I think we all have a basic biological urge toward exogamy, which conduces to the good of the species. After a few generations of marrying into neighboring farm families, within a few kilometers radius, the personalities and other attributes of our neighbors become blandly homogeneous, and the marriageable chicks are all dull as dishwater. But ahh, those exotic, alluring babes beyond the furthest range of hills! Time to pick up the lance and go in search of adventure!
I'm equal parts Scotch Irish and German Swiss, but I don't find the Irish or Swiss girls particularly appealing. But I certainly linger over the images of France and Spain. Do others have that same perception, that their own ethnicity is less appealing than that of a remote (but not too remote) region?

Here's the link to the long-form birth certificate that I just found on Drudge:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf

As a physical entity, just what in the world is it? Look at the left border, where the page disappears into a bound book, and the top border, where there's a nearly undetectable blend with a background paper, and the right border, where the blend is undetectable. There's not a crease or thumbprint on it. Do you think that's a 50-year old document? Do you think that pattern of paper even existed in 1961? Above all, look at the pale nimbus surrounding every character of the written and printed text. Obviously, everything in the image was copied from some other document, using Photoshop or similar, and a lot of work was involved. I couldn't have done it in less than a day, though I'm not good at Photoshop. Do you think the Hawaii registrar's office expends that much effort on every routine document of this type? The situation has taken a turn to the really, really strange, as if it wasn't odd enough already.

Regarding my earlier post: A lot of people have noticed that this is an obvious Acrobat/Photoshop document, e.g.

http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/obamas-birth-certificate/

and maybe Acrobat can process a grubby-looking original in a highly automated fashion. So this is not a legitimate cause of wonderment, and my earlier post doesn't add much to the conversation.

Some comments on other blogs are just plain nuts, e.g. the fact the attending physician has died since then suggests a conspiracy. Maybe it is time for the whole issue to die down. Remove both my posts if you feel like it, Steve.

You nailed it exactly in your post of 4/26 8:35pm, Steve:

"If he settled the issue right now, it would be forgotten by the 2012 election."

Obama and his handlers aren't stupid. They knew that the controversy would be prolonged by releasing a Photoshop confection instead of an original. There's a lot of barking loons out there, and Obama wants them to bark as long and loudly as possible. Of this I am absolutely

POSITIVE, adj. Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
— Ambrose Bierce (Devil's Dictionary)

"Qaddafi deserved a trial" is nonsense? Isn't it self-evident that execution without trial always serves an interest — Qaddafi had a tale to tell, and someone would prefer that tale not be told? Is that interest the same as your interest? Did Oswald, J. W. Booth, and Bin Laden (or whoever it was) not have tales, and are we all not all poorer for not hearing them? I hold it as one of life's basic truths that knowledge is always better than lack of knowledge, and as for anyone who cannot understand that — well, the letters "LOC" pop into my mind == "Lower Order of Creation."

Have you ever reflected on how much injury is done to clarity and rigor of expression in the English language because of the absence of a noun form of "chronic?" Critical is to crisis as chronic is to . . . what? Whenever the word is needed, "crisis" is usually chosen no matter how wrong it is. Anyone who could introduce and popularize the new word would be a great benefactor. Perhaps it could be borrowed from another language. Does anyone have any suggestions?

How hard can it be to lay the rumors to rest? Two barbers need to be bribed, that's all. The hair clippings will prove or disprove a match on the Y chromosome.
Likewise, you'd think there might be some barbers employed by the British royal family who are in a position to earn some money on the side.

If criminals lose drugs as a funding source, what will they turn to next, to recover their lost income? Burglary, auto theft, carjacking, kidnapping? As it is, they have a pleasing habit of killing each other, and perhaps drug dealing is a desirable way of keeping our criminals occupied.

If Cedric and Frederick were second cousins, then Billy is second cousin once removed to Cedric (not nephew).

"Whether your statements are empirically accurate is irrelevant" – Charles Murray couldn't be more wrong about that. The defining characteristic of thoughtcrime is that truth is aggravation, not exculpation. Irrefutability is at the heart of the rancour that forbidden speech inspires.

A lot more than who/whom and its/it's will be gone. The subjunctive mood and several verb tenses are already on their way out the door. Twitter and sports blogs are the new language paradigm.

Most people who use "whom" nowadays use it incorrectly, by the way. Steve almost always gets it wrong.

This is an excellent link, to what appears to be a very informative site:
http://www.censorbugbear.org/black-racism/terrorism/nelson-mandela-the-bombing-record
My apologies, if it has already been posted. A lot of the links on the site are broken. I understand there's some kind of "way-back machine" that gives access to deleted-but-archived pages, which I've never used. Can anyone give brief instructions on how to use that service?

To anonymous at 12/8/13 6:57pm: Does Bibi understand that the techniques of IED's, truck bombs, bombing of fast food restaurants, etc. employed by Mandela's Spear of the Nation terrorist organization are the same as those employed against his own countrymen? And Mandela's destiny to become a wealthy and universally adored elder statesmen will certainly give renewed heart and courage to the terrorist forces arrayed against his own nation? Maybe Bibi refuses to attend the funeral because he has a shred of decency in his soul.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umkhonto_we_Sizwe

I'm fascinated by the magnitude of the weapons cache found at the Rivonia farm:

http://www.censorbugbear.org/black-racism/terrorism/nelson-mandela-the-bombing-record

The 144 tons of ammonium nitrate jumps out at me. The Hiroshima bomb was 16 kilotons, so only 0.144 kilotons, or one percent of Hiroshima (after blending with fuel oil and assuming prills and oil has the same destructive power as TNT) doesn't sound like much, but it's more impressive if you realize that the destructive power of a bomb increases with only the two-thirds power of energy release, and not linearly. Thus, by this calculation, a 100 ratio of energy is only a 21.5 ratio of destruction, and Mandela's cache of bomb material was 4.65% of a Hiroshima equivalent. Moreover, if you subdivide the cache, you increase the destructive equivalency. The Oklahoma City bombing was performed with 2 to 4 tons of material, I think I remember reading. If you split it into 52 bombs of 3 tons each (after blending with fuel oil), each will be one over 305 of a Hiroshima, 52 of which is 17 percent. The Oklahoma event killed 168 people, so 52 such bombs could kill 8736. The Hiroshima bomb killed about 100,000, 17 percent of which is 17,000, so my calculation of 17 percent Hiroshima equivalency is clearly a little on the high side – it should be more like 9 percent. The difference may be in the radiation effects.

