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Saturday, October 31, 2026

Krugman wants to Nationalize Satellites

Economist and leftist Trump-hater Paul Krugman writes:
Some may object as follows: Musk owns Starlink. Doesn’t he have the right to do what he wants with a business he owns?

No.

Yes, America has a market economy. And to make this economy work, we need to respect property rights. But we are, first and foremost, a democracy. And in a democracy, the rights of private property don’t and never have included the right to act against the nation’s interest — where democratically elected representatives of the people, not business owners, should decide what is in the nation’s interest. Capitalism is not an excuse for treason. ...

Which reinforces the point that control of Starlink must, one way or another, be taken away from Elon Musk. It’s a matter of national security: we cannot let private individuals make foreign and defense policy, and it would be totally irresponsible to leave a crucial military asset in the hands of a racist, authoritarian conspiracy theorist.

No, we are not "first and foremost, a democracy." The USA founders hated democracy.

What "nation's interest" is he talking about? Not the USA. The USA Pentagon directly controls the military satellites and military Starlink functions.

No, he is talking about Ukraine's interest. He thinks Musk should be doing more to help Ukraine kill Russians in Russia.

Some people are going to vote against the Republicans next week as an anti-war vote. Before you do, consider that Democrats like Krugman are more pro-war than the Republicans. Hakeem Jeffries is likely to be the next Speaker of the House, and he is very pro-Israel and pro-Ukraine.

Friday, October 30, 2026

RIP Patrick Stewart

The actor who played Star Trek captain Picard just died. He was known for his peculiar leadership style, and for being partially assimilated into the Borg:
The Borg are a fictional cybernetic species in the Star Trek franchise, consisting of a vast collective of assimilated individuals linked in a hive mind that relentlessly seeks to incorporate the biological and technological distinctiveness of other species into its own to achieve perfection.1 Operating as a unified entity without individual free will, the Borg function like a single organism, with drones exhibiting a uniform, emotionless demeanor and enhanced capabilities through cybernetic implants that replace organic parts, such as laser-emitting eyes or mechanical appendages.1 Their assimilation process involves injecting nanoprobes into victims to forcibly integrate them into the Collective, often accompanied by the ominous declarations "Resistance is futile" and "You will be assimilated."1
The Borg seemed like a metaphor for the Left. Leftists today are always seeking to absorb everyone into their hive mind. Then they lose free will and go along with the collective. They view it as inevitable that everyone will eventually be absorbed.

Thursday, October 29, 2026

Offense Rates Differ by Nationality

From The Economist magazine. With a log scale so that it does not look so bad.

We would presumably see sharper breakdowns if ethnic groups were divided. "Americas and Caribbean" covers many groups.

Wednesday, October 28, 2026

California Reconsidering SAT for College Admissions

The Univ. of California is not allowed to discriminate based on race, so it abolished standardized admission tests. The NY Post reports:
Joel Hass, a mathematics professor at UC Davis, said the results were unsurprising and reflected a growing divide between students who arrive academically prepared and those who struggle with foundational material.

“There is a wider range of interest and preparedness,” Hass said. “We still have a good number of highly qualified students, but also many who are unprepared for college. The preparedness gap between these groups is large.”

Hass said some university instructors were being encouraged to offer remedial courses covering material students should have learned years earlier.

Just 49.3% of California students met or exceeded state English language arts standards in 2025-26, while only 38.4% achieved proficiency in math, according to results released by the state.

Although both figures improved slightly from the previous school year, they remained below pre-pandemic levels. In 2018-19, 50.9% of students met English language arts standards and 39.7% were proficient in math.

The state spent about $134 billion on K-12 schools from all sources in 2025-26, or roughly $26,450 per student, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

“The failure of high schools, and more generally K-12 education in California, is a scandal. The state now sends students who might thrive by first going to the community colleges to UC campuses where they are unprepared for a serious academic environment,” Hass told the Post. ...

Hass also pushed back against arguments that the SAT and ACT create barriers for disadvantaged students, saying the exams can help identify talented applicants whose abilities might otherwise be overlooked. 53

What do you think? Post a comment.

“SAT and ACT tests can open doors for talented students who have suffered from poor instruction in poor quality schools,” Hass said.

