We get an abundance of actual images and vignettes, in photos and prose, each recognizable; yet a clear portrait of the man fails to resolve itself in the biography as a whole

I completely agree. I’m reading the book now, about half-way through. I was trying to think what I would say about it if I were to write my own book review, and this was the main point. Buckley just seems to fade into the background at many points, and I have no sense of him, really. Part of it is Tanenhaus’s story-telling style, which is virtually absent. For example, he informs us that Buckley went on the speaker circuit to campuses for ISI, but he never gives us an example. As it happens, Buckley had been to the college I attended the year before I applied, and the students who invited him had a lot to say about his visit. Did Tanenhaus interview anybody about these? What was he doing for 30 years? Not journalism, except for the muck-raking about the Buckley newspaper in SC. That’s the other problem with the bio. Half of it is boomer hand-wringing about racism. Yawn. Tanenhaus’s bio will be forgotten soon. There is perhaps another, better writer still to come out with the definitive bio.

As for Roy Cohn anecdote, it seems quite clear that it was left out because it puts gays in a poor light.

Walter Block was drummed out of the libertarian movement by HHH over his support of Israel in the current Gaza conflict. So, bad example.

“Infinite plasticity”. More typical stupid BS from this side. When people shave or cut their hair, or cut off their feet, they don’t claim to be transforming into a different form of human being. Obviously not analogous to trannyism

You can find it if you just search for “Tucker Carlson demon attack” on YouTube. It’ll come up top.
It’s in an interview he gave for a documentary called “Christianities”.

Also, I note that the Patrick Ben-David podcast is naming associates of Kirk who are directly refuting your claim that Kirk told his associates he was scared of Israel. Dave Smith is also speaking out against this idea in his recent podcast related to the topic of DMs he received from Kirk. This is why it would be nice for you to name names. Right now, it looks like your solid source is going through a phase change.

By the way, the article you published in your “science” section on the science of trannies is of very poor quality. Not up to the standards of the political commentary on the site.

So, when he reached puberty, he developed natural female breasts, hips, skin texture, facial features, and all the other physical characteristics of a regular genetic woman.

Typical lie.

Hormone treatments can change the trajectory of the development of tissues at puberty, which is why secondary sexual characteristics like skin texture and hair are affected. They cannot change the underlying structure of the body, which is why this person did not development at puberty a vagina, uterus, or ovaries, which are the most important parts, definitionally, functionally, and (as this is secondary to functionality), socially. This person cannot be a sexual mate for a man or be a mother, which is why the author met this person in a gay bar.

Today, she is a very beautiful and very nice woman in her 30s.

No, this person isn’t. This person still looks like a man dressing up as a woman. There are occasional transexuals that can really pass but they are few in the trans world, and this is not one, which is why the author met this person in a gay bar.

The article starts by saying the parents believed the child’s self-reported gender dysphoria was his “real gender”. There’s no reason for us to accept that. Sorry his parents allowed him to express his homosexuality as a very complex form of performative transvestitism.

The rest of the article just recounts the author’s acceptance of the ideologies that have captured the scholarly fields that study trannies. The fact that some sex researcher claims there are lots of genders or some stupid nonsense is not a dunk on people who disagree.

The author says he has 40 years of experience writing about trans issues. Looks like he wasted 40 years of his life. Now he should atop wasting other peoples’ time too by stopping his credulous writing.

Following Carlson’s claims during the election that he was physically mauled by demons in his sleep, leaving actual bloody claw marks, which he has not showed pictorial evidence of, I have to conclude that (a) he is crazy, (b) he is a cynical liar (which opens the possibility he is an asset of some clandestine group), or (c) he is really an asset of God. All of these suggest Carlson is not going to take precautions. Nevertheless, I think orchestrating a public assassination in which some patsy is set up convincingly must be harder than arranging a house fire or a “burglary” or a “hunting accident” while he’s walking his dog. Similarly, Kirk wouldn’t need to be killed Ukrainian-style with a car bomb. He could be killed Russian-style in an airplane accident or by falling out a window, or American -style in a “hold-up gone wrong” or an unexplained suicide.

Unless all the evidence so far has been fabricated, Tyler Robinson appeared not to want to be a martyr. I doubt he is “taking one for the team” (i.e., being misled into silence by Mossad manipulation).

The other possibility is that he thinks he really did kill Kirk while someone else did it. In that case, proper police work should uncover multiple bullets.

Mr. Unz, you often have anonymous sources that are able to give you key information. Although I don’t mean to slander you with being a liar, your statements would sometimes be more convincing if these key sources could be identified. What does it mean that he “knew” Kirk?

