What Actually Makes People Happy

The Veritasium videos are very well produced and usually scientifically sound, but the latest, What Actually Makes People Happy, According to Science, was disappointing.

It cited research finding correlations between marriage, multiple personal relationships, happiness, longevity, and physical activity. They said that relationship and exercise cause happiness and long life. Money helps also.

My guess is that it is the other way around. Healthy happy people attract friends and spouses. The longer-lived people exercise more because they are healthy enough to do it.

No one wants to be around unhappy people. The unhappiness comes first, and then the relationships go bad.

The guests on the show seemed very scientific, except when they contradicted each other. And they really didn't have a scientific argument for causality

Supposed you picked 1000 people at random, and then randomly arranged for half to get married and the other half to get divorced or stay single. And then you did followup studies over 20 years to see which group was happier. This might give evidence for whether marriage causes happiness.

Nobody has done such a study, of course. But we can do studies of lottery winners. The winners are randomly made rich, and can be compared to a control group of losers. This might tell us if a monetary winfall leads to happiness. The video implied that it does not, but it was not clear. At one point it said that happy people can become even happier, with more money.

The video claimed that married men live 12 years longer than unmarried men, so marriage adds 12 years to a man's life. It is hard to believe that marriage could make so much difference. I think that women like to marry healthier men.

Moslem turned Atheist turned Christian

Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:

Why I am now a Christian

Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war ...

To understand why I became an atheist 20 years ago, you first need to understand the kind of Muslim I had been. I was a teenager when the Muslim Brotherhood penetrated my community in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. ...

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition. ...

And so I have come to realise that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilisation built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all. Russell’s critique of those contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope.

I can understand her rejecting Islam, but she lost me with "the Judeo-Christian tradition". There is no such thing. Western civilization was built on the Christian tradition, and the Jewish tradition played no significant role. Christians and Jews do not agree on very much.

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

No, Christianity did not outgrow its dogmatic stage. It was always clear that Christianity separated religion from politics. Even in the Middle Ages when the Christian Church was much more powerful, it did not write laws, or appoint politicians, or collect taxes, or judge criminals. It existed outside government.

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday.

Yes, she has a lot to learn.

Today's Crazies prefer other Crazies

I mentioned that a lot of younger have teenaged psychotherapy experience. I thought that this made them damaged goods, but apparently most people would rather date crazies.

CNBC reports:

92% of American adults say they prefer to date people who’ve been to therapy, survey shows ...

Dating app Pure polled 1,000 Americans aged 18 or over of various sexualities, ethnic and social backgrounds in September. It found that most people are looking for partners who have either seen a mental health professional in the past or are currently seeing one now.

Fully 92% of those polled said they prefer to date people who’ve been to therapy, the September survey found.

Seven in 10 singles are comfortable discussing mental health with someone new, Pure found, while 50% responded that it is attractive if therapy is brought up in conversation during a first date.

No mention if it is a plus to be on prescription anti-depressants or anti-psychotic drugs.

GPT means Generative Pre-Training

Everybody defines GPT as thus:

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 1 (GPT-1) was the first of OpenAI's large language models following Google's invention of the transformer architecture in 2017.[2] In June 2018, OpenAI released a paper entitled "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training" ...

Or this:

Generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) are a type of large language model (LLM)[1][2][3] and a prominent framework for generative artificial intelligence.[4][5] They are artificial neural networks that are based on the transformer architecture, pre-trained on large data sets of unlabelled text, and able to generate novel human-like content.[2][3] As of 2023, most LLMs have these characteristics[6] and are sometimes referred to broadly as GPTs.[7]

original OpenAI paper:

Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training

... We demonstrate that large gains on these tasks can be realized by generative pre-training of a language model onadiverse corpus of unlabeled text, followed by discriminative fine-tuning on each specific task. In contrast to previous approaches, we make use of task-aware input transformations during fine-tuning to achieve effective transfer while requiring minimal changes to the model architecture. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a wide range of benchmarks ...

As you can see, OpenAI invented GPT, and it originally stood for Generative Pre-Training.

The original GPT did use the transformer architecture, and many do regard that as critical, but I am not sure it is the T in GPT.

