Sunday, December 31, 2023

NY City pays $2 billion Settlement to Incompetent Teachers

New York City had a competency exam for school teachers, but now requiring competency is considered racist.

The New Yorker magazine reports:

Another district-court judge, Kimba Wood, subsequently found that the city had violated Title VII because the LAST was not properly validated, or proven to show what it said it showed. In 2021, the city agreed to a schedule of payments. This fight over tests has proved expensive: the city now owes many of these teachers significant back pay and other financial compensation. The payouts are expected to total about $1.8 billion—the highest dollar-value judgment ever brought against New York City. ...

Herman Grim, a Queens resident who will get a payout of more than two million dollars from the city after failing the LAST in the nineties, could not give any examples of why the test was racially biased. The clearly intended takeaway is that teachers who weren’t smart enough to pass a basic-knowledge exam cried racism and will get to collect millions of dollars as a result.

A similar problem occurs with all the other ways of doing assessments.
In 2014, New York began requiring teacher candidates to take the edT.P.A., an extensive assessment that focusses on their performance in the classroom, drawing on sample lesson plans and materials, written narratives about their experiences, and video samples of their teaching. A few years later, the state lowered the passing score for the test; Black test-takers were nearly twice as likely to fail the edT.P.A. as white or Hispanic test-takers, according to an analysis done by Chalkbeat. Last year, the state got rid of the edT.P.A altogether. ...

Racially disparate pass rates on aptitude tests aren’t just a problem for aspiring teachers. The ACT, the SAT, the LSAT, the MCAT—Black students do worse than white students on nearly every prominent precollege and preprofessional test. ...

New York has cycled through at least four licensure exams since the late nineteen-eighties, always eventually dropping them. But it’s not clear that any of these changes have actually improved students’ education.

Here is a man with a $2.2 million payout. I did not realize this, but apparently it is very common for Blacks to have low-battery smoke detectors chirping in the background.

Saturday, December 30, 2023

Bad Therapy for Kids

I mentioned that certain psychotherapies are harmful, and now a new book documents how bad they are for kids.

Amazon announcement:

From the author of Irreversible Damage, an investigation into a mental health industry that is harming, not healing, American children

In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth?

In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids—it’s the mental health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers, and young people, Shrier explores the ways the mental health industry has transformed the way we teach, treat, discipline, and even talk to our kids. She reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits. Among her unsettling findings:

Talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression
Social Emotional Learning handicaps our most vulnerable children, in both public schools and private
“Gentle parenting” can encourage emotional turbulence – even violence – in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult in charge

My guess is that it is even worse than described in the book. The more I learn about psychotherapists, the more I do not want them near any kids. They should be treated like child molesters.

Thursday, December 28, 2023

Yes, the 2020 Election was Stolen

The Press likes to keep saying that Pres. Trump never proved to the satisfaction of the courts that enough specific votes were stolen for the courts to reverse the outcome.

Yes, that is right. The damage was done before it got to the courts. About 60 million votes were cast by unverifiable mail-in procedures, and we do not know what would have happened in a fair election.

New poll:

A new poll by The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports found one-in-five voters who cast mail-in ballots during the 2020 presidential election admit to participating in at least one kind of voter fraud.

When asked, “During the 2020 election, did you fill out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child?”, 21% of respondents who said they voted by mail answered “yes.” (Filling out a ballot for someone else is illegal in all states, although many states allow people to assist others with voting.)

Additionally, 17% of mail-in voters said they voted “in a state where you were no longer a permanent resident.” Seventeen percent of mail-in voters also admitted to signing a “ballot or ballot envelope on behalf of a friend or family member.” (Both voting in a state where you are no longer a permanent resident and forging a signature on a ballot or ballot envelope are fraudulent activities that invalidate votes, when caught by election officials.)

According to election data, more than 43 percent of 2020 voters cast ballots by mail, the highest percentage in U.S. history.

Further, 10% of all respondents — not just those who said they voted by mail — claimed that they know “a friend, family member, co-worker, or other acquaintance who has admitted … that he or she cast a mail-in ballot in 2020 in a state other than his or her state of permanent residence.”

Eight percent of all respondents said “a friend, family member, or organization, such as a political party” offered them “pay” or a “reward” for agreeing to vote in the 2020 election.

Taken together, the results of these survey questions appear to show that voter fraud was widespread in the 2020 election, especially among those who cast mail-in ballots.

This was the only major American election run this way. Europe and Canada do not run elections this way. The government is illegitimate until there is a fair election.

Tuesday, December 26, 2023

Chaos follows Trump because He is Right

I said that Nikki Haley is the worst candidate, and here is more confirmation.

Mark Hemingway writes:

During a speech in South Carolina late last month, Haley trotted out a rather interesting line of attack against Trump: “And the truth of it all — and this is another hard truth — I believe President Trump was the right president at the right time. I was proud to serve America in his administration, and I agree with a lot of his policies. But the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him. You know I’m right. Chaos follows him. We have too much division in this country and too many threats around the world to be sitting in chaos once again.” These were not tossed-off remarks. ... Haley has been road-testing some variation of the “chaos” line since October, and it appears it’s a regular part of her stump speech.
I hear other Trump-haters says something similar. They have no quarrel with Trump's Presidency, except that he is divisive, and therefore unacceptable.

It is like saying Jesus was divisive for expelling the money changers from the Temple.

DeSantis and Ramaswamy have at least campaigned in a way that acknowledges this basic reality: For a lot of voters, the number one issue facing the country is the fact that American democracy is being held hostage by a broad array of forces that will use violence and information warfare, in addition to every hidden lever of administrative, legal, and cultural power to punish Americans if they vote for someone they don’t like. Never mind that even mild populist and rhetorical pushback on issues such as interventionist foreign policy or deliberate toleration of mass illegal immigration is cause for punitive measures.
That's right. Anyone would be called divisive and chaotic, if he oppose the groupthink leftists who are selling out the USA.