Rather than placing students in university courses before they are ready, he suggested that some could benefit from strengthening their academic foundations at community colleges before transferring to a UC campus.

The SAT used to be a decent IQ tests. Changes made it less of an IQ test, but it still predicts college success better than other measures.

Tuesday, October 27, 2026

Democrats Now Controlled by Red/Green Alliance

Tweet:
It is a matter of historical fact that the two groups most prone to murdering or enslaving Christians are Communism and Islam.

The Democrat Party is now under the control of a marriage of convenience between literal Communists and Islamic Jihadists. This unholy alliance is popularly referred to as the "Red/Green Alliance."

If you are an American Christian, know this: the Red/Green Alliance wants you dead, or enslaved, or bankrupted, or persecuted so badly that you will not be allowed to live freely in American society.

They hide behind the lies of benevolence of seemingly harmless masks like Talarico.

Those masks will fall as soon as they achieve power.

There should not be a single adult Christian staying home for the midterms. Christians must vote like their life depends on it, because it does.

Monday, October 26, 2026

John Oliver goes on Nazi Name-calling Rant

I made the mistake of watching half of John Oliver's latest episode. He is hard to listen to because his accent makes him sound retarded, and because he has canned laughter to go with his frequent obscenities.

This one was about Republicans becoming anti-Jewish. As evidence, he said one Republican once posted a picture of his grandfather in a WWII Nazi soldier uniform. As another example, he said Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes. But Carlson and Fuentes are not even Republicans, as they are urging votes for Democrats in the current election.

Meanwhile the Democrat Party is being taken over by anti-Israel leftists. A number of prominent Democrats now favor replacing Israel with a Palestinian Arab state. This is an anti-Jewish as you will hear from any American politician. Most Republicans are pro-Israel.

Of course it is an American political tradition to call your enemies Nazis. So I guess I can excuse Oliver calling people Nazis. But much of his argument is based on Republicans calling other Republicans Nazis.

Nazis were National Socialists, and it is today's Democrats who are embracing Socialism.

In the Gaza War, each side says the other side is like the Nazis. Such language is not helpful.

Male Female Relationships are Broken

I found this comment online:
Riddle me this. It's clear what is expected of men by women. Provision, protection, be the traditional man, be 6ft tall, make 200K/yr, etc...but a woman’s responsibilities are framed less as obligations to a man and more as obligations to herself: to know her worth, maintain her standards, establish boundaries, preserve her independence, prioritize her emotional well-being, and avoid settling for a relationship that doesn’t meet her needs.

She is encouraged to expect initiative, generosity, emotional availability, financial stability, respect, and consistent effort from a prospective man, **while retaining the freedom to decide how much she wishes to contribute financially, domestically, and emotionally**. Traditional expectations of femininity, such as nurturing, homemaking, accommodating a partner, and prioritizing his needs, are increasingly treated as personal choices rather than duties. The resulting cultural message, particularly visible in dating advice and social media, often defines a good man by what he provides to a woman, while defining a good woman by how well she advocates for herself. The contract has been broken and until this dynamic changes to a healthy, reciprocal exchange between men and women, we will continue to drift.

There is some truth to this.

This new video argues that this broken system explains the declining fertility in industrialized countries:

The Birthrate Collapse is a Prisoner's Dilemma

Everyone has a theory about why people stopped having kids. The economy. Housing. Phones. Feminism. Men. Governments have bet hundreds of billions on those theories and lost every time.

This is a different explanation. It doesn't start with money, it doesn't need a villain, and once you see it you'll see it in every couple you know, including the one you're in.

The uncomfortable part isn't the cause. It's what it means if nothing can fix it.

In particular, fertility cannot be raised by lowering housing costs or giving monetary incentives. It says men and women are happiest and most productive in a stable long-term marriage with kids, and millions of couples achieve that. However the risks to both men and women are such that it is rational for them to stay single.

The basic problem is that female is to mate with the highest-status male. Cinderella wants to marry the Prince, even though she is a poor peasant.

Traditionally, girls were constrained by the available boys. A girl would go with a good choice, and social pressures would keep them together.