As for the 21.6 tons of aluminum power – the obvious purpose is to make thermite, for which it is the essential ingredient to make 85 tons. The best use to which thermite can be put is to melt structural steel, which is useful for bringing down skyscrapers and bridges. A couple of tons could probably have brought down each of the twin trade towers – call it 4 tons to kill 3000 people, so 85 could kill 63,750 if you find enough really big skyscrapers. And one ton of black powder – three people were killed by maybe a pound at the Boston Marathon, so a ton should be good for 6,000. The wild card is the 210,000 hand grenades. You could do great things if you distributed them as party favors at children's birthday gatherings, but actual efficiency of deployment would undoubtedly be much less. Any way you count them (plus the 48,000 antipersonnel mines) you've got the better part of a Hiroshima's worth of WMD; maybe mult-Hiro's.

The point that I'm leading up to is that if anyone were to compile a list of historic WMD caches amassed by depraved criminal madmen bent on wholesale human destruction, the accomplishment of Mandela and his buddies at Rivonia Farm would surely rank fairly high, at least in the non-governmental division. Our gentle departed Yoda deserves credit for thinking and acting on such a grand scale.

First-cousin marriage was very common among the Mennonite and Quaker families in this country through the end of the 18th century, and in certain branches (like the Quakertown founding families) the practice persisted to the middle of the 19th century. It was a reflection of religious conscience, not ignorance. And, we should not forget that William and Mary, and Victoria and Albert, were first cousins, and they weren't Arkansas hillbillies. Legislators should keep their ill-informed pop-eugenic notions to themselves and refrain from meddling with other people's marriage choices.

The NYT is employing an H. Dumptian definition of "transgender," i.e. "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."

Match the name with the description: "Nice fella, wouldn't mind hoisting a brew with him" and "stomach-churningly repulsive, don't want to breathe the same air with him." The names are a) Donald Sterling; and b) Adam Silver. It's too bad this site isn't set up for poll-taking.

Material affluence allows people free time to have hobbies, and I think the number one hobby always will be, doting on one’s kids and trying to live their lives for them. Thus, the rise of neontocracy is merely an aspect of the history of hobbies.

On the other hand, the wealthy English gentry are notoriously detached from their children, preferring to keep them out of sight by consigning them to nannies and boarding schools. Maybe my theory is plausible but mistaken, or at least the latter, anyway.

Benchley was a wonderful writer. When I was a little kid in the late 1950’s I ransacked the local libraries trying to track down every one of his published works. I still remember being on the phone to the circulation desk at the Ohio State University trying to learn if they had “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or David Copperfield” on their shelves. I couldn’t seem to make myself understood – I still can’t imagine why.

Polls of most-hated basketball players from all schools have been done, and the pattern is always the same. For example, it’s agreed that Aaron Craft is a walking compendium of hateful white-boy qualities: he’s courteous, studious, modest — the list goes on and on. This article doesn’t even mention the worst thing he’s done: he stood before a camera and solved a Rubik’s Cube. How white can you be?

"Pilpul" is what most people mean when they say "argue like a Jew" – see here and here.

The 50’s were the era of exuberance and boundless self-confidence – anyone who believes it was staid, hidebound and stifling could not be more wrong. Think of the cars — every one was a bold fashion statement, with annual model changes, just like Paris couture. We mimicked no one — we were the best in everything we did – everyone knew that – and it was the world’s task to rise to our level. And at last, as the culmination of the decade’s arrow of progress, we had a beautiful glamorous First Lady who wore the latest fashions and a handsome, rich, charming, virile President – we had arrived and come into our own – and then the dream died in a spray of skull fragments and brain matter, and the balloon was punctured. Those of us of a certain age get real misty-eyed when talking about the 50’s. Maybe not everything we remember was real, but it was pretty near the best reality that could be imagined.

There were a couple of cultural phenomena in the 50’s that embodied a Jewish sensibility and also contributed substantially to the glamour of Americanism that, to me, anyway, attaches to the era. One is Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone. Nearly every episode taught a wholesome lesson of self respect and respect for others, and mental independence and resistance to the group-think that leads to mob rule. I don’t think this topic could have held such resonance for Serling had he not been a Jew (albeit converted to Unitarian-Universalism). The other is Mad Magazine. Much of its energies in the ’50 were devoted to mocking the crassness of advertising and the whole mass consumer culture. If there was conformism back then, it was the foil that allowed the daring iconoclasm and ‘hipness’ of the magazine to shine the brighter. Mad didn’t become preachy and didactic until the ’60’s — 1963 maybe, that watershed year. Oh, and we mustn’t forget Superman – “truth, justice, and the American way” – we really believed it back then – who could doubt the man of steel. In this forum, where vibrations of a negative sort may be floating about, I’m proud to express gratitude to Jews who made me a better person.

I think the first time I heard Jews described as non-white was in a radio broadcast by William Luther Pierce, who was one of the nastiest anti-semites who ever lived. He was the furthest thing from a holocaust denier: he thought the murder of millions of innocents was a glorious accomplishment that the Nazis could be proud of, and should be magnified, not denied. He cast the “non-white” slur in order to shock, and he succeeded, as far as I was concerned. Why would Weiner want to embrace the ideology of so hateful a person? For being intelligent, why are Jews so damn stupid?

Course architecture was ruined by the failure of golf’s governing bodies to address the problem of the steady upward creep of distance of travel of the ball, in my view. High-tech design of shafts and clubheads, better ball aerodynamics, earlier, better swing instruction, greater athleticism – all combine to give landing zones 50 yards beyond what the holes were designed for, unless you push the tee way-the-heck back practically to the swimming pool snack bar. The consequence is that beautiful historic courses on limited plots of land are totally uncompetitive to the modern pro, who will dissect them with flip wedges where 4-irons were needed as recently as the early 1960’s. The answer should have been to gradually, progressively, numb the ball, but Jack Nicklaus brought that concept into disrepute a decade or two ago by proposing to grossly overdo it – to reduce the land requirement to the extent that it became a plebian, not patrician game. Now, as a consequence of the outlandish distance and accuracy of the best players, we have tricked-up courses where three feet off the fairway, you have knee-high jungle (and likely loss-of-ball), and hard, skinned, steeply-contoured greens where six-inch difference in landing point can mean 20-yard difference in finishing point. That’s Putt-Putt architecture, in my view – you’d might as well have little windmills on the green – and t’Hell with it.

