Category: Uncategorized

Better learn to plumb

Forget space. Forget science. At this point, indoor plumbing is rapidly on the way out.

President Joe Biden has now taken the push for “diversity” in STEM to a new level. His candidate to head the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest funder of the physical sciences in the U.S., is a soil geologist at the University of California, Merced. She has no background in physics, the science of energy, or the energy sector. She has never held a position as a scientific administrator. The typical head of DOE’s Office of Science in the past has had managerial authority in the nation’s major physics labs and has been a physicist himself, Science reports. The new nominee’s only managerial experience consists of serving since 2020 as an interim associate dean of UC Merced’s graduate division.

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is, however, a black female who has won “accolades for her work to promote diversity in science,” as Science puts it. Berhe would be the first black woman to head the $7 billion office, and that is reason enough, according to the diversity mantra, why she should oversee X-ray synchrotrons, the development of nuclear weapons, and ongoing research on nuclear fusion.

One guess what type of “science” is going to be the only kind getting funding going forward. You’ll have a better chance of getting a major grant if you’re an astrologist or a witch doctor who claims to be able to heal herpes than if you’re a physicist or a geneticist. Of course, the latter will still be funded by the military. The US may not have working toilets in ten years, but at least there is a reasonable chance at functional bioweaponry.

I thought Diversity was just ridiculous back when I first heard it being bandied about my 99-percent white university campus in the late 1980s. Now it appears to be the most aggressively dyscivilizational concept since feminism.

Outkick the ticket

Clay Travis celebrates being bought by the Murdoch Cube:

So how do you get kids, who have tremendous advantages you didn’t have, to work hard and compete in the future? That’s what I’m going to spend the next 10-15 years working on with my boys. And it’s a new concern that I’m grappling with right now.

But after we signed the papers to sell OutKick, I turned to my wife and told her there would never be any kids, grandkids or great-grandkids who had to worry about money during our lifetimes. (They all may blow it after we die.) And that was a pretty incredible moment to have as parents, and hopefully future grandparents and great-grandparents too.

I also told my wife that since she’s going to live to be over 100 years old and I think I’m probably going to die around 51 years old from working too much that she’s going to be a really rich widow for a long time.

On the one hand, you can’t fault an entrepreneur for living the dream. Selling out is the original objective for most startups. On the other hand, if you’re preaching about the importance of independent media, being your own boss, and the evils of the corrupt mainstream media, then how on Earth can you justify selling out to the very people responsible for the problem in the first place? It’s not merely hypocritical, it’s outright wrong.

Anyhow, I thought this graphic below was an interesting comparison. Note that SimilarWeb seriously underestimates VP’s pageviews – which according to Google were over 8 million in January – but I assume it does the same for everyone, so it’s the relative aspect that matters. Fortunately, no media company is interesting in acquiring VP and I have absolutely no interest in taking any tickets. Among other things, I know how fast what appears to be “generational money” can vanish, even during the founder’s lifetime. You may be able to outkick the coverage, but once you take it, you can’t outkick the ticket.

By the way, at 6:39, the Avg. Visit Duration on Arktoons is already 2.27x longer than Outkick and nearly twice as long as here. And that’s only going to increase, as we add more series over time.
UPDATE: Jason Whitlock explains why he left Outkick. And in doing so, he left no question about Travis not only being a ticket-taker, but one who already managed to get played by a partner who sounds shady in the extreme:
Clay and our third partner, Sam Savage, misrepresented the business of OutKick. Both Clay and Sam told me directly (and my lawyer in writing) that Sam’s equity stake in OutKick was contingent on Sam investing $500,000. Shortly after I arrived at OutKick, my lawyer was told that things were going so well financially that Sam no longer needed to invest $500,000 to get an equity stake in OutKick. 
I objected. I confronted Clay and Sam about it. Clay said that he didn’t want to waste time or energy pursuing Sam’s investment. 
I found this preposterous and baffling. My equity in OutKick was based on “sweat.” I believe my “sweat” is far more valuable than Sam’s. Sam, of course, disagreed. He told me that my arrival at OutKick was a “kick in the nuts” and that all three of us should own one-third of OutKick. 
Sam refused to pay the $500,000 and his consulting firm, Savage Ventures, charged OutKick $42,000 a month for work that I deemed amateur. In my view, Sam Savage, the person with the smallest stake in OutKick and the least amount of value, exercised the most control over the company. 

