It is properly termed the Spanish Main.

I live near Ilkley Moor. It has been covered by snow for a week and will be water-sodden well into spring when there are annual controlled burns.

It is perfectly obvious what Kazyrov is up to. He has devised a long term, multigenerational strategy to win the Eurovision Song Contest.

The national result is an aggregate of an unusually localised election in which different insurgencies in different places cancelled each other out.

Commenting on Steve’s previous post I said that the Muslim vote would be important, and it was. I live in a mainly white area of West Yorkshire, where Labour won because the sitting MP, a right wing Conservative and hardline Brexiteer, lost about 4000 votes to a non-entity of a Reform candidate. The neighbouring seats have more Muslims. In one, a pro-Gaza candidate creamed off enough of the Labour vote to let the Conservative in through the middle, and in another (once working class Labour but now majority Muslim) Labour scraped victory by about 1000 votes mainly because there were not one but two Muslim insurgents.

Similar patterns were seen in much of England, disguised by the electoral college character of parliamentary elections.

To look on the bright side, maybe the Starmer government will cool towards the prospect of more Muslim immigrants.

Muslim voters will be important for the first time, and may clip Keir Starmer’s wings. A body called The Muslim Vote has been endorsing candidates, most of them left wing insurgents against the Labour Party, with a chance of splitting the vote in many places. See a series of blog articles by the well-informed Richard North.

Though they have stayed away from the regular pro-Palestinian marches held most weekends, the Muslims are quietly livid about Gaza. I saw mothers and young children demonstrating outside their own primary schools a few Fridays ago, and shopping in an Asian supermarket yesterday the background music was a pop song, new to me, “Oh free, free Palestine”.

Perhaps the Jews are nominally committed to the geocentric theory of the solar system but want you to think that they are heliocentrists.

Good story, but trust does not come into it. The names tell their own story.

Aamani Jhangur
Ambreen Jhangur, Aamani’s mother.
Nafeesa Jhangur, Ambreen’s daughter
Hassan Jhangur, 24
Riasat Khan, father of Hasan
Hasan Khan, the son of Riasat Khan

Hasan/Hassan is a reliably Muslim given name. Jhangur is a Pakistani surname of Moghul origin, whereas Khan is common. Not one but two Has(s)ans were involved. You know my methods, Watson. Both families are Shiite Pakistani Muslims who have been in Sheffield for at least one generation and know each other well. The wedding was held not in a banqueting hall but under the bridegroom’s roof.

This was an honour killing. The bride married without the approval of her family, so nullifying the honour of her male relatives. To restore his eligibility, her elder brother drove his car at her new father-in-law, injuring his own mother and the eloped sister purely as a side-effect

The national conservatives are not pro-Israel, they are anti-Muslim. If Israel tries to offload ethnically cleansed Palestinians on them as asylum seekers, they will soon realise that Palestinian refugees have the right of return to Palestine.

So far, the Ukrainian war has not been a big issue, and nationalist opinion is divided (Orban and Fico are against involvement). This may change if the Uniparty decides to commit conscript troops to the war for human rights (insane but not impossible). Asylum seekers have the human right not to be drafted – or do they?

It is true that almost all significant Americans before the early twentieth century were Protestants, mostly white and male, and I hope Steve pursues this line of thinking further. Wherever the seed comes from, too little attention gets paid to the soil in which wokeness thrives, and the burned-over district is important. It was so called because evangelical revivals had ceased to gain traction there, but it was also the birthplace of Mormonism, arguably the first New Age religion.

Looking further back, the Quaker movement began as a post-Protestant reaction to empowered Puritanism. God: optional. Women: the Society of Friends as an organisation was created by Margaret Fell. Land acknowledgement: Pennsylvania. Preferred pronouns: thee. Activism: before the abolition of slavery in 1833, British Quakers would use no sugar. They later introduced milk chocolate as a health intervention. IQ: I never heard of a white working class Quaker, let alone a black one, though a woman I once knew was a Jewish Quaker.

Jack D said: When Netanyahu starts to talk about Amalek you should worry but until then you can safely dismiss meaningless rhetoric from fringe politicians.

AOC? MTG?

How about Bibi and Itamar? Smotrich?

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netanyahu-amalek-israel-palestine-gaza-saul-samuel-old-testament/

https://www.commondreams.org/news/smotrich-gaza-annihilation

So now I can start to worry?

A great blog attracts a great commenting community (and I still miss the West Hunter crowd). I have no idea how Steve filters out the Godwin’s Law dross he must surely get, but he deserves our thanks purely for that reason.

Recently, after many years of research, I happened across a probable descent from a Mayflower passenger– several, as those often come in clusters.

Congratulations.

“The Jew cries out in pain as he strikes you”

The cry of pain:

is an old (and false) antisemitic trope. Really the most despicable kind of hate speech.

The striking out:

The people who say stuff like this also usually hate gooks like you

I certainly didn’t mean it as a compliment.

Satanyahu

Wotanyahu

What is the suspicion about the pro-Israel “counter-protesters”, reportedly armed and masked, who attacked the UCLA encampment between 11pm and 3am? And the inaction of both city and campus police?

Well obviously, the Joohs (Jews Observant of Halakah) were behind it, but what was their shallow, short-sighted ulterior motive? Money? Universities don’t give money, they take it. To restore the mission of universities to seek the truth? To expose the hypocrisy of rich leftists damaging an expensive lawn? To defend Christian civilisation? Don’t make me laugh.

This was intended to put the fear of Israel into some category of non-Jews, but I cannot see who. The Uniparty? The education Blob? City government?

Somebody please enlighten me.

“Let observation with extensive view survey Mankind from China to Peru.” It is a puzzle.

