Quotulatiousness

August 10, 2026

Clarkson’s Farm (and seven subsidiary businesses)

Filed under: Britain, Business, Environment, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

While I don’t watch much TV outside the NFL season, I was certainly aware of Jeremy Clarkson’s post-Top Gear/post-The Grand Tour TV show, I only started actually watching it earlier this week. And that was only because of a glowing review from The Critical Drinker. I’ve been missing a really good show, but I’ve got four-and-a-half seasons to catch up on — I’m not a binge watcher, so that’s not going to happen immediately. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Sama Hoole points out just how tenuous a farming business can be in England nowadays and how many other businesses Clarkson has started on his farm to try to make it profitable:

Jeremy Clarkson of Clarkson’s Farm.

Jeremy Clarkson runs at least eight businesses off a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Seven of them make money.

Count them. A farm shop. A pub. A lager brand. A bestselling book every autumn. A streaming series. A merchandise range. And now an app, built by Lisa Hogan, connecting the public to farms.

Then the eighth. Growing food.

Year one, working the ground flat out: £144. By year six, a £5,000 loss where £37,000 had been projected. This summer, two hundred of those acres grew nothing at all, because putting wheat in them was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed.

Every enterprise on that farm turns a profit except the farming.

The lager tells you why, and the chain of cause is on the record. Government subsidies were falling, so in 2021 he decided to brew beer from his own barley. That is the entire origin of Hawkstone. A decision taken in Whitehall turned an arable farmer into a brewer, and the beer worked.

Nothing about the grain changed. Barley sold as barley goes at whatever the buyer offers that morning. Barley in a bottle goes at the price the man who grew it decides.

That one difference is the whole business.

The pub is the same move in bricks. A derelict barn nobody had wanted since 2013, bought for reportedly under a million, now with a queue. On the menu a sausage from his own pigs costs 74p against 18p for the imported version, and he absorbs that gap on every plate. The farm shop, meanwhile, is legally barred from selling food produced more than sixteen miles away, and still cannot keep up with demand.

Now look at what the farming has behind it that yours does not. One of the best land agents in England. A farm manager who has worked that ground since he was a teenager. An agronomist. A production company covering the costs. A queue down the lane. A name that sells anything it is printed on.

It loses money anyway.

And this is the ordinary arrangement, not an eccentric one. Defra’s own figures say 72 percent of farms in England now take income from something that is not farming, and diversification accounts for 31 percent of total farm income. The government’s own Batters Review found nearly a third of British farms were loss-making outright in 2024.

Diddly Squat is simply the loudest version. The shop subsidises the field. The pub subsidises the field. The television subsidises the field.

A thousand acres of English farmland, and the one thing it cannot do is pay for itself by producing food.

August 8, 2026

Pointing the finger of blame accurately

Filed under: Britain, Education, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Librarian of Celaeno wants you to know that former professor Jason Arday did nothing wrong:

Former Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle

Once upon a time, an autistic black child was born. Usually, it takes several years to figure that out (the autism, not the blackness), but so autistically autistic was the infant Jason Arday that it was immediately apparent to everyone without there even needing to be any public record of it. Perhaps there is some lost evidence of him having a Reddit account as a toddler; one can speculate. Arday was unable to talk until age 11 and has been unable to stop talking ever since, which is fortunate since otherwise many of his unbelievable life accomplishments would now be unknown.

The range of setbacks he has overcome boggles the mind. Despite being illiterate until age 18, Arday not only graduated high school, but got into college, where he finally learned how to read good. This is even more incredible when you consider that the same year he discovered what the alphabet did he was beaten into epilepsy by random teens — he forgave them so thoroughly that any documentation of the incident is now gone from police records — and that some unspecified time before that he was in a car accident that left him in a waking coma for months. He studied so hard in college that he gave himself a brain tumor, which he evidently removed by himself in the mirror, since there is no evidence of a surgeon having done so. It may be that Arday has in fact learned to read several times in his life, but keeps getting that knowledge erased by semiannual episodes of CTE.