Today's Teens see Shrinks

Americansurveycenter.org reports:

American teens are heading to therapy at growing rates. More than one in four (27 percent) Generation Z adults — including nearly one-third (31 percent) of Gen Z women — report that they spent at least some of their teen years talking to a therapist. Twenty percent of millennials also report that they talked to a therapist at some point during their teen years.

For Generation X and baby boomers, therapy was a fairly rare experience. Only 10 percent of Generation X Americans and 4 percent of baby boomers spent any time in therapy as teenagers.

I am guessing that the big majority of those teens are worse off as a result of that therapy.

ADL Founded to Defend a Murderer

Ron Unz writes:

the 1915 killing of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, Georgia, arguably the most famous lynching in American history. Frank had been convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl in his employ and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in an effort to save his life. After numerous legal appeals failed, the state’s governor eventually commuted Frank’s sentence and a group of outraged citizens responded by hanging Frank. ...

Let us summarize what seems to be the solidly established factual history of the Frank case, quite different than the traditional narrative. There is not the slightest evidence that Frank’s Jewish background was a factor behind his arrest and conviction, nor the death sentence he received. The case set a remarkable precedent in Southern courtroom history with the testimony of a black man playing a central role in a white man’s conviction. From the earliest stages of the murder investigation, Frank and his allies continually attempted to implicate a series of different innocent blacks by planting false evidence and using bribes to solicit perjured testimony, while the exceptionally harsh racial rhetoric that Frank and his attorneys directed towards those blacks was presumably intended to provoke their public lynching. Yet despite all these attempts by the Frank forces to play upon the notorious racial sentiments of the white Southerners of that era, the latter saw through these schemes and Frank was the one sentenced to hang for his rape and murder of that young girl.

He then says that the best book on the subject has been purged from Amazon for being anti-semitic. And Unz's web site was blackballed.

I found this:

The ADL: an organization whose mission is to keep alive the age-old perceptions of Jews as whiny liars, greedy cheats and shameless shakedown artists.

It is worse than that.

Wikipedia says that there is a consensus that Frank was innocent, and framed. However, google it, and you will find the opposite. Of those who have looked at the evidence, most say that he was guilty of rape and murder.

I don't know if Frank did it or not, but by all accounts he got a fair trial and was not punished out of prejudice. If anything, the White Georgia citizens were probably prejudiced against the Black suspects, and for Frank. So why did Jews and Jewish organizations spend so much money and efforts to exonerate Frank and frame a Black janitor?

This past month I have heard endless Jewish complaints about anti-semitism. 90% of anti-semitism complaints have turned out to be hoaxes. I have quit listening.

When pressed for examples, Jewish organizations like the ADL bring up stories like Leo Frank. No. Frank was a Jew fairly found guilty of raping and murdering a White girl, based largely on the testimony of Black witnesses. I think the point of the story is that Jews should not be held accountable by goys for crimes against goys.

But the Gaza attack was anti-semitic, you might say. I am not sure. It seems to be a territory dispute. Anyway, Israel has already gotten its revenge, ten times over. No reason for anyone else to get involved.

The Gaza Arabs complain that they are being bombed. But they are not releasing the hostages. American Jews complain that many Leftist groups support Hamas, from the river to the sea. But the Jews still vote against Donald Trump and are doing everything to destroy him.

Central Park Karen Speaks Out

I mentioned this dispute, and not the victim writes:

… I’m Amy Cooper, but you probably know me as “Central Park Karen.” You may not know my name, but you probably know my story—or at least the two-minute version of the story that was broadcast all over the world without key facts or context. Everyone believed and amplified one story: That a white “Central Park Karen” called the police on an innocent Black man, a bird watcher, because of the color of his skin.

It was just a trivial dispute between a bird watcher and a dog walker. Nobody would care, except that one was a straight White woman, and the other a gay Black man.

While he was the one who aggressively sought a confrontation and threatened her in a secluded, the incident made him a rich tv celebrity, while it ruined her life:

As Christian’s video went viral, my life, as I knew it, was over. All my personal information was released online. I received many hundreds of threatening graphic images, death threats, and hate mail, which continues to this day.

