Schools teach wrong story about Galileo

I have complained about left-wing censorship and cancel culture. In a man-bites-dog story, the Daily Beast reports:

Far-Right Group Wants to Ban Kids From Reading Books on Male Seahorses, Galileo, and MLK

Moms for Liberty is raising hell in a Tennessee school district over books that teach about race in American history — and also books that teach about wild animals and science.

It turns out that they are raising hell about school propaganda, but not banning kids from reading books.

At one juncture, the group implores the school district to include more charitable descriptions of the Catholic Church when teaching a book about astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was persecuted by said church for suggesting that Earth revolves around the sun.

“Where is the HERO of the church?” the group’s spreadsheet asks, “to contrast with their mistakes? There are so many opportunities to teach children the truth of our history as a nation. The Church has a huge and lasting influence on American culture. Both good and bad should be represented. The Christian church is responsible for the genesis of Hospitals, Orphanages, Social Work, Charity, to name a few.”

No, Galilei was not persecuted by said church for suggesting that Earth revolves around the sun. The public schools certainly should not be using historically inaccurate books.

The Tennessee moms are not seeking to avoid the Galileo story, but merely to teach the good and the bad.

The way the story is often presented, kids get the impression that the Church was systematically persecuting scientists for suggesting new ideas. In fact, the Pope invited Galileo to write a scientific book on the pros and cons of his heliocentric ideas that the Sun is at the center of the universe. And there is no other example of a persecuted scientist, as Galileo was supposedly persecuted.

By all means, teach the Galileo story. Teach how nearly all of the scientific advances of the last 500 years came from Christian Europe and America. Teach how other cultures failed to make any significant advances in astronomy.

Trotskyists Run the Last Honest Web Site

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz writes:

But I began feeling uneasy a few minutes into reading the lead essay, by the project’s chief contributor, the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, and then I read a key paragraph so fallacious and dogmatic that it hit me between the eyes. With a tone of absolute assurance, flagging the matter as crucial, the essay informed readers of what it called a „fact“ – a fact „conveniently left out of our founding mythology“ – specifically that „one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence“ from Britain „was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.“5

I instantly wondered how anyone even lightly informed about the history of either slavery or the American Revolution , could write that sentence. Unfortunately, the ensuing explanation only made matters worse. The British, the essay claimed, had grown „deeply conflicted“ over slavery, and the British government was facing rising calls to end the Atlantic slave trade – a reform that would have „upended“ the entire colonial economy, not just in the South. For that reason – the essay mentioned no other – the American colonists, North and South, believed that the British posed a threat to slavery, an institution they desperately wanted to protect. Rather than run the risk of losing slavery, the colonists declared their independence. The Revolution was supposedly, at its core, a reactionary, proslavery struggle to fend off abolition of slavery by the British.6

The paragraph covered subjects of unsurpassed importance and it was historical gibberish.

The 1619 Project was widely praised, and is now taught in schools.

I wonder if the whole thing is counterproductive. Everyone agrees that the American Revolution was a great thing, and brought freedom and prosperity to the world. If it were really based on slavery, then wouldn't that make slavery a good thing?

When no letter appeared and no other historians spoke up, I decided to address the matter myself in a public lecture I delivered in November, which would later appear on-line in the New York Review of Books. Only after the lecture did I learn that four highly distinguished historians – three of them old friends and colleagues, the fourth a scholar I greatly respected – had already been giving interviews to an online forum called the World Socialist Web Site, a Trotskyist venue, taking The 1619 Project seriously to task for its false statements about the Revolution and much more.

It struck me as a little odd that these well-known historians – none of them socialists as far as I knew, let alone Trotskyists – would appear in such a relatively obscure place. Surely, I thought, one of the leading academic journals would have given them a platform. As it happened, only the intellectually honorable Trotskyists…had the nerve to undertake a systematic critique of The 1619 Project….

This is amusing that the last honest historians have to publish on a Trotskyite web site.

As I understand it, the Troskyites are all about class conflict, not racial conflict. They see racial conflict as a distraction, so they are eager to debunk false narratives about race. Well, somebody should hold these NY Times propagandists accountable.

Marriage and Divorce under Jewish Law

Democrat policy is to appoint as many Jews as possible to the courts. Some say this is done because Jews are liberal; others say it is because Jews are smart. What is not so well known is that Jews have very different ideas about law and justice from everybody else's.

Here is the current episode of This American Life, an NPR Radio broadcast:

This is Gital Dodelson. She's an Orthodox Jewish woman, and she's what's known as an agunah. That's the word in Hebrew for a woman whose husband refuses to give her a divorce. Literally, it means a chained wife. Besides money, lots of money, Gital says her husband has a long list of demands for her to meet if she wants her get.

Gital Dodelson I have a four-year-old son. He wants 50-50 custody, where my son would be a week with me and a week with him.

Asking for 50-50 child custody in a divorce is normal and standard in America.

A beis din is a group of three rabbis Orthodox Jew sometimes turn to to settle disputes outside the civil courts. When her husband wouldn't give a get, Gital tried to bring him before the beis din. But he refused to show up.

So the rabbis issued something called a seruv. It's basically a contempt of court. It's supposed to ostracize him in the community. Gital's brother Aryeh is a full-time scholar of Jewish law, and he says the seruv is usually an effective tool. ...

Gital, of course, could just walk away. She's already got her civil divorce. The finances are all settled. So is the child custody. But she can't get remarried. She's a 25-year-old woman. She'd like to have more kids.

And I should point out, most Jews wouldn't care. Plenty of less religious Jews would be happy to marry Gital. But in the Orthodox world, where she was raised, where her whole family is, where she wants to stay, she can't make a new life for herself.

So Jewish women like her hire ex-military special forces to find and torture the husband into issuing the get, and a Jewish scribe witnesses it so the wife can get remarried. This one already got the money and the kids, but that is not enough.

There is some religious authority for this:

But as it happens, there's an old Jewish teaching that recalcitrant husbands should be beaten. And it wasn't some schmuck from Brooklyn who said so. It was Maimonides, the 12th century Spanish rabbi considered the greatest Jewish sage of all time.

Maimonides wrote that a man could be beaten until he gave his wife a get. Here was his reasoning. Deep down, he said, all of us are torn between our good inclinations and our evil inclinations. And being beaten might be just what a man needs to drive out his evil side so that he can see the wisdom of releasing his wife.

Listen to the episode for much more craziness.

Maybe Jews should have the religious freedom to believe whatever they want, but I don't think that Jewish judges should be ruling over non-Jews. In some areas of law, judges have a lot of discretion to do what is fair or equitable or just, but that only makes sense if there are some common beliefs about underlying principles.

I wouldn't want some Moslem who believes in Sharia Law to be an American judge either.

In 2016, Barack Obama tried to appoint a fourth Jew to the US Supreme Court. This would have made the largest voting bloc on the court in a very long time. People say we have a 6-3 conservative majority on the court now, but the conservatives disagree on many issues, and do not vote as a bloc. The liberals vote as a bloc, and consistently take the leftist postition, regardless of the law in question.

Even in Israel, I think they just have Jewish judges ruling on Jewish marriages. Christians and Moslems have their own marriage courts.

I am not even sure these Jewish beliefs should be called religious, as Christians understand religion. They don't have much to do with God, or morality, or spiritual values. They are just ancient customs of unknown origin and purpose. They are enforced by creating an ethnocentric community, and shaming the violators. The whole thing is un-Christian and un-American.

