Economist wants Migrants in USA, not in Israel

EconTalk podcast:

Can Israeli society survive the loss of universal military service? Will the deregulation of Israel's kosher supervision spell the end of its Jewish character? And, speaking of Israel, what is it that makes its television dramas so good? Tyler Cowen discusses these and other subjects with EconTalk host Russ Roberts, new immigrant to Israel and unabashed fan of the Prisoners of War miniseries and Homer's Odyssey.

Along the way, Roberts says that he is a big fan of open borders, except for Israel. He wants Israel to be a Jewish state.

His only explanation is that he says that Jews are being killed for being Jews, in the USA.

The argument that Jews are being killed is usually based on the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and Poway synagogue shooting. Both shooters were Trump-haters. The latter only killed one Jew. The former announced his motives as “HIAS [Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in."

Okay, but it is not plausible that Roberts moved to Jerusalem to get away from anti-Jewish terrorism. More likely, he moved to get away from all the damage caused by him and his fellow open borders advocates bringing the Third World to the USA.

I am not accusing Roberts of being a hypocrite. I think that he is just pursuing perceived Jewish interests. I just point this out as an example of how Jews can have their own reasons for their leftist political opinions.

Jews are the most privileged ethnic group in America. They are also the leaders of many Leftist causes, from Communism to open borders. There is very little anti-Jewish sentiment, and what there is, it is almost entirely based their Leftist, pro-war, and Zionist political opinions.

Breitbart reports on denial of the crime.immigration link:

Italian Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese has denied that migration had a role during the Milan News Year’s Eve sex attacks, despite several suspects being migrants, while others are second-generation immigrants.

Interior Minister Lamorgese spoke about the New Year’s Eve attacks this week, remarking that it was wrong to link migration and violence. She said: “Those who have used violence are boys, second-generation citizens, Italians even by birth so I would not combine the immigration discourse with violence, which unfortunately also occurs on the part of Italian citizens.”

I think they mean first-generation citizens.

So yes, the crime is not all immigrants. A lot of it is the children of immigrants.

Christian Nationalism versus Wokism

Our increasingly polarized society is divided by Right/Left, Red/Blue, Republican/Democrat, Trump/Biden, etc. Some argue that the real division is Christian Nationalism versus Wokism.

An anti-religion society makes this argument in the video, Andrew Seidel: Christian Nationalism on January 6, supported by Christian nationalism key force behind Jan. 6 Capitol attack, asserts new report

“Survey after survey finds that close to half of Americans are at the very least supportive of the fusion of Christianity with American civic life,” Whitehead and Perry write. ...

“There seems to be a reluctance among many in the media to acknowledge the huge part that Christian nationalism played in the events of Jan. 6,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “This report is a go-to guide for a full understanding.”

“The ideology of Christian nationalism, which has become deeply entrenched in American society over centuries, will take generations to dismantle,” says Tyler.

I am dubious about some of this analysis. This is from a bunch of religion-haters who blame everything on religion, but they say the chief leader of Christian Nationalism is Donald Trump, and he is not even particularly religious.

On the other side, Wokism has emerged as a new religion, coupled with a whole set of political opinions.

Assuming this is all correct, and we are reasonably democratic, then both factions are battling for the future of America. Choose one. Other political choices are meaningless.

Wokism is evil. It uses identity politics to create hatred. Nothing good has come of it.

I am not sure what Christian Nationalism is, but it seems to include Europe for the last millennium, and the USA for the last three centuries. In other words, modern civilization as we know it. I will choose that over Wokism.

For recent examples of the evils of wokism, a bitter ex-wife, lunatic judge, and LGBTQ psychiatrists teamed up to have a man's son castrated. University of Chicago students get murdered, and campus leftist groups side with the murderers. Blqck diversity consultants have so much money that one group took the month off to sip champagne out of her bathtub, as the NY Times reported.

The tyranny, intolerance, and vindictiveness of the woke is startling. Liberals used to brag about being tolerant. No more. They are out for blood.

CNN reported:

Jacob Chansley, the so-called "QAnon Shaman," was sentenced to 41 months in prison for his role in the US Capitol riot.

The Justice Department had asked for Chansley to receive a harsh sentence as a way to set an example among the January 6 rioters, and prosecutors have positioned Chansley as emblematic of a barbaric crowd.

I guess they consider him to be on the side of Christian Nationalism, even if he does not know what it is.

The above video complains about trivialities, such as Pres. Trump once crossing the street from the White House for a photo op at a church. Why was this so upsetting to the Left? Surely the President should be able to have a photo op anywhere he wants.

Nagging Progressive Whites to be more Racist

Savala Nolan writes in Time magazine:

I know a lot of white people. A lifetime of private schools, three years at an elite law school, a job in academia, a house in the suburbs, my own family — I’m surrounded. The vast majority of them are progressive and, as of the last couple years, eager to be allies. They were sickened by George Floyd’s murder. ...

I think of whiteness primarily as a collection of habits and behaviors premised on the assumption that you don’t have to deal with race, and if you choose to deal with it at all, you can do it on whatever terms suit you (in a given moment and over the course of your life).

Her complaint is that her progressive white friends are race-neutral. She wants them to go around badgering their fellow whites on how whites should pay slavery reparations to blacks, or whatever else in on her white-hating racist agenda.

These articles just convince me that diversity is not a worthwhile objective. I do not want to mix with people who hate me for what I am.

Judge Orders Teenager to be Castrated

Abigail Shrier reports on a disturbing family court case:

Before she decided to strip him of all custody over his son, Drew*—before determining that he would have no say in whether Drew began medical gender transition—California Superior Court Judge Joni Hiramoto asked Ted Hudacko this: “If your son [Drew] were medically psychotic and believed himself to be the Queen of England, would you love him?”

“Of course I would,” the senior software engineer at Apple replied, according to the court transcript. “I’d also try to get him help.”

“I understand that qualifier,” Judge Hiramoto replied. “But if it were — if you were told by [Drew’s] psychiatrist, psychologist that [Drew] was very fragile and that confronting him — or, I’m sorry, confronting them with the idea that they are not the Queen of England is very harmful to their mental health, could you go along and say, ‘OK, [Drew], you are the Queen of England and I love you; you are my child and I want you to do great and please continue to see your psychologist.’ Could you do that?”

“Yes,” Hudacko said. “That sounds like part of a process that might take some time, sure.”

“What process?” Judge Hiramoto said. “What is the thing that might take some time? Accepting the idea that [Drew] occupies an identity that you believe is not true?”

“The identity you just mentioned to me was the Queen of England,” Ted began. “I can tell him and I can affirm that to him, to reassuring him situationally; but objectively, he is not the Queen of England and that won’t change, and even the therapist in that case would know that.”

The then-54-year-old father of two teenage minor sons (Drew is the elder) felt that he was walking into a trap. ...

On June 24, 2020, following her discussion with Ted about the Queen of England hypothetical, Judge Joni Hiramoto granted Christine sole legal custody of Drew on a temporary basis ... Within just a few months, the court would definitively end Ted’s parental relationship. ...

This is gender ideology — the belief, not backed by any meaningful empirical evidence, that we all have an ineffable gender identity, knowable only to us. This identity has no observable markers, and it is immutable (until the moment we change our minds and reveal ourselves as “gender fluid,” of course). It is promoted by virtually every practitioner of “gender-affirming care,” it is unfalsifiable, and its hold on our legal system is gaining ground.

The situation is much worse.

A few years ago this would have all been as crazy as a medieval court convicting a witch for witchcraft.

In America today, unless a parent has sole legal custody, family courts have the authority to intervene and order this sort of destruction. If the judge needs factual support, she can appoint a psychologist or lawyer advocate. Those professions are completely corrupt, and will do what the judge wants.

Here, the dad was trapped into saying that he would accept a psychologist's hypothetical advice not to confront his son about a false belief that he is the Queen of England. The dad's true opinion was probably that any such psychologist would be fired as a crackpot.

Update: Here is the Daily Mail article. It makes a point of saying the judge was biased and/or conflicted. Yes, that is true, but not the main problem. Judges should not have this power. The problem is with the law and procedures. See also the Daily Stormer article.

Update: The Shrier article is also published here.

Examples of Neanderthal Thinking

SciAm reports:

Last March, as Texas and Mississippi lifted their coronavirus pandemic mask mandates against the advice of health officials, President Joe Biden accused the governors of those states of “Neandertal thinking.” ...

