Yes, Genes Make People Different

Here is a copy of a video that got 10 million views:

[MSNBC/MSNOW reporter] 1:26 but there's no scientific evidence to prove that a black woman and a white woman are genetically different. Right? ... I mean this is like government data. ...

1:58 I'll say that again there's there is at least there is no scientific evidence to prove that

She is quite emphatic about it, and could have edited the comment out of the recording if she wanted to.

I am not posting this to make fun of her for not knowing basic biology. She probably took a college class where she was taught this.

We live in a world where DNA tests are commonplace, and the tests can identify race, other biological traits, and close relatives. We see professional athletes who are the sons of other professional athletes. And yet people recoil with horror at the suggestion that genes have something to do with who you are.

Here is another example:

Alison Gopnik is a well-known professor at UC Berkeley and popular writer on developmental child psychology, the Mind and Matter columnist for the Wall Street Journal from 2013-2023.

The biggest known influences on developmental child psychology are surely genetics and IQ. There is an enormous amount of research on this, so she would write about it, right?

No, she denies that any such questions are interesting.

the common features of, say, what kids are doing are much more interesting than the variations. What I really want to know is how is it that anyone could have a brain that enables them to accomplish these amazing capacities? Thinking about, is this child smarter than the other one, given how unbelievably smart all of them are to begin with, I just think it’s not an interesting question.

No, she cannot really believe this. Any academic study of child development is going to look at why some kids turn out better than others. Otherwise what is the point?

The problem is that the research is too interesting, and too unsettling for many people.

Update: Here is another example of people scared of genetic info: DNA paternity tests are illegal in France, Germany, and Switzerland.

Update: Google AI says:

In the modern scientific community, the consensus is that race does not exist as a biological or genetic category among humans.

Major scientific organizations, including the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), have concluded that there is no biological basis for dividing humans into distinct races.

This is obviously false, but enough people say it that some may even believe it.

Diehard Determinists Opposing Free Will

I mentioned a biology professor against free will, and here is another. They are both hard-core determinists who say the only scientific view is that free will is impossible.

Free will is mostly a philosophical issue, so I can understand scientists saying that it cannot be resolved. Or I can understand most people who believe in it because they experience it in everyday life.

But most academics writing on this subject fall into one of two camps.

(1) Compatibilists like Dan Dennett, who say that free will is scientifically impossible, but it would be bad for the public to find out, so they propose a way to believe in it anyway. It is like saying that it is good for society to believe in God, even though there is no God.

(2) Hard-core determinists, who say everything is determined, and free will is just a harmful illusion. Sam Harris goes so far as to say that he does not even have a feeling of free will.

What is baffling to me is how all these professors live their lives as if they have free will, and they seem very smart, and their arguments make no sense.

People are responsible for their acts in the sense that they are the people who do the acts, and that leads to the idea that those people need, for their own sake and society’s, to be punished or rewarded. Punishment is still justified under determinism to keep criminals out of society, to give them a chance to be rehabilitated, and (to most) as a form of deterrence. ...

Finally, praise is as justified as punishment, for praising people for some actions, even if they had no choice, will almost always lead them to perform more good actions, because we’re evolved to appreciate praise, which raises our status. In the end, though none of us have choices about how we behave, we go about our lives feeling as if we did, and that’s enough for me. ...

I don’t think we should go around telling people that the classical notion of free will is true. Although I’ve been kicked out of a friend’s house and also threatened by a jazz musician for defending determinism (in the latter case by telling him that his saxophone solos were determined rather than improvised under free will, so that he could not have played a different solo), I’m still a diehard determinist. ...

But because notions of free will still permeate our justice system in a bad way, yes, I think everyone needs to think about determinism and accept the science buttressing it. Then we can go about our everyday lives acting as though we have choices.

There is no science buttressing determinism.

If no one has any choices, then it is impossible to improve our society. It is all determined. There is no point in trying to give people incentives, or deterrence, or praise, or punishment. You cannot choose a policy for the common good, because you cannot make choices.

And I don't see what good it is to act as if we have choices, when we do not.

Descartes said, "I think therefore I am." The argument proves that we have free will, to my satisfaction. Maybe not to you. Maybe you are schizophrenic, and have to follow the voices in your head, or maybe you are like Sam Harris, and took too many psychodelic drugs.

Regardless, it is 100% wrong to say that there is any scientific argument against free will, and 100% wrong to think that we can do anything to improve society if we have no free will.

The Latest Garbage on Streaming TV

There is a bidding war for the studio that owns HBO tv, whose hot property is this:

Reid is the Canadian writer of the Game Changers book series and other hockey-themed gay romance novels. She said in 2023, "Game Changer came from a place of me being angry at hockey culture and how clearly homophobic it was and is, and all the other things that made me really ashamed to be a hockey fan. That whole series attacks the NHL and hockey culture quite a bit."

A 2025 television series, Heated Rivalry, was adapted from the first and second books in the Game Changers series.

From her pictures, it is unlikely that she ever played hockey. Her bio says she has two kids, but says nothing about a husband.

From the reviews, the books and shows are pornographic and have lots of homosexuality. They are marketed as romance novels, but they do not have much romance. Mainly it is a way for her to express her anger at hockey culture.

I am just posting this to warn anything who might think this tv series is a good hockey story.

England Abolishes Paternal Rights in Child Custody

The London Guardian reported in October:

The family courts will no longer work on the presumption that having contact with both parents is in the best interests of a child, in a landmark change that domestic abuse campaigners have said “will save so many children’s lives”.

The move has been heralded as “groundbreaking” by family lawyers and campaigners ...

The government confirmed on Tuesday that it would repeal the presumption of parental involvement from the act “when parliamentary time allows”. ...

The announcement means family court judges will no longer have to work from a starting point that parental involvement is in the child’s best interest, and instead will be directed to consider the evidence and assess a child’s wellbeing on a case-by-case basis.

Janice Fiamengo comments:

The article does not admit the well-documented fact that mothers are the most frequent perpetrators of child abuse and child homicide (see, for example, p. 65, perpetrators of child fatalities). Neither does the article acknowledge that women do indeed lie about abuse , precisely as a means to sway custody outcomes in their favor. Moreover, women do alienate children from their fathers, often with the assistance of family court orders. Alienation is a recognized form of child abuse.

Feminists quoted in the article admit that this is merely an important “first step” in their long march to total father-exclusion. ...

Many fathers’ groups have lobbied for decades to secure fathers’ legal right to be involved with their children, amassing peer-revied data showing that children do better with both parents present: they are less likely to experience mental illness and juvenile delinquency, less likely to commit crimes or join gangs, more likely to finish school, less likely to abuse alcohol and drugs, and less likely to commit suicide or self-harm. Against fierce opposition, such organizations have achieved significant success in the United States in helping to shepherd statutes through state legislatures that encourage judges to award shared custody to parents after divorce.

Britain used to be a great nation. This is more evidence of its suicide.

National women’s groups in America (including the National Organization for Women) have been vehement opponents of bills to encourage shared parenting, claiming that a presumption of father involvement empowers male abusers. Such advocates reject any implication that women owe anything to the fathers of their children (Radbord is incensed that a woman might be prevented from moving out of state by a father’s petition), and refuse to acknowledge the sincerity of fathers’ parenting aspirations.

Feminism is not about equality. It is more about eliminating fathers rights.

Christian Nationalism and Heritage Americans

I am seeing more and more articles on what is an American. From Wikipedia:

Christian nationalism asserts that the United States is a country founded by and for Christians. ...

In the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the term "Christian nationalism" has become synonymous with white Christian identity politics, a belief system that asserts itself as an integral part of American identity overall.

Also:

Heritage American is a designation that became popular in American national conservatism and the MAGA movement in 2025. It is an example of loaded language ...

This is somewhat broader than:

Old Stock American (also known as Colonial Stock, Founding Stock, or Pioneer Stock) is a colloquial name for Americans who are descended from the original settlers of the Thirteen Colonies. Historically, Old Stock Americans have been mainly Protestants from Northwestern Europe whose ancestors emigrated to British America in the 17th and 18th centuries.

A WSJ article argues:

There Are No ‘Heritage Americans’

It’s a notion of national identity at odds with our history and traditions. ...

Are you a heritage American? According to a group of online weirdos who call themselves conservatives (and possibly Vice President JD Vance), probably not.

The “heritage-American” concept refers to those who can trace their ancestry back to the beginning of American history. The earlier the better.

