The new conventional wisdom among truth-challenged liberals is that sexual assault and harassment were just as bad from German men prior to the events in Cologne and other cities — and in fact that those evil German men may have even taught those gentle, lamb-like North African men how to harass those German women! Who probably deserved it anyway for being, like, racist or something and wearing short skirts to tempt those meek little kittens into evil!

Never even among the conservative loons, morons and nutcases have I seen such a sorry display of treachery and a forsaking of the values that one professes to hold.

And the odd thing about it is that it’s (mostly) women who are telling these assaulted and harassed women that they had it just as bad before — when both the stats and anecdote show pretty definitively that this was absolutely not the case.

I know that the legacy of racism causes huge cognitive dissonance among liberals when anyone whose skin is darker than Heidi Klum’s does something wrong — but good god, I never thought I’d see a whole bloc of my fellow liberals perfectly willing to tell millions of women to lie back and try to enjoy the theft and rape because they probably either deserved it or brought it on themselves.

It is not any kind of rebellion to be fat and unhealthy (which, yes, statistically do go hand in hand) because some men prefer you’d be lithe and limber.

That’s only rebelling against yourself, which isn’t that useful.

Being fat and unhealthy is its own punishment, on many axes. Your life will be more uncomfortable and difficult. You’ll tend to be a burden both literal and metaphorical on others. And you’ll die earlier.

Corpulence to spite some ill-perceived expectation from others is roughly equivalent to gouging your own eyes out when you see something on TV that you don’t like.

Reason, though, is the last thing people try and only when all other approaches have failed. This is no different.

I’ve finally found (after using a version of this one many years ago) an image viewer that works correctly on all platforms and doesn’t mangle images, have a terrible interface or just generally behave badly. The default image viewer is terrible on MacOS, but that’s true on every OS.

But my image-viewing savior is XnViewMP and it’s free — but I donated to the project because it’s so great. And so fast, unlike nearly any other image viewer I’ve ever used.

Download it here.

Reading things like this, one begins to realize how delusional modern liberalism has become.

I normally agree with Laurie Penny and have long endeavored to read everything she writes — but when one is in the grips of an ideology, it is impossible for her or for any of the “everything is racism and all cultures are equally great” liberals to see things clearly.

I do agree with her that all sexual assault should be prosecuted — that for harassment and rape and all such crimes, there should be no tolerance whether the perpetrators are German or Syrian. At least she’s not (mostly) making the usual argument that “it’s just their culture.” But what she is doing is pretending that Germany was a country that had a major problem with sexual assault — it did not — and that there is no categorical difference between the violently- and virulently-misogynist men Germany insists on importing and German citizens.

And then shamefully — as Penny does — telling the woman who will be assaulted by these men on the streets that “German men are just as bad.” Which is demonstrably not true both by data and by anecdote. And is truly reprehensible and a betrayal of the very women she is pretending to be concerned with.

But hey, she made the right noises so her karma is good, right?

On that list I linked to earlier, did you notice how very high the sexual assault rate in Sweden is? Ever wonder why? Of course it’s politically unacceptable to talk about it (as if I give a fuck), but it’s because of Sweden cursing itself with influx after influx of North African/Islamic refugees.

No mystery there.

Did I just offend you?

Good. That often leads to thinking. As in this article.

When refugees arrive in Western countries, they bring with them violent and sexist cultural attitudes that contributed in part to the mess they fled. Consider a global survey by the Pew Research Center; when asked if women should have equal rights, only 45 per cent of Egyptian men agreed, compared to 97 per cent of Germans. Similarly, not a single Arab or North African nation makes it into the top 100 counties ranked in the most recent World Economic Forum’s gender-gap report. Those medieval attitudes translate into barbaric actions. Due to reporting variances, tracking sexual assault statistics between countries is extremely difficult, but a large comparative database created by the WomanStats Project ranks Muslim countries among the world’s most dangerous places for women. If you’re surprised that some refugee groups in Europe commit crimes at a higher rate than the general population, you’re either not paying attention or you are lying to yourself.

And the US sexual assault rate being so high? Not refugees. Nope, just a ridiculously patriarchic and fundamentalist culture here. Kind of remind you of anything? Like Islam?

Huh. Funny that.

I confuse the shit out of people because they think they have pigeonholed me. But there ain’t no hole I can fit in. I explode out of them like a Hellfire missile, delivering a flaming epistle.

Ah, he seems to hate refugees, he must be a conservative. What? He thinks 50% of all CEOs and board members of any corporations should be required by law to be women, supports UBI and Social Security and — oh my god — socialism? BRAIN BREAKING ABORT ABORT ABORT

He supports Jill Stein, reads Andrea Dworkin, believes in reducing the military to less than 100,000 active duty and supports radical equality and qualified eugenics, too — and admires the Black Panthers and Malcolm X? HOW POSSIBLE?

