Saturday, April 30, 2016

Using foreigners to replace American jobs

In a discussion of Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina favoring using foreigners to replace American jobs, a cuck comments:
I don't think racism has anything to do with it, but I don't know why Americans deserve good jobs more than anyone else. If someone needs the work and they can do it as well as me, I don't care if they are from another planet. ...

I am sure it sucks to experience a diminishing job market and standard of living but why are Americans more deserving, divine right or something? I don't buy the argument that "we" built this economy unless you mean humans. I think we just need to learn to live with less. You can get a lot of nutrition by licking slime off rocks and there is enough slime here for everyone. (joke stolen from simpsons)
Fools like him are being manipulated to sell out our national interest.

Another says:
From where most of us on the altright stand, Cruz looks like The Establishment Candidate: strong defense, protection of corporate interests, and nominal attention to irrelevant social issues. The GOP likes him because he will not rock the boat, and they can keep playing Little Red Riding Hood to the big bad wolf of the Democrats. That way, the donations can continue to roll in and yet they do not have to take any risky stances. Everyone in Washington is keeping everyone else there employed, and the consequences to America and her people are entirely irrelevant.
They don't like Cruz that much, as Boehner says that he is Lucifer in the flesh. But many of them would rather lose with Cruz, than let Trump re-align the political parties according to nationalism versus globalism.

Sunday, April 24, 2016

White guilt and African population

ReturnOfKings writes:
3 Reasons I Will Never Apologize For Being White
1. I’m the descendant of victims myself because many of my ancestors were from oppressed ethnic and religious groups
2. Minorities and other non-whites frequently treated and still treat each other far worse than white people did
3. White-majority countries make the humanitarian world go round
Today's whites are taught to feel guilty about being white. Even Bill Maher mocks today's white-hating leftists.

Or that all have equal value:
Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty.
The Gates foundation has been boosting African population growth, and now SciAm reports:
For years the prevailing projections put Africa's population at around two billion in 2100. Those models assumed that fertility rates would fall fairly rapidly and consistently. Instead the rates have dropped slowly and only in fits and starts. The United Nations now forecasts three billion to 6.1 billion people—staggering numbers. Even conservative estimates, from places such as the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, now see Africa at 2.6 billion. The U.N. has in recent years continually raised its midline projection for 2100 world population, from 9.1 billion in a 2004 estimate to 11.2 billion today. Almost all of the unanticipated increase comes from Africa.
Their solution is educating women to not have kids, and plan that is in alignment with their feminist politics:
African women with no education have, on average, 5.4 children, according to the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Women who have completed primary school have, on average, 4.3 children. A big drop, to 2.7, correlates with completion of secondary school. For those who go on to college, fertility is 2.2. ...

The empowerment of women needs no demographic justification. But it happens that women who can raise their sights high and manage their own lives also decide—and manage—to have fewer children and to have them later in life. Even if population growth did not matter, the future of Africa and the world would be better if every African girl and woman were healthy and educated and free to reach for her own ambitious dreams, to safely refuse unwanted male attention, and to have a child only when and with whom she chooses.
This is not going to work. We are going to have famines, wars, migrant crises, and refugees on a massive scale. Bill Gates will be remembered as the man who helped enable gigantic human catastrophes

If all lives have equal value, then the value of my life (relative to the world) is going down as the world is being re-populated with Africans and Asians.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Time mag tries to explain white nationalism

Time magazine has a big article on How Donald Trump's campaign brought white nationalists out of the shadows. It is filled with terms like "extremist", "far right", "supremacist", "racist", and "bigot" at every opportunity.

The curious thing is what it does not say. It does not accuse Trump of any of those things, and it does not give examples of any of his supporters expressing any of those extremist or hateful views. It is just name-calling.

So why would white nationalists be excited about Trump if he is not one of them?

The defining issue of this political year is globalism versus nationalism. The establishment Democrats and Republicans stand for destroying the American middle class by equalizing it with Third World workers, for waging perpetual overseas wars, and for keeping us in debt. That is profitable for the wealthy elites and political donors.