The question I have about the Israeli theory is why Israel hasn’t killed Tucker Carlson (or John Mearsheimer). Carlson is very much like Kirk in terms of influencing public opinion and much more outspoken about Israel and much easier to kill (in his rural Maine home). For that matter, targetting Kirk in a hotel, home, or airplane would be much easier than this. If they were going to go to the trouble of such an operation, why not do a different one?

Sounds like the Japanese are drinking the kool aid just like the West and will ultimately destroy their country and culture. The creation of a nationalist party is just confirmation things are headed in that direction.

Michael Tracey and Richard Hanania have been having a laugh at the credulous MAGA folks. In fact, they recorded a special “emergency” podcast to guffaw over the birthday letter Trump sent to Epstein…. yeah, that letter that no one has seen and that the WSJ hasn’t wven (if you read between the lines) claimed to have seen let alone verified. Stupid credulous CPT!!!!!

When the SPLC doxxed him a few years ago, they said he was 55 years old, so must have been late 50s or 60s.

To the tune of “On the Road Again”!

At least that doesn’t sound suicidal.

He was still posting just a few days ago. Any idea what he died from? He wasn’t that old, so maybe a heart attack?

Brought to you by ChatGPT, celebrating the posting of a new iSteve Open Thread….

“I Can Load Again”

Well, my tablet’s old, the screen is cracked,
But I still try to load that blog post back.
When the comments rise, I can’t get through,
The page just hangs, what can I do?

I can load again,
Oh, I can load again!
I can load again,
When the post is fresh and thin!
I can load again,
Oh, I can load again!
When the comments aren’t too many,
I can load again!

Sometimes I wait for the screen to spin,
Hoping for that post to load in.
When it’s got a hundred comments, I know,
It’s time to give up and let it go!

I can load again,
Oh, I can load again!
I can load again,
When there’s only five or ten!
I can load again,
Oh, I can load again!
When the comment count’s light,
I can load again!

Oh, the pages take so long,
But when they’re small, I sing my song!
I just keep tryin’, it’s worth the fight,
When the post is new, it feels so right!

I can load again,
Oh, I can load again!
I can load again,
When it’s under fifty friends!
I can load again,
Oh, I can load again!
When the comments are so few,
I can load again!

I can load again,
Oh, I can load again!
I can load again…
When I finally see it spin!
Yeah, I can load again!

It’s nice that the latest thread will load in my browser now that it doesn’t have 1000+ comments.

There should be regular thread renewals. They should have relevant questions like “when Sailer dies, who will be the next Sailer?”. I mean obviously Sailer should turn into a title, like ” Caesar”. It can even have devolutions like Tsar…. Sailer–>Slur. Slur Achmed II, etc.

You’re so endearingly naive. Obviously, Sailer can communicate directly to Unz without posting. He’s doing it as a form of public denial. “I’m not posting at Unz Review” .

I like to scroll through the posts here just to read the handles. Lots of great names going back to the great days of iSteve blog. Cheers!!

In other AI news, researchers report that LLMs like Grok lie, hallucinate, and tell users what they think users want to hear….

About the election, one commenter points out that the Vatican is in deep financial trouble and the likeliest source of fundraising in the next few decades is the USA. That ‘s from a protestant clergyman.

I am confused why you would be surprised over a mathematician’s Catholic faith. Belief in God is not the same as appreciation of God, which may come from spiritual practices that you eschew. More importantly, if God is, as you suggest, real, then you have to accept that He may be closer to some men than others who may only be able to discern Him as an abstraction.

What is she going to do with a $700,000 money order when the bank closes her account?

Gold, Bitches!

Many Chinese are dupes of the regime, which supports outward-looking revenge to distract from the fact that it is itself the inheritor, descendant, and beneficiary of the greatest attacks on Chinese people and civilization in history. If Chinese people took da fu chou seriously, they would be rising up against the regime and all the Party members. An example of this kind of dupe is a girl I met from Dalien who told me that the PRC would “take back” Taiwan for the Chinese and get revenge on the “traitors” there. When one reflects that Taiwan is actually currently in the hands of Chinese people and that the nationalists who fled there were more supportive of traditional Chinese culture than the Communists, it becomes clear that this girl’s perspective is simply incoherent, the kind of internal contradictions in her thought stem from being propagandized. It’s only by conflating Chinese people and culture with the regime and its policies that one can arrive at such an absurd idea as that Taiwan is currently not Chinese or that the Taiwanese are traitors to Chinese civilization.

I have traveled throughout Asia, including the PRC, Taiwan, and other locations of Chinese diaspora, and I meet PRC citizens regularly in my current circumstances. The idea that PRC people in modern times are Confucianists is a joke, and so, when one point of Confucianism, such as vengeance, is selected out and justified by its Confucian grounding, you can be sure the motivation is found somewhere else, such as feelings of inadequacy or state propaganda efforts.

