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The conservative Law and Justice ruling party in Poland holds a now rare confluence of positions: pro-European Union and pro-European. It feels that the European Union should operate in the interests of Europeans, that European Values imply that Poles should be allowed to work in London, but not that Poland should be forced to take in massive numbers of non-Europeans.

Of course, as we all know, what European Values now means is that Europe should be flooded with non-Europeans.

How did Poland end up not understanding the indisputable truth that the highest European Value is Europhobia?

One man, Simon Mol, might have contributed significantly to the 2017 Polish consensus that being pro-European means being pro-Europeans.

Hakon Rotmwrt tweets:

Screenshot 2017-01-04 17.17.23

It’s quite a story in Wikipedia, which I’ll rearrange to avoid premature spoilerization:

Simon Mol

Simon Mol (6 November 1973 in Buea, Cameroon – 10 October 2008) was the pen name of Simon Moleke Njie, a Cameroon-born journalist, writer and anti-racist political activist. In 1999 he sought political asylum in Poland; it was granted in 2000, and he moved to Warsaw, where he became a well-known anti-racist campaigner.

Mol was born into an English-speaking family in Cameroon. His autobiography states that he worked as a journalist; was persecuted and jailed for his writing; sought political asylum in several African countries; and was granted asylum in Ghana, where he was persecuted again. …

In June 1999 he arrived in Poland as a member of the Ghanaian PEN Club delegation to a PEN annual congress in Warsaw. Immediately, Njie applied for asylum, which was granted in September 2000.

In Poland Simon Mol wrote poems, founded a small theatre, and engaged in political campaigns for the rights of mostly African and Chechen refugees, anti-racism, anti-fascism and environmental protection. …

His activities brought attention to presumed racial discrimination in Poland, with him filing reports to Amnesty International about the alleged institutional racism.

He was a football player in the Mazur Karczew football team. One of the matches that he organized himself for his all-Black team was against Polonia Warszawa, according to the bulletin of the Polish Humanitarian Organisation.

He later used his sports team for political campaigns.

He became an advisor with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a journalist of The Warsaw Voice, the secretary general of Association of Refugees in the Republic of Poland, the chief editor of “The Voice of the Refugee” (“Głos Uchodźców”)

In 2005 he organized a conference with Black ambassadors in Poland to protest the claims in an article in Wiedza i Życie by Adam Leszczyński about AIDS problems in Africa, which quoted research stating that a majority of African women were unable to persuade their HIV positive husbands to wear condoms, and so later got caught HIV themselves. Mol accused Leszczyński of prejudice because of this publication.

As a cultural representative of the international anti-racist sports campaigns organized by UEFA, he was sent to conferences in Italy and the UK.

In 2003, he received the award “Antifascist of the Year” given by the Nigdy Więcej (“Never Again”) anti-rasism association.

In 2004, on behalf of the President of Poland, he was nominated for the Sergio Vieira de Mello Prize, alongside the ex-PM Tadeusz Mazowiecki and other Polish luminaries, for “rebuilding peace in post-conflict communities”, under the patronage of the High Commissioner of the United Nations for Refugees, among other institutions.

Honorary member of the British International Pen Club Centre.

In 2006 Mol received the prestigious award “Oxfam Novib/PEN Award for Freedom of Expression”.

In February 2006, further to his partner’s request for him to take an HIV test, Mol declined and published a post on his blog explaining why not:

Character assassination isn’t a new phenomenon. However, it appears here the game respects no rules. It wouldn’t be superfluous to state that there is an ingrained, harsh and disturbing dislike for Africans here. The accusation of being HIV positive is the latest weapon that as an African your enemy can raise against you. This ideologically inspired weapon, is strengthened by the day with disturbing literature about Africa from supposed-experts on Africa, some of whom openly boast of traveling across Africa in two weeks and return home to write volumes. What some of these hastily compiled volumes have succeeded in breeding, is a social and psychological conviction that every African walking the street here is supposedly HIV positive, and woe betide anyone who dares to unravel the myth being put in place.

On the 3rd of January 2007 Mol was taken into custody by the Polish police and charged with infecting his sexual partners with HIV.

In Poland, Mol was accused of knowingly spreading the HIV virus and was charged in the cases of eleven women and remanded in custody.

After his arrest, Mol stated he had no knowledge of being an HIV carrier and accused the police of racism.

According to the Rzeczpospolita newspaper, he was diagnosed with HIV back in 1999 while living in a refugee shelter, but Polish law does not force an HIV carrier to reveal his or her disease status.

According to the police inspector who was investigating his case, a witness stated that Mol refused to wear condoms during sex. An anonymous witness in one case said that he accused a girl who demanded he should wear them that she was racist because as he was Black she thought he must be infected with HIV. After sexual intercourse he used to say to his female partners that his sperm was sacred.

In an unusual move, his photo with an epidemiological warning, was ordered to be publicly displayed by the then Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro. MediaWatch, a body that monitors alleged racism, quickly denounced this decision, asserting that it was a breach of ethics with racist implications, as the picture had been published before any court verdict. They saw it as evidence of institutional racism in Poland, also calling for international condemnation.

