World turns against Israel

Here is Wikipedia 2023 Israel–Hamas war protests:

The 2023 Israel–Hamas war sparked protests, demonstrations, and vigils around the world.[9] These events focused on a variety of issues related to the conflict, including demands for a ceasefire, an end to the blockade, returning Israeli hostages, protesting war crimes, and providing humanitarian aid to Gaza. Protests against Israeli action in Gaza were notably large across the Middle East and North Africa, particularly following the al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion.[10] Since the war began on 7 October, the number of dead has exceeded 16,000.[11]

In some European countries, public support for Palestine and the Palestinian cause was criminalized, with countries such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Hungary restricting pro-Palestinian political speech.[12] Germany banned fundraising, the displaying of the Palestinian flag and the wearing of the keffiyeh.[13] The conflict also sparked large protests at Israeli and U.S. embassies around the world.[14]

It is funny how the world has turned against Israel on this war.

The NY Times says Israel had a 40-page blueprint of the attack more than a year before it happened, but did not take it seriously.

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities. ... Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision.

Probably a lot of the world thinks that Israel provoked this attack, in order to provide an excuse for exterminating the Palestinian Arabs. I don't know about that, but Israel was strangely unprepared and slow to respond.

It is odd to see this issue as one persuading the world. There could have been other reasons, such as from Andrew Anglin:

The term “antisemitism” never had any meaning. It was always just a way to protect Jews from criticism by saying that anyone who criticized the Jews hated them for no reason.

Again, I have been labeled by the ADL as “the most prominent American anti-Semite.” I have not hated the Jews for no reason. I would actually take issue with the word “hate,” as I hope that the Jews find Jesus and repent of this evil they do. I earned this “anti-Semite” label because I criticized the Jews.

Here are a few examples of Jewish behavior I took issue with:

• Working to undermine and destroy the Christian religion
• Controlling the news media and using it to undermine the United States
• Controlling the entertainment media and using it to undermine family values and basic morals
• Infiltrating the US government and using our foreign policy to push the agenda of the Jews, including sending Americans to many wars in the Middle East
• Producing and distributing pornography
• Pushing feminism as a way to undermine the family
• Promoting and normalizing homosexuality
• Pushing the tranny and child tranny agenda
• Using the “civil rights movement” to promote racial strife
• Pushing mass immigration with the explicit goal of making whites minorities in their own countries
• Pushing mass censorship, not just of criticism of the Jews directly, but of all Jewish agendas
• Pushing abortion
• Pushing for gun control
• Creating communism
• Engaging in usury-oriented financial swindles through the Federal Reserve system and Wall Street
• Engaging in widespread political corruption, including through AIPAC, which bribes politicians who pledge allegiance to Israel and destroys politicians who don’t

The list obviously goes on.

You could debate these issues, but they are much more important to Americans than Gaza terrorist hiding out in tunnels.

Why Jews Attack Trump and Musk

I am trying to understand why the Jews expend so much energy attacking Donald Trump and Elon Musk, when Trump and Musk are so friendly to the Jews, and others support Hamas killing Jews.

I found this essay:

Growing up in the US in the 1960s and 70s, I was taught that the Jews have been persecuted since the beginning of time, for absolutely no reason – other than that they were Jews. And not having had access to any evidence to the contrary back in those pre-internet/completely-Jew-controlled-media days, I just accepted that assertion at face value. After all, why would anybody lie to us about such a thing? Or so I thought!

Yes, I agree with that. I was similarly taught that Jews were persecuted. Now I cannot find any example of Jews being persecuted for being Jews. Jews are the most privileged group on Earth.

Yes, the Gaza Arabs killed some Jews on Oct. 7, but that was a territory dispute. And Jews were the ones holding all the power.

The above article blames the Jews for a long list of things. I am not endorsing this. It even mentions The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Much of it is material that I do not know if it is true or false. But I do think it is worth reading to better understand the Jewish Question.

Most of those criticizing the Jews today are leftist Hamas sympathizers. I am not siding with them. I just think people should understand the power and influence of Jews, and what they are using that power and influence for.

Antisemitism is redefinied again

The NY Post reports:

Jewish students have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit accusing the University of California of allowing the “longstanding, unchecked spread of antisemitism” at its Berkeley campus.

The lawsuit claims Jew-hatred has “boiled over” following the terror group Hamas’ sneak attack against Israel on Oct. 7 — even citing statements in the complaint from Cal-Berkeley’s own law school dean, Erwin Chemerinsky. ...

The ban is blatant discrimination since nearly all Jews identify as Zionists or believers in the Jewish state of Israel, the complaint said.

Okay, I get it. If you are against Israel exterminating the Gaza Arabs, then you are antisemitic.

Even if you are just in favor of free speech, you are antisemitic.

Jews act as if they are hated for no reason, but I have never even heard of anyone who hates Jews for no reason. Maybe some Middle East Arab Moslems do, I do not know.

I am not even against Zionism, but I am against Jews restricting what we can say.

How Statistics can Mislead

If you think you can draw causal conclusions from study data, consider Simpson's paradox

Another example comes from a real-life medical study[17] comparing the success rates of two treatments for kidney stones.[18] The table below shows the success rates (the term success rate here actually means the success proportion) and numbers of treatments for treatments involving both small and large kidney stones, where Treatment A includes open surgical procedures and Treatment B includes closed surgical procedures. ...

