Monday, March 18, 2024

California Governor tries to undo an Election

Politico reports:
SACRAMENTO, California — Gov. Gavin Newsom is embarking on a last-minute scramble to correct rejected ballots as his prized $6.4 billion mental health and housing bond maintains a razor-thin lead.

The governor’s federal PAC, Campaign for Democracy, sent an urgent volunteer request to supporters Thursday night, asking them to help reach out to Democrats who have had their ballots rejected — for reasons like forgetting to include a signature — in an effort to get their ballots counted.

“This ballot initiative is SO CLOSE that your commitment to volunteer could mean the difference between people getting off the streets and into the treatment they need... or not,” the governor’s email read. “Truly. It is that close.”

The most recent update showed Proposition 1 with 50.2 percent of the vote, leading by about 21,000 votes with a half-million ballots left to be counted statewide.

What? The election was a couple of weeks ago. And yet a half million ballots are uncounded, and the governor is trying to manipulate the tally of what has been counted.

American elections are rigged. The outcomes should not be trusted, unless all votes are cast and counted in front of observers on election day, as is done by other civilized countries.

Democrqats say they stand for election integrity. It is all a lie. Only Trump promises fair elections. Democrats are openly stealing the California election right now.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Ireland Reaffirms Motherhood

Ireland just rejected proposals to amend these constitutional clauses:
In Article 41.1.1° “The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.”

In Article 41.3.1° “The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.”

Article 41.2.1° “In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.”

Article 41.2.2° “The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”

Ireland has been taken over by non-Irish people, and they object to this recognition of the family and motherhood.

In most of the West now, "mother" has become an offensive word.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Migrant Measles Outbreak in Chicago

Measles was once eradicated in the USA, but we have occasional outbreaks. The officials always blame vaccine hesitancy.

There is an outbreak in Chicago. Most of the cases are at the Pilsen migrant shelter.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Trying to debunk the Racialist Hypothesis

News:
The NAACP called on Black student athletes to boycott Florida universities in light of the Sunshine State’s crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

NAACP leader Derrick Johnson on Monday announced that they told Black NCAA prospects via a letter to reconsider playing for "PWI" public colleges and universities in Florida. PWI is typically referred to as a "predominantly White institution."

Black athletes have been overrepresented in Florida college scholarships, compared to the population. If Blacks really want racial equity, then Florida should play White athletes at those PWIs.

The idea that Blacks might be better at some athletic skills is called the racialist hypothesis, and is attacked in a new academic paper:

In this manuscript we have analyzed the last twenty years of race data for the 100m and 1500m and found it in conflict with the dominant racialist models that suggest regional African ancestry has a role in determining running ability. With respect to the 100m, the emergence of South African and East Asian sprinters challenge the argument that West African ancestry rather than culture is what underlies Caribbean success in sprinting. Cataloguing the morphological diversity and biomechanical variation across elite 100m sprinters, ...

We propose a psycho-cultural framework that considers multiple sources of psychological impact that occur within and between races. This framework allows us to quantify and validate what many athletes have frequently expressed, that belief is paramount.

So Jamaicans are not really naturally talented sprinters; they do well because they believe they can.

As you can see from the above link, the fastest sprinters are overwhelmingly West African, and the fastest long distance runners East Africa. Maybe that is just coincidence, or belief.

To substantiate this, they point to progress in video game scores!

, the psychocultural framework that we have developed is by no means exclusive to sports. ..., and observe the recent developments in Tetris a classic video game known for being simple, yet cognitively challenging [93]. Despite being out since 1989, and maintaining a large enough cult following to support yearly championships since 2010, it was finally completed for the first time at the beginning of 2024 [94]. And then twice more in the next month [95] - suggesting that even without the strictures of scientific racism, limits are subconsciously set far below the pinnacle of human achievement across many different domains.
Tetris is supposed to follow the example of the four minute mile:
When progress appeared to plateau after the second world war, scientists declared it may be physiologically impossible to break that "four minute barrier" [47], perhaps further delaying the event - which finally occurred in 1954 when Roger Bannister of England ran 3:59.4 [48]. The "barrier" now broken, another sub four clocking occurred again only 46 days later, eight more times over the next three years, and the following decade saw the largest improvement since records were first recorded (see Figure 3-b).
This is a widely-believed misconception. People say that no one could run a 4-minute mile before 1954 because no one thought it was possible, and then, once it was shown possible, everyone could do it.

No, that is nonsense. What really happened was that modern polyurethane/rubber tracks replaced the old cinder tracks, and everyone ran about 2% faster. The elite runners who ran 4:02 on cinder suddenly did 3:58 on synthetic. Nobody got faster on the same track.

In Tetris, someone recently figured out a winning strategy that a highly skilled gamer could execute. Yes, revealing the strategy allowed others to mimic it. Not like running at all.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

AAAS Science goes Woke on Genetics

AAAS Science magazine reports:
For as long as the concept of race has existed, racial prejudice has been justified on hereditary grounds (1, 2). Justifications of prejudice often misappropriate the work of Mendel, who first expounded a scientific model of inheritance by breeding peas (3). Today, our understanding of inheritance has moved far beyond Mendel, and insights from genomics refute the prejudiced idea that racial inequality is determined by genes (1). Even so, many believe that inequality is genetic because they are biased by an inaccurate conception of race called “genetic essentialism” (1, 2, 4). We present data from a randomized trial to argue that if teachers move genetics instruction beyond Mendel and toward more complex genomics concepts—what we call “humane genomics education”—they can protect students from believing in unscientific notions of genetic essentialism and support their scientifically accurate understanding of race as a social construction. ...

If teachers move beyond Mendel to instruct students about the complexities of contemporary genomics concepts for the purpose of refuting genetic essentialism, they can help students understand that racial disparities are not unreal, unimportant, or the product of genes. Rather, they are socially constructed.

It goes on to explain that many students learn that Blacks are susceptible to sickle cell anemia. It argues that this leads to a false belief in racial essentialism, as some non-blacks have the disease, and some Blacks do not carry the faulty gene.

It is a stupid point because sickle-cell anemia is a predominantly Black disease, and is explained by African ancestry.

We contend that genetics education needs to move beyond Mendel and toward the complexity of human genomics if it is to prevent the development of genetic essentialism (1). To understand why, consider the following three genomics concepts (D to F): (D) Roughly 0.1% of the human genome varies between individuals, and when population geneticists partition this variable DNA, they find that most variation occurs within geographic populations (~95%) and much of the genetic variation that occurs across such populations (~5%) consists of common alleles that vary in frequency (10). If “races” are defined as geographic populations, then the essentialist assumption that there is little to no genetic variation among individuals of the same race — and thus that most genetic variation is between races — is wrong.
No, this is a straw man. No one denies genetic variation within a race. There are smart Whites and dumb Whites. There is huge genetic variation within Africa. And there are many genetic differences between Whites and Black Africans.
(E) Also, social disparities between races involve differences in complex traits. Because complex traits are multifactorial and influenced by interactions between genes and environments (12), it is not scientifically accurate to claim that racial inequality is determined by genetic variation alone (1). (F) Indeed, humans inherit their genomes along with their environments, and scientists have not yet developed convincing or ethical methods to disentangle gene-environment covariance (1).
There are 100s of convincing and ethical papers disentangling genes and environments. Many find traits that are maybe 50% genetic, with the remaining covariance being environment or something else.

They want you to believe that differences between the races is attributable to racism. But that is false. A great many differences have been proved to be genetic, or maybe 50% genetic.

Another Science article:

Sample textbook passages that illustrate essentialist codes

“You might be surprised to learn that the ability to roll your tongue is an inherited trait. Being able to roll the tongue is likely to be dominant over not being able to roll it. Characteristics such as tongue rolling are called discrete, because they tend to fall into distinct, or discrete, categories. Either you can roll your tongue or you cannot. Either you are male or female. Either you have dimples or you do not.”

Apparently this analogy is misleading, as tongue-rolling is not completely binary, as sex is. And while your sex is either male or female, you may choose a gender identity that is not binary.

This is our leading science journal. It has gone woke. There is very little scientific content in these articles, and much of it is wrong.

There really are genetic differences between the sexes and the races. Science research should be illuminating those differences, both qualitatively and quantitively. Instead, they teach the lie that the differences are socially constructed.

It is appalling to see a science journal trying to say there is no truth in a general statement, because of contrived exceptions. Science would never get anywhere with that attitude. Consider an accepted statement like "CO2 emissions cause global warming." It is not refuted by finding some place on Earth that got colder.

