Equity is everyone deserves to have — right? — and be treated equal. But equity understands that not everybody starts out on the same base. So, if you’re giving everybody an equal amount but they’re starting out on different bases, are they really going to have the opportunity to compete and achieve?

-Kamala Harris

The whole purpose of the USSR was to give the historically disadvantaged a level playing field. For this purpose, the historically advantaged were murdered, imprisoned and expelled from the country. Well into the 1930s, every workplace had DEI-style audits where every employee had to explain their entire family tree, abjectly apologizing for every great-uncle who happened to be a priest, a doctor, or an owner of two cows and four goats. There was no visual criterion to discover who was historically advantaged, thank goodness, and that’s why many people managed to survive the DEI audits by concealing their origins. Let’s hope nobody ever comes up with the advantaged/disadvantaged scale where the advantaged oppressors can be easily identified based on how they look.

The newly equitably empowered in the USSR were incapable of producing science, running the military, or making things work. Foreign engineers were invited in droves to paper over the IQ gap. Some of the formerly advantaged high-IQ oppressors were imprisoned and forced to produce ideas and inventions in jail. Some were allowed to stay free and help run things while living in constant terror of annihilation. Look up Mikhail Tukhachevsky or Mikhail Bakhtin for some examples.

The results of that gigantic equity experiment are well known. Even the outright removal of the entire socially and economically advantaged class did not make the disadvantaged richer or happier. Today their great-grandchildren are still miserable, angry, and threatening to destroy the countries that still incomprehensibly live better.

Giving people a leg up because they started behind others has been tried and tried and tried. The most aggressive means of providing the leg up were attempted. The result is always terrible. The greatest culprit of the Soviet tragedy is the belief that it’s unfair that some people get more than others at birth. The sincere pain of the revolutionaries who were hurt by observing this inequality created one of the worst horrors humanity ever produced. That horror is still alive and bombing cities in Ukraine. The mass rape, torture and atrocities the great-grandchildren of the disadvantaged are identical to what their ancestors had unleashed on aristocrats, bankers, priests, restauranteurs, and the owners of two cows and four goats.

From the same novel:

Then she grabbed a Clif bar and a Diet Dr Pepper for breakfast.

The “she” in question is my age and in a high-pressure, high-earning profession. I’d already be dead three times over if I had such breakfasts as she routinely has.

Not that I would want anything this chemical in the morning.

Do you, folks, think it’s product placement? Normal people don’t eat like that, so why write it that way if not for a fee?

In a courtroom drama I’m reading, a female district attorney is woken up in the middle of the night by a phone call about a suspect getting arrested. She dresses formally in a business suit and is “out the door within five minutes.” That’s how you know that the author is male because otherwise he’d know that a business suit goes with a bra and tights, and hair needs to be brushed, and at least some makeup needs to go on. Nobody is going anywhere in under 5 minutes.

This author makes his female district attorney an emotional wreck so that she’s more believable as a female character. It’s a frequent mistake where people exaggerate clichés about gender and disregard its practicalities.

This is extraordinary:

I keep re-watching this and can't believe my eyes… This is f*cking insane!

Congratulations @SpaceX, @elonmusk 🚀 pic.twitter.com/OKnO9tYmMf

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) October 13, 2024

Again people will say this isn’t great technology but, people, it totally is amazing technology. When you started watching the video, you couldn’t have possibly predicted how it would end. This is very stunning.

The shamelessness of these people has no bounds:

I wonder what her immigration status is that she can engage in political lobbyism like this. It’s also clear now why The New Yorker has come out with a cover image glorifying Navalny. The fascist aesthetic of the picture is very appropriate:

All this is making Harris’s position towards Ukraine very clear. Not that one was very hopeful before, of course.

P.S. And Navalnaya is a “she/her” on LinkedIn:

These people really know how to play gullible Americans.

So far it seems that Columbus was Sephardic jewish. Wonder if its autosomal, Y-DNA or mtDNA. https://t.co/H0sXr8uupA

— Nrken19 (@nrken19) October 12, 2024

Knew it. In his diaries, Columbus explains how hard it was for him to scare up even just 3 puny little ships for his expedition but studiously avoids mentioning what happened to all the other ships and what they were busy doing. This was the time of the expulsion of Jews from Spain. Only a blind man (or a covert Jew) would fail to notice the exodus that was unfolding right where he was preparing to set sail. People who didn’t notice knew it was hitting too close to home.

Another issue with Columbus was that it always seemed that, though he was multilingual, none of the languages in which he was quoted directly was fully native to him. No culture fit him comfortably. Plus, you know, a visionary, an unquiet soul, a relentless seeker.

Everybody is mocking this pro-Kamala ad but what I don’t understand…

At first I wasn’t completely convinced by the psych research suggesting liberals fail at modeling the thought processes of of nonliberals but I’m increasingly convinced it’s 100% accurate. This is what an empathy deficit really looks like. Astonishing.
pic.twitter.com/g0pPSydbvd

— Seasonal Clickfarm Worker (@ClickingSeason) October 11, 2024

… is why almost all men in it hold their hands in such a weird way. These are professional actors who should know how to not come off as weird in a short video. But the hands look very uncomfortable.

And eerily similar to that photo of uncomfortable Kamala I recently posted.

Is it a new secret handshake or something?

Two duck legs cost $15. And if you’ve seen a duck, you know that those legs are not large.

Even in mega-overpriced Montreal, a whole duck is $20CAD. I understand that demand is higher because people have more sophisticated palates than in STL but still.

I don’t even like duck that much but I wanted to create some gastronomical variety.

The number one problem in this country is that the concept of disparate impact is an accepted legal reality. It creates enormous issues in every area of endeavor.

The second most important problem is that immigration applications are accepted from people in the country illegally on the territory of the US.

Both issues require a significant change of the legal system.

What will happen with the people robots will replace?

They’ll be sold for parts.