Police are not killing innocent Blacks

AmRen essay:

There have been careful scientific studies of possible police bias against blacks — and Hispanics. Last year, this paper and, later, this correction were published in the highly prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The researchers built a sophisticated database for all the fatal police shootings in 2015, and looked at them from every possible racial angle. They found that the race of people shot had no bearing on their likelihood of being shot, and that non-white officers behaved no differently from white officers. They therefore concluded that “increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce racial disparity in police shootings.”

Roland Fryer is a black economist at Harvard. He was angry after the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, so he did his own research on police killing. He carefully studied 1,332 police shootings in 10 big-city police departments. When he compared the circumstances of each killing, he, too, could find no evidence of police bias. If anything, police were more likely to shoot a non-threatening white than a non-threatening black. Prof. Freyr said, it was “the most surprising research result of my career.”

It is amazing how many respectable people, such as Barack Obama, are perpetrating the myth that white cops are killing innocent blacks.

CBS Sports reports

[Drew] Brees had been facing some major backlash this week after he said on Wednesday that he would "never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag" by kneeling. Several of Brees' teammates in New Orleans called him out for his comments, including wide receivers Michael Thomas and Emmanuel Sanders.

Less than 24 hours after making the comments, Brees had an emotional meeting with his team, which led to the quarterback issuing multiple apologies.

This is embarrassing. He had to apologize for having angry delusional teammates.

I listened to the NY Times podcast try to explain "Why They're Protesting". Blacks think it is unfair that they get arrested in proportion to their crimes. Blacks are mad about slavery, centuries ago. Blacks say they built America, and they will burn it down if they want to. Blacks who are still mad about Emmet Till.

All of this is insane, and it is insane to treat such nonsense seriously.

The NY Times apologized for publishing an op-ed urging the use of force to stop the riots. Their Jewish columnist said that such opinions should not be allowed. This is just another example of Jewish efforts to destroy America.

Mattis complies with anti-Christian statement

A Jewish magazine proudly presents: James Mattis Denounces President Trump.

I read this, but there is no point. It is all bland generalities. The only specific gripe is something about Pres. Trump visiting a church across the street from the White House.

For that, Mattis makes his big break? What is going on? I didn't think Mattis was Jewish, but maybe he hired a Jewish ghostwriter.

The Jewish religion has no use for Christian churches. I get that. But it is really bizarre for a general to be so triggered by a President visiting a Christian church.

Mattis was in Trump's cabinet. Surely he could say something more substantive, if he wanted to. Apparently Mattis did have a previous dispute where he urged Trump to fight a Mideast war in Syria.

But his statement says nothing about his foolish Syrian war plans. He does try to imply Trump is a Nazi, which is more Jew-speak.

My theory is that Jews are just showing off their power. They own this general, and they hate Trump and hate Christian churches. Mattis is allowing them to make an anti-Trump and anti-Christian statement at the same time.

I doubt that any other President has been criticized for visiting a church. The rioters had set fire to the church, and probably wanted to burn it down. I guess Trump wanted to make a statement that churches would not be destroyed by rioters and looters. The Jews and Mattis want to make a contrary statement.

More and more, I get the impression that our mass media are dominated by lizard people trying to destroy civilization.

Don't depend on somebody else's babies

The Republicans just kicked Steve King out of Congress. His biggest offense was this:

“You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies,” he reiterated. “You’ve got to keep your birth rate up, and you need to teach your children your values. In doing so, you can grow your population, you can strengthen your culture, and you can strengthen your way of life.”

The NY Times also said that he complained about the press equating Western Civilization with White supremacy, but the paper refused to reveal the context.

Most Republican politicians do indeed seem to favor replacing Americans with foreign babies. Sad.

Meanwhile all politicians, Republican or Democrat, can only grovel about how terrible it is that blacks like George Floyd are mistreated. It is increasingly clear that Floyd died of a heart attack, brought on by COVID-19 and a fentanyl overdose. The police were following recommended procedures for dealing with someone showing Excited Delirium Syndrome. The riots just show that we have a lot of citizens who are unfit for a civilized society.

Floyd died of Fentanyl and Excited Delirium Syndrome

News:

OFFICERS from the US police force responsible for the killing of George Floyd received training in restraint techniques and anti-terror tactics from Israeli law-enforcement officers.

LawOfficer.com notes:

From the charging documents on Officer Derek Chauvin we hear, for the first time the issue of excited delirium.

We know Chauvin was concerned about it and that was the reason Floyd was subdued. We will know more when the body camera footage is released but oddly, that has not been done. Frankly, it makes us wonder what the footage shows and whether it supports the evidence of excited delirium.

The Western Journal of Emergency Medicine says that “Excited delirium is characterized by agitation, aggression, acute distress and sudden death, often in the pre-hospital care setting. It is typically associated with the use of drugs Subjects typically die from a heart attack and the majority of the patients die before hospital arrival.”

“All accounts describe almost the exact same sequence of events: delirium with agitation (fear, panic, shouting, violence and hyperactivity), sudden cessation of struggle, respiratory arrest and death.”

Once again, the body camera footage showing the initial encounter, discussions among officers and the call to paramedics about the issue of excited delirium will be a major factor in this case.

While much has been said about Officer Chauvin’s knee to Floyd’s neck, the medical examiner’s autopsy showed that Floyd did not die from from strangulation or asphyxiation. In fact, the autopsy showed no trauma to the body.

Sounds like exactly what happened. In which case, Chauvin may have been acting according to his training.

Did you know that the second autopsy was fake?

And before you respond with Michael Baden’s “independent” autopsy as reported by the media, understand that Baden is a hired man that also believed Michael Brown was shot in the back after looking at a diagram and that O.J. Simpson was innocent. Two specific items were noticed in his press conference that the media is not reporting.

He never said it was his “expert” opinion but rather his opinion. This is to protect his integrity as an expert witness.
Most importantly, Baden didn’t do an autopsy. He formed his opinion from watching the video and speaking to the family of Mr. Floyd.

Nothing he said can be brought into a criminal proceeding. It’s simply done to sway public opinion but we will get to him in another article. Back to the actual facts…….

According to the autopsy, Mr. Floyd had two specific drugs in his system, methamphetamine and fentanyl.

A narcotic that is 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin, fentanyl is associated with more drug overdoses than any other opioid.

And combined with methamphetamine, studies indicate that fentanyl has a higher chance of inducing fatal hyperthermia. And it just so happens that hyperthermia has a direct correlation with excited delirium.

Fentanyl is also unique among the opioids in its ability to cause muscle rigidity of the chest wall, diaphragm, and larynx. Known as “wooden chest syndrome,” it’s safe to say that the combination of this drug is a recipe for heart stoppage.

Combining the deadly effects of this drug combination along with the officer’s reaction to observing signs of excited delirium very likely paints the picture as to why Mr. Floyd ended up on the ground.

The American College of Emergency Physicians’ White Paper Report on Excited Delirium Syndrome recommends two specific responses by law enforcement if they observe signs of excited delirium.

Stating that “Deescalation does not have a high likelihood of changing outcomes significantly”

“The subjects require physical restraint (this is because if they continue to struggle it accelerates the death) combined with emergent sedation.”

“Once the decision to do this has been made, action needs to be swift and efficient, and performed with all responders present when feasible.”

I had never heard of Excited Delirium Syndrome (ExDS)

While not universally fatal, it is clear that a propor-tion ofpatients with ExDSprogress to cardiac arrestand death. It is impossibleat presentto know how many patients receive a therapeutic intervention that stops the terminal progression of this syn-drome. ...

It is important for LEOs to recognize that ExDS sub-jects are persons with an acute, potentially life-threatening medical condition. LEOs must also be aware that remorse, normal fear and understanding of surroundings, and rational thoughts for safety are absent in such subjects. ExDS subjects are known to be irrational, often vio-lent and relatively impervious to pain. Unfortunate-ly, almost everything taught to LEOs about control of subjects relies on a suspect to either be rational, appropriate, or to comply with painful stimuli.