A possible answer is that continental crust accretes. Assume a simplified model in which a single supercontinent centred on the South Pole splits into microcontinents the size of Madagascar which drift around, coalesce and reassemble as a supercontinent over the North Pole. At the beginning and end of the process, no land masses will be antipodal and the theoretical 27% * 27% will hold good only at the half-way mark when most of the land is clustered round the equator. In reality, the continental crust is never distributed randomly and there is no reason why the next supercontinent should be exactly antipodal to the last.

But agreed, the full story has yet to emerge. Years ago, I met a geologist who specialised in the mantle. Me: “So is that about hotspots like Iceland?” He: “Yes, but they ought to be called wetspots. Over 99.9% of the earth’s water is in the mantle.”

It isn’t over yet. Cofnas has been sacked from Emmanuel College but not yet Cambridge University.

To simplify, each of the main Cambridge colleges such as Emmanuel College is a small university, being a corporation with its own governing board and a financial endowment supporting two or three lecturers (“fellows”) in most branches of learning. Collectively, the hundred-plus college lecturers in each subject form the heavyweight Cambridge University faculty of that subject. The University is also a corporation with a governing body and endowment, providing services such as science labs, teaching in minor subjects, the professorial chairs and a copyright library with tens of millions of books.

Cofnas holds a privately funded, short term university position in the faculty of philosophy. University posts normally come with a college affiliation: it is this associated membership of Emmanuel which he has lost (see his Substack and Twitter).

antithetical to the mission of the academic milieu.

Milieus Milieux have missions? (Fun fact: the Danish for “environment” is miljø. Greta Thunberg would spell it miljö.)

The teleology of his corollary subjectivity in no way buttresses his opprobrium.

Would that be flying buttresses? This sentence appears designed to break Google Translate:

Die Teleologie seiner damit einhergehenden Subjektivität untermauert seine Schmach in keiner Weise.

Teleologiae corollariae subiectivitatem opprobrio suo minime approbat.

Of course the opinion formers who guide the conversation are intellectual betas. Their main conviction is that no real issue should be decided by public opinion but instead by… For the very reason that they have no factual opinions the answer is not themselves.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the new powers soon to be conferred on the World Health Organisation, get wise now. The betas want policy making to be contracted out to the organs of civil society, independent advisory bodies, the EU, the rules based international order, a world non-government which will take its policy from the wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Which is where the alphas come into it. Bill Gates. He is so wealthy that he has no option but altruism, he is not positively evil, and he makes such huge donations to the World Health Organisation that he has the main say in its policy. Elon Musk. The rich man’s Ayn Rand. His vast fortune cannot buy him a one hour flight to Australia, so he is selfishly squandering his billions on making it possible. Form your own opinion of them. You won’t be asked for it.

Greg Cochran, in a recent conversation with the Future Strategist, made a remarkable observation about the long-forgotten proposal to harden nuclear missiles against a first strike by configuring them in a “dense pack”. Donald Trump, he claimed, had very strong opinions about dense pack.

For that matter, Trump genuinely wanted to know about potential treatments for Covid, and his supposed endorsement of bleach as a medication was actually a rambling, sloppy description of a promising new medical technology. His mind, when he can be bothered to use it well, has hidden depths.

What has liberalism as in John Stuart Mill got to do with liberalism as in Hillary Clinton? The word as used in the paper is essentially a proxy for upper middle class social attitudes. More interesting is the discussion of class as a possible confounder: I get the impression that it is becoming acceptable to say that class differences in intelligence are hereditary. Thirty or forty years ago, that would have been heresy. Perhaps the ice is cracking.

“You must not look into a dragon’s eyes.” The first two Earthsea books are perfect. Ged, avid for every knowledge except self-knowledge. Tenar coming to see that she was brought up in a lie and a cult of death.

In the real world, Le Guin was on the wrong side of close on every issue, but her imagination saw true.

OT or maybe not. I have just seen that Lionel Shriver has a new novel coming out, in which the Mental Parity Movement has taken over and it is official truth that everyone is equally clever.

Give your kid Earthsea, a much deeper book, and has a young orphan with a scar on his forehead learning magic… oh hang on…
The magic of Harry Potter lies in people not knowing the material it was derived from, which is a variety of sword/sorcery genre books (earthsea, Belgariad, pig Latin) and Enid Blyton.

Which is more probable?

1. Linda has one leg.
2. Linda has two legs.

Some people just can’t see that the answer is 1.

Favorite comment so far!

There was no ship. It was obviously a controlled demolition. No steel-frame bridge ever collapsed into its own footprint at freefall speed. Even professional marine pilots admit that they couldn’t have hit that pile if they tried. There were no Jews driving over the bridge at 1:30 AM. Larry Silverstein said “pull it.”

~Shipwrights and Helmsmen for 3/26 Truth

Gov. Wes Moore confirms that the ship's crew issued a mayday and communicated they were experiencing a power issue, enabling transportation officials to halt traffic over the bridge. "These people are heroes. They saved lives last night," Moore said.

— Justin Fenton (@justin_fenton) March 26, 2024

Some recent opinion polls have put the Reform party (national conservative) within hailing distance of the Conservative party (conservative in name only).

This needs some context. A general election is due by the end of the year, the Uniparty will form the next government under bland Keir Starmer (Labour) or geeky Rishi Sunak (Conservative), and it won’t be Sunak. One recent poll put him on 19% and Reform on 15%. Reform, the successor party to UKIP and Nigel Farage’s Brexit party, can’t win, but they are now the third party and a big realignment is coming.

The significance of 1945 for British civic architecture is the long period of central planning which followed. In the age of Gladstone and Disraelie, social legislation was made the responsibility of strong city governments financed by local industrial magnates. If you want to attract wealth, an impressive building is money well spent, and many imposing municipal buildings date from this period. Under the Attlee government, the industrialists were nationalised and town halls became outposts of the national bureaucracy. Bureaucrats’ architecture followed.