Like you, Steve, I list golf course architect among my fantasy alternative careers, although I’m much less knowledgeable on the subject than you (albeit strikingly opinionated nonetheless). Had I followed that route, I would be known for Thompson’s Elementary Precepts of Golf Course Design:

1) Punish bad shots;
2) Don’t punish good shots.

Modern design violates precept 2) big-time. I haven’t played in many years, but if I played an elite modern course like you describe, today, I’d enjoy it like a weekend in the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition. Admittedly, it’s the lashings of precept 1) that would raise the wettest spray from my bloodied back, but it’s number 2) that would truly rankle the spirit. You can have these Precepts, Steve – I’m not using them at the moment.

I caddied many years at a ritzy suburban club, and it was straight out of Caddyshack. In fact, that was a favorite movie to be shown at the annual caddy banquet. The caddies, pro staff, and membership recognized themselves in the movie, and were very good-hearted about it. I have many more positive than negative memories of the place. But God, I’m glad the Judge Smail character never caught me sneaking on at dusk to play the course . . .

Mencken had a contrary view of the subject, FWIW.

I think accounts of the New York draft riots give some evidence of the degree of altruism that many Northern whites felt toward the Southern slaves. Also, I’d like to point out something often forgotten: at the onset of hostilities, Northern politicians and journalists assured the public that it would be a cakewalk, i.e. over in weeks. I use the term “cakewalk” to resonate with modern events in the Middle East where Saddam Hussein’s regime was expected to collapse like a deck of cards. The party of Lincoln had a neoconnish aspect even at its inception.

Not a one of the Hallelujah Chorus audience stood up – they just stayed on their fat butts, mostly with sullen, bored expressions. None of them knew the tradition, or if any of them did, they couldn’t care less. No honor is to be given to the majesty of their religion nor the beauty of its music. That’s my takeaway from the clip. The continuing obliteration of our culture is nothing but the filling of a vacuum.

To call all of modern art crap would be overstatement, but some of it certainly is.

This whole business of waves of immigrants entering Europe and crossing our southwestern border is one big Mariel boatlift, isn’t it? A dirty trick played on us by the immigrants’ home countries? So much is happening on a bigger scale, at the present time – it seems pointless to dwell on minute details of the earlier prototypical event.

“Onionesque” would be a better choice of words. The event in question is reality, which anymore is a lot funnier than the Onion.

A good scheme for the government to raise additional revenue: “Tax foreigners living abroad.” That’s a Bennie Hill joke from about forty years ago. “The U.S. Constitution extends its protections to foreigners living abroad.” – that’s the theoretical basis for saying that Trump’s plan to exclude Muslims is unconstitutional. The first joke is still funny, but the second, less so, because it’s been the received legal wisdom for some time now.

Steve – there’s something about this heritability of personality issue that I simply cannot grasp – given that DNA is a digital recording medium, why should it be surprising that it’s capable of capturing extremely detailed and subtle nuances, and transmitting copies with perfect fidelity over multiple generations? Your post of a couple of weeks ago, discussing similarities of personality of separated identical twins almost provoked a prolix, borderline-bizarre rant from me, and I may still have it within me – why, I ask, would anyone presume that extreme close-relatedness would be a necessary condition for joint-inheritance of subtle nuance of personality (or anything else?). As a long-term obsessive genealogical hobbiest, I’ve noticed multiple cases where one of my first cousins resembles one of our second or even third cousins much more closely than any of his first cousins. It’s not usual, but it’s not rare either. I conceive of heredity being like a big, vertically arranged pinball machine, with multiple levels of bumpers, each with equal probability of deflection left or right. That’s the generative mechanism of the normal distribution, if I’m not mistaken. Descending upon the bumpers is a steady rain of DNA fragments, big and little, like the descent of detritus from the upper ocean into the abyss (or metaphors into a mixmaster). These fragments are stamped “pancreatic enzymes,” “hairy big toe,” “religious impulse,” and so forth. Big identical chunks could end up in widely separated bins.
Most DNA research is driven by crazed lust for windfall profits from proprietary pharmaceuticals. My own CL-du jour is to discover the seat of personality and of “self” itself. Here’s what I’m really angling for: I want Prof. Churchill of the Personal Genome Project to walk down the hallway to the office of a particular astrophysicist and request a hair sample and if necessary yank it out. An angry argument would ensue, culminating in “Why should I care if an obscure weirdo allegedly from a branch of my family that I never heard of wants to tell me that he started a spiral notebook fifty years ago titled “Thompson’s New Eclectic Compendium of Astronomical Data / Being a Catalog of the Multifarous and Multitudinous Marvels of the Celestial Vault.” And if he says his efforts to embody in Fortran the concepts of Eddington’s “Stellar Interiors” and Pauling/Sharp’s “Quantum Theory” were completely feckless, puerile, and half-assed, what am I supposed to do? Argue against him?” Prof. Churchill’s calm rejoinder will be “Because Churchill/Thompson’s “Abode of Self” will surpass “Origin of Species” in the world’s esteem, albeit only slightly.”
Wow, I’m surprised how terse and lucid my posting turned out. I’m getting better at this.

A couple of days ago I encountered in Belloc’s biography of Thomas Cranmer a sentence described by Belloc as “probably the longest ever written in the English language.” This, from what Belloc believes to be one of the greatest of all prose stylists: the author of the “Book of Common Prayer.” Intolerability of long sentences reflects more on the attention span of the reader than skill of the writer. What makes the bloviations of Clinton and Obama noxious is their banal, gaseous, trite content and occasionally their botched syntax, rather than sentence length per se.
Once, complexity of syntax was an art form, akin to poetry, in a way. I loved DeQuincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater,” as a teenager. The beauty of his prose (and eccentricity of personality) were things I aspired to, although fell far short of.

