What I learned in 2020

At the end of each year, I like to summarize what I learned in the last year.

A major USA election can be stolen and a puppet installed as President.

Gene sequencing has medical benefits. After 25 years of hype about medical cures, it appears that the technology helped find the vaccines to stop the Wuhan virus. The sequence allowed the vaccine to be developed in two days! (Then a year in testing and production.)

The rich elites do not even need much of the infrastructure, and are happy to shut it down.

The public can go nuts about video showing a fentanyl overdose death (George Floyd), and nobody dares say the obvious truths.

I never thought that anyone would close the churches, and I am still surprised that they do not complain more.

Physicians can be fired, for questioning the necessity of lockdowns.

Our medical and scientific establishments are hopelessly politicized.

White Fragility is a theory of White Supremacy that academia accepts.

The entire news media attacked Pres. Trump as an authoritarian, while he is actually the least authoritarian President in decades. This was just explained by leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald, who makes these points:

1.) Donald Trump was never an authoritarian. That is, he never wielded the power that he could have.

In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. ...

2.) The authoritarian myth was made up by the media to attract clicks, dosh, and attention.

The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. ...

3.) The Democrats, among them Biden and his administration (he calls them “neoliberals”), as well as previous presidents who waged war without the proper authorities (e.g., Obama), are the real authoritarians.

... as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. ...

4.) The Democrats are further culpable because they’re in league with the large monopolies, like Facebook and Amazon—companies that are really destroying America. (Greenwald goes on and on about this. )

What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies.

Greenwald is right about this. The press lying and manipulation of public opinion about Trump is beyond what I thought was possible.

NPR Radio promotes slavery reparations

NPR Radio On Point broadcast Confronting Misconceptions Around Race With Michelle Singletary, audio mp3.

She is a Black Wash. Post columnist and wants slavery reparations because she says all Whites today have profited from forced Black labor.

No, there are no net profits or benefits from Black labor. Blacks have cost the USA many trillions of dollars in crime, welfare, affirmative action, etc. White Americans would have been much better off if Blacks had never come to America. If there were an honest reckoning, Blacks would be pay Whites to compensate for damages.

The NY Times currently has some articles on the death of Breonna Taylor. But she was associating with illegal drug dealers, one of which shot a cop in the leg. The paper called it a "botched raid", as it is unclear whether the police properly announced themselves, and some of the shot were way off target. Okay, maybe some policemen could use additional training. Millions of dollars were paid in a settlement.

Is this really the best example of Blacks suffering discrimination? It appears to be just another example of Black criminals causing trouble and expense to the White community.

I see that the NY Times is getting some push-back for its article, I recently mentioned, about a college rejecting a girl for a 3-second private chat from several years earlier. But the criticism is too mild.

This girl was 100% innocent. She had every right to express her opinions privately. The details are none of anyone's business. She was being bullied by a half-black boy who disliked her because of the color of her skin. And the U. of Tennessee and NY Times took the side of the bully. And the NY Times doxxed in an attempt to ruin her life. It is disgusting.

How Bill Buckley purged conservatives

Steven Greenhut writes in an Orange County California op-ed:

One of the modern conservative movement’s greatest leaders, the late William F. Buckley Jr., retold a fascinating story from the run-up to the 1964 presidential election. As he explained in the Wall Street Journal in 2008, Buckley and his allies convinced Barry Goldwater to distance himself from the John Birch Society — a conspiracy-minded group that touted his candidacy.

Buckley noted that the society’s president, Robert Welch, had at the time a “near-hypnotic” influence on the right, despite his “wild” ideas: “(Welch) said Dwight D. Eisenhower was a ‘dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,’ and that the government of the United States was ‘under operational control of the Communist Party.’”

Buckley realized that Welch’s fixations did a disservice to the anti-communist cause. So he convinced Goldwater to reject the core fallacy — “the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the communists, therefore the president of the United States and the secretary of state wished China to go to the communists.”

Goldwater, of course, gained the GOP nomination, and lost the general election vote by 23 percentage points. Thanks to Buckley’s efforts, however, the GOP vanquished various fringe groups.

This story has been told many times, including by Buckley himself.

The story was a simple power struggle. Buckley wanted control of the conservative movement. According to this, it was okay to lose an election by a landslide, as long as its leaders did not tolerate inferring subjective intention from objective consequence.

I sometimes denounce inferring subjective intention from objective consequence. I call it mindreading. I probably denounce it more than Buckley. But I do not agree with Buckley here.

You cannot win political office by purging the folks who only agree 90% with your principles. The above essay was praised by Libertarians, as they are even worse examples of ideologues who are content to lose all the elections.

Buckley is dead, but his National Review magazine continues his tradition by denouncing Donald Trump. The Left probably regards the magazine as the controlled opposition.

Opposition to the Birch Society has always been a little strange. The Society was primarily known for being anti-Communist in a time in which Communism was genuinely evil and a threat to America. So why oppose those who are fighting evil?

The Bircher critics fell into two camps. There were the Leftist Commie-sympathizers who objected to any criticism of the Left. And then there were the cuckservatives and controlled opposition who sought to appease those Leftists. Buckley and much of National Review is in the latter camp.

I have read a lot of criticism of Trump, and 90% of it infers subjection intention. Hardly any of it examine the objective consequences of his policies. Those consequences have been peace and prosperity. Instead, the criticism consists of name-calling and arguments about his supposed thought processes.

Here is another new article that details the Buckley story, and explains how he launched personal attacks on people and organizations he disliked. It adds:

Phyllis Schlafly had just graduated from City House, the now defunct Catholic high school in St. Louis, when Lindbergh gave his speech. It’s hard to imagine that the brightest girl at City House was unaware of America First, since Lindbergh had already given the same speech to 15,000 people attending an America First rally at the St. Louis arena.

Phyllis Schlafly was a tragic figure. She was the abused wife of the Republican Party, an organization which treated her with contempt until it was time to get out the vote. Then like the husband who had beaten her in a drunken rage the night before, the Republicans would apologize and sweet talk her into supporting them once more. Schlafly was a tragic figure because she was cut off from her natural constituency, which was Midwest, America First Catholics, in Alton, Illinois and St. Louis, most of whom were blue collar union members.

Phyllis was the victim of identity theft, perpetrated on her by the conservative movement by people like William F. Buckley, whose job was policing the conservative movement and expelling anyone who showed genuine, i.e., America First, conservative inclinations.

The article has a good discussion of how conservatism and Trumpism fit into history. Much of Trump's struggle has been against control-freaks like Buckley who do not want an open discussion of some issues.