It is true that administrators value interiors more than exteriors. The British Library building, 1970s brutalism not improved by a skin of red brick, is surprisingly traditional on the inside, with hardwood desks, leather seats and walls lined to the ceiling with books, valuable ones in glass-fronted cases.

Fortunately the neighboring Danes are not so squeamish, and have almost the same data.

https://inquisitivebird.substack.com/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-denmark

Spoiler Alert:

Exactly what you thought.

Worst:
Somalia
Syria
Lebanon
Iraq
Afghanistan

Best:
Britain
France
Neths.
USA

Apparently they don’t have enough financial data to check the SS Africans. But if you look at their Violent Crime indices, suddenly there is enough data for the SS Africans to show up! And quelle surprise, they are all in the worst half.

Very true. My degree was in classics and modern languages and my career was in software. We humanities graduates tend to find continuous mathematics difficult and discrete mathematics easy. I struggle to see why prime factors are unique, but I have no trouble with lambda calculus.

An economy is a group of people, and if all groups are equal, the consequences of free trade will be what the cited article suggests. But if one economy has more innovators and high tech workers than another, it can export its low wage industries while staying ahead and maintaining a higher standard of living for all its workforce. Open borders, unlike free trade, will reduce the proportion of skilled workers in high wage economies and they will lose their comparative advantage. If you want your country to be richer than others, you need to keep it more intelligent than others. And anyway, I want my country to be intelligent as well as rich.

Deaton does not address a question which puzzles me. Why is free trade supposed to be a package deal with high levels of migration? The first without the second might well be a winning formula.

As a political prescription mass migration was never heard of before the end of the Cold War. The first British politician to embrace it was Tony Blair, and he was never open about his views while in power. In the USA? Bill Clinton openly, maybe GHW Bush covertly. As an economic thesis, I believe it originated with Ludwig von Mises (e.g. Human Action, 1949), who observed that Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage between nations also operates at the level of the individual.

The perspective of von Mises is no mystery. He was a brilliant man and in 1914, aged 33, he was on the fast track to high station in his country. In 1940, he was a refugee. From his own point of view, he was an Austro-Hungarian, his kind of Austro-Hungarian was Austrian, his kind of Austrian was German-Austrian and his kind of German was German-Jewish. His hereditary title was accorded to his father for building a railway from his birthplace, Lemberg, to Czernowitz. Isn’t there a joke about the man who grew up in five nation states and never left Czernowitz? Von Mises took a dim view of nations as, at best, a relic of feudalism and, at worst, complete inventions like Moldova. George Soros comes out of the same box.

None of this is true of Blair and Clinton, two men who are secure in their national identities and have done exceedingly well out of their countries. The best explanation I can think of is that they would like to rule the world, but they will settle for countries with huge populations which look like the world. Any other ideas?

One name: Arthur Scargill. The strike of 1984 revealed that by then very few students regarded themselves as working class, and those who actually were did not see it as their identity. The workerists accordingly reinvented themselves as therapists and twenty years later, Blairism ensued.

A man I knew at Oxford at that time was working class, highly intelligent, right-wing and and a hereditarian. His subject was not PPE but PPP, the science of the mind and the brain, and he had interesting views on this. He thought that social stratification was inevitable, but it mattered less than we imagined. Low IQ people spend very little time thinking to themselves (hence their repetitious speech), to dull minds dull work is not torture and meritocracy did not consign them to misery.

I did not know that about PhD students, but postgraduates went woke before undergraduates, for obvious reasons when you think about it.

By the way, is Steve going to cover the suppression of the Bob Uttl paper indicating that the IQ of North American college students has fallen to 102?

Cofnas again. The Mail, Times and Telegraph pieces are all rewrites of a story in the Cambridge University newspaper Varsity. He is the target of a long-running campaign led by student activists to get him sacked, and this is significant. In Britain, wokeness first appeared in the universities in the mid-1980s, long before it entered national politics. Since the governing class of the country is more than ever dominated by graduates of the top fifteen “Russell Group” universities, the national politics of today is the student politics of 30-40 years ago.

Wokeness, certainly in Britain, is all about the internal politics of the right tail of the Bell Curve, say the area to the right of two standard deviations. Steve’s readers will not need telling that group differences in IQ are most obvious at this level. Furthermore, divide that right tail at the median point. To the right of the median there are more scientists and men, to the left more humanities students and women. I think I can guess where future university administrators are to be found. There has been surprisingly little affirmative action, and most Russell Group students are white or, increasingly, Chinese, but I would not be amazed if other non-whites fell mostly to the left of the median. Working class numbers have always been negligible.

Crucially, all those to the left of the median and some to the right are below average. It is in the nature of the right tail that the mean is higher than the median (think of mean and median income), and that IQ differentials are huge (think of Fermi and von Neumann). Students at elite universities, exposed to famous teachers and genuine geniuses, are extremely insecure about their abilities. I believe that impostor syndrome, the conviction that you were admitted by mistake, is a common problem. Student politicians appeal to the insecurity of the majority: that is the true explanation of “inclusiveness”, why it is heresy to discuss group differences and why groups to the left of the median are encouraged to think of themselves as intimidated and oppressed. The composition of the national population does not come into it.

Thanks to Steve for Noticing a story about my country which I had not. It has already been announced that the 2021 census of the UK will be the last in which officials visit every home in the land in person with a questionnaire: there will be no 2031 census.

The link to Neil O’Brien’s Substack is worth following for the words of the National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority. “Historically…transforming…transformation journey”. Also, “weight”, “estimates” and “population”. This is about population in the statistical sense, population as opposed to sample, hypothesis as opposed to data, continuous curves as opposed to finite data points.

