Quotulatiousness

May 21, 2025

AI hallucinations capture the Chicago Sun-Times summer reading list

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Good luck finding some of the highly recommended books on the Chicago Sun-Times list of summer reading … they don’t actually exist (yet):

Critics aren’t perfect.

Sometimes they get facts wrong. Sometimes their judgment is faulty. Sometimes they dangle their modifiers or split their infinitives with everybody watching.

I’ve been there. And it’s awkward.

But I’ve never seen anything as embarrassing as the “Summer Reading List for 2025” in the Chicago Sun-Times.

It gave glowing reviews to books that don’t exist. And I bet you can guess why.

Yes, the newspaper relied on AI to write the article.

The article starts with a recommendation for Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende. This is Allende’s “first climate fiction novel” where “magical realism meets environmental activism”.

It’s a shame that Allende never wrote this book. Nor did anyone else — the book simply doesn’t exist.

(I’ll predict, however, that an AI-generated book with this title will show up on Amazon within a few days. When you live in a world of AI hallucinations, this is how the business model plays out.)

The next book on the Sun-Times list is The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir. This novel is also non-existent. But the storyline — about rogue AI that gains consciousness — makes me think that the bots are now mocking us.

It doesn’t get better. The first 10 books on the summer reading list are entirely hallucinated.

As the story of the fake reviews spread on social media, the Sun-Times got into damage control mode. It issued a public statement denying responsibility.

But that just makes matters worse.

Why are they publishing garbage without vetting it? And the denial is also implausible.

Somebody at the newspaper must have given the okay to this. The printing presses don’t run themselves (although maybe that will be the next stage of the AI business model).

How is this happening?

We are now several years into the AI revolution. I’m constantly hearing about new, improved bots that are smarter than super-geniuses, and can replace lowly humans.

But the bizarre lapses are getting worse — and more dangerous.

AI is routinely making stupid, nonsensical mistakes that even the most incompetent employee would never make. I’ve met some incompetent journalists over the years, but none would make a boneheaded move of this magnitude.

And this is after a trillion dollars has been sunk into AI by the most powerful corporations in the world. This is after they have soaked up much of the energy grid. This is after all the training and vetting and upgrading.

We’re not talking about beta testing or first generation AI. Silicon Valley is actually bragging about this tech — but it’s stupider than the worst journalist in the country.

Canadian voters got fooled again

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Roxanne Halverson on Canadian voter gullibility that Mark Carney and the Liberals took full advantage of in the election campaign:

Offer not applicable in Canada, apparently.

Liberals voters on your elbows up crusade — do you feel foolish, do you feel shamed? Are you ready to admit that you were duped? That you were played like the fiddle in the Devil went down to Georgia. How does it feel to know that you fell for Mark Carney’s fear mongering fabricated crisis that made him Prime Minister. Or is your Trump Derangement Syndrome so severe that you cannot recognize how the Liberals used it and used you to win an election they didn’t deserve to win. It wouldn’t be so bad if only you had to pay the price, but unlike the phony COVID mantra, of we’re all in this together, we really are all in this nightmare together for another possible four years of Liberal rule and corruption, and we’re all going to pay the price. That includes those of us who didn’t get fooled again, but most of us are the same ones who also didn’t get fooled in the last three elections that gave the country the Liberals under Justin Trudeau for a decade of destruction.

Did you see the interview Prime Minister Mark Carney did with Sky News Australia?

You really should watch it. Because in it he admits what those of us who didn’t vote for him knew, and what he, himself also knew. There was never any real threat from Trump to annex Canada. And when pushed on it by the Sky News interviewer Samantha Washington who asks if he inflated the threat as political tool to inflame voters who hated Donald Trump, Carney dances around it saying one minute it wasn’t a threat and the next minute, well he thought it was and so did the Canadian people and well maybe he did use it to kind of stir them up. Essentially he was trying to dodge the fact that he lied and knew all along that Trump wasn’t really going to make Canada the 51st state.

So, let’s begin with the Trump threat — the existential threat to the existence of our country! According to Carney, Trump “wanted to take Canada, he wanted to break it“. But when asked by Washington about that ‘existential threat’, Carney walked it back. In his words, “No the existence is not at stake, it was more of economic crisis, and had a heavy element of national security comes with it, the extent to which we will be cooperating with others, particularly with the United States“.

Now wait a minute, Carney told voters — the elbows uppers — that Canada’s existence was at stake. And now he’s adding in a national security element? I don’t recall Trump ever saying anything about invading Canada or threatening our national security, in fact it was quite the opposite, he said the United States would always protect Canada for any foreign threat. His interest in national security had to do with Canada’s porous border and the fentanyl trade that the Liberals chose to ignore. This response is a typical Carney word salad dancing around answering the question. Something he seems to have in common with his predecessor Justin Trudeau. But at its core, he says, no Canada’s existence was never in danger.

