GET WOKE, GO BROKE? Sexual harassment training, a new trans-inclusive policy, and (in Ollie North’s old office!) Muslim prayer rugs. In Roger Ailes’s old haunts [at Fox News], it’s not the ’50s anymore.

What could go wrong?

BREAKING NEWS FROM 1919: Even Architecture Has Been Overrun by Politically Correct Babbling.

An article published by the April 2017 American Institute of Architects Journal asks: Should architects step into the political ring? The writer, Chris Bentley, recalls the “March for Science,” which was supposed to be non-partisan but wound up being a protest against President Trump. He asks: “Can a March for Architects be far behind?”

The March for Architects may not be here, but architectural PC culture is alive and well.

One need look no further than the city of Chicago to get wind of current trends. Keefer Dunn, a Chicago architect who calls himself an “architectural worker” (that’s a Marxist with a bricks-and-mortar accent), writes: “Architects must reach beyond the profession and locate their activism in the context of mass movements.” Dunn adds: “There is no such thing as an activist architecture, only activist architects.”

Which has been true ever since Walter Gropius founded Germany’s Weimar-era Bauhaus design school in 1919. Both Gropius and the Bauhaus’ last director, Mies van der Rohe, were members of the socialist Novembergruppe of radical artists in the 1920s. Both men, as Jonathan Petropoulos wrote in his 2015 book, Artists Under Hitler, were eager to remain in Germany and work with Weimar’s National Socialist successors, if only their leader hadn’t loathed modernist architecture, in part for his own failures as an artist, and in part for populist reasons.

But in the meantime, as the late Tom Wolfe wrote in From Bauhaus to Our House regarding the Weissenhof Estate project (or Weissenhofsiedlung in German)  that Mies chaired in 1927, bringing in modernist architects from throughout Europe to design ultra-modern, ultra-nonbourgeois worker housing for Stuttgart, and a smaller development, Cité Frugès, in Pessac, France, that Corbusier built in 1924: 

It was as if a new international style were in the wind. The truth was that the internal mechanism of the compound competition, the everlasting reductionism— nonbourgeois!— had forced them all within the same tiny cubicle, which kept shrinking, like the room in Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Short of giving up the divine game altogether, they couldn’t possibly have differed from one another in any way visible to another living soul on this earth save another compound architect outfitted, like a cryptographer, with Theory glasses.

And how did worker housing look? It looked nonbourgeois within an inch of its life: the flat roofs, with no cornices, sheer walls, with no window architraves or raised lintels, no capitals or pediments, no colors, just the compound shades, white, beige, gray, and black. The interiors had no crowns or coronets, either. They had pure white rooms, stripped, purged, liberated, freed of all casings, cornices, covings, crown moldings (to say the least), pilasters, and even the ogee edges on tabletops and the beading on drawers. They had open floor plans, ending the old individualistic, bourgeois obsession with privacy. There was no wallpaper, no “drapes,” no Wilton rugs withflowers on them, no lamps with fringed shades and bases that look like vases or Greek columns, no doilies, knickknacks, mantelpieces, headboards, or radiator covers. Radiator coils were left bare as honest, abstract, sculptural objects. And no upholstered furniture with “pretty” fabrics. Furniture was made of Honest Materials in natural tones: leather, tubular steel, bentwood, cane, canvas; the lighter— and harder— the better. And no more “luxurious” rugs and carpets. Gray or black linoleum was the ticket.

And how did the workers like worker housing? Oh, they complained, which was their nature at this stage of history. At Pessac the poor creatures were frantically turning Corbu’s cool cubes inside out trying to make them cozy and colorful. But it was understandable. As Corbu himself said, they had to be “reeducated” to comprehend the beauty of “the Radiant City” of the future. In matters of taste, the architects acted as the workers’ cultural benefactors. There was no use consulting them directly, since, as Gropius had pointed out, they were as yet “intellectually undeveloped.” In fact, here was the great appeal of socialism to architects in the 1920s. Socialism was the political answer, the great yea-saying, to the seemingly outrageous and impossible claims of the compound architect, who insisted that the clientkeep his mouth shut. Under socialism, the client was the worker. Alas, the poor devil was only just now rising up out of the ooze. In the meantime, the architect, the artist, and the intellectual would arrange his life for him. To use Stalin’s phrase, they would be the engineers of his soul. In his apartment blocks in Berlin for employees of the Siemens factory, the soul engineer Gropius decided that the workers should be spared high ceilings and wide hallways, too, along with all of the various outmoded objects and decorations. High ceilings and wide hallways and “spaciousness” in all forms were merely more bourgeois grandiosity, expressed in voids rather than solids. Seven-foot ceilings and thirty-six-inch-wide hallways were about right for … re-creating the world.

How very little has changed in the century since — because “Progressivism” is where time stands still.