Netflix vision of human future

I tried to watch the Netflix movie, The Midnight Sky, where George Clooney is a scientist stranded in the Arctic. After some boring scenes with an improbably little girl and some confusing flashbacks, I skipped ahead to see if the girl was a figment of his imagination. I didn't really want to watch a whole movie wondering whether some character was supposed to be real. The flashbacks are bad enough.

Clooney once starred in another sci-fi movie where all the action was in flashbacks and imaginary characters, and where the viewer could never tell what was supposed to be real and what was not.

So I skipped ahead, and everyone on Earth was dead! There was some unexplained disaster. The future of humanity depended on convincing some astronauts to settle on a newly-discovered moon of Jupiter, which seems like a paradise. That could be a figment of someone else's imagination, I am not sure.

This being Netflix, the movie had to involve a Black man banging a White woman somehow. So I skipped ahead again, to find out. Sure enough, the last two humans alive end up on Jupiter's moon, and they are a Black man and a White woman! From the woman's expression, she appears to think that she died and went to Hell.

Netflix knows more about the public taste in movies than anyone else. It tracks what shows people watch. More than that, it tracks when people skip scenes or quit watching. From this, it has decided that movies should have a lot of interracial sexual relations. And a fair amount of LGBTQ characters also.

This baffles me, because I don't know anyone who enjoys watching that stuff. I skimmed a few dozen user reviews, and I found none saying:

I enjoyed seeing Clooney hallucinate and persuade astronauts to avoid Earth and head to Jupiter. It was especially emotionally satisfying to see the human race depend on a Black man raping a White woman, and knowing that all future humans will be mulatto.

Nobody says that.

So I see a couple of possibilities. Maybe Netflix knows something that we don't know, and that millions of people secretly enjoy this stuff. Or maybe Netflix is controlled by sick perverts who see social justice racial humiliation as more important than making money.

Either way, these movies are disappointing.

Amazon Prime has a movie, Assassin 33 A.D., that is explicitly anti-Christian. Some Arab terrorists steal a time machine to go back to kill Jesus before he can found Christianity. Actually they say Islam teaches that Jesus was a prophet, but was not divine and did not rise from the dead. So they just need to kill Jesus to prevent him from rising from the dead. Yeah, it doesn't make much sense and is not intend to be taken seriously. Maybe it is a dark comedy, I am not sure. The heroes plan to go back earlier to make sure that Jesus gets crucified, as in the Bible. I did not watch it to the end, so I don't know if the timeline gets restored.

Blacks have been taught to hate Whites

This Gallup Poll on race relations says that 70% of Black adults in 2001 thought that White/Black relations were good. It was still 66% in 2013, but sank to 36% in 2020.

So what happened? Were there a lot of lynchings like Emmett Till? Did new Jim Crow laws get passed? No.

Barack Obama and the liberal press perpetrated a series of hoaxes about Blacks being mistreated. There was Trayvon Martin, the Harvard professor, Ferguson Missouri, George Floyd, etc. Then there were White politicians like Joe Biden pandering to Black voters by promising slavery reparations.

When the NY Times detailed the five or so important people who died in 2020, one was George Floyd. They mentioned his criminal history, but not his fentanyl overdose.

It is all a cruel lie. This Quillette article explains:

Full-time, year-round white male workers, specifically, earn 73 cents for every dollar ($57,003) an equivalent Taiwanese American woman makes ($78,153). A cursory glance at the data reveals disparities of this magnitude across the board, some of which are even more significant.

So obviously there is no big discrimination against either women or non-whites.

So why did the news media push these racial hoaxes? Obviously they have ulterior motives. In the case of the NY Times, they have a deep hatred of White Christian American culture. Every day they have articles about how they would like to destroy it.

Today's NY Times has an article naming and shaming a 19-year-old for once using a commonly-used offensive word in a 3-second Snapchat video 4 years ago. This is just cruel anti-White racial hatred. Because of racist attacks, she had to withdraw from college.

Jesus was a blue-eyed White man

The NY Times caters to Jewish readers, but occasionally lectures Christians on what they ought to believe, such as this column:

Trump evangelicals have turned Jesus’ message upside down. That’s called heresy. And, in the United States, this has created a toxic melding between white evangelicals and the Republican Party. We’ve seen the conversion of too many white evangelicals to the narcissistic and nationalistic cult of Trump, where the operative word in the phrase “white evangelical” is not “evangelical” but “white.” ...

Do you consider Jesus to have been a person of color?

Of course he was a person of color given where and when he was born. Blue-eyed white Jesuses exist only in American churches.

Jesus was born in Roman-occupied territory, and a lot of Romans were blue-eyed Whites. It is offensive to say that he was a BIPOC, when there is no historical evidence for that.

Some say that Jesus was a Jew, but he was a Christian, of course.

It is even more offensive to say that supporting Trump is a heresy. Trump has kept his promises, and worked for religious freedom and other rights for his Christian constituency. Nationalism is not a heresy, it is the job description.

No doubt the NY Times figures it can get away with these anti-Christian statements because they are in an opinion column of someone claiming to be a Christian. But he also admits that he does not subscribe to very much of what most people would call Christianity.

Fauci lies to manipulate the public

In March, Anthony Fauci told CBS 60 Minutes that masks should largely be reserved for healthcare providers. He said: “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”

He later admitted that he gave out bad info in order to manipulate public opinion.

Now he has admitted to doing it again, as the NY Times reports:

At what point does a country achieve herd immunity? What portion of the population must acquire resistance to the coronavirus, either through infection or vaccination, for the disease to fade away …?

In the pandemic's early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did. About a month ago, he began saying "70, 75 percent" in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said "75, 80, 85 percent" and "75 to 80-plus percent."

In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks….. [H]e believes that it may take close to 90 percent immunity to bring the virus to a halt ….

Dr. Fauci said that weeks ago, he had hesitated to publicly raise his estimate because many Americans seemed unsure about vaccines …. Now that some polls are showing that many more Americans are ready, even eager, for vaccines, he said he felt he could deliver the tough message that the return to normal might take longer than anticipated.

"When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent," Dr. Fauci said. "Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, 'I can nudge this up a bit,' so I went to 80, 85."

So he is lying to us to promote vaccination.

Hardly anyone mentions it, but his wife is a big-shot bioethicist. I guess it is considered bio ethical today to lie to the public in order to achieve certainly policy. Not just by Fauci, but it appears that most of our public health authorities have this attitude. After all, they said that it was okay to participate in George Floyd riots.

