Bull-fucking-shit. My maternal grandfather did this in the 1950s. It was incredibly common. He grew up a sharecropper in rural Georgia in the 1930s and early 1940s, so it was not like he was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. And he supported a family of four on a single salary while taking nice vacations, had multiple cars, and other luxuries. He did things that are impossible now for most people earning two salaries.

This is a retcon to get you to believe that there was never general prosperity (especially if you were white). When in fact, there very much was.

Men who gave up dating and opted for a foreign wife through an agency, help me understand why.

You don’t have to use an agency. Just go somewhere and meet people. Not everywhere is like the US.

Why you would do such a thing: American women have extremely insane expectations that only 1% (or fewer) of men meet. Even in countries that are roughly as rich as the US, this level of absurd expectation inflation is simply not true. Basically any dating market in any non-Muslim country is better than the US. For men, anyway.

Something very, very wrong has occurred in the psyche of American women and it’s worth spending a lot of time and money to get away from that to find something better when you want a decent partner. Or even something short term, for that matter.

If I were not with my amazing partner and if I wanted to seriously date, I’d spend six months in Greece, Portugal, Norway, Italy, Croatia, etc. No fucking way would I even attempt here after what social media has done to women in the US. It has just destroyed them.

Even when I was in the UK recently, women were much more approachable (and approaching) than the US. I had 5 or 6 women in age range from 20-55 flirt with me quite obviously there. Admittedly, that sort of thing happens to me more everywhere since I got a lot hotter, but there it was very blatant. It helped that I was hanging out with an extremely attractive extrovert who talks to anyone and everyone around her, of course, but even apart from that it would’ve been easier there for me to partner up.

And it’s even better/easier in other countries as compared to the UK.

If you’re an American man and you want to meet someone worth your time, your absolute best bet is to get the hell away from American women at all costs.

Now that I ‘m officially a homeowner, this neighborhood better stay exactly like it was when I moved in! I’m the last valid resident and anyone after me is a damn interloper! No one better even move a blade of grass or build anything anywhere where I can see it. Because that’d be wrong and infringe on my rights to live in stasis like in some crappy sf show.

If I even hear a rumor of someone unauthorized so much as walking through these environs, I’ll run them over with my F-250 in self defense. There is no reason for anyone to be in this neighborhood unapproved when they simply could be somewhere else.

(This is a parody of the Boomer NIMBY mentality. I’ve not become Kevin Drum all of the sudden, whose whole political outlook hinges solely on what any policy or politician might do to his house price. Frankly, I do not give a single fuck about my house price.)

When I’m galactic overlord, you’ll only be able to get a tattoo if you’ve given me the gift of at least 10 solar systems with useful ecologies or technologies.

Any others who besmirch their skin with unauthorized tattoos must work in the thorium mines for 10,000 years. Choose wisely.

The Boomer mentality:

When you were helpdesk, did you think sysadmins to be smarter?

No, because when I was on helpdesk I was doing most of the troubleshooting for the sysadmins as I was vastly better at it. That unfortuntely made it hard to get off the hell desk because I could and did fix anything everywhere.

All I have to say is I hope I never win anything like Russia is winning in Ukraine. If I were to win like that in the stock market, I’d be a billion in the red, my wallet would be napalmed to hell, and I’d owe some warlord in Zimbabwe for a 700% APR loan.

I made the mistake of visiting Ian Welsh’s Twitter again. Can’t help myself. His claims that Russia is “winning” don’t match the actual…anything. Like, how war works, the evidence, the views of anyone else or even a casual glance at reality.

Russia has managed to take and barely hold about 20% of Ukraine’s territory and that hasn’t changed much in two years. See for yourself.

What’s odd is that so many people believe Welsh and propagandists like him when you can just go look for yourself. It’s no secret (and impossible to conceal) which areas of Ukraine are under Russian control and which are not. And mostly, the war has been a bloody trading of territory back and forth with some slight Russian advances while Russia experiences a 10 to 1 KIA ratio compared to Ukrainian forces.