Haley is like someone saying: I want someone to limit immigration, but not someone who is called a racist. That is nonsense, because anyone who wants to limit immigration will be called a racist.

The article recites what everyone knows -- that the chaos and accusations against Trump are almost entirely false, and based on authoritarian leftists out to destroy the USA.

Monday, December 25, 2023

Merry Christmas

As I write this, there are official Satanic goats in the capitols of Iowa and Michigan.

Christianity Today reports:

Yet the goat god is not actually worshiped by Satanists. Most of them are, in fact, atheists for whom “Satan” is a metaphor for freedom from rules and norms. As Aleister Crowley and, later, the Satanic Bible explain it: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” These Baphomet statues are often a performative ruse—tried several times in different states and localities—along the same lines as the atheists who claim belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster to ridicule belief in God.

These gaudy goats exist to make a point in the culture war—namely, that public places shouldn’t allow Christmas crèches or Hanukkah menorahs and so forth. The devil displays are just a means to an end. It’s not so much about whom the followers love as about whom they hate, which is religious people—especially the kind that would be outraged by a devil in the capitol. Shock and repulsion from religious people aren’t merely unintentional byproducts; they’re the whole point.

That’s where the devil worship gets perilous, and not just for occultists.

C. S. Lewis, in response to a critic, argued that the fundamental problem of the age—one that he saw in the emergence of Communism, Nazism, and fascism—was devil worship.

It is bizarre to say that First Amendment religious freedoms require this. It is like requiring Swastikas or Commie symbols on government buildings. American religious freedom is for Christian religions.

Against Consent

Who decided web browser cookies require user consent? It is a stupid European privacy law.

This is example of the foolish of informed consent. And of the European legal system.

Apparently lawmakers believe that an abuse of your rights is okay as long as you are informed, and you consent. So now you have to click a box for every web site.

But it is not really informed, or consent. No one who clicks that box understands what cookies he is accepting, or how he is being tracked. That is concealed. Nor is he really consenting. He is just clicking to get rid of the box.

There are many other examples. User terms and conditions. One-sided contracts offered by businesses. Etc. There nearly always conceal what is really going on, and offer no real choice for you to consent.

The sex crime lobby has also attempt to redefine the word "consent". They have convoluted and unworkable definitions. No, I do not see how anyone could abide with how they think things should be done.

Sunday, December 24, 2023

Enabling Technology to Abuse Children

Susan Landau writes:
Many proposed laws on encryption assume that children are harmed by the technology, but encryption often provides children with safety and security. ...

Internet-enabled child sexual abuse exploitation (CSAE) is a horrible crime — and there’s no doubt that some CSAE investigations are stymied because criminals hide evidence using end-to-end encryption (E2EE), a method of securing communications so that only the message endpoints can view the unencrypted message. ...

While it is easy to imagine that eliminating E2EE will make children safer by making CSAE investigations more effective, it is likely the opposite effect will occur. As the EDPS report noted, “E2EE provides security and safety to children too, especially vulnerable ones (e.g. LGBTQ+ who use the Internet to explore their sexuality).” Indeed, the systems that automatically flag CSAE are likely to capture images created by the children themselves. These sexting photos are intended for private sharing, and the broad scanning envisioned by the bills thus risks that young people sexting will be investigated and accused of purveying CSAE.

Gandhi is supposed to have said that “the true measure of any society is how it treats its most vulnerable members.” LGBTQ+ children are such a population. Children are aware of their sexual orientation from relatively early on. A Human Rights Campaign (HRC) report showed that 84 percent of LGBTQ+ children realized they were non-straight by age 13. ...

The point is that E2EE benefits children.

She has made many good arguments for encryption and digital freedoms, but I cannot agree with this.

It is just not true that 13-year-old kids realize that they are non-straight, and not true that they need to be sending secret pornographic and sexually deviant messages and images to other young kids and adults.

Supposedly Gandhi left his wife to live with a male lover. Not sure what he has to do with anything.

Yes, 13yo children are vulnerable, and adults should protect them from being exposed and induced into perverted sexual acts. But Landau wants E2EE technology to enable that, and says that children benefit from it! No, 13yo kids do not benefit from being sodomized by child molesters. This is really sick.

Saturday, December 23, 2023

Women Control Men with Tears

SciAm reports:
Women’s tears act to reduce aggression in men who are close enough to catch a whiff of the waterworks, according to findings published in PLOS Biology and confirmed through human behavioral studies, brain imaging and molecular biology. ...

The new paper suggests that a fundamental reason why women shed emotional tears is “to convey a chemical signal that lowers aggression,” ...

To collect the tears used in the new study, the team put out a call for volunteers who cry easily. Only a few men showed up, and none was able to produce enough tears to qualify.

Just as I suspected. Men are slaves to female chemical controls.

Friday, December 22, 2023

Effective Altruism Lost Its Way

A Quillete essay explains Effective Altruism as a name chosen for fund-raising purposes:
[Philosher Peter] Singer’s essay presented a now-famous thought experiment: “If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.” Singer says this scenario isn’t all that different from the situation that confronts us every day—we’re well aware of the immense suffering in the world that could be improved without “sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance,” yet we fail to act. While there’s a clear psychological difference between allowing a child to drown right in front of you and failing to donate a lifesaving amount to an effective global nonprofit, the end result of each choice is the same.
No, the results are not the same. One is being a decent human being. The other is foolishing pursuing a stupid socialist utopia.
Two of the biggest stories in tech this year took place just weeks apart: the conviction of disgraced crypto magnate Sam Bankman-Fried on charges of fraud and money laundering and the firing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman was later reinstated as the head of OpenAI after most of the company threatened to resign over his firing, but Bankman-Fried may face decades in prison. Beyond the two CEOs named Sam at the center of these stories, there’s another connection—many people believe EA is to blame in both cases.
The article explains how some of these do-gooders have some very strange ideas about saving the world. In Bankman-Fried's case, it was stealing investor money and donating to the Democrat Party. I would suggest against giving money to any of these creeps. They are making the world worse.