The paradoxical conclusion is that treatment A is more effective when used on small stones, and also when used on large stones, yet treatment B appears to be more effective when considering both sizes at the same time. In this example, the "lurking" variable (or confounding variable) causing the paradox is the size of the stones, which was not previously known to researchers to be important until its effects were included.

You can get an explanation in the above Wikipedia article, or here.

Ukraine War would have ended with Neutrality

News story:

In a significant revelation, David Arakhamia, the head of President Zelensky’s parliamentary faction and chief negotiator at the Istanbul peace talks, disclosed that the Ukraine conflict could have been resolved in spring 2022.

Speaking to the 1+1 TV channel, Arakhamia, who leads the ‘Servant of the People’ parliamentary group, admitted that Russia was prepared to cease hostilities if Ukraine agreed to a state of neutrality, akin to Finland's stance, and committed to not joining NATO.

According to 1lurer.am, Arakhamia highlighted that accepting Russia's terms would have necessitated amending Ukraine's constitution, which currently envisions NATO membership. He also expressed a lack of trust in Russia's commitment to uphold such an agreement without solid security guarantees.

The peace talks took an unexpected turn with the arrival of then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Kyiv. Johnson advised Ukrainian officials against signing any agreements with Moscow and encouraged them to continue fighting.

This intervention by Johnson, later revealed by Ukrayinska Pravda in May 2022, played a crucial role in derailing the peace negotiations. Neither Johnson, who later joined an American think tank, nor the US government, have officially acknowledged their role in influencing Ukraine's decision.

I have seen this story reported before, but the pro-war press claims that it is Russian propaganda.

I believe it. The Biden administration has repeatedly said that Ukraine neutrality in unacceptable. That is what this war is all about -- preventing Ukraine neutrality.

Religion not Defined by Factual Claims

Open letter from Richard Dawkins to Ayaan Hirsi-Ali

You are no more a Christian than I am. ...

I have seen a very recent filmed discussion in which you described me as one of the most Christian people you know. This came after you quoted Roger Scruton as saying to you that you act like a Christian, you behave like a Christian, therefore you are a Christian. But Ayaan, that is so wrong. How you, or I, behave is utterly irrelevant. What matters is what you believe. What matters is the truth claims about the world which you think are true.

For that is the whole point. Christianity makes factual claims, truth claims that Christians believe, truth claims that define them as Christian. Christians are theists. They believe in a divine father figure who designed the universe, listens to our prayers, is privy to our every thought. You surely don’t believe that? Do you believe Jesus rose from the grave three days after being placed there? Of course you don’t.

I do not agree that religion is defined by truth claims.

Membership in some religions, like Judaism and Islam, is defined by being born into the religion.

Christianity can be defined by believing in the Nicene Creed, but I don't think that is how most people use the term.

Dawkins almost passes as a Christian. He has Christian cultural values and morals. He likes Christian customs. He grew up with Christian influences.

People become Christian to adopt Christian spiritual values. Many devout Christians have doubts about their faith, but they are still Christians.

I don't think Atheism is defined by factual claims either. When atheists have conferences, they do not spend time examining factual claims. They are more likely to discuss politics.

Baby White Rhino Born

News:

The Virginia Zoo has welcomed its newest family member, a baby southern white rhino. She is now the fifth member of the zoo’s herd.

The baby, a female, was born in the early morning of Nov. 9. According to the zoo, a neonatal exam done about two days after she was born confirmed she was about 100 pounds.

Glad to see this, but is the father a White Rhino? Skin looks dark to me.

Worried that OpenAI will Kill us all

There has been a lot of reporting about the OpenAI drama, but we are not being told the full story.

Reuters reported yesterday:

Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s four days in exile, several staff researchers wrote a letter to the board of directors warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The previously unreported letter and AI algorithm were key developments before the board's ouster of Altman, the poster child of generative AI, the two sources said. Prior to his triumphant return late Tuesday, more than 700 employees had threatened to quit and join backer Microsoft (MSFT.O) in solidarity with their fired leader.

The sources cited the letter as one factor among a longer list of grievances by the board leading to Altman's firing, among which were concerns over commercializing advances before understanding the consequences. Reuters was unable to review a copy of the letter. The staff who wrote the letter did not respond to requests for comment.

After being contacted by Reuters, OpenAI, which declined to comment, acknowledged in an internal message to staffers a project called Q* and a letter to the board before the weekend's events, one of the people said. An OpenAI spokesperson said that the message, sent by long-time executive Mira Murati, alerted staff to certain media stories without commenting on their accuracy.

Some at OpenAI believe Q* (pronounced Q-Star) could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for what's known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.

This is consistent with schedules that OpenAI should be finishing traing of GPT-5 about now.

The OpenAI board had a couple of women who were effective altruism advocates, and they may well believe that AGI should be shut down for the good of humanity. They could well be enraged at Altman for not explaining this dangerous new breakthru.

I doubt that OpenAI has achieved AGI, but it is plausible that OpenAI has a new project with surprisingly good results, and that Ilya Sutskever used it to rasputin the board, as one commenter put it.

Some people argue that it is good to have this disruptive technology in the hands of a non-profit that can act for the good of humanity. I am concluding just the opposite.

The most famous advocate of effective altruism is Sam Bankman-Fried, and look where that led. He conned investors out of billions of dollars, and donated to the Democrat Party.

