Joe Biden is one of the Struldbugs, who came to the USA as a young “asylum seeker,” intentionally failed to appear for his immigration hearing, and was de-facto amnestied as a “Dreamer.” Jonathan Swift warned us about the ever-aging but yet undying Struldbugs, who…

…as avarice is the necessary consequence of old age, those immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public.

Since Richard Nixon’s 1969 Executive Order 11478 on ‘affirmative action’ which built, of course, on FDR’s and LBJ’s precedents, but added the demand for quotas using the coded language:

…assure participation at the local level with other employers, schools, and public or private groups in cooperative efforts to improve community conditions which affect employability; and provide for a system within the department or agency for periodically evaluating the effectiveness with which the policy of this Order is being carried out…

there have been two driving rationales for ‘affirmative action’ discrimination against uppity middle-and-lower-class whites (and latterly asians).

Let me pause to remind the reader of something: affirmative-action schemes in employment and education have never robbed the children and friends of the “elite” of opportunities (think George W. Bush, or Hunter Biden). Affirmative action has always stolen scarce school-admission slots (Bakke, Fisher), jobs (Ricci), and contracts (Adarand) from middle-class (or rising lower-class) whites/asians and gifted them to unqualified blacks. You can review every court case, every anti- or even pro- affirmative-action article or book (Derek Bok, anyone?), and promptly discover this to be true. The scions of the rich get into Harvard/wherever on a “legacy” or simple cash basis. The “boost” given to unqualified blacks always displaces the hard-working/studying lower tiers of the regular selection ladder, which is populated by whites/asians. If the rank-order of applicants for 100 slots runs from 1-100 (1 being top), then 1-99 will be whites/asians, and maybe #100 is black. But the 15% black quota demands that slots 86-100 be filled with blacks, so 14 whites/asians, real-rank-numbers 86-99, will be replaced by unqualified blacks. They won’t be the “top” whites/asians, but they will be people who qualified by criteria other than race, chiefly intelligence and hard work. (Sorry for leaving out the hispanics/etc. here but accounting for them would clutter my text without affecting the basic story at all.)

Those displaced are “sacrificed” to achieve the goal of affirmative action. What is that goal? It depends on whether you are a member of the elite or a pawn.

To the plutocrats, the goal of affirmative action is specifically to create and maintain a buffer of dependent clients between the really rich and upstarts from below. Beneficiaries of affirmative action know they are unqualified. They resent this fact, they try to hide it, they use all sorts of psychological crutches to avoid thinking about it (see Ibram X. Kendi), but more importantly than all that, they desperately support the affirmative-action system to which they owe their unearned positions in life. They will go to any lengths (BAMN=”By Any Means Necessary”, BLM=”[Only] Black Lives Matter”) to defend the elites from white/asian upstarts, that is, whites/asians who are not legacies, who are not yet rich, and who threaten to displace the lazy offspring and cronies of the current elite if not kicked-off the ladder before they can climb it. The AA recipients become grateful clients (in the Roman sense) of the existing elites and always turn out to support those elites lest they lose their sinecures.

To the hysterical spinsters and not-too-bright liberal stalwarts fed on elite propaganda, the goal of affirmative action is to sacrifice “just one generation” of whites to just-one contemporary generation of blacks. This is expected to give the next generation of blacks a middle-class environment provided by their affirmative-action-beneficiary parents so that next generation of blacks will achieve their imagined “equal potential” for greatness because they won’t be handicapped by growing up poor.

This affirmative-action rationale, the notion that the government should screw one generation of whites to give one generation of blacks a middle-class lifestyle whether they deserve it or not, as a way to create a follow-on generation of blacks who (then) will not need affirmative action, has been in circulation since the 1960’s and has been emphasized by all authorities. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor repeated it in 2003 in the Grutter decision, even though it was by then obviously idiotic; if affirmative action since 1969 hadn’t had any positive effect by 2003, another 25 years of affirmative action wasn’t going to work either.

The “temporary sacrifice” scheme is now, and really has been for a while, utterly and completely exploded. So all we have left is ever-more-insane anti-white hatred because liberals cannot accept the fact that blacks’ problems cannot be “fixed” by white sacrifice, driven by elite-produced propaganda in service of their scheme to handicap white/asian upstarts.

It is impossible to abolish affirmative action by appealing to the reasonable minds of liberals (they cannot possibly think clearly until they give up the blank-slate axiom) and even more impossible to end it by appealing to the wisdom of the current “elites” because those people correctly perceive affirmative action as a scheme which directly supports their short- and medium-term interests (and either don’t care about the long term or unsurprisingly believe that they’ll deal with that later).

Wrong! Well, sort of. Getting rid of affirmative action without also discarding the administrative lust for blacks in the faculty would leave Harvard as the only highly-selective school with a visible concentration of intellectually-qualified black professors, because ultra-prestigious, fabulously-wealthy Harvard would hire most of the few available. All of the other schools would compete for a small residuum of impressive scholars who were also black by offering them outsized compensation plans or better weather or football tickets or some such, but the available candidates would end up thinly-spread.

(Non-Harvard schools would try to accumulate black professors in fake fields like African-American Studies, by using hiring criteria that even asians and whites desperate for academic jobs would have trouble meeting, like “authentic prison-gang experience.”)

The fact that there are always a few genuinely-qualified scholars who are also black has propped-up affirmative action propaganda for many decades. Innumerate or ill-informed people see legitimate black profs at Harvard or wherever, and to those people that “proves” that “all schools could have” well-qualified black profs “if they would just act like Harvard!” Of course this is as impossible as all schools fielding a Heisman Trophy winner every year.

I should have noted that the indigenes of Tierra Del Fuego lived nude at the chilly, rainy Southern tip of South America and prospered, but their necessary habit of gathering around bonfires for warmth day and night most of the year actually inspired the European name for their domain. They even carried constant fires on stone hearths in their boats.

It seems unlikely that the multitudes dwelling today in the temperate regions or at even higher latitudes would like to live in a similar fashion.

One consideration militating against forcing the popularity of nudism à la trannyism is simply that many Americans, especially those Northeasterners who possess The Megaphone, live in climates which really demand clothing for comfort. It’s all very well for tropical people to go around nude or nearly, and it’s not too unpleasant for those who dwell in Arcadia (or other nice parts of California), but only seasonal nudism is really plausible in New York and a merely seasonal fetish just won’t support the political ambitions of the sex perverts and their allies both cynical and hysterical.

(You might suggest that people could just go nude indoors–and indeed, many already do at home–but people have to move around and public venues rarely have the kinds of cloakrooms they would need for everyone to be constantly doffing-and-donning all their clothes. People wouldn’t want to carry bundles of clothing around in supermarkets or restaurants. By contrast, trannies’ wigs (or combat boots), tics, and odd fashion choices, plus the chips on their shoulders, travel with them all the time.)

With respect to Heinlein:

I remember reading that Heinlein was distinctly unamused by impecunious hippies who had read Stranger and researched his home address showing up at his door asking to “share water.” Of course Heinlein was famously the author of the slogan “an armed society is a polite society” so he was not without ways to encourage people to go away.

Heinlein wasn’t afraid to shock readers, whether with the (ritual) cannibalism in Stranger or the incest in Time Enough.

After Robert A. Heinlein died, his widow Virginia (Ginny) Heinlein was entitled to, and did, reclaim the copyright to Stranger In A Strange Land. She then approved publication of R.A.H.’s uncut first draft of the book. In this case “uncut” doesn’t mean more salacious, but rather more verbose. The original publishers (G. P. Putnam’s Sons) had requested Heinlein to trim down the manuscript before publication, and he did this apparently without rancor. Having read both versions, I think the trimmed (i.e., first-published) version is much better, and apparently so did Robert A. Heinlein, because he told interviewers as much. Many of the changes are just omitting redundant adjectives and so-forth, though some plot-irrelevant passages were also excised. I don’t begrudge Virginia Heinlein her royalties on the later publication of the original manuscript, though, since comparing the two versions gives a useful example of good editing!

In Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories “How The Rhinocerous Got His Skin” we hear tell of a small island not far from the isle of Socotra (now, as Steve has explained, renamed “Soqotra” to confuse people who finished elementary school more than a few years ago).

THIS Uninhabited Island

Is off Cape Gardafui,

By the Beaches of Socotra

And the Pink Arabian Sea:

But it’s hot—too hot from Suez

For the likes of you and me

Ever to go

In a P. and O.

And call on the Cake-Parsee!

Everyone in the stands should join in on the chorus.

If that link fails, the song is ‘Bad Moon Rising’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Everyone in the stands should come in on the chorus.

If that link fails, the song is ‘Bad Moon Rising’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

An AGP tranny tees off early with polyamory because any real partners he scores are just supplemental to the fetish partner who lives in his head.

How exactly are middle-class parents supposed to “tak[e] a stand to defend the SAT/ACT?” Most selective schools have deprecated them, and the University of California has forbidden submission of test scores with UC applications.