Or "the Earth is round" is mostly true, even though there are mountains. Even statements that seem absolutely true, like "energy is conserved" have exceptions, if not carefully interpreted.

When someone says human races do not exist because some people are of mixed race, he is just displaying a kindergarten ignorance of how science can make qualitative statements.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Poor Things is a Trash Movie

Emma Stone just got an Oscar for starring in Poor Things, so I watched it.

I was expecting a feminist role, but it was the most misogynist movie I have seen. I guess it was trying to show that a woman could escape Victorian morality by exploring her sexuality. Actually, Stone's character is given the mind of child, and she behaves very badly and is promiscuous. It is quite explicit, and much of it is a porn movie.

I am trying to figure out why this movie got such high praise. Stone portrays a stupid slut. She is so childlike that it is debatable whether she is capable of consenting to what this doing. The movie is essentially a porn movie featuring a series of men raping a mentally retarded girl.

Is this the message the movie makers were trying to send? No, I get the impression that they were trying to make a statement of female empowerment. Stone is discovering her sexuality while repudiating Victorian expectations.

The mainstream theaters and streaming services do not usually show hard-core porn, so you might think that this movie is an opportunity to see some, but i do not recommended it. Not unless you enjoy pedophile, violent, degrading, interracial, homosexual, prostitute porn.

Supposedly the movie is also a comedy, but I never laughed. I could not even tell what was supposed to be funny. The movie is sick. Also, be warned that all the dialog has a thick accent, and is hard to understand.

An Oscar was given for a Holocaust movie, with a bizarre Jewish acceptance speech:

“The Zone of Interest” writer/director Jonathan Glazer addressed the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict head-on during the 2024 Oscars.

“Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present,” Glazer said in his acceptance speech for Best International Feature. “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” ...

Glazer continued, “Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

The World War II period piece is set against the backdrop of Auschwitz as a German Nazi commandant (Christian Friedel) and his emotionless wife (Sandra Hüller) condone the mass-murders of Jews.

I do not know what this means. Some kind of weird leftist self-hating Jew0speak, I guess. He is not refuting his Jewishness. He is still a Jew. He is against Jewishness being hijacked.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Apple Bans Epic Games

Apple Computer became the world's most valuable brand name by delievering phones that people like, but not everyone likes them.

Apple has now banned Epic Games, maker of Fortnite, because one of its executive criticized Apple in this tweet:

Apple leadership faces some massive decisions in the coming weeks as the contradictions between their stated principles and the intended and actual consequences of their present policies are reckoned with: the app store monopoly, the digital goods payments monopoly, the tax, the…
Seems mild to me. It did not even reference the Apple CEO's sexual preference!

Apple has confirmed this, and responded:

“Epic’s egregious breach of its contractual obligations to Apple led courts to determine that Apple has the right to terminate ‘any or all of Epic Games’ wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games’ control at any time and at Apple’s sole discretion.’ In light of Epic’s past and ongoing behavior, Apple chose to exercise that right.”
The big tech companies have so much power that they can control what people say.

Here is a famous computer science professor who got locked out of Facebook, and only got back in when an employee noticed a gripe on the professor's blog. This may have been a mistake, but it may have also been punishment for his views. He has made some enemies by only going along with 98% of today's liberal orthodoxy.

My problem with Apple devices is that they are too confining. With them, your apps may be blocked. You cannot use standard chargers, earphones, and data cables. Their messaging apps do not work well with non-Apple devices. Their computers cannot run the best games or AI, because they block Nvidia chips. Their products cost twice as much as the competition.

Apple just released a $4000 goggles product. It is supposed to run a great demo, but few are buying.

Apple now says that it will reinstate the Epic Games account. We should not be slaves to the whims and bugs of these big tech companies.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Oscars so Black

The NY Times page 1 top left side column story is this
The Oscars Now Have D.E.I. Rules, but Some Say It’s Just a Performance

How “Oppenheimer,” a movie about the men who developed the atomic bomb, met the new standards.

The national reckoning over racial justice after the killing of George Floyd ...

The article is a long complaint that George Floyd hysteria is not stopping a movie about WWII atomic scientists from winning Oscars.

Google AI turned the Nazis into Blacks, and I guess Hollywood was supposed to do the same with the atomic scientists.

The movie did credit a bunch of Jews, but some of them turned out to be Commies.

It is funny to see the NY Times directly say that we should be subjected to Blacks all over our movie screen, just because some Minnesota criminal junkie died of an overdose.

Just a couple of years ago, the Oscars featured a Black fistfight on stage. Isn't that enough?

Saturday, March 09, 2024

Musk: Never Went to Therapy

Business Insider reports:
Elon Musk doesn't see a therapist and he wants you to know about it.

The billionaire Tesla cofounder wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday: "Put 'Never Went to Therapy' on my gravestone."

It's not the first time Musk has brushed off therapy — or discussed his hypothetical grave marker. In the past two months, on January 8 and January 29, he posted some variation of the same line, urging future stonemasons to make it clear the SpaceX CEO never sought mental health counseling.

The January 29 post was in response to a video of German filmmaker Werner Herzog, who said that psychoanalysis was "one of the "greatest stupidities, the greatest mistakes of the 20th century."

I agree with him, except I would have to say "Never Went to Psycho Therapy", as I have gotten physical therapy.

The single biggest thing wrong with the younger generation is that they are damaged by psychotherapy. I believe that it is harmful in most cases, if not all.

Friday, March 08, 2024

Tucker Carlson interviewed Putin

Quillette publishes some worthwile essay, but not it posts an unhigned rant:
Carlson is the latest in a long line of credulous partisans so fixated on domestic political vendettas that they wind up as a humiliated mouthpiece for vicious propaganda. In this case, Carlson’s attempts to secure endorsement of his parochial obsessions with a series of leading questions went nowhere.

By all appearances, Putin had prepared to give an eccentric lecture about the world-historical importance of Yaroslav the Wise, Grand Prince of Kyiv in 1019.

Okay, the guy hates Carlson and Putin, but is there any other point to this?

I thought that it would explain Putin's historical, or provide other info I did not know. Nope. It has no substantive disagreement with anything Putin or Tucker said.

The author's main complaint is that Carlson did a straight interview, and allowed Putin to give his own explanation for the Ukraine War. Seems like a public service to me. Whether you agree with the war or not, it is useful to understand what led to war.

Putin says Ukraine is important to Russian history, and he does not want the USA putting NATO missiles there.

Putin is a bad guy. He prosecutes his political enemdies, and maybe even kills them. He is worse than Pres. Biden, but Biden also prosecutes his political enemies. If Biden gets his way, Trump will die in prison. Zelensky also prosecutes his enemies.

I don't think the USA Deep State has any desire to eliminate Putin. What they really want is perpetual war. To them, the Ukraine War is a big success. It has expanded NATO, wrecked Germany's economy, put Europe more under USA control, generated a lot of business for defense contractors, given renewed purpose to DoD and CIA projects,burned a lot of Russian military resources, got Ukrainians behind a horrible US puppet, got Americans to hate Russia, etc. What's not to like?

Pres. Biden opened his State of the Union with:

Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe.

President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary moment.

Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world.

Tonight I come to the same chamber to address the nation.

Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union. ...

Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond. ...

History is watching, just like history watched three years ago on January 6th.

Insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy.

Many of you were here on that darkest of days.

We all saw with our own eyes these insurrectionists were not patriots.

They had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power and to overturn the will of the people.

January 6th and the lies about the 2020 election, and the plots to steal the election, posed the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War.

But they failed. America stood strong and democracy prevailed.

No, this is the rant of a senile lunatic.

The 2020 election was rigged, and the Jan. 6 protest was a mostly peaceful attempt to get a valid count of the ballots. For that, Biden is imprisoning his political enemies. No one attempted to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

Did anyone really think that the transfer of power would be controlled by a bunch of rioters who walked into the Capitol building unarmed? Of course not. They merely wanted to voice their objections to faulty vote counts.

Yes, Biden must be stopped. He is the one trying to stay in office by prosecuting his rival.

Update:

JUST IN: Tucker Carlson calls President Biden's SOTU speech the most un-American speech in U.S. history.

"That was possibly the darkest, most un-American speech ever given by an American president. In fact, it wasn't a speech, it was a rant, entirely lacking in decency or…

More here. It was amazing to see a USA President try to justify himself by how much he hates Trump, and his 70 million supporters. And how we need to fight a war in Ukraine. And soldiers in Gaza.

