Just in time for Christmas, Drunk History presents:

Drunk Christmas

I’d have embedded the video, but as a special added present, Funny or Die doesn’t make that easy.

Part Seven of the Veil War is up over at the cleverly named Veil War site.

Read, tell your friends, and tell your friends to tell their friends.

Copy Paste Character allows you to click on useful symbols to pop them into your clipboard.  Then, just paste where needed.  Now updated with thousands instead of merely hundreds of symbols.  Check it out.

In pursuit of my life long dream of having a career that involves nothing more than sitting in front of a computer in my jammies, I have been writing a novel. It became apparent to me that sitting in front of a computer in my jammies four out of five days a week as a technical writer and web developer is not enough. I need that last day. The novel is about 1/4 done, and the initial feedback has been very positive. Yay, me! I will shortly be setting up another website for that novel to live on, and you’ll see a link here.

Also, I have remembered that I never finished my series on state mottoes. Expect updates soonish.

I would like to state for the record that it has become almost impossible for me to have normal conversations about politics with, well, anyone. I no longer have common referents with the average interlocutor. And I can’t really say, go read the last six months of Zero Hedge, the entire corpus of Moldbug, and a hundred other things and get back to me when you can understand what I’m talking about. And can you summarize Austrian economics and the history of the Great Depression and the formation of modern banking every time you’re talking to someone about the state of the economy? And God forbid trying to explain where I’m coming from on politics.

And, on that note, thanks Chris for having read Zero Hedge and Moldbug and Charleton so that I can talk to you. You’re a mensch.

Devoted readers often send in grist for the Perfidy mill. In fact, the mail address for email submissions is now actually grist (at) perfidy (dot) org. So there.

First up is a book recommendation from Christian – The Limits of Democratization: Climate, Intelligence, and Resource Distribution. It seems very hbd-ish:

A central conclusion is that it is probably never possible to achieve the same level and quality of democracy in all countries of the world because of the impact of the two ultimate constraining factors (annual mean temperature and national IQ), which are outside conscious human control. We should learn to accept the fact that because of the evolved human diversity, we are bound to live in a world of many kinds of disparities, including inequalities in the quality of democracy and in the possibilities to enjoy similar political rights and civil liberties.

Also, it’s written by a Finn.

Next, from Minister Emeritus GeekLethal, there’s this:

Frightening.

And, from Mike, the predecessors of our future robot overlords.

Dad chimes in with a link to this Pew Research study, Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In little more than a century, the religious landscape of sub-Saharan Africa has changed dramatically. As of 1900, both Muslims and Christians were relatively small minorities in the region. The vast majority of people practiced traditional African religions, while adherents of Christianity and Islam combined made up less than a quarter of the population, according to historical estimates from the World Religion Database.

Since then, however, the number of Muslims living between the Sahara Desert and the Cape of Good Hope has increased more than 20-fold, rising from an estimated 11 million in 1900 to approximately 234 million in 2010. The number of Christians has grown even faster, soaring almost 70-fold from about 7 million to 470 million. Sub-Saharan Africa now is home to about one-in-five of all the Christians in the world (21%) and more than one-in-seven of the world’s Muslims (15%).

(…)

In addition, the 19-nation survey finds:

• Africans generally rank unemployment, crime and corruption as bigger problems than religious conflict. However, substantial numbers of people (including nearly six-in-ten Nigerians and Rwandans) say religious conflict is a very big problem in their country.
• The degree of concern about religious conflict varies from country to country but tracks closely with the degree of concern about ethnic conflict in many countries, suggesting that they are often related.
• Many Africans are concerned about religious extremism, including within their own faith. Indeed, many Muslims say they are more concerned about Muslim extremism than about Christian extremism, and Christians in four countries say they are more concerned about Christian extremism than about Muslim extremism.
• Neither Christianity nor Islam is growing significantly in sub-Saharan Africa at the expense of the other; there is virtually no net change in either direction through religious switching.
• At least half of all Christians in every country surveyed expect that Jesus will return to earth in their lifetime, while roughly 30% or more of Muslims expect to live to see the re-establishment of the caliphate, the golden age of Islamic rule.
• People who say violence against civilians in defense of one’s religion is rarely or never justified vastly outnumber those who say it is sometimes or often justified. But substantial minorities (20% or more) in many countries say violence against civilians in defense of one’s religion is sometimes or often justified.
• In most countries, at least half of Muslims say that women should not have the right to decide whether to wear a veil, saying instead that the decision should be up to society as a whole.
• Circumcision of girls (female genital cutting) is highest in the predominantly Muslim countries of Mali and Djibouti but is more common among Christians than among Muslims in Uganda.
• Majorities in almost every country say that Western music, movies and television have harmed morality in their nation. Yet majorities in most countries also say they personally like Western entertainment.
• In most countries, more than half of Christians believe in the prosperity gospel — that God will grant wealth and good health to people who have enough faith.
• By comparison with people in many other regions of the world, sub-Saharan Africans are much more optimistic that their lives will change for the better.