So if you hear an expert on TV, and he does not mention fentanyl and ExDS, then he is either ignorant or lying. And if he fails to mention that the autopsy showed no bruises or other trauma to the neck, then he is definitely distorting the evidence.

If it turns out that George Floyd died of a neck injury, then I will have to revise my opinion. But it is appears that the police officers followed their training.

Update: The autopsy showed that Floyd tested positive for COVID-19, and even Baden admitted that Floyd had enough fentanyl in his system to kill him. Either condition could explain his difficulties breathing, as could the heart attack.

Author says to let the invaders in And to

From NPR Fresh Air:

When living things cross into new territory, they are often viewed as threats. But science writer Sonia Shah, who has written a new book — 'The Next Great Migration' — says the "invaders" are just following biology. Shah talks about the migration of people, animals and plants (especially due to climate change), and our misconceptions about "belonging."

She says that the environmentalists were anti-immigration about 50 years ago, until they realized the racial implications.

She doesn't say what those racial implications are, but it is clear that limiting immigration would interfere with extermination of the White race.

She is in favor of open borders, not only for people, but for plants and animals also!

She is hoping that climate change will send 100s of millions of climate refugees to the USA, to replace the population. Because wild animals migrate all the time, we should just let humans migrate like wild animals.

She makes reference to the possibility that an invasive plant or animal will displace and destroy other species that we would much prefer. She says we should just let nature take its course.

This is essentially telling farmers to let pests eat their crops. And to let other invaders destroy civilization.

Do not say that it was not murder

The Daily Beast reports:

A Louisiana police officer has been put on administrative leave after he wrote in a Facebook post that the death of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man who died in police custody, was a “mistake or misstep not an act of murder.” Shreveport Police Chief Ben Raymond has reportedly ordered an investigation into Sgt. Brent Mason to determine whether he violated the department’s social media policy. Floyd, 46, lost consciousness after saying repeatedly that he could not breathe while an officer held him down by kneeling on his neck.

Mason said in the since-deleted post that he had been training officers for 12 years and had been with the department for 25 years. He wrote that Derek Chauvin, the officer who kneeled on Floyd’s neck, had “poor technique,” which is a “common mistake” made by police officers. “Normally this mistake does not result in death,” he wrote, adding, “where is the innocent until proven guilty!?” Shreveport PD said the “views expressed by individual officers on their personal social media accounts do not reflect” the department’s views or values.

I do not hear anyone say that Chauvin should be considered innocent until proven guilty. Now I know why. One can get fired for saying that.

If Chauvin were intentionally murdering Floyd, why would he do it in from of a live videographer accusing him of murder? It makes no sense. It is much more likely that Chauvin thought that he was following proper procedure.

Speaking of censorship:

Google Drive, at the request of The Washington Post, has taken down a user’s personal copy of the movie “Plandemic.”

Plandemic has some non-mainstream opinions about COVID-19, but that's all. It is bizarre to censor this movie.

Update: There are now conflicting autopsies in the George Floyd case. Obviously a lot depends on whether a neck injury was a cause of death. We have yet to hear Chauvin's story, and how he was trained to deal with situations like this.

Female social skills do not scale

Baumeister and Vohs write:

The large institutions have almost all been created by men. The notion that women were deliberately oppressed by being excluded from these institutions requires an artful, selective, and motivated way of looking at them. Even today, the women’s movement has been a story of women demanding places and preferential treatment in the organizational and institutional structures that men create, rather than women creating organizations and institutions themselves. Almost certainly, this reflects one of the basic motivational differences between men and women, which is that female sociality is focused heavily on one-to-one relationships, whereas male sociality extends to larger groups networks of shallower relationships (e.g., Baumeister and Sommer 1997; Baumeister 2010). Crudely put, women hardly ever create large organizations or social systems. That fact can explain most of the history of gender relations, in which the gender near equality of prehistorical societies was gradually replaced by progressive inequality — not because men banded together to oppress women, but because cultural progress arose from the men’s sphere with its large networks of shallow relationships, while the women’s sphere remained stagnant because its social structure emphasized intense one-to-one relationships to the near exclusion of all else (see Baumeister 2010). All over the world and throughout history (and prehistory), the contribution of large groups of women to cultural progress has been vanishingly small.

The above link also has some contrary opinions.

In other words, female social skills do not scale.

One of them has coauthored a new paper saying this:

The prescriptive values of highly educated groups (such as secularism, but also libertarianism, criminal justice reform, and unrestricted sociosexuality, among others) may work for groups that are highly cognitively sophisticated and self-controlled, but they may be injurious to groups with lower self-control and cognitive ability. Highly educated societies with global esteem have more influence over global trends, and so the prescriptive values promulgated by these groups are likely to influence others who may not share their other cognitive characteristics. Perhaps then highly educated and intelligent groups should be humble about promoting the unique and relatively novel values that thrive among them and perhaps should be cautious about mocking certain cultural narratives and norms that are perceived as having little value in their own society.

A statistician blogger suggests that the left-wing journal only published this because the editors did not understand the political implications.

As I write this, the city of San Jose California has announced a curfew this week from 8:30pm to 5:00am. Apparently they don't want their stores and police stations burned to the ground.

If our laws could discriminate better, the curfew would be aimed at the sub-population with low IQ and low self-control.

Between COVID-19 and the race riots, we could be headed towards a new social order.

News:

Nike have denounced racism by switching their slogan to support protests in the US over the death of George Floyd, a black man killed at the hands of police.

So what happened? The Chicago Nike store was trashed and looted.

Preliminary autopsy for George Floyd

The London Daily Mail reports:

The preliminary results of the county’s autopsy instead concluded Floyd, 46, died from a combination of heart disease and 'potential intoxicants in his system' that were exacerbated by the restraint placed on him by police officers. ....

The criminal complaint filed against Chauvin, 44, cited that preliminary findings from a Tuesday autopsy conducted by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner saw 'no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxiation or strangulation'.

'Mr. Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease,' said the complaint from the Hennepin County Attorney.

'The combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death.'

Floyd was pronounced dead about an hour after the ambulance picked him up.

People are rioting because they think the video shows traumatic asphyxiation. I do not think that it does.

The video shows a gas station selling 99 cent diesel gasoline. Can that be right? It cost a lot more elsewhere.

This definition was posted last year:

A Karen is a kind of person who is unhappy when little things don’t go their way. They are a, “Can I speak to your manager?” kind of gal. The bitchy soccer mom of her friend group that nobody likes. ...

karens are usually extremely self entitled, the think that they can do what ever they want to anyone, this is why karens are a nightmare retail workers and really just anyone that has to encounter one. usually what happens is that she randomly will get mad at an other customer for whatever reason and for and ask a retail worker for free stuff and when the worker eventually says no, she will say the dreaded phrase "cAn i sPeAk TO YOur MAnageR" so the worker will call his manager and when they evenually say no she will have a complete meltdown that will result in the karen will be estorted your of the store but not without screeming I WILL SUE YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOU.

It doesn't say that the Karen has to be white, but I think that is implied.

More race-baiting from NY Times

The NY Times is going nuts again with stories about supposed black persecution. There is Arbery who died while resisting arrest. He tried to take a shotgun. There is a Minnesota black man who also died while resisting arrest. I watched the video, and it appears that he lost consciousness while waiting for the ambulance. The cause of death is unknown, and perhaps we will learn from an autopsy. If the autopsy shows that the man died of a neck injury, then the cop is probably at fault, but I doubt it.

There was also a minor dispute between a dog-lover and a bird-lover in NY Central Park. Both exhibited some rude and threatening behavior. No one was hurt, except that the white woman was fired.

While I could second-guess some of these characters, it is not clear that any of these incidents have anything to do with race. The black birder guy did use a derogatory word for a white woman, and the dog woman got fired for being racist, so there is some relation to race. But it is not clear that anyone got mistreated because of racial identification.

So why does a Jewish newspaper invent racial conflict wherever it can?

