WHITE PRIDE

More Evidence of An Association Between European Ancestry and g Among African Americans

This is a paper I have submitted recently to Mankind Quarterly. This version has been accepted after review and should be published very soon (March this year). Results and syntax are made available in the spreadsheet for replication purposes. In this post, I’ll go over the main analyses and discuss related papers.

European ancestry was found to be positively associated with higher cognitive ability scores among Black Americans in two separate data : The NLSY79 and ABCD.

In the NLSY sample, I used self reported ancestry variables as an approximation for ancestry (alternatively, see my earlier paper using skin color). Using Jensen’s method of correlated vectors, after accounting for reliability subtests, I found that the ASVAB subtests g-loadings positively correlated with group differences. The found correlation (r=0.40) was lower than other analyses which generally reported a Jensen effect of r~0.60. As for the second analysis, I restricted the Black sample to NLSY79 respondents with 2 SD above the mean, the sample was small (N=99) yet 3 respondents had reported having European ancestry, equivalent to 3%. For how reliable this is, this percentage is higher than the corresponding number of 1.81% found in the total sample.

In the ABCD sample, the analysis is a follow-up to the paper published by Fuerst et al. (2021). European genetic ancestry was assessed with autosomal SNP variants. It was found here again that Blacks with more European ancestry performed better on g scores (computed from the NIH Toolbox cognitive battery). Looking at the African American subsample with 2 SD above IQ mean and having =>50% European genetic ancestry (N=57), we were left with 35% of the subjects compared to 16% in the total Black sample. This further validates the idea that Blacks with more European ancestry are more likely to be found at the upper end of IQ levels.

This paper generally evaluates Witty and Jenkins (1934) statement that if ancestry is associated with intelligence among admixed populations, then the right tail should be overrepresented with more admixed individuals. And this is exactly what was found.

Now, to discuss Fuerst et al. (2021). We found that African and Amerindian ancestry are strongly negatively associated with general cognitive ability among US ethnic minorities : African, Hispanic, and Other American subsamples. We followed the same procedure for all subsamples. In our mixed effects models, the first model typically considers ancestry effects, the second model adds self identified race/ethnicity (SIRE), the third model adds “discriminatory” variables such as skin color, state racism, feelings of discrimination, the fourth model finally adds SES. In the Black sample, only ancestry measures and SES correlated with g. However SES did not attenuate the association between ancestry and g. In the Hispanic sample, both Amerindian and African ancestry showed substantial associations with g, while SIRE and discrimination didn’t, but SES attenuated the effect of our ancestry indices. In the Other American sample, the result was similar to the Hispanic sample, since we found significant effect of our ancestry measures while SES variables attenuated such association.

Overall the research is meaningful in a way that we offered a solution to the problem of decomposing genetic and environmental variances.

Other studies worth taking a look at are Lasker et al. (2019) and Pesta et al. (2020). Similar to Fuerst et al. (2021), Lasker found a relationship between European admixture and g among African monoracial and biracial samples while controlling for SIRE, SES and discriminatory variables and except (moderately so) for SES none of these confounding factors altered the association between ancestry and g; furthermore a strong Jensen effect was found on European ancestry and for the subtest correlations with the MTAG Education-Related Polygenic Scores (eduPGS). Pesta conducted a large meta-analysis of studies on group differences in the heritability of intelligence, examining separately the three components which are known as additive genetic, shared environment and nonshared environment. It was found that heritability differs little among Whites, Blacks and Hispanics. (read more)

Morality and Abstract Thinking : How Africans may differ from Westerners – Gedaliah Braun

I am an American who taught philosophy in several African universities from 1976 to 1988, and have lived since that time in South Africa. When I first came to Africa, I knew virtually nothing about the continent or its people, but I began learning quickly. I noticed, for example, that Africans rarely kept promises and saw no need to apologize when they broke them. It was as if they were unaware they had done anything that called for an apology.

It took many years for me to understand why Africans behaved this way but I think I can now explain this and other behavior that characterizes Africa. I believe that morality requires abstract thinking — as does planning for the future — and that a relative deficiency in abstract thinking may explain many things that are typically African.

What follow are not scientific findings. There could be alternative explanations for what I have observed, but my conclusions are drawn from more than 30 years of living among Africans.

A public service billboard in South Africa. Note old tire and gas can.

My first inklings about what may be a deficiency in abstract thinking came from what I began to learn about African languages. In a conversation with students in Nigeria I asked how you would say that a coconut is about halfway up the tree in their local language. “You can’t say that,” they explained. “All you can say is that it is ‘up’.” “How about right at the top?” “Nope; just ‘up’.” In other words, there appeared to be no way to express gradations.

A few years later, in Nairobi, I learned something else about African languages when two women expressed surprise at my English dictionary. “Isn’t English your language?” they asked. “Yes,” I said. “It’s my only language.” “Then why do you need a dictionary?”

They were puzzled that I needed a dictionary, and I was puzzled by their puzzlement. I explained that there are times when you hear a word you’re not sure about and so you look it up. “But if English is your language,” they asked, “how can there be words you don’t know?” “What?” I said. “No one knows all the words of his language.”

I have concluded that a relative deficiency in abstract thinking may explain many things that are typically African.

“But we know all the words of Kikuyu; every Kikuyu does,” they replied. I was even more surprised, but gradually it dawned on me that since their language is entirely oral, it exists only in the minds of Kikuyu speakers. Since there is a limit to what the human brain can retain, the overall size of the language remains more or less constant. A written language, on the other hand, existing as it does partly in the millions of pages of the written word, grows far beyond the capacity of anyone to know it in its entirety. But if the size of a language is limited, it follows that the number of concepts it contains will also be limited and hence that both language and thinking will be impoverished.

African languages were, of necessity, sufficient in their pre-colonial context. They are impoverished only by contrast to Western languages and in an Africa trying to emulate the West. While numerous dictionaries have been compiled between Euro­pean and African languages, there are few dictionaries within a single African language, precisely because native speakers have no need for them. I did find a Zulu-Zulu dictionary, but it was a small-format paperback of 252 pages.

My queries into Zulu began when I rang the African Language Department at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and spoke to a white guy. Did “precision” exist in the Zulu language prior to European contact? “Oh,” he said, “that’s a very Eurocentric question!” and simply wouldn’t answer. I rang again, spoke to another white guy, and got a virtually identical response.

Kikuyu women do not need dictionaries.

So I called the University of South Africa, a large correspondence university in Pretoria, and spoke to a young black guy. As has so often been my experience in Africa, we hit it off from the start. He understood my interest in Zulu and found my questions of great interest. He explained that the Zulu word for “precision” means “to make like a straight line.” Was this part of indigenous Zulu? No; this was added by the compilers of the dictionary.

But, he assured me, it was otherwise for “promise.” I was skeptical. How about “obligation?” We both had the same dictionary (English-Zulu, Zulu-English Dictionary, published by Witwatersrand University Press in 1958), and looked it up. The Zulu entry means “as if to bind one’s feet.” He said that was not indigenous but was added by the compilers. But if Zulu didn’t have the concept of obligation, how could it have the concept of a promise, since a promise is simply the oral undertaking of an obligation? I was interested in this, I said, because Africans often failed to keep promises and never apologized — as if this didn’t warrant an apology.

A light bulb seemed to go on in his mind. Yes, he said; in fact, the Zulu word for promise — isithembiso — is not the correct word. When a black person “promises” he means “maybe I will and maybe I won’t.” But, I said, this makes nonsense of promising, the very purpose of which is to bind one to a course of action. When one is not sure he can do something he may say, “I will try but I can’t promise.” He said he’d heard whites say that and had never understood it till now. As a young Romanian friend so aptly summed it up, when a black person “promises” he means “I’ll try.”

The failure to keep promises is therefore not a language problem. It is hard to believe that after living with whites for so long they would not learn the correct meaning, and it is too much of a coincidence that the same phenomenon is found in Nigeria, Kenya and Papua New Guinea, where I have also lived. It is much more likely that Africans generally lack the very concept and hence cannot give the word its correct meaning. This would seem to indicate some difference in intellectual capacity.

Note the Zulu entry for obligation: “as if to bind one’s feet.” An obligation binds you, but it does so morally, not physically. It is an abstract concept, which is why there is no word for it in Zulu. So what did the authors of the dictionary do? They took this abstract concept and made it concrete. Feet, rope, and tying are all tangible and observable, and therefore things all blacks will understand, whereas many will not understand what an obligation is. The fact that they had to define it in this way is, by itself, compelling evidence for my conclusion that Zulu thought has few abstract concepts and indirect evidence for the view that Africans may be deficient in abstract thinking.

Abstract thinking

Abstract entities do not exist in space or time; they are typically intangible and can’t be perceived by the senses. They are often things that do not exist. “What would happen if everyone threw rubbish everywhere?” refers to something we hope will not happen, but we can still think about it.

Everything we observe with our senses occurs in time and everything we see exists in space; yet we can perceive neither time nor space with our senses, but only with the mind. Precision is also abstract; while we can see and touch things made with precision, precision itself can only be perceived by the mind.