Are you sure you don’t have this backward? I would have said that productivity rises because wages rise, not the the other way around. And I would call higher productivity an unqualified benefit to society.

Best movie not on the list: The Fall, 2006 fantasy by Tarsem Singh. Also consistently under-rated: nearly anything by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children, Amelie, Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet). Gentle, visually-rich fantasies with a humane outlook, stressing the importance of kindness and loyalty – that’s what I look for. “Lives of Others” and “Ida” are the best of the recent foreign flicks. And it’s so good to not see “300” on the list.

Too often Sherlock Holmes’ foundational premise of modern science is forgotten, i.e.
“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
Creation by a supernatural being is impossible. Therefore, the best alternative explanation we can come up with, no how how grotesquely, bizarrely implausible, must be believed. We’re stuck with that. We have no choice.

“improve to outdo their peers” – you’re suggesting that a spirit of competition could improve educational achievement? You’d think it would, and I’ve often wondered why the possible impact of the Buckley Amendment on classroom dynamics is never discussed. When I was in second or third grade, the teacher would post a list of high scorers on the blackboard after every test, with perhaps a gold star for particularly good accomplishments. Nowadays, a teacher who did that would be committing a federal crime. If statistics for athletes were carefully-guarded secrets, would that improve performances? Hardly – why would it?

Of course, if Buckley secrecy were jettisoned, we could identify individual recipients of affirmative action, and if a teacher said something really, really stupid in the classroom, we might have means to confirm our suspicions. That alone assures the continuation of secrecy forever.

There is an easily-testable hypothesis implicit in the NYT article: why does 23andme or other DNA testing or post-processing site not do a survey of political preferences, and calculate the correlation between Neanderthal content and votes for Trump? And, there must be other developments of this easy DNA knowledge that are currently unfolding. How long will it be before high-Neanderthal dating clubs spring up? And high-Neanderthal heraldic societies? Speaking as a genealogical hobbyist, I was greatly disappointed when the web link I discovered connecting me to Adam (through the ancient kings of Munster) went dead before I could explore it. Mark Twain certainly was proud to claim descent from the highest ranking member of human nobility, as would be I. Now, armed with my 23andme results (putting me on the 94th percentile of Neanderthal content), I can explain and justify my annoying air of condescension, based as it is on membership in the Earth’s true Ancient Aristocracy. It easily outweighs the inconvenience of finding pants cut in proper proportion and hats of large enough size. I have to give the cannibalism thing a pass, though.

It’s ironic, is it not, that the nation whose national anthem is a paean to race purity (” . . qu’un sang impur”) should have its gift to us disfigured by Emma Lazarus’ ode to cultural inundation? And furthermore, the anthem’s defiance of rule by foreign elites (“Quoi! des cohortes étrangères feraient la loi dans nos foyers!”) should be nullified by membership in the European Union? Lafayette, De Toqueville, and countless French patriots would agree, chisel that poem from the plinth or gift shop or wherever it is, and Vive Le Pen!

On every occasion like this when a chemical weapons atrocity causes a stir, discussion always neglects the question I find most interesting, which is: we all know that traditional methods, like bullets that make heads explode like overripe melons, and shrapnel that flings entrails into picturesque sausage-like festoons are licit and acceptable to enlightened humanity, but use of chemicals is outside the pale of decency. But why is that? I think this article contains clues to the answer, but I can’t seem to follow the exact line of reasoning:
J.B.S. Haldane on chemical warfare

This discussion, to my mind, gives too little emphasis to the two barriers to intermarriage that traditionally been thought responsible for racial types: language and religion. Many traditional racial classifications (Semitic, Hamitic, etc.) are, after all, linguistic categories. The example of the three different language areas of Switzerland demonstrating micro-geographic resolution is borderline foolish, inasmuch as it demonstrations the height of the language barrier even in the face of geographic proximity, rather than geographic resolution per se. Likewise, Catholic-Protestant intermarriage was nearly unheard of until recently, even where the populations are physically intermingled. Is the Roman Catholic religion distinguishable in the genome, and if not, why not? Likewise, Ashkenazi or Sephardic Judaism? 23andme allows self-assignment to the Ashkenazi category, but wouldn’t it be a slam-dunk for them to do the categorization themselves? Why does 23andme refrain from doing the analysis – is it too politically fraught an issue?

Just about everything of value.
You’ve got a pretty good schtick. You’ve conned a lot of people into thinking you’re some kind of troll, but actually your mission is to make the opposing viewpoint appear as ridiculous as possible, and you’re a virtuoso at it.
Maybe I should keep quiet about it, but you’ve certainly blown your cover with your latest post. I want to be the first to say Kudos, friend!

It had positive effects, didn’t it? So why should good-thinking people try to discourage the phenomenon, by stigmatizing it in some way? It’s one of the few ways that the perpetrators can get a warm feeling of accomplishment.

FWIW, I found this statement in the wikipedia article for X_chromosome:
“For reasons that are not yet understood, there is an excess proportion of genes on the X-chromosome that are associated with the development of intelligence, with no obvious links to other significant biological functions.”
If there’s truth to this, then you would expect the mixed-race children of white mothers to be brighter, since all of them carry a “white” X, whereas male children with a white father can get their X only from their mother.

It’s off-topic, but I thought this article by Roger McGrath was particularly interesting:

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2017/June/41/6/magazine/article/10839553/

Anymore, it’s as impermissible to say that anyone but blacks were enslaved, as it is to deny the One True Holocaust.

Remember, you have only half of your parents’ DNA – otherwise, you’d have 200% of a normal genome. What you get with each succeeding generation is governed by a binomial or multinomial distribution, i.e. it’s the flip of a coin. Thus it’s impossible to refute distant ancestry of a particular type with a single autosomal test. A certain person who’s third or fourth on my brother’s list of 1250 closest relatives is absent from my list of 1250 (on 23andme). Thus your sibling could easily show interesting stuff that your own genome doesn’t.

