Professor Dave Joins the Trans Cult

Professor Dave has a popular science channel, here is his latest video:

So you see, getting back to the outrage-inducing 6:12 essay, anyone who was upset by the sentence “a woman is whoever she says she is”, indeed does not 6:18 understand language. Admittedly, it’s not the best wording. A woman isn’t Abraham Lincoln because she 6:24 says she is. Perhaps a more accurate way to put it would be to say that “woman” refers to whoever we 6:30 say it refers to. And we decided that it refers to adult individuals of female gender identity, 6:36 which includes trans women in addition to cis women.

No, he is wrong. Sex means biological sex. Gender is a linguistic term that is sometimes used interchangeably with sex, but is sometimes used for language terms like pronouns.

Trump's executive order covers this, and uses definitions consistent with modern biology and centuries of use.

Sex is binary, immutable, and determined by the SRY gene. Trans people sometimes claim gender identities different from their sex.

I say this because Professor Dave denies that anyone uses these definitions. I don't know how he can be so silly, as it appears to me that 90% of the public and 90% of scientists use these definitions.

Professor Dave is also a Trump-hater, so it is fair to assume that he is driven by ideology on this issue.

Update: I listened to some more of this creep. He later rants about "Christo-Fascism" by Trump to replace govt web site terms like "pregnant people".

He then says he is on the right side of history, by siding with an LGBTQ rise to power.

The Advancement of Human Flourishing

Steven Pinker argued about the cause of human progress:

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. The book argued that humans have clawed increments of progress out of an indifferent universe only through the development of refined tools of reason, of institutions like science that incentivize the struggle towards truth, and of a moral commitment to enhancing human flourishing as the ultimate good (rather than religious dogma, national glory, and other distractions). The “Now” in the title emphasized that progress can continue only if we redouble our commitment to these fragile ideals against the constant drag of authoritarianism, tribalism, superstition, and zero-sum thinking that are legacies of human nature.

Pinker has a lot of sensible views, but he is a Jewish Atheist, and does not want to credit Christianity.

Peter Frost responds:

Steven Pinker argues that we humans have advanced by refining our capacity for reason, by building institutions that incentivize the struggle for truth, and by becoming morally committed toward "human flourishing as the ultimate good (rather than religious dogma, national glory, and other distractions)."

First, let's be precise in our language. By "humans," we don’t mean all humans or even a majority of them. We mean Western Europeans and a trajectory of cultural evolution that began among them and spread to the rest of the world. This spread was not a passive diffusion of Great Ideas. Western Europeans literally took over the world and still dominate it economically and politically.

Second, we now have good evidence that this trajectory of cultural evolution acted as a template for genetic evolution. Humans adapt to their cultural environment just as they adapt to their natural environment. ...

Suffice it to say that progress has not been confined to the realms of culture, ideas, and politics. It has also affected flesh-and-blood humans.

One story is that in the European Enslightenment of about 1700 AD, intellectuals rejected religion and adopted science, leading to an explosion of human progress.

Another story says that about a millennium earlier, the Catholic embarked on a eugenic program for the White race to evolve into a superior race. White Europeans evolved genes for cooperation and collective intelligence. They then built universities, invented technologies, advanced math and science, created great art, music, and literature, and did everything else to make Christendom the greatest civilization ever, by far. By the XX century, the center of these activities moved to the USA.

You will probably say that the latter theory is racist and ridiculous, but there is a lot of evidence for it. Most intellectuals did not reject religion during the Enlightenment, and did not until about 50 years ago. The creation of universities and market economies happened many centuries earlier.

It has been argued that the Church policies only accidentally improved humans but Frost writes:

Did the Church have that goal in mind? Early Christians certainly understood that some lifestyles are more procreative than others. They also had a basic understanding of population genetics: 1) humans inherit not only physical traits but also mental and behavioral ones; 2) such traits vary not only among individuals but also among populations; and 3) selection for certain mental and behavioral traits will, over successive generations, change the moral character of a population.

These principles of genetics were set forth by Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–253 CE), a theologian who wrote over two thousand treatises on many subjects. Of course, the term “genetics” did not yet exist. He spoke instead of logoi spermatikoi – “the organizing principles of the seed.” As he explained it, “the seed of someone has within itself – still immobile and placed in reserve – the procreator’s organizing principles” (Origen, Commentary on the Gospel of John, XX, 3).

This is surprising. That understanding of population genetics is lacking in most educated people today. If more people believed it, then our immigration policy would favor those with the genetics for desirable physical, mental, and behavioral traits. Yes, immigration is changing the moral character of the American population.

Some might still argue that it is desirable to import people who are suited for particular types of labor. That was the rationale behind he slave trade of the 1700s, and today for importing Mexican farmworkers, Indian programmers, and Dominican baseball players. Even if that is true, we need an analysis of the long-term population genetics implications.

The Greatest Human Accomplishments

Prof. Ricardo Duchesne made a list, with the assistance of Grok3:

I. 100% of the Greatest Modern Inventions

II. Almost all the Greatest Classical Composers

III. All the Greatest Astronauts

IV. Almost all the Greatest Sculptors

V. The 5 Biggest Ideas in Science

VI. Almost all the Greatest Historians

VII. About 95% of the Greatest Explorers

VIII. Most of the Greatest Mathematicians

IX. Europeans Invented All Literary Devices

X. 66 oldest universities in the world were founded in Europe

XI. Europeans, with the exception of one Chinese, invented all the

XII. Whites invented close to 100% of the sports/athletic competitions

XIII. 43 of the 50 greatest technological breakthroughs in history

XIV. Europeans Named the Continents

XV. Almost all the top groundbreaking medical advances

XVI. All the Greatest Theater Playwrights

XVII. White Men Engineered and Designed the Best Airplanes

XXVIII. 100% of Inventions between mid-1700s and 1860s

XIX. The 50 Greatest Philosophers

XX. All 21 Greatest Books on Science Except 1

XXI. Almost 100% of the Greatest Architects are European Men

XXII. 18.5 of the Greatest 22 Modern Logicians are European with 3.5 Jews

XXIII. Almost all the Greatest Adventure Stories

XXIV. 100% of the Greatest Physicists of the 19th century

XXV. Whites invented all the home appliances

XXVI. Almost all the greatest Political Theorists

XXVII. Most Decisive and Tactical Battles in History

XXVIII. 100% of Inventions between mid-1700s and 1860s

XXIX. Almost all the Greatest Painters

XXX. Designed all the Most Beautiful Cars

XXXI. The Greatest Mountaineers

XXXII. Founders of all the Disciplinary Fields of Knowledge

XXXIII. Key scientists involved in DNA, the genetic code,

XXXIV. ALL the Greatest-Original Children Stories

XXXV. Identified the Cosmological and Geologic Time Periods.

XXXVI. Invented all the extreme sports

I would quibble with some of the details, but it is nearly all attributable to Western Civilization. That is, White Christendom. A few things were invented in India or China, but not much.

Pushing for a George Floyd Pardon

The Daily Wire has taken up the cause of exonerating the cops who were convicted for the death fo George FLoyd, with videos from Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh.

George Floyd was a case of mass hysteria. He was a low-life criminal and drug addict who died of a drug overdose while resisting arrest. The cops called an ambulance and tried to accommodate his demands. They followed accepted procedures. The ambulance was late and he died under police restraint.