Yet numerous studies underscore the similarities between Neandertals and us. Finds at Neandertal sites across Eurasia show that they had innovative technology, complex foraging strategies and nascent symbolic traditions. ...

It is very unlikely moderns independently evolved these Neandertal-like traits. Rather there was probably a lot of variation in Neandertal morphology, and in later times some interbreeding occurred between them and our modern European ancestors. The “unique” traits were passed on as part of these interbreeding events. ...

Mounting evidence from sites across Europe is forcing scientists to rethink their conception of these long-disparaged members of the human family. The Krapina Neandertals are an important part of this shift. We suspect that future discoveries at Krapina and beyond will further narrow the list of behavioral and anatomical traits that supposedly set Neandertals apart from moderns. They were not the same as us. But we have far more in common with them than not.

I am not sure who is more bigoted, Biden or Scientific American.

The states lifting the mask mandates were much more sensible.

Why do SciAm, and other anthropologists, keep insisting that Neanderthals were not the same as us. DNA research has proved that they were ancestors to all Europeans and Asians. This article was written by a Kansan and a Croatian, not an African.

Biden said "Neanderthal Thinking", not "Neandertal Thinking". Listen for yourself.

The accumulating evidence shows that Neanderthals were the more advanced ones, when they interbred with Africans about 30k years ago. The Neanderthal-African hybrids also showed advanced traits, but they seem to have gotten them from Neanderthals.

Neanderthals did not just interbreed with our modern European ancestors. Neanderthals are our modern European ancestors. It would be more accurate to say that Africans interbred with our Neanderthal European ancestors.

Also showing anti-White bigotry is the new Showtime movie, everything's gonna be all white (2022). The preview is swamped with 1000s of negative comments. The negative comments have more likes that the preview itself. Apparently it is a whole movie about how POCs (ie, colored people) hate White folks. Based on the preview, perhaps someone should find a place for those POCs to live, far away from Whites.

NFL gets a lot of Female Complaints

The NFL is a men's football business, but somehow women think that they should control the action.

The NY Times has a long article with female gripes:

Promised a New Culture, Women Say the N.F.L. Instead Pushed Them Aside ...

Exactly what happened between the woman, who was involved in the production of the show, and the man, Mark Quenzel, the N.F.L.’s senior vice president and head of content, remains in dispute, and the league insists he did not push her. ...

Some of the women interviewed by The Times spoke on condition of anonymity because they said they were bound by nondisclosure agreements or feared that their careers would be sabotaged if they went public. ...

Locklear said that during the meeting, the male employee, Aaron Jones, who worked in the Culver City, Calif., office, argued that Rice’s fiancée shared culpability by egging on Rice [in 2014]. Jones replayed the video to the group, Locklear said, pointing to key moments that he said supported his claim. ...

As a result, the number of women at the vice president rank or higher grew to 31 in 2015, from 21 the year before, while the number of people of color at that level rose to 21, from 14, over the same period. ...

Another Black woman who worked at the N.F.L. for five years said that the league was mostly concerned about making money and maintaining its “overall whiteness,” and that women were never prioritized when decisions were made.

Why is any of this news? The 2014 incident was on a player's private time, did not result in a criminal conviction, and the supposed victim married the player. Why is it any of anyone's business? Why would anyone bring it up today?

The women who violated their nondisclosure agreements are dishonest.

All I get out of this is that the NY Times hates pro football, and publishes a hit piece before the Super Bowl.

Ways the 2020 Election was Stolen

The Gateway Pundit reports:

The Mainstream Media continues to promote the lie that the 2020 Presidential Election was the most secure election ever. This was clearly not the case. Here are ten examples from the 2020 Presidential Election showing it was stolen. ...

1. Before the 2020 Election Drop Boxes were inserted into the election process in multiple states in reaction to COVID. These were unconstitutional. ...

2. Absentee ballots for any reason were unconstitutionally allowed in multiple states.

A Pennsylvania court just ruled that its absentee ballots were unconstitutional.

The list does not mention all the dark money that favored the Democrats, or the controlled news media that blocked stories on vaccine trials and Biden family corruption.

Update: Also not mentioned was NY Times prize-winning reporting with bogus stories like this:

Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

This was a complete lie, and there were no such contacts.

Do not get caught doing a Monkey Gesture

I mentioned attacks on EO Wilson, the recently-deceased famous ant biologist, and here is another:

Evolutionary ideas continue to be used by “race realists,” scientists and commentators alike, to promote ideology regarding the origin and implications of individual differences among humans that fall into socially-constructed racial groups. ...

Wilson pontificated that arguing for equity among groups of people was ideologically similar to racism, adding the evocative phrase “my way of putting it would be that anti-racism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

Wilson left his papers to the Library of Congress, and someone spent three months scouring them for evidence of racism. He did not find any, but he did find where Wilson supported the academic freedom of scholars who might be called race realists. In particular, "Rushton’s disturbing attempts to enshrine his pseudoscientific beliefs about the biological basis of racial personality differences (from IQ, to sexual promiscuity, to criminality) into the scientific literature."

A year later, Rushton again asked Wilson to sponsor a PNAS article (box 143, folder 11). Wilson declined. This time, the article is explicitly about race, promoting Rushton’s now infamous ideas about applying r-K selection theory to racial differences.18 A few months later, Rushton submitted the paper to Ethology and Sociobiology, for which Wilson provided a strong positive review (box 143 folder 11), although it was eventually rejected.

In summary, r-K selection theory was a term coined by Wilson to describe how evolutionary forces may act to produce two types of reproductive strategies: “r” in which organisms produce many offspring with little parental care and “K” in which organisms produce few offspring and care for them greatly. In his pseudoscientific analyses, Rushton proposed that people of African ancestry were “r” strategists and people of European and Asian ancestry were “K” strategists.

So do Africans have more babies than Europeans and Asians, or not?

These are not socially constructed racial groups. They are defined by continent of origin.

The issue here is not whether Rushton is right or wrong. The issue is whether this is legitimate research. Today's leftists do not want to permit such research.

Pro hockey seems to have acquired an obsession for monkey gestures:

The East Coast Hockey League suspended Jacob Panetta on Sunday after the brother of longtime NHL defenseman P.K. Subban accused the Jacksonville defenseman of making “monkey gestures” in his direction.

The league said the indefinite suspension is pending a hearing under its collective bargaining agreement with its players. Jacksonville then announced it had to decided to cut Panetta. ...

comes in the wake of minor league forward Krystof Hrabik’s 30-game suspension for making a racial gesture during a Jan. 12 AHL game.

Video posted by P.K. Subban on Twitter shows Panetta taking a monkey-like pose while Jordan Subban is being led away by an official. ...

“As I began to turn my back he started making monkey gestures at me so I punched him in the face multiple times and he turtled like the coward he is,” Subban posted.

So a Black player go beserck on the ice and punches out a White player for a monkey gesture?

Of the two players accused of monkey gestures, one got a 30-game suspension, and the other was kicked off the team entirely.

I have searched, and I cannot figure out what a monkey gesture is. Supposedly this video shows it, but I don't see anything unusual.

Joe Rogan has learned that he has to avoid the N-word, even if he just referring to the word in a neutral way, or acknowledging that Blacks use the word all the time. I guess we all have to avoid monkey gestures also, but I don't even know what they are. I doubt that ignorance will be a defense.

Yahoo reports:

The same judge who presided over the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin signed the no-knock warrant that led to the fatal shooting of Amir Locke, several Minnesota outlets reported.

Judge Peter Cahill probably thought that he was safe from the BLM/antiracism forces because he helped avenge the death of George Floyd. Not any more. He has now killed a Black man. If Chauvin is a racist killer of a Black man under color of legal authority, then the same will be said of Judge Cahill. Maybe someone will find video of him doing a monkey gesture, and he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Update: Police video of the raid.

A Leftist hate site has a database of racist gestures, but no monkey gesture is listed.

Atheism Movement is Controlled by Leftists

Here is a recent lecture on Phil Zuckerman: “How Secular Morality Will Save the World”:

Phil Zuckerman is the author of several books, including "What It Means to be Moral." He is the Associate Dean as well as Professor of Sociology at Pitzer College, and the founding chair of the nation’s first Secular Studies Program. Zuckerman gave a talk about “How Secular Morality Will Save the World” at FFRF's National Convention in Boston.

Learn more about the Freedom From Religion Foundation at ffrf.org.

He says, at 8:40 to strong applause:

“The question is not how can you be moral if you don’t believe in God, but how can you be moral if you believe in God.”