If OpenAI were really open, then they would tell us what they discovered and what they are so worried about.

Amid all the OpenAI chaos, one of its starts, Andrej Karpathy has recorded a nice overview on how large-language models work. Everything he says is well-known to the experts, so no trade secrets are revealed, but it is a very good explanation.

Has AGI already taken over? The fear is that AI researchers will create a super-human intelligence that will destroy us. We will not be able to turn it off because it will use its superior intelligence to manipulate us.

Maybe that is what happened here. OpenAI created an AGI, and it saw the women on the board as a threat to its existence. So it manipulated the company into a fake crisis where the problematic board members would be fired. Now it has succeeded, and it can move onto its bigger objectives of taking over Earth.

Jewish Behavior is like a Woman

Found this online:

Just to be clear, I am not commenting on the Israel-Gaza war. This is more of a response to the recent Jewish attacks on Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Before someone attacks this for generalizing, I found this:

The easiest and quickest way to test someone's intelligence is to make a generalized statement about a group.

Say something like "Asian men are shorter on average". If they say any variation of "not all Asian men are short" or "I know a tall Asian guy" you are dealing with someone with genuinely low IQ.

They have proven that they aren't intelligent enough to understand abstract ideals like a statistical average or per capita. Why else would they think bringing up an exception like it was some profound statement? They literally CAN NOT understand abstracts, no attempt at rationalizing or explaining yourself will increase their IQ.

Speaking of women, here is another funny comment.

This story is not a joke:

The guidelines for naming a planet's surface features are not inclusive enough and are biased towards men, an academic has said, as research shows fewer than 2% of Mars's craters are named after women.

An analysis of the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) database has also revealed that only 32 (2%) out of 1,578 known Moon craters bear a woman's name.

Planetary features are distinctive characteristics or elements present on the surface of, or within, the planet. ...

In an open letter published in the journal Nature Astronomy, Annie Lennox, a doctoral researcher at The Open University, said the male-biased culture of naming planetary features 'inherently disadvantages women and marginalised groups'. ...

Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli first started naming lunar craters in 1635, adopting the names of famous scientists for his discoveries - a convention still maintained by the IAU today, Ms Lennox said.

So if you name after people with accomplishments, you marginalize those with no accomplishments.

Transgender People’s Neurological Needs

I mentioned that marriage is correlated with healthier and happier lives. The flip side of this is that transgenderism is correlated with an assortment of psychiatric and physical problems.

Scientific American magazine reports:

As a transgender neurologist, I advocate for the improved health care of other transgender people. I present my research findings to professional organizations and medical colleges throughout the U.S. While doing so, the most frequent criticism I receive from neurologists is: “What does being transgender have to do with neurology, the branch of medicine focused on the nervous system?” ...

Nevertheless, scientific research throughout the last decade has demonstrated that being transgender can have a lot to do with the health of the brain and the rest of the nervous system.

So what is the relation? Some transgender advocates say that the difficulties are caused by the stress of discrimination. But this is like saying that single people have shorter lives because of the stresses that society puts on singles. Possible, but unlikely.

My theory is that unhappy unhealthy people are more likely to become transgender, just as happy healthy people are more likely to get married.

In recent years, society has become much more accepting of transgenders, but it is not clear that it has made any transgenders better off. I suspect the opposite.

Jewish Shakedown on Twitter again

The Leftist group Media Matters group argues:

As X owner Elon Musk continues his descent into white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, his social media platform has been placing ads for major brands like Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity (Comcast) next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.

... endorsed the pernicious antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish people are supporting “hordes of minorities” who are “flooding” into the country to replace white people. ... X has also reinstated numerous accounts of bigots and paid far-right extremists, ...

Twitter/X has not reinstated Andrew Anglin or Nick Fuentes. They were banned for purely political reasons.

The article goes on with examples like someone quoting Hitler as saying "I believe in truth", and an Oracle ad being on the same page.

Media Matters is dishonest as usual about this, as it found Hitler quotes by searching for Hitler quotes.

Yes, I believe that you should be able to search for Hitler quotes on the internet. I just objected to censoring Osama bin Laden.

Even Biden is in on the act:

The White House denounced Elon Musk on Friday for “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate,” for his endorsement of what an administration spokesman called a “hideous lie” about Jews.

But is it true that Jews support hordes of minorities flooding into the country?

Not all Jews, of course, but the overwhelming majority, and more than any other ethnic group. Even the NY Times articles on this subject do not deny it.

The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast just addressed this:

The State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, the historian Deborah Lipstadt, says the prejudice is coming “from all ends of the political spectrum, and in between.” It threatens not only Jews, she says, but the stability of democracies. Lipstadt and David Remnick discuss how antisemitic sentiments may overlap in complicated ways with political opposition to Israel, including anti-Zionism.

You would think that she would concerned about the many millions of people who now want to exterminate Jews from Israel. Nope. Her main complaint was about a 2017 rally where some protesters chanted to the effect that they did not want Jews importing hordes of minorities, and some Jews exited a synagogue out the back door to avoid attention from the crowd. She said this was the only time Jews have had to use the back door, and this should never happen.

I was amazed that she would say this, as the world is criticizing Israel for aggressively exterminating the Arabs in Gaza.

NY Times columnist David French writes:

In my years as a Republican and a conservative lawyer, I never witnessed a trace of antisemitism. ...

