Tattoos are a Mark of the Uncivilized

Americans have freedom, and China is under the dictatorial rule of Communists. Here is the latest example.

The UK BBC TV reports:

Footballers who play for China's national team have been banned from getting tattoos - and advised to remove ones they have - under a new directive. ...

In Chinese culture a stigma has been attached to tattoos - in the past they were used to brand criminals and the tattoo still has links to organised crime groups in east Asia. Tattoos among ethnic groups were often seen as a mark of the uncivilised.

They are disapproved of by China's ruling Communist Party, but have become increasingly popular among young Chinese. ...

Last December, a women's university football match in China had to be called off after players were told they were not allowed to have dyed hair.

The match organisers, the National Youth Campus Football League, said in a statement at the time: "Athletes at all stages shall not have tattoos, dye their hair, wear weird hairstyles, or wear any accessories, otherwise they will be ineligible for the competition."

Update: A Chinese woman reports in the NY Times:

China is facing serious challenges on multiple fronts: Great power competition with the United States. Trade disputes. The future of Taiwan. But that doesn’t mean it’s too preoccupied to escalate a battle of another sort on the home front.

The Chinese government, you see, has been fighting what state news outlets have called a “masculinity crisis” for the past few years, with one top official warning that “effeminate” men in popular culture were corrupting “a generation.” The Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece decreed that young men need to have “toughness and strength” and censors have blurred out male celebrities’ earrings in television and online appearances. ...

These women’s embrace of a more fluid form of masculinity is not a phenomenon the party should dismiss. Well-educated and financially independent, these women are bucking gender norms themselves by turning away from matrimony and motherhood and are proving to be resistant to the party’s push to boost marriages and births to offset the effects of an aging population.

So the NYT wants Chinese men to be gender fluid, and Chinese women to turn away from marriage and motherhood.

The government’s idea of the ideal male reads like an outdated description of 1950s gender norms: Muscular, reliable, career-oriented providers. The “masculine spirit” requires physical and mental fitness as well as “strong will power,” the Ministry of Education said earlier this year.

Yeah, they hate manly men.

Biden has Failed Covid Promises

From Politifact, last year:

Speaking about the coronavirus during a CNN town hall less than two months away from Election Day, former Vice President Joe Biden said every one of the nearly 200,000 COVID-19 deaths recorded in the U.S. can be laid at President Donald Trump’s feet.

"If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive," Biden said at the CNN town hall in Moosic, Pa. "All the people. I'm not making this up. Just look at the data. Look at the data."

From a Newsweek fact checker:

The Claim

This week, multiple public figures and social media users attempted to directly compare how current and previous administrations fared in the battle against COVID by analyzing the cumulative number of deaths from the virus under each president.

"Joe Biden based his entire 2020 presidential campaign on the promise he would solve covid by trusting "the science." It was all bullshit. He's presided over more deaths, hospitalizations & cases than Trump. Yet media crushed Trump for covid, gives Biden a pass," political commentator Clay Travis tweeted.

Others simply posted death count figures that suggested more Americans fell victim to COVID under Biden than under Trump.

False.

While the number of deaths from COVID in the U.S. under president Biden is on course to top the death count during the Trump administration, it has not yet done so. Around 379,000 people have died in the U.S. from COVID since January 20, when Biden took over as president, around 45,000 fewer than under Trump.

So the Biden covid death count will surpass Trump's in several weeks.

The claim is essentially true, not false. Biden did base much of his campaign on doing better against covid, and he has not done better at all. The news media was constantly blaming Trump, but giving Biden a pass.

While you are keeping score, Biden lost the Afghan war, brought back monetary inflation, created racial animosity, caused crime waves in the cities, spent money irresponsibly, and opened the borders for bogus refugees. He is senile, and his VP is incompetent and disliked. He has accomplished nothing worthwhile.

Polls indicate that people have wised up to Biden. The Trump presidency was better in every way.

Last year, PBS TV reported:

Trump’s sinking approval rating is due in part to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. This month, the U.S. reached 5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, more than any other country in the world, as states struggle to scale up to recommended levels for testing and contact tracing, and the daily death toll has rebounded to levels not seen since mid-May.

Fifty-three percent of U.S. adults think Biden would handle the coronavirus pandemic better than Trump, while 37 percent think Trump would do a better job.

But now that is reversed:

In the latest sign that President Joe Biden is falling out of favor, the public now thinks that former President Donald Trump handled the coronavirus crisis better.

What’s more, the latest Rasmussen Reports survey found that voters believe Biden has broken his promise to end the virus. On the question of fighting COVID-19, likely voters said Biden has done a “worse” job than Trump by a 49%-39% margin.

The press and other establishment influencers are still overwhelmingly favoring Biden, and trying to put Trump in jail.

NY Times Libels Dog-Walking Karen Again

Black professor Michael Eric Dyson writes in a NY Times op-ed that Whites should be forced into "restorative justice" re-education, and gives this example:

By contrast, take the case of Amy Cooper, a white woman who falsely claimed to the police that an amateur bird-watcher, Chris Cooper, who is Black, had threatened her. After a public outcry, she was fired from her job. Although she received some form of restorative justice, an even better approach would have been her keeping her job while her employer demanded that she read and study more about race, Black masculinity, white privilege and social injustice. The loss of her job as an act of retributive justice left all these structural issues aside and merely shamed her without transforming her or using her circumstances to throw light on similar cases.

He is falsely shaming and libeling her. Here is the Wikipedia account:

The Central Park birdwatching incident was a confrontation on May 25, 2020, between Amy Cooper, a white woman walking her dog, and Christian Cooper (no relation), a black man who was birdwatching, in a section of New York City's Central Park known as the Ramble. Amy Cooper's dog was unleashed in the Ramble, an area where leashing is required; she allegedly refused Christian Cooper's request that her dog be leashed. Christian then said, by his own account, "Look, if you're going to do what you want, I'm going to do what I want, but you're not going to like it," and beckoned the dog toward him with a dog treat. Amy responded by yelling "Don't you touch my dog!".

The Black man is clearly threatening her, by his own account. He says he is going to do something to her that she will not like, in response to her unleashed dog. That is what a threat is. My dictionary defines it:

a statement of an intention to inflict pain, injury, damage, or other hostile action on someone in retribution for something done or not done.

He did, in fact, inflict a lot of pain on her by getting her fired from her job, prosecuted, publicly humiliated, and subjected to about a dozen negative NY Times stories, in retribution for her unleashed dog and calling 911.

According to Wikipedia, she was forced into restorative justice, and "completed a five-session educational and therapeutic program focused on racial identity."

I am not saying that she is entirely innocent, but this was a trivial little argument between a White woman dog walker and a Black man bird watcher. He was at least as much at fault as she was, as he aggressively threatened her, publicly shamed her, and proceeded to ruin her life.

And yet the NY Times continues to try to shame her, and say that she deserves racial re-education schooling.

There is a pattern here. The newspaper dishonestly distorts all these incidents, racializes them, excuses the Black criminal behavior, and blames the White person. Before long, it will be saying that all Whites must be sent to re-education camps.

E. O. Wilson Obituary

NY Times obituary:

Edward O. Wilson, a biologist and author who conducted pioneering work on biodiversity, insects and human nature — and won two Pulitzer Prizes along the way — died on Sunday in Burlington, Mass. He was 92. ...

At first, “Sociobiology” was showered with praise and attention. An article about it landed on the front page of The New York Times on May 28, 1975. In Scientific American, the Princeton biologist John Tyler Bonner called it “an extraordinary beginning.” Dr. Bonner wrote that Dr. Wilson “has identified and brought together in one tome all those elements that will be the ingredients of sociobiology in the future.”

Then, Dr. Wilson later recalled in his memoir, “Everything spun out of control.”

Dr. Wilson got in trouble for extending sociobiology to humans. He had invited his readers to consider how human nature might be shaped by evolutionary pressures. He warned them that this would not be easy: It would be hard to tease apart the effects of human culture from those of natural selection. Making matters worse, no one at the time had linked any genetic variant to any particular human behavior. “There is a need for a discipline of anthropological genetics,” he wrote.

Nevertheless, Dr. Wilson argued that our species had a propensity to behave in certain ways and form certain social structures. He called that propensity human nature.

Natural selection could help explain psychology, in other words. Human aggression, for example, may have been adaptive for early humans.

From this, he was maybe the most accomplished biologist alive. The strange thing is how he was hated by left-wing academics.

Not that he was a right-winger. He appears to be a typical academic liberal. He was hated for wanting to study human nature, and claiming that there was a human nature like plant and animal nature.

Yes, of course there is human nature. The leftist denial of human nature is striking.