That is not correct. The early settlers were White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASP). By 1800 or so, the USA was a melting pot, where that term meant a mixture of WASPs with Germans, Irish, Catholics, and others from northwest Europe. This created a uniquely American ethnic identity. The heritage Americans are those belonging to that ethnic identity.

There is an American ethnic identity, and I do not know of a better term for it.

Saying that there are no heritage Americans is like saying that there are no ethnic Japanese or Italians. Of course there are. To deny it is just to express ethnic hatred.

Christian nationalists admire the USA founders who were Christians and nationalists. I don't take the term to mean advocating for a theocracy or anything like that. The founders did not want a theocracy.

Islam seeks to tightly integrate religion with government. But that is not Christian nationalism. The USA founders created a government inspired by Christianity and designed for a Christian citizenry of heritage Americans, but the government is not directly controlled by church authorities or anything like that.

A new video says: 10 European Countries FORCING Muslims To RETURN To Their Countries Of Origin!!! Apparently some European countries are taking some steps to prevent being invaded by Mohammedans.

Merry Christmas

The Stanford Crackpot against Free Will

I mentioned Stanford Biology professor Robert Sapolsky a few times, as he is the leading academic opposnent of free will. He has written books and given lectures on how everything we do is biologically determinied.

His arguments are weak, but I expect him to at least get his scientific facts right. Nope. See these two videos that mock him mercilessly.

I watched 40+ hours of Sapolsky neuroscience videos. Madness.

The Polycene is not a New Era

This is getting attention:

The Polycene is a proposed new geological/historical epoch describing our current era, characterized by the entanglement of multiple global crises (a "polycrisis") like climate change, AI proliferation, geopolitical shifts, and social fragmentation, moving beyond simple binaries into a complex, interconnected, multi-dimensional world demanding new governance, ethics, and design thinking. Coined by thinkers like Thomas L. Friedman, it signifies a time where technology, society, and the environment interact faster and more profoundly than ever, creating both immense challenges and opportunities for collective adaptation.

Friedman explains here and here.

This is backwards. In the late 19th and XX century we got running water, electricity, motor cars, telecommunications, antibiotics, world wars, computers, television, electronic chips, air travel, modern math and physics, etc.

By contrast, the 21st century has been boring. Progress has slowed to a crawl.

The most exciting development has been AI. It is bigger than anything else in the last 30 years. But in retrospect, it was just the inevitable consequence of XX century inventions. There are not many new ideas. It is mainly the neural nets of 50 years ago, run on chips that are faster according to the Moore's law of the 1960s.

Christian Zionism is a Heresy

Here is Sen. Ted Cruz, speaking for Christian Zionism:

8:20 I will tell you there is a movement among Christians, particularly young Christians. The public polling numbers of support for Israel among young Christians is plummeting. 8:35 And they're being spread lies. They're being spread lies, isolationist lies that we should withdraw from the world because nobody wants to hurt us.

8:46 But they're also being spread theological lies. They are being taught replacement theology, which is a lie that the promises God made to Israel and the people of Israel are somehow no longer good. They are no longer valid. That when God made a promise, he didn't mean the promise he made.

9:11 And instead, it is an argument that the Christian church has replaced Israel and the Jews and the Jews are no longer God's chosen people. And all of the promises throughout the Bible are now a dead letter. The church need to engage and say the Bible is not silent on Israel. The Bible is crystal clear on Israel. And in the church, we will stand and fight.

Cruz is espousing a Christian heresy. It is not what mainstream Christians believe.

The Jews of today are not even the same as the Jews/Hebrews of the Bible. Judaism developed around 500 AD, largely as a rejection of Christianity. Christians do not have to give special consideration to an opposing religion.

Jews themselves do not believe in anything like Christian Zionism.

There is a long tradition of trying to preserve the Holy Land for Christianity. There are three major religions that attach great historical significance to Jerusalem and the surrounding area -- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. If Christians want to take a religious interest in Israel, it should be to clear the way for Christians and Christian interests. Instead, the Christian Zionists are content to let Jews run the place, and maybe let Mohammedans run the West Bank and other territories. This is baffling to me.

Whatever deal God made with the Jews, it was not to keep the Christians out, or to subordinate Christians to Old Testament customs.

Taylor Swift is not Hitler

Rolling Stone magazine reports on fake controversies over Taylor Swift's new album:

Soon, online discussion of the album turned extreme in ways that many found bewildering. There were social media posts accusing Swift of implicitly endorsing the MAGA movement, trad-wife gender norms, and even white supremacy with dogwhistle references. While the far-right have been known to claim the singer as an icon of “Aryan” greatness despite her record of championing Democrats and liberal values — and President Trump himself has blithely and disingenuously shared AI-generated imagery depicting her as a supporter — this was a noticeably divergent trend, an apparent attempt to cancel Swift for those presumed affiliations. The attacks largely focused on specific word choices (her use of the term “savage” on the song “Eldest Daughter” was interpreted as racist) and symbols (a necklace for sale on her website stirred up Nazi comparisons because its lightning bolt charms bore a passing resemblance to the bolt pattern worn by the SS). ...

What Swift’s defenders didn’t realize, however, was that they were pushing back against a false narrative that had been seeded and amplified by a small network of inauthentic social accounts. Worse, they were helping to disseminate those bad-faith allegations by earnestly engaging with them.

A lot of these controversies are fake. Anonymous online comments pretend to be offended, when they are really just stirring up attention.

Here is another fake controversy.

The reconstruction of Beachy Head Woman’s skull before, right, and after the latest DNA results, left

The London Sunday Times reports:

For a time she was hailed by historians as the earliest known black Briton, a woman who lived and died on these islands during the Roman occupation but whose ancestry was thought to lie in sub-Saharan Africa. New DNA evidence tells a different story. The skeleton known as Beachy Head Woman was not a long-distance immigrant. ...

In 2016 a plaque was put up to mark her significance. The sign, erected in East Dean, East Sussex and now taken down, read: “The remains of ‘Beachy Head Woman’ were found near this site. Of African origin, she lived in East Sussex 2nd-3rd Century AD.” ...

“By using state-of-the-art DNA techniques we were able to resolve the origins of this individual. We show she carries genetic ancestry that is most similar to other individuals from the local population of Roman-era Britain,” he said.

It was all a big hoax. She probably looked like the one on the left.

Newsom brags about Transgenderism

California governor Gavin Newson is running for President, and is all-in for transgenderism:

80% of the 0:30 people listening disagree 0:31 with my position on this, 0:32 but. But it comes from my 0:34 heart, not just my head. 0:36 It wasn't a political 0:37 evolution. It was a 0:38 position. Being that I 0:40 don't think it's fair.

I 0:42 want to see trans kids. I 0:43 have a trans godson. 0:44 There's no governor that 0:46 signed more pro-trans 0:46 legislation than I have, 0:47 and no one has been a 0:49 stronger advocate for the 0:50 LGBT community.

Using security keys for passkeys

I am moving some accounts to passkeys, and posting some notes about it. Passkeys were standardized in 2018 and adopted by Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Banks have mostly avoided them. Other alternatives are email codes, sms codes, and an authenticator app, such as from Microsoft or Google.

There are different ways to use passkeys. You can put them on your PCs and phones, secured by special memory and whatever biometrics you use to login to those devices.

Or you can put them in a password manager.

Or you can put them on security keys.

You can use passkeys instead of passwords, but then you need to be sure that they are stored in reliable places, and/or backed up. They cannot be memorized like passwords.

If you trust your phone or your password manager, then that is all you need. But the big advantage of passkeys is that you can easily create them on multiple devices such that they never leave the device. That is, you do not need to back them up if you have alternate passkeys to accomplish the same logins.

Passwords have the drawback that an eavesdropper might copy them, or a phisher might trick you. Passkeys solve these problems. You can put the passkey on a security key, and be sure that it never leaves the key, and it will only be used on the intended web site. There is also a pin on the key, to protect against loss or theft.

Here are some security keys I tried.

Yubico 4. There are pre-2018 and now obsolete, but have the advantage that they can be used for an unlimited number of accounts. Google can use it as a 2sv, with a password. The other keys have this feature also, but Google refuses to use the feature if it thinks that the key supports passkeys.

Yubico 5. These are the market leaders, and are the safest bet. Some can use NFC with a phone, and also store Authenticator keys.

uTrust. Mine works most of the time, but is sometimes not recognized properly.