From what I’ve seen, he appears to be anti-gay but pro-immigration. My guess is that there was a concern among the cardinals that a pro-gay Pope would cause a schism in the church (because of the third-world bishops), so they’re preventing that while at the same time advancing the leftist agenda of destroying the West with immigration. Dumb-case scenario is that the conclave elected an American someone to a decades-long job in order to oppose Trump/Vance, who will probably be in office only 3-7 more years.

I must have screwed up the link, and I didn’t check it: “Houston, we habe Papem.”

No problems!

https://imgflip.com/i/9svkyv

Well, my idea was that Mars colonization would be one-way until we got that figured out. I.e., there would be no generations raised on Mars until we got the problems you refer to figured out.

The real issue with gravity, I suspect, will be less the issue of pure strength (we could likely be mitigated through various exercise regimens and stress inducing) than the issue of unknown physiological effects, especially in development. Although there may be rodent experiments on the ISS that I am unaware of, I think we have no idea about gravity’s impact on embryos or early life tissue formation, and how that may impact things like nutrition. For example (just speculating), maybe without Earth gravity, bone formation would require less calcium, and the “excess” calcium in a normal diet would end up in places we don’t want it, doing things we don’t want it to do.

Anyway, just as AI can detect the race of a patient from a chest x-ray in some way we can’t understand, I suspect AI will be able to contribute a lot to solving these kinds of problems even before we experience them. I read a criticism of Musk’s Mars plans that essentially amounted to “his timeline is too fast” and then discovered the AI2027 working group soon after that predicting that our timelines are all too long. Maybe Musk is really just that much smarter than many of his critics. That would explain why his politics got more like ours!!! ; D

There are quite a few people, I think, who would be willing to take a one-way trip to Mars. We could start with them and figure out the whole travel back and forth thing later.

As I pointed out in another thread , Netanyahu tells Israelis to remember Amalek because there are no laws in the Torah he can point to to support the Gaza ethnic cleansing. If there were, we can be sure not only he but all the Torah-observant Orthodox would be relying on it. Instead what we see is that many Torah-observant Jews are anti-Zionist and oppose the war in Gaza. Amalek is not a generalizable principle, and Netanyahu is wrong and dishonest on this point.

There are strands of Jewish interpretation that predict a messianic-genocide-slavery scenario, but these are apocalyptic and their use to guide contemporary policy-making are wrong and cannot be fairly laid on the Torah.

I have always pondered about how Christians (and to some extent Jews) caricatured God as having human features (bearded oldish gentlemen with halo in a cloud somewhere) which is totally different from the Muslims’ view of the God of whom NOTHING is comparable to Him. Why would god have features similar to human? Does god need a mouth? Does god eat. If he has a mouth to eat does he have a stomach? Does he go to the bathroom often like we do? Does he has nostrils to breath? Does he has a navel? Obviously The God CANNOT be similar to human. Our form is functional and God does not function like us. This alone would counter the notion that man was created in the image of god.

There may be a sense in which man was created “in the image of God,” but to get a sense of that sense, you need to leave your body and ego behind. That’s what the mystics from all traditions have been telling us for millennia.

This is dumb. No serious Christian theologian or believer thinks of the Father as a literal embodied man, while the Son is conceived of as definitely an embodied man about whom we can say, yes, he has a stomach and eats. So, the commenter is wrong about Christian belief in multiple ways.

He’s also wrong about Islam because although Allah may be philosophically posited to be unlike man in that religion, actually what we see throughout the Koran is a god that demonstrates man-like psychology and communicates through language. In other words, he condescends to communicate with his creation in a very human way, and this is exactly how Yahweh is conceived by Jews and the Father conceived by Christians.

Kevin Barrett’s idea is also wrong. Islam is not gnostic any more than Christianity and preaches a physical resurrection of the body on judgement day and an embodied paradise. What is in God’s image is not a disembodied unemotional Aristotelian point.

No, you’re not recognizing the divisions between observant and non-observant and among different sects of observant. There aren’t Hasids making porn and distributing it among gentiles as your ideas would suggest.

Take, for example, James Deen the porn actor. He is a Jew who has expressed Jewish supremacy views. He makes porn with gentile girls and distributes it in a gentile country, but he also made lots of porn with actress Joanna Angel, who is Jewish, and distributes that both in the US and in Israel. In other words, he’s not holding a double standard for inside and outside the Jewish community.

When the porn blogger Luke Ford converted to Orthodox Judaism, his rabbi told him he had to stop writing about porn or he couldn’t come to their synagogue. In other words, the rabbi was cracking down on Ford’s promotion of porn in the gentile world of blogging.

Luke Ford writes:

Jews participating in the sex trade are not behaving Jewishly. They’re acting in a manner contrary to everything Jewish – the Torah, Israel, God, synagogue and everything the Jewish tradition considers holy.

