Eric Raymond provides some advice to those who are not.

This blog post is brought to you by a recent bad experience I had watching a 5-minute clip from Big Bang Theory on the recommendation of a friend who thought I might find it amusing.

Bleagh. This is supposed to be a show about geniuses? It’s not. It’s a show about a dimwit’s idea of what bright people are like. The slowest person in my peer group could out-think and out-create any of these sad-sack imitations of “smart” on any day of the week.

Read it.

This will tell you what to avoid to escape these twits.

I figure that tattoos and a man-bun figure prominently, but I don’t care that much to actually find out.

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Funny, it doesn’t look Jewish.

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In July 2015, William Merideth, 47, was at home in Hillview, Kentucky, America, when his daughter came in from sunbathing in the garden to say there was a drone buzzing overhead. As a firm believer in his Second Amendment rights, Merideth loaded up his shotgun with bird shot, waited until the camera-fitted quadcopter came over his home, and then took it down with a single shot – which bought the drone’s operators running.

“They asked me, ‘Are you the S-O-B that shot my drone?’ and I said, ‘Yes I am’,” he told journalists. “I had my Glock on me and they started toward me and I told them, ‘If you cross my sidewalk, there’s gonna be another shooting’.”

Heh.

The police were called and they arrested Merideth – not for shooting down the drone per se, but for discharging a firearm within city limits. In October, a judge agreed with Merideth (now known as the Drone Slayer) that he was within his rights to take down the trespassing drone. The dad was cleared of all charges.

And rightly so.

David Boggs, the drone’s owner, was not a happy chap. He sued Merideth for the $1,500 it had cost to replace his toy, insisting that only the US Federal Aviation Administration has the right to control airspace, so his aircraft couldn’t have been trespassing.

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Gee, I wonder why?

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Trees that were domesticated by pre-Columbian peoples still dominate the forests of the Amazon Basin. The findings put a dent in the notion that the vast rainforests were untouched by human hands before the arrival of the Spanish explorers in South America. In an article published in Science, an international team including Florian Wittmann from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, the scientists report their findings.

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And we’re coming for you. There ARE no ‘safe spaces’.

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Well. There it is.

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Chelsea Clinton is set to receive a lifetime achievement award from Variety magazine next month, though it is unclear why.

Well, she survived to adulthood with Bill Clinton as her father and Hillary Clinton as her mother. I find that impressive.

Clinton’s other achievements include being born to one of the most skilled politicians in American history, growing up in the White House, landing a $600,000 contract with MSNBC, marrying a hedge fund millionaire, and tweeting constantly about President Trump.

That’s more than I’ve ever achieved. I’m convinced.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Lion of the Blogosphere has a theory, with which I disagree.

Rich people talk a lot about getting taxes raised, but if you listen closely they’re talking about tax rates on Ordinary Income, wages and such-like, and that’s not where they make their money.

And even if taxes were raised on the forms of income that they get, they still have a comparative advantage over people who make orders of magnitude less than they do. A tax rate of 50% or even 90% is not going to hurt very much when you’re pulling down a hundred mil a year, but if you’re only making a hundred thou, that drops you to poverty level pretty quickly.

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In his 2005 book Blink, he confirms that Pepsi has more of a citrus flavour, while coke is characterised by a raisiny-vanilla tang.

He also states that the sweeter and more citrusy taste behind Pepsi is why it usually wins in taste tests. This gives is a stronger blast of flavour while Coke is a lot smoother.

No, the reason is that Pepsi tastes like something a human being would want to drink, while Coke tastes like something you would want to clean rust off of furniture with. It’s really just that simple.

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Will the planet actually be saved? Stay tuned for the next thousand years.

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Well, yeah. Especially if the Social Justice Warriors keep throwing poor people out of work by jacking up the minimum wage.

This past July, the BratWurst Bot, developed by the Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI) Research Center for Information Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, flawlessly took orders, cooked, and served over 200 meals for a salivating garden party crowd. “We had a few people at the party surprised that robotics can do something like this,” Arne Roennau, the department manager of robotics at FZI, said. “People are not aware that technology has come this far.”

…

As fast-food employees continue their Fight for $15, restaurant corporations have begun to look for, and invest in, technological replacements.

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The world is divided into people who sit on the floor and those who sit on chairs.

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With the first billionaire in the White House, Wall Street booming and, for the first time in almost a decade, very solid and broad based job growth, one would think America’s business elite would be beaming. But that’s not so because the country’s moguls are more divided than at any time in recent history.