Onlykey. These have the feature that you can store a bunch of site passwords on them, and protect them with a pin that you enter directly on the key. Other keys depend on the OS to control the pin. A drawback is that each only holds 12 passkeys.

Thetis and Trustkey. These are cheap and reliable, and hold a lot of passkeys.

Solo Tap version 1. I had low expectations for this, as the company announced a version 2. I was able to upgrade the firmware by loading an obsolete python library, and it works well with 50 passkeys. That is better than my Yubico keys.

Fetian. These work with bluetooth, but that is more trouble than it is worth. Being wireless seems like an advantage, but they have to be charged, and the pairing is a hassle.

Price varies from $10 to $60. I get the impression that there is not much consumer demand for these, as some of these products have not be updated in years. Paying more does not necessarily get you a better key, as they all implement the same FIDO2 spec.

Using these has some quirks. With a passkey to a Google account, you can login with Mozilla Firefox without entering your username or password. With Google Chrome, you must take the extra step of entering your password. It is odd that logging into a Google account is more smooth on a non-Google browser than a Google browser.

Hindu Candidate wants to define Americanness

Vivek Ramaswamy writes an op-ed in the NY Times:

There are two competing visions now emerging on the American right, and they are incompatible. One vision of American identity is based on lineage, blood and soil: Inherited attributes matter most. The purest form of an American is a so-called heritage American — one whose ancestry traces back to the founding of the United States or earlier.

This view is now popularized by the Groyper right, a rapidly ascendant online movement that argues for the creation of a white-centric identity. This is a predictable response — one that I anticipated in my 2022 book, “Nation of Victims” — to anti-white discrimination over the last half-decade, and it is no longer just a fringe viewpoint.

The alternative (and, in my view, correct) vision of American identity is based on ideals.

Americanness isn’t a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry. It’s binary: Either you’re an American or you’re not. You are an American if you believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation.

He goes on to say that his top priority is to condemn White Americans like Nick Fuentes.

I am surprised that he regards his alternative vision as the binary one. Most of today's immigrants do not accept American values, and retain allegiances to their home countries. I guess he is also rejecting the Jews who claim dual citizenship with Israel.

I agree with some of what he says, but the idea that he defines the American vision is absurd.

He is rich, but I would not call it the American dream. He mainly profited by sell stock based on exaggerated promises that never materialized.

Neanderthals Invented Fire-making

Conventional wisdom says that superior African homo sapiens wiped out Neanderthals, and became modern humans. But new evidence comes out all the time that the Africans were no more advanced than the Neanderthals.

The NY Times reports:

Some 400,000 years ago, in what is now eastern England, a group of Neanderthals used flint and pyrite to make fires by a watering hole — not just once, but time after time, over several generations.

That is the conclusion of a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Previously, the oldest known evidence of humans making fires dated back just 50,000 years. The new finding indicates that this critical step in human history occurred much earlier.

They found evidence of Neanderthals using tools to deliberately and repeatedly set fires.

A wildfire would have left evidence far from the site, but the researchers found none. What’s more, the same patch had been burned repeatedly over the course of decades. And the fires there reached intense temperatures and burned for hours. The researchers grew increasingly certain that generations of Neanderthals had intentionally set fires at Barnham.

A last major clue came to light with the discovery of pieces of pyrite alongside heat-shattered flints. Anthropologists have documented many groups of hunter-gatherers around the world who make fires by striking pyrite against flint.

All the more notable, Dr. Ashton said, was that the rocks for miles around Barnham don’t contain pyrite. He speculated that the fire-making Neanderthals must have brought pieces of it to Barnham. The nearest known source of the mineral is some 40 miles to the east.

For more, see Control of fire by early humans. Older humans were known to have made use of naturally occurring fires, but there is no proof that the Africans were able to start fires.

Comparing the Holocaust to the Crucifixion

Piers Morgan took criticism for interviewing Nick Fuentes, and discusses:

regardless his argument was it all happened so long ago 54:06 why did Jews continue talking about the Holocaust?

we've all moved on they use it all the time as a political weapon and 54:13 so And of course, I suppose the obvious question for him, I went and checked afterwards how many times he's talked 54:19 about, for example, on his show the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, which was over 2,000 years ago, right? He does it 54:25 all the time.

So, you know, if I'd been smart in the moment as a fellow Christian, I would say, "Well, hang on. 54:30 But isn't that exactly what Christians do all the time about the crucifixion? What's the difference?"

What is the difference? Christians like to talk about the Crucifixion of Jesus, and Jews like to talk about the Nazi-Jew Holocaust.

I can think of a few differences. One is well-documented in the last century, and for the other we only have ancient second-hand accounts.

One is central for Jewish cohesion, and one for Christian cohesion.

One is illegal to question on most of Europe, and one is openly doubted by lots of respectable scholars.

Jews demand that people like Fuentes endorse the Jewish stories. No one demands that Jews endorse the Christian stories.

In the interview, Morgan seemed to think he scored when he called Fuentes, and Fuentes accepted the label. Fuentes just shrugged it off, saying everyone is racist.

Fuentes is correct, as the term is used today. The anti-racists say so, and they especially attack those who claim to ignore race. They say it is racist to not notice racial differences. But of course people like Fuentes are called racist mainly because he notices racial differences.

H-1B system is an anti-American scam

The NY Times reports on the front page:

As young conservatives discuss cost of living as a top concern, the H-1B issue has become a purity test of one’s nationalist bona fides, and by extension, one’s commitment to the America First agenda promoted by conservative figures including Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson. ...

As the 2026 midterm elections approach, the H-1B issue has already emerged as a central talking point in some races. In Florida, James Fishback, a 30-year-old investment chief executive running for governor as a Republican, has described the H-1B system as an “anti-American scam.” He vowed to “eliminate” the program, if elected, and fire the H-1B workers currently employed by the state.

I agree that the visa program is an anti-American scam. It is used by the richest companies to replace Americans with Indians.

“‘If there are more jobs for immigrants, then there must be less jobs for natives,’” said Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University who focuses on immigration. “It’s a combination, really, of nationalism and economic ignorance. They don’t understand the benefits and gains from the policy.”

Those benefits can include economic growth and innovation that leads to more jobs, including for U.S.-born workers, according to some studies.

Somin is a Russian Jew lawyer who advocates policies to destroy USA, mainly open borders, legalized heroin, and abolishing single-family zoning and nationalism. He literally wants to replace Americans with foreigners. He just gave speeches in Israel and Mexico, but did not advocate them having open borders or abolishing nationalism.

He regularly complains that American voters are too stupid to understand that they are better off working for Indians and living in crowded housing projects.

You might think that the Indians have hot computer skills, but actually they are worse than AI.

Artificial intelligence has gutted entry-level roles in the tech industry that Mishra and his classmates were counting on. Among his 400 classmates at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing, fewer than 25% have secured job offers. ...

Students at engineering colleges in India, China, Dubai, and Kenya are facing a “jobpocalypse” as artificial intelligence replaces humans in entry-level roles. Tasks once assigned to fresh graduates, such as debugging, testing, and routine software maintenance, are now increasingly automated.

Over the last three years, the number of fresh graduates hired by big tech companies globally has declined by more than 50%, according to a report published by SignalFire, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm.

More on Jesus being a Roman

I posted a theory that Jesus was a Roman, not realizing that a famous and influential 1911 book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, made a related argument. The book was notorious for other reasons.

All races are equally gifted; we point to history and answer: that is a lie! The races of mankind are markedly different in the nature and also in the extent of their gifts, and the Germanic races belong to the most highly gifted group, the group usually termed Aryan ... Physically and mentally the Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right ... the lords of the world.

The author did not believe in Darwinian evolution, so I am sure his analysis is flawed and outdated.

People say Jesus was a Jew, and I am not sure if they mean genetically, culturally, or religiously. I asked Google Gemini AI, and it said all three. It said that Jesus was not a Christian, because Christianity was founded by Paul after Jesus died.

That seems crazy to me.

Here is a more modern essay:

Any realistic path to victory over wokism requires widespread acceptance of hereditarianism among the elites. As I explained in “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem,” wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of Christian morality. If all races and sexes have the same innate distributions of psychological traits, disparities in socioeconomic status must be due to environmental factors. In practice, that means differences in outcome favoring whites or men will be attributed to past or present white racism or sexism. This triggers an all-consuming crusade against the hidden forces of discrimination. That’s what wokism is. Smart people are disproportionately attracted to the woke left because the mainstream right accepts the equality thesis but fails to recognize its implications. Woke law and woke institutions are primarily effects rather than causes of elites being woke. Undermining the equality thesis destroys the intellectual basis of wokism and gives the elites a reason to join the right.

