Sydney Sweeney is more attractive in nerdgirl mode than she is when she's vamping. Yes, I will die on this hill.

Dear lefties: One of yours just killed Charlie Kirk. What you don't understand is that Charlie was a sweetheart compared to the people who are likely to gain power from the hatred you have sown with his death. No, I don't know who those people are. And I don't expect to like them much when I find out. But I've studied history, and I know how this movie goes. I fear what you have unleashed today. I think you will learn to fear it far more than I do.

And yet, women keep loudly advocating for and voting for policies that make cities more dangerous.

It was difficult for me to watch this video all the way through to the end, but it reminded me of something important that I think a lot of people at and above IQ level 100 don't understand. It's something I only understand myself because travel is broadening. This video is what like life among the truly stupid is like. The incompetent, spasmodic monkey-dance violence. The pre-verbal hooting crowding out articulated speech. The squalor of people without the cognitive capacity to plan much beyond the next cheap high. No, the important thing about these wretched people isn't that they're black. It's that they're sampled from a population with an average IQ of 85, and the high time preference that predicts, and the general inability to handle counterfactual hypotheticals that that predicts. If you picked a stupid enough cohort of white people and let them stew in each other's juices for long enough, you'd see the same crap. Hillbilly Elegy anyone? People of average intelligence (average intelligence for Europeans or Northeast Asians anyway) do not usually understand how stupid stupid gets. When they try to model the behavior of somebody with an IQ of 85 or below, they imagine someone like themselves but with a smaller vocabulary and missing the ability to do specific smart-people things like mental arithmetic or whatever. It isn't like that. It isn't like that at all. This video is what it's like.

The most important thing I've learned about human psychology in the last five years: therapy for depression in men is usually mistargeted and ineffective because therapists think men are like women, who become depressed because they don't feel loved. This is completely wrong. Men cope with feeling unloved relatively easily. What destroys them is feeling powerless. So yeah. Swing a sword. Restore a steam engine. Climb a rock. Do something - anything - that asserts your competence and control over your environment. For men, this is much better therapy than talking about feelings.

I got a stark reminder today that people with college degrees, in general, haven't got the faintest clue what the conceptual world of a person with an IQ below 90 is like. This was in reaction to a large, carefully designed study of the outcomes of universal basic income. Basically, what it found is that UBI doesn't work. Recipients simply increase their discretionary consumption, and end up deeper in debt than they were before with none of their problems solved. I won't identify the person who insisted that the problem is a lack of financial education - those people simply need to be taught better money-management practices! Because I don't want to embarrass the poor goof. Education would probably work fine if everybody in the UBI program had an IQ of 100 or up. The problem is that not too far below that level people start having cognitive deficits in their ability to handle hypotheticals and long-term planning. They can't handle "financial education"; they can barely even process the concept. I think there used to be more cultural wisdom about this than there is now, back when there was less social mobility and people with above average IQs didn't almost automatically segregate themselves away from the below-average. We used to understand that the not-very-bright can only stay out of poverty by having habitual thrift hammered into them so hard in childhood that the conditioning partly overrides their high time preference. Nowadays, it's too easy for the relatively bright to project their own low time preference on everybody else, and to assume that more education is an all-purpose fix for everything. Cluebat time: some people - quite a lot of people in fact - are just plain stupid. You can't fix their problems with interventions like UBI that might work if everybody had an IQ that is above average for a first-world country. We've put our society through a lot of unnecessary grief by pretending this isn't so.

I'm about to do something I think I've never done before, which is assert every bit of whatever authority I have as the person who discovered and wrote down the rules of open source. After ten years of drama and idiocy, lots of people other than me are now willing to say in public that "Codes of Conduct" have been a disaster - a kind of infectious social insanity producing lots of drama and politics and backbiting, and negative useful work. Here is my advice about codes of conduct: 1. Refuse to have one. If your project has one, delete it. The only actual function they have is as a tool in the hands of shit-stirrers. 2. If you're stuck with having one for bureaucratic reasons, replace it with the following sentence or some close equivalent: "If you are more annoying to work with than your contributions justify, you'll be ejected." 3. Attempts to be more specific and elaborate don't work. They only provide control surfaces for shit-stirrers to manipulate. Yes, we should try to be kind to each other. But we should be ruthless and merciless towards people who try to turn "Be kind!" into a weapon. Indulging them never ends well.

Nobody is demanding a ceasefire in Ukraine because a ceasefire would effectively concede Putin what he wants by allowing him to continue and consolidate his control of occupied Ukrainian territory. This is not an acceptable outcome.

Yes. It is astonishing, and somewhat disheartening, that women don't know this is what mens' lives are like.

You realize, don't you, that the fact that this pisses you off just makes it funnier?

I preferred the style of the old Republican establishment too. The restraint. The dignity. Unfortunately, being civilized turned out to be a complete failure at preventing crypto-Marxists from seizing control of the media, education, entertainment, and an alarmingly large portion of the government. So now conservatives are trying being rude and assertive. Can't really say I blame them for it, even when it makes me wince.

If you kick out your Jews and replace them with Black women, that's a 25 to 30-point drop in average IQ. In an individual this would be severe brain damage. Forget policy, even. The Democratic leadership may now lack the cognitive competence to operate the party's own administrative machinery. Because time preference and propensity to criminality rise with falling IQ, expect a future cascade of scandals as insiders loot the party's assets.

I am about to be serious. I am emphasizing this because it's going to sound like I'm being either satirical or lust-ridden. There should be an immigration fast track for hot white girls. Why? Because women have a limited number of ovulations in their lifetimes. The absolute scarcest and most valuable reproductive resource there is is the ova of women whose offspring are likely to raise the average IQ of your country rather than lowering it. Furthermore, good looks are positively correlated with high-IQ genes via health of the immune system. I know, I know. You're going to say that following my logic, the fast track should cover Northeast Asian women as well. You're not wrong.

This is a heads-up for Indian immigrants in the US from a person who is not hostile to you. I'm going to try to say some helpful things. I understand why you're finding the recent xenophobic reactions on X shocking. You believe you've come here and played the American game by its rules. You do not as a group have a notably high propensity to criminality. You're more willing to assimilate to American cultural norms than perhaps any other immigrant group outside of Europe and Northeast Asia. You may well wonder, what has gone wrong here? Less has gone wrong than you might think, listening to X randos. Mostly, your reputation as a group is still good. Being married to Usha Vance is not injuring JD's political standing. Nobody gets upset when a Hindu family moves in next door. Nobody thinks your food is horrible. There's very little entrenched prejudice against Indians, as yet. But. You do have two serious problems, and one behavior that needs to change because it's both creating increasing resentment in itself, and is an aggravator of other issues which in themselves might be minor enough to dismiss. One problem is not directly in your control, and that is the displacement of Americans from good jobs by Indians brought in on H-1B visas. This is being driven by cost pressures and MBA-think in industries that are mostly not run by Indians. No reasonable person can expect Indian immigrants to fix this problem; it will take policy and incentive changes you can't arrange. The other serious problem, though, is on you immigrants - and also on second generation Indians born here. You're developing a nasty reputation for preferentially hiring your own kind, locking out better-qualified Americans of other ethnicities. This is not the way Americans are supposed to do things. Other ethnic minorities that do this have bad reputations. Because of it, yours is getting worse rather than better. There are a couple of other minor problems. Conservative Americans don't like any religion that isn't even a recognizable monotheism, let alone Christianity. Also, you have a reputation for copping arrogant attitudes that is probably at least somewhat deserved in some of you, given high-caste behavior patterns imported from India. But these issues alone would be quite resolvable. Americans are tolerant folk, and your high-caste kids won't learn or keep the unconscious habit of treating others as casteless. But to get there you need to stop doing the ethnic-nepotism thing. That is a serious violation of unspoken norms, and if you don't fix it you run a serious risk that prejudice against Indians will become an entrenched and increasing problem. This is especially, though not only, true among white native-stock Americans. They are increasingly feeling like various other ethnicities have been taking advantage of their liberality, pursuing racialist group advantage while white Americans are forbidden by law and custom from doing the same. It would be unwise to make yourselves targets of this resentment any more than you already have. As individuals you can choose to do better. To the extent that there's a desi network, it needs to have some conversations about how the whole group can avoid being seen as clannish and exploitative. Thank you for your attention.

I've been there, and I can tell you exactly why they left. The Amalfi Coast is indeed gorgeous -the pictures don't even properly do it justice. But it's also grindingly poor even today, let alone more than a century ago during the peak period of Italian emigration. Modern Americans can't really even comprehend the level of poverty of these places. They make a precarious living from the soil and the sea, but it takes constant hard labor and the returns are thin. Given any opportunity to trade away that gorgeous weather and scenery for a steady job that pays cash and doesn't break your health before you're 50, people took it without hesitation. Yes, even New Jersey was an improvement.

The dirty secret that confounds all modern attempts at improving outcomes by social engineering is that the low-IQ, the poor, and the badly behaved now pretty much coincide, statistically speaking. Why? Because free markets and meritocracy mine the virtuous poor for people who can be productive and useful; they uplift and become, at the least, petits-bourgeoises (and tend to marry each other rather than other bottom-quintilers). Which is an excellent thing, but... ...it means your bottom quintile loses those people. Its average IQ drops. Its average time preference goes up. Its propensity to criminality actually rises. Now run this effect over several generations. Your civilization gets wealthier and more successful because it's using its human capital optimally. But your bottom quintile gets...worse. The US is the wealthiest society in the world, with the longest history of meritocratic idealism. The idealism produced the wealth, of course, but it also means we were the first to mine out our deserving poor. I estimate that it happened around 1970 when the last pockets of dirt-floor poverty in Appalachia were cleaned out. This effect also means that all policy interventions intended to better the lives and prospects of the bottom quintile have decreasing returns over time. Their problems become progressively more intractable and more genetically loaded The bitter paradox - for which I do not have an answer, only a clear view of the problem - is that a meritocratic society inexorably produces increasing stratification long fault lines defined by innate traits like IQ.

I notice that the period during which American engineering talent became less and less effective at actually engineering anything coincides with the period in which straight white males couldn't get hired because everybody thought they had to virtue signal by recruiting anyone but them. The fix seems obvious.

arstechnica.com/science/2024… Evil has a sound. It's the sound of humans screaming in agony as they die. Aztecs made implements to simulate this sound. They have been found in the hands of sacrificial victims. The article wonders why, but the answer is obvious. The factual piece missing from the article is that sacrificial victims were drugged into semi-consciousness so they wouldn't struggle and disrupt the ceremony. This meant they didn't scream as obsidian knives were penetrating their chests and their hearts were ripped out to be offered to the gods. Obviously, the Aztecs considered the ceremonial experience incomplete without the screaming, and built death whistles to simulate the proper sound of agony. Anyone who tells you that all cultures are equally valid and we shouldn't pass judgment on indigenous ways of knowing deserves to die under those knives. This is me, blowing the whistle on them.