Fauci used to be very controversial because of his positions regarding GRIDS/HIV/AIDS. I have not followed the details.

Fauci has blown his reputation several times over by now. Why does anyone listen to him? He is the US federal govt's highest paid employee, and the press treats him as if he were the source of infinite medical wisdom.

Merry Christmas.

The Unraveling of America

The UK BBC nominated this Rolling Stone essay for a prize:

Wade Davis holds the Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia.

The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand. ...

and his [Trump's] dispensing of medical advice concerning the therapeutic use of chemical disinfectants,

No, that was a CNN/NYTimes hoax. Barack Obama and other Democrats talked about using injecting bleach to treat COVID-19, but Trump never said anything about it. He only referred to some legitimate medical research.

So Wade is either a moron, or pretending to be one.

Most of the essay is an argument that the USA was the world's greatest country in the 1950s, but has been declining in the past few decades. But then it complains about those with a similar opinion:

For many years, those on the conservative right in the United States have invoked a nostalgia for the 1950s, and an America that never was, but has to be presumed to have existed to rationalize their sense of loss and abandonment, their fear of change, their bitter resentments and lingering contempt for the social movements of the 1960s, a time of new aspirations for women, gays, and people of color.

So what countries does he like? The most White countries, like Canada and Denmark, of course.

Wade is a distinguished professor of Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk, so I guess he is trying to say that White Americans are at risk. He cannot blame non-whites, because such opinions are not tolerated at his university.

Joe Biden just said:

“This country is doomed.. it’s doomed. Not just because of African Americans, but because by 2040 this country is going to be minority white European. You hear me, minority white European.”

It is at 1:14:40. The source says the "quote is being taken out of context". Okay, I link to the full recording so that you can judge for yourself. He also says "All kidding aside. ... I am not mincing my words."

The context is that he is telling a bunch of Blacks (and saying "y'all" to them) that we need to make progress on race relations and equity. I think that is correct also, because we are headed for civil war otherwise.

The message is similar to that of many others I have quoted on this blog, such as a book published a century ago on The Passing of the Great Race.

I have also quoted Biden as saying that it is a good thing that non-white immigration is reducing Whites to being a minority. This guy is senile, but at least he has a clear-eyed view that he is working for the destruction of the White race.

Biden also argues that his team doesn't want to say anything about defunding the police until after the Jan. 5 Georgia election, because that is very unpopular with voters.

High-profile Jew pretends to be oppressed

A Jewish magazine :

With just over two weeks until the two runoff elections in Georgia that will decide who controls the next Senate, all eyes are on the Democratic candidates who are hoping to flip the upper house. It’s a remarkable moment for Jon Ossoff, who may well be the most high-profile Jewish Democrat in the United States right now.

“I’m descended from Ashkenazi immigrants who fled pogroms in the early 20th century, and I grew up among relatives who were Holocaust survivors,” he told Haaretz in an exclusive interview last week. “So my Jewish upbringing instilled in me a conviction to fight for the marginalized and oppressed, and also to be vigilant where there’s the risk that authoritarianism may emerge.”

He says the Trump era has seen a dangerous rise in right-wing extremism, noting that “ethno-nationalism had been a threat to Jewish people throughout the world and our history, and a threat to minorities in American society.”

Ossoff goes on to argue that Jews need to stay aligned with Black as fellow oppressed people against Whites.

He is saying: My Jewish family brainwashed me as a child to hate White Christians by pretending that we Jews were marginalized and oppressed, just like Blacks.

Every Jewish kid is taught crazy stories about how Jews were once slaves in Egypt, but killed all the Egyptian first-born kids and escaped.

Jews are the most privileged group on Earth, and have nothing in common with Blacks. Jews just like to manipulate Blacks for political purposes.

Here is a strange comment on a family court free speech case:

Pavel Petrovich
December.22.2020 at 1:38 pm

Family Court is constructed from the Talmud and run by jews. If there was an allegation of sexual abuse, it would go to proper agency of the state government for investigation, not tried as part of a divorce proceeding…..see how the jews work? Child Sexual Abuse is a criminal matter…. there are no gag orders in criminal cases….not allowed. See how the jews twist everything to the point it is unrecognizable? Welcome to Amurika, run by jews for the benefit of jews….protecting child abusers is a hallmark of jewish law.

The parents dragged the kid into a public forum as part of their dispute, there is no right to privacy to uphold for the kid as his parents surrendered it on entering court….pretty simple. The decision is the work of paedophile protectors in the family court system…..a.k.a. JEWS

I don't know if any of the judges are experts in this case were Jews. The comment is on the blog of a Jewish law professor who certainly does not agree with the judgment.

But there is some truth to what he says. This case has a Talmudic odor to it. The judge commissioned some experts to investigate some dubious criminal allegations, and then declared that no one could publicly contest their conclusions.

I am not sayin that Jews protect criminal behavior. They don't. But the whole system of using psychologist opinions in family courts is heavily Jewish influenced, as it is mainly Jews who believe in that sort of nonsense.

History of big brains

Razib Khan posted a nice essay on IQ:

Homo sapiens are very smart. They are very smart because they have large brains. This is not controversial. In relation to our body size, humans have bulging craniums housing large brains. About 20% of our caloric intake feeds our brain when we’re resting even though it’s only 2% of our body weight. It’s a calorically expensive organ. ...

Around 200,000 years ago the growth of our brains leveled off, probably due to biological constraints. ...

And H. sapiens and its brain found its barrier 200,000 years ago. In fact, the largest brained humans seem to have lived during the Ice Age, not today. Since the transition to farming our brains have been shrinking.

European Neanderthals had the big brains, so they may have been smarter than us.

Consider the polymath John von Neumann. A basis for the character of Dr. Strangeglove, von Neumann was one of the most brilliant individuals of the 20th century. The theoretical physicist Edward Teller said of von Neumann that he “would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.”

Possible. I have had many conversions with 3-year-olds, and about 90% of adult conversations are not much different. The adults have a largers vocabulary, and a broader range of experiences to draw on. But otherwise, they carry on conversations like 3-year-olds. It is usually easier to deal with them if I think of them as 3-year-olds in adult bodies. For example, in talking politics, I have never heard a Biden supporter converse at more than a 3-year-old level.

Tests are imperfect. But what is the alternative? Over the past few years graduate schools have been removing the GRE as a requirement for admission. What will the consequence be? If the history of China is any guide, those with connections and pedigree will benefit. Without a hard-to-fake entrance exam, recommendations from those you trust will loom large again. The abolition of the GRE will be a back door through which the “letter of introduction” returns. Who will be hurt by this? Who will benefit? There are many answers here, but one thing seems obvious: those without connections will suffer.