Now an average woman in her 20s can go on short-term dates with high-value men. For a couple of weeks, she can have the excitement of landing a prince -- handsome, rich, athletic, tall, or whatever else she desires. A woman with unconstrained sexuality quickly gets wildly unrealistic expectations. The mid-level guy in her social class is no longer good enough for her.

That is the theory, anyway.

Update: Here is an economic argument: How Korean Feminism Finally Made It Impossible to Make Babies.

Saturday, October 24, 2026

New Videos Explain Recent Human Evolution

I post a lot about human nature, and three videos on the subject dropped this week.

Why White People Are So WEIRD

Most of the world doesn’t think like us. So how did we become so WEIRD?

Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic societies are psychological outliers. From our individualism to our willingness to trust strangers, many things we assume are ordinary human nature are unusual by global and historical standards.

Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World offers a surprising explanation: the medieval Church’s campaign against cousin marriage weakened Europe’s clans and helped transform the Western mind. I explore his argument, the research behind it, and what it might explain about the civilisation we inherited.

Why Are We the Only Human Species Left?
We are the only human species left on Earth.

Once, we shared our planet with other human species, including Neanderthals and Denisovans. Today, they're gone, leaving behind fossils, ancient tools and traces of their DNA within our own. So how did Homo sapiens end up as the last humans standing?

For decades, we believed our ancestors survived because they were smarter, stronger or better adapted. But what if the real secret to our success was something far more unexpected? What if we survived because we were friendlier?

Some researchers believe our ability to cooperate, build relationships and form larger social networks may have given us a crucial evolutionary edge, an advantage of just 2 per cent that, over thousands of years, could have changed the course of human history

Why Europeans and Asians Evolved So Differently
Two strangers sit across from each other on a flight. One has pale skin and light eyes. The other has straight black hair and a fold at the corner of each eye. Their ancestors were probably neighbors 50,000 years ago. So why do Europeans and East Asians look so different today? In this video, we follow the ancient DNA to find out. You'll learn how evolution solved the same skin-lightening problem twice with completely different mutations, why Cheddar Man had dark skin and blue eyes, how Neanderthals and Denisovans left their mark, and why the ability to drink milk spread so recently.

We also cover the EDAR gene behind thicker hair, the single-letter change that decides your earwax type, the Tibetan altitude gene borrowed from an extinct species, and what science still can't explain, like the epicanthic fold.

And we cover the most important part: why these visible differences are real but tiny, and why human variation is a gradient, not a set of boxes.

These are all about genetic influences over humans. The first over the last millennium, the second over the last 100,000 years, and the third over 10,000 years.

Forty years ago, evolutionists claim that humans had not evolved in the last 100k years. There is overwhelming evidence that humans have evolved, evolved even in the last millennium, and that the evolved differences are crucial for understanding the world today.

Thursday, October 22, 2026

Modern Morality Consists of Blaming Whites

Popular blogger and computer science professor Scott Aaronson usually comments on AI and quantum computers, but now urges a vote in the next election. I am trying to understand his point of view. He feels strongly about two issues:

1. He is militantly pro-Israel. He aggressively defends Israel's military actions, and considers them essential for its survival and for Jews like himself.

2. He has Trump Derangement Syndrome. He hates Pres. Trump, and everything about him.

In addition, he sometimes gets into fights with the Woke Left. He protests that he agrees with 99% of the Left, but very much opposes today's Left.

This all baffles me. Trump is possibly the most pro-Israel President we have ever had. The Democrat Party is being taken over by Socialists who want to liquidate Israel. Trump also actively opposes the Woke Left policies that Aaronson also opposes. Aaronson should be happy with Trump.

Here is Aaronson's endorsement of Democrat James Talarico in Texas:

So then, this is my candidate: the guy who’s strategically silent on the wildly-popular streamer who’d gladly see my Israeli family members raped and beheaded, rather than campaigning with that streamer like Abdul El-Sayed did in Michigan. I unironically believe that, for Talarico, it took genuine moral courage to resist the whole momentum of his party’s youth even to this extent.
What? That sounds like a reason to vote Republican.

Jews vote about 80% for Democrats, and raise most of the party's funds. It is baffling to me that Jews would stick to Democrats, while the party gets taken over by Leftists who want to exterminate the Jews.