Activists who know enough to know the distinction love population. Though climate is not a Sailer issue, those who follow climate science may have heard of “Mike’s Nature trick to hide the decline.” Mike was Michael Mann, and the trick was the publication in the journal Nature of a graph, a curve, splicing data with hypothesis, whichever suited the point to be proved.

Some commenters are puzzled why Cofnas has not been shown the instruments of torture, but it is no mystery.

He will not be charged under national laws against hate speech because there are two equiprobable reactions and Guardian or Daily Mail headlines. “Cambridge researcher is white nationalist, say campaigners” or “Charges against Cambridge researcher antisemitic, say campaigners”. Why go there?

Cambridge University will not discipline him because there is no such thing as tenure there, his externally funded appointment ends after three years and he has no hope of being kept on after it expires. He knows full well that he will soon be cancelled, and is using his current status to win a silent following for his serious work after it happens.

Nobody has heard of Nathan Cofnas. Nor has anyone heard of Charles Murray, John Derbyshire or Steve Sailer, have they? Nay, Sir, I know nothing of them, Sir. I do not concern myself with matters too high for me, Sir.

Polyamory as a thing has always existed and making it a status with a name won’t change anything. What difference has gay marriage made? “Minor celeb Mike Smith and his husband…”, that’s what. At most the normalisation of something that is far from new.

Something I have noticed recently, in connection with Covid vaccination and transitioning, is the principle that the interests of the child are paramount. The vaccines were administered in schools with a great deal of encouragement to take them, and there have been many cases of school policies on pronouns and transitioning overriding parental wishes. In other words, the interests of the school (and for school, read state) are paramount. There is huge potential here. For starters, how about schools with targets for carbon-neutral students and powers to enforce them in the home? Indirectly of course. “The city council has determined that you are an educationally carbon-neutral household…”

Charles Murray is always right.

My theory is that Will Stancil is Steve Sailer having a little joke with a fake account. He’s too good to be true.

Is Steve really standing for office in the lower house of Minnesota? Can we send donations?

I said “substantial body of halakhic opinion” because I know perfectly well that not all Jews, nor even observant Jews, hold the same views. I make it a rule to suggest that a point of view is halakhic only if I have come across it in demonstrably modern orthodox writings or reasonably sympathetic descriptions of orthodoxy.

Concerning open borders, I have read, in literature describing orthodoxy, of a halakhic principle that a Jew may live anywhere in the world. Is this principle taught by orthodox rabbis? And, if so, is it overriden by any other principle? Is it overriden by laws of a non-Jewish state enforcing its own borders?

Concerning Amalek, one sometimes reads otherwise in books describing orthodoxy, though books expounding it are silent on the matter. I am glad to learn that Netanyahu’s references to Deuteronomy last October are merely pious rhetoric and not to be put into practice. My thanks to you for expounding halakhah (or perhaps aggadah) to a non-Jew.

I am genuinely surprised to learn that YU would in theory admit a Gentile to the theological seminary to which it is attached. In modern orthodox literature demonstrably two degrees of Kevin Bacon from that seminary one reads that, in theory, Gentiles should not be taught Torah, but that exceptions sometimes apply.

My real point is this. You doubtless know the old Belfast joke “is he a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?” Equally, you can be observant of little or nothing and still be observant. For those with eyes to see, Binyamin Netanyahu, the son and grandson of Jewish cranks, observes little or nothing, but observing is what he does with Nothing.

Yeshiva University! Is there an HSAT and are you permitted to reveal your score? If so, can you enlighten us on two other important questions.

1. Is it true that a substantial body of halakhic opinion favours open borders excepting the borders of halakhic Eretz Israel?

2. Is the mitzvah to blot out Amalek dormant or valid in our day?

In Britain it is very noticeable that the war in Gaza has driven a wedge between the Labour-Conservative Uniparty (pro-Israel) and the Blob of administrators, NGOs, diversicrats, Muslim city mayors and independent advisory bodies (pro-Palestine) living in symbiosis with it.

It is not easy to say why the Uniparty is pro-Israel. Hardly IQ. The high IQ classes know who they are and they do not find Jews clever: that is for people who have garden gnomes. No doubt Jewish political donors are a consideration, but both parties could probably survive without them, and for all other purposes, as a recent book title reminded us, Jews don’t count. The Labour party in particular has far more need of the Blob as a core constituency.

My guess is that foreign policy has been contracted out to the familiar kind of expert who regard geography as a substitute for thought. “The balance between East and West. No, a Euro-Atlantic policy. No, our common European values. No, a tilt to the Indo-Pacific…” etc. This sort side with the Ukraine against Russia for the same reason. For them, the Cold War was about geography, not ideology, and geography has not changed.

We can protect their bargaining power by closing the borders.

This is exactly what I meant. A high tech country which innovates new industries and creates new wealth can put a floor under poverty, but only if it selects its immigrants.

We can protect their bargaining power by closing the borders.

This is exactly what I meant. A high tech country which innovates new industries and creates new wealth can put a floor under poverty, but only if it selects its immigrants.

Pedro de Alvarado had blond hair.

Philadelphia lost its cookie industry to Mexico. Equally, Honiara lost its nail industry to Malaysia. Middle wage, middle tech industries go to middle income countries. If Nabisco did not lower the wages of cookie workers to the level of Honiara, or even Mexico, that is because it could not compete with the higher wages paid by higher tech American employers.

The question is this. Do you want A: to be rich in the sense of commanding the services of nearby low wage earners delivering your pizza, driving you everywhere by taxi and leaf blowing your lawn? Or B: to live in a country where everyone is rich? If the answer is B, you need to keep low wage earners and the work they do out of your country.