Finally, from anonymous, a link to a DVD you can buy and which will be sent to your home like in the olden days: Expendable.

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I have a stupid reason for why I don’t post more often. I hope you are now asking yourself, “How stupid?” and not muttering, “And this is surprising how?” And that reason is this: I do not have the luxury of pursuing lengthy trains of thought. While individually, my wife, son, three daughters, dog, cat, work, natural catastrophes, neighbor kids and Global Warming may only interrupt me only occasionally; collectively they are derailing my lengthy trains o’ thought on average about every three milliseconds.

So the Grand Thoughts that I wish to think remain unthunk. Which pisses me off a little.

Because I feel that a lot of the stuff I think about is just this close to congealing into something more than a pile of unordered ramblings. I sense the outlines of order and coherence, but can’t get it down on paper, or pixels.

So, I am making a conscious decision to: a) stop leaving things in my feed reader in the now obviously futile hope that I will get back to them and write something about them; b) prune the feed reader so that I have less to obsessively read; c) read more books; and finally, d) post smaller bits as they occur to me.

In aid of d), there’s this: Aretae talks about immigration. Some of this has now been addressed in his comments, and he’s updated his post a little from when I read it this morning.

To lay it out Aretae-style, my thoughts went roughly like this:

• Anti-Immigration summary: fair.  If something is hurting us, well, maybe stopping is a good idea.
• That’s a good argument for letting that one Haitian dude in.  When you’re confronted with one guy, you could even say, hey, I’ll personally take a haircut of $2 a day (a substantive, if not crushing loss of almost $500 a year) to help Jean-Paul or whoever get a real life in the home of the free and the land of the brave.  That’s charity.
• Wait a minute, where’s Hati, where these Hatians are coming from?
• But, in the world of freely-entered contracts and libertarian (left- or otherwise-) why does Jean Paul get to come here and unilaterally cut my income and take $500 out of the mouths of my Children?  Do I get a say in this?
• Put another way, am I really morally obligated to give up my income and so reduce the prosperity of my family to help others?  More to the point, if I decide that I don’t want to, is it right for others, like Jean-Paul, to force me to lose that income?
• Stalin said that quantity has a quality of its own, or something like that.  One Jean Paul – hard working, thrifty and pious – he’s okay.  But what about five million of his less upright, smelly compatriots who have made a wonderland of their homeland in the 200 years of their independence?  Does their collective presence in this country make it less likely that immigrant n will get the same benefit from moving here?  Does it make it more likely that subsequent income loss to American workers will be more than $2/day?
• Aretae talks monkeybrains™ about everything except left-libertarian issues.  There is no tribe of all humanity.  As commenter Lurking Apple put it, “You seem to be assuming a spherical immigrant on a frictionless border…”  People are different.  Different tribes have different abilities, beliefs, and attitudes.  If we allow too many in, we cease to be what we were.  That may be good, but most mutations are not beneficial.  What we are – or at the very least, were – was very good at creating staggering amounts of prosperity from the nothing but hard work, ingenuity and the occasional tariff.  Add tens of millions of (to pick just two) notably prospering Mexicans, notably peaceful Muslims  – we might just end up with a shit sandwich on rye.
• It seems to me that while we should assiduously and strenuously hope that other places – backward, poor, disease infested, Global Warming-afflicted, trounced by Colonialism and the Man (you know where they are) – might adopt our miraculously effective package of property rights, innovation, and win! to rework their lives in a way that seems best to them, but in any event a richer version than what they have now.  We might even offer classes or something.  But it is probably not our job, as a nation or a people, to provide that life for them there, and it certainly isn’t our job to provide that life for them here.