Dr. Wilson’s critics ignored these caveats. In a letter to The New York Review of Books, some denounced sociobiology as an attempt to reinvigorate tired old theories of biological determinism — theories, they claimed, that “provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.”

In her book “Defenders of the Truth” (2000), Dr. Segerstrale wrote that Dr. Wilson’s critics had shown “an astounding disregard” for what he had written, arguing that they had used “Sociobiology” as an opportunity to promote their own agendas. When Dr. Wilson attended a 1978 debate about sociobiology, protesters rushed the stage shouting, “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” A woman dumped ice water on him, shouting, “Wilson, you are all wet!”

After drying himself off with paper towels, Dr. Wilson went ahead and gave his speech.

In that speech and elsewhere, Dr. Wilson declared that sociobiology offered no excuse for racism or sexism. He dismissed attacks against him as “self-righteous vigilantism.” And he went on to dig even deeper into the evolution of human behavior.

His main expertise was in ants, not humans.

I have seen the new Matrix movie, as everyone says it is disappointing. The original was partially an exploration of human nature. Neo had to take the red pill to see who he really was. People were programmed robots, blissfully unaware of their programming.

Scientific American magazine has a Black woman attacking Wilson:

Second, the application of the scientific method matters: what works for ants and other nonhuman species is not always relevant for health and/or human outcomes. For example, the associations of Black people with poor health outcomes, economic disadvantage and reduced life expectancy can be explained by structural racism, yet Blackness or Black culture is frequently cited as the driver of those health disparities. Ant culture is hierarchal and matriarchal, based on human understandings of gender. And the descriptions and importance of ant societies existing as colonies is a component of Wilson’s work that should have been critiqued. Context matters.

I really don't think Wilson's studies of ant colonies had anything to do with Black obesity rates.

Jerry Coyne adds:

Scientific American has hit rock bottom with this new op-ed that is nothing more than a hit piece on Ed Wilson, basically calling him a racist.

It is written by someone who apparently has no training in evolutionary biology, though she says she “intimately familiarized [herself] with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.” I usually don’t question someone because of their credentials, but this piece is so stupid, so arrantly ignorant of Wilson’s work, that I can attribute its content only to a combination of ignorance (perhaps deliberate) or a woke desire to take down someone as a racist who wasn’t a racist. Or both.

In fact, the piece below could have been written by any social-justice ideologue, for its real aim is more than smearing Wilson; it;s also to change the nature of science.

Apparently woke racism has replaced science at what used to be the best science magazine.

More Paranoia about Coming Civil War

Newsweek essay:

America's massive and mostly Republican gun-rights movement dovetails with a growing belief among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by any means necessary. That combustible formula raises the threat of armed, large-scale attacks around the 2024 presidential election—attacks that could make the January 6 insurrection look like a toothless stunt by comparison. ...

Both Democrats and Republicans are rapidly losing faith in the integrity of U.S. elections. Democrats worry that voter suppression and election interference from Republican state officials will deny millions of Americans their say at the polling booths. A PBS NewsHour/ NPR/ Marist poll in early November reported that 55 percent of Democrats saw voter suppression as the biggest threat to U.S. elections. Republicans claim, contrary to the evidence, that Democrats have already manipulated vote counts through fraud to steal a presidential election. An October CNN poll found that more than three-quarters of Republicans falsely believe Joe Biden's 2020 election win was fraudulent. ...

In October 2020, 13 men were charged with plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat; all of them were aligned with the political right.

I am skeptical about this. That whole kidnap plot story seemed fishy. The plot didn't make much sense, but why would some FBI agents frame some right-wingers? The whole thing seems to have been carried out by FBI informants. A Michigan TV station reported some clues:

One of the lead FBI agents on the federal kidnapping case involving Michigan’s governor didn’t just betray the badge off-duty, he also showed questionable judgment online by posting an obscenity-laden, anti-Trump tirade.

“If you still support our piece of s–t president you can f–k off,” began the 2020 post on Richard Trask’s personal Facebook page.

As Trask, 40, prepares to enter a plea Monday on charges he beat and choked his wife at their Kalamazoo County home, Target 8 investigators are revealing the contents of a vitriolic, Trump-bashing post on Trask’s personal Facebook page.

Target 8 has also obtained police body camera video of Trask’s July 18, 2021, arrest for allegedly assaulting his wife after they attended a swinger’s party at a Kalamazoo-area hotel.

Trask’s Facebook declaration blasting then-President Donald Trump was dated March 28, 2020.

At the time, the FBI was in the early stages of its investigation into the alleged plot to abduct Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat.

Trask played a central role in the case, which has since become one of the most politicized in Michigan’s history, with defense attorneys claiming the FBI orchestrated the abduction plan itself through its direction of confidential informants.

This is one of several examples of outlandish plots that were supposedly broken up by FBI informants. I do not know whether to credit the FBI for stopping terrorism, or blame them for instigating it.

A lot of Americans are arming themselves, but I think it is mostly driven by police failures to curb crime, and by pro-criminal political forces.

The Jan. 6 protest was not an insurrection. The protesters were not armed. Donald Trump did win a big majority of the votes cast and counted on Election Day, and many people legitimately disapprove of how Joe Biden got into the White House.

Blacks are being told that they are suffering systemic racism, as shown by the jury conviction of a female Minnesota police officer. As Ann Coulter explains and the NY Times omits, she was arresting the young half-Black man for trying to choke a woman to death while robbing her at gunpoint. He also shot a guy in the head. The policewoman was trying to hit him with a taser when he was resisting arrest.

She will now serve many years in prison for using more force than was intended.

Robots Deter Invasive Species

The NY Times is usually pro-immigration, but it now reports on efforts to stop invaders:

How to Scare an Invasive Fish? A Menacing Robot Predator. ...

The mosquitofish is not a fussy creature: It can live in filthy bodies of water and has an undiscerning appetite. Larvae? Other fishes’ eggs? Detritus? Delicious. Often, the voracious few-inch creature chomps off the tails of freshwater fish and tadpoles, leaving them to die.

But the invasive fish is threatening some native populations in Australia and other regions, and for decades scientists have been trying to figure out how to control it, without damaging the surrounding ecosystem.

Now, the mosquitofish may have finally met its match: A menacing fish-shaped robot.

It’s “their worst nightmare,” said Giovanni Polverino, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Western Australia and the lead author of a paper published Thursday in iScience, in which scientists designed a simulacrum of the fish’s natural predator, the largemouth bass, to strike at the mosquitofish, scaring it away from its prey.

The robot not only freaked the mosquitofish out, but scarred them with such lasting anxiety that their reproduction rates dropped; evidence that could have long term implications for the species’ viability, according to the paper.

“You don’t need to kill them,” Dr. Polverino said. Instead, he said, “we can basically inject fear into the system, and the fear kills them slowly.”

The research paper starts:

Human activities have resulted in the rapid redistribution of the world's biota, assisting some species to colonize regions far beyond their natural range

Here is another summary. Or here and here.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.

I post a lot of complaints about the direction America and the world are heading. But I am an optimist by nature. Things will get better. I wish everyone well.

Bill Gates Advocates Vaccine Censorship

I used to think that Bill Gates was a trustworthy source, on subjects like vaccines. Yes, he is invested in vaccines, but he has so much money that he can say whatever he thinks.

Now he advocates censorship, in his annual letter:

I believe that governments need to regulate what you can and can’t use social media for. In the United States, this topic has raised a lot of free speech questions. But the reality is that our government already has all sorts of norms around communication.

You can’t slander someone or trick them out of their money by promising something you don’t deliver on. Network TV shows can’t show explicit sex scenes or use certain profane language before 10 p.m. in case children are watching. These rules exist to protect people. So why couldn’t our government create new rules to protect them from the most tangible harms created by social media? They wouldn’t be easy to enforce, and we’d need public debate about exactly where the lines should be, but this is doable and really important to get done. A video falsely claiming that the COVID-19 vaccine makes you infertile should not be allowed to spread widely under the guise of being news.

Men only advocate censorship to suppress truths, not lies.

The covid vaccines have had adverse effects in many people. For most people, the benefits appear to outweigh the risks. But we can only assess those risks if we have open access to info on the subject.

Gates says that there should be laws prohibiting communication of covid vaccine ill effects.

You might say that we don't know if the vaccine caused the adverse effects, in most cases. That is true. But the vast majority of communication platforms are dominated by vaccine advocates who are able to get the safety evidence out to everyone. Wanting to suppress minority views about unproven risks can only have one explanation -- that Gates and others believe that the stupid public needs to be tricked into getting vaccines.