Given with whom he partnered, it’s clear that Travis was always looking to sell Outkick despite his nonstop talk about the importance of independence. I doubt he was ever anything more than a pedestrian financial grifter looking for the big strike. Whitlock did well to get out when he did. What profit it a man and all that.

Gov. Cerno

That would certainly make for an interesting twist in the world of California politics:

A poll of registered voters in California published last week had three percent of respondents selecting Cernovich as the most likely person they would support to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom in the event of a gubernatorial recall. Republican candidate Caitlyn Jenner received five percent.

“You’re a viable gubernatorial candidate out in California, which is super cool,” Marlow stated. “You’re polling at three percent, despite the fact you’re not in the race. Do you have any reaction to that?”

Cernovich replied, “I thought it was like a prank or something at first, so I looked and it was a legitimate poll and I thought that was pretty revealing of the time. People want a little bit of excitement today. 

Marlow inquired, “Do you think it’s a possibility? Are you considering it?”

Cernovich replied, “Well I’ve definitely been considering it. If anything, for no other reason than to push the issues. … There’s still this mass denial that [politicians] seem to have where they don’t know what the people want. The people whose job it is in the GOP to win elections — to run people, to run messaging — they still don’t get it. They really are in denial about what is exciting, what people are hyped for, [and] what gets people to vote.”

I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to vote for him, were I a California resident. Among other things, he’d definitely sign SB 762 into law. 

The essence of SJW

Titania McGrath distills it down to a 180-proof level as she takes on the evils of institutional racism in Britain:

The government’s new “Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities” has issued a report intended to gaslight us into believing that we are not living in a fascist state. My lived experience tells me otherwise, and that is surely far more reliable than “facts” or “evidence”.

As critics have noted, the report makes the astonishing claim that racism no longer exists in the UK. I mean, it doesn’t technically say that (it actually says that “racism still exists in the UK” and “has no place in any civilised society”) but we all know what the report’s writers were secretly thinking.

Anyway, the substance of the report is beside the point. Unless it confirms everything that I have already decided is true, it has absolutely no value whatsoever and all copies should be destroyed.

So brave. So stunning. So necessary. 

I do not want to take the vaxx

Would you, could, in a car?

Take them, take them, here they are!

I would not, could not, in a car.

I will not take them, near or far!

Would you, could you, with a fox?

I would not, could not, with a fox.

I will not rot inside a box.

Would you, could you, with a nurse?

I would not, could not, with a nurse.

I do not wish to ride a hearse.

UPDATE: This is not an invitation to demonstrate that you do not understand the concepts of poetic meter and rhythm. And FFS, don’t be the little boy at the wedding who tries to follow up the joke that gets a big laugh by repeating the same joke.

An informative choice of words

To be honest, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to learn Dominic Cummings occasionally reads this blog. He’s by far the smartest man in British politics today. It would be fascinating to see what would happen if Cummings were to team up with Nigel Farage and provide the UK with an actual pro-British party with the sense to encourage Scottish independence.

Mr Cummings offered his own analysis today, accusing Sir Keir of being too focused on the Westminster Bubble.

‘KS is a beta-lawyer-gamma-politician, like ~all in SW1 he obsesses on Media Reality not Actual Reality, he’s played the lobby game (badly) for a year WITHOUT A MESSAGE TO THE COUNTRY, now the pundits will a) savage him, b) tell him he needs to focus on them more, more exclusives,’ he wrote.

‘A measure of how bad KS is: until I googled yesterday I didn’t know who Shadow CHX (Chancellor – Anneliese Dodds) is & when I looked at photo I had 0 recognition, she never touched my consciousness in a year.’

What I find interesting about the Labour Party meltdown in yesterday’s by-election in a longtime Labour stronghold is the fact that the British media hasn’t whispered a word about the fact that Labour has spent most of the last 18 months leading up to the by-election dedicated to rooting out supposed anti-Semites from its leadership. This silence is particularly striking in light of the fact that for months, that’s about the only thing the British media was talking about besides Corona-chan.