The schools have very strong motives to push away test scores— they know test scores provide objective evidence of racial preferences in admissions, and the Supreme Court has just (after fifty years of dissimulation) pronounced those preferences unlawful, so the schools don’t want such scores on the record any more (because administrators would rather die than give up racial preferences).

Middle-class parents can’t rescind a slick billion dollars in promised donations to persuade a college or university to rely on the SAT/ACT scores like outraged Jewish Harvard benefactors who want administrators to stifle anti-Israel demonstrations.* Telling high-schoolers not to apply to universities that don’t want test scores presents a huge “collective action problem.” What’s left? Writing plaintive e-mails to hostile university presidents?

*Even if middle-class parents stopped making all their piddly little donations and across many schools over some years the forgone gifts added up to a billion, not even one selective school would notice.

In default of a suitable and willing black scholar, perhaps Harvard will settle for a Jewish tranny— they can get one with, shall we say, high energy to put fundraising back on track, and as a master of shameless aggressive lying, a high-IQ low-empathy autogynephiliac would be the ideal leader for Harvard’s continuing (“F-you, Supreme Court”) affirmative-action race-and-perversity-based admissions system.

It seems plausible that the fentanyl problem is contributing here.

Fentanyl (like other opiates) constricts the pupils and greatly slows pupillary accommodation to ambient light, which is a fancy way of saying that fentanyl makes it hard for you to see in dimmer light and that effect passes off slowly.

See the information in the table column “Narcotic Analgesics” (meaning “opiates”) at this link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6886135/table/T2/?report=objectonly (Table II: Summary of effects of abusive drugs on ocular motility and pupil). Note that other drugs don’t have the critical effects.

That table comes from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6886135/

As Steve has noted, fentanyl is in everything now: https://www.unz.com/isteve/recreational-drugs-these-days-are-more-likely-to-kill-you-due-to-fentanyl/

And as Steve discussed, others have suggested a link between fentanyl and bad black driving: https://www.unz.com/isteve/did-fentanyl-cause-black-traffic-fatalities-to-rise/

Just “being stoned” might cause bad driving at any time of day, but bad driving at sunset or soon after… hints at opiate intoxication.

Trying to comment on a fresh Steve Sailer post, after I click the “Publish Comment” button my comment disappears– I get a new copy of the page but neither the comment nor any feedback appears. If I have inadvertently offended I apologize (I’m pretty sure there’s nothing evil in my comment text). Can you advise me how to regain the ability/privilege to comment?

Note that this message is itself a test of the comment system– I want to find out if I can comment on this thread even though I seem to be blocked on that iSteve post.

(A moment later: okay, this message seems to be accepted into the moderation queue. If Steve has banned me I really think that would be an accident (for example, intended to ban someone else but clicked my handle by mistake) because he’s tolerated my comments for years and I really haven’t gone off the rails. Can I ask for a reprieve if needed?)

However, despite interest in inclusion of measures that more directly reflect risk related to racism [emphasis added] (eg, residential segregation, perceived racial discrimination) …

These jerks can’t even keep their stories straight. What could predict “risk related to racism” better than race? That works whether “race” is a “biological” or a “social” construct, whether it’s nature or nurture–none of those puzzles matters, because “racism” is agreed to be something which keys on “race” so if you’re worried about “risks of racism” you might as well predict whether those risks are likely present in a given case by looking at (wait for it…) the patient’s “race.”

The late P.J. O’Rourke published some comments on the looks of women in places he visited. IIRC he was blown away by his translator in Poland and absolutely devastated by the bicycling beauties of Viet Nam, so much so that he suggested American leaders’ enthusiasm for the Vietnam War arose from their fascination with Vietnamese women.

In 2005, Ariely ran an experiment at M.I.T. in which electric shocks were administered to Craigslist volunteers, who had been told that they were testing the efficacy of a painkiller. One of the participants was subjected to more than forty shocks of increasing strength, and broke down in tears. She claims that an assistant in a lab coat told her that she would forfeit payment if she backed out. …

He soon agreed—for his own reasons, he said—to leave M.I.T. (A spokesperson for the university declined to comment on personnel matters.)

Life imitates art: Ghostbusters (1984).

Except for copies left in lounges or on bus seats I only read Rolling Stone when it contained a P. J. O’Rourke piece— for those I would actually buy the rag. Generally RS was schlock. Commonly the ads were better than the nominal editorial content, proving that Madison Avenue could get better writers than RS even though the bills were ultimately paid by the same people.

Pour encourager les autres.

Hey, Steve, sorry for going OT, but thought readers may wish to see how Ed West just gave your work a big hug (with lots of explicit credit, that is; seems West isn’t the typical cowardly sneak-thief essayist who scratches your name off your ideas before passing them on): https://edwest.substack.com/p/iraq-was-all-about-blood

As previously discussed on iSteve [link] it seems hot weather impairs mathematical thinking.

So one sort of question is which came first, the chicken or the egg math ability being more needed in cooler climates so it evolved there but then didn’t function so well in warm climates so not much selected-for in those, or math ability evolved in warm climates but it worked much better in cooler climates so was more selected for there.

Are Jane Goodall and friends to be cancelled next for racistly hanging around with charismatic wildlife?

The horrible revelation of the day is that systemic racism moves urban wildlife (deer, skunks, raccoons, squirrels, etc.) to white neighborhoods, depriving ¡BLACK! people of their healthful presence…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11738875/Now-systemic-racism-driving-ANIMALS-deprived-urban-areas-creatures-ditch-poor-areas.html

In 20th Century European Communist countries academics had to parrot ‘scientific socialism’ and follow the Party line, and truckle to some charlatans like Lysenko. They even had to pretend that some Party-leaders’ nepo-babies, and ‘activists’ who sprang from workers-and-peasants stock (Soviet-style affirmative action in academia) were valuable co-authors. But so long as they attended enough Party meetings and so-forth, they were allowed to contribute to the advancement of Science most of the time.*

It’s looking like today’s West is gonna dispense with that last part. No more advancement of science— it’s gonna be all Cultural Revolution, all the time, baby!

*The Party was often even proud of them and would reward them with trips to foreign conferences.

If you can’t find a doppelganger, manufacture one: In The Teeth Of The Evidence, by Dorothy L. Sayers (link) (a short story. Yes, pre-DNA-analysis).

For fun, look up “the Rouse case” mentioned in the story.

Is the bird flu devastating the US chicken/egg industry now a retaliatory bioweapon attack?

Sorry, chums. The ballpoint-pen theory is attractive, plausible-sounding, and quite incompatible with the evidence.

Hardly any schoolkids got ballpoint pens before the 1960’s because they were too pricey.

Decades too late for Steve’s graph.

Phones and typewriters, I’m-a tellin’ ya.

Moreover, Avatar appears to borrow one of its central ideas — Pandora, a planet where the entire ecosystem is a single living network exchanging information — from the climax of Heinlein’s 1953 book for boys, Starman Jones.

Yeah, but the ability of that planet-spanning living information network to absorb personalities of the dying and transfer them to new bodies comes directly (tree roots and all) from Poul Anderson’s Harvest of Stars series.

I’m pretty confident Cameron has read more SF than just Heinlein– Avatar is a salmagundi of ideas from various SF stories.

Omar Sharif explains this in Lawrence of Arabia: https://taylor.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/3c923a2d-7a43-43ab-8fac-c04ac4fafa77

I suspect that trying to train left-handed kids to write with their right hands came into vogue with increasing literacy and faded out with the introduction of telephones and typewriters.

During the era when every first-world child was supposed to learn to read and write, then send and receive letters, write school papers, fill in forms (and for some, prepare long letters or other documents) or be mocked as a dimwit, writing conventionally and neatly was given a gloss of morality by the likes of the clergy, schoolteachers, patronizing “respectable citizens,” and parents trying to motivate their little darlings. Analogously when society got around to washing off the dirt of the Dark Ages, its leaders told the young that “cleanliness is next to godliness.” Of course since many adults holding petty authority are stupid, many of them in that era assimilated the notion that right-handedness actually was a moral issue, though of course that was silly.

The telephone reduced most people’s need to write letters and the typewriter let lefties create long legible documents (for school or work) as easily as righties. Only school work and form-filling remained; school teachers could be expected to decipher student papers, and careful lettering would do for occasional forms. Sympathetic parents and empathetic respectable citizens retreated from harassing leftie kids and the clergy and the schoolteachers eventually got the message.

Yeah, it’s called The Felony Murder Rule.

It is a wise and just rule which tends to deter murder, so it is disliked by gangsters and those (such as New York Times writers and editors) who idolize gangsters.

It was abolished about four years ago in the one-party (Democrat) State of California because too many Democrat voters feared prison sentences for participating in gang murders.

The felony murder rule does have one unfortunate effect: it inspires an awful lot of lying by gangster-worshippers. They always tout the same story… the supposedly-unjust prosecution of the defendant who didn’t hold the knife, or didn’t pull the trigger, or didn’t swing the club. But to plump up that story they always add two lies— first they omit that the defendant did drive the car, or break into the home, or chase down the victim; then they aver that the defendant “had no motive.” That last one (repeated by NYTwit Ms. Bradley in the story Steve links above) is the more reprehensible— the defendant invariably has a clear motive which everyone on the jury or who who studies any particular case recognizes instantly: the defendant wanted to help his confederate, the one who actually stabbed (or shot, or beat) the victim to death, to carry out the crime. That’s what criminals acting together want, they want to help each other commit a violent felony. Camaraderie is a very powerful motive.