Once we know that they believe in outlawing info about adverse effects, how can we ever believe their safety evidence? The same reasoning would lead them to doctor the evidence in favor of what they want to trick you to doing.

CNN News reports:

A sixth child has died in hospital after a bouncy castle was lifted into the air at a school event in Australia late last week, police said Sunday.

Wow, 6 kids dead from a bouncy castle! This makes bouncy castles appear more dangerous than covid, to little kids. If Gates were as invested in bouncy castles as he is in vaccines, would he be lobbying for laws to suppress this news?

IQ Tests do Measure Intelligence

Professor Scott Aaronson defends colleges using standardized testing, and draws this silly anonymous comment:

It is a fact that minorities score worse on those tests than the standard advantaged classes. There are two possible explanations for this:

1) The tests are meritocratic, and minorities have less merit.
2) The tests are not meritocratic (and thus are probably reinforcing entrenched privilege, not eliminating it).

You do not seem to believe (2), which means you must believe (1). (1) could be explained by things like early childhood inequality (something like the iodine deficiencies of the early 1900s), but given the emphasis on meritocracy in adulthood I’m not sure how you plan on solving this as a generational thing even if you do believe it. And I don’t think you do. I think you, like the other Scott and like most people in your ideological sphere, believe that it’s genetic.

And I gotta be honest with you, Scott, I really don’t know how you can call yourself an advocate for social justice when you’re implicitly taking the stance “minorities are worse off because they’re naturally stupider”. Be a Bayesian for a second. Of all the people in history who claimed this, how many of them were right? Would they have been right when Ashkenazim were stuck in ghettoes for centuries, without a grand achievement to their name? Were they right when they closed the borders of Japan, believing nothing better could come from abroad? Were they right when they rolled their eyes at the challenge of some horseman from Mongolia?

When people have made this kind of claim they have, without exception, been wrong and been reflecting the biases of their time and culture. And the people promoting these claims today are obvious, active, and malignant racists (seriously, have you *seen* Steve Sailer talk?). Why on Earth would you listen to them, and why on Earth would you trust they’re not just manipulating you? Are you so arrogant as to believe you can definitely avoid manipulation, even by groups of bad-faith actors, often with the support of major governments?

This is wrong from beginning to end. First, some minorities score better on those tests.

No, iodine deficiencies cannot explain the differences.

Ashkenazi Jews were not thought to be of low intelligence. As far back as 1900, they were seen to have high IQ.

The advantage of those Mongolian horsemen was their stirrups. Not sure how that or Japanese nationalism relates to standardized testing.

IQ tests do measure intelligence differences between people. It is comical to see leftists try to deny it by citing someone a millennium ago rolling his eyes at a Mongolian horseman.

Many colleges are dropping standardized test requirements, but it is not because the tests fail to predict college performance. It is because they predict it too well.

On Being a Trans Abortion Provider

Medpage Today has this essay that appears to be satire, but is not:

On Being a Trans Abortion Provider

"I'm so glad it's all women in here."

As a family doctor and abortion provider, I hear this all the time. I know how important it is for many of the patients I care for to be seen by someone who shares their experiences. But I am not a woman.

I am trans. Getting dressed for every shift, I put on my they/them and he/him pronoun pins. Like many trans folx, I use multiple pronouns. Often these go unseen. People assume my gender based on what they've been taught about which bodies look like a woman and which bodies look like a man. ...

But what I cannot make space for is being misgendered by my colleagues. It is a daily occurrence. Sometimes followed by over-apologizing, asking me to excuse the mistake to assuage their discomfort at my own expense. It happens despite the pronoun pins and Zoom name. Despite me talking about how weird it is to give myself testosterone injections. Despite the they/he in my email signature on that email I sent months ago announcing my pronouns and asking for some basic inclusion. ...

There has been a concerted effort by some in the reproductive rights movement to make abortion more gender inclusive. Some clinics ask patients for their pronouns and some of those staff members will use them. Some organizations use "pregnant people" in their communications. The key phrase being "some." ...

Quinn Jackson, MD, (they/he) is a family medicine physician in Kansas and fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health.

So when Jackson was a girl, did she say that she wanted to do this when she grew up?

Here is some dubious sex-related research:

The notion that men are more variable than women has become embedded into scientific thinking. ... However, evidence for greater male variability is limited to morphological traits, and there is little information regarding sex differences in personality-like behaviours for non-human animals. ... In sum, we find no evidence for widespread sex differences in variability in non-human animal personality.

Their press release said:

The ANU team reviewed more than 10,000 biological studies and analysed behavioural traits of males and females in more than 200 animal species, from insects to dolphins. ...

"But our research in over 200 animal species shows variation in male and female behaviour is very similar. Therefore, there is no reason to invoke this argument based on biology to explain why more men than women are Nobel laureates, for example, which we associate with high IQ."

So they studies papers about insect and dolphin personalities, did not see much difference, and concluded that male Nobel prize winners are not any smarter than women. This is what statistician call a null result. Research looks for something, and does not find it.

Epstein Trial is Rigged

From the Ghislaine Maxwell trial:

The Defense … moved to permit three anticipated witnesses to testify under a pseudonym or their first names only…. The Defense's primary contention is that some form of anonymity for its witnesses is justified by the same reasons that the Court permitted three alleged victims and two related government witnesses to testify under pseudonyms. The Court disagrees with this basic premise and denies the Defense's motion.

She is going to get convicted by anonymous witnesses before a biased judge for things that supposedly happened 25 years ago, but no one can say when or where they happened.

She probably did cover up some crooked behavior, but this is just a show trial that seems to be also covering up what Jeffrey Epstein did. Strange.

City Helps Drug Dealers Compete

News:

San Francisco supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved an ordinance to suspend the city’s Cannabis Business Tax through the end of next year, in an attempt to curb illegal marijuana sales.

This is one indication that the city's priorities are disordered. For more, see the book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

How Schools get CRT and other Woke Training

Andrew Joyce writes:

In August, California’s Newport-Mesa Unified School District voted to continue its relationship with the ADL, but “with modifications.” The school district was the victim of an ADL shakedown in March 2019, after it was revealed that some drunken students from Newport Harbor High School arranged cups in the shape of a swastika at an off-campus party. After the prank was made viral by a malcontent, the ADL swooped on the instance of “abhorrent anti-Semitic activity” and shamed the nervous school board into accepting a rapidly escalating series of contracts for anti-bias training for staff and students.

The minutes of the school boards meetings are publicly available, and contain the actual contracts with the ADL which run to the value of some $96,650 over a two-year period for anti-bias and pro-immigration training sessions. The shakedown started to come apart in August, when board members began to question the transparency and cost of their agreements with the ADL, as well as the content of ADL training courses. In response to parents objecting to the school district’s relationship with the ADL on the grounds that it was “bringing critical race theory into the classroom,” the school district “reviewed the proposed contract and recommended eliminating second-level anti-bias courses for school employees.” Unfortunately, the most damaging aspect of ADL ‘training”—their lessons for children—remain in place (at a cost of $27,800), prompting Anti-Defamation League Regional Director Peter Levi to gloat, “We have long believed education is the best antidote to hate and bias.”

What BLM Stands For

In case you support Black Lives Matter, you should hear what its leaders actually say.

From BlackLivesMatter.com:

The below is a statement from Dr. Melina Abdullah, Director of BLM Grassroots and Co-Founder of BLM Los Angeles, regarding the ongoing trial of Jussie Smollett:

As abolitionists, we approach situations of injustice with love and align ourselves with our community. Because we got us. So let’s be clear: we love everybody in our community. It’s not about a trial or a verdict decided in a white supremacist charade, it’s about how we treat our community when corrupt systems are working to devalue their lives. In an abolitionist society, this trial would not be taking place, ...

In our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom. ...

Black Lives Matter will continue to work towards the abolition of police and every unjust system.

Smollett was found guilty of perpetrating a hate hoax.

Wikipedia:

Melina Abdullah (born Melina Rachel Reimann on September 18, 1972)[1] is an American academic, Marxist and civic leader. She is the former chair of the department of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and a co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter.

Melina Rachel Reimann was born on September 18, 1972 at East Oakland, Oakland, California, U.S.[2] Her father, John Reimann, was "a union organizer and self-proclaimed Trotskyist."[2] Her mother is Linda Fowler Blackston and she was raised by Oji "Baba" Blackston. Her paternal grandfather was Günter Reimann (born Hans Steinicke), a German-Jewish Marxist economist and member of the Communist Party of Germany ...

Abdullah is a self-described "womanist scholar-activist". ...

Abdullah is a tenured professor and served as chair of the department of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. ...

