Hollywood and Oscars have degenerated

There is a current movie out called The Gods of Egypt, with mostly white people playing ancient Egyptians. I actually don't know whether the ancient Egyptians would be considered white or not. The ancient Greeks and Romans are often considered white, and whiter than the inhabitants of Greece and Italy today.

The Oscar went to Spotlight as best picture. It is the supposedly true story of uncovering child sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

I did not see the movie, as it appears to be anti-Catholic propaganda. The ex-Catholic makers brag about exposing how John Geoghan molested 100s of kids. But the only thing he was ever convicted of was grabbing the buttocks of 10-year-old boy at a public swimming pool 11 years earlier.

The newspaper complains about various people ignoring molestation complaints, but the newspaper itself ignored the same complaints.

I am always suspicious when people make accusations that are (1) wildly implausible; (2) based on recovered memories many years later; (3) not thought to be criminal by anyone at the time; and (4) invented only when the accusers have the chance to win large damage awards.

This movie is sick, and so is everyone who treats it as a true story.

I did not watch the Oscars, as most other people did not either, but apparently it was a big feud between the blacks and Jews. Last year's big movies mostly had gratuitously anti-white movies, but that was not good enuf for the blacks and the Jews. Blacks have been over-represented in acting Oscars over the last 15 years, but that is not good enuf either.

Today, the white-haters are all complaining than Trump only disavowed David Duke and the Klu Klux Klan only 40 or 50 times, or whatever he did. CNN badgered him to disavow various other groups, and Trump refused, without specifying the groups.

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are labeled non-white by the NY Times, and they are attacking Trump for not being anti-white enuf.

More and more, I am convinced that the white-haters want to start a race war. And I am classifying people by whether they have signaled white hatred or not.

As I write this, conservative Jewish movie critic Michael Medved is complaining that Donald Trump is an "existential threat to the conservative movement". By conservative, he means the neocons and cuckservatives who have controlled the Republican party, and brought us foreign wars, bad trade deals, high immigration, and anti-white policies. One can only hope.

A Mass. blogger writes:

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday and people have been in a tizzy for months over the prospect of Donald Trump as President. My Facebook feed is about 30 percent comparisons of Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.

I expect this to continue for the foreseeable future. Trump will probably be the most pro-Jewish President ever elected, but that does not matter. He does not buy into certain liberal Jewish ideologies.

Medved says that Trump is certain to lose the election, and predicts that Trump will lose all 50 states. This is crazy. Hillary Clinton supporters are scared of Trump, and I think that Trump could win 45 states. He has the broadest appeal of any candidate running.

Facebook against America and free speech

Breitbart reports:

Mark Zuckerberg praised Germany for their “inspiring” refugee policies during a visit to the country and reiterated his commitment to combating “hate speech” on Facebook.

Speaking at a town hall event in Berlin, the 31-year old billionaire said German leadership in the refugee crisis has been “insipiring” and a “role model for the world.”

“I hope other countries follow Germany’s lead on this,” he added. “I hope the U.S. follows Germany’s lead on this.”

Speaking at the same event, Zuckerberg also emphasised his commitment to tackling “hate speech” on Facebook.

“Hate speech has no place on Facebook and in our community,” he said. “Until recently in Germany I don’t think we were doing a good enough job, and I think we will continue needing to do a better and better job.”

Zuckerberg added that the company would place a special priority on tackling hate speech against migrants. Facebook’s policies, he said, would “now include hate speech against migrants as an important part of what we just now have no tolerance for.”

Germany has been exerting considerable pressure on Facebook to co-operate with them to remove alleged “hate speech” against migrants on the platform. In September, German chancellor Angela Merkel was caught on tape at a luncheon event pressing Zuckerberg on the issue.

Since then, Facebook has dramatically expanded its anti-hate speech efforts, launching a new initiative to combat “racist and xenophobic” material on social media alongside European NGOs this January. Facebook is also cooperating with a task force set up by the Germany Justice Ministry to hunt down alleged racists on the platform.

The Germany government is taking a hard line against online critics of its refugee policies. In September, it emerged that the government had hired an organization led by a former Stasi agent to patrol Facebook for allegedly xenophobic comments.

Someday Merkel and Zuckerberg will have reputations like Stasi agents.

Zuckerberg is Jewish, with a Chinese wife. They believe in doing whatever they can to undermine white Christian America.

I regularly see news stories implying that Facebook has a diversity problem because the great majority of its employees are white Americans. But that is not true, and white Americans are under-represented there. It like to hire Asians more than anything.

Facebook finally has some options to that "Like" button, but no Dislike button. Why? Because "Like" really means "Please spam me", and Facebook makes its money by bombarding you with ads based on spying on your preferences.

Merkel is destroying Germany with Moslem migrants, and Facebook wants to censor anyone who criticizes Merkel's policy.

Using Facebook means supporting the destruction of American culture.