Concealing the Genetics of Intelligence

London Guardian interview:

The behaviour geneticist explains how biology could have an influence on academic attainment – and why she takes an anti-eugenics approach

Kathryn Paige Harden argues how far we go in formal education – and the huge knock-on effects that has on our income, employment and health – is in part down to our genes. Harden is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she leads a lab using genetic methods to study the roots of social inequality. Her provocative new book is The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality.

To even talk about whether there might be a genetic element to educational attainment and social inequality breaks a huge social taboo – particularly on the political left, which is where you say your own sympathies lie. The spectre of eugenics looms large, and no one wants to create a honeypot for racists and classists. To be clear, it is scientifically baseless to make any claims about differences between racial groups, including intelligence, and you are not doing that. But why go here?

... But also people are hearing every day about new genetic discoveries and seeing in their own families and lives that genetics matter. When asked to estimate how much genes influence intelligence, people’s answers are not zero. I’m trying to help them make sense of that information in a socially responsible way. ...

You have been accused of promoting eugenics, including by prominent sociologist Ruha Benjamin, who has written that you are engaging in “savvy slippage between genetic and environmental factors that would make the founders of eugenics proud”.

How do you predict a person’s educational attainment via their genome?

It starts with a statistical exercise in correlation called a genome wide association study (GWAS).

Okay, but the consortium that controls that data requires researchers to promise "not to use these data to make comparisons across ancestral groups." The Terms and Conditions threaten retaliation to ruin the career of the researcher. See also this 2018 statement:

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) is alarmed ...

race itself is a social construct. Any attempt to use genetics to rank populations demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of genetics.

So Harden will not say how genes affect the intelligence of racial groups, because she is not permitted to say, and because it would be career suicide. When she was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer, she said, “I care what people think about me and my work. I’m interested in changing how people think.”

Some researchers would say that they care about finding the truth. Not her. She cares about what people think of her, and she does not want to be lumped in with Nazi sympathizers.

Raxib Khan writes:

A new paper, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, highlights the fact that genes your parents didn’t transmit to you still matter—the phenomenon of “genetic nurture.” A team of researchers based in the United Kingdom conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 12 studies with nearly 40,000 parent-offspring comparisons. The genetic nurture effect for years of education, they found, is about 50 percent of the value of direct genetic effects. “Empirical studies,” they write, “have indicated that genetic nurture effects are particularly relevant to the intergenerational transmission of risk for child educational outcomes, which are, in turn, associated with major psychological and health milestones throughout the life course.” Genetic nurture is clearly not a factor you can ignore.

That is, you are partially determined by your genes. And so were your parents. There could be genes that helped determine your parents, and not inherited by you, and those genes could have still indirectly shape you by shaping your parents behavior.

Biden is Upset about Horses Patrolling the Border

We have a crisis at the border, and our President says:

Biden: “Of course I take responsibility. I’m president, but it was horrible what to see — as you saw — to see people treated like they did, horses nearly running them over, people being strapped. It’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay. They will be, an investigation underway now, and there will be consequences. There will be consequences. It’s an embarrassment, but it’s beyond an embarrassment. It’s dangerous. It’s wrong. It sends the wrong message around the world. It sends the wrong message at home. It’s simply not who we are.”

Wow. I think Biden could be our worst President in a very long time. With immigration, the budget, Afghanistan, race relations, and Covid-19, his policies have been spectacularly bad.

Apparently Biden leaped to some pretty crazy conclusions about a routine border enforcement story. And he thinks it is embarrassing that some foreign invaders were repelled. The embarrassment is that we have such an incompetent and anti-American President.

Remember all the news of a few months ago about how Chinese-Americans were being targeted for hate crimes in California? Supposedly it was all Donald Trump's fault, because he used the phrase "China virus". Now they caught the perps, and here they are:

I am guessing that these guys are not Trump supporters, and did not read Trump's tweets. And they certainly do not belong to any White supremacist organizations.

Another Woman Abandons Elon Musk

Elon Musk may be the most admired man in the world, but he cannot keep a wife:

Elon Musk and Grimes have broken up after three years together, Page Six can exclusively reveal.

The SpaceX founder confirmed that he and the Canadian singer are “semi-separated” but remain on good terms and continue to co-parent their 1-year-old son, the epically named X Æ A-Xii Musk. ...

Musk was previously married to author Justine Wilson, with whom he has five sons: twins Griffin and Xavier, 17, and triplets Damian, Saxon and Kai, 15.

He was also married — twice — to “Westworld” actress Talulah Riley. They first wed in 2010 but divorced in 2012. They reconciled a year later, remarried in 2013 and divorced again in 2016.

The billionaire also dated Amber Heard from 2017 to 2018 following her ill-fated marriage to Johnny Depp.

Each of these women left him, and complained that he didn't spend enough time on her needs, or some such nonsense.

He is not alone. The most desirable husbands in the world have been dumped by their wives: Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, etc.

Even Grimes' mom attacked Musk:

The grandmother of Elon Musk and Grimes’ new baby boy has harsh words for a recent tweet by the controversial billionaire.

It happened after the Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted “Take the red pill” on Sunday morning.

The phrase originally appeared in the first “Matrix” film ― where it amounted to facing reality ― but it has become popularized by men’s rights activists (MRAs) presumedly unhappy over women making their own choices.

When Grimes’ mother, former Canadian prosecutor and arts advocate Sandy Garossino, saw Musk’s tweet, she called out her daughter’s partner in two now-deleted tweets of her own.

“If your partner went through a challenging pregnancy and childbirth in the last two weeks... and you were over 16 years old, would you be blaring MRA bullshit on Twitter right now?” she asked in one post.

No, the phrase has nothing to do with men's rights activism, and men's rights acivists almost never use the term.

Yes, the red pill means facing reality, and especially accepting the reality of human nature and how the world works. A red-piller might see the Musk breakup news, and observe that no man is good enough for today's woman. The red-pillers accepts that female nature is to make these sorts of choices.

The men's rights activists have a very different attitude. They see various laws and policies as being unfair and sexist, and seek changes to make them more fair. The red-pillers see that as a hopeless attempt to change human nature.

The hostility from Grimes' mom is bizarre. You would think that mom's would be happy to have Musk as a son-in-law.

No, not from today's feminists. Here is current advice from Jezebel:

Here Are Some Good Reasons To Divorce Your Husband This Fall ...

But assuming some of these people getting divorced are women who date men, I have a couple alternate theories for why the divorce rate is spiking. For instance: During the pandemic, when both members of a couple were working from home full-time during a lockdown, 67% of women reported they were fully or mostly responsible for housework. When a child was homeschooled during the pandemic that shuttered schools for months, 3% of women said their spouse was doing more schooling than they were. Between May and June of last year, one in four women who left the workforce reported doing so because they needed to care for a child. One in eight men reported the same circumstances, and while most fathers say they’re actively and equally involved in raising their child, a full three-quarters of women say they do more child work than their spouse. The cumulative effect of all of this labor foisted on American women—labor that appears to go unnoticed by the men who are living with them and co-parenting their children—has been called “grotesque,” and it has help create a scenario in which women’s participation in the workforce is now as low as it was in the ‘80s.

There are a lot of women who would much rather be caring for a child in the home, than working outside the home.

Here is a typical comment:

I’m sure it’s because I’m a barren millennial spinster with no prospects but I’m also sure it’s because I watched my mother and aunts struggle in their relationships with men that I am convinced that marriages with men are a true dice roll in life.

Married men get all of the benefits of a live in house keeper who raises their children while they get to act like permanent children.