Trump and Sanders reject this. Trump, in particular, wants to make America great again. The white nationalists just think that it is obvious that we are going to need white people to make America great.

The internationalist business and financial interests are much more interested in global development, because that increases the supply of people who can be put into debt buying their products, and then controlled for the benefit of the wealthy elites.

Trump's big accomplishment is to put forward the idea that an American President should put America first, and advance the interests of American. And for that, he is hated by the leftists and the cucks.

Monday, April 18, 2016

The cancer of human history

Radio Derb said:
Here's the thing. Fifty years ago next fall, back in 1967, the lefty magazine Partisan Review published an essay titled "What's Happening in America" by Susan Sontag. Ms Sontag told us that, quote:
The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
Susan Sontag was white, and that essay is a landmark in the history of white ethnomasochism. A lot of people at the time were shocked by it; but Ms Sontag had lit such a candle as, by God's grace in America, shall never be put out.

White self-hatred is now the conventional wisdom. The media promote it in a thousand ways.
Derbyshire's following program says he heard from listeners who pointed out that Sontag was Jewish. He defended calling her white, by saying that Jews cannot be blamed for white ethno-masochism. He says that he is anti-anti-white, and criticizes those who vilify whites.

He points out that there are plenty of white non-Jews who have enacted anti-white policies, and since whites outnumber Jews by a wide margin, whites would have little excuse for letting Jews trick them into destroying themselves.

He calls himself the "dissident right", but says that the term "alt right" has gotten more popular.

All that may be true, but if Sontag identified as Jewish and not white, then her anti-white rants are not examples of white ethnomasochism. She was just an example of one ethnic group hating another.

Many Jews identify as non-white, and work to undermine whites.

There are also self-hating Jews, but that is another story.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Bernie Sanders' guiding principle

CNN reports:
Though raised Jewish, Sanders says that he is "not particularly religious," nor is he a member of any congregation or synagogue. "I am not actively involved in organized religion," he has told reporters.

But at a CNN town hall in New Hampshire in February, Sanders seemed to contradict himself.

"It's a guiding principle in my life, absolutely," said the Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate.

"You know, everyone practices religion in a different way. To me, I would not be here tonight, I would not be running for president of the United States if I did not have very strong religious and spiritual feelings."

So what gives? Is Bernie Sanders religious or not?
The confusion here is that Judaism is not a religion like Christianity. It is an ethnic identification that he was born with, and a set of political ideologies.

Sanders is a leftist authoritarian. There is a long tradition of Jews being leftist authoritarians, and of despising Christian culture and values.

So maybe Sanders does not believe in God, or participate in the sorts of things that Christians recognize as religious. But he is very much in the Jewish tradition of leftist authoritarian anti-American ideologies, and this tradition if obviously very important to him.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Facebook's new world order

NPR Radio reports:
Mark Zuckerberg has laid out a 10-year master plan for Facebook. It's bold. It's savvy. And it glosses over a key detail: the dark side of making the world more connected.

At F8, the company mega-conference in San Francisco, the 31-year-old CEO delivered a keynote address in which, he said, over the next decade he plans to build a suite of products — each with a billion or more users — that together will serve one humble goal: "Give everyone in the world the power to share anything they want with anyone."

It's a mouthful. And they're not empty words.
His goal is to integrate the American middle class with Third World poor people. He is a cuck. We should start calling him Cuckerberg, and resist his evil plans.

Fortune mag reports:
Donald Trump’s campaign staff have criticized Facebook fb supremo Mark Zuckerberg after he took a thinly veiled swipe at their candidate over his politics of fear.

“I think I’ll take Mark Zuckerberg seriously when he gives up all of his private security, moves out of his posh neighborhood and comes live in a modest neighborhood near a border town, and then I’m sure his attitude would change,” Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson told CNBC.

