Monday, June 30, 2025

How Girls Fall Behind in Math

A new Nature article claims to have resolved a nature-nuture debate.
When do girls fall behind in maths? Gigantic study pinpoints the moment

Analysis of almost three million children captures when ‘mathematical gender gap’ first emerges and could help focus efforts to stop girls from falling behind. ...

Boys and girls receive similar maths scores at the start of school, but boys pull ahead of girls after just four months (see ‘Watch the mathematics gender gap emerge’). A more dramatic gap in mathematical performance emerges after 12 months of school, according to the analysis, published on 11 June in Nature1.

“This paper suggests that the gender inequalities in children’s maths performance aren’t innate or inevitable,” says psychologist Jillian Lauer at the University of Cambridge, UK. “If we want to stop girls from falling behind, we need to focus on their early experiences at school.”

The research found that boys and girls get to first grade being equally able to count, but boys pull ahead when asked to do problems like 5+6=11. The poor girls never catch up.

This is ridiculous. Grade schools are much more adapted to teaching girls than boys. I do not think that girls are falling behind because first grade teachers are not teaching them to add well.

I also don't think first grade addition has much to do with long term math abilities.

I met the science writer of this story a long time ago. She might even remember me, even though it has been maybe 25 years. I don't blame her for this. She is just writing up the published research that the Nature editors accepted. I am happy to see she is a successful science writer.

This research is only appearing in the leading British science journal because of the leftist egalitarian implication. Nature even has an editorial:

Close the mathematics gender gap: huge study prompts urgent call to action ...

‘Boys are better at maths’. It’s a stereotype that’s still pervasive among many children, teachers and parents. But is there any truth to it? A study of millions of schoolchildren in France reveals that boys pull ahead of girls in mathematics early, during the first year of school, but suggests that this ‘gender gap’ is not inevitable ...

The lack of differences in achievement at the start of school is an indication that boys have no inherent advantages when it comes to raw ability or interest. That, in turn, indicates that the gap could be reduced, or even erased, if children’s early environment at school and at home is changed. By pinpointing when girls start to fall behind boys, this study should help to focus further research into interventions that could reduce the gap.

Such interventions are needed. Women in many countries are less likely than men to study maths, ...

The latest study is a wake-up call for parents and carers, educators and scientists. The next step is for researchers to develop various interventions and measure their impact before and during the first year of school. For instance, do girls in classes taught by teachers who provide support to reduce anxiety around maths perform better than girls who don’t receive such support?

No, this is crazy stuff. First grade schooling is already girl-oriented. First grade girls do not have math anxiety. It is foolish to even think that this is a problem to be solved. From Wikipedia:
The gender-equality paradox is the finding that various gender differences in personality and occupational choice are larger in more gender equal countries.
The better you teach math, the more you will find performance differences. Face reality.

Sunday, June 29, 2025

The Death of Freakonomics

See The Death of Freakonomics for a blistering takedown of the popular economics books and podcasts. Supposedly Steven Levitt had an ability to analyze data like no one else, get a fresh perspective, and jump to conclusions that the experts overlooked.

Nope. It is all overhyped.

Some of his stuff is trivial. Some of it raises big issues, like crime and global warming.

He is most famous for claiming that legalized abortion led to a decline in crime. The idea is that the unwanted babies were more likely to become criminals. Sounds possible, but the evidence is extremely weak. Others have found errors in his analyses.

I applaud that he tries to present academic research to the public, especially when it has public policy implications. But it is not good if he gets it wrong. He is way too confident about weak or wrong results.

Saturday, June 28, 2025

Gay Rights Movement Lost Its Way

Gay rights activist Andrew Sullivan wrote a NY times op-ed:
But in America, on, this anniversary of the Obergefell decision, we also need to remember a critical thing: We won. We won because we defended free speech, reached out to right and left and center, left others and children alone — and trusted liberal democracy. That trust was rewarded with one of the swiftest successes in civil rights history. Let’s not throw it away.
He explains that the LGBTQ movement is increasingly radicalized. You buy into their whole agenda, or they demonize and destroy you.

That agenda now includes an assortment of Leftist, anti-American, anti-White, anti-Family, etc. causes. They subscribe to a theory that all these freaky causes should stick together, whether they have anything in common or not.

Even worse, they have focused on grooming and corrupting children. They are constantly pushing parades, drag shows, childrens books, and other indoctrination of kids.

It is almost as if evil powers have decided to identify children who are likely to grow up homosexual, convince them to be transgender, and castrate them.

As much as the LGBTQ activists complain about conversion therapy and push gender affiruming therapy, there are gays like Sullivan who believe that the gender affirming therapy is much worse than the conversion therapy. The conversion therapy just tries to get people to live a normal life. The gender affirming therapy singles out sissy boys, and tries to convince them to cut their genitals off.

Here is an example of LGBTQ intolerance.

Atlanta police said Tuesday that three men and a juvenile could face hate crimes charges after they pulled down LGBTQ+ pride flags and cut them up at an intersection known as the center of the city's LGBTQ+ community. ...

Police said they have also cited the 16-year-old's father for failing to supervise his son.

A prosecutor would have to decide whether to ask a judge or jury to add additional penalties to any conviction. Georgia's hate crime law, passed in 2020, allows a court to impose additional prison time or fines when a judge or jury finds that a crime was motivated by the victim's race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or other characteristics.

There is a free speech right to burn American flags, but burning a $10 pride flag brings stiff prosecutions, including to a parent! This was not motivated by the victim's characteristics, as the victim is a $10 piece of cloth.

Friday, June 27, 2025

Trump and the Jewish Enlightenment

A Jewish computer science professor writes:
I voted against Trump three times, and donated thousands to his opponents. I’d still vote against him today, seeing him as a once-in-a-lifetime threat to American democracy and even to the Enlightenment itself. But last night I was also grateful to him for overruling the isolationists and even open antisemites in his orbit, striking a blow against the most evil regime on the planet, and making it harder for that regime to build nuclear weapons.
He goes on to praise Pres. Trump's Middle East policies.

His blog is mostly non-political. When he discusses politics, it is usually either on how much he hates the Woke Left, or how he hates Trump. And he hates Trump for somehow subverting the views of Enlightenment philosophers three centuries ago.