South African Press Association (SAPA) and Agence France Presse in their article described him as “a darling of Poland’s liberal press” due to his political campaigns Thus some of his victims were reportedly intimidated and threatened and Polish police delayed his arrest for long because of his political connections, thus allowing him to infect new victims.

On 6 March 2007 newspaper Rzeczpospolita published an article on Simon Mol (Na tropie oszusta Simona Mola by Bertold Kittel and Maja Narbutt in co-operation with Anna Machowska from TVN), stating that his biography was fabricated. An editor of the Cameroonian English language weekly The Sketch denied that Njie worked there; his mother said he was employed at a refinery; didn’t write about government corruption in Cameroon; and was not jailed in 1996. A representative of Ghanaian journalists said that while in Ghana Njie published newspaper articles about football and was never arrested in that country.

Mol was put on trial in July 2008, but the trial was suspended when Mol’s health deteriorated. Due to this and previous procedural delays, at this point the case on behalf of his victims was taken over by the then current minister of Education and Deputy PM Roman Giertych, who demanded that the case be requalified as intentional murder and demanded life sentence for Mol, thus increasing the profile of the case.

After police published Mol’s photo and an alert before the start of court proceedings, Warsaw HIV testing centers were “invaded by young women”. A few said that they knew Mol. Some of the HIV tests have been positive. According to the police inspector who had been monitoring the tests and the case: “Some women very quickly started to suffer drug-resistant tonsillitis and fungal infections. They looked wasted, some lost as many as 15 kilograms and were deeply traumatized, impeding us taking the witness statements. 18 additional likely victims have been identified thereby”. Genetic tests of the virus from the infectees and Simon proved that it was specific to Cameroon. …

… However, Mol’s trial was suspended due to his severe illness. He died from HIV-related complications on 10 October 2008. …

Despite concerns voiced by UNHCR in April 2007 the plans for HIV testing of asylum seekers were fully introduced in Poland shortly after Mol’s well-publicised trial.

For more on the Simon Mol story, see Virtuous Cycle and Irish Savant.

 

From the New York Times:

Screenshot 2017-01-04 16.26.50

From the same New York Times:

Screenshot 2017-01-04 16.22.39

This is of course completely different from “American Conspiracy Theories Blame Russia for Every Crisis.”

 

From CBS News in Milwaukee:

Four Arrested in Chicago after Man Duct-Taped and Tortured on Facebook Live
Posted: Jan 04, 2017 3:28 PM PST

By Christie Green

(CBS CHICAGO) — Four people are in custody in Chicago after a live-streamed video was released of a duct-taped man allegedly being tortured on Chicago’s West Side.

In the video, the victim’s clothes were cut, he was peppered with cigarette ashes, and then his hair cut with a knife until his scalp bled.

Several people can be seen laughing and eating as the attack is going on. … The victim, who has special needs, was a high-risk missing person from northwest suburban Crystal Lake. …

From Fox 32 in Chicago:

Chicago Police: 4 in custody after man tied up, tortured on Facebook Live

POSTED:JAN 04 2017 04:58PM CST

FOX 32 NEWS – Investigators are looking into a Facebook Live video showing a group of people holding a young man hostage.

Chicago police told FOX 32 that four people are currently in custody.

Chicago police were made aware of this video Tuesday afternoon. A young African American woman streamed the video live on Facebook showing at least four people holding a young white man hostage.

The victim is repeatedly kicked and hit, his scalp is cut, all while he is tied up with his mouth taped shut. The suspects on the video can be heard yelling, “F*** Donald Trump! F*** white people!” …

FOX 32 was told the young man is now at a hospital being treated for his injuries.

Keep in mind that this could be a hoax or performance art or whatever.

Here’s the full video (NSFW).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfzvrCwjfLE

Or maybe here:

Conservative Treehouse and Live Leak are likely to have the video if it stops showing up here.

MisterLomez says:

weird that the anti-trump hate crimes are always caught on tape, and the pro-trump hate crimes never are.

must be a coincidence.

 
• Tags: Projection 

On Twitter, Chef Boyhowdy asks:

Wouldn’t tropical, depopulating Puerto Rico make a great “refuge”?

But

During the Obama Era, 2009-2015, Puerto Rico has taken in ten (10) refugees.

If you stop to think about it from an Electing a New People point of view, however, this all makes sense to Democratic party strategists.

Sure, refugees and their children who become citizens of Puerto Rico get to vote in Puerto Rican gubernatorial elections and they get to vote in Democratic and Republican presidential primaries. But they don’t get to vote in Presidential general elections or Congressional elections, so they are worthless at tipping the balance of power in Washington, which is what really matters.

So, let’s continue sending those tropical refugees to risk frostbite in northern states that matter electorally.

 

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

Choose Your Words Wisely
by Steve Sailer
January 04, 2017

A paradox of the current nationalist rebellion is how worldwide it is. Three years ago, I pointed out in Takimag in a column entitled “Nationalism Is a Blast”:

In 2014, the global winds are blowing in favor of conservative nationalism.

