> Was Dept. of Education contract researcher Jacob Hartog a true believer?

Assuming Hartog was sharing genuine experiences and opinions, he is far from woke. Probably to the left of Sailer, but not too distant. Apparently he reached out to Razib, not something that very many true believers would have done.

Re: Trump/Musk chainsaw clearcutting at the Dept. of Education

Podcasts aren’t terribly efficient, but fortunately for my fellow commuters, I don’t read and drive. On 3/16/25, Josiah Neely and Razib Khan interviewed (now former) DoEd contract researcher Jacob Hartog for an hour, Khanversation #33.

tl;dr, Hartog seems nice. Absent an absent 4D chess strategy, DOGE’s sweep of people like him will disrupt the time series of studies like NAEP, making it much more difficult to distinguish good from bad and ugly in educational policy.

> [Edward] Jenner did a trial of precisely one subject, an 8-year-old boy called James Phipps. He later injected Phipps with pus taken from the sores of a smallpox sufferer, and lo and behold, he was immune.

Jenner didn’t apply statistics to his trial, because they wouldn’t be invented for another century or so.

Jenner chose the son of his gardener to be the subject of the cowpox vaccine trial, exposing Phipps to smallpox from multiple sources to gauge its performance. Two of Jenner’s own children were about the same age as Phipps. It would be interesting to read Jenner’s explanation of why he favored enrolling Phipps instead of them for the experiment, if he wrote one.

The past is another country.

OT, but a developing example of a longstanding iSteve theme.

Twitter, Jan. 26, 2025 at 5:21 PM:

So, Biden’s staff didn’t double check the ACLU’s list of “nonviolent drug offenders” and gave clemency to a drug lord in Connecticut who murdered an 8 year old boy and his mother to stop them from testifying.

CT Sen. Blumenthal : “someone dropped the ball… This was a really vicious murder that changed our laws.”

Just now:

> No, these [influential public figures] are people who regularly get emails saying “hey, you should read this, it’s good”, and if they click on the link and it’s paywalled they are going to just move on.

One point to consider is that Substack subscribers get (or can opt in to getting) paywalled posts sent to them as emails. These can be forwarded. Your points are valid, presumably this is an effort by Substack to straddle the “freemium” line.

WaPo:

Hurricane Maria ravaged the island in 2017, creating the longest and largest major power outage in modern U.S. history. The storm and its aftermath caused nearly 3,000 deaths, including from disease, lack of access to health care and water insecurity.

Not really on topic, but I recall that “3,000” figure as being suspect, even fabricated. Racist mainland WASPs oppressing hapless angelic Brown victims etc. PR must be a heck of a desert if droves of Boriquas are keeling over from water insecurity.

Where he will fail is in reducing inflation and balancing the budget.

You got it, Mark. It could be Ron Paul as President right now – same thing. It’s too late and, this is baked into the numbers, as Peak Stupidity explained (just getting started) in Will the DOGE save our economy? . (Pretty much the same budget explanation you gave.)

I know our host and all but a couple of commenters here can do a lot higher math than arithmetic, but people generally don’t seem to want to. How about that – to keep it simple – the ~$1 Trillion interest payments last fiscal year were paid on (call it) ~$34 Trillion of debt? You don’t need a calculator – that’s about a 3% rate. How’d they get that great deal? I take it many of the older, lower-interest-bearing bonds were paid out. What happens when the net interest rate paid is 7%?

Interest payments will be take up half the revenue, the deficits will be that much bigger, and that debt total (now, ~ $36 and 1/4 Trillion) will go up that much quicker. As the man said in the movie “Boys, we’re in a tight spot.”

This cannot NOT end in major financial pain, I don’t care who ya’ are, and Donald Trump is not the kind of guy to want to understand this or hear about it. It’s gonna be a Golden Age, I tells ya’!

That said, enjoy your eggnog and the time with your families. Don’t mind the arithmetic today.

A handful of dedicated culture warriors took up the cause: Joe Rogan, Robby Starbuck, Elon Musk, etc. Robby Starbuck organized boycotts against woke businesses – especially businesses that primarily cater to square, flyover America. And I think Elon Musk really got pissed off when the tranny-insanity claimed his own son.

Just the fact that Trump won, and with a decisive majority, took the wind out of the sails of the Democratic Party. When Trump won, after all they tried to do to him, they just gave up.

For now, that is. It isn’t over. The left is down, but not out. The election was still relatively close, it turned on just under 3 million votes out of over 150 million cast. About half the country kind of believes a bunch of twaddle that I consider to be anywhere from stupid to totally bats**t insane. About a quarter to a third of the country really believes it. That isn’t a recipe for the long term stability of this country.

This is the best I was able to find, read various posts:

https://twitter.com/Slatzism/with_replies

Whole thing has way more the feel of reality than a LARPer. More detail. No tease. And references pictures of shooter as child and infant. (Facebook of father is still up.) So I’m inclined to trust Slatzism.

TLDR:

*15yo female (not trans, always female).
*Manifesto shared (unreadable rant, confusing).
*Gun was stolen from father.
*Had an online e-bf from Germany.
*Lots of electronic trail of fascination with school shooting nihilism.
*No info yet from classmates or teachers on her personality. E-bf said she was sweet.

They’re still doing it. But they still don’t have any solid evidence of this corruption. Where’s the smoking gun? There isn’t one.

There was. It’s even on video-tape. Here’s Smilin’ Joe Biden bragging ab0ut forcing the government of Ukraine to fire the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, the natural gas company his son represented – the company his son only started representing after Biden was given the “Ukraine portfolio” – the son who didn’t speak Ukrainian or any foreign language for that matter, who knew nnothing about Ukraine, who had no experience in the natural gas business or the energy business at all, and who was a raging drug-addict, whore-monger, and generally just a degenerate scum-bag f**k-up.

Then there are the payments to various Biden family members, amounting to several million dollars, shuffled around and filtered by numerous shell-companies, that were uncovered by James Comer’s committee.

Tell us, just what does Hunter Biden do? What is his talent – his unique skill that allows him to command multi-million dollar fees for brokering deals? What are the nature of these deals? Why was Hunter Biden invoking his father to extort a payment from a Chinese businessman, telling him in an E-mail that his father was sitting right next to him and would be displeased if the payment was not forthcoming.

You want a smoking gun for rampant corruption? It’s all on Hunter Biden’s own laptop, which the Feds pretended didn’t exist and then sat on.

If the charges (brought by a Trump-appointed special counsel) were a ruse to distract from anything, it was to distract from the lack of solid evidence of corruption.

No, that isn’t true. He was a Trump appointed attorney (from Delaware – Joe Biden’s stomping ground). But it was Merrick Garland who appointed him special counsel to “investigate” Hunter Biden (and – more importantly – not investigate Joe Biden).

If the special counsel had such evidence, there would have been corruption charges.