This reminds me of the famous Jewish Atheist Harvard professor Steve Pinker, who is also Trump-hater, a critic of the Woke Left, and admires the Enlightenment so much that he has written several books on it.

What are they talking about? What do they even mean by the Enlightenment? And if they like Trump's policies, why don't they vote for him?

Puzzled, I found this:

Growing emancipation of European Jews in the eighteenth century was matched by an intellectual movement that came to be called the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah. Jews started to enter the mainstream of European society, in particular in major German cities such as Berlin, and Jewish thinkers had to accomplish two tasks. They needed to show their Gentile peers that they were just as committed to rationality as anyone else, and they needed to persuade other Jews that they should establish links with the local non-Jewish cultures in which they lived. ...

The basis of Haskalah was respect for reason, as the word suggests (sekhel being reason in Hebrew) and this was to have longstanding effects on Jewish culture. It contributed to the start of Reform Judaism in Germany, its basis being a putative rational attitude to traditional Judaism. It also played a part in the secular nature of Zionism, the idea that the Jews, like other national groups, had a right to a homeland that was based on reason not tradition.

I never heard of this. Today, the orthodox Jews vote for Trump, and the other Jews vote against him with a religious passion.

I have posted theories about this, but maybe I am wrong, and it all stems to some obscure Jewish philosophers who lived centuries ago. I will have to investigate this further. Pinker bizarrely attributes all that is good in the world to this Enlightenment, as if no one knew what to do until some 18th century Jewish philosophers had the great idea to use reason.

No, I do not think that these Enlightenment philosophers had any significant impact on the modern world. The use of reason goes back to Aristotle, and probably long before him. These philosophers do not even seem particularly rational to me.

I have posted many times on European developments that led to modern civilization. I credit events of a millennium ago, not the Enlightenment. To the extend that Enlightenment philosophers were influential, they were mainly Christian. Not Jewish or anything else.

But what's with this Jewish devotion to Enlightenment philosophers, and what does it have to do with hating Trump? I do not know. I think it is the key to a modern political puzzle.

The above professor writes:

“if, as it seems, Israel can survive only by waging constant wars against its neighbors, then doesn’t that itself prove the problem is Israel’s existence, and that modern Israel should never have been created at all?” ...

I used to be much further left than I am now. I turned against leftism largely because I saw how the progressive anti-Zionist worldview, taken to its logical conclusion, leads inevitably to this sort of question. If the highest value was the welfare of the masses, and if (hypothetically) the masses wanted the Jews gone, then by what right would the Jews remain alive?

Okay, but why is he anti-Trump?

Thursday, June 26, 2025

Maryland Schools Grooming their Kids

The US Supreme Court is about to rule on a public school dispute in Maryland:
One of the “storybooks” about which the parents are complaining is called Pride Puppy and is typical of the six books advancing the LGBTQ+ cultural agenda. This book is said to be for children three to five years old. In Pride Puppy, parents bring their children, including the family puppy, to a gay pride parade. The puppy gets lost and is later reunited with his family. The illustrations show the participants in the parade, along with rainbow signage, dress, and flags.

Pride Puppy purports to be helping preschoolers learn the alphabet. One of the key pages contains an activity called “Search and Find Word List.” The children are prompted to look for images in the pride parade that begin with certain letters of the alphabet. Some of the words in the lists are innocuous. However, one finds, for example, that under the letter “Q” there are only two choices and one of them is [drag] Queen. The same is true for “K” where we find [drag] King. (The brackets appear in the book.)

One of the choices in the list of “M” words is the name of a person whose picture and name appear on a placard held by a parade participant. It bears the name “Marsha P. Johnson.” Johnson was “a self-identified drag queen and prominent gay liberation activist who co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.” Since she had “difficulty finding employment she turned to sex work.” That is only one of the six books.

To make matters worse, the school board proposed various responses for teachers to use in dealing with questions in class from students. Here is just one: Suppose a student asks what “transgender” means?  Here is the suggested response from the board: “When we’re born, people make a guess about our gender and label us boy or girl based on body parts. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes wrong. Body parts do not decide our gender. Our gender comes from our insides.”

The court is probably only going to find that religious parents have a right to be notified about this curriculum, and maybe to opt out.

I will look to see if any of the justices detail what is really wrong here. This is a story about perverts using mandatory public school to groom small children into LGBTQ. A kindergarten story about a child losing and finding a puppy at a Gay Pride Parade? This is textbook example of psychological manipulation. No one should be allowed to manipuate schoolkids in this way.

Ask yourself: Why are schools doing this? Why are they so adamant that this must be done without the parents knowledge? Why are they litigating this all the way to the US Supreme Court?

The only answer is grooming and indoctrination of small schoolkids into the LGBTQ lifestyle.

Update: Here is the decision. 6-3 against the forced LGBTQ indoctrination. A dissent appendix has a bunch of pages from one of the sick books. See for yourself.

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Bombing Another Moslem Country

I saw an anti-war activist say that the USA has bombed eight Moslem countries in recent years. Besides Iran, the others are Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and those were all bombed by Pres. Obama in 2016.

He said it is foolish to ask why they hate us. We violate their sovreignty and kill their leaders.

No, that is not why they hate us. CNN reports:

Pakistan has formally recommended US President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing his “decisive diplomatic intervention” following a spike in violence between India and Pakistan earlier this year.
Maybe the Pakistanis do not hate us.

Iran complains about the surprise attack, but USA policy for about 30 years has been that Iran is not allowed to have an atomic bomb. Iran had every chance to negotiate a peaceful outcome.

Monday, June 23, 2025

NY Times Targets College Student for Views

The NY Times spent years promoting The 1619 Project, where a Black woman argued that America was founded as a White supremacist nation.

Now the paper has a big story complaining that a White college student expressed similar ideas in a class paper:

Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. ...

In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.” Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.” At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class.

It says he also posted some online offensive comments, but did not link to any.

I searched, and here is his paper on the Constitution Article V and 14A. A law professor evaluates the latter paper, and says that it is pretty good.

Here is his most offensive tweet:

My position on Jews is simple: whatever Harvard professor Noel Ignatiev meant by his call to “abolish the White race by any means necessary” is what I think must be done with Jews. Jews must be abolished by any means necessary.
Now that the NY Times has targeted him, he has been suspended from the university.