But to be a Jew, you simply have to be born of a Jewish mother, just as you automatically become an American if you are born to American parents. A Jew can hate Judaism and Israel, Moses and the Torah, and still be a Jew. His values aren’t Jewish but he’s still a member of the people Israel. To be a Christian, by contrast, one must affirm Christ.

This explains how Jews can live un-Jewish lives.

While few Jews are radical, many radicals (and pornographers) are Jews. Writes non-Jew Ernest van den Haag in his book The Jewish Mystique, “Out of one hundred Jews, five may be radicals, but out of ten radicals, five are likely to be Jewish.”

Virtually all movements to change the world come from the Jews – Christianity, secular humanism, Marxism, Socialism and Communism, feminism, and the labor movement. That’s part of the reason that Jews are hated. The world doesn’t want to be changed.

Rooted in nothing, radical Jews frequently seek to make others equally rootless by tearing down their religious, national, communal and traditional allegiances. Such Jews carry on the traditional Jewish hatred of false gods but without offering anything to replace the scorned allegiances.

Jewish domination of porn, banking, entertainment, media and academia does not lead to discrimination against gentiles – most radical Jews marry Gentiles. Nor does it lead to flattering portraits of Jews, as Jews abound in self-criticism. Rather, the most important result of the domination of non-Jewish Jews in these fields is their war on traditional values. Porn is just one expression of this rebellion against standards, against the disciplined life of obedience to Torah that marks a Jew living Judaism.

https://www.lukeisback.com/essays/essays/jews.htm

Your idea that Jews undermining gentile society are acting out the spirit of the Torah is just wrong.

The key word in your comment is ” cursory “. In fact, there was disagreement among Jews about how to interpret the lending laws. Some thought as you suggest, that it was an ethnic command that allowed them to exploit other people, but some thought it was a command about about community and that “foreigners” were people who lived outside the community. In the diaspora, there was a debate about whether the commandment disallowed, for example, French Jews lending to French gentiles but allowed French Jews lending to German gentiles.

The Torah does advocate for separation between Israelites and non-Israelites, but not for the destruction of all non-Israelites just because of their ethnicity. In fact, the Torah describes Israel as a witness to other nations, the “Noahide” commands are generally considered to be a path to eternal life for non-Jews, and in the 1st century BC, synagogues all over the Roman empire welcomed “God-fearing” gentiles who were interested in learning about Torah and Yahweh.

The reason Netanyahu makes references to the Amalekites instead of referring to laws commanding the destruction of non-Jews living in Palestine is that such laws don’t exist. The situation with the Amalekites was a one-off specific thing with historical contingency, not a general command for all time. So, Netanyahu can’t cite such a law in his statements.

Does the Torah have different standards for different peoples? Yes. Does it just blanket advocate for destroying or undermining all non-Jews? No.

The article is about Yahweh and the Torah, not about the Jews. When Jesus criticized the Jews, His criticism was based on their non-adherence to Torah. When He says their father is Satan and that he was a murderer from the beginning, He is referring back to the beginning of Genesis, the first scroll of Torah. Jesus is not saying Yahweh is part of Satan, but that the Jews are of Satan because they do not follow Yahweh.

The issue of Yahweh’s haram command to genocide people is an ethical challenge to the Torah’s divine inspiration, but (1) it is a challenge to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, all of whom rely on the Torah’s inspiration to legitimize their beliefs and (2) it is separate from the JQ, which is about population, not theology and belief.

So, killing or exiling people for adultery is the letter of the law but making porn is the spirit of the law? Banning cross-dressing and homosexual sex is the letter of the law but LGBTQ is the spirit of the law? Wearing somber clothes that hide your body is the letter of the law but Hollywood is the spirit of the law? LOL, no.

Yes but those things are all done by secular/liberal Jews, not Torah-observant ones, which fact puts an interesting spin on the Yahweh is evil schtick.

We have revealed the Torah, wherein is guidance and light. The submissive prophets ruled the Jews according to it, so did the rabbis and the scholars, as they were required to protect God’s Book, and were witnesses to it. So do not fear people, but fear Me. And do not sell My revelations for a cheap price. Those who do not rule according to what God revealed are the unbelievers.

And We wrote for them in it: a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and an equal wound for a wound; but whoever forgoes it in charity, it will serve as atonement for him. Those who do not rule according to what God revealed are the evildoers.

In their footsteps, We sent Jesus son of Mary, fulfilling the Torah that preceded him; and We gave him the Gospel, wherein is guidance and light, and confirming the Torah that preceded him, and guidance and counsel for the righteous.

So let the people of the Gospel [which confirms the Torah] rule according to what God revealed in it. Those who do not rule according to what God revealed are the sinners.