She will probably remain a barren millennial spinster with that attitude.

Advice for men is not much better.

Matthew Fray is the pseudonym of a man with widely publicized post on SShe Divorced Me Because I Left Dishes by the Sink. He would drink a glass of water, and leave his glass by the sink, so he could use it again. His wife was some sort of obsessive-compulsive control freak who kept putting his glass into the dishwasher, against his wishes. She eventually got fed up and left him.

Now he has decided that this was inconsiderate on his part, and made him a terrible husband, so he has launched a new career as a marriage coach to advise other men not to make the same mistake he did. He even has a book coming out, with such advice.

Is that what Musk, Gates, and Pitt did wrong? They failed to wash their dirty cups?

This must be a unique time in human history. Women have become impossible to please. It is hard to imagine divorces over such matters in any other era.

Jews Try to Censor Truth about Demographics

Jews and Jewish organizations consistently seek to replace Whites with non-whites in the USA and Europe, and to destroy anyone who points this out.

The Daily Beast reports:

The Anti-Defamation League is reiterating its calls for Fox News to fire Tucker Carlson after the network’s primetime star went all-in on espousing the racist “Great Replacement” theory this week.

The last time Carlson embraced the conspiracy theory, his boss Lachlan Murdoch dismissed the outrage, claiming the Fox star was merely talking about voting rights. But now, the ADL said, Carlson is “openly embracing white nationalist talking points.”

The Fox News host has repeatedly fear-mongered about Democrats allegedly bringing in dark-skinned immigrants with the express purpose of “replacing” the American (read: white) electorate. On Wednesday night, he declared that the Biden administration is intentionally trying “to change the racial mix of the country” through immigration.

“In political terms, this policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries,” Carlson exclaimed. “They brag about it all the time, but if you dare to say it's happening they will scream at you with maximum hysteria.” ...

On Thursday, in response to Carlson’s latest segment, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt renewed his calls for Fox News to dump its biggest star.

“It cannot be overstated enough,” Greenblatt said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “For Tucker Carlson, host of one of the most-watched news programs in the country, to use his platform as a megaphone to spread the toxic, antisemitic, and xenophobic ‘great replacement theory’ is a repugnant and dangerous abuse of his platform.”

Note that the ADL doesn't say that the Great Replacement theory is false. The NY Times has about one article a week celebrating the replacement as being a good thing. That is, good for Jews.

Israeli law prevents Jews being replaced with non-Jews in Israel. Most Jews and Jewish organizations openly support policies to keep the ethnic mix of Israel predominantly Jewish. But if you argue to preserve the ethnic mix of the USA, then Jewish organizations will use their power and influence to cancel you.

It is a fact that the Biden administration is intentionally trying “to change the racial mix of the country” through immigration. If the ADL were honest, it would welcome an informed public debate on the merits of this. Nope. It is all-in for racist and destructive policies that would not survive such a debate.

It goes without saying that not all Jews are in favor of replacement. Probably only 80% of them. A lot of the orthodox Jews are probably against it. I am commonent on the Jewish organizations and publications that are openly in favor of it, such as the ADL and NY Times.

Update: Here is Tucker Carlson responding, on another show. He doesn't say anything about Jews It is funny that the ADL is so adamant that any criticism of the great replacement must be a criticism of Jews. It is implying that Jews are the driving force behind the great replacement.

The Jewish Telegraph Agency also writes about this:

The “Great Replacement” is ... Jews are orchestrating the replacement of white people in western countries with nonwhite immigrants. ... white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia infamously chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

It is also funny how Jews endlessly complain about Whites not wanting Jews to replace them with non-whites. If this were not a Jewish goal, they would surely say so.

ACLU says Abortion is no longer a Women's Right

The ACLU used to be a civil liberties organization, and now it tweets a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

So why all the square brackets? The feminists of RBG's generation wanted to transfer power and sexual freedom to women, and enable women to avoid responsibility. But now her quotes are considered transphobic, because women who prefer a male gender want to abort their babies also.

Update: The NY Times reports that the ACLU mistake was quite deliberate:

There are people who are pregnant and who seek abortions, he said, who do not identify as women.

“My colleagues do a fantastic job of trying to understand a reality that people who seek abortions are not only women,” he said. “That reality exists.”

Fathers have Few Rights

From a New Yorker story:

And fathers — his hand swung again — have few rights. In this country, children belong to their mothers. So, as for raising children, there’s little that fathers can do. When married to his ex-wife, he said, he’d worked a hundred and twenty hours a week, and his ex-wife, a homemaker with two live-in servants, taught the boys to be rude and slothlike. Now he paid millions annually and attended court regularly just to see the boys four days a month, and that brief access did not provide a platform for lessons in manners. In addition, he couldn’t sway his kids’ minds about much, because their mother told them daily that their father was a selfish miser and a godforsaken liar, alcoholic, and adulterer.

This is probably fiction, but plausible as it happens all the time, and is not even newsworthy.

Women complain that the USA is misogynist because they have trouble getting an abortion in Texas. But look at how fathers are treated.

There are examples of women and mothers being mistreated by the family court. I have seen a couple of particularly outrageous examples. But I have seen a lot more examples of fathers getting mistreated.

` Here is a ProPublica essay arguing that moms should be able to collect welfare without naming the dad:

This was another common fear articulated by mothers who were asked to name fathers to get aid: that an absent dad forced to pay support would spitefully seek custody or greater involvement in medical and educational decisions about the child.

If the mom cannot take care of the child, and has to go on welfare, then child custody should probably go to the dad. The moms are the irresponsible and spiteful ones, as they areeeI hav depriving their kids of a dad.

Projecting Costs to the Year 2300

A new paper looks at the cost of carbon emissions out to the year 2300:

The Social Cost of Carbon: Advances in Long-Term Probabilistic Projections of Population, GDP, Emissions, and Discount Rates

This paper, coauthored by scholars at RFF and top research universities, examines the key methods and challenges involved in estimating a more accurate social cost of carbon.

The paper mentions the effect of climate change on agriculture, but no one knows whether the cost will be positive or negative. Much of the paper is devoted to discussing how to figure the economic growth rate, and suggests using 2% or 3%.

If the economy really grows at that rate for 200 years, then everyone will have so much wealth that atmospheric carbon will be insignificant.

I was struck by the UN population projections, as shown above. As you can see, the world will be overwhelmingly African and Asian. Mostly African. Maybe 20 billion of them. Whites will be an insignificant fraction of the world.

So where is all that economic growth going to come from? Will Africans enslave the Whites and force them to invent new technologies? Where will the Africans get enough food to feed themselves?

If this kind of population growth takes places, there will probably be famines and wars that kill billions of people. They might burn coal just to increase atmospheric CO2 and crop yields. A small temperature increase will be the least of their problems.

Children Bypass Parents to get Tranny Drugs

AP reports:

Britain’s Court of Appeal ruled Friday that doctors can prescribe puberty-blocking drugs to children under 16 without a parent’s consent, overturning a lower court’s decision that a judge’s approval should be needed.

Appeals judges said the High Court was wrong to rule last year that children considering gender reassignment are unlikely to be able to give informed consent to medical treatment involving drugs that delay puberty. The December 2020 ruling said that because of the experimental nature of the drugs, clinics should seek court authorization before starting such treatment.

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, which runs the U.K.’s main gender identity development service for children, appealed against that ruling.

On Friday the Court of Appeal agreed with the trust. The judges said it was “inappropriate” for the High Court to have given the guidance and said it was up to doctors to “exercise their judgment” about whether their patients can properly consent.