After a video was released, the whole world went nuts with how this proved systemic racism and the need for black lives matter. Many cities had race riots. Most USA big corporations stopped hiring White folks. Joe Biden was elected President, as the choice of Black leaders.

All of this was completely crazy. There was no proof that the cops harmed Floyd, and no evidence at all of any racial motive. Even if the cops had a deficient medical awareness, or whatever they were accused of, that would do nothing to justify all the racial retaliation that took place.

The most damning part of the case against the cops was the video showing Derek Chauvin with what appeared to be his knee on the back of Floyd's neck, and a passerby yelling that he was killing Floyd. At trial, the prosecution expert testified that Floyd was indeed dying at that time. The implication was that Floyd might have lived if Chauvin listened to the bystander, and backed off.

But no one testified to that, and it seems unlikely. The autopsy showed that Floyd had a lethal dose of illegal drugs. He complained that he could not breathe, but he was complaining of that before the cops even touched him. They had already called the ambulance because he was in severe medical distress.

If the cops wanted to kill Floyd, they would not have called the ambulance, and would not have done it in front of spectators with video cameras. At worst, the cops made a medical misjudgment, but it is not clear that they could have done anything to keep Floyd alive.

A pardon would not solve much, as the cops were convicted on state and federal changes. That alone should convince you that they were railroaded, as it is extremely rare, and arguably unconstitutional, to be charged in state and federal court for the same offense.

Imprisoning these cops is about on the level of buring the Salem witches. It is just madness.

Apply the Free Market to Citizenship

From an online argument about deporting a pro-terrorist alien:

Why must citizenship in the United States be a limited resource? We have a much lower population density than many other advanced economies, e.g. Japan and South Korea. And if were genuinely to start to get too many people, the supply vs demand problem should take care of itself. Surely citizenship is not the one domain where free market principles should be ignored?

My own feeling is that all states have a moral obligation to offer citizenship on an equal basis to all comers (at least those willing to make some minimal demonstration of loyalty) regardless of background or where they happen to be born, and that these should be treated no differently than any other citizen. Anything less is unacceptably illiberal.

There are many things wrong with this. Japan and South Korea are overcrowded countries, and not self-sufficient.

If you want to apply free market principles to citizenship, then sell it for $5 million per person. Americans do not want more immigrants, and are burdened by them. Immigrants profit by coming to the USA. Market principles would say that the immigrants should pay the citizens enough money to be willing to accept them. Those principles certainly do not say to give away a resource for free until it is worthless.

States have moral obligations to their own citizens, and not to foreigners. To say foreigners should have the same rights as citizens is leftist madness. If the USA pursued the suggested policy, it would become a dumping ground for countries with out-of-control population growth. As it becomes more like India and Nigeria, fewer people would want to come. No, that is not a sensible market solution to excess immigration.

Princeton's Endowment might be Taxed More

The Princeton U. magazine for alumni reports:

It sounds preposterous.

President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 warned in his annual State of the University letter in January that absent additional fundraising and income from investments, if Princeton University keeps spending 5% or more each year from its $34.1 billion endowment — which is its customary practice — it “will be gone in 20 years or less.”

Unless the world turns upside down, that is not actually going to happen. Princeton will keep fundraising and the endowment should keep producing returns, if not at the almost 10% a year rate of the past two decades. At the same time, the University will keep tapping the endowment, as it did this fiscal year for $1.7 billion as part of its $3.1 billion operating budget, which covers everything from student aid and faculty salaries to opening new labs and mowing the lawns.

It goes on to say that PU pays 1.4% tax on its investment earnings, and warns ominously that the rate could go up. One proposal is to tax university endowments like corporations.

PU has an endowment of $4 million per student, and so it is earning $400,000 per student. It brags about price discrimination, as if that were a good thing.

More than 70% of the financial aid Princeton provides comes from the endowment, according to the University. While tuition this year is $62,400 and room and board $20,250 on top of that, 62% of all undergraduates and 71% of first-year students receive financial aid. Most families with incomes up to $100,000 pay nothing, which Levine says makes Princeton “one of the cheapest schools in the country.”

PU has all the diseases plaguing other American colleges. Woke policies, DEI, discriminatory admissions, leftist Trump-hating faculty, no free speech, bloated administration, etc.

How Europe Became Civilized

I mentioned the theory that Europeans advanced ahead of the rest of the world a millennium ago, based on evolving improved IQ genes. It appears that other factors were also at work.

This new podcast gives some theories of a distinguished Harvard professor:

Joseph Henrich – The Church Accidentally Triggered Industrial Revolution

Humans have not succeeded because of our raw intelligence. Marooned European explorers regularly starved to death in areas where foragers thrived for 1000s of years. I’ve always found this cultural evolution deeply mysterious. How do you discover the 10 steps for processing cassava so it won’t give you cyanide poisoning simply by trial and error? Has the human brain declined in size over the last 10,000 years because we outsourced cultural evolution to a larger collective brain? The most interesting part of the podcast is Henrich’s explanation of how the Catholic Church unintentionally instigated the Industrial Revolution through the dismantling of intensive kinship systems in medieval Europe.

His theory says that Europe developed a collective IQ that allowed great advancement on many fronts. He actually has a lot of empirical evidence for the details of his theory.

He explains:

Well, so my story is that the rise of 45:28 the Industrial Revolution in Europe has to do with the consolidation of Europe’s collective brain. And one of the things that requires is trust in strangers, 45:36 and at least the beginnings of moral universalism. And it’s that moral universalism that eventually causes the British to say, “We’ve got to stop 45:44 with the slave trade thing.” It’s a moral decision that they made because it’s no longer consistent 45:49 with the changing moral values over time. Right, right. Okay, so we’ve been dancing around the thesis of your book following The Secret, which is The Weirdest People in the World. 46:00 And before we really jump into it, maybe you can give me a summary of what the thesis there is. 

46:06 Yeah. So the first observation is that there’s a great deal of global psychological variation 46:11 around the world. So European, American, Australian populations tend to be highly 46:17 individualistic. They’re inclined towards analytic thinking over holistic thinking. They have a lot of impersonal prosociality, so trust in strangers. They’re against conformity, 46:27 willingness to cooperate with strangers. So the question is, how can we explain the global variation in these features of psychology? And towards the end of the book, 46:35 I actually connect these features of the psychology to economic differences, including the Industrial Revolution that happened in Europe, which reshapes the world. And the 46:45 story is that the key event is the spread of a particular form of Christianity into Europe, 46:51 where the Catholic Church- what becomes the Catholic Church- systematically dismantles the intensive kinship systems in Europe, leading to small monogamous nuclear families. 47:00 And this transformation leads to the creation of new institutions. So by the high Middle Ages, you get the rise of guilds, which are voluntary groups of craftsmen and self-help societies, 47:09 because people don’t have their families to rely on. People begin moving around. There’s occupational sorting into different occupations. You get urbanization rising. Charter towns are 47:19 on the rise. Universities pop up. New kinds of monasteries pop up. And then Europe begins 47:24 to urbanize, and you get new kinds of law that are based around the individual. Contract law. 47:30 And then eventually this leads to a lot more innovation because ideas are flowing around Europe and then eventually the Industrial Revolution. So that’s the argument in a nutshell. 47:38 Can you explain again what exactly the Church did which led to the kin-based existing system breaking down? Yeah. So the Church outlaws polygyny, 47:49 and so that stops elite males from having multiple wives and concubines and whatnot, and creating kind of a giant family through that. It outlaws cousin marriage going all the way out to sixth 47:59 cousins at some point, and that included spiritual kin and other kinds of non-genetic relatives as 48:06 well as the cousins. It frees up inheritance, so it has inheritance by testimony rather than normal 48:12 patrilineal inheritance. And a simple example here is in most societies, you inherit access 48:18 to land corporately, which means you and your brothers and stuff all own the land. And it might 48:24 be your uncle is actually in charge of the land, your father’s brother. And so you can’t sell it, you can’t move it around, and you’re also tied to it. It’s where your ancestors are buried, 48:32 and so there’s this big importance of land. So the Church allows people to give land to the Church, 48:37 the Church becomes the largest landowner in Europe, because you can do it by testament. 48:43 So those are just some of the examples of the ways it transforms the family structure, and eventually you get these monogamous nuclear families which are basically unheard of around the world, at 48:52 least if you look at the anthropological record. And you can really see this when you can compare, individuals can move to European cities as individuals or nuclear families. In China when 49:01 you move to the city, you maintain contacts with the folks back home in the village, and people flow back and forth and you get these little enclaves of different clans and stuff in 49:11 the cities, the connections. And this is really important because your ancestors, and there’s rituals that have to be done back in the home community. But Christianity 49:19 does away with all those ancestor rituals.

