Jefferson did not Father Kids with a Slave

A good new video explains:

"I really thought that Thomas Jefferson having children with Sally Hemings was a settled fact. I was wrong." –Ken

That's right, it is not a settled fact, and probably wrong.

Just today, a NY Times podcast said:

In the late '90s, we get a truly explosive book about Sally Hemings, one of Jefferson's slaves, by the historian Annette Gordon-Reed, and elevates all these accounts that have been lost that Jefferson in fact fathered children with Hemings. And then a year later, there's even DNA testing to prove that she's completely right.

This, uh, 200-year-old sex scandal returned to the headlines last week with news of scientific proof now.— that has confirmed Jefferson's sexual liaison with a woman named Sally Hemings. ...

Jefferson is being depicted variously as a rapist, a hypocrite, and a dirty old man.

No, this is not true. You can read the details on Wikipedia, or follow a court case that might resolve it. In short, DNA shows that some descendants of Hemings are also descendant from someone in Jefferson's family, but there is good reason to think it was a brother.

Celebrate the Fourth, not Slavery

Josh Blackman writes:

I recently took my young children to the public library for an early celebration of America's 250th Birthday. Perhaps naively, I expected a patriotic gathering that would help my kids feel proud of America. No such luck. During story time, the librarian could have selected any children's book about American history, independence, or what made America exceptional. Instead, she chose a book that spent every page talking about immigrants coming to America. The second page depicted Africans in chains being transported against their will on boats to the United States. Then every subsequent page repeated that maxim that people were allowed to come to America without regard to their race, gender, or religion. One page showed political refugees from the war-torn Middle East. Another page showed migrant workers from Mexico. And so on. I doubt any of the young children had the slightest clue what the book was trying to convey. But the kindly librarian thought this book was not only appropriate for an America 250 celebration but was important for toddlers to learn from.

Libraries today often have flags and signs promoting homosexuality, transgenderism, illegal migrants, and White hatred.

Immigrants were never more than 15% of the USA population, until recently. Slavery was not something that affected most people.

I am not against telling about slavery in history books, but they should get the story in perspective, and tell the truth. Those slave were enslaved in Africa by African, and the USA Constitution abolished the slave trade in 1808. Most slaves were better off in the USA, and very few went back to Africa when they were freed.

Most Charity is Wasted

People keep complaining that a small part of the fortunes of Elon Musk and other billionaires could solve a lot of human problems. I doubt it.

News:

MacKenzie Scott has become one of the most active philanthropists of our time. After all, she's given away more than $26 billion during the past few years to thousands of organizations through her foundation Yield Giving.

While many of her recipients had never received a donation of that size and many have called them life-changing gifts, not everyone sees her work in the same way. Take Elon Musk, who recently became the world's first trillionaire, who thinks Scott's giving is actually making the world "worse off." ...

Melinda French Gates has also been openly frustrated with her fellow billionaire class, saying those who previously signed the Giving Pledge—a promise for the ultrawealthy to give away the majority of their wealth—could be doing more.

So we have an experiments. Large portions of the fortunes of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos went to their wives in divorce settlements, and then given to charity.

How are we better off? What problems have been solved?

The California billionaire tax has now qualified for the ballot, and the governor is running for President on a promise for a nationwide billionaire tax. An economist says confiscating the wealth will not enrich other Americans.

Why Today's Ads Feature Non-Whites

I always assumed that ads are filled with non-whites in order to appeal to non-white customers, or to pacify woke leftists.

Maybe not. A 2021 study claimed: Neuroscience shows value of proactively diverse casting.

That is, the non-white casting increases the appeal to Whites, without really really appealing to non-whites. So ads feature Blacks in order to sell to Whites, not Blacks.

I am not sure I believe this, and the study is paywalled, so I don't know if it has any validity. But it does not matter what I believe. If the advertisers believe it, then ads will be full of Blacks.

I would think that if White man sees an ad featuring Blacks, the first reaction is that he is not in the target market for the product, and ignore the ad. Or if the ad has a strong woke left theme, then the viewer will think that the product is for woke leftists.