That is not in fact “winning.” And I’d say that even if I were a Russia supporter. They are trading about 1,000 to 3,000 dead for every kilometer they gain. That ain’t no form of winning I am aware of. Just by some simple math (and I know war does not work linearly this way), to take all of Ukraine Russia would have to expend about 25% of its entire population as KIAs. Yeah, winning, sure. Wackypants motherfuckers.

Serious question: Does Russia think bombing a children’s hospital is going to make the Ukrainian people resist less fiercely, to just roll over and go with the invasion? I mean, what is the purpose there? It doesn’t even help Russia win. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I didn’t want to believe that there is just something sadistic in Russian culture in general, but appears I was wrong. About time to send NATO troops in I think, so we’re not fighting China and Russia in 2032. Nearly anything is worth it to avoid that fate.

Taylor Swift replacing Biden for the presidential nom?

Let’s do it!

Modern warfare is so much worse than it’s ever been. I’ve been studying all of this a lot, because we’ll be fighting this way soon. With China, and perhaps with Russia too.

I’ve have some thoughts on all of this later, because I believe that most analysts are wrong about how this business with drones and such will play out. But still gathering all my notions, knowledge, intuitions and observations about it all. Then I’ll hit you with some truth. And it’ll probably be the opposite of what Ian Welsh says, because he is full of bullshit.

The media really dealt themselves a one-two punch with, first, their insistence that there were no substantive supply chain issues when anyone could walk into any supermarket and peep the empty shelves their damn selves. Guess to them there were no supply chain issues because their nannies and maids did all their grocery shopping.

And then, second, when they claimed against all evidence and reason that inflation really wasn’t a big deal, was transitory, and that the economy was humming along great — that all those insuperable price increases were just fabrications or your misperception. Just because you used to pay $4 for a Big Mac combo and now it’s $8 means nothing, they claimed. Just your lyin’ eyes doin’ what they do.

What a way to win ’em over. Command performance there.

It’s notable that when Justin Bieber was still underage, millions of very much adult women (some in their 40s and 50s) were talking about how much they wanted him — and oftentimes explicitly what they wanted to do to him — while facing nearly no pushback nor negative repercussions.

He was 14-16 at the time. Imagine if a bunch of men had done the same to, say, Selena Gomez when she was 15 and already famous. It would not have been permitted out in the open, and certainly would not have been seen as very hip and cool as it was for those creepy-ass women.

Women need their goddamn creep passes revoked en masse. My view is no one above the age of majority should be sexualizing underage people, while not denying they have a sexuality (nor punishing them for it, as we do in America).

You need the power of hundreds of GPUs to run ChatGPT that writes your little work summaries that you’re incapable of writing yourself.

I need the power of hundreds of GPUs to manage all the browser windows and tabs I have open as I ingest a significant portion of the world’s knowledge daily.

We are not the same. 😉

Pilots of the Strike Drones Company (47 OMBr) use a large FPV drone to smoke Russians out of a bunker.

(No on-camera death/gore.)

Where the fuck are their weapons? And their gear? This is what Ian Welsh defines as “winning,” remember. They also aren’t going to a clear and known fallback point and seem to be following no kind of doctrine when under attack.

Don’t believe the Welshian propaganda; Russia has massive advantage in numbers and GDP, but have a massive disadvantage in everything else. And remember when you watch this that that “bunker” is a house where a Ukrainian family used to live. Some advice: don’t want to be bombed, don’t invade a non-hostile country and pillage it.

The only thing Ian Welsh got right about the war is that Russia was pugnacious and likely to attack. Big fucking whoop. I knew that too. Does not take a genius to see the fucking obvious. Everything else since then has been Bozo the Clown levels of laughably wrong. Also, he’s a huge authoritarian-worshipping scumbag so that doesn’t help.