Zuckerberg this week used a keynote address at Facebook’s F8 developer conference to decry current political rhetoric against immigration and globalization. He called for politicians to have “the courage to see that the path forward is to bring people together, not push people apart, to connect more, not less.”
Meanwhile Trump called for returning the Joe Paterno statue. Good for Trump. Paterno was very unfairly maligned.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Rich men live longer

NPR radio reports:
The study, published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, bolsters what was already well known — the poor tend to have shorter lifespans than those with more money. ...

"There are vast gaps in life expectancy between the richest and poorest Americans," Chetty said. "Men in the top 1 percent distribution level live about 15 years longer than men in the bottom 1 percent on the income distribution in the United States.

"To give you a sense of the magnitude, men in the bottom 1 percent have life expectancy comparable to the average life expectancy in Pakistan or Sudan."

And where life spans are concerned, the rich are getting richer.
This is good and expected news. If a man works hard all his life to make a lot of money, then he should be able to use that money to improve his health and longevity. If not, why would he work so hard?

But the study does not actually show that money buys a better health outcome. It just finds a correlation. It is entirely possible that the men are getting rich because they are healthier, and the money itself is not improving their lifespans at all.

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

PZ Myers denies human evolution

A common premise of the Left is that all people are inherently the same, and equal, and conforming to the same ideals. Here is an example.

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist and popular blogger PZ Myers writes:
Modern humans emerged out of Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years. They were slightly smaller (and smaller brained) than the robust humans living in Asia and Europe, but they did bring about some advances in technology and swept over the world…and were adept at learning new skills. Again, we’ll say for the sake of argument, they represented a clear adaptive advantage to greater intelligence, even though there is no biological basis for assuming they were more intelligent, or that it was their intelligence that allowed them to displace other human groups. (I suspect that more complex social structures and language, which are obviously a product of the brain, are more responsible than IQ).

But here’s the thing: those early modern humans were pretty much indistinguishable from us today. They were about the same size, looked about the same, had the same capabilities we do now. If we used a time machine to go back and kidnap a Cro Magnon baby, bring her to our time and raise her in an ordinary American home, she’d probably grow up to play video games, shop at the mall, get a college degree, and land a job at an investment bank, and do just fine. Most of the evolving humanity has done since seems to be focused on their immune system and adaptations to agriculture and urban living.

One has to wonder, if IQ is such a great boon to humanity, why hasn’t the biological basis for it shown much improvement in the last 100,000 years?
Not only are we all the same, we are all the same as some Africans over 100k years ago!

This is a denial of human evolution, because it would mean that humans have not evolved over that time. He concedes some evolution, but insists that they are for unimportant traits.

He also denies twin studies, and denies that the concept of intelligence is meaningful. See this rebuttal.

In short, he is a cuck.

The NY Times reports:
The term cuckold traditionally refers to the husband of an adulteress, but Dr. Larmuseau and other researchers focus on those cases that produce a child, which scientists politely call “extra-pair paternity.”

Until the 20th century, it was difficult to prove that a particular man was the biological father of a particular child.

In 1304 a British husband went to court to dispute the paternity of his wife’s child, born while he was abroad for three years. Despite the obvious logistical challenges, the court rejected the husband’s objection.

“The privity between a man and his wife cannot be known,” the judge ruled.

Modern biology lifted the veil from this mystery, albeit slowly. In the early 1900s, researchers discovered that people have distinct blood types inherited from their parents.

In a 1943 lawsuit, Charlie Chaplin relied on blood-type testing to prove that he was not the father of the actress Joan Barry’s child. (The court refused to accept the evidence and forced Chaplin to pay child support anyway.) ...

Comparing the chromosomes of living related [Belgian] men, Dr. Larmuseau and his colleagues came up with a cuckoldry rate of less than 1 percent. Similar studies have generally produced the same low results in such countries as Spain, Italy and Germany, as well as agricultural villages in Mali.
They were looking at an era when marriage meant something, and adulterers were social outcasts. It is a different world today.

1% sounds low, but it means that you probably know someone who has told you about his father, not realizing that his father is not his father. Just in the last week, the current Archbishop of Canterbury announced that a DNA test determined that his father was the man that he always thought.