Reimann changed her surname to Abdullah due to her marriage to filmmaker Phaylen Abdullah and kept the name after their divorce.[

Abdullah is a supporter of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.

Wow.

A blogger writes:

Radical feminist Brittany Cooper recently responded to being called out on her stance that the Black nuclear family isn’t necessary for Black children to thrive by doubling down on her comments.

While Cooper said she is “pro-family” and “pro-family planning,” she was clear in her opinion that it isn’t necessary for a family to include a mother and father to raise successful children.

“We don’t need traditional nuclear families for Black thriving,” Cooper said in a Twitter thread. “As one raised by my mother, grandmother and aunts I can attest. We should support families however they are configured to provide basic needs in loving and safe environments. That’s what being pro-Black family means.” ...

In Sept. 2020. Black Lives Matter removed a page and language from its website that some, including former NFL lineman Marcellus Wiley, deemed problematic.

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” the website formerly read, according to the New York Post.

Okay, I guess the nuclear family is a tool of the White supremacist patriarchy.

How Biden is Destroying Girls Sports

Doriane Coleman writes:

The House of Representatives (in passing The Equality Act) and the Biden Administration (in Title IX litigation) have taken the position that distinctions on the basis of sex in regulated programs are prohibited, no exceptions, full stop. According to them, maybe we can still have "girls'" and "women's" sport, but if we do, the eligibility standards for the category can't discriminate on the basis of sex, which they define to include gender identity. In other words, "women's" sports can include both males and females without regard to their gender identity or their physical status. They've provided no explanation for what makes the categories meaningful in light of this.

I thought that I was going to like this article, but she goes on to advocate boys competing in girls sports if certain conditions are met.

A lot of her argument is based on testosterone levels. She writes: 

On average, even in the elite athlete population, males have 30 times more T than females. ...

For example, swimmer and multiple Gold Medalist Missy Franklin is six feet two inches tall with a wing span of six feet four inches. Her world record in the 200 meters backstroke, set at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, is 2:04.06. Ryan Lochte's world record, set at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, was a full nine seconds faster at 1:53.94.

Actually, a full ten seconds.

I don't think the arguments for girls sports have anything to do with Missy Franklin's testosterone level or wing span. Girls are different from boys in many ways, and it is for cultural reasons that we separate them in sports, not reasons of testosterone fairness.

Title IX was adopted for fairness in educational programs, and does not even mention sports.  

J.K. Rowling has made a lot of enemies, and now tweets:

War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.

Almost all of the controversy is from choosing to distinguish sex from gender, allowing people to choose a gender identity not matching the sex, and changing sex distinctions to gender distinctions.

I am not sure that distinguishing sex and gender serves any useful purpose legally, or in sports competition. The main purpose of the distinction is to play out the fantasies of drag queens.

It is funny that Rowling is the world's greatest creator of a fantasy world, and now she is hated for bringing a dose of reality to the fantasies of drag queens.

Update: I am beginning to think that elite female sports should be abolished. Wokeness is on a collision course with reality.

Update: Here is a review article on testosterone effects. Regulating levels in transgender athletes does not work.

NY Times Beating the Drums for Civil War

I hope we find a way to avoid civil war, but the mainstream press sees it as more likely all the time.

NY Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall writes:

Political analysts, scholars and close observers of government are explicitly raising the possibility that the polarized American electoral system has come to the point at which a return to traditional democratic norms will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. ...

On Dec. 10, The Washington Post published “18 Steps to a Democratic Breakdown,” which warned:

Democracy is most likely to break down through a series of incremental actions that cumulatively undermine the electoral process, resulting in a presidential election that produces an outcome clearly at odds with the voters’ will. It is this comparatively quiet but steady subversion, rather than a violent coup or insurrection against a sitting president, that Americans today have to fear most.

We have already had a Presidential election, in Nov. 2020, that was clearly at odds with the voters' will on Election Day.

And columnist Charles Blow writes:

I see too many uneasy parallels between what was happening nearly 200 years ago and what is happening now. I see this country on the verge of another civil war, as the Calhounian impulse is reborn.

Right-wing and conservative opinions have not changed too much. A large faction of the Democrats have jumped radically to the Left, and show no interest in compromising.

Update: Wash. Post columnist Dana Milbank writes:

“Indeed, the United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency — the “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” phases — and only time will tell whether the final phase, “open insurgency,” began with the sacking of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6. …

The enemies of democracy must not be allowed to prevail. We are on the doorstep of the “open insurgency” stage of civil conflict, and Walter writes that once countries cross that threshold, the CIA predicts, “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes.”

It is no exaggeration to say the survival of our country is at stake.”

I think that i t is an exaggeration, but it is worthwhile noticing that liberal news media see it this way.

Almost a Billion Dollars for One Physician's Behavior

NPR Radio reports:

USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee have agreed to pay a $380 million settlement to hundreds of survivors of sexual abuse by former team doctor Larry Nassar. ...

The deal grew out of a bankruptcy filing by USA Gymnastics in 2018, with a federal judge in Indiana approving the settlement Monday afternoon. ...

It is a defeat for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and USA Gymnastics who spent over $100,000,000 in legal fees,

This is in addition to a $500 million settlement from Michigan State University.

One of the claimants was Simone Biles, who was recently Time magazine sportsman of the year. Time praised her for quitting some Olympic events in order to preserve her mental health.

This is all very fishy. How could defense lawyers burn this much money? What will the plaintiffs lawyers get, $200 million?

This settlements are based on a theory that Michican State and USA Gymnastics somehow knew that Nassar was a child molester, and encouraged his crimes. However that seems very unlikely, as no one anywhere approves of physicians molesting underage girls.

I wonder how much of this case has been driven by lawyers sniffing deep pockets.

Professor Fired for Confusing Two Students

Professors today have to walk on eggshells.

The NY Post reports:

A Fordham University professor was fired after mixing up the names of two black students in class, according to a report.

Hours after what he called an “innocent mistake,” lecturer Christopher Trogan, 46, sent a rambling, nine-page email to students in his Composition II classes explaining the faux pas — and defending, without being asked, his “entire life” of working on “issues of justice, equality, and inclusion,” the campus newspaper reported.

“The offended student assumed my mistake was because I confused that student with another Black student,” Trogan wrote, according to a Nov. 29 article in the Fordham Observer. “I have done my best to validate and reassure the offended student that I made a simple, human, error. It has nothing to do with race.”

He blamed the mistake on his “confused brain” when the two students arrived to class late on Sept. 24, while he was reading a classmate’s work.

It used to be that students were blamed for being late to class.

Head can be a Plural Noun

Think of a word to describe a single animal. Change the third letter to get a word that describes the plural of that animal. Both are nouns, and neither word contains an "s."

The solution is:

HEAD, HERD, as in: The farmer had 123 head of cattle in his herd.

I sent this in as the obvious intended answer, but it makes no sense to me.

The word "head" in that sentence refers to all 123 animals, not a single animal. The clue is wrong.

It can be used for the singular, such as:

Owners are charged a per diem for each head of livestock pastured.

Yes, but i could also say I sold each sheep for $100, and then sheep would refer to one animal in that sentence. But the word "sheep" is still a collective noun that can refer to any number of animals.

The Great Men of History

Interview of historian Patrick Wyman:

His new book, The Verge, focuses on the years 1490 to 1530. It’s a four-decade period that, Wyman explains, laid the groundwork for Western European nations — and later, the United States — to become the dominant players for the next 500 years. At the start of the period, Western Europe was largely a backwater, a collection of far-flung ministates that produced little in the way of goods anyone else wanted to buy. Those countries lagged far behind the Ottoman Empire or Imperial China or a host of other civilizations around the globe. But by the end of the period — thanks to a breathtaking series of technological changes, historical accidents, and decisions that were little understood at the time — these nations had laid the groundwork for dominating the globe.

I think he is right that the advances get overcredited to a few great men, like Christopher Columbus.

List of 1963 Communist Goals

In order to get a better understanding of our storm clouds, let’s exam a few of the 45 Communist, and by extension Socialist and Progressive, goals that have been read into our Congressional Record:

Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

Get control of the schools and teachers’ associations. Soften the curriculum.

Gain control of all student newspapers.

Infiltrate the press.

Gain control of key positions in radio, TV and pictures.

Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and press.

Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in the media.

Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, and healthy.”

Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion.

Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the grounds that it violates the principal of “separation of church and state.”

Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate and old-fashioned.

Discredit the American founding fathers as selfish aristocrats [and racists].

Belittle American culture and discourage the teaching of American history.

Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

Infiltrate and gain control of big business and unions.

Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as mental health or social problems.

Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents.

Repeal the Connally Reservation, allowing the World Court jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.