"Collapse the government within a year." Don't threaten us with a good time, dude!

"Boomers and their crusade to tear down the entire past, resent to year zero, and reinvent culture. That's what happened." Oh, no, Devon. It wasn't that simple. You're excused for not understanding this, because you weren't there. I was. I'm a late Boomer, born in '57. I can dimly remember the day JFK was shot. I watched the moon landing. My teens and early twenties coincided with the 1970s. I was there for it all. And even then, even in the 1970s, feeling a sense of subtle disintegration all around me, I already dimly grasped that we weren't just falling. We were being pushed. But I was very young then; I wouldn't come to fully understand why, and by whom, for almost another 30 years We Boomers didn't burn down our heritage in a fit of thoughtless hedonism. I mean, we did some thoughtless hedonism, yeah, but that's not where the real damage came from. If you want to know where the damage came from, look up Yuri Bezmenov. Listen to him explain "demoralization" and the long game of Soviet culture-jamming against the West in general and the U.S. in particular. Reset to year zero was a Marxist idea. It was part of a suite of memetic weapons, infectious propaganda bombs deployed against the social and cultural cohesion of the "main enemy". Often, they were successful in damaging us by leveraging not our vices but our virtues. Valorizing tolerance and liberality until they became helplessness in the face of more and more extreme forms of deviance was one of their attacks. We didn't fall on our own. We were pushed. The Boomer fault wasn't that we were hedonists or nihilists, it's that we didn't have sufficient cultural immune defenses against what was being done to us. Why that is exactly is a long sad story that I'm still not sure I completely understand. But I can hit some highlights. One is that religion failed us. This is nobody's fault and I don't think it could have gone differently; it's a failure that had been on the cards ever since the mechanistic worldview reached effective completion by Darwin. One of the things the Marxists did was work to accelerate the inevitable decay of religious authority. Secular conservatives failed us, too. They had one job - just one job - which was to explain why all those Chesterton's fences shouldn't be torn down. They utterly flubbed that on all three levels of awareness, analysis, and persuasion. That could have gone differently. It didn't help that after the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 conservatives developed a severe case of cowardice about calling out Communist subversion. That may have been their single greatest dereliction of duty. The result was that over the next 50 years Communist institutional capture of academia and other institutions went almost unopposed. Which is why today we struggle with "woke". Most of us Boomers weren't wreckers, even by accident. Most of us were duped. It's easy to say in hindsight we should have done better, but the enemy was very clever and determined. Try not to judge us too harshly, kids. It's nice to think that a later generation might have done better, but...I haven't seen it happen yet.

Today's big beef is between tech-success maximizers like @elonmusk and MAGA nationalists who think the US job market is being flooded by low-skill immigrants because employers don't want to pay competitive wages to Americans. To be honest, I think both sides are making some sound points. But I'd rather focus on a different aspect of the problem. When I entered the job market as a fledgling programmer back in the early 1980s, I didn't have to worry that some purple-haired harpy in HR was going to throw my resume in the circular file because I'm a straight white male. I also didn't have to worry that a hiring manager from a subcontinent that shall not be named would laugh at my qualifications because in-group loyalty tells him to hire his fourth cousin from a city where they still shit on the streets. It's a bit much to complain that today's American students won't grind as hard as East Asians when we abandoned meritocracy more than 30 years ago. Nothing disincentivizes working your ass off to excel more than a justified belief that it's futile. Right now we're in and everybody-loses situation. Employers aren't getting the talent they desperately need, and talent is being wasted. That mismatch is the first problem that needs solving. You want excellence? Fire the goddamn HR drones and the nepotists. Scrap DEI. Find all the underemployed white male STEM majors out there who gave up on what they really wanted to do because the hiring system repeatedly punched them in the face, and bring them in. Don't forget the part about paying competitive wages. This whole H-1B indentured-servitude thing? It stinks, and the stench pollutes your entire case for "high-skill" immigration. You might actually have a case, but until you clean up that mess Americans will be justified in dismissing it. These measures should get you through the next five years or so, while the signal that straight white men are allowed to be in the game again propagates. I'm not going to overclaim here. This will probably solve your need for top 10% coders and engineers, but not your need for the top 0.1%. For those you probably do have to recruit worldwide. But if you stop overtly discriminating against the Americans who could fill your top 10% jobs, your talent problem will greatly ease. And you'll no longer get huge political pushback from aggrieved MAGA types against measures that could solve the rest of it. Doesn't that seem like it's worth a try?

There's been some griping here on X recently about Terrence Tao losing his research grant. And yes, I think this is a shame - I have enormous respect for the man. But. If you stand idly by as an academic while your university engages in illegal and immoral racial discrimination, I don't think you have any actual grounds for complaint when your failure to oppose that discrimination comes back around to bite you in the ass. Would I like to live in a world where research funding for titans like Tao isn't subject to political winds? Why yes, I would. I'd also like to live in a world where the Marxists who corrupted the university system are all dead or exiled and institutions of higher learning have returned to affirming the highest values of the civilization they serve. We won't get the former until we get the latter.

I shipped an essay yesterday about how relatively smart people are oblivious about what life on the low end of the IQ distribution is like. It mentioned UBI because what stimulated me to write it was somebody else's thread about a recent study of UBI. I should have expected what happened next. Lots of clever people tried to come up with clever ways to fix UBI's failure modes by time-structuring the payouts, or erecting restrictions on what the money can be used for. I was gobsmacked that only one person in the entire thread pointed out the obvious: if you try to trickle payments so that UBI recipients can't overspend, all you will do is create a market niche for shady characters peddling predatory payday loans. At which point your clients will revert to their careless high-velocity spending, after the shady characters have taken a rake off the top. I waited in vain for somebody to point out that we already know what happens when you try to put use restrictions on transfer payments. There's plenty of experience about this around EBT cards - people spin up informal markets in which they can sell the planner-approved goods they don't want for money to buy the disapproved goods they do want. They don't mind that they're usually taking a huge nominal loss on these transactions, because they want what they want and not what planners think they should want. All such proposals are doomed. They're technocratic wankery, perfect examples of what Nassim Taleb calls "fragilista thinking". They illustrate another chronic failure mode of smart people. This post may look like it's about UBI, but it's really about that failure mode. All you would-be social engineers continually trip over your own blindness about second-order consequences. Especially the second order consequences that come from the fact that the people you are trying to help, or nudge, don't want what you want. They want what *they* want, and they don't care about your clever planning except to the extent they can exploit it to pursue their own desires.

True story: I was involved in deplanetizing Pluto, and it made me a little sad, but I can't be sorry about it. The whole flap started when somebody at the International Astronomical Union noticed that there didn't seem to be any definition of what a "planet" is other than "these things we've traditionally called planets". Originally there were only five, out to Saturn, visible fast movers in the night sky. Then it was recognized that Earth orbited the Sun, like other visible planets, so it was added to the list as a sixth. After the invention of the telescope people started discovering Sun-orbiters that hadn't been naked-eye visible; Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Yes, for a brief time in the 19th century the largest asteroids were sometimes classified as planets. Eventually, the largest asteroids were dropped off the list out of a vague sense that they were too small. Leaving us in the early 20th century with eight bodies that we were comfortable in describing as planets and one tiny oddball, Pluto, in a high-inclination orbit that made it seem kind of like an asteroid. The trouble started when we began to be able to detect Sun-orbiters roughly the size of Pluto way, way out past it in the Kuiper belt. Suddenly there were way too many "planets", with every prospect that the list would get larger every couple of years. The International Astronomical Union decided to try and come up with systematic definition of "planet" that would include all the bodies that had been traditionally described that way and exclude the awkward newcomers. And the major asteroids. I got involved because the IAU's rules required it to seek input from interested non-astronomers. I was on an email list that was ideal for the IAU's purposes, being stuffed full of highly astronomy-literate geeks and tinkerers. There wasn't any controversy about the first criterion, which is that a planet has to orbit a star, rather than orbiting something else that orbits a star. Beyond this, the debate got spirited and interesting. I think I was one of the first to argue strongly that a main criterion for "planet" ought to be that it's spherical under self-gravitation. The IAU did eventually adopt this as its second criterion. The problem was that with these two criteria we still ended up with way too many "planets", including a potentially endless list of invisible iceballs way way out past Pluto. We tried to come up with a third filter that would exactly match the nine planets of 20th-century folklore and science fiction. So did professional astronomers all over the world. Alas, we all failed. The best we could do was to come up with a third criterion that a planet had to "clear its orbit", e.g. not share its orbit with any object of similar size. I don't think that one came from our mailing list, though we did discuss it. Bur this excludes Pluto, because it has a "moon" similar enough to itself in size that they rotate around a common center of gravity (barycenter) that is outside Pluto. (Interestingly, this is almost but not quite true of the Earth-Moon system; the barycenter of the system is 74% of the Earth's radius from the center of the Earth.) Nobody was really happy about crossing Pluto off the list. The IAU compromised by relabeling it a "dwarf planet" that didn't have to meet criterion 3. There are lots of those: currently the list includes Pluto, Ceres, and 4 Kuiper-belt iceballs. It is expected that around 200 may eventually be discovered. Pluto got redefined as "not a planet" not because anybody wanted it that way, but because the three-point definition the IAU now uses was the closest we could come to including the traditional nine planets without sweeping in potentially hundreds of other tiny objects that would violate our intuitive, folk sense of "planet". Which, as I said, is a little sad. But I can't bring myself to regret it.