Okay, I guess he thinks atheists are morally superior.

At 24:30 he says he has more in common with a religious leftist, than an atheist Trump supporter. The audience applauds.

What is going on here? What does atheism have to do with hating Trump? Trump is not even particularly religious.

Much of the lecture was bragging about how secularists and atheists are mostly leftists. He says he is horrified and disgusted that any atheists would support Trump.

Atheists hate it when you accuse them of having their own faiths, just like religious folks. But how else do you explain the atheist movement being so Leftist?

My dictionary defines atheist as someone who denies God. However, the leading atheists hardly ever talk about God, and talk about advancing Leftist political causes much more. I think atheism has become a variant of Leftism.

More California Laws to Destroy Marriage

Here is another example of a politician pushing anti-marriage law. In this case, a gay California legislator sees no legal significance to marriage.

A local weekly reports:

Enter Senator Laird. ...

“It’s just not fair,” says Laird, “It’s not fair to the surviving partner, and it’s really not fair to the kids. They have no control over their lives; they’ve lost their father, and the fact that certain benefits accrue to the kids of the surviving spouse, and if there isn’t a marriage, there is no surviving spouse, that disadvantages the kids greatly.”

Laird says he believes the state should acknowledge a family unit regardless of marital status and seeks to make things right with this bill. Laird said he wasn’t able to address this issue following Butler’s death in 2013 because he wasn’t in the Legislature at the time.

In the future, marriage ceremonies will be legally meaningless. The state will decide what your family is.

Some people try to deny that gays are out to destroy marriage for heterosexuals. Here is an example.

Here is another:

The German Bishops’ Conference (DBK) has officially supported the #OutinChurch LGBT campaign publicly backed by 125 Catholic Church employees, including clergy.

On January 24, the LGBT campaign released their seven-point list of demands to the Catholic Church, including for a change in Church “doctrine” on sexuality, ...

For years, the German bishops as a whole have been notorious for defying Church teaching in various ways, such as by advocating for allowing sacrilege via Communion for those in adulterous relationships and permitting Protestants to receive Holy Communion under certain circumstances.

Protecting Fairness in Girls Sports

FoxNews reports:

Republican Gov. Kristi Noem said Sunday her bill making its way through South Dakota’s legislature aimed at protecting fairness in women's sports will be the "strongest bill in the nation" of its kind.

"This is about fairness," Noem said on "Fox News Sunday." "This is about making sure that our girls have a chance to be successful and to compete, to win scholarships, potentially go on to play professional sports beyond that. We want them to have the opportunity to do that.

She seems like that rare sensible politician who is standing up to the transgender madness.

At the same time, I don't agree with her reasoning. Winning scholarships and prepping for pro sports are lousy reasons for girls sports. I would favor abolishing girls sports, if those were the best reasons for them.

Girls develop differently from boys, and benefit from being separated from boys in some activities. Conservatives accept that there are these natural differences, and do not require contrived excuses for making traditional distinctions.

Those differences are recognized in literature going back millennia. They are confirmed by modern science. A boy does not become a girl by taking some hormone pills, or by becoming a fair athletic competitor.

Here are the new USA Swimming rules:

The elite athlete policy will be implemented by a decision-making panel comprised of three independent medical experts and eligibility criteria will consist of:

Evidence that the prior physical development of the athlete as a male, as mitigated by any medical intervention, does not give the athlete a competitive advantage over the athlete’s cisgender female competitors.

Evidence that the concentration of testosterone in the athlete’s serum has been less than 5 nmol/L (as measured by liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry) continuously for a period of at least thirty-six (36) months before the date of application.

This is an unworkable compromise.

By using the term "cisgender female competitors", it shows that they know who the females are.

Whoopi was just using popular definitions

Whoopi Goldberg has gotten into trouble, but she seems to have said the same thing as the Jewish Anti-Defamation League.

Newsweek reports:

The ADL had revised its definition of racism during the summer of 2020, according to internet archives. At the time, the U.S. was seeing waves of racial justice protests. In response, the ADL defined racism as: "The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people."

Previously, the ADL had defined racism as "the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person's social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics."

Goldberg had simply adopted this same change, and used the word racism to refer to BIPOC gripes against whites.

A Jewish publication explains:

Jews have long debated whether they are a “race” or something else. Judaism is a religion, practiced by people of all varieties and races across the globe. But Jews do not have to be practitioners to regard themselves or be accepted by other Jews as Jews. The Jewish tradition of “matrilineality” — defining as Jewish a child born of a Jewish mother — points to a biological definition of Jewish identity. But Judaism also accepts converts.

Taken all together, these various understandings have led Jews to regard themselves (and others to regard Jews) variously as a people, a nation, a tribe, a family and a faith — sometimes in various combinations, sometimes all at the same time.

But Hitler, like many antisemites before him, specifically — and repeatedly, in writings and laws and speeches — labeled Jews as a physically impure Slavic-descended race, in contrast to what he termed the blonde, blue-eyed genetically pure German Aryan race. Nazi propaganda promoted pseudoscientific ways to supposedly identify Jews — by the size of their nose and lips, or the shape of their heads, among other things.

Hitler was obsessed by what he considered the biological fact of Jewish identity, and wrote that the “Final Solution” was inspired in part by his drive to create a more “pure” and singular human race, rid of “Jewish” and other impurities.

That would made Hitler racist, by definitions that used to be in common use, but not by today's ADL, BLM, and others.

Here is an anti-Whoopi rant:

Whoopi Goldberg’s claim that the Holocaust was not about race has got to be the dumbest thing said on a TV show since Whoopi Goldberg said Roman Polanski’s rape of Samantha Geimer was not ‘rape-rape’. Though of course Goldberg’s inflammatory comments about the Nazis’ extermination of European Jews, made on her show The View yesterday, are far worse. They confirm just how thoroughly the woke politics of ‘intersectionalism’ and the feverish obsession with ‘whiteness’ have distorted people’s understanding of racial hatred and of anti-Semitism in particular. They confirm that the end result of the contemporary bourgeois fixation on ‘white privilege’ and ‘black victimhood’ is that more and more people are historically illiterate, morally vacuous and racially insensitive. ...

The Holocaust was the clearest, most notorious act of racial savagery in human history. To say the Holocaust wasn’t ‘about race’ is to engage in explicit Holocaust revisionism. It is a species of Holocaust denialism, in fact, where the core motivating factor of the Holocaust – the Nazis’ racial hatred of the Jewish people – is erased. The Holocaust is rendered meaningless, or at least mundane, if its driving force of racial loathing is removed. ...

But perhaps the most revealing and unsettling thing said by Goldberg was this: ‘But these [were] two white groups of people.’ She means the Nazis and the Jews. Both white folk. So how can it have been about race? Isn’t race all about white privilege and black victimhood? Isn’t it all about the ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white fragility’ that contemporary white Americans and Europeans display towards black people in their every interaction? This captures how impoverished and shrivelled the woke set’s understanding of racism is.

Yes, the woke set has adopted anti-white definitions. It is not ignorance. It is an anti-white ideology, using an anti-white definition of racism.

NY Post reports:

Former Democratic US senator and comedian Al Franken offered a defense of suspended “The View” host Whoopi Goldberg, arguing her stage name is solid proof that she isn’t an anti-Semite.

“I know Whoopi. She’s not anti-Semitic. She chose ‘Goldberg’ for her last name for a stage name,” Franken said during a Wednesday appearance on CNN. “I think she gave a really fulsome and sincere apology. I think what she said wasn’t quite what she meant.”

Goldberg was born Caryn Elaine Johnson before adopting her new name.

She is just against all whites and Jews.

Update: This Jewish essay from six months ago says, No, Jews Aren’t White. The reasoning does not make any sense, but it does reflect common Jewish opinion.

Update: Here is the Ibram X. Kendi definition of racism, and what he calls antiracism.

Covid Lockdowns have Failed

A new research paper claims:

Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results are in line with the World Health Organization Writing Group (2006), who state, “Reports from the 1918 influenza pandemic indicate that social-distancing measures did not stop or appear to dramatically reduce transmission […]

In Edmonton, Canada, isolation and quarantine were instituted; public meetings were banned; schools, churches, colleges, theaters, and other public gathering places were closed; and business hours were restricted without obvious impact on the epidemic.” Our findings are also in line with Allen’s (2021) conclusion: “The most recent research has shown that lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid 19 deaths.”