It is absurd that the NY Times targets this student in this way. He is entitled to his opinions. We do not know if there are really his opinions, as class papers and tweets are often deliberately provocative to try to defend a peculiar view.

There are indeed two views about American founding. One says that it was a grand egalitarian experiment, open to all. The other says that it was only for White Christians. If we are going to let people express one view, we should also allow the other.

The paper does not rebut either side, but apparently the topic is so toxic that people get fired for any views on it.

One former student, who graduated in May, had his post-graduation job offer rescinded by a large law firm when he told them he had spoken to The New York Times for this article, criticizing Mr. Damsky’s paper and Judge Badalamenti for granting him the award. The student asked not to be identified for fear of jeopardizing other job offers.

Before his suspension, Mr. Damsky had been offered a summer internship in the local prosecutor’s office. But in early April, the prosecutor, Brian Kramer, the state attorney for the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida, rescinded the offer.

This is pretty crazy. Lawyers are trained to argue views that are not necessarily their own, in order to defend a client. We are not supposed to care about the personal views of a lawyer. Only that he advocates in behalf of the client.

Sunday, June 22, 2025

Jesus was a Roman

Suppose you are a skeptic, and you do not believe the Bible is the word of God, or even an accurate account of anything. It is just a collection of wild stories. The Exodus from Egypt, the Great Flood, etc. are grossly exaggerated, and maybe entirely fictional.

The Bible is said to be the basis of the three great Abrahamic religions, but none of them took shape until centuries later.

Maybe Jesus never existed, but the gospel teachings must have originated somehow. Assuming it was mostly one person, call him Jesus.

People say Jesus was a Jew, but I don't think that makes any sense, because Judaism did not exist yet. According to Wikipedia, rabbinic Judaism started in the 6th century AD.

In the time of Jesus, Jerusalem and the surrounding area was under Roman occupation. So Jesus lived in the Roman Empire. So I think it makes much more sense to call him a Roman, than a Jew.

The Roman Empire was the most important civilization in pre-modern times, by far. The people and culture of the Jerusalem are might seem important if you read the Bible, but they were not. Being part of the Roman Empire was the most important thing about them.

Much of early Christian theology was defined by the Bible books written by St. Paul, and he brags about being a Roman citizen. I think it makes sense to think of Christianity as being Roman from the start.

People say Judaism is older than Chistianity, but I also question that. Both religions trace their roots to the Old Testament of the Bible. Both were radically reinvented, with Christianity by the 3rd century, and Judaism by the 6th. Christianity became a real religion before Judaism did.

You could say that the God of the Old Testament is more similar to the Jewish God than the Christian God. Maybe. I am not sure.

Even today Judaism is defined much more by its rejection of Christianity, than by following the Old Testament.

I could be wrong about this, but I say Jesus was a Roman, and Judaism was an outgrowth and rejection of Christianity. Not the other way around.

Saturday, June 21, 2025

Antarctica is Gaining Ice

Science news, from last month:
Antarctica has gained ice in recent years, despite increasing average global temperatures and climate change, a new study finds. ...

The ice sheet gained mass from 2021 to 2023 at an average rate of about 119 billion tons (108 metric tons) per year. Four glaciers in eastern Antarctica also flipped from accelerated ice loss to significant mass gain.

Sounds like a lot to me, but I guess it is a big continent.

Thursday, June 19, 2025

The Argument for the Colorado LGBTQ Law

I mentioned that under Colorado law, if a child is confused or questioning about sexual orientation or identity, psychotherapy must push the child towards LGBTQ, while encouraging normal behavior is illegal. You might wonder who could defend such a law.

More than 20 states have similar laws, and courts have upheld them. Here is the brief defending the Colorado law, and it claims that all of the science and expert opinion is on its side:

As the record makes clear, the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence demonstrates that conversion therapy is an unsafe and in- effective treatment.

That conversion therapy inflicts harm has been confirmed by at least twelve research studies, four sys- tematic reviews of that research, and two independent evaluations of conversion therapy and the attendant research. D. Colo. Decl. of Dr. Judith Glassgold, Dkt. No. 45-1 (“Decl.”), ¶ 14. Conversion therapy’s docu- mented harms include depression, anxiety, loss of sex- ual feeling, negative self-esteem, negative changes in family relationships, loss of faith, and suicidality. Decl. ¶¶ 65-68, 72-84 (citing studies). A cross-sectional survey of over 27,000 transgender adults found that exposure to conversion therapy at any time in a transgender person’s life was associated with adverse mental health outcomes in adulthood that included se- vere psychological distress, suicidal thoughts, and su- icide attempts. Id. ¶ 78. The studies of adults who underwent voluntary conversion therapy also found that they experienced harms including shame, a loss of faith in religious institutions, and suicidal thoughts. Id. ¶¶ 70-71, 83 (citing studies).

In short, “[s]tudies dating across two decades have evaluated [conversion therapy] and identified it as a potentially harmful treatment.” Decl. ¶ 61. A sys- tematic review of this evidence led the American Psy- chiatric Association, American Psychological Association, and other professional health care provid- ers’ associations to recommend against the use of con- version therapy due to the evidence that it harms young people. Id. ¶ 19. Nothing in the Cass Review— cited for the first time in the Petition, see Pet. 3-4, 8-9, 282—challenges the evidence on conversion therapy’s harmful effects. Indeed, that Review states that “no LGBTQ+ group should be subjected to conversion practice,” Cass Review at 150 § 11.5, and observes that “[n]o formal science-based training in psychotherapy, psychology or psychiatry teaches or advocates conver- sion therapy.” Id. at 151 § 11.7. It advocates the ap- proach taken by the MCTL: “If an individual were to carry out such practices they would be acting outside of professional guidance, and this would be a matter for the relevant regulator.” Cass Review at 151 § 11.7.

I post this so that you can get both sides, but also so you can see how overwhelmingly corrupted the psychiatric establishment is. You could tell a confused child to try to go straight, and all the experts say not to do it.

The way it is written, it sounds as if the case for the law is overwhelming, but look closely, and it is all bogus. It cites a "survey of over 27,000 transgender adults" as if that is scientific. It is not. Any real study would have control groups, and look at treatment outcomes. They were calling people who rejected advice, and asking if the advice was bad.

It says treatments were associated with harms. That could be said about most medical treatments. Have you ever looked at the list of possible harmful effects of common prescription drugs? The above says nothing about whether the benefits outweigh the harms.