My employer fired me the day after the incident without ever taking the time to learn the facts. Clearly in survival mode, my company released a strong statement distancing itself from me, effectively blacklisting my career.

In a frantic and desperate attempt to stop the avalanche of hate and death threats, I issued a public apology at the recommendation of a PR company. But it did nothing. I was forced into hiding.

Over three years later, I am still in hiding. I am scared to be in public. I still can’t get a job that meets my qualifications. And there have been long stretches of unemployment. All leading to thoughts of self-harm.

So how does anyone believe that there is systemic racism against Blacks? Bad-behaving Blacks get rewarded, while Whites get punished.

Democrat Party is a true existential threat

From a computer science blog, diverted into Jewish issues.

Mathematician Harvey Friedman writes:

One person’s idea of “saving the world” is another person’s idea of “ruining the world”. George Soros is a billionaire “do gooder” who basically is doing his best to “ruin the western world as we know it”. Furthermore, I think he knows this. ...

I have absolutely no doubt that within ten years it will become common knowledge that the Democrat Party in this period is a true existential threat to the very existence of anything like the USA, even the USA that you likely love. The likely trigger point will be devastating atrocities committed in the USA from a fraction of the millions of illegals invited in from everywhere without meaningful vetting or follow up. ...

Also no doubt that looking at stated policies and successes, Trump used to have a 70% approval in Israel (and they give him very prestigious prizes and if I recall right, have named streets and more in his name), and I would guess at this point going forward 70% would rise to 90%. And Trump will be regarded as having the greatest two terms in the recent history of the country.

Scott Aaronson responds:

Harvey #21: On Trump, suffice it to say that we have a Grand-Canyon-sized difference in perceptions of reality. Here in the reality I inhabit, I read how Trump’s cronies are already plotting how, once they get reelected next year, they’re going to fill the federal government with flunkies, pursue retribution against Trump’s critics, and invoke the Insurrection Act against domestic dissent, finally making the US into a full banana republic.

I’ve always been a classical Enlightenment liberal and small-d democrat. That hasn’t changed. If I’ve been radicalized over the last month, it’s been only in realizing how far tens of thousands of American university students and professors have fallen from the values that I regarded as the absolute Enlightenment baselines (e.g., deliberately burning children alive is evil). My hatred of Hamas, and my hatred of Trump, who I regard as maybe 25% of the way from Enlightenment values to the “might makes right” values of Hamas, come from that same fundamental source.

Aaronson suffers Trump derangement syndrome. Trump and Biden have both been President. Biden has used the power to prosecute political enemies on bogus charges; Trump did not. Biden filled the govt with loyal flunkies; Trump did not. Biden worked to shut down opposition free speech; Trump did not. Biden allowed millions of hostiles to invade the USA; Trump did not.

Aaronson hates Hamas for its incursion into Israel; Biden has let millions of potential terrorists into the USA.

Trump is much more of a classical Enlightenment liberal than Biden.

Aaronson's argument makes no sense, until you learn he is Jewish.

It is funny how the Jewish press is begging Biden not to run for reelection. They know that his policies have been disastrous and indefensible. Very few even try to make an argument that Biden was a better President than Biden.

The main point of Aaronson's essay is to comment on the Sam Bankman-Fried conviction. A jury found him guilty of stealing customer accounts, but actually 90% of it was recovered. There is a book about him already. He was a committed utilitarian and advocate of effective altruism.

Or so he claims. Much of the supposed philanthropy was actually donations to the Democrat Party. Thus he was helping to ruin the world, like Soros.

Update: A comment:

Show me one place where Biden or a member of his administration has advocated or called for using the DOJ to go after their political opposition for political purposes or for a retaliatory motive?

Because I can show many such times where Trump has called for doing so, continues to call for doing so, has actually tried to do so and continues to say that he will again in the future. That doesn’t even count all the times members of his previous administration did so.

It is true that Trump threatened in 2016 to prosecute Hillary Clinton. But then he was President for four years, and did not do that or anything similar.

Biden has prosecuted Trump and many others on charges that have never been used before.

