Tse Chi Lop, the suspected ringleader of a $21-billion crime syndicate, may be the world’s most innovative drug lord.

https://torontolife.com/city/this-man-is-the-jeff-bezos-of-the-international-drug-trade/

Tse rose to prominence as a criminal disciple of open multicultural hypercapitalism. David Au of the RCMP says that’s what sets Canada apart. “When I used to go down to the western U.S., every group was very siloed,” Au says. “The Chinese would only work with the Chinese. The Vietnamese would only work with the Vietnamese. The African-Americans among themselves, Latinos among themselves.” The inter-ethnic collaboration here is distinctly Canadian. “Other jurisdictions find it unique,” Au says.

What gave traditional organized crime its strength in the past—the violence, the control of territory, the ethnic loyalty and defined hierarchies—are the heart of its weakness in the present. Tse had a better system. Instead of ethnic loyalty, transnational and inter-organizational co-operation. Instead of territory, logistics. Instead of hierarchy, metrics. Instead of centralized control, connections. Tse Chi Lop is easily the most significant criminal in Toronto’s history, and he represents, in an entirely diseased way, a perverse triumph of the city. His vast criminal organization flourished through open-mindedness and entrepreneurship, by creating markets and exploiting them in a spirit of eager globalization and cosmopolitanism. He is one of capitalism’s grandest and most polite monsters. He is very much one of us.

Why Did Everyone in My County Just Go Crazy at the School Board?

https://medium.com/reclaiming-rural/why-did-everyone-in-my-county-just-go-crazy-at-the-school-board-c53a6d9f0562

This brings me to why you only are getting my first name on this article. No one seems to know who is behind this uproar. Some of my neighbors have full-on bought into these fights as if they are their own but haven’t seemed to stop to ask who’s fight it is or who made all this up. They’ve never stopped to think about where all this money is coming from or how they even heard about “CRT’ or started to think that masks had something to do with freedom. I think they are being manipulated and they don’t who is behind it. They’ve got Proud Boys and other anti-patriots going to school board meetings trying to look tough and they don’t even know who’s bidding they are doing.

There is no way that these issues of masks and CRT came up in thousands of school boards all at the same time all over the country without someone planning it and spending money on it. People are looking for conspiracies all over but they seem to be playing along inside one and not know it. I’ve gone to a few school board meetings now and I’ve seen people looking like they want to throw punches. I can do that if we need to but we don’t. I’m not putting my neck out there or my family and kids out there until I know who is pulling the strings. I can tell you for sure that it’s nobody in Johnston County.

The McDonald's Test -- Learning to Love Back Row America

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/social-justice/economic-justice/the-mcdonalds-test

You also visited many churches. As an atheist, what was that like?

I was certainly an atheist when I began; it’s more complicated now. Initially, I went to church for the same reason I was going to McDonald’s: it was where the people I was speaking to were going. I didn’t discriminate, I just went to whatever church or mosque was there, whatever faith was reflective of the community.

Like McDonald’s, the churches worked. They were often the only institutions that were lit up and functional; usually they were storefront operations. You’d go down a street that was boarded up, derelict buildings, and then there was a church. Its doors weren’t closed.

There aren’t many success stories in my book – there’s almost nobody who got out of a negative lifestyle. The only people who succeeded did it through faith – through the church. And so I had at first a grudging respect, and then a full-blown respect for what churches are doing.

[...]

You suggest that one thing which may have stayed more the same than people would like to admit is racism.

There’s awful racism in the United States, which cannot be denied or diminished. What’s forgotten, though, is that the most progressive towns are often the most segregated. We tend to focus on the ugly incidents of racism that happen among the white working class and ignore the racism of the elites, which is less overt because it’s structural. It’s a matter of zoning laws, of where the best schools are, who is more likely to be arrested or imprisoned, where good jobs are available.

My visit to Milwaukee, which is well-known for its progressive politics, illustrated this to me. Historically, the African American community was intentionally confined to a tiny neighborhood in the city, and it’s largely still concentrated there. 

The Methods of Moral Panic Journalism

https://michaelhobbes.substack.com/p/moral-panic-journalism

The real story of the McDonald’s case was always available, it just didn’t matter. By the time the Liebeck verdict came down, Americans had already spent nearly a decade hearing about ambulance-chasing lawyers, “jackpot justice” awards and the debilitating “tort tax” on American businesses. As early as 1986, Ronald Reagan speeches included a laugh line about a woman who sued her doctor after a CAT scan robbed her of her psychic powers. (In reality, the woman had an allergic reaction to a surgical dye, suffered severe headaches for the rest of her life and had her lawsuit thrown out. She never received a dime.) 

This pre-existing narrative explains why the exaggerated version of the McDonald’s case was so durable. Sure, some of the details didn’t check out and the facts turned out to be a bit more complicated than they seemed. But still, journalists argued at the time, we know frivolous lawsuits are a problem in America.

But they weren’t. Civil cases were actually falling throughout the 1990s. Seven-digit payouts attracted headlines, but they were vanishingly rare — just 3% of plaintiffs got punitive damages at all; the median award was $38,000 — and nearly always got overturned on appeal.

The central premise of the “frivolous lawsuits” panic — it is too easy for citizens to sue corporations — was an obvious lie, a blinking, howling whopper that would have been laughed off of front pages if it weren’t for all the overblown anecdotes making it seem plausible.

u/CockGoblinReturns on Dave Chappelle's recent comments

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/q8w7gx/netflix_fires_employee_for_sharing_confidential/hgt1gcg/

The irony of Chappelle's defenders saying 'I guarantee you that they didn't watch it' is that they never actually looked at the criticisms. What's more flabbergasting is they openly admit this, 'I guarantee', 'I bet', etc. It's peak lack of self-awareness

It's lengthy to explain Dave's phobias, because Dave makes several pro-Trans statements. He wants them to be equal. He dissed the transgender bathroom laws. His conversation about his trans friend human experience was moving. But this is my best attempt to break down the phobias exhibited in his set despite these.

But what is a Fourier series? From heat flow to drawing with circles | DE4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6sGWTCMz2k

The Ship That Became a Bomb

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/11/the-ship-that-became-a-bomb

In March, 2015, a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, which included the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, intervened to stop the Houthi advance. The U.S., Britain, and France provided intelligence, planes, naval support, and bombs. The Saudis saw in the Houthi advance the hand of their regional enemy Iran, a Shia nation. But, despite the aerial might of the Saudi coalition, the Houthis weathered the attacks, and entrenched themselves in northern Yemen. When Saudi Arabia entered the conflict, it predicted that fighting would last six weeks; instead, it has endured for more than six years. During the war, other regional actors, such as the U.A.E., have flexed their military muscle. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has maintained a foothold in the south of the country. A secessionist group called the Southern Transitional Council holds Aden. It is extremely unlikely that the Yemen of 2014 will ever be put back together.

The consequences for civilians have been devastating. Both the Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition are alleged to have committed many war crimes. The Saudi air campaign has been recklessly conducted, and has killed thousands of civilians, including children. The Houthi regime has used child soldiers, deployed banned antipersonnel mines, and fired indiscriminately into civilian areas. Meanwhile, a sea-and-land blockade of Houthi-controlled areas by the coalition has contributed to life-threatening shortages of food, medicine, and fuel.

u/gorgewall on educational attainment

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/pjekum/a_generation_of_american_men_give_up_on_college_i/hbx0xr3/

For decades longer than you have been alive, men have been being sold an expectation that is a lie and are increasingly finding out that it is just that: a lie. The evidence becomes clearer and clearer. The thing that men are supposed to be able to achieve slips further away from where the average man is. "There is a good thing here if you do X, Y, and Z," and they try their damnedest to do those things--succeed, even--and don't wind up at that good thing. It's depressing.

Over that same timespan, women have been another expectation, one that's more grounded in reality. It starts with the depressing state: things will suck for you unless you do X, Y, and Z. Doing these things is the only way you're going to have a chance, and that's not even guaranteed. You're already on the back foot, so any little bit you can move forward is a win....

How Church Sexual Abuse Cover-Ups Succeed

http://christianitytoday.activehosted.com/index.php?action=social&chash=512fc3c5227f637e41437c999a2d3169.6958&s=d3a5f9608762114a06a793cd9b7a34d9

A second dynamic at work in various sorts of institutional cover-ups is that many of them count on co-opting or destroying those who can see or who have experienced what’s happening. Some people enjoy conflict and controversy—maybe especially so in an institution built around a founding story of a “great battle.” Such people, who long to find a grand purpose or meaning in their lives, can then reenact the battles of the past over and over, with an ever-narrowing and ever more ridiculous definition of who gets to be the “liberals” or “the Catholics” or whatever the enemy used to be.

What’s especially sad about this is that usually these people are conscripted to become the very thing they once fought against. If, for instance, an institution was once adrift, moving theologically leftward while those in charge used “double speak” (talking one way in the pulpit and another in the seminar room), we sometimes find that a generation later, the very people who objected to it are doing the same thing. Their about-face is not about whether the Virgin Birth happened or whether faith in Christ is necessary for salvation but about whether blatant racism demands repentance or whether rape and sexual assault—clearly condemned in the inspired and inerrant Word of God—are just part of a “liberal” #MeToo culture to which the church should not listen.

Just as some people in some traditions say, “Pay no attention to our theological heterodoxy, because if you do, the institution will be hurt,” in the fullness of time, people in other traditions can say, “Pay no attention to our set of theological heresies or our crimes or our cover-ups; otherwise, the institution will be hurt.” If we are in an institution where we have been taught literally since birth that our tradition is God’s best and only hope for reaching the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ, that argument often works.

What the Never Trumpers Want Now

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/never-trumpers-democrats-now/620055/

Once, Republicans and conservatives defined themselves as the party of life. Human life was so precious that the law should require women unwillingly pregnant to give birth anyway. Then came a deadly pandemic, and suddenly “life” became less important than protecting the spring-break revenues of hotels and restaurants, or indulging the delusions and fantasies of people who got their scientific information from YouTube videos and Reddit threads. And again dissident Republicans and conservatives were left to wonder: What do we have in common with you?

This process of estrangement builds on itself.

I thought we believed X, says the dissident. You’re a bunch of hypocrites for now saying Y. You’re betraying everything I thought we believed.

No, reply the majority. We always deep down believed that Y was more important than X. We never before had to choose. Now we do. And if you choose X over Y, it’s you who are betraying us.

The leader of a Hawaii anti-vax group caught COVID-19 and almost died. He now supports vaccines and wants his group's protests to stop.

https://news.yahoo.com/leader-hawaii-anti-vax-group-112003358.html

Wikoff said he previously believed vaccine mandates and passports seemed "over-the-top totalitarian control" because he didn't believe the disease was that serious, Hawai News Now reported.

"We were told the COVID virus was not that deadly, it was nothing more than a little flu," he told Hawaii News Now.

"Well, I can tell you: it's more than the little flu."

Wikoff's change of position came after he was hospitalized after catching COVID-19 in August, per Hawaii News Now. "I was afraid I was going to die," he told the outlet.

He urged people to stop participating in the protests and rallies his group was organizing, including those taking part outside of Hawaii's Lieutenant Governor Josh Green's house, Hawaii News Now reported.

"Before I thought Josh Green was exaggerating the situation and after my experience, he sounds very rational to me," he said, per Hawaii News Now. 

Glitch Reveals Ballot Choices of N.Y.C. Voters, Including Mayor’s Son

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/nyregion/voters-dante-deblasio.html

The researchers were able to identify the voting records of the individual New York City voters by cross-referencing the New York State voter file — a list of every registered voter, whether they voted and their address — with the board’s cast-vote records, which contained hundreds of voting precincts where just one ballot was cast.

Those precincts included that of Mr. de Blasio, who is registered at Gracie Mansion, and that of Mr. Steel, a registered Republican who lives in NoHo, a heavily Democratic part of Manhattan.