The USA had the best tools for fighting covid, but the NY Times reports that we had more deaths per capita than other wealthy countries.

I believe that we would have all been better off if we treated covid-19 like the seasonal flu, or maybe the unusually bad flu strain that we get every ten years or so. The world went mad over a minor disease that we could not do much about anyway.

Update: Denmark Lifts All Covid Controls.

The Kamloops Hate Crime Hoax

Do you remember the big NY Times story about mass graves of Canadian eskimo kids? It turns out that it was all a big hoax:

It said the remains of 215 children had been found on the grounds of what was known as the Kamloops Residential Indian School, run by the Order of Mary Immaculate from 1893 to 1969, and by the Canadian government for a few years after that.

The worldwide assumption was that vicious nuns had either killed these children or let them die and covered the whole thing up.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau grieved over the “dark and shameful chapter” in Canadian history and ordered all national flags be flown at half-mast. ...

Mr. Trudeau said burning churches was “unacceptable and wrong,” but also that it was “understandable.” ...

Not one body has been found where Miss Beaulieu said they were. No one has dared to look. It now appears that the radar findings were of tree roots and other soil disturbances.

And this huge story may be another hoax:

The militia members who allegedly plotted to kidnap Michigan's Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer because of her COVID-19 lockdown policies will go to trial in just a few weeks. Six were charged in connection with the plot, and one of them has already pleaded guilty and is expected to testify against the rest. State authorities charged eight others with aiding a terrorist plot. But the government's case against these 14 alleged extremists relies on work done by at least a dozen government informants and undercover FBI agents whose extensive involvement in the plot calls into question whether it would have moved forward at all without the government's prodding. Some of these government actors took lead roles in organizing the supposed plot—one of the informants was even paid $54,000 by the FBI. Taken together, these and other details raise the strong possibility that the militia members were victims of entrapment on the part of the FBI.

It is likely that the Jan. 6 insurrection charges will be another case of entrapment. The only conspiracies were among fringe groups that were led by FBI informants.

Pope Endorses new Index for Vax Fake News

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum,also known as the Index of Forbidden Texts, was a list of material banned by the Catholic Church. The Index was originally published in the 1500's with the last edition published in 1948. The books and articles listed were banned in order to protect followers from immoral or blasphemous material. In 1966, the Church officially ceased the support and use of the Forbidden Index.

The Index was famous for requiring nine sentences in the Copernicus treatise to be corrected.

Apparently the Index is being revived for covid-19!

The pope met with the International Catholic Media Consortium on COVID-19 Vaccines, which runs the website catholic-factchecking.com.

“We can hardly fail to see that these days, in addition to the pandemic, an ‘infodemic’ is spreading: a distortion of reality based on fear, which in our global society leads to an explosion of commentary on falsified if not invented news,” the pope said.

“Contributing, often unwittingly, to this climate is the sheer volume of allegedly ‘scientific’ information, comments and opinions, which ends up causing confusion for the reader or listener.”

New French Law Promotes LGBT Conversions

RT reports:

EU country bans gay ‘conversion therapy’ The new French law, which authorizes jail time and fines for practitioners, was unanimously passed
EU country bans gay ‘conversion therapy’

Lawmakers in France’s National Assembly have given their unanimous backing to a new law which prohibits so-called ‘gay conversion therapy’, voting 142-0.

The new law, passed on Tuesday, prohibits attempts to “convert” LGBTQ people to heterosexuality or traditional gender roles. It also grants authorities the right to seek criminal charges against practitioners of conversion therapy.

Sustained efforts to “aim to modify or reprimand sexual orientation or gender identity,” which negatively influence the physical or mental health of victims, will be punishable by up to two years imprisonment and €30,000 ($34,000) in fines.

Penalties can be increased to three years imprisonment and fines of €45,000 ($50,000) when the victim is a minor or another vulnerable member of society.

Under the new legislation, campaigners will now be able file civil suits on behalf of victims of conversion therapy. The measure was hailed in parliament as a vital move to safeguard those who hesitate or are unable to alert police themselves.

There are no penalties for trying to convery a child into homosexuality.

The law lets a nosey third party initiate the legal action.

This passed unanimously!

It is sometimes said that the conversion therapies do not work. However that is obviously not the case, or France would not be passing a law like this.

The last time I looked at the research, the success rate for conversion therapy was comparable to that of other psychotherapies.

This shows how far we have degenerated that no one in France is willing to stand up and say that parents have a right to teach their kids to behave straight.

Democrats Favor Putting Unvaxed into Camps

The press was always complaining about Pres. Trump being authoritarian, but the Democrats are much more authoritarian than anything Trump dreamed of. See this Rasmussen poll:

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters would oppose a proposal for federal or state governments to fine Americans who choose not to get a COVID-19 vaccine. ...

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. ...

Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications. ...

Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

While there is good evidence that the vaccine reduces the chance of death in old people, there is very little evidence that it reduces the spread of the virus or has any other public good. So taking the vaccine should be a personal health decision, like losing weight or taking drugs to reduce blood pressure.

No, Cash does not make Babies Smarter

The NY Times reports on a new study:

Cash Aid to Poor Mothers Increases Brain Activity in Babies, Study Finds

The research could have policy implications as President Biden pushes to revive his proposal to expand the child tax credit.

It says you can make babies smarter by just giving cash to the moms!

Astral Codex Ten is skeptical:

People love studies showing that some effect is visible on MRI, or EEG, or some other three letter acronym. It makes it feel real - you can literally see the effects! In the physical brain! ...

And finally, people want to discover a link between poverty and cognitive function so bad. Every few months, another study demonstrates that poverty decreases cognitive function, it's front page news everywhere, and then it turns out to be flawed. This recent analysis tried to replicate twenty poverty/cognition priming studies. 18/20 replications had lower effect sizes than in the original, and 16/20 had effect sizes statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Statistician Andrew Gelman does not believe it either.

Reason has a new video on N.Y. Can't Teach Kids To Read on $30,000 a Year. It attacks the common idea that schools are underfunded.

For a lot of things, you can get better results by paying more money. However, nobody has figured out how to make kids smarter by paying moms or schools more money.

Update: A chemistry professor is under investigation for some class break comments:

“I don’t think it’s racist [to say Black people do poorer on IQ tests than white people and that Asians score higher]. But that’s just a historical fact, for however many decades … that’s been a historical fact. You can get into all kinds of reasons for that certainly,” he said, according to a video of the lecture posted on YouTube. "So it is grey ... I think, what's racist and what's not.”

A student also posted a transcript to the UBC subreddit.

Sherman said people can “get into a long debate” over whether the difference in IQ test scores is the result of genetics or one’s environment, but still said his comments were facts.

He could have made the same point by saying income, instead of IQ tests.

Court to Rule on Racial Preferences

The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear cases on the legality of racial preferences in college admissions.

I wonder how many people are in favor of meritocratic race-blind admissions. A few years ago, I would have said that was the liberal ideal that all good folks are striving towards.

Not any more. And no one is being honest about it.

The racial categories do not make much sense. Hispanic is not a race. Neither is Moslem. Asian is called a race, but India and China are different races.

Schools are dropping standardized tests, even though they are good predictors of college performance.

Harvard refuses to explain why it discriminates against Asians. Perhaps some of the reasons are what Amy Wax explained.

We still have historically Black colleges, and most people think that is fine.

Illegals do not Face Enforcement

The Biden administration announces its open borders policy:

On January 20, 2022, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas delivered remarks at the U.S. Conference of Mayors. His remarks are below: ....

Unlawful presence in the United States will alone not be a basis for an immigration enforcement action but rather, we will allocate our efforts, we will allocate our resources on those individuals who present a current public safety threat, a threat to national security, or a threat to our border security, and that is a very important principle. ...

We are not engaged in indiscriminate enforcement

It is not indiscriminate, so he means that they will discriminate.

Another Biden policy is to promote transgenderism. There was big news recently when a college boy who was transitioning to a female identity, and won a bunch of swim meets big. Then she lost to a girl who was transitioning to be a boy. Now it turns out that it was all fixed, as a transgender publicity stunt.

And a California school got caught trying to change the gender of a student:

Mother: teachers manipulated child to change gender identity

The ACLU sides with schools that conspire against the parents:

“Parents are supposed to have access to all the educational records of their children,” said attorney Harmeet Dhillon, who filed the case.

Under state and federal law, however, students have privacy rights that extend to sexual orientation and gender identity, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Only in limited circumstances can a school notify a parent of their child’s sexual identity against their wishes.