Here’s the thing, though: when you think for yourself, everybody’s gonna hate you. And you fit nowhere. No tribe will have you.

Fine with me; I’m so used to it that I’ve come to like it.

The crazy uncle archetype fits me well. I’d rather be right than respected; right than accepted; rather be right than with conformity tainted, with broad brush painted, me and the truth unacquainted.

Yeah, I’m a pugnacious little prick, North Florida redneck from way back, never sure I’m on the right track but not afraid to circle back, take the other tack, fly through the flak. Wish others could learn that trick, see what makes me tick.

Because this liberal moron bullshit just makes me sick.

In general, I like Mac OS. It’s stable, renders fonts at 5K far, far better than Windows and generally gets out of my way.

But there is no good music player on the platform. Not the first one. It’s the glaring gap of the entire OS.

iTunes is an abomination of application overreach, poor coding and features an inscrutable and hostile user interface. And somehow all the alternatives are even worse.

I don’t want some damn media manager snarfing up my whole music library. I don’t want it re-encoded, dropped into folders, made into playlists automatically, fucking album art downloaded or my data uploaded to the goddamn cloud.

I just. Want. To. Play. Music.

Is that so hard?

Right now I use Clementine but that hasn’t had a new release in over two years and it has various bugs (such as sometimes not advancing to the next track).

Why is a simple music player so difficult? I’d even pay for it if a decent one existed but the paid ones also look disastrous.

As with smartphones, I’m not the target market I know because I don’t want to “social” my music into the “cloud” — I just want to listen to the goddamn songs.

But apparently that’s asking the impossible.

Before all ya’ll get your hopes up about Bernie Sanders ever being president, here’s why it’ll never happen.

Yeah, I don’t want Hillary to be president either, for as much as it matters to me either way. She’ll be George W. Bush part VI and continue to hand over the country to banksters and fight some more wars here and there.

But Bernie is not going to be nominated. It will never, ever happen. The link above explains why.

Meet the Robin Hood of Science.

Alexandra Elbakyan, my fucking hero. Been meaning to write about her for a while now. Because of her work I’ve been able to access and read things I would’ve had no easy way to — and so have hundreds of researchers with funding too poor to pay extortionate fees. I do have a friend or two in academia with access to most things, but I don’t like to bother them all the time when I want something.

Not everyone has that advantage, though.

People like her should win the Nobel Peace Prize. Elsevier and other scam companies should be burned to the ground.

Alexandra E. rules.

I am not opposed to encryption in itself. Quite the opposite.

But Mozilla and Google and others are using encryption as a cudgel to force people into services they don’t and can’t control. This isn’t a side effect. This is the intended result.

Expect to see more of this bamboozlement sold as “security” when in reality it’s much less secure from a number of important threats — including from the companies themselves who now control all of your data.

True security would be empowering people to have control of and say over their own data, all the time. What these large companies are doing is just using a nimiety of pseudo-security to make it too difficult for even someone technically-competent to be able to provision and operate their own services without lots of time invested and unnecessary work.

For the same reason in other spaces, it’s why large companies actually like regulation — it eliminates competitors in their arena who do not have the resource base they do to comply with them.

I wanted to elevate my comment (slightly edited) to the front after a reader complained that I didn’t report any actual calorie numbers for my consumption posts:

I don’t track calories at all, sorry, not even approximately. Calories reported on manufacturer’s labels are notoriously wrong and I neither measure my food by weight or track by calorie. Only by what you see above.

And yet I still managed to get rid of and keep off 25%+ of my body weight for over five years.

So I do what works for me. If you want actual numbers, you’ll have to track yourself. But I guarantee it’ll be off by a lot and be misleading. Also many of the things I eat I have no way to estimate the calories as they aren’t the types of places who post this (small bakeries, etc.), and any estimate I’d make independently would be off by 30% or so, at least. Perhaps more.

That said, I changed the post to make it more accurate. The only way to truly track calories relatively accurately for anyone would be to purchase or somehow gain use of a laboratory-grade calorimeter, use it on an exact duplicate of the food you intend to eat, and then eat the non-destroyed dupe. And then — even then — it is not well-known how every body responds to each food eaten, how calories are processed by the same person at different times (hormonal and diurnal changes, etc) nor how differing compositions of foods with the same calories as measured by a calorimter will be processed and perhaps stored differently. Nutrition science just is not very solid. Wish it was, but it isn’t.

That said, calories in, calories out is still the way to lose weight. Judge what to eat by how your body responds to it, with self-experiment, is my advice — not that you sought any. Calorie counting in most cases probably is not helpful and is going to be wrong by at the minimum 20%, and most likely 30%+. Which is exactly why I did not even attempt to report calories and have never tracked them and never will.

