What you get when you invite anti-Enlightenment people into your country en masse.

I don’t think there is much direct threat from refugees as far as terrorism goes, at least not first-generation refugees.

No, the real risk is the worsening environment for women that inevitably results.

Sweden will be a very, very different place — and far worse — in 30 years.

I’d urge any Swedish women (especially) to beat feet while you can.

Intel’s 72-Core ‘Knight’s Landing’ Xeon Phi Supercomputer Chip Cleared For Takeoff.

For some context, for vector-based tasks at least it will soon be possible for a regular person to own in a single box more computing power than existed in the entire world in 1970.

Heck, it already is, and at least for a while it was possible for less than $200, at least for the previous generation.

Of course then you have to know what to do with it….

I got a pushy note from a recruiter today. It annoyed me.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to have recruiters contacting me every few days with real job prospects. As an American, this is wonderful. Most people are not so lucky.

But good lord they can be pushy prats.

This one was particularly bad: basically demanding a new copy of my resume, filling out some forms, etc. Note that they already have pretty recent info on me. They just want me to do their work for them.

So this is the response I sent back:

Hello, thanks for contacting me. I don’t need a job. I already have two at the moment. But apparently you need to fill a position. That’s great.

But you already have all of this information and I’m already in high demand. For this reason I don’t waste time sending personal information out applying to mystery jobs to unknown parties, especially in response to those who send demanding letters requiring me to do a lot of work. This is not, might I add, how you are likely to find top employees.

If you have a specific job that you think I might be interested in and could possibly be well-suited for, pitch me that particular job. I’m not in a place in my career where I am desperate for work. I am good at what I do and I take pride in it. So it follows that I will only work with employers that meet my standards  — and for me to determine that, I need to know who they are in advance.

If this is not acceptable, please remove me from your list. If it is acceptable — great. We can work together. Thank you.

Yes, I know 100% that will get me nuked from this recruiter’s database. It is both a bit arrogant and dismissive. That’s the whole point — even though everything in the letter is true.

I just don’t have time for that anymore, and if it makes someone think (I know, probably won’t), all the better.

And now I have a form letter I can send out to all these sharks.

Why is everyone wringing their hands over the greater coverage given to the Paris vs the Beirut attacks?

It’s completely obvious why people in the Western world notice what happens in Paris more — there are far more cultural connections to Paris than Beirut in the US. Heck, Paris is one of the few overseas cities that many Americans have visited. Many millions of  Americans slept through French class in school. How many took Arabic? I’ve never seen a public school that offered Arabic classes, though there must be a few. But every school nearly offers French.

Do I care what happened in Beirut? Of course. It’s a horrible tragedy. But I have no cultural connection to Beirut. And even though I lived in the Middle East for a while, I don’t have any deep understanding of the region and I don’t speak or read Arabic. I have no context for anything that happens in Beirut nor could I easily obtain this without years of difficult study.

The same is true of most Americans and most Westerners.

The left is always so eager to blame racism for everything to burnish their reputation and gain empathy status points when more pedestrian explanations are this time (and often) more correct.

To put it in computer design terms, Paris is an easily-accessible interface with many affordances; Beirut is a command line interface without tab completion and with no man pages.

That’s really all it is.

What indeed was Bloomingdale’s thinking?

As usual, I interpreted the ad completely differently than everyone else, apparently.

I thought it was clear from the woman’s head being turned away as if laughing at a joke only she has knowledge of and the man’s vaguely confused/dazed look that the woman was implied to be the one having done the spiking. It never occurred to me that anyone in this particular ad would think the man had been the one slipping a mickey.

That doesn’t make it any better, though.

But everyone is talking about the ad so it worked, right?

When will we finally discuss Brussels?

Note that it is not Islamophobia to not wish women to be treated like cattle, and to be rightly avoidant and disdainful of cultures who do wish this.

And if wanting equal rights for women makes me Islamophobic, and recognizing that importing large numbers of men who will gladly take those rights away from women who are already present if given the chance and the political power also makes me Islamophobic, then well hell I guess I am Islamophobic.

In many areas, the liberal left is full of just as many fairy stories as the ridiculous right.

A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war.

I don’t particularly like her, but I’ve voted for tons of people I don’t like in the past. But the actual reason I won’t be voting for her is that she is more hawkish than most of the Republicans and will almost certainly drag us into a war or two.

War is not helping America. Just as much as Radical Islam and moronic immigration policies, the Paris attacks can be blamed on Western war-making in the Middle East.

Bernie Sanders is clueless on foreign policy. But he’d still be better as he almost certainly wouldn’t drag us into any unnecessary wars.

In the end, I probably won’t vote at all because there is even now about a 99% chance Hillary Clinton will win.

And that will be a very sad day for everyone because contrary to what I’ve written here before, waging war overseas is the one area that a leader could make a difference. And in the case of Clinton, it’ll be a very terrible deviation indeed.

I agree with this in principle, but for Europe especially it must be taken in context of mass uncontrolled immigration and the fact that as few as 0.1% of Islamists (though that number is probably far higher) shooting people and blowing things up can really destroy their host society posthaste.

Undoubtedly the vast majority of Muslims are good people. Who want nothing to do with terrorism. Who love their kids and want a peaceful life.