"I got that white girl, I got that white girl." Well, so much for not knowing the motive of the savage who murdered Iryna Zalutska. It may surprise some of my readers to learn that I am not entirely without compassion for the murderer. Life dealt him a shitty hand - too stupid to really function in a technological society, and then with delusional psychosis on top of that. This, though. This. "I got that white girl." These are the words of a man who has long dreamed of committing racial violence against whites, for whom the murder was a victory. A coup. I think these words ought to take the insanity defense off the table. The murderer didn't babble about crystals or demons or space lasers; he knew what he was doing, and why he was doing it. 15 years ago, John Derbyshire was canceled for writing an essay titled "The Talk: Nonblack Version", framed as safety advice for his mixed-race children. In it, he said a number of things about dealing with the presence of Blacks in American society that I think are true, a few things that I think are probably false or exaggerated, and one which has stood out in my mind because I didn't have the evidentiary basis to have any idea whether it's true or not. I'll quote his point 9 in full: "A small cohort of blacks—in my experience, around five percent—is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us. A much larger cohort of blacks—around half—will go along passively if the five percent take leadership in some event. They will do this out of racial solidarity, the natural willingness of most human beings to be led, and a vague feeling that whites have it coming." Now consider "I got that white girl" and the fact that the first public statements of the Black mayor of the city where the murder took place oozed sympathy for the poor mentally ill murderer while not even naming the victim. I think we can safely describe the murderer as ferociously hostile. And the mayor as part of Derbyshire's 50% subset that willingly enables such hostility. What I've wondered about ever since "The Talk" is the size of the "ferociously hostile" cohort. On general principles I was sure it's non-zero, because if you go far enough down the left tail of any normal distribution you can find arbitrary levels of craziness; but I had no way of knowing if I can trust Derbyshire's 5% estimate, and still don't. I'm well aware that the sample of Blacks I usually interact with is too skewed for me to make an estimate based on my experience. I usually deal with Blacks in contexts like science fiction conventions, or professional meetings, or martial arts training, that filter heavily for intelligence and pro-sociality. They don't run as bright as the whites and Asians, but they don't give me any feeling of danger either. On the other hand, many years ago I found myself on a night train from Trenton to Philadelphia, the only white in a car full of young Black men. A gang; they bantered like they knew each other. Despite doing my best to be invisible, I was subjected to an escalation of hostile verbal taunting. They were working their way up to doing something. It was a couple of decades before I learned the term "monkey dance" to describe this kind of pre-violence ritual. I stood up to get off at my stop and had to push my way through hands that were shoving at me. I'll never forget the last words I heard before I fled off the train - one of them, in a tone of command, saying "Let the Cauc go." I think I only narrowly escaped being beaten to death that night. Iryna Zalutska was not so lucky. I still don't know what the size of the "ferociously hostile" cohort is. I do think it's time to abandon the taboo in polite society on recognizing that it exists, and needs to be contained with violent and punitive measures. It won't do anymore to bandy excuses like "mentally ill" or "oppressed". That way only leads to a lot more murdered women.

I have a close friend who is bitterly opposed to the H-1B system because he had to sit in meetings where plans for systematically posting ghost-job solicitations were made to cover abuses. I have no direct knowledge, but he says this sort of thing is rampant in Silicon Valley.

Open source is voluntary cooperation. Marxism is involuntary cooperation enforced with violence. One leads to better software, the other to oppression and mass murder. We are not the same.

What. The. Fuck? Every time I think I've seen the uttermost depths of the crazy shit racial-grievance peddlers can make up out of thin air, they find a way to go lower.

I was an "unusually smart/talented" kid. One of the things I learned early is that mobs form to beat up bright deviants like me, and that the kids who will grow up to use the phrase "altruism and communitarianism" like this are the organizers of those mobs. They talk like they want to improve the world, but that's a lie and a con. Their actual game is to whip up the normal monkeys to be cruel to the abnormal ones so they can gain status by leading the beat-down. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, evil. Also, I understood what my "primary purpose in life" was by the time I was old enough to walk to school. It wasn't to "uplift others", it was to achieve and change the world in ways the normal kids around me couldn't, because they lacked the talent to try and the imagination to conceive of trying. Trying to "uplift others" would have been a horrible mistake. For one thing, it wouldn't have worked. I won the morphogenetic lottery; there isn't any amount of grinding that could give a normal kid the capabilities I was born with. I can't do that. They can't do that. Nobody can do it. For another thing, trying to "uplift others" would have distracted me from working my ass off at what was actually possible and important - furnishing my talented brain with lots of facts and heuristics so I could actually do something with it when I got old enough to act in the world. I don't know how or when it happened, but I acquired a horror of wasting my talents early on. I was utterly determined not to become a tragic dilettante, one of those vaguely bright people who's all potential and no actual achievement all their life. So I truly did work my ass off. Taught myself stuff like physics and organic chemistry and genetics, read a lot of history, practiced prose composition until I got good at it. These things don't fall into your lap even if you are gifted, and the time you spend in futile attempts at "uplift others" is time taken away from them that you'll never get back. I was pretty monomaniacal about improving myself. Which paid off in the end, for me and for everybody else. I hope the bright kids of today are doing likewise rather than paying any attention to this "communitarian" crap.

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned;" The part of me that was once an idealistic anti-racist liberal marching for civil rights died its final death last night as I watched the video of Irina Zarutska on the Charlotte light rail, being fatally stabbed in the throat from behind by a black savage I refuse to name. What has finally broken me is, incidents like that aren't even a surprise anymore. The frequency of brutal, senseless murders by "African-Americans", both individually and in predatory mobs, has risen exactly as rapidly as social and coercive controls on their behavior have weakened. Meanwhile, for anybody who's wondering, American whites still have about the same crime rate as Switzerland. When enforcement of norms disintegrates, only intelligent people with low time preference still act civilized. As I've watched us sliding down the civilizational failure gradient, the question I've been increasingly unable to dismiss is this: was the whole ugly apparatus of racial repression - segregation, sundown towns, lynchings - really just senseless hatred? Or was it a rational containment strategy evolved under pressure from living alongside a large, visually distinct population of low-IQ savages? I think I know the answer now. And I hate knowing it. I preferred my innocence. It doesn't do any good to protest that this particular savage was "mentally ill", whatever you think that means. The mobs that routinely form to beat up and kill whites unwary enough to wander onto their turf aren't psychotic, unless all Blacks are psychotic. Yes, yes, I know. If you were to select a population of whites for the same distribution of IQ and time preference as American Blacks, and then coddle them, scholarship out their brightest kids for four generations, and tell them all of their failures are society's fault, you'd get the same level of pathology and violence in about the time it took you to say "dyscultural and dysgenic". That doesn't matter. We're not dealing with that hypothetical. We're dealing with reality. The reality is that we have a predation problem that will only be solved when our actual population of low IQ savages is contained again. Creatures like Irina's murderer, cognitively unable to participate in civilization, must be subject to either segregation or repression so brutal that they live in fear of it. I don't really want to live in the kind of society that can do either these things. But Irina Zarutska's murder is the seal on my realization that there are no longer soft options, only hard choices. I'd prefer the one where armed citizens routinely shoot down creatures like that at the time of the attempted crime, or immediately after it. All the alternatives seem far worse.

He's the vice president of the most powerful nation on Earth, and he just delivered you a powerful and long-overdue dose of reality. Adapt or fail.

I'm a student of history. Here are three possible futures following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They're based on historical examples of what happens when a Communist subversion campaign or insurgency overplays its hand and triggers broad popular resistance. 1. Popular revulsion against aboveground leftists celebrating the murder gives the Trump administration political cover to go after Antifa and its shadow funding network hard. Both are smashed. Communist agents of influence in the mainstream media and academia continue to self-discredit. Relatively few Communists are arrested, but their millions of aboveground tools become isolated and demoralized. Propelled by a huge swing in voter registrations that we are already seeing happen, the Democrats get crushed in the 2026 midterms. The long period of fever, madness, and Left ascendancy that began with the assassination of JFK by a Soviet agent in 1963 ends not with a bang but with a whimper. This is the best case scenario for everybody, including the Communists who don't get thrown out of helicopters or shot down in the streets. If things don't go this way it will likely be because Democratic lawfare prevents the counter-subversion push from being fully effective. An obvious index of this failure would be another high-profile political assassination or attempt against a conservative target after about 4 months out. What happens in the event of that failure, especially if the third public attempt to kill Trump succeeds: 2. A period of Caudillismo. A charismatic strongman rides popular anger into power. If this happens, the Left better pray that the strongman is an infuriated JD Vance, because any alternative to him is likely to be worse for them. The crackdown against the Communist network becomes brutal and routinely uses extra-Constitutional means, possibly thinly covered by a declared state of emergency. At the harder end of this range of possibilities, right-wing death squads not exactly formed by government but winked at by it go after Communist public figures that are out of reach of the law because they've carefully preserved deniability. Many journalists are at the top of this target list. It is not likely that the Communist network can survive this future. The only way it happens is if they have enough popular support to develop a semi-militarized resistance - in effect making certain parts of the country no go regions for Federal agents. Going by historical precedents, the index of this failure would be a resurgence of banditry by armed groups, initially with overtly political goals but decaying into general predation. This would land us at: 3. Low-grade civil war, a la Bosnia or the Irish troubles. Anybody wishing for this has no idea how bloody, ugly, and brutal it would probably be. Especially if the Left succeeds at what it will with absolute certainty try to do, which is racialize the conflict. I don't think there is any realistic scenario in which the Communists win any of these confrontations. Not in the U.S., not in the 21st century. The question is how much blood and agony the rest of us will go through before they are finally defeated.

After reading their "Code of Conduct", it was entirely predictable that any libertarian or conservative writer would be instantly blackballed. Communist clowns are going to Communist-clown. The concept that an award should be judged on merit rather than politics is utterly beyond their ken.

This is a myth, a false-prominence effect. It persists because non-autistic people with high IQs and excellent communication and relational skills don't stand out for their awkwardness the way high-functioning autists do. I was finally disabused of believing that high-IQ people are necessarily poor at being attractive and playing well with others back in the 1990s when I was a speaker at the Institute for Advanced Study and invited to faculty tea with a room full of Nobel laureates and their friends. There were awkward people there, but they were the slow kids in the room, not the brightest ones. A few years later I learned some basic psychometrics, enough to understand what I had seen. Here's the explanation: "EQ" is a myth. Like almost all other cognitively-based skills, over half the variance in it is driven by the same principal cofactor (what psychometricians call "Jensen's q") that IQ tests are designed to measure. Smart people are better at acquiring skills, including social skills. But you can't learn to paint if you're blind, and it's tough to learn to be likeable if you're autistic and your mirror neurons don't work. People who think high-IQ people necessarily have low EQ are in exactly the same position as they would be if they were claiming that people with high IQ can't paint - because the only ones they notice have been blind from birth.

I think I've heard somebody say this approximately every 15 minutes since about 1965.

A message to trans people: I'm a biological essentialist about sex - your sex is a given of your chromosomes and organs, and I will never actually believe that you can invert it by choice. I am, however, conditionally willing not to challenge your weird Gnostic beliefs on this point, and to treat you as the sex you "identify" as anyway. Here are the conditions: 1. You must be good at passing. If you can't present a convincing pretense, it's neither in my interest nor anyone else's to help you prop up an unconvincing one. 2. You must be harmless. Most obviously, you must not use your "identification" to prey on others, whether directly by violence or by using the physical advantage of your sex to overwhelm them in sports, or in any other way. And if you're told you're unwelcome in a bathroom or changing room, it's on you to not impose. 3. You must be modest. Your desire to role-play as M or F does not entitle you to violate prevailing norms about where, and to whom, you expose your genitals. If you aren't polite enough to refrain from this, I won't be even a bit polite to you. 4. Children are off-limits. The moment you engage in behavior that seems intended to confuse or indoctrinate them, you enter the category of "predator" and stay there. My response to sexual predation on children only begins with rejection and rudeness. 5. If you try to use the force of law to gain what equal and voluntary negotiation with individuals won't give you, you also enter the category of "predator" and stay there. The meta-rule is: the more your behavior imposes costs on others, the less polite and accepting I will be. If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others.