Blaming Christianity for the Fall of Rome

Someone on Twitter blamed Christianity for the fall of the Roman Empire, and Elon Musk commented that Gibbon's famous book said so.

On Twitter, Grok often does fact checks, and posted:

@grok, If Christianity was a key driver, as supposed by Gibbon, why didn’t we see the same decline of civilization in the East? Why do modern historians criticise Gibbon’s take?

Gibbon claimed Christianity sapped Roman civic virtue and military spirit in the West. The Christian Eastern Empire (Byzantium) avoided that fate and endured another ~1,000 years, aided by stronger administration, Constantinople’s walls, and different geography/pressures—showing other factors mattered more for the West’s 476 collapse.

Modern historians fault Gibbon’s heavy emphasis on religion as Enlightenment bias. They see multifaceted causes (invasions, economic woes, plagues, overextension) and view Late Antiquity as gradual transformation with continuities, not religion-driven catastrophe.

The fall of Rome led to some setbacks, but Europe recovered to be far better than ever long before the Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The surprising thing is that the Roman Empire lasted as long as it did.

Update: New Lex Fridman podcast on Roman Empire.

Atheists believe in Determinism

I try to understand intellectuals who deny free will.

They argue that all of everyone's choices are determined by laws of nature, and yet they often talk about choices they make, and they try to persuade others to make better choices.

Here is a leftist-atheist-evolutionist in his latest of many rants against free will:

There need be no “free will” to have morality, for even though we lack free will, we are still malleable beings and can alter our behavior depending on society’s “moral code” and the praise and punishment that go with it.

How can we alter our behavior if we have no free will? What is the use of praise or punishment, if no one else has free will either?

Since Egnor is a neuroscientist, the audience probably buys this the most. Egnor cites two bits of evidence here. First, as he says, during operations that involve stimulating parts of the brain, he says, “Patients asked to raise their arms at some point could tell whether they raised arm voluntarily or due to electrical stimulation.” And they could tell the difference. But that is not “free will”, ...

There is a difference between raising your arm voluntarily, out of your own free will, and being forced to raise it because a brain surgeon triggered a neuron.

He complains that Egnor ignores a 2013 study that concludes:

Neuroscience cannot straightforwardly accommodate a concept of “conscious free will”, independent of brain activity [42].

I accept that free will involves brain activity. I do not accept that there is any law of nature prohibiting free will.

They cite experiments by Libet that supposedly showed that voluntary decisions are preceded by brain activity. This means that a decision takes more than a millisecond, as the brain takes some time to make it. It has nothing to do with free will.

when you push a button at a time your brain determines, and think you did it of your own “free will.” The problem with that, and the reason Libet and his successors have done such provocative studies, is that brain signals (fMRI, etc.) say you’re about to push a button before you become conscious of making that decision.

So your brain prepares to push the button before it pushes. It baffles me that anyone thinks this refutes free will.

Responses are posted here and here.

I have never said that people are or should be deemed “morally responsible” for their good and bad acts. That would assume the ability to freely choose to be moral or immoral, but I am a determinist who rejects that kind of “choice.” What I have said, and which anybody who reads what I’ve written will know, is that you should be held responsible for what you do, but not morally responsible.  That is, you are responsible if you are the person who performed the act. That, to anyone with two neurons to rub together, is absolutely compatible with determinism.

So no one can make any moral choices. Curiously, he goes into a big rant against another site for plagiarism. Web content is mostly generated by robots today, and of course the robots are deterministic plagiarizers.

If no one has any free will, then all the humans posting online are just deterministic automatons who are not much different from the robot plagiarizers that he complains about. Including himself.

He concludes, to rousing applause, that “Free will is God’s fingerprint in us.”

Here we see that religion, tricked out in the trappings of science, has led Egnor to reject determinism and materialism because they don’t involve his Catholic God.