That was the end of the comment. One seeking certitude where there is none will never find it. QED.

Yet another reason for diversity in tech: there would be no lack of small phones if 50% of phone designers and engineers were women.

But in bounding after large screens, phone makers seemed to ignore the usability issues that accompany them. Small studies have shown before that 4.3 inches is about as big as a phone can get before people start struggling to use it. The time to operate the phone slows down significantly because one-hand use is awkward—and that’s for average men’s hands. Assuming a normal distribution, for half of men and most women, a phone bigger than 4.3 inches—like the current smallest iPhone—is too big.

I have pretty large hands, and even with that being true anything beyond 4 inches I find unusable. A phone with a 3.7 inch screen would be perfect for me.

I know, some women choose large phones on purpose. A few times in public I’ve seen a woman with a 6+ inch phone hold it up to her face and it’s so large that it nearly covers her whole head. This is kind of funny because it looks like some Alice in Wonderland tableau.

But most women — like my partner — would choose smaller phones if any were for sale.

As would I. So in other words phone makers are not just ignoring half the market — they are probably ignoring 60% or more of the market.

What’s that about the omniscalar efficiency of capitalism again?

I’ve seen loads of articles lately about how the world isn’t changing at all — that none of the advances since the 1920s have really mattered in any way. That technology is and has stagnated. In some ways, I agree with some of this but in most ways I think it’s utterly delusional and extremely harmful to what happens next, bad or good.

These misguided ideas are all of a piece with the people who just can’t see social change no matter how quick or how drastic (and these people are the vast majority).

Sure, if you are just talking about physical characteristics of reality and meeting basic human needs (food, water, housing) then yeah, we pretty much got there by the 1930s.

But are humans — and is modern society — just an epiphenomenon of basic needs being met? Is that all that matters, all that is consequential to a life? To a society? To a polity?

No, of course not. This is obviously wrong. And pretty damn stupid.

To be clear, I’m not aligning myself with the singularity nuts or the Extropians or any of these also-delusional groups. They are just as useless for having any cogent thoughts.

Nor am I walking a middle ground. No, I am forging a new path that takes into account that what matters to most modern, non-impoverished humans is not some basic meeting of physical needs but in the informational spaces in which that person dwells and who controls, influences and corrupts those.

One of the reasons in fact for the narrative that nothing done since the 1920s matters is so that those who very much realize that is false can successfully monopolize and dominate what has become nearly — and in some cases more — important than food, water and housing.

We live in an information society. Yes, that is a cliché but no one repeating that cliché seems to actually know what it implies.

And technology of late has made the control of information the most important factor in success and flourishment on the micro and the macro scales.

Pretending that none of the absolutely amazing and information-space-enlarging technologies coming to fruition in the last 30-50 years — as Ian Welsh and most others do — don’t matter at all is so damn dangerous I don’t even have words for it.

(Also, I am glad I’m not an academic, because I don’t care about being published or even being widely read. But I do care about coming up with original ideas with no one’s sanction (yes, I intend both meanings of that contranym) and being able to call the stupid “stupid,” which unless you are very famous you cannot do in an academic paper.)

This is a clean, unused Windows 10 install and it exfiltrates massive amount of data.

I also discovered the same thing in my own analysis which I never posted due to lack of time to write it up (would’ve involved several hours of work). This is contra all those who said, “If you turn off all the options, it doesn’t send any data!” They were of course completely deluded and wrong. As wrong as could be.

Here is the roughly 8-hour network traffic analysis of 5508 connection attempts of an unused, base install of Windows 10 Enterprise (NOTE: I did not remove any 192.168.1.x home network IP addresses from the analysis).

3967 connection attempts to 51 different Microsoft IPs, too, all on an unused install. Just imagine what happens if you use the damn thing.

Those who say that Windows 10 does not steal all your data are completely mistaken (of course many of those who claim that on internet forums are probably paid to do so).

Tumblr SJW blog/insult generator:

https://tumblr-argument-generator.lokaltog.net/

Pretty damn funny as I can’t tell the algorithmically-generated versions from some actual Tumblr blogs I’ve visited.

This article is way out of touch. At first I was interested. Then just annoyed.

Now, there isn’t anything particularly unusual about young white kids identifying with hip-hop culture. That’s been happening since the beginning. But the performance of hip-hop culture as a normalized part of white identity is fairly unusual.

That’s been happening since the 1990s. Probably since the 1980s, but went mainstream in the 90s. Vine and the internet had nothing at all to do with that.

The part about black contributions being downplayed or minimized is correct, though, and has been happening since forever.