The article suggests that maybe some people could be more successful EAs if they were more pragmatic. I think the whole concept is evil.

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Arson Against Another Catholic Church

LifeSiteNews reports:
Yet another historic Catholic church in northern Canada has been reduced to ashes in an “suspicious” case of suspected arson, with police confirming they are actively looking for suspects seen fleeing the scene. ...

Since the spring of 2021, well over 100 churches, most of them Catholic but all Christian, have been burned or vandalized across Canada. The attacks on the churches came shortly after the unconfirmed discovery of “unmarked graves” at now-closed residential schools once run by the Church in parts of the country.

In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools.

No dead bodies were ever found, and it was all a big anti-Catholic hoax.

You don't see any press about this, and instead the press is always yapping about supposed rise in antisemitism. But CNN reports:

Hundreds of false bomb threats that were emailed over the weekend to Jewish facilities across the US are believed to be connected and originating from outside the country, according to the FBI.

“At this time, based on similar language and specific email tradecraft used, it appears the perpetrators of these threats are connected. Additionally, these threats appear to be originating from outside of the United States,” the FBI said in a message to national Jewish organizations that was obtained by CNN.

“To date, none of these email threats have involved any actual explosive devices or credible risk of harm to congregants,” the bureau added.

No Americans are bombing Jewish facilities, or even making threats. It is all some foreign prankster.

It sounds like the 2017 Jewish Community Center bomb threats, which turned out to be an Israeli trying spread the myth that Jews are persecuted. There were also a few calls by an African-American trying to frame an ex-girlfriend.

Meanwhile Canadian Catholic churches really are being burned.

Wednesday, December 20, 2023

Biden keeps linking Trump to Hitler

Politico reports:
Why Biden’s campaign keeps linking Trump to Hitler

The Biden campaign warns that Trump’s rhetoric — from “vermin” to “poisoned” blood — could reflect history repeating. ...

In most situations, comparing a political opponent to Adolf Hitler might seem like an extraordinary step. For Joe Biden’s campaign, it has become part of the routine of running against Donald Trump.

When the former president said that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” during a New Hampshire rally on Saturday, a Biden campaign aide charged with monitoring Trump immediately circulated the comments to staffers, according to senior officials.

Within hours, the campaign released a statement attacking Trump for having “channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy.”

It was the fourth time in the past six weeks that Biden’s campaign has likened Trump’s remarks to Hitler’s in written statements and probably not the last.

If anyone is threatening American democracy, it is the Biden DoJ for prosecuting political enemies on frivolous charges. And the Colorado supreme court just voted 4-3 to kick Trump off the presidential primary ballot.

I expect the US Supreme Court to reverse the Colorado court. Nobody but a Trump-hating partisan would say that a Civil War law applied to Trump. If democracy means anything, it has to mean that we get to vote for the candidate of our choice. Even if the President compares him to Hitler every week.

If you really want to avoid damage to our democracy (republic, actually), then Trump must be re-elected. Otherwise partisan judges and litigators will have stolen the public's ability to make a choice.

John writes about the Colorado court:

Reasons to reject this opinion:
1. What happened on Jan. 6 was not an insurrection.
2. Even if it was an insurrection, Trump was not responsible.
3. Even if Trump was responsible, he has not been found guilty of insurrection.
a) Trump was not even charged by the Special Counsel with committing, aiding or abetting an insurrection.
b) Trump was acquitted by the U.S. Senate of accusations relating to Jan. 6, thereby creating double jeopardy.
c) Colorado wrongly relied on the J6 Committee, a one-sided partisan witch hunt that lacked due process.
4. Even if Trump was guilty of insurrection, Sec. 3 of the 14A does not apply to the president.
5. Even if Trump was guilty of insurrection and the 14A applied to him, he is covered by the general amnesty passed by Congress, as authorized by the 14A itself. That amnesty was so broadly worded that no one can ever again be disqualified from office under the 14A.
That's right. The US Supreme Court may focus on just one of these reasons, but they are all independently valid.

Update: Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz says the Colorado decision is the most unconstitutional decision he has seen in 60 years of teaching.

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Why Couples Therapy Never Works

YouTuber psychologist PsyHacks explains:
I might take some heat for this one, but I'm not a big fan of couples therapy -- mostly because I haven't seen it associated with a very high rate of success. In this episode, I give several reasons why this may be the case, and argue that -- if therapy is needed -- most issues can be more productively addressed in individual counseling. It's very hard to tell the truth that one person can hear; it's almost impossible to tell the truth that two people can hear simultaneously.
In short, there is a myth that relationship problems are caused by a lack of communication, and that they can be solved by a counselor recommending compromises. But communication is almost never the problem, and compromise almost never the solution.

There are some people who say that they were helped, but they probably helped themselves and would have done better without the therapy.

Conventional wisdom is that all psycho therapy is good for you, unless it is directed at normal sexual feelings, which is so objectionable that some states ban it. But that is not so simple, as Joy Pullman writes:

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to 26 state laws at least partly based on studies claiming “conversion therapy” increases LGBT Americans’ suicide risks. Yet every existing study that makes this claim is seriously scientifically unsound, several research reviews recently found.

Not only do all these studies depend on unscientific methods, but the data from one highly cited such study actually shows the opposite of what its authors claim, says a sociologist who reran the study’s data with standard scientific controls the authors omitted.

“The evidence shows that SOCE [sexual orientation change efforts] is fairly effective at preventing suicide attempts,” said Paul Sullins, a research professor at Catholic University and senior researcher for the Ruth Institute, in a press conference released Friday.

So the psychotherapy that works is banned, and the harmful psychotherapy is encouraged.

Almost all psychotherapists are in on this scam. You may think that you know a good one, but I doubt it.

Rejecting Aquatic Ape Theory

Evolution professor Jerry Coyne rejects the aquatic ape hypothesis
I’m not an expert in human evolution, but the failure of an aquatic lifestyle to explain our large brains, our bipedalism and, importantly, the lack of evidence that hominins didn’t live in aquatic habitats during the time that important features of our body developed—all this counts against the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. ...

As far as I can see, scientists did take the aquatic theory seriously, but rejected it based on the preponderance of evidence. The accusation that scientists are suppressing novel and counterintuitive evidence out of a group desire to avoid major paradigm changes in their field is one sign of pseudoscience.

He cites John Hawks who wrote an essay last year on Why anthropologists rejected the aquatic ape theory.

I mention this because I have made favorable comments about the hypothesis in the past, here and here, and wanted to give the mainstream view against it.

These are informed comments, but I do not find them convincing. First they say that the theory was oversold, and cannot explain all the things that its proponents claim. Second, anthropologists study fossils and aquatic apes do not leave fossils, so researchers have not been making progress on the theory. Third, the hypothesis seems implausible.

Okay, but that does not mean the hypothesis is false. It explains some things better than the competing theories. Even if the theory seems implausible, it seems to me that researchers should take it seriously and compare against it, when they discuss alternative theories. That is, they should find a theory that works better.

Monday, December 18, 2023

Marxist Thinking Infects Colleges

The Atlantic magazine essay:
Painful experiences long ago convinced Barvinok that requirements to affirm any ideal are corrosive in academia.

“I grew up in the Soviet Union, where people had to affirm their fealty to ideals, and the leaders embodying those ideals, on a daily basis,” he told me. “As years went by, I observed the remarkable ease with which passionate communists turned first into passionate pro-Western liberals and then into passionate nationalists. This lived experience and also common sense convince me that only true conformists excel in this game. Do we really want our math departments to be populated by conformists?”

Surprising to see this pushback against diversity DIE dogma.

Sunday, December 17, 2023

Atheists Deny Free Will

Recent videos, from Freedom from Religion and CosmicSkeptic, concern free will. And to those on these videos, it is directly tied to belief in God.

Christians believe in free will. So do Orthodox Jews. But Atheists adamantly deny free will, and insist that they are preprogrammed robots.

I thought that Atheism was just a denial of Theism. Nope. Belief in Atheism comes with a whole set of other beliefs, including free will denial.

Free will is a philosophical issue, and one can believe in it or reject it. The Atheists will try to tell you that a scientific worldview requires rejecting free will. This is false. There is no compelling scientific argument against free will.

So Atheists are choosing to deny free will for other reasons. I have listened to these guys at great length, and it is hard to understand.

Update: The Freedom From Religion folks have moved into a bunch of leftist non-religion issues, such as what they call trans rights, disability rights, and voting rights. Those are euphemisms for things like letting boys compete in girls sports.

Saturday, December 16, 2023

How Biden Attacks Political Enemies

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr posts:
Last year, after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, President Biden gave federal agencies the green light to go after him.

And they have.

Today, the FCC adds itself to the growing list of federal agencies engaging in the regulatory harassment of Elon Musk.

I dissent.

He explains more in this interview.

You might say that Pres. Biden is too senile to even know what Starlink is. Maybe right. Biden is a puppet. But the Biden administration is firmly controlled by leftist deep staters who use govt power to destroy political enemies.

You might say that Musk is not really an enemy, as he is not known to have even voted Republican. But Musk has stubbornly resisted Jewish censorship orders, and is therefore an outlier. The rest of the news media complies.

Friday, December 15, 2023

Penn Professor is Against Campus Free Speech

Here is a typical Jewish effort to censor free speech, in a Wash. Post op-ed:
Opinion To fight antisemitism on campuses, we must restrict speech
By Claire O. Finkelstein

Claire O. Finkelstein is Algernon Biddle professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the school’s Open Expression Committee and chair of the law school’s committee on academic freedom. ...

This is because the value of free speech has been elevated to a near-sacred level on university campuses.

Her college, Penn, along with Harvard, have been rated as the two worst with free speech. She and her department are working to fire a distinguished tenured professor, for her political opinions.
First, Penn, like Harvard and MIT, is a private institution, and as such it is not bound by the First Amendment. In my experience, Penn has never actually followed the First Amendment, even to a close approximation. The same goes for other amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Penn also does not follow the Second Amendment; if it did, our campus would be a war zone, especially given our apparent embrace of hate speech!
Firsts she says that free speech is at "a near-sacred level", and then admits that is not even close to offering First Amendment protections.

The comment about guns is also bizarre, as about half of Americans have guns, and most states allow almost anyone to carry one. Is Penn really a hotbed of murderers who cannot be trusted with the same rights as other Americans?

That underscores the point: With or without the First Amendment, calls for genocide against Jews — or even proxies for such sentiments, such as calling for intifada against Jews or the elimination of Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea” — are, in the present context, calls for violence against a discrete ethnic or religious group. Such speech arguably incites violence, frequently inspires harassment of Jewish students and, without question, creates a hostile environment that can impair the equal educational opportunities of Jewish students.
No. Those chanting “from the river to the sea” are objecting to Israel being a Jewish ethnostate, and are not much different from those objecting to the USA being a White Christian ethnostate. But Penn rewards those who favor White genocide.
The crisis of antisemitism in our universities mirrors the crisis in our democracy. Isn’t it time for university presidents to rethink the role that open expression and academic freedom play in the educational mission of their institutions?
What is she talking about? What is the crisis in our democracy?

I looked up Claire Finkelstein, and sure enough, she is a Trump-hater. The crisis is that Trump has free speech, is running for President again, and people might vote for him. She wrote in 2021:

This was followed by President Trump’s repeated baseless claims of “election fraud,” leading up to Jan. 6, when an angry mob invaded the U.S. Capitol Building during the counting of the Electoral College votes and sought to halt the certification as well as to do violence to the vice president and the speaker of the House, among others. We do not address here whether Trump was criminally responsible for the events of that day, though emerging evidence increasingly suggests direct White House involvement. ...

