Twenty-Two Percent of the World’s Power Now Comes from Renewable Sources.

Much of that is hydro still, but that is changing rapidly.

I remember about a decade ago when many prominent and likely well-intentioned (not industry shills) scientists and other experts asserted that it was not possible to get world renewables past 10 percent of energy production. There were even a few well-reviewed books at the time proclaiming that “fact.”

It’s almost always correct to trust experts, but sometimes they can be spectacularly wrong. I am really interested in how to tell (and if it is possible to tell) when this inconsonance is likely to occur.

Not only is is useful for its own sake, but can lead to making loads of money.

Did you know that the lead software designer of the Apollo flight software was a woman, Margaret Hamilton?

Neither did I, until today.

Tell me again why we’re trying to chase all women out of STEM fields?

True, true.

There’s no denying that black women’s sexuality is policed and derided in a way that white women’s is not. By white feminists, especially.

It’s also true that white feminists are falling all over themselves to criticize Iggy Azalea, while at the same time fawning over and praising Eminem.

Hypocrite much?

However, it’s always been true that oppression reproduces itself; it’s an apparently-innate human tendency to increase relative status by oppressing and diminishing others rather than attempting to eliminate oppression altogether. Feminism is not immune to this.

Adblock Plus, in addition to having sold out to the ad industry, is also now slow and very, very bloated.

When I was using it, my Firefox would routinely consume more than 7GB of memory. I have 32GB in my machine so the absolute amount of memory used wasn’t that big a deal, but it also caused the browser to crawl more slowly than me walking away from a milkshake store.

So next I removed AdBlock Plus and installed Bluehell Firewall. While that worked well, Bluehell has no options and no ability to whitelist anything. Good, but perhaps there was something better.

This might be it. So far, AdGuard has not resulted in any additional memory consumption, hasn’t slowed the browser down at all and has configurable options. I can whitelist things again!

I’ll wait a few more days to say for sure, but it seems pretty good so far.

Of all the things in the world that I can’t understand, the hatred of women is at the top of the list.

No, not every man, yada yada. But it’s common enough that it happens all the time and wide (mostly male, but not exclusively) swaths of the population gleefully participate in it when it does.

Usually most hatred is born from fear. What is it then that so many men fear? Sure, I can list the reasons. I know those. But I can never understand.

This essay – in addition to being beautifully written – is a good encapsulation of why the humanities is the most dangerous field of study of all. And why it’s the most often and the first attacked, and why it’s as necessary for life as science and engineering.

Yes, science and engineering can build that nuclear weapon, but can it give you a reason not to want to?

Yep.

In job searches, people frequently look at the listed requirements, see a gap, and move on, fearing rejection and not wanting to waste the employer’s time and their own. They’re making a big mistake, and potentially holding their careers back.

I’ve applied to and gotten jobs where I only met 10-20% of the “requirements.” And was very successful in those jobs, and did not lie on my resume. I do think women would have a harder time of this than men, but I think it pays off for anyone if they believe they could do the job to apply.

The best strategy for a job is: if you think you could do it, apply. The listed requirements are often completely fictional or impossible.

Back in April I wrote, “The Russian invasion of Ukraine is inevitable now, and has been for a while.”

Today, this happened.

Won’t someone get me a cushy and well-compensated pundit job? I am much better than they are, as they use, apparently, their asses as a guide while I use all of history – which isn’t perfect but does pretty damn well.

Had I died at 18, and if the NYT had written an article about me post-mortem the way they chose to write about Mike Brown, these are the facts they’d have had to include:

Mike…was no angel, public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Suspected of a string of retail theft and campus disturbances, shortly after departing his hometown for military service nearly all of his known associates received lengthy prison sentences for various serious crimes up to and including involuntary manslaughter. Until his tenure in the Army, Mike lived in a state of constant conflict with his community, once even being briefly detained by the school resource officer, accused of assaulting two students. It was later revealed that there were larger issues in play with this violent attack after the parents of the pair declined to press charges. However, this was not the only such incident noted by those who knew him. About these and other outbursts of aggression, Mike produced violent and pugilistic short stories and poems in his creative writing class that were rejected as too controversial for his high school paper. Other students mentioned that he was at turns distant and confrontational, and many suspected that he peddled drugs on campus though no charges were ever brought.

I could go on. (My name is also Mike, by the way.) But I’m white. I’d never get treated that way, even though if I’d died at 18 the above would’ve been a perfectly accurate summation of my life till that point. And with more that I could add.

By the way, I never sold or did drugs but everyone “knew” that I did. I’ve never had more than a bit of alcohol in my system. No idea why anyone thought differently, other than just stereotyping.

That’s brilliant.

There’s so much vapid stupidity associated with every human –ism that even the ones that I am naturally aligned with and for the most part agree with I tend to run from and to disassociate myself from.

It’s not rational — for the most part — but due to my upbringing and general contrarian proclivities, being part of a group feels really profoundly mentally dangerous to me.

You’ll have to wait for more afflatus, because this blog is going on hiatus.

Will probably be about a week or so. Meanwhile, you should read this.

This is why I have problems with the fat acceptance movement, because a lot of it is the “shame anyone healthy” movement.

Note that the woman being made fun of is obviously very fit. While her muscles aren’t extremely well-defined (which is hard to do for women anyway), her arms are full and her core abs are visible (and healthy). None of her bones are protruding anywhere. Those are called “abs” and that’s what they look like when you work out a lot.

But most notable, her Latissimus dorsi musculature is very pronounced, giving her upper torso even from the front that definite V shape that screams, “I work out a lot and in the right ways.”

In other words, she’s very fit, probably very strong, and unless she has some undetected physical problem separate from her fitness regimen, obviously very healthy.

Though I am sure I didn’t get it nearly as badly as a woman gets it, when I was in the army and I’d go back to North Florida where probably 70% of people are overweight and 30%+ are morbidly obese, I’d hear things like, “You are so skinny you are going to blow away.”

Yeah, actually, I was 25 pounds heavier and much, much fitter, but I’d lost all my adolescent pudginess and was all wiry muscle.

At one point I could run two miles in just over 11 minutes. I could do 115 push-ups without stopping. I was fitter than most people ever get in their lives. And yet I was shamed for improving myself, just like this woman in the photo.

It’s an interesting change in my lifetime as the percentage of overweight/morbidly obese people has surged, anyone of a normal and healthy weight (like the woman in the photo) is seen as aberrant and abnormal.

Fuck that. There’s a difference between acceptance and being a colossal wrong dumbass.

I know that I am not as charitable as I could be, but I’ve gone down the path after the army of being overweight verging on obesity, and it is in NO way more freeing, nor does it feel better, or lead to a better life. When 40% of Americans will experience diabetes in their lives, pretending it’s all good while their limbs rot off, celebrating corpulence just seems full of dipshittery to me.

Be fat if you want to be. I don’t give a fuck. But pretending that healthy people are anorexic and somehow flawed doesn’t lead me to supporting fat acceptance (which to me sounds like “giving up and surrendering to the diabetes”) and doesn’t make me give a shit about your movement or its goals.

I’ll always have more respect for the person who tries than the one who sits at home typing nasty comments while stuffing their face full of Ho-Hos.

If that offends anyone, well, get in line.