Even though he’d accumulated a substantial amount of what for a normal person would be crippling physical trauma over the course of his short time in the world, of the sort that would require medical interventions that would otherwise severely limit active life, Arday rapidly became one of the world’s most elite athletes. He participated in a ‘30 Marathons in 35 Days’ challenge, which was actually somewhat documented by an independent contemporary account, in the midst of which he suffered a hairline fracture in his fibula, which he seemingly just shrugged off to complete the remaining nine marathons. This was apparently the last time he ran slowly enough for anyone to witness, however, because his career as an ultramarathon runner who hyperGogginsed his way through 600 miles in six days passed entirely without notice by the few other people on Earth who could conceivably do that. He played semi-professional soccer, but was so good that he got bored with it and moved on before anyone could write his name down on a roster. Along the way, Arday became one of the best snooker players in Britain, with a skill level far beyond the need to participate in any public tournaments, other than the single amateur contest he entered but was too gracious to the other players to win.

He surmounted the intellectual challenges involved in becoming a PE teacher, and from there went on to earn a Ph.D as a black man, with his thesis largely consisting of arguing that it’s easier to do well in academia if you’re not closely supervised. It was so convincing a premise that his doctoral committee at Liverpool University evidently forewent actually reading the dissertation, perhaps also having concluded that his proximity to their whiteness had burdened him enough already. It was thus that Dr. Arday came into being, following a path blazed by Ibram X. Kendi as a bedredlocked black man writing about being black while being black blackly in a world basically controlled by the bad guys in Caddyshack.

On Substack Notes, Michael Southon also points the finger at the people who enabled Arday’s rise and attributed racist beliefs to anyone who asked questions:

Arday’s arrival to take up his professorship at Cambridge was recorded by at least two BBC cameras. Here he is talking to Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge.

Cambridge University was so proud of its choice of Jason Arday that they invited the BBC to film Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education, welcoming Arday to his new post. In the clip you can hear Cremin gushingly tell Arday:

    We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.

Arday himself is incredulous and suggests that some people will see his appointment as “tokenistic”. In response, Cremin assures him he is “world class”.

The Telegraph reports that when Arday’s students complained that they weren’t being properly supervised, they were told they were being “racist”.

The truth is that Cambridge was desperate to appoint more people of colour. His alleged autism ticked another box on the identity politics agenda. The dreadlocks were icing on the cake.

Will this episode, which has been reported around the world, finally convince the establishment that DEI is a disastrous social policy that lowers standards and turns august institutions whose reputations are based on centuries of meritocracy into the laughing stock of the world?

I doubt it.

Also on Substack Notes, GenX Anecdotes finds the behaviour of Hilary Cremin to be emblematic of a kind of condescending attitude found most frequently among liberal white women:

We know the type.

And it does tend to be a woman.

They love nothing more than to put on that awful softy, patronising voice, as if talking to a small child.

I am reminded of that excrutiating clip of Hilary Cremin (Head of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education) “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do“.

Really? “The best in the world”?

Like the bestest in the whole big wide world ever! 😂

I’m surprised she didn’t lean in and give him a pat on the head.

Wtf?

And that tone. 😭

It’s bad enough when they do it to kids.

I have posted about this “tone” before.

Near where I live there’s a Waitrose. The spiritual home of such a woman.

There used to be a Muslim woman wearing a hijab who would beg for money outside. I never gave her money because she seemed fake to me.

Always clean and well presented with the latest new iPhone (!), she would look up from her phone when she saw someone approaching, visibly completely change her facial expression, tilt her head to one side in a kind of puppy dog, “poor me” way, and put on a kind of fake whimpering “please help me!” and hold her hand out.

It was so obviously fake af!

One day I was waiting outside the shop for my daughter who had run in to get something.

As I waited, these two middle class, middle aged women stopped to talk to her.

They were both fawning over her, using that same softy patronising tone, falling over themselves to praise her. One of them said “you’re so beautiful and brave” and the other put her arm around her.

It was such a sychophantic display of patronising bullshit, I think I might have thrown up a little bit in my mouth.

This pathological sickly, performative fawning over their little pet minority groups, is something to behold!

And they were both being played.

This beggar wasn’t homeless. So obviously! You’d have to be a special kind of stupid to think so.

But they really are a special kind of stupid.

They just wanted to feel good about themselves. It’s all about their need to feel like they’re “good kind people”.

Then, no doubt make a FB post about it so all their other annoying cloying phoney friends can “coo” over how much they adore their little darling minority pets.

🤮

July 31, 2026

Drinker’s Extra Shots – Clarkson’s Farm

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Critical Drinker After Hours
Published 30 Jul 2026

In the mood for an Amazon show that’s actually good, unlike Rings of Power? Then Clarkson’s Farm, arguably the best reality show on TV right now, has got you covered. Join me for a quick review of this absolute gem.