Devon, I'm a Boomer. Born in '57. And you've misdiagnosed the problem. It wasn't TV. It was World War II. Our parents had either fought the Nazis or grown up in the shadow of that war. When the influencers of their day told them "we must reshape human culture so that never happens again", they bought into it eagerly. We were the first generation to be told insistently that nationalism is intrinsically bad. Everybody is the same under the skin. Violence is never the answer. All cultural values are relative. Racism is the worst possible thing. You must love even people who hate you. And so on, and so on... This became the secular catechism of the TV, and the movies, and everything else in popular culture. It's not that we had no memetic defenses, it's that we were flooded with messaging intended to make us so virtuously pacifist and relativist and anti-violence that the tanks would never roll again. We were taught to be always-cooperators in the great iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, in the belief that this would reduce violence and warfare. In a world entirely inhabited by pro-social people with low time preference, it might have worked. In the real world, it was a tragedy created by the best of intentions. Many of us are still running this programming.

I think you're going to eat these words. Really soon.

When I hear someone saying "changes to the social contract", that's when I reach for my revolver.

One of Antifa's strategic problems in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk is that there's an inherent tension between its goals and those of its aboveground allies. Both networks want a Communist revolution, but by different paths. Antifa is running the classic Castroite/Maoist playbook: direct action and terrorism escalating to armed insurrection. Their road to victory runs through chaos and a weakened government that eventually suffers a general legitimacy collapse. The aboveground allies are Gramscians who have committed to a long march through the institutions. The last thing they want is a weakened government and a legitimacy collapse. They aim to take over the state machinery and totalitarianize it, gradually replacing the American civic religion with some variant of Marxist ideology (see "social justice" and wokeism). Gramscian capture of some portions of the US government made it easier for Antifa to operate almost openly, which is why we're now seeing semi-militarized attacks on ICE facilities. But the assassination of Charlie Kirk changed the game again, leaving the Gramscians with a dilemma about how to manage Antifa. (I say "manage" because the way the Communist network is structured for deniability means none of the aboveground leaders are able to give the entire Antifa portion of it direct orders. They have to nudge it via propaganda and suggestions through cutouts. And they have to deal with the possibility that some cells will not get the message, or will misinterpret it.) As Antifa grows more violent and overt, the avoidance strategy of claiming it doesn't exist is doomed. Gramscian leaders will have to choose whether to embrace Antifa's revolutionary violence or repudiate it. One of the impacts of the assassination of Charlie Kirk is that it makes this choice very difficult to defer. If you're willing to say that he deserved it, you're endorsing assassination and revolutionary violence. Condemning it makes the opposite choice. The political stakes are obvious. The Right is successfully mobilizing to dox Left allies who endorsed Kirk's assassination and force them out of their jobs. What's more worrying, from any Gramscian's point of view, is that this is a grassroots effort, not something the partially co-opted government is organizing. For the first time since Joe McCarthy was discredited in 1954, the Communist program of gradual institutional capture is being reversed. To save it, the Gramscians might have to disavow assassinations and Antifa, allowing the un-captured parts of the US government to take Antifa down. Antifa, of course, is going to resist this. And it's an open question whether disavowal is a move that the Gramscians are ideologically capable of making. Like religious fanatics of other kinds, their capability to make rational strategic choices is constrained by their belief system. Of course they'll use the institutional leverage they have to sabotage and obstruct government action against Antifa as much as they can. But it's not government that's holding candlelight vigils for Charlie Kirk and pressuring school boards all over the US to fire Communist tools in teaching positions. And victory feeds victory; there's a real risk that the popular backlash will become even stronger from its successes, especially as Antifa ratchets up the violence level. I don't know which way the Gramscians are going to break. It's not likely all of them will make the same choice, and there isn't any one leader who can enforce that. But they can't avoid choosing much longer. In retrospect, the crisis point might have been something other than the assassination of Charlie Kirk...but here we are.

American Jews perplex the hell out of me. I like their food, I like their humor, I like their culture in general, and most of all I like their IQ distribution. If you're a gentile but you select your friends for being bright, it is statistically inevitable that a lot of them are going to be Jewish. (Full disclosure: genetic assays on my family suggest that we have a few percent of Ashkenazic markers. But my family has never thought of itself as Jewish and I don't self-identify that way.) The recent wave of virulent public anti-Semitism would greatly disturb me even if I didn't, in general, like Jews as individuals. Because I consider the Jews the canary in the civilizational coal mine - any society that treats them increasingly badly is probably in the process of flushing itself down the toilet of history and will certainly become a hostile environment for brainy gentile me before very long. But I said that American Jews perplex me, and here's why. They seem to be incapable, for all their above-average intelligence, of grasping how large a hand they themselves had in creating the monster that is now stalking them. There's this concept of tikkun olam in Judaism, repairing the world as a religious duty. It's expressed in both religious and secularized Jews as a persistent attraction to social-reform causes. Jews want to fix what's broken about society - which, in the abstract, is quite admirable. But... They keep buying into Marxism, either directly or as critical theory and "social justice". Jews disproportionally give their money and their leadership abilities to collectivist ideologies which will inevitably turn on them - because to a would-be totalitarian, the thinker and the Jew and the cosmopolitan are always a disruptive threat. I've been watching this colossal, self-destructive error play out all my life. It doesn't take much study of history to see that Jews, especially secularized Jews, have been repeating this mistake almost en masse since the mid-19th century if not earlier. Why? Why? You guys are smart enough to dominate the Nobel prizes and yet you keep failing to see the bloody obvious. For your individual and tribal self-preservation, you ought to be the staunchest anti-Communists and anti-socialists anywhere. Collectivism isn't good for anybody, but it's especially deadly to Jews. Instead, when Stalinists stuffed you in boxcars you failed to connect the dots so comprehensively that the red-diaper Communist families in the U.S. are still predominantly Jewish generations later. Nazis murdered six million of you and you still don't get that racial identity politics is poison? How can you be so blind? Today, it's the hard left in the US, again, organizing "anti-Zionist" demonstrations that are working themselves up to become pogroms, and judging by your voting and donation patterns you *still* don't get it. Can anybody honestly tell me that American Jews are waking up? I'd like to think so, because we need you on the side of liberty and individualism. History doesn't make me optimistic, though, and that colossal blind spot continues to puzzle me exceedingly.

An observation I left out of my earlier thread on the xz back door: Autotools. Must. Die. The complexity and obscurity of autotools build recipes was essential to the way the malicious code was concealed and inserted in the release tarball.

Unstated in the comic: Anne's lifelong involvement in left-wing politics was her enthusiastically creating the very machine that now oppresses her. She deserves the outcome she got.

Mafia families don't have membership cards. Why am I bringing this up now? Because one attempt to head off the hammer coming down on Antifa that we're hearing from its aboveground allies is that Antifa doesn't exist. It's just an idea. There's no central command. No common funding. No membership cards. No way to tell who's a member and who isn't. The reductio ad absurdum of this bullshit is to point out that, following the argument, the Mafia cannot possibly exist. Which would be interesting news to all the people it murdered. Historical note: there was a period when the Mafia was structurally different from Antifa in that it had a Boss of All Bosses, but the position was abolished by assassination in 1931. In reality, when you're dealing with a criminal or terrorist conspiracy that doesn't have membership cards, you identify members of it the same way that other members do: by their willingness to cooperate with each other on shared projects. And sometimes, by their participation in shared bonding rituals like a Cosa Nostra initiation ceremony or a "bash the fash" demonstration. None of this is difficult, and it's exactly the kind of situation that the RICO (Racketeering and Corrupt Influence) laws were written to address. From Trump's public statements, I'm guessing that they're going to go right past RICO to a Foreign Terrorist Organization designation. This won't be difficult either. If you have any doubt that at least some Antifa chapters are funded by Chinese Communist money, you really need to get out more.

This is a public service announcement for anybody thinking about using the term "racist" in a political argument. We (the majority that voted for Donald Trump, and many others) are now past caring about accusations of racism. Even when they're true. If this bothers you, maybe you and your allies shouldn't have spent the last 40 years weaponizing false accusations of racism. Over the last decade you have led people of good will to a terrible choice. We can either tolerate overt expressions of racism. Or we can tolerate the dreadful harm "anti-racists" have done - poisoning our discourse, tribalizing our politics, tearing down our statues, destroying our cities, and instructing law enforcement to ignore crimes up to and including the rape and murder of children. We have chosen. Your weapon is burned out. The preference-falsification bubble that gave it power has popped. We will no longer allow grifters and power-seekers to yank us around by our virtues. The same fate is swiftly bearing down on your other "-ism" and "-phobia" words.

Trudeau has a dilemma. Somebody, probably Cynthia Freeland who is (unlike Trudeau) not an idiot, has clued Trudeau in that interprovincial tariffs and GST have been strangling the Canadian economy for a long time, and this is a drag the country can no longer afford if the US isn't an extremely benign and forgiving trade partner. But fixing this problem starts some dominoes falling. Quebec, which has an extremely powerful and coddled dairy industry, run by the Canadian version of the Mafia, has lobbied its way into a 300% tariff on imported dairy. That's going to be impossible to defend if interprovincial tariffs go away - even if other Canadian producers don't undercut them, American dairy coming over the border will. The profits from the Mob's money machine will go poof. This is going to sound crazy, but a well-informed friend tells me (and a bit of web research backs him up) that Quebec might very well secede over this, and the Ontario government knows it. The Parti Quebecois has not gone away. The scenario goes like this: flush with mob money, PQ gins up and wins secession referendum. J. Random Voter doesn't grasp that what he has voted for is to keep the corrupt dairy industry afloat and the Mob's profits fat, but that's what happens. If Quebec secedes, it breaks Canada. Newfoundland and the Maritimes, isolated from the rest of the Anglo region and not viable on their own, have no good alternatives to applying for U.S. statehood. There's an active secessionist movement in Alberta that the U.S. has very carefully refrained from encouraging. Albertan oil is the economic engine of the country, and Albertans resent that they're heavily taxed so Ontario can funnel t.ransfer payments to other provinces. If the Ontario government is unable to keep Quebec and the Eastern seaboard in the Union, Trump might get his 51st state because Alberta heads for the exits. But the fun doesn't stop there. The Maritimes aren't a big deal, but without Alberta and Quebec, Canada is an economic basket case, and the viability of the Union is probably down to single-digit years.

I feel stupid now. I need to stop underestimating Trump, dammit.

I hate it when reality taps me on the shoulder and says "You haven't been paranoid enough." Sure, I believed that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. But I thought it was done with ballot stuffing in a handful of swing-state urban precincts. I dismissed the claims about Dominion electronic-voting machines being widely subverted as nuttery being pushed by demagogues and grifters. Not that I didn't think that could happen mind you. I know entirely too much about software engineering and networks to want anything other than paper ballots and mechanical tabulation - or, at the very least, an auditable paper backup for electronic tallying. But I wasn't convinced that those potential vulnerabilities had been actually exploited in 2020. Now the Director of National Intelligence says it happened. I'm updating my priors accordingly. The single most important thing the Trump administration can do is clean out the corruption in the election system. Require ID for voting, exclude illegal aliens, cleanse the rolls of dead people, and harden the tallying so it can't be subverted on a large scale. Nothing addressable by political means matters for the future of the U.S. more than this.

