The big election issue

Hillary Clinton bragged in the debate that Alicia Machado is now an American citizen who will vote against Donald Trump.

Yes, that sums it up well enuf for me. She is a good example of someone who should not have been allowed to become a citizen. Trump was right to criticize her.

Choice not triple echo

A reader sent this photoshopped cover of a 1964 book, making it look like an early inspiration for the Alt-Right. Funny.

Rocket scientist from another era

The NY Times reorts:

On July 20, 1969, moments after mission control in Houston had given the Apollo 11 lunar module, Eagle, the O.K. to begin its descent to the moon, a yellow warning light flashed on the cockpit instrument panel.

“Program alarm,” the commander, Neil Armstrong, radioed. “It’s a 1202.”

The alarm appeared to indicate a computer systems overload, raising the specter of a breakdown. With only a few minutes left before touchdown on the moon, Steve Bales, the guidance officer in mission control, had to make a decision: Let the module continue to descend, or abort the mission and send the module rocketing back to the command ship, Columbia.

By intercom, Mr. Bales quickly consulted Jack Garman, a 24-year-old engineer who was overseeing the software support group from a back-room console.

Mr. Garman had painstakingly prepared himself for just this contingency — the possibility of a false alarm.

“So I said,” he remembered, “on this backup room voice loop that no one can hear, ‘As long as it doesn’t reoccur, it’s fine.’”

At 4:18 p.m., with only 30 seconds of fuel remaining for the descent, Mr. Armstrong radioed: “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

Mr. Garman, whose self-assurance and honed judgment effectively saved mankind’s first lunar landing, died on Tuesday outside Houston. He was 72.

Could this ever happen again? I fear that men like Armstrong and Garman are going extinct.

So what are today's 24-year-olds doing? The Atlantic mag reports:

He told students that one “staggering” statistic stood above the rest. "In 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men [those without a college degree] aged 21 to 30 had not worked at all during the prior twelve months,” he said.

"Think about that for a second,” he went on. Twentysomething male high-school grads used to be the most dependable working cohort in America. Today one in five are now essentially idle. ...

So, what are are these young, non-working men doing with their time? Three quarters of their additional leisure time is spent with video games, Hurst’s research has shown. And these young men are happy—or, at least, they self-report higher satisfaction than this age group used to, even when its employment rate was 10 percentage points higher.

Many of these kids are still living with their parents:

Data released recently from the Census Bureau show that 30-year-olds today — as compared to 30-years olds in 1975 — are less likely to have hit many of the milestones that have come to define adulthood. In 1974 three in four 30-year-olds had married, had a child, were not enrolled in school anymore and had lived on their own; in 2015, just one in three could say that....

Millennials are also more likely to be in school in their 30s: 8% were enrolled in school at age 30 in 2015 versus 1% of 30-year-olds in 1975, according to the Census Bureau, which may also delay some of these milestones.

Fired for criticizing BLM

Wonder what it takes to get your career destroyed? For baseball catcher Steve Clevenger, it was these tweets:

“Black people beating whites when a thug got shot holding a gun by a black officer haha shit cracks me up! Keep kneeling for the anthem!

“BLM (Black Lives Matter) is pathetic again! Obama you are pathetic once again! Everyone should be locked behind bars like animals!”

And now his employers want nothing to do with him again.

Okay, I guess MLB baseball is on the side of the cop-killers.

Many genes from out-of-Africa wave

Carl Zimmer reports in the NY Times:

Modern humans evolved in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. But how did our species go on to populate the rest of the globe?

The question, one of the biggest in studies of human evolution, has intrigued scientists for decades. In a series of extraordinary genetic analyses published on Wednesday, researchers believe they have found an answer.

In the journal Nature, three separate teams of geneticists survey DNA collected from cultures around the globe, many for the first time, and conclude that all non-Africans today trace their ancestry to a single population emerging from Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.