Numb the ball — that’s my advice to re-invigorate the game. Not by a lot – by just enough to reverse some of the distance-creep that has rendered so many fine old courses obsolescent. I caddied for the club membership in 1989 after a lapse of 20 years and was shocked to see the drives of 11 handicappers go as far as 3 handicappers used to. Jack Nicklaus brought discredit to the concept many years ago by proposing so drastic a numbing as to change the essential character of the game and broaden the participation. Golfers swilling beer, wearing tank tops, and pulling hand carts over 25-acre courses are fine with him so long as the developers make money, I suppose. Improved equipment has disrupted existing course design strategy and you can push the tees back only so far, so it’s time to partially reverse the trend by careful tinkering with the ball’s size, mass, or resilience, without going so far as to diminish the game’s patrician aspects.

We’re overlooking a key benefit of mass immigration, which is the introduction of more-emancipated women to our society, which can only be a positive. Here’s a key quote from Sylvia Weber, Frankfurt’s Secretary of Integration, from this Breitbart article.

“Weber hailed the rate of single motherhood amongst women of foreign origin, which the report showed was significantly higher than that of native Germans in the city, as “a possible sign that female migrants are emancipating themselves. . .”

William and Mary, too, and Edgar Allan Poe, and the Hapsburgs. People of Quality have always been reluctant to share their genes outside the family. And Cleopatra – wasn’t she the product of seven generations of brother-sister marriage? She was enough of a babe for wars to be fought over.

The conventional explanation for the Catholic Church’s prohibition of cousin marriage is the desire to weaken clan loyalties that act in competition with allegiance to the Church. Likewise, the prohibition of priestly marriage was required to prevent multigenerational dynasties and resultant competing power-centers. The same principle unlies the prime directive of every system of governance, which is to destroy all sense of community outside the government, e. g. by forced integration of schools and obliteration of racial and cultural homogeneity, destruction of family structure, marginalization of private charity, and supplanting of collective bargaining with state paternalism. Complete power requires destruction of all competition. It has been so, ever since the Pharaohs conflated themselves with deity and state-parentage. God the Father is properly defined as the highest power of which the mind can conceive, which for most people is the government, and we all know the one true God is a jealous God.
“Progressives,” so-called, think the state’s provision for all our needs is the latest thing, at the forefront of progress. Ramses the Great would laugh – he knew better.

I believe that endogamy and exogamy both have benefits to survival of a racial line, and the greatest level of sexual attraction corresponds to an unconsciously-perceived balance between the two. I read somewhere that the degree of consanguinity optimal from the standpoint of fertility is fourth-cousin.
To say that sufficient consanguinity is a “necessary condition,” though, is nonsense. The concept of hybrid vigor pertains to humans as well as other species. Many half-breeds have been highly estimable individuals – Will Rogers, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, even Obama if you’re politically so inclined.

Fertility means the number of children that result from the marriage. Maximum number of offspring I’d think would be ideal for the perpetuation of. the line.
Mules have their merits, I guess, or they wouldn’t have seen such service as pack animals. If they have mulish personalities, that’s to their credit, to be rebellious against servitude. I flaunt my own mulishness when I can get away with it.

Quakers and Mennonites took a stand against slavery long before 1782. The declamation against slavery drafted in Thones Kunders’ house in Germantown in 1688 is sometimes referred to as one of this nation’s foundational documents. Robert Pyle was another influential Quaker abolitionist, who published his views in 1698. Kunders and Pyle were both grandparents of mine, FWIW, and believe me, I’m proud of my dissenting oddball antecedents. I have to concede truth to the statement that many Quaker owned slaves, however.

“Russia retaliated [against the Magnitsky Act of 2012] by prohibiting American families from adopting Russian children.”

If I recall, a major reason for Russia stopping American adoptions was the Newton and Truong case. That is, because American law offers insufficient protection against predation by degenerates. People in other countries are more familiar with the names Newton and Truong than we are, due to the rigorous self-censorship of our press. Any American journalist knows that if he visited that topic he might be Eich’d out of civilized existence, or at least suffer a major change in standard of living.

Fracking is an enormous boon to humanity, because of the way it alleviates the burden of poverty by reducing fuel costs. The difference between a $150 and a $300/month wintertime home heating bill means very little to me, but for the elderly poor trying to get by on $700/month social security, it could make an enormous difference in quality of life. And, cheaper polymer precursors lower the cost of all kinds of consumer products. My complaint is with the profligate rate at which we are using up our mineral wealth. What’s the big hurry to beggar our posterity? Wouldn’t we rather beggar Saudi Arabia’s posterity first? It’s madness to run baseload power plants on natural gas, the highest grade of fuel, that should go instead to domestic furnaces, clothes dryers and kitchen ranges. Meanwhile, coal combustion has been priced out of the market by envirohysteria. Our great-grandchildren will resent the fact that the era of cheap natural gas is as dead as the passenger pigeon, but screw-em – what has our posterity ever done for us, anyway?

Somebody should write a movie script based on this. It would be better than American Hustle – call it Pakistani Hustle, maybe.

Is it true that Lewontin’s analysis would equally apply to breeds of dog, so that one could argue that there is no true biological difference between a yappy little purse dog and a ferocious Rottweiller? This would bring the “race does exist” concept to a level within the public’s understanding, so they would know how JPS it is. This is a new initialism the world desperately needs, by the way, to supply LOL and FWIW and so on. We at this site know how many of the world’s “truths” are Just Plain Stupid, and barely worth the time to discuss.

“the race does not exist concept.” Arrgh.

I meant “supplement” not “supply,” and “does not exist.” Sorry. I must have been feeling especially obnubilated yesterday morning. And while I’m wasting the reader’s time with “by the way’s,” let me add another. A meme the world greatly needs is “The Simpson Defense.” I’m speaking of Bart, not O. J. That is, “Don’t blame me! I didn’t do it! It was like that when I got here!” Bart spoke with the utmost epistemological and juridical rigor (or whatever kind of rigor it was) when he spoke those words, and if we draw abuse by noting racial differences, then the irrefutability of the Simpson Defense should be enough to demolish our abuser and even make his head explode.

The “what is to be done” list leaves out something important: AIPAC should be required to register as foreign agents. And the problem is much bigger than just AIPAC; if I understand the concept of hasbara, a great deal of pro-Israel agitation and so-called news on the internet is directly and secretly funded by Israel.