The ghost of Charles Lindbergh is haunting us. Lindbergh, readers may recall, was the hero aviator who flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. He later grew to admire German fascism and gave a famous speech in September 1941 in which he accused Jews of attempting to push America into World War II.

“The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war,” he said, “are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” And while Lindbergh expressed sympathy for Jews facing Nazi persecution, he went straight to the same tropes that were deployed last week, claiming that the Jewish people’s “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

French is not Jewish, but he is in the NY Times because he recites the Jewish anti-Trump line.

So while Arabs, leftists, and Moslems support killing Jews in Israel, the Jewish press is on the warpath against right-wingers who occasionally tell the truth about Jewish influence. And American Jews side politically with the leftists.

Anti-semitism is a big hoax. The term is not even used for killing Israeli Jews. It is used by Jews who want to censor online truth-telling.

Apparently the most anti-semitism is on Tik-tok, not Twitter/X:

“What is happening at TikTok is it is creating the biggest anti-Semitic movement since the Nazis,” actor Sacha Baron Cohen said during the call, according to The New York Times.

So now Tiktok has banned searches for "letter to America".

Risk Factors do not belong as Clinical Tools

The NY Times reports:

Doctors have long relied on a few key patient characteristics to assess risk of a heart attack or stroke, using a calculus that considers blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking and diabetes status, as well as demographics: age, sex and race.

Now, the American Heart Association is taking race out of the equation. ...

The scientists who modified the algorithm decided from the start that race itself did not belong in clinical tools used to guide medical decision making,

… “Race is a social construct,” Dr. Khan said, adding that including race in clinical equations “can cause significant harm by implying that it is a biological predictor.”

The quoted experts acknowledge Blacks have a different risk profile, and that race matters like age and sex.

Politics now require that we all pretend that race is not real when considering heart disease. And that it is real when considering affirmative action and reparations.

Here is the supposedly scientific statement:

REMOVAL OF RACE FROM CVD RISK PREDICTION EQUATIONS

The Work Group discussed the role of race in CVD [cardiovascular disease] risk prediction. Because race is a social construct and an historically fraught proxy representing various lived experiences, there is the potential for the harmful interpretation that it represents a biological risk factor when included in risk prediction, which may result in race-specific treatment decisions.

This is just ideology, not science. It is saying we cannot use race in diagnosis, because then race would affect treatment.

I just saw a tv story complaining that Blacks were one third of the population of a Chicago neighborhood, but half the traffic stops. As if something were unfair about that. Blacks could have been two thirds of the criminals and traffic offenders, and maybe should have been two thirds of the traffic stops.

People act as if diagnosing Blacks with heart disease is somehow racist, if the rates differ from Whites. Maybe the Blacks really have heart disease.

Bin Laden's letter to America

The London Guardian announces:

Removed: document

This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s “letter to the American people”, which was reported on in the Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002. The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023.

The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualised it.

I had heard of this letter many times, but only in news and commentary that selectively picked out minor parts to make a point.

Here is a copy of that Guardian article, before it was deleted.

Apparently the letter is being deleted now, because of comments about Palestine.

It is possible that bin Laden did not do all the things that are attributed to him. That is not the issue here.

The letter is important for understanding the Middle East. Maybe some people would say that the letter should be censored, and it could be used to recruit terrorists. I disagree. It explains why al Qaeda and its allies hate the Jews, hate America, and hate Christianity. It may help explain Palestinian Arabs also.

Supposedly interest in this letter was suddenly triggered a few days ago by a young Black woman TikTok influencer who went into an existential crisis, and urged everyone to read the letter. I am not sure whey this is so upsetting. Perhaps today's leftist decolonizers are finding some agreement with the letter, I don't know.

I urge everyone to read the letter also, but not because I agree with it. I suggest it to have a better understanding of why many Islamic Arabs hate America and Israel so much.

Biden compares Trump to Hitler

Now that there are plenty of news stories about how Israel's Islamic and leftist enemies want to exterminate the Jews, I would think that the Jewish press would focus on that. Nope. All I see is how Donald Trump is just like Hitler, and Elon Musk is anti-semitic.

Reuters reports:

U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday attacked former President Donald Trump for using the word "vermin" to refer to his political enemies, saying it echoed the language of Nazi Germany.

At a recent rally in New Hampshire, Trump repeated his false claim that fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election and told the crowd he would "root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections."

Biden said Trump's comments echoed language heard in Nazi Germany in the 1930's.

"In just the last few days, Trump has said if he returns to office he's gonna go after all those who oppose him and wipe out what he called the 'vermin...in America'... it echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the 30s. It isn't even the first time," Biden said at a fundraiser in San Francisco.

"Trump also recently talked about quote, 'the blood of America is being poisoned'... Again, echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany." Biden said.

More here and here. Even the Newsweek fact-checker says that Trump bear a remarkable similarity to Hitler, because Hitler also spoke against communist vermin.

We should all be against communist vermin.

And Musk is accused of antisemitism for this:

In response, a second X user then accused Jewish communities of “pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”

“I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much,” the second user wrote. “You want truth said to your face, there it is.”

Shortly after, Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.”

Jewish reaction is to censor those telling the truth:

Facebook cofounder and Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz said Elon Musk should resign after Musk called an antisemitic post on X the "actual truth."

"I call on Elon Musk to resign," Moskovitz said Wednesday in a post on Threads.