I was expecting something like this any day now. It means the genie is fully out of the bottle; open source wins again. Implications: The business models of OpenAI and every company like it are busted. There's no moat anymore. This is a no-GPU build. Which means Nvidia's license to print money just expired. Everybody who thought they were accomplishing anything by conditioning LLM not to perform wrongthink is about to find out what happens when you try to hold back the tide, because the full power of distributed weaponized autism is about to be unleashed on that problem. I have been keeping mostly quiet about AI, but seriously. How could anybody not see this coming?

Let's be more specific here about what is hilariously wrong in the psychology of this campaign ad. Women rely on alliance networks to get things done. So a pitch that suggests: "your entire alliance network is voting for Harris, so you should too" is effective, especially if there's an implicit threat of ostracism if they don't go along. Men don't work that way; sure, they're subject to social pressure, but the pressure points are noticeably different, and no I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole right now. This ad reads like the scriptwriter assumes that men have female-typical social instincts. Every man I know who's watched it cringed so hard he almost ruptured something - despite the burly visuals, these "men" mimicking the persuasive behavior of women present as weirdly effeminate. It's just astonishing. It couldn't be worse if the people who produced it were covert agents of the Trump campaign. I believe the kids call this sort of thing "fake and gay". Yep.

These two images are perfect brackets for the crypto-Marxist attack on civilization. From one end: anarcho-tyranny. "The combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety." That's a term I used to be reluctant to use, because although it's exact and descriptive and fills a gap in the lexicon, it was coined by a neo-Nazi. Well, even a stopped clock can be right twice a day. Anarcho-tyranny murdered Iryna Zarutska. If this becomes common understanding, perhaps she won't have died in vain. From the other end: murder anybody who dares to speak out publicly and effectively against the permanent revolution, then dance on his grave. I was not a fan of Charlie Kirk in life; he exemplified much of what I detest about conservatism. But he had one very positive quality: he insisted on open debate and free speech and solving problems with argument rather than oppression and violence. For this, he was murdered in front of his wife and two children. I won't apologize for having had differences with Charlie Kirk; I still think he was deeply wrong about the Establishment Clause and many other things. But I honor him now, because he bled for all of us. If we confront what actually propelled a bullet into his neck, perhaps he won't have died in vain either. Understand what we are facing. The Long March of the Communists through our institutions brought us to this. Learn to recognize their poisonous propaganda and reject it. They must be cast out if our nation and our civilization is to survive.

I posted here last week that I thought the DNC had given up on winning via election fraud in the 2024 general. I believe my prediction was borne out, and now I'm going to think out loud about what that reveals. The level of attempted shenanigans we saw in Pennsylvania and elsewhere was really low compared to 2020. This cycle we didn't have 3:00AM vote drops that violated the hell out of Benford's law. We didn't have convenient water-main breaks. We didn't have cardboard glued to windows to keep people from watching the counting. We didn't have 19 bellwether counties that always predict the national failing to predict the national. It's like the Democrats weren't really trying. The Democratic fraud machine was clearly never a unitary conspiracy that could be turned on and off like a light switch; in order to be deniable, it has to be a whole bunch of smaller local conspiracies, all pulling in the same direction, not communicating with each other, managed to the limited extent they are managed by political operatives who act as deniable cutouts for the DNC and various state-level political machines. I think some low-level fixers never got the message to stand down. So we got some spasmodic twitches like Democratic operatives in Bucks County PA masquerading as election workers, telling voters in a Republican-leaning precinct to go home. But the stochastic-fraud network as a whole didn't generate the strong stink it does when it's fully activated. I'm not sure why the network didn't get its go signal this time. There are at least two possibilities: one is the DNC knew from internal polling that Harris was utterly doomed, the other is that they contemplated the amount of monitoring the Republicans put in place this time and quailed. Either way, they must have concluded that all they would accomplish by trying to put the fix in was risking the exposure of their network. But the thing they can't hide now is the consequences. Somewhere around 15 million fewer votes, losing the popular vote, and losing all seven of the swing states that normally get buggered by big-city Democratic fraud machines. It's the last confirmation I needed that 2020 was stolen. And it's big enough to make me suspect they frauded in Obama. Twice. I only suspect, mind you, because unlike Biden I and Biden II and Harris, Obama ran campaigns that weren't somnolent dogshit. Maybe he won honestly - I'd still give that odds of over 50%, though not by much. Still, I wish there were a way to do forensic audits that far back. Because the possibility of another Presidential election being swung by fraud needs to be eliminated, and making it common knowledge that Democratic fraud was endemic in the past would help with that. One of the top priorities for the Republicans has to be pressuring the states to clean up their act. Mandatory voter ID, elimination of ballot harvesting and drop-boxes. No mail-in voting except in special hardship cases. You know, the things even poor Third World countries do so their election security isn't laughable. Maybe Democrats will even stop opposing these measures now. Right, I know, who am I kidding... Why is this important? Maybe it wouldn't be if government weren't so powerful and intrusive. But as it is, the stakes in elections keep getting higher and higher; the righteous anger that would be unleashed by revealed fraud becomes more and more daunting to contemplate; and I prefer my breakfast eggs without a side of civil war, thank you.

Goddammit. Libertarians have been trying to tell you this for 50 years. Why in the flaming fuck did you not listen?

This is not going to be a post about race or Black people. Please have a little patience while I get to its actual point. For several decades there was a taboo in the major media against showing mugshots of Black criminals or even mentioning the race of a non-white offender in text. Recently - quite recently, like since about 2022 - I've noticed that this taboo seems to have disintegrated. I think I've figured out why. Cheap surveillance cameras are what did it, I think. There's been such a flood of video evidence of Black street crime that it has broken containment. I understand the impulse behind that containment. Media gatekeepers thought of it as virtuous anti-racism. But yesterday it occurred to me that the long-term effects of having this taboo collapse may go beyond what we normally think of as racial issues. The laws and customs of modern liberal democracies are built on the assumption that everybody in them is basically peaceful and has low time preference. Of course we all know that some people aren't, but we're accustomed to thinking of violent and impulsive behavior as something we have pushed to the margins of society and can relatively easily suppress. Ubiquitous video challenges this assumption. It's just too easy now to find documentary evidence of lots of stupidity and violence, not as dry text but as visual immediacy in motion. We've all seen the video of Iryna Zarutska being stabbed to death. I'm not claiming this video is what broke the containment, because I think it happened a few years sooner. But it is an index of the new reality. There's no going back from this. One immediate result is that "anti-racist" gatekeeping now looks pointless. So incentives have flipped, and media now shrugs and uses Black mugshots as clickbait. Downstream, I think the classical-liberal assumption that human beings other than children and obvious mental defectives are universally competent to be equals in a free society is now under an unprecedented kind of pressure. As a libertarian, I'm unhappy about this. It's not good for my normative political desires. It's more difficult to argue for liberty when there are not simply individuals but identifiable large classes of people that are morally incompetent. Ubiquitous video is giving us that identifiable large class. I think this is a more corrosive problem than a simple resurgence of racism would be. How do you argue against aristocracy when there's a lower class that really is violent and stupid, and we're immersed in moving evidence of this? This is my real point. Congratulations to anybody who persisted long enough to get here. I don't have a facile answer to this question. I do think it's important for everybody who loves liberty to start thinking about it.

The downshouting of Sidney Sweeney's American Eagle ads reminds me of one of my favorite Damned Facts. As far back as we have records, and into the present day, anywhere that women are sold as pleasure slaves blonde blue-eyed girls with big racks have been the most in demand. Our most extensive documentation on this is from the Ottoman Empire. Their slave-takers raided as far north as the west coast of Ireland and even Iceland because a handful of Sidneys could fund years-long expeditions - ships, weapons, provisions, hundreds of men - from the price they fetched on the auction block. And net a healthy profit, too. But the pattern is everywhere - cross cultural, cross-racial. Evolutionary biologists think they know why: chicks who look like le Sweeney are radiating signals of youth and immune-system effectiveness and general reproductive fitness. Blonde hair fades with age, clear skin doesn't hide blemishes that reveal vulnerability to infection, and I hope nobody reading this needs any education about breast-to-waist-to-hip ratios. If you do, ask an AI for an explainer. I don't know that anybody's explained the allure of blue eyes satisfactorily yet. We know they're a huge win in the sexual selection game, because of the rapidity with which they propagated. A single point mutation, probably less than 10,000 years ago in Europe, spread like wildfire despite the fact that lack of melanin granules in the iris is recessive. There's not much that can reveal the instinctive desires of men more clearly than what they're willing to pay to own women who light up their limbic systems. This is revealed preferences with an erection. It's not just yesterday, either. Every few years somebody busts a semi-covert slave market in some shithole like Mauritania or Afghanistan and it's the same old story. The highest value merchandise is always blonde white girls, usually trafficked from Eastern Europe. So, yes, when old-school racists ranted about darkies lusting for the flower of white womanhood, they were not wrong. Because, well, basically everybody lusts for the flower of white womanhood. It seems to be wired in.

I hate to see the DOGE/Trump wrecking ball swinging through scientific research funding. Gives me a churning feeling in my gut. But I'm afraid it's necessary. The scientific establishment stood by while entire fields were corrupted into politicized junk. If this is what it takes for them to learn not to do that, I have to reluctantly approve.

Donald Trump's actions since his inauguration have caused public discussion of some questions in Constitutional law. I'm not a lawyer. But I have more than a passing acquaintance with Constitutional law - I've been studying it ever since I was an individual amicus in the Supreme Court case that struck down the Communications Decency Act back in the 1990s. After 30 years of studying issues around the First and Second amendment and the doctrine of judicial review, I have some thoughts. There are several intermingled issues here. First: when JD Vance says that the courts do not have the authority to intervene in the administration of the executive branch, he is probably correct. The judicial review power is generally considered to extend to modifying or striking down laws, not to allowing any judge to interfere in the president's administrative authority over the executive branch. Second, any judge that rules that the Treasury of the Secretary may not have unlimited access to Treasury department data is setting himself up for reversal. This has never been litigated because it's a ridiculous overreach that has never been attempted before. Third, there are serious questions about the authority of federal judges below the level of the Supreme Court (what the Constitution explicitly calls "inferior" courts) that may now be forced to a resolution. For purposes of separation of powers, only the Supreme Court itself is considered co-equal to the executive and legislative branches. Inferior judges are not. One question, therefore, is whether the President may assert separation of powers as a defense against rulings of an inferior judge. Certainly invoking separation of powers against a ruling of the Supreme Court itself would trigger a constitutional crisis, but that's not the situation we're talking about here. This has not been litigated, but I think the Peesident is likely to prevail on the question. The fourth question is about the authority of federal circuit court judges to issue injunctions with nationwide effects outside the circuit where they have formal authority. Until very recently, federal judges were so reluctant to raise this Constitutional issue that they almost never issued such injunctions. They issued injunctions only for their own circuits, and left it to the Supreme Court to resolve questions about nationwide application. But nationwide injunctions in contentious cases have become more common recently, and it is likely that the Supreme Court will be forced to address whether inferior-court federal judges do in fact have nationwide authority. I think it is quite unlikely that the Supreme Court will affirm this. I am not addressing here the question of whether I think Trump and DOGE's authority to block Treasury payments should prevail. I am predicting that it almost certainly will prevail.

