Mr. Klaus, the family cat.

Disclaimer: I'm American, BUT I got my tech degree at a popular institution with a very solid reputation. The walls were plastered with "women in STEM" infographics and the like. My graduating class was 100% male. The Early Childcare class across the street was 100% female.

Years ago, I actually looked closely at a framed piece of art which had hung in my aunt's house for many years. A cluster of wildflowers done in oil pastel. The little scribble in the corner, barely legible, was my name. I only barely remembered drawing it as a child.

1) NYPD brings a man in for a psychiatric evaluation 2) Man is released after an hour 3) Hours later, the same man shoves a 76-year-old down a flight of subway stairs - fatally. Hey, they're your policies, not mine.

Maybe it's an olive branch, considering the United States under FDR and Britain under Churchill were complicit in covering up the Katyn story and attempting to blame Germany - who in fact discovered the mass grave.

I wish Kindles were better for picture books. I want to read about ships. Specifically, junks. Dhows. Anything not square-rigged. Did lateen-rigged ships make trans-oceanic voyages? Who knows?

The funny election results coming out of Yookay aren't surprising. It's a senile welfare state in a state of visible and rapid decline. It has no purpose, no moral center. Elections will be rougher the closer to the status quo your party is.

My new security guard, still in training 🐰

My Occam's Razor theory is that Israel is moving now because they know they're on a timer. Well within our lifetimes, support for Israel will very quickly flip from a de facto requirement to a ten-ton albatross around the neck of anyone seeking elected office. They need to make hay beforehand.

Contemplating reading about the old Nubian civilization, partially because I suspect the literature is full of attempts to conflate it with the Egyptian Old Kingdom. Already saw one example of this. Scholars, please, quit trying to assuage modern insecurities by mutilating history.

My heavily pregnant wife is somehow a stronger swimmer than me. We race across the pool, and I have to cheat to win (grab an ankle and pull). I chalk it up to the baby bump giving her an edge in buoyancy.

I don't really care about whatever this cartoon is griping about, but I think it's really funny that one of these hooded figures is Clarence Thomas, who is blacker than the ace of spades.

Your thoughts on this?

"America is an assimilation machine which incorporates immigrants from all over the world into its diverse culture and political system, but ethnic minorities need specially-made congressional districts because they have distinct interests which need unique accomodation." Can't have it both ways.

"Ozymandias" is the Greek corruption of "Usermaatra," the throne name of the Pharaoh Ramses. The famous sonnet by Horace Smith (considered by many to be a critique of absolute rulership) looks a little petty, as Ramses ruled a sublime power which was ancient even in his time.

I know California's wealth tax isn't actually a one-time thing, because if they can do it once, they can do it as many times as they want. Why not? What recourse is there?

I oppose political violence. I support political force.

Any Ukrainian head of state has a strong incentive to play nice with Russia. That's just geography. Zelensky rebuffed that incentive and was openly a Washington man. Safer to do that when you're on the Potomac, not the Dnieper.

Oh boy! Red button/blue button debate! Again! I am a Red Button Pusher, because it's the zero-risk choice, and I don't feel any moral duty to risk my neck trying to bail out people stupid enough to press the blue button.

I really can't take calls for gun legislation seriously. You can go on Instagram right now and see gangbangers showing off their glock switches (for the uninitiated: very illegal) and nothing will be done about it. There are no laws. Not really.

Power's last resort is a sneer, which is why I don't feel bad getting sneered at by a True Believer. Like, knock yourself out. YOUR bad ideas led us here; my bad ideas remain purely hypothetical.

The NYT pity piece on that lady from the defunct non-profit is pretty funny. Also, if your NGO goes belly-up when the government money stops, you weren't really a "non-government organization," were you?

In which people FAR wealthier and better connected than I am make a case for petty theft - an antisocial nuisance for which none of them would ever face accountability (though I certainly would).

Takeaways from the SPLC thing: 1) The *actual* accusation is of wire fraud, not just giving money to naughty people. 2) It's actually bizarre that a non-profit would be LARPing as law enforcement with paid informants. 3) Non-profits should be explicitly barred from political maneuvers like this.

Kitsch.

The tremendous effort poured into deconstructing masculinity has actually convinced some people that manhood exists solely as a performance - that it couldn't possibly exist innately within someone. See also: those who see manhood as obsolete/archaic.