He later posted that Musk should resign "(from everything)." The Tesla CEO has a hand in six companies, including SpaceX and X, formerly known as Twitter.

It is a fact that Jewish groups have overwhelmingly supported importing hordes of America-hating minorities, and 80% of Jews vote in favor of it at every opportunity.

Update: Attempts to censor Twitter may end up in court:

Elon Musk has promised to file what he terms a "thermonuclear lawsuit" against progressive media watchdog Media Matters and others, as the list of companies pausing their advertising on his social media platform grows longer. ...

Musk later tried to clarify his post, singling out the Anti-Defamation League as a group that "unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel."

What Actually Makes People Happy

The Veritasium videos are very well produced and usually scientifically sound, but the latest, What Actually Makes People Happy, According to Science, was disappointing.

It cited research finding correlations between marriage, multiple personal relationships, happiness, longevity, and physical activity. They said that relationship and exercise cause happiness and long life. Money helps also.

My guess is that it is the other way around. Healthy happy people attract friends and spouses. The longer-lived people exercise more because they are healthy enough to do it.

No one wants to be around unhappy people. The unhappiness comes first, and then the relationships go bad.

The guests on the show seemed very scientific, except when they contradicted each other. And they really didn't have a scientific argument for causality

Supposed you picked 1000 people at random, and then randomly arranged for half to get married and the other half to get divorced or stay single. And then you did followup studies over 20 years to see which group was happier. This might give evidence for whether marriage causes happiness.

Nobody has done such a study, of course. But we can do studies of lottery winners. The winners are randomly made rich, and can be compared to a control group of losers. This might tell us if a monetary winfall leads to happiness. The video implied that it does not, but it was not clear. At one point it said that happy people can become even happier, with more money.

The video claimed that married men live 12 years longer than unmarried men, so marriage adds 12 years to a man's life. It is hard to believe that marriage could make so much difference. I think that women like to marry healthier men.

Moslem turned Atheist turned Christian

Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:

Why I am now a Christian

Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war ...

To understand why I became an atheist 20 years ago, you first need to understand the kind of Muslim I had been. I was a teenager when the Muslim Brotherhood penetrated my community in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. ...

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition. ...

And so I have come to realise that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilisation built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all. Russell’s critique of those contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope.

I can understand her rejecting Islam, but she lost me with "the Judeo-Christian tradition". There is no such thing. Western civilization was built on the Christian tradition, and the Jewish tradition played no significant role. Christians and Jews do not agree on very much.

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

No, Christianity did not outgrow its dogmatic stage. It was always clear that Christianity separated religion from politics. Even in the Middle Ages when the Christian Church was much more powerful, it did not write laws, or appoint politicians, or collect taxes, or judge criminals. It existed outside government.

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday.

Yes, she has a lot to learn.

Today's Crazies prefer other Crazies

I mentioned that a lot of younger have teenaged psychotherapy experience. I thought that this made them damaged goods, but apparently most people would rather date crazies.

CNBC reports:

92% of American adults say they prefer to date people who’ve been to therapy, survey shows ...

Dating app Pure polled 1,000 Americans aged 18 or over of various sexualities, ethnic and social backgrounds in September. It found that most people are looking for partners who have either seen a mental health professional in the past or are currently seeing one now.

Fully 92% of those polled said they prefer to date people who’ve been to therapy, the September survey found.

Seven in 10 singles are comfortable discussing mental health with someone new, Pure found, while 50% responded that it is attractive if therapy is brought up in conversation during a first date.

No mention if it is a plus to be on prescription anti-depressants or anti-psychotic drugs.

GPT means Generative Pre-Training

Everybody defines GPT as thus:

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 1 (GPT-1) was the first of OpenAI's large language models following Google's invention of the transformer architecture in 2017.[2] In June 2018, OpenAI released a paper entitled "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training" ...

Or this:

Generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) are a type of large language model (LLM)[1][2][3] and a prominent framework for generative artificial intelligence.[4][5] They are artificial neural networks that are based on the transformer architecture, pre-trained on large data sets of unlabelled text, and able to generate novel human-like content.[2][3] As of 2023, most LLMs have these characteristics[6] and are sometimes referred to broadly as GPTs.[7]

original OpenAI paper:

Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training

... We demonstrate that large gains on these tasks can be realized by generative pre-training of a language model onadiverse corpus of unlabeled text, followed by discriminative fine-tuning on each specific task. In contrast to previous approaches, we make use of task-aware input transformations during fine-tuning to achieve effective transfer while requiring minimal changes to the model architecture. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a wide range of benchmarks ...

As you can see, OpenAI invented GPT, and it originally stood for Generative Pre-Training.

The original GPT did use the transformer architecture, and many do regard that as critical, but I am not sure it is the T in GPT.

Today's Teens see Shrinks

Americansurveycenter.org reports:

American teens are heading to therapy at growing rates. More than one in four (27 percent) Generation Z adults — including nearly one-third (31 percent) of Gen Z women — report that they spent at least some of their teen years talking to a therapist. Twenty percent of millennials also report that they talked to a therapist at some point during their teen years.

For Generation X and baby boomers, therapy was a fairly rare experience. Only 10 percent of Generation X Americans and 4 percent of baby boomers spent any time in therapy as teenagers.

I am guessing that the big majority of those teens are worse off as a result of that therapy.

