Amerika

• The 2006 Origins of the Lockdown Idea

  Thus did some of the most highly trained and experienced experts on epidemics warn with biting rhetoric against everything that the advocates of lockdown proposed. It was not even a real-world idea in the first place and showed no actual knowledge of viruses and disease mitigation. Again, the idea was born of a high-school science experiment using agent-based modelling techniques having nothing at all to do with real life, real science, or real medicine.

• More Than Just Food

  We need to remember why we grow things, and why we feel a deep connection with the land and with our people. Southern Agrarianism is very much a cultural matter, and our culture has always placed a high value on beauty. We see it in the art, the architecture, and the music of our European heritage. It is an important part of who we are. To that end, we need to remember that there is an aesthetic, almost spiritual, aspect to raising our own food.

• The Risks of Homeschooling

  “From the beginning of compulsory education in this country, we have thought of the government as having some right to educate children so that they become active, productive participants in the larger society,” she says. This involves in part giving children the knowledge to eventually get jobs and support themselves. “But it’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints,” she says.

• The ‘80s Core of the New Right

  It is well documented that ‘80s kids were a latchkey generation. Boomer parents were so self-absorbed that they scarcely remembered that they had kids at all, and couldn’t be bothered to do much actual parenting. We were the first generation to experience large numbers of divorces and the rise of illegitimacy, therefore many of us grew up in broken, single-parent homes. What all this means is that popular culture took on a much greater importance in our lives than it might have otherwise. As GenX rapper Slug from the group Atmosphere put it, “My best friend was my TV / Game shows and cartoons / substituted for puppies, rainbows, and balloons.”

• How Reddit’s Quarantine Of The_Donald Presaged Social Media’s Control Over Information

  All the other social media companies have done this as well: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google Pinterest, even the knitting community Ravelry. Each identify and muzzle the conservative members in their midst and enforce leftist conformity.

• America the Wuss – From Rugged Pioneers to Cowering Sheep

  How did we get here? Was it the feminization of America, whereby we’ve been taught to spurn what used to be called “manly virtues”? In an era of transgendered rights, micro-aggressions and drag-queen story hours, manhood is out of fashion.

• Filthy-Rich Harvard Isn’t The Only University Taxpayers Shouldn’t Bail Out

  Worse, federally financed production of college grads is crowding out those with high school diplomas and certificates. Researchers have noted an increase in the number of job advertisements that require college degrees, even as the necessary skills for those jobs remain similar to when they merely required high school diplomas.

  We called this one.

• It’s Time To Let Go Of Commuter Culture

  Jackson concludes quite forcefully that this was not a market-driven process of people voting with their feet for a preferred way of life, but the result of a massive, nationwide social engineering project with the full weight of the federal government tipping the scales. Since Jackson’s book was published in 1985, his findings have been reinforced by generations of urban studies historians.

  No, it was diversity causing white flight from the cities.

• Coronavirus and the smell of Saul Alinsky

  “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which),” Alinsky said, “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

• The unbearable pettiness of the Washington press corps

  Many millions of Americans are watching these briefings and seeing firsthand just how rude and disrespectful most of the “reporters” in the room are. There may be a few who show respect and are interested in learning something. The rest are mere little yappy dogs trying to nip at Trump’s ankles and getting nowhere. He skillfully exposes them for who and what they are: ignorant and noxious.

• A meme by a beer thirsty Helsinki subway driver escalates quickly

  During some unusually warm weather in early May 2016 a Helsinki Subway driver put the text “OISPA KALJAA” to the display in the Metro train.

  The term is a meme that refers loosely translates to “I wish I had beer” and was a common meme in Finland in 2015 and early 2016. The short version “OISPA” works just as well.

• Will the coronavirus make permanent our diminishing need for human contact?

  Long before the virus’s arrival, social distancing was becoming a way of life in my native South Korea, as it was around a globe increasingly accustomed to same-day shipping, on-demand service apps and more streamed entertainment than one could watch in a lifetime. The precision and convenience of drop-down menus and electronic payments has taken the place of in-person transactions; the allure of algorithm-optimized content and infinitely replenishing social media has come to trump the less sure bet of flesh-and-blood company.

• The Rise and Fall of Labor Unions In The U.S.

