July 12, 2025

July 11, 2025

OPEN THREAD: We are here to save the Erf. E – R – F.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WELCOME TO D.C., MR. OPM DIRECTOR: Scott Kupor is a Silicon Valley venture capital giant who will be sworn-in Monday as President Donald Trump’s Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM). As I report in The Washington Stand today, Kupor is undertaking one of the most challenging but least heralded agency chief positions in the nation’s capital.

Because OPM manages the federal bureaucracy, people on the Right mostly just ignore it, which is a profoundly significant mistake. Recalcitrant federal bureaucrats have a thousand ways of slowing down, and outright subverting popular policies voters put a president in the Oval Office to carry out.

The career civil service is supposed to be professional, objective and non-partisan in carrying out presidential policies. When there’s a Democrat in the Oval Office, that’s what happens. And regardless who is president, 95 percent+ of the campaign contributions from unionized federal workers go to Democrats.

But put a Reagan, Bush or Trump there, and legions of costly, time-consuming and often nonsensical roadblocks suddenly appear out of nowhere. How Kupor performs at OPM will have a great bearing on how much success Trump has in reforming the federal government in the remainder of his second term.

Posted at 7:08 pm by Mark Tapscott

IT’S COME TO THIS: Namaste, fascists! The racist history of yoga.

[Stewart Home, the author of Fascist Yoga] pursues his promise of fascist yoga to the Free State of Fiume in 1920. After the First World War, Fiume (today the Croatian city of Rijeka) was seized by a one-eyed, cocaine-snorting sex-addict novelist and former soldier called Gabriele D’Annunzio. He established a regime with all the symbols and violence of fascism, if not the complete ideology. There were balcony addresses and Roman salutes and the troops guarding D’Annunzio used the bellicose slogan “I don’t give a damn”, which was later co-opted by Benito Mussolini. Those around D’Annunzio in Fiume formed a group called YOGA, Home says. They were mystics and nudists who danced and hugged trees and believed in a spiritual hierarchy based on the Hindu caste system. The group emblazoned its shortlived weekly paper with swastikas — they believed the swastika to be a symbol of their Aryan ancestors after it was discovered scrawled on ancient artefacts. The Nazis used it for the same reason.

Like YOGA, the Nazis also twisted Hinduism. They tried to use it to justify the Holocaust. Home shows how Heinrich Himmler, the chief planner of the Final Solution, was influenced by a German Indologist called Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who was enchanted by Hinduism. Hauer founded the German Faith Movement, which sought to promote a new religion, a fusion of paganism and Nazi ideas. When writing in 1934 about the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu text, Hauer said it called on men to meet the hereditary or “innate duty” demanded of them by their caste and fate, even if that deed is steeped in guilt. Himmler believed that his caste — the SS — were called upon by fate to exterminate Jews.

The weakness of Home’s book is there is no clean link between yoga and fascism. There is no record of Mussolini or Hitler ever doing a downward dog. This mostly doesn’t matter because so much of the history is strange and interesting, but sometimes Home stretches his thesis too far. A few pages are wasted trying to prove that Ezra Pound’s fascism was “very much entwined” with yoga. As evidence, Home relies on a sign that Pound once put in the window of a bookshop he owned that said something or other about marijuana and communism — it’s thin and convoluted evidence.

Still though, considering yoga’s been practiced by Nazis, Italian Fascists, Aleister Crowley, and more recently, guys wearing man buns, why take chances?

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

MORE NUKES IS GOOD NUKES: Japan’s Yoroi Reactor Ushers In a New Era of Micro-Nuclear Power. “Japan has quietly taken a radical step in nuclear energy innovation with the deployment of the Yoroi Reactor — a compact, self-contained nuclear power unit designed to operate autonomously in remote or disaster-prone regions. Unlike conventional reactors, Yoroi requires no towers, no operating crew, and no on-site refueling for up to a decade.”

Posted at 4:54 pm by Stephen Green

FRISCO STILL FLUMMOXED BY FLOPPY DISKS: Muni says it’s ready to modernize S.F.’s subway, by tossing the floppy disks that control it.

San Francisco transportation officials have secured $41 million to modernize the city’s subway, chiefly to overhaul a train control system that still runs on floppy disks.

The money, awarded last month by the California Transportation Commission, came with rules attached. It’s targeted at efforts to manage congestion, including by making transit more reliable, and the funds must be directed toward capital infrastructure.

For leaders of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the timing seemed critical. Faced with a $322 million deficit next year, the agency has paused some projects and trimmed costs wherever possible to avoid drastically slashing service. Despite the obvious strain, SFMTA kept plodding ahead with an ambitious and desperately needed upgrade: a new $700 million renovation of Muni Metro train control.

Jokes about the antiquated technology that runs Muni’s subway have long made the rounds among riders. Automated train control surely made sense when San Francisco officials installed it in 1998, enabling computers to evenly space trains as they rolled underground between Embarcadero and West Portal stations, and later, in the Central Subway from Moscone Center to Chinatown-Rose Pak Station. Yet the software, stored on floppy disks that have to be loaded each morning, has passed its expiration date. Because automated train control transmits signals via loop cable wires, communication is slow and easily disrupted.

Flashback: “Shades of the New Yorker cover from 2013, which showed Obama with Gordon Gekko’s brick-sized cell phone and Kathleen Sebelius crossing her fingers while Jay Carney nervously inserted a five-inch floppy disk into the TRS-80-era Obamacare server. Not to mention the speeches that Newt Gingrich was giving during the heady Contract With America days of 1994 and 1995, when he would hold up in one hand a vacuum tube, and in the other a microchip. As he explained, vacuum tubes were still in use in some FAA-regulated Air Traffic Control towers in America.” As I wrote back in 2019 responding to a Bloomberg News article that exclaimed:

San Francisco rarely conjures images of creaky, decades-old technology, but that’s what’s running a key swath of its government, as well as those of cities across the U.S.

Now who’s being naive, Kay? When I lived in Silicon Valley, the numerous power outages were a reminder that the businesses trying to bring you the 21st century were reliant upon a power grid that, thanks to the NIMBY nature of Bay Area leftists, hadn’t been upgraded since the 1960s heyday of Pat Brown, Jerry’s dad.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IS ANYONE SURPRISED?

UPDATE: Harsh, but fair:

So Trump’s maneuvered Democrats into standing up for Dem donors who run illegal pot farms using child slave labor. How does he keep doing this?

Posted at 4:06 pm by Glenn Reynolds