Yet, he repeatedly told crowds at rallies that the US wanted to break us, when it was really just an economic crisis — something Canada has faced many times before, often due to bad Liberal policies.

But that’s what Mark Carney, with the help of his cartel media echo chamber, drummed into the heads of the elbows up crowd during his leadership campaign and during his entire election campaign. Trump was going to come and take our country — “he wants our resources, he wants our land, and he wants our water“.

Now here’s another word salad, walking back the ‘threat’ from Trump. When Washington asked him why he met with Trump when he was still disrespecting Canada by talking about making it the 51st state, even during their meeting in the Oval Office, which he said it, as she described it, “right to your face“. According to Carney this was ‘different’, and then he delivers another word salad because apparently, “Trump was expressing a desire … he had shifted from an expectation to a desire for that to happen. He was also coming from a place where he recognized that that wasn’t going to happen. I made it clear to him in that context.”

May 20, 2025

Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

News broke the other day that former President Joe Biden is suffering from a highly advanced cancer and it only reinforces the questions about who was really performing the role of the President during Biden’s term in office:

Well, now it almost isn’t funny anymore.

Here’s the progression of the Democrats’ desperate attempts to shame you out of talking about Joe Biden’s mental and physical health:

“Stop talking about this because it’s not true.”
“Stop talking about this because he’s not the president anymore.”
“Stop talking about this because he has cancer.”

You may notice a pattern.

I think it was Andrew Klavan who made me realize the First Commandment of the Democratic Party: Thou shalt STFU. All their gaslighting, shaming, whataboutism, and other dishonest rhetorical techniques are attempts to stop you from talking about whichever lie they’re telling at that particular moment.

Why would they stop at cancer?

A lot of medical professionals are pointing out that a prostate cancer diagnosis doesn’t just come out of the blue like this. It’s easily detectable in blood work, it takes years and years to progress, and it should’ve been detected at his last annual physical.

Even Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (an oncologist, Rahm’s older brother, and certainly no MAGA-head) says Biden must have learned of this diagnosis many years ago.

If Biden was undergoing cancer treatments during his presidency — remember all those unexplained trips to Delaware? — it would explain a lot of his behavior. “Chemo brain”. And of course he and Jill would keep it under wraps, because it would only strengthen a 25th Amendment challenge.

Who else knew about this, and when did they know it?

And who the hell was performing the duties of the president of the United States for four years?

Keep in mind that Joe Biden loves using his personal tragedies as a Get Out of Jail Free card. We heard it in that just-released Robert Hur audio from October 2023, when Biden deflected a question he didn’t want to answer about his handling of classified documents by complaining that his son Beau died. He couldn’t remember the exact year, but he used it as an excuse anyway.

If he’ll use his dead son, why wouldn’t he use a cancer diagnosis?

eugyppius also notes that such an advanced case can’t have just popped up recently, reinforcing the notion that his term in office was partially or completely a “regency”:

Yesterday evening, Joe Biden’s office announced that the former president had been diagnosed “with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones“. Biden must have had this cancer for a long time for it to have spread that far, and thus it seems very strange that someone receiving presidential levels of medical care should have been diagnosed only just last week. Many in our circles posit that insiders have known about Biden’s illness for years, but that they have kept his diagnosis and treatment under wraps for political reasons. Among other things, they argue that this explains a July 2022 gaffe in which Biden complained that environmental pollution is “why I and so damn many other people I grew up with have cancer“.1

In fact, I think a simple cover-up is the most harmless possibility here. It’s likely that doctors have diagnosed Biden’s cancer so late because the former president was subject to a high degree of isolation and medical neglect while in office. Perhaps family and close advisers carefully managed Biden’s annual physicals to avoid any inconvenient findings as part of a broader campaign to hide his dementia. Alternatively, it’s possible that signs of cancer were discovered at some point, but that Biden’s inner circle avoided confirming the diagnosis or pursuing treatment. Either way, the late diagnosis and the advanced cancer together suggest that Biden has been left sick and untreated for a long time.

As I wrote last year, Biden’s presidency was an informal and unacknowledged regency. Biden himself did not have the mental capacity to rule on his own, and so a confined circle of close advisers and family effectively directed the actions of the presidential office on his behalf.

Importantly, this regency was not “the White House” or “Biden’s staff” or “the Democratic Party” in general. It was much smaller than all of those things. The regents worked hard to obscure Biden’s dementia from Congress, from large parts of Biden’s own campaign, from the Democratic Party and from many others within Biden’s White House. They ensured that even internal meetings unfolded in highly scripted and predetermined ways, so that cabinet and other officials could not gain a clear idea of Biden’s mental state. They berated and intimidated anyone voicing concern about the president’s health behind the scenes. And they had very simple reasons for doing all of this: If Biden’s dementia were to become common knowledge and not merely an object of private suspicion (however widespread), the regency would be shown up as illegitimate and potentially broken.