In short, his evidence is that Christianity was crucial, although perhaps not for the reasons you might guess.

The host calls it "accidental" because there is no proof that the Church had the foresight to understand the long-term implications of its policies. I would not use that term, as they were very deliberate Church that it went to a lot of trouble to enforce.

If Henrich is correct, then the Medieval Catholic Church was acting for the good of humanity in a way that no one is doing today. We do not even have the legal and political frameworks for such actions today. Anyone making such arguments would be laughed at.

These issues should get a lot more attention. If we can determine what made Western Civilization great, then we should celebrate that, and learn from it so we can make it greater.

Democrats are Obsessed with Culture War Issues

Congressman Sarah McBride, formerly Tim McBride, rants:

they are obsessed with culture War 0:52 issues. the Republican party is obsessed 0:56 with culture War issues. it is weird and 0:58 it is bizarre

The video also shows a Democrat going into a rage about how McBride was introduced, and shows McBride recited perverted trans propaganda to small children.

McBride is the weird and bizarre one here. And Democrats are the ones waging a culture war. Republicans rarely talk about trans issues, unless it is forced on them.

The MAGA War on Ukraine

Cathy Young writes:

The MAGA War on Ukraine

Why does so much of the US Right hate a country valiantly resisting a war of aggression?

The escalating tension between the Trump administration and Ukraine in recent weeks has been accompanied by an alarming surge of extreme anti-Ukraine rhetoric in pro-Trump quarters. Some of this rhetoric has even implied that Ukraine is America’s enemy.

She is a Russian Jew with her own personal hatred for Russia.

She acknowledges that Ukraine is corrupt, and the USA helped create the conflict by funding anti-Russian forces in Ukraine. She says nothing about the claim that Ukraine started the war by threatening to join NATO.

It seems to me that Ukraine and NATO-expansionists started this war, and that Ukraine cannot win. Young does not dispute this. So what is the point of continuing the war? Young does not explain.

It appears that Young and the deep state cold warriors hate Russia so much, that the Ukraine death and destruction is worth it because the war is draining Russian resources and uniting the West against Russia.

Count me out. I do not want this war against Russia.

DEI Equals White Hatred

From a NY Times op-ed:

Unfortunately, the D.E.I. policies that followed at Anheuser-Busch were none of the above. In 2021 the company started using online dashboards that gave managers a breakdown of their employee base by demographic characteristics.

Then the company created annual performance targets linked to the company’s environmental, social and governance strategy, of which D.E.I. was one component, for thousands of employees. It was clear to me that if teams didn’t check the right boxes, managers could be punished. Promotions could be withheld. Bonuses could be lost. That year, senior executives, including me, attended weekly meetings to discuss D.E.I. initiatives. These meetings often distracted from more critical business matters, like the fact that the company risked losing employees as the Great Resignation set in. (Anheuser-Busch declined to comment for this article.)

Anheuser-Busch was hardly alone. At least 70 big companies — from Airbnb to G.E. — had set public targets for gender diversity hiring. Among the worst examples of efforts to accomplish D.E.I. goals was a diversity training course offered to Coca-Cola employees via a third-party platform that urged workers to “be less white,” which the presentation helpfully defined as being “less oppressive,” “less arrogant” and “less ignorant.” A course in Kentucky reportedly told nurses that “implicit bias kills,” that white privilege is a “covert” form of racism and that nurses may contribute to “modern-day lynchings in the workplace.”

Companies, schools, and other institutions have been anti-White for decades, with peak DEI following the death of George Floyd.

Anthropic’s U.S. AI Action Plan

Anthropic is an AI leader, along with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Tesla/xAI, and Perplexity. It advocates:

As our CEO Dario Amodei writes in ‘Machines of Loving Grace’, we expect powerful AI systems will emerge in late 2026 or early 2027. Powerful AI systems will have the following properties:

• Intellectual capabilities matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners across most disciplines—including biology, computer science, mathematics, and engineering.
• The ability to navigate all interfaces available to a human doing digital work today, including the ability to process and generate text, audio, and video, the ability to autonomously control technology instruments like mice and keyboards, and the ability to access and browse the internet.
• The ability to autonomously reason through complex tasks over extended periods—hours, days, or even weeks—seeking clarification and feedback when needed, much like a highly capable employee would.
• The ability to interface with the physical world; controlling laboratory equipment, robotic systems, and manufacturing tools through digital connections.

... We believe the United States must take decisive action to maintain technological leadership.

This assumes that AI research continues to progress at its current pace. That is plausible, as AI has been progressing at a steady pace for about 15 years.

Columbia U Penalized for being Anti-Jewish

The Trump administration is penalizing Columbia U. for documented anti-Jewish conduct on campus, and Trump-haters are countering with gripes about a low-level official:

DOD deputy press secretary has history of tweets with racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories

Kingsley Wilson has pushed conspiracy theories about a Jewish lynching victim and Haitian migrants and argued against U.S. support for Israel and Ukraine. ...

Frank is widely believed to have been falsely accused and unjustly convicted. ...

A significant number of Wilson’s past posts on X peddle discredited conspiracy theories, including that Haitians living in the U.S. are “eating cats” and “dirt,” as well as the "great replacement theory," the racist belief that ethnic white groups and their culture are being “replaced” by nonwhite immigrant groups in Western countries.

On Thanksgiving in 2022, she wrote, “REMINDER: the Native Americans were anything but peaceful before the arrival of white Europeans.”

Okay, she has some opinions that differ from what is widely believed.

These are not conspiracy theories. They are just facts and opinions that she posted. She is not harassing anyone, the way that Columbia is harassing Jews.

You might think that Columbia is not at fault, because it is just allowing free speech by foreign students. But Columbia does not believe in free speech, and has, along with Harvard, the worst free speech rating of all American colleges.

It is funny to watch academic Trump-haters get histerical over this. I expect public opinion to turn against the colleges.

Woke Justice at Its Most Horrifying

Jack Cashill writes:

The 2012 arrest of George Zimmerman for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin signaled a dark turn in American history. With the tacit support of Barack Obama’s DoJ, activists now felt free to frame innocent citizens and proclaim their guilt. Mob-dictated and media-driven, woke justice would indict the not guilty, almost all of them white, in case after case for the next decade and more.