Sure, Merrick Garland just follows the law without fear or favor, as he always says. If you believe that – that Biden’s AG, a long time Democratic Party hack, was going to allow an investigation to get anywhere near “The Big Guy”, then you are a fool.

One of the many contemptible aspects of the Garland/Biden Department of Justice has been the normalization of punishing whistleblowers. I don’t know if this apples to Agent Shapley; I am most familiar with the case of Eithan Haim, a surgical resident who worked at Texas Children’s Hospital. Haim became aware that TCH continued to perform transgender interventions on minors once it became illegal in Texas. And that TCH’s leadership was lying when they announced that they had desisted from these practices.

In leaking the information to Chris Rufo, it appears that Haim was scrupulous about maintaining patient confidentiality and following HIPAA. That was irrelevant to the DOJ, who has been engaging in a jihad to ruin the gender heretic’s life in every way they can.

From this past summer, the US Attorney’s press release. And a defense of Haim at the National Review.

Haim continues to discuss his experiences on Twitter, which unsurprisingly now include motions to gag him. Public awareness of DOJ/FBI lawfare could diminish trust in these institutions.

How can the public be so easily diverted from the central issue surrounding young Biden’s legal problems? No one should care about the petty problem about owning a gun while drug addicted. If anything, focussing on that creates sympathy, because it smacks of striking at Joe Biden by damaging a family member, which is contemptible. What matters, to my mind, is the obstruction of justice that obviously occurred when a substantial income tax case against young Biden was slow-walked to allow a statute of limitations to expire. I read the long testimony that IRS Agent Gary Shapley gave to a House Committee in July of 2023 – about a hundred double-spaced pages including questions asked by committee members – and I remember there were only about three people who seemed to be in a position to commit the obstruction – one was David Weiss, and I forget the two others. Thus I was astonished when AG Merrick Garland named David Weiss as Special Counsel to investigate. I wondered – had an arrogant, contemptuous middle finger just been raised in the public’s face? In any case, even if Weiss is totally innocent – is that the norm, for an investigator to himself have involvement in the situation being investigated?
The press has pointed out that young Biden’s pardon may further the cause of justice, in that he becomes stripped of protection from self-incrimination. That being the case, I suggest that newly-inaugurated President Trump issue pardons to a number of officials with potential involvement in this and related obstructions – numbering possibly dozens, up to but not including the level of Merrick Garland – and then proceed with an aggressive, truly independent investigation.
Here’s a link to Gary Shapley’s opening address:
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Shapley-Testimony.pdf
Finally, I apologize for not reading this whole thread, and possibly rehashing subject matter already addressed. It’s late, I’m lazy – you know how that works.

Thanks. I try, and I continue to discover musical artists that I did not know about. We all have our tastes.

One of my philosophy professors in college liked to say, with regard to relativism, “Everything is a matter of taste, but some tastes are better than others.”

He had worked as a carpenter building apartments in San Francisco before he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy.

On Christmas Day this year, my godson will give a performance on the organ in the same church in Transylvania where I became his godfather at his christening that I attended 14 years ago. We have pictures of me holding him there in the church in his little, white, christening outfit.

He cried when the priest put the water on him.

The organ he will play is so old that the bellows were powered mechanically by men in the days before electricity.

He is gifted, like my wife. He loves music and music theory. We have had detailed conversations about this. He speaks English fluently, which he learned entirely on his own, via the internet, by communicating with other young people around the world. He is 14 years old, and his parents are always amazed when he converses with me, very adroitly, in my native language.

He will play the organ in that old church in his hometown in Transylvania on Christmas Day.

Tears are welling up in my eyes now…

> no matter how much of a “bad boy” I have become here

Bad boy with good taste in music 😉

Ford’s 1974 pardon of Nixon speaks to some of your points.

…As a result of certain acts or omissions occurring before his resignation from the Office of President, Richard Nixon has become liable to possible indictment and trial for offenses against the United States. Whether or not he shall be so prosecuted depends on findings of the appropriate grand jury and on the discretion of the authorized prosecutor…

Now, THEREFORE, I, GERALD R. FORD, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.

The felonies Hunter were convicted of speak to his poor character (crack, handgun violations, etc.). But so what, many such cases. He was never indicted on the charges that were serious in terms of his celebrity parent — influence peddling in Ukraine, accepting/extorting payoffs from front organizations for the CCP. And, if the [sarc] Russian disinformation [/sarc] laptop hard drive is to be believed, distribution of the ill-gotten gains to family members. Including to his celebrity parent.

> Biden talks loudly about 2 minor charges that Hunter has been charged with… Then he pardons him for a 10-year period of all crimes.

Yes. More significant than the pardon was the timing of the Justice Department’s handling of Hunter Biden’s serious wrongdoing. Specifically, the slow-walking of his Burisma board lucre, his consulting jackpots from PLA-owned Chinese companies, and his tax evasion. (If Hunter had evaded paying taxes on unreported foreign income, then so had the other members of the Biden family who had profited through Hunter from those cozy relationships.)

Oh, darn. If the belatedly-appointed Special Prosecutor doesn’t rush to indict Hunter on those major crimes, the statute of limitations will pass.

Oh, darn.

Steve, Here is an on-topic tweet that should be of great interest to you and your readership.
Correlation = 0.91!
https://twitter.com/JayMan471/status/1856645644833665067
I explained the background to Mrs. ic1000 — how an obstacle to insight among academicians and legacy-media journalists/pundits is that Sailer/Voldemort must not be mentioned.
She doesn’t believe me: no way that the Current Year’s public intellectuals could be so enstupidated.

In the ’90s and oughts, Rust Belt City had a hip, lefty weekly, modeled on NYC’s Village Voice, but available free from sidewalk newspaper racks. It was (obviously) supported by ad revenue, especially of the spicy Personal Services variety. In retrospect, the rise of Craigslist was its death knell.

Most articles were as regime-compliant as one would expect — understanding their actual topics required the Pravda-reading skills that are oft-discussed in this comment section.

But now and again they would publish bangers. One on the politics of the City’s schools (“We don’t care about students, this is our turn at the trough,” to paraphrase one African-American teachers-union official). Another on a taxi-unavailability crisis in bad black neighborhoods (“No-go zones because we’re fed up with being serial victims of casual armed robberies and shootings,” explained a Nigeria-born cabbie).

Relevant to Austin/Oak Park, a third expose that dissected one rowhouse neighborhood’s transformation from working-class ethnic to ghetto hellhole. The reporter quoted real estate agents of that time and place, detailed how flipping led to fortunes, and bared the connections of these unsavory activities to the origin stories of many of Rust Belt City’s eminent patron-of-the-arts philanthropies.

All this from memory. At the internet’s archives… nothing. Brittle newsprint in the public library’s basement? Nope. Microfiche? A deprecated storage technology.

It’s like it never happened.

Thanks for the followup.

> [Reilly] struck me as articulate, smart, measured and good-natured.

He is on Team Reality.