“I think all three studies are basically saying the same thing,” said Joshua M. Akey of the University of Washington, who wrote a commentary accompanying the new work. “We know there were multiple dispersals out of Africa, but we can trace our ancestry back to a single one.” ...

In the 1980s, a group of paleoanthropologists and geneticists began championing a hypothesis that modern humans emerged only once from Africa, roughly 50,000 years ago. Skeletons and tools discovered at archaeological sites clearly indicated that modern humans lived after that time in Europe, Asia and Australia. ...

I posted before that the Out-of-Africa theory had been falsified, but now I am not so sure.

“The vast majority of their ancestry — if not all of it — is coming from the same out-of-Africa wave as Europeans and Asians,” said Dr. Willerslev.

But on that question, Dr. Metspalu and his colleagues ended up with a somewhat different result.

In Papua New Guinea, Dr. Metspalu and his colleagues found, 98 percent of each person’s DNA can be traced to that single migration from Africa. But the other 2 percent seemed to be much older.

Dr. Metspalu concluded that all people in Papua New Guinea carry a trace of DNA from an earlier wave of Africans who left the continent as long as 140,000 years ago, and then vanished.

As I understand it, the Out-of-Africa theory said that Africans completely displaced others 50k years ago. The previous theory said that humans had multiregional ancestors.

Now we know that Europeans and Asians definitely had ancestors from Neanderthal and other populations that were quite distinct from that out-of-Africa wave.

So maybe the out-of-Africa theory is 98% correct, in terms of nucleotide count. Maybe the multiregional theory is also mostly correct.

I do not trust Zimmer as long as he says things like "Modern humans evolved in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago." No, that theory has also been disproved, as human evolution has been accelerating in the last 10k years. There were no modern humans 200k years ago.

Wishing for a trillion humans

Amazon's Jeff Bezos says, in the newspaper he owns"

“I wish there were a trillion humans in the solar system. Think how cool that would be. You’d have a thousand Einsteins at any given moment — and more. There would be so much dynamism with all of that human intelligence. But you can’t do that with the resources on Earth or the energy on earth. So if you really want to see that kind of dynamic civilization as we expand through the solar system, you have to figure out how to safely move around and use resources that you get in space.”

This is lunacy. We would probably have more Einsteins if we first exterminated 80% of the world population. Not that we need more Einsteins or that we would kill ppl for more Einsteins.

His rockets are great, and may someday be commercially useful for putting satellites in orbit. But colonizing other planets is a sick fantasy.

Do Parents Matter?

An Atlantic mag essay asks:

How Much Do Parents Matter?

“Parents in every culture at a given moment think they’re doing the optimal thing for their kids.” ...

Their response: Parents don’t matter as much as many parents think they do. ...

I’d been working with schizophrenic children, or autistic children, and so on, and the [since-discredited] theory in those days was that these American children who were autistic — their mothers had done that to them. I thought: This is perilous what’s going on with this little child.

I observed a lot more children, and it was the same in every case: that the young mother did not look at the child and did not talk to the child. And yet all around me people were perfectly fine. They were warm, they were humorous, they were engaged. They were not autistic! [I came to] understand that these little children got their socialization and the affection that they needed to grow psychologically from other people. It didn’t have to come from the mother. ...

In general, if you go outside of the Western world, you will find that interdependence is the goal of psychological development rather than independence, which we Westerners emphasize to a huge degree, starting in infancy.

So maybe parenting does not matter in the way that the American textbooks say, but it still matters in other ways. For example, the parents can teach the child to be independent or interdependent.

Here is a recent video interview on Why Spanking Does Not Work | Elizabeth Gershoff and Stefan Molyneux. This claims to be scientific knowledge on parenting, but if you listen carefully, there is nothing scientific at all. There are no controlled studies, so the studies are very limited, and there is no discussion of the limitations. Furthermore, Gershoff seems to make no distinction between research findings and her own personal unsupported opinions. She says that spanking does not work, but her reasoning is mostly ideological, and she cannot cites studies showing that any other method of discipline works any better.