Your tacit assumption is incorrect. I'm a quiet-mind - I was quite shocked a few years back to learn that inner monologue wasn't just a literary convention but something a lot of people have going all the time. If other quiet-minds are like me, we only have an inner voice when we're actually forming speech or writing something, and not always even then. I assure you that I do not exist in a blur. My stream of consciousness isn't just images and sensations and feelings, it includes things like logic diagrams and networks and geometric visualizations - a constant stream of concept representations that just don't usually happen to be verbalized. Um. I don't like to talk about how effectively I can think because it seems like bragging. But it's actually relevant here: I'm an A-list software engineer (my code is in your smartphone) and bestselling writer, and have a stratospheric IQ. Inability to think and reflect is not something I suffer from. After I discovered the existence of you inner-voice people, I took inventory among my bright friends. We seem to be roughly equally divided between inner-voicers and quiet-minds, and try as I might I couldn't discover any correlations with anything else interesting. So, don't assume that quiet-minds are stumbling around in a daze. It ain't so.

Is it just me, or does J.D. Vance often write like he has at least partly internalized rationalist discourse norms?

In the 6 weeks since the gruesome murder of Iryna Zarutska, we've had time to learn what politicians and the courts and the media think her death means. And that's this: Nobody is responsible. Brutal black-on-white violence is either a depersonalized fact of nature, like bad weather, or it's a sort of just retribution by the oppressed against a racist society. We're to avert our eyes, to forget the psychotic mumbling "I got that white girl! I got that white girl!" He's just crazy. The mumbles don't mean anything, and if they mean something it means that white people deserved it. But it does mean something very definite. It means that white girls like Iryna can no longer trust that society will make any systematic effort to deter Black psychotics from murdering them. An LLM, asked to summarize, says "prior opportunities for mental health evaluations were missed". That agentless, passive language is perfect; no one did anything. No one is responsible, and no one, not even the murderer, can be held accountable. The purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of our justice system is to allow grisly murders to happen, as long as the victim sorts into an oppressor class and the perpetrator to sort into an oppressed one. If Iryna's death hadn't been caught live on video all our institutions would have colluded to make us forget it. Institutions like the Community Relations Service. Which for 60 years until President Trump just defunded it, strongarmed white victims of racial hate crimes into keeping silent or uttering anodyne denials that race hatred could be a factor. Blacks, 13% of the population, commit at least 60% of serious index crimes, murder and rape and felony assault. The actual percentage is probably higher, since there's increasing evidence that Black crime is underreported by police and officials as a way of managing racial tensions downwards. In a fair system, this would predict that a solid majority of the state and federal prison population is Black. The actual percentage is about 33% Blacks are privileged. They're under-arrested, under-indicted, under- imprisoned, and (despite popular mythology) less likely to be killed during a police stop than a white person is. It's exactly by treating Blacks as a privileged class, licensed to act from racial hatred and mumble "I got that white girl!", that we got to the point where. Iryna Zarutka bled to death on live video. The grimmest fact about her murder other than the horrific death itself is that six weeks later, nobody is talking about black privilege. It's time to start having that conversation, and it's time to start using the term "black privilege" for the combination of systematic averaion and viciousness that led to Iryna Zarutska dying, innocent and alone and abandoned by the system that should have protected her.

Stop deboosting posts with links and quote tweets. These rules are penalizing thoughtful discussion.

You're wrong. The white-trash neighborhoods *do* get like this when their social controls relax a little. It's those social controls that make the difference between private self destruction and public chimp-out.

My code is already in your phone, Elon. And in your browser. And in your ATM. And in your rockets, too.

White and Asian. There's his problem, right there.

1/ Since the level of public consternation about the xz back door seems to be increasing rather than decreasing, I want to point out something simple and important:

Hi. My name is Eric, and I have 35 years of martial arts training that leaves me better equipped than almost anybody else would be to deal with some idiot charging at me with a knife using just bare hands or an improvised weapon. But because I'm not stupid, if I have a gun, the aggressor is going to get shot.

Wow. People who think this is a clever rhetorical move are really begging for trouble. The propositions "We want DEI for whites" and "We want white people to no longer be consciously discriminated against by ethnic mafias" are easily separable. Even to me, a very cosmopolitan libertarian with little patience for MAGA nativism, this reads like a bad-faith argument - a dishonest attempt to jerk the listener around. Actual MAGA types? It will make their blood boil. And I can't say I'd blame them. If you want to turn them against even legal immigration, this is a great way to go about it.

One of my regrets about my years of being Mr. Famous Guy, when I had maximum leadership leverage, is that I didn't foresee the political threat to open source. I thought it was enough to be apolitical, invite everybody to be part of our development community, and that everybody would continue to keep politics out of the coding. Including even my own libertarian politics. If I had known what was coming, I would have made a big deal about insisting that the open source community had to have one positive political value: free speech and opposition to censorship. That would have been justified on the object level, because we can't function when those political conditions are violated. On the meta-level, having that as a positively asserted community value would have made it far more difficult for the Marxists/wokies to do their entryism thing. They would have been recognized as a fundamentally toxic phenomenon sooner. Failure of leadership on my part. I got a lot of things right, and we've pocketed the gains from my good decisions, but on this I screwed up, and I feel bad about it.

I busted out laughing when I first heard about this. Because I remember how bodycams on street cops went. It was a huge Leftist cause for a long time, because they thought the videos would expose a vast ocean of systematic and racist police brutality. Then police departments actually installed the bodycams. And what do you know, it turned out that the police are mostly coping reasonably with a lot of stupidly violent people, many of whom happen to be Black. This is one of those occasions where I'm going to say: I was wrong. While I wasn't expecting bodycams to reveal a lot of racism, I did expect to see a pattern of cops not infrequently being inappropriately violent towards anyone they weren't scared of offending. It turns out this doesn't happen much. The Left hasn't updated. They still think bodycams are going to embarrass ICE rather than mostly vindicating them.

There's more dimwitted IQ discourse on X recently, so it's time for me to bring the unpleasant news again. To be a world-class performer - the kind of person who wins a Nobel prize, or a Fields medal, or just upends the industry he works in the way I did - you have to be genetically gifted, you have to work your ass off, and you have to be lucky. Nobody wants to hear this. Almost everybody wants to deny that one or more of those cofactors is necessary, because the denial makes them feel better. But I've been that guy, and I've known other people operating at that level, and my experience qualifies me to speak the hard truth. You are born competing towards excellence with 8.2 billion people. The most important single determinant of how well you will do in that competition is how rapidly and precisely your brain can process information. That talent can modulate in lots of different ways - mathematical ability, musical ability, language ability, even the ability to manipulate the social systems around you. But most of the variation in any of these can be explained by a single general intelligence factor that psychometricians call "g", which is accurately measured by modern IQ tests. One way we know this is that people with extremely high ability in any of these areas tend to be cross-talented in others as well. Above a certain IQ level, polymathy is the rule rather than the exception. If the "multiple intelligence" theories that keep getting revived every few years were true, we wouldn't observe this - the super-bright would live in much more separated silos. The g factor is highly heritable. If you didn't have near relatives with the genetic endowment to be super-performers, you almost certainly won't either. It can be lowered by environmental insults, but not raised; no matter how much you enrich their childhoods, people revert to IQs near that of their genetic relatives when the brain rewires itself at puberty. This is why I speak of genetic luck. Egalitarian cultures like that of the U.S., and libertarian individuals like myself, are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that genetic luck is critical in constraining who the super-performers are going to be. Unfortunately for our feelings, reality do be like that. But genetic luck isn't enough. You also have to work your ass off. Because there are other people with genetic luck in the world! Contrast two people, both with the genetic luck to have 150 IQs. One has a lazy disposition and coasts on his talent. The other puts in years of hard practice burnishing talents into skills. Common sense tells you which one has the edge becoming a super-performer. Common sense is in this case not wrong. But hard work isn't enough. Hard work alone won't turn you into a Stephen Hawking or a Terence Tao or an Elon Musk without having a brain wired to see around the right kinds of corners. If you have that, it was a gift of your genes. The last piece of unpleasant news is that genetic gifts and hard work don't suffice either. You have to be lucky. This is the most difficult part for me to write about. It wouldn't be helpful for me to talk about the specific ways I was lucky, because the way the lightning strikes is so random and individual The global luck to grow up in a culture with a high average wealth level, so a kid who could be a world-class thinker doesn't have to be a subsistence farmer? The contextual luck of being in the right place at the right time? The local luck of a chance-heard remark that starts you thinking in a fruitful way? I've had all of these. They matter a lot. Nobody wants to hear this, because it seems doubly unfair. What? You have to be genetically gifted and you have to be lucky? Yes. And you can't slack on the hard work, either. The woods are full of talented people who thought they could and ended up frustrated losers with a lifetime of regrets about what they might have been. I don't make these rules. I'm just reporting how things are.

Commercial desktop software is getting worse, not better. I've been generally aware of this for a while - the relentless pull away from "you pay for it once and own it" to monthly subscription models that extract money from you forever has been a leading indicator. But my friend @DrInsensitive reports that the enshittification is accelerating. He says that in addition to a lot of tediously stupid UI changes, his most recent upgrade of CorelDraw now spams ads at him even when CorelDraw itself is not running! Furthermore the plague of microtransactions that has afflicted AA games for years is spreading - the set of free fill patterns for rectangles that his old version had is gone, instead when he tries to fill a rectangle he gets a pop-up invitation to buy an extra-cost feature pack of them. When one asshole vendor thinks they've successfully numbed their user base into accepting this kind of crap, others immediately follow. We've seen this movie before, we know how it ends - with applications, like games, designed to be deliberately frustrating and low-level awful, intended to give you itches that you can only scratch by buying their endless parade of "enhancements". I'm sure a surcharge to suppress the spammy CorelDraw ads won't be long in coming. And soon after that it will be everywhere. If this goes on, open-source software will finally win the desktop not because it's gotten enough better but because closed-source desktop applications have reached final form as an intolerable swarm of blood-sucking leeches. This is not the way I was looking forward to winning.