It is the same strategy used by Russian Communists. When they put out anti-American propaganda, they consistently to stir up racial animosity or other conflicts that would turn Americans against other Americans.

When the NY Times published its list of 100,000 "incalculable" COVID-19 deaths on its front page, one of the very first victims was a black man who the newspapers reported as having died of gunshot wound. Why did it say this guy died of COVID-19? Why did it say 100,000 is incalculable? These are not mistakes. The newspaper is propaganda.

The NY Times has been pushing Commie propaganda for a century. The Jews who run the paper hate black people, and want nothing to do with them. They would be slavemasters today, if slavery were legal. Their interest in blacks is just a device for attacking White America.

Meanwhile, CNN reports:

In new guidance for mathematical modelers and public health officials, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is estimating that about a third of coronavirus infections are asymptomatic. The CDC also says its "best estimate" is that 0.4% of people who show symptoms and have Covid-19 will die, ...

Still, the "current best estimate" number of 0.4% is significantly lower than the 3.4% mortality rate the World Health Organization warned in early March.

The lockdowns were based on that 3.4% estimate.

The CDC says that only 30-50% of infections show symptoms, so the death rate is more like 0.2% of infections. And if you look at healthy people under age 50, the death rate is a whole lot lower than that.

Update: A lot of people are saying that the Minnesota cops are guilty of murder. I am in the minority on this one.

One argument is that the cop choked the man to death, by blocking his trachea and stopping him from breathing. I doubt this, as the cop's knee is at the back of the neck, and nowhere near the trachea. Also, the man was talking for the first couple of minutes, so air was passing thru his trachea just fine.

Another argument is that the cop blocked one the main two neck arteries, causing death. Again, I doubt it. It takes a lot of force to block the artery, and the cop does not appear to be using force at all.

Another argument is that the cop should have checked the man's pulse, and gotten medical attention. But he had called an ambulance that got there a few minutes later. It is unlikely that the cops could have done better than that.

The autopsy may determine that the man died of COVID-19.

Update: Now rioters are looting a Target story. Because black lives matter, I guess.

Founders said people were sheep

Ferdinand Bardamu writes:

America began life not as a democracy, but as an “aristocratic” republic. Under this model of elite governance, also known as federalism, civic participation was restricted to propertied White males. The basis for this particular exclusion was traditional English jurisprudence, which maintained autonomous agency was not possible without ownership of property. John Adams, a prominent Federalist, spoke for the majority of American Founding Fathers when he wrote:

“Such is the frailty of the human heart that very few men who have no property, have any judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by some man of property, who has attached their minds to his interest …. [They are] to all intents and purposes as much dependent upon others, who will please to feed, clothe, and employ them, as women are upon their husbands, or children on their parents.”[i]

I did not know that the Founders had such a dim view of the agency of ordinary citizens.

I am not sure it is much different today. Most people are sheep. Politicians don't say this, except maybe Joe Biden implying that black voters do as they are told.

We must look to human biology to understand why diversity always fails. The separate evolutionary histories of each human race, which inhabited different ecological niches for thousands of years, entails average differences in intelligence and temperament between populations. This makes conflict inevitable when racial groups must live together under a single roof. As far as human relations are concerned, the greater the diversity, the greater the severity of the ensuing conflict. If group differences are too wide, the prospect for internal stability is diminished considerably.

In America, immigration policy has increased the potential for race conflict.

Even if all the races had the same intelligence and temperament, we would still see big conflicts between ethnic groups. That is what we see in all parts of the world.

The Dilbert filters

I like the Scott Adams Dilbert podcast for his filter on current events. In particular,

No mindreading. If some commentator is basing his analysis on telling you the intents, feelings, or thinking of someone else, then he should be disregarded by humans do not have such psychic abilities. Either he is a stage magician, or he is bluffing, or he is self-deluded. Regardless, his mindreading attempts will not yeild any useful info.

No wordplay gotchas. If somebody says something that sounds offensive, but a simple rewording of it is reasonable, then it is silly to get offended. A recent example is Joe Biden saying something stupid about blacks.

Consider the biases. If you are getting a news story from NY Times, NPR radio, or PBS TV about Donald Trump, you should remember that they have never done a fair story about him. So it is reasonable to assume that the facts have been twisted to support their ideology.

Persuasion. People are influenced by images, anecdotes, memes, and other non-rational communications. It is a mistake to pretend that people make rational decisions.

Another filter I like, but which Dilbert does not use, is the 3-year-old filter. Having talked to 3-year-olds a lot, I find the conversations very similar to adult conversations. The adults just use bigger words, and refer to a wider range of experiences.

Is the Alt-Right dead?

Hunter Wallace writes:

The Alt-Right doesn’t really exist anymore.

There were some people who were drawn to the Alt-Right from conservatism and libertarianism. They have returned to conservatism and libertarianism. There were some people who came from the conspiracy theory/truther world. They have returned to their conspiracies and truths. Finally, there were people who joined the Alt-Right who were moderates. They have gone back to being moderates.

Okay, but Donald Trump is still President, and the Republican Party has reluctantly aligned with him.

Alt Right used to mean the alternative part of the right wing that was supporting Trump. Now the Republican Party is. It is not "alternative" anymore.

A lot of the old political issues have been replaced by COVID-19. It is a whole new game now. Trump will be judged on how he handles the crisis. Nobody is even talking about the other issues.

The lockdowns postponed some deaths

Here is the top NY Times story:

If the United States had begun imposing social distancing measures one week earlier than it did in March, about 36,000 fewer people would have died in the coronavirus outbreak, according to new estimates from Columbia University disease modelers.

And if the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, two weeks earlier than most people started staying home, the vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83 percent — would have been avoided, the researchers estimated.

Under that scenario, about 54,000 fewer people would have died by early May.

Sounds impressive, right? Not really.

When it says deaths "would have been avoided", it only means that according to the model, those deaths would not have occurred before May 3. All they really show is that earlier social distancing would have postponed 1000s of deaths until after May 3.

Nobody thought that the social distancing would stop the Wuhan virus. It was only going to slow the spread, and postpone the deaths.

Many argued that delaying the spread would ultimately reduce deaths because the hospital ventilators would not be overwhelmed, but no such reduction happened.

It is an open question whether the social distancing has done any good at all.

Another NY Times article notes:

“We now know that geography played a large role. 54 percent of all U.S. deaths were in the 100 counties in or within 100 miles of NYC.”

Covid-19 deaths — more than 90,000 so far — are “concentrated among the elderly,” Horowitz continues, and the “virus lopsidedly targets people with particular underlying conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes.”

The death rate, Horowitz claims, “doesn’t even climb above .1% until you reach over 70, with a steep and dangerous growth of risk over 75 and 80.”

While the death toll is more than I expected, the disease impact on most of the population is far less that what anyone was predicting.

The article goes on to wonder why there might be a correlation between skepticism about policies against climate change, and against COVID-19.

I don't think it is so hard to understand. Some people, such as redpillers, accept that there are forces of nature that may be impossible or impractical to change. Climate and coronavirus disease may be among them. Sure, a cure would be great, and everyone is in favor of that, but most of the policies are ineffective and expensive, and should be treated with skepticism.

Critic thinks women are excluded

An LA Times culture critic and dedicated feminist writes:

“Mrs. America” is quite possibly the bravest show in the history of television. ...

No, the real courage of “Mrs. America” is baked into its pitch: To chronicle in nine episodes (the last of which runs Wednesday night) Phyllis Schlafly’s successful campaign to prevent ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, hook the legs out from under the women’s movement and aid the rise of religious-driven conservatism in our political arena.

In other words, let’s all watch a nine-hour television show in which the heroes lose. ...

The end is what the end is. The ERA dies, the women’s movement is shoved increasingly to the sidelines and Schlafly helps usher in neo-conservative politics. Which will bring us, among other things, the evangelical movement, the tea party and the election of Donald Trump.

It is difficult to watch “Mrs. America,” especially at a time when many of us, in pandemic isolation, are already feeling powerless, and when the systematic exclusion of women from our highest offices has never been more obvious.