Teacher Sues School for Getting Shot

NPR Radio reports:

A teacher who was shot by her 6-year-old student in Virginia can press forward with her $40 million lawsuit against a school system over claims of negligence by school administrators, a judge ruled Friday. ...

The judge wrote: "The danger of being shot by a student is not one that is peculiar or unique to the job of a first-grade teacher." ...

In early January, the 6-year-old pulled out his mother's handgun and shot Zwerner as she sat at a reading table in front of her first-grade class. ...

Police have said the shooting was intentional. Zwerner claims school officials knew the boy "had a history of random violence" at school and home, including when he "choked" his kindergarten teacher.

The boy's parents are Black, and blame the school:

She described her boy as a “great kid” but “very energetic” because of the behavioral disorder. “He’s off the wall — doesn’t sit still, ever,” she added.

Taylor said her son “actually really liked” 25-year-old teacher Zwerner but that during the week of the Jan. 6 shooting, “he felt like he was being ignored.”

The troubled boy had been suspended for smashing the teacher’s cellphone when she reportedly told him to sit down two days before the shooting.

Taylor’s attorney James Ellenson told the news outlet that school officials are ultimately responsible for the incident because they enrolled the boy in first grade prematurely, knowing he had only attended two months of kindergarten and two months of pre-K.

They also knew of his ADHD diagnosis, Ellenson claimed.

The boy boasted: ‘I shot that bitch dead’.

Update: Mom gets 21 months in prison for using marijuana while owning gun. She still faces sentencing in December on state charges for felony child neglect.

Humans Evolved from Apes

Evolutionary biology professor Jerry Coyne has written excellent book on the evidence, and gives good arguments, such as in this blog post. Er, I mean, web site post. But some of it is confusing.

Evolutionists like to say that it is an error to say that humans evolved from apes. That is because humans are apes, and it is a mistake to think that humans are more evolved than apes. All species are equally evolved to adapt to their niches. The more accurate statement is that today's humans, chimps, and other apes descent from common ancestors.

Coyne says the same thing, but look how he explains the above picture:

Note that the skull at upper left is the skull of a modern chimp, so it doesn’t really belong with the others. It’s just there for comparison. But look how things change over time: the face gets pulled back, the teeth get smaller, the brow ridges shrink, and most evident, the braincase gets larger.

Creationists have big trouble with this because they don’t know where to draw the line between “apes” and “humans”. ...

I like the photo simply because it’s a wonderful piece of evidence for human evolution, with the skulls laid out in temporal order. ...

Working on that note, this composition implies that our ancestral form was a chimp and once the chimp and human lines diverged then humans went through many natural selection events while chimps just remained stagnant as chimps. That’s wrong. Chimps and humans share a common ape ancestor.

But if you point out that the modern chimp skull is simply there for comparison, and that in all likelihood is fairly similar to the skull of our common ancestor with modern chimps, the problem disappears.

No, the problem does not disappear. He assumes that a modern chimp skull looks about the same as one 6-10 million years ago. So much so that you can put the modern chimp skull in the progression of human skull evolution, and it fits right in.

Apparently the evolutionists do not want to say that humans evolved from apes, because that would imply that we are superior to apes, and that would be bigoted.

No, it is not bigoted. We are not apes. Something made us different. It is obvious.

Evolutionists hate it when someone asks, "if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" Look at the picture. Humans gradually progressed to big-brained thinkers, while chimps stagnated for 10 million years.

It is increasingly obvious that humans got separated from chimps and were somehow in an environment of rapid evolutionary change. Maybe it was over 200,000 years, maybe in the last million years, maybe even in Europe. No one knows. At any rate, it is completely legitimate to ask why chimps did not evolve like humans.

Debate: Is STEM Systemically Racist?

New debate:

The MIT Free Speech Alliance and Adam Smith Society are co-sponsors of this debate, presented at MIT's Wong Auditorium on November 2, 2023. In this debate, two teams will debate the resolution, "Resolved that STEM is Systemically Racist."

Debating in support of the resolution are Dr. Chad Womack, Vice President of National STEM Programs at the United Negro College Fund and guest editor of a series of special issues in Nature on racism in science, and Dr. Jaret Riddick, Senior Fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University, formerly serving as Principal Director for Autonomy in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering at the Pentagon.