Memo shows Trump lawyer's six-step plan for Pence to overturn the election

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/20/politics/trump-pence-election-memo/index.html

The Eastman memo laid out a six-step plan for Pence to overturn the election for Trump, which included throwing out the results in seven states because they allegedly had competing electors. In fact, no state had actually put forward an alternate slate of electors -- there were merely Trump allies claiming without any authority to be electors.

Under Eastman's scheme, Pence would have declared Trump the winner with more Electoral College votes after the seven states were thrown out, at 232 votes to 222. Anticipating "howls" from Democrats protesting the overturning of the election, the memo proposes, Pence would instead say that no candidate had reached 270 votes in the Electoral College. That would throw the election to the House of Representatives, where each state would get one vote. Since Republicans controlled 26 state delegations, a majority could vote for Trump to win the election. 

‘I can still feel it’: Groundbreaking arm amputation surgery makes a ‘phantom’ hand seem real

https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/14/i-can-still-feel-it-new-arm-amputation-surgery-makes-a-phantom-hand-seem-real/

Since the first of the new amputation procedures was performed in 2016, 30 patients have had the surgery performed on one or both legs — including U.S. Paralympian Morgan Stickney, a double amputee who just won two swimming gold medals in Tokyo. Their results show that Majetich’s experience is not uncommon.

“What we’ve found are a number of distinct advantages of the AMI amputation,” said Hugh Herr, an MIT Media Lab professor, using the shorthand for the procedure he jointly developed with Carty. (AMI stands for agonist-antagonist myoneural interface, which refers to the joining of opposing, agonist and antagonist, muscles.) Herr said the AMI patients have felt less pain in their residual limbs, and their limbs don’t atrophy, as is typical after a standard amputation, resulting in a poor fit and pain when using a prosthesis.

In a study published last December, MIT postdoctoral fellow Shriya Srinivasan and colleagues in Herr’s group reported that when AMI patients moved their phantom ankle, a part of the brain associated with proprioception lit up on functional MRI scans just as much as it did in patients with intact limbs. This suggests the surgery fully restored patients’ ability to sense their limbs’ position and motion, a result Herr called “truly remarkable.” In people who had standard amputations, activation of this region was significantly reduced.

The Other Afghan Women

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women

Shakira was bewildered by the Americans’ choice of allies. “Was this their plan?” she asked me. “Did they come to bring peace, or did they have other aims?” She insisted that her husband stop taking resin to the Sangin market, so he shifted his trade south, to Gereshk. But he returned one afternoon with the news that this, too, had become impossible. Astonishingly, the United States had resuscitated the Ninety-third Division—and made it its closest partner in the province. The Division’s gunmen again began stopping travellers on the bridge and plundering what they could. Now, however, their most profitable endeavor was collecting bounties offered by the U.S.; according to Mike Martin, a former British officer who wrote a history of Helmand, they earned up to two thousand dollars per Taliban commander captured.

This posed a challenge, though, because there were hardly any active Taliban to catch. “We knew who were the Taliban in our village,” Shakira said, and they weren’t engaged in guerrilla warfare: “They were all sitting at home, doing nothing.” A lieutenant colonel with U.S. Special Forces, Stuart Farris, who was deployed to the area at that time, told a U.S. Army historian, “There was virtually no resistance on this rotation.” So militias like the Ninety-third Division began accusing innocent people. In February, 2003, they branded Hajji Bismillah—the Karzai government’s transportation director for Gereshk, responsible for collecting tolls in the city—a terrorist, prompting the Americans to ship him to Guantánamo. With Bismillah eliminated, the Ninety-third Division monopolized the toll revenue.

What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction

What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction is the 11th lessons learned report issued by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The report examines the past two decades of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. It details how the U.S. government struggled to develop a coherent strategy, understand how long the reconstruction mission would take, ensure its projects were sustainable, staff the mission with trained professionals, account for the challenges posed by insecurity, tailor efforts to the Afghan context, and understand the impact of programs. There have been bright spots—such as lower child mortality rates, increases in per capita GDP, and increased literacy rates. But after spending 20 years and $145 billion trying to rebuild Afghanistan, the U.S. government has many lessons it needs to learn. Implementing these critical lessons will save lives and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse in Afghanistan, and in future reconstruction missions elsewhere around the world.

You’re Not Imagining It: Biden Is Building His Team Slower Than Recent Presidents

https://time.com/6089083/joe-biden-nominations/

Getting infrastructure through Congress has been front and center to Biden’s first 200 days in office, which passed us by on Saturday. It also helps explain why other parts of his Administration are moving so slowly, in particular Senate confirmation of his nominees to top government jobs. Biden has put forward approximately the same number of nominees at this juncture as predecessors George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and markedly more than Donald Trump. Yet Biden is badly lagging all three in terms of getting them approved, according to a new analysis.

In all, 1,200 federal gigs require Senate sign-off under the body’s “advise and consent” power, from the big ones like Cabinet secretaries to lesser known posts like overseeing the quality of life for residents of the Mississippi Delta region.

At this point in his presidency, Bush had nominated 448 people to those positions, Obama had nominated 430 and Trump had nominated 308. Biden stands at 400. But the Senate at this point had confirmed 65% of Bush’s picks, 71% of Obama’s and 42% of Trump. Biden’s success rate is parked at 32%.

The Ides of August

https://www.sarahchayes.org/post/the-ides-of-august

I reported for a month or so, then passed off to Steve Inskeep, now Morning Edition host. Within another couple of months, I was back, not as a reporter this time, but to try actually to do something. I stayed for a decade. I ran two non-profits in Kandahar, living in an ordinary house and speaking Pashtu, and eventually went to work for two commanders of the international troops, and then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (You can read about that time, and its lessons, in my first two books, The Punishment of Virtue and Thieves of State.)  

From that standpoint — speaking as an American, as an adoptive Kandahari, and as a former senior U.S. government official — here are the key factors I see in today’s climax of a two-decade long fiasco: 

Scents & Sensibility

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/12/scents-sensibility/306443/

How the author helped Afghans build a thriving soap and body-oil business—and overcame the incompetence of America’s aid establishment

Killing Tibetans Is Cool Now in Woke Hollywood

https://www.asleepthinking.com/blog/killing-tibetans-is-cool-now-in-woke-hollywood

Now, China being a totalitarian state controlled by a one-party mafia, they are particular about what gets seen in their country. If you offend them, they don’t just ban your film, they ban your slate of films for the next five years as they did to Disney for releasing Kundun.

Every American studio makes their films now understanding that reality. You no longer celebrate the Dali Llama. You go out of your way to genuflect to the Chinese Communist Party.

A foreign government is having their way with American movies and you the movie goer barely notice it

Remember when the British actress Tilda Swinton was cast as The Ancient One in Doctor Strange (2016) and woke Twitter was up in arms about Hollywood white-washing a role meant for an Asian?

Well, the actual reality was more insidious. The Ancient One was a Tibetan male which was offensive to the Chinese censors (you are not supposed to acknowledge that Tibet is a thing). The studio made her a white woman to avoid any controversy (see here).

Red Dawn (2012) was originally made to depict a Chinese invasion given they are our current major geopolitical adversary (the original made in the 80s depicted a Soviet invasion). Upon seeing the final product, the studio had a panic attack and did an extensive series of post-production digital edits to change the villain to North Korea (see here). You were none the wiser when you watched the film.

The Uncomfortable Truth of Biden’s Rapid Afghanistan Withdrawal

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-uncomfortable-truth-of-bidens-rapid-afghanistan-withdrawal

The Biden Administration’s rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan has spurred a debate over the moral responsibility that America bears to its partners in a failed foreign intervention. Deciding who receives help getting out and why will only grow more urgent as the completion of the U.S. withdrawal approaches, on August 31st. Across Afghanistan, thousands of local civilians have participated in one of the largest efforts to rebuild a nation since the Second World War, establishing thousands of schools and health clinics, along with hundreds of human-rights groups and local-language news outlets. What once was a well-paying, steady job contributing to the nation’s future has now become a dangerous liability. Younger Afghans embraced the use of new technologies to help modernize their society; cell phones, social media and cable television—from “American Idol”-like singing competitions to twenty-four-hour news channels—exploded in popularity. But now that online visibility makes it easier for the Taliban to track and find those who embraced the American-led effort. “We are just a Google away,” an Afghan working at a European embassy told me. “Search, everybody can find you.”

