Kanye

The woke media is going crazy over Kanye's MAGA support, producing article after article trying to decipher what's gone wrong with the guy. My counter: if you're upset with a pop star's political views, the problem is YOU. Not the other way around. Firstly, you're too invested in assigning meaning to a musician. Secondly, you've lost your way with the Trump derangement syndrome.

I'd bet money -- when Trump is gone, we will look back and be like "huh...that wasn't so bad. I don't know what all the fretting was about." Any takers?

Holding Up A Mirror To Intellectuals on the Left

My guess is they won't listen.

Being Woke

In my casual observation of wokeness, the woke always seem unhappy and depressed. Correlation / causation, I don't know...but it certainly ain't a good sales pitch. Even the Islamicists pitch a good afterlife.

The More Of Everything Problem

Smart.

So, before continuing down The More of Everything path, consider an alternative. Sometimes the answer is more of something. But often, a more relevant question is how well something is being done. Are you getting the most out of what you already have? What can be done to improve community cohesion today? To what extent are the existing pieces integrating in a productive way?

In my experience, the answer to these questions comes not from adding, but from activating and transforming. That makes it an issue of culture and mindset, and means that seemingly small changes in behavior—adopted widely and practiced consistently—can have a big impact on outcomes down the road. It's not always the big moves that get you where you need to go.

Unconscious Bias Training

According to a study, doesn't seem to work.

Also, already known to literally anyone who's ever had to sit through one.

Strong Counter

To building more housing.

Phillip Glass

A good read.

In those days you could work three days a week, maybe four sometimes, and you could live on that. It was the quickest and easiest way to make an honest living. I thought it was a pretty good deal. I didn’t have to teach any classes anywhere. I just drove the car and I got paid. I liked that. I had my independence, which was very important to me. But also, it didn’t take much time. 

But, look, the thing to remember is that life was financially much easier. Actually, for the young people trying to make a living today, part-time, it’s almost impossible.

When the history is written of this era, I think the thing people will notice are not the hysteria surrounding racial or gender injustices, but the cultural logic of careerism and what it is doing to the family and culture. People work to hard for too little and spend their time self medicating through drugs or entertainment or facebook.

Notice even the "radicals" accept this logic. All the radical feminists, etc, really just want more money and better jobs.

Yep

On the soullessness of careerist from Barbara Bush in 1990.

These seemingly anodyne, Hallmark-y words, when taken seriously, are the most subversive words that could be uttered, then or now, on a college campus—a place where subversive words are supposed to be prized and protected but often aren’t. Mrs. Bush’s subversion wasn’t a matter of left or right, or even of feminism or traditionalism. She cut much deeper, into an American faith that transcends political categories. 

This is the faith of careerism. For generations, career had been the guiding light of the bourgeois American male. Work came before family, even if work was done in service of family, as many men told themselves it was. The result was that fathers and mothers of the broad middle class lived separate lives: men at work, women at home to attend to domestic matters, kids above all. Mrs. Bush understood that this division of labor, enforced through countless social customs and economic arrangements, was manifestly unfair to women who wanted something different, and no decent person could object to dismantling the barriers that stood in the way of their ambitions. But in this otherwise admirable goal, Mrs. Bush suggested, the advocates of women’s equality overshot. They went beyond making materialism an option to making it an expectation, perhaps even mandatory. 

They fell for the great lie at the heart of American business and professional life as men had lived it: that a single-minded pursuit of professional success was the surest source of personal fulfillment. The lie was well known to be a lie. 

By 1990, we had already accumulated a vast literature about the soullessness of the modern corporation, the emotional poverty of “the organization man,” the terrible spiritual price paid for capitalist conformity. The best of the 1960s rebellion briefly understood this. But then came Reaganism, the valorization of the all-conquering market, the glorification of material advancement. When Mrs. Bush spoke to Wellesley’s class of 1990, many self-declared feminists had fallen hard for the unforgiving materialism of a liberal society and the market economy. Feminism itself got tangled up in a wan and desiccated view of what life is for. 

Well, that was then. It was always a “First World problem” anyway, as we call them nowadays. The debate is long behind us. The materialists won. We’re all careerists now, men and women alike. 

The enormous success of Sheryl Sandberg’s chilling Lean In is proof of that. For Sandberg, the worthiest goal in a well-lived life will be found in the steady march through the cubicles of corporate America straight into the CEO’s corner office, or as near to it as you can get. Power is the object—power as successful businessmen have always defined it: lots of money to spend, lots of subordinates to boss around, nice houses, nice vacations, work, work, work . . .

Starbucks

I'm not in a position to judge the situation, but as I writer, I am in a position to speculate.

If I were one of the two dudes who got asked by an employee to either buy something or leave, I would've bought something. I go to coffee shops all the time and overpay for shit for the right to hang out there. It's sort of the deal. Coffee costs $2. Once the employees asked multiple times, I would've left, since if I got this far, I must've REALLY not wanted anything. By the time the police came, I would've definitely left before getting arrested because I'm not stupid. (Yes, it's stupid and self destructive to get arrested over this.)

If I were the manager or a store employee and two guys are sitting in Starbucks not ordering something, I would probably not call the cops on them. I'd just let it go unless this was an ongoing problem that was hurting business. And don't rule this possibility out - my local Starbucks, on occasion, is a bit homeless heavy. Let's be honest - that's not a pleasant vibe. I'd go elsewhere.

I Can Confirm This

SF tourism czar speaks out against the city turning into a shithole (an expensive shithole).

$1,000 Bet

I'd bet anyone a cool grand that the anonymous racist graffiti at Depauw is a hoax by some of the folks protesting it.

Also related: this is a new chapter in the absurdly dumb protests in our country - now they are protesting an event the protestors openly acknowledge has nothing to do with the very thing they are protesting. As dumb as the Starbucks protests are, at least there is some connection to be made (although one manager calling the cops isn't really the fault of every single Starbucks, is it?)

Weddings

This seems like a spoof: woman goes broke attending 20 weddings in 4 years.

Logging

TV: Peaky Blinders, S. 4

Binged this weekend. Great, pulpy fun. That's a huge compliment.

Russians

They are talking retaliation against the West.

Unwise.

The Russians are great fighters, but so were the Germans and the Japanese. And the thing about dictactorships are that taking out one man and all his support is a lot easier than defeating an entire nation, especially with the technology available today.

The Revolution Eats Its Own

Starbucks protest. It's easy to hand over other peoples money, space, and labor. Harder when it's your own.

Investigation Into Broward County

This is really interesting and worth reading. Don't see why this isn't the national story instead of the NRA.

Let's Get GRRM On It

The Syria situation is too complex to model. Someone should hire authors and screenwriters to develop various scenarios. We are better suited than social scientists.

Logging

TV: Superstore

Not bad, not good. I chuckled at times and cringed at others.

Molly Ringwald

Publicly calling out a dead man who made her star by "standards" that weren't obviously not around when he was alive. Utterly despicable on human being to human being level. And yet, totally woke.

Housing

Wells numbers suggest bad news for housing market going forward. Although we should take ZeroHedge with a grain of salt because the sky is always falling over there.

I'm of two minds re: housing in Coastal California. On the one hand, the prices are high because of supply issues that I don't see going away. On the other hand, incomes aren't rising as fast as prices and something that can't go on, won't. So that fact goes some of the way to explain how a small 1% rise in rates totally kills new mortgage applications: new buyers are pushing their housing costs to the limit.

What breaks first?