LOL.

These guys (heroes) are risking blindness to solve Africa’s iq problem.

In the Genesis story we are not told Adam and Eve’s skin colour. But from this pair came the diverse nations we see on earth today. It is clear the whole of creation was to be multi-coloured and diverse. For God loves diversity…

At this point a sperm donor who knew Mejier became a Whistleblower. Jonathan Mejier was not a lone wolf, he was part of a global group of mass donors who divide the world into territories with the aim of creating as many white children as possible. This is their method of bleaching the world. Their task is to rid the world of non-white nations by saturating it with white babies…

Mass donors like Jonathan Jacob Mejier are no better than Adolf Hitler. Here is a quote from serial donor Anthony Greenfield “So far, I donated sperm in the Netherlands, Belgium, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Kenya, Uganda. But soon more countries will be colonised by my glorious and mighty white seed.”

Author photo below the More fold..

But they’ll be slave labor, not gast-arbeiter moochs.

Open thread #3 today, open thread #3 tomorrow, open thread #3 forever!

I wish you would try engaging with the issues instead of the personality.

A banker acquaintance recommended to me a white paper by Stephen Marin, of Trump’s council of economic advisors, as a key to understanding the policy.

https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/research/638199_A_Users_Guide_to_Restructuring_the_Global_Trading_System.pdf

Dear Mr. Unz,
Thanks for the Sailer open threads. Unfortunately, the discussion there is not very interesting. I wonder if it would be possible to write a script that would scrape the first paragraph of text from each of Sailer’s Substacks and post it along with a link to Substack as the intro to a new open thread on TUR. This is how Sailer himself used to manage commenting at TUR on the articles he wrote for Taki’s mag. Or, if that is too cumbersome, it could be a once-a-week scrape and post of the week’s Sailer Substacks. Or maybe a long-time commenter would be willing to do something similar manually.

I have some quibbles. For example, his argument that GDP per capita gains have not gone to the wealthy is based on an analysis that after tax income distribution is relatively unchanged. Also, his “you can buy anything now” analysis doesn’t address the issue of whether individuals buying smaetphones and $1.25 massive hotdogs at Costco is really an improvement over married people who didn’t have access to those things but skrimped to buy a little house together. There are so many issues tied to that little question. Economic analysis often focuses on how we make money–transition to a service economy–but less often on how we spend money (the structure of consumption) and what that implies for the non-economic aspects of life. Nevertheless, I am afraid Cofnas has a legitimate point about the inability of the country to go back to the economy of 50 years ago, even if that would be better for human flourishing.

I don’t understand. Why would Trump, a citizen, buy a visa? Is the card really a visa status, or is it a tax status? I.e., purchase exemption from taxes on foreign income for $5m? If so, that’s a terrible program. The US just shouldn’t collect taxes on foreign income. Other countries don’t. I can’t afford to purchase that exemption for $5m, but the amount of tax revenue the treasury collects from me doesn’t make it worth the effort of processing my tax filings.

Dude, you just called yourself an imbecile.

I thought without Steve, we would at least lose Corvinus and Jack D too, but I see they are still posting.

Oh well. I can still look forward to Ron Unz’s next article–American Pravda: Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb?

With your DNA, it won’t matter….

I’m thinking the threat is a possibility in the future, not something now. For example, maybe there will be a future biometric security technology that can be broken if you have someone’s DNA.

Or maybe in the future, someone will create designer diseases that can target individuals or very small numbers of people. Actually building viruses is not that economically resource intensive, so maybe with all of (future doxxed) Unz commenters’ DNA, I could make up a batch of viruses that would target them…?

or maybe in some future legal system, I’ll be able to clone you and claim all your property belongs to the clone.

You obviously haven’t seen high-res close-ups of Pam Bondi’s face. Pam Anderson at 30000 feet; Emperor Palpatine at 3 feet.

Yes. If you read Mr. Unz’s American Pravda articles, you’ll find he considers her very likely to be not controlled opposition but promoted opposition.

The Republicans elected an amoral charlatan over better candidates.

LOL. You’re a moron.

I think a semi-literate will being produced by the man who wrote the plays is so far beyond the pale that it alone virtually precludes Shakespere being Shakespeare.

It’s all a bit sad as the story of the bard from Avon is one of the great ones of Anglophone history. However, since the isles are descending into barbarism and the west is in its death-throes anyway, better to know the truth than maintain the civilization-undergirding lie.

The McCarthy book and Substack look interesting from your summaries, although I haven’t read them. Is there any chance that McCarthy’s work with the plagiarism software is inaccurate? Has anyone else duplicated his findings?