Whatever its origin, midwit is a much-needed word. Some people have no sense that there is a stratosphere of intelligence above them.

Saini: “Words I never expected to hear from a respected mainstream geneticist”. Words I never expected to hear from a respected mainstream polymer chemist… game theorist… algebraic topologist…

Stancil: “Rufo is smart enough to know”. James Watson is smart enough to know… Andrew Wiles is smart enough to know… Carlo Rubbia is smart enough to know…

The hallmark of midwits is that they have no fear of waking up in a world from which high intelligence has vanished and they are surrounded by low IQ dimwits, because in their estimation they already are.

I can’t track it down but I remember than someone was fairly recently cancelled for saying that “Africans can’t swim”. A search on the phrase returns articles on the lines of “busting the myth that blacks can’t…” If you add “Mediterranean”, “boats”, “migrants”, “drowned” it seems that most migrants from Africa can’t swim. And this link: Top 7 Reasons why Most Africans (blacks) Can’t Swim by web developer and pan-Africanist Uzonna Anele.

Most of the reasons are obvious to some of us. Few waters in Africa are safe to swim in, and black people’s hair styles require time, work and money. To me, one reason was obvious only if you think about it. Blacks are adapted to heat and never long to be in cold water.

I don’t use these AIs yet, but can they write in the style of Claudine Gay?

Out of curiosity, what happens if you try Charles Murray? I’m wondering where the cutoff is.

@ Jeffrey D Sachs. All this is true. Thank you for saying it.

In October and November I saw four pro-Palestine demonstrations in Leeds (population 812,000, 5.4% Muslim) and one in Bradford (522,500, 25% Muslim) all five numbering in the hundreds of protestors. All were orderly and the police were easily in control. The Leeds protestors were about 50% white, 50% Muslim and at Bradford a large majority were Muslim. They were organised by left-wing coalitions, had no Islamic character and the Muslims present were plainly not Islamists. A majority of Muslims walking round both city centres at the time did not participate.

There was considerable misrepresentation of the main protest in London on 11 November as a “pro-Hamas” demonstration. Armistice Day (11 November) was conflated with the more important Remembrance Sunday on the 12th; the ceremonies at 11am on both days were alleged to be under threat from a march routed nowhere near which began at 2pm; and a minor incident after the march at the Australian war memorial was implied to have occurred a mile away at the Cenotaph, the national war memorial.

As in past years, an electronic Hanukkah menorah went up near Leeds City Hall in December and attracted no attention whatever.

The protests are expected to resume in January. Do not believe everything you read about them.

I thought everybody knew that it is halakhically forbidden to profit twice from the sale of eggs. Is there no entertaining workaround like the sale of the leaven?

Are eggs a commodity, and if so is there a way for Jews to trade in them? Throwing a slipper at a Collateralised Egg Obligation or something like that?

The commentator Eugyppius interestingly distinguishes between Type 1 and Type 2 academic plagiarism.

Type 1 occurs where the plagiarist could legitimately have paraphrased a passage but quotes it verbatim because she lacks the grasp to distinguish standard terminology from original content in the source.

Type 2 is where an entire publication consists of Type 1 plagiarism because it contains no original thought and simply appropriates other people’s ideas.

Eugyppius finds Gay guilty of both. Her analysis of certain data on voter turnout blatantly lifts statistical terminology from an unrelated study because she plainly does not know how to do the job herself. And, according to Christopher Rufo, Gay has appropriated the entire research agenda of one Carol Swain. I have not heard of her, but she seems to have been delated to the secular arm for punishment around the time that Gay’s reputation took off.

According to the Gryphon, the University of Leeds Jewish Chaplain has taken leave from his role to serve as a reservist in the Israel Defence Force. Some students are “worried and concerned for their safety”. Palestinian and Muslim university groups have issued a statement asking the university “what they will do to ensure the protection of all students in a safe environment for everyone” and demanding his dismissal. A spokesperson has said that the university has been made aware.

The number of Jews in Britain is commonly estimated at around 250,000. Recent demonstrations in London organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Campaign Against Antisemitism claimed 200,000 and 100,000 demonstrators respectively.

I currently live in northern England and I have observed four pro-Palestine demonstrations in Leeds and one in Bradford, photographing every banner and listening to the chants for at least ten minutes, the two biggest numbering in the hundreds, half of them whites, and the others in the tens. They were plainly organised by Trotskyites and left-wing trade unions and had no Islamic character whatsoever. A pro-Palestine march through Leeds University, which I did not see, was organised by the Socialist Workers Party and numbered about 50.

No federal agency can properly perform such [investigatory] functions unless it is totally separate and independent from any other…agency

The word “independent” is worth watching. Under the European Union, many British institutions were made independent, a status long accorded to the BBC and the state universities, meaning that the government makes senior appointments but cannot issue direct instructions. It is a general rule that independent bodies work well at first and that the mice play when they discover that the cat is away.

The Bank of England was made independent in 1998 with a mandate to maintain 2 percent inflation. After initial success up to and including the credit crunch of 2008, our central bank discovered quantitative easing, expanded its concerns to matters such as diversity, equity and climate change, and inflation peaked last year at 9 percent.

The civil service too regards itself as independent. A government department lately ignored a direct order to illuminate its headquarters in the colours of a certain country. And this year cabinet minister Dominic Raab was forced out by accusations of bullying. Supposing that he was the head of department and the bureaucrats were his subordinates he criticised their work, angrily threw a tomato into a waste bin and, according to one complaint, acted as if he was the most important person in the room.

For those with eyes to see, Donald Trump is a Puritan. He believes. As the sharp eyes of Steve Sailer have noticed, his religion is that of Dale Carnegie, a gospel of wealth and divine election. Trump is so rich that he must be elect, or so he believes.

