Jewish professor explains religions differences

The NY Times explains:

I’d say there are two characteristics that set most forms of Judaism apart from Christianity and Islam. First, whereas Christianity and Islam imagine themselves as universal religions, Judaism is usually imagined as a religion for a specific people, for Jews. ...

Second, in comparison to Christianity and Islam, Judaism places less of a stress on belief and more on practice. ... Most Jewish movements are concerned not with what you believe about God, but with how the tradition informs your life: how you pray and celebrate the holidays; how you conduct your family or business affairs; what you eat and so on.

In short, Jews are tribalist and have no spiritual beliefs.

These differences are so huge that it is hard to see what anyone could mean by "Judeo-Christian". The term used to refer to Jews who had converted to Christianity, but is now used as if Jews and Christians believe the same things. They do not.

There are many other large differences as well. I just give these, as they are from a Jewish source. Other differences are apparent from Hollywood movies, or Jewish voting patterns.

Plan to replace the white European race

A Dutch politician said this:

the European Union was setting up ferry services “to transfer immigrants from Africa to Europe, to weaken national identities so that there will be no more nation-states.”

A court just ruled that it was correctly summarized as:

“Thierry Baudet caused a stir in the House of Representatives last week by saying that he thinks the EU has a preconceived plan to replace the white European race with African immigrants,” TV presenter Natalie Righton said a month ago on the Sunday afternoon program “Buitenhof.”

Baudet sued, but:

On Wednesday, the Lelystad-based Central Netherlands Court agreed that although Righton had used three words Baudet had not – “white,” “race,” and “replace” – the sentiment was similar, both to what Baudet said during that debate and also in other statements.

Really? So if someone complaints about transferring in African migrants, that is just the same as complaining about the plan to replace the white European race.

After all, why else would those African migrants be imported, except as part of a plan to replace the White race? This court is essentially saying that is the only reason. Okay, noted.

Media doing more harm than good

Rawstory.com reports:

One of the first deaths in Virginia from coronavirus was a 66-year-old Christian “musical evangelist” who fell ill while on a trip to New Orleans with his wife. As the Friendly Atheist’s Bo Gardiner points out, Landon Spradlin had previously shared opinions that the pandemic was the result of “mass hysteria” from the media.

On March 13, Spradlin shared a misleading meme that compared coronavirus deaths to swine flu deaths and suggested the media is using the pandemic to hurt Trump. In the comments, Spradlin acknowledged that the outbreak is a “real issue,” but added that he believes “the media is pumping out fear and doing more harm than good”

“It will come and it will go,” he wrote.

I guess we are supposed to laugh at how stupid he was.

He is dead, but he was also essentially correct. We are living in mass hysteria. That is why the stores lack toilet paper.

When this crisis is over, we can have a rational discussion about whether the public overreacted or underreacted to the Wuhan virus. My gut feeling is that officials have exaggerated the threat, and that the cure was worse than the disease. We shall soon see, as the New York city gets overloaded with cases. But the disease has run its course in China, and they only had about 3000 deaths from it.

It seems clear now that the govt overreacted to the 9-11-2001 crisis, and probably also the 2008 investment banking crisis.

Site attacks neo-Nazi attitude towards women

I think I found the most misogynistic site on the net. Consider this:

Women do not like soft, pathetic men who treat them as equals. Women like being under the control of strong and dominant men. The feminization of white men, through this program of feminism, is why so many European women have chosen to start dating blacks and Arabs.

They will tell you this themselves.

All women prefer masculine men. The exception is women who are in their late twenties and have lost their sex appeal and single mothers. Those women are simply looking for a man to feed off of, and to control. Many feminist neo-Nazis will actually tell men to marry single mothers, because that fits into their “respect overload” philosophical paradigm.

However, if you are interested in attractive and fertile young women, respecting women harder is not going to get you there. Even if you are uniquely handsome, if you treat women as equals, they will still view you as weak, and exploit and abuse you.

The defining aspect of masculinity is the ability to control a situation. That goes beyond intelligence or physical strength, though it is often represented by one or the other or a combination of the two. There is no place for the gynocentrism of viewing women as sacred in a masculine identity.

Only a weak man is capable of having respect for women. Women are stupid, physically weak, incompetent and utterly amoral. Respecting that sort of a creature is something only a pathetic individual would do.

And this:

Women are Vile and Disgusting

What neo-Nazis don’t understand, due to their lack of sexual experience, is that women are disgusting and savage animals. Their lack of sexual experience should be a virtue, and something they are proud of, as being “sexually accomplished” is still this stupid boomer meme. Instead, these neo-Nazis speak on something they clearly know nothing about. I’m sure some of them have had sex before, in stupid casual situations, or with girlfriends. Some of them may even have been married. But they have never seen the depths of female depravity, which is why they are able to maintain the illusion of female purity.

Here’s the truth about what is considered “good sex” for a woman: every single woman just wants to be slapped and choked during sex. That is what women crave more than anything. That is what she will compliment you on, that is what will make her obsessed with you and keep texting you compulsively afterward. I’ve even heard tell that literal hookers will ask you to choke them, if you’re a muscly and aloof young guy, and they want to use the opportunity of you paying them for sex to act out their own sex fantasies on you in-between business sessions with old men.

You all know that the 50 Shades of Gray trilogy topped the best selling books list for the 2010s, right?

Wow. The site trolls a lot, so I don't know how serious this is. Those Grey books really were the best selling books of the last decade, and they were almost entirely read by women who like to fantasize about being abused by a man. And they were not reading those books for the quality of the writing.

Was Freud right about anything?

Evolution professor Jerry Coyne writes:

About fifteen years ago, I decided to read Freud. After all, he was touted as one of the three greatest thinkers of our time, along with Einstein and Marx (all Jewish men), and while I found Marx boring, I could at least try to read Freud. And I did: I read a lot of Freud, including his major books on dream analysis, the psychopathology of everyday life, The Future of an Illusion, his book on jokes, his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, and many of his famous case studies, like “Little Hans” and the “Wolf Man.”

I was appalled. As a scientist, I recognized that his works were tendentious in the extreme. He wasn’t following the data, but massaging the data to conform to his preconceptions. In other words, he was ridden with confirmation bias. In fact, I couldn’t find a single idea in his works that was new (the “unconscious” had been suggested by others), and a lot of ideas that were complete crap (e.g., the Oedipus complex). In the end, I couldn’t figure out why he was regarded as such a great thinker. While psychoanalysis was touted by Freud as a “science,” there was no science in it: it was in fact the opposite of science—pseudoscience based on faith (a religion, really) and, ultimately, on Freud’s ambition to be famous.

Then I discovered that a professor named Fred Crews, once chairman of English at UC Berkeley, had devoted a lot of his writing to criticizing Freud in an objective but hard-hitting way. ...

“Statistically, it’s conceivable that a man can be as dishonest and slippery as Freud and still come up with something true,” Crews said. “I’ve tried my best to examine his theories and to ask the question: What was the empirical evidence behind them? But when you ask these questions, then you eventually just lose hope.”

The conclusion is that Freud was never right about anything.

I had a similar experience. Freud was just an obvious charlatan that it is baffling that anyone would respect him for anything. And yet they do. Not only that, but he was supposed to be "one of the three greatest thinkers of our time".

At least it has become acceptable to trash Freud in the last 30 years. But still, most of the trashing comes from non-psychologists.

One explanation for this is that other theories of the mind are also problematic. True, but not really an explanation.

The Einstein story is also interesting. He got some things right, but he got a lot wrong, and was also dishonest and slippery. He is credited for a lot of things where he deserves little or no credit. The discovery of the theory of relativity was almost entirely the work of others. I have explained this in great detail elsewhere.

So why are these three Jewish men considered the greatest thinkers? What do they even have in common?

Several things, besides all being Jewish men. All were not really religious in the usual sense, but very strongly identified with their fellow Jews. All were extreme leftists and communists. All have an army of Jewish academics worshiping them. The worship is so silly it is almost like a religious cult.

None of this is new. These guys were exposed as impostors in their lifetimes. A well-respected 1953 book attributed relativity to Poincare and Lorentz. Einstein's friends urged him to defend himself, but he had no defense. Most physicists agree that Einstein was wrong about most of what he said in the last 30 years of his life. But he is idolized anyway.

Update: I see Netflix just started streaming a biographical series on Freud.

Drug companies dependent on foreigners

USA Today op-ed:

President Trump initially kept reasonable travel restrictions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, ...