Regents exercise power by restricting access to their charge and restricting their charge’s access to information and the outside world. It is thus unsurprising to find that Biden’s regents subjected him to strict social isolation, particularly towards the end of his term …

    1. The White House clarified that Biden was referencing his earlier diagnoses for non-melanoma skin cancer.

Gen Z is blaming Capitalism for the sins of Cronyism

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lika Kobeshavidze at the Foundation for Economic Education explains why angry Gen Z’ers are blaming capitalism but should instead be blaming crony capitalism for the economic plight they find themselves in:

Image Credit: Custom image by FEE

Across college campuses, on TikTok feeds, and in everyday conversations, a familiar narrative is gaining steam: capitalism is broken.

Rising rents and stagnant wages fuel the claim among some young people that free markets have failed an entire generation. According to a 2024 poll by the Institute of Economic Affairs, more than 60% of young Britons now view socialism favorably. In the United States, the trend is similar, with Generation Z increasingly skeptical of capitalism’s promises.

But much of this idealism is rooted in distance — many of the young people romanticizing socialism have never lived through the economic dysfunction or political repression it often brings. For those who experienced Soviet shortages, Venezuelan collapse, or East Germany’s surveillance, the word socialism doesn’t suggest fairness or opportunity — it suggests fear, failure, and control. There’s a reason so many fled those systems to come to freer countries. What sounds utopian in theory has too often turned dystopian in practice.

But blaming capitalism misses the mark. The real culprit is cronyism, the unholy alliance between big government and big business that twists markets, blocks competition, and rewards political connections over genuine innovation.

[…]

Cronyism is not limited to one country or one political party. Across the United States and Europe, the symptoms are the same.

In the US, Canada, and the UK, the dream of homeownership slips further away for young people. Sky-high housing prices are blamed on “market failure”, but the real cause lies in layers of government-imposed barriers: restrictive zoning laws, burdensome permitting requirements, and endless bureaucratic delays. Big developers who can afford to navigate or influence the system survive. Everyone else gets locked out.

In Europe, the pattern repeats. France’s labor laws, designed to protect workers, instead stifle opportunity. Hiring becomes risky and expensive, especially for young people. Large corporations, with the resources to manage compliance costs, consolidate their dominance. Small firms and startups never get off the ground.

There’s also a persistent myth that big business fears government intervention. In reality, the largest corporations often embrace it, because it keeps them on top. Tech giants like Facebook and Google now lobby for more regulation, knowing that complex new rules will strangle smaller competitors who can’t afford fleets of compliance officers. Green energy subsidies, meant to combat climate change, often end up showering billions on well-connected firms while locking out emerging innovators.

Cronyism doesn’t reward the best ideas. It rewards the best lobbyists.

May 19, 2025

1949: What are those kids listening to? – W2W 29

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 18 May 2025

There seems to be an evolution, that may one day become a revolution, in popular music in the US. Songs with amplified electric guitars, wailing saxophones, and backbeat rhythms are being released more and more often, but it’s not just R&B or jump blues, this is a bit of a different style — a new style. And it’s spreading quickly thanks to a vinyl record revolution that’s also getting in gear. Looks like exciting times ahead for the youth of America, and maybe even the whole world.
(more…)

Best of Cunk on Shakespeare – Part 1

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Philomena Cunk
Published 20 Dec 2023

Are you saying I’m a liar?

Sharing all things Cunk – a fictional character from Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, Cunk on Britain, Cunk on Shakespeare and Cunk on Earth – Portrayed by the incredible Diane Morgan.

May 18, 2025

Trump today, Taft a century ago – interfering with Canadian federal elections

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Coolidge Review, Amity Shlaes looks at the long-ago pre-Trumpian example of US interference in Canadian federal politics:

President Trump isn’t the first U.S. leader to turn a Canadian election with a few remarks. A little over a century back another president, William Howard Taft, managed the same feat.

The story starts in 1908, when outgoing president Theodore Roosevelt handpicked a successor, the lawyerly Taft. Taft won election. But from the eve of inauguration, Roosevelt began to voice doubts that Taft was up to the job. Word got around. Taft reacted to this disloyalty by attempting to prove he was no Roosevelt puppet. Where Roosevelt had invaded nations, Taft would write trade treaties. As Taft biographer Jeffrey Rosen writes, the motto of Roosevelt had been “speak softly and carry a big stick”. Taft’s maxim could have been “speak softly and carry a free-trade agreement”.

Taft’s marquee effort was to be a trade agreement with Canada, then lodged in the ambiguous status of “self-governing dominion”. As Taft noted, the dominion did have the freedom to conduct trade policy. Canada’s prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, was a distinguished free marketeer. The political stars appeared to align. In his enthusiasm Taft praised Canada, practically crowing: “She has cost us nothing in the way of preparations for defense against her possible assault, and she never will … I therefore earnestly hope that the measure will be promptly enacted into law.” Such a treaty, Taft said, would mark a new “epoch” for North America.