July 25, 2026

QotD: “… the major evolutionary pressure is other humans”

Filed under: History, Humour, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the grand joys of being ignorant on a subject is that it’s possible to project one’s own insistences onto the findings of others. This explains Gazza on wealth, Sir Lenworth on reparations and Spud on any aspect of economics. Given the fun they’re having why not partake?

    The Reich Lab article on genetic selection in Europe over the last 10,000 years is finally online, and it includes such interesting results as:

    — Intelligence has increased

    — People got lighter

    — Mental disorders became less common

Clearly, given Gazza, Sir Lenworth and Spud less common is not a synonym for does not happen. But to proceed to my own ignorance:

    In a sort-of confirmation of the Cochran-Harpending thesis, they also found that, for several traits, the intensity of selection appears higher more recently in time.

    Specifically, selection intensity increased in the Bronze Age compared to the Neolithic, then it stabilized!

At which point I get to project my own mental wibbles onto the results of others.

Now, think of that deep history. Up until agriculture — roughly that Bronze Age — the driver of human evolution was the wolves trying to eat us. OK, mebbe the staphilococci, the crocs, hippoes, Venus Human Traps and so on. We were, as with most species, not really competing against ourselves but against those who saw us as either food or as competitors for an ecological niche.

Yes, yes, I know, this isn’t true but it’s a reasonable pencil sketch start to an argument.

OK, so now Bronze Age. We’ve got agriculture. We also, at this exact same time, see human populations change quite a lot. There’s a massive expansion of certain Y chromosomes and much less of maternal mitochondria. You know, the blokes from over the hill come in, kill all the men and shag the birds. We’ve — perhaps through agriculture, perhaps through bronze, perhaps through the simple absence of any more terra nullius — made the major threat to human other humans.

Or, of course, given the genetics here we could say that the major threat to male humans is now other male humans but that doesn’t make much difference to the argument — men, after all, the only ones who ever do anything.

Well, if the major threat is now humans then that means that the major evolutionary pressure is other humans. And they’re fighting with the same weapons we are. Same basic DNA possibilities, roughly the same physique, about the same IQ and on and on. This is going to have much more pressure on that evolution than being chased by a hippo is — that’s a one time win or lose event. Whether your genes persist is now a permanent battle with others who share near all of your capabilities. The importance being that word “near”.

Yes, I do know that it’s possible to make much the same argument for any species and their access to breeding. But the thing we’re interested in explaining here is why did this speed up in humans at one point? I claim that’s it’s because of the above — the rough settlement of decent agricultural land, worldwide, (or in the case here, in Europe. This doesn’t apply to Wales, say, or Scotland, which explains both of them now neatly) means that the competitor is other humans, not the more general environment. We’ve changed the evolutionary pressure. We’re no longer trying to outhink a pig — something Gazza, Spud etc often don’t — but that other bastard with his eye on our field and our wife.

So, that’s the thing. Human evolution sped up because it was the other bastard humans we were competing with, not the general environment. QED, I’m right and go boil your heads.

Tim Worstall, “Human Beings Were The Enemy In Human Evolution”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2026-04-24.

July 13, 2026

Larry Correia’s trailer park elves

Filed under: Books, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On X, Larry Correia explains the genesis of a group of characters he created in his Monster Hunter International series:

I’ve been talking to this pathetic, race obsessed loser, bitter failure of a wannabe writer for a while, but it did remind me of the fun story of where MHI‘s trailer park elves came from.

This dork thinks it is because I’m racist against white people or some shit, but it is actually a lot simpler. I was in the bedroom, typing on my laptop. I was working on the beginning of MHI and still figuring out this whole writing thing.

My wife was in bed reading a fantasy novel. She sighs and puts the book down. I ask what’s wrong, and she says “Elves are always the same. It’s so boring. Authors just keep rehashing Tolkien elves over and over. They’re all wise and beautiful and eternal and blah blah blah. Just once I’d love for them to do something different! Why can’t there be, I don’t know … redneck elves or something?”

And the light bulb went on because she said this to a guy who’d lived in some poor areas in Alabama and Mississippi and had a blast. And that night I wrote the Enchanted Forest Trailer Park scene.

The part where the dog pees on the outside couch, and they just flip the cushion over and tell you to have a seat, true story. 😀

Contrary to what this woke loser thinks, I love rednecks. I think they’re hilarious and awesome and I appreciate the culture of being rowdy and not giving a shit while being ready to fight at the drop of a hat. Anybody who has read the series knows MHI is filled with bad ass southerners. Just like the woke left appointed themselves “speakers for the marginalized” this asshole is the same. I never bent the knee to the woke left, and my answer is the same to the woke right. Fuck off.