If there is one enduring truth that has emerged from the Trump presidency, it is that unfettered presidential power poses a profound threat to U.S. democracy.

She has Trump Derangement Syndrome. There are some arguments that Trump exceeded his authority while President, but no more than Obama or Biden.

This is one of the worst op-eds I have seen. It is hard to imagine anyone but a Jewish female law professor saying things so stupid.

Thursday, December 14, 2023

New Germans must Recognize Israel

German news:
German state: Citizenship applicants must support Israel

The state of Saxony-Anhalt has said people who do not recognize Israel's right to exist cannot become naturalized citizens. The eastern state's interior minister said Germany's other 15 states should take similar steps.

Germany has always wanted Israel to exist, so it has a place to deport the Jews.

I think this is a good idea. A lot of their immigrants are Moslems, and Germany does not want them bringing their religious wars with them.

Maybe the USA should do the same. And require immigrants to recognize Taiwan's right to exist. And Trump's right to free speech.

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

Harvard being ruined by White-haters

USA Today reports:
Their performance caused widespread outrage from their campuses, donors, the public and Democrats and Republicans alike.

And reaction has been swift. Magill resigned over the weekend, under intense pressure. She had tried to do damage control, but it didn’t help.

Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also have been strongly criticized for their responses at the hearing. Gay, at least, will keep her job for now. ...

The university presidents’ sudden discovery of free speech rings hollow. Harvard ranks "dead last" out of 248 schools in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) survey of college free speech rankings. Penn is second worst.

Students at Harvard undergo training that "fatphobia" and "cisheterosexism" are violence. Using someone’s wrong pronouns is abuse. Any words lowering a person’s self-worth are abusive. Speakers are disinvited for having the “wrong” opinions on gender issues or other topics. Conservative students are denied admission for "offensive" social media posts made years before.

Harvard hired Gay because she is a Black woman in African-American Studies. She is incompetent, and her scholarship is garbage.

Most of the elite colleges now have incompetent women presidents. They all repeated the same legalistic excuses at the hearing because they had all been coached by the same law firm.

A college president making $500k+ should be able to explain university policies without being coached by a law firm.

These colleges do not have diversity. No Trump supporters are allowed. They are systematically anti-white, anti-male, and anti-Christian.

The Jews are discovering that they made a deal with the devil when they brought in all these white-haters.

I happen to think that colleges should have enough free speech to allow denying the Jewish Holocaust, siding with Palestinian Arabs, and pointing out the extent and consequences of Jewish power and influence.

I mostly agree with Harvard professor, and Jewish Atheist, Steve Pinker:

The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. [President Claudine] Gay was excoriated not only by conservative politicians but by liberal alumni, donors, and faculty, by pundits across the spectrum, even by a White House spokesperson and by the second gentleman of the United States. ...

The real problem with Gay’s testimony was that she could not clearly and credibly invoke those principles because they either have never been explicitly adopted by Harvard or they have been flagrantly flouted in the past (as Stefanik was quick to point out). Harvard has persecuted scholars who said there are two sexes, or who signed an amicus brief taking the conservative side in a Supreme Court deliberation. It has retracted acceptances from students who were outed by jealous peers for having used racist trash talk on social media when they were teens. Harvard’s subzero FIRE rating reveals many other punishments of politically incorrect peccadillos. ...

A fivefold way of free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity, and DEI disempowerment will not be a quick fix for universities.

His colleague says:
Harvard would certainly be “fixed” if these plans were implemented, but the chance they will be is nil.
Harvard and the other elite colleges are getting worse.

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Liz Cheney is Nuts, wants Revenge

Liz Cheney is a Trump-hater and former congressman, and she is out pushing a book on how she hates Trump so much. I watched an interview, and here is what I got.

She voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and think that he was one of our best Presidents. She voted for his policies.

Now she says that Trump should have conceded the 2020 election several hours before he actually did. For that, Trump has become the great Satan to her.

This is nuts. She blames Trump for getting voted out of office, and she wants revenge. Pay no attention to her.

Her biggest claim to fame was being the stooge on the House J6 Committee. That committee could have given us the facts, by releasing the surveillance tapes, or allowed contrary opinion. It did not. it was all Democrat propaganda. She was extremely dishonest.

I often read the rants of these Trump-haters to see if they have anything substantive to say. They never do. The more of I hear of these people, the more I think that they should have nothing to do with governing.

Monday, December 11, 2023

Penn President is Fired for Antisemitism

NBC news:
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned from her post Saturday after facing intense criticism from the White House, lawmakers and alumni for appearing to dodge a question at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. ...

In a five-hour House hearing Tuesday, Magill and her counterparts at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were grilled over how their institutions responded to the rise in anti-Jewish hate since Oct. 7.

In their testimonies, the three university leaders each condemned antisemitism. The outcry centered on a contentious exchange with Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate each school’s code of conduct.

Instead of directly replying to Stefanik’s yes-or-no question, Magill said that decision would be “context-dependent.”

The hearing was bizarre. These colleges have women presidents who do not express themselves very well, and should have been able to explain the difference between bullying and expressing a political opinion.

Penn continues to try to fire its excellent Jewish professor Amy Wax.

Sunday, December 10, 2023

Atlantic goes full Trump Derangement

I mentioned that The Atlantic magazine was publishing Trump derangement nonsense, but it is much worse:
For The Atlantic’s January/February 2024 issue, 24 contributors consider what Donald Trump could do if he were to return to the White House. Trump’s second term, they conclude, would be much worse.
This junk is paywalled, so I am just seeing the first few paragraphs of each story, but that is enough. Here is David Frum:
If he wins the election, Trump will commit the first crime of his second term at noon on Inauguration Day: His oath to defend the Constitution of the United States will be a perjury.