But what does that matter? Who cares about them? They are irrelevant to the discussion.

The issue is what happens when you allow hundreds of thousands or millions of people to stream into your country (already straining to the breaking point social services) and a few thousand of them are violent Islamist jihadis and a few hundred thousand more support these people financially and morally.

You got problems then. Because the reality is that it takes very few people going essentially violently jihad-crazy to essentially incapacitate a whole society (not to mention just how many more of even the non-fundamentalists truly hate women and want very much to oppress them).

Look, I wish everything could be peach ice cream and fucking unicorns, but life just isn’t that way. Wishing it were doesn’t make it so. Actually, that makes it even less likely.

Again, understand that if you allow unrestricted mass immigration into your country from Islamist-infested regions, this will result.

That some or even most Muslims kiss butterflies or help old ladies cross the street means precisely nothing and is completely irrelevant to the discussion and misses the point entirely.

I remember using Terraserver (over dial-up, no less) in 1998 It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen a computer do. It was the first computing application I’d seen that gave a human a completely new capability that was not present in any way prior to computing.*

Funny how Microsoft had all this great tech and novel ideas and really never did anything with any of it.

*Computers made many things faster prior to this in my life, but did not give me a completely new superpower. Terrasserver did.

The attacks in Paris show both the real effects of allowing a bunch of anti-Enlightenment radical Islamists into your country and the folly of bombing brown people into freedom.

I refuse to coddle moronic liberals or idiotic conservatives. Both sides are wrong.

The best move is to transition to renewable energy so that regions invested in Islam can live their 12th-century lifestyle in peace.

If you accept large numbers of Islamists into your country uncritically, this is going to happen. Simple as that.

I’m sure people who don’t read as widely as I do think I’m exaggerrating when I discuss how Fat Acceptance nutjobs believe it is oppression if people aren’t attracted to them. But it’s real.

“If you think you have the right to choose one body type over another.”

I have the right to date whomever I please, for whatever reason I please. And not only for attraction (I’m not attracted to fat women at all, just to be clear), but you know what? I can hike 10 miles with no training and feel like a million bucks at the end. Think some 300 pound woman can keep up with me on that, like my partner can? Of fucking course not. Then I won’t date you for yet another reason. Deal.

The rest of the post is too delusional to even quote. I don’t feel like typing that bullshit. Just read it. But does she realize though that if it is oppression to say “no” to a person’s sexual advances, that’s rape-promoting and no different than MRA “logic” about how women owe them sex.

Someone needs to deport this rape-culture-promoting, crack-smoking sorry excuse for humanity so hard she lands on the fucking Moon. I don’t care if she’s an American citizen. Get the deportation cannon ready. But it’s gonna need a lot of gunpowder.

If the amount of time that pseudo-feminists spent arguing over whether “girl” or “woman” was appropriate and in which situations could be somehow directed at useful pursuits, a lot more progress could be made on actual feminism.

Arguing over words is mostly a distraction, and a useful one to patriarchy and to the powerful.

This despite the fact that it’s also really, really common to use “boys” to refer to adult men. And many adult men use “woman” as an insult. Should we ban that word, too?

Such a non-issue about something completely irrelevant. Banning words does absolutely nothing. Changing culture does.

If Metro style crapplications that are 100x slower to use and have all useful features removed are the future, I’m going to do like Mulder and Scully and fight the future.

It might make the droolers 20% more productive, but makes me completely unproductive.

And I frankly don’t give a shit about the droolers.

A woman at work was surprised that I know who Tori Amos and Anaïs Nin are, and was shocked that I had listened to Tori extensively and read Nin (when I was 12).

I don’t like “girl stuff.” I like good stuff. That most men are too fucking poisoned by masculinity to not recognize quality when it’s right in front of them is why I don’t generally associate with men.

It’s really disheartening to observe how the whole experience of computing has gone retrograde for anyone who has the vaguest clue what they’re doing.

Every day, computers become less powerful, less useful, more difficult and annoying to use and more locked down. All because the droolers demand it. Or at least don’t care.

It truly was an exciting time to be alive if you liked computers during the 1980s and 1990s as each upgrade brought much more power, a better interface, more useful software and increasingly user-focused design. Now, design is designer- and moron-focused so for people like me find computers increasingly annoying or even impossible to use.

Even though the hardware has gotten better, for anyone with half a brain computers are now so very much slower because doing something that used to take two clicks or a second at the command line requires an increasingly large list of arcane hacks, mods or breaking into your own computer to battle against it turning into an oversized mobile phone.

Because I’m selfish, I wish computer use had never democratized, that morons and smartphones had never invaded the computing landscape. I enjoyed it a lot more when I could actually make my machine do what I wanted it to do, rather than be trapped in some toy OS mobile phone nightmare where some suit-bedecked bumblefuck decided what my computer was allowed to do.

It really is going to be like the 1960s again soon — a small coterie of people knowing how to use a real computer, and able to afford one, who seem like demi-gods compared to those who just know how to click on something madly, and if that doesn’t work, that’s it.

That’s not a better world, but that’s an inevitable world.

The future — and it will be terrible — is big, dumb, and slow.