Such is the sad state of parenting research. Experts will claim that a parenting practice damages children while other cultures use the practice all the time with no apparent damage.

Molyneux has posted other interviews on twin studies that show that differences in common parental practices like spanking have no measurable effect on outcomes. And yet he has also posted rants against spanking as being against research. It is also against his philosophical beliefs about an ideal society where no one ever takes an aggressive act against another. He calls it the non-aggression principle.

Not identifying as White

A Jewish journal announces:

Jews will always believe Black Lives matter because Jews do not think of themselves as “White People.” You have but to walk down a street in Tel Aviv to see the multiplicity of Jewish skin colors. You have but to live as a Jew in any time in history, in any country including the United States, to recognize we are not the White People – we were not the White People allowed into certain clubs, schools, neighborhoods for most of American history. We are not the people rallying for “white people’s rights.”

Remember that when you hear Jews badmouth white ppl.

Rejecting Chomsky grammars

SciAm reports:

The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions.

The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique hu­­­man ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky’s theory for guidance.

This may be true, except that Chomsky's theory was never widely accepted.

My experience is that there is nothing innate about grammars. Kids have no great leaps in ability or understanding, as you might expect if they already had a Chomsky grammar that did not need to be learned. They have to tediously learn ever aspect of grammar one concept at a time.

A key flaw in Chomsky’s theories is that when applied to language learning, they stipulate that young children come equipped with the capacity to form sentences using abstract grammatical rules. (The precise ones depend on which version of the theory is in­­voked.) Yet much research now shows that language acquisition does not take place this way. Rather young children begin by learning simple grammatical patterns; then, gradually, they intuit the rules behind them bit by bit.

Yes, that is my experience.

Math is racist

A new book titled Weapons of Math Destruction has gotten a lot of publicity, and here is a representative excerpt:

Algorithms are being used to determine how much we pay for insurance (more if your credit score is low, even if your driving record is clean), or what the terms of our loans will be, or what kind of political messaging we’ll receive. There are algorithms that find out the weather forecast and only then decide on the work schedule of thousands of people, laying waste to their ability to plan for childcare and schooling, never mind a second job.

Their popularity relies on the notion they are objective, but the algorithms that power the data economy are based on choices made by fallible human beings. And, while some of them were made with good intentions, the algorithms encode human prejudice, misunderstanding, and bias into automatic systems that increasingly manage our lives. Like gods, these mathematical models are opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, are beyond dispute or appeal. And they tend to punish the poor and the oppressed in our society, while making the rich richer.

No, credit scores do not punish the poor. Lots of poor ppl have higher credit scores than rich ppl. You can get a high credit score by paying your bills, borrowing money, and making the necessary timely payments.

Credits scores allow me and millions of others to easily buy things online, and when traveling. There is no easier alternative. Vendors are eager to sell me things, but just want some assurance that they will get paid.

Math is racist in the same sense that the truth is racist.

This book is leftist nonsense. It does not deserve the good reviews it has. See rare negative review for how bad it is.

Colleges against microinvalidations

The NY Times reports:

Some graduates have curtailed donations, and students have suggested that diversity training smacks of some sort of Communist re-education program. ...

Her two-hour presentation on Aug. 27 aimed to help students identify microaggressions and to teach them how to intervene when they observe one. Microaggressions can be verbal, nonverbal or environmental, she said.

“What’s an environmental microaggression?” Ms. Marlowe asked the auditorium of about 525 new students. She gave an example. “On your first day of class, you enter the chemistry building and all of the pictures on the wall are scientists who are white and male,” she said. “If you’re a female, or you just don’t identify as a white male, that space automatically shows that you’re not represented.”

But Ms. Martinez, a sophomore transfer student, also realized that she, too, was guilty of microaggressions, because she frequently uses the phrase “you guys,” she said. “This helped me see that I’m a microaggressor, too.”

The presentation elicited a lively question-and-answer session, during which students asked about the N word, discrimination against white people and men, and the definition of “Asian.”