Also for those who can see, Netanhayu is an observant Jew. His grandfather was a yeshiva dropout in Tsarist Russia. He consistently chooses halakhic parties as his coalition partners. He doesn’t observe very much halakhah and he thinks and speaks a great deal, but observance is what he does with speech, observance is what he does with thought.

Spot on.

Did Czogolsz act alone? Does anybody know? Does anybody care? Did they know or care in 1963?

You can get Guardian readers to believe anything by the argument from broad-mindedness. (Generations of British schoolchildren have been taught to regard Henry VIII as a just and tolerant monarch, but researchers into the legacy of empire have uncovered evidence…)

In other news (see the Daily Telegraph), the North Hertfordshire Museum is to accord the Roman emperor Elagabalus her preferred pronouns. A blockbusting investigation by classical historian Dio Cassius has shown that she identified as a woman.

Oh, and didn’t Elizabeth I expel the “blackamoors” from England?

Risk factor epidemiology has always been the handmaiden of preventive medicine, its main purpose being the search for new health regimes such as a low fat diet and leisure exercise. Genes cannot be countenanced as risk factors because a risk factor is by definition something which can be modified. The Mediterranean diet is a (negative) risk factor, genetic differences between Mediterranean and northern Europeans are not. What if nothing needed to be done? It does not bear thinking about.

I suppose that few people will take my website on the smoking sceptic Philip Burch seriously, but it contains many examples of this style of thinking, particularly in the sections on heart disease, falsification and preventive medicine, including fairly explicit statements that sceptical “health beliefs”, randomised trials and Popperian falsification are themselves risk factors for ill health.

This is well-known fact. Go to a research library and you will find it stated in pre-internet printed books. The key term is halakhic Eretz Israel.

Certain provisions of Jewish law, halakha, obtain with reference to Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel. Charmingly, Jewish burials require a pinch of its earth. More ludicrously, when the Passover dinner (“Why is this night different from all nights?”) is celebrated outside the Land, it is supposed to be repeated the following night (“the second Seder”) for fear of getting the date wrong. To strictly religious Jews, the boundaries of this territory are a real issue, and on any interpretation they are wider anything now controlled by the state of Israel.

The Undark article contains an interesting hint that preventative medicine is under threat from GWAS.

A linked paper concerns a randomised study of Estonians considered at high risk from cardiovascular disease on the basis of a genomic score and also traditional (epidemiological) risk factors such as high blood pressure and cholesterol. An intervention group were told of their genomic risk and counselled to take anti-hypertensive and lipid-lowering drugs, while a control group were not.

If I have interpreted the results correctly, the intervention group took significantly more of these drugs than the controls, but when the two groups were compared, there was no significant change in the epidemiological risk factors. It is not new that randomised interventions make no difference to health outcomes (search on MRFIT). What’s new is that genes seem to be the reason why.

Preventative medicine is a big industry, and politicians like it because it is cheap. It will not throw in the towel before putting up a fight.

Climate sceptics are science deniers who don’t know the Two Laws of Thermodynamics.

The First Law. Heat is signal and climate is not weather.

The Second Law. Cold is noise and weather is not climate.

Noah Smith was replying to a suggestion that tweets filtered by nation of origin would reveal significant differences of outlook. I think this is true, but for other reasons than highbrow theorists like Carl Schmitt. I am just about able to discuss politics in French and German, but when I do I always come away feeling that both parties were talking past each other.

The French are lucid and forthcoming about their country, but they explain their affairs in terms of concepts such as laicity and the indivisibility of the Republic which I do not find as self-evidently compelling as they do, and of course the same is true the other way. A Frenchman who was digitising a dictionary asked me to define Whigs and Tories: were they the Left and the Right? I gave him the thumbnail sketch, and he grasped it immediately, but they meant no more to him than physiocrats do to me. He then asked me a question about the American Constitution, seemingly expecting an Englishman to know it well. Chatting to a Frenchwoman and her husband on another occasion, she mentioned (which I knew) that liberalisme in French means Reagan-Thatcher economic liberalism. What, I replied, would the French call liberalism meaning the views of Hillary Clinton? Intriguingly, she said that the thing exists but there is no French word for it.

In their own language, I have found the Germans courteous but evasive, extremely unwilling to admit any kind of social or political divisions in the modern Federal Republic, let alone explain them. Obviously the past is a problem, but more because of WWI than WWII. I never met a German who knew that (from my point of view) the most disastrous year of the 20th century was 1916. Those who are willing to see their country as a product of its history emphasise Kleinstaaterei, the system of small states in the 18th century, which they regard as bad and wrong. As a believer in nationalism all round I agree, but that does not seem to be their reason. One highly educated German emphasised that the office of King of the Romans was of considerable importance. That title was held by the Holy Roman Emperor (of the German Nation, also apparently extremely significant) between his election by the princes and his coronation by the Pope. The context, don’t ask me why, was the failure of the Weimar constitution in 1932.

James Shapiro has a plausible answer to this question in Contested Will, a very good survey of alternative Shakespeare theories. Some people want literary criticism to be an extension of literary biography; as he puts it, to read every author as you might read Sylvia Plath. Since all the known facts about Shakespeare are pretty dry, he does not lend himself to this approach, whereas de Vere in particular had an interesting life, a distinctly dramatic one.

I come late to this thread, but nobody seems to have made a rather obvious point. There are more people alive now than in Shakespeare’s day, but also a great many more activities to excel at. It was not open to him to become a famous sportsman, scientist, composer of orchestral music or dozens of other things which had not yet been thought of. As a proportion of the general population, there are quite possibly not more but fewer playwrights now.