I was forward-deployed when COVID hit, and the synthesis of being deployed + a near-global shutdown made it easily the worst experience of my life. It kinda rubs me the wrong way to hear people's wistful reminiscence about sitting at home collecting checks.

I'd tweak the Palantir manifesto in a few places, but my general impression is: "Very cool - IF you mean it." Take solace in the fact that nobody ever means it.

I mean, transnational corporations spent much of the last decade broadcasting progressive orthodoxy. Their pfps still become rainbow-themed in June. If the critique here is that corporations shouldn't adopt transgressive political stances, that ship has sailed.

Fun facts: None of this happened. Everything in the Declaration of Independence is complete nonsense, and the Revolution was, fundamentally, a criminal conspiracy aided and abetted by a critical mass of the British government.

My pet theory, which I could easily verify if I wasn't lazy, is that "Deseret" is an Anglicization of the Egyptian "deshret" (meaning "the red land"). A lot of Utah desert is an oxide orange color, so it kinda checks out. Map barely related. I live in one of the dark red counties.

The bodycam gods have given us a 21st century Rorsach test. What do YOU see?

"I laid over 100,000 cubic yards of stone a year for thirty years to build monuments people visit 4,000 years later. Currency had not been developed. Horses had not been domesticated." "I was given $126,000,000,000 and twenty years, and I built nothing."

A huge stumbling block in life is the point when you reach adulthood and think "what am I going to do with my life?" I think a perfect regime is one in which that question is answered implicitly. The current regime does a terrible job at this, mostly because it isn't actually trying.

"I demand the right of citizens to vote, because that's democracy. I oppose having a list of citizens, because that's tyranny." How is this meant to work, exactly?

I could take this rhetoric to be serious if its proponents had anything to say about the other, more explicit expropriator of my time and wealth - the one which funnels it to people and interests which either do nothing for me or are openly hostile towards me.

For the small-souled man of the moment, none of this is worthy. The pyramids, the immortal legions of terra-cotta, the immense ziggurats and resplendent tombs are simply tourist attractions, and the men who built such eternal wonders are reducible to petty and superstitious tyrants.

Reading ancient history, regardless of the locale, fills me with sadness for the present. For the ancients, history was still in motion. Magic was real. The myths were alive, people believed in them - there were higher modes of belief than the petty moral fables of our own time.

You think Egypt under Thutmose III would have been hobbled by midterm elections and environmental impact statements? Do you know what the pyramids looked like in their time? No and no. Even our rulers are slaves.

Chinese emperors from 1000 B.C. to 1912 A.D. were considered literal sons of Heaven. The Pharaohs of Egypt were deifying themselves back in 1300 B.C. Heads of state NOT claiming divine heritage is the real aberration.

Orban's 37% vote share: Humiliating. Deserved. A devastating repudiation of his policies and character. Starmer's 32% vote share: Landslide victory. Voice of the people. An utter triumph and a model of democracy.

I'm going to try this out, so when you see me doing a Mark Levin impersonation in someone's replies, just know: this is for science.

There needs to be an epithet for people who insist, ad nauseum, that their politics are simply an outgrowth of "being a good person." That's hardly a settled question, and if it was, that's a case for Platonic rule by philosopher kings (which I support, but YOU don't).

Me, a pig and a chauvinist: "Ladies, you don't have to suck off your boss if he tells you to." Liberal feminists: "Yes you do."

You'd think a surveillance state could prevent machete slashing sprees if nothing else, but we don't even get that much.

"The void" encourages you to act with compassion and love because saying "God" would have been icky and gauche. I'm imagining The Void as a tentacled Lovecraftian horror lurking in a starry abyss. "Be kind, for I was old when the stars were young..."

Why not use hackneyed pro-immigration language to settle the Israel/Palestine conflict? Anyone can be Palestinian. An Israeli who settles in Gaza is just as Palestinian as someone whose family has lived there for generations. Palestine is a nation of immigrants. You object? On what grounds?

Uh-oh, SA allegations directed at an Inner Party candidate. Do we black-bag them out of public life per post-2018 conventions? Does that set a bad precedent encouraging frivolous allegations as tools of intrigue? Seems like our norms are tailored for maximum power-grab potential and nothing else.

"The culture war is fake!" says someone who would never accept any manner of compromise on any extant cultural conflict. "It's fake... but I demand victory!" would be slightly more honest and coherent.

Decadent, obese moderns are lamenting that Reconstruction didn't properly resemble the Khmer Rouge.