How do we acquire abstract concepts? Is it enough to make things with precision in order to have the concept of precision? Africans make excellent carvings, made with precision, so why isn’t the concept in their language? To have this concept we must not only do things with precision but must be aware of this phenomenon and then give it a name.

How, for example, do we acquire such concepts as belief and doubt? We all have beliefs; even animals do. When a dog wags its tail on hearing his master’s footsteps, it believes he is coming. But it has no concept of belief because it has no awareness that it has this belief and so no awareness of belief per se. In short, it has no self-consciousness, and thus is not aware of its own mental states.

It has long seemed to me that blacks tend to lack self-awareness. If such awareness is necessary for developing abstract concepts it is not surprising that African languages have so few abstract terms. A lack of self-awareness — or introspection — has advantages. In my experience neurotic behavior, characterized by excessive and unhealthy self-consciousness, is uncommon among blacks. I am also confident that sexual dysfunction, which is characterized by excessive self-consciousness, is less common among blacks than whites.

Time is another abstract concept with which Africans seem to have difficulties. I began to wonder about this in 1998. Several Africans drove up in a car and parked right in front of mine, blocking it. “Hey,” I said, “you can’t park here.” “Oh, are you about to leave?” they asked in a perfectly polite and friendly way. “No,” I said, “but I might later. Park over there” — and they did.

While the possibility that I might want to leave later was obvious to me, their thinking seemed to encompass only the here and now: “If you’re leaving right now we understand, but otherwise, what’s the problem?” I had other such encounters and the key question always seemed to be, “Are you leaving now?” The future, after all, does not exist. It will exist, but doesn’t exist now. People who have difficulty thinking of things that do not exist will ipso facto have difficulty thinking about the future.

It appears that the Zulu word for “future” — isikhati — is the same as the word for time, as well as for space. Realistically, this means that these concepts probably do not exist in Zulu thought. It also appears that there is no word for the past — meaning, the time preceding the present. The past did exist, but no longer exists. Hence, people who may have problems thinking of things that do not exist will have trouble thinking of the past as well as the future.

This has an obvious bearing on such sentiments as gratitude and loyalty, which I have long noticed are uncommon among Africans. We feel gratitude for things that happened in the past, but for those with little sense of the past such feelings are less likely to arise.

Why did it take me more than 20 years to notice all of this? I think it is because our assumptions about time are so deeply rooted that we are not even aware of making them and hence the possibility that others may not share them simply does not occur to us. And so we don’t see it, even when the evidence is staring us in the face.

Mathematics and maintenance

I quote from an article in the South African press about the problems blacks have with mathematics:

“[Xhosa] is a language where polygon and plane have the same definition … where concepts like triangle, quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon are defined by only one word.” (“Finding New Languages for Maths and Science,” Star [Johannesburg], July 24, 2002, p. 8.)

Apartheid-era sign post.

More accurately, these concepts simply do not exist in Xhosa, which, along with Zulu, is one of the two most widely spoken languages in South Africa. In America, blacks are said to have a “tendency to approximate space, numbers and time instead of aiming for complete accuracy.” (Star, June 8, 1988, p.10.) In other words, they are also poor at math. Notice the identical triumvirate — space, numbers, and time. Is it just a coincidence that these three highly abstract concepts are the ones with which blacks — everywhere — seem to have such difficulties?

The entry in the Zulu dictionary for “number,” by the way — ningi — means “numerous,” which is not at all the same as the concept of number. It is clear, therefore, that there is no concept of number in Zulu.

White rule in South Africa ended in 1994. It was about ten years later that power outages began, which eventually reached crisis proportions. The principle reason for this is simply lack of maintenance on the generating equipment. Maintenance is future-oriented, and the Zulu entry in the dictionary for it is ondla, which means: “1. Nourish, rear; bring up; 2. Keep an eye on; watch (your crop).” In short, there is no such thing as maintenance in Zulu thought, and it would be hard to argue that this is wholly unrelated to the fact that when people throughout Africa say “nothing works,” it is only an exaggeration.

The New York Times reports that New York City is considering a plan (since implemented) aimed at getting blacks to “do well on standardized tests and to show up for class,” by paying them to do these things and that could “earn [them] as much as $500 a year.” Students would get money for regular school attendance, every book they read, doing well on tests, and sometimes just for taking them. Parents would be paid for “keeping a full-time job … having health insurance … and attending parent-teacher conferences.” (Jennifer Medina, “Schools Plan to Pay Cash for Marks,” New York Times, June 19, 2007.)

The clear implication is that blacks are not very motivated. Motivation involves thinking about the future and hence about things that do not exist. Given black deficiencies in this regard, it is not surprising that they would be lacking in motivation, and having to prod them in this way is further evidence for such a deficiency.

The Zulu entry for “motivate” is banga, under which we find “1. Make, cause, produce something unpleasant; … to cause trouble . … 2. Contend over a claim; … fight over inheritance; … 3. Make for, aim at, journey towards … .” Yet when I ask Africans what banga means, they have no idea. In fact, no Zulu word could refer to motivation for the simple reason that there is no such concept in Zulu; and if there is no such concept there cannot be a word for it. This helps explain the need to pay blacks to behave as if they were motivated.

Zulus.

The same New York Times article quotes Darwin Davis of the Urban League as “caution[ing] that the … money being offered [for attending class] was relatively paltry … and wondering … how many tests students would need to pass to buy the latest video game.”

Instead of being shamed by the very need for such a plan, this black activist complains that the payments aren’t enough! If he really is unaware how his remarks will strike most readers, he is morally obtuse, but his views may reflect a common understanding among blacks of what morality is: not something internalized but something others enforce from the outside. Hence his complaint that paying children to do things they should be motivated to do on their own is that they are not being paid enough.

In this context, I recall some remarkable discoveries by the late American linguist, William Stewart, who spent many years in Senegal studying local languages. Whereas Western cultures internalize norms — “Don’t do that!” for a child, eventually becomes “I mustn’t do that” for an adult — African cultures do not. They rely entirely on external controls on behavior from tribal elders and other sources of authority. When Africans were detribalized, these external constraints disappeared, and since there never were internal constraints, the results were crime, drugs, promiscuity, etc. Where there have been other forms of control — as in white-ruled South Africa, colonial Africa, or the segregated American South — this behavior was kept within tolerable limits. But when even these controls disappear there is often unbridled violence.

Stewart apparently never asked why African cultures did not internalize norms, that is, why they never developed moral consciousness, but it is unlikely that this was just a historical accident. More likely, it was the result of deficiencies in abstract thinking ability.

Public service message, South Africa.

One explanation for this lack of abstract thinking, including the diminished understanding of time, is that Africans evolved in a climate where they could live day to day without having to think ahead. They never developed this ability because they had no need for it. Whites, on the other hand, evolved under circumstances in which they had to consider what would happen if they didn’t build stout houses and store enough fuel and food for the winter. For them it was sink or swim.

Surprising confirmation of Stewart’s ideas can be found in the May/June 2006 issue of the Boston Review, a typically liberal publication. In “Do the Right Thing: Cognitive Science’s Search for a Common Morality,” Rebecca Saxe distinguishes between “conventional” and “moral” rules. Conventional rules are supported by authorities but can be changed; moral rules, on the other hand, are not based on conventional authority and are not subject to change. “Even three-year-old children … distinguish between moral and conventional transgressions,” she writes. The only exception, according to James Blair of the National Institutes of Health, are psychopaths, who exhibit “persistent aggressive behavior.” For them, all rules are based only on external authority, in whose absence “anything is permissible.” The conclusion drawn from this is that “healthy individuals in all cultures respect the distinction between conventional … and moral [rules].”

However, in the same article, another anthropologist argues that “the special status of moral rules cannot be part of human nature, but is … just … an artifact of Western values.” Anita Jacobson-Widding, writing of her experiences among the Manyika of Zimbabwe, says:

“I tried to find a word that would correspond to the English concept of ‘morality.’ I explained what I meant by asking my informants to describe the norms for good behavior toward other people. The answer was unanimous. The word for this was tsika. But when I asked my bilingual informants to translate tsika into English, they said that it was ‘good manners’ …”

An all-too-common problem.

She concluded that because good manners are clearly conventional rather than moral rules, the Manyika simply did not have a concept of morality. But how would one explain this absence? Miss Jacobson-Widding’s explanation is the typical nonsense that could come only from a so-called intellectual: “the concept of morality does not exist.” The far more likely explanation is that the concept of morality, while otherwise universal, is enfeebled in cultures that have a deficiency in abstract thinking.

According to now-discredited folk wisdom, blacks are “children in adult bodies,” but there may be some foundation to this view. The average African adult has the raw IQ score of the average 11-year-old white child. This is about the age at which white children begin to internalize morality and no longer need such strong external enforcers.

Gruesome cruelty

Another aspect of African behavior that liberals do their best to ignore but that nevertheless requires an explanation is gratuitous cruelty. A reviewer of Driving South, a 1993 book by David Robbins, writes:

Victim of Rwandan violence.

“A Cape social worker sees elements that revel in violence … It’s like a cult which has embraced a lot of people who otherwise appear normal. … At the slightest provocation their blood-lust is aroused. And then they want to see death, and they jeer and mock at the suffering involved, especially the suffering of a slow and agonizing death.” (Citizen [Johannesburg], July 12, 1993, p.6.)