This is delusional.

A woman was almost elected President in 2016. Many other candidates have been greatly helped by campaigning as a woman. Joe Biden has promised to pick a woman for VP.

Male candidates get systematically eliminated by MeToo attacks. Trump and Biden are constantly attacked for being men. Stacey Abrams and Kamala Harris are being touted as possible VPs, but only because they are women of color. Nobody thinks that these women would ever be chosen for anything on the merits.

I suspect that some viewers of the TV show will wonder what the fuss was all about. The anti-ERA arguments are clear enough. But for those favoring the ERA, it is never clear what their goal is. Did they have some broader Jewish or Black leftist political agenda? Did they think that they were going to get improved abortion rights or lesbian rights? Presumably it was some combination.

The final episode is to be released today.

Taking the Red Pill

The NY Times reports:

Elon Musk, the bombastic head of Tesla and SpaceX, exhorted his 34 million Twitter followers on Sunday to “take the red pill.” ...

In “The Matrix,” the movie’s hero, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is given the option to take a pill that lets him see the truth.

The world he thinks is real turns out to be an entertaining lie; his body is actually trapped in a farm where people are being used as human batteries. Taking the blue pill would let him return to living in the ignorant but blissful lie, while taking the red pill would launch him into an arduous journey through a brutal but fulfilling reality.

The idea of taking the red pill later grew to mean waking up to society’s grand lies. ...

To be red-pilled can now mean being broadly skeptical of experts, to be distrustful of the mainstream press or to see hypocrisy in social liberalism. ...

Asked to explain his thinking, Mr. Musk pasted an image of the Urban Dictionary definition of red pill in an email. It read:

“‘Red pill’ has become a popular phrase among cyberculture and signifies a free-thinking attitude, and a waking up from a ‘normal’ life of sloth and ignorance. Red pills prefer the truth, no matter how gritty and painful it may be.”

Here is a current example of Red Pill thinking, from Steve Pinker:

The motive seems to be the slipshod politicizing I exposed 18 years ago in The Blank Slate: if we’re blank slates, there can’t be differences between races, which would make racism impossible; therefore to combat racism we must believe that humans are blank slates.

The essence of the Red Pill is to accept the facts and science of human nature, wherever that leads.

There are many aspects of human nature where society regularly perpetrates lies. These include male-female difference, and blank slate ideas.

I think that there are also lies we are being told about the Wuhan coronavirus also. Perhaps this is what Musk meant.

Libertarians require open borders

The Libertarian magazine Reason reports:

The Libertarian Party (L.P.) has always stuck up for mobility rights unencumbered by political barriers—in other words, for open borders. ... "A truly free market requires the free movement of people, not just products and ideas," the party platform's immigration plank declares.

So one key question for the five-term Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, a former Republican who recently joined the L.P., is whether he will advance this commitment or dilute it if he succeeds in getting the party's presidential nomination. ...

This was evident during Saturday's L.P. presidential debate in Kentucky, when Jacob Hornberger, the founder of the libertarian think tank Future of Freedom Foundation, raved about the party's 1990 platform that unambiguously called for the "elimination of all restrictions on immigration [and] the abolition of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol." He castigated Amash, ... Meanwhile, Jo Jorgensen, the 1996 L.P. nominee for vice president, promised to "immediately stop construction on President Trump's border wall boondoggle, and work to eliminate quotas on immigration so that anyone who wishes to come to America could do so legally." She asked Amash point blank if he would do the same. He refused to answer — just as he did repeated requests from Reason for an interview for this piece.

Amash has flunked the ideological purity test, and has dropped out of the Presidential race. He cannot get the support of the Libertarian Party unless he endorses open borders.

The same is true of Joe Biden and the Democrat Party.

This is all very short-sighted, because open borders is national suicide.

Immigrants would be more likely to ban the Libertarian Party, than to become Libertarians. If you value American freedom, then open borders are the last thing you want.

NY Times partially exposes Ronan Farrow

I thought that I was the only one attacking Ronan Farrow's reporting. The NY Times shared a Pulitzer Prize with him, but now publishes a long article trashing his reckless reporting. He relies on unverified gossip, and distorts the facts.

Because if you scratch at Mr. Farrow’s reporting in The New Yorker and in his 2019 best seller, “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” you start to see some shakiness at its foundation. He delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic. At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove.

Yes, I know Harvey Weinstein was convicted by a jury, but I think that he was innocent, and didn't get a fair trial.

The article portrays him as an over-eager young reporter who hasn't yet learned the difference between being a journalist and a novelist.

It does not touch the deeper issues.

Farrow passes judgment on various celebrity sex lives, but has little to say about his own bizarre sex life, except that he is engaged to another man.

His father is Woody Allen, who named him Satchel. He has bizarre daddy issues, as he blames his famous father for things that don't make any sense.

His bizarre Jewish attitudes. His father is famously Jewish, and many of his targets are Jewish. Is he trying to destroy famous Jews as a`way of getting revenge on his father? Revenge for what?

Everything about Ronan Farrow, aka Satchel Allen, is creepy and weird. I am glad to see the NY Times finally call him on some of his crap.

Update: See also Quillette essay.

Zip codes do not determine futures

The NY Times has a big article on Do children’s ZIP codes at birth determine their futures?. No, I didn't read it, as it is behind a paywall, and it is just too idiotic.

Is this some kind of Jewish form of astrology? The newspaper is published by smart people, and surely they are smart enough to understand that zip codes do not determine children's futures.

My guess is that this is some sort of Jewish way to announce their superiority over other people. Those in the wrong zip codes are doomed to subservience to their Jewish masters. The zip code is just a code for something else.

Professors call out NY Times for censorship

Pamela Paresky, Jonathan Haidt, Nadine Strossen, and Steven Pinker write in Politico:

a recent course of action by the New York Times is cause for alarm.

On December 27, 2019, the Times published a column by their opinion journalist Bret Stephens, “The Secrets of Jewish Genius,” and the ensuing controversy led to an extraordinary response by the editors.

Stephens took up the question of why Ashkenazi Jews are statistically overrepresented in intellectual and creative fields. This disparity has been documented for many years, such as in the 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene by the eminent sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab. In his Times column, Stephens cited statistics from a more recent peer-reviewed academic paper, coauthored by an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. Though the authors of that paper advanced a genetic hypothesis for the overrepresentation, arguing that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group because of inherited traits, Stephens did not take up that argument. In fact, his essay quickly set it aside and argued that the real roots of Jewish achievement are culturally and historically engendered habits of mind.

Nonetheless, the column incited a furious and ad hominem response. Detractors discovered that one of the authors of the paper Stephens had cited went on to express racist views, and falsely claimed that Stephens himself had advanced ideas that were “genetic” (he did not), “racist” (he made no remarks about any race) and “eugenicist” (alluding to the discredited political movement to improve the human species by selective breeding, which was not remotely related to anything Stephens wrote). ...

The Times’ handling of this column sets three pernicious precedents for American journalism.

I mentioned the original column last year, as well as the subsequent editorial redaction.

I am not sure if all of these authors and publications are Jewish. It appears that most of them are.

While I agree that the NY Times retraction is deplorable, and that its explanation was dishonest, the criticism is still a little strange.

The critics are also eager to dismiss a legitimate scholar as being racist, and to show off liberal credentials. It says:

First, while we cannot know what drove the editors’ decision, the outward appearance is that they surrendered to an outrage mob, in the process giving an imprimatur of legitimacy to the false and ad hominem attacks against Stephens.

No, that is not the problem.

The NY Times prints lies about Pres. Trump everyday. The outrage mob does not induce the paper to tell the truth about Trump. These critics are giving giving an imprimatur of legitimacy to the false and ad hominem attacks against Henry Harpending.

I think this whole story is about how to best reinforce certain Jewish ideologies. Stephens accidentally revealed some truths about Jewish beliefs, and his employer and others must rush to obscure the truth and help him out.