Meanwhile I go to the south and people love this stuff. Only humorless dolts get butt hurt over the Enchanted Forest, because the rest of us have been there! We know those guys. That’s what makes it fun.

The elves gave me the idea, what if every mythological race from the old world adopted an American subculture once they got to the US? Which gave us orcs, gnomes, minotaurs, dragons, cyclops, all adopting some culture. I’ve had a lot of fun with that over the series.

And the culture has got to be a twist on what’s expected. That is what makes it interesting. It goes back to what my wife said back in 2007. This prick is crying how come the elves are WHITE?! Tolkien, that’s why. And why is one FAT?! Why are they POOR?!? Did you make the other races fat and poor and use them for comedy relief or just the WHITE ONES?

Well A. stupid obviously never got to the gnomes, and B. it is because, elves are supposed to be beautiful and immortal and awesome. If I wrote a dwarf as fat and drunk that’s not interesting because that’s NORMAL, and doesn’t fit the established nature of the setting where traditional stuff goes sideways when it gets here. Duh.

This explanation is for my fans. Not this dork. I don’t think he’s smart enough to explain anything to.

June 27, 2026

Larry Correia is “not a real writer”

Filed under: Books, Business, Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

While I haven’t read everything Larry Correia has published, I’ve enjoyed reading a lot of his work, but I’m clearly having fun wrong because “he’s not a real writer“:

    T-Lex @T_Saurus_Lex
    “Not a real writer” is an inside joke, from the Sad Puppy era. Something some cunning quarter-wit accused him of because Larry wasn’t prone to bend the knee to the SJW mafia. I think the details are on his blog somewhere.

Yeah, for my newer readers saying I’m not a *real* writer has been a running joke forever.

When you are a writer who annoys the liberal publishing establishment they always make up some reason to disqualify you, so they can dismiss you, and never take anything you say seriously. These are not honest people.

(If you are a proper good thinking liberal writer, don’t worry, you achieve real writer hood by loudly existing and they’ll stick you on panels if you’ve published one short story that was read by six whole people)

So at first I wasn’t a real writer because I only wrote monster adventure pulp. So then I was multi genre (and now I’m successful in more genres than most authors ever attempt). No. Those are the wrong genres.

Then I didn’t count because I wasn’t a bestseller. Until I was.

Then to be a real writer I needed to win some awards. (The big one I got nominated for at the beginning didn’t count because reasons). So then I won some awards. No. Not those! Those don’t count!

Real writers tackle serious topics and impress serious academic critics, until I wrote Son of the Black Sword, which impressed even my snootiest haters … so they promptly dropped that path to real writer hood.

This got super silly at times, and how the title really stuck, one time on book tour one of my haters saw me arrive early to a book signing outside Portland. It didn’t start for an hour so there was only three people there who had driven a long way. So I was just hanging out talking to them.

My hater immediately got on Twitter and told everybody “I saw Larry Correia on his alleged book tour and he only had three people show up. WHAT A FAILURE. WHAT A LOSER!”

The actual signing had 40, which is pretty decent. I was still there when somebody showed me this tweet. We all laughed and responded with a group photo saying learn to count, dork.

But Social Justice Warriors (ah, the good old days) can never admit a mistake. So he doubled down and tweeted I still wasn’t a REAL WRITER because that same store ROUTINELY had book signings for TWO HUNDRED customers.

Problem was, the book store wasn’t that big. To fit 200 they would have to remove all the shelves. And at this point I was still there signing their inventory so I asked the manager. She said out of hundreds of signings they had only hit 200 twice the entire time they’d been in business. Brandon Sanderson post WoT and GRRM at the absolute height of the HBO show, and those had lines out into the parking lot.

So only the top bestsellers on Earth at that moment count as Real Writers. Seems unfair. But okay.

So me and my fans leaned into this super hard to mock the absurd and ever moving goal posts of the terminally online haters. And the rest of my book tour was called THE STILL NOT A REAL WRITER WORLD TOUR. And I got a big group photo at every event for the next week.

And yes, I have hit 200 since, but I’m sure the minute I did the new Real Writer threshold moved to 400. 😀

This has been a running gag ever since, the same way my fans refer to me as the ILOH, though that is a story for another day.