I wonder if that is the real issue. Catholics and most other Christians believe in free will, and Atheists believe in determinism. Rejecting free will is a way of expressing rejection of Christianity. The other prominent anti-free-will scholars are all strident Atheists. They like to present themselves and logical, scientific, and enlightened, but what they say does not make any sense, is not grounded in science, and is terrible advice on how to live.

Citizen Vigilante

The new movie, Citizen Vigilante, starring Armie Hammer in the title role, has been released on Twitter and banned in Germany.

Audiences like it, and critics hate it. Watch it now, as it might be gone tomorrow.

Based on the controversy, I was expecting it to be an anti-migrant movie. Actually it was more of a Batman movie. The protagonist is an American in Germany, with inherited wealth, and his own personal issues.

The title is odd, as he is a vigilante, but not a citizen in Europe where he goes on his rampage.

It does get a little political at the end, where he blames Islamists and woke leftists. Those are two very different groups.

Update: The movie is set in some European country, but not Germany. The protagonist is a psychopath, with unclear motivations. Some of the scenes appear pointless.

It is a little like the Charles Bronson 1972 movie Death Wish. A lot of violence in pursuit of revenge on criminals and enablers.

So not really a great movie. I thought it was interesting because it directly appealed to citizens to do something about migrant criminals terrorizing people, while the authorities do nothing. For that, it is anti-woke.

Update: Writer-director Uwe Boll is interviewed about the movie. He says it was filmed in Croatia, with the migrants being Moroccan, Hungarian, and a Jew.

How the NY Times Hates Dads

I found this comment on how the NY Times celebrated Fathers Day:

The New York Times Unbelievable Attack on Fatherhood
Alex Berenson exposes a shocking trend in mainstream media: the cultural elite's apparent contempt for traditional fatherhood and masculinity. Looking closely at recent New York Times opinion pieces on being a dad, the authors included three women, a trans man [woman who sometimes dresses as a man], and two childless men, but not a single actual father.

The trans article was really strange. There was also a podcast interview of a man who wrote a book about his deceased father, and mostly complained that he had extramarital affairs.

AI LLM Story beats Humans for Prize

Harper's Bazaar magazine announces:

Read the winning entry of the 2026 Harper's Bazaar Short Story Competition

The story chosen by our all-star judging panel is published here

It was supposed to be a human competition, with no AI allowed.

An AI LLM validity tester says that it is 100% AI. I cannot tell. Read it yourself.

Wikipedia Bans its Founder

The NY Post reports:

Left-leaning website Wikipedia has taken the drastic action of permanently blocking one of its founders from editing pages — after he had campaigned to make it more balanced and fair.

Last month, Larry Sanger launched WikiProject Intellectual Diversity (WID), a group designed to help reinforce the online encyclopedia’s “original, firm commitment to intellectual diversity,” by emphasizing neutrality and transparency.

However, Sanger — who coined the name “Wikipedia,” drafted the site’s foundational set of rules and guidelines, and launched the site alongside Jimmy Wales in 2001 — is now indefinitely blocked from editing, the most drastic action the site can take against an editor.

It is bizarre that a cabal of anonymous Wikipedia editors would ban someone for having a Wikipedia discussion outside Wikipedia.

I have posted here about Wikipedia controversies occasionally, and I did not realize that I could be accused of the sin of canvassing:

To justify the ban against Sanger, editors categorized Sangers’ recent efforts — most notably his intellectual diversity project — as “canvassing.” Wikipedia policy describes canvassing as alerting other editors on the site about editorial activity “with the intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way.”

Keir Starmer Resigns

News: U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer Resigns.

Britain is getting its 7th prime minister in 10 years.

Ten years ago, Britain voted for Brexit in order to get their country back. They got the opposite. Those 7 prime ministers flood the country with Third World migrants.

The Slave Trade was Banned in 1808

In light of confusion about Juneteenth, I wondered when slavery was really abolished.

The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves (also called the Slave Importation Act) was passed by Congress on March 2, 1807, and signed by President Thomas Jefferson.

Effective date: It took effect on January 1, 1808 — the earliest date allowed by the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 9, which barred Congress from prohibiting the "Migration or Importation" of persons before 1808).