There are groups still pursuing these goals, successfully, without calling themselves Communists.

Atlantic Magazine supports Great Replacement

An Atlantic magazine article complains:

Pape was alluding to a theory called the “Great Replacement.” The term itself has its origins in Europe. But the theory is the latest incarnation of a racist trope that dates back to Reconstruction in the United States. Replacement ideology holds that a hidden hand (often imagined as Jewish) is encouraging the invasion of nonwhite immigrants, and the rise of nonwhite citizens, to take power from white Christian people of European stock. When white supremacists marched with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, they chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”

I am trying to uderstand this. Jews seem to have two complaints here, against (1) Whites who say Jews promote importing non-whites to replace Whites; and (2) Whites who say Jews will not replace Whites.

Either way, this is an issue that Jews talk about endlessly. Joe Biden said that it was the reason that he ran for President.

For an example of Hollywood Jews advocating White Replacement, see the new Santa Inc trailer. Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen are openly anti-Christian, and push diversity as a way of replacing White Christian men, including Santa Claus. The show is supposed to be funny, but is bombing:

The show’s first (and possibly only) season was released in full on Thursday (December 2), and has thus far been majorly panned by viewers. Feather imdb 90.6 percent rating out of 5,236 viewers Santa Inc. a star; It has an overall score of 1.1 out of 10, making it the lowest-rated TV series in the site’s history. over on rotten Tomatoes, only three percent of the rated audience Santa Inc. Gave favorable marks. ...

Controversy erupted even before its release, with its trailers being targeted by alleged far-right hate groups spreading anti-Semitic comments (the majority of the show’s producers and cast are Jewish).

So Jews make an unfunny anti-Christian movie, and it is anti-Semitic to criticize it.

Emmett Till Case Closed, after 66 years

Tjhe NY Times is getting more racially woke every day. Consider this: exmplae of Whites telling Blacks how to respect Mexican transsexuals:

In California, a Black college freshman from the South is telling a story about his Latino friends from home when he is interrupted by a white classmate. “We say ‘Latinx’ here,” he recalls her saying, using a term he had not heard before, “because we respect trans people.”

Or this complaint about Whites moving into a Black neighborhood, and reading books. Or this Black man feeling death looming, and he is not talking about Blacks killing Whites.

The NY Times reports today on a 1955 lynching:

The Justice Department announced on Monday that it had closed an investigation into the abduction and murder of Emmett Till, the African American teenager whose gruesome killing by two white men more than six decades ago in Mississippi helped begin the civil rights movement.

In a news release dated Dec. 6, federal officials said there was not enough evidence to pursue charges in the case, which was reopened after a historian claimed in a book that Carolyn Bryant Donham, the central witness whose account of an encounter with Emmett led to his death, had recanted the most salacious portions of her story — that he had grabbed her and made sexually suggestive remarks. ...

In a statement on Monday, the Justice Department said Mr. Tyson, despite saying he had recorded two interviews with Ms. Donham, provided just one recording to the F.B.I. that did not contain a recantation.

So it appears that the case had been kept alive by lies.

In articles about racism in America, the 1955 story of Emmett Till is often mentioned. It is almost as if one criminal act 66 years ago proves systemic racism.

There are some hot trials still going on today: Ghislaine Maxwell, Jussie Smollett, and Elizabeth Holmes. Probably all three will be guilty.

Not a vaxxer or an anti-vaxxer

Merriam-Webster now defines:

Definition of anti-vaxxer
: a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination

This is bizarre.

First, the English language does not use a double-x. Someone who boxes is a boxer, not a boxxer. A tax collector would be a taxer, not a taxxer.

Second, someone against mandates is anti-mandate.

Would someone call himself anti-abortion if he is against abortion mandates? Anti-gun if he is against gun mandates?

I believe medicine should be based on informed consent, but such a view is not defined as anti-vaxxer.

Supreme Court Opinion does not apply to Private Parties

Salon article:

I was one of the lawyers who helped win marriage equality. And yes, the GOP can take it away
And they might not even need another landmark legal battle to do it

Knowing that the courts will demur, could the GOP launch a similarly successful offensive on marriage equality? You bet. It's already happening.

A couple of weeks ago, a letter from a Texas state representative calling on the Attorney General to declare that private citizens can ignore federal law was making the rounds on social media. ...

The Republican Party Platform, a 66-page conniption fit, mentions the word "marriage" 19 times and the phrase "one man and one woman" five times under three separate headings ("Religious Liberty," "Marriage, Family, and Society," and "Defending Marriage Against an Activist Judiciary"). If the GOP can get the gun to the head of marriage equality, you'd better believe they'll squeeze the trigger. The question is: How will they go about it?

The letter says:

The State of Texas has not amended or repealed its marriage laws in response to Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015). And the Supreme Court has no power to amend formally or revoke a state statute or constitutional provision — even after opining that the state law violates the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. See Pidgeon v. Turner, 538 S.W.3d 73, 88 n.21 (Tex. 2017) (“[N]either the Supreme Court in Obergefell nor the Fifth Circuit in De Leon ‘struck down’ any Texas law. When a court declares a law unconstitutional, the law remains in place unless and until the body that enacted it repeals it”); Texas v. United States, 945 F.3d 355, 396 (5th Cir. 2019) (“The federal courts have no authority to erase a duly enacted law from the statute books, [but can only] decline to enforce a statute in a particular case or controversy.” (citations and internal quotation marks omitted)). The federal judicial power extends only to the resolution of cases and controversies between litigants. The fact that a federal district court has enjoined state officials from enforcing the Texas marriage laws1 in no way affects the existence or validity of those laws with regard to private parties, who are not even bound by the Fourteenth Amendment — let alone the Supreme Court’s purported interpretations of it. See Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).

California is the most leftist state, and its constitution says that marriage is between a man and a woman. The gay lobby has made no serious attempt to remove this clause.

This is not a loophole. The gay lobby probably could have legalized same-sex marriage in some states, but they decided to bet everything on everyone going along with a majority opinion on the Supreme Court regarding death certificates and estate taxes.

It hasn't happened. I would not be surprised for the courts to say that they have no authority to force private parties to recognize a marriage that is not a marriage under statutory law or religious tradition.

The recent Supreme Court abortion arguments had the liberals mostly arguing in favor of authoritarianism:

[Justice Sotomayor] Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?

To ask the question is to admit the stench.

How Medicine got Corrupted

Psychiatrist Sally Satel writes in Quillette:

Twenty-one years ago, I wrote a book called PC, M.D. How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine. One chapter explored “multicultural counseling,” a form of therapy that encouraged white clinicians to ask themselves, “what responsibility do you hold for the racist oppressive and discriminating manner by which you personally and professionally deal with minorities?” ...

Today, the Indoctrinologists are officially in.

She goes on to describe the situation today. It is so much worse, that it is a wonder what she could have been complaining about 20 years ago.

She concedes:

I strongly agree that much of black Americans’ disadvantage in health and access to care is the cumulative product of legal, political, and social institutions that have historically discriminated, and sometimes continue to discriminate, against them. Systemic racism may indeed have broad explanatory value regarding health disparities,

People say this, but with no data to back it up. I doubt it. Do Blacks get better treatment in African countries? No. Blacks come to the USA, and they do not leave.

AIDS Unfairly Infects Certain Groups

In 2013, a woman got fired for jokingly tweeting: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

Apparently people were offended by the observation that gay Black men get AIDS more than others, but not it is San Francisco news:

President Joe Biden on Wednesday unveiled his new HIV/AIDS strategy to end the more than 40-year-old epidemic, calling for a renewed focus on vulnerable Americans — including gay and bisexual Black and Latino men, who his administration says are too often stigmatized even as they are disproportionately affected.

Under current wokeism, we must have policies so that the White female AIDS incidence matches that of gay Black men.

Anti-racism is a Form of Anti-Whitism

Ibram X. Kendi writes in Atlantic magazine:

“critical race theory is explicitly anti-white,” to use the words of Christopher F. Rufo, a travel-documentary filmmaker turned leading critic of CRT. At his final campaign rally, in Loudoun County, Virginia, Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin said, “What we won’t do is teach our children to view everything through a lens of race where we divide them into buckets and one group is an oppressor and the other is a victim and we pit them against each other and we steal their dreams.”

Republicans provoked a backlash against CRT, which they also call anti-racism or wokism. Their backlash won 2021 elections. “But it wasn’t a backlash of parents,” William Saletan found in his close study of polling data. “It was a backlash of white people.”