This is sick. What are parental rights for, if not to shelter their kids from taking these dangerous drugs.

Human are Still Evolving

Not long ago, Stephen Jay Gould and the other evolution popularizers were fond of saying that humans had not evolved in 50,000 years. We were all the same as our African ancestors.

A famous and accomplished 19th century biologist is being canceled because he believed that human races diverged evolutionarily:

[From the report on the WWU President’s website]: Even though Thomas Huxley made significant contributions in the field of biology, he also had significant contributions to scientific racism. He was a polygenist: someone who is of the belief that all races evolved from different origins instead of coming from one homosapien. [sic] This is not only scientifically disproven, but also a racist mindset, and an argument that one of his “archrivals” at the time called Richard Owen attempted to refute with evidence that we all are the same species that evolved from the same homosapien [sic] thousands of years ago. Huxley won the argument, and it is historian Nicolaas Rupke’s thesis that this argument between Huxley and Owen in which Huxley’s “deeply racist, polygenist viewpoint” won lead to building the scientific racism of the early 20th century.

[Evolutionist professor's response]: It’s not true that Huxley was a “polygenist”; like Darwin, he correctly believed in a single evolutionary origin of humans: both were monogenists.) Huxley believed, correctly, that different ethnic groups (then called “races”) evolved in geographic isolation from one another following migration to new places. But, like Darwin, Huxley also thought that whites were on the top of the racial hierarchy.

So you cannot say that humans are still evolving, because that geographically isolated groups could be genetically somewhat differenct from the rest of the population.

Research from last year indicates that Europeans evolved the ability for adults to digest milk in only the last 3,000 years.

Other research suggests that some Eurasians had dairy farms in the Early Bronze Age.

Other research says that the poorer British are evolving towards worse health:

Studying natural selection can help us understand the genetic architecture of health outcomes: we find evidence in modern day Great Britain for multiple natural selection pressures that vary between subgroups in the direction and strength of their effects, that are strongly related to the socio-economic system, and that may contribute to health inequalities across income groups.

Evolution of lactase is easy to measure. Evolution of intelligence is not so easy. It is very likely that genes for human behavior are also evolving, and they are more difficult to measure.

The 2019 Movie Parasite is a Revelation

I expect Hollywood movies to be leftist propaganda. When they show a conflict between rich and poor, the rich are the greedy jerks, and the poor are the heros.

The 2019 movie Parasite is an exception.

Alex Tabarrok reviews it:

I am late to this but Parasite, now available on streaming services, is the most willfully misinterpreted movie that I have ever seen. The conventional interpretation is so obviously wrong that I cannot but think that it is anything but a collective gaslighting. The conventional interpretation is that the film is about inequality and on the surface that makes sense. After all, there is a rich family and a poor family, and an upstairs and a downstairs, and everyone knows that inequality is the problem of our age so despite the subtitles this Korean film must be a version of what we expect to see.

The movie is strange for several reasons. It is not in English. No Jews were involved, except those giving it Oscars. And it won more praise and big awards than any other movie in recent years.

It is about a family of good, honest, successful people who prey to parasites.

The parasites are not rats or cockroaches, but they as might as well be. They are lower-class humans who pretend to be decent folks, but they are disgusting crooks who are unfit for polite company.

If there is any message to this movie, it is that poor people deserve to be poor, and must be seperated from productive citizens.

I am still wondering why this movie was so popular. Did they really like the message that much?

A new Netflix movie, JJ+E, is also all about class divide. It is a Romeo and Juliet, with a low-class dark-skinned boy and a nice rich Swedish girl. It keeps portraying the rich as bigoted for looking down at the boy, even tho he started the movie as a hero.

It turns out that the Swedish father is exactly right when he tells his daughter to stay away from the boy. The girl seduces him, as a way of rebeling against her father. The viewer is left with the impression that the school should not have let them attend classes together, and the girl should have to obey her father. The movie ends with the boy and girl kissing in the back seat of a police car, after they both get arrested.

Psychologists claim that we do now know ourselves

David Brooks writes:

One of the most unsettling findings of modern psychology is that we often don’t know why we do what we do. ...

We have a conscious self, of course, the voice in our head, but this conscious self has little access to the parts of the brain that are the actual sources of judgment, problem-solving and emotion. We know what we’re feeling, just not how and why we got there.

No, this is ridiculous.

In the first place, humans have made enormous progress in understanding the roots of their behavior. If you fear intimacy and tend to be emotionally avoidant, you can consult attachment theory to gain insight into how the attachment model you learned as a toddler is influencing your relationships today. Moreover, if you look at the patterns of your life — you tend to get dumped about three months into a relationship — you can discern the underlying causes. You’re doing something off-putting at three months for a reason, and you can gradually come to discern the source, the “why,” of that pattern.

Psychologists can make big claims for attachment theory as the most scientific work in the whole field, it is almost completely worthless. It is pseudo-science. It seems like science because it has some experiments that can be replicated, but those experiments don't really tell anything about adult relationships or anything useful.

Polls show Marriage and Trump Trends

Gallup reports:

Ninety-four percent of U.S. adults now approve of marriages between Black people and White people, up from 87% in the prior reading from 2013. The current figure marks a new high in Gallup's trend, which spans more than six decades. Just 4% approved when Gallup first asked the question in 1958.

I wonder how many people alive today have even heard the arguments. I suggest this Muhammad Ali on Mixed couples are against God and nature.

I also wonder what is meant by "approve". If pollsters asked who approves of Prince Harry's marriage, what would they say? They would probably say the marriage is his business, even if they find the couple very annoying, and agree with kicking them out of the English royal family.

A new CNN poll says:

In a new CNN poll released Sunday, 59 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say that believing Trump won the 2020 election is "important" to being a Republican⁠ — 36 percent indicated that it's "very important" and 23 percent "somewhat important." ...

Additionally, 61 percent of Republicans consider support for Trump to be a crucial part of what it means to be a Republican — 34 percent say it's "very important" and 27 percent "somewhat important." Only 23 percent say supporting Trump is "not at all important" to what it means to be a Republican.

On the other hand, we apparntly had General Mark Milley conspiring with Communist China and Nancy Pelosi to undermine President Trump, during his last month in office. Yes, we have a Deep State that is betraying America, and they help rig the election against Trump. Republicans need to stand up against all of it.

I see now Calif. Gov. Gavin Newson is claiming to have survived election based on mail-in ballots. While he outspent his opponents with ads, his endorsers did not even argue that he had done a good job. They just attacked Larry Elder for being a Black conservative.

I listened to this Nov. 2020 Quillette podcast:

While Trump’s hopes of a second Presidential term seem to be vanishing, his surprisingly strong showing among Black, Hispanic, Muslim, and Asian voters is challenging the progressive claim that Trump’s primary appeal is rooted in racism. Quillette’s Jonathan Kay discusses these surprising election results with author and journalist Jamil Jivani.

He is correct that Biden's primary appeal was rooted in racism, not Trump's.

But at the end, he went into a little rant about how all Moslems are apt to hate Trump because of some comments critical of a Moslem Democrat attack dog couple who made some wildly anti-Trump campaign statements.

No reasonable person would be offended by what Trump said. If it is really true that Moslems hate Trump for these remarks, then Moslems are not fit to be Americans. I don't think it is true, as many Moslems voted for Trump.