Yeah. The children of blacks and whites exhibit reversion toward the mean, but that indicates reversion toward more crime for rich blacks’ kids and toward less for poor whites’ kids. Then you add in the “going for a ride with cousins” problem—the rich black kids’ cousins tend to be more criminal (this is also predicted by reversion-toward).

I knew a pretty mature black man (like 28 years old) with a high-paying corporate tech job (that he could do fairly well— there was a tinge of AA, but he was inside the acceptable performance band) who earned a long trip to state prison as an active accessory to murder because he drove the car from which his cousins assassinated (by pistol fire) a dope dealer with whom they had a beef, when they saw him emerging from a bar. They all fled the scene after the shooting and it took the cops a while to identify and catch them. The one I knew facilitated the evasion— his normal middle-class lifestyle did not prompt him to avoid his lowlife kin, to refuse to participate in their heinous crimes, nor to betray them to the police afterward (when he could have claimed coercion, turned State’s evidence, and likely gotten himself off while sending his companions to prison as they fully deserved). A lot of people in the office were shocked when he was arrested.

While one can imagine transracial adoption severing the criminal-cousins links, it could not fix personal reversion toward the mean, and the studies I’ve read seem to confirm that supposition.

Colin, none of the diminution of Japan’s road accident rate 1970’s-2020’s can be blamed on the absence of blacks in Japan. Japan’s per-capita traffic-fatality rate diminished across a time-span during which Japan had almost no blacks from start to finish. (I don’t think you can attribute the decline to the reduced numbers of black American servicement visiting Japan either.)

(I am quite willing to believe that the USA has a large reservoir of people who are genetically disinclined to behave with proper caution around roads and cars. Heck, did you see the news just this week that California is repealing its (anti-)jaywalking law because NAM’s get nearly all the citations, due to their propensities for wandering into the street? But America’s problem with NAM’s does not explain Japan’s experience with traffic fatality rates.)

It appears that less than 30% of the Japanese population is under 30 years of age.

Per capita, younger people usually get into more traffic accidents than middle-aged people. Elderly people who continue to drive may cause some trouble, but many oldsters don’t drive.

How much of the diminution of Japan’s road accident rate can be blamed on Japan’s birth dearth?

At least no one will be able to touch Emmett’s hair.

Steve, you reasoned about this in May 2015 while dissecting an NYT op-ed signed by the infamous Richard C. Atkinson which called for further dumbing-down of the already-debilitated SAT. You pointed specifically to Chinese and Chinese-adjacent-ethnicities Tiger-Mom history with test-prep. You noted that earlier g-loaded versions of the SAT had been resistant to coaching, but that re-architecting the SAT into a test of fixed-curriculum memorization (which is what Atkinson and chums had been demanding and doing for over three decades) was catnip to Tiger Moms.[1]

I had the privilege of sharing some info about Atkinson and his war on the SAT in the comments then. However, I wonder now whether I missed something important at that time, something your remarks should have prompted me to recognize, especially since in 2014 you had already asked “How is the New SAT Not Going to Help Asians the Most?”

Atkinson had a long history of collaboration with the Chinese government and Chinese academics. Per Atkinson’s official biography at the National Science Foundation:

Atkinson made history by negotiating the first memorandum of understanding between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, which opened the door for major exchanges of scientists and scholars between the two nations. His efforts contributed to a comprehensive agreement between China and the United States on science and technology that was signed in January 1979 by Chairman Deng Xiaoping and President Carter.

From the same NSF document:

When Atkinson left NSF in 1980, he became chancellor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), leading the university through its biggest growth period. During his 15-year tenure as chancellor, UCSD rose to “top five” status in acquiring federal research funding and was ranked among the top ten graduate programs in the United States by the National Research Council. In 1995, Atkinson became the University of California system’s 17th president, a position he held until 2003. During this period, Atkinson initiated national reforms in college admissions testing and spearheaded new approaches to admissions and outreach in the post-affirmative action era at the university. [emphasis added]

Of course, “the post-affirmative action era” means “the era after 1996, when California’s voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 209 to outlaw (again) racial discrimination in public university admissions, but were thwarted by university administrators’ massive resistance.” Atkinson’s “new approaches to admissions” were deliberate subversion of Prop. 209 that reinstated stiff racial preferences under a veil of bafflegab (“eligibility in the local context,” etc.). Atkinson’s “reforms in college admissions testing” were specifically intended to halt the accretion of objective evidence that racially-preferred candidates were less qualified academically. Test scores are the bane of college administrators facing “reverse racism” lawsuits (like the critical 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke)— just look at the Harvard admins squirming in the witness box recently.

From 1980 to 2000 California experienced exponential growth in its Chinese immigrant population. In 1994 Atkinson coerced the removal of analogies from the SAT and got it “recentered.” In 2001 Atkinson launched a new war against the SAT which lead to the huge dumbing-down of 2005. Atkinson himself called this “revolutionary change” which was “very much in accord with my [Atkinson’s] original proposal” of 2001.

Based on his remarks at the time, I believed (along with most analysts, I think) that the chief goal of Atkinson’s war on the SAT was to hide “the gap” which is so familiar to readers here, in support of race-preferences in admissions.

But perhaps there was another motive lurking in the background. Atkinson knew that a dumbed-down SAT would be more coachable and so did his Chinese friends, including the famous Chinese-American Chancellor of UC Berkeley (1990-97) Chang-Lin Tien, well known as an outspoken advocate of both racial preferences— Tien loudly opposed Prop. 209— and increased Chinese enrollment at UC. Maybe Atkinson wanted to help the children of powerful Chinese get admitted to American colleges and universities by making the SAT more amenable to Chinese-style test-prep— a speculation for which I have no direct evidence. Tien seems to have thought that anti-white discrimination would favor Chinese applicants. His personal campaign against Proposition 209 is widely credited with producing a 70-30 vote against Prop. 209 by Chinese and East Asian voters in California. (Twenty-three years later it appeared that Chinese and East Asian voters likely gave only about 55-45 support to 2020’s attempt (“Proposition 16”) by California’s left-wing leadership to repeal Prop 209, so perhaps Tien’s influence faded after he died in 2002.)

I should point out that Atkinson did credit American of Japanese extraction Pat Hayashi, in 2001 his assistant as Associate President of the University of California and a member of the College Board’s Board of Trustees (and former long-serving UC Berkeley admissions officer) with helping Atkinson attack the SAT. Hayashi was in fact Atkinson’s proud hatchet-man for the UC’s evasion of Proposition 209. He personally led the creation of new schemes for racial discrimination in admissions. Hayashi later boasted of terminating in 2006 (when Atkinson had been gone for a few years) the UC’s participation in the National Merit Scholarship program specifically because it used test scores (the PSAT, a miniature version of the SAT) to choose scholarship recipients. I have no basis to suggest that Hayashi’s views were Tiger-Mom friendly, quite the opposite: the National Merit Scholarship program he killed had been instituted in 1990 at UC Berkeley by Chinese-American Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien while Hayashi was Associate Vice-Chancellor for admissions there. I don’t know whether Hayashi favored Chang-Lin Tien’s test-friendly policy at that time, but I’m pretty confident Tiger Moms did. There was certainly no dispute between Hayashi and Tien over racial preferences in admissions. In 2018 Tien recounted that he “felt I could not really in my conscience work with the new rules [non-discriminatory admissions from 1996], but later on I changed my mind. I felt I had to work some program out to sustain, to help affirmative action, although we are not allowed to use race and religion, color, as a criterion for admission.” Hayashi and Tien found multiple proxies for race and used them to obfuscate their reimplementation of all the racial discrimination they had previously practiced openly.

Anyway, according to a 2018 report from the Migration Policy Institute:

Chinese immigrants have considerably higher levels of educational attainment […] compared to the overall foreign- and U.S.-born populations. […]

This high educational attainment is linked to the specific channels through which Chinese immigrants enter the United States. In recent decades, many Chinese immigrants arrived either as international college students or high-skilled H-1B temporary workers (generally requiring a university degree). China is the leading sending country of international students in the United States: In the 2018-19 school year, close to 377,000 students from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau were enrolled in U.S. higher education institutions, according to the Institute of International Education. They accounted for about one-third of the 1 million international students studying in the United States.

U.S.-China relations were normalized in 1979 [with significant involvement by Richard C. Atkinson, as noted above —Veracitor], beginning a second wave of Chinese migration to the United States.

The number of immigrants from China residing in the United States nearly doubled from 1980 to 1990, and again by 2000. Since then the population continued growing but at a slower pace…

China is the main source of foreign students enrolled in U.S. higher education…

As of 2014-18 (per US Census ACS data analyzed by MPI), 32% of Chinese immigrants to the USA resided in California.