Debating against the resolution are Dr. Luana Maroja, Professor of Biology and Chair of the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Program at Williams College, and Dr. Erec Smith, Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania and President and Co-founder of Free Black Thought.

Serving as debate moderator is Nadine Strossen, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Past President of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The debate is long and boring.

I have not heard of any examples of someone's science/STEM career being hindered because of being Black. Just the opposite, Blacks are given extra opportunities and promotions. So I wondered if the debaters would offer any examples. No, they did not know any either.

The only real argument for racism was some studies of disparate outcomes based on race. And complaints that Black parents have to tell their sons not to fight policemen.

Not much mention of Asians.

Although this was supposed to be a free speech debate, it wasn't really. Nobody even talked about several of the possible explanations for racial disparities. You cannot blame racism unless you give direct evidence for it, or evidence against the alternative explanations. They did neither.

Birders Act to Spite the White Dog-lovers

The NY Times reports:

The American Ornithological Society, the organization responsible for standardizing English bird names across the Americas, announced on Wednesday that it would rename all species honoring people. Bird names derived from people, the society said in a statement, can be harmful, exclusive and detract from “the focus, appreciation or consideration of the birds themselves.”

That means the Audubon’s shearwater, a bird found off the coast of the southeastern United States, will no longer have a name acknowledging John James Audubon, a famous bird illustrator and a slave owner who adamantly opposed abolition.

What are they going to do when they figure out that the word Ornithological comes from people who were firm believers in slavery?

No, they are not responsible for policing the language. People can use whatever names they want.

Jordan Rutter, a founder of Bird Names For Birds, said the petition was inspired by what became a momentous encounter in Central Park in 2020, when a white woman falsely reported to police that Christian Cooper, a Black birder, was threatening her.

Is that what this is about? He certainly was threatening her. Wikipedia reports:

By his own account, Christian then said, "Look, if you're going to do what you want, I'm going to do what I want, but you're not going to like it", and beckoned the dog toward him with a dog treat.

So by his account, he threatened to do something that she would not like. He did not say what, but it was obviously hostile, and involving the dog. He also got her fired from her job.

But to Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago who is an avid birder, the need for more descriptive names seem pressing. Performative acts like this “are really deeply injurious to science,” he said. “We cannot go back through the history of science and wipe out everybody who was not a perfect human being.” Dr. Coyne added that the effort to update so many names would be better invested in something more impactful to society, such as teaching underprivileged children about birds.

Glad to see Coyne quoted saying something sensible. Apparently birders hate the dog and cat lovers the way the Gazans hate the Jews, but the rest of us should not have to change the language.

Jewish power and influence

Kevin MacDonald writes:

The current situation in the United States is the result of an awesome deployment of Jewish power and influence. One must contemplate the fact that American Jews have managed to maintain unquestioned support for Israel since the 1967 war despite Israel’s seizing land and engaging in a brutal occupation of the Palestinians in the occupied territories—an apartheid occupation that will most likely end with expulsion or complete subjugation and degradation of the Palestinians. During this same period Jewish organizations in America have been a principal force—in my view the main force—for erecting a state dedicated to suppressing ethnic identification among Europeans, for encouraging massive multi-ethnic immigration into the US, and for erecting a legal system and cultural ideology that is obsessively sensitive to the complaints and interests of ethnic minorities: the culture of the Holocaust. All this is done without a whisper of double standards in the aboveground media.

The American Jewish community is well organized and lavishly funded. It has achieved a great deal of power, and it has been successful in achieving its interests. One of the great myths often promulgated by Jewish apologists is that Jews have no consensus and therefore cannot wield any real power. Yet there is in fact a great deal of consensus on broad Jewish issues, particularly in the areas of Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties. Massive changes in public policy on these issues, beginning with the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, coincide with the period of increasing Jewish power and influence in the United States. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find any significant area where public policy conflicts with the attitudes of mainstream Jewish organizations.

If you want proof of a broad Jewish consensus, just look at how they vote.

This is all considered anti-semitic. If you read the Jewish press, the most anti-semitic things are Marjorie Taylor Greene's rant about space lasers, or some Kanye West comments.