There is something so unspeakably vile about this, something so beyond depravity, that the human brain recoils. This is not merely the absence of human empathy, but the positive enjoyment of human suffering, all the more so when it is “slow and agonizing.” Can you imagine jeering at and mocking someone in such horrible agony?

During the apartheid era, black activists used to kill traitors and enemies by “necklacing” them. An old tire was put around the victim’s neck, filled with gasoline, and — but it is best to let an eye-witness describe what happened next:

“The petrol-filled tyre is jammed on your shoulders and a lighter is placed within reach . … Your fingers are broken, needles are pushed up your nose and you are tortured until you put the lighter to the petrol yourself.” (Citizen; “SA’s New Nazis,” August 10, 1993, p.18.)

The author of an article in the Chicago Tribune, describing the equally gruesome way the Hutu killed Tutsi in the Burundi massacres, marveled at “the ecstasy of killing, the lust for blood; this is the most horrible thought. It’s beyond my reach.” (“Hutu Killers Danced In Blood Of Victims, Videotapes Show,” Chicago Tribune, September 14, 1995, p.8.) The lack of any moral sense is further evidenced by their having videotaped their crimes, “apparently want[ing] to record … [them] for posterity.” Unlike Nazi war criminals, who hid their deeds, these people apparently took pride in their work.

Where Amy Biehl was killed.

In 1993, Amy Biehl, a 26-year-old American on a Fulbright scholarship, was living in South Africa, where she spent most of her time in black townships helping blacks. One day when she was driving three African friends home, young blacks stopped the car, dragged her out, and killed her because she was white. A retired senior South African judge, Rex van Schalkwyk, in his 1998 book One Miracle is Not Enough, quotes from a newspaper report on the trial of her killers: “Supporters of the three men accused of murdering [her] … burst out laughing in the public gallery of the Supreme Court today when a witness told how the battered woman groaned in pain.” This behavior, Van Schalkwyk wrote, “is impossible to explain in terms accessible to rational minds.” (pp. 188-89.)

These incidents and the responses they evoke — “the human brain recoils,” “beyond my reach,” “impossible to explain to rational minds” — represent a pattern of behavior and thinking that cannot be wished away, and offer additional support for my claim that Africans are deficient in moral consciousness.

I have long suspected that the idea of rape is not the same in Africa as elsewhere, and now I find confirmation of this in Newsweek:

“According to a three-year study [in Johannesburg] … more than half of the young people interviewed — both male and female — believe that forcing sex with someone you know does not constitute sexual violence … [T]he casual manner in which South African teens discuss coercive relationships and unprotected sex is staggering.” (Tom Masland, “Breaking The Silence,” Newsweek, July 9, 2000.)

Clearly, many blacks do not think rape is anything to be ashamed of.

The Newsweek author is puzzled by widespread behavior that is known to lead to AIDS, asking “Why has the safe-sex effort failed so abjectly?” Well, aside from their profoundly different attitudes towards sex and violence and their heightened libido, a major factor could be their diminished concept of time and reduced ability to think ahead.

Liberian billboard

Nevertheless, I was still surprised by what I found in the Zulu dictionary. The main entry for rape reads: “1. Act hurriedly; … 2. Be greedy. 3. Rob, plunder, … take [possessions] by force.” While these entries may be related to our concept of rape, there is one small problem: there is no reference to sexual intercourse! In a male-dominated culture, where saying “no” is often not an option (as confirmed by the study just mentioned), “taking sex by force” is not really part of the African mental calculus. Rape clearly has a moral dimension, but perhaps not to Africans. To the extent they do not consider coerced sex to be wrong, then, by our conception, they cannot consider it rape because rape is wrong. If such behavior isn’t wrong it isn’t rape.

An article about gang rape in the left-wing British paper, the Guardian, confirms this when it quotes a young black woman: “The thing is, they [black men] don’t see it as rape, as us being forced. They just see it as pleasure for them.” (Rose George, “They Don’t See it as Rape. They Just See it as Pleasure for Them,” June 5, 2004.) A similar attitude seems to be shared among some American blacks who casually refer to gang rape as “running a train.” (Nathan McCall, Makes Me Wanna Holler, Vintage Books, 1995.)

If the African understanding of rape is far afield, so may be their idea of romance or love. I recently watched a South African television program about having sex for money. Of the several women in the audience who spoke up, not a single one questioned the morality of this behavior. Indeed, one plaintively asked, “Why else would I have sex with a man?”

From the casual way in which Africans throw around the word “love,” I suspect their understanding of it is, at best, childish. I suspect the notion is alien to Africans, and I would be surprised if things are very different among American blacks. Africans hear whites speak of “love” and try to give it a meaning from within their own conceptual repertoire. The result is a child’s conception of this deepest of human emotions, probably similar to their misunderstanding of the nature of a promise.

I recently located a document that was dictated to me by a young African woman in June 1993. She called it her “story,” and the final paragraph is a poignant illustration of what to Europeans would seem to be a limited understanding of love:

“On my way from school, I met a boy. And he proposed me. His name was Mokone. He tell me that he love me. And then I tell him I will give him his answer next week. At night I was crazy about him. I was always thinking about him.”

Moral blindness

Whenever I taught ethics I used the example of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army who was convicted of treason in 1894 even though the authorities knew he was innocent. Admitting their mistake, it was said, would have a disastrous effect on military morale and would cause great social unrest. I would in turn argue that certain things are intrinsically wrong and not just because of their consequences. Even if the results of freeing Dreyfus would be much worse than keeping him in prison, he must be freed, because it is unjust to keep an innocent man in prison.

To my amazement, an entire class in Kenya said without hesitation that he should not be freed. Call me dense if you want, but it was 20 years before the full significance of this began to dawn on me.

Death is certain but accidents are not.

Africans, I believe, may generally lack the concepts of subjunctivity and counterfactuality. Subjunctivity is conveyed in such statements as, “What would you have done if I hadn’t showed up?” This is contrary to fact because I did show up, and it is now impossible for me not to have shown up. We are asking someone to imagine what he would have done if something that didn’t happen (and now couldn’t happen) had happened. This requires self-consciousness, and I have already described blacks’ possible deficiency in this respect. It is obvious that animals, for example, cannot think counterfactually, because of their complete lack of self-awareness.

When someone I know tried to persuade his African workers to contribute to a health insurance policy, they asked “What’s it for?” “Well, if you have an accident, it would pay for the hospital.” Their response was immediate: “But boss, we didn’t have an accident!” “Yes, but what if you did?” Reply? “We didn’t have an accident!” End of story.

South African AIDS education poster.

Interestingly, blacks do plan for funerals, for although an accident is only a risk, death is a certainty. (The Zulu entries for “risk” are “danger” and “a slippery surface.”) Given the frequent all-or-nothing nature of black thinking, if it’s not certain you will have an accident, then you will not have an accident. Furthermore, death is concrete and observable: We see people grow old and die. Africans tend to be aware of time when it is manifested in the concrete and observable.

One of the pivotal ideas underpinning morality is the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. “How would you feel if someone stole everything you owned? Well, that’s how he would feel if you robbed him.” The subjunctivity here is obvious. But if Africans may generally lack this concept, they will have difficulty in understanding the Golden Rule and, to that extent, in understanding morality.

If this is true we might also expect their capacity for human empathy to be diminished, and this is suggested in the examples cited above. After all, how do we empathize? When we hear about things like “necklacing” we instinctively — and unconsciously — think: “How would I feel if I were that person?” Of course I am not and cannot be that person, but to imagine being that person gives us valuable moral “information:” that we wouldn’t want this to happen to us and so we shouldn’t want it to happen to others. To the extent people are deficient in such abstract thinking, they will be deficient in moral understanding and hence in human empathy — which is what we tend to find in Africans.

In his 1990 book Devil’s Night, Ze’ev Chafets quotes a black woman speaking about the problems of Detroit: “I know some people won’t like this, but whenever you get a whole lot of black people, you’re gonna have problems. Blacks are ignorant and rude.” (pp. 76-77.)

If some Africans cannot clearly imagine what their own rude behavior feels like to others — in other words, if they cannot put themselves in the other person’s shoes — they will be incapable of understanding what rudeness is. For them, what we call rude may be normal and therefore, from their perspective, not really rude. Africans may therefore not be offended by behavior we would consider rude — not keeping appointments, for example. One might even conjecture that African cruelty is not the same as white cruelty, since Africans may not be fully aware of the nature of their behavior, whereas such awareness is an essential part of “real” cruelty.

I am hardly the only one to notice this obliviousness to others that sometimes characterizes black behavior. Walt Harrington, a white liberal married to a light-skinned black, makes some surprising admissions in his 1994 book, Crossings: A White Man’s Journey Into Black America:

“I notice a small car … in the distance. Suddenly … a bag of garbage flies out its window . … I think, I’ll bet they’re blacks. Over the years I’ve noticed more blacks littering than whites. I hate to admit this because it is a prejudice. But as I pass the car, I see that my reflex was correct — [they are blacks].

