find your 2%ers.

This is good advice, and my response is also going to sound terribly arrogant. But I also terribly do not care: I am only interested in deep friendships with people who can keep up with me intellectually and unfortunately that’s a really small slice of the population. And it is very difficult to find this cut of people I could be friends with, especially as even the “very smart” usually aren’t all that bright in reality.

I don’t need my friends to know the disparate things I’m aware of or be involved in all the weirdo crap I like. Frankly, I don’t think anyone can know all of what I do because you have to read dozens of books a week for a couple dozen years to do that. And not many can or probably should undertake such a project. And, just so there’s no misunderstanding, I do not need these friends to agree with me.

But I do need people who don’t have brain stall-outs out when I talk about Noether’s Theorem or describe the philosophical milieu of early 20th Century Germany or whatever crap I’m going on some too-lengthy spiel about.

These things both will not be interesting to most people and their brains can’t hold them enough to have any sort of conversation, either.

I tried to be a polymath. It worked a bit, but it can also be lonely. That said, I am what I am, for better or worse. I’m happy, too. But there are maybe a few score thousand people like me around the world and they are very hard to find in all the din and distraction.

Someone said that there are actually three genders: high status men, women, and low status men.

And I think, basically, that is true. It says nothing good about any of us, but it is how things are.

When I get annoyed by happenings at work or am stuck in traffic, I think of the videos I’ve watched of soldiers being relentlessly hunted down by drones on the battlefield in Ukraine. Then I realize how fucking awesome and amazing my life in fact is.

That terrible war has some of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life. No, it hasn’t traumatized or scarred me. That does not happen to me easily. A rural North Florida misfit upbringing will do that for you.

But it does makes me thankful for what I have, and that I’m not dying in some Ukrainian farmer’s field because I wanted to steal washing machines and rape Ukrainian women.

My field is a weird one. Weird bad, that is.

I’ve seen accountants get hired after not being in the active workforce for 10+ years. And yet I wouldn’t hire an IT person who’d been out of the workforce for 3 years. And in some areas, merely 2. That’s how fast it all changes.

If you’re out of the game for 3 years or more, you’re basically a newbie again.

No other field is like that.

The best blueprint for the future is to do nearly everything the degrowthers say we should not do.

We need:

• Massive increase in electricity production — we really need to attempt to make it too cheap to meter
• Building all kindsa shit in space
• Massively increasing our industrial capacity even if it is not “profitable”
• Geongineering, despite the risks

Etc. We simply must become the gods now we only pretend to be.

We have no choice. It’s that or oblivion.

One thing that is accurate from Sherlock Holmes is that you can discern more about most people than they think they are revealing by paying very close attention and having a whole lot of background knowledge.

My partner says that I “do my Sherlock Holmes thing” sometimes and I take that as a huge compliment. Seeing more than most people means you have to have done more with your mind than most people in the past.

And that’s always been my aim — but I don’t do it within other people’s parameters. And never will.

I’m not sure I’d rather be dead than be vegan, but it’s not an easy decision I have to admit.

A gay guy, a Black man, and a woman walk into a flight deck— that’s not the beginning of a joke, but just a regular day at work! There was so much DEI on this plane that we could hardly get in the air. Luckily my limp wrists were able to wrestle the heavy jet back to the ground 💅🏼

[image or embed]

— Mx. Robbie Bobbie Berta Boeing (@captainbobbie.bsky.social) February 1, 2025 at 5:19 PM

That looks like a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Big puppy. The woman pilot is holding the IFR (International Flight Release) paperwork.

Why would a black hawk be doing a training course at night in the middle of a busy airport?

To learn not to crash into airliners.

They failed the course obvs.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done to [a] girl?

I feel terrible about this to this day, but when I was at some military training there was this Air Force girl there that was like a little puppy dog the way she was into me. I have no idea why. No, I wasn’t attracted to her and didn’t sleep with her. I’m not that evil.

But I did my best to be her friend though she got on my (and most people’s) nerves. I should’ve been clearer about that to her, but I also didn’t want to hurt her. There didn’t seem to be any call for that.

That said, on to what I did. For some reason she had these absolutely huge and heavy photography cases. They were about 4×3′ and weighed a good 80 pounds each. There were two of them. This was excessive and unnecessary for what we were doing, by the way.

During our last days in training, she asked me to help her with these absurdly large cases, which involved taking them to and carrying them through the airport. Now, this was before 9/11 — I could’ve walked all the way to the gate with her. However, I did not need to go to this airport and had no reason to drive that way.

I told her I would help her, though.

The day we were all set to leave, I thought about how much work it’d take to deal with those cases, how far out of my way it was and how much she annoyed me. I pondered that for a bit, then got in my car and drove away. I didn’t call her or let her know — I just disappeared.

I’m not proud. But that is what I did. Sorry, weird Air Force girl.

End birthright citizenship. End all citizenship! You lot are not citizens of anything until you conquer the galaxy with me.

Get fucking started.

5 girls ranking themselves by attractiveness pic.twitter.com/Nr0HfSL26Z

— non aesthetic things (@PicturesFoIder) November 11, 2024

Leftists/liberals hate this stuff because it reveals social truths that they wish weren’t the case. But it’s incredibly interesting to me. And we should think about these things. It shows how much women actually do not understand what is attractive to most men aesthetically.

I would’ve ranked them similarly except the tall blonde woman with striking features I would’ve put first and changed her place with the short Asian woman. She’s the prettiest and has the most appealing personality to me (of the very little you can see of it). The blonde woman is being penalized essentially because she has short hair and has a somewhat masculine affect, and a lot of men hate both of those things. If she had long, flowing hair with those features she would’ve been chosen by almost all of them.

That’s correct. “Locker room talk” is something women believe men do because they themselves engage in it, but most men (the vast, vast majority) do not. However, it’s common for women! So it’s all projection.

I was in the army for five years. I never witnessed any “locker room” talk at all. The closest I ever heard was something like, “Rebecca was hot! I hope she likes me.” Or something of that nature. Most of it was so vanilla and anodyne. And unlike in high school, in the army I was popular and well-liked. So it wasn’t like I was being excluded, etc.

I miss how freakishly smart the intern I mentored some years ago was. Her brain was big, y’all.

This is a bit harsh, but yeah, it’s also true:

Instead of gilding the lily, it’s like fecesing the lily.