Useful dog.

Weird and lovely: Really weird, and really lovely.

Are most Christians white? Seems to me Christianity is heavily represented in Latin America, Africa and Asia...

The Episcopalian church (Church of England) is a majority black church. It is currently mainly based in sub-Saharan Africa. The other main population center for it is southern USA. As for England where the variation began, there aren't too many parishioners. Management is still based there. But mostly ignored. We are the third largest Christian group in the world, behind the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church.

The head of the American branch of our church is Michael Curry, who happens to be black.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Curry_(bishop)

If you want to point to politics with him you wouldn't be wrong. He was installed in 2015 at the end of a relatively bitter fight in the church. Him being black and somewhat more conservative helped pacify people in the southern USA and Africa. Him being a Yale and Princeton grad made the north USA people happy. He has also lead a couple of anti-corruption movements, which is nice.

I will say the church really struggles with staffing good priests in the US. They are nice people but almost uniformly boring and softheaded. If you want a good church experience you really do need to find an immigrant preacher, which is not an easy task.

Men, I know what you're thinking…

Best Christmas ev-var!… FREE HOUSES!

Escudero walked through the broken door of an empty home in Los Angeles' El Sereno neighborhood and started bringing it back to life.

She fixed the garbage disposal, turned the garage into a classroom for her 11- and 8-year-old daughters and harvested squash and sweet potatoes from a vegetable garden she planted.

Her homesteading, part of an organized effort by tenant activists in March, was illegal, but it worked. The Los Angeles Housing Authority this fall granted occupancy rights to the family of Escudero and others who had seized numerous homes that the state acquired as part of now-abandoned plans to extend the 710 Freeway.

“I feel like it was the best decision of my life,” said Escudero, 41, who works as an elderly caregiver. “Everyone deserves this.”

• A broken [grandfather] clock is a useless instrument. But twice a day....

• Adoption video: It's great when it works out. (Sorry about the music.)

This is unfathomable:

https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1342855267982192641

It's like the potatoes thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox

The one thing we wouldn't expect from Pompeii: Breaking news!

• Translated.

• Untranslated, for the photography.

• If you've been tracking the madness in the SV, you'll like this essay.

• The concluding passage here describes Woke America really, really well.

Ooops! / By the way, the Free Houses article was from Lenona's might Arcamax.

Oops again:

https://www.arcamax.com/currentnews/newsheadlines/s-2459380

I'm having problems posting links in here today.

LOTS of problems. Here's the Wokies thing, note the fourth panel:

https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1342857531580968961

Humiliating errors… Losing face… I need to finish up strong…

Here's a wonderfully cruel advertising scheme:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://creapills.com/lionel-messi-budweiser-but-biere-20201226

The concluding passage here describes Woke America really, really well. ~ Crid at December 26, 2020 8:29 AM

Wait. Tech extracted talent from the Bay Area? Um, tech attracted that talent to the Bay Area in the first place. Anybody remember Yahoo!?

Cue in the Spaceballs scene where Darth Helmet threatens princess Vespa with leaking her pre-nosejob pictures:

Hackers threaten to leak plastic surgery pictures

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55439190

The Woke thing was actually about the Didion cite from Henderson, but Uncle Marky had a bad morning, which is inexplicable after a sober holiday.

My best friend in California, an L.A. native, arrived in Atlanta with his wife and child on Thursday night. Like me, he made out like a bandit when selling his house in 2020. We're mere teevee types from Hollywood (Mike does movies, too)… But when Cali loses the enthusiasm of the Silicon Valley, it will be a game-changing correction to the flow of world culture.

Glad to be out… I had my fun.

> Anybody remember Yahoo!?

I attended a conference in their HQ in 2005, well after the tide had decisively turned toward Google et al, but before Marissa Mayer had been brought in as savior… A doomed prospect. The place had no juju at all… There were a few engineers walking around like they were waiting for something to happen, but they didn't seem like world-changing technical intellects.

California government sincerely believes that they've been brought to this planet to tell other people how to live. They have zero understanding of wealth creation, particularly the intellectual kind (programming, etc.). They are literally planning to tax departing Californians for twenty more years, and back-dating the laws to punish Elon Musk.

Baliji Srinivasan has a LOT of insights about tech and world history. And the future.

He has a bunch of sensational podcasts and speeches and articles, I'll like a few later.

Here's another wonderful story of comeuppance against the doubters…

See also the Fritos Guy.

Hackers threaten to leak plastic surgery pictures

Sounds like an episode of Nip/Tuck.

A doomed prospect. The place had no juju at all... ~ Crid at December 26, 2020 11:53 AM

I moved out to SF when Yahoo was at the peak of its power and Google was little more than an upstart interloper struggling to gain market share. No one "googled." Companies were only beginning to understand why they needed a Web site and SEO was still pre-natal.

The dot-com revolution boomed down the street from my office in SOMA. I got to watch as the entire neighborhood was transformed by an explosion of dot-com companies, along with the arrival of the Giants' new stadium. Suddenly there was a Porsche Boxster on every corner, all of them bought with brand new wealth from dot-com shares. The RV parking lot across from the office went condo and the warehouse beside the Third Street Bridge became an art school. Secretaries at old economy companies were named VPs of dot-coms making six-figure salaries. Companies that had yet to produce a product, or to show a profit, gained value overnight as everyone wanted in on what they were sure would be a new economic revolution. A sock puppet became evidence of the marketing genius of a new generation.

California government sincerely believes that they've been brought to this planet to tell other people how to live. ~ Crid at December 26, 2020 11:53 AM

That might have worked better if the precarious state of California's finances was not rapidly becoming impossible to hide. The government does not run the state of California, its unions do.

Good point. In government as in business (Jamie Dimon comes to mind this week), top officeholders carry on as if they were bringing distinctive leadership to circumstances and unprecedented challenges, though in most every case, what's actually happening is feasts of seed corn, whether actual finance or opportunities, to ward off constituents who might challenge their payouts present & to come. And in both venues, change would be constrained even if pandering weren't an option.

We need to talk about bitcoin.