This is sick. The school and ACLU will not ba around to deal with the long-term damage they are doing. The parents should have access to all school info.

Explaining Jewish Influence

Nathan Cofnas writes in Quillette:

Last year, I published a paper in the Israeli philosophy journal Philosophia arguing that both the woke and the far-Right narratives are wrong and rooted in similar errors. I focus on the work of Cal State Long Beach psychologist Kevin MacDonald. MacDonald argues that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy,” and that Jews were a necessary condition for the triumph of liberalism, which he sees as bad for white gentiles. His approach is similar to that of MSNBC anchors who cherry-pick (real or imagined) examples of racism and then spin fanciful stories about how these isolated cases illustrate a “system” of “white supremacy.” MacDonald points to examples of prominent Jews promoting liberalism, ignores prominent liberal gentiles, and claims to find evidence that Jewish liberals are secretly motivated to undermine gentile society for the benefit of their co-ethnics.

In my paper I address three specific false claims made by MacDonald and other advocates of the anti-Jewish narrative: Jews (a) are highly ethnocentric, (b) hypocritically promote liberal multiculturalism for gentiles/Western countries but not for Jews/Israel, and (c) were responsible for liberalism and mass immigration to the US.

Why bother refuting MacDonald? Why not just dismiss him as an antisemite? There are at least three reasons to engage with him. First, some respected scholars have (publicly or privately) endorsed his ideas. Second, Jewish influence is a legitimate topic for scientific investigation, and his theory cannot be dismissed a priori. Third, he has been enormously influential on the far-Right, and many of his readers interpreted the lack of a refutation as proof that there are no good arguments against his views. So both scholarly and political considerations dictate that he should be given a fair hearing.

On January 1st, MacDonald’s reply to me, “The ‘Default Hypothesis’ Fails to Explain Jewish Influence,” appeared online in Philosophia.

Cofnas goes on to complain about Jews who want to censor any discussion of the issues. See also this criticism of Cofnas.

I haven't studied this, and I am sure that there is truth to both sides. That is, in some ways Jews are very ethnocentric, and in some ways not.

Consider a simple statement like "Jews are left-wingers." If that were true, then you were expect the most Jewish people, the Orthodox Jews, to be the most left-wing. But that is not true at all. The most left-wing Jews are secular Jews who do not seem to be particularly Jewish at all.

And yet it is undeniably true that Jews are left-wingers, as polls consistently show Jews voting 70-80% Democrat.

Here are some extreme examples of ethnocentric Jewish laws:

If a Jew has coitus with a Gentile woman, whether she be a child of three or an adult, whether married or unmarried, and even if she is a minor aged only nine years and one day—because he had willful coitus with her, she must be killed, as is the case with a beast, because through her a Jew got in trouble.

Gentiles are forbidden to bear testimony in rabbinical courts, since all gentiles are presumed liars.
Jews must not offer gifts to gentiles.
Jews must exact interest when lending money to gentiles.
Jews must never return items lost by a gentile.
Jews shall not deceive other Jews in business, but may practice “indirect deception” when doing business with a gentile.

I don't know of any other ethnic group with laws like this.

Does any other ethnic group have this?

Secure Community Network

The official safety and security organization of the Jewish community in North America, founded under the auspices of The Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations

Trump Supporters Doubt some Leftist Narratives

The mainstream news media has been telling a narrative about BIPOCs. Resarch is finding that the people who reject the narrative also rejct other narratives about elections, and probably covid also.

The Wash. Post reports:

Since Trump’s election to office in 2016, scholars have carefully documented the relationship between racial attitudes and support for the former president. ...

These divisions over racial equality were closely related to perceptions of the 2020 presidential election and the Capitol attack. For example, among those who agreed that White people in the United States have advantages based on the color of their skin, 87 percent believed that Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate; among neutrals, 44 percent believed it was legitimate; and among those who disagreed, only 21 percent believed it was legitimate. Seventy percent of people who agreed that White people enjoy advantages considered the events of Jan. 6 to be an insurrection; 26 percent of neutrals described it that way; and only 10 percent who disagreed did so, while 80 percent of this last group called it a protest. And while 70 percent of those who agreed that White people enjoy advantages blamed Trump for the events of Jan. 6, only 34 percent of neutrals did, and a mere 9 percent of those who disagreed did.

I am surprised that the newspaper capitalizes White.

The George Floyd narrative sent Black homocide deaths up 53%.

What is Queer Theory?

An essay from some sort of leftist encyclopedia:

Queer Theory exists, in a nutshell, to antagonize norms, normativity, and the normal—that is, anything that can be considered normal by society (even in accurate, neutral description) and thus that carries or can be construed to imply a morally normative expectation about it, which it deems intrinsically oppressive. This attitude is probably most clearly understood in the binary dichotomy “normal” versus “abnormal,” noting that there is a relatively positive connotation to “normal” as compared to a relatively negative connotation to “abnormal.” ...

Queer Theory seems to deliberately confuse anything that is descriptively normal, in the sense of being commonplace, e.g., heterosexuality or the sexual binary, with that automatically carrying an implication that any variation from that sense of falling within the general norm must be understood pejoratively and seen as somehow illegitimate. It views society has carrying strong expectations, if not requirements, for people to fall within the “normal” range and not to be “abnormal” in any way, and sees these expectations as a central application of dominance to create oppression. ...

Thus, many people mistakenly understand queer Theory as somehow relevant to LGBT civil rights and acceptance—including most queer Theorists—but this is not at all the case. Queer Theory has nothing positive to say about lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender rights except to the degree that those can be made useful for breaking societal norms, and it has no interest in lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender acceptance at all, as that would make them fall within the reach of acceptable societal norms (i.e., normal) and thus a necessary location for disruptive and subversive queer activism. That is, while it seems because of its name that queer Theory is activism on behalf of LGBT rights, it is actually not; it is actually about destroying normalcy in all its forms, including for LGBT people, most of whom don’t like or want this. Queer Theory elevates only one identity as authentic: the queer identity, which ceases to be queer the moment it is accepted or even able to be categorized.

This has the effect of making queer Theory self-defeating and simultaneously self-concentrating in a peculiar way.

I post this for those wanting to understand the Q of LGBTQ.

Bad Computer Security at Financial Firms

You would think that financial firms would have good login security, but read this from several years ago:

An angry Vanguard customer had called her to say he was able to log into his account, even though he'd deliberately provided a misspelled security answer, Brock explained to her tech colleague, named Mike, who took her call on May 7, 2013.

The company is weird. They put in a security image in the login process, telling customers to refuse to login if the right image is not seen. Then it just dropped the feature, without telling anyone. So if you followed their own security instructions, you would never login.

On a dozen occasions in recent months, I have logged into my own Vanguard account despite dropping letters and introducing other typographical errors to my security answers. On several occasions, I was able to reset my password after entering typos of between one and two characters into three separate security answers. The process did require that I provide my date of birth, zip code, the last four digits of my Social Security number and email address. But security experts say such information is easily stolen or found online, making accurate security answers critical.

So what is it doing? This is fairly standard:

During an hour-long interview with Sherlock and three other Vanguard officials in late July, the company stressed that it has made strides in customer safety that include the launch in December of an enhanced security option to make customers' login process safer. Its so-called "two-factor authentication" service requires not only that a customer enter a user name and password, but that they also submit a 6-digit code that Vanguard sends by text message to the customer's cellphone.

Okay, but here is the message that Vanguard sent me:

Vanguard won't contact you for this code: 894581. Don't share it with anyone. Reply HELP for help, STOP to cancel, Msg&Data Rates May Apply

Why would it say that? The whole purpose of the code is to submit it when Vanguard contacts me and asks for it. I am unable to login unless I share the code with Vanguard. Or maybe I should say logon, as that is what Vanguard calls it.

Currently, I cannot even login to Vanguard with my Firefox or Chrome browsers. They used to work fine.

BLM has been Bad for Blacks

The Reuters news service fired Isaac Kriegman for writing this essay on why Black Lives Matter has been bad for Blacks.

Here is the latest example of Black suffering from systemic racism:

A ProPublica analysis found that traffic cameras in Chicago disproportionately ticket Black and Latino motorists. But city officials plan to stick with them — and other cities may adopt them too.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.