In those days, tariffs represented a much more important share of U.S. federal revenues. Selling free trade was no easy work, especially not to Republicans, for whom tariffs were part of the brand. Then as now, trade treaties, unlike peace treaties, required support from both chambers of Congress. But again Taft sang his heart out, not only making the usual case for an “increase in trade on both sides of the boundary line” but also trying out wider arguments.

Early in 1911, Taft infused urgency into negotiations by threatening Canada via ultimatum: Team up with the United States, or there might be a “parting of the ways”. Hunting votes at home, Taft wrote a private letter to the still influential Roosevelt. Appealing to the imperialist in his predecessor, though not very hard, Taft suggested such a treaty might render Canada “only an adjunct of the United States”. Historians debate whether the “adjunct” letter was leaked or stayed private over the course of the 1911 negotiations. Lawmakers on the Hill, in any case, began to speak in similar tones.

Next, Taft called a special session of Congress. Congress warmed to the treaty but pounded the imperialist angle as much as Taft’s main case. “I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions, clear to the North Pole,” thundered the soon-to-be House Speaker, James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark of Missouri.

Such statements did not elude Canadian ears. Some loathed the treaty for pulling Canada farther from Britain; others, independence minded, loathed the idea of trading the thumb of one empire upon them for the thumb of another. By the time Taft signed the Tariff Reciprocity Agreement in July 1911, Canadian reciprocity opponents were on the march. By September, Canada was rejecting in a landslide referendum Taft’s and Laurier’s work.

As The Literary Digest commented in 1912, these flamboyant statements from U.S. politicians were handy weapons for Canada’s treaty opponents. They had put into Canadian Conservatives’ hands “an excellent club with which to cudgel the Liberals and their brilliant leader, Laurier”. Laurier himself was defeated in an election as well, on the argument he was pandering to the U.S.

May 17, 2025

German democracy … saved by bureaucratic incompetence?

Filed under: Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Checking in to the situation in Germany, it seems that the big secret report compiled by the German spy agency on the extremely extreme extreme right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party is a bit less than what was expected. Okay, a lot less:

In my last post, I wrote that “The campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is not going well“. Today – a mere seventy-two hours later – you could say that the campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is all but dead. This is because the people most committed to banning the AfD also happen to be some of the stupidest, most incompetent legal and political operators the world has ever seen. Their incompetence is so enormous that I am for once willing to entertain conspiracy theories as to why they might have undermined their own project. It is that bad.

Two weeks ago, you may remember, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser forced the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to rush their long-planned upgrade of the AfD and declare the party to be a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation. Word spread of a mysterious 1,100-page assessment, full of damning proofs that allegedly supported this upgrade. This document had to be kept secret, Faeser explained in an interview, “… to protect sources and withhold indications of how our findings were obtained”. So espionage, much secret, wow.

The thing was, the anti-AfD dossier could not have been that secret, because somebody (almost certainly, somebody in the Interior Ministry) immediately leaked it to Der Spiegel, whose journalists published various excerpts in an effort to make the case for how evil and fascist and Nazi and Hitler the AfD are. In this way the press could climax repeatedly in a wave of democratic orgasms over the renewed possibility of an AfD ban, even in the absence of the supersecret report.

The media circus dissipated quickly, however. The publicity campaign, the roll-out – a lot of things went wrong, some of them inexplicably wrong. Still, I thought there was a 40% chance that the Bundestag would try to open ban proceedings sometime this year. That, as I said, was on Monday. What happened on Tuesday, is that Cicero, NiUS and Junge Freiheit all received the secret 1,100-page assessment (actually, it contains 1,108 pages) and published it in its entirety. Since Tuesday evening, a great many people have been reading this document, and they have been realising various things.

The first thing they’ve realised, is that it contains hardly anything derived from supersecret spy sources at all. It is little more than a collection of public statements by AfD politicians. Faeser’s sources-and-methods justification for keeping the report hidden was a total lie.

The second thing they’ve realised, is that it is an abomination. The vast majority of material that the BfV have collected is not even suspect. It is a lot of off-colour jokes, memes, but also just banal nothing statements – thousands and thousands and thousands of them, arranged under various hysterical subject headings. Nothing in here is remotely strong enough to support the case for banning the AfD and a lot of it is also very bizarre in terms of argument. Not only have the prospects of an AfD ban all but evaporated, but I think it’s even likely the party will succeed in their present lawsuit and that the administrative court in Cologne will throw out the “right-wing extremist” label.

QotD: Suburbs and their critics

Filed under: Architecture, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I respect [sprawl] as people’s choice – the suburbs, highways and byways, strip malls, cookie-cutter houses, whether small semi-detached or McMansions, the whole lot of it.