Only Trump understands the concept

From an anonymous Trump supporter:

Worrying about free trade and healthcare is ridiculous when white children are already a minority in the US. I care about blood and soil, and Trump is the only candidate that even understands the concept. Libertarian ideological straight jackets mean nothing to me. Every quasi religious concept about liberty and freedom has been used by a parasitic elite in the name of open borders, offshoring and outsourcing and against white males. Free trade with Mexico and China has been an obvious and unmitigated disaster. Slap on the tariffs.

Libertarianism is a coward’s ideology. It’s an attempt by white males to argue in their own interest by ideological means instead of arguing plainly for what’s in the interest of their own blood and culture like every other ethnic group does. Every libertarian ideal has been turned against them by their ideological opponents. To be a libertarian you have to believe in open borders and free trade (or make some Rube Goldberg argument about why it’s more libertarian to believe otherwise) despite the fact that this is dispossessing and impoverishing white males who make up 99.9999% of all the libertarians that ever were or ever will be.

Here is a Libertarian law professor in a panic about Trump. He is always claiming to follow principles, such as America giving more rights to people on the other side of the world, than to Americans.

The Democrat Party has become the anti-white-male party. Trump is threatening a party re-alignment, where the election is globalists v. nationalists.

White-haters obsessed with skin color

Last week a front page (above the fold) NY Times story said:

“They’ve been fighting that man since he’s been there,” Mr. Gadsden, who is African-American, said of Mr. Obama, before pointing at his forearm to explain what he said was driving the Republican opposition: “The color of his skin, that’s all, the color of his skin.” ...

“The words that have been said, the things the Republicans have done they’d have never have done to another president. Let’s talk like it is, it’s because of his skin color.”

Reflecting on the Supreme Court vacancy, Bakari Sellers, a former state representative from Denmark, S.C., likened the Senate treatment of the president to the 18th century constitutional compromise that counted black men as equivalent to three-fifths of a person.

“I guess many of them are using this in the strictest construction that Barack Obama’s serving three-fifths of a term or he’s three-fifths of a human being, so he doesn’t get to make this choice,” Mr. Sellers said. “It’s infuriating.”

Reading these stories just convinces me that the major news media represents those who hate white people, and who do not identify as white.

Barack Obama has been treated better than any President since JFK. His nominees have been treated much better than those of Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43.

Doing so, Mrs. Clinton added, is in keeping with a longstanding pattern of mistreatment.

“They demonize President Obama and encourage the ugliest impulses of the paranoid fringe,” she said. “This kind of hatred and bigotry has no place in our politics or our country.”

Republicans are especially sensitive about the notion that they are diminishing Mr. Obama because of his race, and spokesmen for several Republican senators, including Mr. McConnell and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, declined to comment or would not make the senators available for comment.

The article is trying to imply that McConnell and Scott are racists, but does not mention that Scott is black.

The leftist white-haters have discovered that they can bully whites by calling them racists. I expect Obama to appoint a non-white (or maybe non-Christian or LGBT) so he can try to use white guilt to get he/she/it confirmed. Or to inflame anti-white voters in the Nov. election.

Some of these folks promoting white hatred are white themselves, such as Hillary Clinton. But she is entirely dependent on man-hating feminists, white-haters, Christian-haters, and other leftists for her support.

Cook doubles down for Apple backdoors

Apple's Tim Cook has doubled down in its protection of a dead Moslem terrorist. NPR radio reports:

"The only way to get information — at least currently, the only way we know — would be to write a piece of software that we view as sort of the equivalent of cancer. We think it's bad news to write. We would never write it. We have never written it — and that is what is at stake here," Cook said. "We believe that is a very dangerous operating system."

The government has said that the software key would be limited in scope, but Cook rejected that characterization.

"This case is not about one phone. This case is about the future," Cook said. "If we knew a way to get the information on the phone — that we haven't already given — if we knew a way to do this, that would not expose hundreds of millions of other people to issues, we would obviously do it. ... Our job is to protect our customers."

Following the federal magistrate's ruling, Cook posted a statement on Apple's website which argued the government was effectively ordering Apple to put its customers at risk by compromising their privacy. "We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack," Cook wrote.

But that's not exactly true, NPR tech reporter Aarti Shahani says.

Yes, Cook is lying.

Cook pretends that he is standing for customer ownership of its own data, for privacy, and against universal crypto backdoors, but the truth is the opposite.

In this case, the customer is a state agency, and it wants its own data. Cook is refusing. The terrorist is dead, and has no privacy rights.

According to published reports, Apple has the ability to update the firmware of a particular iphone by using a digitally signed data file that is customized for the serial number of that phone, and such that the update will not work on a phone with any other serial number. The signature prevents the file from being modified to work on another phone. So the update file could not be used for any other purpose by the FBI or anyone else. It also has been reported that Apple could do tne update itself, so the FBI does not need to get that update file.

