I am not in favor of annexing Canada because then we’d have to deal with their massive problems as well as our own.
No thanks.
Also, it’s hugely morally wrong.
Month: February 2025
Bad Books
Fun question from @Sam__Enright: What’s the “anti-reading list” in your field of expertise?
I have many fields of expertise.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is an atrocious book that teaches you nothing, or if it manages more than that is completely wrong. A book designed to make stupid people feel smart. Read specialist books or textbooks in this and related fields instead. Do not fall prey to this utter piece of shit or you will become much dumber than you were before.
Helogland by Carlo Rovelli. Full of wrong information. I don’t mean that it’s my opinion that it’s wrong. A lot of the most important parts of the book are directly contradicted by actual experiments conducted in the real world, including some Nobel-prize-winning ones.
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future. Just a clueless work that marshals poor evidence in service of murky points. Avoid.
There are other books in the thread, but these are ones I did not see mentioned that are also atrocious and cause you to know less than you did than when you started. And all are in fields I know enough about to say that yes, they are 100% full of bullcrap.
Read Up
From being a photojournalist and then a blogger for many years, I know that only about 10% of people will read your entire article and of those maybe 5% will understand it. And that is no matter how clearly you write or how much you stress your thesis.
So I don’t really care that much about those who “hate” me as they are hating some version of me that doesn’t exist based on an article or post they did not read fully and if they did, they did not understand.
Not my problem.
Giant Problem
My hot take that everyone will hate is the fact that so many women read crap like Twilight and whatever this nonsense might be is just as harmful (and perhaps more so) to women’s psyche and ability form relationships as men watching porn.
Yes, I know women watch porn as well. I worked with a woman porn addict who got fired for storing gigabytes of it on her work machine. But men watch more of it.
I think the difference is that for men, porn is mostly instrumental. It’s for getting off and then is quickly forgotten. But for women, Twilight and the like is aspirational — they really believe deep in their hearts that they will find someone like Edward or whatever the hell is happening in that Mountain Bullman book. I don’t mean a sparkly vampire, but just someone that unreservedly devoted and uncaring of your flaws or that you’re the size of grain silo and about as capable of walking up a mountain.
Women’s expectations have increased greatly while men’s prospects have declined. These two factors are partly (but not wholly) responsible for the loneliness epidemic. And that so many women are into “literature” like Twilight and the Fifty Shades series certainly has a lot to do with that epidemic too.
Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row.
Woman who had pioneering cancer treatment 18 years ago still in remission.
We’ll Soon Find Out How Much Permanent Damage Trump Can Do.
Trump’s Misguided Strategies for Peace in Ukraine.
Scientists Simulated a Quantum Apocalypse. Then the Universe Disappeared. Cool.
Musk steals a billion dollars from low-income Americans and sends it to Intuit.
Elon Musk’s first month of destroying America will cost us decades. It sure will. Pure evil shit.
What Elon Musk Got Wrong About Why Federal Retirement Is Still Managed out of a Limestone Mine.
The Price of Trump’s Power Politics. Why China and Russia Stand to Win in a Might-Makes-Right World.
The scammers are getting BETTER and the job market is getting WORSE. It’s a scammer’s paradise now.
Shock therapy comes home to roost. Correct.
Decline
The foundations of America’s prosperity are being dismantled.
The US will be a much, much poorer and worse country after this four years. This was not inevitable; it will be a direct result of actions by President Musk and and his lackey Trump.
I have trouble understanding why they are doing this other than the urge to destroy, as these actions will harm even Musk in the end. It seems just utterly pointless. The only hypothesis I can posit is that China and Russia are promising them enough that diminishing the US is worth it to them.
But I have no insight other than that.
Neuropsy
Latest smart book I’m reading: Neuroscience of Clinical Psychiatry: The Pathophysiology of Behavior and Mental Illness by Edmund S. Higgins, M.D. and Mark S. George, M.D.
It’s not actually as hard as I thought it’d be because I have a good baseline for this topic, so I’m gonna slot another one in there. Not sure what yet.
GRII
Great Recession II: Immiseration Boogaloo inbound.
Do prepare, if you can. Try to have a deep emergency fund. Secure another income stream. Determine if you live in a non-recourse state or not if the worst happens.
But it’s comin’, y’all.
Smarts
Why, exactly, other than propaganda do people think using a terrible small smartphone is more convenient? Is it just that they find a real computer difficult to use?
I’ve never found a single thing on a phone easier or faster if I had a real computer at hand. It’s all much slower. And yes, I can use one competently.
MRE
What’s the payload here? https://t.co/7buqgnnVl4
— David Hambling (@David_Hambling) February 22, 2025
Payload is probably a cardboard Russian seven-day MRE box with a tarp or something wrapped around it to weatherproof it. It’s the right size and shape and the logistics of getting those to the front line with ground vehicles now is nearly impossible with all the Ukrainian drones.
Pure Foul
About the Ukraine war, it’s an extremely evil tenet of a lot of modern left belief that defending your home is an undesirable and in fact immoral thing to do if a genocidal invader comes knocking.
That just letting the plunderers do whatever they like “saves lives.”
That’s never true. But the same idiotic views can be seen in the lefty stance on what deranged vagrants should be allowed: free-for-all assaults and setting people on fire if it makes them feel better. I think they see it as restorative justice or some such nonsense.
If anyone invades my home — country or house — the only thing I’ll be sad about after I shoot them in the face is that they got blood on my carpet. And if they get blood in the dirt, I don’t care. It makes good fertilizer.
Any other way of thinking is someone who cares more about appeasing Putin-like people than they do about being a free person in the world. And I want to have nothing to do with those quislings at all because they’d sell me out the very moment it becomes convenient.
All to still be killed themselves after they stop being a useful idiot.
Weather Migration
What The States Would Look Like If They Were Resized By Population.
Not shown here, but there has been a long trend of people moving away from states with shitty weather (too cold) to those with more salubrious weather. Enabled, of course, by air conditioning becoming cheap and widely available.
HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls.
The Key to a Stronger Economy? It’s Housing, Stupid.
Why Trump’s Clean Energy Rollbacks Could Derail a Factory Boom. Terrible idea. Like most of Trump’s.
Ukraine Is Just a Pawn in a Russian Reset.
Europe Is Becoming an Afterthought for the World.
Massive WWII B-29 Bomber Base Fully Reclaimed For Future Pacific Fight.
China’s homegrown tech boosts global surveillance, social controls.
Meta approves plan for bigger executive bonuses following 5% layoffs.
Trump and Elon’s ‘Pointless Bloodbath’ at the FAA Is Even Worse Than You Think. Weakening state capacity to promote Chines and Russian goals.
the real, tangible danger that comes from infantilizing adults in their 20s. Funny how many idiot leftists harm themselves more than anyone else with their insane beliefs about how relationships “should” be.
A Nuke For You, and a Nuke For You
Yes. In the new world of conquest, any country that is menaced by a great-power neighbor and doesn't have nuclear weapons is just signing their own death warrant. https://t.co/6pwgGeqM52
— Noah Smith
(@Noahpinion) February 19, 2025
Shit, I need some nukes too. Right to bear arms, yeah? 