Second sentence is unfinished.

The principle referred to here as “Chekhov’s gun” is known to philosophers of language as Grice’s Maxim of Relevance, one of four basic rules for normal conversation.

https://effectiviology.com/principles-of-effective-communication/#Maxim_of_Relation_be_relevant

People have the right to expect obedience to it. Its violation or evasion is cheating.

How much of the difference in outcomes is due to differences in what the IQ tests measure and how much is due to “systemic racism” (presumably everything else)? What is the average per capita income of black people with scores of 85 and what is the average per capita income of white people with scores of 85? Same comparisons with scores of 100, 115, 130. I am surely not the first person to imagine such comparisons but I have not seen reports that they have been done. This will be a crude inquiry, and will be subject to various objections, some circular (e.g., attributing the scores themselves to “systemic racism”) but it will still tell us more than what we know now.

There was a black 18th Century composer, Saint-Georges. He was from the Caribbean and worked in France. Some of his violin concertos have been recorded. They are decent enough but not masterpieces.

The body of Julius Caesar and others of his time and class would not be findable because they were cremated.

I also understand that a large percentage of slaves and other lower class people in the city died off before they could leave descendants — it was an unhealthful environment, with the population replenished with importation and immigration.

Why should one infer an inconsistency between the fact that the U.S. accounts for almost half the world's military spending, and the increasingly peaceful state of the world? The overwhelming power of the U.S. and the absence of global rivals presumably has at least some effect on deterring the adventurousness of the various dictators. I am thinking of the complaints about how horrible it is that the U.S. imprisons so many people, even while its crime rate declines.

By sampling, one could compile good statistics on surgery in general without in fact collecting data on most individual surgeons. In any event, if this "batting average" idea were taken seriously, surgeons would have a nasty incentive to avoid operating on the riskier categories of patients.

The Bible seems to be full of mistaken attributions (books of Moses, the four gospels) and forgeries (some of "Paul's" letters). Some people think that Samuel Clemens helped write Grant's Memoirs. But unlike the Shakespeare allegation, these cases do not involve a high status person ashamed to write under his own name, using a lower status person as a front, though the Grant case has some similarity. This would have been one Clemens book that probably would not have sold better under the Mark Twain name. The profits in any event went to Mrs. Grant.

He’s no oil painting, but you wouldn’t call to have him arrested.

The standard reason given for the traditional system is that subtle cues revealing dishonesty or unreliability are more obvious when the witness appears live before the jury. This value is considered so high as to outweigh the advantages of the videotaping alternative. In fact, I think most lawyers would feel queasy even about subjecting the traditional system to such cost-benefit analysis — the value of live witnesses appearing before the finder of fact is considered quasi-sacred, perhaps even constitutionally protected, as under the confrontation clause in the federal constitution. Compare this with the admission of other forms of evidence. A photocopy, for example, is usually not admitted when the original document is still available.

As if flouting His own Mosaic law, God is either too generous or too stingy to everyone in the universe except carpet and tile installers.

The first thing I thought of after learning how ridiculous charges are was Br'er Rabbit and the briar patch. Can we rule out the possibility that this is a collusion and a charade intended to buy time before his eventual extradition to the United States?

There was also speculation, vaguely supported by Plutarch, that Brutus was the natural son of Julius Caesar.

The plot of Gore Vidal's novel Burr makes much of the speculation that Martin Van Buren was the illegitimate son of Aaron Burr.

If Shakespeare was just a front for someone else, it would seem difficult to explain how Shakespeare fooled Ben Jonson, his acquaintance and competitor. Every hostile or skeptical thought that occurred to the later anti-Stratfordians would have occurred to Ben Jonson and would have convinced him, had there been a basis for it.

Two more Bible incidents:

In Exodus 32, the Israelites scandalously get drunk and party in celebration of Aaron's crafting of the Golden Calf. In 1 Samuel chapter 1, the priest is worried that Hannah has scandalously entered the temple drunk. Hannah explains that she is not drunk, merely in an emotional state.

The neighboring Egyptians and Mesopotamians drank beer and wine. In the Gilgamesh story, wine drinking is characterized as a sign of civilized status — Gilgamesh's wild man friend had to be taught to enjoy it.

Deformed or otherwise unwanted children in the Roman Empire were exposed — abandoned to die. See, e,g.:

http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/wlgr/wlgr-privatelife249.shtml

But it seems that exposed infants were often taken in by slave traders and sold as slaves. So I suppose a percentage of abandoned daughters ended up as prostitutes.

Article III, section 1 of the Constitution is interpreted as giving federal judges life tenure unless properly removed for misconduct ("…shall hold their offices during good behaviour"). The Democrats therefore cannot enact the reforms proposed here, even if they wanted to — a constitutional amendment would be required.

They could, I believe, do other things, such as dilute the power of senile justices by enlarging the size of the Court. This is because the number of Supreme Court justices is fixed by statute rather than by the text of the Constitution. FDR attempted a maneuver along these lines, to dilute the power of conservative justices, but was blocked by public opinion.

The last time a glaringly senile justice sat on the Court — William O. Douglas, at the end of his tenure — the other justices worked around the embarrassment by, among other things, agreeing to postpone cases in which Douglas would have cast the deciding vote.

When I saw the seascapes that illustrate this post, I did not recognize them as golf courses. Rather, I wondered whether they were exhibits from the laboratory of Komar and Melamid.

http://www.diacenter.org/km/

It is not clear whether Komar and Melamid are unintentionally supporting Steve Sailer’s position, or whether Steve Sailer is unintentionally supporting their position, whatever that might be — they are inscrutably quasi-ironic.