This conflict stems largely from divergent interests among rival factions of the putative ruling class. Trump’s backers tend to have links with the “real” economy, that is, those people who make things, such as energy producers, domestic manufacturers, agribusiness, suburban home-builders, and aerospace firms. These interests are increasingly concentrated in parts of America Trump painted “red”—the South, the Midwest, the Great Plains, and Appalachia.

On the other side lies the “ascendant” ephemeral economy, based in such industries as media, entertainment, software, and social media, as well as their financial backers. These industries are less affected by environmental regulations than those in more tangible lines of business. They are also concentrated in the deep blue slivers along the coasts and in college towns, the very places where the progressive social and environmental agenda is most deeply entrenched.

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For a climate activist, having babies is apparently a troubling ethical dilemma, a distressing personal contribution to the global anthropogenic carbon footprint. But somehow they keep popping them out.

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One of my cousins recently attended an event at a suburban church and I tagged along. I’m amoral and omnivorous. I’ll go to any house of worship on the odd chance I might actually learn something useful – and I often do. And I meet a lot of really nice people along the way. But mostly I like to explore the landscapes other people inhabit. Church provides an intimate glimpse into what people are thinking and feeling in a particular location.

…

I was immediately impressed with how much this church looked and functioned like a shopping mall. The size, shape, and general construction of the buildings and surrounding parking lots were indistinguishable from a large retail center. I spent more time than I probably should have trying to figure out which denomination it was. Catholic? Definitely not. Lutheran? Not exactly. Baptist? Meh. Mormon? Nope. It was a generic all inclusive Christian arrangement that celebrated the lack of any specific affiliation. Come and worship. We take all kinds. And enjoy the ample free parking and food court while you’re here. There was a well populated Christian school, a substantial auditorium, and all manner of programs and facilities. It was a highly successful suburban version of Big Box Jesus.

The Dallas term is ‘Godatorium’.

But then I looked out at the parking lot. How many people paid cash for their cars? I explored the subdivisions all around the church. How many people bought their suburban homes with cash? How many people are capable of setting aside even a sliver of savings on a regular basis ever. How many people bought their clothes and shoes and had their hair done with a credit card that got rolled over into a big ball of vague but gradually mounting debt? How many people are approaching middle age and still paying off student loan debt?

I understand the dynamics of contemporary accounting. Carrying mortgage debt provides a substantial tax advantage. Using “other people’s money” at a low interest rate to invest in an asset that consistently rises in value is smart and frees up cash to be deployed in other more productive ways. Putting cash into savings is inefficient since it sits in a bank earning near zero interest these days. Stock values keep rising so investing in equities is a no brainer.

You can’t go around wearing thrift store clothes and sporting a bowl haircut and expect to be taken seriously in a professional business setting. You don’t want to drive around in an old clunker and put your family at risk when you could have the latest safety and reliability features of a newer car bought on credit. If you can buy that car with a home equity loan and get the tax deduction, all the better. Everything about respectable modern life is predicated on people spending a certain amount of money in a very specific way that is nearly impossible to achieve on a cash basis. And that set of arrangements is in direct conflict with the traditional virtues of frugality, saving, and self reliance. Big Box Jesus takes Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.

Read it.

Over the last 15 years there has been a steady and disconcerting leak of young people away from the labour force in America. Between 2000 and 2015, the employment rate for men in their 20s without a college education dropped ten percentage points, from 82% to 72%. In 2015, remarkably, 22% of men in this group – a cohort of people in the most consequential years of their working lives – reported to surveyors that they had not worked at all in the prior 12 months. That was in 2015: when the unemployment rate nationwide fell to 5%, and the American economy added 2.7m new jobs. Back in 2000, less than 10% of such men were in similar circumstances.

What these individuals are not doing is clear enough, says Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, who has been studying the phenomenon. They are not leaving home; in 2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close relative. Neither are they getting married. What they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video games. As the hours young men spent in work dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video games. It looks as though some small but meaningful share of the young-adult population is delaying employment or cutting back hours in order to spend more time with their video game of choice.

Think about it:

No fat ugly feminists screeching about The Patriarchy.

No welfare queens complaining that drinking milk is raaaaaaacist.

No nerd little shrimp of indeterminate sex complaining about what pronoun she/it is entitled to.

No minimum wage pricing out of the only jobs you’re qualified for.

No gangbangers whupping your ass because you looked at them on the street.

Just peace – and quiet – and fun.

What’s not to like?

