I disabled comments here, obviously. I doubt I will re-enable them anytime soon. It’s not that I care about people posting their thoughts whether in agreement or not, but simply that I don’t have the cognitive space to read them or deal with them at all.

I’m just not very social and even a little bit more than I can stand is way too much. I like to be in complete control of that part of my life. Hence, no Facebook. No Twitter. Etc.

This is my space to rant imperiously, to post unfounded assertions, and to generate my own alternative facts.

I kid, I kid.

But this blog is for me. I used to say that I’d write it if only one or two people read it. Now I realize I’d do so if no one did.

Post on your own blogs and link to me if you have something to say. I’ll probably read it.

The Witch.

Talk about a movie that takes its world seriously, and the weltanschauung of its characters.

It felt as foreign as any film I’ve watched, and that includes all the actually-foreign films I’ve seen.

It’s not really a horror — not in the classic sense. It’s more an examination of the dreads and torments that each of us harbor and inflict on one another, and the deeper fears that instantiate them.

Highly recommended.

People get really angry when you attempt to discover the deeper reasons for an event, an ideology, or a cultural moment.

Doesn’t really matter whether you are wrong or right. Science and exploration is most often opposed because it is a threat to the existing order.

If productivity were the primary concern of corporations, open office plans simply would not exist anywhere.

If profits were a primary concern at the executive level, same.

This realization has led me to think over the years of what drives behavior that actually materially harms companies and their workers. Seems to be a combination of factors: there are the primate brain things like that most managers don’t believe their staff is working if they can’t see them and that power displays are more impressive if done in person.

Saving money is important to some execs, but that’s not the primary motivation.

I do think it’s mostly about dominance, which is very important to most of the people who are attracted to the executive class. It’s about enforcing will, lording over the (mini) empire, about demonstrating the worthlessness or at least powerlessness of your underlings to other execs.

This is just as true if the executive is a woman as if it’s a man; perhaps more so.

The metric system is rationalist anti-human BS.

The thing is, despite the fact that it’s based on our own ten fingers, I don’t like the metric system. I don’t like a system that requires decimal calculations and which won’t easily divide by anything other than 5 or 2. It is not ultimately logical for people who make clothes out of four basic panels (and have to size those panels up and down), and in my opinion anything that requires an infinitely repeating decimal to represent a third of the measuring unit is crazy. It just doesn’t make my life better. The system was made up by a bunch of rationalists who got carried away with creating a completely new system that people in different countries would accept — for the sole reason that they wanted something new. It figures that it caught on — only something this untidy and bizarre would.

That said, I’m not particularly tied to the US’s semi-Imperial system. Figuring out how to reduce recipes from cups to tablespoons etc. is excruciating.

It’s just that the metric system isn’t any better, merely the usual modern rationalist religion claptrap that ignores human needs for the convenience of spreadsheet fuckery.

BTW, I am completely comfortable in the metric system. Was in the army for five years, where that is used exclusively. It’s not lack of familiarity, but rather familiarity that breeds derision.

About immigration, I mostly agree with James Kunstler.

I think borders matter and they need to be protected. I think our immigration law enforcement under Obama has been deeply dishonest and damaging to our politics in ways that go far beyond the question of who gets to come here. I believe we are under no obligation to take in everybody and anybody who wants to move here. I believe we need an official time out from the high-volume immigration of recent decades. I believe we have good reasons to be picky about who we let in.

In case you are very, very dense the “open borders” nonsense is something promulgated not by hippie utopians but by large corporations and their functionaries who salivate over the cheap labor and the devastation of wages and living standard this causes among the working class. Then they pay economists to massage the numbers to show that the net effects are always positive of this calamity.

Modern immigration politics as actually practiced has almost nothing to do with humanism or with charity, but rather with the destabiliziation of societal arrangements for various corporate and neolib purposes.