Pope Makes Apolitical Remarks about Hungary

The NY Times reports:

‘Not a Flag to Wave’: Pope Criticizes Political Use of Christianity

On a four-day visit to Slovakia and Hungary, Francis had strong words for those who wield Christian symbols for personal gain.

I am not sure why this is news. The Vatican has always favored staying out of politics.

What is the value, he asked, of hanging a crucifix from a rearview mirror or one’s neck if a person has no meaningful relationship with Jesus? “What good is this,” he said, “unless we stop to look at the crucified Jesus and open our hearts to him?”

Okay, this seems apolitical to me.

The Vatican said that the pope’s visit to Budapest was purely spiritual in nature, to celebrate the closing Mass of a weeklong Catholic congress. But others close to the pope allowed that there could be a tacit message to Mr. Orban in the discrepancy between the time spent in Hungary and that spent in Slovakia, which is led by a progressive president who, like Francis, is critical of nationalism.

This is ridiculous. The NY Times hates Hungary and Orban. It hates that Orban presents Hungary as a Christian country. It will twist anything to try to make him look bad. However bad this Pope is, he certainly does not want Hungary to be invaded by Moslems, as the NY Times does.

Adoption Studies Prove Heritability

I mentioned Kathryn Paige Harden, and her new book on the genetic lottery. One of her main points is:

Average IQ scores are increasing across birth cohorts, such that Americans experienced an 18-point gain in average IQ from 1948 to 2002. And the most decisive and permanent environmental intervention that an individual can experience, adoption from a poor family into a better-off one, is associated with IQ gains of 12 to 18 points.

If this were true, then everyone would be in favor of those policies that increase IQ. But Americans are getting dumber, not smarter. And adoption is not helping.

Consider this new adoption study on the heritibility of IQ:

Heritability of IQ was estimated to be 0.42 [95% CI 0.21, 0.64]

Proportion of variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects of parental IQs was estimated at .01 [95% CI 0.00, 0.02]

See also discusssion here.

That is, smart parents have smart kids. You might think that the cause is White privilege, or having enclopedias at home, or sending kids to good schools, or better nutrition, or some combination. But nobody has found any parental strategies that work, other than having better genes to start with.

If this were the only study, I would not believe it. But dozens of studies have been showing this for decades. It is probably the most well-verified theory in the entire field of psychology. Psychology is filled with untestable nonsense, such s Freud, and studies that failed replication, such as what fills the textbooks. But the IQ studies have been well-replicated.

Nobody likes these results. They suggest genetic determinism, and no one wants to be a pre-programmed robot. Furthermore, they suggest that all the things parents do to improve their kids intelligence are wasted.

Leftists especially hate these results because all their programs to close IQ gaps are doomed to fail.

There are similar results for bahavior traits that may even be more important than IQ.

This is part of why the Left has shiftwd from "equality" to "equity". They know that equality of opportunity will never lead to equality of outcomes.

Vatican Submits to Rabbi Demands

I mentioned that the Jews were badgering the Pope into submission.

Rabbi Daniel F. Polish

Why Pope Francis’ comments on the Torah were hurtful to his Jewish friends ...

This past August, Pope Francis made a statement that some have characterized as causing the greatest tension in the relationship between the church and the Jewish people since the beginning of his pontificate. ...

That the pope could embrace the notion that Torah is just a way-station to a fuller, higher truth is painful to Jewish ears. Whether it was said with strategic intentionality, or just blurted out inadvertently, it is a testimony to the fact that for all that has been achieved since 1965, and despite all the hopes held by many — Jews and Catholics alike — there is still much work to be done until the hopes engendered by “Nostra Aetate,” until the implicit message of that document, bloom into the fullness of their potential. For Jews those words carry great weight; and they will, undoubtedly, be the subject of much conversation with the church in the time ahead. They raise the question whether the church is truly prepared to accept the faith of Jews as a spiritual equal. That is an issue of the greatest significance, indeed.

Now the National Catholic Register reports:

A cardinal has written to Jewish leaders, assuring them that recent comments by Pope Francis did not devalue the Torah, the Vatican confirmed on Friday.

The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, which oversees the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews, published two letters on Sept. 10, written by Cardinal Kurt Koch, who is president of both the council and the commission.

The letters, dated Sept. 3, were addressed respectively to Rabbi Rasson Arussi, chair of the Commission of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel for the Dialogue With the Holy See in Jerusalem, and Rabbi David Sandmel, chair of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations in New York.

Reuters reports:

The Vatican's official response, seen by Reuters on Friday, said the pope's comments in a homily on the writings of St. Paul should not be extrapolated from their context of ancient times and had no bearings on today's Jews.

"The abiding Christian conviction is that Jesus Christ is the new way of salvation. However, this does not mean that the Torah is diminished or no longer recognised as the 'way of salvation for Jews,'" wrote Cardinal Kurt Koch, whose Vatican department covers religious relations with Jews.

"In his catechesis the Holy Father does not make any mention of modern Judaism; the address is a reflection on (St. Paul's) theology within the historical context of a given era," Koch wrotei

"The fact that the Torah is crucial for modern Judaism is not questioned in any way," he said.

The Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, contains hundreds of commandments for Jews to follow in their everyday lives. The measure of adherence to the wide array of guidelines differs between Orthodox Jews and Reform Jews.

This admits that the Reform Jews do not even accept the Torah. So why should the Pope?

This show how pervasive Jewish power and influence are today. Some rabbi can made an absurd rant about the Catholic Church being insfuffiently res pectful of an ancient Jewish law that that most Jews don't even care about, and the Vatican has to issue a groveling apology.

Relations between Catholics and Jews were revolutionised in 1965, when the Second Vatican Council repudiated the concept of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus and began decades of inter-religious dialogue. Francis and his two predecessors visited synagogues.

So are the Jews going to Hell or not?

Is following the Torah really a way of salvation for the Jews? If so, does that mean that Orthodox Jews can be saved, but not Reform Jews who ignore the Torah? And who is responsible for killing Jesus?

Of course Judaism is contrary to Christianity. So is Islam and every other religion. The Pope should make that clear, and not take orders from any rabbis.

California Law Equates Marriage with Rape

Fewer couples get married today, and fewer stay married. There are many reasons for this. A major one is that we have legal and policy disincentives for marriage.

Here is a minor one, but it shows the anti-marriage mindset of our legislators.

The NY Post reports:

Also Tuesday, the state Senate moved to treat the rape of a spouse the same as the rape of a non-spouse. The bill removes an exemption to the rape law if the victim is married to the perpetrator.

California is one of 11 states that distinguish between spousal rape and other forms of sexual assault. The bill’s supporters said the distinction lingers from a time when women were expected to obey their husbands.

Those convicted of spousal rape currently can be eligible for probation instead of prison or jail, although there is no difference in the maximum penalties. Those convicted of spousal rape also must register as sex offenders only if the act involved the use of force or violence and the spouse was sentenced to state prison.

The bill passed, 36-0. It returns to the Assembly for a final vote before lawmakers adjourn for the year on Friday.

It is a very serious crime when a stranger abducts and forcibly rapes a women. It is bizarre to say that this is exactly the same, with exactly the same punishments, as a husband making love to his wife.

The vote was 36-0. Not one was willing to stand up and say that stranger rape is worse. This shows how anti-marriage our leaders have become.

Notice that the maximum penalties for rape and marital rape had already been equalized. The only remaining differences were minor and obscure. And no one defended those differences.

This is about like someone saying that non-gun crimes should be prosecuted the same as gun crimes, and then sifting thru all the laws to make sure that gun and non-gun perps get treated equally in all respects. He might claim that giving greater punishment to the gun crime is discriminatory.