Think of all the Tiger Moms in China and in the USA trying to test-prep their kids into the University of California as well as the Ivy League schools. The Urban Dictionary has a cite for “UCLA” standing for “University of Caucasians Lost among Asians” back in 2004 (before the huge SAT dumb-down of 2005) and the quip probably goes back further. Atkinson was not likely to be unaware of the existence and predelictions of these fine people.

Keeping all that in mind, it’s curious that the most visible SAT “reform” only lasted a single decade: the SAT essay portion, worth 800 out of 2400 total SAT points during its era, abolished in 2016. Atkinson had pushed hard for that essay portion.

Like many people, I had thought the SAT essay portion had two motivations: first and most important, to dilute the influence of the objective portions of the test; and second, to allow essay-readers to award extra points to students who wrote racial appeals.

I don’t think any scheme to give extra points to racially-preferred students worked out; the official scoring rubrics could not emphasize it (too much danger of negative publicity) and it was dangerously coachable– any test-taker could write in racial stuff and the graders had no way to check for Dolezality.

Diminishing the effect of the objective portions on the overall score worked well enough to disguise the traditional American racial gap, but I think the essay portion annoyed Chinese test-takers, who average less English proficiency than other immigrants, let alone American natives. Per the MPI report linked above:

Chinese immigrants are less likely to be proficient in English and speak English at home than the overall U.S. foreign-born population. In 2018, about 58 percent of Chinese immigrants ages 5 and over reported limited English proficiency, compared to 47 percent of the total foreign-born population. Approximately 11 percent of Chinese immigrants spoke only English at home, compared to 17 percent of all immigrants.

In the years after the essay portion was introduced in 2005, MIT’s Les Perelman discovered that the College Board’s chintzy essay grading meant that Atkinson’s vision of a “predictive” essay test was not achieved. SAT essay graders had only about 2 minutes per test to look for sheer length, the use of fancy words, and the inclusion of some formal quotation (even if it had little relevance to the assigned subject).

That meant the essay portion was quite coachable (Perelman himself proved that by coaching kids to get high scores on it by literally writing down a bunch of nonsense!) but prepping for it cost time Chinese students and their parents would rather have spent test-prepping math. Worse, many Chinese students resented having to prep on material their logorrhea-afflicted Jewish and even American black competitors seemed to have more innate talent for. Chinese (and related East Asian) students are notorious for talent skewed toward the mathematical and away from the verbal.

By 2013, Steve, you were writing about how the incoming David Coleman was under pressure from lots of folks to scrap the essay portion. Coleman told Inside Higher Ed that he would create “a new kind of test, one that would promote educational values.” You quoted part of the story you were analyzing for the cloud around that silver lining:

Another question [to Coleman] — from someone who used to work in admissions at an elite university — highlighted how challenging that may be. The questioner said that his instructions at the university — straight from the president’s office — were to increase average SAT scores and to increase minority enrollments. He said that he found it impossible to do both.

On the other hand, the 2005 SAT had brought Algebra II questions into the math portion. Though very coachable, those seemed likely to trip up American-minority test-takers (I’m not aware of public data on this point). The new questions probably boosted the scores of Chinese test-takers because they replaced more g-loaded items.

Abolishing the SAT essay portion pulled the maximum overall score back from 2400 to 1600 and refocused the test on the material most amenable to Chinese-style test-prepping. Of course the essay had not worked well as a counterweight to test-prepping, but rather than restructure it, Coleman just removed it. All other g-loaded questions had been removed already or were openly targeted for removal by Coleman, so after 2015 the SAT was gelded shorn of every item which could possibly discomfit test-preppers. Since “Asians” as Americans call them are the champion test-preppers of all time, the SAT is now their lap dog.

(An optional essay test offered along with the SAT for a few years after 2016 was discontinued in 2022.)

[1] In 2015, Steve, you questioned the then-86-years-old Atkinson’s grasp of statistics, suggesting he was too stupid to realize what neutering the SAT would do. Although I suggested at that time that Atkinson’s intellect might indeed have faded a bit with old age, I thought then and now that Atkinson understood statistics very well indeed during his active career and was simply an expert and aggressive political liar. Seriously, look at Atkinson’s CV. He was a much acclaimed math professor and statistics expert. When he promoted claptrap like S. J. Gould’s Mismeasure of Man in the mid-2000’s to bolster his war on the SAT, Atkinson knew full well that it was garbage. That was why he promoted it. Atkinson’s personal writings about his campaign against the SAT are filled with misdirection and evasion easily detected by students of the issues.

Decades ago law and poli-sci professor Martin Shapiro of Boalt Hall told students that he thought the Framers’ worst mistake was omitting to deal with political parties in the (1787) Constitution. Since political parties are inevitable, he thought, the Constitution ought to have included rules for them and their relationships with legislators and officials, etc.

…a leaked audio recording revealed racist and disparaging remarks that she had made about the Black child of a white fellow council member and about Indigenous immigrants in the city’s Koreatown neighborhood…

It’s good of you, Steve, to keep us informed about New York Times writing style. Now I know (a) the term “Indigenous” deserves “reverent capitalization” like “Black” and (b) the NYTwits don’t comprehend that “indigenous” and “immigrant” are opposites.

Is Ernaux’ literary style especially engaging? Seriously, I haven’t read her works, but are they perhaps wonderful to read even if they’re, erm, “self-regardent” like Seven Pillars of Wisdom?

Well-known American correspondent in Russia, John Helmer, says the Poles did it (link).

By John Helmer

The military operation on Monday night which fired munitions to blow holes in the Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II pipelines on the Baltic Sea floor, near Bornholm Island, was executed by the Polish Navy and special forces.

It was aided by the Danish and Swedish military; planned and coordinated with US intelligence and technical support; and approved by the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

The operation is a repeat of the Bornholm Bash operation of April 2021, which attempted to sabotage Russian vessels laying the gas pipes, but ended in ignominious retreat by the Polish forces. That was a direct attack on Russia. This time the attack is targeting the Germans, especially the business and union lobby and the East German voters, with a scheme to blame Moscow for the troubles they already have — and their troubles to come with winter.

[more]

I always thought that it was amusing that the sacred cause of gay marriage started out as a New York City rent control spat.

Not really, though: as we discussed just a few years ago in the comments section of this, the best of all possible weblogs, the sacred cause of gay marriage really started out as a way to transfer the costs of AIDS treatments from gay sufferers to their straight co-workers (genuine iSteve link).

We even discussed the claimed benefit Andrew Sullivan is now waffling about: “[proponents]…claimed that AIDS was caused by the lack of gay marriage which virtually forced gays into promiscuity;…”

Even if those four proposed (malicious, mostly unconstitutional) laws were able to prevent* a few criminal shootings, they would also prevent some people from quite-properly using guns defensively, so they might not save any lives at all. Indeed, by reducing criminal deterrence they might increase the overall number of homicides even if a few telegenic multiple-victim shootings were averted.

*Very possibly just delay, not prevent— making such laws even less useful.

See, for example, https://lawnews.tv/examples-of-kids-using-guns-to-defend-themselves/

This is a general problem with public pseudo-intellectuals’ remarks about gun control. They always assume that their targeted criminals would be entirely disarmed (because there are no other weapons but AR-15’s, or cheap handguns, or whatever a pseudo-intellectual is gibbering about at the moment) and so they would be thereby perfectly incapacitated or deterred from committing crimes. But that is half-logic. The proposed laws would also and much more effectively disarm law-abiding people, emboldening bad people to commit more crimes. Even if new gun-control laws actually did keep criminals from getting guns (something which has never been achieved in any country no matter how tyrannical), they would not keep criminals from using knives and axes and clubs— and molotov cocktails, for the ones who wished to murder a classroom full of school children. History books, heck, the Bible too, inform us that murder, singular and multiple, was very much a thing before firearms were even invented— and that we have much less murder now than our ancestors did in the pre-gun past.. It takes a special kind of stupidity, or mendacity, to write or say that “gun control” schemes are intended to reduce crime. Gun-control schemes are actually intended, by the oligarchs who rule over us, to help keep them in power, and that is all. Anything else you hear is propaganda or the wishful thinking of ignorant or dim-witted people who quite naturally fear crime but don’t know anything about it (in a public-policy sense) so they are easily besotted by the cynical propaganda of the ruling class.

(When the English were disarmed starting a century ago their ruling class felt no need to dissemble— Parliament was openly told that the people had to be disarmed to help prevent “red” revolution, the elite’s great fear in that era. There was little crime then (it’s much worse now, proving once again that even draconian gun control does not reduce crime). Nowadays British elites constantly (though of course hypocritically) recite “reddish” political cant, but they still fear justice at the hands of the masses and keep them disarmed for that reason.)

I’m glad you mentioned Kingsley Amis’ book The Alteration. I had been dithering over whether to bring it up myself. That book has quite a lot to recommend it; not for nothing was it a good seller over forty years ago. Yet it has one substantial flaw… [spoiler alert!]

So far as I can discover, the “Hong Kong tailoring” system doesn’t work any more.