Assuming that is true, then Cook is lying and no other users or phones are at risk. If it is not true, then Apple has specifically engineered the phone to have a universal backdoor. No one ever required Apple to have a universal backdoor, so it would have had to make a deliberate decision to do that for its own business purposes.

So Cook's position is that Apple and Apple alone owns customer iphone data, and that it has the right to install backdoors for its own business purposes while thwarting a Moslem terrorist investigation.

Cook's previous political stances have all had to do with promoting LGBT activism and his own homosexuality. But he does not really stand for individual gay rights, and instead stands against the religious freedom of others. He is a leftist creep who wants everyone else to be forced to accept his gay-leftist values.

Cook is damaging the cause of personal data privacy. Cook is going to lose this court case, and the public is going to conclude that Apple is being unreasonable. The privacy organizations are controlled by leftists who have been baited into supporting Apple, and that means they are against any sort of real personal data autonomy. Leftism is all about control, and Apple wants control of your data.

Rush Limbaugh is an Apple fanboy, and he suggests that Apple may configure the upcoming iphone 7 so that the user can set a password that not even Apple is able to break. That would be legal for Apple to do, even if it loses the current case. Whether Apple chooses to do this is purely a business decision, Rush says, but Apple may not do it because of the unhappy customers who forget their passwords. Apple does not want to lose those customers.

I do not know whether Apple's business interest is to offer genuine privacy in the iphone 7 or not. But it does not make any sense to me to have a system where Apple can recover data, but the FBI cannot see that data in a court-ordered Moslem terrorist investigation.

Gates wants men in the kitchen

The Bill Gates Foundation is supposedly saving the world, but I have my doubts. According to the latest report:

According to Gates, “globally, women spend an average of 4.5 hours a day on unpaid work. Men spend less than half that much time.” The unpaid labor gap is especially large in poor countries. “In India, to take one example, women spend about six hours, and men spend less than one hour,” she writes.

And when women are too busy cleaning and cooking, they have less time for paid work. Girls in many countries fall behind in school because they're swamped with tedious chores. Gates writes that reducing women’s unpaid labor from five hours per day to three can increase a country’s female labor-force participation rate by 10 percent. If women participated in the economy at the same levels as men, she writes, global GDP could increase by 12 percent. ...

Couples should start having conversations about how they can redistribute unpaid chores more fairly, Gates says. That means more American dads pushing vacuum cleaners, and more husbands like one Gates met in Tanzania, who volunteered to help his wife fetch water. ...

For those who think it can’t be done, Gates offers an example from her personal life. Though Bill and the couples’ children would always help with after-dinner cleanup, she nevertheless was always the last person left in the kitchen, “doing those last few little things.”

Is increasing "global GDP" really their goal? I guess it would increase if they replace unpaid labor with paid labor, but why is that desirable?

A billionaire wife nags her family into a more equitable system for cleaning up the kitchen, and that somehow sets an example for the Third World?

I think that 50 years from now, it will be clear that the Gates Foundation made the world worse.

Update: Here is a video of Bill Gates promoting his letter.

Polls favor the FBI over Apple

A new Pew poll reports:

As the standoff between the Department of Justice and Apple Inc. continues over an iPhone used by one of the suspects in the San Bernardino terrorist attacks, 51% say Apple should unlock the iPhone to assist the ongoing FBI investigation. Fewer Americans (38%) say Apple should not unlock the phone to ensure the security of its other users’ information; 11% do not offer an opinion on the question.

The poll details are here.

A new Reuters poll reports:

When asked if the U.S. government should be able to look at data on Americans' phones to protect against terror threats, 46 percent agreed, 42 percent disagreed and the rest said they were not sure.

Rush Limbaugh reported this poll as favoring Apple, because it found 46% agreeing with Apple's decision to contest the court order.

It appears to me that the DoJ, FBI, and the judge also wanted Apple to contest this order. The case was chosen as one where Apple was sure to lose in a higher court. All of the circumstantial factors favor the FBI -- the crime was terrible, the guilt is certain, the terrorism inguiry is necessary, it is easy for Apple to comply, it was a government phone, there is no privacy at stake, etc. Both Apple and the FBI seemed to agree to make a big public show of this case.

Apple can lose this case, and use the court decision as a justification for spying on its users. There could well be a lot of people who agree with Apple contesting this case, and then losing it.

Apple is not helping the cause of privacy. It retains the power to spy on us while also thwarting prosecution of Moslem terrorists.

Rush defends Apple on this issue, as he is an Apple fanboy. He regularly praises Apple products, even tho he admits to having to spend many hours each week chasing down bugs and performance issues. He says that his device only last about 4 hours on a full charge, and he has spent weeks trying to figure out what was draining his batteries. His time would be better spent getting Donald Trump elected President. Trump is not siding with Apple and the Moslem terrorists.