I would think Lincoln’s would be the most vulnerable Memorial on the Mall. I know of no statement on the races by Washington or Jefferson more succinct and to the point than this:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, — that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

There’s a basic question about the Colonization Society that Lincoln favored that I’ve never seen adequately answered: was the repatriation to be, in all cases, voluntary? A basic distinction between Northerners and Southerners of the time was that the latter were comfortable with the presence of Blacks in their fields, kitchens and nurseries, while Northerners viewed their presence with abhorrence. Lincoln’s own state of Illinois banned free slaves, and Lincoln obviously imbibed the Northern attitudes. I have to wonder – was Lincoln’s opposition to slavery in part due to the fact that the slaves’ economic value as slaves posed an obstacle to shipping them all out of the country?
Next on the agenda: stigmatize the name of Darwin and purge it from civilized discourse, for reasons that should be obvious by now. His books certainly shouldn’t be allowed in school libraries. Imagine the potential lawsuits on behalf of triggered and traumatized students.

This is a shockingly ignorant and wrongheaded article by Ron, insofar as it discusses the magnitude and period of prevalence of lynching. Enough so, as to make me wonder if anything he writes is reliable. The 50’s and 60’s were the height of the Klan’s modern power? Rubbish. It was virtually extinct, and a figure of fun. It had peak political importance in the 1920’s, and lynchings peaked around 1900. The numbers killed were substantial – see this listing:

http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/classroom/lynching_table_year.html

To trivialize the phenomenon by throwing around the figure “only 15 killed” is, well, deplorable.

Meanwhile, the issue of repealing birthright citizenship (if the concept ever actually existed within the law, to begin with) has been forgotten about. Where’s the logical coherence to building a border wall on the one hand, if on the other, we’re going to offer the greatest possible inducement to cross the border, i.e. the prospect of a better life for one’s children?

Double jeopardy worked in the Rodney King case. Why can’t it here?

A bizarre posting utterly detached from reality. Don’t you understand that if a blustering lunatic presses a megaton-pistol against our collective foreheads and threatens to pull the trigger, it represents a very disquieting situation? And if we contemplate actions that would cause a million utterly harmless and innocent Koreans to be incinerated, to prevent a million of our own brains from being blown out, aren’t we allowed to do so without being accused of being vile bigots that think yellow gook lives are worthless? Aren’t we entitled to any instinct of self preservation at all?
What the Korean situation obviously entails is a high-stakes experiment in human psychology. All that attention-seeking little freak probably wants is to be treated with respect, and like somebody important. Trump started out in a sensible way, by treating Kim courteously, but for that he was pilloried by the insanely-partisan opposition within his own party – McCain I’m mainly thinking of. That’s the true obstacle to a sane resolution of the problem. I say if the twerp would feel good if we gave him a tickertape parade down Fifth Avenue and a day pass to Disneyland, we should do so – it’s small enough a concession in view of what’s at stake. But if rabid congress-critters obstruct propitiation, then intimidation and even preemptive megadeath may be all that’s left.

Here are the amounts of Indian blood required to belong to various tribes:

https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/native-news/what-percentage-indian-do-you-have-to-be-in-order-to-be-a-member-of-a-tribe-or-nation/

For Cherokees, it’s “lineal descent.” Question: how does one person descend from another except lineally? I often hear the phrase “directly descended from.” How else do you descend from someone? I’ve been a genealogical hobbyist for thirty years, and still don’t know the answer. I have reason to believe my 57-times great grandfather was King of Munster during the 6th century. If I compute one-over-two to the 57th power, I find I don’t have a single princely nucleotide. Is there a single-nucleotide criterion to be a Cherokee? I guess not.

My favorite chemical engineering professor gave an illustrated lecture 40-odd years ago. To depict “the average human being” he showed a doctored image of a person with one large breast in the center of his/her chest.

Is it correct to say that the argument that “race is a social construct” applies with equal validity to dog breeds? If you think a mastiff is not a suitable purse dog for Paris Hilton, you’re engaging in invidious stereotyping? This, I think is the most accessible argument to convince the public that they’re the victims of perhaps the most colossal scientific hoax of all time. This spurious theory is, after all, the basis for all affirmative action, disparate impact, and implicit bias ideology. What other quack pseudo-scientific concept has been as consequential as this one? If the public could only have it explained to them in terms they can understand, the upheaval of institutions would be enormous.

Two short sentences explain nearly everything about current events: “Nothing has been forgotten” and “It’s payback time.”

The work that needs to be brought up to date, and Steve would be a good person to do it, is “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Or perhaps it should be crowd-authored, with Steve having overall editorial control.

I have long believed that the “fig sign” originated in the Middle East, commemorating an occasion when an arrogant potentate, touring a subjugated land, detected that his camel was suffering discomfort due to a date pit lodged in his anus, and commanded a bystander to dig it out with his teeth. I’m not sure who the potentate was, but it may have been Mohammed. Yet, the wikipedia article omits this explanation. Does anyone else remember it like I do?

A movie, 7 Years in Tibet was made about that country in the period just after WW II, starring Brad Pitt, with a large role for the Dalai Lama’s sister Jetsun Pema. Like her brother, she seems like a person of considerable charm and intelligence.

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” – this statement by Sherlock Holmes is the foundational doctrine of modern biology, not anything that Darwin said. God is impossible, therefore no intellectual contortion to rationalize the theory of evolution is too extreme.

Is it true that “Iranian” is an alternative spelling of “Aryan?” It’s a common belief, whether correct or not. Does that belief do anything to explain Jewish animus toward Iran?

Dogs, stick to dogs, if you really want to influence large numbers of people. It’s my understanding that the between-breed variance is of magnitude comparable to intra-species variance, and in that regard is analogous to the relationship of races within the human species. Once people are told that, by the same reasoning that tells us that race is a social construct, the apparent difference between a Chihuahua and a Newfoundland is not grounded in biological reality, they’ll realize what a colossal line of guff they’ve been fed. Use actual numbers for the F1st statistic – they’re out there somewhere. Let people know that the Lewonten “fallacy” is actually a hoax, and one of the most socially destructive hate-hoaxes in all history, in that it gives pseudoscientific grounding to the notion that negroes have been victimized by systemic racism spanning all of time and place.