If Oxford bought North’s work and reworked it for publication but wrote the sonnets himself, I would assume there is some difference in style between the sonnets and the plays and also within the plays themselves between parts lifted from North and parts original to Oxford. Also, if Oxford bought other non-North works and re-worked them into the plays that scholars have removed from the canon, there should be similarities between the Oxford parts of the North-inspired plays and the Oxford parts of the the others. I would imagine AI, if not already able to figure all this out now, will able to do so in the near future.

By the way, do you regard North as the true fountainhead of modern English that Shakespeare has traditionally been considered, or Oxford? Also, do you have an opinion about why North’s non-dramatic works have not been remembered more prominently in the history of English composition?

As Colin Wright said, so what? These tapes are a low-life liar talking about a former rival and possible ex-friend. Did Trump make passes at European models? Undoubtedly. I would too if I were a billionaire with access to them. Did he specialize in seducing the wives of his married friends? Unlikely. Where are the complaints from these men and women, or are they all still married decades later and so disdainful of the limelight? Ha!

Trump’s old comment about Epstein–“he likes them young”–shows that he knew there was something a bit off about Epstein, and it’s confirmed by the Mar-a-Lago club ban on Epstein he imposed , showing that he knew Epstein was a predator. Photos of them together show them at public parties where there were lots of guests, not like the Prince Andrew photo with Giuffre, and they seem not to have had contact for a long time before 2015.

Trump’s choices of women as girlfriends show he likes voluptuous women –no hebephile he! Witness depositions universally confirm Trump was not involved with Epstein’s girls.

Trump was also “friends” (whatever that means) with Bill “safe legal and rare” Clinton, but facilitated the end of Roe vs Wade. So, what do his previous associations mean for our politics today? Essentially nothing.

These Daily Beast pieces and videos are an embarrassment of credulousness to those who make much of them. That’s why they’ve never gotten more traction in the MSM or in campaigns.

The women in Japan age incredibly well. Many women remain attractive into their 60s. Unfortunately for them, Japan has a major focus on youth, such that young girls are sometimes sexualized when they should not be and older women who are truly attractive are considered dried up and past being interesting.

We recently traveled to Singapore and there the contrast between the Chinese, Malays, Indians, Thais, etc and the Caucasians was shocking. The “minorities” are all thin and healthy looking even into old age, but the Caucasians are universally overweight and often gross-looking (skin and personal grooming) and slovenly dressed after their 30s. Caucasian women de-sexualize themselves by gaining weight, wearing shower-curtain clothes, and cutting their hair short. It’s pretty shocking.

I don’t believe this is a racial thing. Something went wrong in Anglophone culture in the mid-20th-century. Jogging, low-fat vegetarian craze, restaurant portions, feminism, universal car ownership…

Yes, I went to university with several.

So, what caused Steve to finally leave? Was it the yoga pants controversy?

Also, will discussion of golf course architecture continue here?

In 2015, YouTube algorithm suggested Bowden videos to me and I binge-watched them. They are terrific. But after Trump won, the left started their soft censorship scheme. Bowden videos are never recommended to me now. I’m surprised they are even allowed and not taken down. But that’s a benefit to us because we can still listen to them. He is good enough that he is a pleasure to listen to ecen if you disagree with him.

Steve posts old review of Judith Rich Harris’s The Nurture Assumption.
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/the-nurture-assumption-by-judith

I’m shocked how weak that one is though. Harris’ thesis is very narrowly trained on parenting’s contribution to personality (as defined in psych literature) development, not global outcomes including things like choice of career, which makes many of. Steve’s comments (like citing Sowell) red herrings.

Also, it overlooks the interesting question about peer group generational interactions. For example, it’s possible that fathering has a far different impact in a community in which 95% of children are raised in intact homes vs one in which 5% of children are. Perhaps 95% intact leads to a situation in which the remaining 5% are “fathered” indirectly via their peer group.

I guess that essay is Sailer’s contribution to the Living in Wonder moment, as proclaimed by Rod Dreher ( https://roddreher.substack.com/p/downloads-and-the-demonic ).

Peter Thiel has recently been talking about End Times, as in Armageddon and Anti-Christ, which is funny because he may the world’s leading candidate for the Anti-Christ, or he may be Saruman to the Anti-Christ’s Sauron. Only thing is we already know he’s the rainbow wizard, not the white wizard. Somebody should clue in Rod Dreher.

Other ways the moment is expressed: “the meaning crisis,” which is being blamed for ” Ortho bro” phenomenon of young men joining the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, and “advent of the sacred”.

Maybe the point is that it’s not that the right is woo, but that everybody is woo. The Anglo-non-woo tradition is dying maybe too as the WASPs and the UK commit suicide*. Nowhere to run to, baby; nowhere to hide!

* I wanted to coin a new word here: dysgenicide. It’s a high-fallutin’ term for the Great Replacement, or Creolization as Melenchon would put it.