June 25, 2026

QotD: Division of domestic work, 1970s onward

Filed under: Australia, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    The Women’s Liberation Movement wanted many things in 1970, but one of the most important was freedom from “unpaid domestic servitude at home”.

Again, this is Straight Outta Engels, from 1884. Even back in 1970, we could all yell “Read another book!” Someone ought to rewrite The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State with a few quidditch matches in it; it’d be on the bestseller list until the sun’s a cinder.

    Half a century later, most women are still waiting for their freedom. Women still do far more domestic and care labour than men.

I find this extremely hard to believe. So I checked their source, which is a very scientific-sounding site called “The Conversation”. You’ll just have to click it for yourself, since I can’t figure out how to screenshot just the little graphic they have, but if you do, you’ll notice a couple things straight off:

First, this data is from Australia. Which is bullshit, because look, y’all, I’ve seen the Mad Max movies, and nobody’s doing any domestic labor in Australia. Their main settlement is ruled by Tina Turner, for fuck’s sake, and the Prime Minister runs around in a thong and a hockey mask. Sweet cars, though, I’ll give them that.

The other thing you’ll notice is that the “Australian Bureau of Statistics” — I’m pretty sure that’s the motorized hang glider guy — has obviously been having fun with the scalar functions in whatever post-apocalyptic version of Excel they’ve got down there. The bars for “did no unpaid domestic work” look dramatic … but they represent a mere seven point difference. (And do you see what I mean? Apparently 29% of Australian men, and 22% of Australian women, do no unpaid domestic labor whatsoever. By my math, that’s a quarter of the country stewing in its own filth. I know, I know … I’m amazed it’s that low).

The bars for “5-14 hours”, though, show a fractional difference: Women do a whopping 0.3% more. And again, this is Australia, but even if we assume that “unpaid domestic labor” is stuff like “wiping the blood from the somehow intact windshield of the last of the V-8 interceptors”, 5-14 hours is what you might call “the outer limits of normal for a working stiff”. Admittedly I live in a two-bedroom apartment, not a house, but I’m a bit of a neat freak, and “an hour a day” is about all I do. Vacuum the floors and scrub the toilets on Sunday, that’s two hours tops. I’ll be generous and say I spend another 3-4 doing the squeegee thing to my shower walls after I bathe, and loading the dishes in the washer, and giving the counters a quick wipedown once or twice a week, etc.

The real difference comes in the “15-29 hours” and “30 hours or more” categories, and you have to be very, very Smart indeed to find that “problematic”, since those are stay-at-home moms. In other words, they do that “unpaid domestic labor” by choice. Because “the care and feeding of the next generation”, not to mention “the deep, primal satisfaction one gets from seeing a little life grow that you helped create” don’t really count as pay.

    Since the 1960s, more and more women have taken up paid employment, but a problem remains: how would their unpaid domestic work be replaced?

Gosh, that IS a problem! And as the Australians have shown us, the answer seems to be “just stew in your own filth”. It’s a solution America’s single gals, at least, seem to have embraced with kamikaze-level enthusiasm. Back in the days, I’d always insist on taking a girl back to my place, because condoms don’t cover the entire body and her place was always, and I do mean always, a certifiable biohazard. I’d rather do a striptease in Chernobyl’s reactor core than do anything in an American woman’s bedroom, and their bathrooms are pits of unspeakable Lovecraftian horror.

Severian, “SJWs Always Project”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-08.

June 21, 2026

Explaining our failure to expand beyond Earth to an alien

Filed under: Economics, Government, Humour, Space, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen pens an ultra-short story in response to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s claim that “we” need to take a lot more money from Elon Musk to benefit “everyone”:

This-individual has an outstanding query for you-individual.

Yes, Dee-six-twenty-four-prime? Ask your question.

When we-collective initialized language-idea-exchange with you-collective, you-collective had no settlements on the surface of other planets in your-collective own star system.

Yet you-collective possessed advanced chemical propulsion technology sufficient to leave your-collective native gravity well. For over a hundred cycles around your-collective star, you-collective possessed this.

Why did you not use it?

Well, all that technology was worth a lot of money.

Value-consideration-tokens, yes. Continue.

So we decided to take it away from the really talented geniuses who built, break it up for parts, sell the parts, and throw a big free stuff party.

A … free stuff party?

Yeah, for like, average dudes. The kind of guys who don’t know calculus or anything. The ones you’d want to have a beer with. We thought we’d buy them some stuff.

Instead of leaving your home planet?

Yeah.