Kids and bones are anti-fragile

From a recent interview:

John Leo: What happens to the academy now? You used the word “die.” Is it dead or dying? Most academics think it’s just aflutter. They seem to have no idea that something important happened at Yale.

Jonathan Haidt: The big thing that really worries me—the reason why I think things are going to get much, much worse—is that one of the causal factors here is the change in child-rearing that happened in America in the 1980s. With the rise in crime, amplified by the rise of cable TV, we saw much more protective, fearful parenting. Children since the 1980s have been raised very differently—protected as fragile. The key psychological idea, which should be mentioned in everything written about this, is Nassim Taleb’s concept of anti-fragility.
Leo: What’s the theory?

Haidt: That children are anti-fragile. Bone is anti-fragile. If you treat it gently, it will get brittle and break. Bone actually needs to get banged around to toughen up. And so do children. I’m not saying they need to be spanked or beaten, but they need to have a lot of unsupervised time, to get in over their heads and get themselves out. And that greatly decreased in the 1980s. Anxiety, fragility and psychological weakness have skyrocketed in the last 15-20 years. So, I think millennials come to college with much thinner skins. And therefore, until that changes, I think we’re going to keep seeing these demands to never hear anything offensive.

Leo: Like micro-aggression, trigger warnings, safe spaces and different forms of censorship for anything that bothers them?

Haidt: Yes, that’s right. Even much of the gender gap in STEM fields appears to result from differences of enjoyment—boys and girls are not very different on ability, but they’re hugely different in what they enjoy doing. Anyone who has a son and a daughter knows that. But if you even just try to say this, it will be regarded as so hurtful, so offensive. You can get in big trouble for it.

Yes. In my experience, most people do not grasp this simple concept.

Hillary Clinton hired another hater

A justice site posts:

Hillary Clinton has hired Zerlina Maxwell. Do you remember her?

Maxwell has written this: “Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.” Maxwell said that false accusations "can be undone by an investigation that clears the accused, especially if it is done quickly."

Yep, she actually said that. And her views mirror those of her new boss, who recently said that rape accusers should be believed until evidence proves the accusation is false.

Yes, friends, if Hillary is elected, we will enter into a feminist nirvana, where women never lie about rape unless the accusation is lobbed at Bill Clinton; where due process for men and boys accused of rape is a luxury we can afford but won't bother to extend; and where it's Salem, Massachusetts, 1692, all the time, at least when it comes to men and boys.

Maxwell's comments are even worse in context. Her next sentence is:

Even if Jackie fabricated her account, U-Va. should have taken her word for it during the period while they endeavored to prove or disprove the accusation.

No, no one should have believed Jackie. She claimed that U-Va fraternity gang rapes were part of normal and accepted fraternity hazing rituals, but that somehow everyone had been tricked to keep quiet about it. This was not plausible.

Maxwell also cites the Duke lacrosse rape story, but that was similarly a wildly implausible accusation. Yes, some action should be taken if either of these were true, but you could say the same about space alien abductions or doomsday prophets.

Maxwell is a black woman, and has joined the leftist hatred for white males.

If accusers were believed, then Bill Clinton would have never been elected President, and Hillary would be living a quiet retirement in Arkansas.

Instead, she is leading a campaign of feminist and ethnic hatred. She is a disgrace.

And the news media joins here. Buzzfeed openly refuses to hire white males.

The Republicans have their anti-white influences also. The NY Times reports that the vast majority of campaign financing has come from anti-white wealthy donors, in a failure so far:

The outcome is a rebuke to the party’s traditional donor class, which poured record-breaking amounts of money into the race last spring and summer in the hope of grooming a nominee with broad national appeal and a chance at winning over more Hispanic and other nonwhite voters.

The financial interest of those wealthy donors is to destroy the white Christian middle class.

Treating Neanderthals as non-human

NY Times science editor Carl Zimmer writes:

In 1997, scientists found the first scrap of Neanderthal DNA in a fossil. Since then, they have recovered genetic material, even entire genomes, from a number of Neanderthal bones, and their investigations have yielded a remarkable surprise: Today, 1 to 2 percent of the DNA in non-African people comes from Neanderthals.

That means that Neanderthals were ancestors to today's non-Africans.

That genetic legacy is the result of interbreeding roughly 50,000 years ago between Neanderthals and the common ancestors of Europeans and Asians. Recent studies suggest that Neanderthal genes even influence human health today, contributing to conditions from allergies to depression.

Wait -- didn't he just prove that Neanderthals are common ancestors of Europeans and Asians? The interbreeding was between some common ancestors and other common ancestors.

The confusion continues.

Now scientists have found that the genes flowed both ways. In a study published on Wednesday in Nature, a team of scientists reports that another instance of interbreeding left Neanderthals in Siberia with chunks of human DNA.