The year 2020 would see a major escalation in the woke reign of judicial terror.

He goes on to explain the Ahmaud Arbery case. Three innocent men went to prison for a long time, because they defended themselves against a Black man, and Black lives matter.

Professor only Likes One Thing about Trump

A big-shot American secular Jewish computer science professor writes:

From my perspective, Trump’s ironclad support for Israel, and his strong opposition to antisemitism in the US, is the one big issue where, by whatever accidents of history, he’s wound up mostly on the side of good.

Which (crucially) is the only reason I’m still here! If it weren’t for that one bright spot in a gigantic field of dogshit, I would’ve probably already fled the US with my family, rather than staying here to protest all the other stuff.

He complains about Trump wanting peace in Ukraine, and cutting overhead in academic research grants. But it is appears that his main concerns are Jewish leftist ideology and what is good for Jews in Israel, not what is good for America.

British Broke Their Own Economy

News:

What’s the matter with the United Kingdom? Great Britain is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, which ushered in an era of energy super-production and launched an epoch of productivity advancements that made many life essentials, such as clothes and food, more affordable. Today, the country suffers from the converse of these achievements: a profound energy shortage and a deep affordability crisis. In February, the Bank of England reported an ongoing productivity slump so mysterious that its own economists “cannot account fully” for it. Real wages have barely grown for 16 years. British politics seems stuck in a cycle of disappointment followed by dramatic promises of growth, followed by yet more disappointment.

France and Germany are also declining.

Britain voted for Brexit to leave the EU and gain more national autonomy. They got the opposite, as the supposed Conservative government opened the border for massive immigration. That made housing scarce, and a lot of other problems.

Britain is officially a Christian nation. It would be entirely legal and proper for it to limit immigration to Christians who are genetically similar to historical British citizens. Instead London has been repopulated by Pakistanis and others. Now their Prime Minister gives a speech on how they are willing to send troops into Ukraine. It is baffling how Britain will fight for losers 1000 miles away, but will not fight for themselves.

German Women Go Leftist

News:

The gender gap continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung very sharply left… young women’s AfD vote is significantly lower than average (14 vs 21), and leftwing vote far higher (34 vs 9). The overall story is of young Germans rejecting the established centre-right and centre-left, but while young men are shifting to both populist flanks, young women are shifting overwhelmingly to the populist left.

This is part of female nature. Women are just more likely to go along with groupthink. Men are more likely to think for themselves.

The NY Times has an article on “In an Age of Right-Wing Populism, Why Are Denmark’s Liberals Winning?”. The prime minister is a women, and considered a leftist, but she is against immigration by Moslems and others much different from Danes. That is why she is winning.

Lawsuit over Hockey Stick Graph finally Finishes

Some litigation started in 2012 over a comment"

Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in service of politicized science that could have dire consequences for the nation and planet.

I would have said that this is obviously not legally actionable, but after 12+ years in the courts, Mann can now collect $1 in actual damages and $5000 in punitive damages.

The core of the dispute was about Mann putting two types of data together on one graph, and presenting it as alarming. The connection to Sandusky was that both were affiliated with Penn State University.

I have posted here the opinion that Sandusky never molested anyone, and that Penn State was blameless in the matter. But whether that is true or not, I thought that it was legal to make a colorful analogy.

Truth-seeking is Residential School Denialism

The biggest story in the world several years ago was about how Canadian Christian schools were killing and burying Indian children. Even the Pope went to Canada to apologize. Many churches were burned down by arsonists.

It was all a hoax. No bodies were ever found in any grave.

The Canada National Post reports:

Just as the federal government suspends funding to a body designed to exhume residential school burials, a B.C. politician is being pilloried for saying that the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School contains “zero” confirmed children’s graves.

“The number of confirmed child burials at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site is zero,” wrote B.C. Conservative MLA Dallas Brodie in a Saturday post to X. ...

B.C. Indigenous Relations Minister Christine Boyle slammed Brodie’s post by saying there is “no place in B.C. for residential school denialism.” “This type of ‘truth-seeking’ rhetoric is nothing more than a smokescreen for anti-Indigenous racism,” said Stewart Phillip, grand chief of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, in a Monday statement.

But on the specific issue of confirmed graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School, Brodie and Heller are correct. Although many children died at the school, no children’s graves have been exhumed or confirmed on the former site. This includes the 215 suspected graves turned up in a May 2021 ground-penetrating radar scan commissioned by Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc, the First Nation whose land contains the former school.

This is just crazy anti-White, anti-Christian, anti-Canada propaganda. The entire press used this hoax to try to make Christian schools look bad, when the schools were performing a valuable public service.

Here is a Quillette essay on the hoax. It is astounding how the news media and elites accept this nonsense, without any proof, and just some unverified radar evidence.

European IQ Gains and Industrialization

Economic historian Gregory Clark proposes this theory:

An actual genetic change in British peoples’ cognitive traits occurred which led to British people leaping ahead economically

This genetic change was common around northern Europe

The change in the status-fertility correlation in the 19th/early 20th century caused underperformance of British economic outcomes

There are other theories for British success.

The above article claims that the genetic data does not explain large enough IQ increases to explain the huge British advances.

This does not settle the matter. I have posted other theories. Maybe there are other IQ genes. Maybe the IQ of the elites went up more than the overall average. Maybe IQ was one of several contributing factors.

My suspicion is that genes for civilized behavior were crucial. Possibly also genes made Europeans more amenable to Christianity.

For current info on IQ, see this book review:

The Science of Human Intelligence (hereinafter SHI) is the most comprehensive and up-to-date textbook on human intelligence now available. It is lavishly and usefully illustrated, and includes hundreds of full references to the original research on all key concepts. It is a serious book for serious students, but has been carefully edited to be fully accessible to non-specialists.

The lead author, Richard J. Haier, is one of the world’s top experts on the neuroscience of intelligence, and asks all the right questions: Is IQ real? Can it be increased? Are there different kinds of intelligence? How does the brain work? Which is more important: nature or nurture? Are all groups equal? Perhaps inevitably, the section on race is incomplete, sometimes timid, and includes a shocking error, but it clearly recognizes that race differences in IQ could have genetic causes.

Yes, NATO has Attacked Nations

NPR interview:

John Bolton discusses the implications of a tense Trump-Zelenskyy press conference ...

SIMON: What about the Russian argument that the U.S. wouldn't accept a hostile power on their border - they shouldn't have to either?

BOLTON: You know, it's not a hostile power on their border. Ukraine didn't attack Russia. It simply expressed the desire to be free and independent. That ought to resonate with Americans, you know?

SIMON: Well, an adversarial power that's well-armed. Let's put it that way.

BOLTON: So is Finland. So are most of the powers that border Russia based on their historical experience of being oppressed by Russia in - during the Cold War period after 1945. Let's be clear - the NATO alliance has never attacked anybody.

He said NATO never attacked anybody!

NATO invaded Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, and Libya in 2011. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has aggressively expanded its power and influence, and become the world's biggest empire.

The Deep State is overrun with Russia-haters who have revived the Cold War.

Ukraine did not express the desire to be free and independent. It could have had a favorable peace deal, if it remained an independent neutral country. But no, it insisted on being able to join NATO and to put NATO bases on the Russian border.