A small fragment can sometimes reveal a lot. The palimpsest scrap of Hipparchus’s star catalogue published last year describing four stars in Corona Borealis proved that Hipparchus and Ptolemy are significantly different, and that the seemingly late Aratus Latinus (8th century AD) contains observations derived from Hipparchus.

DREADLOCKS.
Mum murdered in hair studio.

THE SWEENEY.
Knife killing in beauty salon.

NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY.
Hair-do at 11.00. Dead at 31.

HAVE YOU CALLED THE FUZZ?
Hair stylist dies with the phone in her hand.

No, I don’t remember those headlines either.

Glancing at Wikipedia it seems that Agustin Fuentes is essentially a theorist and administrator. Does he actually know anything worth knowing? He has a B.A. in Zoology and Anthropology from Berkeley, so he presumably does, but his published research concerns the interaction of tourists with colonies of macaques in Singapore, Bali and Gibraltar, which makes him both a biological and a cultural anthropologist. Nice work if you can get it.

One of the few exact results of Boasian cultural anthropology is the classification of kinship systems – who you can marry, different sorts of uncle, parental authority over adult children, moieties, the Alaskan kinship type and so on. Does anybody know of such a system which does not assume that there are exactly two sexes?

Exactly. In Ireland, rural villages are being flooded with alleged asylum seekers who barely pretend to be genuine refugees – and if you think that The Jews have any say in the governance of Ireland you need your head examining. The Irish political class clearly think that a larger, browner population will somehow make them less provincial, more important, more global.

Don’t ask why they think so. I was once chatting with two software developers, one from Ireland, one from New Zealand, at a startup in London. I said that if you come from a small country you must have an easy path into the governing class. They both said that it wasn’t worth getting into.

My mistake, I meant English courts. Photography and drawing inside the courtroom were still forbidden when last I heard.

The main British news of the week has been the conviction and sentencing of nurse Lucy Letby for murdering ten pre-term infants under her care in the neonatal ward of a hospital in Chester in 2016. She was convicted almost entirely on the basis of scientific evidence and there are several web pages raising scientific doubts about the case against her. One of them is this, which I mention here because of the images of Letby near the top. You need to know that British courts do not admit photographers, but that a profession known as court artists may attend a trial and sketch the proceedings from memory afterwards. I think it will be admitted that the “artist’s impression” of her looks distinctly more villainous than two photographs of her at home and at work.

The concept of a generation was originally about youth culture and successive fads in music and dress. When Grease and the first episodes of Happy Days were new they were set all of twenty years in the past, but to those of us who watched them as 1970s teenagers that period seemed as remote as the Jazz Age of our grandparents’ day. Retro on demand has changed that. The youth do not define themselves as the insurgent voice of a new decade.

A very interesting study illustrated with an interesting chart. Not a steady clip at all, as I had assumed too. The green line, transportations to three pure death camps, plainly indicates that Operation Reinhard was planned in advance, activated in June 1942 and more or less completed in six months. The red line, all other Jewish deaths in the holocaust, plausibly suggests that the German invasion of Hungary and the liberation of France and southern Italy in mid-1944 activated a similar plan in western Europe.

One quibble. The red line rises in tandem with the green line during mid-1942, but that peak is said to represent shootings and gassings by Einsatzgruppen, presumably during the initial success of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941. These deaths are less easily quantified, and Richard Evans stated in his testimony to the Irving trial that they are the reason for the doubt about five and a half million or six.

And a question of information. Who was sent to Chelmno? It was a pure death camp, but sited in territory claimed by Germany to be part of the Reich, and not part of Barbarossa and Reinhard.

I always thought the Napoleon story was too good to be true, even if it should have been. Thanks for tracking it down.

Do any possible scenarios involve inquoracy or abdication of office? That is how Englbert Dollfuss, the incumbent Chancellor of Austria, acquired permanent emergency powers, and I have often thought that that is what Goedel had in mind when he said there were any number of ways to turn the USA into a dictatorship.

State governors resign rather than certify the result of the vote for the College and…

The incumbent Vice-President resigns rather than call the joint session of Congress and…

The vice-presidency happening to be vacant, the lame duck President resigns and the lame duck Speaker of the House becomes the new lame duck President and…

We don’t dance to techno any more, but I am slightly surprised that nobody has mentioned MDMA. The 1990s were the age of Oasis and Blur, but also of Paul Oakenfold and Fatboy Slim, of ecstasy, raves, dance clubs and celebrity DJs. I know, because I was there, that you could go into a provincial pub, take a chance that you had spotted Mr Nice and openly say that you could have wished that you knew somebody who might know where the pills might be found for Friday night. Really. No harder than buying grass.

According to Wikipedia, the GDP of Hungary is 150-180 billion US dollars at nominal exchange rates (more by purchasing power parity) of which the government take is about 45%. That is to say, the Hungarian government has something like 80 billion USD per year at its disposal to spend on all governmental responsibilities.

George Soros, who is very active in his native country, is said to have a net worth of about 8 billion USD and to have given away 32 billion to his Open Society Foundation of which 15 billion have been spent. On issues which concern him, such as migration, he can quite possibly match the Orban government dollar for dollar, or forint for forint at purchasing power parity.

I have always thought that the key to George Soros is his father’s youth before and after World War I. He genuinely seems to believe that open borders would transform the world into Austria-Hungary in the palmy days of emperor Franz Joseph.

Probably irrelevant but possibly not. May I draw attention to a front page story on BBC world news 2023-03-05?

Headline:
The infamous town hosting Trump’s rally

Teaser:
Waco, Texas, was the site of a deadly standoff in 1993 between the US government and an “Army of God”

Click on the link. More of the same and then factual claims of a sort.