It gets a lot of bad press, it has got a lot of influential haters, ridiculers and deriders. There are the urbanists, the town planners, the architects, most of whom can’t abide the sprawl. It’s ugly, inefficient, unsustainable, it lacks amenities and it lacks a sense of community, it prioritises – or privileges, as they would say – cars over pedestrians, it wastes space and it wastes resources, it’s barbaric. Those much smarter and more creative than us have offered a lot of alternatives: high-density living, modernist spaces, Le Corbusier’s houses as “machines for living”. They tore down the slums and erected high rise projects, council flats, banlieues and osiedla. They designed and built whole new districts, rich in concrete and wide bare expanses of public space.

Then there are the cultural as opposed to professional haters, and they too are as old as the suburbs themselves. The sprawl is a prison, a conformist hell. It deadens imagination and stifles creativity. It’s full of dumb people leading dumb lives. It’s a triumph of materialism, selfishness and narrow mindedness over selflessness, community and commonweal. From literature through movies and music to TV shows, suburbs don’t get a break; they are the hotbed of reaction, sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, intolerance, prejudice, oppression and kitsch. “Revolutionary Road”, “Stepford Wives”, “American Beauty”, “Weeds”, “Little Boxes”, Stephen King novels, the list is endless, but you get the drift.

There are many differences between the suburbanites and the suburbs haters, but the one big one is this: the suburbanities are the live-and-let-live crowd – they know what they like but they don’t give a shit if you don’t like it. It’s your business and it’s your life – you can do whatever you like. The suburbs haters, on the other hand, not only know what they like but they believe that everyone else should like it to, and if they don’t, tough luck, they should be forced to change for the sake of what’s really good for them and for the whole community. Suburbs are not something that can be tolerated as an option; they should be destroyed, land reclaimed, ideally by nature, their former residents corralled and concentrated.

In many ways it’s yet another example of the old elite versus the masses cultural clash. The masses essentially just want to be left alone. The elites want to remake the whole world so it accords to their vision of what’s good and useful. The masses’ is not to question why …

Arthur Chrenkoff, “In praise of sprawl”, Daily Chrenk, 2020-05-21.

May 16, 2025

Those scary “Brexity books”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Andrew Doyle on the sudden interest British police seem to be taking about what kind of books you may have on your shelves at home:

If the British police saw this collection, you’d be lucky to get out of prison in fifty years!

The UK police certainly seem to believe in that old aphorism that that “You can tell everything you need to know about a person from their bookshelf”. There has been much press coverage this week of the case of Julian Foulkes, a former policeman who was arrested at his home in Gillingham for tweetcrime. It took six officers to handcuff the pensioner and take him to a cell, and bodycam footage from the arrest shows them assessing the contents of his bookshelves. One was seen singling out The War on the West by Douglas Murray and another remarked that there were “very Brexity things”.

I have a fair few “Brexity” books on my shelf too. I have just as many “anti-Brexity” books, as it happens. It seems to have escaped the attention of these officers that it is possible to read multiple points of view without necessarily subscribing to any of them. They have also apparently forgotten that “Brexity” views are fairly commonplace, enough so to win the largest democratic mandate the country has ever seen. If it’s a majority view, is it really all that controversial?

I recall during the lockdown I was scheduled for a television interview and, having set up the webcam, I suddenly realised that the two volumes of Ian Kershaw’s excellent biography of Hitler were not only visible, but prominent. The design of the books’ spines is such that the word “HITLER” is displayed in huge letters. Very dramatic and marketable, but not so helpful if you’re about to appear on live television. I must confess that I repositioned my chair to ensure that the books were obscured.

But why? It isn’t as though any sensible person could possibly believe that my interest in the history of tyranny implies an endorsement of it. I could just as easily have a copy of Mein Kampf on the shelf and still retain my wholehearted opposition to its author and everything he stood for. If I owned a copy of the Koran, would that make me a Muslim? If I owned a copy of Jilly Cooper’s Riders, would that make me prone to passionate romps in stables? As a chronic hay fever sufferer, this hardly seems likely.

The assumption that the books we choose to read are a mirror-image of our private thoughts, or that we are so malleable that any opinion we encounter will automatically be assimilated, is very much a core tenet of faith in today’s woke mindset, one that has quite palpably infected the justice system. Those who are currently serving prison time for offensive tweets will be aware that the unevidenced belief that the public act on cue to the language they read has some very authoritarian consequences.

For some reason, men who sleep around don’t want to marry women who sleep around

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Young women who approach casual sex the way that young men do (or used to, anyway) are shocked to find that men don’t want to settle down in a long term relationship with a woman with a similar “bodycount”:

A young woman at a club with unrealistically disinterested young men.
Image generated by Grok.

First of all, men are very different than women, but guys are also fairly simple creatures.

Here are the fundamentals, ladies …

If a man sees you as a potential match, is attracted to you, you feed him, seem to want to take care of him, you’re a good mom (if you have kids), have good sex with him, are nice to him, he enjoys talking to you and you genuinely seem to think he’s great, he will think he’s the luckiest guy on earth. The great thing about all of this is that it’s mostly under your control. Yes, you might have to dress up and have some open conversations about what the two of you like in bed, but it’s a doable list. Being 6’4′ or making $500,000 per year to get some woman’s attention may be outside of a man’s control, but if a man considers a woman relationship material, she is probably capable of locking him in if she wants to do it.

