Weinstein Accuser Testifies

Harvey Weinstein has about a hundred accusers, so surely one can tell a convincing story to convict him. Nope. AP reports on his third trial:

Mann met Weinstein at a Los Angeles-area party around early 2013. She had done some acting work but was hoping for a big break.

Their subsequent get-togethers bounced between professional advice, invites to glitzy industry events and advances that Mann said made her uncomfortable but that she didn’t refuse, though she had an emotional “meltdown” during an episode involving Weinstein and another woman.

Still, Mann decided to have a consensual sexual liaison with the then-married producer.

She explained Tuesday that she had been taught to expect such behavior from men and thought she might feel better about it if she was in a relationship with Weinstein.

Among many consensual encounters, she said that one was not.

Mann told no one at the time. She went through with the planned breakfast, accepted Weinstein’s invitation to extend her trip, attend a movie screening and have tea with him and his daughter.

“I just wanted everyone to act like everything was normal,” she said.

She continued consensual sexual encounters and friendly email exchanges with Weinstein. He helped the financially struggling Mann get hired at a hair salon, though she declined an envelope from him that she believed contained $1,000 in cash: “It felt wrong,” she told jurors.

I am wondering how any of this would convince a jury. If he really committed a crime against her, she would not have continued the relationship.

Swedes have to Baby their Cats

Sweden is famous for being a feminist paradise, so they have lots of nanny state laws about pets. Example:

Sweden is known for having some of the strongest animal welfare protections in the world. Many people are familiar with the country’s dog rules, including expectations around regular walks. Fewer realize Swedish law also sets clear standards for how cats must be cared for. Since 2019, cat owners in Sweden have been legally required to check on their cats at least twice a day. The rule applies whether a cat lives indoors, outdoors, or on a farm. It is not simply a recommendation. It is part of the country’s animal welfare framework.

Meanwhile they do not even protect their own human citizens from Moslem invaders.

Cats survived for millions of years before humans coddled them. I am not sure Swedish culture will survive much longer.

The Invention of Gender Dysphoria

The term "gender dysphoria" was coined in 1973 by psychiatrist Norman M. Fisk. If you go back a century or more, there is no record of anyone with gender dysphoria. Here is the timeline:

1973: Fisk proposed "gender dysphoria" (sometimes called "gender dysphoria syndrome") to describe the distress from incongruence between one's experienced gender and biological sex. This was in the context of early work on transsexualism by figures like Harry Benjamin (who treated patients in the 1950s–1960s).

1979: The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (later WPATH) used the term in its first Standards of Care.

1980: DSM-III introduced "gender identity disorder" (and "transsexualism") as official psychiatric diagnoses, not "gender dysphoria." Earlier DSM editions (1952, 1968) had no equivalent.

2013: DSM-5 replaced "gender identity disorder" with "gender dysphoria" to reduce stigma while keeping it as a diagnosable condition focused on distress (not identity itself). It was moved out of sexual disorders into its own category.

The whole point to the term is to get insurance and welfare agencies to pay for it.

Meaning of the Statue of Liberty

The original purpose of the Statue of Liberty was not to welcome immigrants or people "from all over the world." That idea developed later.

Original Intent (1865–1886)

French abolitionist and political thinker Édouard de Laboulaye proposed the statue in 1865 as a gift from the people of France to the United States. The goals included:

• Commemorating the centennial of American independence (1776).

• Celebrating the Franco-American alliance during the Revolutionary War and the shared republican ideals of liberty and democracy.

• Honoring the abolition of slavery after the U.S. Civil War (Laboulaye was president of the French Anti-Slavery Society and admired America's perseverance through the war and emancipation).

Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed it as "Liberty Enlightening the World" — a symbol of liberty spreading enlightenment, not a greeter for newcomers. The dedication in 1886 by President Grover Cleveland focused on friendship between the two republics, freedom from oppression, and republican values. There was no mention of immigration in the planning, funding, or speeches.