This nearly got philosopher Nathan Cofnas canceled.

Schumer Asks Senate to Censor Fuentes

Sen. Chuck Schumer introduced this in the US Sentate:

RESOLUTION Condemning white supremacy, hate, and antisemitism, and efforts to give a platform to these dangerous ideologies.

Whereas Nick Fuentes is a white supremacist leader, organizer, and podcaster; ...

Whereas Fuentes used the 2017 ‘‘Unite the Right’’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which hundreds of torch-bearing demonstrators chanted ‘‘Jews will not replace us’’, to mainstream his ideology; ...

the ‘‘Great Replacement REALITY’’, an antisemitic, racist, and xenophobic conspiracy theory that claims that Jews are orchestrating the replacement of native white Europeans from their countries by non-white immigrants;

Schumer is very pro-Jew and pro-Israel, and in this commentary:

I have always admired Senator Chuck Schumer. He has long presented himself as one of Israel’s staunchest allies in the US Congress. He’s spoken with pride about being the “Shomer Yisrael,” the “guardian of Israel” — a clever play on his name and his self-proclaimed role in protecting the Jewish state. He has addressed AIPAC conferences, authored a book on antisemitism, and often cites his Jewish upbringing as the moral compass guiding his political choices.

You might think that Schumer would argue that Jews are not replacing White with non-white immigrants. No, he does not argue that at all. He is a big advocate of letting migrants into the USA. And it is not because of a belief in open borders, and he is firmly against it in Israel. His complaint is that Fuentes has a platform for his views.

The resolution continues:

Fuentes perpetuated antisemitic conspiracy theories, including— ...

(4) advancing the dual-loyalty trope by saying that Jewish Americans are loyal first to Israel and that ‘‘they have this international community across borders, extremely organized, that is putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country’’; and

(5) claiming that he sees ‘‘Jewishness’’ as the defining trait of his political opponents;

Yes, I think Jewishness is the defining trait for Fuentes' opponents, and Schumer's resolution proves it. Furthermore, Schumer is a good example of someone loyal first to Israel. He brags about it, to his Jewish constituency.

The resolution goes on to condemn the "platforming of Nick Fuentes". In other words, censor him.

In other Jewish news, Bari Weiss has promoted Tony Dokoupil to CBS evening news anchor. His name is Czech, not Jewish. He seems to be best known for this essay:

My adult circumcision: how I made the cut for my new religion

To remain uncut, I was told, is to remain spiritually cut off from the Jewish people.

By Tony Dokoupil ...

I came to this knowledge on the way to the altar, of all places. I was engaged to a nice Jewish girl, taking some free conversion classes at a big, progressive Manhattan synagogue. I wanted to learn about something that mattered to her, and the more I learned the more it mattered to me, too.

This wasn’t a fur-coat-in-summer kind of congregation. It was part of the Reform movement: only game for the high holidays, mostly casual about pork, always down with gay female rabbis.

So these Jews eat pork and get led by a lesbian rabbi, but he had to get his foreskin cut to please an Israeli girl. He implies that he was already circumsized, but had to get cut some more for ritualisic submission to matriarchal Jewish customs.

According to Wikipedia, they divorced a couple of years later, and he married another Jew.

Bari Weiss is fanatical Jewish and Zionist. Is this all a coincidence? Did he have to subordinate his manhood to the Jewish cause to get this job? This is so weird, I do not know what to say.

Update: Weiss is also a lesbian. She quit the NY Times because it was not Jewish enough for her.

Update: I saw a claim that Weiss spends $10,000 per day on bodyguards. I find this hard to believe. She should not have to spend anything, as her views are not even particularly unusual.

Online Debate on Child Spanking

Stefan Molyneux and Malcolm Collins have Debate: Is Hitting Children Good?!?. Molyneux subsequently posted his debate prep.

This is a funny topic. Among the general public, people overwhelmingly believe that spanking is beneficial, and even a necessary part of childrearing.

But among experts, meaning academics, child psychologists, and pediatricians, only opposition to all spanking is acceptable. Must never be done.

In the history of human civilation, all successful societies have used corporal punishment.

I have run across commentary by social scientists, where they are not only opposed to spanking, but do not understand the purpose to it. This baffles me. Social science researchers are supposed to be able to look at data, and deduce causes for behavior. If they want the reasons for spanking, they could just ask any parent. And yet they cannot figure it out. This causes me to doubt any research that they do.

Both Molyneux and Collins have unusual personal stories that color their views. Molyneux emphasizes Libertarian principles, while Collins talks a lot about evolutionary principles.

They do not talk about the published research much. It is mostly anti-spanking, but not really convincing as the studies not have good controls, and only really show that extreme and frequent beatings are harmful. They do not show that any method of discipline is better than any other.

They both have unusual and well-thought out philosphies that are worth considering, even if you disagree. Both have their own podcasts where they expound on their views at great length.

Wikipedia says:

The Collinses also employ corporal punishment in disciplining their children, which is based on Simone's personal observation of lions and tigers during a safari trip, despite clinical consensus that it impairs childhood development.

This is Wikipedia bias. His view is based on a great many things, including published research, as you can see in the debate. No, there is not a clinical consensus. Wikipedia is essentially saying that Collins is impairing his kids based on seeing lions on a safari.

Molyneux started to lose me when he talked about how abolishing spanking was a step in a multi-century project to adopt the Non-Aggression Principle and reach a libertarian utopia. Collins had more immediate concerns, such as keeping his child off the street.

One of the main arguments against spanking is that emotional manipulation is more effective. The idea is that mom smothers the baby with love and affection, and then discipline the child by withdrawing affection. Doing this makes the child loyal and obedient, better than spanking. That may be correct, but I do not agree with it.

Thank the Christian Dark Ages for Modernity

I found this on Twitter.

This view is widespread, but I have criticized it many times. It is anti-Christian propaganda. Most of what created the modern world was invented during the period labeled the Christian Dark Ages on this chart. Christian Europe advanced centuries ahead of the rest of the world.

The chart gives the impression that Europe would have done better without Christianity, or that Europe was falling behind the rest of the world. Not true. The opposite is more accurate.

It is true that when the Roman Empire moved east, some areas got left behind. But Christians were playing the long game, and making changes that would take centuries to pay off.

Everyone agrees that scientific advancement skyrocketed in Christendom after about 1500, while the rest of the world lagged far behind. That built on earlier advances, such as those described in Renaissance of the 12th century.

I get the impression that a lot of educated people think that Christianity somehow held back scientific progress, and that we might have advanced farther without it. That is completely crazy, as all Christian countries did much better than all non-Christian countries. The difference is so dramatic that it is hard to imagine Christendom doing better than it did.

Swedes are getting dumber

I found this online. Could be fake, I don't know. The cause for getting dumber is probably AI and other technologies.

Zionist Takeover of the Republican Party

News:

Hatred of Jews threatens Western civilization itself, Fine said.

U.S. Rep. Randy Fine says antisemitism serves as a “canary in the cold mine” when it comes to destructive hate.

“Jews have been around for 3,000 years. In fact, we’re the oldest civilization that has existed,” the Atlantic Coast Republican said, “and the antisemitism was around for most of that 3,000 years. What we have seen over that history is that every civilization that has hated Jews has not stopped at hating Jews.” ...

“I serve with two antisemites in Congress. Of 220 Republicans, two of them are antisemitic,” Fine said.

This is all nonsense. The Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese had older civilizations. Judaism did not even become a religion until about 500 AD. Israel only since 1948.

Jews are not particularly hated. Jews have high-status positions thoughout the West. Those two Congressmen do not hate Jews. Fine called Tucker Carlson "the most dangerous antisemite in America", after Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes. Glenn Greenwald says Fine is more anti-Islam than Fuentes is anti-Jew.

Fine is Jewish, and has a $30M fortune from Las Vegas gambling fees. He was probably doing slimy things that Christians do not do.

Fine is leading a Jewish effort to purge the Republican Party of those who do not fully support the Jewish agenda. 80% of Jews vote Democrat, and yet the Jews want to take over the Republican Party as well. And not just the majority. Any dissent must be silenced.

I found this online comment:

There have always been two large groups of Jews.

The secular and the religious.

The secular group is where the globalists, marxists, fascists, censors etc come from. Globalists who demand multiculturalism for everyone except the Jew.