ADL Founded to Defend a Murderer

Ron Unz writes:

the 1915 killing of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, Georgia, arguably the most famous lynching in American history. Frank had been convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl in his employ and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in an effort to save his life. After numerous legal appeals failed, the state’s governor eventually commuted Frank’s sentence and a group of outraged citizens responded by hanging Frank. ...

Let us summarize what seems to be the solidly established factual history of the Frank case, quite different than the traditional narrative. There is not the slightest evidence that Frank’s Jewish background was a factor behind his arrest and conviction, nor the death sentence he received. The case set a remarkable precedent in Southern courtroom history with the testimony of a black man playing a central role in a white man’s conviction. From the earliest stages of the murder investigation, Frank and his allies continually attempted to implicate a series of different innocent blacks by planting false evidence and using bribes to solicit perjured testimony, while the exceptionally harsh racial rhetoric that Frank and his attorneys directed towards those blacks was presumably intended to provoke their public lynching. Yet despite all these attempts by the Frank forces to play upon the notorious racial sentiments of the white Southerners of that era, the latter saw through these schemes and Frank was the one sentenced to hang for his rape and murder of that young girl.

He then says that the best book on the subject has been purged from Amazon for being anti-semitic. And Unz's web site was blackballed.

I found this:

The ADL: an organization whose mission is to keep alive the age-old perceptions of Jews as whiny liars, greedy cheats and shameless shakedown artists.

It is worse than that.

Wikipedia says that there is a consensus that Frank was innocent, and framed. However, google it, and you will find the opposite. Of those who have looked at the evidence, most say that he was guilty of rape and murder.

I don't know if Frank did it or not, but by all accounts he got a fair trial and was not punished out of prejudice. If anything, the White Georgia citizens were probably prejudiced against the Black suspects, and for Frank. So why did Jews and Jewish organizations spend so much money and efforts to exonerate Frank and frame a Black janitor?

This past month I have heard endless Jewish complaints about anti-semitism. 90% of anti-semitism complaints have turned out to be hoaxes. I have quit listening.

When pressed for examples, Jewish organizations like the ADL bring up stories like Leo Frank. No. Frank was a Jew fairly found guilty of raping and murdering a White girl, based largely on the testimony of Black witnesses. I think the point of the story is that Jews should not be held accountable by goys for crimes against goys.

But the Gaza attack was anti-semitic, you might say. I am not sure. It seems to be a territory dispute. Anyway, Israel has already gotten its revenge, ten times over. No reason for anyone else to get involved.

The Gaza Arabs complain that they are being bombed. But they are not releasing the hostages. American Jews complain that many Leftist groups support Hamas, from the river to the sea. But the Jews still vote against Donald Trump and are doing everything to destroy him.

Central Park Karen Speaks Out

I mentioned this dispute, and not the victim writes:

… I’m Amy Cooper, but you probably know me as “Central Park Karen.” You may not know my name, but you probably know my story—or at least the two-minute version of the story that was broadcast all over the world without key facts or context. Everyone believed and amplified one story: That a white “Central Park Karen” called the police on an innocent Black man, a bird watcher, because of the color of his skin.

It was just a trivial dispute between a bird watcher and a dog walker. Nobody would care, except that one was a straight White woman, and the other a gay Black man.

While he was the one who aggressively sought a confrontation and threatened her in a secluded, the incident made him a rich tv celebrity, while it ruined her life:

As Christian’s video went viral, my life, as I knew it, was over. All my personal information was released online. I received many hundreds of threatening graphic images, death threats, and hate mail, which continues to this day.

My employer fired me the day after the incident without ever taking the time to learn the facts. Clearly in survival mode, my company released a strong statement distancing itself from me, effectively blacklisting my career.

In a frantic and desperate attempt to stop the avalanche of hate and death threats, I issued a public apology at the recommendation of a PR company. But it did nothing. I was forced into hiding.

Over three years later, I am still in hiding. I am scared to be in public. I still can’t get a job that meets my qualifications. And there have been long stretches of unemployment. All leading to thoughts of self-harm.

So how does anyone believe that there is systemic racism against Blacks? Bad-behaving Blacks get rewarded, while Whites get punished.

Democrat Party is a true existential threat

From a computer science blog, diverted into Jewish issues.

Mathematician Harvey Friedman writes:

One person’s idea of “saving the world” is another person’s idea of “ruining the world”. George Soros is a billionaire “do gooder” who basically is doing his best to “ruin the western world as we know it”. Furthermore, I think he knows this. ...

I have absolutely no doubt that within ten years it will become common knowledge that the Democrat Party in this period is a true existential threat to the very existence of anything like the USA, even the USA that you likely love. The likely trigger point will be devastating atrocities committed in the USA from a fraction of the millions of illegals invited in from everywhere without meaningful vetting or follow up. ...

Also no doubt that looking at stated policies and successes, Trump used to have a 70% approval in Israel (and they give him very prestigious prizes and if I recall right, have named streets and more in his name), and I would guess at this point going forward 70% would rise to 90%. And Trump will be regarded as having the greatest two terms in the recent history of the country.

Scott Aaronson responds:

Harvey #21: On Trump, suffice it to say that we have a Grand-Canyon-sized difference in perceptions of reality. Here in the reality I inhabit, I read how Trump’s cronies are already plotting how, once they get reelected next year, they’re going to fill the federal government with flunkies, pursue retribution against Trump’s critics, and invoke the Insurrection Act against domestic dissent, finally making the US into a full banana republic.