By "human DNA", he means African DNA. The Neanderthals already had human DNA, as noted in the first paragraph.

This exchange, the scientists conclude, took place about 100,000 years ago. That’s a puzzling date, because a great deal of evidence indicates that the ancestors of today’s non-Africans did not expand out of Africa until 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.

No, the ancestors of today's non-African includes Neanderthals, and they lived outside of Africa 100k years ago.

It’s possible, then, that these Neanderthals acquired DNA from a mysterious early migration of humans.

By "humans", he means Africans.

“I think at this point we’ve convinced everybody the observation is real,” said Adam Siepel, a geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a co-author of the new study. “But the story behind the observation is still very much in dispute.”

Humans and Neanderthals split from a common ancestor in Africa about 600,000 years ago. At some point afterward, the ancestors of Neanderthals spread to Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia.

The story ought to be in dispute, as it does not make any sense. Saying that "Humans and Neanderthals split" is wrong because they were all human ancestors.

The article continues with this confusing terminology.

In October, Chinese researchers discovered another intriguing clue in a cave: 47 teeth that they estimate are between 80,000 and 120,000 years old. The scientists argue that the teeth belonged to modern humans.

No, no one would say that a 120k year old tooth is from a "modern human". The argument is that the teeth came from ancient African migrants.

Maybe I am too sensitive, but there is some kind of weird racism going on here. They are claiming that only Africans are fully human, while Europeans are only partially human because their DNA has been polluted with non-human Neanderthal DNA. Africans who lived 500k years ago qualify as modern humans, but today's Europeans do not. This is crazy, and offensive. It is yet another way in which white people find it necessary to denigrate the white population.

More proof of hominid interbreeding

At one time it was assumed that human were descended from the various human-like fossils that were found around the world. Then anthropologists convinced everyone of the Out Of Africa theory, where all human are descended from those who left Africa about 65k years ago, and all other hominids went extinct.

Now no one wants to admit that Out-Of-Africa is dead wrong, but it is now clear that the Africans interbred with the other hominids, rather than displacing them. In other words, the older theory is more accurate than the Out-Of-Africa theory.

This is even more so, now with a new analysis, as SciAm reports:

The discovery of yet another period of interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals is adding to the growing sense that sexual encounters among different ancient human species were commonplace throughout their history. ...

“There is this joke in the population genetics community—there’s always one more interbreeding event," Castellano says. So before researchers discover the next one, here’s a rundown of the interbreeding episodes that they have already deduced from studies of ancient DNA.

Early modern humans and Neanderthals

Humans and Neanderthals

Humans and Denisovans

Neanderthals and Denisovans

Denisovans and a 'ghost' population of hominins

The article should say interbreeding between early Africans and Neanderthals, since they were all human ancestors and all the same species.

Here is more detail:

Here is a summary of our current knowledge in easy-to-digest bullet points. Cut them out and pin them to your bedside table. There will be a test in class next week.

Modern humans and Neanderthals diverged 550,000-765,000 years ago.

Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged 381,000-473,000 years ago.

Modern humans mated with Neanderthals in Asia around 100,000 years ago, during our first failed wave of migration, leaving our genes in their DNA.

Modern humans mated with Neanderthals in the middle East around 50,000 years ago, during the second successful wave of migration. We got some of their DNA, which has been linked with a number of characters.

Modern humans mated with Denisovans in Central and Eastern Asia, and got some cool genes from them, including one that enables Tibetans to live at high altitude.

Denisovans mated with an unknown form (NB we don’t know what the Denisovans looked like, beyond the fact that they had whopping teeth), perhaps a relict Homo erectus, the product of the very first wave of Homo migration from Africa

Denisovans mated with an unknown form (NB we don’t know what the Denisovans looked like, beyond the fact that they had whopping teeth), perhaps a relict Homo erectus, the product of the very first wave of Homo migration from Africa

It is very strange that these papers use the term "modern humans" for Africans that lived 500k years ago. There is no reason to believe that they were any more modern or human than Neanderthals or Denisovans.

This is a little like saying "modern humans mated with Aztecs", instead of "Spaniards mated with Aztecs".

It is also strange to say "leaving our genes in their DNA". Is this written by Africans for an African audience? Since Europeans have Neanderthal ancestors, you could also say "leaving their genes in our DNA".

Many people also consider Barack Obama African, even tho he is half African and half white American. That is mainly because he chooses to identify as black, but also because others view his African characteristics as being more obvious.

Is that what is going on here? I don't know. I think that anthropologists spent so much time trying to convince us that we are all African, that they do not want to admit that they were wrong.

Or maybe it is some kind of weird racial preference. Everyone is happy making fun of the European Neanderthals as being backward and brutish, but no one wants to say that the Africans were anything less then fully modern humans.