The religious is filled to the brim with Zionists and where the child sacrifices, blowing mosques and churches, and killing Palestinian children come from. Nationalists who demand multiculturalism for everyone except Israel.

There is some truth to this. The secular and religious Jews sometimes seem to be opposites. Then they agree on certain things.

Controlling Subscription Costs

I am trying to control subscription costs, and finding it more difficult than expected.

When you buy something online with Visa or Mastercard, the merchant is prohibited from saving the 3-digit security code. Unless it is a recurring subscription.

You might think that the fees will terminate when the card expires. Nope. Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater (ABU) and Visa Account Updater (VAU) are services that provide merchants with the info from a replacement or updated charge card. So the charges continue without your notice or approval.

If you paid on your phone with Google or Apple Pay, then you can use those services to cancel. However Google will typically charge your card 1-2 days in advance of renewal, on the excuse of trying to maintain uninterrupted service. If you cancel before the renewal date, then presumably Google will undo the charge.

If you subscribed to Twitter/X on Google Play, then you cannot even use Twitter to manage the subscription. Google owns the payment contract. Twitter does not even see the charge card number. You can only cancel or renew on Google, not Twitter. When I tried, Twitter gave me this message:

Premium -- Expiring soon
Your features will be available for the remainder of your billing period. Looks like you bought this subscription on the X Android app. You’ll need to manage or cancel your subscription from there.

I knew that Google and Apple take big commissions on their app store sales, but I had no idea that they own the renewal rights.

I guess I will have to lose my blue check mark until I free myself from Google.

Some banks offer virtual credit card accounts. These used to have the advantage that you could set them to expire in a money, and with a low credit limit. Then you use one to buy some online services, and then let it expire with the confidence that any unwanted charges will be severely limited.

However, no more. Visa and Mastercard now block these services. You can still get a virtual card, but Visa and Mastercard will renew it and send the updated info to the merchants.

It appears to me that I can still open a vitual charge account, allow it to be scheduled to expire in three years, and then manually cancel it after a month. This should be a way to avoid the card updater service.

Another alternative is Privacy.com. It is not a bank, but it can create virtual charge accounts and let you manage them online. It has a free plan, with premium plans starting at $5 per month.

I find that I have to have multiple bank cards, because charges are sometimes inexplicably declined. Sometimes I have to call the bank and ask them to unfreeze the card. Often I cannot figure out why a completely routine charge was questioned.

All in all, these charge accounts are extremely good deals for consumers, but some of the rules are baffling. If a purchase is declined, why can't the bank app tell me why? If I am buying with the phone on a merchant card terminal, why can't the phone let me approve the amount of the purchase? Who decided that restaurants should be able to add tips after I approve the bill and get my card back? Why isn't easier to control expenses?

Stanford Students are Mentally Disabled

News:

The students at America's elite universities are supposed to be the smartest, most promising young people in the country. And yet, shocking percentages of them are claiming academic accommodations designed for students with learning disabilities. 

In an article published this week in The Atlantic, education reporter Rose Horowitch lays out some shocking numbers. At Brown and Harvard, 20 percent of undergraduate students are disabled. At Amherst College, that's 34 percent. At Stanford University, it's a galling 38 percent. Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD. 

Obviously, something is off here. The idea that some of the most elite, selective universities in America—schools that require 99th percentile SATs and sterling essays—would be educating large numbers of genuinely learning disabled students is clearly bogus.

I would think that colleges would want a reputation for rigorous standards and mentally competent graduates. Instead they have DEI admissions, mentally disabled students, and easy A grades on all the courses.

How Drug Companies Manipulate Research

Dr. Josef explains Study 329: Why I Stopped Trusting Medical Research.

Briefly, a drug company manipulated a study to claim that the anti-depressant Paxil was good for children, and then made $11 billion in sales. It later paid $3B to settle govt claims about fraudulent research.

A p-value of 0.11 was moved to less than the required 0.05 by restructuring the data.

He ends by saying that the journal should retract the publication. There must be a better solution. The study data were not faked. They were just artfully presented, with some relevant data omitted. This was considered acceptable at the time. Possibly someone could figure that out by reading the study.

We need higher standards for medical study publications.

In the meantime, you should know that the research behind psychiatric drugs is questionable.

Superiority in applying organized violence

From an interview, Palantir C.E.O. Alex Karp Defends Aiding Trump’s Immigration Policies:

You wrote a book last year called the technological republic and you quote Samuel Huntington in it and 2:45 you that argues the following argues that the rise of the west was not made 2:50 possible quote by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.

3:01 What do you mean by that? And is that what Palantir ultimately does?

3:06 Well, I I I think one of the most interesting about that, about the quotes, that quote, is it's indisputably and obviously true.

Some of those European and American ideas, values, and religion did contribute to the ability to apply organized violence.

Europe had to fight a lot of wars to get where it is today. So did the USA.

one of the biggest one of the biggest problems we have in our 3:39 elite institutions especially our ivy leagues is this indisputable truth that 3:44 no one would listen to the superior of our ideas if our ability to organize in violence was inferior

that every single 3:52 person in the world believes outside of the faculty of Harvard and certainly all of our adversaries know to be true is 3:59 viewed as something that's kind of worthy of great discussion and dispute.

And the primary reason they dispute it 4:05 honestly is because at their core they they want to undermine the superiority of western values which are meritocracy, 4:13 rule of law, accepting that inputs and outputs are not the same, that are the 4:18 basis of building the superiority on the military on the military plane. Yo

He has gotten rich from supplying AI to military contractors.

Immigrants did not build this country

News:

Democrat Rep. Pramila Jayapal says immigrants from Somalia, India, Latin America, and Africa “built this country and make this country what it is today.”

She is from India.

No, East Indian immigrants did not build USA. There are many hard-working and productive Indian-Americans, but on balance, Indians are a net negative.

It is much more accurate to say that Britain and the USA built India. Without that help, India would not even be a real country.

The situation with Somalians is much worse. The news out of Minnesota makes it appear that all the Somalians are criminal parasites.

Constitution not to Advance Mohammedanism

Constitutional scholar Clayton Cramer writes:

Joseph Story was an early Supreme Court justice. His Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States have been cited repeatedly by the Supreme Court. There are 172 citations in federal court decisions since 2021. Concerning freedom of religion, let me quote from there:

1877. The real object of the [First] amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance, Mahometanism, or Judaism;, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government. [2 Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States 606 (1873).

If you examine the laws of the early Republic, you will see that this appears repeatedly. The dominance of Christianity was simply assumed. The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, section 10, includes this requirement for officeholders: ...

He goes on to give examples of requirements to be Christian or Protestant.

Some people act as if the First Amendment means an obligation to admit Mohammedans or Jews into the USA. No, the truth is more nearly the opposite.

NPR Radio reports:

President Trump's extensive new travel ban took effect just after midnight on Monday, barring nationals of 12 countries from entering the U.S. and partially restricting those from another seven. ...

The ban mostly affects countries in Africa and the Middle East. ...

The 2017 ban — initially targeting Muslim-majority countries — prompted immediate outcry and legal challenges, forcing the first Trump administration to make a number of revisions. The Supreme Court upheld a revised version in 2018, but former President Joe Biden promptly rescinded it on his first day in office in 2021, calling it a "stain on our national conscience." ...

The full ban applies to foreign nationals from 12 countries: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

Heightened restrictions apply to people from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

No, it was not a "stain on our national conscience." It was a stain that we admitted so many Mohammedans.

Not Born That Way

New video:

Tucker Carlson Network

Tucker and Piers Morgan have a heated debate on whether or not people are born gay.

Neither of them are scientists, so it is not much of a debate.

I wonder how Morgan can be so sure that people are born gay, while there is no gay gene. And there are statistical variations that are hard to reconcile with people being born gay.

Somehow respectable people have been trained to say that, even though it does not even make any sense.

I am sure he would be a lot less eager to say that people are born criminal, or low IQ, or even male.

Some Investors Understand Power Laws

Veritasium posted a new video on power laws, and how they occur naturally. It argues, for example, that fires in Yellowstone Park will occasionally be much worse than what is typical, and fire prevention tactics make the matter worse.

It also explains hwo venture capitalists make all their money on 10% of their investments. And how some people are far richer than you might expect from variation in incomes.

Another video says Europe's economy is dying.

Everyone complains that there is no good reason why anyone whould make more that $1 million per year, or be worth more than $1 billion.