Ms. Marlowe said she questioned the validity of the concept of reverse racism, arguing that racism is a system in which a dominant race benefits from the oppression of others. ...

A nonverbal microaggression could be when a white woman clutches her purse as a black or Latino person approaches.

Another subset of microaggression is known as the microinvalidation, which includes comments suggesting that race plays a minor role in life’s outcomes, like “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough.” ...

But Ms. Martinez, a sophomore transfer student, also realized that she, too, was guilty of microaggressions, because she frequently uses the phrase “you guys,” she said. “This helped me see that I’m a microaggressor, too.” ...

Ms. Marlowe said she questioned the validity of the concept of reverse racism, arguing that racism is a system in which a dominant race benefits from the oppression of others.

Besides blaming white males, a new book blames math and big data for doing objective number crunching:

In a new book, "Weapons of Math Destruction," Cathy O'Neil details all the ways that math is essentially being used for evil (my word, not hers).

From targeted advertising and insurance to education and policing, O'Neil looks at how algorithms and big data are targeting the poor, reinforcing racism and amplifying inequality.

These "WMDs," as she calls them, have three key features: They are opaque, scalable and unfair.

There is a longer review on SciAm. See also her blog, and this book excerpt.

See also this negative review:

The remaining chapters all follow the same pattern. Unbalanced and inaccurate summary of a popular news account, made up facts and distorted quotes, uneven speculation about mathematical models, and strong but unsupported conclusions.

Democrats started the demographic war

(((David Brooks))) of the NY Times writes:

Once, I seem to recall, we had philosophical and ideological differences. Once, politics was a debate between liberals and conservatives, between different views of government, different views on values and America’s role in the world.

But this year, it seems, everything has been stripped down to the bone. Politics is dividing along crude identity lines — along race and class. Are you a native-born white or are you an outsider? Are you one of the people or one of the elites?

Politics is no longer about argument or discussion; it’s about trying to put your opponents into the box of the untouchables.

Donald Trump didn’t invent this game, ...

Human beings are too complicated to be defined by skin color, income or citizenship status. Those who try to reduce politics to these identities do real violence to national life.

I agree with this. Over the past couple of decades, the Democrat Party has increasing on crude identity politics for votes. They get their votes by identity appeals to non-whites, non-Christians, and low-info voters.

I have posted about this many times, long before Trump announced that he was running for President.

With Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the Democrats do not even hide it anymore. They celebrate blacks killing white cops. Clinton even talks openly about White Genocide, as if it were a good thing.

Clinton did not win the nomination based on her competence, trustworthiness, experience, or policies. She got it by making promises to super-rich donors and to anti-white voters.

One of Clinton's top advisors is Huma Abedin, who is closely associated with Islamic jihad against the West, besides being married to a famous New York Jewish weirdo.

Yes, when Democrats give preference to non-citizens over citizens, they do violence to national life. Their policies are unsustainable.

Where I differ from Brooks and other anti-white-Christian elites is that they regard destroy national identity a good thing, if the country is mostly White Christian.

It only takes one side to start a war. The Democrats started this Demographic war. Trump just happens to be the only Republican willing and able to fight back.

Trying to shut down trolls

The Wash. Free Beacon reports:

The National Science Foundation is spending roughly half a million dollars to combat “online trolling.”

A joint project by Northwestern and Northeastern universities is examining how to create “trolling-free environments” on the Internet. The researchers define online trolls as those who try to influence public opinion by boosting “misleading” and “inauthentic comments.”

When the authorities are lying to us, there is a fine line between trolling and telling the truth.

The Russian have their own anti-trolling police:

The basis for the prosecution was a particular passage in a pro-Ukrainian-nationalist article that Luzgin reposted:

The Communists and Germany jointly attacked Poland, beginning World War II on September 1, 1939.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, of course, did provide for a partition of Poland between the USSR and Nazi Germany, and the Soviets did indeed invade Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, implementing that partition.