“[As I pull] into a McDonald’s drive-through … [I see that] the car in front of me had four black[s] in it. Again … my mind made its unconscious calculation: We’ll be sitting here forever while these people decide what to order. I literally shook my head . … My God, my kids are half black! But then the kicker: we waited and waited and waited. Each of the four … leaned out the window and ordered individually. The order was changed several times. We sat and sat, and I again shook my head, this time at the conundrum that is race in America.

“I knew that the buried sentiment that had made me predict this disorganization … was … racist. … But my prediction was right.” (pp. 234-35.)

Africans also tend to litter. To understand this we must ask why whites don’t litter, at least not as much. We ask ourselves: “What would happen if everyone threw rubbish everywhere? It would be a mess. So you shouldn’t do it!” Blacks’ possible deficiency in abstract thinking makes such reasoning more difficult, so any behavior requiring such thinking is less likely to develop in their cultures. Even after living for generations in societies where such thinking is commonplace, many may still fail to absorb it.

A trash pile in Sudan.

It should go without saying that my observations about Africans are generalizations. I am not saying that none has the capacity for abstract thought or moral understanding. I am speaking of tendencies and averages, which leave room for many exceptions.

To what extent do my observations about Africans apply to American blacks? American blacks have an average IQ of 85, which is a full 15 points higher than the African average of 70. The capacity for abstract thought is unquestionably correlated with intelligence, and so we can expect American blacks generally to exceed Africans in these respects.

Still, American blacks show many of the traits so striking among Africans: low mathematical ability, diminished abstract reasoning, high crime rates, a short time-horizon, rudeness, littering, etc. If I had lived only among American blacks and not among Africans, I might never have reached the conclusions I have, but the more extreme behavior among Africans makes it easier to perceive the same tendencies among American blacks. (read more)

Her Name Is Christina Spicuzza: White Mother of Four Children Begs for Her Life Before Being Murdered by Black Career Criminal Out on Bail
(read more)

You Can Have Nice Things or Diversity... In Alabama, Permitless Concealed Carry Is Opposed Because of High Levels of Black on Black Gun Crime

The great state of Alabama can’t have true freedom of concealed carry without a license because black people kill other black people too much.[Permitless carry bill sparks emotional debate in Alabama House committee, Montgomery Advertiser, February 9, 2022]:

Supporters and opponents of a bill to drop permit requirements for concealed weapons could agree on this much Wednesday: The bill was about public safety.

But the often-emotional testimony before the House Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday showed there were completely different conceptions of what that safety meant.

Supporters from gun rights organizations insisted the measure, which would drop legal punishments for hiding a weapon on a person or in a vehicle, reaffirmed rights to safety, which they located in the U.S. Constitution and at times in the will of the divine.

“In Alabama, the ‘We Defend Our Rights’ state, we want people to prove and show papers that we are allowed carry weapons in self-defense, or we are a criminal,” said Eddie Fulmer, president of Bama Carry, a gun rights organization. “Are we so low that we must ask permission to exercise the right of self-defense given by God alone and protected by our founding documents?”

But opponents, who included law enforcement officers, government organizations and one trauma surgeon, said the bill would allow people to legally travel with loaded weapons in their cars and deepen a crisis of gun violence in Alabama.  (read more)

You Can Have Nice Things or You Can Have Diversity: Because Blacks Can't Stop Shooting Each Other in Atlanta and Throughout Georgia, White People Shouldn't Get to Conceal Carry Without a License...

Because almost all gun crime (fatal and nonfatal) in Georgia – and specifically Atlanta, Savannah, Macon, Augusta, and Columbus – is committed by black people against other black people, white people shouldn’t have the right to conceal carry without a license.

In essence, the 2nd Amendment shouldn’t exist because blacks can’t stop shooting each other in Georgia. [Gov. Brian Kemp Pushing For Looser Gun Laws As Data Shows Black People Are Shot The Most, Newsone.com, January 27, 2022]

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp pushed for a new state gun law during a press conference on Wednesday at the Adventure Outdoors, an outdoor sports store located about 15 miles Northwest of Atlanta.

The new law would do away with the license needed to carry a handgun in public, openly or concealed on one’s body.

During the press conference Kemp, who spoke to a nearly all-white audience, plugged right-ring talking points and claimed that Georgians needs looser gun laws to feel safer in their communities.

“Building a safer, stronger Georgia starts with hardworking Georgians having the ability to protect themselves and their families, said Kemp. “In the face of rising violent crime across the country, law-abiding citizens should have their constitutional rights protected.”

Kemp, like many Republicans, have used fear to create a false narrative that your family isn’t safe because you need a license to open carry.

They also never address the real issues facing Black Americans.

According to data from the Atlanta Police Department, by May 2021 there had been a reported 311 shooting victims for the year; 291 of them were Black and 252 of them were Black men.

Gun violence is a serious problem in the black community and a solution was never mentioned by Gov. Kemp as he touted the 2nd amendment in front of his NRA buddies. (read more)

Science.org Advocates for Affirmative Action in Science (Meaning, Redefining Science in an Anti-White Manner)

Where were you when “science” jumped the shark?[Science needs affirmative action, Science.Org, February 3, 2022]:

(read more)

The Latest Black History Month Achievement: Biden Admin to Fund Crack Pipe Distribution to Drug Addicts to Promote "Racial Equity"

5 Media Lies About The Latest Special Counsel Revelations

The Durham deniers’ talking points remain gibberish. They are furiously attempting to hand-wave away the facts the special counsel has found.

One week ago today, Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion in the government’s criminal case against former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. That motion, in requesting the court obtain Sussmann’s waiver of any conflicts of interest held by his lawyers on the record, provided in excruciating detail the factual basis for the purported conflicts.

In doing so, it revealed that “enemies of Donald Trump surveilled the internet traffic at Trump Tower, at his New York City apartment building, and later at the executive office of the president of the United States, then fed disinformation about that traffic to intelligence agencies hoping to frame Trump as a Russia-connected stooge.”

While earlier filings by Durham had revealed equally explosive facts, this time the special counsel’s motion generated enough attention that #Durham began to trend on Twitter. Not since the special counsel’s office indicted Sussmann in September 2021 for lying to the FBI’s former general counsel, James Baker, has the Durham investigation forced itself into the legacy press’ purview.

Rather than report on the latest developments, the corrupt media spun Friday’s filing as a big nothingburger, while parading several false narratives—just as it did when news of the indictment of the Clinton campaign’s lawyer broke.

Charlie Savage at the New York Times led the way in a Monday article headlined, “Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets, but Their Narrative Is Off Track.” Amazingly, several of Savage’s talking points coincided with arguments presented by Sussmann’s attorneys in a document filed with the court that same day.

By Tuesday, Vanity Fair had joined in, quoting Savage’s “analysis.” That evening, Jimmy Kimmel turned the talking points into one-liners. Wednesday saw Brian Stelter at CNN further cribbing from the Savage’s initial take at the Times.

While the leftist press continues to fall in line to advance the unofficial defense of the Clinton campaign’s former attorney, the talking points the Durham deniers are pushing remain nothing but gibberish. Here they are and why they are wrong.

1. It’s Just Those Crazy Right-Wingers

In his opening salvo in the Sussmann counter-offensive, Savage began his New York Times column by noting that Durham’s Friday night filing “set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump.”

Framing the “furor” as right-wing proves a ready go-to for a corrupt media seeking to discount the substance of the reporting. Stelter likewise hit this talking point repeatedly over at CNN, in his article “Right-wing media said it was exposing a scandal. What it really revealed is how bad information spreads in MAGA world.”

Hillary Clinton likewise pushed the right-wingers angle, tweeting that “Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones.”

Of course, while casting coverage of Special Counsel Durham’s investigation as the cries of cray-cray conservatives might resonate with their readers, as a substantive counter to the most recent revelations in the Sussmann case it falls flat.

2. Pay No Attention to the Facts Behind the Filing

The second narrative pushed by Savage and then quickly parroted by his ilk is that the facts behind Durham’s most recent court filing are too dense for readers to bother using their brainpower to decipher. Yes, I am serious.

The facts “also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time—raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims,” Savage wrote in his Monday pro bono P.R. piece for Sussmann.

Amazingly, CNN quoted this passage in its coverage of the issue, demonstrating the utter lack of regard in which the leftist press holds its readers.

3. There Was No ‘Infiltration,’ So There Is No Story

A third counter pushed in response to Durham’s Friday court filing focused on Fox News’ coverage and its opener that read, “Lawyers for the Clinton campaign paid a technology company to ‘infiltrate’ servers belonging to Trump Tower, and later the White House, in order to establish an ‘inference’ and ‘narrative’ to bring to government agencies linking Donald Trump to Russia, a filing from Special Counsel John Durham found.”

Durham never said “infiltrate,” however, came the rejoinder. At least on this point, the press members suffering from “media vapors” have a point: Durham did not say “infiltrate.” Rather, Kash Patel, a former chief investigator for Devin Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee, used that word in an interview with Fox News, as the article later explained.

Durham said the data Sussmann provided to the CIA came from data tech executive Rodney Joffe obtained when he “exploited” his access to sensitive data from the Executive Office of the President (EOP).