A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War.

Only Jews say stuff this stupid. There is a reason Jews hate Trump, and they will not say what it is. Instead they recite these crazy hysteria.

The same issue also has Jewish propaganda:

Over the past six months, Elon Musk has publicly affirmed the deadliest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in recent American history, claimed that Jews and Jewish organizations cause anti-Semitism, and echoed extremist conspiracy theories about the Jewish financier George Soros. As a result, the billionaire has lost a few advertisers on his
That deadly theory is that Jews support importing Third World migrants into the USA. (Not to Israel, of course.) The theory is true. Just read the magazine, where every issue has Jews pushing dishonest and anti-American policies.

People can have their political differences, of course. I would not mind it listing factual harms from the Trump Presidency, and how Biden was better. But there is none of that. Just hysterical lies and name-calling. None of it makes any sense, until you realize it is produced by Jews.

Saturday, December 09, 2023

The Fall of Minneapolis

This site has the truth about George Floyd:
Award-winning investigative journalist Liz Collin sets the record straight. She uncovers what really happened on Chicago Avenue and exposes the truth of the 2020 riots.

Based on conversations with those who were there—including Derek Chauvin, Thomas Lane, and other Minneapolis police officers who’ve never spoken out before — Liz exposes how the facts were manipulated to dupe and divide America.

The book has 735 ratings, overwhelmingly positive. You can watch the 1.6 hour video documentary online for free.

I did not see anything surprising. The essential facts have been available from day one.

I watched the trial on tv. I was puzzled by a few things, such as why the jury was not shown the actual police training materials. I thought that maybe I missed that testimony, or that it had to be excluded for some reason.

Based on the documentary, it was excluded because it would have exonerated the police. The police were reasonably following reasonable procedures, in a difficult situation.

Update: See here for reasonable liberals being convinced by this film that Chauvin did not murder Floyd. One of them is a Black professor who had written about the murder of Floyd, and now admits that he was wrong. It is always nice to see people revise their opinions in the face of hard evidence.

Friday, December 08, 2023

Nikki Haley, Worst Candidate

The London Guardian reports:
The former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley claimed during the Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday that watching TikTok made people “17% more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas” every 30 minutes.

“We really do need to ban TikTok once and for all and let me tell you why,” Haley said. “For every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok every day they become 17% more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that.”

This was a carefully prepared remark, approved by all of her advisors.

I am wondering how we got to this point. She is supposed to be the sensible candidate, who can beat Pres. Biden without Trump's baggage.

She believes and misrepresents a ridiculous study, and uses it as an excuse to censor any criticism of the Jews. My guess is that she is just trying to signal that she is owned by the Jews.

Haley is a warmonger, and seems to think that being a woman of color makes her qualified.

The Leftist news media was mostly in hysterics over Vivek Ramaswamy at the debate. Wired reports:

Then, Ramaswamy claimed that the “great replacement theory is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory, but a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.” The great replacement theory is a widely-debunked conspiracy that the liberal establishment, along with a cabal of “global elites,” is encouraging the immigration of people of color in order to “replace” white voters.
Yes, it is Democrat Party policy to import as many people of color as possible. Nobody denies this. The article goes on to say that threats of white extinction has occasionally motivated violence, and:
Southern Poverty Law Center, tells WIRED. “At times, these theories have mainly found favor among the far-right fringe. In other cases their embrace among more mainstream political actors has led to devastating policy changes, such as the use of racial quota systems in immigration law.”
So complaints about anti-white policies have induced politicians to reduce immigration? Great!

And from the Jewish stooges at CNN:

Jones broke down the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that Ramaswamy openly supported during the debate, underscoring the danger that he said that kind of rhetoric poses to the country.

“When those people were saying ‘Jews will not replace us, Jews will not replace us.’ That slogan sits on top of a very sick and twisted view that, if you bring enough people of color here — we are so deficient, we are so stupid, we’re so unwanted — that we will be zombies to fill out the ranks for some Democratic Party agenda that Jewish people are manipulating and driving forward,” he said, explaining the conspiracy theory.

“That leads to violence. That puts at risk Jewish people. That puts at risk people of color. It is wrong,” Jones said.

Van Jones is saying that Jews are importing non-whites to replace whites, and if you complain about it, you are putting Jewish people at risk. Pres. Biden essentially said that the whole reason he ran for President in 2020 was to enable Jews to replace whites, and shut up anyone who criticizes it.

You may think that I am exaggerating, but why do Biden and other Democrats keep complaining about a handful of demonstrators who once chanted "Jews will not replace us". It can only mean that they are in favor of Jews replacing us, and against anyone complaining about it.

Thursday, December 07, 2023

Liberal Parents have Crazy Kids

News:
Conservative parents have better quality relationships with their children, leading to better mental health, research has found

Teenage children of liberal parents are more likely to experience mental health problems, according to a study published Thursday by the Institute of Family Studies and Gallup. Liberal parents have poorer quality relationships with their offspring – the most important influence on a child’s mental development, according to the survey.

Explaining that political ideology is one of the strongest predictors of parenting style, study author Jonathan Rothwell noted that “conservative and very conservative parents are the most likely to adopt the parenting practices associated with adolescent mental health.”

Okay, not surprising.

Wednesday, December 06, 2023

Greta moves from Climate to Killing Jews

You may have forgotten about Greta Thunberg, now that she is no longer a teenager.

London Guardian op-ed:

We won’t stop speaking out about Gaza’s suffering – there is no climate justice without human rights ...

Advocating for climate justice fundamentally comes from a place of caring about people and their human rights. ...

We are now seeing a sharp increase in antisemitic and Islamophobic statements, actions and hate crimes in Sweden and the world. ... We unreservedly condemn all forms of discrimination, including antisemitism and Islamophobia. ...

Silence is complicity. You cannot be neutral in an unfolding genocide. ...