If you’re having BP issues, you should go on a ketogenic diet, do some exercise, and stop drinking anything except water. Eating a banana for potassium is like taking a potassium supplement with a spoonful of sugar. Also, the research behind the sodium-BP connection is weak. My sense of the situation is that it is like protein-kidney disease. If you are already sick, protein is bad for kidneys, but protein does not cause kidney disease. Likewise, salt is problematic only when your BP/fluid balance systems are already broken. You should aim at the root causes.

There is one product that you apparently didn’t notice. Not noticing that product seems hard to do, but noticing is in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. I myself noticed the product being pushed on many occassions, and I think there were many noticers noticing it on this website because we were put on notice that it had sold out at one point. If you notice anything odd about this post, then you may be noticing a clue too!

1.3% fatality rate is just the flu.

Actually it’s an interesting psychological point that people could dismiss low fatality disease but be very worried about rolling the dice with a comet.

It sounds vaguely like the peak oil/peak energy theories that posit that civilization cannot be rebuilt in the future because the easy-to-access sources of fossil fuels have been used up, leaving behind only those that require technology dependent on fossil fuels to access.

Here’s my plot for sci-fi end of world thriller:

Trump and Musk solve Palestinian problem by flying all the Gazans to Mars. Then a celebratory Israel is destroyed by a massive comet, leaving the Holy Land desolate. The Gazans can’t get their stuff together enough to survive on Mars, but they can’t return to Earth. Speculator Vivek Ramaswamy buys all the Holy Land at dirt cheap prices and flips it, selling it off to wealthy high-caste Indians who want to escape “the worst country”. Then Razib Khan reveals that the latest genomic studies show that the Aryan invasion of northern India was actually the settling of northern India by the Ten Lost Tribes, meaning Vivek’s land speculation has led to fulfillment of Bible end times prophecy.

Of all the lazy & dumb posts that SS has dropped here since he wisely moved over to substack, this is surely the laziest & dumbest.

a guy who is obviously bad news?

2 weeks to flatten the curve!

Isn’t that Chuck Schumer on the left?

Maybe Biden is legion!!

Best EO:

Stripping the security clearances from the Dirty 51 signers of the “Hunter’s Laptop was a Russian Op” election interference letter, plus John Bolton.

Couldn’t have happened to a better gaggle of political whores pretending to be objective intelligence professionals

On your previous article’s recommendation, I read Douglas Reed’s The Controversy of Zion. You mention Reed’s lack of documentation. Subsequent unrelated researches have revealed to me that the theories Reed puts forward in his early chapters are highly suggestive that he was familiar with 19th and early 20th century academic biblical criticism. The theories he seems to incorporate have now been revised or rejected by later scholars, but it reveals him to be well-read rather than a crank.

Also, good catch on the Indiana Jones movies defaming Hilaire Belloc. The character’s name is René Belloq, and the historical author had 4 given names: Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc. One quibble, though: in the movie, Belloq is not a Nazi but a Frenchy, as was the historical author.

I read part of Belloc’s The Jews and found it unobjectionable, but I understand why he would be out of favor now. I think he has been inoculated against total cancellation by friendship with Chesterton, which puts him just a few degrees of separation away from modern Evangelicals (Evangelical reader –CS Lewis — GK Chesterton –Belloc). Despite what some of the authors you publish claim (e.g., Guyenot), the churches are still an intellectual bulwark of independent thought. That can change, however. There is a theological movement now called “New Christian Zionism.” In addition to rejecting Premillenial Dispensationalism, one of the distinguishing characteristics of NCZ is its woke-ish, uncritical acceptance of Christian responsibility for historical anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.

they could not even begin to comprehend why a mayor went to a foreign country to the inauguration of a leader there….

… there was a deafening silence for quite a long time.

… saying nothing at all and everyone just shook their head.

You must live in a rural area (i.e., not Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, nor Osaka). Where I live, many have already internalized the lies.

Am I the crazy one when I hate the douche who pulls out the guitar at the bon fire? Those horrible droning songs. I’d rather get drunk and talk about beaver.

The doors operate in different ways in different locations, and they do not exist at every station. However, they do exist. In Japan, the problem is not people being pushed onto the tracks but people jumping onto them to commit suicide. The gates prevent one and would prevent the other just as well though.

I am no fan of the education system, but the issue here is not only about education. Tech employers are not sitting around saying “anyone! at any wage! please!”. They are trying to cut wages by bringing in people who will live in dormitory or hostel conditions and spend all their time at work and who risk having their visas revoked if they complain about anything. I’m sure American young people could improve their work ethic as well as their knowledge base, but expecting people to forgo family formation to find jobs is unreasonable. On the hand, if the foreign workers really are that much smarter (I doubt it), then the visa are importing a foreign overclass. These are really the two main issues–both related to the social consequences –not the inability of native American tech sector to compete economically.