How many Americans know that the claim that anti-racism is harmful to white people is one of the basic mantras of white-supremacist ideology? Americans are familiar with white-supremacist movements like the Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the Proud Boys. But they don’t seem to recognize white-supremacist ideology—the most venomous form of racist ideology. I suspect that many Americans don’t know how much white-supremacist ideology shapes their political thought and America’s political discourse, and allows juries to exonerate racism and convict anti-racism.

He wants Whitew to pay reparations to Blacks until Blacks have as much money as Whites.

Those supposed white-supremacist movements probably have a combined membership of less than a thousand people. Meanwhile Wokism has taken over all of the major centers of power and influence.

I found this definition:

Anti-Whiteism or Anti-Whitism [an-ti-white-is-um]

noun

1 all concepts, ideologies, actions and everything derived therefrom (such as opinions, policies, laws, rules) that inflict injury on white people i.e. European people.

2 hostility towards whites.

3 the infliction of harm on whites by many implicit and explicit means and methods.

4 presupposing that whites are more privileged (a common myth) and therefore must be brought to non existence and ultimately white-erased.

5 the personal hate of whites because the whiteness of their skin. this case is often called (anti-Whiteness) Note: Anti-Whiteness or Whiteness is a term used by Anti-Whites to mean whites are inherently racist and must rid themselves of their “Whiteness”. This term is not recognized by the white community.

Clarification of use: Anti-White does NOT mean Anti-racist.

Yes, Kendi is anti-whitist.

It is interesting to see how antisemitism compares to antiwhitism. The NY Times reports:

Éric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist who officially declared on Tuesday that he is running in next April’s presidential election, is the loudest and most extreme voice of French racism today. ...

The great irony is that Mr. Zemmour, twice convicted of inciting racial hatred and discrimination, is a Jew ...

With the advent of mass immigration from France’s former colonies, antisemitism was largely replaced by anti-Black and, especially, anti-Arab racism. ...

for Mr. Zemmour there is no crime for which Muslims are not guilty. The cause of exurbanization, with working people forced to drive to work from their distant homes? The immigrant “occupation” of cities and their suburbs. The spread of drugs? All immigrants’ unaccompanied minors are drug dealers. The cause of resource shortages in hospitals? Immigrants’ abuse of a system to which they don’t contribute.

His solution to these problems — and every other — is simple. Like the antisemites of France’s past, he wants to reduce the presence of immigrants in the country’s life.

The immigration is making France less French, and a less desirable place to live.

Thses articles regularly conflate race with religion. Islam is not a race, and those who are anti-Islam do not like white Moslems.

"Semite" is a racial category, while Judaism is a religion, and Israel is a nation. There is no agreement on whether anti-Israel people should be called antisemitic.

Likewise, some who are anti-American are really anti-white. It is not always clear whether they are against the race, the nation, or Christianity.

All the News that Fits We Print

A libertarian law professor writes:

All the News that Fits We Print

According to the New York Post and some other conservative media, Darrell Brooks, the man who drove his car into a parade in Waukesha killing at least six people, had pro-Hitler, anti-semitic and violently anti-white material on his social media account. Googling on [Darrell Brooks Hitler] I found no mention of it in any mainline source. The New York Times has a long story on Brooks with no mention of those facts — and the claim that "The suspect’s motivations are unclear." The Wall Street Journal has had multiple stories on Brooks but I cannot find any mentioning the social media.

It is possible that the conservative sources are lying but I think it unlikely, since if they were I would expect the NYT or other left of center media to call them on it. It looks very much as though the mainline media are deliberately hiding facts they don't want their readers to know.

Yes, they are deliberately hiding facts.

In Kenosha Wisconsin, there was a violent White male rioter who went around starting fires and calling people the N-word, but those mainline news media called Kyle Rittenhouse the racist instead.

An NPR Radio story starts:

From Charlottesville to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, the public has come to realize that white supremacists pose as much, if not more, of a threat as Islamic extremists.

It goes on to tell a story about how Somali Moslems invaded a Kansas town, and some FBI informants discussed a bomb plot.

There was no Jan. 6 insurrection. There was a Black cop who shot and killed and unarmed White woman, but no white supremacists were involved. No Whites killed anyone. In Charlottesvilles, a White guy did drive a car into a crowd, but it was not near as bad as the Waukesha driver.

More Dubious Trials

This must be the season for dubious trials.

Ghislaine Maxwell appears to be a stand-in for sex-trafficking charges against the deceased Jeffrey Epstein. She and Epstein may be guilty of somehting, but the charges are unconvincing. First, they are all for events that happened over 25 years ago. Second, the charges are very vague, and do not say where and when the supposed illegal acts took place. Third, half the charges are for conspiracy and perjury.

It is hard to believe that they abused dozens of girls, and no one complained until 25 years later. I would not be surprised if she is innocent of the main charge of "enticing", but guilty of uncharged crimes.

The complainers are all prostitutes and gold diggers. They got paid for their services, and now they seek to cash in by telling 25-year-old stories that no one can verify.

We still don't know how Epstein made his fortune, or how he got so friendly with so many big-shots. There are rumors that he was running an extortion racket. It is hard to believe that Epstein made that much money legitimately, without any paper trail. Maxwell surely knows, but isn't talking. This trial is unlikely to give us any answers.

Elizabeth Holmes is on trial for Theranos. Yes, she was running a scam, but she is largely on trial for the Silicon Valley game plan of fake it until you make it. Her investors should not have been so gullible.

Too bad federal trials cannot be televised.

The NY Times reports:

Prosecutors who say Bill Cosby belongs in prison are asking the United States Supreme Court to throw out an appellate court ruling earlier this year that overturned his 2018 conviction for sexual assault on due process grounds. Mr. Cosby walked free from prison in June after serving less than three years of a three-to-10-year sentence. ... Patricia Steuer, 65, who has accused Mr. Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in 1978 and 1980, said that although she appreciated the effort to appeal what she viewed as a flawed decision, she was not optimistic about the outcome.

This is sick. That was over 40 years ago. They were only able to convict Cosby by denying his constitutional rights, and flooding the court with recovered-memory accusations.

The Masculinity Gap

Noah Carl writes:

The gap in masculinity between the left and the right seems to have widened over time. In the early 20th century, the left was as masculine as the right, or nearly so. Today, the right is unquestionably more masculine. What happened? ... The remainder of this post reviews nine separate publications, covering several different methodologies, which all triangulate on the same conclusion: the right is more masculine than the left.

There is also an IQ gap.

American Journal of Psychology:

The past 30 years of research in intelligence has produced a wealth of knowledge about the causes and consequences of differences in intelligence between individuals, and today mainstream opinion is that individual differences in intelligence are caused by both genetic and environmental influences. ...

In this article I discuss 5 lines of research that provide evidence that mean differences in intelligence between racial and ethnic groups are partially genetic.

This should not be surprising. Intelligence evolved because it is heritable and useful. Group differences are expected.

This has little consequence, if you treat people as individuals.

If you are committed to Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, then it is crucial. It means that racial differences cannot be attributed to racism or socioeconomic background. They are genetic. In part, at least.

The Left keeps saying that we need a racial reckoning. Okay, figure out the genes for intelligence differences. If you are not doing that, then you are not even getting started.

The Salvation Army gets Woke

The Chriatmas season is starting, that means the Salvation Army will be out collecting donations. Do not give. It has turned anti-White.

News:

The Salvation Army wants its white donors to give it more than just money this Christmas season. Its leadership is also demanding they apologize for being racist.

It's part of a push by the Christian charitable organization to embrace the ideas of Black Lives Matter, an activist group working to, among other things, "dismantle white privilege" and "disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure."

The Salvation Army's Alexandria-based leadership has created an "International Social Justice Commission" which has developed and released a "resource" to educate its white donors, volunteers and employees called Let's Talk about Racism. It asserts Christianity is institutionally racist, calling for white Christians to repent and offer "a sincere apology" to blacks for being "antagonistic.. to black people or the culture, values and interests of the black community."

"Many have come to believe that we live in a post-racial society, but racism is very real for our brothers and sisters who are refused jobs and housing, denied basic rights and brutalized and oppressed simply because of the color of their skin," one lesson explains. "There is an urgent need for Christians to evaluate racist attitudes and practices in light of our faith, and to live faithfully in today’s world."

In an accompanying Study Guide on Racism, Salvation Army authors explain that all whites are racist, even if they don't realize it.

“The subtle nature of racism is such that people who are not consciously racist easily function with the privileges, empowerment and benefits of the dominant ethnicity, thus unintentionally perpetuating injustice," it says.

"Sunday school curriculum that only uses white photography and imagery" is an example given that perpetuates injustice.

"We must stop denying the existence of individual and systemic/ institutional racism. They exist, and are still at work to keep White Americans in power," the lesson says.