The latter summary is from Professor Jerry Coyne's blog, who adds this to a cute video:

Note that this animation is misleading in that it presents our species as the culmination of evolution, which of course is not true. In that sense its progressivism is wrong. They could easily have put a squirrel or a cactus as the final step!

There is the leftist academic mind at work. He refuses to accept that humans are more advanced than a squirrel or cactus.

More white hatred of Trump and others

Every day I see hatred for white Christian people, or celebrations of anti-white policies.

Even the Pope has joined the act. So has Hillary Clinton.

The Wash. Post reports:

But that's really not the only reason that Republican strategists and activists got so excited Wednesday night.. A more formal Rubio-Haley collaboration — a fantasy dream ticket of young, brown or faintly tan Americans with governing experience and strong Republican principles — suddenly seems all the more likely to become real.

And there was plenty of excitement about just that. Witness this compilation.

The Republican Party, these excited folks will say, could shed its image as the exclusive political home of old white men.

Republican Senators are called racist for not wanting to confirm Pres. Obama's replacement for Scalia. There is will more of that if he nominates Eric Holder.

NPR radio host Steve Inskeep writes in the NY Times:

Needless to say, Jackson and his Democratic Party enforced a certain idea of America — an America for white people. Jackson was personally cordial to people of other races, but their rights did not concern him. ...

Mr. Trump’s proposal for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States until the government “can figure out what is going on” has a brutal simplicity that echoes Jackson. So does his promise to force Mexico to pay for a border wall. The people Mr. Trump favors are to be protected from all harm. Nobody else matters. ...

Could Mr. Trump ride the Jackson vote to ultimate victory? Not unless he adds to it. Jackson’s old coalition no longer dominates the electorate. Nonwhite voters are growing in numbers, and many white voters have told pollsters they would be embarrassed by Mr. Trump as president. Mr. Trump would have to reckon with one of Andrew Jackson’s cherished principles: In America, the majority rules. Assembling a majority today is not the same as it used to be.

Inskeep is happy that the white percentage of the population has declined, and that the non-white-Christians are not so interested in protecting America from Moslem invaders and terrorists.

I listen to NPR regularly, and it never has any Trump supporters or true explanations for his popularity. Just snide remarks about how he is angry, or is an anachronism, or appeals to bigots, or is a passing sideshow.

Today's Democrats and other leftists seem determined to start a race war.

Update: Friday morning NPR had two stories from politicians who say that they do not understand Trump's popularity when he doesn't take any stands on issues. It is hard to see how they could be so confused, as Trump has expressed himself very well on the issues. My guess is that they are blinded by some sort of anti-America prejudice.

Apple sides with Moslem terrorists

I am a privacy advocate, and I believe that people have a right to private communication, but I cannot agree with Apple in its current FBI dispute. I am relying on this analysis:

Based on my initial reading of the request and my knowledge of the iOS platform, I believe all of the FBI’s requests are technically feasible.

Apple has been telling the public that it does not have the ability to comply with police requests, but that is not what it told the court. It has engineered the iphone to allow itself to break into it.

There is no real privacy issue in this case. The phone was a govt phone being used by an Islamic terrorist. The phone's contents should be available to the employer, a state govt agency.

Apple and Google take the position that they have a right to your data, but they also have a right to not comply with FBI investigations. They are putting their own business interests ahead of both privacy and law enforcement.

American law has always held that individuals do not have to testify against themselves in a criminal case, but any evidence in the hands of others can be subpoenaed for use in court (with rare exceptions, such as attorney-client privilege).

In this case, it is possible that the suspect used an option for a long alphanumeric password to protect the data. If so, then maybe Apple cannot the data, and some other issues might be in play. But as it stands, I cannot see any good legal reason for Apple to refuse.

Separately, Google has just announced that it is ceasing its service for offline photo editing, and requiring its users to upload all their photos to Google servers. It is motivated by the fact that its AI servers can now spy on those photos and pull valuable info for its advertisers. Maybe this is an efficient business arrangement, so I have no quarrel with that. But people should know that Google sometimes reports illegal activities to law enforcement, and has a legal obligation to comply with subpoenas.

A Si Valley newspaper story says:

The government is asking Apple to hack our own users," Cook said starkly.

Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, which makes the popular Android mobile operating system, tweeted Wednesday afternoon that "forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users' privacy."

He also said that "requiring companies to enable hacking of customer devices & data" could be "a troubling precedent."

Of course, the government has a legitimate interest in the contents of Farook's iPhone. It wants to fully solve a crime and prevent others.

Yet, if Apple is forced to come up with a way to unlock it, will a line be irrevocably crossed?

I think so.

No, this is misleading pro-Apple editorializing. Apple would not be hacking its users. It would be using an Apple-designed feature to recover data for its customer, the state agency.

I guess Cook wants to help gays keep their gay lovers secret, but this is not the way to do it.

Update: It has now been revealed that Apple has complied with dozens of similar FBI requests in the past. The difference this time is that the case is public, and Apple has business reasons for denying its ability and willingness to spy on its users.