Nevertheless it is worth pointing out that the major psychiatric and psychological associations are fully on board with this Colorado law. Every parent who considered taking a child to psychotherapy should know that. That therapist is likely to believe in an ethical obligation to push the child to being LGBTQ, and believe that it is unethical to encourage the child to live a normal life.

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Doomed: Modern Dating is Broken

I found this rant about the difficulties of dating in the modern world:
There IS a dating problem in the western world. Something of a dating crisis, really. Traditional methods of pairing-up have fallen by the wayside and have been replaced by a mess that doesn't work.

However, this joke of an idea won't fix it. It is just another gimmick that doesn't address any root cause and just won't work.

We are kind of stuck. There is simply no going back to the old world. The kinds of technologies that shape our daily lives make doing so a ridiculous prospect. The Internet, in particular. It has made a fundamental change in how we connect with each other (and a whole lot of stuff I won't bother to mention because nobody wants to read a novel here anyway). The old world is gone.

But the new world is broken. Especially when it comes to dating. And dating sites are a major contributor to this broken world. They present us with a selection environment utterly unlike the one in which we evolved. Much like the way in which modern food abundance gives free reign to instincts that should have been naturally curtailed (and drive up obesity and diabetes), so to does the modern dating site give free reign to instincts that only serve us when naturally constrained by a much more limited environment.

To put it bluntly: dating sites motivate the upper 20% of attractive people to have short term sexual flings with each other while leaving the other 80% alone and disappointed. 100% of the people want to date the top 20%, so this is what you get. The people that "everybody want" will never commit because they have too many options, and everyone else will never settle in the face of such desirability a seeming mere click away.

It gets worse. Those in the 80% who actually do settle for an "even match" both feel like they are getting less than they deserve, both feel like the other should be grateful for settling, and hence both feel like they bring more value than the other and hence the other owes more. That dooms the relationship.

And for the upper 20%, once any of them decide to stop sleeping around and find a life-mate, they generally find a barren wasteland. Some of them have aged out of the upper 20% and so are no longer desirable, and others find people who are in theory willing to commit but both of them have become so narcissistic that the relationship is doomed before it begins. And this says nothing of the life-destroying consequences of the inevitable divorce, when it happens.

No dating site will fix this, but we cannot just eliminate them. They are here to stay. It IS possible that a few individuals can enlighten themselves out of this mess and find a satisfying relationship that will last, but statistically speaking this is not a common event. And the threat of life-destroying divorce remains ever-present even for them.

I think that the first step in climbing out of this mess is to fix the divorce situation. People need to know that getting married is a financially safe thing to do. They need to know that they will not be facing a life of indentured servitude if the other decides to leave. And they need to see marriage as something other than a means of gaining access to someone else's money. We need a new definition for it and new laws to regulate it so that it once again becomes an agreement with social-support that fosters child bearing and family. This will require legislation and will be fiercely resisted by religious types who cling to the past and others who still want to use marriage as a means of financial enrichment. So, that's an uphill battle and probably lost already.

After that, we need much better social support for raising kids. It's expensive as hell, hard as hell, and takes two decades. People are more hesitant to sign up for that than ever. We need to take the edge off if we want more babies.

And after that it's mostly a matter of educating people as to how love actually works (no more hollywood romance bullshit), what their timeline is, and why they need to reflect on their life goals and proceed along a life plan if they want to feel accomplished and satisfied when they die.

Personally, my money is on "we are doomed."

A common theory says that women are instinctually hypergamous, and will seek out the highest status man available. The peasant girl wants to marry the prince, And if she goes on a date with the prince, then no other man is good enough.

That is an ancient story, but is exaggerated with urban opportunities and dating apps. An average woman can go on a date with a top 5% man, but he is unlikely to marry her. So all the women chase the alpha men, and get dumped. People do not find suitable mates, and everyone is unhappy.

There is no easy fix. We lack the political will to make any big changes, so we are probably doomed.

A NY Times op-ed details how no one knows what do about declining marriage and birth rates:

To date, no government policies have significantly improved their nation’s birthrates for a sustained period — at least no policies whose lessons are easily transferable to other countries. ...

America has made parenting unusually, needlessly hard. Child care and rent are unaffordable; medical care, even when subsidized, is a nightmare of red tape; family leave is too short and too rare; everyone feels overextended and underachieving.

As the climate activists Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli have observed, the United States “is already an anti-natalist country in everything but name.” ...

Surveys conducted over the past few years show that Americans already want more kids than they are having; they’d like between 2.1 and 2.7 children on average, depending on the gender and age group questioned, which is half to a full child more than the 1.6 that women are actually having at present.

Usually behaviors can be changed with financial incentives, but they have not worked here. When women make more money, they become more picky about men, and not less picky.

The highest fertility rates are in the poor and the rich. The rich do not need the financial incentives. Giving money to the poor just moves them out of the demographic having the most kids. So no nation has succeeded in paying people to have more kids.

She has her own unworkable ideas.

So what do America’s women actually need? Or to put it another way, is there a way to be natalist without also being patriarchal?

First, some facts about American women. A growing share of them are single; by one estimate, more than half of non-college-educated women born in the mid-90s will be single when they’re 45. Among women of reproductive age, a vast majority work. Women are increasingly having children in later years. And despite women’s growing earning power, they still do the lion’s share of housework, even when their husbands are unemployed.

But fewer women are marrying, at least in part because they’re having trouble finding appealing men. In addition to the partnering problem, many women report financial concerns as a major obstacle to having kids (or having more kids).

Helping heterosexual women have children, then, will require tackling toxic gender dynamics before and within marriage, and committing real, ongoing financial support

She goes on to recite a bunch of feminist goals. But she admits they do not work either, as Denmark has created her feminist utopia, and still has declining birth rates.
The most woman-friendly and birth-friendly regime I have come across so far is in Denmark, where child care is subsidized and extensive parental leave is provided. The public health ministry, which has offered free in vitro fertilization for single women as well as couples until the woman turns 41, recently started to cover treatment for a second child. Today medically assisted reproduction accounts for roughly 12 percent of Denmark’s births, compared with just over 2 percent in the United States. ...

Denmark’s policies haven’t changed the trajectory of the nation’s falling birthrate, which now stands at about 1.5 per woman.