So, research scientists: I get that you are upset about the prospects of massive cuts to government research funding. So am I, actually. Maybe you shouldn't have stood by idly while so many of your colleagues sold out science and objectivity for a mess of Marxism? The dildo of consequences seldom arrives lubed.

Various lefties have reacted to the assassination of Charlie Kirk by saying that he deserved it for having toxic beliefs. And they get to decide what's toxic. Are those the new rules? Really? OK, I'll play. I hereby announce my intention to murder every Communist I can get my gunsights on. And I decide who's a Communist. So, maybe you want to rethink your position on political assassination just a bit?

In this interview, Daniel Penny shows that he understands that what he did should not be regarded as heroism, but as the normal duty of every adult male. To defend the weak. To stand between predators, four-legged or two-legged, and the women and children. This is what men are for. Daniel Penny is a man. And a living rebuke to any of you with Y chromosomes who aren't physically, mentally, and morally prepared to step up when it's your turn.

This is a message to the center-Left. I'm assuming it still exists. Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, you guys may be the only faction in American politics who can move to prevent a hot civil war from happening. Because the hard Left is doubling down. They're creating a myth that Tyler Robinson was a right-winger who shot another right-winger for being insufficiently right-wing; never mind that this doesn't make any goddamn sense. They're still dancing in Charlie Kirk's blood while they do this. Conservatives (I'm not one of them, but I can see them from here) are furious. Many think the second American civil war has already begun, waged as a stochastic-terror campaign of assassination attempts against prominent Republicans. After the shooting of Steve Scalise, two attempts on Donald Trump's life, and now the killing of Charlie Kirk in front of his wife and family, that's an increasingly difficult proposition for me to argue against. It's being said that the bullet that went through Charlie's neck killed the moderate Right. I fear this is true. Public alliances are now being made between mainstream-Right leaders and some rather grotesque hard-Right types that I devoutly hoped would never gain much influence. I can't really expect the Right to calm down, and the hard Left clearly thinks its ends are served by escalating the violence. That leaves only liberal moderates as the only people with the ability to turn down the temperature. You can do it by joining in the public morning for Charlie Kirk. I didn't like him much myself, and I don't expect you to either. But he died for free expression, and we need to honor him for that. Also, assassination needs to be taken off the table as a political tactic. That means that you're going to need to break with the hard Left. Don't buy the myth. Denounce Antifa terrorism. Withdraw your support from Democratic politicians who celebrate and excuse assassination. And all that begins, symbolically, with mourning Charlie Kirk as a hero who died for all of us. All of us! I know this is difficult, but the price of not doing it may literally be that this country turns into Bosnia - neighbor set against neighbor in an ugly low-level war that will simmer for years, accumulating atrocities on both sides. I love my country, I don't want to see this happen. Please. Wake up and do the right thing.

Gawker deserved to die, and if you wrote for it you deserved to suffer, and it is highly unlikely that your existence has been more positive for the world than Hulk Hogan's.

I'm about to make myself unpopular by defending price-gouging during a hurricane. If you are an economist, you can tune out because you already know what I'm going to say. If you're not, kindly pay attention because you might learn something. My friend @Devon_Eriksen_ (you should read his novel) likes to say that "Money is a measure of fucks given." This is a succinct way of focusing on willingness to pay as a measure of how much you think you need what you're paying for. A gas station that doesn't raise its prices during a hurricane is going to be besieged by people wanting to top up their tanks just in case. Most of those people don't expect to actually need the top-up, but because the price of buying that option is low, they'll take it. Result: lines miles long. Many people wait hours to get fuel. The gas runs out. Most of it was driven away by people who had little likelihood of actually needing it, so now it's no longer available to people who need it desperately. Now suppose the gas station jacks up its prices to $10 a gallon, like we're hearing about from North Carolina. Lots of people swear at the gas station owners, but a quiet miracle occurs. People sort themselves into two sets: "I need gas enough to pay $10 a gallon for it," versus "I don't actually give that many fucks." Only the I-need people show up at the gas station. And look - more of them get gas, before it runs out, than would have if most of the gas had been bought by don't-actually people. This is called efficient market allocation. In a hurricane, it can save lives. And probably does. One last point: if your reaction to this lesson is to whinge "What about the poor people?" the practically and morally correct answer is "Get real. They don't have cars in the first place."

You can just make things. This is my massive white-pill about the revolution in small scale manufacturing that's going on right now. The immediate trigger is a story I read about a guy who was annoyed that his wife needed a wheelchair, and the designs were all crappy and hideously expensive and made in China. So he booted up a small factory that now builds custom wheelchairs, delivering them for about $1,000 a pop, undercutting the Chinese by a factor of five. The context, though is something that's been going on since the first mass market 3D printers in 2009. We've had more than a decade now in which many of the people who would have become part of the hacker culture I came up in back when software was the cutting edge have been learning how to use FDM printers, desktop CNC mills, laser cutters, EDM machines, and all kinds of physical fabrication techniques that you can set up in a garage or a basement. The lesson has had time to sink in. If you're clever about it, you can hack matter the way we learned how to hack code - high speed, low drag, flexibly and playfully. You can just make things. Without bimpty-bump millions of dollars of startup capital. With the new tech you can start small, turn a profit on boutique items, and scale up organically. SpaceX is part of this story, using rapid iterations of custom designs made with 3D printing in sintered metal to continuously improve and simplify their rocket engines. So are Defense Distributed and the other semi-underground firearms-fabrication anarchists. So were the people who figured out how to garage-build respirators during the COVID panic. And now so is JerryRigEverything, the YouTuber who built a wheelchair factory. The software revolution of a quarter century ago was fueled by Dennard scaling driving down the cost of compute power and wide area networking. Suddenly you could do things on a desktop that had taken raised floors and dedicated computer rooms just a few years before. Hackers grabbed these new possibilities and ran with them. I helped the movement understand itself. I see something very like that happening again now. But instead of the demassification of software, we're seeing the demassification of manufacturing. The new hackers are being playful with atoms rather than bits. But the same spirit is there; I can feel it every time I wander into a makerspace. These kids are not going to be stopped. There's too much fun to be had. Too many brains chasing every problem in sight. If my hacker culture didn't still exist it would make me all nostalgic to watch them. But no. The old hacker culture and the new one flow together at the edges. The apprentice I'm teaching systems programming has a side-hustle printing models for mail-order customers. The kids put their part designs in public repositories; they didn't have to discover open source and distributed collaboration, they grew up absorbing both through their pores. (Which has the accidental result that though I'm not leading things and writing manifestos this time, I'm one of their culture heroes anyway. That feels nice, I won't deny it.) And you ain't seen nothing yet. FDM and other small-scale fabrication technologies are attracting enough attention to improve at a torrid pace. There are obvious synergies with robotics and deep learning that haven't kicked in yet. Or, maybe they already have in somebody's garage, and we'll find out about it next week or next month. It's a swarm attack, a disruption from below, and lots of conventional large-scale manufacturing outfits are going to suffer the fate of massified Chinese wheelchair factories - they just don't know it yet. They'll be undercut by cheaper, lighter, faster, smarter, custom, and localized. Somewhere, Buckminster Fuller is whispering "ephemeralization" and smiling.

I've been meaning to post about this. This image illustrates perfectly how full of shit the people are who are hyperventilating about the US blowing up innocent Caribbean fishermen. Reasonable people may differ on whether it is legal or moral or appropriate to smoke drug runners with Navy missiles. But... "Innocent fishermen" do not gang three or four high-power outboard engines onto a speedboat that's been painted black to lower its visual signature running at night. And you notice none of the shoot footage was taken in the daytime? Engines like that are expensive to to buy, expensive to run, expensive to maintain, and way overkill for fishing. Just right for drug runners, though. "Innocent fishermen", my ass!

Shorter: Windows is evolving from being passively dangerous to being actively dangerous.

You misspelled "Young women are gullible and easily yanked around by the feelz".

Well...it's only because they are. Hating the truth tends not to be very effective.

2/ Open source worked the way it's supposed to. Some hacker noticed something that made him curious, poked at it because hackers are like that, and because the code was open and availablwe for inpection, diagnosed the problem before any serious harm was done.

Given that anybody can check into more recent psychometric studies and verify Walsh's assertion, the main effect of rants like yours is to suggest to unbiased observers that 19th-century race science might have gotten a bad rap. Somehow I doubt that's the outcome you intended.

Hey, @elonmusk: as long as there are stories like this in the news, all the honking in the world about how we need to import talent is going to sound like self-serving bilge. Because one in six is only the number of hiring managers that would admit to this. The actual number is almost certainly higher. Remember, I'm at least partly on your side in this. I'd be happy to see the US poach all the top 0.1% talent from the rest of the world. But how can I defend even that when this crap is going on?

Next comes the part where every NGO/nonprofit implicated in funding a major terrorist organization gets a proctological exam by people with no sense of humor at all. As I have emphasized several times in the last week: the long game in taking down a terrorist network is to smash its funding chain.

I'm a hand-to-hand martial-artist who has taught self defense to women, and I'm here to say that this video is so misleading that it's actually dangerous. This woman is trying to give women confidence in a move that won't work. The most "effective" slap in the world by a normal female, even a fit and athletic one, will not do more than piss a man off. The upper-body strength you'd need to make that blow effective just isn't there. The only time a slap will actually work to deter a male attacker is when it's a signal to other men nearby that they should intervene, and in that case, how efficiently you transfer force isn't important. Mainly you want the slap to be loud and obvious. Otherwise, whatever trouble you're in has just gotten worse because the slap made your attacker angrier without impairing him. This is a bad idea, unless you think ending up raped and dead is better than ending up just roughed up and possibly raped. A knife isn't reliable against a male attacker either, not unless you catch him off guard and can make a disabling first strike. Otherwise he's rather likely to grab your knife arm, break your wrist, and make you eat the blade. Pepper spray is not immediately disabling, and under modern conditions a substantial fraction of assailants will be on disassociative-anesthetic drugs that make it ineffective. It's almost worse than no self-defense plan at all. There is only one thing that will pretty reliably stop a male attacker, and that is putting two bullets in him. Note that I didn't say one bullet. One-stop shots are not reliable with pistol calibers. Even two shots leave around 17% of assailants active; you have to be psychologically and morally prepared to empty your mag if two shots don't do it. If you can't carry a gun, don't fuck around with slapping an assailant. Learn how to do a disabling strike to eyes or groin (bearing in mind that some men can even shrug off a groin strike) or don't play at all. The broader truth is that Hollywood lies to you, ladies. If you get into a contact fight with a male, there is a better than 90% chance that you will lose. Even martial arts training doesn't do a lot to fix this, since men are effectively inhibited from using their full strength in a dojo. Don't fall for bullshit like this video. Stay out of situations where you might need to get in a muscle contest with a man, or carry something to shoot him with. The alternatives to this are all fantasies.