For those with a commute, here is Razib Khan’s February 2024 podcast interview, Wilfred Reilly: a social scientist in the culture wars.

> I guess these [quotes of Sailer’s] get old Jason all hot and bothered. But to a normal person giving them any kind of fair read, this Sailer fellow sounds [a strait shooter].

Yeah. Reading the text, I saw plenty of “get me rewrite” instances. But… overall… I would have sent the article to typesetting as-is. Woke Jason and his woke editors can’t sense the water they swim in, and thus don’t recognize how the published quotes undermine their Antifa-adjacent narrative.

To normie readers, that is.

> Is Wilfred Reilly your foil?

Please read a couple of Reilly’s essays (or follow him on Twitter), then Reply to this comment with an update on (or restatement of) your opinion. Judging books by covers, all that stuff.

She hasn’t won yet.

The MSM is ecstatic at Kamala’s performance but what excites DC pundits is not the same thing as what excites swing voters in Wisconsin.

I don’t think that either candidate scored a knockout punch. There’s not even a good soundbite that can be played in campaign commercials, no gotcha, no “we beat Medicare”. It wasn’t like the last debate where senile Joe was left on the canvas. I don’t see this debate as decisively swinging the election and the race is going to remain close. There might be some temporary bump in the polls but in a week or two everyone will have forgotten this debate. Either candidate may squeak thru.

Frankly they both suck as debaters (and the moderators were awful and biased) but they are not running a debating championship.

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1833708735165841744

Pollster Nate Silver’s analysis.

Tonight was the first and perhaps only debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Thanks to all of you who joined us in the subscriber chat. It’s been a busy couple of weeks with travel and a lot of long newsletter pieces, so I’m going to prioritize speed rather than depth here with a series of bullet points based on notes I took while the debate was underway.

There is a strong consensus that Harris won the night. Polymarket predicts there’s a 97 percent chance that Harris is judged the winner of debate in snap polls, and also has the overall race drawing to 50/50 after having shown a Trump lead at the start of the night. Bitcoin prices are down, which also implies a loss for Trump. Even the Fox News panel that I caught at the tail end of the evening seemed to concede that it was a win for Harris.

Harris is a good tactician, and I imagine her campaign couldn’t have been more pleased with Trump repeatedly taking the bait literally every time that she offered it.

Trump didn’t seem to know to do with the long 2-minute blocks and microphones muted. He’d have coherent and occasionally even fairly effective sections for 30 seconds at a time, but then he’d veer off into another direction. You’ll probably see some process stories complaining that Trump wasn’t well prepared for the evening.

And Trump also was very much in “campaign rally” mode, speaking in terminology that was more coded toward the GOP base and name-dropping people like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram.

Lots of GOP complaining on Twitter about the biased moderation, which whether you agree or not, is almost always a bearish indicator.

But to be fair, the set of questions was pretty friendly to Harris. Nothing about Biden’s fitness for office, for instance, even though his catastrophic failure in the first debate is the reason she rather than Biden was standing on stage tonight. And ABC News also doing basically real-time fact checking played well for Harris. Maybe some of the constant Democratic ref-working of the mainstream media played dividends.

Trump was more effective on the economy than on other topics, sticking to simpler rhetoric that an economist might not approve of (e.g. on tariffs) but which will probably play reasonably well with the median undecided voter. I thought the first 10 minutes or so, focused on the economy, were actually pretty good for Trump — but there may be a fatigue issue, as there was with Biden. We didn’t see much “A-game” after that.

Sustained debate early in the evening on abortion very bullish for Harris, both in terms of the substance and the subject matter — it’s probably Democrats’ best single topic. In particular, Trump couldn’t really land the point about the Supreme Court throwing it to the states as being a good thing. What happens in the first 15-30 minutes almost always matters disproportionately relative to the rest of the evening.

Style-wise, Harris seemed quite canned at times, like in invoking Camp David.

And the stature gap in terms of physical size was also notable, especially with Harris having a shorter podium. Sometimes you’ll hear people say that you should watch the debate with the sound off, and by that measure it was much closer than with the sound on.

The most meme-able moment of the evening — Trump saying he had “concepts of a plan” on Obamacare but not articulating any details — also clearly favorable for Harris.

Harris was repeatedly trying to recycle themes from convention speech, like American competitiveness against China and the military having a “lethal” fighting force. I thought Harris’s convention speech was very good, but this was interesting in light of her not getting a sustained convention bounce.

Trump seemed more like the incumbent, which is bullish for Harris. He had some effective moments in attributing blame to Harris for the Biden-Trump administration — like in his closing statement where he asked what she’d been doing for the past three-and-a-half years — but he wasn’t focused enough to build these to a crescendo.

I wrote yesterday that I thought there wouldn’t be a second debate, but if Harris gains in the polls, this might actually wind up being in the zone where both candidates have an incentive to debate again, with the race coverging fairly close to 50/50.

But there’s also some chance that the Twitter/pundit buzz is getting a little carried away and underrating the impact of things like Harris’s gender. It would be surprising if this had an impact on the scale of the Biden-Trump debate, for instance.

In closing, Harris got the debate she wanted. If she isn’t able to move the needle in the polls at least a little bit, maybe that means the country just isn’t buying what she’s selling.

People that love or hate him creep me out.

I get voting for him over Harris. Pick your poison.

But wearing the stupid hat and cheering as he brings a wrestler to the stage? Or trying to believe that ALL of his criminal accusations are a liberal conspiracy?

I also don’t get the Trump cult – especially now, after his dismal track record. The hats, the enormous “Trump” banners on trucks, the child-like belief that he cares about the common man. I find it off-putting and silly. Creepy, as you say.

But I also believe that none of the current prosecutions and suits against him are legitimate. They are indeed all a liberal conspiracy – lawfare designed to torpedo his campaign. The fact that most of the cases weren’t even brought until he announced he was running again is strong evidence of that. And even that sexual assault charge by that one loopy woman is bogus.

Trump is kind of a slimy creep and probably has bent/broke some laws during his long career, but probably no more so than any other person in his league. The piling on him clearly is an attempt to utterly crush, not just him personally, but any movement he might (admittedly, badly) represent.

Proof that Joe Biden was right when he said white supremacy is the greatest threat to America. If even Ms. Chartrand can fall for this ideology, America is in big trouble.

These days, “debunked” just means they don’t want to believe a claim and don’t actually have any data to buttress their beliefs. People like Stancil and whoever this guy is fall back on “systemic racism” as having altered what would otherwise be impressive black progress and achievements but they never, ever, have any actual data with a clear link to that.