One reason it’s happening over much of the planet is because the various establishment elites have become so homogenous in their ideology, unconsciously egging each other on into more extremism. For example, after the normally cautious Angela Merkel made her historic refugee blunder in 2015, Hillary Clinton repeatedly endorsed Merkel’s foolhardiness, even as the German leader herself came to regret her imprudence.

But the corporate press has been no more aware of its own drift toward anti-border fanaticism than a fish notices it’s wet. Thus, the American establishment’s increasingly comic conspiracy theory blaming its political failings on a nefarious Kremlin plot. After all, what else could explain why voters did not respond appropriately to the media’s furious instructions to elect Hillary besides Muscovite mind-control rays?

A sensible exception has been Fareed Zakaria, who pointed out last month:

… One way to test this theory is to note that countries without large-scale immigration, such as Japan, have not seen the same rise of right-wing populism.

That raises the question of why Japan’s ruling class didn’t feel the necessity of going down the same mass-immigration path as did so many other advanced countries: Why is Japan such an exception?

Read the whole thing there.

 

For most of the two Obama administrations, the corporate press kept talking about the record setting number of deportations, but that was largely due to a methodology change of starting to count border crossers caught near the border as deportees.

The dog that wasn’t barking was workplace raids. After the Postville raid of 2008, you just didn’t hear much at all about the government trying to round up illegal aliens at obvious mass scale employers.

Now the New York Times is kinda sorta admitting they were lying to us with that “Deporter-in-Chief” talk:

Raids of Illegal Immigrants Bring Harsh Memories, and Strong Fears
By AMY CHOZICK JAN. 2, 2017

The 2007 raid was one of the hundreds of coordinated federal sweeps targeting illegal immigrant workers carried out during President George W. Bush’s second term. The headline-grabbing roundups of illegal workers slowed under the Obama administration, which has deported a record 2.5 million immigrants since 2009, largely by focusing on recent border crossers, employers who hired illegal workers and immigrants with criminal convictions.

But as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office and promises to swiftly deport two million to three million undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, bipartisan experts say they expect a return of the raids that rounded up thousands of workers at carwashes, meatpacking plants, fruit suppliers and their homes during the Bush years.

 
• Tags: Fake News 

Birth tourism is a result of birthright citizenship being granted to any baby who happens to be dropped on American soil. There are lots of financial privileges that ensue. From the L.A. Times:

Why birth tourism from China persists even as U.S. officials crack down

In 2015, the State Department issued 2.27 million visas to Chinese tourists. It does not track what proportion of visas are issued to birth tourists.
Frank Shyong

At 10 a.m. on a cold morning in April at Whittier Medical Center, Sophia was born.

She was a healthy baby girl at 7 pounds and 1 ounce, with a future in America to look forward to, if she chose it.

Her mother, Tracy, came from Shanghai to give her this choice — a chance at the world’s best education, a safe childhood and reliable medical care without long lines.

“I’m here to give my kids better options,” said Tracy, who asked to be referred to by her first name because she has read stories about U.S. officials cracking down on mothers who come to America to give birth.

But it would be inhumane for American officials to force a Shanghai person to go home to the primitive wasteland that is Shanghai:

Even as middle class incomes in China enjoy explosive growth, and 96% of Chinese people in a recent Pew Research poll say their lives are better than their parents’, an unknown number of “birth tourists” like Tracy cross oceans each year to have their babies in America.

And in America’s Chinese enclaves, they find a cottage industry of Chinese midwives, drivers and doctors who accept cash and “maternity hotels” — apartments or homes run as hotels for the women during their pregnancies.

Chinese listing sites show several hundred maternity hotels in Southern California, though it’s not clear how many of the listings are active.

Anyone who lies about the purpose of their visit to the U.S. can be charged with visa fraud, but birth tourism per se is not illegal.

“There is nothing in the law that makes it illegal for pregnant women to enter the United States,” said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Critics, however, blast the practice as a way to gain citizenship for children by unfairly gaming the immigration system. And spurred in part by those complaints, U.S. officials at every level are exploring ways to crack down on maternity hotels.

That the practice persists, birth tourists say, is a testament to the hold that America still has on Chinese imaginations.

Restrictive family planning policies may have driven some Chinese mothers to give birth in America before 2015, when the one-child policy ended. But many others are simply curious about America and exploring the possibility of a life in the U.S., said Kelly, a birth tourist who has settled in Riverside County’s Eastvale neighborhood.

“China has developed very quickly,” said Kelly, who also declined to provide her first name. “But … Chinese people still have this perception of America as a dream place to live, that it is bigger, better, stronger.”

In 2015, the State Department issued 2.27 million visas to Chinese tourists. It does not track what proportion of visas are issued to birth tourists.

Do you ever get the feeling that our government isn’t really trying on immigration fraud?

Childbirth is a legitimate reason to travel to the U.S., and as long as Chinese nationals provide the correct paperwork and evidence they can pay for their medical care, they will be issued a visa, department officials said. …

In the San Gabriel Valley, where birth hotels are an open secret, local leaders field a steady stream of complaints from area residents who oppose maternity hotels. In Chino Hills, a group of residents protested the presence of birth hotels in the neighborhood, and Arcadia police even assigned a detective to investigate the businesses in response to residents’ complaints.