Again: I am not against all immigration. I think it can be a net gain for every culture and society, including our own. I am against being called a “racist Nazi misogynist KKK Hitler-loving stormtrooper demon” — as is the wont of much of the Left — because I don’t support neoliberal destruction of my society and culture.

Also, there’s this. As I’ve pointed out many times before, you can have open borders or any sort of welfare state. You absolutely will not get both.

So, choose.

The hard-to-accept fact about the ancients (for many at least) is that they could have had a much more high-tech society than they did but they chose not to. That is to say, the minds, the methods and much of the building blocks were there, but the cultural imperative was not.

Culture matters. Choices matter. Empiricism only gets you so far, and not really all that far without cultural impetus.

Come near, O nations, and hear; be attentive, O peoples! Let the earth and what fills it listen, the world and all it produces.

The Lord is angry with all the nations and is wrathful against all their host; he has doomed them and given them over to slaughter.

Their slain shall be cast out, their corpses shall send up a stench; The mountains shall run with their blood, and all the hills shall rot; The heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll, and all their host shall wither away, As the leaf wilts on the vine, or as the fig withers on the tree.

When my sword has drunk its fill in the heavens, lo, it shall come down in judgment upon Edom, a people I have doomed.

The Lord has a sword filled with blood, greasy with fat, With the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of rams’ kidneys; For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah, a great slaughter in the land of Edom.

Wild oxen shall be struck down with fatlings, and bullocks with bulls; Their land shall be soaked with blood, and their earth greasy with fat.

For the Lord has a day of vengeance, a year of requital by Zion’s defender.

Edom’s streams shall be changed into pitch and her earth into sulphur, and her land shall become burning pitch; night and day it shall not be quenched, its smoke shall rise forever. From generation to generation she shall lie waste, never again shall anyone pass through her.

But the desert owl and hoot owl shall possess her, the screech owl and raven shall dwell in her. The Lord will measure her with line and plummet to be an empty waste for satyrs to dwell in.

Her nobles shall be no more, nor shall kings be proclaimed there; all her princes are gone.

Her castles shall be overgrown with thorns, her fortresses with thistles and briers. She shall become an abode for jackals and a haunt for ostriches.

Wildcats shall meet with desert beasts, satyrs shall call to one another; there shall the lilith repose, and find for herself a place to rest.

There the hoot owl shall nest and lay eggs, hatch them out and gather them in her shadow; there shall the kites assemble, none shall be missing its mate.

Look in the book of the Lord and read: no one of these shall be lacking, For the mouth of the Lord has ordered it, and his spirit shall gather them there.

It is he who casts the lot for them, and with his hands he marks off their shares of her; they shall possess her forever, and dwell there from generation to generation.

–New American Bible – Isaiah, Chapter 34

Everyone is missing that the Trump administration’s chaos isn’t an accident; it’s intentional. Yes, they are incompetent in many way, but are not complete fools. Imputing that the chaos is inadvertent ineptitude is underestimating them as Democrats almost always do. The Democrats are imagining what they’d do if they were in charge. The Trump administration shares none of those goals, values or priorities.

Chaos is a feature, not a bug. Wait a little and you’ll see why.

It’s kind of funny that if we got really rich, we’d probably live in a smaller house than we do now.

Since we’re not quite well off enough to just decide to build a house* (especially since we don’t know where we really want to live), we end up with larger-than-necessary houses so that we have one room big enough to be our office room that is not also the living room. This almost always means a three bedroom home, which is if designed properly totally unnecessary for us.

In a house we designed and had built, none of these compromises would apply.

Even if we were billionaires, I doubt we’ve live in a house more than 1500 square feet. I don’t want cleaning staff. I don’t want strangers in my house ever. I don’t want cooks or chefs or attendants or servants, no matter how rich I am.

So now we actually have to pay for a bigger house than we need because we aren’t yet ready to build our own.

*Building a custom house from scratch (not from a template or pasted together from templates) is around 3-10X as much as selecting one from, say, a Toll Brothers catalog.