Yes, we are moving away from being a meritocracy. Universities are filling up with lower-IQ students.

Medical Journal denies that Sex is meaningful

The most prestigious medical journal in the world announces (paywalled):

We believe that it is now time to update the practice of designating sex on birth certificates, given the particularly harmful effects of such designations on intersex and transgender people. ...

Assigning sex at birth also doesn’t capture the diversity of people’s experiences.

Nothing else on the birth certificate captures the diversity of experiences either.

A biology professor explains the error in this, and why human sex is binary.

California dropped "mother" and "father" from its birth certificates several years ago. Some babies legally have two fathers and no mother.

The New York Dalton School may be the most racist:

Parents at Manhattan's $54K-a-year Dalton School pull their kids after it imposes anti-racism manifesto that focuses on 'challenges to white supremacy' - weeks after Megyn Kelly removed her children from another 'woke' NYC prep school

Posh private prep school Dalton drew uproar over staff's extreme demands
News of the eight-page memo was leaked this week by a furious parent
Lengthy list of 'demands' was signed by 129 faculty and staff members
It includes 12 diversity officers and giving 50% of all donations to NYC schools
All AP classes would be eliminated by 2023 if student scores aren't racially equal

Mode White American is a 60yo Boomer

The biggest long-term trend in the USA is the systematic replacement of Whites with non-whites. Wikipedia calls it a conspiracy theory, but the truth is plain to see.

A Pew Research analysis of 2018 US Census data shows this in a striking way. The most common ages for each race are:

27 - All Americans
58 - Whites
26-29 - Blacks, Asians, American Indians, Hawaiians, etc
11 - Hispanics
3 - multi-racial

Ok Boomers, you are about to be replaced by Hispanics and multiracial babies.

The data is two years old, so presumably the mode age for White is now 60, if they haven't died from COVID-19.

Barack Obama's daughter Malia is dating a White boy from another country.

In TV and movies, the changes have gone backwards in time. The London Daily Mail reports:

Jodie Turner-Smith plays Anne Boleyn in new Channel 5 drama that seeks to 'challenge conventions' by casting black actress as Henry VIII's executed wife and 'shine a feminist light' on her story

I thought that people watch these historical period dramas as a way of getting away from watching Blacks and others destroy White culture. No more.

Now the main source of White dramas is Eastern European Netflix shows. They feature White people. The American-made and British-made Netflix shows nearly always have White stars being sexually molested by Blacks or otherwise doing something perverted.

Meanwhile I see that the NY Times has finally confessed, after two years, that its reporter, Rukmini Callimachi, faked several of her prize-winning stories, particularly about ISIS terrorism. For the last 6 months, she has been reporting on Breonna Taylor. I am guessing that those were distorted also. NY Times is not saying, because Black lives matter.

Greece tries to prosecute for party membership

This NY Times article tells us how broken Europe is:

He’s a convicted criminal, found guilty by a Greek court in October and sentenced to 13 years in prison for his part in setting up and running the violent, neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, which the court ruled was a criminal organization. ...

In a court case that dragged on for five years and caught the world’s attention, Golden Dawn leaders and members were found to have formed and operated a criminal mob, destroying property, intimidating people, attacking leftist organizations and migrants and murdering an antifascist musician. Sixty-eight of its adherents were convicted.

A five year trial to extinguish a political political? Yes, obviously the trial was a political hit. If they really committed crimes, it would not have taken five years to prove it.

Golden Dawn leapt to prominence a decade ago, blaming the European Union, elites and immigrants, particularly Muslims, for the country’s ills as a calamitous financial crisis pounded Greece.

They should be blamed.

Mr. Lagos is several months away, at least, from being arrested and extradited to Greece to serve his sentence. ...

But the head of the Parliament’s legal committee, which handles requests to waive immunity, was adamant that nothing could be done to expedite Mr. Lagos’s case.

The lawmaker, Adrián Vázquez Lázara of Spain, said in a recent interview that Mr. Lagos is 12th on a list of 12 immunity waiver cases the committee must deal with in due course, and that they must be addressed in the order they were received. He warned that any deviation from the process could expose the committee to accusations of bias.

That is laughable.

While Mr. Lagos’s crimes are serious, the cases against the Catalan politicians are also “very, very serious,” Mr. Vázquez Lázara said. “They are accused of sedition!”

But sedition — incitement to overthrow the government — is no longer considered a criminal offense in many Western countries, while in others it is rarely prosecuted and carries only minor penalties. In addition, the Catalan politicians, unlike Mr. Lagos, have not been found guilty of anything as yet.

Sedition? They let Moslems run free while prosecuting Spanish Catalans for sedition?

A Communist country like China might prosecue that, but I am beginning to think that China has more free speech than we do:

In China, you are censored if you:

Talk against the government aggressively, and in particular if you attack Xi Jinping or the communist party directly.

In America, you are censored if you:

• Talk about Jews
• Point out that Jews are the single wealthiest group of people in the world
• Research the Holocaust
• Say the n-word
• Misgender a tranny
• Make jokes about a dead fat woman
• Say that trannies aren’t women
• Oppose homosexual marriage
• Post black crime statistics
• Post CDC coronavirus statistics
• Post about Hunter Biden
• Ask any questions at all about the coronavirus
• Ask any questions at all about the coronavirus vaccine
• Post information showing that Trump won the election

I am expectin a lot less free speech under Pres. Biden.

Zero evidence means a lot of evidence

Slate essay:

And of the top 100 players in the world, only one is a woman (Chinese grandmaster Hou Yifan). ...

Let me state unequivocally that there is currently zero evidence for biological differences in chess ability between the genders.

He cites anecdotes that female players have been insulted. No doubt. However, there is no mention of the possibility that male players are insulted even more.

It has become common to say "zero evidence" to mean "I refuse to accept what the evidence implies". The press says "there is no evidence that the election was stolen" to mean "it has not been proved in court that fraud changed sufficient votes to reverse the outcome".

The NY Times has an article on COVID vaccine skeptics, but they are the ones who are following the evidence.

Actually, the 4 vaccine skeptics quoted in the article are entirely reasonable. They just want to see more testing and evidence, and imply that they may get the vaccine when there is a more convincing case. It is foolish to believe that some FDA committee knows what is best for everyone. The pro-science people are the ones who want to see more scientific evidence, not the ones who blindly trust authority.

“As more information comes out, and things appear to work better, then I will weigh the risks of the vaccine against the risk of the coronavirus and make a judgment,” she said.

This article is a good example of the Jewish authoritarian mindset of that paper. Before the election, discussion of the vaccine was squelched. Then some official committee recommends it, and everyone is supposed to line up and get it.

Leftist support for White Supremacist arguments

There are three views about the USA founding.

1. Egalitarian. The founders wanted universal equal rights for everyone, even if they were hypocrites in their personal lives.

2. White supremacist. "We the People" really meant We White Men, and the USA is still White Supremacist today.

3. Compromise. The Constitution is silent on slavery because it was a compromise between free and slave states.

Argument (1) is based on the Declaration of Independence saying "All Men are created equal", and has long been promoted by Republicans.

Argument (2) is made today by the NY Times 1619 Project, which said that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery of Negroes. Also by those who complain about the supposed murder of George Floyd. It was also articulated in the Dred Scott decision, perhaps the Supreme Court's most famous decision.

Argument (3) is what I remember from history books.

I am not sure this issue can be resolved. I thought that it was resolved by the Civil War, but apparently not.

Here is a new book, carrying on the race wars, as reviewed in the NY Times:

In “Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America,” Ijeoma Oluo punches up rather than down, reckoning culturally, politically and historically with white men. ...

Oluo argues that all of us, “regardless of demographic, have played a part in upholding white supremacy.” ...

Yet, she insists, invoking pandemics, mass shootings, the climate crisis, economic recession and war: “White manhood is on a suicide mission.”

I think she is complaining that average White men are still superior to Black men and women.

I heard someone on the radio say that no defends what was done to George Floyd. In a way, that is true. I cannot find any public person who says that the cops were innocent, or justified.

On the other hand, I cannot find any public person who can explain what the cops did wrong, or what the cops should have done. Someone might say that the cop should have should more sympathy before the camera, or not put a knee to the neck, or tried to get medical assistance. But Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose. He was resisting arrest. The cops did arrange for medical assistance. The knee did not contribute to Floyd's death, as far as anyone knows.

Los Angeles now promises not to prosecute perps for resisting arrest. Would such a policy in Minneapolis have saved Floyd? I doubt it, but we shall soon seen if that policy causes more or fewer deaths.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo want to ban symbols of White supremacy. That could include the American flag, depending on how you interpret history.

Some weirdos are destroying Jeffrey Toobin

The NY Times reports on The Undoing of Jeffrey Toobin

“It wasn’t a full-out sexual act, but it was much more than a second,” Mx. Gessen said. “I was really, truly shocked.”

I don't want to pile on, as I never liked Toobin for other reasons. I would rather criticize him for his stupid legal opinions. But who is this character who was "shocked"? Wikipedia says:

Gessen is nonbinary and trans and uses they/them pronouns.[4][5] Gessen has written extensively on LGBT rights.[6] Described as "Russia's leading LGBT rights activist,"[7] they have said that for many years they were "probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole country."[8] They now live in New York with their wife and children.[9]

So it is not clear whether this is a man dressing up as a woman, or vice-versa.

The NYT authors are described:

Katherine Rosman is a features reporter on the Styles desk. She covers media, the business of fitness, and the politics of gender. She joined The Times in 2014. @katierosman

Jacob Bernstein is a reporter for the Styles desk. In addition to writing profiles of fashion designers, artists and celebrities, he has focused much of his attention on L.G.B.T. issues, philanthropy and the world of furniture design. @bernsteinjacob

And of course all of these characters are Jewish.

I don't know what is going on here. These men or women or nonbinaries, whatever they are, advocate for a broad range of perverted activities, but a man does something in what he thought was the privacy of his own home, and it cannot be tolerated because it lasted "much more than a second"?

Forecasting the End of the World

Glenn T. Stanton writes in Quillette:

Data released this summer indicates the beginning of the end of humanity can be glimpsed from where we now stand. That end is a dramatic population bust that will nosedive toward an empty planet. New research places the beginning of that turn at about 30 years from today.

This means that Thomas Robert Malthus, and his many influential disciples, had it precisely wrong. ...

human death rates from air pollution have declined by nearly half since just 1990. ...

Water is humanity’s second most immediate life need. The number of people around the world with improved access to clean drinking water increased 68 percent from 1990 to 2015, even as the population itself has expanded. ...

Food is our third greatest survival need. Contrary to grim Malthusian predictions, the United Nations explains that humanity now produces more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet. In fact, the Journal of Sustainable Agriculture revealed back in 2012 that “we already grow enough food for 10 billion people.” ...

Earth is becoming a much safer place for humans to live precisely because we are adapting to it better.

He is right that a lot of forecasts for the end of the world have been wrong, and that life is getting better in some ways.

But he draws the wrong conclusions. He seems to think that more people means more world-saving innovation, so we need more people, not fewer.

We had more innovation when the world had a lot fewer people. Today we have almost 8 billion people, but the number of innovators is less than a million. The rest are a burden.

Population increases are making the world worse. Traffic jams, expensive housing, scarcity, and even disease. Globalism that is destroying the middle class. Declines in real wages. Most people are in debt.

Yes, more people have clean water, but that is in spite of population increases. A few decades ago, California had plenty of fresh water for its population and agriculture. Now, overpopulation has caused many water problems there.

Hospitals can be busy with flu

Agitated by stories of hospitals with COVID-19 patients? For example:

Hospitals across the state are already overburdened. In southern California, the capacity of intensive care units has dwindled down to 10%. In Santa Clara county in the Bay Area, just 31 ICU beds remain for 2 million residents. San Francisco is projected to run out of ICU beds by 27 December.

But the article does not say whether it is any worse than a bad flu season. See this Time magazine story from only a couple of years ago:

The 2017-2018 influenza epidemic is sending people to hospitals and urgent-care centers in every state, and medical centers are responding with extraordinary measures: asking staff to work overtime, setting up triage tents, restricting friends and family visits and canceling elective surgeries, to name a few.

NPR Radio reported, a couple of weeks ago:

The actual number of coronavirus infections in the U.S. reached nearly 53 million at the end of September and could be approaching 100 million now, according to a model developed by government researchers.

The model, created by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, calculated that the true number of infections is about eight times the reported number, which includes only the cases confirmed by a laboratory test.

If that is true, then we could reach herd immunity a lot faster than what the experts are predicting.

Update: The CDC has a page on the differences between COVID-19 and flu. They are minor, and a test is required to distinguish them.

Unraveling the Mindset of Victimhood

Psychologists have finally figured out that victimhood is just a personality disorder that some people are cursed with.

SciAm reports:

Based on clinical observations and research, the researchers found that the tendency for interpersonal victimhood consists of four main dimensions: (a) constantly seeking recognition for one’s victimhood, (b) moral elitism, (c) lack of empathy for the pain and suffering of others, and (d) frequently ruminating about past victimization.

So where did the researchers go to find all these people with four dimensions of interpersonal victimhood?

I would rather not say. Click on the link to find out.

This new Black Pigeon video explains why it is bad that we have adopted a culture of victimhood.

Free Will v. Insanity

I posted that I am beginning to think that beliefs about free will are key to understanding a lot of attitudes.

If somebody said that he hears voices in his head, or that he has a twin that no one can see, or believes in an invisible world, then you would infer that he is schizophrenic, or suffers some similar mental illness.

If somebody believes in Heaven, Hell, angels, and devils, and prays to an invisible god, you would infer that he is religious, but not crazy.

But what do you make of somebody with an advanced scientific degree who believes:

* You have identical twins in distant universes.

* Our world is just a simulation, running on a computer in a more advanced civilization.

* The universe constantly splits into parallel universes, where every possibility is played out for real.

* All events have been pre-determined, from the first second of the Big Bang.

* We have no free will, and all actions are controlled as with a robot or puppet.

All these things seem like symptoms of mental illness to me.

Another tipoff is having crazy ideas about randomness. Insane people sometimes think that nothing is random, and every coincidence is a manifestation of some bizarre conspiracy of causes. Or they think that randomness is one of the fundamental forces in the universe, disrupting everything. Either way, the insane man is troubled by imaginary demons that are sabotaging his life.

So how am I supposed to think about respected physics professors who believe in this crazy stuff? I do not have a good answer for this.

I have reviewed some debates on free will, from respected professors. Nearly all of them reject free will. I think that they are all insane. I wonder how they can even function in their daily lives with such peculiar beliefs.

Sam Harris is someone who seem intelligent, and even has a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, and yet vehemently argues that he is a biochemical puppet with no free will. In his case, it appears that his free will was destroyed by recreational psychodelic drugs that he began taking at age 18. In his podcasts, he talks about practicing Eastern Buddhist meditation, in order to try to get free will. He sounds very convincing, just as the schizophrenic can be very convincing that he really does hear voices in his head.

Google censors election news

Google Alphabet YouTube announce:

Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S.

Wow. This is only happening because the election was stolen.

They are not taking down videos saying that the Earth is flat or that the 1969 Moon landing was faked.

There have been many controversial elections in USA history. In 1960, it was widely alleged that Chicago delayed its count until the Democrats could determine how many votes would be needed to win Illinois, and then produced the required number of phony votes so JFK would win.

This was never proved, so I don't know if it is true or not. Chicago did delay the count, and if our election were working properly, that would not happen.

Several crucial cities, such as Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia, also delayed their counts this year. In my opinion, cities should report on time, or not at all. We cannot trust an election with such monkey business going on.

But now YouTube is banning all such discussion. Why? The election is over. Google did its best to manipulate the vote beforehand, but now it says that Biden won undisputably. What is the purpose is censoring videos about what happened?

Would we have somehow been better off if allegations of JFK steeling the 1960 election were censored?

Hillary Clinton still claims that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election from her. Will YouTube censor her gripes? I doubt it.

I cannot see any legitimate justification for this. Google is just trying to cover up the steal. If it were not stolen, then the videos would not be a threat.

Maybe Individualism predated Christianity

I mentioned some historian criticism of the WIRED (or WEIRD, in the more pejorative form) theory of Western individualism, and here is a separate criticism:

As I note in the abstract, this contrasts with my recently published book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future, which proposes that Western individualism, as expressed in the characteristic European marriage system and in a plethora of other cultural expressions, is ultimately the outcome of selection in the ancestral environments of northern Europe and northern Eurasia more widely. This commentary highlights the historical evidence bearing on these alternative explanations for European exceptionalism. The main conclusion is that European individualism, as expressed in kinship structure and social organization, was firmly established before the advent of Christianity.  My paper has 4 sections:

1. Primordial Tendencies toward Western Individualism: the key issue is signs of individualism in the Indo-Europeans and Northern Hunter-Gatherers that make up the core populations of Western Europe.

2. Sources and Targets of Church Power, where the key issue is whether the Western European tradition of monogamy predated Church influence.

3. How Widespread Was Compliance with the Church’s Rules on Incestuous Marriage? A basic claim of Shulz et al. is that the Church eradicated widespread cousin marriage. I present the case that cousin marriage and clan-type social organization were never characteristic of the West.

4. The Geography of Church Influence. I show that Western individualism does not at all map onto the research on Western family history which shows that some areas of Western Europe long under Church influence (e.g., southern France) retained collectivist family patterns, while some areas of Western Europe that were Christianized late are the most individualistic (Scandinavia).

I am not sure about this. Scandanavia does not seem to individualistic to me. They are individualistic about some things, but not others.

Christendom was the result of (1) Christianity; (2) Greek and Roman civilizations; and (3) pre-Christian culture of Northern Europe. That last factor is harder to evaluate, because we do not have so many written records of it.

So when the Church eradicated clan-type social structure, was it following religious teaching or extending trends that pre-dated Christianity? I do not know how to answer that questions. I am not sure it matters. If millennia of development made the WIRED people different from the rest of the world, then that is a difference that will probably persist for a few more centuries. We need to understand it.

Update: Ricardo Duchesne writes, about Henrich's book:

This book offers a substantial answer to a question white identitarians are continually asking: why whites are allowing themselves to be replaced in their own homelands? Simply put, because whites are weirdly unattached to their own ethnic in-groups but believe instead that humans across the planet are just like them, individualistic, capable of impartiality, and fair play. Whites don't know what Henrich's book (implicitly) teaches: non-Weird people are nepotistic and highly biased towards their own ethnic in-groups.

He then goes on to discuss the role of 16th century Protestant literacy. Maybe that had a role in making Europeans different, or maybe Europeans were already different.

Family has to apologize for long dead man

Every once in a while, some celebrity says that the Jews control the news media, and then the Jews in the news media force him to apologize.

NPR Radio reports:

The family of children's book author Roald Dahl has issued a belated apology for his history of anti-Semitism.

"The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl's statements," read the comment on the official Dahl website.

The apology comes three decades after the British author's death in 1990. Over his nearly 50-year career, Dahl wrote such classic children's books as Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, and The BFG.