In 2013, Los Angeles County formed a birth tourism task force to tackle the issue. The task force has identified and cited 34 birthing hotel operators for running businesses on land that is zoned for residential use. But there is still no county regulation against running hotels for foreign nationals traveling to the U.S. for the sole purpose of giving birth. …

Karin Wang, a vice president at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, says she is concerned that such attitudes toward birth tourism reflect xenophobia and anti-Asian sentiment. She cast birth tourism as the side effect of a broken immigration system.

“If the immigration system itself worked better, then these convoluted paths that people take to secure status in America would lessen or disappear,” Wang said.

If only the U.S. government simply declared all 1.2 billion Chinese and their posterity unto the seventh generation to be U.S. citizens with all the rights and privileges such as instate tuition at Berkeley and financial aid at USC, this problem would be solved.

By the way, something that most Americans don’t realize is that the college financial aid system (which is, most importantly, price discounts on tuition based on your financial status) is largely restricted to American citizens. My sons received six figures worth of “grants” (i.e., discounts off the list price), which they wouldn’t have been eligible for if they weren’t American citizens. Foreigners typically pay list price at American undergrad colleges.

Not that many Americans understand this benefit to American citizenship — colleges don’t spell it out that often because it seems politically incorrect these days for American colleges to discriminate in favor of Americans. Fortunately, the system was set up awhile ago, so it does. Not many Americans understand this, but lots of Chinese do. So that’s one motivation for birth tourism — if your kid is an American citizen, you can save a bundle 18 years later on American college tuition.

On a recent weekday in Rowland Heights, a block from the birth hotels raided by immigration officials last year, Target was having a 50%-off sale on baby clothes and items. Pregnant Chinese mothers packed the aisles.

Tracy settled into a chair at the Starbucks in the Target, wrapped a jacket around Sophia, installed a toy in her chubby fists, then warmed her hands on a cappuccino.

For better or worse, Chinese mothers’ first impression of American life is often in places like Rowland Heights, a mostly-Asian sprawling suburb of homes and vast strip malls 25 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

Birth tourism is the neighborhood’s incognito economic engine — dozens of pregnant Chinese women visit these shopping centers each day, … Among the baby stores, there are home loans on offer, car rentals to go see the homes, real estate agents to guide shoppers and immigration attorneys to handle paperwork.

Many mothers, like Tracy, consider staying. Her reasons have more to do with China’s flaws than U.S. freedoms.

In Shanghai, she says, the buildings are tall and modern, but the rent is high. The skyline is beautiful, but the air isn’t clean and the food isn’t safe. The airport is architecturally impressive but inconvenient. The people speak her language, but they are always judging and comparing, evaluating the clothes she wears, the home and neighborhood she lives in, the school her children will attend. A life in America is a break from all of that.

“Here people are not so competitive, trying to wear better clothes and use better things,” Tracy said. “I don’t even have to wear makeup.” …

Rowland Heights, along with Arcadia and Irvine, have long been plagued with rumors that the communities host “mistress villages” — a slang term in China to describe a housing complex where rich Chinese men house their mistresses.

The rumors are unverifiable …

For the time being, they plan to stay.

“We haven’t really decided that we want to be American, but we like America,” Kelly said.

You like us, you really like us!

I’m going to try that line of psychology at Augusta National where they hold The Masters. I’ll show up with my golf clubs and say, “I haven’t really decided that I want to be an Augusta National member, but I like Augusta,” and see if they feel so flattered that I like their country club that they will tell me to play anytime I like. It seems to work on Americans, so maybe it will work on Bill Gates’ and Warren Buffett’s club?

 

Also:

And this would be a good voice for a cartoon gorilla:

By Peter Serafinowicz

 

Commenter Mike Sylwester writes:

My wife and I go to garage sales on most weekends, and I often see grade-school reading books for sale. Browsing through them, I often see stories written for the purpose of “including” ethnic minorities, and these stories are sprinkled with such useless foreign words.

I recommend a book titled Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction is Undermining Our Children’s Ability to Read, Write, and Reason, written by Sandra Stotsky, a research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

One of her criticisms is that multi-cultural reading books provide stories with useless vocabulary and even phonetic letters. Here is an example from a sixth-grade reading book, a story that is inclusive for Native Americans:

Tahcawin had packed the parleche cases with clothing and food and strapped them to a travois made of two trailing poles with a skin net stretched between them. Another travois lay on the ground ready for the new tipi.

Chano was very happy when Tasinagi suggested the three of them ride up to their favorite hills for the last time.

As the three of them rode along, Tasinai called Chano’s attention to the two large birds circling overhead. They were Waŋbli, the eagle. Chano knew they were sacred to his people and that they must never be killed.

He looked at the eagle feather in his father’s hair, a sign of bravery and wondered why it was that the Lakotas as well as many other Indians held Waŋbli, the eagle, in such great respect. Someday he would ask his father about this.

So, this reading challenges sixth-graders to learn the French-Canadian-Indian words parleche, travois and Waŋbli. And, yes, the last word’s third letter is ŋ.