Maybe you will say that those NATO invasions are excusable because those nations deserved to be invaded. Maybe so, but Russia deserves to be invaded more than those nations, so it has a justifiable fear of military action.

Five Million Buys a Citizenship Gold Card

US News magazine reports:

Trump said the gold card would cost “about $5 million,” provide a “route to citizenship” and could be available in two weeks. ... The gold card would replace the existing EB-5 visa program, which allows foreign investors to obtain green cards by making job-creating investments in the country. Lutnick criticized the EB-5 program as being “full of nonsense, make-believe, and fraud,” stating that it provided an easy pathway to residency for foreign investors at a “low price.”

Libertarians should be favoring this, instead of open borders. An immigrant visa is very valuable to the recipient. Most Americans want reduced immigrants, so there preferences suffer a loss when immigrants arrive. The free-market solution is to sell the visas at a price acceptable to compensate Americans for the losses.

Germany Election has Strong Right-wing Showing

Germany just had a election, and the Jews are panicking that the right-wing AfD party got 20% of the vote. They call the AfD nazis, and urge that they be blackballed, in the name of democracy.

But the AfD is pro-Jewish, and it is the Left party that wants to prosecute the Israel prime minister.

I don't think the voters cared about Jewish issues, one way or the other. The real issue is immigration. The right-wing wants to keep Germany German. The Left wants more immigration.

Book on Covering Up Biden's Decline

CNN reports:

The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson decided to co-author a book about what had led the Democratic party to defeat, with a focus on former President Joe Biden.

The deeply sourced reporters found what they call a “cover-up” of the former president’s “serious decline.”

The resulting book, titled “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” is coming out on May 20.

The book’s publisher, Penguin Press, announced the project on Wednesday.

“What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless — a desperate bet that went bust — and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents,” Penguin said in a press release.

This is like saying my pit bull made a disastrous decision to roam the street.

Pres. Biden was just a Biden. There is no proof that he ever made any decisions by himself.

Everyone knew in 2020 that Biden was not very smart, and in 2023 that his mental abilities were in serious decline. Maybe CNN and the Democrat Party tried to cover it up, but it was well-reported in the right-wing press.

Just because Biden ran again, the Democrats did not have to support him. They could have had contested primaries.

Finally, the real disaster was running Kamala Harris. However incompetent and ill-suited Biden was, Harris was worse. And yet most of the news media, intellectuals, hollywood, and power elites endorsed her as if she were fit to be President.

She Is in Love With ChatGPT

podcast on a woman in love with a chatbot.

This is indeed a new trend, but maybe the NY Times should have talked to more than one user. The article says that the AI boyfriend is always accommodating and emphatic, and not like any real-life boyfriend who would be more challenging.

In fact these things are configurable, and you can set it up any way you want. If you want, you can have an AI boyfriend or girlfriend who is as challenging as you want. You can get one that is stubborn and disagreeable, if you want.

The story laments that teenagers might learn to flirt with the opposite sex with AI chatbots.

Yes, that is likely, and is a positive development. Trends are that teenagers and young adults are dating much less than before, and lack dating skills. These chatbots are really good, and amazingly realistic They have inherent limitations, but there is no better way for young people to learn to flirt.

African Origins of Human DNA

Spencer J. Quinn writes:

What makes these recent discoveries of archaic human introgression so remarkable, however, is that they provide a reason for sub-Saharan African inferiority. Previously, the best all our neuroscientific and psychometric data could tell us was that they were inferior, but not why. Now we know why. 19 percent of black African DNA tells us they interbred at a greater rate with more primitive subspecies of archaic humans than did those Homo sapiens who left Africa.

I am ntot sure racial differences can really be attributed to genetics of 100,000+ years ago, but it is an interesting theory.

The Jewish Vote in 2024

I have to read the Jewish press to learn what the Jews are up to.

Jewish Commentary magazine reports:

A survey commissioned by the Jewish Electorate Institute, an organization led by prominent Jewish Democrats, found that 34 percent of Jewish respondents agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States.” The division within the Jewish community is particularly sharp among younger Jews, where the survey found that 38 percent of those under 40 believe that Israel is an apartheid state. ...

And where the Jews go, so too go the Democrats. ...

Before jumping into the data, it’s also worth asking why anyone even cares about the Jewish vote, given that American Jews number less than 2.5 percent of the total population. To be sure, Jews vote in much greater percentages (approximately 80 percent) than the rest of the American public (about 66 percent). But the Jewish role in American politics goes well beyond the ballot box. In 2016, the Jerusalem Post reported on a study showing that Jews donate 50 percent of all funding to the Democratic Party and 25 percent of all funding to the Republican Party. This past year, in a truly astounding statistic, Forbes revealed that the top 15 donors to the Kamala Harris campaign were all people who identified as Jewish. ...

Fox News and the Associated Press then published their own exit polling results, which found that 66 percent of Jews voted for Harris and 32 percent voted for Trump. ...

While the data from the recent election show a move to the right by Jewish voters, it was not nearly as significant a shift as many Republicans had hoped for, given the prevailing political winds post–October 7. ...

As the rest of the traditional Democratic coalition has been heading for the exits, American Jews have been remarkably resolute in their embrace of the Democratic Party. Over the last half century, going back to the 1968 election, Jews have favored the Democratic candidate by about 71–29 percent. ...

More than 85 percent of American Jews (who are neither ultra-Orthodox nor Modern Orthodox) are solidly in the liberal camp and show little sign of abandoning the Democratic Party. ...

It is only in the ultra-Orthodox communities that Jews voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

It is hard to say that Jewish support for Democrats is religious, when the most religious Jews vote Republican. But it is not coincidence that the seculoar Jews support Democrats. Obviously even the secular Jews have a belief system, whether you call it religion or not, that ties them to Leftism and the Democrat Party.

If you want to know what Judaism is all about, you can read the Torah or listen to rabbis. Or you can look at what the members believe in. Apparently the orthodox ones believe in Israel and Trump, while the other ones are leftist Trump-haters, and are responsible for much of the craziness of the Democrat Party. They brought us DEI, illegal aliens, LBGTQ+ politics, etc.

Likewise, you might say that the Episcopal Church believes in the Gospels, but it has specialized in LGBTQ+ inclusion. It has become anti-white, anti-straight, anti-male, anti-cisgender, and anti-Trump, because that is who its members have become.

Update: From another Jewish site:

A group of 70 rabbis, clergy and liberal Jewish groups are calling on New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul to resist President Donald Trump’s mass deportation orders, drawing a parallel to the biblical story of King Pharaoh’s decree to kill Hebrew boys in ancient Egypt.

“We read in the Book of Exodus of how a new Pharaoh arose over Egypt who scapegoated and marginalized the Israelites, spinning a narrative that they were a threat and needed to be suppressed and ultimately enslaved,” the 70 rabbis wrote in a letter addressing New York governmental leaders. The group compared themselves to the Egyptian midwives who refused to comply with Pharaoh’s decree.

In Exodus, the Israelites end up with a plan to murder the Egyptian children. We have a lot of historical evidence for Egypt, but none for these Exodus stories.

There are other religions that also support this invasion of illegal aliens. Not just Jews. The Catholic bishops are suing for more refugee resettlement money.