Denmark can maintain its population by importing foreigners, but it has tried that, and stopped it.

Note that she does not want to roll back any of the feminist trends that led to the marriage and birth declines. Her main concern is giving women what they say they want, but women may be already getting too much of that. There is no mention of what would incentivise men.

Any plan to make marriage and children more attractive would need to consider what men want and need. But that does not seem to have occurred to the above author. Also what women say they want may not be what makes them happy. By most surveys, women were happier before the supposed gains of feminism.

Update: The NY Times celebrates Fathers Day by publishing a whiny narcissistic list of petty complaints. This is a good example of leftist feminist women devaluing fatherhood. by a woman about her father.

Monday, June 16, 2025

Trying to Define Western Culture

I have heard people argue that there is no such thing as Western or White culture, as whatever you list has been copied all over the world. I say that is backwards, as it is copied because it is a distinctive culture that is widely emulated and admired. I asked an AI LLM to draft a list.

Core Systems and Values:

Democracy, rule of law, constitutionalism, balanced power.
Individualism, personal freedom, human rights, universalism.
Contract-based legal systems, civic associations.
Intellectual and Scientific Traditions:
Math, logic, scientific method, medicine, philosophy (e.g., rationalism, empiricism).
Exploration and discovery (e.g., maritime voyages, space exploration).
Universities, libraries, research labs.
Cultural Expressions and Institutions:
Codified competitive sports (e.g., soccer, cricket, basketball).
Art, literature, tonal music, film, comedy, digital entertainment.
Western culinary traditions (e.g., fast food, European cuisines).
Monumental architecture (e.g., cathedrals, civic statues).
Fashion, work ethic, hobbies, moral responsibility.
Economic and Technological Innovations:
Market economy, capitalism, corporations.
Transportation innovations (e.g., automobiles, aviation, infrastructure).
Machines, electricity, semiconductors, key inventions (e.g., printing press, internet).
Social Norms:
Romantic love, nuclear family.
Pet ownership and companionship, hobbies.
Probably a lot of people would say that these are not uniquely Western, or White. For example, people play soccer all over the world.

Yes, they play soccer, but they are copying White culture when they do. Nobody ever played sports like that until White people invented them. Likewise with other stuff on the list.

Tacos are still Mexican when Whites eat them. So yea, everyone copies White culture, and it is still White culture.

Sunday, June 15, 2025

Science does not support LGBTQ Counseling Policies

I asked an AI LLM about the Colorado MCTL, and it defended the law as being grounded in scientific evidence about the prevention of harm.

It admitted:

Asymmetry in Counseling: The law creates an asymmetry: therapists can support a minor exploring or adopting an LGBTQ identity but cannot counsel them toward a heterosexual or cisgender identity if it involves trying to change their current orientation or identity. This reflects the law’s grounding in the medical consensus that conversion therapy is harmful, whereas affirming care is not. ...

Under the MCTL, if a minor is confused about their sexual orientation or gender identity, a therapist can affirm or support an LGBTQ identity if it aligns with the minor’s exploration, but they cannot counsel the minor to be straight or cisgender if it involves attempting to change their orientation or identity.

When I pressed it for the evidence, it admitted that there are no randomized clinical trial, or similarly rigorous studies. The studies cites by the authorities are mostly surveys of teenagers who already identify as LBGTQ, and asking them if they prefer therapy that affirms their beliefs or asks them to change. And yes, they are happier being told that what they already believe is good.

There are several things wrong with this. First, if Colorado is going to pass laws intruding on psychotherapy free speech in a way that has never been done before, there ought to be good evidence. Even if Colorado considers such as study unethical, as it argued in court, it ought to be able to use studies from somewhere else where it would be ethical.

Even if these studies are valid, they tell us nothing about how to counsel the confused or questioning teenager. This law requires the therapist to push the kids into being LGBTQ, when that may not be what he wants at all.

Third, kids do not necessarily know what is good for them. The same arguments would say that fat teenagers should be counseled to affirm their fatness, and be happy about it. Surveying them might well find that they prefer being told it is good to be fat. However it would be incorrect to deduce that teenage health is promoted by affirming fatness.

Fourth, there is really something sick and perverted about adults passing laws mandating children to receive pro-LGBTQ counseling. It is called grooming kids to be molested. Some also pass laws requiring pro-LGBTQ pornography to be available to kids in school and public libracies. Some force drag shows and pride parades for children. Many schools are now required to have pro-LGBTQ programs, classes, and symbols. Some even conceal this from parents.

Everyday I see stories about how Jeffrey Epstein and Puff Diddy were the epitome of evil for sex trafficking. The evidence seems weak to me. But the Colorado legislature is openly and brazenly conducting its own form of sex trafficking.

You might say that these lawmakers and others are just following expert opinion on what is good for the kids. Do you believe that? Why? It is against common sense, against scientific studies, and against moral views that have prevailed for centuries. Believing these supposed experts is about like following witchcraft or voodoo.

There are many court briefs against the Colorado law, and they make many good arguments, but I did not see any arguing the points 2-4 above. Some did argue that lack of good studies.

Saturday, June 14, 2025

Court to Rule on Pro-LGBTQ Psychotherapy

The US Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of this decision upholding a Colorado law, and briefs are going online. Wikipedia explains:
Colorado's Minor Conversion Therapy Law (MCTL), passed in 2019, prohibits licensed mental health professionals from engaging in conversion therapy with clients under 18 with an exemption for therapists "engaged in the practice of religious ministry". Conversion therapy refers to practices aiming to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity. Over 20 states have similar laws which are supported by major medical organizations.[2][1] The Supreme Court has turned down earlier cases challenging state bans on conversion therapy.[2]
So if a minor seeks advice about his/her sexual identity, the Colorado psychotherapist can push the child into being LGBTQ, but cannot help him/her be normal or straight.

I am expecting the Supreme Court to overturn this crazy Leftist law. If not, I expect Republican states to start passing laws saying that licensed psychotherapists must treat LGBTQ patients as having a disorder where the cure is to go straight.

The lower court said, 2-1, that the law is consistent is the policies of major psychological organizations and:

We thus have no trouble concluding the MCTL is rationally related to Colorado’s interest in protecting minor patients seeking mental health care from obtaining ineffective and harmful therapeutic modalities.
But most psychotherapy is effective and harmful. If that were the standard, it would all be abolished.