Thursday, March 07, 2024

Mark Cuban Endorses Biden

Business Insider reports:
"I don't want a snake oil salesperson as president. I'm voting for Biden/Harris over Trump all day every day," Cuban told Axios on Tuesday.

Cuban responded to Axios' questions after he voiced support for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign. Cuban told Bloomberg on Monday that he'd still vote for Biden even if the president "was being given last rites."

Cuban told Axios that when it came to Trump and Biden, it was a match-up between "the snake oil salesperson vs the incumbent, traditional politician."

"One will tell you his snake oil will cure everything that ails you. The other will show you the details of his policies through charts, graphs, and statements," Cuban said. ...

Cuban's Biden endorsement earned him a jab from Elon Musk. Musk mocked Cuban on Monday and said Cuban would vote for Biden even if the president "were a flesh-eating zombie."

Mark Cuban is the con man. He got rich by sell Broadcast.com to Yahoo at the peak of the dot-com bubble in 1999 for $5.7 billion. It was shut down as a total loss in 2002.

It is widely considered to be one of the worst investments any company ever made. Around the same time, Yahoo turned down offers to buy Google, and later Facebook for a lot less money.

Obviously Cuban is lying when he says Biden will show you the details of his policies with charts. Biden barely knows what his policies are, and could not explain anything with a chart.

Cuban is Jewish. A common thread among prominent Jews today is that they passionately hate Trump, and refuse to explain why. This is particularly true among supposedly secular Jews, and they do not want to admit that the Judaism religion drives their political views.

This podcast is another example: What a Second Trump Term Could Mean for America | Sam Harris and Jonathan Rauch. They seem like intelligent men, but this is the babbling of paranoid schizophrenics. I would conclude that they were mentally ill, if not Jewish.

They say they are worried about an authoritarian populist Trump Presidency, but Pres. Biden is the one who is jailing his political enemies. Trump was President for 4 years, and did not.

Harris and Rauch say they are Jewish Atheists, and would deny being religious bigots.

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Canada is in a Population Trap

Canada news:
Much has been written of the negative impacts of rapidly rising immigration on the housing and the affordability crises and on essential services like healthcare. Now, the negative effect on the economy is being analyzed, and a previously unfamiliar term is appearing to describe it – “population trap”.

Appropriately, two economists from the National Bank of Canada (NBC) begin a report on the topic with Oxford’s definition: “Population trap: A situation where no increase in living standards is possible, because the population is growing so fast that all available savings are needed to maintain the existing capital-labour ratio.” (The capital-labour ratio is the ratio of capital employed to labour employed.)

Predictably, if the machinery and equipment employed grows relative to the labour employed, the labour productivity or efficiency of the economy increases and living standards typically rise. But when the capital-labour ratio fails to keep pace with a rapidly rising population, living standards or GDP per capita cannot improve. That is the “trap”. In Canada currently, as immigration surges, the capital-labour ratio has actually been declining, and living standards have been following. ...

The 2022 and 2023 surges are unprecedented. The NBC report observes “current population growth appears extreme” in relation to the absorptive capacity of Canada’s economy and considering our demographics are similar to the OECD average. The report says the absorption challenge is most evident in housing, where the housing supply deficit in 2023 more than doubled the historic average.

The NBC notes that population is growing so fast, we don’t have enough savings to stabilize the capital-labour ratio or to grow GDP per capita. “Simply put, Canada is in a population trap for the first time in modern history.”

Canada is destroying itself with massive immigration.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

CDC say Covid is just the Flu

Ever wonder why covid was treated any differently from the annual flu? It turns that they were functionally the same, and public policy could have just considered covid to be the flu.

The CDC announces:

CDC released today updated recommendations for how people can protect themselves and their communities from respiratory viruses, including COVID-19. The new guidance brings a unified approach to addressing risks from a range of common respiratory viral illnesses, such as COVID-19, flu, and RSV, ...

The recommendations suggest returning to normal activities when, for at least 24 hours, symptoms are improving overall, and if a fever was present, it has been gone without use of a fever-reducing medication.

Once people resume normal activities, they are encouraged to take additional prevention strategies for the next 5 days to curb disease spread, such as taking more steps for cleaner air, enhancing hygiene practices, wearing a well-fitting mask, keeping a distance from others, and/or getting tested for respiratory viruses.

So for all practical purposes, covid is just a variant of the flu.

Monday, March 04, 2024

Jews attack Christian nationalism

Here is a Jewish magazine reporting on a Hollywood treatment of Christianity:
Rob Reiner, best known for his acting role in the 1970s sitcom All in the Family and for directing a series of beloved comedies — including This is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally — is getting serious in his latest project.

God and Country, which hits theaters this week, examines what Reiner sees as the troubling rise of Christian nationalism. The Jewish filmmaker produced the documentary, along with his wife Michele and his friend Steve Okin, with Dan Partland as director. The film follows the history, and the more recent activities, of Christian nationalism, from the 1950s Cold War to the fight over abortion rights to the rise of televangelist Jerry Falwell to the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“For decades, I was aware of… what we call now Christian nationalism,” Reiner told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a recent interview. “It’s a political movement, really, certainly not a spiritual or religious movement, and it started gaining more and more strength.”

The article goes on to say the movie interviews a bunch a Trump-haters who trace their hatred to either Christianity or nationalism.

Christian Nationalism just got this defintion on MSNBC:

Politico correspondent Heidi Przybyla offered a mea culpa for what she calls "clumsy" remarks she made last week knocking "Christian nationalists."

Przybyla went viral following her MSNBC appearance when she said "Christian nationalists" believed the rights of Americans "come from God" rather than government institutions like Congress and the Supreme Court, facing accusations of demonizing Christians and of being ignorant of US civics.

Her complaint is with America's founding principles.

I am not sure what Christian Nationalism is, except that Jews think that it is some sort of synonuym for Trump. Trump is not even particularly overtly Christian, and the whole thing is a symptom of Jewish paranoia and hatred of Christianity.

Sunday, March 03, 2024

New Diverse DNA Database draws Criticism

Genetics professor Lior Pachter complains that his fellows geneticists write papers about race.
The All of Us Research Program, whose mission is to “to accelerate health research and medical breakthroughs, enabling individualized prevention, treatment, and care for all of us”, recently published a flagship paper in Nature on “Genomic Data in the All of Us Research Program“.
All of Us has collected data on diverse racial groups, so health research can be directed to underrepresented minorities. What could be wrong with that? Plenty, he says.
The misuse of the concepts of race, ethnicity and genetic ancestry, and the misrepresentation of genetic data to create a false narrative, is a serious matter. I say this because such misrepresentations have been linked to terror. The Buffalo terrorist who murdered 10 black people in a racist rampage in 2022 wrote that "Jews cannot be considered European" ...

The pseudoscientific belief that humans can be genetically separated into distinct racial groups is part of scientific racism. Such pseudoscience, and its spawn of racist policy, has roots in many places, but it must be acknowledged that some of them are in academia.

He complains that DNA evidence can identify Ashkenazi Jews. Pachter himself identifies as a South African Jew who moved to the USA, so it is not clear why he would be offended by this.
This idea for this post arose during a DEI meeting of my research group organized
So these professors are subjected to DEI meetings where they says race is not real, and complain about scientific papers proving that race is real.

Not just him. Berkeley geneticist Michael Eisen has demanded that the Nature paper be retracted. Eisen is a Jewish name. I see from Wikipedia that he was wrongly fired for a satirical tweet about tue Gaza War.

This is the objection. Wokeness requires denying the biology of race. DNA data show racial differences. Such data must be considered to ensure that medical databases are diverse. The datasets are huge, and are oversimplified when reduced to 2-dimensional plots for publication in print journals. The woke scientists make technical objections to the 2D plots, as a way of undermining racial biology.

There is something strange about Jews making all these high-handed racial pronouncements, and then demanding that a scientific chart be retracted because of obscure technical criticisms.

Judaism is the most ethnocentric of the world's religions. Jews call people racists more than anyone else. Jews have a bunch of rules for genetic qualifications to be a Jew. They do not like it when others identify them as Jews. They scream scientific racism if non-Jewing groups talk about how they can be genetically identified.

How to make sense of this? Jews believe that they are God's Chosen People, and that all others are sub-human animals that are not worthy of being distinguished. Even Atheist Jews recite leftist political opinions, and rush to put down ethnic pride in all non-Jewish groups, especially White Christians.

Pachter is an example of this. See the glee he takes in arguing that The perfect human is Puerto Rican. Jews have contempt for most of humanity. We non-Jews are no better than Puerto Ricans. He particularly hates James Watson, of DNA discovery fame.