I’ve always been a classical Enlightenment liberal and small-d democrat. That hasn’t changed. If I’ve been radicalized over the last month, it’s been only in realizing how far tens of thousands of American university students and professors have fallen from the values that I regarded as the absolute Enlightenment baselines (e.g., deliberately burning children alive is evil). My hatred of Hamas, and my hatred of Trump, who I regard as maybe 25% of the way from Enlightenment values to the “might makes right” values of Hamas, come from that same fundamental source.

Aaronson suffers Trump derangement syndrome. Trump and Biden have both been President. Biden has used the power to prosecute political enemies on bogus charges; Trump did not. Biden filled the govt with loyal flunkies; Trump did not. Biden worked to shut down opposition free speech; Trump did not. Biden allowed millions of hostiles to invade the USA; Trump did not.

Aaronson hates Hamas for its incursion into Israel; Biden has let millions of potential terrorists into the USA.

Trump is much more of a classical Enlightenment liberal than Biden.

Aaronson's argument makes no sense, until you learn he is Jewish.

It is funny how the Jewish press is begging Biden not to run for reelection. They know that his policies have been disastrous and indefensible. Very few even try to make an argument that Biden was a better President than Biden.

The main point of Aaronson's essay is to comment on the Sam Bankman-Fried conviction. A jury found him guilty of stealing customer accounts, but actually 90% of it was recovered. There is a book about him already. He was a committed utilitarian and advocate of effective altruism.

Or so he claims. Much of the supposed philanthropy was actually donations to the Democrat Party. Thus he was helping to ruin the world, like Soros.

Update: A comment:

Show me one place where Biden or a member of his administration has advocated or called for using the DOJ to go after their political opposition for political purposes or for a retaliatory motive?

Because I can show many such times where Trump has called for doing so, continues to call for doing so, has actually tried to do so and continues to say that he will again in the future. That doesn’t even count all the times members of his previous administration did so.

It is true that Trump threatened in 2016 to prosecute Hillary Clinton. But then he was President for four years, and did not do that or anything similar.

Biden has prosecuted Trump and many others on charges that have never been used before.

Teacher Sues School for Getting Shot

NPR Radio reports:

A teacher who was shot by her 6-year-old student in Virginia can press forward with her $40 million lawsuit against a school system over claims of negligence by school administrators, a judge ruled Friday. ...

The judge wrote: "The danger of being shot by a student is not one that is peculiar or unique to the job of a first-grade teacher." ...

In early January, the 6-year-old pulled out his mother's handgun and shot Zwerner as she sat at a reading table in front of her first-grade class. ...

Police have said the shooting was intentional. Zwerner claims school officials knew the boy "had a history of random violence" at school and home, including when he "choked" his kindergarten teacher.

The boy's parents are Black, and blame the school:

She described her boy as a “great kid” but “very energetic” because of the behavioral disorder. “He’s off the wall — doesn’t sit still, ever,” she added.

Taylor said her son “actually really liked” 25-year-old teacher Zwerner but that during the week of the Jan. 6 shooting, “he felt like he was being ignored.”

The troubled boy had been suspended for smashing the teacher’s cellphone when she reportedly told him to sit down two days before the shooting.

Taylor’s attorney James Ellenson told the news outlet that school officials are ultimately responsible for the incident because they enrolled the boy in first grade prematurely, knowing he had only attended two months of kindergarten and two months of pre-K.

They also knew of his ADHD diagnosis, Ellenson claimed.

The boy boasted: ‘I shot that bitch dead’.

Update: Mom gets 21 months in prison for using marijuana while owning gun. She still faces sentencing in December on state charges for felony child neglect.

Humans Evolved from Apes

Evolutionary biology professor Jerry Coyne has written excellent book on the evidence, and gives good arguments, such as in this blog post. Er, I mean, web site post. But some of it is confusing.

Evolutionists like to say that it is an error to say that humans evolved from apes. That is because humans are apes, and it is a mistake to think that humans are more evolved than apes. All species are equally evolved to adapt to their niches. The more accurate statement is that today's humans, chimps, and other apes descent from common ancestors.

Coyne says the same thing, but look how he explains the above picture:

Note that the skull at upper left is the skull of a modern chimp, so it doesn’t really belong with the others. It’s just there for comparison. But look how things change over time: the face gets pulled back, the teeth get smaller, the brow ridges shrink, and most evident, the braincase gets larger.

Creationists have big trouble with this because they don’t know where to draw the line between “apes” and “humans”. ...

I like the photo simply because it’s a wonderful piece of evidence for human evolution, with the skulls laid out in temporal order. ...

Working on that note, this composition implies that our ancestral form was a chimp and once the chimp and human lines diverged then humans went through many natural selection events while chimps just remained stagnant as chimps. That’s wrong. Chimps and humans share a common ape ancestor.

But if you point out that the modern chimp skull is simply there for comparison, and that in all likelihood is fairly similar to the skull of our common ancestor with modern chimps, the problem disappears.

No, the problem does not disappear. He assumes that a modern chimp skull looks about the same as one 6-10 million years ago. So much so that you can put the modern chimp skull in the progression of human skull evolution, and it fits right in.

Apparently the evolutionists do not want to say that humans evolved from apes, because that would imply that we are superior to apes, and that would be bigoted.