It is likewise true that the special counsel’s Friday filing did not claim that the “Clinton campaign paid to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower, White House servers to link Trump to Russia,” as Fox News headlined its coverage of the developments in the Sussmann case. Rather, it appears that Joffe voluntarily exploited his access to the data and received no compensation from Clinton for his forays into the EOP and other databases.

These criticisms by the Times, CNN, and others might hold more weight if the same outlets hadn’t pushed the Russia collusion hoax for five years. But, in any event, correcting those two points does nothing to counter the serious allegations revealed in Durham’s latest filing revealed.

In fact, he exposed so many significant details that it required two separate articles to adequately cover the developments. Notwithstanding the concerted pushback against the Fox News article, The Federalist’s in-depth coverage remains unblemished.

4. But Trump Wasn’t Even President Yet

The next narrative launched to minimize the significance of the revelations contained in Durham’s motion focused on the data Sussmann presented to the CIA purporting to show “that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.”

The data relating to the White House “came from Barack Obama’s presidency,” the Times reported, quoting two lawyers representing one of the researchers who aided Joffe. Rather, “to our knowledge,” the lawyers claimed, “all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”

This counter is nothing but lawyerly wordsmithing, however, and anyone who read the actual court filing—that dense document Savage believed beyond the grey matter of his readers—would know that fact. As the motion explained, in providing the DNS data to the CIA, Sussmann told the government agents “these lookups demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.”

As a matter of pure logic, the data Sussmann presented to the CIA related to the White House must have somehow related to Trump or it would not “demonstrate” that “Trump and/or his associates were using” the Russian cell phones “in the vicinity of the White House.” Most likely, then, the data presented concerned the transition period. Further, there is nothing to say that after Trump took office Joffe stopped “exploiting” the data.

5. It’s Old News

The fifth response, which Savage again initiated, ran that the “news” was “old news.”

“But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news,” Savage wrote early in his Times coverage. He reiterated that point later: “for one, much of this was not new: The New York Times had reported in October what Mr. Sussmann had told the C.I.A. about data suggesting that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.”

Surprise, surprise: It was Savage himself who made passing reference to the YotaPhones in his October 1, 2021, Times article that focused primarily on the Alfa Bank aspect of the indictment. In retrospect, we should have foreseen Durham’s latest revelations because they were handed to the Sussmann-friendly reporters who penned the October article, in what is now an obvious attempt to get ahead of the bad news Sussmann’s legal team knew was coming.

What the Times did not report on October 1, 2021, however, was that Joffe’s internet company “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the [Executive Office of the Presidency] as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services to the EOP.”

Nor did the Times report, as Durham alleged, that Joffe and his associates, “exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.” Also missing from the October 2021 coverage was the fact that DNS data compiled, but withheld, from the CIA showed the DNS lookups involving the EOP and the Russian cellphone provider “began at least as early as 2014 i.e., during the Obama administration and years before Trump took office.”

In other words, this was new news, and those claiming otherwise serve, not as journalists, but as pushers of propaganda. (read more)

Key Indicator Hints America Is Headed For Its Worst Real Estate Crash In History

A shockingly large price bubble appears to have formed in the real estate market.

Although it’s impossible to predict economic crashes with certainty, a key economic indicator suggests the U.S. housing market is on the verge of an unprecedented crash, one that could end up being the biggest in America’s history.

Following the 2008 stock and real estate market crashes, the Federal Reserve, Democratic-led Congress, and the presidential administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama began an unprecedented effort to pump new dollars into the financial system — and, to a lesser extent, the economy at large.

The strategy behind the flood of quantitative easing, government takeovers, stimulus checks, and government welfare programs that followed was that the Fed, working in conjunction with Congress and the White House, needed to prop up the economy to keep it from sliding completely off the cliff.

One of the primary tools the Fed used to accomplish its goals was to keep interest rates at near-zero for years on end. From 1980 to 2000, the Fed’s federal funds rate — the primary driver of interest rates economywide — rarely dropped below 4 percent, and it was common for interest rates to be 5 percent or higher.

However, from 2009 through 2016, interest rates were consistently much lower than 1 percent. Beginning in 2017, the first year of the Donald Trump presidency, the Fed began to more aggressively raise rates, but it only briefly topped 2 percent in 2018 and 2019 before the Fed once again slashed rates to near-zero as part of its plan to address the effects of the Covid-19 lockdowns.

When interest rates are kept low, it’s easier for governments to spend more money than they take in, because debt is cheap. Additionally, banks and other financial institutions are more likely to lend out money for high-priced items.

The real estate market is especially sensitive to rate changes, because a home is usually the biggest purchase a person will make in his or her lifetime, and the vast majority of purchasers rely on large mortgages to complete the purchase.

When interest rates are kept extremely low, people can afford to take on more debt, because the monthly payments cost less. As a result, sellers increase their prices.

This is one of the reasons the real estate market crashed so hard in 2008. Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Fed kept interest rates low, encouraging people to take on higher-than-usual levels of debt, especially in the real estate market.

Rather than learn its lesson from the 2008 crash, the Fed doubled down on this failed strategy, and then tripled down during the Covid-19 response. Congress and the White House were all too willing to cheer the Fed on, since lower interest rates have helped them expand government programs without begging foreign governments to finance U.S. debt.

As a result of these policies, a shockingly large price bubble appears to have formed in the real estate market. The average sales price of a home in the fourth quarter of 2021 was $477,900, compared to $403,900 in the fourth quarter of 2020 and $384,600 in the fourth quarter of 2019. That’s a $93,300 increase in just two years, by far the biggest increase ever recorded in just 24 months.

Further, the 12-month home sales price increases for the second, third, and fourth quarters of 2021 were all above 17 percent, the highest hike recorded over a three-quarter period since at least 1963, the earliest date in the Fed’s data made available online.

Put simply, Americans have literally never seen housing prices skyrocket like they are now for this long of a period. And every time they have approached the numbers we are seeing today in the past — in the 1970s, late-1980s, and early to mid-2000s — there was a massive real estate or stock market crash that soon followed (or both). There appear to be no exceptions, other than a few rare cases where housing prices increased quickly immediately after a crash had occurred.

Determining the size of a market correction is extremely difficult, but if the 2008 crash is an indicator of what’s in store for us today, then if the current real estate bubble pops soon, as all bubbles inevitably do, it could end up being the largest real estate crash in history.

The bubble that developed from 2002 to 2007 peaked at around a 47 percent price increase, before plummeting by 20 percent from 2007 to the first quarter of 2009. If we see a similar pattern emerge for the bubble that has been developing since roughly 2012, then we could see housing prices drop by 30 to 40 percent over a two-year period.

Whatever the final numbers end up being, the evidence is clear: based on data reported over the past six decades, America appears to be on the verge of an epic real estate crash.

As painful as such a correction would be, it is likely necessary. The price increases we’ve been seeing in recent years are primarily the result of inflation and reckless monetary policy, not real economic growth.

However, there is a chance that housing prices will not drop, or only drop minimally. If the Fed decides to continue to keep interest rates low, despite the ongoing inflation crisis, it might prevent a real estate crash the size and scale of the one discussed above. It will come at a cost, though — more inflation, even bigger market distortions, and perhaps the collapse of the dollar.

Regardless of what the Fed does in the short term, it’s clear that America’s disastrous monetary-policy chickens are coming home to roost. Prepare accordingly. (read more)

belated warnings
(It's getting hard for the regime to hide vaccine deaths.)

The problem with anti-woke liberals

They are foot soldiers for the status quo

In the summer of 2005, hundreds of recent college graduates gathered in a giant auditorium in Houston for a lesson in “diversity, community and leadership”. At 20 years old, I was the youngest of the bunch. The organisation Teach for America — the US equivalent of Teach First — was about to parachute us into classrooms set in the nation’s poorest inner-city and rural areas. But not before immersing us in a bath of race and gender theory.

The training began with a corny short film, featuring a number of justly forgotten D-list actors. The central action revolved around a middle-aged white guy with a moustache struggling to come to terms with diversity. At work and in his neighbourhood, vexing new identity-based demands confronted him. He figured it sufficed to treat everyone fairly and without prejudice. He didn’t hate anyone, but neither did he think he owed anything on account of his own identity.

The middle-age white guy just didn’t get it. Luckily, his United Colors of Benetton cast of colleagues were prepared to gently guide him to the truth: that behind his “colourblind” assumptions lurked his enormous “privilege”; and that fairness and old-fashioned decency just weren’t enough, not with all the racial abuses marring Western history and still racking society.

At first, he resisted, spluttering angrily about “affirmative action” and “reverse racism”. But gradually, our protagonist came to recognise how much hurt his words inflicted on his minority (and female) colleagues. He resolved to do better, starting by acknowledging his privileges and consciously checking them. In short, he learned a new ethic for a new America.

This was the first time I ran into the tangle of ideas now known as “woke”. And back then, I dismissed them as a silly sort of therapy-cum-spirituality for young adults, much as the Columbia University linguist John McWhorter does in his best-selling and hotly debated new book, Woke Racism. I was wrong then — as McWhorter is now.