BREAKING A GLASS CEILING, WHICH IS MORE THAN HILLARY EVER DID: Senate confirms Haspel to head CIA.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Bullshitization Of Academic Life. “In most universities nowadays — and this seems to be true almost everywhere — academic staff find themselves spending less and less time studying, teaching, and writing about things, and more and more time measuring, assessing, discussing, and quantifying the way in which they study, teach, and write about things (or the way in which they propose to do so in the future).”

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TIME TO SQUEEZE IRAN’S VIOLENT AYATOLLAHS: Remember the Iranian opposition Green Movement protests that began in 2009, the ones Obama was slow to support?

In 2010, the Iranian regime brutally suppressed the Green Movement.

However, the quiet gripes and grim faces, the bitter jokes about robes and beards and theft, and the internet complaints of food prices—all tell-tale signs of deep dissatisfaction with the regime—never disappeared.

A bit more:

The Iranian regime faces increasingly grim prospects. American political and economic sanctions wounded Iran, and oil price warfare waged by Saudi Arabia, Arab states of the Persian Gulf, and U.S. frackers further increased Iranian pain. The resulting economic stresses have produced a currency crisis.

Trump ditched Obama’s “nuclear deal” at a ripe time. My latest Observer essay. Hope you’ll check it out.

DAVID FRENCH ON HOW LEFTY INSTITUTIONS ARE CESSPITS OF SEXUAL ABUSE:

I truly don’t think the Left understands how the relentless drumbeat of sexual scandal looks to Americans outside the progressive bubble. Left-dominated quarters of American life — Hollywood, the media, progressive politics — have been revealed to be havens for the worst sort of ghouls, and each scandal seems to be accompanied by two words that deepen American cynicism and make legions of conservative Americans roll their eyes at the Left’s moral arguments: “Everyone knew.”

Let’s put this in the clearest possible terms: For years, as Hollywood positioned itself as America’s conscience and as the media lauded its commitment to “social justice,” it was harboring, protecting, and indeed promoting truly dreadful human beings as leaders and taste-makers. Progressive politicians who proclaimed support for women’s rights on Twitter were groping women on airplanes or punching them in the bedroom.

All this was happening at the precise time that the dominant argument — particularly against social conservatism — was that “you people are haters and bigots.” It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which conservative Americans have felt scolded and hectored. So how do you expect us to react when it’s revealed that all too many of the self-appointed moralists weren’t just the kind of preachers who’d run off with the secretary, they were the kind of monsters who’d press a button in their office, lock the secretary in the room, and assault her?

And again, people knew.

It was fine when they knew. It only became a problem when we did.

THE PROBLEM ISN’T THAT WOMEN MAKE TOO LITTLE, BUT THAT MEN MAKE TOO MUCH: Men should work less to close gender pay gap, says thinktank.

GOOGLE  EXPANDS LIST OF REASONS IT MAY DE-INDEX A WEB SITE:  When an administrative agency (like the FDA) finds that a site illegally distributes material that risks physical harm to consumers …

NORTH KOREA’S TART OF THE DEAL: My latest Creators Syndicate column.

OLD TWEETS BECOME A NEW WEAPON: My weekly column at The Daily Caller is up. Bonus (interview with the inimitable Scott Adams!)
(Bumped from this morning)

WW2 CLASH OF EGOS IN CHINA-BURMA-INDIA: Al Nofi reviews Stilwell and Mountbatten in Burma: Allies at War, 1943-1944. A short and insightful review of a book examining two key leaders in WW2’s neglected theater.

THE ATLANTIC KNOWS ITS SUBSCRIBERS: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy: The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

The skin colors of the nation’s elite student bodies are more varied now, as are their genders, but their financial bones have calcified over the past 30 years. In 1985, 54 percent of students at the 250 most selective colleges came from families in the bottom three quartiles of the income distribution. A similar review of the class of 2010 put that figure at just 33 percent. According to a 2017 study, 38 elite colleges—among them five of the Ivies—had more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent. In his 2014 book, Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz, a former English professor at Yale, summed up the situation nicely: “Our new multiracial, gender-neutral meritocracy has figured out a way to make itself hereditary.”

It’s an interesting piece, echoing some of the observations I made in The Judiciary’s Class War, and it also makes me think that the lefty war on “the 1%” was really intended as a distraction.

And if you want to reduce inequality, it’s probably time to abolish the Ivy League.

Though federal preemption of zoning laws might help: “The returns on (the right kind of) real estate have been so extraordinary that, according to some economists, real estate alone may account for essentially all of the increase in wealth concentration over the past half century. . . . It is well known by now that the immediate cause of the insanity is the unimaginable pettiness of backyard politics. Local zoning regulation imposes excessive restrictions on housing development and drives up prices. What is less well understood is how central the process of depopulating the economic core of the nation is to the intertwined stories of rising inequality and falling social mobility. Real-estate inflation has brought with it a commensurate increase in economic segregation. Every hill and dale in the land now has an imaginary gate, and it tells you up front exactly how much money you need to stay there overnight. Educational segregation has accelerated even more. . . . The traditional story of economic growth in America has been one of arriving, building, inviting friends, and building some more. The story we’re writing looks more like one of slamming doors shut behind us and slowly suffocating under a mass of commercial-grade kitchen appliances.”