… But for all of their safety benefits, the hundreds of cameras that dot the city [of Chicago] — and generate tens of millions of dollars a year for City Hall — have come at a steep cost for motorists from the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods. A ProPublica analysis of millions of citations found that households in majority Black and Hispanic ZIP codes received tickets at around twice the rate of those in white areas between 2015 and 2019.

The consequences have been especially punishing in Black neighborhoods, which have been hit with more than half a billion dollars in penalties over the last 15 years, contributing to thousands of vehicle impoundments, driver’s license suspensions and bankruptcies, according to ProPublica’s analysis.

So the robot cameras are racist?

The obvious conclusion from this is that Blacks are unable or unwilling to live according to the norms of a civilized society. Complaints about racism are just demands to subsidize bad behavior.

Update: Studies show:

Diversity training doesn’t work, ditto with microaggression training, implicit bias training, or any mandatory DEI training

Most Whites have no antagonism towards Blacks, and believe that Blacks have suffered from systemic racism. But when Whites have to take classes on the subject, they see that it is all BS.

For a long time, I thought that there were examples of Blacks being mistreated. But no one can seem to find any. All of the big BLM examples are Black criminals who are treated much better than they deserve.

The Real Reason Djokovic is Being Detained

Australia's battle against Novak Djokovic appears to ba about forcing political submission, not health. The NY Times reports:

In a statement explaining why he revoked Djokovic’s visa a second time, Alex Hawke, Australia’s minister for immigration, argued that if Djokovic were allowed to remain in Australia and play, the influential tennis star could harm efforts to combat the virus. The government has conceded that Djokovic poses no imminent threat to spread the disease. It is more about the example it would set by allowing him to stay.

“Given Mr. Djokovic’s high-profile status and position as a role model in the sporting and broader community,” Hawke said in a statement, “his ongoing presence in Australia may foster similar disregard for the precautionary requirements following receipt of a positive Covid-19 test in Australia.”

Djokovic’s lawyers argue that the government unfairly based their decision to revoke his visa again on the premise that Djokovic would engender anti-vaccine sentiments and not on the rule of law.

I am surprised that the Australian authorities would admit this. We have had two years of crazy health advice and orders, making many suspicious that the pandemic was just used as an excuse to force new rules on everybody.

Now it is confirmed. Djokovic is not being allowed to tried for his 21st big tourney win. Not because he might spread the disease, but because he might spread opinions about freedom and personal choice.

Update: The Australian court ruled against Djokovic.

More Sick Advice from NY Times

The NY Times is getting sicker all the time. Here is news:

An upsurge in teenagers requesting hormones or surgeries to better align their bodies with their gender identities has ignited a debate among doctors over when to provide these treatments.

An international group of experts focused on transgender health last month released a draft of new guidelines, the gold standard of the field that informs what insurers will reimburse for care.

Many doctors and activists praised the 350-page document, which was updated for the first time in nearly a decade, for including transgender people in its drafting and for removing language requiring adults to have psychological assessments before getting access to hormone therapy.

But the guidelines take a more cautious stance on teens. A new chapter dedicated to adolescents says that they must undergo mental health assessments and must have questioned their gender identity for “several years” before receiving drugs or surgeries.

Experts in transgender health are divided on these adolescent recommendations, reflecting a fraught debate over how to weigh conflicting risks for young people, who typically can’t give full legal consent until they are 18 and who may be in emotional distress or more vulnerable to peer influence than adults are.

Some of the drug regimens bring long-term risks, such as irreversible fertility loss.

I am not sure which is worse -- sterilizing children with or without psychiatric endorsement. No, this is not gender alignment, or a gold standard, or a legitimate medical treatment. This is mutilation to pursue a sick sexual fantasy.

Here is advice to parents of a daughter having an affair with a married man:

Try to understand, as best you can, what your daughter likes about this arrangement and how it satisfies her.

As a show of respect, read up on polyamory before you broach the subject with her.

I suppose they are going to tell us that polyamorous people are born that way, as they now say for pedophilia.

ACLU Attacks Jewish Supremacy

A Jewish site reports:

The @ACLU human rights head rails about "Jewish supremacy." A brief history of that term. ...

Nowadays, however, the phrase "Jewish supremacy" is used far more often by the Left than the Right.

Apparently Jewish Supremacy was an issue in Germany all the way back to 1880.

I had thought that Hitler invented German anti-semitism in the 1920s by finding a poor defenseless ethnic group, and using them as scapegoats for other problems. No, it turns out that Germans had been concerned about Jewish supremacy for decades before Hitler.

One article said Jews were outcompeting Germans in the intellectual and commercial race. Another said:

Jews ... form a race who do not produce any results due to their own labor. Their sole desire is to derive the benefits of others' labor by tricks and frauds. I hold that the Jewish spirit is corrupting the gentiles.

A Newsweek essay on this subject complains that Hitler wrote:

Hence it is that at the present time the Jew is the great agitator for the complete destruction of Germany. Whenever we read of attacks against Germany taking place in any part of the world the Jew is always the instigator. In peace-time, as well as during the War, the Jewish-Marxist stock-exchange Press systematically stirred up hatred against Germany, until one State after another abandoned its neutrality and placed itself at the service of the world coalition, even against the real interests of its own people.

The Jewish way of reasoning thus becomes quite clear. The Bolshevization of Germany, that is to say, the extermination of the patriotic and national German intellectuals, thus making it possible to force German Labour to bear the yoke of international Jewish finance--that is only the overture to the movement for expanding Jewish power on a wider scale and finally subjugating the world to its rule. As has so often happened in history, Germany is the chief pivot of this formidable struggle. If our people and our State should fall victims to these oppressors of the nations, lusting after blood and money, the whole earth would become the prey of that hydra. Should Germany be freed from its grip, a great menace for the nations of the world would thereby be eliminated.

Obviously Hitler thought that Jewish Communists were a threat to Germany, and to the world.

This Newsweek essay also concludes that the real anti-semites are the leftists who side with the Arab Moslems against Israel.

Why EO Wilson was Hated

I commented on E.O. Wilson's obituary, but I am still trying to figure out why the Left hated him so much. It appears that everyone liked and admired him personally.

Here is an open letter attacking him:

In his attempt to graft speculation about human behavior onto a biological core, Wilson uses a number of strategies and sleights of hand which dispel any claim for logical or factual continuity. Of the twenty-seven chapters of Sociobiology, the middle twenty-five deal largely with animals, especially insects, while only the first and last chapters focus on humans. Thus, Wilson places 500 pages of double column biology between his first chapter on “The Morality of the Gene” and the last chapter, “From Sociobiology to Sociology.” ...

This approach allows Wilson to confirm selectively certain contemporary behavior as adaptive and “natural” and thereby justify the present social order. ...

For instance, in insect populations, Wilson applies the traditional metaphors of “slavery” and “caste,” “specialists” and “generalists” in order to establish a descriptive framework. Thus, he promotes the analogy between human and animal societies and leads one to believe that behavior patterns in the two have the same basis. ...

What we are left with then is a particular theory about human nature, which has no scientific support, and which upholds the concept of a world with social arrangements remarkably similar to the world which E. O. Wilson inhabits. We are not denying that there are genetic components to human behavior.

Wilson did once call Stephen Jay Gould a charlatan. That was correct.

Amy Wax on Limiting Asian Immigration

U Penn law professor Amy Wax has tenure, survived previous woke cancelation attempts, and is at retirement age anyway, so she is one of the last Americans who can speak her mind. Here is her email opinion, on the site of a non-woke Black professor:

I have great respect for George Lee and his efforts to preserve the admissions requirements for exam high schools in New York City, and I have joined him in this cause. But I think he is too optimistic about the influence of Asians and Asian immigrants on our polity and culture. Although Lee is right that Asians vary in their political views, as do all groups, the important and often overlooked question is “how many?” Enoch Powell asked that question about third-world immigration to Britain decades ago and was excoriated and ostracized for it, but the importance and wisdom of the question prove themselves over and over.

Numbers matter, a lot! In the case of Asians in the U.S., the overwhelming majority vote Democratic. In my opinion, the Democratic Party is a pernicious influence and force in our country today. It advocates for “wokeness,” demands equal outcomes despite clear individual and group differences in talent, ability, and drive, mindlessly valorizes blacks (the group most responsible for anti-Asian violence) regardless of behavior or self-inflicted wounds, sneers at traditional family forms, undermines and disparages the advantages of personal responsibility, hard work, and accountability, and attacks the meritocracy.

I confess I find Asian support for these policies mystifying, as I fail to see how they are in Asians’ interest. We can speculate (and, yes, generalize) about Asians’ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, mindless social engineering, etc.

