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 They are no longer valid.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.