Of course, like everything else in life, there is some nuance involved here.

For one thing, good sex is a key part of a good relationship, BUT unlike a lot of women, men are also generally very comfortable with the idea of having sex OUTSIDE OF RELATIONSHIPS. A lot of men can enjoy sex with women they just met, women they know they’ll never see again, or even women THEY DON’T EVEN LIKE AS HUMAN BEINGS. Men just have a biological drive toward sex, the same way, for example, a lot of dogs have a biological drive toward prey. The second my dog sees a cat; she wants to chase it. If she catches up to the cat, she doesn’t even know what to do, but she does know she wants it to run so she can have the fun of running after it. It’s an innate drive for her and most men have that same kind of innate drive around sex, even though most of us never have the opportunity to fully express it.

[…]

For example, all other things being equal, just about every man would prefer a virgin to a woman with say 50 previous partners. Why? Well, in a man’s book, being promiscuous is a huge negative in a woman you’re interested in long term for reasons great and small, fair and unfair.

Like what?

Well, first and foremost, the traditional concern is that if she’s sleeping around, how do you know your child is yours? The last thing any man wants to do is get cucked and end up spending his life raising a child some other man impregnated his wife with right under his nose. Along similar lines, the more a woman has slept around, the more likely it is that she may cheat. After all, unless you’re the absolute peak of the pyramid for men, having sex requires a lot of effort and work. For women? Not so much. She’ll have easy opportunities every day of the week, probably multiple times per day, and if she feels comfortable sleeping around, can you trust her?

How easy is it? Well, once, I remember talking to a female friend of mine who had moved to another city, was lonely, and she complained to me that she “Just needed to get laid.” I laughed at her over the phone and told her something like, “All you have to do is dress up, go to a hotel bar, look for any attractive single man, sit next to him, and talk to him for 5 minutes, then ask him to take you up to his room. You’ll be having sex 5 minutes after. It’s that easy” – and it is, for women.

We can go on. Promiscuous women are statistically less likely to stay married. You also have to think they probably aren’t going to be as satisfied in bed if they’re comparing you to a large number of men. You know, “Well, Brett had that amazing 8 pack, Jimmy was really hung, Paul could go forever, and Todd did that really cool thing with his tongue, so how good is this compared to those guys?” Furthermore, it’s natural for men to want large numbers of female partners, but not so much for women, which usually means women who sleep around have issues. How many mentally healthy, happy women are racking up truly large numbers of guys? Not many.

May 14, 2025

We welcome (almost) all refugees

Filed under: Africa, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn notes the odd situation of rabid pro-refugee organizations suddenly finding that there are some refugees they don’t want to come to the United States after all:

We are told, relentlessly, that “diversity is our strength”. But it’s a delicate balance, isn’t it? After Biden’s untold millions of drug mules and sex fiends, just fifty-nine whites from South Africa could completely destroy all the multiculti harmony:

I confess to mixed feelings about those scenes myself. When I was a kid, the Boers had a reputation, unlovely as they might be in certain aspects, as the toughest buggers on the planet. In Britain and Canada, it was not uncommon to hear fellows, depressed at how their own countries were going, talk breezily about emigrating to South Africa. Yet in the end they folded in nothing flat — and the country’s new masters don’t want them and they have to find somewhere to go. Gee, it’s almost like that might be a lesson of more general application in the year ahead.

So it’s interesting to see the American left tiptoe all the way up to making the real purpose of “diversity” explicit: We’re in favour of open borders … except for whites. Rather than sully their hands with fifty-nine Afrikaners, the Episcopal Church has declared it’s willing to forego the moolah from the federal “refugee resettlement” racket. The spousal-abusing MS-13 gangbanger may be the quintessential “Maryland man”, but these white guys never can be.

Watching hoity-toity upper-class whites like NBC’s Andrea Mitchell finger-wagging from the anchor chair about their anti-whiteness is instructive. They assume that they will never have to face the consequences of their virtue-signalling. But the chasm between Eliteworld and Reality yawns wider with every day, and it will one day consume most of the west’s high-status “progressives” too. There are limits to kingly power. That’s the lesson Canute tried to teach his courtiers when he took them to the water’s edge and commanded the tide to lay off his loafers. But King Canute would never have ordered his staff to tell the peasantry to eat crickets on a bed of cockroach coulis. Because that would be too ridiculous.

For that we had to wait until Justin Trudeau, sinking bazillions of dollars into bug farms as part of the masterplan: that’s not just a bug, it’s an indispensable feature. Because at the World Economic Forum all the clever guys decided that, in the interests of saving the world from “climate change”, our rulers had to do to our own farmers what the mob is doing to white South Africans: destroy their farms, kill all the cows and sheep, and ensure that nothing grazes there ever again.