Here’s how I read this:

Tawhatever had packed the parchesi cases with clothing and food and strapped them to a trawhat made of two trailing poles with a skin net stretched between them. Do I have to finish this? Another trasomething lay on the ground ready for the new tipixnay. My eyes are glazing over.

China was very happy when Ta-Nehisi suggested the three of them ride up to their favorite hills for the last time. When is there going to be fighting?

As the three of them rode along, Tasmania called Guapo’s attention to the two large birds circling overhead. They were Waŋwhatthehell, the eagle. Chapo knew they were sacred to his people and that they must never be killed. Hey, kid. You know you want to. Kill the eagle. Do it.

He looked at the eagle feather in his father’s hair, a sign of bravery and wondered why it was that the Lakotas as well as many other Indians held Wombley, the eagle, in such great respect. Someday he would ask his father about this. But he knew deep in his heart that the answer would be as skull-crushingly boring as everything else in my reader.

And you just know that by the time today’s kids have kids, that the People Who Decide These Things will have decided by 2040 that “tipi” is a totally racist way to spell that word and have gone back to spelling it “teepee” to be sensitive. So today’s youth will grow up to be just as clueless as today’s adults at helping their kids with their homework.

 

In general, I’m slightly more sanguine about the Replication Crisis in psychology, especially social psychology, than many critics because a lot of it involves merely not very political attempts by academics to horn in on marketing researchers’ well-paid bailiwick rather than dangerous political demands for the re-engineering of human souls by the state.

One exception, however, has been the popular concept of Stereotype Threat.

German science writer Rolf Degen tweets:

The stereotype threat effect, once regarded as a poster child for outstanding psychology research, fails a meta meta-analysis.

 

From the New York Times:

Hall of Fame Voters Soften Stance on Stars of Steroids Era
By DAVID WALDSTEIN JAN. 2, 2017

Bud Selig, the baseball commissioner during the steroids era, was voted into the Hall of Fame last month by the Today’s Game Era Committee.

Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, two of the most successful players in baseball history, are among the former stars who were essentially blacklisted from the Hall of Fame because of their reputations as doping cheats. But now, because of a sudden and surprising shift of voter sentiment, players who thrived during baseball’s so-called steroids era might be enshrined in Cooperstown after all.

The baseball writers who vote to decide which players are allowed into the Hall of Fame appear to be backing away from their punitive approach to players linked to doping because of what they perceive as hypocrisy.

Bud Selig, who served as commissioner of baseball as the record books were being obliterated by bulked-up players, was recently granted entry into the Hall of Fame by a separate voting body. Selig has been widely criticized for failing to combat the doping scourge soon enough. The former manager Tony La Russa, who was inducted in 2014, benefited from steroids users on some of his successful teams.

No Hall of Fame for American sports carries as much prestige as baseball’s, and no team sport in the country has been as vexed by doping. Baseball officials refused to confront the problem for years, then became more aggressive than other pro leagues in policing the use of illicit drugs. In what would be a dramatic change for the sport and its fans, the penalty phase — for former players, at least — may be over.

Eventually, people will notice that if nonplayer Selig is in the Hall of Fame, statistical writer Bill James deserves to be in the Hall of Fame at least as much. But then they might notice that, like Selig, James went out of his way to not notice the Steroids Era.

Why not demand that Bonds and Clemens come clean about when they were dirty? If, say, Bonds confessed to using PEDs from 1999 onward and apologized, and if that timeline stood up to outside investigation, then I could see, after a period of punishment, electing Bonds to the Hall of Fame based solely on his clean 1986-1998 career.

I suspect (hope?) that both Bonds and Clemens had reached close to 100 Wins Above Replacement, which is well into Hall of Fame First Ballot territory, before they started cheating.

In contrast, there are other players from the Steroids Era whose careers look like that without steroids they wouldn’t have come close to Hall of Fame level accomplishments. They should be kept out permanently.

Similarly, I’d accept the logic of Ted Williams’ argument that Shoeless Joe Jackson’s lifetime ban for being involved in the Black Sox scandal shouldn’t continue to apply past the end of his life, and elect Jackson posthumously, with Pete Rose being similarly eligible for posthumous election.

By the way, I’ve been thinking about a Hall of Interest for interesting players who aren’t in the Hall of Fame, like Rose and Jackson, Bonds and Clemens.

Besides players kept out for scandals, there are players who are just more interesting than many Hall of Famers.

For example, Tommy John is more famous than most Hall of Fame pitchers. He might have been good enough to be elected to the Hall of Fame if he hadn’t missed a season and a half in his prime. But if he hadn’t hurt his arm, he wouldn’t have been the first to get the Tommy John surgery. And he remains the Platonic essence of the sinkerball pitcher in the minds of many baseball fans, the name you use to describe an entire class of pitchers.

Or Moe Berg, the intellectual catcher who was sent by the OSS in 1944 to assassinate Werner Heisenberg, but didn’t pull the trigger because he decided that Heisenberg wasn’t going to get a Bomb built for the Nazis.