This does not count step-fathers, who know that they are rearing someone else's kids. And with the institution of marriage crumbling and women getting increasing sexual freedoms, more and more kids are disconnected from their dads.

That is no big deal if we are all the same as African cave-men anyway, right?

Update: Here is a colloquial definition of cuck. Here is an explanation of why Myers is wrong about IQ.

Monday, April 11, 2016

Sick perverts become college role models

I mentioned that I subscribe to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, and I give an example of the garbage it prints:
Eleven years ago, Jay Ladin *00 was a popular professor at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women in New York, a published poet, and a father of three. Ladin also was in constant agony over the thought of continuing to live as a man. ...

The struggle continued for another four decades, even as Ladin married, earned a Ph.D. in American literature at Princeton, and built a career as a teacher and writer. Throughout, Ladin fought — and sometimes succumbed to — the impulse to dress as a woman and seek out women for close friendships. Being a man was a performance. ...

Today, Jay is Joy. After going through a wrenching divorce and putting her job at Yeshiva — an Orthodox Jewish university — in jeopardy, Ladin is living as a woman, an “incredible miracle, something I never thought would happen,” she says. By sharing her story, she also has become an inspirational figure to LGBT Jews who are struggling to reconcile their religious faith with their identities. ...

(Ladin declines to say whether she has had gender reassignment surgery: “Part of dealing with transgender people as people is giving them privacy, and in our culture, we don’t generally discuss our genitals in public.”) ...

Transgender people pose a problem for Orthodox Judaism, Ladin says, because gender is central to so many of its rituals — men and women sit separately in synagogue, for example. ...

When it became clear that Ladin would live as a woman, her wife was distraught. “You’ve destroyed four lives to walk around in a dress,” Ladin recalls her saying.

“My wife saw me as choosing self-mutilation over her, over the life we had painstakingly built up since we were teenagers, over our future, over our past, over the well-being of our children,” Ladin writes. ...

Ladin is remarried — to Liz Denlinger, a curator at the New York Public Library — and continues to split her time between Manhattan and Massachusetts, where her children live, though her relationship with them is strained. “Two of my children have stopped talking to me. I’m down to one, my 12-year-old daughter,” who still calls her Daddy, she says. The fissure with her other children, now 16 and 21, is “unbearably painful.”
He is obviously suffering from a mental illness, and expects society to indulge his sick fantasies. He tries to use the Jewish religion to justify his perversions.

He is man with a fetish for cross-dressing. He fathered 3 kids, still has his male genitals, and is in a sexual relationship with a woman.

Parents sometimes think that sending their kids to a conservative private religious college will shelter them from role models who are openly promoting sick behavior. Nope.

The Princeton Alumni Weekly was originally an alumni magazine that came out weekly. Now it is neither. It is produced by the university public-relations staff about once a month, and it is primarily a fund-raising publication.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Hastert was a victim, not a money launderer

It appears to me that federal prosecutors have a lot of excess time on their hands, as they keep prosecuting people for things that do not seem criminal.

AP reports:
Prosecutors say when they questioned Hastert about his large cash withdrawals he told them he was being extorted by someone making a false claim of sex abuse.

In the court filing, prosecutors say Hastert agreed to let investigators record phone conversations he had with the man who later became known as "Individual A."

Prosecutors say "Individual A's tone and comments" during the conversations "were inconsistent with someone committing extortion." They say he didn't seem angry when Hastert told him he was having trouble getting money.

Agents then questioned Individual A, who told them about abuse that occurred when he was 14.

Hastert has pleaded guilty to violating banking laws.
He has never been charged with sex abuse, or even accused of it in a civil suit. So we should assume that he is innocent of that, as I assume that people are innocent until proven guilty.

So what was Hastert's crime? The heart of the charge is that Hastert described Individual A to federal agents in terms that seemed inconsistent to the agents' interpretation of "Individual A's tone and comments" on the wiretaps.