A new analysis of government data from the Cato Institute shows that eight of the major companies developing treatments and vaccines for the virus are heavily reliant on foreign workers. ...

A medical crisis is not the time to talk about stopping all legal immigrants. It’s the time for more legal skilled immigrants to help fight this virus.

So that is the Libertarian lesson from this crisis? That America should become even more dependent on China?

Why Biden will be the nominee

The NY Times reports:

Mr. Biden is also succeeding even as progressive policies such as single-payer health care, robust action on climate change and student debt cancellation continue to poll high among Democratic voters, drawing majority support in some states.

This disconnect, in which policies are popular but the candidates who advocate them are losing, has frustrated progressive groups.

It is not that complicated. First, Biden has a moderate voting record, but he has now repudiated all those positions in favor of the more "progressive" Democrat positions. He now favors open borders, LGBTQ agenda, letting blacks out of prison, tax-paid abortions, etc.

He is obviously senile, and controlled by party officials and donors. They have told their obedient members to vote for him.

Second, Sanders is a Commie, and was leading the race for the nomination until the Democrat established decided that Trump and Sanders must both be stopped at any cost.

All of a sudden, Jewish publications were all running articles on how Sanders must be stopped. Being Jewish, they know the type when they see it. They described Sanders as an incorrigible Jewish Leftist Commie who cannot be reasoned with. Electing him would be a disaster worse than Trump, they wrote.

So the fix was in. Nobody ever really liked Biden. But the power brokers had to coalesce on someone other than Sanders and Trump, and Biden was the only once available. The low-IQ Democrat voters promptly voted as instructed.

Banning price gouging is harmful

There are many press stories complaining about price gouging, but not everyone is offended by it. Read this comment:

Banning price gouging is harmful, especially in disaster scenarios. The laws of supply and demand do not change because there's a natural disaster or a pandemic.

Firstly, it destroys incentives for conservation and encourages hoarding. When people rush out to buy hand sanitizer, of course they're going to buy more than one bottle when they cost $4 each. If stores were allow to charge $10 per bottle, people would think twice about loading up.

Secondly, it reduces supply, because sellers don't have enough incentive to supply the market. And the suppliers are both the manufacturers and the people who have some stockpiled. Right now there are thousands of empty office buildings with hand sanitizer stocked in janitorial supply closets. But that supply won't get to consumers, because it's not worth it for most businesses to unload the stuff at $4/bottle. And because online marketplaces have cracked down, there isn't a good venue to sell it.

By setting a price ceiling, the law aims to prevent price exploitation, but at the cost of actually distributing goods. To put it another way, the law is saying that instead of being able to buy hand sanitizer at $20/bottle, it's better for you to *not* be able buy it at all. The price ceiling creates the shortage, and an empty shelf is like an infinite price, from the consumer point-of-view.

No one like a profiteer, but the alternative isn't that the shelves would be full. The shelves would still be empty, and other people would have cleared them out.

Because of price gouging laws, toliet paper manufacturers are refusing to expand capacity, Ebay is banning hand sanitizer sales, and people who need essential goods cannot buy them.

You know your country has too much socialism if your local store's toilet paper shelves are empty.

For most ordinary retail stores, it is easier and more profitable to just sell out the existing inventory in case of emergency demand. Trying to manage the stock in a more responsible way is just too much trouble. But price gouging laws prevent entrepreneurs from entering the market, and making products available for those who really need them.

Whites invented romance

Psychology professors have taken to calling Whites WEIRD:

In 2010, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan reported a systemic bias in conducting psychology studies with participants from "WEIRD" (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) societies.[229][230] Although only 1/8 people worldwide live in regions that fall into the WEIRD classification, the researchers claimed that 60–90% of psychology studies are performed on participants from these areas.

In particular, the American nuclear family is considered weird to most of the world, and to most non-Whites and non-Christians.

Here is what underlies the differences:

Henrich does not express himself in these blunt terms, but for the sake of immediate clarity, his basic argument about WEIRD people is that they see themselves as individuals rather than as members of collective ingroups. Their individualism is the difference that underlies all the other differences. It is the difference that explains why WEIRD people are less attached to extended families, tribal units, religious groups and even nation states. Because WEIRD people judge others as individuals, they are willing to extend their trust to outsiders, to people from other ethnic backgrounds and nationalities. They are more inclined to be fair to outsiders, judging them on the basis of impersonal standards rather than standards that only serve the interests of their ingroup. WEIRD people are less conformist, more reliant on their own individual judgments and capacities, willing to reason about issues without following the prescribed norms and answers mandated from collective authorities. In the non-Western world, trust is circumscribed within one's ingroup rather than extended to individuals from outgroups.

The key to the individualism of WEIRD people is their lack of kinship ties. The most important norms and institutions humans have developed to regulate their social behavior revolve around kin groups, which are networks of individuals connected by blood ties, extended families and clans. Humans are born into these kin groups; their survival, identity, status and obligations within society, as well as their sense of right and wrong, who and when they should marry, where they should live, who owns the land and how property should be inherited, are determined by the norms of the kin group.

Given the importance of kinship networks in determining whether people are "normal" or WEIRD, Henrich set out to find what factors may have led to the breakdown of kinship networks in the West. His conclusion was that the Catholic Church was responsible for the "demolition" of kinship networks and the rise of WEIRD people.

The article traces these difference further back, to the Ice Age and development of agriculture:

MacDonald observes that, as members of the same Homo sapiens species, all humans have common biological adaptations, but they do "differ in degree in adaptations" depending on environments, and these differences can generate "major differences" between cultures. Under the "harsh evolutionary pressures of the Ice Age," there would have been more pressures to live in small groups and in relative social isolation, rather than to form "extended kinship networks and collectivist groups" competing in close proximity for resources. There were selective pressures for males to provision simple households or nuclear families characterized by monogamy, exogamy, and bilateral kinship, because the ecology and availability of resources could not have selected for large polygynous families. This was in contrast to Near Eastern regions with their long fertile rivers supporting "large tribal groups based on extended kinship relations". The strategy pursuit by northern Europeans was quite successful, enabling them to develop complex hunting gathering cultures during the Mesolithic era for a long time, 15,000 to 5,000, delaying the advance of farming which was slowly spreading into central and north Europe after Anatolian farmers settled in various parts of southern Europe starting 8000ybp.

Mesolithic cultures in Europe did consist of larger bands of hunter-gatherers due to their more efficient exploitation of resources and improved stone age tools, but lacking any "stable resource" that could be controlled by an extended lineage group, their residences remained seasonally occupied by relatively small families living in a state of egalitarian monogamy and without one extended family superimposing itself over the others by controlling fertile and stable land areas. In northern Europe, families "were periodically forced to split up into smaller, more family-based groups". These smaller groups were forced to interact both with related families and with "non-kin and strangers" also moving around from season to season. These interactions were not regulated by kinship norms but instead led to emphasis on "trust and maintaining a good reputation within the larger non-kinship based group".

These evolutionary selected behaviors characterized by small families, exogamous and monogamous marriages, and relations based on trust with outsiders, were the primordial ground out of which Western individualism emerged.

In the Near East complex hunting gathering societies soon evolved into agrarian villages controlled by lineage groups in charge of stable resources. I would add, as Jared Diamond observed, that most of the animals and plants susceptible to domestication were found in the Near East, which encouraged or made it easier to develop farming villages with plentiful resources controlled by the stronger kinship groups. Whereas monogamy and exogamy persisted in the West, in the East the tendency was for marrying relatives, even first cousins.

The European practice of marrying outside the extended family meant that marriage was more likely "based on personal attraction", which meant that there was selection for physical attractiveness, strength, health and personality, in contrast to the East where marriage was arranged within the extended family. Love and intimacy between wife and husband, including greater affection and nurturance of children, MacDonald observes, were a salient trait of Europeans. Whites invented romance, in contrast, for example, to Semitic marriages where marriages were intended to solidify kinship ties, arranged by elders, with love and romance having a far lesser role.

This analysis doesn't explain how much is nature, and how much is nuture. Presumably some of these difference are innate. But whether they are or not, they appear to have persisted for millennia, and are unlikely to change anytime soon.

Futility of personal action

Imagine that that there were a little fence around the entire world, made of plastic drinking straws standing side-by-side. That is, it would extend across the roughly 25k mile circumference, including the oceans.

Now suppose that you were convinced that this is stupid, ugly, and detrimental to the environment, and that you should do your part in dismantling it.

It turns out that the number of straws in such a fence is about the same as the number of people in the world. So doing your part would be to remove one straw from the fence.

Would you bother to remove your straw? No, it would be obvious that such a gesture is silly and pointless. You would have such a trivial effect on the fence that no one would even notice.

This is analogous to anyone trying to be environmentally conscious by avoiding straws, recycling newspapers, or driving an electric. It is just lunacy to think that you are doing some sort of good for the planet. At best, you are like the guy who removes one straw from the straw fence.

Feminist goals for destroying marriage

I posted before about Jewish efforts to destroy the American nuclear family, and here is a HuffPost effort to destroy traditional marriage:

28 Reasons It Pays To Have A Feminist Marriage
Don't settle for someone who thinks feminism is a dirty word. ...

6. While we’re on the subject of sex, your partner would never slut-shame you for your sexual past. Your “sex number” is no big deal. ...

8. Mansplaining is not an issue ...

9. You both know a woman’s place is anywhere she damn well pleases ...

10. Ideologically, your partner believes that the world is a better place when women are empowered. ...

11. Your partner loves your body but recognizes that the decisions you make regarding it are yours and yours alone.

12. You don’t fret about maintaining relationships with friends of the opposite sex. Your partner knows you can and should have relationships with other men and other women. ...

15. If your partner’s guy friends start badmouthing feminism, you know he’ll correct them. ...

18. If you decide to marry, you can do whatever you want with your last names. Take his surname, have him take yours, hyphenate, create a hybrid/combo last name ― it’s your call. ...

20. Phrases like “man up” or “don’t be a pussy” are off limits.

This sounds like a joke, but it is not. Note that the picture creates an image of a White man being enslaved by a non-white woman. And the wife is proud to have a history of being a slut.

Another site responds:

For men there is now little reward in marriage and children. Single men can live cheaply. A man would rather pay off a house, buy a fancy car, and get a vasectomy. He has little reason to reproduce – not economic, religious, social, or legal. A man just needs good friends. He doesn’t need to be enslaved by a modern type of marriage that would destroy his standard of life. Maybe men play video games because video games won’t nag them. Modern marriage is a bad deal for men, and it has been for quite a while. Men just don’t want to be plow horses.

Men who are aware of how badly society has decided to treat them are consciously getting out of the game. Men work hard for very little reward. Men with families are often the most boring men one can meet. A lot of men are like sheep, going dutifully off to some job so they can get away from the wife and children for a few hours. But other men have gone their own way. Why spend half a million dollars to be a slave to an ungrateful man-hating woman? Who in his right mind would want to bring a child into this world?

Hence the rise of MGTOW.

Acquitted, and sentenced for it anyway

If you are ever on a jury, there are a few things you need to know, that the judge will not tell you. You can find many of them online at the Fully Informed Jury Association .

Here is a big one, that they don't even mention.

Law site:

Trial by jury is essential to preserving liberty because it protects individuals from arbitrary use of government power by allowing the people to act independently of the state. Accordingly, upholding the people’s role in the administration of justice is foundational to upholding the purpose of this procedural guarantee.

Against this background, U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, recently introduced the Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act of 2019. The bill seeks to address the insidious practice known as acquitted conduct sentencing, wherein a judge enhances a sentence based on conduct underlying charges for which a defendant has been acquitted by a jury.

You read that correctly. Under current law, federal judges are permitted to sentence individuals based on charges for which a jury found them not guilty.

Another legal site:

“Most lawyers, as well as ordinary citizens unfamiliar with the daily procedures of criminal law administration, are astonished to learn that a person in this society may be sentenced to prison on the basis of conduct of which a jury has acquitted him, or on the basis of charges that did not result in conviction,” Yale law professor Daniel J. Freed, a sententencing expert, wrote in 1992. Almost 30 years later, last week, this lawyer was herself astonished to learn this fact.

Can that really happen? “Yes, it can,” writes Oklahoma City University law professor Barry Johnson. “In federal court and many state courts, once a defendant is convicted, under the concept of relevant conduct, the defendant’s sentence can be increased by the consideration of uncharged, dismissed, or even acquitted conduct of the defendant. … Relevant conduct allows a sentencing court to reach as far back in time as can be said to be part of the scheme, plan, or enterprise related to the defendant’s convicted offense.”

This is not just hypothetical. Harvey Weinstein was acquitted of the more serious charges, but the judge sentenced him for them anyway. The LA Times reports:

“Although this is a first conviction, this is not a first offense," Judge James Burke said in imposing the sentence.

In other words, the judge sentenced Weinstein to spend the rest of his life in prison because of accusations that were not even charged as crimes, and for charges that the jury decided to acquit.

Brooks: Nuclear Family Was a Mistake

NY Times columnist David Brooks writes in The Atlantic:

The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake

The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. ...

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

This article is about that process, and the devastation it has wrought—and about how Americans are now groping to build new kinds of family and find better ways to live. ...

Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950–65 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family. ...

But the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems—with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force—stem from that crumbling. We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back.

What to make of this? It reminds me of the Unabomber Manifesto, which starts "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." There is a popular Netflix document on the author.

David Brooks is a divorced Trump-hating Jewish man, writing for Jewish publications.

This is so strange, that I am beginning to think that there is a Jewish plot to destroy the nuclear family. The nuclear family has never been important in Jewish culture, and Commies seeking social change have often regarded the family as a huge obstacle.

Here is how Brooks wants to replace the nuclear family:

The modern chosen-family movement came to prominence in San Francisco in the 1980s among gay men and lesbians, many of whom had become estranged from their biological families and had only one another for support in coping with the trauma of the AIDS crisis. In her book, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, the anthropologist Kath Weston writes, “The families I saw gay men and lesbians creating in the Bay Area tended to have extremely fluid boundaries, not unlike kinship organization among sectors of the African-American, American Indian, and white working class.” ...

Ever since I started working on this article, a chart has been haunting me. It plots the percentage of people living alone in a country against that nation’s GDP. There’s a strong correlation. Nations where a fifth of the people live alone, like Denmark and Finland, are a lot richer than nations where almost no one lives alone, like the ones in Latin America or Africa. Rich nations have smaller households than poor nations. The average German lives in a household with 2.7 people. The average Gambian lives in a household with 13.8 people.

Really? He is haunted by Denmark being richer than Gambia?

Here is what Brooks does not mention.

The nuclear family is an invention of White Christian Northwest Europe, in the last millennium. It is popular there and in America, and not much elsewhere. It was a byproduct of the feudal system and Christianity.

Nuclear families have created the greatest civilizations. If you look at what is great in the world today, nearly all if from the cultures with nuclear families.

For the past 50 years or so, a long list of legal and social policies have served to undermine the nuclear family. Most of those bad policies are promoted by NY Times columnists, and others who come from cultures that do not appreciate the nuclear family.

These attacks on the nuclear family are attacks on Americanism.

There is no indication that Brooks understands any of these issues. Or maybe he does and he wants to destroy Americanism.

There is some online criticism of Brooks, such as here. They cite some data on advantages to the nuclear family, but they great understate the importance, and even concede some of Brooks's stupid points.

Chinese proud of exporting a deadly virus

I was not expecting this, but I am starting to hear about Chinese people who seem to think that they have a right to infect the world with a life-threatening disease.

The NY Times reports:

“I am announcing that I, along with 3 of my senior staff, are officially under self-quarantine after sustained contact at CPAC with a person who has since been hospitalized with the Wuhan Virus,” Mr. Gosar wrote on Twitter. “My office will be closed for the week.”

What followed was a torrent of online criticism that his comment was xenophobic and racist, and that attaching geography to a virus that was first detected in Wuhan, China, will lead to continued stigmatization of the Chinese. Among the critics was Representative Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, ...

Wow, Gosar is objectively describing how he is doing the responsible thing, and some Chinese politician hates him for it.

A Chinese female editor of a Chicago student newspaper writes:

As for why your message was xenophobic, it’s even more obvious: You made Chinese students feel like our trauma is unrecognized and unimportant at this school. Your message suggests that our trauma is only worthy of being the backdrop of “important” discussions like capitalism vs. socialism.

The girl being attacked merely said, "the Coronavirus won't destroy America, but Socialism will."

An especially narcissistic Chinese woman writes in a NY Times op-ed:

I turned 24 last month. The day before my birthday, I walked into a nail salon to get myself a birthday manicure. After I was seated, a nail technician walked over. She was an Asian woman in her 50s. She sat down and I smiled at her. I couldn’t see if she smiled back because she was wearing a face mask. ...

Finally, my voice cracking, I said: “I just came back from China in January. If you’re scared of me, get up and leave.” The technician went silent.

This is shockingly hateful. I refuse to believe that this is representative of Chinese Americans. I am guessing that most of them think about the same of the Wuhan China virus as I do.

Note that the targets in the above are of different races. But all stories represent news media attacks on common-sense efforts to avoid a contagious disease, and trying to recast them as racist.

Are there any limits to what the NYT will call racist?

The disease originated from sloppy handling of bats or snakes for human consumption in Wuhan China, according to reports. It is the biggest public health crisis in decades. I am surprised that people are not much more critical of the Chinese.

Indian laws against men

A men's rights site complains:

Nine gender-biased Indian laws that are unfair to men
Submitted by arindamp on Sat, 2020-03-07 12:23

There are many more such laws. It is time to change these sexist, anti-men laws and end the discrimination faced by men in Indian society. We need equality and justice for men.

1. The father of the deceased doesn't inherit property, but the mother does.
2. A boy is entitled to maintenance only till he turns 18, whereas a girl is entitled to maintenance till she gets married.
3. Only the man is prosecuted for adultery.
4. If a man has sex on the pretext of marriage and doesn't marry, it amounts to rape.
5. If a guy under 16 years of age has consensual sex with a girl of his age, he's a rapist.
6. If a woman is treated with physical or mental cruelty by her husband and his family, she can throw them behind bars.
7. According to Indian law, a man serves up to 3 years jail or a fine for sexual harassment but what about a woman?
8. Under the Special Marriage Act, only the wife can claim permanent alimony and maintenance.
9. If the death of the woman is caused by burns or bodily injury within 7 years of marriage, it's the husband's fault.

Actually, I don't know if these are unfair or not. I just post these because a lot of people assume that a country like India is misogynistic, and probably unfair to women throughout its laws and culture. Apparently not. It has lots of laws that favor women over men.

Continuing to beat the impeachment drum

The NY Times is still hammering the impeachment issue:

Yes, Impeaching Trump Was Absolutely Worth It

Five reasons that the work of Congress to hold the president accountable has left democracy and our nation stronger.

By Norman Eisen

Mr. Eisen served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment of President Trump.

Eisen is Jewish, and has previously worked for Jewish propaganda organizations.

The president’s misconduct has intensified: Having a decorated war hero and impeachment witness, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, marched out of the White House, together with his equally blameless twin brother;

The Vindmans are Jewish also. Is there a pattern here? Eisen says it is misconduct to fire Jews who are openly hostile to administration policy.

I know the gravity of the word alone: impeachment. It is a permanent mark on Mr. Trump and his shameful presidency that will tarnish his name as long as it is remembered. It should, and I believe will, weigh in as Americans decide whether he should continue as our president.

Except that the impeachment was expunged by the Senate.

Take the swirl of events surrounding the sentencing of Roger Stone. The four federal prosecutors who withdrew from the case showed swift, admirable fealty to their principles. The judge who presided over the case, Amy Berman Jackson, and the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, Beryl Howell, also exhibited great integrity by condemning Mr. Trump’s implicit orchestration, with the court levying a tough but fair sentence of over three years.

Actually the judge specifically said in her sentencing order that she agreed with Trump that the recommendation of 7-9 years was excessive.

What's missing from his argument is any criminal conduct by the President. The impeachment was just a big argument that leftist Jews don't like Trump.

Woody Allen's autobiography is blocked

The NY Times reports:

Hachette Book Group on Friday dropped its plans to publish Woody Allen’s autobiography and said it would return all rights to the author, a day after its employees protested its deal with the filmmaker. ...

The journalist Ronan Farrow, whose book “Catch and Kill” was published by another Hachette imprint, criticized Hachette in an email exchange earlier this week, calling its decision to publish Mr. Allen’s book a betrayal. ...

Mr. Farrow, whose reporting on accusations of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men helped touch off the #MeToo movement, is Mr. Allen’s son with the actress Mia Farrow.

Among Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, and Ronan Farrow, I actually think that Woody is the least creepy.

Ronan claims to be a journalist, but he obviously has no interest telling the public multiple sides to a story, or even considering that someone might be innocent until proven guilty. He appears to have never had a sexual relationship with a woman, and does not seem to understand female attitudes and feelings at all. He makes the man guilty if the female accusation is "credible".

The idea that he would block his own father from telling his life story is just bizarre. He does not appear to have any personal grievance with his father. All of the evidence indicates that Mia made up a nasty accusation against Woody as part of a child custody dispute, and Mia's own kid says the story is completely false. Ronan does not appear to have any direct knowledge about it.

Ronan is half-Jewish, and seems to hate Jews, as some sort of weirdo daddy issue. His nastiest accusations are against Jews.

Woody has his faults, which he admits in his semi-autobiographical movies. He is also an amazingly original movie-maker.

Ronan appears to have inherited a mental illness from Mia. No one should take him seriously.

Gladwell is right about Paterno

Statistician Andrew Gelman writes:

“We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly. ... The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.” — Malcolm Gladwell, 2000.

Gladwell’s recent book got some negative reviews. No big deal. He’s the world’s leading science writer, the author of a series of best-sellers and promulgator of science-based slogans (“10,000 hours,” etc.), secure in his perch at the New Yorker, and I’d assume “review-proof” ...

I don’t know, though, if Gladwell’s reputation will fully withstand [saying "Joe Paterno essentially did nothing wrong."] ...

I’m wonder if Gladwell didn’t realize how bad it could look to make a high-profile defense of Paterno and Paterno’s bosses and not realize how. It’s not that this should make anyone think that Gladwell is evil, or that he’s soft on child molestation, or anything like that. It just shines a bright light on Gladwell’s poor judgment, his willingness to believe contrarian stories without looking into them. ...

The Paterno thing is so weird ... I haven’t been following the details. But it seems a bit much to not only excuse Paterno but the entire leadership of Penn State!

Gladwell deserves a lot of criticism for many things, but he is right about this. The Paterno story is the modern witch trial.

The whole story was wildly implausible. The central claim is that an ex-coach was criminally molesting and raping young boys at a public university, and this was generally known to many football and administration officials. No, this sort of thing does not happen in America.

And there was no solid evidence. There was never a contemporaneous complaint of a crime, or any physical evidence, or anything like that. There were about a dozen witnesses, but they all first testified that Sandusky was innocent of any crime. Years later, they found recovered memories after being offered 6-figure settlements to change their stories. The strongest witness, Mike McQueary, got $12M in awards.

What made this case big was that Penn State had deep pockets, and lawyers conspired to drain it of $100M or more.

I realize that I am in the minority on this issue, and that courts ruled against Sandusky and Penn State. To me, this is like saying the Salem witches were convicted. The story is preposterous, and the evidence was so obviously tainted by bad science and monetary bias that I don't see how any rational person could believe it.

I was going to link to a Wikipedia chart of how every witness changed his story, but editors have deleted it, and removed it from the archives. The reason given was that it put victims in a bad light.

Gelman likes to point out the moral failings of other scholars, but Gladwell has many faults to attack.

I hardly hear anyone defending Paterno et al. If Gelman is right, then any scholar would be risking his reputation to making such a defense. I guess that is why there is so little defense.

Jews try to blame the Pope

The London Guardian reports:

Critics of [Pope] Pius XII have accused him of remaining silent during the Holocaust, never publicly condemning the persecution and genocide of Jews and others. His defenders say that he quietly encouraged convents and other Catholic institutions to hide thousands of Jews, and that public criticism of the Nazis would have risked the lives of priests and nuns. ...

More than 150 people have applied to access the archives, although only 60 can be accommodated in the offices at one time. Among the first to view the documents will be representatives of the Jewish community in Rome, and scholars from Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

So Jews are plotting to force the Catholic Church into apologizing, and groveling for approval of another religion.

World War II in Europe was largely a war between the Commies and the Nazis. Neither was friendly to the Catholic Church. The Church had no military power. If the Commies were to win the war, and gain control of Europe, the result would be devastating for the Church.

The Commies were largely Jewish. When they got power in Russia, they sought to exterminate Christianity. And the Commies killed millions of people.

Even today, Jews like Bernie Sanders side with the Commies.

And now a bunch of Jews are complaining that the Pope did not side with the Commies?!

This is pretty crazy for Jews to be trying to dictate what a Catholic Pope should have said about non-Catholics.

This nation began in 1776

Quillette essay:

The United States of America began in 1776, not 1619.

That one sentence is the thesis statement of “1776”—a non-partisan black-led response to the New York Times’s “1619 Project” initiative, which launched last week at D.C.’s National Press Club. I am pleased and proud to be a part of 1776, along with founder Bob Woodson, Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, Jason Hill, Carol Swain, John Wood, Taleeb Starkes, Robert Cherry, and many others. From my perspective as a member, 1776 has three core goals: (1) rebutting some outright historical inaccuracies in the 1619 Project; (2) discussing tragedies like slavery and segregation honestly while clarifying that these were not the most important historical foundations of the United States; and (3) presenting an alternative inspirational view of the lessons of our nation’s history to Americans of all races.

What is going on here? Why would the NY Times conspire with a bunch of historians to tell such an obviously wrong view of American history?

Why is a Black-led response needed to rebut obvious lies?

Nobody wants to connect the dots here.

One possibility is that the NY Times has been secretly taken over by White supremacists. They argue that the USA has always been White supremacists, and that Blacks are inferior creatures only fit to be slaves. Maybe if we recognize that White Americans have always been destined to be slavemaster, we can return the country to a plantation economy.

Okay, I don't really know of anyone who believes that.

Another possibility is that the NY Times editors believe that Jews should run the world. They can't say that explicitly, so they put out fake news about Whites are oppressors, and Blacks and Jews are oppressed. This convinces everyone that White Christians are evil while reinforcing the master/slave view of the world. This tricks White cucks into giving up power out of guilt, and Blacks into accepting Jewish dominance.

Billionaire Tom Steyer is half-Jewish and half-Episcopalian, and he just spent $100M to convince Black voters in S. Carolina that he will pay them slavery reparations, if elected President. He got 11% of the vote, and dropped out. It sounds like the NY Times convinced that White guilt sells, that Blacks need to be reminded about slavery, and that anyone can be bought.

Why pay so much attention to the NY Times? Isn't it just Jewish Leftist propaganda?

Because it now dominates the news. Its own columnist brags:

The gulf between The Times and the rest of the industry is vast and keeps growing: The company now has more digital subscribers than The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the 250 local Gannett papers combined, according to the most recent data. And The Times employs 1,700 journalists — a huge number in an industry where total employment nationally has fallen to somewhere between 20,000 and 38,000.

The Times so dominates the news business that it has absorbed many of the people who once threatened it: The former top editors of Gawker, Recode, and Quartz are all at The Times, as are many of the reporters who first made Politico a must-read in Washington. ...

“The New York Times is going to basically be a monopoly,” predicted Jim VandeHei, the founder of Axios, which started in 2016 with plans to sell digital subscriptions but has yet to do so. “The Times will get bigger and the niche will get nichier, and nothing else will survive.”

It doesn't say how much of this success is a byproduct of catering to Jewish Trump-haters.

Psychotherapies are worthless

I have argued that psychiatry is just bogus stuff that Jews believe, and here is some evidence that the treatments are worthless.

SciAm science writer John Horgan writes:

Over the past half century, researchers have churned out countless findings about the brain, mind and mental illness. And psychologists and psychiatrists have introduced many supposedly new and improved treatments for mental distress, notably cognitive-behavioral therapy and antidepressants such as SSRIs. But research suggests that these ostensibly scientific treatments still gain most of their effectiveness from the placebo effect.

In a massive 2002 study of psychotherapies, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, a teal led by psychologist Lester Luborsky found that all are roughly as effective as each other. Studies favoring one particular therapy, Luborsky asserted, tend to show an “allegiance effect,” a prior bias of researchers toward that therapy.

Other analyses suggest that medications for mental illness, although they benefit some people in the short term, might end up hurting more people than they help. Thomas Insel, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said recently, “I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.”

Research into the brain and mind, I have argued on this blog and elsewhere, has yet to produce truly persuasive theories of and treatments for mental illness. As a recent essay in a British psychiatric journal argues, “it is still not possible to cite a single neuroscience or genetic finding that has been of use to the practicing psychiatrist in managing [mental] illnesses despite attempts to suggest the contrary.”

This failure helps explains why people still turn to Freudian psychoanalysis, although it does not stand up to scientific scrutiny, and to an even older mind-therapy, Buddhism. And it explains why many people in distress turn to astrology, tarot cards and other pseudoscientific methods. May they find the solace they seek.

So quack stuff like Freudianism and astrology is not any crazier than the mainstream methods.

For an example of a widely acclaimed psychotherapy that is worthless, see this
review of John Gottman Marital Counseling.

In the past several years, California and other states have partial banned psychotherapies to avoid homosexuality, on the grounds that testimony said that they were not effective. But if you read the testimony carefully, it never really claims that any other psychotherapy is more effective.

We also have laws saying physical and mental ailments have to be funded the same, in some ways. But we have hundreds of effective treatments for physical ailments, and none for mental ailments.

Matthews confronts Warren on believing women

Laura Bassett writes:

MSNBC host Chris Matthews, whose long history of sexist comments and behavior have somehow not yet gotten him fired, tested the boundaries of his own misogyny again on Wednesday night. After the tenth Democratic presidential debate, the Hardball anchor grilled Elizabeth Warren about one of her lines of attack against Mike Bloomberg during the debate: that a pregnant female employee accused Bloomberg of telling her to “kill it.”

“You believe he’s lying?” Matthews asked Warren of Bloomberg's denial.

“I believe the woman, which means he’s not telling the truth,” said Warren, who recently had to defend her own credible story of pregnancy discrimination.

“And why would he lie?” Matthews said. “Just to protect himself?”

“Yeah, and why would she lie?” Warren responded pointedly.

“I just wanna make sure you’re clear about this,” Matthews said. Right there on America’s purportedly liberal network, the anchor spoke to a 70-year-old United States senator who is running for president — and a renowned Harvard Law professor, no less — like she couldn’t possibly understand her own words, as if she were a child choosing between a snack now or dessert later.

It is revealing that Warren would so stubbornly accept the truth of and old and unverified accusation, and on that basis to accuse her fellow candidate of being a liar.

I have no idea whether the accusation is true or not, and I think it is foolish to argue about such a thing or to blame someone on such flimsy evidence.

If Warren is elected President, she will have to make decisions about committing acts of war based on limited evidence. Would she weigh the evidence by just always believing the woman?

Yes, women sometimes lie. Warren herself has been caught lying many times, including "her own credible story of pregnancy discrimination." Sure, it was a credible story, but it was contradicted by every other account, including the ones she told herself.

The lesson here, from Bassett and Warren, is that a woman telling a credible story should be believed.

I hope that this is not what is taught at Harvard Law School. All this gives the impression that women are incapable of understanding truth.

Mike Bloomberg has had a very public life, and his candidacy has many pros and cons based on demonstrable facts. It is crazy to make an issue about an old rumor of an inappropriate remark. He is running for President. Even if he made the tasteless remark, there are a thousand other issues that are more important.

Bassett goes on the whine about some gossip about Chris Matthews. I can believe that he has made some inappropriate remarks, as he says a lot of dumb things on the air. But who cares? He was just asking Warren to explain her peculiar opinions.

Update: March 2 was Matthews' last day on the air. It appears that he was forced into retirement, as a result of some of these remarks. I do not agree with terminating him for this.

Redefining identity politics

Ilana Mercer writes:

EVERY time a racist, anti-white event goes down, which is often, conservative media call it “identity politics.” “The left is playing identity politics.”

Whatever is gripping and convulsing the country, it’s not identity politics. Blacks are not being incited against Hispanics. Hispanics are not being turned on Asians, and Ameri-Indians aren’t being urged to attack the groups just mentioned. Rather, they’re all piling on honky.

That’s anti-white politics or animus.

The anger of the multicultural multitudes is directed exclusively at whites and their so-called privilege. Anti-whitism is becoming institutionalized, systemic and therefore dangerous.

Never once, however, is the thing called what is it: Non-stop and dangerous incitement to hate innocent whites for their alleged pigmental privilege.

This is a fair point. I have posted here many times about how the Democrat Party has embraced identity politics. But she is right. She only embrace Black identity politics to the extent that it is anti-White.

She doesn't mention other popular Democrat identity politics, such as LGBTQIA and religion. She does mention sex, but of course the Democrat party only endorses sexual identity politics to the extent that it is anti-straight-male. You never hear them welcome the men's rights movement.

So it is more accurate to say the Democrats are anti-straight-White-Christian-male? Close, but they still need votes from that group. They have one presidential candidate, Joe Biden, from that group. However, he will probably only win one primary, S. Carolina, and that will be from pandering to Black voters. He has to act as if he is embarrassed to be White.

The NY Times has yet another article in its Jews-will-replace-you series. It argues that demographic replacement of Whites by non-Whites will elect Bernie Sanders:

These particular strengths matter because the composition of the electorate in 2020 will be appreciably different than it was in 2016. Pew Research projects that this will be the most racially diverse electorate ever, with people of color making up fully one-third of all eligible voters. ...

Notably, the expanding sectors of the population are much more progressive and pro-Democratic than their aging and white counterparts. ... As for Latinos, nearly two-thirds of that population consistently votes Democratic. ...

To fully harness the energy from the demographic revolution, Mr. Sanders will need to strengthen his support among African-American voters ...

Mr. Sanders ... could close that gap and make the leap into the Oval Office.

This sums up the Jewish-Leftist-Democrat game plan. Import millions of non-Whites, make the Democrat Party the anti-White party, demographically marginalize straight White males, win elections, and put Jews in charge.

There is also an op-ed article explaining that the real environmentalists today are the Alt Right, as they are the ones who oppose excessive immigration that drains resources and damages the environment. This is very upsetting with the NY Times mindset, as they wish to tie environmentalism to Leftist causes.

David Brooks disavows Bernie Sanders

The NY Times has a policy that columnists are not supposed to say how they vote. The paper only hires Trump-haters, so it is pretty obvious anyway.

Now David Brooks writes:

A few months ago, I wrote a column saying I would vote for Elizabeth Warren over Donald Trump. ...

Now I have to decide if I’d support Bernie Sanders over Trump. ...

Populists like Sanders speak as if the whole system is irredeemably corrupt. Sanders was a useless House member and has been a marginal senator because he doesn’t operate within this system or believe in this theory of change.

He believes in revolutionary mass mobilization and, once an election has been won, rule by majoritarian domination.

In other words, he is a doctrinaire Jewish Marxist Communist.

And yet every day we find more old quotes from Sanders apologizing for this sort of slave regime, whether in the Soviet Union, Cuba or Nicaragua. He excused the Nicaraguan communists when they took away the civil liberties of their citizens. He’s still making excuses for Castro.

To sympathize with these revolutions in the 1920s was acceptable, given their original high ideals. To do so after the Hitler-Stalin pact, or in the 1950s, is appalling. To do so in the 1980s is morally unfathomable.

I say all this not to cancel Sanders for past misjudgments. I say all this because the intellectual suppositions that led him to embrace these views still guide his thinking today.

Wow, people get called Nazis for talking like this.

David Brooks is Jewish, and the NY Times is run by Jews, so this is not just an anti-Semitic smear.

The Jewish Commie is a political animal distinct from all others. Brooks regularly denounces Trump in the harshest terms, but at least Trump is an American patriot. It is amazing that Brooks' disgust for Sanders could rival his disgust for Trump.

Update: Bret Stephens, another NY Times Trump-hating Jewish Israeli columnist, wrote a similar column attacking Sanders.

How Weinstein got convicted

So how did prosecutors convict a Jewish movie producer of having a casting couch?

By hiring a female Jewish forensic psychiatrist expert witness, of course!

The NY Post reports:

The smartest thing the prosecution did was call Dr. Barbara Ziv, a forensic psychologist who testified to “rape myths” in Bill Cosby’s trial, to do the same here.

Ziv told the jury that more often than not, victims don’t report or disclose right away. Most victims actually know their assailants, and they often don’t resist. When it’s over, they often try to recast the assault as an encounter gone wrong or a one-time exception.

And very often, Ziv said, victims maintain a relationship with their rapist because “they can’t really believe that this happened to them. They’re hoping that this is just an aberration. You hear that all the time.”

And Weinstein, in vacillating between predator and benefactor, played right into that destabilizing dynamic, one in which his targets could never be sure he was truly a bad guy.

I couldn't find out much about her. She is supposed to be at Temple U., but she is not listed on their faculty page. Maybe being an expert witness is too lucrative to bother teaching.

Much of psychiatry is just bogus stuff Jews believe in.

Cosby and Weinstein will probably spend the rest of their lives in prison, but the appellate courts should not be allowing this sort of testimony. There is no scientific basis for it. It is just a Jewish feminist legal opinion that women should be able to change their minds about a sexual encounter, and complain about it many years later.

In the court of public opinion, Weinstein was destroyed by the NY Times and Ronan Farrow. Their stories were gossip from many years ago. There was no physical evidence, police reports, or contemporaneous reports.

What we have here is a re-definition of legal consent, and the infantilization of women. They are no longer capable of consent, at any age. A child cannot legally consent. And now even a 30-year-old woman can send hundreds of messages indicating consent, and years later some court might decide otherwise. MeToo means women must be treated like children.

The NY Times reports:

The actress Ashley Judd, who was among the first to go on the record for The New York Times’s 2017 investigation of Mr. Weinstein, tweeted:

‘I have mixed reactions about the whole case’

Ashley Judd also told The Times that the outcome was not her ideal form of justice. “I would love for Harvey to have a restorative justice process in which he could come emotionally to terms with his wrongs” through reconciliation, she said, rather than court proceedings leading to incarceration.

So obviously Judd does not believe that Weinstein committed a crime. She wanted him confronted for his rude behavior, and she wanted some sort of female emotional closure by telling him off or something like that. Women often have weird mixed feelings toward their ex-lovers.

This is all some sort of Jewish feminist power play.

Speaking of Jews in Hollywood, Disney just promoted a new guy to CEO. Could this be the first non-Jewish CEO in Hollywood? Nope. He is Jewish, and so is most of the rest of Disney management. You can count on more sick anti-Christian messages in their movies.

Miss Germany, age 35

A mum has made history after being crowned Miss Germany at the age of 35 – making her the oldest winner in the history of the competition.

Leonie von Hase beat 7,500 applicants to the crown, all while juggling her own online business and being a mum to her three-year-old son.

She is also the oldest woman to compete in the contest since it began in 1927.

She is German, White, attractive, heterosexual, and born female. If trends continue, these pageants are going to get a lot worse.

Max Boot attacks Christianity

Max Boot is a Russian Jew who claims to be an American conservative. He doesn't really have many conservative views. He is mostly known for being a warmonger.

He writes an attack on Christianity in the Wash. Post:

It has become conventional wisdom on the right that religion is under assault from secular liberals — and that the waning of faith is bad for America.

Attorney General William P. Barr, a conservative Catholic, summed up this alarmist outlook last fall during an incendiary speech at Notre Dame. He bemoaned “the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system” and the “growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism. By any honest assessment,” he thundered, “the consequences of this moral upheaval have been grim.” He went on to cite statistics on rising out-of-wedlock births (“illegitimacy”), along with “record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.” ...

Barr’s simplistic idea that the country is better off if it is more religious is based on faith, not evidence.

He then goes on to argue that America is better off than Pakistan, even tho Pakistan is more religious.

The United States is unusual not because religious observance has declined over the years but because it remains much higher than expected. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey found that 55 percent of American adults say they pray daily, compared with only 22 percent of Europeans. ...

But, perversely, the United States does worse in critical areas — such as the rate of homicides by firearms and the rate of children living in single-parent households — than Western nations that are less religious. How does Barr explain this if he thinks religion is a social elixir? ...

Remember, Rome fell after it converted to Christianity.

Yes, we have very high firearm homicides among blacks, and very illegitimacy rates among blacks and Mexicans. Blacks and Mexicans are nominally Christians at very high rates, but obviously they are not that religious if they are shooting each other and having illegitimate babies.

Boot is a big advocate of importing millions of non-Christians into America. He very much wants to turn us into a non-Christian country. These views are common among Jewish intellectuals.

The fall of Rome had more to do with its failure to deal with immigration effectively. The Eastern Roman Empire fell, because of Mohammedan invaders. Christian Europe lived on, and became greater than ever.

Impossibility of proving consent

USA Today reports on a case where video-recorded consent did not exonerate a couple of Ohio State football players:

Brad Koffel, a Columbus criminal defense attorney in private practice for more than 25 years and managing partner of Koffel Brininger Nesbitt, advises his clients to obtain written consent for sexual acts, even if it’s just a text message, or any sort of audio or video recording indicating consent.