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Any time a Leftist disagrees with a policy, a person, or an idea, if he has already used up the tedious racist/sexist/whatever deal, and hasn’t started rioting yet, he has one more lame argument in his bag of tricks. He has learned from ex-President Obama, to point his nose skyward and assert, “That’s not who we are!” Please. Do us the courtesy of not telling us who we are when you don’t even know us. You know precious few Heartland Americans, as we can tell by the movies you make about us. They ring as true as Hillary’s mortifying black preacher accent when she’s “no ways tahrd.”

Barry’s other go-to threat was that we would end up on “the wrong side of history.” But History just kicked him in the nuts, as History will sometimes do, so it’s back to telling us who we are.

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Influenced by Edison and honed via experimenting on patient, hand-sore librarians, library hand focused on uniformity rather than beauty. “The handwriting of the old-fashioned writing master is quite as illegible as that of the most illiterate boor,” read a New York State Library School handbook. “Take great pains to have all writing uniform in size, blackness of lines, slant, spacing and forms of letters,” wrote Dewey in 1887. And if librarians thought they could get away with just any black ink, they could think again real fast. “Inks called black vary much in color,” scoffed the New York State Library School handwriting guide.

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My first breakthrough on this idea was with salt. It’s the most basic ingredient, but it can also be hellishly complex. A chef can go crazy figuring out how much salt to add to a dish. But I believe there is an objectively correct amount of salt, and it is rooted in a counterintuitive idea. Normally we think of a balanced dish as being neither too salty nor undersalted. I think that’s wrong. When a dish is perfectly seasoned, it will taste simultaneously like it has too much salt and too little salt. It is fully committed to being both at the same time.

Try it for yourself. Set out a few glasses of water with varying amounts of salt in them. As you taste them, think hard about whether there is too much or too little salt. If you keep experimenting, you’ll eventually hit this sweet spot. You’ll think that it’s too bland, but as soon as you form that thought, you’ll suddenly find it tastes too salty. It teeters. And once you experience that sensation, I guarantee it will be in your head any time you taste anything for the rest of your life.

Steve Sailer celebrates blowing up the Internet.

Congressman Steve King (R-IA) has noticed just how extremist today’s respectable conventional wisdom has become. So King has been exercising a Trump-like knack for trolling the Establishment with blunt truths that enrage goodthinkers into revealing just how much their worldview is founded upon hatred of average Americans.

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King is particularly hateful because he represents Sioux County, Iowa, which Stanford economist Raj Chetty’s big 2015 study of IRS returns from 1996 to 2012 found to be the single best county in America for raising children who are upwardly mobile. Sioux County is extremely white, Protestant, native-born, traditionalist, and prosperous. It represents the egalitarian essence of everything that coastal elites find deplorable about the people they currently preside over.

Numerous talking heads responded to King that taking care of “somebody else’s babies” is what America has always been about. John Adams and the other Founding Fathers weren’t fathers looking out for the interests of their progeny. Instead they were inseminating an idea: that America exists for the benefit of the huddled masses of not-yet-arrived immigrants who are, by definition, the only true Americans.

ZMan casts a jaundiced eye.

The hand-wringers all swear that we are reliving Weimar Germany and Trump is the 12^th invisible Hitler the prophecies foretold. The inevitable result is the Cossacks galloping through the streets of Jewish neighborhoods. Maybe so, but I’m skeptical. Trump seems to get along well with the Tribe and he seems to love his Jewish grandchildren. He has quite a few Jewish advisers and business partners. Maybe they are not making Hitlers like they used to, but my hunch is he is not Hitler and we are not Weimar Germany.

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Whites in American have never been anti-Semitic and have largely accepted the reality of Jewish success in America. In fact, most whites take some pride in it, seeing it as validation of America’s meritocratic culture. The millions of Muslims being imported will obviously be hostile to this arrangement. Hispanics and Asians don’t seem to care. Progressive whites, on the other hand, are increasingly anti-Semitic, suggesting there is a war brewing among the Cloud People. The Democrats coming close to putting Keith Ellison in charge is a good example.

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Well, you know, stuff has consequences.

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Well, good luck to ’em, eh.

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When politicians prose on about ‘working families’, what they really mean (without feeling empowered to say so) is ‘working class families’.

So, I pulled out the General Social Survey (GSS), which has been asking thousands of Americans every year or so all about their lives, political identifications, and voting patterns. I decided to see if there were differences within the working class based on type of working-class job, and not on education, race or  income level.  Working-class jobs are those with little autonomy and often involving the use of one’s body – to wield a hammer, carry a baby, deliver a package from Amazon, stand all day greeting customers.  These jobs are held by a very diverse group of people; there are more people of color in the working class than in the middle or upper class.  When I refer to “the working class,” I mean this whole diverse group, not only white male workers.

Lileks.