Background: just before the pandemic I tried to buy some new suits and sport coats. I really am kind of average-sized for a 1980’s American man and honestly not fat, so for decades I could get by with minor alterations to mid-sized off-the-rack clothes. But nowadays I can’t— because the patterns have been changed. Every department-store and mall-boutique brand is now cut to fit Southern Chinese men, so far as I can find out. All the clothes are sewn there and they use the same patterns for all production, with narrow chests and too-short sleeves and pipestem legs.

American retailers then market the badly-patterned clothes as “slim fit.” But they don’t stock any “regular fit” items! At first I thought the problem was gay buyers stocking what they like personally, but when I went to Men’s Wearhouse I got clued-in. No American retailer moves enough sack suits or sport coats to persuade a Chinese factory to cut the cloth to Euro-American standard patterns. Our retailers buy what they can get cheaply and then tell retail customers to take it or leave it. Since it doesn’t fit and there’s no extra cloth in it for expansive alterations, customers mostly leave it. (This is then interpreted as a lack of interest in men’s fashion when a lot of the problem is unwillingness to purchase clothes that cannot be worn.)

But “what about Hong Kong tailors?” you ask. When I complained about the crap on the racks, several retailers tried to upsell me to semi-custom garments from China. That sounded good until they all confessed under questioning that the patterns would be exactly the same! They would measure you and you would choose your cloth and wait six weeks— and then get a semi-custom suit that still didn’t fit and couldn’t be returned!

When he realized that I wasn’t going to take the semi-custom-but-still-unwearable bait, the salesman in Men’s Wearhouse switched gears completely and told me wistfully that the lack of supply was very frustrating to him. He couldn’t sell anything to the more discerning buyers who were the ones with all the money because the inventory was all unwearable . He could only sell crap to kids and FOB’s.

At the time I couldn’t get any line on the old-fashioned traveling “HK” tailor scheme, where you got measured in a rented office or meeting room while the rep was in town and received your clothes a couple months later. If that system has been revived (maybe not actually sewing in HK) and offers properly-patterned or even affordable fully-custom-cut clothes, I’d like to hear about it.

Ha! They’re doing the obstreperous-large-black-woman version of Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.

See genuine iSteve link: https://www.unz.com/isteve/human-biodiversity-in-mau-mauing-the-flak-catchers/

Campion’s nominations/prizes are just affirmative action plus her reward for promoting queerness. If she were a man she would have only the latter and it probably would not be enough.

By contrast, the Williams sisters owe nothing to anyone else’s agenda— they really are top tennis players.

Tricia Hersey, an activist and artist best known for founding the Nap Ministry — an organization that uses rest as a framework for liberation — is one of the many Black voices who this year rose above the demand. As Black History Month began, she wrote simply to her social media followers, “We won’t be doing anything specific for Black History Month on our platforms.” And then: “The genius of Black culture is all around. Open your eyes. Plus, we not doing more for these platforms. We doing less. We slowing down. We resting. To thrive as a Black person in this wicked land is breathtaking. It is history.”

Blacks and their amen chorus used to angrily denounce the common perception (i.e., “racial stereotype”) that “blacks are lazy” as a pernicious falsehood. Not any more. Today’s blacks boast about how lazy they are. “Rest as a framework for liberation” indeed! “The genius of Black culture is… doing less.”

“Why is aspirin white?” the old joke asks. “So it will work!” “Why won’t gypsies marry blacks? They’re afraid the kids would be too lazy to steal!”

Black history month sure is exhausting, isn’t it?

In 1965 L. Sprague de Camp published The Arrows of Hercules, a historical novel about the world’s first military ordinance department and R&D center, created in 399 B.C. on the island of Ortygia just off Sicily by Dionysios, the master of Syracuse, for his great war against the Carthaginians.

De Camp dedicated the book “To Isaac Asimov and Bob Heinlein, in memory of our own Ortygian days.”

The Arrows of Hercules was founded on real events and people, though the extant history is sparser than that ballasting some of de Camp’s other historical novels. De Camp was and is justly famed for both historical (non-fiction as well as fiction) and technical writing, but it seems clear that the versimilitude of the office politics and other behaviours of the characters in The Arrows of Hercules is founded on de Camp’s experiences in WW2 military ordnance development.

Edward L. Beach, Run Silent, Run Deep, 1955.

The book is better than the mivie!

Meaningless, I tell you. Meaningless. Mean-ing-less!

X-chromosome inactivation, friends.

I suggest you may be misinformed about the RBMK reactors. Their design (including operating procedures and technical support) was not slightly-flawed or incomplete, it was dreadful. Among other problems, they were too big, so reactivity varied throughout the core and made them impossible to run safely. They incurred many severe accidents before the Chernobyl Reactor #4 disaster (even one in another reactor at Chernobyl). If the Chernobyl disaster had not happened when it did, something comparable would have occurred sooner or later.

I recommend the fascinating and well-researched book Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham (2019) to everyone. It includes a very illuminating short history of the RBMK program.

Everything old is new again. Left-wing Jewish lawyers suing the State, pretending that variations in neighborhood ethnicity are equivalent to de jure segregation; non-parents demanding busing from the suburbs, even across school-district boundaries, because too few whites live in or near bad (black/brown) neighborhoods; actual black parents who don’t want busing, just better school amenities; actual white parents ditto; lying consultants and expert witnesses who don’t want improved schools, just professional fees which come right out of school budgets for the stuff the students’ parents want; and entirely-false claims that forcing white students into black schools is good for those students.

I especially liked two parts of the article. One part was the second human-interest bit about the mother whose daughter had been rezoned to the black high school 55 minutes away from her home by car, 30 minutes further than her former HS but now with no bus service because (the article explained) the bus transportation budget had been raided to pay diversity consultants fund more academic classes at the black HS and its peers. All that meaning that white parents were supposed to drive their children back and forth long distances to their new, inferior assigned schools, as if the parents had nothing better to do all day. Remember, you have to multiply each non-bused student’s one-way commute time by 4x to get the parent’s daily time expenditure (to school in the morning with child, return home alone, back to school alone in the afternoon, return home with child).

The second part I admired due to the diabolically-obscure writing:

Today, two in five Black and Latino students in the United States attend schools where more than 90 percent of students are children of color, while one in five white students goes to a school where more than 90 percent of students look like them, according to the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.

If you read that very carefully, you can puzzle out that 80% of white students are doing their part to make black and brown students feel good, while only 60% of black and brown students are reciprocating. Or as Steve has explained, the white kids are spread out very thinly to butter all the bread a little.

Actually, I realize now that I admire one more thing in the article. The straight-out lie (repeated so often that the NYTwit writers probably believe it), first, that integration/desegregation (the article uses both terms within two lines) is beneficial for both black and white students, and second (undermining the first claim) that integration/desegregation merely does not harm the education of white students. A large number of studies have shown that white students suffer a lot, unless the “integration” is sort of fake—tracking or grouping smarter students separately inside a single “school”—in which case the white students suffer only moderately, because of bullying and violence on and near campus perpetrated by black/brown students and their families and acquaintances. Plus the fact that white students lose access to team sports other than water polo.

Like I imagine Steve does sometimes, I just shake my head ruefully at the “Year Zero” approach to all this. Every single thing described in that article just recaps the stories of a half-century ago (plus/minus of course) and ignores everything learned along the way and since. How tiresome.

If you can take arbitrary books and/or other tools with you to the past, then you’re golden. I find it more interesting to contemplate what a clever person with very little baggage could accomplish, armed only with engineering and history knowledge an iSteve commenter might possess. Let’s wave away language constraints but not social ones. We’ll drop you someplace populous– if you went back to Iceland in 1000 you would be as screwed as Poul Anderson’s protagonist.

I suspect a 1940 clever American would cope better in most past eras than a 2020 clever American. In the Thirties many homes still lacked electric light so people were familiar with oil lamps. Record-keeping and calculation were mostly paper-based (with help from slide-rules and log tables). Manual water-pumps were common. We have better stuff now, but someone familiar with pre-WWII stuff could reproduce lots of it on a 6th-Century technology base while utilizing many advances which had been made in the preceding fourteen centuries.

I’ve been thinking of the 6th Century, but though that is traditional, I admit it’s arbitrary. If you go back to the Neolithic then you will have a really, really hard time. Late 1800’s? You can get rich quickly by preinventing vacuum tubes (thermionic valves)– the industrial base will be ready to supply everything you need (by 1878 the technically-complete telephone was available).

The Dark Ages were devo, remember– besides excellent cement, Imperial Romans had multi-ton-carrying wagons with iron-tired single-felly spoked wheels and pivoting front axles; all features lost to Europeans a few centuries later. In the Dark Ages, could you get enough metal and high-temperature brick together to build coking ovens? Could you use the coke effectively? Would coking be worth the trouble if you lacked metallurgical coal?

Problems/ideas (in no special order):

* You just won’t have enough time to introduce everything you can think of. You will have to build prototypes of gadgets using what you can find (or can reasonably make; bootstrapping is permitted) and demonstrate their use before your new contemporaries can copy them.