Another AP story has more details:
Hastert made 15 withdrawals of $50,000 — for a total of $750,000 — from 2010 to 2012. It's what he did next that made his actions a crime. After learning withdrawals over $10,000 are flagged, he withdrew cash in smaller increments, taking out $952,000 from 2012 to 2014.

The case had been shrouded in secrecy since Hastert was indicted in May 2015. Prosecutors only confirmed at a March hearing that sex-abuse claims were at its core.

Hastert's fear, prosecutors said Friday, was that if he didn't pay Individual A "it would increase the chance that other former students he molested would tell their stories." Burdge had already confronted Hastert at her brother's funeral and he could see "she had been deeply affected by what defendant did to her brother, and she was likely to tell her story publicly if anyone would listen."

Court records say Hastert managed to pay $1.7 million to Individual A — handing it over in lump sums of $100,000 cash — starting in 2010. The payments stopped late in 2014 after FBI agents questioned Hastert about his cash withdrawals. Prosecutors said Friday that it was a bank compliance officer who spotted the huge withdrawals.
If all this is true, then Hastert was a victim of extortion, and Individual A should be charged with a crime, not Hastert.

The feds knew about the cash withdrawals, and knew that Hastert was buying Individual A's silence, so what is Hastert's crime?

Even assuming that Hastert behaved inappropriately, and that he would be embarrrassed by a public revelation, it does not follow that he committed a crime. In Individual A believes that he was harmed, then he could sue for damages. But it is a crime for Individual A to extort money for silence, even if there was a crime.
The filing recommends that a federal judge sentence Hastert to up to six months in prison for violating banking laws as he sought to pay one of his victims, identified in court documents as "Individual A," to ensure the person kept quiet. The sex-abuse allegations date to Hastert's time at Yorkville High School in the Chicago suburb of Yorkville from 1965 to 1981.
Six months for this? And the feds continue to protect the extortionist by concealing his name.

Individual A's name should be revealed in an extortion indictment. He could have made a police complaint 35 years ago. He could have sued. He could have gone public with his story when Hastert was Speaker of the House, and destroyed his career. All of those things might be defensible. But collecting a million dollars in secret cash transaction 40 years later after threatening to go public? Indefensible.

You might say that if Hastert is a child molester, then he deserves whatever he gets. I disagree.

First of all, we don't know that he was a molester. Only that he is privately and anonymously accused of doing something inappropriate.

Secondly, is that really how child molestation should be handled? That molestation victims can just wait 40 years for the perp to get rich on his reputation, and then extort suitcases full of cash under threats to destroy that reputation?

Just think about that. It is impossible for Hastert today to prove that nothing bad happened 40 years ago. It is his word against the accusers. Admittedly, Hastert looks bad by making the payoffs, but maybe he or someone else in that position might just make the payoff rather than face an ugly fight over false accusations.

Saturday, April 09, 2016

Colleges bigoted against male personalities

Colleges claim that they are committed to diversity and inclusiveness, but it is still fashionable to badmouth whites, males, Christians, straights, and conservatives.

Autism spectrum is peculiar in that it is defined to include people with a psychological disorder as well as people with certain masculine personality characteristics.

Tyler Cowen writes:
Thinking back on history, maybe you've wondered how it was that American colleges and universities could ever have contributed to racist discourse. But Princeton and many other institutions kept out Jews, and "academic" defenses of slavery, segregation, and eugenics were commonplace until broader social changes rendered such views unacceptable.

The sad truth is that dehumanizing ideologies are still with us in the modern university, although they take very different forms. Prime examples include the unacceptable ways we sometimes talk and think about the autism spectrum.

A few years ago, Michael L. Ganz, who teaches at the Harvard School of Public Health, published an essay titled "Costs of Autism in the United States." Nowhere in the essay does he consider whether autistic people have brought benefits to the human race. Can you imagine a comparable essay titled: "Costs of Native Americans"? Ganz might think that autism is strictly a disease, but he never mentions or rebuts the fact that a great number of autistics reject this view and find it insulting. ...