He also made some anti-Semitic comments.

In one example, in 1983 Dahl reportedly told Britain's New Statesman magazine that "there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. ... Even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason."

That last statement is a historical fact. Hitler wrote a book about his reasons.

So some childrens book author was critical of Israeli war policy 30 years ago, and it is all over the news yesterday. Why?

Criticism of Israel's military policy comes mostly from leftists, not antisemites. Leftists and Arabs, I guess, and I don't know whether Arabs are considered antisemites.

Update: Coelsblog notes that the prevailing definition of anti-semitism is not a definition at all. And Islamophobia is also a propaganda word.

Historians criticize work on American traits

I mentioned the Joseph Henrich theory that Americans are psychologically superior to the rest of the world in March and September. He is a liberal Harvard professor, so I am sure that he would deny that he is a White supremacist, or even that he is defending a theory of genetic group differences.

So he doesn't say Whites are superior but that they

they exhibited a far greater "neurological and psychological" set of capacities for:

trust, fairness, honesty, and cooperation with anonymous others
patience and self control
time drift and hard work
reduced in-group nepotism
free will and the capacity to make its own decisions
analytical over holistic thinking
impartial principles and objectivity
original and nonconformist thinking?

For the sake of intellectual fairness, I am citing a historian essay critical of this work:

Deploying an influential social-scientific concept known as WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic), the article asserts that a distinctive Western psychology—one valuing agency, autonomy, and kindness toward strangers—explains the differential development trajectory of the West and the Rest. “The Church, Intensive Kinship, and Global Psychological Variation” tells a linear story of how Westerners became WEIRD. Beginning in the sixth century CE, when the medieval Church became “obsessed” with incest, the article adopts a claim made by the eminent social anthropologist Jack Goody: that European kinship was transformed in the post-Roman West when Church officials broadened incest prohibitions, discouraged remarriage and adoption, and thereby redirected the flow of property away from families into the Church, weakening kinship. Church authorities codified a prohibition on marriage extending to third and, later, to sixth cousins. Combined with the abolition of polygamy, this resulted in a decline of extended kin networks and the emergence of the monogamous nuclear family. The transformation of the incest prohibition by the Church, the authors conclude, created the foundation for individualism, civil society, and democracy. 

The Science team took Goody’s idea and performed a battery of statistical regressions to show that the intensity of WEIRD traits corresponds to the duration of a population’s exposure to western Christianity, as measured by the date of the foundation of Latin bishoprics: the longer the exposure, the stronger the WEIRD traits. This conclusion is reinforced with modern demographic and ethnographic data about rates of cousin marriage, followed by laboratory interviews with living subjects to gauge their WEIRD psychologies.

They don't really refute any of these findings, but argues that if some of their fellow leftist/woke historians had been on the team, they would have added context on colonialism, slavery, and Christian hegemony. They claim that the Catholic Church did not really have the power to ban all cousin marriages. In particular, some royal cousins still got married. So did some plantation owners in the Old South.

Yes, no doubt about that. The weakness of this criticism only convinces me of the robustness of Henrich's thesis. No one disputes that the WEIRD traits make American Whites different from most of the world, and that these are deep structural differences that will not go away easily.

Nobody wants to talk about whether they are genetic differences. I presume that Henrich refuses to say.

I don't see how it can be anything but genetic. If these were merely the behavioral changes induced by the Catholic Church a millennium ago, how could they possibly persist today? Most Americans today are not Catholic, and those who are do not adhere to Medieval customs.

If genetic, maybe they should be called WIRED traits, for western, industrialized, rich, educated, and democratic. The traits appear to be hard-wired into the genes of White Americans.

Drug companies manipulated the election

Before the election, Pres. Trump told us that COVID-19 vaccines were coming this year. The press said that he was lying. We now know that he was telling the truth. We would have known before the election, but Pfizer and Moderna delayed the news. The NY Times reports:

Mr. Trump’s anger about the timing has not abated. In a news conference on Friday, he suggested Pfizer and other drugmakers had taken revenge on him for pushing drug price controls.

“They were going to come out in October, but they decided to delay it because of what I’m doing,” he grumbled. “They waited and waited and waited.”

As the article details, Trump was completely correct. The drug companies were on an approved timetable for releasing the info, but they asked for, and obtained, permission to delay the announcement until after the election. Stock market analysts deduced that the companies were hiding poor results. We now know that the results were better than expected. When Pfizer was ready to announce the good results, it secretly tipped off the Biden campaign, and Trump had to read about it in the newspapers.

This election manipulation was vastly more damaging than anything the Russians did in 2016.

And of course Google, Facebook, newspapers, TV, etc were all heavily biased against Trump. I don't know how anyone could think this was a fair election.

You could say that the FDA is managed by Trump appointees, and that he could have had his appointees force the drug companies to honestly follow the protocol before the election. Yes, that is true. Unfortunately, 4 years was not enough time to drain the swamp, and the federal govt is filled with employees who actively undermine the administration.

If Trump were really the authoritarian that his enemies say, then he would have forced the drug companies to behave.

The major news media continue to describe the election contest inaccurately. They always say that Joe Biden is the President-elect, that he won the election, and that there is no evidence of anything wrong with the election. In fact the electoral votes have not been decided yet, and there are hundreds of examples of election irregularities. While it is true that the courts have not been persuaded to reverse the certifications, there is certainly evidence.

The courts are not really the ones to decide on the evidence anyway. As I pointed out, federal law requires electors to be appointed on election day. That did not happen in the swing states.

Federal law then requires:

Whenever any State has held an election for the purpose of choosing electors, and has failed to make a choice on the day prescribed by law [Nov. 3, this year], the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day [such as now!] in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct. [3 US Code 2]

The legislatures are probably not going to act, but they can and should, and Biden is not the President-elect until the electors meet and vote.

Develop some disease and resign

I said that Joe Biden was a puppet, and now the Daily Caller reports:

Biden told CNN Anchor Jake Tapper on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time” that working with Harris hasn’t held “any surprise” since they’ve previously spoken about it. Biden told Tapper “I understand how campaigns can sometimes get a little out of wack a little bit” and he said he doesn’t “hold grudges.”

“So I don’t have — when we disagree, it will be just like — so far it’s been just like Barack and I did. It’s in private. She’ll say I think we should do A, B, C, or D. And I’ll say I like A, don’t like B and C. And let’s go okay,” Biden said.

“And like I told Barack, if I read something where there’s a fundamental disagreement we have based on a moral principle, I’ll develop some disease and say I have to resign,” Biden told Tapper.