Georgy_K_Zhukov on the evil of slavery

 When your teacher says that slave owners were "nice", he means that they used the whip less, or perhaps that when they did feel it necessary, they allowed the wounds to be dressed immediately. What he doesn't mean is that they recognized their enslaved persons as full human beings. The mere fact that they owned another person at all gives that the lie, as in doing so they inherently participated in a system that was perpetuated the dehumanization of their human property.

And to be sure, the slaves themselves were aware of this, even if the enslavers might be oblivious. In the recollections of his period of enslavement, Frederick Douglass remembered how his owner would occasionally give him a penny or two (I've written more here on slaves and property), but as Douglass relates:

I always felt worse for having received any thing; for I feared that the giving me a few cents would ease his conscience, and make him feel himself to be a pretty honourable sort of robber.

 

Biden (and Trump) did the right thing on Afghanistan

 https://www.slowboring.com/p/afghan-war

Since the Taliban was never the internationally recognized government of Afghanistan, one totally plausible approach to 9/11 would have been a fast military action aimed at killing top al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, putting the Afghan opposition coalition back in charge of Kabul, and then basically leaving them to figure things out.

Another approach would have been to try to really commit wholeheartedly to the U.S.-led reconstruction of Afghanistan — to go all-in on what was called at the time “nation-building.”

The Bush administration didn’t want to take what was behind door number two for basically two reasons. One was that they were skeptical of the odds of success in a massive rebuilding effort. But the second and more important reason is that they wanted to invade Iraq. When 9/11 happened, American military preparedness was based around the 1-4-2-1 doctrine. The first 1 was the defense of the homeland. The 4 is to deter enemies in four key regional theaters. Then the 2-1 meant, to quote Fred Kaplan, that “the U.S. armed forces must have the strength to win swiftly in two near-simultaneous conflicts in those regions. The final 1 means that we must win one of those conflicts ‘decisively,’ toppling the enemy’s regime.”

So basically do a regime change operation in Iraq while also helping South Korea win a war against North Korea.

In other words, Bush had to choose. Either Iraq or Afghanistan could be War Number One, but they couldn’t both be. He chose Iraq. That should have implied taking the quick-and-dirty approach to the war in Afghanistan. But Osama bin Laden got away at Tora Bora, so the quick-and-dirty war lacked an emotionally and politically satisfying endpoint.

Given that context, he made a very fateful choice that has haunted us ever since. He adopted the expansive nation-building goal but deliberately turned the war into an economy of resources effort in order to devote maximum resources to War Number One against Saddam Hussein. But then of course he didn’t level with the public that this is what he was doing. And even though the war was sidelined in terms of American resources, it nevertheless was shot-through with maximalist goals.

Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live in Infamy

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/bidens-betrayal-of-afghans-will-live-in-infamy/619764/

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the 20-year debacle in Afghanistan—enough to fill a library of books. Perhaps the effort to rebuild the country was doomed from the start. But our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, staked their lives on us, is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided. The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency—and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden. 

You Can't Censor Away Extremism (or Any Other Problem)

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-cant-censor-away-extremism-or

Of all the pretense and hubris that regularly spools forth from the social justice crowd, probably the most deluded is their dogged belief that if some new laws restricting speech were to be passed, they would inevitably be the ones to choose who gets silenced and what they don’t get to say. This is from a group that constantly self-identifies as marginalized and othered, and yet they are certain that they will be the ones left on the throne to decide who gets to say what. Why? I have no idea. The cops like you as little as you like them, lefties. You really think they’re gonna enforce the hate speech law the way you want them to? You want to defund the police, you think they’re irredeemably racist, you think they’re all fascists at heart, but you also want to give them sweeping new powers to limit what people say? That’s… strange.

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.