This-individual understands, now. Conclusions have been submitted to collective-thought-matrix. Please line you-collective up in an orderly fashion for processing, classification, and reassignment and/or biomass reclamation.

June 17, 2026

QotD: The artillery

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Military, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Artillery, aka Gunners. As the science of war evolved, it was determined that you could stand a long way away from your opponent & shoot them to bits with bigger longer ranged guns. This was only defeated by the cavalry charging or the infantry appearing nearby, killing the enemy and stealing their guns. In modern times they produce devastating fire aimed at high value targets but spend most of their time hiding or moving as the enemy artillery or air forces are targetting them. Their tattoos are mostly spelt correctly, their officers dress like colour blind cavalry officers and their soldiers fight each other most nights.

Combat Boot, “So, ‘capbadges’, what’s that all about then?”, combatboot.co.uk, 2020-11-13.

June 13, 2026

QotD: Ecce BCG

Filed under: Education, Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Seriously, you’re wondering if a young lady in your life is a BCG? Let’s go over the diagnostic criteria. Fully acknowledging that some folks don’t photograph well, appearing to be 10-15 years older than your chronological age is a strong tell. BCGs live hard, on a steady diet of half-caff pumpkin spice mocha latte frappucinos and cock. […]

Of course BCG stands for “Basic College Girl”, and thus she can be found at any institution of “higher” “learning”, but the most Basic ones of all go to colleges you’ve never heard of. Jonah Goldberg is a good example, and while I know he’s technically male, his act is classic BCG. He famously — or infamously — went to Goucher College, which is the kind of school that likes to pretend it’s a mini-Ivy, when in fact it’s the kind of school bright-enough but directionless young nouveau riche kids go to when they just can’t kick that drug habit.

[…]

Achieving shockingly high rank right out of the gate is another tell, and I know what you’re thinking, because of course I thought it too: Mark Meadows is 63 years old, and in the world we grew up in, there’s only one way for a straight-out-of-college girl to become a “close confidante” of a 63 year old man. In my experience, though, BCGs aren’t socially savvy enough to figure that out.

Yeah yeah, I know, but y’all, as primal as that is, these BCGs are just weird. They have no social skills whatsoever. Two data points. First, from Hutchinson’s wiki page:

    Identified as a “White House legislative aide”, Hutchinson was the subject of a nationally-syndicated AP photograph in which she was shown dancing to the song “Y.M.C.A.” alongside White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany at the end of Trump’s September 21, 2020, campaign rally in Swanton, Ohio.

That is not grownup behavior. No woman who ever hoped to be taken seriously in politics would be caught dead doing that, as recently as 15 years ago. They have absolutely zero idea how they come off to other people.

Second data point: I once taught a night class in one of my Flyover State tours. I had this girl there who was just dying to get to Capitol Hill. She was involved in every possible Poli Sci club, the pre-law club, the Young Legislators (or whatever FNG shit it was), and so on. She emailed me once to say she’d be coming to class late, because she was representing Student Senate (or whatever) in some big to-do the college was hosting for the Governor.

When she shows up to my class, she’s wearing this tight red cocktail dress that would’ve looked trashy on a Vegas waitress. It was slit at the sides and back. and at the midriff. It had sequins, I shit you not. It was all I could do not to bust out laughing. You went to a reception. With the Governor. Wearing that.

They have no savvy at all, y’all. None whatsoever. The invitation she got read “formal attire”, so she wore what she wore to the sorority formal. You could practically still see Chad Thundercock’s handprints on her ass.

And that’s the fourth and most diagnostic criterion: utter, complete, hilarious fucking cluelessness. About everything.

Severian, “Alt Thread: Diagnosing the BCG”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.

June 7, 2026

Morality and humour

Filed under: Health, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen suggests that there’s a correlation between a person’s morality and their sense of humour (or lack thereof):

There is probably a correlation between morality and sense of humor.

Larry Niven once theorized that humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism.

The idea is that you have a situation presented to you which would normally trigger a defensive response, but when you realize it is actually harmless, the response that you experience as laughter or amusement is your brain’s way of derailing that inappropriate defense mechanism.

Because it isn’t appropriate to fight or run away from harmless things.

This mechanism become easy to see when you look at very simple or developing senses of humor. To a baby, unexpected + safe = comedy gold.

And my cat Dante’s favorite joke is “I BITE your toes! … but actually, I don’t bite them! I just lick them by surprise, watch you jump, then run away mewing and looking pleased with myself!”