To save my family from my predictable pedestrian cooking, I signed up for one of those services that gives you a box of stuff once a week. If you’re used to using the smoke detector as a timer, it’s a new level of cookery. The accompanying directions have stories, of course.

I’d use one myself, but they appear oriented toward the hipster-foodie demographic, which gives me a rash.

Watch it.

Louise Mensch is a Tory Member of Parliament in Britain. Apparently they have the same problems with the LaborLegHump Media over there.

Conspiracies! Conspiracies everywhere! Dogs and cats living together! Madness! Communists in Congress! (Well, that part happens to be true….)

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Until somebody steals it and sells it for scrap. Hey, this is New York and it’s a small statue — unlike the bull.

In a world where people go into a Paris zoo, put three in the head of a rhino and cut off its horn with a chainsaw, I give it about a year. You heard it here first.

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There’s a scene in the 1976 film The Pink Panther Strikes Again in which the nations of the world send their top assassins to eliminate Inspector Clouseau. One by one the assassins take their best shot, and time and again Clouseau survives (and the assassins die) due entirely to pure luck on the inspector’s part. That was the thing about Clouseau; unlike Sherlock Holmes, who would prevail through intelligence and skill, Clouseau could always be counted on to stumble out of danger and pratfall his way to victory. And the bad guys, no matter how smart they were, no matter how skilled, couldn’t beat him.

I’ll be frank; I still can’t decide whether Trump is Holmes or Clouseau. But the sonofabitch always wins, and his enemies always lose in spectacular fashion, and it’s making for a presidency that’s far more enjoyable to watch than any Hollywood movie.

Make Politics Entertaining Again.

Steve Sailer points the finger.

As we all know, IQ gaps don’t exist, but it they did exist, they would be the fault of the book The Bell Curve for noticing them and thus causing Stereotype Threat. For example, Charles Murray’s malignant influence is so all-pervasive it reaches all the way into the slums of Copenhagen where he singlehandedly caused Denmark’s draftees of non-Western background to score about a standard deviation lower than Denmark’s conscripts of Western ancestry.

ZMan lays out some inconvenient truth.

People instinctively understand a basic truth about education. That is, the quality of product coming in dictates the quality of product coming out. Despite generations of lectures from our betters, we still know that the apple does not fall far from the tree. If the parents are low-IQ losers, the kids are most likely going to be low-IQ losers. The schools are not correcting this. In fact, it is the opposite, because the other old saying about apples is also true. One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch.

Everyone, including our hypothetical real estate agent, is too polite and too afraid to say what this means as a practical matter. For instance, I knew someone who lived in a mostly Jewish suburban neighborhood of starter homes. These were townhouses and ranchers. A black family moved in next door and they got along well with everyone. Then another black family moved in, but it was ghetto time, with parties into the late hours. Suddenly, the neighborhood sprouted “for sale” signs and the demographics changed within one summer.

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With enforced diversity came the police state and that is not a coincidence.

Free association is illegal now. If a real estate agent is too obvious in how they handle these things, they face disciplinary action from the real estate board. A homeowner, who refuses to sell or rent to whoever shows up, can easily find themselves in front of a judge. Freedom of association is no longer a right in America. Everyone has to seek permission from the state before they can make these decisions. That means finding a place to live has become a game of cat and mouse for middle-class families.

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I am not making this up.

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How would the Trump-Clinton debates have been perceived if the genders had been reversed? Two professors worked with trained actors to duplicate not just the words but also the mannerisms of Trump and Clinton–only with a female actor playing Trump, now called Brenda King, and a male actor playing Clinton, now called Jonathan Gordon.

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What happened, however, was quite different. Audiences in two sold out performances were shocked. They liked Brenda King and distrusted Jonathan Gordon!

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

ZMan looks at the Washington scene.

There’s another aspect to this that has become abundantly clear over the last couple of months. Both parties wanted to see Clinton win. The Republicans, at least the leadership, liked the setup under Obama. They got to pose as rock-ribbed conservatives fighting Obama, without ever having to do anything. Democrats liked that Obama was just issuing executive orders and bypassing the parliamentary process. The Washington ecosystem was at equilibrium as long as everyone on both sides played their part.

The proof of this is the fact that the GOP has no plans ready for the 2017 legislative session. They have been talking for years about ObamaCare and now we know they never planned to do anything. The same is true of taxes, which is the one thing Republicans like doing. They have no plans for anything, not even something symbolic. They not only have no plans, they are still staggering around in shock, not sure what they should be doing. Suddenly nothing makes sense to the people inside the bubble and they are scared.

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‘For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat….’

Gotta love Australians.