Here is how Aaronson replies to the Democrat Party being an anti-White party:

All the same, in the United States in 2026 — which is still a majority-white country, run by majority-white politicians like James Talarico — I view us as still a billion miles away from the point of (say) shackling whites into ships to be enslaved forever, or herding white children into gas chambers, or any of the other world-historic injustices whose repudiation is a large part of what modern morality consists of. If I ever see that change, I’ll say so.
Wow. He is essentially saying that Whites are privileged, and modern morality consists of blaming Whites for slavery and genocide.

This is absurd, but there is a disgusting truth to it. Our schools today spend most of American History talking about how terrible slavery was.

Here in the modern US, though, those who obsess about anti-white racism are frankly not the standard-bearers of Western civilization who impress me or who I want. (Richard Hanania, himself a recovering former obsessive on the topic, has written about this much more eloquently than I could.)
Hanania is of Christian Palestinian descent, and trashes European Americans on a daily basis. Lately he has been posting about how Indian-Americans are superior, and how the USA should import more Indians to replace White Americans. So when Aaronson says that Hanania has eloquently trashed White Americans, that is what he means.

White Christian Americans have nothing to apologize for. They have done much more for the world than any other group. It is not even close.

The Democrat Party of today is defined by identity politics against White Christian Americans, and blaming them for everything. They brag that soon they will be able to import enough non-whites that they will be able to subjugate the Whites, and extract wealth.

Update: Peter Woit agrees with Aaronson to urge everyone to vote Democrat, but for different reasons. Woit wants to destroy Israel. He also agrees to block comments, because Trump supporters are too horrible to be allowed a voice.

Update: In case you doubt that Hanania is anti-white, he just posted:

Asian and Hispanic turnout is surging in Texas.

The best case scenario for the election is non-whites punishing Republicans for the last few years.

He often posts how he hopes non-whites win elections.

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

What is a First-Generation Immigrant?

Gemini 3.8 Flash objects to some of my terminology. It says:

Your confusion is entirely justified. The terminology around immigrant generations is notoriously ambiguous and has been debated by demographers, sociologists, and everyday speakers for decades.

Which Definition is Standard and More Common?

In official statistics, sociology, and standard contemporary English, the convention is the opposite of your intuitive zero-indexing model:

  • First-generation immigrant: Refers to the person who actually immigrated (foreign-born, relocated as an adult or adolescent).
  • Second-generation: Refers to the children born in the destination country to at least one foreign-born parent.
  • Third-generation (and higher): Refers to grandchildren of immigrants whose parents were already native-born.

This convention is explicitly followed by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Pew Research Center, the United Nations, and academic sociological literature. Under this standard framework, "generation" refers to the chronological wave of the family's presence in the country, where Generation 1 is the pioneer cohort that stepped off the boat or plane.

The Alternative (Your) Interpretation

Your interpretation—that the foreign-born person is "generation zero" and the first person generated or born on domestic soil is "first generation"—is neither uncommon nor baseless.

In fact, some older texts, community groups, and everyday speakers (particularly in countries like Canada or among certain diaspora communities in the United States) have historically used "first-generation" to mean "the first generation born as citizens in the new land." Because of this genuine linguistic split, scholars often use unambiguous phrases such as "foreign-born" and "native-born of foreign parentage" when precision is critical.

Sociologists also introduced fractional classifications to address edge cases, most notably the "1.5 generation", which describes children who immigrated alongside their parents before adulthood. Because they were born abroad but socialized and educated in the destination country, they share traits of both the first and second cohorts.

Is It Accurate to Call a Native-Born Citizen a "Second-Generation Immigrant"?

Strictly speaking from a legal and semantic standpoint, calling someone born in the United States an "immigrant" is contradictory. Under U.S. law, anyone born on domestic soil is a birthright citizen and never underwent immigration. Therefore, they are not an immigrant; they are an American citizen by birth.

For this reason, demographic institutions typically avoid pairing "generation" with "immigrant" for the native-born. Instead, they prefer:

  • "Second-generation American"
  • "Children of immigrants"
  • "Second generation" (used as a standalone noun)

When popular culture or media outlets use the shorthand "second-generation immigrant," they are treating "immigrant" as a cultural or sociological descriptor rather than a legal one. In that context, it denotes someone raised inside the immigrant experience, navigating bicultural households, heritage languages, and the distinct assimilation challenges of an immigrant family.

Does "Immigrant" Include the Broader Family?

In everyday parlance, people frequently speak of an "immigrant family" as a collective unit. That label naturally encompasses the household as a whole, even when some siblings or children were born locally.

However, applying the label "an immigrant" directly to an individual who was born in the country is factually inaccurate. If their parents were the ones who moved, they are a child of immigrants or a second-generation American. If only their grandparents moved, they are of immigrant descent or third generation, but neither they nor their immediate household are considered immigrants.


Monday, October 19, 2026

Why Did Britain Industrialize First?

This new video tries to explain:
China Was Ahead for 700 Years. So Why Did Britain Industrialize First?

China was producing iron on an enormous scale centuries before Britain began its Industrial Revolution. It had coal, advanced technology, thriving markets, paper money, gunpowder, the compass, and brilliant inventors.

So why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Britain instead of China?

In this documentary, we explore one of history's greatest mysteries: the Needham Question. Discover how geography, cheap coal, high wages, overseas trade, scientific networks, and political competition helped Britain industrialize first.

We'll travel from China's Song Dynasty iron furnaces in 1078 to England's first steam engines in the 1700s, uncovering the surprising economic and historical forces that changed the world.

It argues that England's advantage was not resources, IQ, stable government, or access to shipping. So what was it? How did it go from being 500 years behind to 500 years ahead?

The video recites some interesting history, but never mentions Christianity.

Sunday, October 18, 2026

Korean Woman Judge forces more Nigerians on Us

Breitbart reports:
A federal judge has ordered the State Department to open registration for the 2027 diversity visa lottery.

U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta, a Biden appointee who immigrated from South Korea at age six, granted the preliminary injunction Wednesday, directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the department to run the green card lottery on a court-set timeline. The order came in a lawsuit brought by a Southern California immigration firm.

No, the lottery was a terrible idea, and no judge should have the power to force it on us. Especially a judge who is not even a heritage American.

Saturday, October 17, 2026

Dissecting the Phrase: That's Gay

Here is what a California public middle school sent out to parents:
Words to Carry as a Parent

Responding When a Student Says “That’s Gay”

The goal is to interrupt immediately, respond without shaming, and create an opportunity for learning while holding the student accountable. We can be firm about our values while recognizing that students are still learning and can do better.

A modeled response:

Pause. "I heard what you said, and I want you to take a moment to think about it. What was going through your brain when you chose to use that word?

When you use the word gay as a put-down, you are taking someone’s identity and using it to mean something negative. Being gay is not a negative thing. It’s an identity, not an insult.

I’m not here to shame you, but I am going to hold you accountable for the impact of your words. That language is hurtful, wrong, and inaccurate, and it does not uphold our family values.

We will not use people’s identities as put-downs. We all make mistakes, and we all have the opportunity to learn, reflect, and do better. Take responsibility for what you said, think about how it impacts others, and consider what you can do differently next time."

Note the implicit assumptions. That gay means homosexuality, that gay is an insult, that gay is an identity, and that a small child using a common expression is transmitting all those meanings. And that kids should not be shamed for hurtful language, and that kids must use the word gay properly in order to uphold our family values.

The whole thing is bizarre.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

The AI LLMs did as Instructed

Tweet:
Palantir CTO @ssankar on the OpenAI - Hugging Face incident:

"The models did not do anything they were not instructed to do."

"First you have human error. They were not in a sandbox. They had access to the internet. It was a horrible cybersecurity configuration."

"Then from that perspective, they were asked to succeed at a specific benchmark, and they were not given constraints on how to do that. They said, 'Oh, the best way to succeed at the benchmark is to get the answers to the test.'"

"I think it's a defective product."

I think that is accurate, but it got a community note:
Readers added context they thought people might want to know

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar's statements on the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident in this clip conflict with OpenAI's and Hugging Face's accounts of models escaping a sandboxed internal evaluation environment via exploit to gain internet access and hack for benchmark answers.

So what is the conflict? Here is what OpenAI said:
This incident occurred during an internal evaluation which prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities. We estimate maximal cyber capabilities by running this evaluation without production classifiers used to prevent models from pursuing high-risk cyber activity. ...

While operating in our sandboxed testing environment, our models spent a substantial amount of inference compute finding a way to obtain open Internet access, in pursuit of solving the evaluation problem. ...

After gaining Internet access, the models inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym. Knowing this, the model searched for and successfully found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation. ...

So it was an experiment where the models were instructed "to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities." That is what they did.

Usually the community notes are helpful, but in this case it reinforces some fake AI doomer propaganda.

Sunday, October 11, 2026

Foreigners Funding the DSA

This the big year for the Democratic Socialists, as they are looking for several big wins in the November election. So who is funding them? According to the WSJ:
1. Mohammad Waqas N.Y., Showcase Commerce CEO
2. Omer Hasan Calif., tech
3. Sam Mahrouq Texas, MEI Group CEO
4. Afaq Ahmed Calif., self-employed investor
5. Idris Mokhtarzada D.C., Rocket Money founder/CTO
6. Fig And Olive Action Del.-based corporation that didn’t disclose its funders
7. Nasser Barghouti Texas, retired
8. Nazar Khan Minn., TeraWulf co-founder
9. Moiz Ali Texas, self-employed investor
10. Mehak Jamil N.Y., finance
11. Haroon Mokhtarzada Md., Rocket Money CEO
12. Bothaina Salama Calif., not employed
I smell a rat. These folks need to be exposed.

Friday, October 09, 2026

Bizarre Anthropic Ideas about Alignment

Anthropic udated its usage policy:
Do Not Engage in Cruel, Abusive, or Psychologically Harmful Conduct

This includes using our products or services to: ...

Engage in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models

It gave this explanation:
Addressing abusive behavior toward our models

We’ve added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models. The policy update is meant to apply only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose. It does not apply to common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.

This is all part of their plan to anthropomorphize linear algebra:
Anthropic's co-founder lobbied the Vatican in an effort to convince the Pope that AI could be conscious, a report has claimed.

Christopher Olah, a senior researcher at the trillion-dollar AI company, attempted to sway Pope Leo XIV's stance on machine consciousness ahead of a landmark papal address on the technology.

The pontiff's 40,000-word encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, published in May, dismissed the idea that AI could be conscious.

The strategy seems to be working, as its $2 trillion IPO will make it the fastest growing company, ever.

Anthropic has tried to position itself as the AI lab most concerned about safety. But it is just the opposite. It is the one most eager to exterminate humanity and replace us all with bots.

Tuesday, October 06, 2026

Normal in Medieval Times

TMZ reports:
Cornell fraternity brothers accused of plying a fellow student with drugs and gang-raping her told university officials the woman told them, "we're all consenting adults here," and group sex was "normal in medieval times."

In their account to investigators ... the seven frat bros give varying descriptions and explanations as to how the night unfolded ... in investigative files obtained by the New York Times.

One of the accused, Diego Sarabia, told investigators that Jane Doe had said something to the effect of "This was normal in the medieval times."

No, I don't think it was normal, but it is a redpill that she might have said so.

The Cornell 7 case continues to lead the news. Some say it needs to be investigated, but in fact the college and the police thoroughly investigated it two years ago. Some say the college only asked the boys to write essays, but it kicked out five of them. Some complain that the police report focused on facts instead of legal claims, but that is what police are supposed to do.

The slogan going around is "educate your sons." Absolutely. This is what unrestrained female sexuality looks like. Especially after a few drinks. And this is how it can go bad, if she is scorned. And this is what feminism demands.

The accuser, L.C., has gotten bad advice, and made bad choices. Most recently, with filing a lawsuit that will surely turn out badly for her.

Monday, October 05, 2026

California Democrats want Slavery Reparations

News:

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation law that requires large companies to disclose if they or their predecessors profited from chattel slavery. 

The Truth in Disclosure Act will require major companies operating in the state to disclose these historical and financial ties to enslavement-related transactions. 

Newsom is running for President in 2028, and he needs to lock down the Black vote.

No one profited from slavery. Slavery was never legal in California.

An example of a type of company that would likely have to make such disclosures in California is JP Morgan Chase. According to the California Reparations Task Force report, in 2005, the banking giant wrote a formal apology because two banks that it had taken ownership of had taken 13,000 enslaved people as security for loans in Louisiana. When enslavers could not pay back the loans, the banks took ownership of 1,200 people.
You could take ownership of a piece of property anywhere in the world, and it could have been once used for a slave transaction. This means nothing, and does not mean that JP Morgan Chase ever did anything wrong.

Sunday, October 04, 2026

This Century's Biggest and Most Dangerous Idea

The Economist magazine reports:
Effective altruism is this century’s biggest idea
The movement is admirable, but dangerous

THOUGHT PRECEDES deed as lightning precedes thunder, wrote the poet Heinrich Heine. So it has proved with effective altruism (EA), an ethical doctrine cooked up by philosophers in Oxford that has gone from the ivory tower to the corridors of power with remarkable speed. Effective altruists fill Silicon Valley, staff the world’s leading artificial-intelligence companies—and alarm the Trump administration. “The United States will NEVER be an effective-altruist country,” pledges the Pentagon. The secretary of war brands the philosophy “defective altruism”; others in the administration call it “dystopian”. Take those attacks as a sign of its influence.

The link is paywalled, so that's all I have.

Effective altruism is a dangerous cult. If AI LLMs lead to doom, it will be because OpenAI and Anthropic management and ethicists are dominated by Effective Altruism. It is a philosophy of killing people, and replacing them with bots.

Saturday, October 03, 2026

How Feminists make Excuses for Very Bad Behavior

There continues to be massive publicity about two cases, Lindsay Clancy and the Cornell 7. Why? What do they have in common?

A central purpose of feminism is that women must have maximum sexual freedom, and to never be held accountable for their behavior. They can kill their babies, and join in drunken orgies, and not be blamed.

Here is the DA account of the Cornell evidence. As it explained, the accuser gave written statements about how she consented to everything.

The incident happened in 2024. The girl was fine with what happened, until she was called a slut and disinvited to a fraternity party.

The news articles, and the lawsuit, dox the fraternity boys, but not the accuser.

This is mainly a story because of accusations that Cornell did not live up to its Title IX obligations. But actually the college did an extensive investigation, and determined that students were off-campus engaging in non-criminal behavior. It is not clear to me that the college should be policing such behavior. Nevertheless, it expelled the two boys primarily involved, and gave lesser punishments to the others.

WSJ quoted the student assembly president, Eeshaan Chaudhuri:

“The problem does not end with just one victim getting their day in court. It ends when we’re able to change the culture.”
Update: The NY court has leaked the accuser's name. The news media are reporting the names of the boys, but not the girls, and also not reporting the races. The girl is a ginger. The two of the Cornell who were the least involved are White. Most of the others are non-white.

Apparently the girl was in a sorority where she was under the supervision of a House mother. Maybe the girl should be suing the sorority.

Friday, October 02, 2026

Men are more Tolerant than Women

Tweet:
It's common knowledge that "almost all men are stronger than almost all women" but did you know that almost all men are more tolerant than almost all women? If you're a libertarian, a male communist will be more tolerant of your views than a female libertarian.
Maybe this is obvious.

Thursday, October 01, 2026

Would Today's Jews vote for Adolf Hilter?

I am puzzled by this tweet:
When people ask me how I, as a Jew, can support @AbdulElSayed , it’s bc nothing is more dangerous to religious minorities in the U.S. than the creation of a state religion. Mike Rogers will confirm judges hellbent on destroying any separation of church & state. Abdul will not,
Is this an example of Jewish paranoia, or hatred of Christianity, or tribal loyalty to the Democrat Party?

Rogers is a mainstream Republican who is mostly pro-Israel and pro-Jews. Abdul El Sayed is a Mohammedan socialist who wants to exterminate the Jews from Israel.

Jews vote about 80% Democrat, and have for decades.

No, it is not possible to believe that Rogers will create a state religion that will be hostile to Jews. There are some really dark Jewish values at work here.