Sure, it is discriminatory. We want to discriminate between dangerous criminals and non-dangerous ones. We want to distinguish between consensual and non-consensual relationships. To refuse to do so is extreme left-wing nuttiness.

The previous law had nothing to do with women being expected to obey their husbands. It had to do with the state not interfering in marriages, and the state accepting that the marriage was consensual. The state also had no-fault divorce, so anyone can get out at any time.

Update: A comment below missed the point.

For millennia, a major purpose of marriage has been to legitimize a sexual relationship. The only purpose to this change in the law is completely erase this, and to explicitly declare that sexual intercourse outside marriage is just as legitimate as inside marriage.

What is the purpose of this, except to nullify marriage as it has been understood for millennia? If I am wrong here, then tell me the purpose to this change in the law.

The Unfairness of the Genetic Lottery

Psychology professor Kathryn Paige Harden is plugging her new book, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality

She co-wrote a 2017 article attacking this reasoning:

1) Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is a meaningful construct that describes differences in cognitive ability among humans.

2) Individual differences in intelligence are moderately heritable.

3) Racial groups differ in their mean scores on IQ tests.

4) Discoveries about genetic ancestry have validated commonly used racial groupings.

5) On the basis of points 1 through 4, it is natural to assume that the reasons for racial differences in IQ scores are themselves at least partly genetic.

Until you get to 5, none of the premises is completely incorrect. ...

It is never a good thing to make poorly justified scientific claims. When it comes to race and IQ, doing so is toxic.

The article gives the impression that the reasoning is mostly correct, but immoral to make it because it leads to toxic conclusions.

Reviews have started to appear here and here.

It is good to see an ambitious leftist scholar take on these genetic issues, because it appears to me that points 1-5 make many egalitarian goals impossible. Any plan to equalize the races without addressing these issues is dishonest.

Here is a video about how even good scientific papers on this subject are being retracted by those who consider the facts embarrassing.

Harden is correct that none of us did anything to “earn” our genes; nor, for that matter, the homes into which we were born. As she notes, when you combine the “shared environment” factors with the estimated genetic effects in twin studies, these (unearned) causes explain most of what there is to explain — with the leftover portion comprising a sort of “free will” residual, which serves to illustrate why even identical twins growing up together will end up on (at least somewhat) different paths. That residual figure tends to be around 20 percent or so for educational outcomes, and about twice that for income.

Harden is also right that we can recognize the power of genes without invoking them to justify inequality as a “natural” phenomenon. Genes do explain, to some extent, why some people are more economically productive, and thus earn more than others, given the demands of a modern economy. But, again, genes are just luck. And the structure of the economy is something we can change.

I am sure she is correct that we don't earn our genes, or earn that unshared environment influence either. Maybe we earn the free will portion, but it is hard to say.

I guess she is going to say that it is unfair to benefit from what you did not earn. That might make for a moral philosophy discussion, but I am not sure any of that matters in the real world. You still will not equalize the race, or eliminate the unfairness of the genetic lottery.

Right-wingers tend to view all this as showing a need to understand the facts, and avoid trying to change what cannot be changed. Leftists like to complain about some supposed unfairness, even if the unfairness cannot be fixed. So they like to pretend that race does not exist, when that is a convenient way to escape facts.

Here is a video rant with Russell Brand on how unfair it is that wealthy folks have inherited wealth. Kyle says that Tiger Woods is the exception, as he got rich on his own. Kyle says most of the richest billionaires did not make it on their own, did not necessarily work hard, and it is unfair that a handful of billionaires have more wealth than half the world.

But Tiger Woods had the good fortune to win the genetic lottery, combined with a dad who expertly trained him in golf at a very early age. If inheriting wealth is unfair, then so is inheriting good genes, and having a good upbringing.

A large part of the world is in debt. So if you are flat broke, you still have more money than the combined wealth of millions of people, as their net worth is negative. That is how capitalism works. Some people will be investors, and some debtors.

I haven't read Harden's book. I expect her to get canceled for merely discussing the subject.

MeToo Leaders are Split on Andrew Cuomo

The MeToo movement is just an arm of the Democrat Party.

PBS TV reports:

Judy Woodruff: It's been almost a month since New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced he would resign, after a report by the state attorney general's office found he sexually harassed multiple women.

Since then, a cascade of firings and resignations have brought down leaders of the women's movement caught in Cuomo's orbit. On Monday, Alphonso David was fired as president of the human rights campaign. That follows resignations by Tina Tchen, the chief executive at Time's Up, an organization focused on supporting women in the workplace, along with Roberta Kaplan at the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund, and a number of the group's board members.

All left after revelations that they had advised Cuomo's team on how to respond to the allegations. The news raises questions about the progress of the MeToo movement and where to go from here, nearly four years after the hashtag went viral in 2017.

I am not sure why giving advice is so bad. There must be more to the story. Maybe they advised Cuomo to attack the credibility of the accusers, while those organizations promote the idea of believing all women.

Or maybe MeToo is all about ganging up on those men who are out of favor, and someone didn't get the memo that Cuomo quickly switched from being in favor to out of favor.

Either way, I don't get the impression that anyone was interested in getting to the underlying truth.

Google is Caught Being Evil

Christopher F. Rufo writes:

Technology giant Google has launched an “antiracism” initiative that presents speakers and materials claiming that America is a “system of white supremacy” and that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”

I have obtained a trove of whistleblower documents from inside Google that reveal the company’s extensive racial-reeducation program, based on the core tenets of critical race theory — including “intersectionality,” “white privilege,” and “systemic racism.” In a foundational training module called “Allyship in Action,” Google’s head of systemic allyship Randy Reyes and a team of consultants from The Ladipo Group train employees to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, and then rank themselves on a hierarchy of “power [and] privilege.” The trainers then instruct the employees to “manage [their] reactions to privilege” — which are likely to include feelings of “embarrassment, shame, fear, [and] anger” — through “body movement,” “deep breathing,” “accessing [their] ‘happy place,’” and “cry[ing].”

The program presents a series of video conversations promoting the idea that the United States was founded on white supremacy. In one video, Google’s former global lead for diversity strategy, Kamau Bobb — who was later reassigned to a non-diversity role at the company after being exposed for writing that Jews have “an insatiable appetite for war and killing” — discussed America’s founding with 1619 Project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones. Jones claimed that “the first Africans being sold on the White Lion [slave ship in 1619] is more foundational to the American story” than “the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock.” She claimed that she led the New York Times’ 1619 Project — a revisionist historical account of the American founding — to verify her “lifelong theory” that everything in the modern-day United States can be traced back to slavery. “If you name anything in America, I can relate it back to slavery,” Jones said in the video. At the end of the conversation, Jones concluded that all white Americans benefit from the system of white supremacy. “If you’re white in this country, then you have to understand that whether you personally are racist or not, whether you personally engage in racist behavior or not, you are the beneficiary of a 350-year system of white supremacy and racial hierarchy,” she said.

It is funny how these White-haters occasionally get into trouble for badmouthing Jews. I guess he didn't get the memo on what groups he is allowed to attack.

Suppose Google convinces me that everything good about the USA stems from White supremacy, and that BIPOCs are going to hate and resent Whites no matter what. Then what? The sensible conclusion is that we need to continue this system of White supremacy, as the only way to maintain civilized society.

With Google controlling a lot of the internet, one would hope that they uphold liberal tolerance for different views.