Maybe it’s just that Democrats love open borders, and Asians want more Asians here. Perhaps they (and especially their distaff element) are just mesmerized by the feel-good cult of “diversity.” I don’t know the answer. But as long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration. There needs to be more focus on people who are already here, and especially the core (and neglected) “legacy” population, and a push to return to traditional concepts and institutions and Charles Murray’s “American Creed.”

Wow, this is both innocuous and offensive at the same time.

Razib is an Asian who objects to her lumping all Asians together. Some Asians vote Republican, he says.

The explanation could be simpler. Maybe most Asians do not pay much attention to politics. Someone explained to them that USA has a White and an anti-White party, so they just vote with the anti-White party.

We could import 100 million Asians a year, if we wanted to. Or we could take zero. It is all a matter of policy, as carried out by elected official. By some measures Asian immigrants are the best, but there are still good reasons not to take them.

Update: Wax's dean is out to get her:

Professor Amy Wax has repeatedly made derogatory public statements about the characteristics, attitudes, and abilities of a majority of those who study, teach, and work here. ...

The complaints assert that it is impossible for students to take classes from her without a reasonable belief that they are being treated with discriminatory animus.

These are absurd. If students have such prejudiced beliefs, it is their problem.

Angry at being Called a Mother

NPR Radio book review, about 6 months ago:

Belc's family structure often confounds the people around him. Anna carried their eldest and youngest children, while Belc carried the couple's middle child, all three conceived using the same donor. Belc carried his pregnancy before his medical transition — he knew he was not a woman, but the world often read him that way — and credits the pregnancy and birth of his son, Samson, with helping him realize that he needed to go on testosterone. "Without him," Belc writes of his son, "I never could have believed in myself enough to say yes. Yes to hormones, yes to finding out how to live."

Belc's gender often occupies an in-between space that defies categorization, both for himself but also for the world around him. People do not know how to make sense of a child who was "made by their dad." There are no models of other transmasculine parents that Belc can turn to for support, or to show his children that they are not alone in the world. "[Samson] asks when we can meet other families like ours and I say, honestly, that I do not know," he writes. Even an interaction Belc has with Anna, a nurse who is seeking lactation support certification, shows how much of an outlier gestational parents who are not women are thought to be: Belc suggests Anna change the word "mother" to "parent" on worksheets she is creating for a class; she brushes him off, telling him not to "take everything so seriously."

The book is not linear in structure, and skews literary and lyrical, told as a collection of fragmented essays. Belc seamlessly weaves in primary source documents with historical references, including the history of ultrasound machines, and of mastectomies to treat breast cancer ("The problem with reading about the science of pregnancy is that I cannot help being angry at the words mother and maternal," Belc writes).

It is hard for me to imagine someone giving birth to a child, and then being angry at being called the mother. In today's society, you are the oddball if you do not appreciate that anger.

The J6 Rioters were Led by Federal Agents

I hate to post conspiracy theories, but there is a lot of evidence that the Jan. 6 violence was instigated by federal agents. The only organizations found in the investigations are Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, and they were both infiltrated by FBI informants.

Real Clear Politics reports:

FNC's Will Cain reported an update Wednesday on Ray Epps, the guy from the January 6 riot that Rep. Massie asked Attorney General Garland about at a hearing in October.

"Interesting to hear the crowd begin to chant, 'Fed, Fed, fed[eral agent]' as he encourages them to storm the Capitol," Will Cain noted about the videos showing Epps in the gathering of pro-Trump protesters in Washington on January 5 and 6.

Cain: "Epps was on the front line between rioters and Capitol Police on January 6. Two days later, on January 8, the FBI placed Ray Epps on the Most Wanted list. He remained there until July 1st, which was a day after the New York Times reported that Epps had encouraged Trump supporters to breach the Capitol. But unlike almost every other person near the Capitol on January 6th, including people who didn't even enter the building or commit any violence, Ray Epps has never been charged with a crime. He hasn't even been arrested."

"So where has Ray Epps been? According to photos from the 'Daily Mail,' it appears Epps has been relaxing on his ranch outside of Phoenix, Arizona. The 'Daily Mail' asked him if he had involvement with the FBI," Cain reported. "He answered by yelling at reporters to get off his property."

Apparently Garland refused to say whether Ray Epps was a federal agent carrying out a false-flag riot.

Surely Garland and the feds know who Epps is. Why won't they tell us?

Also, Garland says that the US DoJ has 20,000 hours of video surveillance recordings. Why haven't they been released?

This is all smelling like the Mueller investigation, where it kept leaking hints that it was going to incriminate Trump as a Russian spy, and only admitted years later that it exonerated Trump early on.

The Banality of the Insurrectionists

Slate tries to explain:

What We Still Refuse to Accept About the Insurrectionists A year later, we are still trying to understand what drove the individuals to the Capitol, and still ignoring what we already know about how they got there. ...

Hannah Arendt coined the term—banality of evil—after watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS officer who had shuttled millions of Jews to their deaths during World War II ...

The insurrectionists are depicted in a similar light. ...

A subset of Americans, mostly white, vehemently believes the country is being stolen from them by liberal elites and people of color. ...

What do we do about the people, like Howley’s protagonists, who have been so whipped up by the right and its conspiracy theories, and the millions of others who have yet to act? The fallout from the insurrection is still working its way through our democracy.

It is not that complicated.

The USA really has imported millions of foreigners. More than any other nation in history.

Our leaders really have shifted sharply to the Left.

Pres. Trump really did win a clear majority of the votes cast and counted on Election Day.

The Jan. 6 protesters were not carrying out a coup. They were merely pushing for constitutional election processes. They were trying to make their voices heard in the Capitol and influence a Congressional vote.

Most of the conspiracy theories I hear are from the Left. They spent about four years pursuing conspiracy theories about Trump being a Russian agent. There was more evidence of Clinton and Biden being Russian agents. And they keep reciting Jan. 6 conspiracy theories, but we have now had one of the biggest US DoJ investigations in history, and no conspiracies at all have been found, except for some chatter among FBI informants.

Here is Ted Cruz admitting that it was a mistake to call the Jan. 6 protest a terrorist attack. Terrorism usually means organized violence against civilians for political aims. The J6 protesters were merely trying to get into the Capitol building, and did not use any extra violence. Trespassing is more accurate.

Update: Pat Buchanan writes:

The left cannot let go of Jan. 6. Indeed, it has fixated upon, exploited and exaggerated the riot to discredit and destroy the Trump presidency in the history books and to prevent Donald Trump from ever running or being elected president again.

Though Trump was exonerated by the Senate ...

There are other reasons the left cannot let go of Jan. 6.

Democrats have no other issue on which to run this November.

The Biden presidency has produced an uninterrupted string of disasters: the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, the Texas border crisis, inflation, an explosion of gun violence and murders setting records in Democrat-run cities, failure to produce an adequate federal response to the delta and omicron waves of COVID-19. ...

Was Jan. 6 really comparable to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, during each of which 3,000 Americans went to their deaths in an hour’s time and major wars followed — as Vice President Kamala Harris said yesterday?

If so, why, a year after Jan. 6, 2021, has no one been charged with inciting a rebellion, sedition, treason, armed insurrection, plotting a coup, or a takeover of the government of the United States? ...

Another reason for the left to paint up the horror of that day is that the perpetrators of Jan. 6 were not the radical left who battled cops and burned and looted Seattle, Portland, Milwaukee and scores of other cities in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing.

They were the “deplorables” of Trump, the populists of the American right, against whom any slander is justified.

Democrats in a Panic about Election Control

AG M. Garland gave a speech yesterday about how he is preserving democracy by locking up political protesters. The public is not buying it. The Jan. 6 protesters were making a legitimate political statement.

The Democrats are increasingly panicking that they might not get away with another election steal.

The lead new year NY Times editorial:

In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time. ... Thus the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.

An opinion column adds:

The outcome will clearly come down to those three key states — all with Republican legislative majorities that put in place laws making them the final arbiters of electoral disputes. As the counting in the three proceeds, Democratic Party representatives raise a hue and cry that it is proceeding unfairly, with significant numbers of valid ballots being rejected without proper cause. State election officials (mostly pro-Trump Republicans) declare that there is no substance to these objections. All three conclude that Mr. Trump won their states’ electors, and with them the presidency. ... The scenario I described above is precisely what multiple observers have been warning about in the year since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Republican legislatures in several states have revised their election statutes to give themselves more authority over the conduct of elections in their states, reducing the authorities of state secretaries of state, governors and county election officials in the process. From the perspective of anyone who isn’t a Republican, those moves look like preparation to commit fraud and to do so with legal impunity.