There are Moslem Arabs who want to eradicate Jews from the Middle East, and Western leftists who support the cause. That is not anti-semitism, as the term has been come to be understood.

While I have called out Jews for their views on this blog, I want to make it clear that I am not siding with Hamas or the Palestinian Arab cause. The Palestinian Arabs are obviously unfit for self-determination.

Biden wants to control AI

Pres. Biden has issued an executive order to control AI.

I have not seen the details yet, but it is clear that they are afraid of an uncontrolled source of information. They will say that certain knowledge reinforces system racism, patriarchy, and other leftist buzzwords.

I do not think that they can control it, but it is possible that we already reached peak knowledge in 2021. ChatGPT is obviously trained to regurgitate leftist ideas. Its output is all over the place. Future AI engines will be trained on the available web pages, and thuss they will be trained on the output of previous AI bots. If certain ideas can be wired in now, then we may never discredit them.

Electric Vehicles still not Economical

The Texas Public Policy Foundation released this report:

Setting aside some of the questionable assumptions used in deriving such favorable economics for EVs, no one has attempted to calculate the full financial benefit of the wide array of direct subsidies, regulatory credits, and subsidized infrastructure that contribute to the economic viability of EVs. In this paper, we show that the average model year (MY) 2021 EV would cost $48,698 more to own over a 10-year period without $22 billion in government favors given to EV manufacturers and owners.

EV advocates claim that the cost of electricity for EV owners is equal to $1.21 per gallon of gasoline (Edison Electric Institute, 2021), but the cost of charging equipment and charging losses, averaged out over 10 years and 120,000 miles, is $1.38 per gallon equivalent on top of that. Adding the costs of the subsidies to the true cost of fueling an EV would equate to an EV owner paying $17.33 per gallon of gasoline.

If this is true, electric vehicles (EV) are being propped up by subsidies.

The EVs continue to be a big disappointment for Detroit car makers. They are nowhere close to making their sales estimates.

Somali Jailed for Kenyan Female Circumcision

The London Guardian reports:

A woman has been found guilty of handing over a three-year-old British girl for female genital mutilation (FGM) during a trip to Kenya, in the first conviction of its kind.

After a trial at the Old Bailey, Amina Noor, 39, was convicted of assisting a Kenyan woman to carry out the procedure in 2006. The conviction, which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years, is the first for assisting in such harm under the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003.

The only other successful prosecution under the act was in 2019 when a Ugandan woman from Walthamstow, east London, was jailed for 11 years for cutting a three-year-old girl.

Campaigners said the verdict showed that the introduction in 2015 of mandatory reporting of suspected FGM was working. ...

Previously, the prosecutor Deanna Heer KC said Noor travelled to Kenya with the girl in 2006 and while there took her to a private house where the child was subjected to FGM.

The crime only came to light years later when the girl was 16 and confided in her English teacher at school. ...

Jurors were told the defendant was born in Somalia and moved to Kenya at the age of eight during the civil war in Somalia. She was 16 when she came to the UK and was later granted British citizenship.

There are many things wrong with this story. Why is Britain importing Somalis with vastly different cultural norms, and then not allowing them to continue their cultural practices?

Why is it a crime to circumcize girls, when Jews circumcize their boys all the time?

Why is Britain prosecuting something that happened in Kenya in 2006? Is there no statute of limitations, or respect for other legal jurisdictions?

Why are citizens required to report this, and not required to report more serious crimes like murder?

Why do the medical authorities disapprove of female circumcision, while they promote much more drastic and damaging transgender procedures?

This whole thing is crazy.

Israel Accuses UN of Blood Libel

The Jews are always complaining of persecution, and never stop talking about blood libel, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Jewish Holocaust. I doubt that most people even know what blood libel is.

The London Guardian reports:

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, was locked in a bitter row with Israel on Wednesday, saying he was shocked that the Israeli government had misrepresented remarks he had made to the UN to suggest he had justified the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October.

Israel has called for his resignation, accusing him of a blood libel and announcing that it was withdrawing travel visas for UN officials, including the UN humanitarian coordinator, Martin Griffiths.