Trump wants to End the Ukraine War

Francis Fukuyama writes:

Even though anyone with eyes could see this coming, Donald Trump’s recent moves with regard to Ukraine and Russia come as a huge blow. We are in the midst of a global fight between Western liberal democracy and authoritarian government, and in this fight, the United States has just switched sides and signed up with the authoritarian camp.

What Trump has said over the past few days about Ukraine and Russia defies belief. He has accused Ukraine of having started the war

We have been fighting on the wrong side. Ukraine is the authoritarian and corrupt government.

Yes, Ukraine started the war, and Zelendsky is a monster. We need to stop supporting him.

Jewish Man in Marriage Therapy

The NY Times is good for Jewish versions of the news, Trump Derangement Syndrome, and insights into Jewish life. Here is a Sunday magazine article

How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me

It took a superstar couples therapist to help me see beyond my anger.

By Daniel Oppenheimer

One thing I’ve learned from being married to my wife, Jess, who is a couples therapist, is how vast the distance is between the masks people show to the world and the messy realities that live behind them. Every couple knows its own drama, but we still fall prey to the illusion that all other couples have seamlessly satisfying relationships. The truth about marriage — including my own — is that even the most functional couples are merely doing the best they can with the lives that have been bestowed on them.

This past spring, Jess and I had the first of eight sessions of couples therapy with Terry Real, a best-selling author and by far the most famous of the therapists we’ve seen during our marriage. ...

This is what we signed up for. Real, whose admirers include Gwyneth Paltrow and Bruce Springsteen, is one of a small number of thinkers who are actively shaping how the couples-therapy field is received by the public and practiced by other therapists. He is also the bluntest and most charismatic of the therapists I’ve seen, the New Jersey Jewish version of Robin Williams’s irascible Boston character in “Good Will Hunting” — profane, charismatic, open about his own life, forged in his own story of pain.

The author is presumably Jewish, along with his couples therapist wife, and the various other psycho therapists they see.

I could not stand to read this. It is too pathetic. I do not want to repeat Jewish stereotypes, but it is hard to believe anyone lives like this.

It’s the last of our eight sessions, and I’m talking to my “inner child.” I remember, under Real’s guidance, closing my eyes and bringing him up out of my memory so that we could talk. He was 6 or 7, a bit chubby, wearing clunky eyeglasses and shorts pulled up too high above his waist. He’s a composite, I realize now, of details of me at my most awkward self across the ages.

I find this session the hardest of all of them to watch. What we talk about is intensely vulnerable, but that’s not the most difficult part. Nor is it imagining the silent audience evaluating me. It’s that I’m too sealed off from it, then and now. I couldn’t — can’t — feel it in the way I so urgently want to.

When therapy is dramatized on TV or in the movies, there’s a classic scene where the deep childhood trauma is finally exposed. “It’s not your fault,” Robin Williams says to Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting,” referring to the gruesome abuse Damon’s character suffered in foster care. ...

Daniel Oppenheimer is the author of “Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art.” He is currently working on a book about relationships and couples therapy with his wife, who is a couples therapist. They live in Austin, Texas.

They cannot manage their own lives, but they are writing a book on how other couples can blame the husband and the husband can blame his inner child.

Much of psycho therapy is controlled or influenced by Jews, but I read this:

After October 7, 2023, the Jewish Therapist Collective received a sharp increase in calls from Jewish therapists saying, as shared by the collective's director Halina Brooke, that they were "sidelined or fired from their mental health workplaces due to being Jewish." Jewish therapy trainees, according to Brooke, were "told that their presence is triggering to non-Jewish therapists."

Likewise, Chicago-based psychologist Allison Resnick wrote in Kesher, the journal of the Association of Jewish Psychologists, that she routinely reads about "therapists being told to conceal their Jewishness for fear of offending colleagues and clients."

Here is a comment, from a NY Times reader:

@Tim Thank you for sharing. I also think you have illustrated the widening gap between Millennial women and men, at least in my own social circle. My female friends and I read self-help books, go to therapy and even talk about how we can break the patterns of our parents through personal enlightenment and self-improvement…whereas the men in our lives are staunchly against the idea, at most willing to placate us women by providing lip service in a passive, surface-y couples therapy session or two.

It’s creating a widening gap between the genders and, in my view, resulting in ever increasing misunderstandings and resentment. I’m hoping that articles like this (thank you Oppenheimer!) and guys like Real can de-stigmatize this emotional work for the men that we love and desire a healthy connection with.

We are getting a generation of infantilized and therapized women who will never have a healthy connection with anyone.

Claiming Vanilla is Not a Flavor

I got this AI explanation:

The claim that "vanilla is not a flavor" among some racists or those with racially biased views often stems from a derogatory use of the word "vanilla" to denote something or someone as plain, boring, or lacking in diversity or complexity. This usage is rooted in cultural and racial stereotypes where:

Vanilla as "Plain": Vanilla, in this context, is used metaphorically to refer to white or Caucasian people, suggesting they are culturally or inherently uninteresting compared to other racial or ethnic groups, which might be described with more "exotic" or "rich" flavors (like chocolate, which has sometimes been used to refer to people of color). This is a gross oversimplification and misrepresentation both of vanilla as a flavor and of human diversity.

Denial of Complexity: By saying vanilla isn't a flavor, there's an attempt to deny the complexity of vanilla itself. Vanilla is one of the most complex flavors in culinary use, with hundreds of flavor compounds, but this complexity is often ignored to fit the narrative that "vanilla" (and by extension, what it's used to represent) is simple or uninteresting.

Cultural Superiority: This statement can also reflect an underlying belief in the cultural superiority of one group over another, where the "vanilla" culture is seen as less valuable or less worthy of respect. This is part of broader racist ideologies where one's own culture or race is elevated at the expense of others.

Racial Identity and Flavor: The use of food metaphors in racial discourse often serves to belittle or mock other racial identities by associating them with flavors considered inferior or less desirable. This is not unique to vanilla but reflects how food can be weaponized in racial rhetoric.

It's important to recognize that these assertions are rooted in prejudice and misunderstanding:

Vanilla as a Flavor: Vanilla is indeed a flavor, derived from the vanilla bean, and it's one of the most widely used flavors in the world, not for its simplicity but for its ability to enhance other flavors.

Cultural Misappropriation: The use of "vanilla" in this manner is a form of cultural misappropriation, reducing vast and varied cultural heritages to simplistic, often negative stereotypes.

Racist Tropes: This kind of rhetoric is indicative of deeper racist tropes that seek to diminish or demean those who are different, often by using innocuous terms like food flavors in a derogatory way.

In summary, the claim that "vanilla is not a flavor" when used in racist discourse is a misguided and harmful attempt at denigration, ignoring both the literal and metaphorical richness of vanilla and the cultural diversity it represents.

Movement to Destroy American Democracy

New podcast:

Sam Harris speaks with Katherine Stewart about her new book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. They discuss Project 2025, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, whether the backlash against wokeness has been overblown, the asymmetric standards between right-wing and left-wing media, Trump’s appeal to evangelicals, wealth inequality, political ideology in public schools, and other topics.

She admits that the Left pushes some extremely divisive issues, but somehow blames the Right.