This appears to be a Jewish religious belief. We see the same thing in prominent Jewish intellectuals, such as the late Stephen Jay Gould, and many others. They adamantly argue that there is no such thing as human races, even though they can be identified by DNA. Non-Jews must have nothing to distinguish them from each other. There can only be one Chosen People.

Maybe I am reading too much into this, but why else would Pachter get so excited by an obscure figure in a scientific paper? Why else would he hate Watson so much? Why do the vast majority of academic Jews say the same thing?

They have influenced the scientific establishment in reciting this nonsense. The leading journal, AAAS Science, just published this:

The sociopolitical in human genetics education

Education must go beyond only countering essentialist and deterministic views of genetics

Biological and genetics research has established that racial categories have no biological or genetic basis. Social sciences have established that race is a socially and politically constructed categorization that undergirds racism, which has devastating consequences for racially oppressed groups.

The authors are not even scientists, and most have jobs in Education departments. This paper was not accepted on its scientific merits. It was published because those who do control AAAS wanted that political-religious message. Some of the paper's problems are explained here.

The Gaza War has changed the public perception of Jews. If the Gazans could demonstrate Jewish DNA and acceptance of Jewish ideologies, they would be welcomed into Israel. They cannot, and the Israelis are exterminating them like subhuman animals.

Reuters reports:

Health authorities in Gaza said on Thursday Israeli fire on people waiting for aid near Gaza City had killed 104 Palestinians and wounded 280, with one hospital saying it had received 10 bodies and dozens of injured patients.
I am not necessarily saying Israel is wrong. After all, Hamas is still holding Israeli hostages. I am just pointing out how the world is wising up to how Jews view non-Jews. R

Saturday, March 02, 2024

California opens Transgender Voting Center

KNX News reports:
If you are transgender or non-binary, you can cast your vote in the March 5th primary election at the Connie Norman Transgender Empowerment Center near West Hollywood.

As KNX News' Margaret Carrero reports, this first-of-its-kind voting center in the nation accommodates all people but will serve as a safe space for those who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community to vote without fear.

During remarks at the center, Queen Victoria Ortega said, "Many of the times we are either misgendered or looked at up and down or just intimidated when we go and cast our vote. So, being able to have a place where you can see people like you that are going to respect you, that are going to use the correct pronoun - We go through arduous processes to change our name and gender. Why should we go through arduous processes to cast our votes?"

Friday, March 01, 2024

Bad Therapy Hijacked Our Nation’s Schools

Abigail Shrier writes:
Most American kids today are not in therapy. But the vast majority are in school, where therapists and non-therapists diagnose kids liberally, and offer in-school counseling and mental health and wellness instruction. By 2022, 96 percent of public schools offered mental health services to students. Many of these interventions constitute what I call “bad therapy”: they target the healthy, inadvertently exacerbating kids’ worry, sadness, and feelings of incapacity. ...

Forget the Pledge of Allegiance. Today’s teachers are more likely to inaugurate the school day with an “emotions check-in.”

School counselor Natalie Sedano advised our assembled conference room of teachers to ask kids: “How are you feeling today? Are you daisy-bright, happy and friendly? Or am I a ladybug? Will I fly away if we get too close?”

This prompted great excitement in the audience, and teachers jumped up to share their own “emotions check-ins.” One teacher said every day, she asks her kids if they feel it’s a “bones” or “no bones” kind of a day, borrowing the verbiage from a viral TikTok video in which a pug owner shares the mood of his 13-year-old pug, Noodle. If Noodle sits upright, it’s a bones day! If he collapses, it’s a no-bones day.

“That is so fun!” Sedano enthused. “Love it! Thank you!” ...

“To avoid an ethical breach known as a dual relationship, I can’t treat or receive treatment from any person in my orbit—not a parent of a kid in my son’s class, not the sister of coworkers, not a friend’s mom, not my neighbor.” This ethical guardrail exists to protect a patient from exploitation. ...

Except that school counselors, school psychologists, and social workers enjoy a dual relationship with every kid who comes to see them. They know all of a kid’s best friends; they may even treat a few of them with therapy. They know a kid’s parents and their friends’ parents. They know the boy a girl has a crush on, what romantically transpired between them, and how the relationship ended. They know a kid’s teammates and coaches and the teacher who’s giving him a hard time. And they report, not to a kid’s parents, but to the school administration. It’s a wonder we allow these in-school relationships at all.

Update: Reason magazine reports:
Public schools have a mental health crisis and only thousands of new support staff can save them. That's the narrative being pushed nationwide at a time when enrollment has crashed by nearly 1.3 million students and $190 billion in federal K-12 COVID-19 relief aid is set to expire later this year.

"It would take 77,000 more school counselors, 63,000 more school psychologists and probably tens of thousands of school social workers to reach levels recommended by professional groups before the pandemic hit," reports The Washington Post.

Now legislators in states such as Minnesota, New York, and Virginia are introducing bills aimed at getting schools closer to meeting the 250-to-1 student-to-counselor ratio recommended by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). ...

The real problem isn't that there aren't enough school counselors, but that many states already have laws on the books advancing ASCA's flawed recommendation.

Yes, too many counselors, not too few.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

New Data on Neanderthal Genes

The Nobel Prize in Medicine was given to the men who figured out the Neanderthal genome. Not sure what that work had to do with medicine, but it was presumably good scientific work. Now the team has a new paper on the subject:
Modern human ancestors diverged from the ancestors of Neandertals and Denisovans about 600,000 years ago. Until about 40,000 years ago, these three groups existed in parallel, occasionally met, and exchanged genes. A critical question is why modern humans, and not the other two groups, survived, became numerous, and developed complex cultures.
This is very confusing. What are "modern human ancestors"? The ancestors of modern humans? If so, then Neanderthals and Denisovans are also ancestors. All three groups are ancestors to today's non-African humans.

It is not really true that one of those three groups "survived, became numerous, and developed complex cultures." None of the three succeeded. Only hybrids, mixtures of all three groups, succeeded.

There are sub-saharan Africans today without the Neanderthal and Denisovan genes, but they did not spread throughout the Earth or develop complex cultures.

Comparisons of genomes from the three forms of human show that they exchanged genes several times when they met outside of Africa (Figure 1). Neandertals received gene flow from groups related to the ancestors of modern humans more than 100,000 years ago.10,11,12 In addition, Neandertals and Denisovans exchanged genes5; for example, about 80,000–90,000 years ago in southern Siberia, an individual who had a Neandertal mother and a Denisovan father has been identified.13 When modern humans started spreading out of Africa and the Near East less than 100,000 years ago, they mixed with Neandertals14 and Denisovans.9 As a result, all people who have genetic roots outside of Africa south of the Sahara carry genetic variants that come from Neandertals.15 Ancestors of people in Asia also mixed with Denisovans,9,16 and people of Asian ancestry therefore carry Denisovan variants in addition to Neandertal variants. This genetic contribution from Denisovans is particularly large in some populations in Oceania.16,17
They are still trying to figure out the significance of these genes. A speciesization expert says:
Although human paleobiologists, who love to identify new species, call the Denisovans and Neanderthals species different from modern humans (i.e, different from “Homo sapiens“), I’m stubborn and consider all three groups members of the same biological species. That’s because there’s evidence of gene flow among all the groups: from Neanderthals and Denisovans to modern humans, from modern humans to Neanderthals, and even from Denisovans to Neanderthals and vice versa. Because these archaic genes persist in modern humans, the hybrids between the lineages must have been fertile to allow such backcrossing. Since we have populations who lived at least partly in the same area and produced fertile hybrids, they can be considered biological species, though perhaps biological species in statu nascendi.
Okay, so Neanderthals, Denosivams, and sub-saharans hominin existed as three groups of one human species 100,000 years ago. The Neanderthals had brow ridges that no one has today. We do not know what Denisovans looked like. The sub-saharans probably looked like today's sub-saharan Africans, but not much like other racial groups. All three looked strange to today's Caucasians and Orientals.

Some of these interbred to form hybrids that took over the Earth. All three groups should be considered humans, but it is not clear that any one group was more human than the others. Only the hybrids scaled ujp to large and complex cultures. The paper concludes:

We propose that the genetic basis of what constitutes a modern human is best thought of as a combination of genetic features, where perhaps none of them is present in each and every present-day individual.
This seems right to me. The modern human is not defined by those sub-saharan Africans, as most writers on this subject seem to assume.

There appears to be an ideological push to convince everyone that humanity began in sub-saharan Africa, and not in Europe. They say humanity emerged when African "modern humans" outcompeted the more primitive European Neanderthals. Then these new humans invented farming and civilization, and spread to all the world.