Bad newspaper advice

The newspaper advice column Ask Amy writer went on vacation, and started by recycling her favorite advice of all time:

Dear Amy: I recently discovered that my son, who is 17, is a homosexual. ...

He won't listen to reason, and he will not stop being gay. I feel as if he is doing this just to get back at me ...

[Amy replies] Pressuring your son to change his sexuality is wrong. If you cannot learn to accept him as he is, it might be safest for him to live elsewhere.

This is sick advice. Suppose she had gotten this letter:

I recently discovered that my daughter, age 17, is a slut.

She won't listen to me, and has been banged by every guy in town. She says that promiscuous drunken anal sex is who she is, but I think that this is her way of rebelling.

Would it also be wrong for a parent to try to straighten her out? Of course not.

Ask Amy has bad advice nearly every day, but I point to this because she is just reflecting conventional wisdom. Newspapers do not print any common sense on this subject.

Libertarian open borders

Libertarians often argue for open borders. They usually claim to be following abstract general principles, and ignore the fact that they are letting in people who will destroy all those abstract principles. Here is an example:

He thinks that as a matter of fact, banning certain immigrants would help prevent an illiberal culture from forming. He might respond that, given the facts, we don’t need to censor people, indoctrinate them, or ban certain religions. He might be right. But we can still ask him, “Would you in principle be willing to do those things, if the facts were different? If, e.g., allowing people to convert to Islam turned out to be just as dangerous as you think allowing immigrants from Afghanistan, would you favor banning Islam, in order to maintain a liberal culture committed to the rule of law?” We doubt he’d say yes.

Yes, we can have free speech, freedom of religion, and democracy as long as we do not let in too many people who are opposed to those principles.

Islam is not just a religion. It is a belief system that is opposed to those libertarian principles.

If half the population wants basic freedoms, and the other half are opposed, then that is a recipe for war. Yes, it is sometimes to fight for freedom. I have no problem saying that. The strange ones are the Libertarians and cuckservatives who promote policies that will ultimately destroy what they stand for.

Proposal to abolish marriage

The Dilbert cartoonist writes:

Last night I was watching a special on CNN about the United States in the 1960s. A women’s rights activist complained that being home all day with two small kids was mental torture. She was nearly in tears. I totally get that. I love kids, but being around them for more than ten minutes feels like brain death. You can’t think your own thoughts, do what you want to do, or take your eyes off them. And 80% of your interactions can be unpleasant if you are the disciplinarian.

Being a parent on a school night can be torture. The schools load up the kids with hours of homework and hand them off to their parents, tired, restless, and unsatisfied. The workload is beyond what most kids can handle without a struggle. The parents compensate by yelling and threatening their children. The family environment is a cage fight on a good day.

You know what would solve that?

Get rid of marriage.

The only reason the local school system can crap on kids with truckloads of useless homework is because they hand-off the problem to parents. If kids were under one set of rules all day (such as the school’s rules) that wouldn’t happen. The schools would adjust the workload to be reasonable because THEY would have to deal with the fallout, not the poor parents coming home from long days at work.

I’m not suggesting that schools raise kids. I’m only going to make the case that marriage is civilization’s biggest mistake and we’re all too brainwashed to admit the obvious.

For the sake of comparison, imagine a system in which kids are raised by some sort of organized partnership of parents, teachers, and medical professionals. Parents can spend as much quality time as they want with their kids, but mostly for mentoring and social reasons. The jobs of discipline, healthcare, feeding, fitness, and education would be handled by the greater organization.

He is probably trolling us, but this is the direction we are heading. Marriage and family laws and policies have gotten so damaged that his proposal will seem like a better alternative.

Likewise, our health care system is so screwed up, that a fully socialized medical system now seems better than Obamacare.

A commenter replies:

I became a father a year and a half ago. The idea of giving her away to strangers, to a school or institution so they raise her goes against every instinct that I have. It's not about having "quality time" whatever that means. Being her father is the thing. It's the job, it's the responsibility. it's the taking care of someone, teaching someone. It's not a burden, it's a mission.

When I was a kid I hated my family, and I dreamt of running away and living in a parenthood-free socialist hippy farm. Many years later I discovered families aren't the problem. People are the problem. Some people are inept and shouldn't have kids, shouldn't be burdened. People should have kids when they have a certain degree of emotional intelligence and skills to pass on, and the abiltiy to teach these skills. And people should have kids when they have the motivation and drive to do it and do it well. It's a very important job.

The kid experiences everything in a magnified way. it comes pre-written. Anything mom or dad do is magnified x10. Rules are laws. Little incidents are major adventures. Everything has significance. It's a delicate ecosystem.

Teacher, doctors, gubernamental officers, neighbors, etc, they cant do the job. They just cant, because they don't care enough - they cant ever care enough, not as it was their own child.