The backers of this law say that a scientific consensus is in their favor, but when asked for scientific studies, they say that would be unethical!

The dissent says:

Science has enjoyed tremendous respect because of the great advances it has made since the beginning of the scientific revolution. But it has not made those advances by respecting “authority.” To give just one illustration, although Albert Einstein is widely recognized as the greatest of physicists, virtually all theoretical physicists, then and now, have rejected his views of the nature of quantum mechanics. ...

the briefs of appellees and several amici emphasize the official positions taken by national professional organizations. But I have no idea of the process by which those positions were arrived at or who actually made the decisions, and it really does not matter unless they are based on persuasive evidence. Consensus is irrelevant to science. A book by one great physicist reports a comment by an even greater one that makes the point: “When a book was published entitled 100 Authors Against Einstein, [Einstein] retorted, ‘If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!’” Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time 193 (1996).

The Left and the Democrat Party today is obsessed with pushing LGBTQ ideology on underage children. I believe that the purpose is grooming children for abuse by adults.

What other explanation is there? Colorado is literally using state-licensed pyschotherapists to counsel children to engage in perverted sexual acts or be transgender. And trying to carve an exception to First Amendment free speech in order to prevent those children from learning the truth.

Friday, June 13, 2025

The Trangenderism in Sports Arguments

I asked an AI LLM for both sides of this issue.
Arguments for allowing transgender girls to compete in girls' sports:
  • Inclusion and equal opportunity for all students to participate in school activities
  • Mental health benefits of sports participation and team belonging
  • Anti-discrimination principles - treating all students fairly regardless of gender identity
  • Educational value of inclusive environments that prepare students for diverse workplaces
  • Individual assessment rather than blanket policies may be more appropriate Many argue that school sports should prioritize participation and development over pure competition
  • There are no mental health benefits. No one's mental health has ever been improved by letting boys compete against girls.

    The other arguments are all against letting the boys compete. Nearly everyone believes that equal opportunity and fairness require letting girls compete against other girls, and not boys.

    Arguments for maintaining sex-based categories:
  • Biological differences in muscle mass, bone density, and physical development that typically emerge during puberty
  • Concerns about competitive fairness, scholarships, and records in girls' sports
  • Safety considerations in contact sports
  • Preserving opportunities that Title IX was designed to create for female athletes Arguments that separate categories serve important purposes in maintaining competitive balance
  • These arguments are better, but do not go far enough.

    The differences between boys and girls are not just puberty muscles. They affect many psychological and behavioral traits, and have cultural importance.

    Sports are sex segregated not just for muscle and bone fairness and safety. It is also for all those other differences.

    I do not see the arguments on either side addressing those other differences. I wonder why. Is it because they believe those differences do not exist? Or that the differences are not relevant to sports? Or that some important social goal is achieved by trying to minimize or ignore those differences?

    I do not know. People talk about the puberty muscle differences as if those are the only ones, so maybe they do not know about others. On the other hand, even the transgender advocates talk about sex differences before puberty as being real and substantial, so they must recognize the differences. And they obviously think that the differences are relevant to sports, as that is why they push transgenderism in sports.

    So my conclusion is that they have some ideological purpose in pushing transgender sports, even if it has negative consequences for everyone involved. Those reasons would be similar to the reasons for progressive pride flags. It serves to undermine social norms that certain people hate.

    Gymnast Simone Biles was in the news promoting transgenderism, but why? She is a freak with a height of 4'8". I would not be surprised if she used drugs to suppress her growth. It is known that she uses performance-enhancing drugs under a controversial exemption she was granted. The creepiest thing about her is her allegations against Larry Nassar, the disgraced gymnast physician. I think she is lying. She only complained just in time to collect on the millions in settlements. Apparently she made enemies with her pro-transgender, and she had to issue an apology. Riley Gaines said it was very strange that Biles attacked Larry Nassar, while giving a pass to transgender sex abusers.

    Thursday, June 12, 2025

    What is Wrong with Democracy

    The most important political thinker in the world today is Mencius Moldbug, according to a 12k word New Yorker essay. He has a lot of radical ideas.

    He is most known for his critique of democracy. He has a lot of other ideas. Some of his ideas are so outlandish that it is hard to tell if he is serious, or if they would work. They are thought-provoking.

    He is considered right-wing, and so he is despised by the leftists at the New Yorker. The article is a hatchet job, of course. But they must be scared of his ideas that they would bother writing such a long article about him.

    See last month's debate:

    Danielle Allen and Curtis Yarvin met for a debate at the Harvard Faculty Club on May 5, 2025. The event was not sponsored by the university but was a private event booked in the club by Passage Press, Mr. Yarvin's publisher. Allen and Yarvin debated two resolutions prepared by the Press:

    Resolution 1: “Resolved: The long-term stability and flourishing of our society is better secured by concentrated executive authority than by egalitarian democratic institutions.” - 35 minutes

    Resolution 2: “Resolved: Harvard’s model of elite formation, grounded in a contested balance between meritocratic excellence and egalitarian inclusion, undermines the democratic legitimacy of the political and cultural systems its graduates go on to shape.”

    The debate lasted roughly 1 hour and 15 minutes.

    As a thought experiment, Yarvin asks if moral equality should be extended to chimpanzees or to missing links, if they were not extinct. There is no good answer.

    Wednesday, June 11, 2025

    Magazine says AI Industry is a Scam

    It is funny to see people trying to predict AI. Some experts say:
    We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.
    Eliezer Yudkowsky says it will kill us all.

    The Atlantic is a dopey magazine own by a billionaire widow and edited by Jewish Trump haters. It says AI is a con:

    Her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, is part Silicon Valley exposé, part globe-trotting investigative journalism about the labor that goes into building and training large language models such as ChatGPT. It joins another recently released book — The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, by the linguist Emily M. Bender and the sociologist Alex Hanna — in revealing the puffery that fuels much of the artificial-intelligence business. Both works, the former implicitly and the latter explicitly, suggest that the foundation of the AI industry is a scam.

    To call AI a con isn’t to say that the technology is not remarkable, that it has no use, or that it will not transform the world (perhaps for the better) in the right hands. It is to say that AI is not what its developers are selling it as: a new class of thinking — and, soon, feeling — machines. ...