The Mother Jones reporter I can actually sympathize with to an extent. Although wrong on this and no doubt many other political issues, he’s clearly reasonably intelligent and no one with any sense of pride in their ancestry wants to believe that they are a major outlier rather than representative of what is possible for most of one’s co-ethnics. You can see this with Glenn Loury and John McWhorter as well, although they are far more honest about at least the cultural aspects that keep blacks dead last when it comes to every single positive socio-economic indicator. To Loury’s credit, he at least has a ‘let the chips fall where they may’ view rather than demanding interventions to artificially boost the appearance of achievement. McWhorter clearly understands the genetic piece as well but is so uncomfortable with it and the implications he clings to a sort of old school liberalism that is all but extinct with the actual left that holds power in academia and elsewhere as a kind of intellectual safe harbor.

Stancil, on the other hand, is pond scum. Earnest prog whites who construct increasingly absurd political theories and actual policy that supposedly will put blacks (or other supposedly marginalized people) in their rightful societal place have wrought more political, cultural, and economic damage on the United States than anyone else and it’s not close. I think some people look at him with bemusement due to his low-T and nerdy demeanor, but he and his fellow travelers are truly the biggest enemies of a well-functioning and cohesive society that exist and they deserve be utterly destroyed in the professional and political realm.

As Sailer’s tweet flashes on screen, Stancil says he’s arguing against race scientists [sic] whose claim is that American blacks have a genetically-determined IQ of 70.

Would Mother Jones’ fact-checkers permit Sailer to rebut that he disagreed with Progressive Twitter personalities who run for state office, when they urged George Floyd to pass more counterfeit $20s?

Kind of a one-way street you’ve got there.

The evil tweet of mine they chose to display (at 1:06) is particularly funny because in it I’m arguing for the positive effects of better nurture on raising black IQ

Yeah, that’s true, but they’re not interested. They’re never going to allow a good faith debate against people they deem anathema. They just wanna hold up a few designated sinners to ridicule before they bring on Sasha “Prelate of The Science” Gusev to declaim the catechism to the true believers.

I notice the Voice Of Moderation™ black guy host did your favorite maneuver of claiming it’s all been debunked without actually saying what the debunking was (0:24), but who are ya gonna believe, logic or the Moderate™ host? He’s black, if you disagree with him that makes you racist.

The part of that short video that was most surprising wasn’t that the designated evil Emmanuel Goldstein tweets were just anodyne, rational social science commentary, but that Will Stancil, whom I’ve never seen on video before, is almost incomprehensible when speaking. Even reading the (machine generated?) captions, it’s still hard to parse what he is saying. He seems to combine a facial tic (subclinical Tourette’s?) with a stilted mental model that results in syntactically awkward declarations delivered in mushy nasal enunciations. No wonder not even liberals would vote for him.

Is your follower Soledad O’Brien really woke? I’ve watched a few episodes of her syndicated Hearst news show “Matter of Fact” on the local NBC station. She seemed to be more of an old-fashioned American Marxist or Communist, with anti-white racism and radical feminism added to the mix in an almost casual, “Why Not?” way.

Silver isn’t right about everything but I do feel that he is better than most than putting his emotions and bias to the side to try and put forth his best forecast about where things are headed at the present. His sentiment that Harris has the lead at present is accurate, I believe.

The Dem establishment – who deserves condemnation for the deliberate fraud the Biden presidency has been – had the brains to shove him out the door when it was obvious he couldn’t win. Harris is not particularly politically talented, is implicitly part of the unpopular current administration, and has zero grasp of any public policy that I can discern. However, putting her forward gave them a fresh shot at defining their candidate in the public eye with the aid of their collaborators in the media and it’s working, which a useful reminder of just how easily led and manipulated most Americans are. Trump reacted with his trademark lack of discipline, which is the best thing that could have happened for the nascent Harris campaign.

I do think Trump will regain his stride somewhat, and at the end of the day *all* of the criticisms he could have leveled at Biden apply to Harris so he should stick to that. Harris is probably going to come out of this convention as popular as she ever will be, so the race ultimately comes down to how much/how quickly that erodes in the time left.

It seems pretty doubtful that the National Guard would be much use in such situations [civil unrest], and politically aware people in the US are no doubt still cognizant of the Kent State shootings.

Perhaps the National Guard could be used to protect important buildings and redirect traffic while the police are engaged elsewhere.

Anyway, I don’t see why anyone would blame Walz for treading very carefully before calling out the National Guard, because it could have made the situation worse, not better.

I asked ChatGPT about the peacetime roles of the National Guard; its reply is below the fold. See #2. If (contra the FBI and the Justice Dept.) you believe that Antifa and Black Bloc exist, and behave as terrorists, feel free to add #4.

It’s good to know that you aren’t a sophisticated, current-generation chatbot. (Not that I ever thought that you were.)

The Argument Clinic.

Agree.

Walz, by contrast, is a DEI-cordycepted bureaucrat, subjecting every statement and action to tedious, defeatist DEI do-loops. City aflame? Wait! Are the Guardsmen DEI-vetted? Rioters to blame? No! DEI excuses their crime. He’s a Company Man, loyally pursing the corporate mission statement while executing all programmed subroutines. The company is the Democratic Party and the mission is The Great Replacement.

Kamala can be a ditz. On subjects she has no interest in, she retreats into Veep-ish circular self-reference. Or if really cornered, she’ll deploy what everyone calls her “cackle” but what is more of a sorority party-girl guffaw: it is engaging and disarming rather than irritating and id-disclosing, as Hillary’s actual cackle was. But on the subject of conquering America, she is an able acolyte of Obama’s one big talent: presenting egregious—even genocidal—policy as if it were just uncontroversial common sense. For this reason alone, Kamala was worse than Tim on the Mostly Peaceful Riots and is worse on everything else.

Belatedly, this morning, the NYT drops “Walz Faces New Scrutiny Over 2020 Riots: Was He Too Slow to Send Troops?” The article’s 58 paragraphs are big on the passive voice, as the reporter describes the complexified difficultness of the pressure-cooker situationality that unprecedented Governor Walz used all of his military veteran and schoolteacher experience to face in dealing with the cascade of fast-paced challenges.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Below the fold is the start of the article (fair-use extract.)

The “Ctrl-F ‘murder’ adjacent to ‘Floyd’” count is six.

In an amusing effort to validate Sailer’s view of the NYT’s revenue model, subscriber comments are pouring in. At the moment, “Diedre” has garnered the most upvotes:

Walz offered help and waited for the Mayor to make the call.

The Mayor should have made the call a day earlier but Walz was ready to go when asked.

We still have not heard a response from Donald Trump why it took 4 hours for his office to allow a response on Jan6

Top-ranked comments two through eight also call out Trump, January 6, or both.

Not off-topic, here is a reply to Sailer over at the Astral Codex Ten Substack, on Kamala’s “How I Met Your Mother My Running Mate” origin story. Deiseach quotes an August 8th AP account of Harris’ meetup with Walz:

The makings of a presidential ticket began in an unusual spot six months ago: a Minnesota abortion clinic.

At the time, it was a historic visit for Vice President Kamala Harris — no president or vice president had ever made a public stop at one. But the visit laid the groundwork for Harris to connect with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and learn about his interest in reproductive health, an issue Harris has taken the lead on during her White House term.

At first glance, the 60-year-old governor might not seem the most likely of political surrogates to talk about abortion and pregnancy. But Harris found a partner who has a track record of increasing abortion access in his state and can speak comfortably about his own family’s struggles with infertility.

[continues…]

Deiseach’s acerbic comment:

See the enthusiasm for Kamala which includes “and of course she and Walz are correct on reproductive justice”, where that means “all abortions all the time!” Oh, excuse me, I’m always lagging behind on what the current correct terms are: now it’s “reproductive health.”

How far we have come from “Safe, legal, and rare.”

Whoever “we” might be.

It’s bizarre that they’re trying to present Walz as a candidate who represents “joy.” He reminds me of Ed Asner’s crabby character in the movie “Up.”

That character had a reason to be crabby – the love of his life couldn’t have a baby and then she fell ill and died before he, not having fulfilled their joint dreams.

What’s Walz’s excuse?

All that “joy” stuff is just Instagram-pretend. He and Harris are two of the phoniest political characters in America.

Squad member Ilhan Omar, a native of Mogadishu, is in another tight primary race with Don Samuels, a native of Kingston, Jamaica, for the right to crush face Republican Dalia al-Aqidi, a native of Baghdad, in November. What’s wrong* with this picture?

Mr. Walz’s skin color bore on his legitimacy as a decision-maker, he said: “I will not patronize you…”

Pandering is evidently distinct from patronizing.

Sis you know that Ilhan Omar is not black, or “Black”? Just ask Hassan Al Khaire, former prime minister of Somalia, who declared on a visit to the district and its representative:

“Whether you like this girl or not, it is very important that Ilhan, as a Somali, is in that place [Congress] for us. Any Somali who believes that a Black man should take that seat [the Fifth Congressional District] or a white person, there is something wrong with that person’s morals.”

https://www.donsamuels.com/2024/07/31/don-samuels-issues-statement-on-rep-ilhan-omars-failure-to-condemn-campaign-surrogates-racist-remarks/

*What’s right is that none of them can be President!

Black crime is a major issue for middle class Whites, including me, who live in the inner suburbs of large cities. Trump did not do well with White suburbanites in 2020, winning them by four percentage points versus sixteen percentage points in 2016.

Trump made an effort to get more of the White rural, Black and Hispanic vote in 2020. This worked some with Hispanics and White rural voters but failed with Blacks. Republican efforts should be more directed at increasing the percentage of middle class White voters rather than pandering to Blacks.

The Republicans received a gift with the Walz pick because of his weak response to rioting and looting after the Floyd death. In addition to advocating tough on crime policies, coming out against affirmative action, third world immigration and an extensive welfare state are other positions that could help increase the White middle class vote for Trump.

Kamala is doing exactly what Biden did for the 2020 campaign – what someone called a basement campaign.

Both are prone to awkward gaffes and have no upside to doing interviews. But that’s okay, that just means the GOP can keep running old footage like the “Have you been to the border?” bit or the “Be woke” bit.

Democrats act like Biden’s dementia was some big new discovery (“We’ve been lied to!”), but he was already manifesting it prior to the 2020 election, which culminated with him introducing his granddaughter as his deceased son and then “correcting” the mistake by confusing her with her cousin.

No, it was there already and the press just “nothing to do see here” the whole thing.

As others have pointed out, the press is now on full-court press to throw the election to Kamala. Witness the New York Times’ brief coverage of the scandalous revelation about Kamala’s husband Doug Emhoff. It reported of Emhoff confessing to an “old” affair (he didn’t confess, he was exposed), for which he allegedly “paid the price” and quickly transitioned to how his ex-wife thinks Kamala is just great!

What the NYT leaves out is that Emhoff impregnated a much younger elementary school teacher of one of his children and then the woman in question “did not keep the baby.” In other words, the mainstream press is desperately trying to “nothing to see here” the fact that their proposed First Gentleman cheated on his first wife with his young child’s teacher, got her pregnant, and then the baby was aborted. Classy, huh?

The US press have bent over so far they’ve come around in a full somersault, just so they can bend over some more. It’s sickening.

Mr. Sailer wrote:

Americans tend to like black Americans and want to do nice things for them….

In response, you wrote:

I don’t think that’s true at all. Most Americans don’t hate black Americans, but doing nice things for them and fawning over them is largely forced, because everyone knows that it’s expected from above, and nobody really knows what to do with blacks. Nobody likes affirmative action and gimmes for blacks when they are on the receiving end or view themselves as paying for it.

I do think that many white Americans – especially on the left – want to do nice things for blacks, but “tend to like black Americans” is completely wrong and is contradicted by real life, revealed preferences such as intermarriage and housing patterns. Nice educated white liberals might want a nice educated black liberal as a token, emblematic friend, but he/she certainly stays the heck away from most blacks.

Mr. Sailer misses some trends in this article, because of his own particular priors. For example, he writes:

In his vague way, Trump appears to sense that one issue that might unite the white, black, and red historic nations of America is opposition to ceding rule of the United States to an Obama-Kamala-style global elite ruling class…

This is more of Mr. Sailer’s wishful thinking than is reflective of reality. All statistical indicators are that, far from a nativist white, black, and red alliance, the broad political trends seem to indicate a white-Hispanic working class political coalition emerging versus the high-low coalition of elites (largely white/Jewish/South Asian) and blacks.

Mr. Sailer also seems to miss the sexual dimension to the above political coalitions. Increasingly, males of all races – even blacks – especially those of the working class segment are trending toward a coalition with working class white males. Recently, commenter Elmer T. Jones wrote a very insightful and humorous comment, in which he described Kamala Harris as “the Stock Photo DEI Candidate.” He went on to write, “You’ve seen her on every corporate web page under the “Careers” tab. She’s leading teams, giving presentations, programming space vehicles.” (https://www.unz.com/isteve/governor-of-isteve-content-generator-mississippi-gets-veep-nod/#comment-6699067)

There is a reason why the stock photo DEI is almost always a black woman. It’s because “women of color” are often the biggest beneficiaries of DEI employment. Black women tend to have higher educational attainment rate than black men and, being women, are more ideally suited to nebulous, talky fields such as “human resources” and the like that contain a large fraction of DEI hires. There is even some statistical evidence that affirmative action benefits black (and even more Hispanic) women at the expense of black men: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/08/the-long-run-impacts-of-banning-affirmative-action-in-us-higher-education.html

Results suggest that banning affirmative action results in a decline in URM women’s college degree completion, earnings, and employment relative to non-Hispanic White women, driven largely by impacts on Hispanic women. Thus, affirmative action bans resulted in an increase in racial/ethnic disparities in both college degree completion and earnings among women. Effects on URM men are more ambiguous and indicate significant heterogeneity across states, with some estimates pointing to a possible positive impact on labor market outcomes of Black men.