All the elements of wokeness McWhorter identifies were present, in embryonic form, in that Houston auditorium 17 years ago: the grievance-mongering; the reduction of complex problems to an obsession with language; the denial of agency to victim groups; the corollary duty of whites to pursue social change, mainly by seeking individual self-improvement; the thrill of a higher gnosis.

It was useful for elite, mostly white grads to give some thought to how their backgrounds might help or hinder them in “majority-minority” school districts, such as the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas, where I was headed. But the sessions went far beyond that, staging by-now-familiar confessional routines (“for each privilege point the chart gives you, please take one step forward from the line….”) and ultimately seeking to mould a new type of person.

I found the whole thing contemptible, partly because I saw in the proto-woke worldview a bowdlerised version of the critical theories I had studied — indeed, adored — in college. And partly because I fell into the interstices of the official oppressor-oppressed categories. I could have brought home an Intersectional Olympics medal, as a Muslim-born immigrant in post-9/11 America. But I wasn’t, in fact, besieged by prejudice, and it would have been risible for a son of Iran — literally, “land of the Aryans” — to claim “POC” victimhood.

Others were enthusiastic. There were transports of tears, ecstatic hugs after heated exchanges, tedious self-criticisms. It all seemed to give them solace, of a kind that I, then a proud atheist, didn’t think I needed. Today, judging by social media, more than a few of my fellow Teach for America alumni are zealots who force everyone around them “to spend endless amounts of time listening to nonsense presented as wisdom, and pretend to like it”, to quote McWhorter.

They’re everywhere, of course, not just in Teach for America. In a very few years, public life in the Anglosphere has devolved into one giant diversity session. McWhorter, who is black, is justly alarmed by this. He doesn’t want his daughter to grow up thinking of herself as a permanent victim, nor to believe that she carries some immutable racial essence that defines who she is more than anything else about her.

More immediately, McWhorter has had it with progressive inanities, which he dissects with great wit and gusto. A table supplied early in the book shows how the woke — whom McWhorter labels “the Elect”; more on that shortly — demand that white people simultaneously believe pairs of diametrically opposed propositions. “Silence about racism is violence,” we are told, but also: “Elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own.” Heads they win, tails we lose.

McWhorter addresses persuadable New York Times readers, who sense that such rhetoric is sinister but are cowed by progressive bullying, which is often backed by corporate power. The hope is that such sceptical liberals will finally “stop being afraid of these people” and “stand up” to them. Amen. But such calls to courage have been issuing from anti-woke liberals like McWhorter (and Bari Weiss, Douglas Murray, Bill Maher and James Lindsay) for some time. Why isn’t it working?

For McWhorter, “the Elect” win by duping well-intentioned modern people into adopting a malignant worldview. Wokeness, in this telling, is just a set of bad ideas. Bad religious ideas, to be precise, which assail the rational, individualistic pillars of the “post-Enlightenment society we hold dear”. If that’s the case, the “solution” is for the rest of us to double down on secular individualism. We, the non-Elect, should simply recognise that we’re dealing with faith-based fanatics, people who can’t be reasoned with, and “work around them”.

The author is less than clear on what this might mean in practice, other than answering progressive claims with a resounding “No”: No, we won’t apologise. No, we won’t recant. No, we won’t mouth your inanities.

There is much that is sensible here. It’s especially commendable for a black, liberal intellectual, for example, to warn that the quest to extirpate all racist thoughts, once for all, is quixotic and dangerous.

But I’m afraid his diagnosis, and the treatment that follows from it, are woefully lacking. For one thing, the anti-woke liberals, who trend heavily toward Christopher Hitchens-style New Atheism, badly misunderstand religion, McWhorter especially so.

In fact, he admits early on that the book is likely to get pilloried for “disrespect[ing] religion.” But the problem isn’t so much his mean caricatures of traditional faiths as his sloppy definitions and the unaccountably sharp divisions he draws between religious and “secular” reason. These lead him to lose sight of the liturgical character of all political society, even the ardently godless.

Certainly, it’s hard to deny the religious characteristics of wokeness. The woke have their own liturgies (like the ones I witnessed in Houston). They believe in original sin (slavery, colonialism) and exalt themselves as a sort of secular Elect and excommunicate heretics (cancel culture). They’ve built a hieratic structure, composed of high priests (the UCLA critical theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, say), popular preachers (Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo) and ordinary pastors (your workplace diversity consultants). And because theirs is a messianic faith, they are hellbent on imposing it on the rest of us.

So far, so familiar. After all, it isn’t exactly ground-breaking to notice the religious dimensions of secular ideologies. The classic of the genre remains Raymond Aron’s Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), which exposed the messianic dimensions of Communist ideology. But where Aron was nuanced and sophisticated, and obviously learned when it came to a Christian faith that wasn’t his own, McWhorter is too often downright crude. Straight-faced references to The Da Vinci Code as a guide to understanding how believers think? Check. Blanket assertions that the Bible “makes no sense”? Check. Constant evocations of “the medieval” as shorthand for superstition and barbarism? Check.

Three millennia of Jewish, Christian and Muslim theology and philosophy? Poof! — all demolished by McWhorter’s equation of “reason” with Enlightenment empiricism.

Through it all, McWhorter never pauses to define precisely what a religion is. It’s a shocking lapse for a professional linguist. We owe “religion” to the Latin religio — “to bind”. And who was bound to whom, thanks to religion’s marriage of ritual and belief? In the classical world, religion didn’t just involve binding the human creature to God or the gods — but also the political subject to his earthly rulers. Politics and piety, in other words, were bound together, a fact made especially manifest in the Roman worship of the god-emperor.

As a matter of substance, religious experience could and did vary; some religious beliefs are more reasonable than others. But as a matter of form, religion was about orienting the community, rulers as well as the ruled, toward the highest goods of human life. And in that sense religion was — and remains — unavoidable. Hence, ancient writers’ insistence that man is among other things a religious animal, always seeking to erect his altars in public squares.

Today, our altar looks unquestionably progressive. Anti-woke liberals see themselves as the brave few who refuse to genuflect — rather like Roman elites who, following Constantine’s conversion, griped that worship of a would-be Jewish king had ruined the empire. Only, unlike the Roman religious dissidents, who were proud pagans, the anti-woke liberals refuse to recognise the religious character of their own beliefs.

They insist that their ideology is merely a gossamer framework for upholding pluralistic societies. Yet liberalism, too, offers a definite account of what should bind the individual to society, with its own pieties and liturgical practices. From French revolutionaries’ shrines to the goddesses of Reason and Liberty to today’s pantheon of civic saints, liberals render worship. And from the arch-liberal philosopher John Rawls’s infamous footnote excluding from the realm of “public reason” any “comprehensive doctrine that denied this right [abortion],” to the anti-woke liberals’ increasingly unvarnished hostility to those further to their Right, liberals excommunicate.

Meanwhile, their shoddy account of religion leads anti-woke liberals to separate the woke religio from material reality. McWhorter & Co. rightly mock and denounce the bad religio of the woke, but they give little thought to how the ideology might be legitimating a class structure.

McWhorter’s book is replete with hints, but he never connects the dots. Nearly all of the persecutors he profiles, and many of their victims, belong to the professional classes. He writes of teachers, professors, columnists, pollsters, corporate executives — people who, in one way or another, service the dominant classes under his cherished liberal order.

I’ve argued, in these pages and elsewhere, that wokeness might be the latest legitimating ideology for neoliberal capitalism: a way to bind its subjects, to motivate them and to discipline the wayward. If it were otherwise, if wokeness truly undermined the material interests of today’s corporate ruling class, it would be extinguished this very day. And the Walton family and every other mega-foundation wouldn’t be lining up to fund woke outfits, not least Teach for America.

Teach for America (and Teach First) are premised on the idea that the achievement gap between poor kids and their affluent peers could be closed if only a committed corps of teachers mounted heroic, McKinsey-consultant-style hard work. Now, it’s absolutely true that we could use higher expectations and more diligent teachers in low-income classrooms. But these organisations would deny larger, structural causes for the achievement gap: the white teacher, for instance, mustn’t dare judge illegitimacy rates and absentee black fathers. A ferocious focus on race, sexuality and gender, meanwhile, helps to suppress the question of class.

Rolling back wokeness, then, requires paying attention to the intersection of ideology and class conflict in liberal society. Anti-woke liberals aren’t prepared to do so, because finally they’re loyal to our current material order, however annoying or discomfiting they might find its cultural symptoms. Their critique doesn’t give rise to any political response. You rarely find them at the forefront of legislative efforts to limit race-and-gender theory in classrooms. Indeed, they often oppose such efforts, lest they threaten higher liberal idols, such as the “marketplace of ideas”.

A deeper critique would call into question the anti-woke liberals’ own deepest commitments, their own religio. (read more)

Privilege is the new original sin

Today's zealots demand an orgy of punishment

You think communism is a modern invention? Consider this: “At the very first, when he returned to the country from overseas, he had ordered that no one in the society should possess anything of his own, that everything should be held in common and distributed to each according to his needs.” This is not about Bernie Sanders’s return from his 1988 trip to the Soviet Union, nor even Lenin’s return to Russia from exile, several decades earlier. It’s certainly not about Marx or Engels. The eminently communist exhortation to hold everything “in common”, and to distribute wealth “according to his needs” is a quote from the most influential Father of the Church, Saint Augustine, who died in the year 430.