I wonder if these are related. Maybe there is a law of nature that California venture capitalists and bankers understand, and that Europeans do not. As a result, Silicon Valley can crank out entrepreneurs to follow daring business plans and get big on new technology markets, and Europe cannot.

Pinker Pushes Jewish Atheism Again

I have posted many times about Steve Pinker's Jewish Atheist pro-Enlightenment anti-Christianity, such as here, and he is at it again:

Whatever humane advances we might attribute to Jesus, his followers did not adopt them for an awfully long time. For some 1,400 years that separated Constantine’s embrace of Christianity in the early 4th century to the rise of the Enlightenment in the 18th, most Christians remained untroubled by slavery, the persecution of heretics, and brutal colonial conquest.

(The full article is behind a paywall.)

Notice that he does not compare Christianity to other belief systems. Christianity is actually quite tolerant of heretics. The Enlightenment itself was very much a Christian movement, and made possible only by Christianity.

It is ridiculous to complain about Christianity and older economic systems. Christianity had no power to change these systems. Someday it might be considered immoral to have employment without a retirement plan, and someday atheists will blame Christianity for that.

It’s notable that Kingsnorth, in his essay railing against modernity, consistently cites the Christian, never the “Judeo-Christian,” tradition.

America was founded on the secular Enlightenment principles of equality, rights, flourishing, and democratic governance. It’s no coincidence that Jews thrived here. Nor can it be a coincidence that a movement founded on parochial Christian theocracy would be accompanied by a recrudescence of the world’s oldest hatred.

No, this is crazy Jew talk. Jews hate Chrstians much more than Christians hate Jews.

Gaza had three Christian churchs -- Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Baptist. Israel has now bombed all three. American Christians have strongly supported Israel anyway.

There is no Judeo-Christian tradition. The term originally meant Jewish converts to Christianity. Only recently has it been used in the sense that Pinker uses it, which is to undermine Christianity. America was founded on Christian principles. Not Jewish.

UN Pushes Replacement Migration

Wikipedia says:

The Great Replacement (French: grand remplacement), also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory,[1][2][3] is a debunked[4][5] white nationalist[6] far-right conspiracy theory[3][7][8][9] coined by French author Renaud Camus. Camus' theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites,[a][7][10] the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans.[7][11][12]

It fails to mention this UN document:

Replacement Migration: Is it A Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?

ESA/P/WP.160
21 March 2000
ENGLISH ONLY
Population Division
Department of Economic and Social Affairs
United Nations Secretariat

DNA Tracing Catches Criminals

A new book claims:

We found that adding anyone charged with a felony to the law enforcement DNA database in Denmark reduced future criminal convictions by over 40 percent. Again, people responded to the higher probability of getting caught by committing fewer crimes. Being added to the database also increased enrollment in school and rates of employment — signs that folks really were on a better path. This effect was largest for the youngest men, those ages eighteen to twenty-four.

That effect seems high to me.

I do believe that radical invasions of privacy are inevitable in the future. The criminal justice payoff is too large. Everyone's DNA could be registered at birth. Surveillance cameras could be everywhere, with face recognition. GPS tracking of everyone's phone and car. All money could be traced.

The Most Dangerous Cognitive Bias

Veritasium posted a new video on the psychological effects of overconfidence.

Here is the Wikipedia explanation of a related concept:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability. The term may also describe the tendency of high performers to underestimate their skills. It was first described by the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999.

The published effect is really just a misunderstanding of regression to the mean. It is further misunderstood by most of the people quoting this effect.

Rep. Massie Leads the Epstein Coverup

Congress Thomas Massie is celebrating that Congress approved his bill to release Jeffrey Epstein files. However, it does not release all the files.

Exceptions include: classified documents, materials related to ongoing investigations, and invasion of privacy.

It is good that some more documents will be released, but this is just another coverup.

The Epstein story was big because of allegations that he was trafficking underage prostitutes to the rich and famous, and then using Israeli intelligence to blackmail them. There is no proof of any of this. From what we know, he only procured prostitutes for himself, and they were all, or nearly all, over the age of consent.

The story is that Epstein supplied 1000 underage girls to rich clients, and yet no one has been able to find a single example.

What we do know is that dozens of women were paid millions of dollars to make accusations, and those accusations were never verified. If Epstein were really video recording encountered to be used as blackmail, then there would be some evidence.

Harvard economist Larry Summers is now a casualty of the Epstein emails. But Summers was not using prostitutes. The emails merely reference an extramarital affair.

Separately we learn that the FBI has covered up for over a year the motivations behind the assassin who shot Donald Trump in the ear. And it turns out that he used preferred pronouns.

O'Reilly says Fuentes is Frightening

Bill O'Reilly joins those denouncing Nick Fuentes:

So Fuentes 3:38 goes on there and he says this stuff 3:41 about organized jewry and I'm going, 3:44 "What are you talking about?" All right. 3:46 He doesn't define it.

Now earlier um few 3:50 years ago he did define how he believes 3:55 uh and it's scary. Roll that tape.

[Alex Jones] 3:59 Let's just get the Hitler thing out of 4:00 the way. Do you actually admire Adolf 4:03 Hitler

[Fuentes] 4:05 in some ways? Yes. And I'm not a 4:08 national socialist and I'm not a you 4:10 know I wouldn't identify that way 4:11 because I'm a I'm a Christian. ...

4:24 I don't share this uh histrionic Jewish 4:27 view that Hitler is this exceptionally 4:30 boogeyman evil figure.

[O'Reilly] 4:34 Now that is really frightening. Now I 4:37 don't care what Nick Fuentes says. I 4:40 don't care. He doesn't know anything. 4:44 He's dumb.

Frightening? If he doesn't care about Fuentes dumb opinions, then what is frightening?

Yes, there is an organized Jewry. Why else is O'Reilly making this video? He would not make a video about an obscure theological point just because he disagrees with a dumb comment from someone he does not care about.

Fuentes said he does not share a Jewish belief, and O'Reilly says that is frightening.

O'Reilly is not Jewish, and retired a multi-millionaire. He should not have to rush to the defense of Jewish beliefs, but does it anyway. That only happens because there is an organized Jewish effort to ostracize Fuentes.

Most of the YouTube comments favor Fuentes.

The organized Jewry and Zionists are losing the hard Left Democrats, Blacks, and young people. Now they might be losing conservative Republicans. That would be a disaster for them. So they are desperate to hang on to conservative Republicans.

Mark R. Levin not only wants to cancel Fuentes, he wants to cancel Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and other mainstream conservatives who do not profess allegiance to Israel. This issue is not about Hitler and Stalin. It is about Jewish supremacy and Israel.

Black Women Uncomfortable about Hair

News:

Michelle Obama has claimed that Black women have to straighten their locks to 'follow white people's beauty standards' during a furious on-air rant. ...

'Let me explain something to white people. Our hair comes out of our head naturally in a curly pattern,' an exasperated Michelle began.

'When we straighten it to follow your beauty standards, we are trapped by the straightness.

'That's why so many of us can't swim, and we run away from the water. People won't go to the gym because [they're] trying to keep [their] hair straight for y'all! It's exhausting, expensive and takes up so much time.'

Only about 15% of the world has curly hair. Most of Asia has straight hair. She is straightening her hair mostly to conform to Asian styles, not White. Lots of White women curl their hair.

She has been saying crazy things for months.

Sierra Club goes Woke, and goes Broke

A leftist biology professor posts:

This happens over and over again. It happened with the Southern Poverty Law Center. It happened with the ACLU. It happened with the Audubon Society. And now it’s happening with the Sierra Club. What is happening? An organization with a narrowly defined but admirable mission cannot resist the ideological Zeitgeist, and embraces social justice precepts that are not universally accepted. The organization becomes riven with controversy, and it erodes, becoming damaged. (This also happened with Scientific American, remember?)

The NYT from a week ago tells us how this is happening to the Sierra Club, which has lost money and membership after deciding to branch off into Social Justice Warriorism. Read about it by clicking the headline below, or find the article archived here for free.

That article starts:

The Sierra Club calls itself the “largest and most influential grass roots environmental organization in the country.” But it is in the middle of an implosion — left weakened, distracted and divided just as environmental protections are under assault by the Trump administration.

The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.

Its political giving has also dropped. Federal campaign-finance records show $3.6 million in donations from the Sierra Club during the push to defeat Donald J. Trump in 2020, but none as Mr. Trump stormed back to the presidency in 2024.