Under Koresh, the Branch Davidians had stockpiled weapons in order to become an “Army of God”.

Authorities intended to conduct a surprise daylight raid on 28 February 1993 and arrest Koresh, but what ensued was a 51-day standoff that left 76 people dead, including more than 20 children and four federal agents.

The calamity – and a similar incident one year earlier in Ruby Ridge, Idaho –

If memory serves, the Branch Davidians were a mainly black evangelical sect, the purchase of guns was a technically illegal exercise in fund-raising and the massacre ensued because the feds got bored and lost their temper.

Alexa. Fact check me.

I’ll have to take your word for it that the article was nice because they appear to have put up a solid paywall after the first couple of paragraphs. None of the usual methods (google cache, archive.org, bypass paywalls browser extension, etc.) gets you past the 1st page.

You can currently get the whole Washington Post for $4/month with the 1st month free or something like that so it’s pretty presumptuous of them to ask $9 a month for their little magazine.

OTOH, the Washington Post never has anything nice to say about Steve. Maybe after he is dead they will have strange new respect for him that they will use as a stick with which to beat the new conservatives at that time.

I understand that payrolls have to be met, but the fucking paywalls are ruining the internet for anyone who wants to get information from more than one or two sources. The whole thing is just closing down. One solution would be an infrastructure that would allow publications to replace paywalls with micropayments for individual articles. Calling Elon Musk…

Very true. I’d pay $0.25 to read the Compact article but I am not signing up for $5 a month. Same thing with people on Substack like Glenn Greenwald.

I would, however, pay $5 a month if Steve went to Substack.

Although I don’t think I would usually find myself in agreement with Compact magazine, I wish them well. I wonder, though, how much writers and publishers expect us all to pay to stay well-informed. Compact wants 90 bucks a year. How many newspapers and magazines do you read? How many Substack bloggers to you subscribe to? If I paid for all the ones I wanted to read, I’d probably top a thousand bucks a year. What should someone who wants to be well-informed be willing to pay? P.S. I am in fact a subscriber to American Conservative, so it’s a bit disappointing to me that Helen Andrews, AmCon’s editor, has chosen to write about STeve Sailer for Compact, where I can only see the first couple of paragraphs.

Hypnotoad’s second sentence is the null hypothesis. That leaves the first sentence. What’s the contradiction? Ex hypothesi, and without loss of generality…

My brother-in-law teaches English at a vocational college in Yorkshire, i.e. to mainly white students of just above average intelligence. As a comprehension exercise he set them the opening passage of Bleak House about London fog (family reading in its day). Expecting them to find it tough, he made a list of difficult words and phrases which he thought would stump them, but the list was not long enough. To his surprise, none of them understood “Kentish”, the adjective referring to the county of Kent. In fact, none of them had heard of Kent.

So, I could easily believe such a story about Hawthorne and students in general, but it does seem a bit incredible when told about Harvard.

Not to be taken seriously.

The vegetable section of my local supermarket looked exactly the same earlier today (18.00 GMT, 22 February 2023). Twenty four hours previously it was full. What happened in between? Panic buying triggered by stories in the morning newspapers about panic buying. Believe it or not, many people still get their news from print newspapers. The reason for the shortage, mentioned in paragraph 4 of the Mail story, is cold weather on the continent.

Since this cannot be blamed on global warming, isolation from EU markets or the Ukraine war, the field is open for the president of the National Farmers Union, addressing the annual conference of that subsidy-hungry producer lobby, to come up with the real explanation: soaring energy costs (true) which leave Britain unable to grow its own vegetables in heated greenhouses.

He certainly had a good retirement.

Years ago I saw him on the television news. It seems that he happened to be in Britain and had agreed to be interviewed live about some crisis or other. He proceeded to say that he didn’t know anything about it, because he was here for a convention on Dylan Thomas and was out of touch with events in Washington. Think it through.

He can only have attended the convention (and yes, inevitably guarded like a ton of gold) because he was genuinely a Dylan Thomas fan. Starting with Trump and working backwards, can you imagine any of the rest being a fan of anyone other than themselves? GWHB perhaps.

Yet why did he give the interview? A worldlier man would have pretended to have something to say. A really worldly man would have turned down the interview and let “sources” leak the story of Humble Jimmy. Instead, he humbly did his own humility signalling just like us ordinary folks. After peeling two layers of the onion, you just have to stop and accept that the onion has been sufficiently peeled.

Regression downwards towards different means strikes me as much the most plausible explanation of the spike at high income levels. But would you not expect to see the reverse effect at very low income levels, with a pronounced differential regression upwards?

What about actual service in the world wars? To me, it was like the Black Death, something that happened long ago, but my parents, born in 1937 and 1939, had fathers who were absent in WWII and grandfathers who served in the trenches. With hindsight it was unwise to be born in the 1890s and found a family in your twenties. Can it be that the real soundtrack to 1960s Britain was Oh What a Lovely War?

Thanks to Steve for a general interest post.

May I draw attention to my website The Burch Curve about the medical physicist and scientific heretic Philip Burch?

In short, he said in the 1970s and 80s that Richard Doll’s hypothetical mechanism whereby smoking causes lung cancer could not possibly be right because

1. It was falsified by empirical data.
2. It invoked two incompatible dose-response relationships.
3. It appealed to verification and ignored falsifying evidence.

Burch was ignored away because

1. His arguments involved a command of mathematics beyond most physicians, politicians and opinion journalists.
2. If he was right, nothing could be done about cancer until well into the 21st century.
3. Sir Richard Doll, M.D., F.R.S, Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford could not possibly not be a great man and a great scientist.

Readers who know what power laws are and why true power laws never occur in nature may have their eyes opened by the quality of the arguments which convinced the medical establishment that Burch had been disposed of: