Democrats celebrate white hatred

Foreign Policy Magazine celebrates the decline of White Christian men:

White men have had a great run. From the rise of the Greeks to the birth of Western-based global empires, they have controlled much of the world or sought to: So much of history is a consequence of decisions made by — and at the behest of — the white guys in charge. ...

Finally, thanks to the mobility revolution of the past century, flows of refugees and migrants of all kinds have shifted the demographics of societies ...

The result is that the status quo of the past several millennia is going to undergo a profound change. In Europe alone, the influx of migrants and refugees is already producing irreversible demographic shifts — a great blending of cultures.

But by mid-century in the United States, the former majority population will be a minority: The majority, according to demographers, will be nonwhite. By that time, Europe will include massive populations from Africa and the Middle East, as well as Asia. This is to say that by 2050 white men will be the ones checking the “other” box on census forms.

The author, David Rothkopf, identifies as non-white and non-Christian, so I guess he is pursuing his ethnic interests.

He is assuming that the white guys in charge are going to commit demographic suicide. That seems likely from leaders like Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and Hillary Clinton. Oops, these are not white guys. There are hardly any politicians opposed to these trends, except maybe Donald Trump. Rothkopf argues that the demographic changes have already guaranteed that Hillary Clinton will be the next President, and that she will accelerate the attacks on white Christian men.

There will, of course, be good and bad aspects to any such changes. The article does not argue that they will improve the well-being of Americans, by any measures like income, crime, freedom, etc. Instead he argues that we should celebrate diversity for its own sake:

Of course, human mobility is not something to be fought, but rather something to be embraced. While belonging to a community is wired into our DNA for reasons linked to the survival-based social units of our most ancient ancestors, the story of civilization and progress has been one about the blending and reblending of those units. ...

What we need instead are those who will stand up and say, “No. You have it wrong. Diversity is not the threat. It is the answer.” That is, in fact, what has made America and every diverse society great. To be sure, we should not — not for one minute — lament the passing of the white-male era, for there is at least a glimmer of hope that soon to come is the era of “all.”

The story of civilization is one of invaders destroying what others have built, of ethnic differences causing hostility, and of blending by rape.

If this blending really worked, then Israel would absorb the Palestinian Arabs.

We do have a choice about whether to elect Hillary Clinton and to continue the mass influx of Third World migrants.

Before you vote to end the era, you might want to consider what white Christians males have done for modern civilization. I am guessing that it has been over 90% of scientific breakthrus, inventions, and other accomplishments that have created our modern standard of living. Or maybe even 99% of what is important.

The Democrat Party has aligned itself with demographic interests as no American party has before. It wins elections only by getting the votes of non-whites, non-Christians, single women, others with gender identity issues, government dependents, and low-info voters. The Obama administration has stood for the creation of racial animosity with Trayvon Martin and Ferguson Missouri, and Hillary Clinton says the President should be a women because women are better.

I suppose there have always been disreputation publications that promote racial, sexual, and ethnic animosity, but Foreign Policy is a respectable magazine. Rothkopf had a job in the Bill Clinton administration, and looks forward to an offer from the Hillary Clinton administration. Mainstream Democrats now openly say that it is a good thing that White Christian patriarchal culture is being destroyed. They preach hatred of whites, Christians, and masculinity, and they are intolerant of anyone who does not go along with their leftist agenda.

How far does this go? White Christian males are the most tolerant in the world, but at some point, they are going to fight back. They ought to, anyway.

Eurasians did not invade Africa

Nature mag reports:

An error has forced researchers to go back on their claim that humans across the whole of Africa carry DNA inherited from Eurasian immigrants. ...

Manica is not yet sure if Science will change the title of the paper, ‘Ancient Ethiopian genome reveals extensive Eurasian admixture throughout the African continent’. But if the team had caught the error earlier, he says, “I’m sure we would have phrased things differently”.

Eurasians have Neanderthal DNA, and Africans do not. So that claim never made sense to me.

MLK Dream speech too bigoted

Today's young leftists have to move the blacks to the back of the bus, to make room for all the other grievance groups. Mediate reports:

U of Oregon Debates Removing MLK Quote For Not Being Inclusive Enough

Student leaders at the University of Oregon debated removing a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. from its student center, arguing that the quote was not inclusive enough for modern understandings of diversity.

Oregon’s Erb Memorial Union, which is currently under renovation, had the following famous King quote on the wall: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream…”

But as renovation continues, the Oregon Student Union seriously considered replacing that quote. ...

The problem wasn’t so much the message, but the fact that it only focused on racial diversity instead of gender identity.

“Diversity is so much more than race,” said one sophomore architecture major. “Obviously race still plays a big role. But there are people who identify differently in gender and all sorts of things like that.”

I just wonder how far the Left is going with this inclusiveness fad.

Prosecuting the Unabomber

Yahoo has some new articles on the Unabomber:

David, unaware of what his brother was doing, returned to society and married. Years later, he made one of the most difficult decisions imaginable: to turn in the brother he loved as a suspected killer, which would save the lives of innocent victims, and perhaps Ted’s as well. He made what he still believes is the only rational decision. ...

“I still look back on the decision and know it had to be done,” David said. “He could have and probably would have killed other people. … If there was any way out of having to do what I did and still be a responsible human being, I would have. But I had a responsibility. As painful as it was. As it still is.”

The decision probably did not save any lives. The Unabomber promised to desist from terrorism if his manifesto were published, and there were no incidents after the publication.

David’s stipulation to the FBI, when he contacted it with his suspicions, was that he would be warned before the bureau took action, and that his role would be kept secret. But when word leaked to the media that there was a Unabomber suspect, federal officials moved quickly. David and his family were given almost no notice, and someone leaked his role to the media. Within hours, reporters from all over the world were on David’s doorstep.

A day later, sitting in a jail cell in Lincoln, Mont., Ted asked his public defender how the feds had found him. “Oh, didn’t you know?” the man told him, according to a story that was later recounted to David by a member of his brother’s legal team. “It was your brother.”

Ted shook his head in disbelief. “No,” he said. “David wouldn’t do that.”

Yes, his brother turned him in for the $1M reward.

I don't disagree with prosecuting the Unabomber, but his brother did have another option. He could have simply blackmailed the Unabomber into keeping his promise to stop terrorism.

Rich leftists hate the middle class

A few decades ago, almost all Americans described themselves as middle class. Now the data show that they are increasingly split into the rich and the poor.

This is one reason that they are willing to spend so much for college. There is a consensus that you need a college degree to get the good life.

It is common to hear complaints about the gap between the rich and the poor, so you might think that everyone wants a strong middle class. The Democrat party is entirely dependent on a large underclass. It also likes the rich, but the rich liberals hate the middle class:

The true enemy of the rich is not the poor but the middle class — the hated bourgeoisie for which both international finance capitalists and international communists have so much contempt. If you own your own home, have strong family support, have savings, perhaps run your own business, or have some source of income other than wages paid by an employer, or you work in a career field where demand for your labor is high and you earn high wages, then you are your own person. You can earn a decent living without bootlicking.

If you are an American citizen and middle class, you are a powerful force to be reckoned with. Although you are not rich, you have rights and assets and you have something to lose. You have numbers and the ability to organize and raise funds to pursue your interests.

The rich have more assets than you but they lack your numbers. You can organize against the rich to pursue your own interests and put your considerable collective assets to work to defeat the rich who are smaller in number. You have voting power.

Currently, our richest Americans have global interests, which are in direct conflict to the interests of the American middle class and the American nation at large. While small in number, the rich are winning in their aims and the middle class is losing. The rich are organized and their goal is clear in their minds — at least in the minds of the richest few who are pulling the strings. These few are in firm control of the media, the government, the banks and the monetary system.

The past few decades have seen many liberal policies put in place that have the net effect of damaging the middle class.

Japan has porn, but not real sex

McClatchy reports:

In a Japan seemingly obsessed with sex, few seem to indulge

Birthrate has dropped as surveys show Japanese singles have little interest in relationships

Even married couples say their relationships are sexless

26 percent of men have no sexual experience by age 34

Japan is well known for many things, and its obsession with sex is one of them. It has one of the most robust pornographic and adult-toy industries in the world and airs TV commercials for items as banal as candy that feature sexually suggestive themes. It even has an annual fertility festival that parades two five-foot-tall penis sculptures down a busy street on a Sunday afternoon.

And yet nearly half of singles in Japan have no interest in dating – a situation that many experts predict will help lead to a population decline of one-third in the next 45 years.

Japan is over-populated, so the decline is an improvement. It is also retaining its culture, even if the rest of the world does things differently.

Pretty we will high-quality consumer virtual reality goggles, and probably some ultra-realistic pornography soon thereafter. The Japanese will probably also have robots for sexual relations. These advances may diminish demand for the real thing.

It does appear to me that the Japanese idea of marriage is a lousy deal for both men and women. They are probably obsessed with sex because they have not figured out how to combine it with their marriage customs. Maybe they will figure it out in a century or so, when the country will have been de-populated.

Debating whether to accept Syrian migrants

Intelligence Squared debated Should The U.S. Let In 100,000 Syrian Refugees? (mp3):

Since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, more than 4 million Syrians have fled the country, creating the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. The United States has taken in just over 2,000 Syrian refugees since the war’s start, and the Obama administration has pledged to take another 10,000 in 2016. What are our moral obligations, and what are the cultural, economic, and security issues that must be taken into account? Should the U.S. let in 100,000 Syrian refugees?

To my surprise, the affirmative won the debate.

The negative used good arguments, but not good enuf. There was no mention of the billion more people who want to come here. Or that the pro argument was coming from a British man in the business of exporting refugees. Or that Moslems are doing long-term damage to the USA.

The pro argument was mostly emotional, saying that Steve Jobs was a Syrian, and that the Statue of Liberty promises that we will take everyone. The response was logical, saying that the refugees cannot be vetted, that they will go on welfare and cost too much, that it would be more effective to help them in Syria, and that we do not make policy based on a poem on the wall of the gift shop adjoining a statue.

An emotional argument against taking the refugees might get a critic saying that it was like Hitler. Not many people can stand being compared to Hitler.

Just as few people are willing to publicly say that Bruce Jenner suffers from a mental illness, few are willing to say that the Syrian migrants do not belong in the USA.

Testing for marijuana psychosis

NPR radio reports:

The American Psychological Association emailed us to say that the correction they issued on Thursday was incorrect. The email says in part:

I am afraid that the correction we put out regarding the teen marijuana study was not accurate. We are in the process of placing this more accurate editor's note on the release on our website. ...

Although these supplemental analyses indicated that teens who engaged in frequent marijuana use had a higher probability of meeting criteria for a psychotic disorder than infrequent/nonusers by their 30s, this difference did not reach statistical significance using a two-tailed test (p=.09). ...

The group difference on psychotic disorder approached statistical significance and would have been significant if a more liberal test (i.e., one-tailed) was utilized.

It is unusual to make such a big deal out of an obscure statistical test, and to have to correct a correction.

The high-growth era is over

For 80 years, economists have argued that we can finance ever-expanding social programs from economic growth, and that growth will come from innovation and population.

These assumptions are wrong.

There will never be a century with the scientific, technological, and practical advances as the 20th (XXc). We will not see this sort of per-capita economic growth again.

You can raise GNP by increasing the population, but that is not sustainable. And if the increase is from immigration, then it does not help the natives.

The WSJ reports:

Most Federal Reserve policy makers and private forecasters are giving up on the long-awaited breakout and instead predicting little change in 2016 and beyond: an economy growing a little faster than 2%, just like it has for years.
“To tell a story of 3% growth at this point—it’s not that it can’t happen, but it’s unlikely,” said Joseph LaVorgna, the once-optimistic chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank. ...

Economists aren’t sure why growth has slowed down. Some argue it reflects powerful long-term trends affecting the U.S. and other advanced economies. Others point to temporary, if stubbornly persistent, headwinds generated by the financial crisis and recession.

You can read arguments for permanent slow growth in the book The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy and in this pdf paper.

Update: See also NY Times article.

Americans like to think they live in an era of rapid and unprecedented change, but this kind of comparison — pitting the momentous changes of the mid-20th century against the seemingly more modest progress of our present era — raises a critical question about the nation’s future prosperity.

What does this portend for our well-being over the next half century? Has technological progress slowed for good?

Update: Paul Krugman writes:

Robert J. Gordon, a distinguished macro­economist and economic historian at Northwestern, has been arguing for a long time against the techno-optimism that saturates our culture, with its constant assertion that we’re in the midst of revolutionary change. Starting at the height of the dot-com frenzy, he has repeatedly called for perspective: Developments in information and communication technology, he has insisted, just don’t measure up to past achievements. Specifically, he has argued that the I.T. revolution is less important than any one of the five Great Inventions that powered economic growth from 1870 to 1970: electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine and modern communication.

In “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” Gordon doubles down on that theme, declaring that the kind of rapid economic growth we still consider our due, and expect to continue forever, was in fact a one-time-only event. First came the Great Inventions, almost all dating from the late 19th century. Then came refinement and exploitation of those inventions — a process that took time, and exerted its peak effect on economic growth between 1920 and 1970. Everything since has at best been a faint echo of that great wave, and Gordon doesn’t expect us ever to see anything similar.

Chickens prefer beautiful humans

Discover mag

Many people believe that our perceptions of human beauty are primarily determined by societal norms. But could there be something innate in our brains that influence whether we think a face is beautiful? Here, a group of researchers tested this hypothesis by determining whether chickens have any innate preferences for certain human faces.

Yes, the chickens prefer the pretty faces.

Happy slave story censored

Everyday I am bombarded by liberals promoting racial hatred. The NY Times reports:

Scholastic Publishing said on Sunday that it would halt distribution of a children’s picture book about George Washington and his enslaved household cook amid an outcry over its visual depiction of the former president’s slaves as happy, smiling workers.

Other papers report:

From the Washington Post:

Very white Oscar nominations leave Academy president ‘heartbroken and frustrated’

From the Los Angeles Times:

Oscars 2016: It’s time for Hollywood to stop defining great drama as white men battling adversity

From the Wall Street Journal:

Black Actors and Directors Shut Out of 2016 Oscar Race

Sometimes I think that the typical Barack Obama supporter has more racial hatred than the Ku Klux Klan.

Failing to control behavior

Andrew Anglin writes:

An 18 year old Austrian woman was “rushed to hospital” in the early hours of this morning after a drink with an Afghan stranger she met on a train turned into a sex attack. ...

At the time of his arrest, the man was found to be carrying a quantity of forged money, and marijuana. He is being kept in pre-trial custody. ...

This is officially a crisis. And feminism is at the root of this crisis.

There is absolutely no doubt that this girl who thought it was a great idea to go to a park at night and drink alcohol with a random Afghani was one of the women out there shilling for the invasion, shouting down everyone who was like “no wait this is completely insane” and calling them Nazis.

If you tell a child they can eat whatever they want, they will eat nothing but candy. Then they will get sick. That is what we’ve done with women, allowing them to make decisions. They called in millions of monkeys from the world over, now they’re getting mass-raped.

Feminism is not a defect in women. It is the natural outcome of men failing to control the behavior of women.

We let them loose and now they’re getting mass-raped, and need our help. And we should help. We should protect them. We should avoid “you stupid slut, this is what you deserve!”-type thinking.

Instead, we should be compassionate, and understand that pretty well every teenage girl who is told she can do whatever she wants, after being inundated her entire life with Jewish propaganda, will go into the woods alone to get drunk with an Afghani man and then be completely shocked by the surprise sex.

If you told a 2-year-old to eat whatever he wants, and he ate only candy and got sick, you wouldn’t say to the child “you stupid brat, this is what you deserve!”

He is often trolling, but he gets his point across. He is hated on this leftist race-baiting site.

Never again let the Africans invade

The August 2015 SciAm cover story is about how African human ancestors conquered Europe and Asia about 70k years ago, and concludes:

Sometimes I think about how that fateful encounter between [Africans] and [Europeans] played out. I imagine the boasting tales [European] Neandertals might have told around their camp-fires of titanic battles against impossibly huge cave bears and mammoths, fought under the gray skies of glacial Europe, bare-foot on ice slick with the blood of prey and brother. Then, one day, the tradition took a dark turn; the regaling turned fearful. Neandertal raconteurs spoke of new people coming into the land — fast, clever people who hurled their spears impossible distances, with dreadful accuracy. These strangers even came at night in large groups, slaughtering men and children and taking the women.

The sad story of those first victims of [African] ingenuity and cooperation, the [European] Neandertals, helps to explain why horrific acts of genocide and xenocide crop up in the world today. ...

Culture can override even the strongest biological instincts. I hope that recognition of why we instinctively turn on one another in lean times will allow us to rise above our malevolent urges and heed one of our most important cultural directives: “Never again.”

I used brackets to clarify some confusing terms. The article refers to Neandertals as "cousins", whereas DNA data has proved that they were direct ancestors to Europeans, with African interbreeding. It also refers to the Africans as "modern humans", whereas it is now known that there has been significant human evolution since then.

What is meant by "never again"? This is some vague political spin on an anthropology article. The obvious meaning is that Europeans should never again allow African invaders to destroy their culture, exterminate their resources, dilute their gene pool, and steal their women.

The article theorizes that the Africans learn to cooperate by fighting to defend shellfish beds, and invented throwable spears while the Europeans just had hand-held spears. The main evidence is from looking that tiny stone blades, but they really don't know what the blades were used for, and the assertions about throwing spears are highly speculative.

The author must realize that Africans and Arabs are currently swarming into Europe, and threatening to destroy its culture. They have evolved to try to exterminate a competing race, he says.

Poor people buy lottery tickets.

I almost bought a Powerball lottery ticket. Here is who does:

Nationwide, people who make less than $10,000 spend on average $597 on lottery tickets — about 6 percent of their income. ...

Nationwide, African Americans spend five times more on lottery tickets than white people. ...

One in five Americans believe the lottery is the only way they can accumulate a significant amount of savings.

I have heard that half of big jackpot winners declare bankruptcy within 5 years. Some are also victims of crimes.

Your cells outnumber bacteria

It is always interesting to see some widely-cited textbook fact proven false.

Nature mag reports:

It's often said that the bacteria and other microbes in our body outnumber our own cells by about ten to one. That's a myth that should be forgotten, say researchers in Israel and Canada. The ratio between resident microbes and human cells is more likely to be one-to-one, they calculate.

A 'reference man' (one who is 70 kilograms, 20–30 years old and 1.7 metres tall) contains on average about 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion bacteria, say Ron Milo and Ron Sender at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and Shai Fuchs at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada.

Those numbers are approximate — another person might have half as many or twice as many bacteria, for example — but far from the 10:1 ratio commonly assumed.

“The numbers are similar enough that each defecation event may flip the ratio to favour human cells over bacteria,” they delicately conclude in a manuscript posted to the preprint server bioRxiv.

So a trip to the toilet can let you outnumber the bacteria.

There are lots of other examples. Astronomers used to say that Saturn's rings were only a few million years old, but now they say billions. They used to say that Earth's water came from comets, but now isotopic evidence has caused that to be doubted.

On another matter, the Wash. Post has now admitted that the Univ. of Virginia Rolling Stone fraternity rape story was a catfishing hoax by a girl trying to make a boy jealous. This is about a year after blogger Steve Sailer said that it was obvious.

Getting directions from a machine

We are being enslaved by robots, and here is more evidence:

The speed at which I’ve started following commands from a computer algorithm shows how easily we will give up our own self-determination in the face of advancing technology.

Instead of using my own knowledge to determine an acceptable route to a known location, I have willingly relinquished control to an app. While I enjoy the time savings that Waze offers me, I fear how I will incrementally and voluntarily give up more of my free will to computers that can process information much more efficiently than I can. Bit by bit, I will have my behavior constrained by the digital cloud, entrapping myself in a prison of my own doing.

I was very much surprised about 20 years ago when I discovered how willing people were to take orders from physicians, optometrists, dentists, and other professionals.

To me, these professionals just give facts and recommendations so that I can make an informed decision. However, I found that most people do not want to go against professional advice, and prefer to get orders.

Three things have accelerated this willingness. First, there is a belief that algorithms are more objective than humans, and therefore people are actually more willing to take orders from robots than professionals. Second, the younger generation has gotten accustomed to taking orders from Apple gadgets and Google. Third, improvements in artificial intelligence has made machine orders more reliable.

Twitter censors archaic opinions

It is popular to complain about economic inequality, but it is also obvious that inequality is necessary for any modern civilized society. It is not so obvious how much inequality is needed, or whether we have enuf or too much today. I assume that economists have studied this, but I do not know what they have found.

Here is an inequality defender:

In their sights is Paul Graham, one of the giants of Silicon Valley start-ups and one of the most thoughtful and impressive men in the tech industry. Graham co-founded Y Combinator, widely regarded as the most prestigious and effective accelerator for fledgling tech companies. It has invested in over 940 companies, including Reddit, Dropbox, and Airbnb.

The controversy began when Graham, who is popular essayist in his spare time, published a long defence of economic inequality on his website. In it, he made the reasonable point that inequality is a fundamental necessity to a successful culture of entrepreneurship.

“Almost by definition, if a startup succeeds its founders become rich,” wrote Graham. “And while getting rich is not the only goal of most startup founders, few would do it if one couldn’t. So when I hear people saying that economic inequality is bad and should be decreased, I feel rather like a wild animal overhearing a conversation between hunters.”

How often does a Powerball winner make good use of the money?

Twitter is censoring those who criticize social justice warriors. Their definitions of hate speech are getting stricter and stricter:

Michael Moritz, the chairman of Sequoia Capital and one of the most successful investors in Silicon Valley history, has amended his televised remarks on the lack of women partners at his firm.

Discussing the topic on Bloomberg TV’s Studio 1.0, Moritz said, “We look very hard. What we’re not prepared to do is to lower our standards. But if there are fabulously bright, driven women who are really interested in technology, very hungry to succeed, and can meet our performance standards, we’d hire them all day and night.”

That comment, televised on Wednesday night, was met with outrage on Twitter, where people condemned Moritz for archaic thinking and for not working hard enough to attract a diverse partnership.

Really? Refusing to lower standards is archaic?

Atlantic mag has an inequality complaint:

The main reason it’ll fall short, though—the reason that that remaining one-quarter of benefits hasn’t yet materialized—is that the method of funding for Social Security was calibrated to an America with much less inequality than the nation currently has.

Since the late ‘70s, most of the growth in workers’ earnings has gone to the people who have made the most money. To be precise, the wages of the top 1 percent of workers have grown 138 percent since 1979, while the wages for the bottom 90 percent grew only 15 percent during that period.

If all of that income growth were taxed evenly, Social Security would have no shortfall. But it’s not taxed evenly: Any dollar that an American earns beyond $118,500 is, under current laws, not subject to Social Security taxes. In other words, someone who makes $118,500 this year is going to pay the same amount in Social Security taxes as someone who makes $4 million this year.

For most people, this doesn’t really matter: Less than six percent of wage-earners last year took home more than $120,000. But because lots of the last three decades’ earnings growth has been in the realm beyond $118,500 a year, much of it has escaped Social Security taxes.

No, this is just a weak attempt at class warfare. The Social Security system pays benefits in proportion to taxes received. It does tax high wages and does not pay high benefits. The rich are left to fund their own retirement, if they want more. The SS system does not care if someone makes $200k a year or $2M a year, no one needed to make a judgment about how rich the rich would be.

Condemned for laying an egg

I had heard about medieval witch burning, but I did not know that sometimes animals were punished:

In 1474, a chicken passing for a rooster laid an egg, and was prosecuted by law in the city of Basel. Now, we are inclined to dismiss the event as fowl play, but in those days lusus naturae was no joke. The animal was sentenced in a solemn judicial proceeding and condemned to be burned alive "for the heinous and unnatural crime of laying an egg." The execution took place "with as great solemnity as would have been observed in consigning a heretic to the flames, and was witnessed by an immense crowd of townsmen and peasants." 1 The same kind of prosecution took place in Switzerland again as late as 1730.

American pronunciations are more correct

Eugene Volokh writes:

English pronunciation of place names is a question related to the English language, not to the foreign language — that Kiribatese say “Kiribas” means very little to what is linguistically correct in English. ...

Just as we have our own English words for “cat” and “house,” so we have our own English words for “Russia,” “Spain,” “Sweden,” and “Kiribati.” And this isn’t some peculiar English thing. It’s certainly true in Russian (“Angliya” for “England,” “Frantsiya” for “France,” “Shvetsiya” for “Sveriye,” “Germaniya” for what the natives pronounce as “Doychland”).

Yes, and I would say the same for personal names, business names, foreign foods, and everything else.

Often someone tries to correct me, and tell me that some word is pronounced differently by foreigners in some other language like Spanish or Arabic. I have to explain that I am speaking American English.

Update: Here is a Mexican-American news anchor in Phoenix lecturing her audience to justify her mispronunciations.

The current crypto war

Here is an essay about the second crypto war:

Some people claim that it is impossible to make a secure system that also provides government access. Which is true if your security requirement is to not give government access. As I have argued above, the purely technical arguments against government access are not very convincing. Unfortunately, it is exactly those arguments that are most often raised in the debate.

I agree with that. A counter-argument is that the Juniper backdoor ies an example of a govt backdoor that got subverted for nefarious purposes. But we have no proof of that. Juniper may have been using the pseudo-random number generator in recommended and secure ways.

Accusing males of social development issues

Bruce Perens writes:

It’s unfortunately the case that software development in general and Open Source communities are frequented by males who have social development issues. I once complained online about how offended I was by a news story that said many software developers were on the autism spectrum. ...

It’s still an open issue whether males and females have built-in biases that, for example, lead fewer women to be programmers, or if such biases only develop as a response to social signals. There is more science to be done.

Assuming that this is a problem, the attempt to pathologize men is annoying.

Maybe the men have social development issues, but it is more likely that the women have social development issues.

Suppose that the software development process requires contributors to be told when their programs do not work, and that women take offense at such harsh judgments. One inference might be that men should use more gentle words with the women. Another is that the women should learn to face the facts.

Apparently the more common conclusion is that the men have some psychological disorders or misogynistic habits that make them rude to women.

No, this is crazy feminist social justice warrior propaganda.

The Muslim and the fascist

Consider these statements:

Barack Obama is a Muslim.

If Barack Obama were a Muslim, he would not behave any differently.

Unless you are a mindreader, these statements have the same meaning.

The meaning depends on the definitions, of course. If Muslim excludes those who profess to be Christian, then he is not a Muslim. If Muslim includes those who were born Muslim and have not publicly repudiated it, then he is Muslim. Those are legitimate definitions. But if Muslim is defined by inner beliefs, then others cannot be sure, unless they are mindreaders.

Among those who claim to be able to perceive Obama's inner beliefs, some say he is an atheist, some say Christian, and some say Muslim. In my view, those disputes cannot be resolved.

He does appear to have unusual sympathies for Muslims, and those views do seem to have influenced many policy decision. Saying Obama is a Muslim is useful shorthand for a long description of those policy preferences.

Likewise consider:

Donald Trump is a fascist.

Donald Trump's top priority is making America great.

These mean essentially the same thing.

The leftists who call Trump a fascist do not make any comparison to Mussolini or Nazi policies. It is nearly always just a meaningless leftist epithet, or based on some sort of mindreading about what Trump thinks or might do. Pro-immigration rivals and neo-con Republicans have also called him a fascist.

The New Yorker mag reports:

Part of the problem is a definitional one. Even historians who have spent their lives studying Fascism can’t agree on what the word means. Were Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini Fascists? To be sure. ...

But if historians of Fascism can’t write down on paper what it is, they can recognize it when they see it. And when Vox’s Dylan Matthews interviewed a number of them before Christmas, they agreed that Trumpism doesn’t meet the standard.

So why do they call Trump a fascist? They do not like him sticking up for American interests.

Biggest threat humanity faces

NY Times columnist Paul Krugman writes:

Everyone who isn’t ignorant or a Republican realizes that climate change is by far the biggest threat humanity faces. But how much will we have to sacrifice to meet that threat?

If it is really the biggest threat, then we should prepare to fight a war over it. Maybe we should bomb all the coal-fired power plants in China and India, and put an embargo on all the OPEC countries.

No, I do not hear anyone suggest these things. I guess no one sees climate change as such a big threat.

If you want to help people on the other side of the world, you might want to read: Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help Hardcover – September 29, 2015 by Larissa MacFarquhar:

What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats and wrenching dilemmas.

She finds that these people of "extreme ethical commitment" are really suffering from a mental illness, and dealing with their own personal demons.

Update: In Gallup polls, no one thinks climate change is a problem.

New California law against earbuds

California announces a new law, effective Jan. 1:

DMV Reminds Motorists of New 2016 Laws

Earbuds or Headsets (SB 491, Transportation Committee): This law, among other things, makes it unlawful to wear a headset covering, earplugs in, or earphones covering, resting on, or inserted in, both ears, while operating a motor vehicle or a bicycle. This prohibition does not apply to persons operating authorized emergency vehicles, construction equipment and refuse or waste equipment while wearing a headset or safety earplugs.

Not so fast. Here is the new law, compared to the old law:

27400. A person operating a motor vehicle or bicycle may not wear a headset covering, or earplugs in, or earphones covering, resting on, or inserted in, both ears. This prohibition does not apply to any of the following: ...

Okay, that clearly adds in-ear headphones or earbuds to the law, but this exception is unchanged:

(d) A person wearing personal hearing protectors in the form of earplugs or molds that are specifically designed to attenuate injurious noise levels. The plugs or molds shall be designed in a manner so as to not inhibit the wearer's ability to hear a siren or horn from an emergency vehicle or a horn from another motor vehicle.

My ear buds do attenuate injurious noise levels without inhibiting my ability to hear a siren or horn. So I do not see how this law has any effect on me wearing earbuds in my car or bicycle.

The police and judges may have another opinion, but safety is the intent of the law, and I do believe that earbuds are safer because they allow controlling volume to the ears. The law appears written to allow for that.