Thomas B. Edsall writes in the NY Times:

“In a striking reversal,” Chong wrote, “liberals are now consistently less tolerant than conservatives of a wide range of controversial speech about racial, gender and religious identities.”

That's right, and Google has joined the intolerant Left.

[Cass] Sunstein cites “microaggressions” as an area that “has exploded,” writing:

At one point, the University of California at Berkeley signaled its willingness to consider disciplining people for making one of a large number of statements,” including “America is a melting pot,” “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough,” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

Apparently it is acceptable to say that America is a White supremacist nation, but not to say that it is a melting pot.

Edsall goes on to explain that White liberals do not even believe the stuff they say, and may even be opposed to it. So what keeps them towing the line?

They are scared of Democrats who "relentlessly enforce norms by shaming and ostracizing nonconformists." So "they bend over backward to use the most up-to-date terminology and to lend public support to policies they may privately oppose." And "there does seem to be some true feelings of guilt and shame about being white."

The NY Times is right. White liberals have been intimidated into betraying America.

Afghanistan is Governed by Men

News:

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban on Tuesday announced an all-male interim government for Afghanistan stacked with veterans of their hard-line rule from the 1990s and the 20-year battle against the U.S.-led coalition, a move that seems unlikely to win the international support the new leaders desperately need to avoid an economic meltdown.

When Washington's forces won the American Revolution, how many women were appointed to an interim government?

The problem is that they are Moslems, not that they are men.

Women always want to take what men have earned.

Does anyone really think that appointing a few women would make the Taliban acceptable? We spent a trillion dollars on Afghanistan, and sometimes I get the impression that the main goal was to force feminism on the natives.

Wokeism is the New Religion

Atheists are fond of bragging about the decline of religion, as measured by things like church attendance and stated affiliation. But there is no increase in freethinkers.

In a new PragerU video, Moslem apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells us What Radical Islam and the Woke Have In Common:

The adherents of each pursue ideological purity, certain of their own rectitude.

Neither Islamists nor the Woke will engage in debate; both prefer indoctrination of the submissive and damnation of those who resist.

The two ideologies have distinctive rituals: Islamists shout “Allahu Akbar” and “Death to America”; the Woke shout “Black lives matter” and “I can’t breathe.”

Islamists pray to Mecca; the Woke take the knee.

Both like burning the American flag.

Both take offense at every opportunity and demand not just apologies but concessions.

Islamism inveighs against “blasphemy”; Wokeism wants to outlaw “hate speech.”

Islamists use the word “Islamophobia” to silence critics; the Woke do the same with “racism.”

A new book blames a new religion:

Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America Hardcover – October 26, 2021
by John McWhorter (Author)

Acclaimed linguist and award-winning writer John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting Black communities and weakening the American social fabric.

The Economist magazine explains:

What links these developments is a loose constellation of ideas that is changing the way that mostly white, educated, left-leaning Americans view the world. This credo still lacks a definitive name: it is variously known as left-liberal identity politics, social-justice activism or, simply, wokeness. But it has a clear common thread: a belief that any disparities between racial groups are evidence of structural racism; that the norms of free speech, individualism and universalism which pretend to be progressive are really camouflage for this discrimination; and that injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled.

These notions were incubated for years in the humanities departments of universities (elite ones in particular), without serious challenge.

It continues in another article:

Yet something extraordinary is happening in the West: a new generation of progressives is reviving methods that uncannily resemble those of the confessional state, with modern versions of loyalty oaths and blasphemy laws. And this effort is being spearheaded in the heartland of Anglo-Saxon liberalism—often by people who call themselves liberals. ...

Creeds. Churches demanded that people sign a statement of religious beliefs, like the Anglican church’s 39 Articles, before they could hold civil office. The University of California (UC) is doing something similar. Applicants for faculty posts have to complete statements about how they will advance diversity and inclusion.

These are worthy goals. But Abigail Thompson, until recently chair of maths at UC Davis and a lifelong liberal, points out that UC’s scoring system rewards a woke view of how to realise them. In 2019 the life-sciences department at UC Berkeley rejected 76% of applicants on the basis of their diversity statements without looking at their research records.

Blasphemy. Scotland,  a cradle of the Enlightenment, abolished the crime of blasphemy in March. At the same time, however, it reintroduced it by creating new offences such as “stirring up hatred” and “abusive speech” — punishable by up to seven years in prison.

The analogy with the past has its limits: no one is getting burnt at the stake.

According to Wikipedia, about 50k witches were executed in the history of Europe. In previous centuries, many crimes could get you executed.

Executing witches seems extreme, but it was done by the civil authorities, not the Church, and it was done because it was thought that witches were doing real harm to others by casting spells. Wokeism seeks to punish those who are just expressing opinions, and not causing any harm to anyone.

As the article points out, Wokeism is the result of the Democrats having been taken over by radical leftists pushing identity politics, and that most Democrats would have disavowed it several years ago. It is not a reaction to Donald Trump, as the conservatives and Republicans have not changed much.

America has not yet reached peak woke.

Yes. I assume that it will peak out and decline before we have a civil war, but it is too early to tell.

Today's NY Times has an essay against online porn. No, it is not a Christian complaining about Jews promoting immoral and sinful activities. It is law professor Catharine A. MacKinnon, promoting her peculiar anti-sex feminism:

One measure of this success is the media’s increasing insistence on referring to people used in prostitution and pornography as “sex workers.” What is being done to them is neither sex, in the sense of intimacy and mutuality, nor work, in the sense of productivity and dignity. Survivors of prostitution consider it “serial rape,” so they regard the term “sex work” as gaslighting.

So she has joined those who call ordinary consensual heterosexual intercourse as "rape". It is hard to understand what her objection is, as she makes no mention of marriage or any sexual activities that would be acceptable to her. She is just dogmatically asserting her religious beliefs, and not explaining her theology.

Prosecutors get soft on Black Crime

Michigan news:

Another area she said she hopes to tackle is felony firearms, which is a charge that can be filed if someone has a gun on them while committing a felony, regardless of whether they use it or if it is legally owned. If convicted, it carries a mandatory two-year prison sentence.

In 2018 in Ingham County, 80 percent of the 269 people serving a sentence for felony firearms were Black, according to a 2020 Safe and Just Michigan study. In the 10 counties statewide that used this charge most frequently, which includes Ingham, 86 percent of those serving a sentence for felony firearms were Black.

Charging people with a felony firearms offense was supposed to dissuade people from carrying guns, but "all it did was disproportionately impact Black people," Siemon said.

Yes, because Blacks disproportionately commit felonies with guns.

Who wrote the Bible?

Fred Reed writes:

Do Jews Contain Microchips? ...

The perennial insistence that Jews are out to destroy white Christian civilization runs into the awkward facts that Jews are usually white and that Christianity is their invention. Uberpatriots make invidious comparisons between Christian virtues and the dark morals and failings of other races and tribes, but … wait … didn’t Jews write the Bible?

No, Jews did not write the Bible.

Saying Jews wrote the Bible is like says the British wrote the Declaration of Independence. Yes, it is written in the English language, and the British invented the English language, and the authors were descended from the British. But America is not their invention. America was invented as a rejection of British monarchy.

The Bible was written in Greek by unknown authors. Parts of the Old Testament were first written Hebrew, but Christians don't care about that. Traditions says that Moses wrote the first five books, but this Jewish source says Moses was not a Jew.

Some of the apostles and other New Testament characters appear to be off Jewish descent, but they convert to Christianity, and so would not be considered Jews anymore.