26:35 in order to divide you know some of these ideas are incredibly divisive and um and one of the things 26:42 that this does is sort of um makes people think well well the like the 26:49 moderate liberal you know Progressive left they sort of throw all of it into 26:54 that sort of woke communist bucket which is ridiculous I mean the people who are talking about these issues constantly 27:01 are people on the right you know I was recently at America Fest it's an annual Gathering held by turning point USA it 27:10 took place in Phoenix Arizona there were 20,000 sort of Hardcore MAGA every 27:15 single speaker had to talk about transgender women in sports this is like 27:22 you're right they're making a boogeyman out of this issue

I agree that transgenderism should not be a big issue, but the Left has made it so. It was one of Kamala Harris's top issues in running for President in the recent election. Republicans hardly ever talked about it, until the Dems and Transgender advocates forced it into everyone's face.

Likewise for a range of other identity politics issues. Republicans ignored them until airplanes started dropping out of the skies. Colleges stopped admitting and hiring based on merit, and so did many others. The peak DEI craziness was the aftermath of the overdose death of George Floyd, a low-level criminal.

At some point, people said enough is enough. If we are not going to stand up for little boys being castrated by woke crazies, then for whom?

Game Theory of Marriage Decline

An essay on the game theory of marriage decline:

But unilateral divorce doesn’t just destabilize marriage. It also changes the power dynamics within marriage from favoring the more committed partner to favouring the less committed partner. ...

Unilateral divorce is sometimes portrayed as an advance in human freedom, but this is a mistake. By removing the ability to credibly commit to a long-term relationship, unilateral divorce prevents couples from reaching a mutually-beneficial bargain that greatly assists in the raising of children. ...

To get married is no longer such a major commitment and no longer offers the degree of security which it once did, since divorce is now relatively easy and the responsibilities and rights of the married and the unmarried are increasingly similar. These developments are often presented as an advance in human freedom since they allow individuals to exit unilaterally from unhappy relationships at minimum cost to themselves and with minimum delay. However, this is a one-sided view, since it ignores the benefits and freedoms associated with trust and security. The fact that individuals can now exit easily, and unilaterally, from a relationship makes it difficult for couples to make credible commitments to each other. They can promise anything they want, but most of these promises are no longer legally enforceable, and many are undermined by social policies which reward those who break their promises.

States have passed a lot of laws making the responsibilities and rights of the married and the unmarried are increasingly similar. I wonder if those legislators even realized they were destroying marriage.

Update: Here is a podcast discussion.

Ukraine waits for a Trump-Putin Deal

NY Post reports:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky believes his country would have a “low chance” of survival without US military aid, and insisted that he still trusts President Trump.

Zelensky, 47, also fretted that without US support, Ukraine could be vulnerable to another attack from the Russians within the next few years.

“I will never accept any decisions between the United States and Russia about Ukraine. Never. And our people, never,” Zelensky stressed. “there is no[t] any leader in the world who can really make a deal with Putin without us about us.”

What difference does it make whether Zelensky accepts it or not? He is just an evil dictator, a warmonger, and a USA puppet. Without USA aid, he is finished. Trump could make a peace deal, and Ukraine would have to accept it.

Lawsuit to Force Transgenderism on Schoolgirls

There are many lawsuits challenging Pres. Trump's orders, and here is one in NH challenging the restriction of girls's sports to girls.

The plaintiffs are two boys, neutered by drugs:

Plaintiffs Parker Tirrell and Iris Turmelle are transgender teenage girls attending New Hampshire public high schools. Each knew from an early age that she was a girl.

No, that is impossible.

35. In medicine, “gender identity” is the term for a person’s internal, innate sense of belonging to a particular sex.1

No, there is no such medical term. It cites a source in a footnote, but that does not say that the sense is innate.

37. A person’s gender identity is innate and cannot be changed by medical or psychological intervention.

There is no evidence that gender identity is innate. Sex is innate, and gender identity is nearly always the same, so you could say that is innate. But the transgender identities are not innate.

41. When transgender children and adolescents are provided with appropriate treatment, they will thrive and grow into healthy adults like any other child and adolescent.

No, these plaintiffs are not going to grow into healthy adults.

45. Before puberty, there are no significant differences in athletic performance between boys and girls arising from any biological or physiological bases.

Soccer teams are 8-year-olds often have separate girls teams. That is because there are athletic differences at that age.

The complaint is about a law saying girls sports are for girls.

HB 1205 as it applies to Plaintiff Parker Tirrell cannot survive rational basis review either, because it lacks any rational basis, rests on stereotypes and misconceptions, and undermines rather than advances any alleged purpose.

The rational basis is that girls are able to better get the benefits of sports when they compete with other girls.

These lawsuits attempt to use sex discrimination lawsuits to complain that boys are not allowed to play on girls teams. Yes, girls sports are literally sex discriminatory in that sense.

The lawsuits do not attempt to end discrimination. They seek to continue to discriminate against cis-gender boys, and to give preference to the boys with the non-gender-conforming upbringing.

This really sick. These parents are mutilating their kids, and forcing their perversions on everyone else.

Update: For explanations of why sex is binary in mammals and most other animals, see here and here.

Professor Upset by Students with Opinions

Computer Science prof. Scott Aaronson endlessly complains:

I, of course, survived attempted cancellation by a large online mob a decade ago, led by well-known figures such as Amanda Marcotte and Arthur Chu. Though it was terrifying at the time—it felt like my career and even my life were over

No, this is grossly exaggerated. He is a big-shot tenured professor at a top university, and his employers never had any interests about his narcissistic little rants about his dating troubles.

He claims to hate the Woke Left, but he is a Jewish academic, and he has Trump Derangement Syndrome. He would probably be a Trump supporter, along with his Israeli wife, but his religion will not allow it.

Now he rants against Trump, and wants to cancel some low-level workers in his administration because of some supposedly offensive tweets from being a student many years ago. He says an apology is not enough, and they must be "willing to have a good-faith moral conversation with the world, and nearly unlimited contempt for people who mock the request for such a conversation."

So what set him off? Apparently this:

tweeting “normalize Indian hate” and “I was racist before it was cool,”

He also refers to "my little tribe of pro-Enlightenment, science-loving nerds".

No, he is not pro-Enlightenment. The Enlightenment did not say that people with opinions are accountable to him. Free speech means being able to express an opinion, and not having to explain it to moralistic and judgmental leftists like him.

Update: Depending on context, the above tweets could easily be innocuous joking, or provocative. But I am not trying to make excuses to explain the tweets away. I say that the author should be able to express his opinions whatever they may be. Depending how you define the term, 50-95% of the world is racist. Sayings something racist should not trigger an inquisition.

Update: Physicist Sean M. Carroll posts a 70-minute rant against possible science funding cuts. He is pessimistic about his research grant being renewed, and about paying overhead. He says foreign students will never come here again, and he might even leave the country.

In case you are worried that some vital science might be lost, he main researches many-worlds theory. This is the theory that every time you make a decision or toss a coin, the other possible results happen in imaginary parallel universes. There is no way to communicate with these parallel universes or find evidence for them, but he likes to think about them anyway. Aaronson is also a proponent of this theory. Yes, it is just as crazy as it sounds.

Professors Promoted from an Unweighted Citation Graph

@BasedBeffJezos tweets:

The problem with academia is that the selective pressure is induced peer to peer through an unweighted citation graph.

OTOH, industry is a weighted graph of capital flux according to the utility of a product. It has a much better algorithm for focusing search over design space.

What he is saying here is that professors get promoted by showing that their friends cite their papers. Companies succeed by people buying their products.

The latter works well because products have to be commercially useful in order to sell a lot. But academic citations can be inflated even for worthless research.