(You will probably need a lot of time to experiment with little details of anything you try to build, or to gather components. For example, the Argand lamp is remarkably simple, but you would still have to get and sew some fabric for the wick, get a coppersmith to fashion the lampbase, fount, oil reservoir, wick-holder, etc. (some of that could be pottery), and get a glassblower to make you a chimney.)

* Partial exception to the previous problem– if you introduce printing you can create and distribute technical books (cf. De Re Metallica) so other people can introduce your gadgets.

* Sanitary advances will be hard to proselytize. You can tell people about the germ theory of disease, but will they act as you suggest? Remember, there are plenty of diseases/disorders which are not caused by microorganisms that you can abate by sanitary measures, so there will always be scoffers pointing to legitimate examples of the uselessness of your methods. NIH syndrome will be a severe obstacle. (Semmelweis demonstrated the correctness of his antiseptic theory beyond a peradventure, so rather than wash their hands the medical doctors of his day literally beat him to death to shut him up.)

* Partial responses to the previous problem– found a sanitary hospital and administer it yourself, making rituals out of your sanitary measures; send forth trained disciples to spread your methods. Eventually your cult will get a good reputation. Maybe. Or else preinvent the microscope and Pasteur’s experiments and Koch’s methods and spend years convincing bright students.

* You can (and should!) introduce Jennerian vaccination against the smallpox, but many people still won’t listen to you about sanitation or bacterial disease.

* The heavy plow dates from around 900 as does the horse collar in Europe. Stirrups were used in Europe by 600 or so.

* You will want rubber to make hoses and gaskets (and gum boots, and many other things). If you end up in Europe before 1500 you will have to mount a trans-Atlantic expedition to acquire Brazilian latex. You may be able to send to Africa for Congo latex. Happily you already know how to vulcanize rubber with sulfur. Perhaps you can send to Malaysia for gutta-percha. If you arrive before the Age of Sail perhaps you can jump-start it by building and demonstrating improved sailing rigs and the sternpost rudder. You will need a lot of employees or disciples.

* You can look for lodestone then go into the magnetic-compass-needle business. Perhaps you should construct a solenoid, though, even if you have to build a battery to power it.

* To do much with electricity you’ll need a lot of wire and perhaps acid for batteries. You should introduce wire-drawing machines to replace boys with pliers on swings. Be careful making acid, you might injure yourself with fumes. Considering how many pre-requisites you would have to accomplish before getting much done with electric motors, you might prefer to concentrate on steam engines. Of course with cheap wire and some batteries you could build an electric telegraph system.

My thinking on this is warped because I first read Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp when I was pretty young (all due credit to ic1000 for introducing it here). It’s a wonderful book. I have read it again several times since (the story is about much more than engineering).

I can think of some technical ideas which de Camp didn’t put into that book, but I cannot say de Camp didn’t consider them himself before he constructed his plot.

Often a fiction writer will create a character more capable than him or herself– an expert swordsman, a glorious singer, whatever. But the protagonist of Lest Darkness Fall, Martin Padway, is much less of an engineer than de Camp was, though perhaps more of a linguist (to get the plot moving quickly, Padway–very plausibly for a history PhD. in 1938–knows a fair amount of classical Latin and modern Italian, so he rapidly learns to communicate in 6th Century Rome). In the book, Padway can’t get his homebrew gunpowder to work nor the escapement of his experimental mechanical clock, even though he remembers the basic gunpowder recipe and can open the back of his wristwatch and see its escapement working.

I cannot exaggerate de Camp’s auctorial achievement. He really thought about how Padway, or by extension, any sharp mid-20th-Century American (like the reader) might bootstrap himself out of poverty in the 6th Century with just his wits and pocket clutter.

Padway arrives in the past with a few coins in his pockets, but the indigenes have no interest in those of nickel alloy, only his copper and silver– worth just enough for a few days’ food and shelter. Lacking capital, Padway can’t build any marvelous machines. He has no access to powerful men. He’s in Rome, but at a time when that city is a backwater.

So what to do? According to de Camp, Padway must start by selling personal services. He’s not a mighty warrior (and if he were, it wouldn’t help much– bodyguards and soldiers take on a lot of risk for little pay). But Padway knows the basics of double-entry bookkeeping (something all American high-school graduates used to know). So he becomes an accounting tutor.

That earns him enough credibility to borrow money from one of his banker clients to found a distilling business. Selling liquor is profitable enough to finance Padway’s preinvention of movable-type (Gutenberg) printing. Padway starts a newspaper then uses it to influence local politics (among other things, blackmailing a bishop into squelching a local priest who wants to denounce Padway as a witch). Padway preinvents the telescope, so he can set up a semaphore telegraph system, then he and his clients can trade on early news (you have maybe heard of Reuters?).

You can all go read the book yourselves for the rest; I don’t want to spoil it for you.

The real point is that Padway does find ways to build upon the 6th-Century industrial base with parts of his more-advanced knowledge, incomplete though that is.

I think a mid-20th-Century American could probably do that more easily than, say, a recent (2021) American college graduate. In our 21st-Century era all sorts of mechanical and “analog” technology has fallen out of use in advanced countries. You can’t open the back of your wristwatch to look at the gears any more. People don’t keep small-business account books by hand (not since they got PC’s). I had a “print shop” toy when I was a kid (it was all plastic; you could set a few lines of type, ink them, make impressions)– but I couldn’t even find something similar for my children.

A modern American might not even carry Padway’s grubstake of a few coins, or if s/he did, they would all be zinc or cupro-nickel and worthless to a 6th-Century jeweler.

Besides emulating de Camp’s Martin Padway, if you found yourself in the 6th Century you might also be able to introduce the Argand lamp (lots of light from vegetable oil), the Montgolfiers’ (hot-air) balloon, partial-vacuum salt refining, perhaps the Appert process (canned food)– if you could finagle a supply of containers– and plenty of other valuable things that could be realized on that era’s technology base.

I’m tempted by the idea of chemical innovations but two things bother me. One is that I don’t remember enough practical chemistry to do very much, and the other is fear of poisoning myself or others, especially using 6th-Century apparatus. For example, one could obtain sulfur and potassium nitrate fairly easily so you could make sulfuric and nitric acids, but the process would be awfully risky. I think I would concentrate on mechanical-type improvements, though I might try to refine some petroleum products. Of course I would be tempted to make gunpowder, but I might resist that temptation to avoid getting hoist on my own petard (or worse, ending up at the wrong end of someone-else’s firearm).

HHMI has gone woke. It has abandoned the mission that old HH gave it–funding serious research (not D.I.E. sinecures)–so it doesn’t matter what HHMI alumni achieved in the past. Of course, HHMI is rich enough to keep fancy names around as Fellows or whatever, but who cares? (Theranos had a fancy Board of Directors; did that redeem its fraud?)

Fascinating plan! A world-class computer-science school for subcon Indians and East Asians married to a politically-stigmatized liberal-arts school for founding-stock Americans. Both groups can look forward to low pay in their future careers…

Wages for the CompSci group will be held down by offshore and H-1b labor (though a few grads with good people-exploitationmanagement skills will prosper by using their non-English language skills to herd coders in or from Hyderabad, etc.). Only aspergery founding-stock Americans go into CompSci nowadays because of the dreadful career prospects—it’s not like the 1970’s-through-90’s any more.

Wages for the liberal-arts group will be held down by their political and racial undesirability for, first, graduate programs at other institutions, and second, academic jobs. Attempts to overcome the first problem by combined undergrad/grad study in Austin will exacerbate the second problem. Academic excellence won’t help, or even matter. The academically-excellent in American academia can now look forward mainly to contingent, starvation-wage adjunct positions, while all the stable, salaried jobs are in the D.I.E. bureaucracy and reserved—openly and shamelessly—for nonwhite candidates of low academic aptitude (both of those qualifications are mandatory, though some fraudsters slip through. Obesity is not mandatory, but you had better not be caught fat-shaming anyone.)

“But what about non-academic careers for liberal-arts graduates? Most college students just want to get jobs in the real world, right?”

Maybe so. Even most HR bureaucrats don’t recognize most liberal-arts-college names they see in candidates’ resumes. But will really smart students, the sort who want to keep their future options open—the sort who would eventually be influential alumni and the sinews of a suitable old-boys network—choose to go to a stigmatized school even if it’s more congenial? Or will you end up with a non-woke school for midwits and people with unfashionable religious notions (sort of like Hillsdale or Liberty U), stuck in a horrible feedback loop by which it gets a reputation as a school for the not-too-bright, so only the not-too-bright will go there; rinse and repeat?

Look, to make Austin U a success, its benefactors will have to pay for more than a top computer-science school. They will have to pay to hire super-fancy profs away from the Ivies, Stanford, etc. so that Austin U students can list famous advisors on their grant and grad-school applications, name-drop in job interviews, and so-forth. A non-woke university with no-name profs seems nearly pointless. (Maybe a really farsighted benefactor could use massive private grants to lure the cleverest new Ph.D.’s to Austin U so it ends up with a fabulous faculty in ten or twenty years, but that wouldn’t help students now, and it would require the benefactor’s personal supervision for decades— look what has become of HHMI).