This article was written by:

Greta Thunberg (she/her), a Swedish activist who inspired Fridays for Future, a movement of school strikes against global climate inaction

Alde Nilsson (all pronouns), a global development student and climate justice activist with Fridays for Future Sweden

Jamie Mater (they/them), a researcher and climate justice activist with Fridays for Future Sweden

Raquel Frescia (she/they), a writer/researcher and climate justice activist with Fridays for Future Sweden

Based on the pronouns, it appears that controlling CO2, killing Jews, and neutering humans are all related somehow.

If she really thinks this, then she should be speaking out against White Genocide also. Her Sweden is being destroyed by Moslem migrants.

There is no social justice until there is justice for Whites.

Monday, December 04, 2023

Schumer gives Jewish Hypocracy Speech

Sen. Chuck Schumer read a major address on antisemitism, presuably written by a Jewish speechwriter:
Some of the most extreme rhetoric against Israel has emboldened antisemites who are attacking Jewish people simply because they are Jewish, independent of anything having to do with Israel.

Those who are inclined to examine the world through the lens of the oppressors versus the oppressed should take note that the many thousands of years of Jewish history are defined by oppression.

From October 7, 2023 in Southern Israel to 2018 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh to 1999 at the Los Angeles JCC to 1986 at Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul to 1974 at Netev Meir Elementary School in Ma’alot to Yom Kippur, 1973 in the Golan Heights to 1972 at the Munich Olympics and Lod Airport to 1967 at the Straits of Tiran to the 1940s and 30s in Germany and Central Europe to the 1800s in the Pale of Settlement to 1679 in Yemen to 1492 in Spain, 1394 in France, 1290 in England to the Crusades of the Middle Ages to 629 in Galilee to the Year 73 in Jerusalem to 586 BC in Judea 722 BCE in Samaria…and the Thirteenth Century BCE in Egypt the Jewish people have been humiliated, ostracized, expelled, enslaved, and massacred for millennia.

To paraphrase lines recited year every year, century after century, at Passover over the seder table: “This is the bread of affliction that our fathers ate in the land of Egypt. […] In every generation, they rise up to destroy us.”

No, this is all a big hoax. Nobody attacked Jewish people simply because they are Jewish. Schumer says this over and over, and it is just a lie.

The Gaza attack was about a land dispute. The Gaza Arabs complain that Israel allows Jewish immigration, and locks out Palestinian Arabs. The Egypt story is in the Bible, but widely regarded as false:

The Exodus (Hebrew: יציאת מצרים, Yeẓi'at Miẓrayim: lit. 'Departure from Egypt'[a]) is the founding myth[b] of the Israelites whose narrative is spread over four of the five books of the Pentateuch (specifically, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).

The consensus of modern scholars is that the Pentateuch does not give an accurate account of the origins of the Israelites, who appear instead to have formed as an entity in the central highlands of Canaan in the late second millennium BCE (around the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse) from the indigenous Canaanite culture.

Passover is a Jewish celebration of the murder of the children of their Egyptian enemies. It is their most sacred holiday.

The history of Jews is that they have been very well treated in most countries, even as they worked to undermine Christendom.

Not long ago, many of us marched together for Black and Brown lives, we stood against anti-Asian hatred, we protested bigotry against the LGBTQ community, we fought for reproductive justice out of the recognition that injustice against one oppressed group is injustice against all.

But apparently, in the eyes of some, that principle does not extend to the Jewish people.

Jews are not an oppressed people. They are the most privileged and influential people on Earth.

Schumer and many Jews have allied themselves with certain causes, not because of oppression, but because they support anything that undermines White Christianity. Their reasons are similar to the Communists supporting those groups. It is just a way to cause trouble, and support their evil political objectives.

On top of feeling alone, the second dominant feeling that Jewish people have endured throughout history has been the sting of the double standard, which is the way the world has practiced antisemitism over and over again.

To Jewish people, the double standard has been ever present and is at the root of antisemitism. The double standard is very simple:

What is good for everybody, is never good for the Jew. When it comes time to assign blame for some problem, the Jew is always the first target.

And in recent decades, this double standard has manifested itself in the way much of the world treats Israel differently than anybody else.

No, Jews are the ones with the double standards. Schumer and the Jews have done everything to import Moslems and other undesiables into the USA, while they keep them out of Israel.

The world treats Israel differently from everyone else because Israel really is different from everybody else.

So of course Jews want to censor anyone not going along with their agenda. The Jewish-dominated Atlantic magazine says:

The newsletter-hosting site Substack advertises itself as the last, best hope for civility on the internet — and aspires to a bigger role in politics in 2024. But just beneath the surface, the platform has become a home and propagator of white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Substack has not only been hosting writers who post overtly Nazi rhetoric on the platform; it profits from many of them.
It is called free speech. It allows Commie articles also. The complaints are not even about Nazis.
Some authors, I should note, reject the toxic label Nazi even as they ostentatiously deploy Nazi and white-supremacist language and themes. ... Substack features content such as a recent post, written by a contributor, that begins: “Geniuses, in their most consequential forms, appear predominantly among Aryans … orbited by successful Jews.”
There are Jewish geniuses, so I don't agree with that, but there should be free discussion of whom the geniuses are.

And they want to censor Twitter. CNN reports:

Musk was responding to a post Wednesday that said Jewish communities “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” The post also referenced “hordes of minorities” flooding Western countries, a popular antisemitic conspiracy theory. ...

The antisemitic conspiracy theory — which posits that Jews want to bring undocumented minority populations into Western countries to reduce White majorities in those nations — is often espoused by hate groups. ...

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said Friday in a statement. “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms.”

CNN does not say that the "antisemitic conspiracy theory" is false; only that Jews do not like to hear it.

Just listen to Schumer's speech. He openly brags about bringing hordes of minorities into the USA, while keeping them out of Israel. It is a double standard, and he is proud of it.

Sunday, December 03, 2023

Trump will Win, so call him Hitler

Robert Kagan writes in the Wash. Post:
Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. ...