Anywho, that’s my small thought for today.

[wik] And here is this amusing, if harsh, take on Libertarianism.

The internet movie firearms database is hours of fun. This page I particularly enjoyed.

An update to my earlier smoking post – Smoking, it’s all good. I went into the local smoke shop to get some American Spirit smokes; explaining that for a while now, my throat has been getting raw from smoking. The smoking nut explained that it was probably the result of the new FSC cigarettes – “Fire Safe Cigarettes,” which came into being early last year loaded with an additive that supposedly helps the cigarette extinguish itself if left unattended.

It seems that lots of people have complained about the additives. And my sore throats started pretty much from when the change was made. So, the smoking nut recommended the roll your own path, because the FSC has not extended to hand-rolled papers.

This was just before Christmas, and since then I’ve been almost entirely smoking hand-rolled smokes. I’ve seen several benefits:

• My throat feels about a thousand times better.
• I smoke about half as many hand-rolled as regular smokes.  Not because  of the difficulty of making them or anything like that, I just smoke less.
• I’ve learned a new skill.  A very minor skill, but hey.
• I pay a lot less.

When I first went in, almost exactly a month ago, I bought a variety pack of pouches of tobacco, a box of 200 filter cigarette tubes, and a clever tobaccy-packing thingy.  All that cost about $30.  So I bought a zippo lighter and fluid to bring it up to the cost of a carton of cowboy killers.  (Strangely, in the middle of rural Virginia, one of the five zippos they had in stock had Chief Wahoo on it.  So I had to get it.)  All that lasted until after New Years’, when I bought some more tobacco, in bigger more cost-effective tins and another box of tubes.  In the time that I normally would have smoked at least three cartons – $120 – I’ve spent $100, of which $25 was lighter and tobaccopackythingy and won’t have to be bought again; and I still have half a pound of tobacco and almost a full box of tubes left, which should last me another couple weeks at least.

So, in recurring costs, we have $75 for a month and a half, or more, of smoking v. $225 for the five cartons of regular Marlboros I’d have smoked over the same period.  So, I have cut my smoking costs by two thirds and it could go lower if I buy the tobacco in even larger quantities.

Not bad.

Just got one of these:

Color me jealous.

My father has impeccable timing. After moving every single thing that I own at least four times – from where it was to a box, the box to storage, storage to new house, box to its new home – Dad informs me that he needs help moving. I am so tired of picking things up and moving them that lifting my coffee mug to my mouth is aggravating. But, devoted son that I am, I will chip in for the big win, and move my Dad’s crap, too this weekend.

The new place is slowly attaining a semblance of order. I have to say that shit-canning half your stuff makes the moving and unpacking process much easier. Having an office again is a real bonus too, and this week I get to put all my books in real, actual bookshelves!

I’m sure you will all be deeply interested to know that my neolithic herder diet is going pretty well. Last July, my pants were a verging on fatbody 44″ waist. This last Black Friday, I stopped by the Eddie Bauer warehouse outlet store thingy in Columbus and (rather optimistically, I thought) picked a pair of 38″ pants to try on. They were too big. I went back for a 36″, and they were just right. Pardon my French, but holy mother of fuck, I just dropped eight full inches of waistline. I haven’t been in a 36″ since no one knew that Clinton liked getting BJs from pudgy chicks. And I still have another twenty pounds I want to lose. The Thanksgiving holiday was a minor setback, as far as the diet goes – what with all the stuffing, rolls, sugar cookies, pumpkin pie, und so weiter. But a few days of hardcore paleo should remove most of what I gained at the feast.

Aretae is suggesting a 100 push up challenge. I think this would dovetail nicely with the superslow that I’ve been doing. Aretae has a charming habit of answering questions that I haven’t realized I needed to ask. The gym at my office sucks ass, really, and I don’t want to keep spending money on something that sucks. I also don’t want to spend money on a home gym, which would likely also suck, and be something I have to move in a couple years. What I need is a weight and equipment-less superslow workout scheme. The 100-pushup thing could be part of that.

What else is going on? There’s been some interesting stuff on the internets. I can’t remember what it was, but if you poke around I’m sure you’ll find it.