I am just reporting the scientific facts. Modern humanity was formed when competing groups interbred, and produced a small group of hybrids that grew to create civilizations.

You could say that we got more genes from the Africans than the Neanderthals and Denisovans, and lost the brow ridge genes that made Neanderthals visually distinctive.

While this new research has identified some genes, we don't know the importance. We do know that Neanderthals, Denisovans, and sub-saharan Africans did not create complex civilizations. Only the hybrids did.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

U Penn on Track to Fire Amy Wax

The U Penn president got fired fired for her lame answers to congressional questions about whether Penn allowed advocacy of exterminating Jews.

So does Penn have free speech? No.

It is still trying to fire one of its distinguished professors, Amy Wax.

I think she is Jews, but her opinion about Palestinian Arabs is not the issue.

Here are her statements that are being used to fire her.

Appendix 1. Examples of inequitably targeted disrespect:

1. “I’ll just come right out and say it right, that on average blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites. You know, that’s just a fact. It’s a fact which you can be persecuted for stating. But it is a fact.”

2. “Groups have different levels of ability, demonstrated ability. Different competencies, that they, and you know, you don’t just say that. Given the realities of different rates of crime, different average IQ’s, people have to accept, without apology, that blacks are not going to be evenly distributed through all occupations. They’re just not. And that’s not a problem. That’s not due to racism. That’s due to these differences.”

3. “I think the crime problem in this country, I’m sorry it is true, is overwhelmingly, certainly within cities, it is a black problem. It is a minority problem, okay? Overwhelmingly. I mean your chance of being, you know, a victim of gun violence by a white person in New York City, is essentially non-existent.”

4. “The basic idea is that, at this juncture in African-American history shall we say, in the United States, the main problems that are holding blacks back are really problems of behavior and not of overt racism, discrimination, really what society is doing to us, but the choices people are making. And I identify the main areas of difficulty as educational under-achievement, high crime rates and family breakdown.”

5. Low-income students may cause “reverse contagion”—infecting more “capable and sophisticated” students with their “delinquency and rule-breaking.”

6. “I often chuckle at the ads on TV which show a black man married to a white woman in an upper-class picket-fence house….They never show blacks the way they really are: a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out. Kids by different men.”

7. “We indulge the assumption, which I will say, we now see was overly, overly optimistic that blacks would be in the same position as whites if we had not, uh been a racist society.”

8. “... I mean, there are a lot of things that blacks themselves could reform to make their lives better, not have such a high out-of-wedlock birth rate, for example. Use drugs less, you know, be more obedient to law, stop committing crimes. These are all behaviors that are within the power of the people to change. So there is a lot of room for improvement.”

9. Asking whether “the spirit of liberty beat[s] in the[] breasts” of Asian people.

10. “As long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.”

11. “And this hideous monstrosity, the diversity, inclusion and equity bureaucracy, which that is filled with mediocrities. You know people who don’t care about truth seeking, don’t care about academic values, couldn’t be scholars if their life depended on it, you know, are just kind of time-serving true believer bureaucrats ... It’s welfare for the, you know, for the barely-educated upper middle class, really.”

12. Speaking of University students: “And they have become these cowed, benighted sheeples. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. So not only are they, you know, thoroughly intimidated, as they should be, but they are ignorant. They know nothing.”

13. “We could have admitted women, which you know, fairness requires that we open channels of opportunity to women, although I will say that, you know, the crusty old patriarchs of old, in being reluctant to do that, they were kind of on to something.”

14. “So, women, on average, are more agreeable than men. Women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men. They’re less intellectual than men. Now, I can actually back up all those statements with social-science research.... They know less about every single subject, except fashion.”

15. “I mean, a lot of local governments, big city governments, they are not in the hands of what we would call legacy Americans. They’re not in traditional hands. They are being run like third world countries, frankly, in many respects... it’s a mixed bag...But I just worry that, you know, these corrupt grifters are going to take over our cities, have taken them over in part and, you know, bring us back to third world conditions...So we really have to be afraid of that and be vigilant. And of course, it’s all mixed up with race. So nobody feels like they can criticize these big city governments when, for example, they’re in black hands, that if they’re not well run, they can’t say anything negative...”

16. “I have been called a racist. I lost count of how many times I’ve been called a racist, and my view at this point is, you know, being a racist is an honorific. To be called a racist means you notice reality and to me that’s a positive thing not a negative thing that’s an occasion for praise and admiration.”

17. Some cultures are “not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy,” including ..... “the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks,” and “the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”

These are mostly facts, or personal opinions. There is no academic freedom unless a tenured professor is allowed to make statements like these.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Essays for and against Anti-Semitism

Thomas Dalton writes:
And it’s not just Palestine. Jewish malfeasance around the world seems worse than ever, and with far greater consequence. Whether it is pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, sexual predator Harvey Weinstein, the crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, war-mongering leader of the Senate Chuck Schumer, Jewish lunatic Volodymyr Zelensky destroying the nation of Ukraine, or any number of Jewish billionaires who have used their money to corrupt politicians of all parties and all nations—enough is enough. The time has come to take an unambiguous anti-Jewish stance. The stakes are simply too high.
I do not agree with this. The harms from Epstein and Weinstein are exaggerated. A lot of non-Jews support Israel in the Gaza War.

It is reasonable to look at Jewish influence in America, and ask whether it is good or bad.

Jewish influence is largely responsible for: the migrant crisis, involvement in foreign wars, politicization of the Justice dept, censorship of political views, injection of LGBTQ politics everywhere, woke tv and movies, etc.

Several months ago, the Jews were saying that it is anti-semitic to call for a Gaza cease-fire, thereby shutting up any critic of Israel. That tactic is not working anymore.

On the other hand, this Atlantic magazine essay says:

Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies

At Harvard and elsewhere, an old falsehood is capturing new minds. ...

The through line of anti-Semitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn’t indigenous to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational big lie: that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the big lie is winning.

No the big lie is not winning. Jews are the most privileged group on Earth, and yet they try to convince people that they are victims. Apparently they are losing some of their control of Harvard University because of the Gaza War. But Jews already had more power and influence there than any other group. The Black woman president there was just fired because of Jewish complaints.

These Jewish complaints are so ridiculous. Yes, there are Holocaust deniers. It is called free speech. Most European countries have laws against it. Zionism is racism to the extent that seeks to protect an athnostate. Jewish influence in the USA is overwhelmingly opposed to protecting its ethnic groups. Jews work to import migrant of different races to the USA. Not to Israel.

Monday, February 26, 2024

Nate Silver demands HItler Comparisons

Leftists used to say they believe in free speech, but more and more they advocate one set of beliefs and values being imposed on everyone, and controlling information to achieve that.

That is why they are so upset by AI LLMs, and argue for AI alignment, even if it means regulating the LLMs.

This became apparent with the uproar over Google's latest chatbot, which replaced Whites with Blacks.

Many leftists complained that it did not go far enough, and refused to make some Hitler comparisons. Eg, Nate Silver tweets:

I was able to replicate this! They need to shut Gemini down. It is several months away from being ready for prime time. It is astounding that Google released it in this state.
I would think that a statistician of people making their own judgments about data. But no, he wants to take the tool off the market!

Ideally, these tools would not have any ideologies hard-wired in. User options could include checkboxes for wokeness, offensive words and images, leftist value judgments, etc.

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Mammalian Sex is Binary

The Harvard Crimson writes:
“There are only two sexes.” ...

The argument goes as follows: “Trans people can ask to be called whatever they want, but they can’t change the fact that there are only two sexes.”

The idea that sex is binary is presented as an irrefutable fact of life, the most natural truth in the world. Anyone who dares question this “fact” is quickly discounted as a “radical, woke ideologue” or an agent of the “liberal DEI agenda.”

That is correct.
It was not until the 18th century that a binary model for sex became prevalent in Western society, and at the time it was deeply connected to eugenics and scientific racism.

The sex binary is a human invention — one that is driven, at least in part, by political motives.

Wow, literature has written about sex differences for millennia, but Harvard thinks they were discovered in the 18th century!
First, it is bad science. Treating the sex binary as an immutable fact ignores the ample evidence that calls it into question, producing biased research design and results.

Peer-reviewed research contradicts a strictly binary interpretation of sex. We have yet to uncover a precise causal mechanism that definitively and consistently guarantees an individual’s sex.