Jews are often considered white, but many Jews consider themselves non-white. Jewish-dominated publications like the NY Times have become anti-white, and Atlantic magazine says Jews are not white.

I am not sure Reed is serious in the above essay.

Why we are taking a Million Afghan Refugees

The NY Post reports:

President Biden on Thursday told Jewish leaders that he spent time at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after the October 2018 mass murder of 11 people there — but the synagogue told The Post he never visited.

“I remember spending time at the, you know, going to the, you know, the Tree of Life synagogue, speaking with them,” Biden said in a 16-minute virtual address ahead of the Jewish holidays Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Actually that was a minor part of the incoherent ramblings of Pres. Biden talking to Jewish leaders.

Here is more:

President Biden on Thursday diverged off-topic during a call with Jewish leaders to complain about his daughter’s wedding to a Jewish doctor, while forgetting the names of two songs that are staples of Catholic and Jewish weddings.

The virtual call was to mark the start of the holiest time of the year for Jewish people. Rosh Hashanah, which marks the new year in the Jewish calendar, starts Monday and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, will be celebrated this month.

But Mr. Biden switched topics and spent a good portion of his remarks venting about his daughter, Ashley, not playing his favorite Catholic hymn at her wedding.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports:

Jewish communities around the world are reactivating their refugee-support networks as they prepare to help resettle Afghans who have fled the Taliban takeover of their country.

In recent weeks, tens of thousands of Afghans have been airlifted from Kabul after the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan with the U.S. exit from the country after 20 years. Many will spend time in another country while they wait to be admitted to the United States, but some are already arriving – and needing support as they adapt to a sudden relocation and a new country.

The importance of welcoming strangers is so deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and experience that immigration issues have long enjoyed a bipartisan consensus in Jewish communities even amid deep polarization on other topics.

To be more precise here, Jews are always pushing non-Christian and non-White immigration into Christian countries. Israel will not be taking any of those Afghans.

Mark Levin is not a Democrat or a Christian, and he denounces Biden, but says we need to take all those millions of Anne Franks from Afghanistan.

Biden is so completely owned by the Jews that he could not get a non-Jewish song at his daughter's wedding, and has Jews in all his key positions:

The New Bolshevik Branches of the United States of America:  Chief of Staff (Klain), State (Blinken, Sherman, Nuland), Treasury (Yellen), CDC (Walensky), DHS (Mayorkas), Cybersecurity (Neuberger), CIA (Cohen), Council of Economic Advisors (Bernstein), FCC (Rosenworcel), SEC (Gensler), Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism (Lipstadt), NSC Border Czar (Jacobson), Council on Gender Policy (Klein), Covid Response (Zients), U. S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (Kleinbaum), U.S. Ambassador to the E.U. (Gitenstein), SGOTUS (Emhoff), Senate (Schumer).

And Meet the New Head of the US Department of Justice: Attorney General Merrick Garfinkle.

The New Puritans

Occasionally I see people complain that a wave of McCarthyist hysteria in the 1950s ruined many innocent lives. It is all a big lie, as all that happened was that a few lost their jobs because they were anti-American and supporting Communism. Communism was the great evil of the day, and its supporters were evil monsters and traitors contributing to death and oppression. But actually many of the worst Communists, such as Angela Davis, got promoted to high-status jobs.

But now there really is a hysteria that is ruining many innocent live.

The Atlantic magazine reports:

Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell. ...

David Bucci, the former chair of the Dartmouth brain-sciences department, who was named in a lawsuit against the college though he was not accused of any sexual misconduct, did kill himself after he realized he might never be able to restore his reputation.

Others have changed their attitudes toward their professions. “I wake up every morning afraid to teach,” one academic told me: The university campus that he once loved has become a hazardous jungle, full of traps. ...

More often than not, apologies will be parsed, examined for “sincerity” — and then rejected. Howard Bauchner, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, apologized for something he’d had nothing directly to do with, after one of his colleagues made controversial comments on a podcast and on Twitter about whether communities of color were held back more by “structural racism” or by socioeconomic factors. “I remain profoundly disappointed in myself for the lapses that led to the publishing of the tweet and podcast,” Bauchner wrote. “Although I did not write or even see the tweet, or create the podcast, as editor in chief, I am ultimately responsible for them.” He wound up resigning.

The author has a new book out on authoritarianism, but I don't know if she complains about right-wing or left-wing authoritarians.

Update: Here is the article that helped destroy the new

Women’s bodies and clothing are recurring subjects for Richards. On a 2013 episode, he says that women “dress like a hooker” on Halloween; on another, he tells a story about a former Price employee who had taken up baking: “We said that we were going to have to saw her out of her room because she was going to be so giant that she wouldn’t be able to fit out the door.” When discussing weight gain, Price announcer Gray says, “There’s a lot of guys that would not be entirely upset with a petite woman that’s curvy”; Richards repeatedly uses the term “huskadoo.” He saves his praise for Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the former cohost of The View and Fox & Friends: “She’s, like, kind of my type. You know—blond, good-looking.”

None of these comments is particularly unusual or offensive. There is something seriously wrong with anyone making an issue out of them.

Here is a Wash. Post article:

Neman, whose chain of 100-plus restaurants sells salads for $10 to $15 a pop, published a LinkedIn post Tuesday suggesting that obesity is the “root cause” of health problems — including severe coronavirus infections. ...

“Yikes, this is incredibly fat-phobic,” one person commented on his LinkedIn post. “Have you considered how our healthcare system systematically underserves people who are considered to be in those groups?”

No, our healthcare system overserves those groups.

The Secret of the Framers' Success

A Russian-American Libertarian-leaning UCLA law professor writes about the framers of the USA Constitution:

The Secret of the Framers' Success

There were many things that contributed — ample land, a wide ocean, and more. But so much, I think, comes from this one foundation:

They were fortunate enough to have been born Englishmen.

A comment:

You must have tenure, to be able to say something like that.

American government was uniquely suited to Americans of mostly English Christian origin.

For 20 years we have tried to impose a constitution on Afghanistan, and it did not work. The American system of government has not worked anywhere else. It is not even working here anymore, now that immigration has made Whites a minority. I doubt that it could work in England.

It is hard to say just what the essential characteristics of those American framers were. It included intelligence, personality, individualism, faith, beliefs, language, etc. It is also hard to say whether those characteristics are genetic or cultural.

If they were just cultural, then you would expect them to be shared by assimilated immigrants. But that does not appear to be happening. Only the most similar ethnic groups, like Irish and Germans, have truly assimilated.

Public Schools Conspire to Deceive Parents

Abigail Shrier writes about how evils schools can be:

Never encourage a child to keep a secret from her parents. That’s what we used to say, in decades past, when we believed a sacred boundary encircled every American home.

Last week, I spoke with another mother who discovered her 12-year-old daughter’s middle school had changed the girl’s name and gender identity at school. The “Gender Support Plan” the district followed is an increasingly standard document which informs teachers of a child’s new chosen name and gender identity (“trans,” “agender,” “non-binary,” etc.) for all internal communications with the child. The school also provided the girl a year’s worth of counseling in support of her new identity, which in her case was “no gender.” Even the P.E. teachers were in on it. Left in the dark were her parents.

This duplicity is part of the “plan”: All documents sent home to mom and dad scrupulously maintained the daughter’s birth name and sex.

This is about like the school saying:

We gang-raped your daughter in the school gym as part of a Satanic ritual. We did not tell the parents because they are Christians and might disapprove.

They do not tell the parents because they are ashamed, and know that it is evil.