    These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not “understand” anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets ...

    These folks have a funny idea of intelligence. The magazine could already be written by ChatGPT or another AI LLM.

    The foundation of the AI industry on benchmarks that are widely replicated. The models do exactly what is claimed for them. People who complain about them nearly always misunderstand them.

    Here is the real reason the Atlantic hates AI:

    At a companywide meeting earlier this year, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, said the publication should assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero and the company needed to evolve its business model. ...

    “Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine,” Thompson said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We have to develop new strategies.”

    The rapid development of click-free answers in search “is a serious threat to journalism that should not be underestimated,” said William Lewis, the Washington Post’s publisher and chief executive. Lewis is former CEO of the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones.

    They may have to start offering content worth paying for.

    Tuesday, June 10, 2025

    Vaccine Advisory Committee Abolished

    RFK Jr announces in the WSJ:
    Today, we are taking a bold step in restoring public trust by totally reconstituting the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP). We are retiring the 17 current members of the committee, some of whom were last-minute appointees of the Biden administration. Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028.

    ACIP evaluates the safety, efficacy and clinical need of the nation’s vaccines and passes its findings on to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine. It has never recommended against a vaccine — even those later withdrawn for safety reasons. It has failed to scrutinize vaccine products given to babies and pregnant women. To make matters worse, the groups that inform ACIP meet behind closed doors, violating the legal and ethical principle of transparency crucial to maintaining public trust.

    I used to complain about this committee. It is a sham. There was not even any attempt at balanced or open analysis.

    At one point I got the ACIP Charter, and it stated its purpose as promoting vaccines! Not promoting health or safety.

    One time I got some meeting minutes, and members said that they should endorse any (FDA approved) vaccine, because that insures free shots for poor people.

    Monday, June 09, 2025

    Psychiatry is Largely Harmful

    Tucker Carlson interview: Here’s Why You Should Never Go to a Psychiatrist. This is part of a longer interview, with pieces here and here.

    The guest explains how the whole field of psychiatry is rather unscientific. There is not much foundation for the diagnoses and treatment. You might hear someone say that a drug is correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain, but there is no truth to that at all. The drugs have never been shown to do that. The drugs have dubious benefits and significant side effects.

    Sunday, June 08, 2025

    Pride Month for Straights

    The last minute is an ad. I think. Or some joke that I did not get.

    Saturday, June 07, 2025

    Zionist Opposes Identity Politics

    Comedian Dave Smith dives into hot political controversies, and declared:
    Ben Shapiro built a career opposing identity politics as a proud Zionist.
    His point is that Zionism is the belief in Israel protecting the Jewish identity.

    I wonder if readers might also accuse me of hypocrisy. I have quoted Shapiro, but I do not blame him for this.

    Nearly all ethnic groups look out for their own kind. China looks out for Chinese. Turkey looks out for Turks. Etc.

    There is nothing unusual about Jews wanting a Jewish state. The only difference about Jews is that their entire religion is based on God having favoritism towards their ethnic group. And also that Jews aggressively subvert other ethnic groups. In the USA they support and finance the Democrat Party whose primary function seems to be to divide the nation along racial, sexual, and religious lines.

    The main difference with Whites is that they identify themselves ethnically much less than any other group in the world.

    Much of the Democrat Party is based on identity politics. About 20 years ago, it went whole hog into identify politics, and neglected some of its bigger issues. The result has been overwhelmingly bad for the USA. I have posted about these negative effects many times, and Shapiro has also addressed them.

    Most non-orthodox American Jews have faithfully supported the Democrats, and done everything they can to divide the USA with identity politics and non-white immigration. On every front, they work to systematically replace Whites with non-whites.

    The American political system was designed for White people, with educated male landowner voters. As the nation becomes more and more non-white every year, it is not clear that the system will continue. Jews and non-whites vote with their ethnic groups. Democracy becomes an identity politics game. The Democrat Party is already ruined.

    So yes, I am against identity politics in the USA, because it is destroying our political system. I do not care so much about Israel and the rest of the world, because they have ethnostates and non-American political systems anyway.

    So if I am against DEI wokism in the USA, should I also be against Israeli genocide in Gaza? No, I do not see it that way. I have no opinion about what should be done in Gaza. It appears to me that both sides are going to fight until somebody surrenders. It does not matter what I think.

    Thursday, June 05, 2025

    Not All Accept Same-sex Marriage

    Everyone assumed that same-sex marriage had become accepted in the USA. No, it has become a partisan issue again.

    The Daily Signal reports:

    A new poll is showing that support for same-sex marriage has dropped to a 10-year low among Republicans but spiked to a record high among Democrats. ...

    Gallup reports that support for same-sex marriage among Republicans has fallen to 41%, down from an all-time high of 55% in 2021 and 2022 and the lowest point since May of 2016, when support stood at 40%. ...

    Despite statistics on support for same-sex marriage, fewer Americans of all political stripes consider same-sex relationships morally acceptable. According to Gallup, only 38% of Republicans consider same-sex relationships morally acceptable, compared to 69% of independent voters and 86% among Democrats.

    The decline in the perceived moral acceptability of same-sex relationships has been pronounced among Republicans.

    Worldwide it is legal in most of Western Europe and the Western Hemisphere, but not Asia and Africa. This month has a lot Pride parades, but interest is declining, and it was canceled in Idaho.

    All of the major religions still oppose same-sex marriage, including Islam, the major Christian denominations, Judaism, and Hinduism.

    Most people answer the same when asked about the morality of same-sex relationships, and the legality of same-sex marriage. Somewhat more favor legality than moral acceptability. So some say that marriage should be allowed, even though the relationship is immoral. One could also thing the reverse -- that the relationships are moral, but not to be endorsed by government marriage.

    Wednesday, June 04, 2025

    Democrats Appeal to Crazy Women

    One of the biggest indicators of the right-left divide is mental illness. Most Democrat women have a diagnosed mental disorder.

    Blaze reports:

    Nate Silver, an American statistician and founder of the now-shuttered political analysis blog FiveThirtyEight, recently dug into why men, young men in particular, don't like Democrats — a trend that has Democratic operatives scrambling both for answers and Joe Rogan-sized remedies.

    Silver indicated that a big part of Democrats' problem might be that those young men beyond their reach are not mentally unstable or attracted to a mentally ill style of politics.