"These systems give privileges to white people"

Think about that, if you consider donating to a man in a Santa outfit with a Salvation Army bucket. You would be donating to a racist organization that is working to exterminate White people.

Big Cities are Victims of Looting

The term "looting" is now considered racist, so we see organized smash and grab.

CNN reports:

A wave of "smash-and-grab" crimes is plaguing upscale stores in major US cities, with mobs of thieves making off with expensive goods in brazen, nighttime raids.

At least 18 people broke into a Nordstrom department store in Los Angeles Monday night and stole thousands of dollars in merchandise, the city's police chief said.

The thefts followed a rash of similar incidents over the weekend in the San Francisco Bay Area. A group of thieves swarmed the Southland Mall in Hayward on Sunday evening, wielding hammers to smash cases at a jewelry store before grabbing items and fleeing.

The Leftists Dems continue to make heros out of some of the worst scum. Arbery, the Rittenhouse attackers, the Waukesha killer driver, Ferguson's Michael Brown, etc. were all career criminals that nobody wants to be living near.

to No, they are not all Black. If you want to live in a civilized society, then we need aggressive law enforcement to keep these guys in jail.

Instead we have Democrats who are aggressively letting these criminals out of jail.

Georgia has convicted the citizens who tried to confront Arbery. Evey the bystander neighbor who recorded the video has been convicted of murder. The state has also passed a hate crime law, and a law abolishing most citizens arrests.

These changes seem very bad to me. In traditional American law, the police are not really that powerful. Their power to arrest suspects and use lethal force is not that much different from that of ordinary citizens.

The authoritarian Left wants to change that. They want stronger police powers and weaker citizen rights. Before long, the police will be enforcing vaccine mandates by forcibly injecting resisters, and citizens will not be allowed to carry guns.

Researchers Ignore what is Abhorrent

Researchers often just look for what they want to see. Social science researchers often exclude possibilities that seem philosophically objectionable. Here is an example.

Julia Galef said:

I wanted to tell you when you were talking about how common it is in a lot of social science research to just ignore the alternate hypothesis that genes are causing the correlation, as opposed to the parenting causing the outcomes... It reminded me very much of my experience reading through a lot of the research on — as I was researching for my book — the research on how self perception affects your success.

Julia: Because there's all these studies looking at how people's self image affects their success at various things. And the conclusion is always: “You should have a positive self image, because people with positive self images tend to be more successful.”

And either it's just not acknowledged that a possible alternate explanation is that people with positive self images are more likely to actually have positive traits that help them succeed... Either that's not acknowledged, or occasionally it is acknowledged, and just dismissed out of hand as, “Well, of course not.”

I remember this one paper where they were reporting these results, and then there was a footnote where it said “Some people might object that people with positive self image have greater inherent talent than people without. But we can dismiss that, as it is obviously abhorrent.”

Wow. If you discover that success is correlated with positive self-image, then the obvious explanation to test is that the success causes the positive self-image, and failure causes negative self-image. But the reseearcher refused to even consider the possibility!

I don't even see why it would be abhorrent. It seems good and natural that success would improve self-image. Don't we want to succeed in order to improve ourselves?

I can only guess that there is some leftist repulsion of some people doing something to make themselves better than others. But the reverse causality seems abhorrent to me.

Michael Shermer writes:

Scientific American Goes Woke

A case study in how identity politics poisons science

In April of 2001 I began my monthly Skeptic column at Scientific American, the longest continuously published magazine in the country dating back to 1845.

He goes on to explain how the magazine became leftist and unscientific, and rejected his columns with comments like these:

But we’re unwilling to publish a piece that suggests — even in a quote attributed to someone else [Carol Tavris] — that sexual harassment and the phenomenon of abused children growing up to be abusers are less of a problem than most people imagine. ...

You say, essentially, that things are better, especially for minorities of various kinds, than ever in history, your evidence being, basically, “you can look it up.” It may be true ...

Driving while black” is still a thing, as is getting shot by cops ... And worldwide, fascist and authoritarian regimes are on the increase.

In essence, you cannot report facts if they counter exaggerated stories that usefully promote a leftist narrative.

Here is a NY Times article complaining about scientists collecting data:

In 1981, when scientists in Hungary sampled the blood of Roma people incarcerated in Hungarian prisons, they classified prisoners as Romani based solely on their appearance, which the authors of the new paper argue is unscientific.

In 1993, another group sampling Romani DNA concluded that there were three distinct ethnic groups in the country, drawing a line between “the genuine Hungarian ethnical groups” and “Jews” and “Gypsies” — a research premise the authors of the new paper argue was racist.

Any data collected inevitably draws attention to differences between ethnic groups.

More Dubious Jury Verdicts

The past week has been big for jury verdicts.

Breitbart reports:

A mistrial was declared in the murder trial of 48-year-old illegal alien Billy Chemirmir, accused of murdering 24 elderly Americans across Collin County and Dallas County, Texas, as the jury remained “hopelessly deadlocked” 11-to-1. ...

Rather than being deported — and thus making him ineligible to ever secure legal status in the U.S. — Chemirmir was able to use a loophole in the nation’s legal immigration system, allowing him to obtain a green card after marrying an American citizen. In November 2007, Chemirmir was approved for a green card.

Chemirmir had a criminal record, Breitbart News exclusively learned, including convictions for drunk driving, trespassing, assault, and obstructing a police officer.

The Georgia jury convicted the three White men in the Arbery trial, and now a prosecutor is being prosecuted for an administrative decision not to prosecute:

Yet the theatrics from the defense have diverted scrutiny away from the seediness of the original prosecutor, Jackie Johnson, who in September was indicted on criminal charges for violating her oath of office and obstructing police when she allegedly showed the McMichaels favorable treatment and ensured they would not be arrested after Arbery's death.

Such charges against prosecutors are almost unheard of.

I did not follow this case closely. They convicted the neighbor who recorded the video. I don't see how that can be murder.

The Wash. Post announces:

Here's what we know so far on the sequence of events that led to the Waukesha tragedy caused by a SUV.

No, it was not a tragedy caused by an SUV. It was a murderous attack by a crazy pro-Hitler, Trump-hating, anti-White Black man who drove an SUV into a Christmas parade. At least they raised his bail from $1,000.

Here is his picture.

The one on the left is his real picture. The one on the right is what was shown in CNN, where they lightened his skin so that he would not look Black.

Jury Bankrupts Charlottesville Rally Organizers

This more bad news for free speech. Dozens of lawyers and millions of dollars were used to sue some political activists into bankruptcy.

BuzzFeed reports:

A Charlottesville Jury Ordered White Nationalists To Pay $25 Million To Victims Of The "Unite The Right" Rally

The jury found the white nationalists violated Virginia state laws, but they could not reach a verdict on federal conspiracy charges.

Apparently the trial consisted mostly of a character assassination.

I am no fan of the defendants. They could be all racists and horrible people, for all I know. But all they did was to organize a political rally in favor of preserving Civil War monuments. Their rally was canceled when counter-protesters showed up and started a riot, and police did not stop it.

One man got caught in the riot, and appeared to panic and drive his car into a crowd. One woman died. He was found to have a racist paper trail, so he is in prison for the rest of his life.

It did not look like murder to me, but I did not follow the trial. He had nothing to do with the organizers. The organizers had left by the time the riots started.

I doubt that the plaintiffs will collect as much money as they spent on the lawsuit. So why did they do it? They obviously want to initimidate right-wingers out of existence. Very few will dare defend something like a Civil War monument now.

The London Guardian has this complaint:

In America, it is reasonable to believe that Black people are scary. ...

The idea of the “scary Black person” manifests itself in every segment of the US criminal justice system. ...

The Rittenhouse verdict is proof that it is reasonable to believe that the fear of Black people can absolve a white person of any crime.

The only scary Black man in the case was Jump Kick Man, but his race was withheld from the jury.

The scary Black men are the ones the Left has lionized -- Trayvon Martin, Ferguson's Michael Brown, the Waukesha WI man who just drove an SUV into a Christmas parade, etc.

Not all Blacks are criminals, of course, or apologists for crime and parasitism. Here is one who has been driven to conservatism:

Seventy-three-year-old Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, was a conservative, then a progressive, and now he’s back on the right: “What has happened to public discourse about race has radicalized me.” ...

Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government. Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps. Loury asserted that as a Black man he is the proud inheritor of the great Western tradition: “Tolstoy is mine! Dickens is mine! Milton, Marx, and Einstein are mine!” He declared that his people are Black, but also proudly American. “Our Americanness is much more important than our Blackness,” he said, before adding, “We must strive to transcend racial particularism and stress universality and commonality as Americans.” This is the classical-liberal case against racial separatism and in favor of integration.

The rest of the essay is a Jewish complaint that, while Jews control most of the media and culture, there is a strain of Christian conservatism that is not under their control.

Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere. The public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite. If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.

Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order — a collective cultural identity.

The history of Judaism demonstrates, Haivry argues, that you don’t need a state or a political order to be a nation.

For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian — and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate.

The Orthodox Jews probably are better off if America becomes a more Christian nation. It is mostly the non-orthodox Jews who are at war with Christianity.

Update: Trial commentary here and here.

What this verdict means is that white Americans have effectively lost their First Amendment right of assembly. The precedent this sets: from now on, if white Americans dare to exercise their right to assemble and protest for the redress of their grievances in our increasingly anti-white country, Leftist authorities can engineer mayhem (as they did in Charlottesville) and then use private civil plaintiffs to levy astronomical damages against the organizers, for the sole purpose of bankrupting said organizers.

Two Visions of American History

The NY Times 1619 Project has brought attention to two competing visions of America.

1. America was founded on egalitarian and libertarian principles, and open to all who accept those principles. "All men are created equal."

2. America was founded as a White supremacist nation, for the benefit of the Whites living there and their descendents. The history of American greatness is that of White deeds, and White domination of other ethnic groups.

Now there is a Wash. Post review:

In the new book version, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times journalist who conceived of the overall effort and wrote its lead magazine essay, offers a few interpretations. In the preface, she cautions that the project is “not the only origin story of this country — there must be many.” Then, in the opening chapter, Hannah-Jones repeats the text of her original magazine essay and refers to Black Americans as the country’s “true ‘founding fathers,’” as deserving of that designation “as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital.” Some 400-plus pages later, in a concluding chapter, she writes that the origin story in the 1619 Project is “truer” than the one we’ve known. ...

In a chapter titled “Progress,” historian Ibram X. Kendi writes that the popular notion of America making steady, if slow, headway toward greater racial justice is “ahistorical, mythical, and incomplete.” The “mantra” of incremental improvement can undermine efforts to promote real equality. ...

Kendi then introduces something else he says is left out of the story — that America requires a “Third Reconstruction” to address the unfulfilled promise of the second. Here the 1619 Project’s project becomes explicitly political. Hannah-Jones fills in the details in the book’s final chapter, “Justice,” where she identifies the racial wealth gap as the most serious challenge for Black Americans. “White Americans’ centuries-long economic head start,” she writes, is what “most effectively maintains racial caste today.” To narrow that gap, the country must embark on “a vast social transformation produced by the adoption of bold national policies.”

So the book favors the second view, that America is the doing of White people, and Blacks want more of the goodies.

Routinely Asked to Use Leftist Fictions

John McWhorter writes in the NY Times:

To point out the nakedness of the emperor is the height of impropriety, and I suspect that the sheer degree to which we are asked to engage in this dissimulation will go down as a hallmark of the era: Do you believe that a commitment to diversity should be crucial to the evaluation of a candidate for a physics professorship? Do you believe that it’s mission-critical for doctors to describe people in particular danger of contracting certain diseases not as “vulnerable (or disadvantaged)” but as “oppressed (or made vulnerable or disenfranchised)”? Do you believe that being “diverse” does not make an applicant to a selective college or university more likely to be admitted?

In some circles these days, you are supposed to say you do. ...

The notion seems to be that practitioners and scholars, across disciplines, must devote a considerable part of their time to putatively antiracist initiatives. ...

The American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges have released a “guide” that urges practitioners to employ a left-leaning glossary in pursuit of “health equity.” The problem is that what they recommend would be all but inapplicable in the real world. ...

My point here isn’t to debate the pros and cons of affirmative action. There are legitimate arguments on both sides of that debate. My point is that the existence of various forms of affirmative action in admissions is a fact, and saying otherwise is fiction. Beyond this musical, it is often suggested that it is disingenuous, if not racist, to surmise that a Black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences.

He can get away with saying the obvious because he is Black.

What if Kyle had been Black?

PBS TV has video on what would have happened if Kyle Rittenhouse were Black.

The guest said that it was understandable that the jury acquitted Rittenhouse, because he turned out to be innocent. But if he had been Black and guilty, then he probably would have been convicted.

They resent all the attention given to a White boy. It is a little like Gabby Petito, the White girl who went missing, along with her boyfriend. Both were later found dead, separately. The leftist press complained that similar attention is not given to missing Blacks.

So they searched for a comparable Black story, but could not find one. Likewise, they cannot find a story about a Black Kyle Rittenhouse.

If Rittenhouse had been Black, he probably would have had a criminal record. He would not have volunteered to remove graffite from the school. He would not be working as a lifeguard. He would not have bought the gun legally. He would not have had the impulse control to only shoot those who were trying to kill him. He would not have been slandered by CNN, PBS, Biden, etc.

He probably would not have even been charged. Most homicides in Chicago are by Blacks, and most are not charged. The killers go free, without a trial.

A year ago, the AP, Politifact, and NPR fact-checkers were saying that Donald Trump was wrong for saying that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. The self-defense was obvious to anyone, as many videos were publicly available. (The FBI videos were only released at trial.)

Why is it that the Wisconsin authorities did nothing to stop the Kenosha rioters? Why was law and order left to a 17-year-old boy?

The next time rioters try to burn Kenosha, I am pretty sure Rittenhouse will let it burn.

I found this online.

I am trying to figure out the point. On the left is Trayvon Martin, with his watermelon drink. On the right is Rittenhouse. Both were about 17 years old when they made national news in a deadly confrontation. Both were away from their poor broken homes. Trayvon Black, and Kyle White.

Some Differences. Kyle was defending life and property. Kyle ran away from conflict, and only shot when he had to.

Trayvon aggressively attacked an innocent resident, and was beating him to death.

In both cases, violent criminals died. Both juries found the killings justified.

This image was posted by an anti-White leftist who was surely inviting the comparison as a way of saying that Kyle should have been convicted. But the comparison just demonstrates the evil of the Left today.

There have been anti-Kyle protests in several cities.

I am trying to understand this pro-Trayvon anti-Kyle point of view. There is no serious dispute about the facts of either case. There were battles to the death. The good guys lived, and the bad guys died.

My conclusion is that today's Left is out to kill me and anyone who stands up for American civilization. And they want it to be a crime to defend ourselves. They want total subjugation. I don't see any other way to read it.

In case you doubt it, see tweets of Rep. Cori Bush:

The judge. The jury. The defendant.

It’s white supremacy in action.

This system isn’t built to hold white supremacists accountable. It’s why Black and brown folks are brutalized and put in cages while white supremacist murderers walk free.

I’m hurt. I’m angry. I’m heartbroken.

Colin Kaepernick:

We just witnessed a system built on white supremacy validate the terroristic acts of a white supremacist.

This only further validates the need to abolish our current system. White supremacy cannot be reformed.

And the ACLU:

Despite Kyle Rittenhouse’s conscious decision to travel across state lines and injure one person and take the lives of two people protesting the shooting of Jacob Blake by police, he was not held responsible for his actions.

Unfortunately, this is not surprising.

The ACLU used to stand for civil liberties, but now it wants to punish White kids for crossing state lines!

Do some people believe that you need some sort of special permission from the government to cross state lines? I am sure the ACLU is not that stupid. It is grasping at straws to say that Kyle did something that sounds wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with an American citizen crossing state lines.

And he did not kill three Black men.

Update: Univ. of California Irvine put out this irresponsible statement:

The conclusion of this trial does not end the reckoning about systemic racism in the United States. If anything, it has simply made it more legible. Kyle Rittenhouse did not live in Wisconsin, but in Antioch, Illinois. ... Rittenhouse imposed himself on the protests in Kenosha. His assistance was not requested.

For this reason, the verdict conveys a chilling message: Neither Black lives nor those of their allies' matter.

UCI will continue its whole university approach to recognizing and responding to anti-Blackness as an existential threat to our mission as a public research university.

A UCLA law professor responds:

I would think that the verdict conveys a message that

There's a right to self-defense, whether against the "allies" of blacks or against the enemies of blacks or against anyone else.
That's particularly so if a person is pointing a gun at you, or reached for your rifle.
The prosecution has to disprove claims of self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt.
Twelve jurors unanimously concluded that the prosecution hadn't met its burden.

In other words, UCI says that if the forces of Blackness want to burn your city down, then let it burn. The college students of today are being taught that this is the necessary reckoning about systemic racism.

This is the same university that announced that standardized tests were the best predictors of college success, but Blacks and Mexicans do not do well on them, and the law prohibits racial discrimination, so it is abolishing the use of such tests in admission.