There’s a lot of Peter-Turchin-esque ‘overproduction of (wanna-be) elites’ driving this story.

You have many more-or-less-literate women who would like to enjoy the social and pecuniary rewards of being a ‘successful writer’ in the style of the last century (which they know of from books, TV shows, and their elders’ wistful stories), even though most of them aren’t very talented and there’s too much competition and writing is no longer worth much (yes, there is still a bit of a tournament market).

They look around and see that for Googles the key to success is whining about ‘racism’ and claiming unearned (indeed, entirely unmerited) accession to fame and fortune as reparations for the imaginary repression of their group.*

The greedy women naturally try to work the same trick, even though that means retconning all the successful female writers of the last 150+ years out of existence (Harriet Beecher Stowe, anyone? How about Ngaio Marsh?) and contradicting themselves about equal opportunity.

( *Of course the real driver of affirmative action is the overclass handicapping potential rivals from below, but most people don’t understand that.)

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. —Upton Sinclair

So, like, you got a ‘D’ on the O-Chem midterm, right?

Artificial Intelligence must be tempered with Artificial Hypocrisy. Or Artificial Stupidity.

To be fair, non-woke SF was long cursed with the cliché that space aliens would love to eat chocolate. Even Pournelle and Niven couldn’t resist; from The Mote In God’s Eye (1974):

The Marine brought them the drink humans called chocolate, and they drank with pleasure. Humans were omnivores like Moties, but the flavors humans preferred were generally tasteless. Chocolate, though: that was excellent, and with extra hydrocarbons to simulate the waters of the home world, it was incomparable.

Later…

“He can get artistic some other time. The Commissioners don’t want anything fancy tonight. Just be able to feed ‘em all if they want it.” Kelley glanced at the magic coffeepot to be sure it was full, then glared at an empty space next to it. “Where’s the goddamn chocolate?” he demanded.

“It’s comin’, Mr. Kelley,” the steward said defensively.

“Right. See that it’s here before the Moties come in. That’ll be an hour.” Kelley glanced at the wall clock. “OK. I guess we’re ready. But make sure of that chocolate.”

Since they’d discovered it aboard Lenin the Moties had become addicted to hot chocolate. It was one of the few human beverages they liked; but the way they liked it! Kelley shuddered. Butter he could understand. They put butter in chocolate aboard the Limey ships. But a drop of machine oil in every cup?

It is pure corruption for taxpayer money to be spent to build a wall around Biden’s private house.

It has been a maxim of the law since Parliament cleaned up after the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt against Richard II that “the King should live of his own,” which means the King should finance his private lifestyle from his own property, not from taxes on the public.

While he’s in office, the President gets to reside in the executive mansion (the White House) which is owned and maintained by the government and to vacation at Camp David, also government property, and so-on and so-forth, but Biden’s private house in Delaware is not an official amenity.

The decision to award this year’s science Nobel prizes exclusively to men has been met with an outpouring of frustration and disappointment from scientists. [emphasis added]

“The decision . . . ?” Joseph Goebbels could not have written a more wicked sentence.

There is, of course, no single, master decision on the sex ratio of awardees. The wokesters are only frustrated and disappointed because they wish for such a decision so they can make it.

(The writer was also clever to stick the word “exclusively” in there (rather than, for example, “entirely”) since that sets up the DIE watchword “inclusion” as the prayed-for antidote to the wholly imaginary evil of the non-existent decision.)

NYT —> EU: Lie back and enjoy it!

Hey, Steve, there’s a copy-editing or content-management-system problem over at Taki’s… your essay is garbled so that it explains Chekov’s gun in detail twice, once above and once below the major ad-insertion point.

The US tax system offers many ways to translate wealth to consumption while dodging taxes.

One of the simpler ways to avoid capital-gains tax: pledge some capital asset as security for a loan; consume the borrowed funds; eventually die and let your estate forfeit the asset or repay the loan. (The musician Michael Jackson famously took this approach, refinancing his loans as his assets appreciated.)

Or why contemplate death? Suppose you want to make a leveraged investment. You will pay a much lower interest rate on the investment funds you borrow than some middle-class slob partly because your wealth makes you seem a lower risk, and partly because the lender wants to woo more business from you and your friends. There is no tax on influence-peddling, and your investment will be more profitable because your cost of leverage is less.

Another good if petty trick: visit a resort, let the management eager for an investment from your family office comp you a suite, usher you to a VIP tee time, run your female companions through the spa gratis…

(Also, all those charts about Federal tax percentage by quintiles are very misleading. Tax rates are high for the upper quintiles, but much lower for the really rich, the top 0.1%, and the exclusions are what’s critical– the tax rate on taxables may seem similar, but when effective assets just aren’t taxed, they are not accounted-for in those charts.)

A sociobiologist (excuse me, an evolutionary psychologist) could promptly hypothesize a likely explanation for Kathryn Paige Harden lavishing much more of her efforts and resources on her disabled son than on her normal daughter, regardless of any resentment she provokes:

Harden can expect her daughter to supply her with a statistically-normal number of grandchildren after just a minimum of support. Harden’s son, however, is unlikely to father many offspring without considerable extra support.

Harden likely did not have to “think that through” and very possibly never did. Natural selection has already “figured it out” and encoded suitable “feelings” into our genes. If Harden were so short of resources that she could only have contrived for a single child to survive, Harden might well have sacrificed the disabled one to save the other. Since Harden had more than enough resources to raise both children, she invested the surplus in the less-fit child to try to ensure that both would reproduce.

Humans of all races behave like that very frequently in all cultures.

Distributing extra resources to a disabled male child makes sense for another reason: it’s easier to get grandchildren through a disabled son than a disabled daughter. A male doesn’t have to do much work to enhance his mother’s (all ancestors’, really) inclusive fitness. His female mate must carry and nurse his babies, and she or the babies’ grandparents or other relatives or even servants or friends can raise them.*

Still, acknowledging all that does not justify a government policy of lavishing other people’s resources (non-relatives’ resources, taxpayers’ resources) on the least fit. Harden’s inclusive fitness is not your problem (unless you are closely related to her). Your inclusive fitness is reduced by taxing you to specially-subsidize her offspring. Harden can try to translate her personal fitness (especially her ability to garner more resources as a reward for her work, enabled as that is by her personal genetic endowment) to more inclusive fitness without doing you any direct harm, but when she tries (with her political allies) to simply steal your resources to support her low-fitness offspring she acts immorally (breaks the inverse Golden Rule). This logic applies to races as well as individuals.

*This can be taken to remarkable lengths. In 2019 the parents of a West Point cadet who perished in an accident won a court order to retrieve his sperm to try to give him posthumous children so they would have grandchildren.

Drapeto, amigo, I think you must somehow have missed my point. I wrote about the massive shift in the farming economy and population during the last Century. As you can easily read for yourself,

In 1900, just under 40 percent of the total US population lived on farms, and 60 percent lived in rural areas. Today [2016], the respective figures are only about 1 percent and 20 percent.

Also

Whereas farm households earned lower incomes than other households before the 1970s, since the mid-1990s, farm households have consistently earned more than other US households. In addition to earning higher incomes, farm households today tend to have substantially higher net worth than the average US household.

If you don’t like that source then check out another, because they all agree. (You may want to read the whole article I link. I think it’s pretty interesting. But note that I’ve been reading about this stuff for decades.)

You wrote “Become a farmer then wait ten years and then comment.” Well, yeah, if you become a farmer now, in 2021 then you are entering a highly-concentrated, capital-intensive business run by highly-educated, high-IQ people.

But if you were a farmhand in 1930 (or a sharecropper, or a fractionating-inheritance small farmer) your situation was different. As I pointed out, the mechanization of farming eliminated many, many low-skilled jobs which had been filled by low-skilled people since time immemorial. Over decades farm-owners (increasingly big businesses) laid off low-skilled labor while retaining chiefly high-skilled labor (gotta fix those tractors as well as drive them). The surplus agricultural labor, and the corresponding small-town support labor, moved on to the cities seeking industrial work and eventually landing in urban underemployment.

GWAS evidence is welcome of course, but in this case like so many others it only confirms what we already knew (C. M. Kornbluth published his famous story The Marching Morons in 1951).

Post-WW2 society (e.g., the welfare state) is dysgenic, and really the problem is somewhat older— once modern industrial management technics were widely applied, dysgenesis emerged in many spheres. 20th-Century militaries chose the smartest, healthiest, best-behaved men to charge the enemy machine guns; the scum in low draft categories were left home to breed. Farming was mechanized, depriving millions of morons and their spawn of jobs so they moved to cities where they could live off handouts or crime. Governments taxed the most productive workers to finance largess to the less useful so they wouldn’t rock the boat, making children less affordable for the former but (thanks to additional per-child grants) positively lucrative for the latter. Cynical elite managers and politicians implemented ‘affirmative action’ preferences to interpose a dependent client class between the elites and any challengers from the middle class, again favoring the genetically less productive. In these and many more ways modern industrial society is dysgenic and things are unlikely to improve before widespread genetic engineering of humans. Even then I fear that elite interest in forestalling competition for the places at the top will result in more genetic divergence not less.