    Democrats — whom Americans largely regard as weak and ineffective — are right to be desperate.

    "I think an underrated factor in the 'how can Democrats win back young men' debate is the effects of personality, which differ especially among younger voters [and] are quite strongly correlated with voting preferences," tweeted Silver.

    Whereas only 20% of liberals reported having "excellent" mental health, 51% of conservatives said the same. On the bottom end, 45% of liberals said their mental health was poor, while only 19% of conservatives reported the same.

    I am trying to figure out this diagram. Possibly it is trying to say that Jews are the source of the world's evils, but I don't think so. My guess is that it is attempt to unite various Leftist movements, even they have little in common.

    Tuesday, June 03, 2025

    Free Puff, and Greenwald Blames Trump

    Journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted to Jason Whitlock:
    Serious thoughtful question: how have you been able to separate what you regard as Donald Trump's inspired and noble political leadership from the repeated behaviors in his private life long considered deeply immoral and degenerate under the most widespread and long-standing Christian and Western moral dogma:

    Overlapping affairs and marriages, serial adulteries, affairs with porn stars that he paid to cover up, closely cavorting with Jeffrey Epstein after he was publicly convicted of sex trafficking of minors, boasting of "grabbing womens' pussies" without asking, and I could go on and on. We'll leave to the side the multiple allegations of sexual assault from various women to whom he wasn't married even though one was repeatedly upheld in a court.

    For his whole adult live, Trump lived the life of a libertine Manhattan billionaire, not even close to a paragon of sexual moral virtue.

    One of the things I've always liked about Trump is he never purported to be a moralist because he knew his life didn't permit that pretense and it wasn't something he pretended to value, Nor -- as his many close libertine friends demonstrate, or, say, his choice of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General this demonstrates -- was it something he used to judge the moral worth of others.

    Trump obviously didn't care to align his private behavior with the moral judgments of others: only with his own codes about right and wrong.

    Greenwald is deflecting attention from a recently leaks homosexual sex tape.

    His accusations against Trump are completely false, and he knows better. He tries to imply that Trump cooperated in the sex-trafficking of minors. Not true. He falsely describes the famous Access Hollywood comedy routine. There were no affairs with porn stars. All we know is that his fixer paid off a blackmailer.

    There was an allegation upheld in court in a civil case, but that was so ridiculous that it is nearly impossible to believe.

    It is weird that Greenwald would compare himself to Trump in this way. There are no videos of Trump doing anything immoral. Some Trump allegations would be illegal if true. Did Greenwald do anything illegal? He is sensitive about adopting a couple of kids with a Brazilian partner who is now dead. Not sure what that is all about.

    Other sex scandals in the news are the retrial of Harvey Weinstein, and trial of Puff Diddy, aka Sean Combs. I haven't followed these trials, but I am waiting for the smoking gun. The defendants may be scum, but the charges are ridiculous. Diddy's chief accuser is Cassie Ventura who had a long-term affair with him from 2007 to 2018. She sued him in 2023, and obtained a $20 million settlement. So what is the issue now?

    Another complaint says Diddy behaved inappropriately at a 1997 party.

    Here is the latest witness, apparently allowed to testify anonymously:

    NEW YORK (AP) — A former personal assistant to Sean “Diddy” Combs who says he raped her testified Monday that she continued sending him loving text messages for years after her job ended in 2017 because she was “brainwashed.”

    The woman, testifying for a third day under the pseudonym “Mia” at the music mogul’s federal sex trafficking trial, ...

    In an Aug. 29, 2020, message to Combs, Mia recalled happy highlights from her eight years working for him — such as drinking champagne at the Eiffel Tower at 4 a.m. and rejecting Mick Jagger’s offer to take her home — saying she remembered only “the good times.”

    I am expecting a prosecution expert to testify that it is completely normal for rape victims to send years of loving messages to their rapists. He will say the messages prove the brainwashing worked.

    With both Weinstein and Diddy have attracted lawyers digging up dozens of gripes from decades in the past, and looking to collect legal settlement. No single complaint is provable, but the argument is that there are a lot of complaints and the defendant has deep pockets, so he should pay.

    That was also the issue with Trump. The porn star figured that Trump had deep pockets, and he would have to pay off to avoid publicity, whether the allegation is true or false.

    Monday, June 02, 2025

    Our Woman Celebrities are Narcissists

    News:
    Michelle Obama: ‘I’m not divorcing Barack — I’m choosing me’
    A lot of people were pushing her to run for President. I do not think she is really liked. She is way too much of a narcissist. Even when she says she is still married, it is all about her.

    This is old news, but UK BBC reported:

    Kanye West has been ordered to pay Kim Kardashian $200,000 (£167,000) per month in child support in a divorce settlement.

    The former rapper and reality TV star will share joint custody of their four children. ...

    The couple have four children: North, 9, Saint, 6, Chicago, 4, and Psalm, 3.

    In several statements submitted earlier, Kardashian, 42, had said she "very much" wanted the marriage to be ended, adding that this would "help Kanye to accept" that the relationship was over.

    Ye, 45, had previously fought against the separation.

    Kardashian is a billionaire, from her celebrity tv shows. Kanye West is Black, so their kids are half-Black. Apparently she bailed out of the marriage, and demanded millions in child support! Only in America does this happen.

    Sunday, June 01, 2025

    Rising Interest in Astrology and Mysticism

    Religious practice has declined in recent decades, so has everyone become more rational? No, of course not.

    AP reports:

    A lot of American adults — about 3 in 10 — make use of astrology, tarot cards or fortunetellers at least once a year. But only a small fraction of them rely on what they learn from these practices to make major decisions.

    That’s according to a nationwide survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center, encompassing 9,593 U.S. adults who were interviewed last October.

    Overall, according to Pew, about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say they engage in at least one of these activities mostly “just for fun,” while about 1 in 10 say they engage mostly because they “believe the practices give them helpful insights.” Only about 1% say they rely “a lot” on what they learn from these practices when making major life decisions.

    Yet it’s a big business. The psychic services industry — which encompasses various specialties such as astrology, palm-reading, psychic readings and fortunetelling — generated an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue in 2024 and employed 105,000 people, according to market research firm IBIS World.

    The Catholic Church has a long history of discouraging superstition. As Christianity declines, superstition will increase.