Calhoun Mouse Experiments

A new paper argues:

With ideal technology, human carrying capacity runs into the tens of trillions, while with currently demonstrated technology Earth could support more than 200 billion humans. These numbers reflect neither a desirable nor a natural equilibrium population level, but represent a rough estimate of the maximum number of humans Earth could sustain.

This is lunacy. We would be much better off if we scaled world population down to about 100 million.

Here is Wikipedia's account of the John B. Calhoun NIMH mouse experiments:

In July 1968, four pairs of mice were introduced into the habitat. The habitat was a 9-foot (2.7 m) square metal pen with 4.5-foot-high (1.4 m) sides. Each side had four groups of four vertical, wire mesh "tunnels." The "tunnels" gave access to nesting boxes, food hoppers, and water dispensers. There was no shortage of food or water or nesting material. There were no predators. The only adversity was the limit on space.

Initially, the population grew rapidly, doubling every 55 days. The population reached 620 by day 315, after which the population growth dropped markedly, doubling only every 145 days. The last surviving birth was on day 600, bringing the total population to a mere 2200 mice, even though the experiment setup allowed for as many as 3840 mice in terms of nesting space. This period between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and in normal social behavior. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, increase in homosexual behavior, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and females, aggressive behavior of females, passivity of non-dominant males with increased attacks on each other which were not defended against.[2]

After day 600, the social breakdown continued and the population declined toward extinction. During this period females ceased to reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, never engaging in courtship or fighting and only engaging in tasks that were essential to their health. They ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves – all solitary pursuits. Sleek, healthy coats and an absence of scars characterized these males. They were dubbed "the beautiful ones." Breeding never resumed and behavior patterns were permanently changed.

The conclusions drawn from this experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles filled, competition and the stresses experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown in complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in the demise of the population.

Calhoun saw the fate of the population of mice as a metaphor for the potential fate of man. He characterized the social breakdown as a "second death," with reference to the "second death" mentioned in the Biblical book of Revelation 2:11.[1] His study has been cited by writers such as Bill Perkins as a warning of the dangers of living in an "increasingly crowded and impersonal world."[3]

We need to limit population long before we get to physical limits.

Sweden's new hospital is empty

The UN WHO and other severe criticized Sweden for not ordering the lockdowns that many other European countries did. They did scare Sweden into building a new hospital and expanded intensive care units. But now cases are declining, and those units are empty:

The newly constructed field hospital in Stockholm, with room for hundreds of patients, has still not received any patients. It will probably never have to open.

In most places, hospitals are operating at below normal levels, as a lot of medical treatments got canceled, and the big COVID-19 rush never materialized.

It may be time to start talking about the COVID-19 hoax. The lockdowns have probably caused more deaths than they have prevented, and we are still within the range of a bad flu season.

For another opinion, see this SciAm article which predicts that the death will increase by a factor of 10 or more in the next couple of months. All of these alarmist predictions have been wrong so far, but decide for yourself.

Update: CNN will give us a Swedish view:

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has been invited by CNN to be an "expert panelist" on a Thursday night event about the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you are a bit confused by this choice, that's fair. Thunberg not really an expert in the field for which she is most well known, and that field is not virology or epidemiology or economics.

Fauci has no expertise underlying most of his opinions either, so this seems fair to me.

Biden opinions are predictably partisan

This essay trashes Tara Reade:

The social media world has spent the last month obsessed with the Tara Reade sexual assault allegation. ...

Tara Reade first gained prominence in April 2019, when she was one of several women to accuse Joe Biden of inappropriate touching. ... After she spoke up in April 2019 about feeling objectified in Biden’s office, she was attacked on social media and called a “Russian asset.” She felt like Biden was behind the attacks.

Okay, but these same criticisms apply to various other MeToo accusers, and Biden is on the record as saying that they should be believed.

Also:

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer says that Joe Biden’s denial of Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation is “sufficient.”

Schumer, who just happened to be a fierce defender of the #MeToo Movement during the confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, commented on the allegation during a press conference on Tuesday.

Reade claims that Biden penetrated her with his fingers while she was working in his senate office in 1993.

“I’ve heard Joe Biden’s explanation. I think it’s sufficient. I think he will be a great candidate. I think he will be a great President and I think he’ll help us take back the Senate,” Schumer told reporters.

So this is all just partisan politics. Everyone knew that Anita Hill was lying, that Christina Ford was lying, and that Ronan Farrow (whose real name is Satchel Allen) is lying. Nobody thinks women can reliably tell these stories.

Biden is a creep, and a senile old fool who is not competent to be President. That is why Barack Obama picked him for VP in 2008, and he is worse now. This Tara Reade stuff is just an excuse to take him out.

Fauci is our top charlatan

The NY Times reports for its top story:

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and a central figure in the government’s response to the coronavirus, intends to warn the Senate on Tuesday that Americans would experience “needless suffering and death” if the country opens up too quickly.

Dr. Fauci, who has emerged as the perhaps nation’s most respected voice during the coronavirus crisis, is one of four top government doctors scheduled to testify remotely at a high-profile hearing on Tuesday before the Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Got that? He is both the top expert and the most respected voice.

This is so idiotic. It is like saying, "our top expert says that you will risk injury if you drive your car too fast". It tells you nothing about how fast to drive.

One way to tell an expert is really a charlatan is when most of his opinions are outside his expertise. If he were really such a top infectious disease expert, he would advise us on how different policies would affect the spread of the disease, and the ultimate death count, and leave it to others to decide whether the cost is worth it. But he has given policymakers extremely little useful info, and much of that has been incorrect.

Fauci is just more proof that the world has gone mad. No one should take that clown seriously.

Update: Here is a list of 15 Fauci mistakes.

The latest hate crime hoax

Jared Taylor writes:

Get ready for another massive national convulsion over race. It will be just like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray. This time, the dead black man is Ahmaud Arbery, age 25. The whites who shot him are Gregory McMichael, age 64, and his son, Travis McMichael, 34. ...

So, what happened? Unlike previous celebrated “modern lynchings,” at least some of the police findings are public. Their lives may be ruined, but there is good reason to think that what Gregory and Travis McMichael did was perfectly legal.

The father, Gregory McMichael, is a former police officer and investigator for the district attorney. He lived close to a new building under construction where there had been break-ins and trespassing. Mr. McMichael had reportedly seen surveillance video of a black man trespassing. He says that on February 23, he saw a black man — who turned out to be Arbery — “hauling ass” down the street, and thought he looked like the man in the video. He and his son armed themselves and followed in a pickup truck, hoping to hold him until the police came. A friend named Bryan William followed in a second vehicle and took cellphone video. The McMichaels drove ahead of Arbery and stopped in the street.

What happened next is on this short video, and is consistent with what the McMichaels told police. They shouted at Arbery to stop because they wanted to talk to him. They say Arbery ran around the pickup and attacked Travis, the younger McMichael, who was holding a shotgun. There were three shotgun blasts as Travis and Arbery struggled for the weapon, and Arbery died at the scene.

I don't know, but I am beginning to see a pattern here. When the mainstream media all jump to the conclusion that there was a hate crime, it usually turns out to be the opposite.

You would think that the leftist race-baiters would be able to find some legitimate example of a black American being mistreated somehow. And yet when Barack Obama and many others make racial complaints, it is nearly always about some hoax case like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, where most of those who examine the evidence agree that the black perp deserved to die.

I don't know about this latest case. I cannot tell from the video whether Arbery attempted to grab or fire the shotgun. But it is hard to believe that the McMichaels set out to lynch a black jogger.

The Crisis is the Official Panic

The big national crises in recent memory are the 2001 9-11 attacks, the 2008 mortgage derivative crash, and the 2020 Wuhan virus. What do these have in common?

In each case, about 99% of the damage was caused by govt do-gooders who overreacted to some relatively minor adverse news.

The 2001 attack was the most audacious terrorist attack anyone had ever seen, but it only killed about 3k people, and did a couple of billion dollars in property damage. Had we just cleaned up the rubble and done nothing else, we would have been a lot better off. There was no big wave of terrorist attacks or anything else to worry about.