But even in Augustine’s time, the idea was old. He was following in the footsteps of the early Christians, who, we learn in the Acts of the Apostles, “owned all things communally”, and “sold their properties and possessions, and distributed to everyone, according as anyone had need.” David Bentley Hart (whose translation of The New Testament I use here) cannot but conclude that “the early Christians were communists”.

Except, of course, that they were not — not in our shallow sense of the word. For Christianity was so much more than a political revolution; it caused a tectonic shift in the mind. Like any major religion worth its salt, Christianity involved taming the power-hungry, self-assertive, greedy animals that humans, by their nature, are. Yet it went one step further and offered the highest prize to those at nature’s losing end: the meek, the wounded, the vulnerable, the unfortunate. And since so much in the human world revolves around material wealth, the religion’s founders struck at its source: our acquisitive instincts.

You really want to be perfect? Jesus Christ recommends a life of utter destitution: “Go sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you shall have a treasury in the heavens, and come follow me.” The result was a religion so “radical”, as Hart calls it, that it was impossible to put into practice in the real world. There was only one Christian, Nietzsche quipped, and he died on the cross. To be a true Christian must be unbearable.

But Christianity didn’t have to be put into practice to have an impact on the world — trying was enough. By trying hard to be Christians (even without ever succeeding), people in the West and elsewhere have, in time, brought forth a major anthropological revolution: a new way of seeing the world and humanity, a new ethical vocabulary, an enhanced and expanded individual subjectivity. And there was something remarkably dynamic about this new subjectivity — one never content with itself, never at ease, always on the move, always having to navigate a perilous inner landscape: temptation, sin, guilt, dread of eternal damnation, remorse, repentance, state of grace.

Not that Christians were much better beings than others. They could be just as bloody as the heathens, if not worse. But they were always thinking about what a better humanity would be like. And in the process, they were taught to seriously distrust “this world,” and to stay away from its “traps”. Above all, they were sensitised against material wealth.

So, when the Industrial Revolution (which was all about material wealth and how to multiply it) came to pass, many Christians recognised it for what it was, and found themselves equipped to deal with it. Capitalism was a wonderful thing, they thought, except that it went against what the Gospels had taught, by fundamentally favouring the wealthy and the strong, the self-assertive and the unscrupulous, at the expense of the poor and the weak and the humble. And to oppress the latter was to hurt Christ personally: “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

That’s why, from John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy all the way to Pope Francis, from that brand of British Labourism that was dubbed “more Methodist than Marxist” to the Social Gospel in the US, from Italy’s cattocomunismo to “liberation theology” in Latin America, there has always been a serious concern, among reflecting Christians, about the damage that the incessant pursuit of material wealth can do to the soul. The wealthier we become, the poorer our spiritual health.

All this is not — or should not have been — surprising. What is more surprising, perhaps, was that even overtly atheist rejections of capitalism — of the “religion-is-the-opiate-of-the-people” variety — were similarly informed by a vigorous Judeo-Christian social vision. For here, too, the rejection of capitalism was done on behalf of its victims: the poor and the powerless, “the least of these my brothers.” For all their anti-religious rhetoric, Marx and Engels’s works make for excellent theological reading. The radical solution they proposed — overthrowing the wealthy and the powerful, enthroning the poor and the downtrodden in their place — is not very different, in its spirit, from the one we find in Christianity, where, you may recall, God has “chosen the destitute within the cosmos,” and offered them his Kingdom.

By the 19th century, then, the ethics, social vision, and philosophical vocabulary of Christianity were simply inescapable for anyone in the business of thinking. No matter what theories one hatched, however secular or un-Christian, one had to employ Christian categories, assumptions, and patterns of thought. Even to attack Christianity itself, one had to resort to Christian language, as Tom Holland has explained in these pages. That fact, of course, can be seen as a great victory for Christianity, if one achieved on the cusp of death.

Communism as an actual political system may have been a failure of historic proportions, but that does not mean that the idea has lost its appeal. Not only do today’s enthusiasts seem to ignore everything about the first attempt’s abject failure in the Soviet Union and elsewhere; they are also, for the most part, blissfully ignorant of the distinctly Christian sound of much of what they say. Elite schools seem particularly good at teaching this kind of ignorance. Secular or even noisily atheistic academics recycle a social vision that has been at the core of the Christian message for some two millennia: a commitment to the victims of any forms of injustice and oppression, to the poor, the weak, and the humiliated — “the least of these.” Their ethical language, too, is radically Christian, centered as it is on guilt and an irrepressible need for repentance, remorse, and reparation.

“Privilege” is the new name of the original sin of old: you are born with it, no matter what you do or say or think, you will always remain “privileged,” and will pass your condition on to others. The much derided woke apology seems just another reiteration of the Christian confession: admit that you have sinned in thought, word and deed, say that you are unworthy and show contrition, promise that you will change your ways, and you will be forgiven. If the zealots had it their way, the implementation of this parodic Christianity, centred obsessively as it is on purity, guilt and repentance, accompanied by an incessant hunt for reprobates, and an orgy of punishment and exclusion, would make Calvin’s fundamentalist Geneva look like a pretty lowkey operation.

But perhaps I’m being naïve. What if this is just another trick the elites use to preserve the status quo, maintain their privileges, and get rid of their potential competitors? People in power have always done that, no matter what religion, ideology and political philosophy they have employed in the process. It’s no accident that this woke brand of radicalism flourishes especially in the Ivy League environment, where students have the means and the leisure to play professional revolutionary. Those at community colleges are too busy just trying to stay afloat.

The space within which the elites now operate has, after decades of intense globalisation, become more crowded than ever. Since the more people get in, the more competitive it gets, to move ahead one needs to get inventive. By adopting such a radical rhetoric and instantiating themselves as the exclusive representatives of the underprivileged — or even their most trusted spokespersons — these trust-fund revolutionaries hope to get a competitive advantage on the political market. “I am already representing the downtrodden, all of them, and brilliantly. There is no role for you to play, so step aside. Holier and way more revolutionary than thou.”

However, in so doing, they resort to an ideology steeped in Christian values and language — rather than, say, to social Darwinism, which would be a far more accurate representation of what they are doing, and would come more naturally to them. They may despise Christianity with a passion, but they cannot do without it. And that’s another Christian victory, if a posthumous one.

For, as far as Christianity itself is concerned, this is not life but a form of death. For something to exist socially, it needs to be named by its name. Indeed, this is no ordinary death, but a degrading, humiliating, highly embarrassing one. Here Christianity is used and abused and then casually discarded. But, then again, this is only too fitting, because that’s precisely what makes it such a Christian death; Christianity’s founder died the most humiliating death imaginable in the ancient world, so bad it was reserved only for slaves and social pariahs.

To complicate things even further, at the other extreme of the political spectrum, Christianity is in no better shape. True, on the far Right it is acknowledged and proclaimed, ever more loudly and more perfunctorily. Christ’s name is everywhere: used shamelessly by politicians as a rhetorical device, political slogan, and dirty trick. Here Christ is emptied of any meaning, glued to the car’s bumper, and left there to rot. That’s another way Christianity is dying — and quite another story.

Over the last two millennia, Christianity has died countless deaths like this. Which is perhaps only appropriate for a religion predicated on death — one that has chosen a cruel execution method as its symbol. In the end, it must be death that has given it such a tremendous vitality. For “unless the grain of wheat falling to the ground dies, it remains alone; but if it die it bears plenteous fruit.” Christianity’s victory lies always in defeat. (read more)

The Political Economy of Autism

Autism is an epidemic and a pandemic by any reasonable definition of those words. J.B. Handley in, How to End the Autism Epidemic, produced the best chart showing the growth in autism prevalence in the U.S. over the last 50 years:

Image Source: Handley (2018).

Darold Treffert at Winnebago State Hospital in Wisconsin was one of the first people to attempt to measure autism in the general population. His study, published in Archives of General Psychiatry in 1970, showed an autism rate of less than 1 in 10,000 children.

Then, sometime around 1987, the autism rate in the United States began to skyrocket. By 2017, the autism rate in the U.S. was 1 in 36 kids (Zablotsky et al., 2017). So the U.S. has experienced a 277-fold increase in autism prevalence in the last 50 years.

In some places and populations the rates are even higher: in Tom’s River, NJ, the state’s largest suburban school district, 1 in 14 eight-year-olds is on the autism spectrum; in Newark, NJ, 1 in 10 Black boys is on the spectrum (forthcoming).

The United States is in the midst of a genocide.

Genetic theories of autism never made much sense because “there is no such thing as a genetic epidemic” — the human genome just does not change that fast. An early twin study by Susan Folstein and Michael Rutter at the Institute of Psychiatry in London in 1977 suggested a strong genetic component to autism. More recent scholarship shows that this was likely overstated; the study only had 21 twin pairs and did not effectively control for environmental factors (twins usually grow up in the same family and are thus likely exposed to the same toxicants).