Trump saying he has H1-B holders “on his properties” puts the lie to the whole thing. He’s not talking about 0.1% engineers but people doing the dishes and laundry.

Just as I said, it turns out Trump doesn’t use H1B workers…

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2024/12/29/despite-new-york-post-phone-call-and-question-on-the-matter-donald-trump-companies-do-not-use-h1b-visas/

Trump saying he has H1-B holders “on his properties” puts the lie to the whole thing. He’s not talking about 0.1% engineers but people doing the dishes and laundry.

Musk’s 50% comment is not incompatible with his 0.1% comment, but as Steve points out on Substack, we need to have a better test than the GRE. Musk seems to be saying that some Ramaswamies will try to pass as 0.1% people by defrauding the system and you can ID the fraudsters with the GRE. Not total betrayal but Steve’s idea of making the test more rigorous is good. What they actually need is an immigration-specific test. Any test that is mildly challenging for Musk will do. This would be his greatest contribution: be the test-taker.

But actually the testing question doesn’t matter because Trump and Musk don’t care. The best we can hope for is deporting the Guatemalan guy who sets women on fire in the subway. That wouldn’t be nothing.

I’m going to put the paywall here. Another 1,259 words beneath the break. C’mon, you know you want to subscribe.

Nope!

Pardons are a harkening back to a system that is best left behind in medieval times, o

Totally disagree. Pardons are part of the checks and balances system. They rpovide an opportunity for the Executive to cancel the actions of the Judiciary or Legislature. Along with the ban on statutory law that targets individuals, they are part of the Constitution’s attempt to prevent the political machine from trampling over individuals.

The fact that pardons may not have been used much in the past is immaterial. By their nature, they will be used less in good times and more in times of political conflict. If they are misused or overused, it’s a small price to pay for having a safety valve.

The bigger problem is that pardons will not be used equally by both sides, which the founders didn’t see. Trump should pardon all the J6 rioters because they are mistreated, over-prosecuted political prisoners, but he won’t. Sorry for them. But he should, and the Constitution should afford him the chance.

Who cares? Personal vindictiveness against the Bidens isn’t going to get us anywhere. The Bidens are finished in politics, and other leftists won’t learn anything from a prosecution of a “cocaine addict.”. Much more important is wreaking havoc in the 3 -letter agencies and increasing transparency and reducing classified materials

By the way, has anyone noticed that people looked older in the past?

Increased prevalence of smoking and universal exposure to second-hand smoke combined with lower levels of body fat.

, but I really wish I could understand the thinking behind it

I assume it is being used to signal that you should always keep in mind who is doing the enslaving and slave-holding. “Enslaved laborers” is supposed to make the reader think “Enslaved [by whites] laborers.”. This would be easier to stomach if black people today were referred to as “freed [by whites] laborers” or “supported [by white taxpayers] welfare recipients” or “protected [by white police] citizens,” etc.

Chinese architecture is nice but extremely repetitive. There is nothing like the variety of beautiful styles found in Europe.

Japanese native architecture is a style I call “refined primitive” . It is related to the buildings of island peoples of the South Pacific. Amongst other points, you can see this from the floors, which are wood up on stilts in traditional Japanese buildings. Chinese buildings have stone floors at ground level.

Chinese and Japanese furniture is universally uncomfortable and uninteresting, although in different ways.

Chinese/Japanese statues (e.g., Buddhas) are derivative of Greece and came to the East via the Alexandrian conquests.

Chinese/Japanese painting and calligraphy is interesting when you see it in an art textbook but less impressive after you are immersed in it.

The art in the Palace Museum in Taipei shows an interest in miniaturization, which is technically difficult but has little aesthetic interest. The museum also has lots of examples of calligraphy, whose appreciation is, I contend,based in psychology rather than aesthetics –more akin to a cross between art appreciation and handwriting analysis.

Textiles and clothing design is where the two cultures really created beauty. In my opinion, clothing, like food culture, which both also refined to a high degree, is a very practical interest and pursuit. Everyone needs clothing and food, and they provide immediate sensual pleasure which is easier to access than higher art. That the East expresses itself in these modes is related to their interest in war, technology, and business.

I teach in a Japanese university that has Chinese foreign students and, although anecdotal, I would not bet on the Japanese.

One interesting point is that your article is focused entirely on economics and technology. I visited the Forbidden city in Beijing and was shocked at its deficit of art. So, I recently made the trek to the Palace Museum in Taipei, which is supposed to have that wonderful artistic heritage. It was very unimpressive. The two most prized objects are a tiny piece of jade carved to look like a cabbage and a small stone that looks like a piece of pork belly. I think it is telling that these two prized objects are images of food rather something heavenly.