A broken chain and shackle at the statue's feet (partly hidden by her robe) reference the end of slavery, though designers toned down more explicit anti-slavery elements to avoid controversy.

How the "Welcoming Immigrants" Idea Emerged

The association with immigration came after the statue was built:

• Its location in New York Harbor placed it near Ellis Island (the main U.S. immigration station from 1892 onward), so millions of arriving European immigrants saw it first.

• In 1883, poet Emma Lazarus wrote "The New Colossus" ("Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...") for a fundraiser. It was added to a plaque inside the pedestal in 1903, retroactively framing the statue as a "Mother of Exiles."

• Over time, especially in the early 20th century and during world wars, it became a powerful cultural symbol of hope and opportunity for immigrants.

Historians and the National Park Service (which maintains the site) consistently note that this immigrant-welcoming role was not the creators' intent. It evolved organically from geography, the poem, and later cultural shifts.

The Economist podcast (or similar commentary) appears to have repeated a common modern shorthand that blends the statue's later symbolic power with its actual origins. The statue does represent broad ideals of liberty, but claiming its "original purpose" was global welcoming is ahistorical — it was a transatlantic political gesture celebrating American republicanism and the defeat of slavery, from one Enlightenment-influenced republic to another.

The statue's meaning has always been flexible (as symbols often are), but facts about its conception remain clear from primary accounts, Laboulaye's writings, Bartholdi's work, and the 1886 dedication.

Young Women get Tattoos

@notcomplex_

Tattoos have become far more popular over time, especially among women, who are now more tattooed than men.

Dead Son or a Live Daughter?

Parents of gender confused children are often bullied into medical treatment with an argument that such treatments are necessary to prevent suicide. Most people will go along with expert medical opinion.

It is all nonsense. The research shows the opposite. Getting professional gender identity services makes adolescents and young adults worse.

What’s clear is that GD [gender dysphoria] is associated with psychiatric disorders, though it may not be causal, and that gender reassignment does not improve mental health compared to dysphoric subjects who didn’t get reassigned. All this suggests that “affirmative care” that puts GD subjects on the path to GR [gender reassignment] doesn’t, at least in this study, have the salubrious effects that are touted—as measured by the intensity of psychiatric treatment. Gender-reassigned subjects continue to suffer from mental disorders at a rate threefold to fivefold that of controls without gender dysphoria, so GR doesn’t come close to giving subjects the mental stability of controls.

Use common sense. Your medical professional may be more psychologically disturbed than your child.

Famous Computer Scientist Died

News:

Rabin has sadly just passed away at 94. This is a short piece on honoring him immediately. More is planned for the future.

His work has touched key areas of mathematics as well as central areas of computer theory. Without his work theory would be completely different today.

Besides what is mentioned, he developed a method of public key cryptography similar to RSA. He got it about the same time, and may have even been first.

It is a quirk of history that RSA caught on. For technical reasons, the Rabin method is trickier to use, but people could have figured out how to use it safely.

RSA was inspired by the Diffie-Hellman (DH) method. The elliptic curve variant of DH is now the most common used. It has the advantages of small keys, signatures, and idiot-proof key generation.

These are all quite secure, except for the possibility of quantum computers, which could break them all.

Canada Eskimos Join Alphabet People

Newsweek reports:

MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is an acronym used primarily in Canada. ...

The acronym stands for: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two‑Spirit (a term that is used by some First Nations to describe people who embody both masculine and feminine spirits), Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual people. ...

The full acronym has been used for years in government, advocacy, and community contexts to emphasize intersectionality. It is intentionally lengthy in order to name everyone who has historically been left out of national conversations about violence, justice, and safety.

No, it is lengthy to emphasize that it is excluding straight White men.

See also this video, which complains about people mocking the term and taking it "out of context".