But Trump will not only dominate his party. He will again become the central focus of everyone’s attention. Even today, the news media can scarcely resist following Trump’s every word and action. ...

Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. ...

The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local gauleiters needed instruction. In such circumstances, people “work toward the Führer,” which is to say, they anticipate his desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the process. ...

[ Alexandra Petri: I’m starting to think Donald Trump is sounding like Hitler on purpose ]

Okay, I get it. Hitler. Hitler. Hitler. Hitler. Hitler. Hitler. Hitler.

Kagan is a famous Jewish neo-conservative Trump-hater warmonger, married to another famouse Jewish neo-conservative Trump-hater warmonger.

The Wash. Post readers are mostly leftists, but the comments are overwhelmingly negative.

I post this to give an example of Jewish insider Washington thinking.

The article goes on to say that the public is convinced that Trump was a much better President than Biden, and Biden has so many failures that is it hard to make the case for him. He suggests doing anything possible to stop Trump, such as the bogus prosecutions and lawsuits, but those have not been effective.

Besides the Hitler theme, the article repeats a democracy theme. That is, it is somehow anti-democracy if the public is allowed to make a popular choice for President.

Until the recent Israel disputes over courts and Gaza, I thought that Jews were pro-democracy. Nope. Jews are fundamentally opposed to Americanism.

What is missing from the article is any explanation of why he and other Jews hate Trump so much. It is not that he was a lousy President, or that his policies were somehow bad for Jews or Israel. Nope. That requires explaining some unpopular Jewish views.

Here is a typical anti-Trump comment, on a Trump-siter site:

Trump is a liar and a bully and a horrible person. ...

One of the worst parts about a Trump return would be the response on the left. I remember the summer of 2020 wondering how we would get kids back in school, ventilation, etc. Then in early July Trump threatened that schools had to reopen. That was that, the left had to be against it because Trump was for it. I so wish he had just shut up, but we all know he won’t or can’t.

Trump was good on the policies you mentioned, as well as ...

So his policies were good, but he is unacceptable because he triggers the Jewish Left.

If you are thinking about living under Jewish rule, look at some aerial maps of Gaza.

Saturday, December 02, 2023

On Track to the Singularity

AI futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote The Age of Intelligent Machines in 1990 and The Singularity Is Near in 2005.

His predictions were based in part on an analysis of the human brain.

Kurzweil writes that by 2010 a supercomputer will have the computational capacity to emulate human intelligence and "by around 2020" this same capacity will be available "for one thousand dollars".
Computers will have human-like intelligence and pass the Turing test by 2029, and the Technological singularity in 2045.

We are on track, more or less.

A lot of people assume that ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and related AI technologies were made possible by technological breakthroughs in software neural nets by Google, OpenAI, academic researchers, and others.

This is partially true, but the neural nets of today are not much different from those of the 1980s. The big advances have been in computational capacity. Moore's Law is dead, but the amount of computation of cheap gaming cards has dramatically improved.

We are seeing huge AI advances now, just because computers have caught up with the human brain. That's all.

Thursday, November 30, 2023

World turns against Israel

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

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

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

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

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities. ... Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision.
Probably a lot of the world thinks that Israel provoked this attack, in order to provide an excuse for exterminating the Palestinian Arabs. I don't know about that, but Israel was strangely unprepared and slow to respond.

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

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

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

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

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

The list obviously goes on.

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

Why Jews Attack Trump and Musk

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

I found this essay:

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Antisemitism is redefinied again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Statistics can Mislead

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

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

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

Monday, November 27, 2023

Ukraine War would have ended with Neutrality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, November 26, 2023

Religion not Defined by Factual Claims

Open letter from Richard Dawkins to Ayaan Hirsi-Ali
You are no more a Christian than I am. ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, November 24, 2023

Baby White Rhino Born

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

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

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

Thursday, November 23, 2023

Worried that OpenAI will Kill us all

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

Reuters reported yesterday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Jewish Behavior is like a Woman

Found this online:

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

Before someone attacks this for generalizing, I found this:

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

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

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

Speaking of women, here is another funny comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Transgender People’s Neurological Needs

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

Scientific American magazine reports:

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, November 20, 2023

Jewish Shakedown on Twitter again

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even Biden is in on the act:

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

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

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

The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast just addressed this:

The State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, the historian Deborah Lipstadt, says the prejudice is coming “from all ends of the political spectrum, and in between.” It threatens not only Jews, she says, but the stability of democracies. Lipstadt and David Remnick discuss how antisemitic sentiments may overlap in complicated ways with political opposition to Israel, including anti-Zionism.
You would think that she would concerned about the many millions of people who now want to exterminate Jews from Israel. Nope. Her main complaint was about a 2017 rally where some protesters chanted to the effect that they did not want Jews importing hordes of minorities, and some Jews exited a synagogue out the back door to avoid attention from the crowd. She said this was the only time Jews have had to use the back door, and this should never happen.

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

NY Times columnist David French writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is happening at TikTok is it is creating the biggest anti-Semitic movement since the Nazis,” actor Sacha Baron Cohen said during the call, according to The New York Times.
So now Tiktok has banned searches for "letter to America".

Sunday, November 19, 2023

Risk Factors do not belong as Clinical Tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the supposedly scientific statement:

REMOVAL OF RACE FROM CVD RISK PREDICTION EQUATIONS

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

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

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

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

Saturday, November 18, 2023

Bin Laden's letter to America

The London Guardian announces:
Removed: document

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, November 17, 2023

Biden compares Trump to Hitler

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

Reuters reports:

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

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

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

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

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

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

We should all be against communist vermin.

And Musk is accused of antisemitism for this:

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

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

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

Jewish reaction is to censor those telling the truth:
Facebook cofounder and Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz said Elon Musk should resign after Musk called an antisemitic post on X the "actual truth."

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

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

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

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

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

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