  But the biggest issue by far in the eyes of the decision-makers was inflation, and behind inflation stood their beliefs about unions being the chief cause of inflation, especially in the construction, heavy metals, and automobile industries…This was especially the view of executives who managed companies rushing to complete new factories, because wages and fringe benefits for construction workers had increased by 10% between June 1968, and June 1969. Wage increases in plant construction also contributed to a rise in housing prices due to the fact that the unionized workers who built residential housing insisted on the same wage and benefit scales established in industrial construction.

• AI suggests Earth has had fewer mass extinctions than we thought

  “The mid-late Devonian diversity decrease is still very clear, but it is spread through the whole time and not concentrated in a single mass extinction,” says palaeontologist Richard Bambach, now retired, who argued in a 2004 paper that there was no late Devonian mass extinction.

• This Is How Reaganism and Thatcherism End

  The new national conservatism, at least as articulated in Rome, is very different from Reaganism and Thatcherism. The starting point is that European integration and American hegemony are both evil, and that universal ideals like human rights are a dangerous ideology. These, in fact, are arguments made in Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, a work that synthesizes biblical history, the writings of John Locke, and contemporary politics into a caricature of a political philosophy for our times.

• An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter

  Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place.

• Economists grapple with rising American mortality

  A growing share of middle-aged white Americans, especially those without college degrees, are dying from suicide and drug and alcohol use. At first it seemed possible to hope that the troubling rise in death rates would reverse as the economy recovered from the financial crisis. Instead, mortality has risen further—a standing indictment of American society.

• Scientists Uncover a Never-Before-Seen Type of Signal Occurring in The Human Brain

  This is the logical underpinnings of our brain – ripples of voltage that can be communicated collectively in two forms: either an AND message (if x and y are triggered, the message is passed on); or an OR message (if x or y is triggered, the message is passed on).

• Civic Religion and the Secular Jew

  Most Jews, like Sanders, are not involved in institutional religious life; yet for many such “unaffiliated” Jews, Jewishness remains an integral part of their identities. The binary of theism vs. atheism is likewise unhelpful in understanding Jewish identity. Judaism, unlike Christianity, is not a strictly creedal religion—that is, a religion that requires belief in a fundamental dogma—and many Jews report feeling strongly connected to Jewish peoplehood, culture, and history without necessarily believing in God.

• 5 reasons we don’t write code like we used to

  The new so-called “serverless” option promises to let us write the most essential logic and be finished, but we’re not there yet. Sure, writing the functions is simpler, but the rest of the time we’re wrestling with configuration options. We spend hours writing hundreds of lines of YAML, spelling out decision after decision, but for some reason that isn’t considered “coding.”

• End the GOP

  Donald Trump is not a departure from the values defining the Republican Party, but the culmination of its efforts to secure power in this country. The question before us is not how much more the Republican Party might be willing to tolerate from the president but how much more we are willing to tolerate from the Republican Party.

• Embattled scientists publish study linking (surprise) diesel exhaust and cancer

  So it is not entirely surprising that a landmark new study involving US miners has identified sharply higher cancer rates in workers exposed to high levels of diesel exhaust. But the study is more comprehensive and apparently robust than those that have come before, and it comes as at least one major scientific organization prepares to reassess the link between diesel exhaust and cancer. Perhaps it was the fear of this exact scenario that led a coalition of industrial interests to wage a 17-year legal and political battle against government scientists conducting the study — a battle that now appears to have outlived its purpose thanks to a 29 February ruling from the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

• How Many Serial Killers are in the United States? One Scientist Believes It Could Be Thousands

  As for Hargrove’s estimate that 2,000 serial killers are still at large in the United States, he says it’s the number he came to after analyzing data available. Hargrove told The New Yorker that according to the FBI, 1,400 murders remain unsolved but are linked to other killings through DNA. That’s only slightly above 2% of murders investigated by the FBI.

• From Wehrmacht executioner to college diversity icon: An Ohio professor’s secret past

  Under interrogation by agents of Liechtenstein’s security police, Michael Rogers, then still known under his Russian name Michael Rogatchevsky, freely admitted his service as an Oberleutnant (senior officer) in Holmston-Smyslovsky’s Wehrmacht forces. He recounted deserting from the Soviet Army together with more than two dozen other men, in response to dangerous punitive missions they were given to fulfill as a punishment for previously failing to follow what he said were unrealistic Red Army orders.

Tags: linkpost, outliers