This calls to mind the beneficial relationship between dogs and humans through the ages – how, through partnerships involving hunting and (in polar regions), warmth and locomotion, each species has materially contributed to the survival of the other. It’s nearly a truism that dog personality is the product of human selection, but is it not also likely that, to a degree, we are the product of dog selection? In a park where dogs are taken off-leash, do they frisk and frolic freely among themselves, big and little, squat and sinuous, without distinction, or do they coalesce into cliques, like with like, bonded by their glowering hostility toward the others? I think it’s mostly the former, and as a fact of empirical observation, I believe we are very doggish, perhaps due in part to their enlightened choice of human partners. We recognize at a glance the essential humanity of others, regardless of how different their appearance.
The point that I’m working toward is that harmony is the natural human state, and to have a Summer of Hate like we’ve just had requires incitement, and of that we have had an abundance – constant, unending, ceaseless, promoted mostly by a fairly small number of organs of influence. The One who said “blessed are the peacemakers” left unspoken the corollary that those who find harmony, and convert it to conflict, embody the soul of wickedness. It should be our mission to call out every single instance in the unending series of hate-hoaxes, and analyze and explicate every single paragraph and sentence and lay the blame at the doorstep of those at fault.

My 23andme results told me that I had ancestry from County Cork, Ireland and Canton Aargau, Switzerland, as well as many less-specific places. By conventional genealogy, I know this is true. I had a pair of grandparents come from Cork in 1833, and another from Aargau in 1843. That’s astonishing. Switzerland I can understand, because mountains are natural barriers, but Cork!! Isn’t it flatland around there?
A commenter in some influential journal or other, whined that these racial attrbutions are borderline fake, because they told her she was 88% Ashkenazi, whereas she was certain she was 93%, or some numbers like that. To me, at least in my instance, the accuracy seems almost miraculous.

Having re-read my post #183, it strikes me as downright silly. A dog that won’t cooperate with his different-looking harnessmates is simply left out, and probably dies of exposure. There’s no need to invoke bi-directionality of selective pressure.
The point of my second paragraph stands, however. Just as there is no effect without cause, there is no violence without incitement. We need to trace the incitement back to its source and forward through its channels and parse it sentence-by-sentence. Let’s start with New York Times reportage immediately after the death of George Floyd.

Tangentially on the topic of post #185, I sent my 23andme data file, analyzed to show 42% German ancestry, to MyHeritage in Tel Aviv, for incorporation in their database. Their analysis showed me as having exactly . . . zero German ancestry. Amazing! It’s almost as if a certain racial or ethnic group wanted to see a certain other racial group vanish from the pages of history and human memory itself.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but — what about people who already have Covid? Would they benefit from being given the vaccine? Has the question been addressed? You’d think existing severe cases would have highest priority, if they would benefit.

I know one aspect of the German race that can literally be erased from the pages of history – their genetic record. I sent my 23andme DNA file, showing about 40% German ancestry (Mennonite and Quaker, mostly) to MyHeritage.com in Israel, for the purpose of identifying living cousins who can help me fill out distant branches of my family tree. They analyzed my data – the same data that 23andme analyzed as 40% German – and lo and behold, I was cleansed and purified! I’m no longer German! Zero percent! “German” was not listed, nor any other ethnicity identifiably German. Germany never happened. It’s a myth that will rapidly vanish from human memory, thanks to those kindly custodians of memory centered in Israel.
On another day, let me tell you about another use being made of these DNA databases. The identification of living relations of persons who, in very distant times and places, owned slaves. Reparations, you see . . . shake downs . . . blood guilt. They can play this blood guilt game too, you see.

Structural racism is not a will-o-the-wisp. It’s verbalized and reified by enormous accumulations of legal code and judicial opinion that create a thing as solid as a building. We all know the twin pillars that support the structure: the doctrines of affirmative action and disparate impact.

When are we going to see an extended and updated version of Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds?” Isn’t it about time?

I think the computer made those utterances in the same way the Mechanical Turk played chess:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk

I took the chimpanzee family in Holy Motors to be a random, inexplicable allusion to His Monkey Wife, a novelette by John Collier (a very fine, under-appreciated writer, by the way).

The statement that kerosene will burn at no more than 1832 deg.F in air is obvious nonsense. It’s easy to look up the adiabatic flame temperature of kerosene, e.g. on wikipedia, where it’s listed as 3801 deg.F: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_flame_temperature
A key phrase that almost never appears in explanations of the building collapse is “chimney effect.” That’s where a continuous empty column creates a suction that causes air to be drawn into the combustion zone and produce nearly perfect turbulent mixing that allows a close approach to the adiabatic temperature. A chimney obviously was created inside the building, as evidenced by the downward propagation of the flame front, as shown by video coverage. This must have been due to pancaking of floors, which opened an empty column downwards.
Most people have no accurate mental image of turbulent combustion. They’ve seen diffusion flames in their fireplace or kitchen range, which is a gentle kitten compared to the raging monster created when turbulence creates near perfect access of atmospheric oxygen to combustible materials.

I’m not a student of the forensics of the 9/11 collapse – I know there are sites devoted to that subject, which I have never browsed – but based on a quick search just now, I gather that it’s not universally accepted that thermite spherules were in fact present in the debris. For instance this article appears credible: https://www.machinedesign.com/home/article/21830429/another-blow-for-wtc-conspiracy-theorists The final few sentences happened to catch my eye: the writer is complaining that all the steel structural support was around the perimeter of the towers, and he wouldn’t want to spend much time inside such a building. I myself have noticed 10 or 12-story buildings going up of pure reinforced-concrete construction, i.e. without any skeleton at all, and thought it looked pretty scary. I know there are earthquake codes to protect against tumbledown construction, but my state (Ohio) and NYC I assume to be rated at low risk. Anyhow, it aligns with my theory that inadequate pancaking resistance was strongly contributory to the collapse.
Thermate (as opposed to thermite) is something I’d never heard of, but I’ll point out that sulfur in the steel and concrete are potential sources of sulfur in the debris.

That’s a good question – you’d think there would be a huge fireball exterior to the building. Perhaps there was – I haven’t studied much camera footage. But I’ll point out that there were tons of combustible materials in the furnishings (chairs, carpets, perhaps the wall coverings, etc) that shouldn’t be neglected when estimating the fuel input available toward the building’s destruction.