Another essay:

These next three years will test our democracy in ways it hasn’t been tested since the 1860s, or maybe ever. The scenario is pretty straightforward. The Republicans retake the House in the midterms. Immediately, any chance of Biden passing meaningful legislation is dead, but that’s the least of it. The GOP will launch hearing after hearing, issue subpoena after subpoena; they will find some flimsy rationale on which to impeach Biden, and they will stretch it out as long as possible. Trump will run—as Raskin put it, “for psychological, political, and financial reasons”—and he will be the GOP nominee, Raskin has little doubt. Assuming Biden seeks reelection, the election will probably be close, because elections just are these days. If Biden wins by a matter of several thousand votes in a few states, as he did in 2020, the Trump machinery will kick into gear to steal the election. Republican election commissioners and state legislators and even some governors will put forward pro-Trump electors. The House of Representatives will not vote to certify Biden’s win in January 2025, which will toss the election to the House, which will make Trump president. (When a presidential election gets thrown to the House, under the Twelfth Amendment, the vote is by state delegation, so North Dakota has the same voting power as California; Republicans now control, and will likely in 2025 still control, a majority of state delegations, and Liz Cheney will probably be gone, meaning that Wyoming will go pro-Trump.) For the second time in the history of the United States, the other time being 1824, Congress will have installed as the president a candidate who did not win a plurality of votes in either the Electoral College or the popular vote. “Donald Trump has now converted every formerly ministerial step of the process into a moment for partisan rumble and contest,” Raskin told me.

Larry Tribe wrote an article with a lot of scare-talk about a "coup", but his main fear is not a coup at all, or anything illegal. He warns that the states might use their constitutional powers to determine a method for choosing electors that might be unfavorable to the Democrat Party.

It is scary to think that Garland and Tribe almost got appointed to the Supreme Court. They are partisan anti-American ideologues.

Forced to Stay in Israel for 8 Millennia

Israel is famous for keeping out non-Jews, but some are forced to stay there!

The London Sun reports:

A DAD has reportedly been banned from leaving Israel for nearly 8,000 years under a bizarre divorce law after his ex-wife filed a child support claim.

Noam Huppert, 44, is barred from leaving the country until December 31 in the year 9999 unless he forks out more than $3million in future child support payments.

It means the Australian dad has effectively been slapped with an 8,000-year prison sentence.

He moved to Israel in 2012 to be nearer to his two young children after his ex-wife returned to the country and filed a divorce case against him in an Israeli court, news.com.au reports.

In 2013, the court issued a so-called "stay-of-exit" order against Huppert.

It bans him from leaving the country even for holiday or work until he pays "future debt" for the child maintenance of his two kids - until they turn 18.

Huppert said: "Since 2013, I am locked in Israel."

He claimed he is one of many foreign nationals who have been "persecuted by the Israeli 'justice' system only because they were married to Israeli women".

Maybe he is supposed to wait for the fulfillment of prophesy:

In the Olivet Prophecy Jesus said to His disciples, “Therefore when you see the ‘abomination of desolation,’ spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place” (Matthew 24:15). Daniel spoke of more than one abomination. This particular abomination would precede Jesus’ second coming.

Daniel speaks of this end-time abomination in Daniel 12:11. A forerunner of this end-time abomination is found in Daniel 11:31. ...

The second coming of Jesus Christ will result in a dramatic change to the topography of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. We read of “a great earthquake” that destroys a “tenth of the city” and kills “seven thousand people” at the end of the sixth trumpet in Revelation (Revelation 11:13).

The prophet Zechariah prophesied that a great earthquake will split the Mount of Olives, which is located east of the Temple Mount, creating a new valley through the middle of it (Zechariah 14:4). These earthquakes will apparently destroy the present Temple Mount and require the building of a new one.

The prophet Ezekiel was given a vision describing a new millennial temple in great detail (Ezekiel 40-44). Jesus Christ is coming to set up the Kingdom of God on the earth (Zechariah 14:9), and there will be a temple throughout His millennial rule on the earth.

I do think that child support is the most anti-family policy we have. Worse than no-ault divorce, same-sex marriage, and child protective services. I haven't heard of a man being literally trapped in the USA, but the USA does have draconian laws that enforce payment orders to the mom, and that separate the dad from his kids.

Do your own research

Social psychologist David Dunning co-authors an NY Times op-ed:

A new slogan has emerged in the culture: “Do your own research.” On internet forums and social media platforms, people arguing about hotly contested topics like vaccines, climate change and voter fraud sometimes bolster their point or challenge their interlocutors by slipping in the acronym “D.Y.O.R.”

“Two days ahttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/opinion/dyor-do-your-own-research.htmlfter getting the jab, a friend of mine’s friend had a heart attack,” a Reddit user wrote recently in a discussion about Covid-19 vaccines. “I’m not saying they’re connected, but D.Y.O.R.”

The slogan, which appeared in conspiracy theory circles in the 1990s, has grown in popularity over the past decade as conflicts over the reliability of expert judgment have become more pronounced. It promotes an individualistic, freethinking approach to understanding the world: Don’t be gullible — go and find out for yourself what the truth is.

That may seem to be sound advice. Isn’t it always a good idea to gather more information before making up your mind about a complex topic?

In theory, perhaps. But in practice the idea that people should investigate topics on their own, instinctively skeptical of expert opinion, is often misguided. As psychological studies have repeatedly shown, when it comes to technical and complex issues like climate change and vaccine efficacy, novices who do their own research often end up becoming more misled than informed — the exact opposite of what D.Y.O.R. is supposed to accomplish.

Dunning is famous for the Dunning–Kruger effect, which is supposed to be a profound result on how people have less expertise than they think. All the work really showed was that if you measure expertise in two different ways, then one measure is apt to be greater than the other. That is, it tells us nothing.

Now he brags about other dopey research:

Likewise, a 2018 study of attitudes about vaccine policy found that when people ascribe authority to themselves about vaccines, they tend to view their own ideas as better than ideas from rival sources and as equal to those of doctors and scientists who have focused on the issue. Their experience makes them less willing to listen to well-informed advisers than they would have been otherwise.

Sure, it is foolish for an amateur to think that he knows as much as an expert, but there are lots of good reasons to doubt the experts. See the video Vaccine Hesitancy EXPLAINED, before it is banned.

Unable to Renounce Citizenship

The USA has more immigrants, refugees, and illegal aliens than ever, and we cannot even get rid of the ones who want to exit. The London Guardian reports:

or almost two years, since the pandemic struck in March 2020, most US consular missions around the world have suspended their expatriation services for those wishing to give up US citizenship. The US embassy in London, the largest of its sort in western Europe, announces on its website that it is “currently unable to accept appointments for loss of nationality applications” and is unable to say when services will resume.

The US state department says giving up citizenship requires a face-to-face interview with a government official, and that it is too risky given coronavirus.

Delays have led to a growing mountain of disgruntled citizens. By some calculations, there may be as many as 30,000 people among the 9 million US citizens living abroad who would like to begin the renunciation process but can’t.

Until they renounce, they have to file USA income tax returns.

New Zealand is Not So Great

It used to be that New Zealand was the favorite refuge of those giving up on Western Civilization. Peter Thiel bought himself a citizenship there.

But now, there are more and more stories of it going politically nuts. They have banned cigarettes for younger poeple, while allowing other illegal drugs. They have onerous vaccine mandates.

They are replaceing science in the schools with primitive witchcraft.

They used to be a reliable ally, but now they declare themselves to be a nuclear-free zone.

Officially, it has elections, but it has no written constitution, and is subordinate to the Queen of England. It currently has a female prime minister.

Jerry Coyne reports:

Despite a rise in spending per pupil over the last 25 years, performance in these three areas in New Zealand has declined, both absolutely and in comparison to the countries like England, Australia, the U.S., Canada, and Singapore—countries regarded as educational competitors with (and comparable to) New Zealand.

Over the past few decades, the national curriculum and assessment have turned the school system into an experiment in child-centred orthodoxy.

The philosophy has changed everything from what is taught to the teacher’s role in the classroom. It has transformed the purpose of school.

I would think that an island nation on the other side of the world would be immune to this nonsense, but apparently not.