Autism is often described as a disease or a plague, but when it comes to the American college or university, autism is often a competitive advantage rather than a problem to be solved. One reason American academe is so strong is because it mobilizes the strengths and talents of people on the autistic spectrum so effectively. In spite of some of the harmful rhetoric, the on-the-ground reality is that autistics have been very good for colleges, and colleges have been very good for autistics. ...

We're also learning that a lot of the stereotypes about autistics are false or at least misleading. It's been suggested, for instance, that autistics don't care much about other people, or that autistics lack genuine emotions or are incapable of empathy. The more likely truth is that autistics and nonautistics do not always understand each other very well. It's odd that the people who make this charge so often, in the very act of doing so, fail to show much empathy for autistics or to recognize their rich emotional lives. Even when the cognitive capabilities of autistics are recognized — most commonly in the cases of savants — it is too often accompanied by a clichéd and inaccurate picture of a cold, robotic, or less than human personality.
Yes, the nonautistics often say that the autistics have various deficiencies in understanding other people, and in the process the nonautistics show that they do not understand autistics.

I do think that the over-emotional and empathic nonautistics would be considered a disease or a plague if they were in the minority.

Thursday, April 07, 2016

Princeton stands only for diversity and inclusiveness

Princeton University has announced that it has completed its re-assessment of Woodrow Wilson, as demanded by black student protesters who occupied administration offices.

Glenn Beck has made a strong case that Wilson was the worse President of the 20th century, so I thought that the re-assessment would consider some of the reasons that conservatives have always hated him.

Wilson brought us the income tax, the Federal Reserve Bank, and World War I. He said "The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible."

I get the alumni magazine, but had not noticed this:
the high aims expressed in his memorable phrase, ‘Princeton in the Nation’s Service.’” That phrase is preserved today as part of Princeton’s informal motto, which was amended in 1996 to “Princeton in the Nation’s Service and the Service of All Nations.
The new mantras are diversity and inclusiveness, and this is no longer good enuf.
We propose modifying Princeton’s informal motto to “Princeton in the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity.” We do so for two compelling reasons. One is that it captures Princeton’s mission to serve the public good through teaching, research, and service that make a positive difference in the lives of people in this country and throughout the world. But it also permits the University to recast the front campus plaque, allowing it to reflect both the timehonored aspiration stated by Woodrow Wilson and the forward-looking aspiration stated by Justice Sotomayor. The new plaque would contextualize the legacy of Woodrow Wilson; it would allow us to contemporize his expression of Princeton’s commitment to service by linking it to our embrace of the coeducational, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, diverse and inclusive composition and ideals of our community today. ...

Contextualization is imperative. ...

We end this report where we began, by reaffirming our insistence that Princeton be a diverse, inclusive, and welcoming community for students, faculty, staff, alumni, and visitors from all backgrounds and perspectives.
Princeton is still one of the most elitist universities in the world, accepting only about 5% of applicants. It also has one of the largest endowments, and can afford to give free tuition to all students with just the interest, if it wanted to. And it does not believe in political diversity, as its only complaints about Wilson are that he was not leftist enuf.

Monday, April 04, 2016

National wealth does not come from consumer spending

I talked to a millennial about economics, and she said that she was taught that consumer demand drove the economy. She said that most of the GDP was consumer spending, and the best thing the govt can do is to stimulate consumer spending by increasing the minimum wage, providing welfare benefits, and making it easier to borrow money. The worst thing was for people to save money, because that is what caused the Great Depression. Immigration is also good for the economy because it increases consumption.

Is this really what is taught in schools today?

The only reason consumer spending is most of GDP is because GDP is defined to exclude other types of spending.

You create wealth for yourself by saving money, not spending it. Debt turns people into wage slaves.

When the govt borrows money and gives it to consumers to spend, the net effect is that our nation is poorer.

Wealth can be created by hard work, inventions, advancing technology, and capital investment. It is not created by consumer spending.