The press reports emphasize
that the blogger was shut down for telling the truth.

Why is that surprising? No one cares about trolls who are telling obvious lies. The authorities are most eager to shut down those telling dangerous or embarrassing truths. It is much more important to censor the truth.

China is always wanting to censor something with the same initials or birth year as Taylor Swift.

If the subject matter is forbidden, then you can bet that there is at least a grain of truth.

Microsoft owns you 12 hours a day

Here is more evidence that the robots are seizing control:

Note that Windows 10 doesn’t let you configure an Active hours timeframe that’s longer than 12 hours. If you do try that, you’ll get a message telling you that “Active hours can be set between 1 and 12 hours”.

I don't want to pick on Microsoft, as Apple, Facebook, Google, Comcast, and Verizon are worse.

The remarkable thing to me is that no one complains about this stuff anymore. Ppl have gotten used to taking orders from machines. It is just normal to beg permission to use your own desktop computer for 12 hours max, and then be put back at the mercy of autonomous bots that seek to alter your behavior.

Anglin defines the Alt Right

Andrew Anglin writes A Normie’s Guide to the Alt-Right, on his hugely popular web site:

Following condemnations by Hillary Clinton, everyone in the world is now trying to define exactly what the Alt-Right is. Most of them are getting it wrong.

The short story is that although the term could refer to a lot of different people saying a lot of different things, the people that it is being used to refer to by the media – Trump-supporting White racial advocates who engage in trolling an other activism on the internet – are the core of the movement, with any other groups and figures being peripheral.

The core concept of the movement, upon which all else is based, is that Whites are undergoing an extermination, via mass immigration into White countries which was enabled by a corrosive liberal ideology of White self-hatred, and that the Jews are at the center of this agenda.

The Alt-Right is a “mass movement” in the truest possible sense of the term, a type of mass-movement that could only exist on the internet, where everyone’s voice is as loud as they are able to make it. ...

Roughly four years ago, a new type of White nationalist movement began to form on the internet. This was mostly made-up of young people who were formulating ideas with minimal influence from prior White nationalist movements. ...

The defining value of the movement and the foundation of its ideology is that the Jews are fundamentally opposed to the White race and Western civilization and so must be confronted and ultimately removed from White societies completely.

Jews are behind all of the things which we are against, the diametric opposite of everything that we stand for. In a very real sense, defeating and physically removing the Jews will solve every other problem. None of this would be happening if it were not for the Jews.

It is now fully-documented that Jews are behind mass-immigration, feminism, the news media and Hollywood, pornography, the global banking system, global communism, the homosexual political agenda, the wars in the Middle East and virtually everything else the Alt-Right is opposed to. This is, to a shocking extent, simply admitted by the Jews themselves. ...

The Alt-Right celebrates the greatness of our ancestors and the glory of our historical achievements. Rejecting revisionist arguments by modern social scientists which portray Whites as having wrought evil on the planet, we view Whites as the creators and maintainers of Western civilization. ...

“Normie” is a term used to refer to individuals who have not yet joined the Alt-Right, remaining trapped in the mental-prison of the Jewish system. These people are viewed as being incapable of objectively processing information, and will instead revert to programmed slogans whenever they are presented with ideas that conflict with their synthetic value system. ...

If Trump loses, we are going to have an opportunity to very vocally blame the Jews for his loss, which will serve our purposes nearly as much as a Trump win. ...

If Trump loses, we are going to have an opportunity to very vocally blame the Jews for his loss, which will serve our purposes nearly as much as a Trump win.

He is a troll himself, so you cannot take everything he says literally.

In particular, he seems to overstate hostility to the Jews, as he despises characters like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as much as the Jews. Many ppl on the Alt Right think that the Jews are just a distraction from the big issues. Indeed, most of the mainstream press articles about the Alt Right do not even mention the Jews.

Here is the Alt Right summarized in a poster.

Update: Garrison Keillor is already arguing in the Wash. Post that Trump has already lost because the Jews in the news media do not like him.