Britain passed its own Slave Trade Act in 1807 as well.

It still took decades of dispute and a Civil War to decide what to do with the slaves. And a few slaves were smuggled in, after the ban.

Canada is Burning Christian Churches

This story is a couple of years old, but the problem continues:

At least 33 Canadian churches have burned to the ground since May 2021. So far, 24 are confirmed arsons

CBC investigation finds steep rise in church fires since reports of potential graves at residential schools ...

"I don't think white people came here and burned this down."

More on Wikipedia.

The arson was triggered by a story about gravesites that turned out to be a hoax.

Why We have the Ultra-Rich

I asked: Is there a natural scaling law that governs how many millionaires and billionaires will be in a market economy?

Yes, there is a well-established "natural" scaling law—rooted in the Pareto distribution (a power-law distribution)—that describes the number of millionaires, billionaires, and ultra-wealthy individuals in market economies.

This isn't a rigid deterministic rule but an emergent statistical pattern observed across many economies and historical periods. It arises from multiplicative processes in wealth accumulation (e.g., returns on capital, networks, innovation, and "rich-get-richer" dynamics), where small advantages compound over time. See Wikipedia.

Key Concepts

• Pareto Distribution Basics: Vilfredo Pareto observed in the early 20th century that wealth (and income at the top) often follows a power-law tail: the probability of someone having wealth w or more is roughly proportional to w^{-α}, where α (the Pareto index) is typically around 1.5–3 for wealth (often ~2–2.5 in modern data). This creates a "fat tail"—extreme concentrations are more common than in a normal (Gaussian) distribution.
  • For example, it leads to approximations like the 80/20 rule (top 20% hold ~80% of wealth), but the top is even more skewed.
• Implications for Counts of Millionaires/Billionaires:
  • The number of people above a high wealth threshold scales predictably with the total population and overall wealth in the economy.
  • In a growing market economy with multiplicative returns (investments, businesses scaling), the tail thickens or thins based on factors like economic growth, returns on capital (r) vs. overall growth (g), taxes, and institutions. Models show r > g (Piketty-style) naturally produces fatter Pareto tails.
  • Empirical fits: Studies of Forbes billionaires and national wealth data show power-law behavior in the upper tail. The number of billionaires can be reasonably extrapolated from the broader wealth distribution's Pareto parameters.

Real-World Observations

• Millionaires: Global numbers (tens of millions) grow with rising GDP, asset prices (stocks, real estate), and middle-to-upper class expansion. The U.S. has a large share due to its large, dynamic economy. Projections often tie this to economic growth rates.
• Billionaires: Much rarer (thousands globally). Their count follows the power-law extrapolation from the top 1% or 0.1% wealth distribution. Cross-country data shows a correlation between overall inequality (Pareto exponent) and billionaire density.
• Stability and Variation: The exponent α isn't fixed—it responds to policy and conditions (e.g., progressive taxes or wars can "thin" the tail by reducing α's effect; tech booms or low interest rates can fatten it). But the power-law form persists across market economies.

This pattern appears in firm sizes, city populations, and other complex systems with preferential attachment or multiplicative noise—common in free-market settings where success breeds further success (e.g., via capital compounding, talent clustering, or winner-take-most markets).

Caveats

• It's a statistical regularity, not a law of nature like gravity. Institutions, culture, technology, and policy influence the exact parameters (e.g., more entrepreneurship might increase the number at the top without changing the shape much).
• Data debates exist: Pure Pareto fits the extreme tail well but may blend with log-normal in the upper-middle; some studies question perfect fits for Forbes lists.
• Normative angle: This doesn't prescribe what should happen—debates rage over whether extreme concentrations are efficient (innovation incentives) or problematic (rent-seeking, instability). But the scaling pattern itself is a robust descriptive feature of market economies.

In short, market economies naturally generate power-law wealth distributions, which predictably determine how many cross millionaire or billionaire thresholds as the economy scales. This has been modeled and observed for over a century. For deeper dives, look into works by Pareto, Piketty/Jones on top wealth dynamics, or empirical power-law studies of billionaire data.