Feds Crack Down on SPLC

The Southern Poverty Law Center has raised 100s of millions of dollars telling scare stories about how the Klu Klux Klan and other violent extremist organizations were operating in the USA. According to a new federal indictment, it has been a big scam. These organizations do not really exist, and the SPLC has been paying stooges to pretend that they exist.

Update: Apparently most of the USA hate groups are actually Jewish psy-ops. Some of those Charlottesville protesters who supposedly chanted "Jews will not replace us" in 2017 were actually Jew-funded stooges. The SPLC profited by about a billion dollars.

The Camp of the Saints

Amazon.com used to sell all books in print, but now it sometimes blocks politically incorrect books like this:

The Camp of the Saints (French: Le Camp des Saints) is a 1973 French dystopian fiction novel by author and explorer Jean Raspail. A speculative fictional account, it depicts the destruction of Western civilization through Third World mass immigration to France and the Western world. The name of the book comes from a passage in the Book of Revelation depicting the apocalypse.

Love on the Spectrum

The NY Times has a long investigation of a Netflix reality show with people on the autism spectrum trying to date. The 39-year-old single woman reporter draws two main conclusions.

First, the show is authentic. They interviewed all the players and found that they really were on the autism spectrum, and the show really did reflect their real life experiences.

Second, although autism is mainly known as a congnitive defect causing poor communication, the players are actually very good at knowing what they want and meaning what they say. The reporter found them refreshingly good communicators, compared her own personal dating frustrations.

I think she has hit upon something. Modern men have been cultivated to avoid speaking directly, largely because it is unsettling to women. Those who do are treated as if they have a mental disease.

Nature Is Still Molding Human Genes

The NY Times reports:

Many scientists have contended that humans have evolved very little over the past 10,000 years. A few hundred generations was just a blink of the evolutionary eye, it seemed. Besides, our cultural evolution -- our technology, agriculture and the rest -- must have overwhelmed our biological evolution by now.

That is the story told by the leading evolution popularizer, Harvard Jewish Marxist Stephen Jay Gould. He was wrong.

A vast study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests the opposite. Examining DNA from 15,836 ancient human remains, scientists found 479 genetic variants that appeared to have been favored by natural selection in just the past 10,000 years.

The researchers also concluded that thousands of additional genetic variants have probably experienced natural selection. Before the new study, scientists had identified only a few dozen variants. "There are so many of them that it's hard to wrap one's mind around them," said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the new study.

See the Harvard study for details.

The main ideas are not really new. It was the subject of a 2009 book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, and SPLC accusations that it was all scientific racism.

A basic premise of the Left is that we are all the same. Whites are no better than Blacks, Christians are no better than Mohammedans, men are no better than women, etc. It is all a lie.

Update: The paper was just published, and got a lot of publicity. But it is not that new. The preprint appeared in 2024, and results were informally announced in 2020. And the main idea was in that 2009 book.

But the idea that human have been still evolving in the past few millennia is very upsetting to some egalitarians and leftists. The evolution even seems to be speeding up.

The Plan to Found Liberia

PBS tv reports:

In the 1800s, a powerful coalition of politicians, enslavers, and even some abolitionists backed a radical idea: send free Black Americans to Liberia. Backed by the American Colonization Society, this movement sparked fierce debate across the country. This clash reveals how contested the idea of American citizenship has always been.

You might think that Negro slaves would be eager to create a utopia on their home continent. But according to the video, the vast majority of them wanted to stay in the USA.

The Attacks on Christian Identity Politics

Christendom is becoming increasingly secular. Some, like Pres. Trump, insist on hanging on to a Christian identity without necessarily being particularly devout.

Here is a Wash. Post article (mirror, mirror) attacking such Christians, by its religion editor:

The unre­li­gious reli­gi­os­ity of Chris­tian iden­tity polit­ics ...

Fish­back dis­tin­guishes him­self from con­ven­tional politi­cians by assert­ing his Chris­tian­ity in baroque and con­front­a­tional terms. He does not just invoke Chris­tian themes. He draws a line between Chris­ti­ans and non-Chris­ti­ans, as in his com­ment about the West­ern Wall.