Schizophrenia is also higher among potheads (I don’t know whether Emmanuel of Rwanda was one).

I still want to know if there is a gay exploitation connection.

Some meaningful fraction of “Total Traffic Deaths” may now be caused by Amazon.com‘s slave-flogging delivery-driver-routing system, which coerces Amazon’s delivery staffers (who drive Amazon-marked vans to deliver Amazon’s packages under Amazon’s total and fantastically-hostile control, but who do not, technically, work for Amazon) to speed, double-park, and trot back-and-forth across busy highways on foot to deliver packages to more-or-less nearby buildings without moving their vans. For less than minimum wage!

The report you linked includes pedestrian fatalities in ‘Total Traffic Deaths’ (it also breaks out pedestrian deaths in some other charts) which is a bit confusing. The clearest indications of the report are that drinking alcohol and walking around at night are major risk factors. Possibly the White Death (from carelessness/intoxication driven by despair) is showing up here.

Driver training is definitely worse now than years ago.

Next explain the decline of the public’s interest in organized sport. Sure, revulsion toward wokeism can account for much of the recent collapse of football, basketball, baseball, and various other fanbases, but boxing interest faded much earlier and I think football, at least, was in trouble even before idiot players started ‘taking a knee’ to annoy the fans.

The protagonist of Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Mannie (Manuel Garcia O’Kelly-Davis), turns out to be black. Heinlein also reveals that slowly and elliptically.

We shouldn’t confuse different kinds of ugly. Thalidomide-baby or war-wounds ugly, for example, differ greatly from morbid-obesity or Portland-Antifa-tranny ugly. A good person may properly react to them differently. For example, it is quite right to be wary of the latter two types of ugly, which often testify to the defective personalities of the people who manifest them. It is wise as well as kind to minimize one’s aversion to the former two, which typically say nothing about character.

What older generations might call National-Geographic ugly calls for measured reaction, as does the sort of ugliness which too often accompanies old age.

Yep, she’s at Pune. And she is totally plugged-in to the G7-academia craziness.

One effect of modern communications (and the large Indian upper-class diaspora) is that Indian academics eagerly imitate Western academics and participate promptly in their fads.

Desire of the Ring: An Indian Academic’s Adventures in her Quest for the Perilous Realm

–Sonali Chunodkar, to be presented Sunday 4th July

Translation: I can think of nothing interesting to say about Tolkien’s work or life, so I will speak about my favorite subject, myself. Don’t worry, mine will be a tale of auto-adversity largely overcome by fanatical self-promotion, so you can empathize with it, then both envy and admire me for creating it.

To anchor my talk in Tolkieniana I will tell you about my experiences as the Ringbearer, that is, about those times when my intersectionality (dark complexion, non-European religion, and reluctantly-deviant sexuality) makes me “invisible” to the goblins predatory cisheteronormative racist white people whose academic meetings I attend to spy on their evil plans. Just as the One Ring helped Bilbo and Frodo sneak past their enemies in Middle Earth but drove them into greed and paranoia, my self-proclaimed “erasure” by white supremacy helps me sneak around the halls of academia, but at the cost of my moral dignity.

Even now, with the Arkenstone of an unmerited conference speaking invitation in my hand, I am beset by furies of shame and self-doubt. I must find the magic to transmute them into a mighty resentment, to give me strength for my struggles, whether against Lit profs who keep asking for analyses grounded in the texts, or against memories of my mother scouring my face with lemon juice or powdering it with chickpea flour.

The story doesn’t quite convey the relevant fact that many LED headlamps emit very blue light which is not “broad spectrum” but rather contains just a few sharp spectral lines spaced rather awkwardly through the color range, with a hell of a lot of blue and even violet because those wavelengths are used to excite phosphors to produce some of the other spectral components.

That means that things often look washed-out and vague under color-deficient, sharply-blue LED-headlamp illumination. The difficulty of recognizing stuff (“seeing” it) in LED beams causes confused drivers to demand even-brighter LED headlamps as they try to compensate for their difficulty perceiving things in LED beams, which leads to more difficulty for other drivers (and pedestrians and really everyone) as the ever-brighter but still unsatisfying LED beams dazzle people.

The NHTSA should simply force headlamp suppliers to emphasize yellowish, color-rich light, which would permit good perception with less luminosity and brightness, enabling limits on lumen output to be enforced without disappointing drivers.

In fact, Africans never really got around to fire either.

Oh, don’t be silly.

https://www.thoughtco.com/african-iron-age-169432

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/iron/hd_iron.htm (this one has interesting descriptions of superstitions and nonsense attached to iron and its production in West Africa.)

Other suitable responses from most politic to least:

1. Answer a hostile question with a converse one: “First tell me, what do you like about being black? Perhaps it’s the same.”

2. “The beautiful women.”

3. “Less worry about reversion toward the mean.”

Wow

She’s smarter than fake American Indian Ward Churchill, who mouthed -off enough to get himself fired from his cushy tenured professorship at the U of Colorado Boulder. Churchill’s story is interesting because he parlayed fake-Indianhood into a tenured professorship without an advanced degree, starting from the base of being a lowly drone in the university’s affirmative-action office. Maybe that achievement made him too cocky to recognize when he was risking his comfy gig by insulting the 9-11 martyrs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill

An artist with more ambition than skill can always try to sell ugly as liberating. There are generally plenty of emperors ready to don the newest invisible clothes.

“adultification bias” — a form of discrimination that uniquely plagues Black girls, leading them to be perceived by adults as less innocent and more adult-like than their White peers, according to a widely covered 2017 Georgetown study

Uniquely? Of course their (everything which follows is “on average”): greater size for age, earlier age of menarche, much higher rate of STD’s, much higher rate of violent behaviour, much higher rate of school discipline problems, and earlier independence from parental control might prompt quite unbiased observers to think them more mature for age…

How can I get a cushy gig publishing crap sociology at Georgetown?

Yeah, but call a male Google of tender years (or even an infant) a “boy” instead of a “young man” and lose your job, possibly even your life.

Yeah, but call a male Google of tender years, even a newborn, a “boy” instead of a “young man” and lose your job, possibly even your life.

Taser/pistol confusion is both understandable, and I suggest, likely forgivable. Current-model “police” Tasers are shaped like automatic pistols and some departments encourage officers to carry them like pistols in belt holsters, accepting the well-known risk that even a respectable, competent officer may draw the wrong weapon in a tense situation.

“So what?” you say. “That officer shouldn’t have drawn her pistol when she wanted her Taser, right? She must be incompetent because she is a woman.”

So we’re all speculating her, but consider this: that woman officer may have carried her pistol in a “retention holster” that forces her to make some fancy moves to draw that pistol at all. She may have drilled assiduously to make those moves to draw her pistol smoothly, thereby training her subconscious “muscle memory” to move her hand to her pistol and twiddle her fingers just right to get her pistol out of its straightjacket so she can present it to the threat.

Now, do you suppose that officer trained as much with the Taser? I wouldn’t have, because (a) if the Taser is the appropriate weapon in some situation, then that situation cannot be very dire (or else the pistol would be appropriate), so I should have plenty of time to draw the Taser; and (b) the Taser is in a different and (probably) simpler holster– I would not want training to draw the Taser to override or confuse the extremely complex and vital muscle memory I need to draw my pistol from its retention holster.

It may well turn out that at a conscious level the officer wished to draw her Taser but in the stress of the moment her (generally admirable) training led her hand subconsciously to her pistol. If the incident provokes any policy changes, maybe those should involve keeping Tasers in patrol cars rather than on belts or some similar hack to prompt officers to reach for Tasers only in low-risk situations and in a manner which minimizes weapon confusion.

But Simmons, who took a seven-month medical leave, said the experience followed a pattern of incidents in which she felt dehumanized, such as colleagues touching her hair and calling it exotic. She left the university Jan. 19, the day she was supposed to return [from her medical leave].

Nothing demonstrates the ‘privilege’ these grifters enjoy like the way they demand and their employers provide months and years of vacation with full pay (“medical leave”) to them as a reward for ridiculous, obviously mendacious complaints about imaginary hair-touching and “emotional labor.”

Where did you get this story (the claim that Mulholland fathered a grandchild on his own daughter)?

I’ve found no trace of it elsewhere so far.

Poor Candace Parker. If she gets her way then her league is likely to solve its real-women-can’t-dunk problem by hiring trannies who can— and much more often than Parker herself.

If altruistic TERF’s save Parker from the humiliation she deserves, she will denounce them in horrible terms.

Of course that “recruiting” ad is meant to repel, rather than attract, white men. But I suspect it has another job as well… tempting current soldiers to utter remarks which will earn them Article 15’s or discharges for “supremacism” (a particularly unattractive neologism I learned from Lloyd Austin just this week). That picture is applied Dalrymple, intended not to persuade but to humiliate, and thereby to goad the recalcitrant into self-incrimination.

Natural selection will reduce the incidence of youthful transgenderism over time. It may well take longer than our society can survive, but it will happen. Late-blooming M2F whack jobs like Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner or Donald/Deirdre McCloskey may be with us forever.