Happy Juneteenth Day

On Twitter, there are still endless complaints about Karmelo Anthony going to prison for murdering a White boy.

Here is an example of blaming the victim:

A Howard University professor tore into the victim-impact statement delivered by the father of slain Texas teen Austin Metcalf, arguing that the teen’s death “did not begin with the knife” wielded by Karmelo Anthony but instead that his father’s parenting style was to be blamed as well.

Dr. Stacey Patton, a professor at Howard University’s School of Communications, penned an opinion piece titled “Dear Jeff Metcalf: Your Son Is Dead Because You Failed to Teach Him That Black Boys Have Boundaries” to Substack on Wednesday on Substack, where she insinuated Anthony was acting out of self-defense.

“YOU failed to teach your boy that Black children have boundaries,” Patton wrote. “YOU failed teach humility, restraint, or the sacred fact that another person’s body is not your jurisdiction. YOU failed to teach him that another child’s space is not a challenge to be conquered. YOU failed to teach him that “community” does not mean white boys get to decide who belongs and who does not.”

No, Austin Metcalfe and his father did nothing wrong.

Here is a response:

After 7 decades of "civil rights" activism, we have a huge black population that believes murder ought to be legal if against a white person.

Black students ought to pretend to be white on college applications, since we are said to live in a "white supremacist" society. Strangely, they do not.

That's because the truth is this: white people, in the 7 decades since the civil rights movement, crippled their own children with preferential policies that favored much less qualified black applicants in schooling and employment. ...

We can hope that the Karmelo Anthony case accelerates the coming of the day when whites say: we have done everything humanly possible for you, and received only hatred and ingratitude in return. You are on your own now.

It continues to amaze me that Blacks picks issues like this to complaint about. It is as if they want to brag about killing Whites.

Update: The court released the trial evidence. Anthony admits to the stabbing. The only excuse he gives is: "He put his hands on me." He does not claim that he was threatened with bodily injury, or anything like that.

California now Certifies LGBT Businesses

California now requires utility companies to buy products and services from women, minority, and LGBT companies:

This scheme raises an obvious question: How does a business qualify as officially gay? Paperwork. Supplier Clearinghouse, a group that certifies firms for the CPUC program, features a list of qualifications linked on its website. Applicants can secure certification by providing a letter from an “LGBT organization” attesting to their sexual preferences; proof that a newspaper identified them as “LGBT”; or three letters from “personal contacts” written “on company letterhead” attesting to their homosexual orientation. Corporate officials who “falsely represent” their business as gay face up to a year in county jail.

It is hard to see how an LGBT company would be certified, or how any certification would be proven wrong.

Why Google Lagged in Deploying AI LLM

The AI companies lie to us all the time,

[10:46] [Bloomberg tv] You raise I think a really interesting point. I mean, was there any hesitation anywhere at Google to say, "We're doing pretty well in search. Why do we need to disrupt ourselves on this?" It's a sort of a form of innovators dilemma. Was there any sense of, you know what, we're doing pretty well, why rock the boat?

[Nick Fox, Google’s Senior Vice President of Knowledge and Information] Never. [music] Because because we've seen it before and we understand that if you stand still, if if you don't innovate for users, you'll become irrelevant. And and that's that's [music] so clear. We know that. We know that time and time again. And so we we see a new technology come along, we jump on it. [music] We invent the new technologies in most cases. But we see it, we jump on it and [music] and we know that if we innovate for users, it will be it will be expansionary.

No, this is false. About ten years ago, Google management was presented with the possibility that a Google Search question could be just answered directly instead of giving the user a list of links. About five years ago, OpenAI and Microsoft starting answering user queries directly. Google refused to do it, because it threatened the Google advertising model.

Google only put AI LLM answers into Search after ChatGPT and Bing were doing it for millions of users, and Google was getting left behind.