There are few things sadder than a post-developed society. If you walk around South African towns at the end of the day, you will notice in high-rise buildings the absence of lights on the upper floors: the inability to maintain skyscrapers is one of the first signs of a society in decline. It starts at the heights and then sinks to the basement, whether those heights are Boeing or bug farms. If you’re in on the racket, you can still live high off the hog-simulating scorpions … for a while. But the people who make the running in the western world are mad, and their fever dreams are boundless.

Carney’s new cabinet – remarkably similar to Trudeau’s cabinets

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Prime Minister Mark Carney talked as if he was initiating a new era in Canadian politics, but when it came to nominating his first cabinet, it’s plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose with most of the same cast of incompetents, crooks, lickspittles, and fart-catchers. Justin Trudeau would feel right at home:

Prime Minister Mark Carney promised change, a new way of doing things at speeds never before seen. Yet to help him do this, he is relying on the same old, tired, incompetent ministers who got us into the mess we’re currently in.

The Liberals will trumpet the large number of new faces in Carney’s 28-member cabinet — there are 15 MPs who have never served before.

But the top tier of ministers — the ones sitting in the front row at the swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday — were all former Trudeau acolytes, cabinet ministers now committed to rescuing us from a crisis of their own making.

In the front row was Sean Fraser, our new justice minister and attorney general, and the man who, under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, was responsible for immigration and then housing, two files he spectacularly failed at. If we want to know how bad Fraser was in those jobs, we need only look to Carney’s election platform.

“The last time we faced a housing crisis at such a broad scale was after the Second World War”, read the platform. This crisis “has left younger generations facing rents, down payments and mortgage payments so high that it turned housing into a barrier to opportunity instead of a cornerstone of opportunity”.

What about Fraser’s record at immigration? According to the Liberal platform, the Trudeau government let immigration “grow at a rapid and unsustainable pace”.

In December, when Liberal fortunes were in the toilet, Fraser announced that, for family reasons, he was quitting politics. Strangely, after the party witnessed a reversal in the polls, he announced he was returning.

In Carney’s eyes, Fraser’s blundering on two key files qualifies him to become justice minister. The only thing worse than Fraser as a cabinet minister may be Carney’s judgment.

Also in the front row was Chrystia Freeland, who served as deputy prime minister and finance minister under Trudeau and is now returning to cabinet as minister of transportation and internal trade.

Freeland’s record is best summed up, again, by the Liberal platform: “Business investment in Canada has dropped from 14 per cent of GDP in 2014 to 11 per cent in 2024, undermining long-term economic growth”.

Meanwhile, long-time Trudeau lieutenant Mélanie Joly, whose reign at foreign affairs was about as successful as Fraser was at housing and immigration, moves to industry.

Well, if we’re stuck with Carney’s retreads, at least we can laugh about ’em. Through the tears:

Noah has some faint praise for the new minister of National Defence and the new Secretary of State for Defence Procurement:

Welp it’s official. Bill Blair is out.

I cant say that it’s overly shocking. I don’t think anyone truly expected Blair to be MND by the end of today. While I will give Blair some credit for holding the fort, most of you already know I wasn’t his biggest fan.

He was a great placeholder who was able to smoothly roll out the plans left to him. He also did have several good public showings, such as his efforts in Korea last year. I will give credit where it is due.

However, he was also uninspiring, too passive in his role, and while I have no doubt he took it seriously, was never going to be a great long-term option. He had long overstayed his welcome […] Now he’s out completely from cabinet and in his place we have not one but two new ministers on the defence profile!

David McGuinty, best known for his eight-year stint as Chair of the National Security and Intelligence Committee has taken the reigns as the new Minister of National Defence While Kelowna MP and veteran Stephen Fuhr will take on a new role as Secretary of State for Defence Procurement.

In this role Fuhr will work under McGuinty specifically to tackle the file of Defence Procurement ahead of the establishment of the DPA. He is one of eight new secretaries of state that will operate on a “junior” level in cabinet.

Now McGuinty wouldn’t have been my first pick. I will openly admit that, but it is hard [not] to argue that he is the most prepared for the role, and likely the best we have available.

McGuinty previously held the NSICOP chair from 2017 all the way until December when he was appointed Minister of Public Safety. He has a background in International Development before becoming a parliamentarian, including stints with UNICEF.

He isn’t coming into this without a background on the current security climate we’re facing. He certainly can’t be said to be ill-prepared to take the role at a time when CAF and the DND are at one of their most pivotal moments in restructuring.

QotD: To hell with visual distractions on your desktop GUI

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Even that 1990s desktop is too frou-frou for me now, let alone the excessively cute GUIs that replaced it.

My desktop layout doesn’t have a background, or icons, or action buttons, or gradients, or any of that crap. It barely even has color.