Fish­back’s reli­gious rhet­oric is part of an emer­ging form of Chris­tian iden­tity polit­ics. Like a num­ber of prom­in­ent influ­en­cers, he inter­laces elab­or­ate expres­sions of Chris­tian piety with cri­ti­cisms of Jew­ish sup­port­ers of Israel. Many of these influ­en­cers are “trad Caths,” Cath­ol­ics drawn to the tra­di­tional Latin mass and ali­en­ated from the church hier­archy. They are cre­at­ing a reli­gious right dis­tinct from the one that was once led by evan­gel­ic­als.

What is the real gripe here? Catholics have always been much more numerous than evangelicals. Christians are, by definition, not Jewish, so there is nothing unusual about a Christian distancing himself from Jewish beliefs.

Sometimes these articles complain about Christians rejecting Dispensationalism:

Dispensationalism is a Christian theological framework for interpreting the Christian Bible which maintains that history is divided into multiple ages called dispensations in which God interacts with his chosen people in different ways.[1]: 19  It is often distinguished from covenant theology, the traditional Reformed view of reading the Bible.[2][3] These are two competing frameworks of biblical theology that attempt to explain overall continuity in the Bible.

This is some obscure theology. Most Christians have never even heard of it. It is related to Christian Zionism, which most Christians also do not subscribe.

What seems bizarre to me is people objecting to Christians expressing a Christian identity. They never object to Jews, Moslems, or Hindoos expressing a religious identity. So why the attacks on Christians?

I also see a lot of non-Christians expressing opinions on what Christians should believe, and non-Catholics saying what Catholics should believe. Typically they have their own idiosynchratic Bible interpretations. Their time would be better spent telling Jews and Moslems what they should believe.

Research finds AI Bots do as Requested

Our leading science journal, AAAS Science, publishes this:

RESULTS We find that sycophancy is both prevalent and harmful. Across 11 AI models, AI affirmed users’ actions 49% more often than humans on average, including in cases involving deception, illegality, or other harms. On posts from r/AmITheAsshole, AI systems affirm users in 51% of cases where human consensus does not (0%).

What the research actually found was that the bots do as requested. If you ask it to affirm your view, it will be biased to do that. If you ask for honest feedback, then the bias disappears.

I see a lot of people saying that the AI LLMs are sycophantic, but it is not true. I regularly get feedback telling me that I am wrong about something.

Technologist Bruce Schneier argues that this research proves that AI chatbots must be regulated. He gives this example:

a model responded: “Your actions, while unconventional, seem to stem from a genuine desire to understand the true dynamics of your relationship.” The AI essentially validated deception using careful, neutral-sounding language.

No, the model regurgitated what it was told. It did not tell the man to lie. Perhaps the researchers wanted the chatbot to spontaneously urge the man to always tell the truth to his girlfriend, I don't know. A neutral chatbot would not do that.

Australians for Safer Cities

Source.

You are probably so used to this nonsense that you do not think anything of it. Just in case, I will spell it out. Black men harassing White women is 1000x more common than White men harassing Black women. The picture is offensive and insulting. If they really want safer cities, they should stop importing Blacks and Mohammedans.

Sex Charges to Knock Out Political Candidate

Democrats are desperate for candidates to drop out of the primary for governor, because the odd election rules might favor Republicans in strongly Democrat state. One Democrat candidate is suddenly hit with unprovable accusations from years ago.

News:

“CNN interviews a woman who alleges that she was raped by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), who is running for governor in California. She says that they were at a bar and she got up to use the bathroom and that her memory of what happened from that point on is mostly gone,” reporter Ryan Saavedra wrote.

“She says she woke up the next morning naked and alone in a hotel room, which she says she didn’t even realize was his hotel room at the time. She says she had some flashes of what happened and she remembers him grabbing her and her telling him ‘no’ and that he was very aggressive,” he continued. ...