Some people think AI is an invention of the last several years. But it was in 2015 that Elon Musk cofounded OpenAI, based on a concern that Google might already have an insurmountable lead in AI technology that will dominate the future. Yes, Google did have a big lead, and still has some of the best technology. It was refusing to give AI Search answers, as a business decision to protect its advertising revenue.

The Stupid Dislosure Day Plot

Another blockbuster movie I will skip is Disclosure Day.

I do not expect space alien movies to be realistic, but this is too silly. The whole movie is about how space aliens secretly invade Earth, subjugate some humans, and announce there presence by having a couple carry out a plot to show some video clips on a tv weather broadcast.

None of it makes any sense. The aliens could just show themselves, or some of their advanced technology. No one watches tv, and no one would believe some pirated video clips.

That's it. The 145 minutes ends with the disclosure, and a suggestion that the aliens might have a message for us. I guess the message itself was saved for a sequel, as it is not disclosed.

This is not really a spoiler, as it is all revealed in the trailer, which goes further and has Director Steven Spielberg saying:

How will disclosure change us? I believe for the better. It will remind us of our capacity for empathy.

And that there is something bigger out there. Than just ourselves.

But the movie ends with the disclosure of the space aliens, so we do not find out how the disclosure changes humans.

Spielberg is promoting this movie as if there really is a space alien coverup. He says:

The witnesses have been coming forward ever since Roswell.

He also acts as if it is a good thing to have human puppets who are mind-controlled by space aliens.

He said one of his favorite movies was The Day the Earth Stood Still, a 1951 movie where a space alien flying saucer makes a dramatic and forceful appearance, and enslaves humans to be under robot domination, so that we will live in peace. Spielberg obviously thinks that would be a good outcome.

I realize that this Spielberg movie is just entertainment, but it is being sold as a documentary, and as subjugation by aliens being a good thing.

I question the sanity of people who believe this stuff. Based on what science we know, I think that other-world intelligent life in our galaxy is unlikely. If there is such life, the idea that they have been secretly visiting us in a few places like Roswell is absurd. And the abduction stories are absurd.

And of course the idea that space aliens will use telepathy to teach humans to have more empathy is crazy absurd.

How a Vatican II Statement Favored the Jews

The Roman Catholic Church has always taught that it is the one true church, and invited everyone to join. In particular, they believe that they are better than other religions.

Other religions also believe themselves to be better.

A shift occurred in the 1960s when this teaching was considered bigoted, or anti-semitic, or insufficiently tolerant. A church official even said:

[37:37] The Christian churches no longer wanted to convert the Jews. While they may not be sure of the theological grounds that dispensed them from that mission, the churches have become aware that asking Jews to become Christian is a spiritual way of blotting out their existence and thus only reinforces the effects of the Holocaust.

This podcast goes into detail on how this spokesman was actually a gay Jew, Gregory Baum, who had infiltrated the Church. Somehow he got Vatican II to issue a statement favorable to the Jews.

Occasionally I hear of Jews making demands on the Catholic Church, as if the Pope's job is to get the Jews a free pass into Heaven.

Elon Musk's Ambitious Project

I go on Twitter and I find:

A lot of Blacks complaining about Karmelo Anthony being convicted for murder. They say a Black jury would have acquitted him. They mention Whites who got acquitted or lesser sentences. They complain that the victim's dad used the word "watermelon", as if that justifies murder. They demand reparations for slavery centuries ago.

A lot of Democrats want to tax Elon Musk, and give his money to some welfare program. They say no one should be allowed to get billions of dollars.

The curious thing about Musk is that he is raising money to do what the consensus says cannot be done. And he has a track record of doing the impossible.

If Musk were not so rich, no one would be trying to put data centers in space. It would not happen for another century.

Musk's crime is that he has sold investors on the most ambitious, risky, and potentially rewarding plan ever carried out. I do not believe he can do it. But is it bad that he is trying? No, it is tremendously exciting. It is capitalism at its best.

It is hard for me to understand the people who want to take away his rockets, and use the money to give to the poor. We would still be living in grass huts if civilization never tried to advance.