Dang, the shiny reflections off my tin foil hat attract notice wherever I go. It’s getting so I can’t push my loony theories anywhere, anymore.

The smokiness suggests to me, too, that the oxygen supply was sub-stoichiometric, and hence could not support the highest-possible temperature, but your statements of “much lower” and “much too low” are almost too nebulous to be of practical value. And there must have been variations of richness/leanness across the tower cross section, perhaps with localized achievement of stoichiometric ratio.
My theory that pancaking of floors was important may have been worth developing further, by stating that it was almost certain to have been self-accelerating. That is, the first few failures occurred at significant intervals, then everything collapsed practically all at once. And what was important in terms of producing molten-metal temperatures must have occurred down near the base, where in-rush of air due to chimney effect would be greatest. And your statement that not “any damage” could have been done to the steel by elevated temperature is extreme. The columns don’t need to be brought to molten or even softening temperature to yield to the weight of an entire skyscraper pressing on them.

Murrikkkan” with three K’s! Wow, you’re on to me all right. I can’t hide the white muslin sheet over my head, but I’ll try to use a denser weave, to hide the shiny reflections from the aluminum foil hat beneath it.
The intent of my comments was merely to stick up for my old buddy William of Ockham, with whom I used to go bar-hopping many years ago. Once, he flashed a razor at me, and muttered something about “Thou shalt not multiply explanations beyond necessity.” It was an obvious attempt at intimidation, but nonetheless I took it to heart, and have frequently recalled the event thereafter.
In this case, I question whether it’s necessary to invoke mysterious midnight skulkers whose cloak of invisibility somehow extends to the long detonator cord trailing behind them, before adequately disposing of the question of whether characteristics of ordinary materials and fuels can explain what happened. That’s all the insight I intended to offer, which admittedly is not much.
In conclusion, I wish to cordially thank you (and Notsofast as well) for needed instruction in the concept of “fever swamp.” I thought I knew the subject, but one is always improved by the knowledge of experts.

I agree, a whole lot of puzzling things demand an explanation, including many of the items on your list. But if anyone makes silly suggestions like “the CIA edits tables of thermodynamic properties like flame temperature,” it brings the whole subject matter into disrepute, and makes likely-bogus official explanations all the more likely to prevail.

Inhaled asbestos causes mesothelioma in other parts of the body, such as the abdominal cavity, in addition to the pleura of the lungs, with the reason being the mucociliary transport mechanism which cleanses the lungs and allows contaminants to drain down the throat into the stomach. At least, I was told this during the two or three weeks of toxicology training that I received as part of becoming an OSHA industrial hygiene inspector in 1985. I don’t know the relative proportions, pleural vs. peritoneal. This is something to bear in mind if you’re trying to infer a radiation exposure based on excess cancer incidence.

A long time ago, I used this advertisement to taunt a friend of mine in a state EPA, in pursuit of my theme of “environmentalism kills:”

I think I recall reading that asbestos removal had begun, starting at the top floors, but had been interrupted for some reason. Thus, on the day of the impact, the upper floors were entirely denuded of that life-saving mineral. I doubt if I could find the article again after so many years. I hope any computer modeling to simulate the day’s occurrences properly represents the asbestos absence. Can anyone add to this?

If we go on as we are, doing nothing, what’s going to happen? Is our country going to turn into a barren, dessicated lunar landscape? Really? Do you think so? Have you ever flown to Las Vegas, and looked out the window, and seen what lies below? It looks to me like it’s already happened to million of acres (whether human-caused or not), but do we give a damn? Hell no! Or else we’d do something about it, wouldn’t we? You’ve heard the saying “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Well, a lot of us – those born in this country during the Truman administration, let’s say – are in this sense refugees from a foreign land. We grew up and formed our opinions when this was a “can-do” nation, when we had vision and ambition to undertake massive projects to benefit ourselves and all our foreseeable posterity. Now we’re the great global, historic paradigm of “can’t do.” There’s no grand project to improve the human (and animal) habitability of the Earth that wouldn’t be tied up by decades of obstructionist environmentalist wrangling. The foreign land that we’re occupying in our declining years is almost unrecognizable in many ways, this being one of them.

An example of what I’m talking about is the notion entertained during the 1950’s of building a giant pipeline to raise Great Lakes water over the continental divide and discharge it into the headwaters of the Colorado. All those millions of gallons of fresh water flowing down the St. Lawrence river, to be blended with salt water, are going to waste, are they not? Will a massive new outflow from the Lakes depress the water level? I hope so. You’ve heard the saying “real estate is always a good investment – after all, they don’t make it any more.” Well, we can. Millions of acres of land, representing a new frontier, could be created. It would be at the expense of corresponding acres of surface water, but – if you see water extending to the horizon, and travel to the horizon, and see it still extending to the horizon, and do that a few times, isn’t there a point where all that water seems redundant? Meanwhile, while we dither, the water table in the Southwest drops lower and lower, until inevitably there must come a day when all wells start to draw dust.

There are a lot of similar examples I could adduce – for example, there was “Operation Plowshare” to use nuclear bombs to blow a few key peaks off mountains in the Cascade Range to bring more rain to eastern Washington. I’m not saying these are all good ideas. That could be determined only by engineering analysis and a national discussion of priorities. But as it stands, if there be a nation on Earth with the vision to undertake grand projects, it must be China, and if it be true that “Without vision, a people perishes,” we look like a bunch of perishers destined to disappear from the world stage of significant actors (and perhaps pretty soon).

I read it again, and it didn’t quite make sense to me either. Maximum outrush precedes the falling piston of collapsed floors, while maximum inrush trails it. I still picture maximum temperatures being achieved relatively low in the structure.

To elaborate on the “falling piston” that I just mentioned: the huge outrush of air would create an enormous dust cloud, which is what the videos show. But that outrush must be balanced by a great in-sucking trailing the piston, and that, I imagine, might have brought the structural elements to almost instant incandescence.
Ever bend glass tubing with your Gilbert chemistry set? Holding the tubing in a candle flame and blowing air on it though a little nozzle quickly brings the glass to cherry-red temperature.