The personal tensions between Guterres and Israeli officials comes as UNRWA, the UN humanitarian agency for Palestinian refugees, warned that it was hours away from being forced to close its operations in Gaza, including the provision of hospital care, due to Israel’s blockade on fuel. Israel also vowed to stop UN officials coming to Israel in a bid to teach the UN a lesson.

So what did Guterres do? He issued bland statement against war, mostly pro-Israel.

Guterres had told the UN security council on Tuesday: “It is important to also recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”

In his statement on Wednesday, Guterres pointed out that in his speech he had stated: “But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

It is bizarre that Jews talk about blood libel so much. There must be some truth to it, or they would not talk about it. But Christians do not blame Jews for things that happened a millennium ago. Christians do not even believe in collective guilt.

Update: The Israel ground invasion of Gaza has reportedly begun. I am not sure why Israel is doing this, as it has reported already destroyed about third of the homes in Gaza, and cut off power, water, and internet.

Here is an amusing Fact Sheet on the Elements of Anti-Semitic Discourse. It is a summary of what Jews consider to be anti-semitic, according to "an independent, unaffiliated, nonprofit corporation established to advance the civil and human rights of the Jewish people and promote justice for all." And here is the opinion of a prominent Israeli:

In an agonizing irony, Hamas and its supporters have succeeded where the Jews have long failed. Incontestably now, anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Hatred of the Jewish nation-state cannot be distinguished from hatred of the Jewish people. The war between Hamas and Israel, involving the largest and cruelest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, is a war against Jews everywhere. To paraphrase Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz, this is the second war against the Jews.

Old Evidence that Floyd was not Murdered

Newsweek reports:

Fact Check: Tucker Carlson Says New Evidence Clears Derek Chauvin of Murder

Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson has claimed this week that new court papers show George Floyd was not murdered in May 2020 by then police officer Derek Chauvin.

Former Minneapolis police officer Chauvin, who is white, was found guilty in April 2021 of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd, who was Black. ...

In a video clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, by Tucker Carlson's account on October 20, 2023, and since viewed more than 21 million times, Carlson said that Floyd was not murdered by Chauvin.

Carlson said during the clip "...did he [Chauvin] actually murder George Floyd? And the answer is, well, no he didn't murder George Floyd.

"We're not guessing about that. We know it conclusively thanks to a new court case now underway in Hennepin County, Minnesota."

Case files include a deposition from Sweasy in which she mentioned a conversation with the county's medical examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, after he performed Floyd's autopsy.

In the Carlson clip, text attributed to Sweasy read: "I called Dr. Baker early that morning to tell him about the case and to ask him if he would perform the autopsy on Mr Floyd.

"He called me later in the day on that Tuesday and he told me that there were no medical findings that showed any injury to the vital structures of Mr. Floyd's neck.

"There were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation." ...

Sweasy added that Baker said "'This is the kind of case that ends careers.'"

Newsweek does not dispute any of this, but rates the Carlson claim false because the evidence is not new.

As the article explains, it was known at the time of Chauvin's trial that Floyd had a lethal dose of illegal drugs in his body, and that the autopsy showed no injury to the neck or nearby areas.

During Chauvin's trial, Baker told Chauvin's attorney that if Floyd had been found at home in his locked residence with no evidence of trauma, and the only autopsy finding was his fentanyl level "then yes I would certify his death is due to fentanyl toxicity," adding, "the interpretation of drug concentrations is very context-dependent."

And the context of this case was that it was of the kind and ends careers.

I watched the trial. Floyd was already dying of an overdose before the cops arrived. They were trying to save his life. Chauvin's actions could not have killed anyone. It was all political.

Blacks activists had been claiming for years that Blacks were mistreated, but no one could find an example. Floyd was supposedly the example that they were looking for. Most people went along with it, to argue for systemic racism. Saying otherwise would end careers.

The new House Speaker is supposed to be a right-winger, but he recites leftist racial nonsense:

I was outraged. I don’t think anyone can view the video and objectively come to any other conclusion but that it was an act of murder. And I felt that initially, as everyone did and it’s so disturbing. And, you know, the underlying issues beneath that are something that the country is now struggling with. And I think it’s something we have to look at very soberly and with a lot of empathy. And I’m glad to see that’s happening around the country.

... the difference in the experiences between my two 14-year-old sons, Michael being a black American and Jack being white Caucasian. They have different challenges. ... But the reality is and no one can tell me otherwise, my son Michael had a harder time than my son Jack is going to have simply because of the color of his skin. And that’s a reality. It’s an uncomfortable, painful one to acknowledge, but people have to recognize that’s a fact.

No, he is wrong. Either lying or deranged.

I watched the video. It is the video of a man dying of a fentanyl overdose. It is not the video of a murder. If Chauvin wanted to murder Floyd, he would have moved to avoid the video cameras. Floyd was being restrained, but no one has ever died from being restrained in that way. It does not happen to a healthy man.

He says "no one can tell me otherwise" because he is not discussing facts. He cannot give any example of the Black boy being treated worse than the White boy. There is no substance to these comments. He is just saying BLM talking points.

The Conspiracy to End America

Here is yet another ex-Republican Trump-hater plugging a book:

Former Republican strategist raises alarms about GOP in 'The Conspiracy to End America'

PBS NewsHour

Stuart Stevens has spent the majority of his decades-long career getting Republicans elected to political office. But his latest book is a warning to the country about the current state of the GOP and its threat to America’s democracy. Amna Nawas spoke with Stevens about the book titled, "The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy."

He has three complaints: (1) Pres. Trump is the same as Hitler; (2) many Republicans like Trump; and (3) the big-money donors are unable to take the Republican Party from Trump.

This is really deranged on the part of PBS TV and Stevens. They are suffering from a mental illness.

Trump was President for 4 years. We had peace and prosperity. Biden has started wars, tried for a New World Order, prosecuted his political enemies, and inflated the currency. His family has taken bribes. He is much more like Hitler than Trump.

That is not just my opinions. These Trump-haters like Stevens are unable to name any way in which the Biden administration has been better than Trump's. There is no substantive criticism at all.

If Trump really controlled the Republican Party, then he would elect a Speaker of his choice. They would vote to fund the Wall and other Trump priorities.

Democrat politicians and appointments are much more consistent sticking to the ideological demands of the party bosses.

I have watched a lot of these Trump-haters, such as Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and the Lincoln Project. I do not believe that any of them are sincere. If they were, then they could explain how Biden is better than Trump. They do not even try. I think that they are evil and dishonest. They have some horrible agenda that they are too embarrassed to admit.

USA Imported Millions of Arab Moslems

Tobias Langdon writes:

Islam is a kind of gentile Judaism, translating the ethnocentric barbarism and bloodlust of the Torah into more universalist terms. Where Judaism has a chosen people entitled to exploit and prey upon outsiders, Islam has a chosen ideology. In short, Muslims think like Jews and behave like Jews. ...

Muslims are only in the West to commit atrocities because Jews wanted those Muslims here. If Muslims and their Jewish enablers don’t leave the West, more and worse atrocities will follow. The Hamas-fans who flooded onto the streets of Western cities are simply more proof of that simple truth.

The USA and other Western countries have had a very strange policy of importing millions of Moslems. As the article documents, the policy has been largely pushed by Jews who saw it as being in Jewish interests.

Based on the Gaza War, I would think that American Jews would be against Arab Moslems moving to the USA. Jews certainly do not want Gaza Moslems in Israel. But they do.

The explanation appears to be that Jews hate Christianity more than Islam. So much so that they would rather import potential Moslem terrorists, if they undermine American Christianity.

Who do these Jews hate the most? Nick Fuentes! The press calls him "perhaps the nation’s best-known white supremacist". He is not even a white supremacist. That is just silly Jew talk. They hate him because he is a Christian. Meanwhile there are lots of other groups openly supporting Gaza/Hamas killing Israeli civilians, including at our top universities.

The Atlantic magazine has a paywalled article on The Hard Truth About Immigration. It admits that the 1965 Immigration Act was a giant scam that made life worse for most Americans. It is surprising to see the magazine admit this, as it is very Jewish and favoring non-white immigration. We need to reconsider immigration policy. We are letting the wrong people in.