The solution for most things is that people don't have kids and we go back to being just a few, but that the few are wanted and loved and have meaningful relationships.

Moving the business to the state would make things worse. As in, how much would you've liked to have been raised in a foster home.

He is right except for one thing -- if he ends up in family court, then there is a good chance that judges and psychologists will use the law to destroy it all and put him on a visitation schedule. He will be reduced to what some bureaucrat thinks is quality time. His opinion may change then.

Update: See this rant:

I learned how to tell if a man was dead by looking in his eyes. ...

Men over 40 were lied to. The rest of us have no excuse. ...

Most men are dead, but you are free to live.

There is wisdom in that essay. Those who defend marriage and family are usually defending some other system that we do not have anymore.

German political correctness

Here is a new word:

"Gutmensch," an overly politically correct person, has been named Germany's buzzword of the year 2015. The award pinpoints an awkward or controversial term that has shaped public discourse. ...

"Gutmensch" was selected because, in connection with the current refugee crisis in Germany, it defames "tolerance and helpfulness as naïve, dumb and worldly innocent, as having a helper syndrome or as moral imperialism," the jury president, linguist Nina Janich, told the press. ...

Last year's non-word of the year was "Lügenpresse," or "liar press." The expression was popular at the time among supporters of the German anti-Islamization movement "Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West," or PEGIDA.

Do not believe a unanimous verdict

The phrase "too good to be true" has some merit. It has a history:

Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made.

Some new research has some quantitative evidence.

The paper argues:

We now consider a different example, drawn from cryptography. An important operation in many protocols is the generation and verification of prime numbers; the security of some protocols depends upon the primality of a number that may be chosen by an adversary; in this case, one may test whether it is a prime, whether by brute-force or by using another test such as the RabinMiller [22, p. 176] test. As the latter is probabilistic, we repeat it until we have achieved the desired level of security ...

No, there are hardly any cryptographic protocols that depend on the primality of a number chosen by an adversary.

The paper gives the argument that repeated tests do not increase security as much as one might naively think, because the computer might be malfunctioning. It is a very weak argument.

Nevertheless if someone tells you than something is known for sure, with no error estimates, you should have some skepticism. Scientific claims normally come with error estimates.

Update: Here is a New Yorker article on the problems with eyewitness identification.

Eyewitness identification is unreliable. So if there are 10 eyewitnesses, and they all positively identify the accused, then I guess I should be suspicious. It is more likely that there was undue influence, than that they all became independently sure of what they saw.

This concept can be applied to a lot of other subjects, like global warming. If someone tells you that there is a consensus about what will happen in a century, be suspicious. They could be right, as eclipses can be predicted like that.

But if they tell you that the effects of global warming are uniformly bad, they are lying. Nearly all changes like that have a mixture of good and bad effects. You can only come to a judgment if you have balanced the good against the bad.

Most people are willing to come to conclusions after listening to one side of argument. This is especially true about the Left, as they insist on news and info that is slanted towards their views, and they refuse opposing views.

Resting Bitch Face

I thought this was a joke:

Queen Elizabeth has it. So does fashion designer Victoria Beckham. And actress Kristen Stewart — poor thing, she’s practically the poster girl.

Among the slew of pop culture icons said to be afflicted with so-called Resting Bitch Face (alternatively known as Bitchy Resting Face), the vast majority are women, though Kanye West is among the male examples. All of them have been mocked by Internet commenters for having a certain unintentional expression when their faces are not in motion — a look best described as vaguely annoyed, maybe a little judgy, perhaps slightly bored.

No, apparently it is a real condition.

Dawkins booted from atheist conference

Here is the latest atheist controversy:

Controversial atheist Richard Dawkins has been dumped as the keynote speaker at an upcoming New York City sceptics conference after he praised a video equating feminism with radical Islamism.

"We have taken this action in response to Dr Dawkins' approving retweet of a highly offensive video," said a statement by the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS). "We believe strongly in freedom of speech and freedom to express unpopular, and even offensive, views. However, unnecessarily divisive, counterproductive, and even hateful speech runs contrary to our mission and the environment we wish to foster at NECSS."

The video mocks both Islamism and feminism. I would not expect atheists to be offended at a video mocking a religion.

Feminism means many things, and the ones expressed in the video deserve to be mocked.

Atheism used to mean to deny belief in God. Skeptic used to be a code word for atheist. Now they are conformists more than skeptics, and use the word "skeptic" less often. Their organizations are being taken over by social justice warriors, and now atheists are expected to have leftist politics.

I wonder why atheists even have conferences. Are they trying to learn something? Are they trying to mimic a religious community? Are they trying to induce ideological conformity? Are they really as horrible as they sound from these news stories?

Update: The woman being mocked resembles this Toronto radical feminist activist. There are YouTube videos of her throwing tantrums against Christianity and men's rights at public events.