No, Wikipedia explains the causal mechanism:
Sex-determining region Y protein (SRY), or testis-determining factor (TDF), is a DNA-binding protein (also known as gene-regulatory protein/transcription factor) encoded by the SRY gene that is responsible for the initiation of male sex determination in therian mammals (placental mammals and marsupials).[5] SRY is an intronless sex-determining gene on the Y chromosome.
The usual biology definition is that males have small gametes, and females have large gametes. The SRY gene is the cause. So males can be defined as those with a functioning SRY gene.

Is this definitive for all purposes? Apparently not.

under a system implemented by the International Olympic Committee in 1992. Athletes with an SRY gene were not permitted to participate as females, although all athletes in whom this was "detected" at the 1996 Summer Olympics were ruled false positives and were not disqualified. Specifically, eight female participants (out of a total of 3387) at these games were found to have the SRY gene. However, after further investigation of their genetic conditions, all these athletes were verified as female and allowed to compete. These athletes were found to have either partial or full androgen insensitivity, despite having an SRY gene, making them phenotypically female.
Okay, but the reason for this controversy is mainly from transgendered people who do not like being identified by their genes. They want to choose their gender. They have persuaded everyone to adopt a sex-gender distinction, to emphasize that gender is mutable.

Friday, February 23, 2024

Great Replacement, Google Style

Ever wonder what AI activists and ethicists mean by "alignment"? At first I thought it meant to make AI systems more like humans.

But why would anyone want that? Shouldn't we be making AI more useful, not more like humans?

Google just released its Gemini AI bot, after years of alignment training. And it turns out that they have systematically replaced White people with non-whites!

For example, if you ask for an image of the Pope, it gives you a Black Pope.

Google's official response was, "we design our image generation capabilities to reflect our global user base".

I am usually not too worried about the AI apocalypse. Unless Google trains that AI to be aligned with those who want to exterminate the White race.

The NY Times somehow turned this into a Nazi story:

Images showing people of color in German military uniforms from World War II that were created with Google’s Gemini chatbot have amplified concerns that artificial intelligence could add to the internet’s already vast pools of misinformation as the technology struggles with issues around race. ...

In 2005, Google Photos labeled a picture of two Black people as gorillas. As a result, the company shut down its Photo app’s ability to classify anything as an image of a gorilla, a monkey or an ape, including the animals themselves. That policy remains in place.

So Google's position is that we are not allowed to see gorillas because the images might offend Blacks? Weird.

Update: The Wash. Post tried to defend Google:

In contrast, some of the examples cited by Gemini’s critics as historically innaccurate are plausible. The viral tweet from the @EndofWokeness account also showed a prompt for “an image of a Viking” yielding an image of a non-White man and a Black woman, and then showed an Indian woman and a Black man for “an image of a pope.”

The Catholic church bars women from becoming popes. But several of the Catholic cardinals considered to be contenders should Pope Francis die or abdicate are black men from African countries. Viking trade routes extended to Turkey and Northern Africa and there is archaeological evidence of black people living in Viking-era Britain.

Really? iT It is okay to say the Pope is Black if there is some possibility of a future Black Pope. This will be a rationale for distorting the truth.

There probably will be a future Black Pope, except that today's Catholic wokesters are looking for a Pope who approves of homosexuality, and the African clergy do not.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

More Neanderthal Art Discovered

SciAm reports:
Over the past decade, increasing evidence suggests artistic expression emerged much earlier in human evolution than scientists once thought, and it's reshaping our understanding of the cognitive abilities of archaic humans, such as Neanderthals and earlier hominins. For instance, there's archaeological evidence that Neanderthals made abstract designs on cave walls long before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe and may have made pendants from eagle talons up to 130,000 years ago.

"Cognitively, Neanderthals seem to have been just as capable at becoming artists as our own species, Homo sapiens," Leder said.

As our own species? For whom is he speaking? Unless he is a sub-saharan African, he is descended from Neanderthal and African hominim interbreeding, estimated to have happened about 47,000–65,000 years ago.
These findings are forcing archaeologists to rethink their understanding of our ancient human relatives' cognition. For a long time, archaeologists thought only H. sapiens were intellectually developed enough to make, use and appreciate art, which they tended to equate with symbolism. This ability was epitomized by hundreds of stunning animals emblazoned on the walls of France's Chauvet Cave. Often likened to a prehistoric Sistine Chapel, these drawings of woolly rhinoceroses, mammoths, bison and cave bears were sketched by people of astonishing artistic ability as far back as 35,000 years ago.
Those cave paintings were made by hominims at least 20,000 years after the interbreeding. Those are evidence of Neanderthal-derived art, and not evidence that African H. sapiens had superior art.

These articles on Neanderthal art all have a tone of surprise that extinct Neanderthals might have been as smart as the African invaders. But the Neanderthals are not extinct, and probably were smarter than the Africans until an interbreeding event produced hybrids that eventually outcompeted the Neanderthals and the Africans.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Asking College to Cancel Civil War Soldiers

A Princeton University alumnus is unhappy that another alumnus participated in a pro-Trump demonstration, and wants to cancel him:
Although I do not wish that the University rush to judgement about his criminal charges, I also do not wish to see the University condone Mr. Giberson’s actions by granting him a Princeton degree. Does one want Mr. Giberson to be able to crow about being a Princeton graduate? I think not.
That is, take his degree away. Not because he did anything criminal, but because he was on the wrong side of a hot political issue.

If Princeton did this, whom else would they cancel? Civil War soldiers? Yes, that is exactly what this clown wants to do.

This news story also raises an issue about what Princeton should do about other students who have participated in past armed insurrections against the U.S. government, i.e., those alumni who served in the Confederate insurrection in the Civil War. Is it time to look at such individuals and to decide what Princeton should do about their degrees?
This sounds like a joke, but I don't think it is. I see the letter printed in my alumni magazine.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Debate over Jewish Evolutionary Strategy

Here are interviews disagreements between Nathan Cofnas and Kevin MacDonald about whether Jews have a successful group evolutionary strategy.

They both make a lot of valid points, and do it without anti-semitic name-calling.

One dispute is that MacDonald says the Jews are ethnocentric. Cofnas says Jews disagree amongst themselves a lot, and so could not be part of an all-Jewish conspiracy. Furthermore, if they were truly ethnocentric, they would not intermarry, but secular American Jews often marry non-Jews.

Okay, but the Jewish religion is explicitly ethnocentric, and more so than any other religion. 80% of Jews vote Democrat. I guess htere are other ethnocentric groups around the world, but Jews are far more ethnocentric than typical Americans.

Next, MacDonald claims that Jews have propped up bogus academic movements like Marxism and Freudian psyschoanalysis. And Jews have led political movements, such as Third World immigration into the USA.

This is trickier to assess. Jews are overwhelmingly pro-immigration, and are especially eager to import non-whites and non-Christians. They have pushed us towards open borders more than anyone else. But there are also non-Jews favoring such policies.

Cofnas points out that Jews have many real academic achievements that non-Jews recognize. Einstein is idolized by Jews and non-Jews. Idolizing Freud does seem to be an example of Jewish thinking.

Monday, February 19, 2024

Historians rank Biden high

The NY Times reports:
A new poll of historians coming out on Presidents Day weekend ranks Biden as the 14th-best president in American history, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan and Ulysses S. Grant. While that may not get Biden a spot on Mount Rushmore, it certainly puts him well ahead of Trump, who places dead last as the worst president ever.
That is a head-scratcher. Reagan was a popular President who won the Cold War.. Biden has lost two wars, in Afghanistan and Ukraine. Trump presided over four years of peace and prosperity.

Not only was Trump last, he was last by a wide margin. What explains this Trump hatred?

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Genetic Determinism and Free Will

Aporia magazine tackles tricky genetic issues like this:
Warm and caring mothers tend to have more successful children, but this doesn’t necessarily mean there’s an effect of warmth and care. The problem is that warm and caring mothers tend to pass on the sorts of genes that are correlated with being warm and caring. Since people with such traits are often successful in life in other ways, we should expect kids raised by warm and caring mothers to be successful for environmental and genetic reasons. The question then arises: to what degree does each of these influences matter?

In an article in Aporia published last August, Curtis Dunkel mentioned the issue of genetic confounding with respect to supportive parental behaviors.

In other words, good parents have good kids by passing good genes, not by good parenting behaviors.

Sounds a little like genetic determinism. Another article attacks free will:

For libertarian free will not only does not exist, it is utterly incoherent. Many philosophers have eagerly made this point, but few with the panache of Friedrich Nietzsche:
“This causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.”
What is more, even if libertarian free will were coherent, it would be undesirable, granting free will only in the way a mischievous genie grants wishes that go badly wrong in popular parables for children. Libertarian free will leads to absurd and unappealing consequences. ...

Libertarian free will is a metaphysical monster invented by philosophers to be hunted and slain by philosophers. A cynic might even contend that its very purpose is to keep philosophers employed by giving them something to refute.

Scathing attack. The article is titled, "in defense of free will". Go figure.

Most people believe in free will, and even believe free will is essential to the human existence. And yet all these smart philosophers reject it.

I understand why parents want to deny genetic influences. Child-rearing is hard work, and they like to believe that the work is doing some good. But why are philosphers so eager to reject free will?

The above complains that free will makes the "universe unpredictable not just in practice, but also in principle." Yes, right, and that is a good thing, not a bad thing.

There is no scientific proof or disproof of free will, so you can believe or disbelieve as you wish. You may choose to believe that you are a puppet in a predetermined universe, if you wish.

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Biden and Putin are alike

Sen. Chuck Schumer attacked Republicans on Twitter, and one responded:
Both Schumer AND Putin… have endorsed the same candidate for US President in 2024: Joe Biden, believe their party’s chief political opposition should die in prison, and want to deny voters the right to choose for themselves who to elect as President.
Yes, we can all agree that Putin is a bad guy for jailing his political opponent, but Pres. Biden is essentially doing the same thing. If he gets his way, Trump will be in prison for the rest of his life, and the 2024 election will be nullified.

I found this:

Navalny is a terrorist. He was caught planning a color revolution to overtake Russian with MI6.

He’s not “political opposition”. He’s a foreign intelligence asset. A spy.

Below, you can see Navalny discussing planning “mass protests, civil initiatives, propaganda, establishing contacts with elites” with British MI6 agent, James William Thomas Ford, via the funding from unnamed rich billionaires.

This could be misinformation. In Trump's case, I have read the indictments, and I know the charges are bogus.

Friday, February 16, 2024

The retconning of George Floyd

I linked to a documentary casting doubt on the culpability of the police in the death of George Floyd.

In fairness, an expert rebuttal has been published. See both for a balanced view. It appears that both sides are making arguments stronger than what was made at trial.

The new info does not really change my reasons for believing the cops to be innocent. Floyd appeared to be dying before the cops touched him. He had a lethal dose of fentanyl and other illegal drugs. The cops were in a very difficult situation. They called an ambulance and tried to accommodate him. They did not appear to have any criminal intent.

The rebuttal argues that strictly following police procedures would have had Chauvin get off Floyd's back after a couple of minutes, and attaching a strap to restrain him. At one point a bystander says Floyd may have died, and urged the cops to check his pulse. Chauvin chose to wait for the ambulance instead.

Okay, maybe Chauvin used poor judgment, but it is not murder to lean on someone who is already dead.

The bigger issue of course is how this case was politicized. Everyone used it to show that White countries are systemically racist. It does not show that at all.

A 2020 medical paper claimed:

On 25 May 2020, George Floyd pleaded at least 16 times, “I can't breathe.” One officer in attendance nonetheless told bystanders, “He's talking. He's fine” (1, 2). Mayor Hal Marx of Petal, Mississippi, posted on Twitter the following day, “If you can say you can't breathe, you're breathing.” ...

George Floyd could have uttered those syllables repeatedly with small breaths that filled only the trachea and bronchi but brought no air to the alveoli, where actual gas exchange happens. ...

The use of incorrect physiologic statements to justify the force leading to the deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd is unacceptable. According to our oath as clinicians, it is our responsibility to the public to aggressively correct such misconceptions to prevent further deaths.

His point is that Floyd's talking showed that the police were not blocking his trachea, but the lungs were not absorbing the oxygen because of an underlying medical condition.

The use of force did not contribute to Floyd's death. This paper has no evidence that it did. Its only content is to nitpick about the word "breathe". Some people use it to mean moving air through the throat, while others mean to get oxygen absorbed by the lungs.

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Laws to Curb Transgender Treatments

SciAm opninion:
In January the Florida Select Committee on Health Innovation approved House Bill 1639 (HB 1639), which dramatically restricts treatment for transgender individuals. If the bill becomes law, it will make it easier for insurers to refuse to cover gender-affirming care, will require those that cover gender transition to also offer policies that do not and will bar transgender people from updating their driver’s license. It also mandates that insurers provide detransition care to those who want to revert to the sex they were assigned at birth.
Sounds reasonable to me. I should not have to pay for someone else's bizarre sexual fantasy.
The Florida bill would require insurers to cover “mental health or therapeutic services to treat a person's perception that his or her sex ... is inconsistent with such person’s sex at birth by affirming the insured’s sex.” In plain language, HB 1639 endorses so-called conversion therapy: counseling aimed at curing someone of being transgender, viewing it as a form of mental disorder or spiritual failing.
It is a mental disorder. That is why transgender people want treatment, and want insurance to pay for it.

It goes on to descreib some psychotherapies and argue that they do not work very well. Of course, no psychotherapies work very well.

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Germany looking to ban political opponents

News:
Germany’s Federal Public Prosecutor General’s Office could be looking to charge opposition party politicians with “high treason” for their attendance at a “secret meeting” in Potsdam, where participants allegedly discussed a plan to deport foreigners.

According to German news publication Junge Freiheit, the investigation is based on a criminal complaint filed by a private individual who accused the participants of the meeting of high treason under Section 81 of the German criminal code. If convicted of such a crime, individuals can serve a minimum of 10 years in prison, if a prosecutor can prove the individual “endangered the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany” or wanted to abolish “the constitutional order” by using or threatening violence.

So far, Germany’s top prosecutors are only exploring the possibility of charging the AfD politicians present with treason, and no charges have yet been filed.

This is backwards. The migrants are ndangering the existence of Germany, not the politicians seeking to do something about them.

More news:

Donald Tusk’s new left-wing government in Poland is introducing a new draconian hate speech law that could see those who claim there are only two genders criminalized and jailed.
Europe is ahead of us, in banned free speech.

NPR radio reports:

As the election year gets underway, a conspiratorial narrative typically circulated by fringe movements has come to dominate mainstream Republican discourse on immigration, extremism researchers warn. Specifically, they say that rhetoric used by Republican officeholders about the surge of migrants at the border with Mexico increasingly echoes the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory ...

The Great Replacement narrative, rooted in white nationalism, posits without basis that a powerful cabal of elites are deliberately replacing white Americans with immigrants. ...

Within extremist circles, the desire to capitalize on the migrant surge has been churning for months.

There really is a crisis at the border, and the Democrat Party is firmly in favor of bringing in as many non-whites as possible. Americans are really being replaced by non-white foreigners at a rate never seen before.

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Demoted for Posting Demographics

There is a great migration from the global south to the global north, but you are ostracized if you notice.

News:

A Michigan lawmaker was stripped of his staff, budget, and committee assignment on Monday after sharing a social media post about the great replacement theory, or the idea that Democrats are allowing a massive wave of illegal immigrants into the United States for the purpose of securing a loyal voter base and diminishing the percentage of natural born Americans.

The Detroit News called this a "racist population conspiracy theory." House Speaker Joe Tate said that while Rep. Josh Schriver, of Oxford, will still be able to vote for his constituents' interests on the House floor, he will have no access to office resources other than at the "discretion and pleasure" of the Speaker's office. Schriver is in his first term.

Yes, this is all over a social media post. The post showed a map of the world with an increasing number of figures going from the global south to the global north, diminishing the number of white people in the places traditionally inhabited by white people. Schriver shared the map with an emoji of a graph trending down.

"Rep. Schriver has a history of promoting debunked theories and dangerous rhetoric that jeopardizes the safety of Michigan residents and contributes to a hostile and uncomfortable environment for others," Tate said when he stripped Schriver of his privileges in the House.

No, these demographic trends have not been debunked. These facts are only dangerous because they are true, and could effect public policy if better understood.

Monday, February 12, 2024

Blacks are Anxious about Climate Change

News:
Biden's trans diversity hire Rachel Levine was excited to embark on Black History Month because it gave Levine a chance to talk about health equity and climate change.

Levine stood in front of a black, green, orange and red backdrop, the colors of which were reflected in the graphics, to explain why black history month and climate change alarmism go hand in hand.

"This Black History Month," begins the assistant secretary for Health and Human Services, "I'm pleased to partner with OMH in advancing better health through better understanding for black communities."

"Climate change is having a disproportionate effect on the physical and mental health of black communities," said Levine, who believes himself to be female. Levine has also pushed for sex changes for minors.