Instead we spent many trillions on foolish wars, created the TSA to hassle everyone at airports, and imported millions of Moslems. These were far more damaging.

The 2008 crash bankrupted some investment bankers who made bad investments in mortgage securities, but did not have a direct negative effect on anyone else. Those who owned homes saw some fluctuations in appraised values, but longterm owners saw no adverse effects. Some people speculated on houses with no money down and dishonestly exaggerating their income. Some of them lost their houses in foreclosures, but it was the banks who closed their eyes to the obvious fraud who absorbed the loss. The govt spent 100s of billions bailing out the firms who made foolish investments. We would have been better off if those firms were bankrupted.

Now the 2020 pandemic has a death toll that is comparable to a bad flu season. It is the lockdowns, not the deaths, that are causing many trillions of dollars in losses. The lockdowns are probably not even saving any lives.

In each of these crises, we were subjected to supposed experts giving silly opinions on CNN and in the NY Times. It should have been obvious that these experts did not know what they were talking about. Their policy proposals did not even have any serious analysis showing benefits would exceed the costs.

Another pitch for importing Chinese censorship

Breitbart reports:

Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule suggests using the Chinese virus pandemic as an excuse to establish a new interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, implementing policies that do away with concepts such as “free speech ideology” and “property rights.”

Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, recently wrote a piece for the Atlantic in which he argues that traditional interpretations of the U.S. constitution have “now outlived its utility,” and that it is now time for the government to take a more centralized role in people’s lives.

Vermeule argues that “circumstances have now changed” due to the Chinese virus pandemic, and that it is now possible to imagine “moral” constitutionalism, which he says is not “enslaved to the original meaning of the Constitution,” and is also “liberated” from the narrative of “relentless expansion of individualistic autonomy.”

The professor is advocating for a new interpretation of the U.S. constitution, which he refers to as “common-good constitutionalism.”

“Such an approach,” wrote Vermeule, “should be based on the principles that government helps direct persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate.”

This is the direction we are headed. Today, the chief censors outside of China are Jews, and the censorship is promoted by Jewish publications.

When they say "common good", just what do they mean? They are not talking about White Christians. They appears to be inspired by Chinese or Soviet Communinists.

Greta Thunberg was right

Philip Greenspun writes

“You come to us young people for hope. How dare you?” a visibly angry Thunberg told the high-level audience gathered for the UN Climate Action Summit in New York.

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing,” thundered the 16-year-old Swedish girl, who has galvanized youth across the world to mobilize against climate change.

This was a debatable point at the time, but just six months later children around the world were cut off from their playgrounds, their friends, and their schools (i.e., most of their “childhood”)! Bizarrely, one of the only countries where this did not happen is Sweden, home of infidels who reject the True Church of Shutdown.

So… Greta Thunberg might turn out to be wrong regarding atmospheric physics, just as the academic researchers who’ve gotten grants for climate modeling may turn out to be wrong (Cato article on a paywalled Nature paper). But I think she got the generational dynamics correct! Given the chance to cut their personal risk of contracting Covid-19 by a percentage point or two, older adults had no difficulty deciding to rob children of their childhood.

I think he is right here. This is yet another example of Baby Boomers selfishly protecting their generation, at the expense of everyone else.

School closings did not help

NY Times science writer Gina Kolata writes:

Did Closing Schools Actually Help?
Researchers have a plan to find out.

As different countries and states tentatively start reopening their economies, there seems to be no clear plan, and no clear way to figure out which of the lockdown measures made a difference in slowing the spread of Covid-19.

Was it necessary to shut down schools? Did it matter if state parks and playgrounds in New Jersey were closed? Did an 8 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew make a difference? When can we go back to normal? ...

Now, two Norwegian medical researchers, experienced in evaluating cancer data, suggest a way to get reliable information. ...

But, Dr. Kalager and Dr. Bretthauer said in a Zoom interview, it is not always in politicians’ interest to get data from randomized controlled studies. Those who called for quickly shutting schools down would face blowback if it turned out that the closings had virtually no effect on the spread of the epidemic.

So far, a study like the one they propose is just a thought experiment. No schools in Norway are planning to randomly test reopenings.

This is an amazing admission from the NY Times.

There was no scientific basis for closing the schools. We could easily find out if there were any benefit to the closings, but no one wants to know. There are only two researchers who are even talking about doing an experiment to find out, but they are in Norway and the experiment is unlikely to be done.

This is nuts. Closing the schools was a $100 billion decision. Shouldn't there be some analysis of the necessity?

No school age kids are dying of the disease. None are spreading it to adults. I have no idea why kids would be immune, but this has been known for months.

I keep hearing people say, "we need to listen to the experts, and follow the data." No, the experts are not following the data. This is all political.

Americans advocating Chinese-style censorship

More and more, Jews are advocating Chinese-style censorship.

Essay in The Atlantic:

Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal

In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.

COVID-19 has emboldened American tech platforms to emerge from their defensive crouch. Before the pandemic, they were targets of public outrage over life under their dominion. Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. ...

But the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary. Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan, China, and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes. The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them.

As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China.

Google used to say that their mission was to make all the world's information accessible. Now Google openly censors medical facts and opinions that different from official govt policy.

And now David Icke kicked off Facebook. He has spent many years advocating many outlandish theories, such as the world having been taken over by shape-shifting reptiles. But the reason given for booting him is that he disagrees with United Nations coronavirus recommendations.

Need Cost-Benefit Analysis

What was the mistake of the Iraq War? Was it WMD?

No. The statements made by Pres. G.W. Bush and Tony Blair were essentially correct. They said that Iraq had previous WMD programs and had not fully complied with inspections. The war discovered WMDs that were more or less consistent with what had been alleged. This is all well-documented, and you can read about it on Wikipedia.

No, the WMD was just a sideshow. The problem was that there was no cost-benefit analysis justifying the war the war cost us trillions of dollars, and there was never any hope of obtaining commensurate benefits.

I see a similar mistake with the Wuhan virus today. The govt policy is costing trillions of dollars. While it is postponing some deaths, there may be no net saving of lives when it is all over. It is quite possibly the most destructive govt policy since World War II.

Many countries allow joint child custody

The Japan Times reports:

Justice Ministry survey finds many countries allow joint child custody after divorce

Many countries such as Canada and China allow divorced parents to have joint custody of their children, a survey by Japan’s Justice Ministry showed Friday.

Of 24 countries surveyed, only India and Turkey have a sole custody system as Japan does.

Joint custody is also the norm in South Korea, Russia and Indonesia, according to the survey. Italy requires divorced parents to agree on their children’s education and whereabouts.

The sole custody system is criticized for limiting the opportunity for parents who lost custody and their children to interact with each other.

Most of the countries surveyed have measures in place to support interactions between divorced parents and their children, including public monitoring.

The ministry will use the results of the survey to consider law revisions, officials said.

Occasionally I hear people say that countries like Japan and India are pro-family.

No. Systems that routinely disconnect parents from their kids are anti-family.

It sounds as if Japan is going to consider laws to allow public monitoring of parents to visit their kids. No, that is not pro-family either.

Japan has degenerated into a sick society where hardly anyone even has kids anymore.

COVID mortality less than the flu

According to the US CDC web site, 61,000 Americans died of the flu in the 2017-19 season (ie, 2 years ago). This year's total for COVID-19 is 55,258, as I write this. It might be more when you access the page.

You might also look for evidence that the lockdowns have done any good. You will not find it.

This SciAm article says that the CDC flu numbers are estimates. Okay, but it is also true that about 95% of the COVID-19 deaths have had other contributing causes. Hardly anyone has died from just the virus.

Max Boot sides with the Commies

Max Boot pretends to be a conservative American, but he is not. He is a Russian Jew who primarily wants to destroy the Republican Party. In the past, has been mainly known for promoting Mideast wars. I have criticized him in the past, but I had no idea he hated my mom so much.