Mr. Sailer is correct, of course, to point out that black elites are more admixed than the black masses. But this is not unusual. I’d posit – based on housing, educational, income, and intermarriage data – that white elites are also more admixed (probably with Asians) than the majority of ordinary whites. Indeed, this is true of all race/ethnicities in the U.S. (in other words, upscale Asians are more admixed than ordinary Asians and upscale Hispanics are likewise). See the median income data by marriage types below:

And this has been the case for millennia globally. During the heydays of the Roman Empire, for example, the genetics of the city of Rome was shifted toward the Levant, likely suggesting that the long distance trade encouraged migration of merchants, ambitious aspirants and the like from the Levant to the imperial capital that led to admixtures, which later disappeared as the empire and long distance trade collapsed (the city’s population was replenished still later from the countryside).

You can see the same phenomenon at work with, say, JD Vance, who – once he rose to the hallowed halls of power, aka Yale Law School, from Appalachia, romanced and married Usha Chilukuri, a daughter of South Asian immigrants and forming a “power couple.”

Obviously, Trump was wrong: Kamala has always identified as both Asian Indian and black.

Was he wrong? Early photos of Kamala show a young Indian woman among her Indian family. To the extent her British Commonwealth family referred to her mulatto father at all, they probably conceived of him as Jamaican-white rather than American-black.

Kamala’s black-identification seems to have begun exactly when the incentives for it kick in: post-secondary education. Identifying as Indian (“Asian”) there doesn’t get you anything, so she didn’t do it. Identifying as black does get you a lot, so she did it, even though she was barely quadroon and certainly less black than Indian.

Of course, by the time Trump encountered her as Willie’s side-piece it was after her black-shift, so nowadays he is supposed to think of her as black, but characteristically he saw her for what she actually was and didn’t bother enquiring about whatever ethnic flag of convenience she was flying.

The question then is not if Kamala used to be Indian, she was, the question is merely over the timing of her transition to black. Trump assumes it was after he met her, but it may have been a few years before, so The Great and The Good insist that he must submit to that transition just as everyone must submit to new pronouns from the gender-confusers.

Ultimately, it’s just another fake technicality that doesn’t matter. The Dems’ Narrative Talkers are already saying “she’s black, she’s Indian, she’s everything!” and their voters will accept this as they accept everything else they are told to, because they operate on consensus-policing not on facts or logic.

The Democrat authoritarianism…

Tulsi Gabbard now has a federal air marshal riding along with her. It’s not for her protection, but for democracy’s.

Federal Air Marshal Whistleblowers Reveal Tulsi Gabbard is Actively Under Surveillance Through Secretive Quiet Skies Program

The ACLU was onto the story six years ago:

TSA Darkens the Skies With Secret Surveillance of Americans

But are they now?

But the retreat of law enforcement from American roadways has also occurred against the backdrop of a rise in road fatalities.

But the proliferation of human papillomavirus has also occurred against the backdrop of an epidemic of genital warts.

> it [passive] is a voice, not a tense.

Thanks.

> Literally nothing in what you quoted is in passive voice

In my opinion, the broader point remains. Badger and Blatt use grammar to obscure, not to illuminate.

Paragraph 13:

As American roads have grown more deadly, many people interviewed for this article blamed a breakdown in the social contract — the basic expectation that drivers will follow the rules. But reversing that will be difficult when the chief enforcement mechanism of road safety for decades in America — the traffic stop — has been a recurring scene of police misconduct.

Roads grow deadly.
People blame a breakdown in the social contract.
Traffic stops are the recurring scene of misconduct.

Scan the “Reader Picks” comments to see how few subscribers grasp what’s driving the increased fatality rate. After reading the lengthy article on that subject.

It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Paragraph 4:

This decline [in traffic stops], seen in an Upshot analysis of local law enforcement data, accelerated a shift that began in many places before the pandemic, suggesting that the police have pulled back from a part of their job that has drawn especially sharp criticism. To many communities, traffic stops have led to racial discrimination, burdensome fines and deadly encounters—not road safety. But the retreat of law enforcement from American roadways has also occurred against the backdrop of a rise in road fatalities.

2nd sentence, Get Me Rewrite.

To many communities, traffic stops have led to racial discrimination, burdensome fines and deadly encounters—not road safety.

Racist white policemen use traffic stops as a pretext to discriminate against Blacks [1], burdening innocent Black drivers with unjust fines. These racist white policemen have enabled Car Violence to join Gun Violence in unleashing deadly encounters—denying too many communities’ yearning for road safety.[2]

[1] The active tense has its uses.
[2] Subtlety is sometimes overrated.

As the famous video of the Chinese supervisor working in Africa goes, “it’s all so tiresome.” For the life of me, I cannot think of a single large news outlet story I have read in the last 25 years that treated blacks as accountable for their actions or spoke honestly about national trends that are driven primarily by this one group.

That said, I will stick to my repeated claim that the tide is going on America’s longstanding cultural and political deference to blacks. Aside from the demographic changes that will mean diverse America has a much larger share of the population from groups that are largely indifferent to black demands, based on my completely anecdotal observations of my teen children and their friends, many young whites are not the least bit unclear or deluded when it comes to racial reality. Naturally the last group to change their views will be the elites at the helm of various media outlets, colleges, and so on, but I do think in the coming years there will be subtle cultural indicators that things are changing.

78 paragraphs to this article, longer even than most of the NYT’s Trump-is-the-new-Hitler thumbsuckers.

Emily Badger and Ben Blatt’s lede sets the tone:

In the early days of the pandemic in 2020, traffic stops by the police plummeted around the country, as fewer cars were on the road and as agencies instructed officers to avoid nonessential contact with the public.

As can be seen, the tenses used by these crack investigators are mostly passive.

In Badger/Blatt World, agencies, traffic stops, and especially cars have agency. But particular individuals rarely do, and black drivers — never.

If Times editors had insisted on mentioning the bad guys’ secret identities, subscribers’ reactions would have been swift and severe. This time around, “Reader Picks” comments disappoint — Theme #1 is “danged reckless drivers waddya waddya,” leavened by “racist police” and “Europe superior.”

But as Sailer notes, the two graphs that would enable readers to grasp the nettle — kindly reproduced at the end of his Taki’s article — were presented by Emily and Ben as an afterthought, in paragraph 79.

Which had to be cut — the paper ran out of space.

Darn.

Excellent comment. I enjoyed the link to NYT reporter Emily Badger’s iSteve Content Generator page. She has much to be proud of.

My concept of Chechens derives from the 2014 movie “The Drop.” This superb film stars Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, and James Gandolfini in his last film. Hardy and Gandolfini are very formidable, as they must manage to successfully navigate the entanglement of their bar with the mafia. Well, the producers needed to cast a group of villains who were even more formidable than the above…not easy. Americanized Chechens – – super-scary bad guys – – to the rescue. Rentable at Amazon Prime.