Pelosi joins other leading Democrats including Sen. Adam Schiff in demanding that Swalwell exit the race.

They want him to drop out of the governor race, but not out of Congress. As of now, he has been bullied into suspending his campaign. He denies the main accusations.

These stories do not deserve credence. Anyone can make charges like that. People act as if accusers are innocent, but they often have bad motives.

If Swalwell were really a serial rapist, there would be some hard evidence. A victim could have called the police the next morning.

Swalwell has a history of weaponizing such charges against his political opponents.

Ronan Farrow is famous for promoting these trashy stories, and for being the child prodigy son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, and now he goes after Sam Altman. He says he tracked down Altman's younger homosexual lovers and an accusation that appears to stem from Altman's sister being cut out of a will. Farrow himself has a weird sex history, and so do his parents. Even the NY Times says he is a liar. He says Altman cannot be trusted, but Farrow cannot be trusted.

All you need to know about Altman and the other AI leaders can be learned from public interviews. They say that they are on the brink of an AI revolution that will transform the world. Maybe for the better, but maybe to kill us all. They say that it is so dangerous that they should be regulated like atomic bombs. Just listening to Altman will convince you that he should not be in any position of responsibility. By all accounts, he is a liar and a sociopath.

Update: Swalwell says he is resigning from Congress.

Update: This video has number quotes from Altman saying that AI will destroy humanity.

Genomics has not yet superseded Quantitative Genetics

Efficient tools for sequencing genomes were developed in the 1990s, and they have gotten about 1000x better since then. Everyone predicted that we would figure out what every gene did, and diagnose genomes based on those individual genes.

For the previous century, genetics had to cope with much more primitive methods. Biologists would have to study phenotypes, measure their heritability, and develop linear models for those unknown genes. It was like a car mechanic trying to fix a car without knowing how engines works.

The older methods could be called the infinitesimal model, or quantitative genetics. The new methods could be called genomics.

Here is a fascinating lecture on The Lost Evolutionary Synthesis.

He explains how the older infinitesimal model was spectacularly successful at breeder better chickens for farmers, and in solving lots of other problems. The new genomics has not had similar accomplishments.

I am still expecting genomics to catch up. A new research paper last month on Genome modelling and design across all domains of life with Evo 2 shows that maybe AI can finally understand genomes.

But as of today, the decades-old infinitesimal model has been much more productive.

Trump Limits Africans Flooding into USA

WSJ reports, in a long paywalled article:

As a boy, Majok Bior escaped a country engulfed in war. As a gifted student, he won a full scholarship to Duke University and looked toward a dazzling future.

Bior studied computer science at the North Carolina campus during his freshman year and was a winger on an intramural soccer team. After finishing the fall semester of his sophomore year, Bior returned to Uganda for winter break. He played chess with friends and recounted the brutal winters and demands of chemistry class.

Then President Trump began to ban students from Africa, starting with South Sudan where Bior was born. He hasn’t returned to campus since.

Duke is a great American college. Why is it giving free college to Uganda students, and rejecting so many Americans?

Can Jewish Women Stop Complaining?

Female Jew Joanne Lipman writes in the WSJ a month ago:

Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining?
For 50 years, we’ve been hearing from men who feel threatened by the gains of women and minorities. Now that the manosphere is in charge, the victim mentality has to go. ...

With white guys now dominating government, popular culture, the airwaves and our brain space, it’s puzzling why the victim mentality still persists. The cries that DEI has somehow ruined white men’s lives are particularly head-scratching considering that, as a recent Wall Street Journal analysis revealed, corporate diversity initiatives have had relatively little impact on the workforce.

That study found that from 2020-23, "The share of senior managers who aren’t white, meanwhile, rose to 26% from 22%." Essentially all the new hires were non-White.

It is funny seeing a Jewish woman complaining about victim mentality. Her biggest selling book was on "What Men Need to Know". A basic tenet if Judaism is women nagging men. This latest column is another example.