He writes in the Wash. Post:

In searching for the origins of our current madness, you can start by watching the historically accurate drama “Mrs. America” streaming on Hulu. It tells the story of the 1970s battle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that pitted feminists such as Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale), Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne) and Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba) against a woman named Phyllis Schlafly who would become the godmother of modern conservatism. ...

Schlafly’s victory over the ERA, an innocuous constitutional amendment guaranteeing men and women equal treatment under the law, was highly improbable. ...

Now the wing nuts at last have the president they have always wanted. Before her death on Sept. 5, 2016, Schlafly endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential run as “the only hope to defeat the kingmakers.” Trump, in turn, spoke at her funeral service, calling her a “hero.”

Defeating Trump is essential to save not just the country but also the Republican Party.

He attacks Trump for endorsing research into medicines to disinfect coronavirus infections, and attacks Phyllis for supposedly being a member of an anti-Communist organization between 1959 and 1964.

Boot is probably not a Commie, but it sure is funny how Jews like him go so far out of their way to attack anyone who is pro-American or anti-Communist.

I don't usually play this guilt-by-association game, but this is all Boot does, as he tries to smear those he does not like. He associates with left-wing Jews who are anti-American at every opportunity. He pushes what is good for Jews, and calls everyone else a racist or some such slur.

Update: Googling Max Boot, I find that he does not feel like an American, and that he said, "I Would Sooner Vote for Josef Stalin Than I Would Vote for Donald Trump". He is also one of those Jews who hate Christians so much that they favor increasing Muslim immigration into Christian countries.

Experts refuse to consider data on low fatality rate

The Wuhan coronavirus lockdown orders have been based on lousy data, and now it turns out that the authorities don't want better data.

Now we are getting better data anyway, and the studies show that the virus is no more deadly than a bad influenza strain.

The NY Times reports:

A survey of New Yorkers last week found that one in five city residents carried antibodies to the new coronavirus ...

Few scientists ever imagined that these tests would become an instrument of public policy — and many are uncomfortable with the idea. ...

On Friday, the World Health Organization warned against relying on these tests for policy decisions. ...

(The W.H.O. on Saturday backed off an earlier assertion that people with antibodies may not be immune at all.) ...

The goal of most of these projects is to get a handle on the size and nature of the epidemic here, rather than to guide decisions about reopening the economy.

Got that? Scientific studies show that millions of people have gotten the virus without having to be hospitalized, that the fatality rate is far less than what we have been told, that it is no worse than the flu, and all the experts say that the new info should not guide public policy!

The lockdowns and the other public policies have been based on the claims that (1) the virus has a high fatality rate; and (2) the rate will be much higher if hospitals get overwhelmed and run out of ventilators.

We now know that these claims are not true. The fatality rate is similar to the flu. The hospitals are not getting overwhelmed. Some of them may even be bankrupted from a lack of patients. And the ventilators do more harm than good, and are not saving any lives.

And yet the NY Times tells us that all the experts say the scientific evidence on the low fatality rate should not be used to guide public policy.

This is like generals fighting a losing war and arguing that info about battlefield losses should not be used to influence war strategy decisions.

Our leaders have gone mad.

Of course the NY Times blames Pres. Trump on every page, such as this in today's paper:

Mr. Trump’s performance that evening, when he suggested that injections of disinfectants into the human body could help combat the coronavirus, did not sound like the work of a doctor, a genius, or a person with a good you-know-what.

Are they really this stupid? Trump was referring to an earlier statement by an expert talking injecting a medicine to disinfect the infection. That is what a disinfectant is. Yes, the word is also used for some common household cleaning products, but Trump was not referring to that. That should have been obvious to anyone with an IQ over 90.

Okay, maybe they just pretend to be stupid in order to score some anti-Trump political points. But why are they arguing that data on the spread of the disease should not be used to guide public policy?

They are either mad or evil.

Bad is stronger than good

One of the most robust psychology findings is this:

Bad is stronger than good refers to the phenomenon that the psychological effects of bad things outweigh those of the good ones. Bad usually refers to situations that have unpleasant, negative, harmful, or undesirable outcomes for people, while good usually refers to situations that have pleasant, positive, beneficial, or desirable outcomes for people. Bad things have stronger effects than good things for virtually all dimensions of people’s lives, including their thoughts, their feelings, their behavior, and their relationships. Few topics in social psychology have approached the generality and validity of bad is stronger than good across such a broad range of human behavior.

For the technical details, see this paper.

Nearly all academic child-care experts advocates something called positive parenting. But is there any research to show that it gives better outcomes? Not really.

Good acts just don't make that much of an impression on a child. Kids from families with model positive parenting parents don't turn out much different from average parents who do not do anything unusual.

Sure, some bad acts are harmful, so an absence of bad acts is beneficial in that sense. Any benefit to positive parenting is probability entirely due to avoid certain bad acts.

The so-called bad acts are not necessarily harmful. For example, overcoming adversity can be character building. If you look at the lives of great men, many have overcome all sorts of adversities that would be considered bad acts. These bad acts were probably more influential than the good acts.

Professor wants to abolish homeschooling

Daily Wire:

In a shocking essay for Harvard Magazine, a professor of law and director of Harvard Law School’s child advocacy legal clinic, claims homeschooling is a threat to children’s rights, a method of promoting white supremacy, and a drain on democratic society — and even goes so far as to suggest a national “presumptive ban” on the practice.

The paper is here.

Much of popular genetic science is wrong

Jerry Coyne points out that a lot of popular writing on genetic science is wrong, such as this:

On page 221, Saini says, “The question of whether cognition, like skin colour or height, has a genetic basis is one of the most controversial in human biology.”

No, it is not controversial. It has been confirmed by 100s of studies.

Coyne explains the errors well, as well as the errors in those who say that race does not exist, or that there are no mental differences between men and women.

Update: Coyne has a technical correction. His main points remain.

The horror of the Invisible Enemy

The Jewish Forward writes:

When President Trump uses the phrase “invisible enemy” to describe the coronavirus, he is using the vocabulary of medieval libels against Jews. ...

There is no other way to say it; just like “America First,” the phrase “invisible enemy” has an ugly history that is now being revived and exploited at the kind of moment when such ugliness thrives—when everyone is scared for their lives and their basic survival. ...

“In 24 chapters, or protocols, allegedly minutes from meetings of Jewish leaders, the Protocols “describes” the “secret plans” of Jews to rule the world by manipulating the economy, controlling the media, and fostering religious conflict,” the US Holocaust Museum explains on its website.

Fortunately, the ratcheting-up of the “invisible enemy” rhetoric by the President has been met with a swift response by editorial writers and anti-Semitism watchers who recognize historical strains of hatred when they see it. The Anti-Defamation League’s deputy national director, Ken Jacobson, immediately responded to Trump’s language with a detailed editorial on the connection between the phrase “invisible enemy” and centuries of dangerous anti-Semitic rhetoric focused on this idea of “secrecy”: ...

And The Chicago Sun-Times ran a scathing piece with this eye-catching headline: “Donald Trump is the virus: His coronavirus response confirms how toxic he is for our nation.”

So Trump called the virus and invisible enemy, Trump supports America First, a newspaper called Trump a virus, Trump is not Jewish, and a Jewish magazine calls all this anti-Semitic.

I am just describing Jewish religious beliefs. Weird conspiracy theories, paranoia, accusations of persecution.

Checking predictions from 17 days ago

Fox News reported on a March 31 White House briefing:

The extension of the social distancing guidelines comes after Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and other public health officials on the White House coronavirus task force ominously warned that even if the U.S. were to continue to do what it was doing -- keeping the economy closed and most Americans in their homes -- the coronavirus could still leave 100,000 to 240,000 people in the United States dead and millions infected.

Without any measures in place to mitigate the contagion's spread, those projections jump to between 1.5 and 2.2 million deaths from COVID-19.

So we have been locked down for the last 17 days in order to reduce American deaths from 2 million to 200 thousand.

I don't believe it. I think that without any lockdown, the death total would be less than 100k. And I don't think the lockdown will have much long-term reduction in Wuhan virus deaths. (It might decrease deaths from traffic accidents, and increase deaths from suicide and economic damage.)