The story of that plane crash, assuming the truth is out there, is pretty damn sad. I imagine Putin had his head in his hands when he got the news.

a) conditions were foggy and unsuitable for a landing – a Russian plane had already diverted to Moscow after two failed attempts

b) the airport didn’t have precision landing aids

c) the bulbs in the approach lights didn’t all work (and trees around the airport had been allowed to grow above safety regulation height)

d) two of the pilots, including the current captain, had flown the President in a 2008 incident where the President had changed the destination mid-flight – the then captain of the flight considered the changes dangerous (he had no airport charts for the changed destination), refused to implement the change and landed as previously planned. The captain never flew the President again and the other pilots were aware of this.

e) they also had on the flight deck the Chief of Protocol and the Air Force Chief.

f) the captain was handling comms as well as flying, as the best Russian speaker in the flight crew

The Poles had crammed a lot of Great and Good on board …the president of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, and his wife, Maria; the former president of Poland-in-exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski; the chief of the Polish General Staff and other senior Polish military officers; the president of the National Bank of Poland; Polish government officials; 18 members of the Polish parliament; senior members of the Polish clergy; and relatives of victims of the Katyn massacre.

They should have aborted and gone somewhere else. Pres would have been late, but alive.

“What’s going on here?”

A game of chicken. The Democrats want Biden out but with as little fuss as possible. But Biden doesn’t want to leave so he is threatening to burn everything down if they try to force him out. So the Democrats keep increasing the pressure telling him one way or another you are gone so why not make it easy for yourself and leave gracefully. And Biden is telling them, I don’t believe you will really wreck everything just to get me out. Especially since that means Harris is next in line and she would be an even worse candidate than me even with my dementia. That’s why I picked her after all. And they are telling Biden you are clueless you are so far gone even Harris will give us a better shot. So leave already with some semblance of dignity.

We will see how things go.

In the minutes and seconds before the killer opened fire someone at the event took video on their phone of the two LEO sharpshooters who will ultimately shoot him… They just calmly wait. And wait. They wait until the killer has taken his multiple shots. Only then do they open fire…. Maybe someday someone will explain to me how this makes sense.

It seems that those are NOT the snipers who shot Crooks, and they never opened fire. Their view of Crooks was apparently blocked by trees and they were looking at buildings or areas considerably beyond Crooks position. The reason they were facing in one direction and not scanning is not that they saw anything in particular in that direction but that their field of responsibility was in that direction.

This explains why Crooks head was not obviously penetrated from the front, or blown apart by the large caliber weapons anti-sniper team #1 (which your video concentrates on, and are shown below) possessed. He apparently took a shot to his right temple from a smaller caliber weapon fired by sniper team #3 to his right and the exit wound was presumably to the left rear of his head. Why his upper front teeth were not visible in the photo I saw is unclear to me, but knocking them out would anyway have required a second near simultaneous shot, which I was never convinced was likely, and I guess there’s another explanation.

You, and Dore, are asking questions I was asking earlier, but I found this video informative:

Sorry about that. I didn’t know about Twitter’s innovative punish-visitors policy until Ralph L. explained it.

Here’s a follow-up tweet from Sunday night — video of another group of outside-the-perimeter attendees trying to draw cops’ attention to the soon-to-be shooter clambering up the roof, as Trump is heard orating in the background.
https://twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/1812642041391915384

You now have to sign up for X to see current tweets. Otherwise you get random ones from several years which don’t seem to change.

https://twitter.com/DrPhiltill/status/1812293956102762982

Thomas Lawson’s Twitter account (@Thomasfidy) has good updates on developing aspects of the attempted assassination. @DanielleFong as well.

Looks like a major security failure by the Secret Service. Nearby rooftops, there are only a few buildings nearby, were not secured. People need to be fired. Or worse.

https://twitter.com/SharpFootball/status/1812265909727396107

Outrageous.

https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1812269821914169514

The dead shooter’s body was on social media while CNN was still saying that “Trump fell” at the rally.

https://twitter.com/ragipsoylu/status/1812267952961699975

Steve is a master of baiting blog readers.

Recently here I mentioned that I was enjoying the summer in Romania as an American with dollars.

People teased me.

Well, my wife and I have been coming here together, about a dozen times now, over the past 23 years.

Her parents died 4 years ago, and she inherited her girlhood home, where I am writing now: 71 square meters (I think that’s about 770 square feet, but I am not going to check right now on my phone.) 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a big balcony facing the sunny south and overlooking the trees. (She remembers when the engineer neighbor downstairs planted these trees.)

We are not tourists, but I seldom see or meet another American here. People stare at me. I like this. This is not a tourist destination, but it should be, with its very pretty art nouveau architecture and its Austro-Hungarian history.

Please forgive typos and anything shoddy. I am using my phone, and I hate touch screens.

This particular city is undergoing a kind of Eastern European “gentrification.” This is good for us, because we have placed this flat on the market. I am pleasantly surprised by the real estate “comps,” comparable sales prices and what our agent is motivated to seek.

Our agent candidly tells us that buyers of “flats” like ours typically come from “out of country.” They remodel and update, like American neighbors I am familiar with in Connecticut.

Are these tourists? Immigrants? Not sure, but prices this American finds ridiculously low here are actually rather high for the natives.

There should be a LOL button for posts too.

AIDS isn’t caused by HIV. Dr. Duesberg began pushing this in 1987, at which point it wasn’t ridiculous. I saw him give his spiel in 2009. It was quite reasonable-sounding…except that by that point, orthodox medical researchers had made enormous progress against AIDS, and they’ve made much more since then. Meanwhile, Duesberg has not.

I don’t know anything about Dr. Duesburg and AIDS/HIV, but others’ medical progress against AIDS doesn’t necessarily invalidate whatever it is that Dr. Duesberg had to say. After all, medieval methods against the Black Death (quarantine, burning the ‘plague houses’ of the deceased, etc.) often made medical progress against the disease even though they thought they were fighting against “miasmas” rather than against Yersinia pestis. It is possible to act constructively without a complete—or even correct—understanding of the object being acted upon. It’s not only possible, it’s downright common. To adapt a saying: “All [mental] models are wrong. Some are useful.”

Similarly,

Top cop Bill Bratton’s memoir recounts that his CompStat initiative in the mid-1990s succeeded because he found, out of 40,000 NYPD officers, six who were interested in statistics and computers.

It’s not just cops. Even in supposedly data-driven business corporations, almost no one actually cares about “what the data says” except to the extent they can use it to advance their careers. Rare executive data request: “I need an unbiased, objective overview of subject x for the sake of our shareholders and all humanity.” Common executive data request: “Give me something that proves what I spent $x million on last quarter actually worked.”

So it may not be that

It has also become dogma among conservatives that crime can’t possibly be going down recently… Instead, conservatives allege, big-city cops like the NYPD must be failing to report crime because they are all liberal Democrats conspiring against Trump.