This girl also told me that she was taking a class in Psychology/Sociology. I asked her what she was learning, and she spend ten minutes telling me stories that blamed white Christian society for all sorts of supposed ills. I finally told her that she is being brainwashed into feeling guilty about being white. She said, "I already feel guilty about being white."

Soon she will have a 6-figure student debt. When she gets married, they will get a big mortgage and decide that they cannot afford kids. They will have to work all the time to make payments on their debts. But somehow they will think that immigrants spending welfare checks in keeping our economy going.

The millennial generation has been duped.

Saturday, April 02, 2016

Scientific elites hate democracy

The subscribers to the UK Nature magazine are overwhelmingly scientists dependent on govt funding, and so they have leftist leanings. They are baffled by Donald Trump. It published an essay :
The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC last month was one of the best I’ve witnessed in more than 20 years of regular attendance. The policy sessions were packed and genuinely stimulating. I met tons of smart, influential people I hadn’t seen for ages, and we all enjoyed a good chinwag about how better to engage with the public — the meeting’s theme for 2016.

The only trouble was what was going on outside the hotel — in the United States and the world at large.

In fact, the AAAS meeting took place in a sort of semi-conscious never-never land. The science-policy crowd talked a great game even as the pillars of the republic crashed noisily down around their heads.

Supporters or representatives of Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee for this November’s US presidential election, his extremely conservative rival Ted Cruz, or even Bernie Sanders, the Democrat insurgent, were simply not involved in these discussions. They never are. Senior scientists are instead inextricably linked to the centrist, free-market political establishment that has tended to rule, but which is now falling dangerously from public favour.

It is not just in the United States that this consensus — and perhaps democracy itself — is in danger.
He is saying that the scientific elite are ignorant of political views outside their own group. They are disturbed by the rise of Trump. They think that he threatens democracy because the people support him, and not the consensus of the scientific elites anymore.

Think about this the next time you hear that some Nobel prize winner endorsed some political candidate. These endorsements are based on contempt for the middle class and their wishes.

Friday, April 01, 2016

More crazy attacks on Trump

The attacks on Donald Trump are getting crazier and crazier.

He is asked a hypothetical question about if abortion is outlawed, would the lawbreakers be punished? He said that there would have to be some sort of penalty for doing something illegal.

Isn't that the definition of illegal?

Some reporter goes after Trump in a crowded room, gets pulled away, and files criminal charges? I watched the video. It shows a couple of hundred people milling around, and none of them showed any indication that anything irregular went on.

I got some comments complaining that Trump does not understand or respect the law. A law professor wrote a whole book on The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law. Trump is on the right side of all those issue, while the Democrats are wrong.

Breitbart has a long article on the alt-right, which has become a small faction of Trump supporters. Curiously, it does not mention the site claiming to be the world's most visited alt-right website.

Hobbit not destroying religion after all

The Guardian reports:
First reported in 2004, and officially named Homo floresiensis, the fossilised remains of the hobbit-like hominins were unearthed in the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Just over a metre tall, the long-lost species had elongated feet and a brain the size of a grapefruit.

The original studies of the remains and the deposits around them suggested the creatures could have lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. But new research now overturns that idea, proposing instead that our long-footed cousins disappeared at least 50,000 years ago - and hints that humans might have played a role in their demise. ...

Writing in the journal Nature, the international team of scientists have revealed that new excavations and analysis at Liang Bua date the Homo floresiensis remains to between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, meaning that the species disappeared much earlier than previously thought.
This is quite a let-down. Here is what the UK BBC said in 2004:
Anthropologist Desmond Morris suggested the discovery of a human Hobbit on Flores would force many religions to examine their basic beliefs. The suggestion provoked quite a reaction.

"The existence of 'Mini-Man' should destroy religion," claims Desmond Morris.

I can't help thinking we've been here before. Indeed, Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, still cannot understand why religion survived Darwin.
They only ever found one skull and a few other bones. There are many controversies over the interpretation of those bones.

So you should unlearn whatever you were told about Flores Man.