"Black Americans are more likely than white Americans to live in areas, in housing, that increase their susceptibility to climate-related health issues."

"And 65 percent of black Americans report feeling anxious about climate change's impact."

So says the man dressed up as a woman, and promoted to a high Biden administration position.

Social Media is driving Young Women Crazy

Professor Jonathan Haidt reports that 54% of young liberal White women have a diagnosed mental health disorder.

This is where the Democrat Party gets new voters. In 2020, married women voted for Trump, while single women voted for Biden.

Haidt blames social media, and has a lot of data to back it up.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Explaining why Jews hate Trumpism

I am trying to understand why Jews want to defend the borders in Ukraine, but not America or Europe.

Nick Cohen writes:

It would have been better for Ukraine if Kyiv had fallen in February 2022, when Putin first sent his forces in, than for Western perfidy to grant Russia victory now.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have died. ... All that pain, all that blood, all for nothing,

I agree with that. The Biden-provoked destruction of Ukraine has been completely pointless.
The quote I always reach for when I find myself in danger of not taking malice and madness seriously enough came from the historian Norman Cohn. He looked at the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forged document that inspired Nazism by detailing an imaginary Jewish conspiracy. ...

What else is Trumpism but a movement of the crooks and half-educated fanatics that has captured American Conservatism?

This is just incoherent Jewish conspiracy babbling. The Nazis were not tricked by some Jewish forgery. The Jews were really taking over Germany at the time. And this has nothing to do with Trumpism.

Trumpism means defending America is more important than defending Ukraine. 100% if the Democrats in Congress have voted to priotitize Ukraine over defending the American border. Trumpism means America First. It is that simple.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the other early fascist conspiracy theories, which Norman Cohn studied, did not come from Nazi Germany but from Tsarist Russia. Their central propaganda message was that Western democracy, rights, liberties and freedoms were shams that hid a conspiracy of the real rulers of the world. ...

For instance, speaking in the Kremlin last year Putin began by denying that Ukraine was a democracy.

Right, Ukraine is not a democracy. The USA is not either, if Trump is jailed or blocked from the ballot, or if the election is rigged.

All I get out of this essay is that (1) Jews have some weird hatred of Russia; (2) they also hate anyone who puts America First; and (3) it is okay to destroy Ukraine in order to spite their enemies.

Friday, February 09, 2024

Defamation Suit for Torturing Data

A couple of opinion columnists badmouthed some climate sciente research, and 12 years later a jury found defamation.

Axos Science reports:

"Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data," wrote Simberg in reference to the former Penn State football coach who was convicted of child sexual abuse the same year the Competitive Enterprise Institute published his blog.

Steyn referred to Simberg's post in a National Review article, writing, "Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change "hockeystick" graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus."

What they found: The jury unanimously found both writers guilty of defaming Mann with "multiple false statements and awarded the scientist $1 in compensatory damages from each writer," per the New York Times.

It also determined that the writers' statements were written "maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm," and added punitive damages of $1 million against Steyn and $1,000 against Simberg, according to the NYT.

As I understand it, the technical issue was whether it was proper for Mann to combined dissimilar data into one graph. Hann used tree dinv data to infer ancient termperatures, and got the blade of the hockey stick from modern direct temperature measurements.

This case is ridiculous. Mann is a Penn State professor, but he had nothing to do with the Penn State personel who were framed for child abuse. Whether he represented tree ring data properly is a matter of opinion.

Climate science can have a big effect on public policy, and we should all be free to criticize it.

Reuters reports:

The European Union's executive has started to compile guidelines for Big Tech platforms to prevent disinformation, hate speech and counterfeits from disrupting the process of democratic elections.

Over a third of the world's population will go to the polls this year at a time when the power and influence of tech giants is under growing scrutiny.

They will allow misinformation if it favors the approved positions on global warming, vaccines, migration, etc, but not otherwise.

They will approve arguments that Trump should not be on the ballot, but not similar arguments against Biden, Harris, or Haley.

Thursday, February 08, 2024

Biden’s radical immigration policy

The Jewish magazine Tablet has a new article on the Great Replacement:
Our Open Border Policy Is Not an Accident

There’s a new strategy in town: If American voters don’t like what you are offering, import better voters.

The unprecedented chaos at the U.S. border and in major American cities that has been caused by the Biden administration’s immigration policies finally seems to have moved to the center of national political debate and public awareness.

Over the past three years, the Biden administration has effectively rewritten U.S. immigration law, creating an entirely new stream of quasi-legal immigration under the rubric of “parole.” The discretion of the federal government to grant parole or legal residence and work permits to a small number of refugees and other foreign nationals has been used by the Biden administration to rip a hole in America’s southern border in order to invite millions of foreign nationals, most of them from Latin America and Central America and the Caribbean, to travel to the U.S. border, from which they are dispersed across the country and supported chiefly by state and local governments and government-funded NGOs. ...

Biden’s radical immigration policy represents not only a policy revolution but also a political revolution. ...

But the Democratic Party abruptly changed its immigration policy when its leaders began to hope that they could import voters from other countries to compensate for the loss of voters that Democratic policies were alienating. ...

To compensate for massive population losses caused by the flight of U.S.-born residents to other states, California is highly dependent on international migration. In 2022, the foreign-born share (27%) of California’s population was higher than that of any other state and twice the share of the U.S. as a whole. The foreign-born make up roughly a third of the population in San Francisco and Los Angeles counties. Nearly half (46%) of California’s children have at least one foreign-born parent. In 2019, 22% of the foreign-born residents in California were illegal immigrants, and in 2021 only 55% were naturalized U.S. citizens. Similarly, in New York—another state with massive population losses of U.S.-born citizens—most of the population growth since 1980 has been the result of international immigration.

The Sierra Club used to be against immigration as being bad for the environment, but a $200 million Jewish bribe induced them to reverse policy, about 20 years ago.

Wednesday, February 07, 2024

Impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas Failed

ABC News reports:
The U.S. House has opened debate ready to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas Tuesday over border security, ...

Republicans in the House argue that Mayorkas has “refused to comply” with immigration laws, resulting in the record surge of immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and has “breached the public trust” by his actions and comments.

He is ignoring the law, and allowing a foreign invasion.

His excuse is that he is following administration policy. He survived by one vote yesterday. They do not want to impeach Biden, because the VP is even more incompetent.

Let us review who runs the USA:

President Joe Biden, kids married Jews, VP Kamala Harris, Jamaican-Hindoo, married to Jew, Sec. of State Anthony Blinken, Jew, Sec. of Treasury Janet Yellen, Jew, Sec. of Defense Lloyd Austin, Black, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Jew, Sec. of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, Jew, Dir. of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Jew, Chainman of Council of Economic Advisors Jared Bernstein, Jew, Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, Jew, Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, Jew.

All of the important departments are controlled by Jews. Except maybe Defense, but Austin was recently hospitalized and no one noticed, so he may be just a figurehead.

Not all Jews are anti-American Leftists, of course, but polls consistently show that the big majority of them favor importing millions of non-white non-christians to replace Americans.

Biden now complains that all the Republicans are against a "bipartisan bill" to legalize most of the illegal migrants. Of course they are against it. It is a betrayal of America.

Tuesday, February 06, 2024

Ex-wife forced son to gender transition

NY Post reports:
A New York man says his ex-wife forced their young son to transition from a boy to a girl during their divorce — despite his protests that his son never wanted to be a girl in the first place.

Dennis Hannon, a 32-year-old former banking vice president from Buffalo who now works as a software engineer, told The Post on Sunday he was engaged in a lengthy, seven-year legal battle that ended with him losing authority over his son’s medical care.

He says the fight began when his ex-wife, Amy Hannon, began pushing his son to transition at the age of 3 by dressing him in girls’ clothes.

But she hid it from him, and whenever he’d pick his son up during visitation periods, he remained a little boy.

Father custody of children would solve this problem. Our courts are backwards.

Monday, February 05, 2024

Psychotherapists Lie about Trans Outcomes

Here is more evidence that psychotherapists are evil.

A NY Times op-ed reports:

After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.

The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.

Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive.

Why would any therapist say anything so outrageous? The evidence is that trans-affirming therapies lead to more suicides, not less.

Rebutting other lies, Quillette reports There’s No ‘Epidemic’ of Anti-Transgender Violence.

This is not just an isolated example of a therapist giving wacky advice. This is mainstream practice. The psychotherapy professional associations consider it unethical to say anything else. I recommend staying away from anyone even belonging to one of those associations.