Lefty O’Doul, who came up to the big leagues as a young pitcher, hurt his arm, then got back in his 30s as an outfielder and hit .398. Then he became the best known manager in the Pacific Coast League, the most popular sportsman in San Francisco, and was the key American figure in building up baseball in Japan.

Fernando Valenzuela.

Sal “The Barber” Maglie, who only appeared in 13 big league games before age 33.

Steve Dalkowski, the legendary minor league fastballer.

Whoever was the best Cuban player of the Castro era who never came to America.

Charlie O. Finley

Marvin Miller

Rusty Staub

George Steinbrenner

Bill James

Bo Jackson

Dick “Dr. Strangeglove” Stuart

Jim Bouton

Smokey Joe Wood, Herb Score, Mark Fidrych, Dwight Gooden, and Jose Fernandez

Carl Mays and Ray Chapman

Curt Flood

Kirk Gibson

 
Screenshot 2017-01-01 16.35.59

L.A. Coliseum late in 44-6 loss

The Rams exited St. Louis to return to Los Angeles after no NFL football in the city in 20 years. So far, it hasn’t worked out well for either the franchise or the city. This year’s Rams have been one of the worse football teams ever to somehow win four games in a year. Lowlights include handing Colin Kaepernick his only victory of the season.

And while Angelenos will dutifully turn out for whatever is the new new thing, undying loyalty isn’t really their style. The San Diego and Oakland managements, which are considering moving to L.A., should take notice.

 

From CBS News in Los Angeles:

Help Wanted: Bilingual Teachers Needed For California Schools
December 31, 2016 11:18 AM

LOS ANGELES (AP) — While Californians passed a ballot measure to bring back bilingual education in the upcoming school year, educators say a challenge to getting the programs started will be finding more bilingual teachers.

Nearly two decades after banning most bilingual education, Californians voted in November to let schools restore it for both English learners and English speakers whose parents want them to learn Spanish, Mandarin and other languages to compete globally for jobs.

Because everybody knows that learning how to speak English well is disastrous in the 21st Century global economy.

There are two kinds of immersion programs:

First, just teach all the immigrant kids in their home language.

Second, teach white kids something intentionally exotic like Mandarin to keep blacks out. Blacks like English — they are pretty adept at using the English language in creative ways. They also have a little bit of respect and affection for French. But African-Americans despise Spanish, and Mandarin might as well be Moon Man talk to them. So these kind of immersion programs are a way for white parents to find public schools that actively repel black students without anybody calling them racist.

Educators say growing interest in bilingual programs will boost already high demand for teachers trained and credentialed to teach the classes. Schools that already have such programs in California — and in other states, including Utah and Oregon — have brought teachers on visas from overseas to meet the need.

Huh, I thought bilingual education was supposed to make Americans more competitive abroad and now you’re saying it’s making them less competitive at home for schoolteacher jobs?

… The overwhelming vote in favor of Proposition 58 is a huge turnaround from the backlash to bilingual education following a surge in immigration to California in the 1990s. Since then, some schools have started bilingual programs but parents of English learners had to sign annual waivers for their children to participate, and many districts were reluctant to take on the paperwork.

Since the measure passed — and with 73.5 percent of the vote — many schools are expected to expand bilingual offerings or start new programs. …

To meet the demand, school districts have looked overseas. Los Angeles Unified, which has more than 500 teachers in dual language immersion programs, brought nine teachers and two support staff on visas for Mandarin programs, said Barbara Jones, a district spokeswoman. In Oakland Unified, the district has brought visiting teachers from Mexico and Spain.

Funny how that works.

 

In answer to my question “What Were the Trends and Turning Points That Led to 2016?,” commenter O’Really observes:

I think the annual Google “Year in Search” ads represent an interesting window into these trends.

For many years, they followed a similar template with inspirational images from the worlds of sport, technology, and celebrity, usually culminating in a disabled kid walking with a space-age prosthetic. Here and there, a few token PC images (e.g., rainbow flag) are tossed in for a few seconds.

Then, one year ago, the whole thing becomes essentially Triumph of the SJW Will, literally narrated by Caitlyn Jenner:

The brazenness of the world’s largest corporation and source of information issuing this level of propaganda was, for me, jaw-dropping.

Needless to say, the most recent Year in Search ad is a little less triumphalist, but no less revelatory of the SJW mindset:

By the way, is the Free Hugs guy being celebrated by Google at 0:24 the famous Free Hugs guy, the Hug Thug Jermaine Himmelstein, who finally got put away in 2016 after all those years of punching girls in the face in Times Square?

I can’t tell.

But if Larry Page is reading this: Larry, I’m triggered.

 

Scott Alexander makes predictions each year at SlateStarCodex.com and then grades himself at the end of the year. Here’s how he did on his 2016 list.

I don’t know how to judge objectively these kind of lists of self-selected topics, but I’d say he did better than I would have if I made forecasts, which I seldom do.

He’s been doing this in public for three years now, and he’s very good at resisting the temptation to forecast colorful long shots.

He missed Brexit (giving a 90% probability no country in the EU would announce plans to leave).

He missed Trump winning the election, but he gave a 60% probability that Trump would win the nomination on January 25, 2016, which seems relatively quite good for prognosticators.