Humor can become quite sophisticated, but I’ve never yet seen anything funny that couldn’t be understood this way.

But there’s a certain type of evil person who is evil precisely because they don’t interrupt defense mechanisms.

They fight harmless things. Even beneficial ones. And they give you long lectures about how the harmless or even the wonderful thing is ackshually super-problematic.

This is the visible symptom of a form of neurotic hypervigilance which can, and often does, progress to the point of simply lashing out, figuratively or even literally, at random parts of the environment, because the brain has constructed some narrative whereby it’s a threat.

The humor response is our natural way of not doing this.

June 5, 2026

QotD: Modern men and the need for male spaces

Filed under: Health, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Many internet men have pointed out the dwindling of male spaces, while internet women cheer for their disappearance.

Internet men believe that some kind of man-space is essential. A place for men to be men, mentor other men, and tell younger men the secret wisdom to get their lives on track. That if only we had these spaces, everything would be great for men because we’d all know the secret wisdom that doesn’t actually exist.

Internet women believe that male spaces are dens of misogyny. Places where trollish men want to gather, away from the eyes and ears of right-thinking people, so they can poison other men with hate and bigotry.

Which is silly. Men don’t hate women because other men told them to. They see women being women, and that does the trick just fine. In fact, if a man is getting hourly blowjobs from every woman whose path he crosses, then some group of troll men try to tell him women suck, he’d be confused at how uninformed these men are when women are clearly awesome.

Women’s behavior is the number-one driver of misogyny. Not men telling other men women suck.

And that’s the point of male spaces. Not secret manly-man wisdom, not chattering about woman-hate. A space where men can just be. Without women there.

Women are … a certain way.

This is especially true of middle-class and richer women, and even a little more true of white women than other kinds. But true of all women to some extent.

Women have this way about them — everything they do, say, everything about how they behave — that just subtly communicates that they do not have a lot of experience with consequences. That they are just not that used to considering consequences seriously before doing something.

I’m usually hesitant to use political buzz-words in a non-ironic way, but I think the term “privileged” is pretty perfect for this situation.

A woman’s reality — her experience — is a world where consequences just aren’t quite as big of a deal for her as they are for others. She’s never really had to consider consequences with quite the same intensity.

It’s important to note that this isn’t some kind of overt, intentional flaunting as women stride around, consequence-free, thumbing their noses at us. Women don’t even know this is a thing. They’ll deny it fiercely if you tell them. They don’t feel privileged, and their feelings are always real. They’ll even tell you that you’re the privileged one, not them. Because that feels right to them.

It’s not something they do on purpose, and it’s not even that frontal and pronounced. It’s very subtle. Just this subtle way that women are. When they talk, act, make decisions.

This makes them very irritating. Even women find each other irritating.

Archwinger, “Male spaces are because women are irritating”, Archwinger’s Substack, 2026-02-25.

May 29, 2026

“Tornados are like a warning sign God put up saying you’re not tall enough to ride this ride”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Larry Correia is feeling a bit rant-y about Europeans lecturing Americans about their morally superior continent without air conditioning:

Even the weather reports emphasize that this is the heat death of the continent …

Oh goody. It is Europe whining about America having air conditioning while they drop like flies season again. This is my favorite time of year (the other continents call it “summer”).

This year they seem fixated on American houses being made of wood and how we have tornados?

Because you know, Europeans all live in two thousand year old mud huts and windowless castles that can’t accept a window unit, and that somehow makes them morally superior to us, so they can die miserably by the thousands when it hits 78 degrees, while lecturing us smugly about “climate change” the whole time.

I live in a place that’s Norway in the winter, Algeria in the summer, five thousand feet higher than the average elevation in the UK, in a house that’s so large the average UK home would fit in my office/game room, but please, do go on about how amazing your 800 square foot mud brick shack built after the Blitz is.

Listen, you absolute pussies, if you’re that scared of living where there’s tornados that’s okay. Tornados are like a warning sign God put up saying you’re not tall enough to ride this ride. That’s why our ancestors came here and yours stayed to decay there.

A couple generations ago the UK used to be our peer. Now they’ve got the per capita GDP of Mississippi, there’s only 5 UK companies in the global top 100, it took them a month to get their one functioning destroyer out of dock (and it promptly broke a week later), and they’re menaced by the rape gangs their government imported and protected. You’d think there would be some self-awareness exercised in there somewhere, but nope. It’s all hubris. America sucks because our average house (which is about 3x bigger than the UK’s, only its insulated and has air conditioning) is made of wood. Oooh sick burn. We also put ice in our water. GASP.