Experts are still predicting doomsday, as this MIT model suggests that we need to be locked down for another year.

As I see it, most people are going to be exposed to this virus eventually, no matter what is done, and it will be just another common cold to the vast majority of them.

The world has gone mad

ABC News reports that Coronavirus California: COVID-19 may have been spreading in Bay Area since late 2019.

Hydroxychloroquine may be a cure, but authorities are impeding its use. Ventilators may be doing more harm than good.

If you want the facts, I recommend this Swiss doctor summary. He documents what he says.

It is increasingly clear that the justifications for the lockdowns were bogus. The scare stories were wildly exaggerated, such as in this widely influential article. Contrary opinions such as this were censored. In the end, the mortality will probably be less than the flu season two years ago.

I didn't believe that so many otherwise-sensible people would go so crazy. Listening to Dr. Fauci is painful, as he regularly expresses opinions about things way outside of his expertise, and he has been often wrong about what is in his expertise.

Of course the experts will claim that things are not so bad because their policies have reduced the harm. But they have no evidence to back up what they say. There is available evidence, such as by comparing policies of different areas of the world. It appears to me that lockdowns have made things worse.

We would have been much better off if the authorities simply treated the Wuhan virus like a nasty cold virus. I think that it will be eventually proved to be less dangerous than influenza.

I could be wrong about that, but we shall soon see. And I am sure that our world has had a hysterical overreaction to a minor disease, and that the analyses leading to the lockdowns are bogus.

Biden finally gets full MeToo attack

After sitting on the story for several years, the NY Times finally reports:

Last year, Ms. Reade and seven other women came forward to accuse Mr. Biden of kissing, hugging or touching them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable.

I think these accusations are ridiculous. But there is video of Biden touching girls inappropriately in public events, so I don't think these accusations surprise anyone.
Of course, the NY Times blames it all on Trump:

President Trump has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct by more than a dozen women, who have described a pattern of behavior that went far beyond the accusations against Mr. Biden. The president also directed illegal payments, including $130,000 to a pornographic film actress, Stormy Daniels, before the 2016 election to silence women about alleged affairs with Mr. Trump, according to federal prosecutors.

Mr. Trump has even boasted about his mistreatment of women; in a 2005 recording, he described pushing himself on women and said he would “grab them by the pussy,” bragging that he could get away with “anything” because of his celebrity.

No, this is just partisan libel. Trump should file another libel lawsuit.

No, there is no accusation that Trump forced an employee against a wall and digitally penetrated her. Trump did not make any illegal payments. His lawyer Cohen made a plea deal on some crooked deals that had nothing to do with Trump, and promised to implicate Trump to prosecutors, but nothing came of it. There is nothing illegal about making a payment to settle a claim, whether the claim is true or false. Daniels was extorting money out of Cohen, but she does not claim anything like the accusation against Biden. That 2005 recording was a an out-take to a TV comedy act. Trump jokingly said that women let TV stars grab them by the pussy, but he never said he did that himself.

This business of taking down public figures with ancient and unverifiable sexual allegations has become the dirty practice of the NY Times, Democrats, and mentally-disturbed creeps like Ronan Farrow. Biden helped start this nonsense, and he was the one to let Anita Hill testify against Clarence Thomas with her bogus accusations. Biden deserves what he gets.

Again, I don't agree with any of this, and this accuser Reade is very unlikely to be telling the truth. But the NY Times has published about 1000 articles with false accusations against Trump, and it is about time they admit that there are charges against Biden also.

The Plot Against America

I tuned into HBO TV, and was surprised to find a pro-Nazi TV show, called The Plot Against America. It is described as alternative history, where America goes fascist during World War II. Amazon Prime TV also has an alternative history series where America goes Nazi, called The Man in the High Castle.

I watched a couple of episodes, and I was surprised at how pro-Nazi it is. Charles Lindbergh is portrayed as a fascist/nazi, but he is the only one telling the truth about President FDR plotting to get America into war. There are many Jews on the show, but they are portrayed in a negative light. The most sensible ones support Lindbergh.

According to the terms of service of most social media today, hate speech is prohibited. Anything pro-Nazi is especially prohibited. But there is a big exception -- hate speech is allowed if it is part of a message that criticizes the hate speech.

So that is the formula for publishing hate speech today. Just couple it with criticism. The HBO show has an occasional comment indicating that this is a nightmare alternative history that we were lucky to avoid. Okay, but FDR really was dishonestly trying to get America into war, and Lindbergh really was a patriotic American.

Just consider: if HBO and Amazon were run by neo-Nazis who wanted to put out a pro-Nazi message, how would they do it? I cannot think of a better way than to broadcast these alternative history shows.

It is unlikely that they are really Nazis, because there aren't any Nazis alive today. You can find some web sites that superficially pro-Nazi, like the Daily Stormer, but they are also using Nazis as an attention-getting device. They do not have much in common with Nazi Germany. They do have political views, but their views are about issues today, like the Wuhan China virus, not Hitler.

Australian Catholic bishop exonerated

The is a world-wide plot to destroy the Catholic Church with bogus accusations that cannot be verified.

The NY Times reports:

MELBOURNE, Australia — Australia’s highest court on Tuesday overturned the sexual abuse conviction of Cardinal George Pell, the highest-ranking Roman Catholic leader ever found guilty in the church’s clergy pedophilia crisis.

Cardinal Pell, 78, who was the Vatican’s chief financial officer and an adviser to Pope Francis, was sentenced to six years in prison last March for molesting two 13-year-old boys after Sunday Mass in 1996.

He walked free on Tuesday after a panel of seven judges ruled that the jury ought to have entertained a doubt about his guilt. The judges cited “compounding improbabilities” to conclude that the verdicts on five counts reached in 2018 were “unreasonable or cannot be supported by the evidence.”

Apparently all seven supreme court judges were convinced that Pell was innocent.

His case had dragged on for years. His first trial ended with a hung jury; his second carried on with a heavy shroud of secrecy as suppression orders limited what could be reported or even scrutinized.

The testimony of the case’s most important witness, a former choirboy who had stepped forward with his claims in 2015, was never made public, not even in transcripts. Legal experts said that made it difficult for the public to comprehend the complexity of the case, as well as the High Court’s ultimate ruling.

This is so obviously bogus that no one should have taken it seriously. Secret testimony based on recovered memories of incidents that supposedly occurred 20 years earlier? Seriously? With no corroboration of anything the accuser said?

This is the only bishop to be convicted on criminal charges, and he was supposedly the best example of misbehavior in the Catholic Church. And the case against him turns out to be bogus. I am wondering if there is any merit to any of the sensationalized charges against the Catholic Church.

Hungary is for Hungarians

Quillette has a lot of good essay, but I am puzzled by this attack:

Nevertheless, they are birds of an authoritarian feather who pose growing threats to US security interests, and they should be treated as such by all Americans.

In response, the United States should create a coalition of allies to isolate Hungary diplomatically and condemn his autocratic rule. They should engage the Hungarian liberal opposition and increase public diplomacy with the Hungarian people through the US Agency for Global Media and its subsidiary organizations Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. And, along with its European and non-European partners, the US should establish a clear red line to assure Orbán that any further moves against US interests will result in sanctions.

Okay, he had some authoritarian responses to the Wuhan virus, but so has America and most other countries.

The article's main complaint is that Orban has criticized George Soros, and a Jewish publication says it is anti-semitic to oppose what it calls "a wealthy Jewish financier". And also some Jews have some ideological complaints about plans to open a Holocaust museum.

The article compares Orban to a Moslem dictator, but of course he is nothing of the kind.

His most controversial maneuver, however, was the 2011 Fundamental Law, ..., and changed the name of the state from the Hungarian Republic to Hungary. This last amendment was the most controversial part of the new constitution.

So all I get out of this is a complaint that Orban is not taking orders from Jewish elites who want to turn Hungary into something else than a Hungarian nation.