I’m not going to name my window manager here, because I don’t want to sound like I’m evangelizing for a particular one. The important part is that it’s all tiled windows all the way down with an absolute minimum of dead space and visual noise.

And I am so much happier than I was with conventional desktop GUIs. I love not having that visual noise constantly pull at my attention.

In hindsight, we spent decades being obsessed with UI details that were just meaningless, distracting fluff. That not only didn’t help us get work done, they were actually a drain on our concentration.

Only part of that can be blamed on pixel-pushing “UX” designers who got erections every time they changed the color or shape of a button. The rest of it’s on us, on people who bought into this glittery fake progress. I used to be guilty of this myself, but I’ve learned better.

Fancy visually-noisy desktop GUIs that suck your attention are the enemy. Fuck all that sideways with a chainsaw. Go simple, go tiled, go minimalist — stop abusing your brain!

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-28.

May 13, 2025

Checking on the parlous state of German democracy this week

Filed under: Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

First, Sabine Beppler-Spahl points out how difficult it was for the new ruling coalition to get their candidate for Chancellor actually installed:

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, 5 May 2025.
Photo by Sandro Halank for Wikimedia Commons.

The spectacle in the Bundestag this week sent shockwaves through Germany’s political establishment. For the first time in modern German history, a chancellor candidate – Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader Friedrich Merz – failed to get elected by parliament. In the first round of voting, he received just 310 out of 621 votes – six votes short of the necessary majority. A total of 18 members of his own coalition brazenly refused to support him.

A second round of voting was then called and Merz managed to scrape through with 325 votes. But this was a stinging embarrassment for both Merz himself and the new coalition government more broadly. “Never before has there been a political car crash on such a scale”, wrote Berthold Kohler, editor of the conservative FAZ.

In hindsight, Merz’s failure shouldn’t have been such a surprise. From the beginning, the new government was always going to be in for a rough ride. For a start, it is made up of two parties that both received phenomenally bad results in February’s federal elections. The CDU suffered its second-worst result since its founding. Meanwhile, the CDU’s coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD), received its worst result ever.

Worse still, the coalition was losing even more support in the polls in the weeks running up to the chancellor vote. At times, the governing parties barely managed 40 per cent between them. Hermann Binkert, head of the INSA polling institute, described this as a “loss of approval like never before in the period between a federal election and the formation of a new government”.

Many commentators are now questioning whether Merz and his coalition will ever truly recover from this humiliation. The fiasco certainly confirms that Germany is in a deep political crisis, which isn’t going anywhere. It also undermines the smug assertions of Europe’s anti-populist establishment, which has been claiming, against all evidence to the contrary, that German politics is less prone to populist upheavals than those of other Western democracies.

Outside parliamentary machinations, the move to declare the largest opposition party to be a formal threat to German democracy isn’t going smoothly either:

On 2 May, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) yielded to intense pressure from their boss, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, and declared Alternative für Deutschland to be a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation“. The media filled with hit pieces and leftoids began a new round of shouting and morally hyperventilating about the evil fascist Nazi Hitler party. I thought we might be seeing the beginning of an earnest campaign to prohibit the AfD and that over the coming weeks the momentum would just build and build.

Instead it’s kind of fizzled out.

One thing that went wrong, was the roll-out. The AfD immediately filed suit with the Cologne Administrative Court to have their extremist status lifted, and the BfV ended up temporarily suspending their assessment for tactical reasons – above all, to avoid a temporary court injunction that the AfD could portray as a victory. I’ve said many times that a lot of the media pressure against the AfD seems to be coordinated by the constitutional protectors themselves. Now that they’re no longer agitating behind the scenes, the steady drumbeat of pearl-clutching news stories has ground to a halt.

The second thing that has gone wrong, is the publicity campaign. You may remember that the constitutional protectors have produced a 1,100-page assessment documenting the right-wing extremism of the AfD. This dossier, however, remains entirely secret, and so journalists have been leaking choice passages from its pages instead. Their leaks strongly suggest that this document is little more than a vast assemblage of public statements by AfD politicians and functionaries that people in the BfV find untoward.

First we had the three leaks in Welt, which I covered in my first post on this topic. These featured people saying such benign things as “There is more to being German than simply holding citizenship papers” and “Failed migration policy and asylum abuse have led to the importation of 100,000 people from deeply backward and misogynistic cultures”.

That did not impress anybody, so Der Spiegel rushed out a new round of leaks. This piece tells us, breathlessly, that “politicians from the party have been ‘continuously’ agitating against refugees and migrants”, that “they have made xenophobic and Islamophobic statements” and that they have an “ethnic-ancestral understanding” of human descent groups that “is not compatible with the free democratic basic order”. They particularly deplore the use of terms like “knife migrants” (“Messermigranten“) which “attribute an ‘ethnocultural propensity for violence to entire groups'”. They say that the party does not consider Germans “with a migrant background from Muslim-influenced countries” to be equal citizens and that the AfD thus “devalues entire population groups in Germany”, violating their human dignity.

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