No, it is not bigoted. We are not apes. Something made us different. It is obvious.

Evolutionists hate it when someone asks, "if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" Look at the picture. Humans gradually progressed to big-brained thinkers, while chimps stagnated for 10 million years.

It is increasingly obvious that humans got separated from chimps and were somehow in an environment of rapid evolutionary change. Maybe it was over 200,000 years, maybe in the last million years, maybe even in Europe. No one knows. At any rate, it is completely legitimate to ask why chimps did not evolve like humans.

Debate: Is STEM Systemically Racist?

New debate:

The MIT Free Speech Alliance and Adam Smith Society are co-sponsors of this debate, presented at MIT's Wong Auditorium on November 2, 2023. In this debate, two teams will debate the resolution, "Resolved that STEM is Systemically Racist."

Debating in support of the resolution are Dr. Chad Womack, Vice President of National STEM Programs at the United Negro College Fund and guest editor of a series of special issues in Nature on racism in science, and Dr. Jaret Riddick, Senior Fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University, formerly serving as Principal Director for Autonomy in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering at the Pentagon.

Debating against the resolution are Dr. Luana Maroja, Professor of Biology and Chair of the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Program at Williams College, and Dr. Erec Smith, Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania and President and Co-founder of Free Black Thought.

Serving as debate moderator is Nadine Strossen, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Past President of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The debate is long and boring.

I have not heard of any examples of someone's science/STEM career being hindered because of being Black. Just the opposite, Blacks are given extra opportunities and promotions. So I wondered if the debaters would offer any examples. No, they did not know any either.

The only real argument for racism was some studies of disparate outcomes based on race. And complaints that Black parents have to tell their sons not to fight policemen.

Not much mention of Asians.

Although this was supposed to be a free speech debate, it wasn't really. Nobody even talked about several of the possible explanations for racial disparities. You cannot blame racism unless you give direct evidence for it, or evidence against the alternative explanations. They did neither.

Birders Act to Spite the White Dog-lovers

The NY Times reports:

The American Ornithological Society, the organization responsible for standardizing English bird names across the Americas, announced on Wednesday that it would rename all species honoring people. Bird names derived from people, the society said in a statement, can be harmful, exclusive and detract from “the focus, appreciation or consideration of the birds themselves.”

That means the Audubon’s shearwater, a bird found off the coast of the southeastern United States, will no longer have a name acknowledging John James Audubon, a famous bird illustrator and a slave owner who adamantly opposed abolition.

What are they going to do when they figure out that the word Ornithological comes from people who were firm believers in slavery?

No, they are not responsible for policing the language. People can use whatever names they want.

Jordan Rutter, a founder of Bird Names For Birds, said the petition was inspired by what became a momentous encounter in Central Park in 2020, when a white woman falsely reported to police that Christian Cooper, a Black birder, was threatening her.

Is that what this is about? He certainly was threatening her. Wikipedia reports:

By his own account, Christian then said, "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.

So by his account, he threatened to do something that she would not like. He did not say what, but it was obviously hostile, and involving the dog. He also got her fired from her job.

But to Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago who is an avid birder, the need for more descriptive names seem pressing. Performative acts like this “are really deeply injurious to science,” he said. “We cannot go back through the history of science and wipe out everybody who was not a perfect human being.” Dr. Coyne added that the effort to update so many names would be better invested in something more impactful to society, such as teaching underprivileged children about birds.

Glad to see Coyne quoted saying something sensible. Apparently birders hate the dog and cat lovers the way the Gazans hate the Jews, but the rest of us should not have to change the language.

Jewish power and influence

Kevin MacDonald writes:

The current situation in the United States is the result of an awesome deployment of Jewish power and influence. One must contemplate the fact that American Jews have managed to maintain unquestioned support for Israel since the 1967 war despite Israel’s seizing land and engaging in a brutal occupation of the Palestinians in the occupied territories—an apartheid occupation that will most likely end with expulsion or complete subjugation and degradation of the Palestinians. During this same period Jewish organizations in America have been a principal force—in my view the main force—for erecting a state dedicated to suppressing ethnic identification among Europeans, for encouraging massive multi-ethnic immigration into the US, and for erecting a legal system and cultural ideology that is obsessively sensitive to the complaints and interests of ethnic minorities: the culture of the Holocaust. All this is done without a whisper of double standards in the aboveground media.

The American Jewish community is well organized and lavishly funded. It has achieved a great deal of power, and it has been successful in achieving its interests. One of the great myths often promulgated by Jewish apologists is that Jews have no consensus and therefore cannot wield any real power. Yet there is in fact a great deal of consensus on broad Jewish issues, particularly in the areas of Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties. Massive changes in public policy on these issues, beginning with the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, coincide with the period of increasing Jewish power and influence in the United States. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find any significant area where public policy conflicts with the attitudes of mainstream Jewish organizations.

If you want proof of a broad Jewish consensus, just look at how they vote.

This is all considered anti-semitic. If you read the Jewish press, the most anti-semitic things are Marjorie Taylor Greene's rant about space lasers, or some Kanye West comments.

There are Moslem Arabs who want to eradicate Jews from the Middle East, and Western leftists who support the cause. That is not anti-semitism, as the term has been come to be understood.

While I have called out Jews for their views on this blog, I want to make it clear that I am not siding with Hamas or the Palestinian Arab cause. The Palestinian Arabs are obviously unfit for self-determination.