No, this is the result of having the federal Department of Education

"Create no-go zones for federal forces.' In one of my previous analysis postings, I outlined three possible scenarios for the future after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This corresponds to scenario 3, the one where insurrection edges into a simmering civil war a la Bosnia. I caught some flak in my replies at the time from people who thought an insurrection based in urban areas isn't practical under modern conditions. Antifa thinks it is. It's what they're planning for. One of the things I have to remind myself of occasionally is that most people know essentially nothing about Communist theory and Communist revolutionary tactics. Antifa is running the classic Communist playbook. Make the enemy fight you where you are strong and they are weak - where you have support among the people and (when possible) cover from sympathetic local officials. Historically that has usually meant fighting from rural areas where the reach of the government is weak. But the Russian Revolution was an exception, and the revolution Antifa is trying to fight is another. Their natural home ground is large coastal cities run by left-wing Democrats.

You left out "Fascism is hot blonde women in advertisements." The stupid, it burns.

Undoubtedly, the funniest thing about the current political scene is hearing people scream about fascism descending on the US in one breath, then advocating censorship and disarmament of civilians in the next. Do they even listen to themselves?

Something to be clear about: Any politician or journalist who says Antifa doesn't exist, or nobody knows what it is, is self-identifying as an ally of Communist terrorists. Remember that these people hate you and want to destroy your country and your civilization.

Dave Täht died yesterday. He was one of the unsung heroes of the Internet, and a close friend of mine who I will miss very badly. Dave, known on X as @mtaht because his birth name was Michael, was a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using X. His work on mitigating bufferbloat improved practical TCP/IP performance tremendously, especially around video streaming and other applications requiring low latency. Without him, Netflix and similar services might still be plagued by glitches and stutters. I think we first met in 2001 near the peak of my Mr. Famous Guy years. Once, sometimes twice a year he'd come visit, carrying his guitar, and crash out in my basement for a week or so hacking on stuff. A lot of the central work on bufferbloat got done while I was figuratively looking over his shoulder. Curiously, we didn't collaborate directly very often. Different technical interests. All of the household cats loved him, though. My wife Cathy liked him. He was a funny, humble, down-to-earth man who liked to surf and play music, made friends wherever he went, charmed the pants off of a succession of improbably attractive women, and bore deteriorating health stoically. While I know him he went blind in one eye and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He barely let it slow him down. Despite constantly griping in later years about being burned out on programming, he kept not only doing excellent work but bringing good work out of others, assembling teams of amazing collaborators to tackle problems lesser men would have considered intractable. There was a certain reserve about him though. I never knew why he changed his name. Nor did we ever talk about politics or the women in this life, nor quite why for so many years he lived as a nomad couch-surfer who was as likely to be found on a beach on Nicaragua or in quasi-residence at a university in Europe as anywhere in the US. My wife called him the International Man of Mystery, which title became a running joke among the three of us. None of that seemed important, because Dave lived for the work he did, except when he was trying to beat me at board games. He swore for years that he was eventually going to win against me and my wife and our Friday night gaming friends at Power Grid, and I truly wish he could get another couple shots at it. Dave should have been famous, and he should have been rich. If he had a cent for every dollar of value he generated in the world he probably could have bought the entire country of Nicaragua and had enough left over to finance a space program. He joked about wanting to do the latter, and I don't think he was actually joking. But he wasn't Elon Musk or me. Didn't want to run a business, and didn't want the crap that came from being Mr. Famous Guy, though he certainly understood why I took that on. Maybe he was wiser than me about avoiding the limelight, jury is still out. He got a lot of stuff done anyway, and that was the important part. I'll miss Dave a lot. I'll miss him showing up on my doorstep to charm my cats and tinker with my routers. I'll miss swapping war stories with him, eating Chinese food with him, and the grin on his face when he won a game. In the invisible college of people who made the Internet run, he was among the best of us. He said I inspired him, but I often thought he was a better and more selfless man than me. Ave atque vale, Dave.

It turns out that "pervert" is a meaningful category, not just a prude hate-word. This is one of the more disturbing things I've learned in this century. All sexual-targeting disorders are comorbid; having any one of them significantly increases the probability that you will also have others. It is likely, though not yet established, that all sexual-targeting disorders are minor variations on a single minimal-brain-damage syndrome affecting the specific portion of the limbic system that does arousal and desire. The statistical correlations certainly seem to suggest this. This is one of the things that libertarian me was extremely annoyed to discover social conservatives had been right about all along. The reasons for their beliefs were usually insane (as in, anyone who uses the word "God" in this context is insane) but the beliefs themselves were predictively sound. Yes, if we let homosexuals fly their freak flag freely, a significant percentage of them *will* in fact come after your children. And they'll scream "bigot" if you try to stop them. I was happier when I didn't know this.

Reminder: the slogan on this poster matches the engravings on Tyler Robinson's bullets. This is not a coincidence. The Communist terror network wants everyone to know that Robinson was one of theirs, in order to put the fright on conservatives. But, of course, they do it in such a way as to allow their aboveground political allies to maintain deniability.

You fucked around. You found out. To be honest, I would prefer the fate of the Gazans to be so horrible that potential terrorists have nightmares about it for the next five centuries and are deterred from acting on their evil dreams. I don't think the Israelis are capable of the degree of cruelty and ruthlessness required for this to occur. Fair enough, I wouldn't be either. But mercy to the Gazans is not kindness to the future.

I was asked last night why, when I talk about politics, I focus on gun rights so much. Surely, said querent, there are lots of other important things for a libertarian like you to weigh in on. Censorship. DEI. AGW hysteria. The list goes on... Fair question. It's because many years ago L. Neil Smith, a libertarian SF writer sadly no longer with us, persuaded me of something important. A politician's attitude about firearms rights is a very reliable index for his actual attitude about individual freedom and agency. Never mind what they say about other issues. A politician standing up for the right of ordinary citizens to be armed is sending a very reliable signal that he values their ability to assert their freedom, and trusts them to generally make correct choices about the use of violence even it might be directed against himself. Conversely, a politician who is against gun rights is telling on himself. He fears the wrath of the people and wants them disempowered. He does not trust them to employ violence only when necessary. And that's actually the best case. In far too many cases, anti-gun politicians clearly dream of being the jackboot that stomps on human faces forever, and view the disarmament of the general population as a step towards that end. If I must have politicians meddling in my affairs, I demand at the very least that they respect my freedom and my agency. That's why I demand that they respect my right to keep and bear arms. Gun rights may look like a narrow single issue. It isn't. It's an even better index of a politician's attitude about liberty than questions about free speech and censorship, because it pushes the stakes higher. Because words can't kill you, but arms wielded by enraged citizens can. No matter what soothing words drop from his lips, no matter what promises he makes, the politician who tries to disarm you is always, always, always your enemy. Never forget that.

Minimum wage laws are a disaster because they price people with low skill levels out of the market. Suppose you're working a job that generates $10 of revenue per hour for your employer. You're being paid $8 an hour. The other $2 is your employer's take for running the business. In reality, a lot of that $2 is eaten by overhead. He has to pay for physical plant, for starters. Now some well-meaning idiot comes along and says $8 an hour is too low, everybody should be paid at least $15 an hour. What the idiot thinks will happen is that your wages will go up to $15 an hour, with the $7 coming out of your employer's pockets. What will happen in reality is that you won't have a job anymore. Not as long as the employer has to run a deficit paying you because you're not generating $15 an hour in revenue. Sometimes your employer has enough pricing power to push up the prices he charges to cover your wages, but that's really rare. Usually you're going to lose your job. The business will close, or you'll be replaced by a robot. Even as I write, minimum-wage are rapidly driving the roboticization of fast-food service. Those jobs, which were the first step on the skill letter for a lot of inner-city youths, are never coming back. Now consider this from the point of view of all the people in the world who are simply not capable of generating $15 of value per hour. They used to have jobs. They used to make at least some money and have some self-respect. Now they don't. The wage floor has crushed them underneath it. That's the silent disaster.

Race science is much better founded.

I hear Kamala Harris has conceded. For just a moment, I'm going to abandon the high-decoupling rationalist stance I normally post from and talk about what I personally wanted from this election and now hope I might get. For me, a good outcome in this election meant not Trump winning, but his enemies losing. I'm not MAGA, and not a tribal conservative of either the old-school or new-school kind. I'm a libertarian, and have some serious differences with substance with Trump and his partisans. Also I have never much liked Trump as a person. He's vulgar and under-controlled; he talks and postures too much and, I think the charge that he's a narcissist has some weight. But...he chooses his enemies well. I will also admit that I think better of Trump now than I did three months ago. He has demonstrated literal courage under fire, which is an important quality in a man who may need to make life or death decisions about the fate of a nation. I went to see him speak, and I saw a man much calmer and more together than I was expecting. But I'm not really posting about Trump today, and the only other thing I'm going to say about him is that his most valuable quality is that he enrages evil people into unmasking themselves. I have believed for decades that the central problem of American politics is defeating the Gramscian long march through our institutions. Covert and not-so-covert Marxists have waged a remarkably successful memetic war. it has many manifestations - blatant bias in the mainstream media, welfare statism, DEI, climate alarmism, transgender ideology, open borders - but the goal is always the same. To cripple and destroy the Main Enemy, the United States of America and everyone in it who loves liberty. Trump's victory is the worst defeat of the Gramscians in my lifetime. They went all-in with an unprecedented campaign of lies, vitriol, hate propaganda, lawfare, and election rigging. He beat them anyway, and for that he has my respect. What I want from the immediate aftermath of the election is to rejoice in their agonized screaming. What I want from Trump and Republican control of both houses is follow-through: 1. Impose election security measures so we can't be frauded again. 2. Abolition of every federal firearms law and regulation, including the disbandment of the ATF. We must restore the proper Constitutional order in which the government is frightened of the people, not the reverse. 3. Massive cuts in the reach and power of the administrative state. No unelected bureaucrat should ever have the power to effectively make law. 4. A concerted and conscious attempt to drive the Communists and Communist tools out from everywhere that they have burrowed into our institutions, perhaps starting with the complete defunding of any educational institution that harbors academic Marxists. Yes, I know, many of these people don't know they're Communist tools. I'm past caring. I've been ready to throw them out of helicopters with my own hands since about 2014, hoping against hope that something would happen to make that kind of violence unnecessary. Now, maybe, we have a path to defeating them peacefully. I'm not sure Trump fully understands this necessity himself, but there are people close to him - notably Elon Musk and Ron Paul - who I'm pretty sure do. The first thing we need to do is be able to name the enemy. Conservatives have been cowards about this ever since the Army-McCarthy hearings a few years before I was born. They became afraid to speak about or explicitly oppose Communist infiltration, and we have been paying an increasing price for that cowardice through my entire lifetime. Conservatives? MAGA people? If you really want to make America great again, make defeat of the Gramscians your cause. Name the enemy. Expose them. Defeat them. They have crippled, divided, and corrupted us for far too long. It's time to take our country back.