The article shows support collapsing in about 2020, but the real problem started decades earlier when it went pro-immigration. There are a lot of arguments for and against immigration, but for an environmentalist, migration from the Third World to the USA is overwhelmingly bad. The Sierra Club should have been overwhelmingly against it.

The story has surprisingly little to do with Donald Trump. If anything, Trump should have united them with opposition to coal-burning and other policies.

Ancient Roman Road Map

Source

A new study identified over 68,000 more miles of ancient Roman roads than were previously known.

Year 150 AD. This is amazing.

Some Christians more Anti-semitic than Hitler

The word anti-semitism is being thrown around looseely on both the Right and the Left, but this is new to me. From a recent Noam Chomsky interview:

the evangelicals have a very 1:36:03 interesting position on Jews and on Israel. They're the most extreme anti-semites in human history. Their 1:36:12 theology, if you look at it, is that uh it's not 100% of evangelicals, but a 1:36:18 leading part of it uh there's got to we got to look for Armageddon.

1:36:23 Yeah. the then the second coming Christ comes. What happens when Christ comes back? 1:36:30 Those who are saved go to heaven. Everybody else goes to eternal 1:36:36 predition. Mhm. What happens to the Jews? Yeah. Actuallyund according to one of the 1:36:43 denominations 160,000 can convert in time. The rest go to eternal predition. 1:36:50 Yeah. Did Hitler call for that? No.

Not even Hitler comdemned the Jews to Hell. Some evangelical Christians do, making them more anti-semitic than Hitler.

I am not sure this is true. I thought most evangelical Christian Israel-supporters believe that Jews have their own deal with God, and therefore not judged so harshly.

Even if he is right, it is bizarre to hear an atheist professor, of Jewish descent I think, complain about some religious after-life belief. If every religion condemned non-believer to Hell in the after-life, why would Chomsky care?

I post this as an example of alleged anti-semitism. It reminds me of Tucker Carlson being called an anti-semite and enemy of the Jews for saying that Christian Zionism is a heresy.

People are entitled to their religious views, which always include negative beliefs about rival religions.

Update: Chomsky is in the news from disclosures of Jeffrey Epstein emails. They were friends, and discussed many matters such as Israel and finance. There is no implication of sexual misbehavior, but everyone with any association with Epstein is being blamed.

A Third of Americans Households are Rich

People complain about the shrinking AMerican middle class, as if that were a bad thing, but look at this graph; Note that the figures are inflation adjusted, and they are for household income, not individual income.

We do have more two-earner households.

Making $150,000 a year is wealthy. You can live in a nice house, drive fancy cars, eat high-class food, and go on exotic vacations.

This wealthy sector went from 5% to 34%. So a third of American households are rich.

No Need for Foreign Workers

News:

President Donald Trump drew criticism from those within his "Make America Great Again" base after he reinvigorated debate on one of his party's most controversial issues: H-1B visas.

The visas allow U.S. companies to hire highly skilled foreign workers for up to six years.

The issue resurfaced after Trump told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in an interview that aired Tuesday that bringing foreign workers to the U.S. on H-1B visas is important to "bring in talent" to the U.S. While Ingraham argued that the U.S. has talent at home, Trump said that wasn’t the case.

It is not true that the visas are for highly skilled workers. There are other visa programs for that: EB-2, EB-3, O-1. The H-1B visas go to Indians and others will skills comparable to an average American college graduate.

Ben Shapiro defended the visas citing Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. He says they created many thousands of American jobs.

I can see the argument for Musk as he founded SpaceX, and essentially founded Tesla and a couple of other companies. But Nadella and Pichai happened to be at the right place at the right time, and cashed in on cloud computing and AI developed by others.

Google and Microsoft hired thousands of Indian programmers and engineers as cheaper substitutes for Americans, and then had to hire Indians to manage them. Nadella and Pichai rose in that environment, but are they responsible for any innovative products that created jobs? Not that I have heard. They are now making good AI products, but they are playing catchup to OpenAI and Anthropic.

Atheist Believed in Parallel Universes

Victor J. Stenger was a physicist who retired and spent the rest of life promoting Atheism. Here are some of his quotes:

The problem is that people think faith is something to be admired. In fact, faith means you believe in something for which you have no evidence.

Proof is not required to believe [in a god]. But some sign, some evidence is needed. None exists... Find some inkling of evidence. There is none.

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.

Sounds like a skeptic, but in this recently-released interview, he says he believes in many-worlds theory!

This is baffling to me. There is not an inkling of evidence for it. It requires rejecting most of science.

Believing in parallel universe is goofier than believing in God or the Bible.

Olympics Returns to Sex Discrimination

Olympic competitions for women used to be just for women. Now it is returning to that.

News:

The Olympics is increasingly likely to ban transgender athletes from all female competition following a science-based review of evidence.

Kirsty Coventry, the new president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), told Telegraph Sport in January that she favoured a blanket ban and, after winning the presidency in March, commissioned a review that assessed the permanent physical advantages of being born male.

This should not have required a science-based review of evidence. The most decisive thing was probably the Pres. Trump executive order for a sex-based policy. It stated the obvious, after our scientific organizations went woke.

Guinness Book goes Woke

The new 2026 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records has 2 whole pages on the WNBA, and only a half page each on the NBA, MLB, NFL, and NHL.

What drives this? I don't think anyone cares about women's basketball records.

The Rise of Nick Fuentes

Nick Fuentes has been in the news. He has this Wikipedia bio:

Nicholas Joseph Fuentes (born August 18, 1998) is an American far-right[8] political commentator, activist, and live streamer. He hosts America First, a livestream promoting white nationalism,[9][10] Christian nationalism,[7] white supremacy,[11] white genocide conspiracy theory, misogyny, anti-immigration, anti-miscegenation, anti-LGBTQ, scientific racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism, including Holocaust denial.[10][12][13][14] His supporters are known as Groypers.

He has 500k followers on Rumble.

His enemies are digging up quotes to trash him, such as this:

Nick Fuentes: “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise”

Fuentes: “White men need to run the household, they need to run the country, they need to run the companies. They just need to run everything.”

Apparently some people are alarmed that he might be the heir to Charlie Kirk, in the attention of young conservative men.

Watson, of DNA Fame, dies

The London BBC reports:

Nobel Prize-winning American scientist James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, has died aged 97. ...

"We have discovered the secret of life," they said at the time.

His later comments on race led to him saying that he felt ostracised by the scientific community.

In 2007, the scientist, who once worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, told the Times newspaper that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa", because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really".

The comments led to him losing his job as chancellor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

Academics are proved wrong all the time, and they do not get fired for it. No, they get fired for saying something true, but offensive.

Working with images obtained by King's College researcher Rosalind Franklin, without her knowledge, Crick and Watson were able to construct a physical model of the molecule. Maurice Wilkins, who shared the Nobel with Crick and Watson, had worked with Franklin to determine the DNA molecule's structure.

This is a little misleading, as she was credited with the images. She might have gotten Wilkins' share of the prize, if she had been still alive, and if the public knew how much those images influenced Watson.

NY Times obituary.

Update: Noah Carl writes:

It’s crucial to note, of course, that Watson’s views on race and intelligence are scientifically unimpeachable. The testing does show large average differences between Africa and Western countries. Meanwhile, surveys of experts working in relevant fields reveal non-trivial or high levels of agreement that genes contribute to psychological group differences. ... ...

Watson’s work on the structure of DNA has certainly earned him a place in history, whatever his (less accomplished) critics might say. But perhaps what he should be remembered for above all is possessing that rarest of qualities: he wasn’t a coward.

Some quotes here:

I’ve given my DNA to two of these companies. I’ve told them they can publish everything except the structure of the gene that will tell me if I’m predisposed to Alzheimer’s. I don’t want to know.

I am always amazed when people are afraid to learn their genes. Watson seems like as much as a DNA enthusiast as you will ever find, and yet he was afraid to learn one of his genes.

That gene is not even dispositive. It is just a risk factor, like cholesterol level and body mass index.

Not a coward? Ha ha.

I don't get it, but the entire related subjects of race and intelligence drive people bonkers. They do not want to know the scientific facts, and they run from examining the implications.

I would say that less that 5% of the population just want the truth, whatever it is.

Update: Here are the snide comments of a Watson-hater.

The Watson-Crick DNA work did indeed depend on the work of others, as with all scientific progress. Their crucial original idea was that DNA had two strands with paired bases, so that the strands could be split and copied as a biological process. This was the secret of life that made digital genetic coding possible. No one else had this idea.

John Rocker was Right

Vox Day writes:

Twenty-five years ago, the Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker wrote an impassioned observation about the decline of New York.

“Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark looking like you’re riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing. The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?”

He was roundly condemned for this by the national media, by Major League Baseball, and was even forced to undergo professional counseling for the thought crime of noticing the consequences of the foreign invasion the city was undergoing. And now, with what appears to be the imminent election of a socialist Muslim born in Uganda to the highest elective office in New York City, he’s taking a well-earned victory lap.

25 years ago I criticized New York for its rapid decline into a third world country. I was forced to undergo Psychological Counseling, as if I were the crazy one. 25 years later, the city is voting in a muslim socialist for mayor.

This is an object lesson for all of the puritanical goodthinkers and immigration fetishists who drank the equalitarian Kool-Aid. Those Cassandras you condemned for being “crazy” and “racist” and “bigoted” were right all along. All of history, recent and ancient, clearly testifies to the obvious fact that if you permit a sufficient number of foreigners to enter your country, they will change it to suit their preferences with absolutely no respect for what was there before them.

The equalitarian ideology has failed. The Enlightenment has failed. Multiculturalism and anti-racism have failed. Immigration is a clear, present, and existential danger to most of the nations of the West.

If you are still having trouble understanding the concept, ask an American Indian to explain it to you.

I remember this, as an early cancelation. I think a Sports Illustrated reporter baited him into redneck some trash talk, and he naively complied. I guess his employer forced him into a public apology, but that did not help.

Women Vote for Socialist Mohammedan

A Fox News Poll found that Zohran Mamdani got 81% of the under-30 female vote in New York City.

I guess NY Jews are not as powerful as I thought.

Was it because he is young, socialist, or Mohammedan?

I mentioned the Helen Andrews theory that feminization is the core driver behind woke politics. Maybe this helps explain the NYC mayor election. Otherwise it is hard to understand voting for a socialist Mohammedan.

As recently as 1950, NYC was 90% White.

Virginia elected a attorney general in spite of this:

In October 2025, Jones came under fire for a 2022 text conversation with fellow delegate Carrie Coyner, in which Jones repeatedly made statements advocating violence against then–House Speaker Todd Gilbert and his family. Jones stated that if he had two bullets and could shoot Gilbert, Adolf Hitler, or Pol Pot, Gilbert "gets two bullets to the head".[29][30] Jones acknowledged that he had talked about hoping Gilbert's children would die because "Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy", before describing Gilbert and his wife as "evil" and "breeding little fascists".[31][32][33]

Update: Polls also show that Momdani got 83% of the foreigner vote. Also a big majority of the non-white vote.

Jailed for Saying Sexual Choices are Mental

News:

A man in Switzerland is facing jail after refusing to pay a fine for a comment courts have ruled discriminates against the LGBTQ community after a three-year legal battle.

Emanuel Brunisholz, a Swiss wind instrument repairman, was convicted under the country’s anti-discrimination laws for an old Facebook comment.

In 2022, he pointed out that the biological differences between men and women are obvious by their skeletal structure.

“If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you’ll only find men and women based on their skeletons. Everything else is a mental illness promoted through the curriculum,” he wrote on Facebook.

The post was reported to police, and Brunisholz was questioned a few months later. He was found guilty of discrimination and incitement to hatred by a court in Bern.

He appealed the decision in regional court in 2023 but was again found guilty and racked up 600 Swiss francs ($753) in court fees.

The court issued a fine of 500 Swiss francs in lieu of a ten-day jail term but Brunisholz refused to pay the fine and accepted incarceration instead, posting his summons on X earlier this month. He is to begin serving his sentence on December 2.

Neo-con Woman tries to Defend Feminism

Alternet reports:

Conservative/libertarian journalist Cathy Young has, at times, been highly critical of what she views as the excesses of third-wave feminism. Back in 2016, an op-ed Young wrote for the Washington Post was headlined "How Feminism Came To Be All About Hating Men."

Although the piece draw criticism from some progressives and praise from right-wing media, Young emphasized that she had no use for sexism whether it was male-bashing from the far left or misogyny from the far right. And in a lengthy article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on October 22, Young aggressively calls out a trend in the MAGA movement: blaming women for a wide range of problems.

"The latest intellectual buzz on the right is about a Compact Magazine essay that boils down to 'Women ruin everything,'" Young explains. "The piece by Helen Andrews, titled 'The Great Feminization'

I would not call The Bulwark a conservative website. It seems to hold mostly neo-con Trump-hater essays.

I mentioned Andrews' view, so I am posting a contrary view.

It’s not that women are bad, says Andrews; but their distinct qualities and values — “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition” — transform these institutions in ruinous ways. Let too many women flock to academia, and we get touchy-feely stuff instead of “open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth.” Too many women in journalism spell the decline of “prickly individualists” willing to brave public disapproval. '''

LET’S NOT MINCE WORDS: This a grotesquely misogynistic screed. ...

Today, there is research showing that female faculty (younger faculty, at least) and Ph.D. students in North America and the United Kingdom are more left-wing than their male peers; they are also more likely on average to prioritize social justice over truth-seeking, to support the suppression of views deemed harmful to oppressed groups, and to believe that it’s more important for the curriculum to have racial and gender diversity than to include “foundational texts.” ... Andrews tweeted:

Men have the concept of an honorable enemy. Men can engage in conflict with an opponent and still respect them. When the conflict is over, they’ll shake the other guy’s hand and accept the outcome gracefully.

Women don’t have that. If you’re her enemy, you are subhuman garbage. No rules govern the fight; no shaking hands when it’s over. It is never over. ...

Whatever the reason, this is actually the number one thing I worry about with the Great Feminization. I see it already in the female-dominated Democratic Party.

I cannot figure out these neo-cons. There is a lot of opinion, but little substance. She apparently copies a silly David French argument that her Andrews' theory does not match the French Revolution.

Another Bulwark article complains that Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes. Exactly why this is so upsetting is not clear. It tries to imply that Fuentes is a Nazi.

It is weird that they hate Fuentes so much. He is primarily known for being America First, and being Christian. He once made an ambiguous offhand comment about "six million cookies", and Jews were very offended. The most outrageous thing he said in the interview was that he like Stalin. He did not say why.

There is also a systematic effort to ostracize Tucker Carlson, as he does not support Israel's war on Gaza.

Fuentes is “the most dangerous man in America to Jews.”

A Republican congressman Randy Fine says:

Make no mistake. Today, Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous antisemite in America.

It is weird that they focus on some podcasters, while a Mohammedan anti-Israel foreigner is about to be elected mayor of New York City. The Trump-haters talk about Nazis and Hitler all the time. Here is Ben Shapiro, a right-wing Jew, with a 41-minute rant against Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. Young continues:

Democrats are once again comparing the Trump administration to Hitler and Nazi Germany. The renewed rhetoric was the subject of debate at a Congressional hearing that included the Democratic governors of three sanctuary states.

Democrats have either called or compared President Donald Trump and his supporters to Nazis for years, going back to his first administration.

That trend began again in May when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, compared the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Gestapo.

New rule: Just ignore anyone talking about Nazis. But some deny that they do it.

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said on Monday she doesn't believe any Democrat has compared President Donald Trump to German dictator Adolf Hitler.

Apparently Fuentes is an extremely divisive figure in the right-wing. He has just enough of a following to get attention. Some disagree with him, but think that he is raising important issues. Others consider him a huge embarrassment, and wish that he would go away.

Shapiro is particularly disturbed that Carlson said that Christian Zionism is a heresy. Shapiro is not a Christian. I do not know why he would even have an opinion on this. I do not post opinions about what Jewish law ought to be.

Mark Levin went into a rant against Carlson and Fuentes before a right-wing Jew audience:

we canceled Pat Buchanan. We canceled the John Birch Society, ... We cancel stuff all the damn time.

I assume that "we" means the Jews.

No, I do not agree with canceling Buchanan, Birch Society, or Carlson. They are all mainstream conservatives, and are not anti-semitic. Fuentes is more of a trouble-maker. I am not sure about Fuentes, but he is just another guy with an opinion.

Some of these Jews seem to be trying to convince us that Jews are the gatekeepers of the popular media. Only certain opinions are allowed.

Update: This dispute has gotten bigger than I expected. In short, conservatives are being split into America First and neo-con pro-Israel factions.