The Case for More Immigration

It seems obvious to me that American immigration have been too high for too long, and drastic measures are needed to curb it. In fairness, I listened to this podcast:

Alex Nowrasteh and Bryan Caplan: The Case for More Immigration

Immigration experts Alex Nowrasteh and Bryan Caplan make the case for significantly more and easier immigration to the U.S.

One of the very first things that Donald Trump did after being sworn in as president was to make good on promises to reduce both legal and illegal immigration. He even issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship, a right guaranteed by the Constitution's 14th Amendment. That order has already been blocked by a federal judge, and its fate may well end up being decided by the Supreme Court. But calls for less immigration are super popular, with 55 percent of Americans saying current levels should be decreased, the highest since 2001. Reason's Nick Gillespie disagrees with that—he believes that immigration is a good thing and that we should have more of it, done in an orderly, peaceful, efficient fashion.

So on January 21, the day after Trump's inauguration, Gillespie asked George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan and Cato Institute analyst Alex Nowrasteh to make the libertarian case for more immigration at a live event in New York City. They've written extensively on the topic and answer every question and concern you might have about immigration. The goal here is to steel-man critics of immigration and explain why more newcomers are good for our culture, economy, and country.

These are smart and informed economists, and they claimed to be steel-manning the critics.

Their main argument was that rich men and certain businesses profit from immigration, and so do the immigrants. The businesses get cheap labor. Others get more choices in exotic restaurants.

These benefits are broadly shared, via a trickle-down theory.

They wanted to open borders, where 30 million immigrants would come in. Maybe eventually a billion more would come.

They admitted that the large majority of Americans have wanted to cut immigration, and that has been true for decades. Being Libertarian economists, I thought that maybe they would suggest that those benefitting from immigration pay compensation to those being hurt by immigration. If each immigrant causes $1 million in damages, then visas could be sold for $1M.

No, they were of the opinion that those wanting immigration cuts should suffer the consequences, with no compensation.

I do not see how there is anything libertarian about forcing most people to suffer harms they do not want.

To give examples where immigration is clearly desirable, they mentioned Einstein and MLB baseball players.

No, those immigrants are not desirable. Einstein never did any productive reseearch after coming to the USA. He joined Communist front organizations, and was a generally malevolent influence. The MLB baseball players take valuable positions away from Americans, and add nothing to American productivity. These are all examples of immigrants who waste resources and make America worse.

All of their arguments were stupid or silly. They said that illegal aliens, subject to deportation orders, try hard not to get arrested. They said that if a shoe-shine boy comes from Haiti and shines Bill Gates' shoes, then that is more productive that what he would be doing in Haiti.

Go ahead and listen yourself, and tell me if you heard anything convincing.

Humans originated in Europe

Earth.com reports:

Humans originated in Europe, not Africa, according to fossil discovery

A recent discovery in Türkiye is shaking up our understanding of human evolution. Scientists have identified a new fossil ape, Anadoluvius turkae, from an 8.7-million-year-old site near Çankırı.

This find challenges the long-held belief that human ancestors evolved solely in Africa, suggesting instead that Europe played a significant role in our evolutionary history.

The fossil, uncovered at the Çorakyerler site with support from Türkiye’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, reveals that Mediterranean fossil apes were more diverse than previously thought.

These apes are part of the earliest known group of hominins, which includes not only African apes like chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas but also humans and their fossil ancestors.

Out of Africa? Maybe not

This discovery adds weight to the theory that the ancestors of African apes and humans may have evolved in Europe before migrating to Africa between nine and seven million years ago.

The Out of Africa theory usually refers to much more recent history, say 100,000 years ago. That has also fallen out of favor, as research has shown that European Neanderthals are human ancestors for today's non-Africans.

“These findings contrast with the long-held view that African apes and humans evolved exclusively in Africa. While the remains of early hominins are abundant in Europe and Anatolia, they are completely absent from Africa until the first hominin appeared there about seven million years ago.”

Anti-American Preacher getting Taxpayer Money

I mentioned the female cleric who insulted Pres. Trump, abdand now it turns out that she was profiting from her anti-Americanism.

The NY Post reports:

Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon to President Trump during an inaugural prayer service, coupled with her church’s advocacy for humanitarian immigration programs, reveals a striking hypocrisy — one that could be seen as self-serving and even a conflict of interest.

That’s because the federal contracting arm of the church, Episcopal Migration Ministry (EMM), is paid to bring in people on resettlement programs that Trump has temporarily paused and targeted for re-evaluation.

EMM budget figures for 2024 are not available yet, but in 2023 it earned $53 million from various taxpayer-funded government programs to resettle 3,600 individuals. ...

EMM brings in LGBTQ refugees and asylees in a special federal refugee program started during the Obama administration called “Preferred Communities.”

This program pays a premium over standard refugee resettlement for contractors that resettle “refugees experiencing social or psychological difficulties, including emotional trauma resulting from war and/or sexual or gender-based violence; survivors of torture; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) refugees; refugees who are HIV positive; populations with physical disabilities or other medical conditions.”

I hope Trump and the DOGE crew shut down this nonsense.

XX Century Decline of Britain

Phil Greenspun writes:

Is it fair to say that the UK circa 1900 was the most successful and richest country in the history of humanity? The sun never set on the British Empire, which included India. The Royal Navy was the world’s most powerful. Compare to today. The UK is an predominantly Islamic society (measured by hours spent on religious activities) jammed with low-skill immigrants. Wages are absurdly low by U.S. standards. GDP per capita is lower than in the poorest U.S. states. After decades of open borders, the core English part of the UK lacks cultural cohesion. The main project of the UK seems to have been assembling humans from the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies and expecting that they and their descendants won’t behave in a violent or dysfunctional manner once parked in the UK. The result is the Southport stabbings (by a young UK-born Rwandan) and the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal and similar. The trajectory of the UK from 1900 to the present looks like that of a country that lost multiple wars, each one having drained away its resources and treasure and each one resulting in the country being occupied by millions of non-British people.

In the 2021 census, only 37% of London was White British.

Canada is no longer Canadian:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told CNN anchor Jake Tapper that President-elect Donald Trump’s repeated digs about Canada becoming the 51st state are a distraction from real issues in a short sit-down interview on Thursday.

“Canadians are incredibly proud of being Canadian,” said Trudeau. “One of the ways we define ourself most easily is, well, we’re not American.”

No, he is not proud of being Canadian. He is proud of being not American.

AI will continue to scale up

The tech world is still rattled by the Chinese AI models that crashed the tech market. The AI community is firmly convinced:

Intelligence can be captured by computer models.

Intelligence will scale up, with increasing computer capacity, for the foreseeable future.

Progress is accelerating, and will continue to accelerate beyond our ability to measure it.

Unleashing artificial super intelligence will be the most powerful thing anyone has ever done.

The premise of OpenAI is that it would discover and tame the super-AI, and make it safe for the world to use.

The real threat of the Chinese models is that open source LLMs would pass up the closed source OpenAI and Google models, and leave everyone exposed to whatever good or bad comes from super-AI.

Recent events have not altered any of these opinions. The Chinese models are just what everyone was expecting and fearing. We just didn't know that they had enough Nvidia chips to be players in the AI race.

We will see more and more AI moving to user devices, like phones, cameras, and toasters. But the real action will be in the supercomputers with the most computational capacity. Companies and governments will invest trillions to try to real that super-AI first.