I am going to take this as a joke, altho I watched the video, and he prefaces his remarks with "All kidding aside."

It is hard to imagine any recent President even thinking these thoughts. I am not just referring to the disease and resign sentence. Before that, he says that he will take orders from Harris, just as he took orders from Obama. I am surprised that Biden is even aware enough to recognize the plan -- he will develop some disease and resign. In the meantime, he takes orders on A, B, C, and D.

No one needed net neutrality

TechDirt reports:

The report found that U.S. broadband speeds -- historically the poster child for mediocrity -- jumped roughly 90% during the COVID-19 lockdowns. ...

Yes, the study shows U.S. broadband speeds jumped 90% in 2020. But Buck also notes this likely isn't because of policy decisions at the FCC, or because ISPs did much of anything differently. It's most likely because when consumers were forced to stay home to work and attend school during COVID lockdown, they were simply willing to pay more money for already available, faster speeds because they realized faster broadband was essential.

A couple of years ago, Google and other monopolists were complaining that the FCC was abolishing net neutrality, and horrible things were going to happen.

Well, the ISPs did not do anything horrible, and people are not getting better service.

On another matter, Google has fired an Ethiopian woman working on ethical AI. It appears that she made too many diversity demands. She was one of those saying that police should not use face recognition because it identifies white men better than black women. She also appears to have an attitude problem, and probably thought that she could not be fired because she is a black African woman.

The post-Trump sellout of American workers has begun, as the US Senate just unanimously voted to drasticly increase programs of importing foreign workers to replace Americans. The Trump DoJ sued Facebook over abusing the program, and displacing Americans, but the Biden administration will probably drop the suit.

The Legacy of George Floyd

The George Floyd hoax continues to destroy fine cities. RT reports:

Minneapolis has suffered a surge in crime that has coincided with a severe shortage of police officers. Undeterred, City Council members want to make further cuts to law enforcement.

Police have registered a 537-percent increase in violent carjackings in the city compared with last November, the local Star Tribune reported. More than 125 such crimes have been recorded over the past two months, with three separate carjackings reported within a one-hour period on Saturday morning. One of the victims, an elderly woman, was struck on the head by her assailants.

“The numbers are staggering,” a Minneapolis police spokesperson told the paper. “It defies all civility and any shred of common human decency.”

Authorities have blamed the crime wave on “small groups of marauding teens,” but acknowledged that adults have also been arrested in connection to the string of carjackings. The surge in this type of attack has prompted the city’s police force to create a new coding system to help keep track of the criminal acts. The spree of carjackings isn’t the only public safety crisis facing the city: An analysis by the Star Tribune in September found that violent crimes – including homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assaults – were up 17 percent from the previous five-year average for this period....

Despite the crime surge and personnel shortage, a trio of City Council members, including Council President Lisa Bender, have submitted a proposal that would cut the Minneapolis police budget by nearly $8 million.

Paul Krugman writes:

When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge — and I don’t mean the pandemic, although COVID-19 will almost surely be killing thousands of Americans every day. I mean, instead, that he’ll be the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy.

Wow. His newspaper, the NY Times, probably printed 1000 stories saying George W. Bush and Donald Trump were not legitimate.

The schools have gone nuts with George Floyd nonsense:

In dramatic, urgent language, K-12 schools across the country – both public and private – professed solidarity with Black Lives Matter and vowed to dismantle white supremacy, as they scrambled to introduce anti-racist courses and remake themselves into racism-free zones.

The president of the Lower Merion School Board on Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line declared to families: “We need to eradicate white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in all of our institutions.”

In Maine, a coastal public school district where 3.7% of the 2,100 students are African American or Hispanic, the superintendent declared war on “the intentional barriers white people have built to harm Black people.” The top administrator added: “We grieve for all of the Black lives taken by white supremacy.”

This is going to backfire. Eventually those schoolkids are going to discover that Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose, and that anyone who even uses the word heteropatriarchy is an enemy of civilization.

Gendering Animals

From an academic paper on Gendering Animals:

When feminists first adopted the sex/gender distinction in the 1960s and 1970s it formed the keystone in their theoretical framework. In a social context where it was typically assumed that the social and political differences between the sexes found in practically every part of daily life were the result of natural, essential, biological sex differences, the idea that many of these differences were, in fact, socially constructed gender differences offered hope of subverting patriarchy.

The article is not a joke.

It says that boys have higher bone mineral density in the lower back than girls, except that it is the other way around for ultra-Orthodox Jewish adolescents. Weird.

Wikipedia has already rewritten its pages on Ellen Page, the actress who starred in the 2007 movie Juno:

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars and called it "just about the best movie of the year. ... Has there been a better performance this year than Elliot Page's creation of Juno? I don't think so."

No, Ebert never mentioned "Elliot Page".

Juno was an anti-man movie, as was her previous movie. It is funny for an actress famous for anti-man roles would suddenly call herself a man. She has said that she was a lesbian, and married to a woman. But now lesbians are extinct, and she is a man, so I guess she is heterosexual. Or maybe her sex is still female and her gender is male, I am not sure.

This should help everyone get ready for the Biden administration. The stock exchange is getting ready:

Nasdaq would require all companies listed on the exchange to publicly disclose consistent, transparent diversity statistics about their board of directors. It would require those companies to have, or explain why they don't have, at least two diverse directors. This includes having one board member who self-identifies as female and one who self-identifies as either an underrepresented racial minority or LGBTQ.

If Ellen Page were on a company board, she would be not so diverse. She is now Elliot, a man, and no longer self-identifying as female. She is not a racial minority, and she no longer identifies as a lesbian. Possibly she identifies as trans, but it is not clear, as maybe she is just a man. If she is trans, is she transsexual or transgender? Those are different, since sex and gender are different. My guess is that her sex is still female, but her gender is now declared to be male. I doubt that she has the fake male organ surgery, after playing a sadistic castrator in a movie, so I do not know whether she would qualify as a Nasdaq diversity choice.

Here is a weak attempt to rationalize a sex difference:

“Can men be victims and women perpetrators? Yes of course,” she says. “But if you define domestic violence saying anyone can be a victim or perpetrator, it ignores that women are disproportionately victimised and men are disproportionately the perpetrator. If you come at if from a gender-neutral angle you will never change it. It's like hitting a pool ball at the wrong angle - it goes into a pocket but the wrong one.”

I will remember that excuse, the next time I get accused of sexism. I will just say, “it goes into a pocket but the wrong one.”