I just saw some Brit bragging about how he had a pub in his neighborhood older than America. Cool. The guys who built that pub would be ashamed of what’s become of you, while their descendants who weren’t scared of tornados moved here. Then he bragged his house was two hundred years old and would be standing in two hundred more! Sure, but living in it will be five dudes named Achmed and their twenty wives.

For the record I don’t hate the British. I like most Brits. I just despise your bossy weenie socialists who want you to live like fucking peasants to sacrifice on behalf of global warming, and those are the ones who mouth off on X all day. I’m actually rooting for you normal sane Brits to continue overthrowing your shitty labor government in the hopes you can move into the modern air conditioned world with the rest of us.

So anyways, happy summer. Try not to die.

May 10, 2026

QotD: The cavalry

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

These chaps, and very recently gals, used to be stylish troops on horses who charged into the infantry and hacked them to bits. Until the infantry all stood in squares, then they needed artillery to kill them. Once weaponry got advanced enough, they decided to give all our tanks to the cavalry. Now we have few tanks, the cavalry are in denial about being infanteers and cling to the old ways by driving around in trucks claiming to be recce or other jobs. They are just posh infantry. Better tattoos but spelt correctly and mostly not DIY ones, traditions dating back to the Tudors, officers wear lemon cords and soldiers still fight each other on Friday nights.

Combat Boot, “So, ‘capbadges’, what’s that all about then?”, combatboot.co.uk, 2020-11-13.

April 21, 2026

QotD: “Bibliophiles are massive losers, why can’t we just admit that?”

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s a conspiracy. Every piece of worthless advice I ever hear tells me I must, “Read, read, read”. I can’t even try to listen to music on YouTube without entrepreneurs, life coaches and other snake oil salesmen popping up on shouty adverts, posing alongside other people’s Lamborghinis and Learjets, asking me to guess how many books the world’s top fifty “Super Achievers” read each year. (It’s fifty-two, conveniently.) “The more you learn, the more you earn!” these morons confidently claim. As if reading books makes you a billionaire.

I don’t buy it. I bet billionaires don’t read at all. Not only because they don’t have the time, but because every big reader I know is broke. Without exception, books have overloaded their minds, and their lives are in total disarray. When they’re not consumed by tortuous examinations of Socialist Realism in the shallower subsections of the Baltic Canal between late October 1933 and early March 1934, they’re deconstructing turgid translations of 9th Century Glagolitic poetry from the White Carpathian territories of Great Moravia. On weekends, for light relief, they dip into obscure anthologies of critically-acclaimed feminist speculative fiction championing unsung writers born in the shadow of the Chappal Waddi in the Mambilla Plateau. What should have been their office hours are spent haggling with elderly volunteers in Oxfam bookshops over worthless, dogeared volumes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s early letters or needlessly exhaustive histories of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in the Ganges-Brahmaputra basin. They own vast stacks of surplus, dust-magnet books, but they never own art, or cars, or houses. Bibliophiles are massive losers — why can’t we just admit that? There’s a clear correlation between reading and underachievement. There’s a reason homeless vagabonds line their coat pockets with paperbacks and newspapers. Our children must be warned, before it happens to them.

Reading is even less helpful to writers. If you write, you are incurably influenced by whatever garbage you happen to be reading at the time. For example, if I’m reading Hemingway, I finish this sentence here. Whereas, in the rare, transcending moments that I am reading, say, Henry James, I find, to my eternal chagrin, that I write — if, indeed, “write” is the morpheme, or mot juste, for which I rightly delve — in my lasting endeavours — my contention, if you will, against the ordained — in a spirit of refined demonstration, or braggadocio, as the case may be, that … Where was I?

Then, of course, there’s the snobbery associated with reading. “Read a book!” command the enlightened few, should you dare disagree with them on any trendy subject. It’s ridiculous, but if you read — or, better still, opine pretentiously about what you read — the chattering classes will clamber to pressgang you into their fanatical ranks. Nobody cares if you write anything, so long as you describe the latest high-status books as “vital”, “necessary”, “required”, or “essential”. Trust me, you can get away for years with pretending that you are “working on something big that I’d rather not talk about for fear of jinxing it” while freely enjoying all the wine and canapes you can stomach. But suggest you don’t read, and people quickly get suspicious.

Dominic Hilton, “All Booked Up”, The Critic, 2020-08-17.

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