(One useful bit of advice is to wait 25/366ths of the way into the new year before making your annual predictions. But, still, that was a week before the caucus/primary season started with Iowa.)

It looks like he did not foresee the Bernie Sanders phenomenon (giving Hillary a 95% chance of winning the nomination), but it didn’t cost him much because he didn’t make forecasts specifically mentioning Bernie.

One forecast that he got right strikes me as wrongheaded:

“48. No major earthquake (>100 deaths) in US: 99%”

My highly scientific view: It’s bad karma to taunt the earthquake gods.

I’d put the odds more like 95% to 97% for any one year. There were four years in the 20th Century with over 100 earthquake/tsunami deaths (1906 San Francisco, 1933 Long Beach, CA, 1946 Alaska, and 1964 Alaska). There were three sizable California earthquakes when I was younger (1971 and 1994 in my native San Fernando Valley, and 1989 in the Bay Area) that each killed about 60 people.

The SFV quakes were lucky flukes in that they happened at the safest time of the day, right before dawn. Lots of people in 1994, for instance, survived their apartment buildings falling 10 feet into their basement parking garages because they were tucked in bed at 4:31 am. Some big structures fell down killing only a solitary janitor or highway patrolman.

Only a few people in America have been killed in earthquakes since 1994, which might be because we are so awesome at building safely these days. (But the Japanese seemed to be doing pretty well, and then almost 16,000 were killed in 2011. The World Trade Center collapses showed Americans aren’t immune from worst case scenarios coming true.)

Or it could be because seismic pressures have been building up without release.

I suspect there are two broad classes of phenomena:

The first, in which the more Years Since the last occurrence, the less likely it is to happen next year: e.g., bubonic plague epidemics or famines.

The second, in which the more Years Since the last occurrence, the more likely it is to happen next year. Earthquakes might be a good example of this, along with economic crashes.

Telling them apart, however, isn’t foolproof.

 

I am thinking of writing a big article to put into perspective the trends leading up to the famously unexpected political reversals of fortune in 2016.

Some are economic, some are political, but I suspect others are cultural/political: ever more spectacular hate hoaxes like Rolling Stone’s, BLM anti-cop terrorism, World War T, the rise of the word “microaggressions,” and so forth.

What are some of your suggestions? And can you think of any way to find quantitative or qualitative data supporting your insights?

 

iSteve has set new records for page views, unique visits, and comments in 2016.

Thanks!

Let me see if I can put that in perspective relative to William F. Buckley’s National Review in the 1970s when it was historically influential. If NR, a magazine with a sizable paid full time staff of dozens plus hundreds of paid freelance contributors, had a circulation of, say, 100,000 in a good year (recent circulation is 143,000). It came out every 2 weeks, or 25 times per year. And if it had, say, 32 pages, that would multiply out to, if each page in each copy was looked at all the way through by each subscriber/purchaser, 80 million page views per year.

That’s eight times as many as the ten million page views iSteve enjoyed in 2016.

Presumably, library copies and subscriptions going to families of multiple NR fans would have boosted the pages viewed per copy. On the other hand, presumably other copies piled up unread in what Tom Wolfe called (in reference to the common sight of piles of unread New York Review of Books) surly mounds of subscription guilt.

No doubt, there are a lot of other considerations that could raise or lower the 1976 NR to 2016 iSteve ratio. So, I wouldn’t put too much faith in my assertion that the ratio is less than one order of magnitude. But I’d bet on the real ratio being closer to one order of magnitude than to two orders of magnitude.

Of course, a huge advantage I have is that you commenters create so much iSteve content. I had a letter published in National Review in 1973 when I was 14 (I joked about sociologist Christopher Jencks’ approach to Nature vs. Nurture questions regarding income inequality — some things never change). But probably only 3 or 4 percent of each NR issue consisted of letters to the magazine or to Buckley. In contrast, I published about 195,000 of your comments, adding up to over 14 million words.

One reason for the huge number of comments is all the work Ron Unz has put into improving the comment system, which should be studied by others looking for how to improve their own comments systems.

Thank you.

 

From Variety:

KKK Leaders Allege Producers Paid Them to Fake Scenes in Canceled A&E Documentary (EXCLUSIVE)

Nate Thayer

DECEMBER 30, 2016 | 04:01PM PT

A&E to conduct investigation to probe what happened during production

The subjects of a TV documentary series about the Ku Klux Klan abruptly canceled last week by A&E allege to Variety that significant portions of what was filmed were fabricated by the producers. …

The KKK leaders who were interviewed by Variety detailed how they were wooed with promises the program would capture the truth about life in the organization; encouraged not to file taxes on cash payments for agreeing to participate in the filming; presented with pre-scripted fictional story scenarios; instructed what to say on camera; asked to misrepresent their actual identities, motivations and relationships with others, and re-enacted camera shoots repeatedly until the production team was satisfied.