It’s just that police precinct chiefs, like other corporate managers, want to report what makes them look good and suppress what makes them look bad, as Nic Stix has been reporting for several decades.

And, as you also say, that there has been a tiny recent remission in crime rates shouldn’t get the Democrat-Media Complex off the hook for ginning up the larger crime wave in the first place.

I reported in this column on Nov. 11, 2020, and confirmed on March 23, 2022, Trump’s Operation Warp Speed would likely have been announced a huge success on the day before the 2020 election, except that Pfizer shut down processing of its Covid vaccine clinical trial from late October until the day after the voting, which allowed the corporation to avoid Democratic enmity for helping Trump win reelection.

That was indeed a major scoop, exposing serious medical malfeasance to serve a political agenda. But obviously the Democrat-Media Complex is not going to report misdeeds fostered by their own, and rightwing media barely exists, so there simply isn’t much of a market for that exposé, however damning. Indeed, that fact that it is so damning is what keeps it out of most of the press. That, and the fact that enthusiasm for vaccinations has waned among almost everyone as the vaccine (like most vaccines) has proved something of a damp squib: having been neither so effective, nor perhaps so safe, as was promised.

1. The US elections systems are doubtlessly as pristine and perfect as you and your fellows claim.

2. I’d rather that you continue to focus on politics, rather than gain any influence over the NTSB. I prefer plane-crash and near-miss investigations as they are.

> In addition…
> https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/michigan-elections-faq-more-registered-voters-eligible-voters?amp

Yes, that June 27, 2024 non-partisan FAQ explains why county clerks registering 102% to 108% of eligible voters is, actually, a good thing. Our Democracy, ever more Fortified.

“I identified a dozen factors, each of which might be involved in certain types of fraud. I looked at seven of them — a majority! Four of those seven — a majority! — had no flaws. For the remaining three, I collected plausible explanations for the observed deviations from Best Practices. Thus, fraud claims debunked!”

A forensic examiner who seeks to ferret out fraud (if it exists) will have a very different mindset from the public-relations types who you persistently quote and link.

You guys should try peddling your wares to election authorities in Scandanavia and those other places where people take clean elections seriously. See how far you get.

Meanwhile, it remains tiresome.

> Masterclass in gaslighting on your part

It’s all so tiresome.

No, not the always-at-hand excuses for failing to adhere to best practices. In this case, it refers to the standard Corvinus holds to, when commenting at this site.

What those are is left as an exercise for the reader. “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

The authors of the linked articles sought to investigate claims of fraud that turned out to be false. This exercise is material, but not a rebuttal to the serious contention underlying my gaslighting sarcasm in #50 supra.

[sarc] I understand that these same tenure-track political scientists are on the verge of publishing a spirited defense of select county clerks’ policy of registering 102% to 107% of eligible voters (see also comments 295, 302, 319, and 337).

When that peer-reviewed article drops, be sure to let me know. [/sarc]

This X Twitter article came to my attention from Real Clear Politics — which is limp noodle spineless mush cowardly when it comes to racial, demographic and mass immigration questions — so it shows that the true conditions in France — as opposed to the mass media gaslighting — is close to civilization breakdown and calamity. SAFETY, SECURITY, HONOR and DEPORTING THE MASS IMMIGRATION MENACE is a big political vote-getter hit in France.

France Is Turning Into A Cradle Of Insecurity by Lilli R.:

“I am 26 years old, blonde, with light eyes, and I have always lived in the 6th arrondissement of Lyon, which is thought of as the poshest area in Lyon, and my daily life has become unbearable. I write this because, ten years ago, I could go out with my friends in the evening, at any hour, without being bothered, insulted, followed, or stabbed.

I mention stabbing because, three years ago, my boyfriend, along with two of his friends, on their way home, were approached by a group of men. They surrounded them, stole one of their cell phones. They tried to fight back, and my boyfriend, in spite of being a strong rugbyman, got stabbed, in the arm–while protecting his neck, which was the target. Someone tried to cut his throat.

As for myself, on a regular basis, men follow me, insult me because I refuse to talk back or because I say I have a boyfriend. One day, one spit on me. More and more, I am whistled at like a dog, or “ksksks”‘d like I am a cat. Acts of this nature have happened to me perhaps thirty times in the past year.

Six months ago, we adopted a puppy. One evening, my boyfriend went out to walk him at 9pm, and three men tried to steal the puppy. Since then, we only go out in the evening as a couple, and I always carry pepper spray in my purse.

In our neighborhood, just in our block, there are three drug dealing spots, which work constantly. Day and night. With everything that entails: watchmen loitering outside our house, milling about, shouting, getting high and bothering people, especially women.

Every single one of the actions I mentioned (and they are only a part of what we have gone through) is the fact of men of sub-Saharan African or North African origin. A white man has never behaved towards me the way they have.

Is it racist to call out what my daily life has become as a woman, because of immigration? Is my reality, my daily life, racist? Am I not as legitimate as any other person to call out traumatising acts of violence, just because they are done by foreigners or immigrants?

To be clear, I am not talking about men in general, but specifically men, sometimes underage, who are of immigrant background.

Now, and for about four years, the way I live my life has had to change to live with this constant insecurity. Now I live with a pepper spray outside my front door, a taser, and a false pistol, after an attempted break-in. We have had an extra lock added to our door. We have a security camera in our apartment. In my purse, I carry a second pepper spray, as well as brass knuckles on my keychain. I never walk into a building without checking both sides of the street, in case a man is following me. I never make eye contact with you-know-who. I constantly cross the street. I no longer leave my home on my own after 9pm. I no longer use public transport for obvious reasons. I am afraid when I am alone at home. I am afraid when outside. Now, I am always afraid.

I do not want this future for my children who, fortunately, are not yet here. I do not understand people who do not see that France is turning into a cradle of insecurity because of immigrant men. Insecurity to women, but to men as well.

Therefore, for your future, and those of your children or your children-to-be: cast the right vote.

https://twitter.com/pegobry_en/status/1807800058597044229

OT: In the “Is sauce for the goose also sauce for the gander?” department, Will Stancil is being openly threatened by somebody tweeting about targeting him with a drone strike. Or something. Tweet below the fold.

> Just goes to show you how incredibly backward (and obviously corrupt) the rest of the world is compared to the USA which is first in everything.

Something that gives me a great deal of faith in the US system is that all plausible indications of possible problems in vote-counting are identified as issues of concern by the Fourth Estate. They are aggresively investigated both by the Secretary of State of the relevant state and by Clark-Kent grade journalists. Once spotlighted, the potential deficiencies in the system are remedied, and the improvements are stress-tested well in advance of the next election cycle.

Just as this system progressively reduces the number of airplane crashes, it has made U.S. elections the best in the world. Thus, almost no concerns were identified in 2020. The lack of interest in the state of vote tabulation mechanisms by the NYT, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, NPR Politico, and all of the other mainstream watchdogs — seen properly, this absence of concern is a huge vote of confidence in the American system.