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES AND THE BIKINI WAX: Transgender woman files human rights complaint against Windsor spa:

The owner of a local waxing spa is mounting a public campaign to clear the name of his business after he was served a human rights complaint for denying service to a transgender woman.

Jason Carruthers, the president of Mad Wax on Walker Road, said he was surprised at the legal move since he had explained to the complainant that the spa did not offer Brazilian wax services on male body parts.

“I have no male wax staff,” Carruthers said Friday. “We are not able to provide that service.”

A local transgender woman claims she was denied services based on her gender identity and gender expression and is seeking $50,000 for “immense harm to my dignity.”

The good news, such as it is, is that this is Canada, and the hierarchy of intersectional harm is a bit fuzzy in this case: “the female employee working that day was a practising Muslim who refrains from physical contact with males outside of her family.” And in an age of Me Too!, are we really arguing about whether a woman should be forced to groom the male genital area?

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: MS-13 Is Bad, Even if Trump Says So.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: I tried a sugar-baby dating site, and you wouldn’t believe my stories.

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MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: 10 Key Takeaways From The New York Times’ Error-Ridden Defense Of FBI Spying On Trump Campaign. “It’s reasonable to assume that much of the new information in the New York Times report relates to leakers’ fears about information that will be coming out in the inspector general report. . . . The story says the FBI was worried that if it came out they were spying on Trump campaign it would ‘only reinforce his claims that the election was being rigged against him.’ It is easy to understand how learning that the FBI was spying on one’s presidential campaign might reinforce claims of election-rigging.”

Remember when Trump’s claim that his campaign was being spied on was dismissed as absurd paranoia?

ROBERT SPENCER: CAIR Enraged by ROTC Exercise Featuring Jihadis as Enemies. “ROTC’s got a lot of nerve to notice the global jihad.”

If CAIR is enraged about something, there’s an excellent chance we should be doing more of it.

WASHING OUT BAD REGULATION: If you’ve bought a dishwasher recently, like I have, you’ve probably noticed that you need to run it on the heavy setting to get your dishes clean – and it runs for hours to do so. You can probably guess why – “energy efficiency” regulations from the Department of Energy. However, the law authorizing the regulations includes a provision to “preclude DOE from promulgating a standard that manufacturers are only able to meet by adopting engineering changes that eliminate performance characteristics.” What this means is that the DOE can actually create a class of dishwasher that can get your dishes clean in a hour.

So the Competitive Enterprise Institute has asked Secretary Perry to do so. Or, in the words of the Daily Caller, “Energy Department Petitioned to Stop Making Dishwashers Even Crappier.” As with all petitions, we need your help. To file comments (just a sentence or two will do, perhaps noting your own experience with crappy dishwashers), go to www.dishwasherchoice.com. Or you can go to www.regulations.gov and search for “dishwashers.” Let’s make America’s dishwashers clean again!

ENDORSED:

YUGE: Michigan State University reaches $500 million settlement with Larry Nassar victims.

IT’S INEVITABLE: One Day the Left Will Be Nostalgic for Donald Trump.

Related: Victor Davis Hanson on The Miraculous Image Rehabilitation of Former Republican Presidents.

Next decade, the DNC-MSM will have a field day comparing the warmongering neocon alt-right President Nikki Haley with their nostalgic look back at the carefully calculated nuanced centrism of the Trump era.

FATHER JACQUES MARQUETTE AND LOUIS JOLLIET: On this day in 1673, a 35-year-old Jesuit priest and a 27-year-old fur trader began their exploration of Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River, leaving from St. Ignace at the north end of Lake Michigan. From there, they went up the Fox River and then overland (carrying their canoes) to the Wisconsin River, which took them to the Mississippi River. Out of fear of running into the Spanish, they turned back at the Arkansas River. By then, they had confirmed that the Mississippi does indeed run to the Gulf of Mexico.

The route back was different. And this becomes important to the history of the country and especially of the City of Chicago: Friendly Native Americans told them that if they go up the Illinois River and the Des Plaines, rather than the Wisconsin, it would make the trip easier. That’s because the portage distance from the Mississippi watershed and the Great Lakes watershed was shortest there. The Chicago River, which dumped into Lake Michigan was only a short distance away.

If you’ve ever wondered why Chicago grew into a major city so quickly, this is why: Location, location, location.  In the modern world it’s easy to miss how much topographical issues like that mattered (and in different ways continue to matter).  But cities don’t just crop up in random places.