“If they don’t,” he said, “in this climate, then they’re going to suffer some consequences.” ...

Columbus criminal defense attorney Dan Sabol of Sabol Mallory said he would feel concerned if a client obtained written or recorded consent from a sexual partner.

“That’d be a red flag,” he said. “It might look as though they’re trying to cover their tracks.”

Proof of consent might help someone who is falsely accused, Sabol said, but if there is compelling evidence that a sexual act was not consensual, the documentation of consent from a partner could increase the appearance of guilt in a suspect.

“Just because someone says it’s consensual on video doesn’t make it so,” he said. ...

“It should be taken as a red flag that a person would have enough doubts about whether or not consent was established to ... request this type of agreement before or after an encounter,” said Laura Palumbo, communication director for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. “Because in reality, one of the most important things for people to know about consent is that if you have any doubts … then the interaction should not move forward with your partner.” ...

“A good consensual act or series of events should be active communication the whole time and checking in with their partner,” she said. “They should consent and enthusiastically agree the whole time.”

Got that, a man cannot prove that he has consent unless he has a written statement or recordings. But even then, having proof of his innocence raises a red flag and puts him under further suspicion.

Also, such proof would only show initial consent. He really needs proof that she was enthusiastic the entire time, and that is nearly impossible.

Harvey Weinstein's accusers showed consent before and after the incidents, but he faces life in prison anyway.

Boy Scouts bankrupted

Here is the Scout Law:

The Scout Law has 12 points. Each is a goal for every Scout. A Scout tries to live up to the Law every day. It is not always easy to do, but a Scout always tries.

A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.

There are a lot of liberals who despise the Boy Scouts and what they stand for, and who did everything they could to destroy them.

Apparently the Boy Scouts biggest sin was that it kept secret lists of suspected child molesters, so that they could be watched or excluded from Scout activities. How else could they cope with the problem?

It appears that our law does not allow a national organization to promote the above beliefs among boys.

In related news:

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg, facing millions of dollars in past sexual abuse claims, filed for bankruptcy protection Wednesday, according to court documents. ...

The diocese filed its petition for Chapter 11 reorganization in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Pennsylvania. The petition estimates the dioceses' assets at $1 million to $10 million – and its financial liabilities as $50 million to $100 million.

This is a pretty crazy way to address a problem.

If these legal actions focused on punishing men for crimes committed, then I would be all in favor of them. But no one is being charged with any crimes. This is about greedy lawyers taking money that would otherwise be used to benefit innocent boys and others.

Using gays to destroy marriage

The NY Times has an article on how straight couples need to act more like gays and lesbians:

How to Make Your Marriage Gayer ...

Women in different-sex marriages reported the highest levels of psychological distress. Men in same-sex marriages reported the lowest. Men married to women and women married to women were in the middle, recording similar levels of distress. ...

Another parenting advantage for gays and lesbians is that they seldom end up with an unintended or unwanted child, which is a risk factor for poor parenting. In 2011, the last year for which figures are available, 45 percent of pregnancies in America were unintended, and 18 percent were actually unwanted. ...

Many gay couples work out detailed agreements about what kinds of sexual contact are permissible outside the relationship, under what circumstances and how often. ...

lesbian partnerships, despite their high average quality, have higher breakup rates than gay-male couples or different-sex couples.

Much of this can be explained by assuming that women complain more than men. Lesbian couples do not have the highest distress levels, but maybe that is only because so many of them break up that the worst ones are not sampled.

Here the biases get revealed:

All of us — heterosexual, gay or lesbian — face obstacles in figuring out how to replace traditional gender and marriage rules that frustrate our modern values while updating those that are still useful.

This assumes that "all of us" have "modern values" that are opposed to "traditional gender and marriage rules".

Spielberg daughter turns to porn

The Sun tabloid reports:

STEVEN Spielberg's daughter Mikaela has launched a new career as an adult entertainer, The Sun can reveal.

In an exclusive interview Mikaela Spielberg, 23, who was adopted as a baby by the legendary film director and his wife Kate Capshaw, told how she has already started self producing solo porn videos - and says she would love to land a job as a dancer in a strip club once she obtains her sex worker license.

Mikaela, who speaks to her parents regularly, broke the news to them via FaceTime at the weekend and said they were “intrigued” but “not upset”.

Describing herself as a "sexual creature" she told The Sun: "I got really tired of not being able to capitalize on my body and frankly, I got really tired of being told to hate my body. ...

Mikaela told how it had been a huge confidence booster to show off her large natural breasts, which she describes as her "moneymaker" - and how she plans on producing more solo erotic videos to show off her curves.

And while she said she'd be happy at turning her hand to fetish videos - she draws the line at having sex with another person on camera, out of respect for her supportive fiancé Chuck Pankow, 47.

This whole story speaks volumes about what Hollywood values have done to our culture.

Bloomberg explains his Jewish values

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency publishes a new interview of Mike Bloomberg:

As a Jew, as an American and as a human being, I am deeply disturbed every time I hear about these hate crimes. ...

When the president calls his supporters “real Americans” — an echo of the language that nativists, anti-Semites and the KKK used for many decades — he undermines our fundamental national values. ...

When he promotes conspiracy theories that are built on lies and prejudice, we must remember: Anti-Semitism is the original conspiracy theory. ...

I didn’t feel like I experienced any prejudice as a kid. ...

And I believe guaranteeing the survival of a democratic, Jewish state in the Holy Land is a solemn obligation of the United States, as it has been for more than half a century.

Got that? He is Jewish and almost 80 years old, and never personally experienced any prejudice. It is difficult to find anyone outside the Moslem world who experienced any anti-Jewish prejudice.

And yet he is preoccupied with a conspiracy theory that Jews are persecuted!

One of his best examples is that the President referred to "real Americans".

He says the solemn obligation of America is not to real Americans, but to Jews living in Israel.

He has the best political consultants that money can buy, and they signed off on this statement.

If I said on my blog that Jews believe this stuff, I would be accused of anti-Semitism. But here is Bloomberg, in his own words, as part of a billion-dollar campaign for President.

Unregulated use of companion robots

The British BBC reports:

US researchers have warned that the availability of sex robots with artificial intelligence (AI) poses a growing psychological and moral threat to individuals and society.

They say the technology is escaping oversight because agencies are too embarrassed to investigate it.

The scientists want action to prevent the unregulated use of such robots. ...

Kathleen Richardson, who is a professor of the Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI at De Montfort University in Leicester, wants this kind of marketing outlawed.

"These companies are saying, 'you don't have a friendship? You don't have a life partner? Don't worry we can create a robot girlfriend for you'.

"A relationship with a girlfriend is based on intimacy, attachment and reciprocity. These are things that can't be replicated by machines," she said.

Prof Richardson advises a pressure group that has been set up to monitor the emergence of these products. The campaign against sex robots is working with policy experts to draw up legislation aimed at banning claims that companion robots can be a substitute for human relationships.
"Are we going to move into a future where we keep normalising the idea of women as sex objects?" she told BBC News.

For centuries, people have gotten companion dogs as substitutes for human relationships. Why not robots?

Maybe we should ban dogs and cats. And if you want laws against normalizing the idea of women as sex objects, then you should want to ban lipstick, and other such things.

Runaway population growth in Africa

The NY Times reports:

As Egypt’s Population Hits 100 Million, Celebration Is Muted

With little habitable land, deepening poverty and dwindling supplies of water, the future looks bleak. And there is no sign of a slowdown.

CAIRO — Somewhere in Egypt, around lunchtime Tuesday, the country reached a major milestone: its 100 millionth citizen was born. ...

Egypt’s cabinet said last week that it was on “high alert” to fight population growth, which President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has described as a threat to national security on par with terrorism. If unchecked, the population could reach 128 million by 2030, officials say.

Mr. el-Sisi tried to push back the tide with a public health campaign called “Two Is Enough” to persuade parents to have fewer children. Like many such efforts, it failed.

Why worry? Quillette assures us that there is plenty of food for everyone:

The Battle to Feed All of Humanity Is Over. Humanity Has Won ...

For millennia, people lived on the edge of starvation. Today, starvation has disappeared outside of war-zones. Let’s look at some data. ...

Even in sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s poorest region, food supply per person per day rose from 1,852 in 1961 to 2,449 in 2017 – a 32 percent increase. According to one report, “There is a silent epidemic sweeping through Africa and it’s worse than HIV. Out of the 20 fastest rising countries with obesity, nearly half of them are in Africa. The health burden on the continent is rising.”

This is the future. Billions of Africans getting fat on Western food technology. Get used to it.

One Commie praises another

Fox News reports:

In 2000, then-high school senior Buttigieg won the John F. Kennedy “Profiles in Courage” essay contest with a piece touting Sanders’ then-bipartisan streak and his bravery for calling himself a “socialist,” despite it being an unpopular term.

Buttigieg painted a picture, at the time, of an unmotivated electorate but, in a hopeful tone, said there “remain a number of committed individuals who are steadfast enough in their beliefs to run for office to benefit their fellow Americans.”

“Such people are willing to eschew political and personal comfort and convenience because they believe they can make a difference. One outstanding and inspiring example of such integrity is the country’s only Independent Congressman, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders,” Buttigieg wrote.

“Sanders’ courage is evident in the first word he uses to describe himself: ‘Socialist,’” he continued. “Here is someone who has ‘looked into his own soul’ and expressed an ideology, the endorsement of which, in today’s political atmosphere, is analogous to a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

He added that Sanders “is not afraid to be candid about his political persuasion,” and that his attitude helps him to be “a powerful force for conciliation and bi-partisanship on Capitol Hill.”

Buttigieg identifies Socialism with Communism when he says:

Even though he has lived through a time in which an admitted socialist could not act in a film

As far as I know, the only blacklisted actors were those who belonged to Communist front organizations loyal to the Kremlin, and who refused to cooperate with anti-Communist investigations.

ACLU defends cross-dressing men

Evolution professor Jerry Coyne writes:

Over history, the ACLU has been a fantastic organization for preserving the civil liberties of everyone, particularly those who are oppressed.

But now they’re going woke, and thereby going downhill. Like the Southern Poverty Law Center, they have decided to get into the social-justice arena—which would be okay except that they are taking positions that are neither reasonable nor supportable. In this case, they’re trying to argue that it’s discriminatory to prohibit biological men who claim that they’re women—”transgender” athletes who have undergone neither surgical nor hormone therapy—from competing in women’s sports.  The ACLU has been arguing this for some time (see here), and the motivation behind this are recent instances when men who identify as women, but haven’t undergone hormone treatment or surgery, are beating the pants off women in track events. See this description of a Connecticut race in which two transgender women took first and second place, at least one of which—and probably both—hadn’t begun physical or hormonal transition (see also here).

Update: Coyne writes today, in defense of human sex being binary:

The shameful part of all this is that the scientific journal Nature, as well as three evolutionary biology/ecology societies, who should know better, made statements or editorials that neither sex nor gender are binary. That’s a flat-out abnegation of both their responsibility and of science itself. Evolution itself produces a binary of sex! To be anthropomorphic, evolution wants a binary of sex.

A while back, biologists like me were voices crying in the wilderness, for if you say that sex is a binary, you’re liable to be labeled a transphobe. (That’s a foolish slur, for the facts about nature are independent of how we should treat transsexual or other “nonconforming” individuals.)

But now other biologists are speaking up. Two of them, Colin Wright and Emma Hilton, have a sensible column about the sex binary in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (a conservative organ, of course: you’ll never see a claim for a sex binary in Salon or HuffPost, much less the New York Times, which ran an op-ed by Anne Fausto-Sterling denying that sex was binary).

It is amazing that mainstream scientific organization have bought into completely false statements in order to appease a tiny minority of kooks.

Human Diversity

Here is a new book:

In Human Diversity, Charles Murray sets out to demonstrate three things: (1) There are biological reasons why men and women behave differently. (2) Human populations have evolved so many genetic differences that different groups cannot be expected to think and behave identically. (3) Increasingly, the people who are rich and influential got that way because they have biologically rooted talents and abilities, not because of unfair privilege. The NY Times

gives it a very negative review.

The main question is: Why am I asking these questions of Charles Murray? True, the burden of proof is on him to make a case for this “exciting” scientific revolution (whose discoveries just happen to regurgitate some of humanity’s most pernicious, wearying and stubborn stereotypes). But proof is not Murray’s concern. Despite its blizzard of statistics, the book’s most astonishing (and telling) declaration is on the first page. If “you have reached this page” — the first page, I remind you — “convinced that gender, race and class are all social constructs, and that any claims to the contrary are pseudoscience, you won’t get past the first few pages before you can’t stand it anymore. This book isn’t for you.” He continues smoothly: “Now that we’re alone...”

Now that we’re alone. This book is for the believers. Rigorous readers, skeptics, the unindoctrinated — you won’t be persuaded by “Human Diversity,” but why should that matter? You’re not even invited. How’s that for a safe space. How’s that for an orthodoxy.

Don't you just hate it when science confirms some long-held stereotypes?

At least Murray and the reviewer are in agreement on one thing -- that the book is not written for that reviewer. The reviewer (and the NY Times) are committed to a leftist world view that does not permit an examination of the facts on this topic.

Update: Sailer criticizes the review. He said the reviewer has a female Indian name.

Demographics are a freight train

Gregory Hood writes:

Joe Scarborough is a former Republican congressman who works at MSNBC. Like Jennifer Rubin, he’s made it clear he’s not conservative or even a Republican anymore. He has supported efforts to expose President Trump’s donors because “if your business funds Trump’s campaign, then you are supporting white supremacy.” He also compared federal immigration officials to Nazis.
Yesterday, Mr. Scarborough tweeted:

Democrats have won the popular vote 6 of the last 7 elections.

They won a record landslide in 2018. Demographics are a freight train carrying them into the future. The GOPs actions will accelerate their collapse. The future belongs to Democrats if they work hard & focus on 2020. https://t.co/Rrvm39xi4n

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) February 10, 2020

Actually, Democrats only won 50% or more of the popular vote in 2 of the last 7 elections.

He is correct that Democrats have bet their future on the demographic freight train. If they can flood America with non-white and non-Christian immigrants and migrants, then they can destroy White Christian America.

Vindman needed to be fired

The NY Times published this letter:

To the Editor:

Re “Trump Hits Back, Firing Witnesses After Acquittal” (front page, Feb. 8):

Given the treatment of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, Ambassador Gordon Sondland and others, no one should ever again question the need for whistle-blowers to maintain anonymity, if they wish. Thank you, Mr. President, for making the case so clearly and so powerfully.

And, thank you to these two gentlemen and all those who had the courage, including Senator Mitt Romney, to do what they believed was right. I suspect history will applaud your efforts.

This is twisted Trump-hater thinking.

America has never allowed anonymous witnesses. I don't know if pre-revolutionary England allowed it, as the founders were against it, and our Constitution expressly forbids it.

The NY Times portrayed the firing of Vindman and Sondland as some sort of punishment, but I don't see it that way. They testified that they did not agree with our American foreign policy, and even implied that they ought to be working to undermine it.

Vindman even appeared to be more loyal to Ukraine than to America. The Ukrainians apparently thought so, and offered him high-level jobs in Ukraine.

Trump needs to have personnel to carry out his policies. That is all that is needed to explain the firings.

As for Romney, he made a big deal how he was following his conscience, and his religious beliefs. In case that sounds noble, it is the opposite of what he should have been doing. He should have been judging the evidence in the case to determine whether an impeachable crime had been committed. It is not a matter of conscience. He was just using his weirdo religious beliefs as an excuse for carrying out his grudge against Trump. He was not that much different from the law professor witnesses, except that they follow a different religion.

Amazon censors books for political reasons

The NY Times reports:

Amazon is quietly canceling its Nazis.

Over the past 18 months, the retailer has removed two books by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as several titles by George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Amazon has also prohibited volumes like “The Ruling Elite: The Zionist Seizure of World Power” and “A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind.” ...

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been roiled in recent years by controversies that pit freedom of speech against offensive content. ...

When Amazon drops a book from its store, it is as if it never existed. A recent Google search for David Duke’s “My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding” on Amazon yielded a link to a picture of an Amazon employee’s dog. Amazon sellers call these dead ends “dog pages.” ...

In 1998, when Amazon was an ambitious start-up, its founder, Jeff Bezos, said, “We want to make every book available — the good, the bad and the ugly.” Customers reviews, he said, would “let truth loose.”

So now they are afraid of what David Duke has to say?

There is a very large amount of junk and misinformation on Amazon and Youtube. The management does not take action against those titles. They only take down items where they have an ideological disagreement, and where they are worried that the items might be persuasive.

Here is one of my favorite quotes:

“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”

― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings