and subject matter. But one thing they have in common is that they’ve never covered a city council meeting or rushed out to a crime scene to get the scoop. “I haven’t seen one of these independent Substacks that comes close to replicating what most news organizations spend most of their resources doing,” said Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia Journalism School and former senior editor at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.

Opinion: Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/19/cornel-west-howard-classics/

Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.

Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.

How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/

And over time, over the past 21 years even , I have seen these telecommunication companies develop. We all remember Bell Labs, and in the Netherlands, KPN Neherlab, when telecommunications companies were innovators, and they were the first to do many things, and when they did actual research.

And over the past 20 years, I’ve seen the extremely sad decline of all these communications companies into branding and financing bureaus, and this has impacted my own business, because I used to sell software, and now I sell services, because no one can buy my software anymore, because none of these telecommunications companies are technical companies anymore.

I spend a lot of time thinking about that, why? Why is that going on? And why is it bad? And that brings me to the central question of this presentation.

In any organization, in any company, in any group, any country and even any continent, what level of technical capability, do we need to retain? How technical do we need to stay to remain viable as a company or a country or a continent? And is there a point of no return?

If you outsource too much? Is there a point where you cannot go back and relearn how actually making things work?