The production team even paid for material and equipment to construct and burn wooden crosses and Nazi swastikas, according to multiple sources …

“We were betrayed by the producers and A&E,” said Nichols. “It was all made up—pretty much everything we said and did was fake and because that is what the film people told us to do and say.” …

The purported quality of the program, originally known as “Generation KKK,” helped draw the support of organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and Color of Change, which A&E publicized. …

The cancellation occurred less than 24 hours after this reporter contacted several producers at TIJAT with the allegations contained in this story. Those same producers, according to multiple KKK members who participated in the documentary, subsequently warned them not to speak to this reporter if contacted.

But sources close to the production also cast doubt on the testimony of KKK leaders, describing them as inveterate liars motivated by an agenda to scuttle a series that could make them look bad if it ever aired and prone to confusing being manipulated with aggressive questioning from producers. …

TIJAT producers went so far as to orchestrate more than one cross-burning ceremony in Pulaski, though it is presented in the documentary as if the KKK is actually hosting the event. “We’ve been allowed special access to film this secret induction,” reads a title card that precedes one of the cross-burning scenes.

“It was the producers who told me they wanted a cross-lighting,” recounted Nichols. “In fact they made two cross-lightings cause they wanted to reshoot some scenes. They bought everything—the wood, the burlap to wrap around the wood, the diesel and kerosene for my cross lighting. They even brought all the food for everyone.”

Nichols’ storyline in the documentary series involves his efforts to recruit a young man, Cody Hutt, into the KKK. But their dynamic was also less than truthful: Hutt made it clear to the producers he was never seriously considering joining the KKK, but he was willing to take $200 per day from them to act the part. “From the first day, I sat them (down) and told them I had no interest in joining the Klan,” said Hutt.

As TIJAT’s cameras capture, the tension between Nichols and Hutt reaches the boiling point when Hutt brings an anti-hate activist, Bryon Widner, to Nichols’ home to help convince Nichols to leave Hutt alone. When Nichols learns who Widner is, he angrily demands he leaves the house, even threatening to kill Widner.

But Nichols and Hutt say the scene was a fabrication. “That was 100% the TV guys’ idea and staged,” said Nichols.

… Hutt, a 22-year-old high-school dropout who lives with his mother, readily admits that getting paid by producers was his motivation for helping distort the truth.

“Hey, I loved the money. Don’t get me wrong; I wanted them to come back,” he confessed.

It’s almost as if there is more demand for than supply of the KKK, so the price has gone up.

 

The New York Times continues its transition into the iSteve Content Provider:

Screenshot 2016-12-30 17.57.05

I was on a marketing strategy team with Martin Rothblatt for a couple of months in 1981 at UCLA MBA school. He was among the least feminine men I’ve ever known.

 

Psychiatrist Scott Alexander blogs at SlateStarCodex.com:

I remember one time one of my patients missed a session because his flight back from vacation was delayed. I told my supervisor this and he got angry with me, saying it was superficial to blame it on the flight instead of talking about which of my comments had triggered the patient and made him decide to miss his plane. I insisted that we’d had a perfectly good session the week before, that the delayed plane had just been a delayed plane, and me and my supervisor got angrier and angrier at each other for both missing what the other thought was the point. Finally I got on the Internet and managed to prove that my patient’s plane really had been delayed to the point where it was impossible for him to have made my appointment, at which point my supervisor switched the discussion to why it was so important to me to believe that his plane had been delayed that I would do an Internet search about it, and whether I was trying to defend against the unbearable notion that my patient might ever voluntarily miss one of our sessions. …

But this method also reminds me of something else. This is Christopher Hitchens:

“I think Hannah Arendt said that one of the great achievements of Stalinism was to replace all discussion involving arguments and evidence with the question of motive. If someone were to say, for example, that there are many people in the Soviet Union who don’t have enough to eat, it might make sense for them to respond, “It’s not our fault, it was the weather, a bad harvest or something.” Instead it’s always, “Why is this person saying this, and why are they saying it in such and such a magazine? It must be that this is part of a plan.”

The avoidance of object-level discussion in favor of meta-level discussion can get really nasty, really quickly. … This can be more insidious when complaints are less dramatic and less binary – I know a lot of psychiatrists who will respond to people saying their medication isn’t working (or is causing side effects), with analyzing their motives for wanting to piss off their psychiatrist or stay unhealthy. And finally, this is absolutely fatal to any kind of complicated social discussion – the thing where instead of debating someone else’s assertion, you bulverize what self-interest or privilege causes them to believe it.

From Wikipedia:

The Bulverist assumes a speaker’s argument is invalid or false and then explains why the speaker came to make that mistake, attacking the speaker or the speaker’s motive. The term “Bulverism” was coined by C. S. Lewis to poke fun at a very serious error in thinking that, he alleges, recurs often in a variety of religious, political, and philosophical debates.

I get this all the time: What kind of horrible character flaw must have motivated me to have learned so many quantitative facts and have thought so logically about the topic that everybody agree is important: diversity?

 
Steve Sailer
About Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer is a journalist, movie critic for Taki's Magazine, VDARE.com columnist, and founder of the Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals.


Past
Classics
What Was John McCain's True Wartime Record in Vietnam?
Are elite university admissions based on meritocracy and diversity as claimed?
The “war hero” candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.