As the autism rate exploded throughout the U.S., the state of California hired eleven of the best geneticists in the country to examine the role of genes in autism. They concluded that genetics explains at most 38% of autism cases and in two places they explained that this was likely an overestimate (Hallmayer et al., 2011). Whatever is driving the surge in autism prevalence, it is not primarily genetics.

Well perhaps the increase in autism prevalence is just the result of better awareness (and what’s called “diagnostic expansion and substitution”)? That theory of the case does not check out either. The state of California funded two multimillion dollar to examine sharply rising prevalence in the state and whether it was the result of social factors. The first study was led by pediatric epidemiologist Robert S. Byrd at UC Davis who directed a team of investigators at UC Davis and UCLA. The investigators concluded that, “The observed increase in autism cases cannot be explained by a loosening in the criteria used to make the diagnosis” and “children served by the State’s Regional Centers are largely native born and there has been no major migration of children into California that would explain the increase in autism” (Byrd et al., 2002).

The state of California revisited this question in 2009 with a study led by the top environmental epidemiologist in the state — Irva Hertz-Picciotto at the UC Davis Mind Institute. This study concluded that changes in diagnostic criteria, the inclusion of milder cases, and earlier age at diagnosis explain about a quarter to a third of the total increase in autism (Hertz-Picciotto & Delwiche, 2009). In a subsequent interview with Scientific American, Hertz-Picciotto explained that these three factors “don’t get us close” to explaining the sharp rise in autism over that time period and she urged the scientific community to take a closer look at environmental factors (Cone, 2009).

There are now seven good ‘societal cost of autism’ studies (Jarbrink and Knapp, 2001; Ganz, 2007; Knapp et al., 2009; Buescher et al., 2014; Leigh & Du, 2015; Cakir et al., 2020; Blaxill, Rogers, & Nevison, 2021). They all show that the U.S. and much of the developed world is heading for economic and social collapse as a result of surging autism costs.

Autism increases poverty and inequality. Lifetime care costs for autism range from $1.4 to $2.4 million. Mothers of kids with autism earn 35% less than mothers of kids with other health limitations and 56% less than mothers of kids with no health limitations (Buescher et al., 2014).

In 2015, autism cost the U.S. an estimated $268 billion a year in direct costs & lost productivity; given current rates of increase, autism costs will reach $1 trillion a year (3.6% of GDP) by 2025 (Leigh & Du, 2015). As a point of comparison, the U.S. Defense Department budget is “just” 3.1% of GDP.

All of the more recent studies show autism costs surpassing $1 trillion a year in the near future. There is no plan by any level of government to raise revenue to meet these costs or prevent autism to mitigate these costs. Elected officials are frozen like a deer in the headlights.

In the last decade, three groups of top epidemiologists have published consensus statements declaring that neurodevelopmental disabilities including autism are caused by toxicants in the environment (The Collaborative on Health and the Environment, 2008; Mount Sinai Hospital, 2010; Project TENDR, 2016).

This is good news because it means that autism is likely preventable. The bad news is that the leading mainstream toxicologists do not want to lose their jobs so they generally avoid mentioning pharmaceutical products (even though these products appear to have an outsized impact). Parents groups have made up for the cowardice of mainstream toxicology by funding their own research.

We have fairly good data that five classes of toxicants increase autism risk:

1. Mercury from coal fired power plants and diesel trucks;

2. Plastics;

3. Pesticides & herbicides;

4. EMF/RFR; and

5. Pharmaceuticals (Tylenol, SSRIs, & vaccines).

Taking each toxicant in turn...

For every 1,000 pounds of environmentally released mercury, there was a 61% increase in the rate of autism (Palmer, 2006). For every 10 miles closer a family lives to a coal fired power plant the autism risk increases by 1.4% (Palmer, 2009).

Plastics: Children with autism had significantly increased levels of 3 endocrine disruptors (two phthalates — MEHP & DEHP, & BPA) in blood samples as compared with healthy controls (Kardas, 2016).

Pesticides & herbicides: Increased use of RoundUp is strongly correlated (r = 0.989) with the rising prevalence of autism (Swanson, 2014). Organophosphates increase autism risk 60 – 100%; chlorpyrifos increase risk 78% – 163%; pyrethroids increase risk 78% (Shelton et al., 2014).

9 studies show an association between acetaminophen (Tylenol) use & adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes (Bauer et al., 2018). Avella-Garcia (2016) & Liew et al. (2016) found that males exposed to Tylenol in utero have significantly elevated risk of autism.

8 studies show a statistically significant association between selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) use in pregnant women and subsequent autism in their children (see meta-analysis in Kaplan et al., 2016). Doctors who prescribe SSRIs to pregnant women are committing malpractice.

Unfortunately, in the debate over toxicants that increase autism risk, all roads lead back to vaccines. At least 5 studies show a statistically significant association between vaccines & autism (Gallagher & Goodman, 2008 & 2010; Thomas & Margulis, 2016; Mawson et al., 2017a & 2017b).

Dr. Paul Thomas is the most successful doctor in the world at preventing autism. Data from his practice show:

If zero vaccines, autism rate = 1 in 715;

If alternative vaccine schedule, autism rate = 1 in 440;

If CDC vaccine schedule, autism rate = 1 in 36.

That study had large sample size (3,344 children), access to medical files, and good researchers working on it. But look closely. His alternative vaccine schedule reduces autism risk by more than 1200%. However even an alternative vaccine schedule increases autism risk by 160% versus no vaccines at all.

And all of those other toxicants that I described above that have been shown to increase autism risk? Those are the 1 in the 715 cases when the parent does not vaccinate at all. Autism appears mostly be a story of iatrogenic injury from vaccines.

This is not a surprise. Thousands of parents have been telling us for years that their children regressed into autism following vaccinations. Ethylmercury is a known neurotoxin and is still in 7 different vaccines (Thomas & Margulis, 2016, p. 14).

Aluminum is a known neurotoxin (Grandjean & Landrigan, 2014) and is used in a majority of vaccines. “The dose makes the poison” paradigm has collapsed in recent years and now we know that many toxicants have no safe dose.

In a sane world, all of this would be seen as good news. In a sane world the CDC, EPA, NIH and every major newspaper would rush out to Portland, Oregon to examine whether the data from Dr. Paul’s practice (and other studies) are correct. But we live in an insane world...

To date, the CDC, EPA, NIH, the federal government, and all state governments have ignored Dr. Paul’s work. None of the top 10 major newspapers in the U.S. have reviewed his book, The Vaccine Friendly, plan even though it is a bestseller on Amazon. In fact the Oregon Medical Board was so incensed by Dr. Paul’s success in preventing autism that they pulled his medical license briefly in 2021 (he has since been reinstated).

All of this information is public and available to anyone with an internet connection and a library card. By 1999 it was clear that vaccines that contained mercury were a problem (see Kirby, 2005). By the early 2000s it was clear that the problems with vaccines went well beyond mercury. Government had a choice to make: come clean or double down. And starting with senior scientist Thomas Verstraeten and then William Thompson the CDC decided to just flat out lie, manipulate findings, and destroy data.

The pharmaceutical industry also had a choice to make: improve their products or utilize their extensive capture of media and government to protect their existing toxic products. As everyone now knows, they chose to protect their existing toxic products. But the pharmaceutical industry has an enormous problem on their hands. We know some vaccines (hepatitis B, HPV, flu, DTaP...) cause catastrophic harms. And pockets of unvaccinated people across the country — who are healthier than vaccinated children — are the control group that provides evidence of Pharma’s crimes.

So starting in 2015, with the introduction of SB277 in California, the pharmaceutical industry began a systematic effort to eliminate the unvaccinated control group in all 50 states. They start by removing religious or personal belief exemptions to vaccination. In subsequent years they introduce bills to eliminate all medical exemptions to vaccination (SB 277 in CA in 2019) to get to 100% vaccination rates (even though all scientists will tell you that there are some children who should not be vaccinated because of underlying health conditions). In the Pharma legislative blitzkrieg no one is spared so that there will be no evidence left of the harms from these products. If 100% of children are treated, then there is no background rate of illness and all vaccine injuries just appear “normal”.

These mandatory vaccine bills are racketeering and crimes against humanity. With the introduction of coronavirus vaccines in late 2020, the situation has gotten much worse. Pharma now aims to vaccinate 100% of adults as well as 100% of kids and the results thus far have been catastrophic.

So here’s where things stand. The vaccine paradigm has collapsed (and no, mRNA, DNA, and adenovirus vector vaccines are not going to save it). Pharma has piles of cash and extensive capture of the media, academia, and government. So they have the ability to do just about whatever they want. Fearing prosecution and seeking immense profits, Pharma has abandoned any pretense of science, consent, or health and pushed all in to set up a totalitarian state that will serve their interests.

But Pharma has harmed so many people — first with the childhood schedule and now with coronavirus vaccines — that there are now millions of people who have seen vaccine injury first-hand and are now fighting back with everything they’ve got. Variously referred to as the medical freedom movement, the health choice movement, and/or the personal sovereignty movement, these brave citizens are taking on the most powerful industry in the world and fighting to save our country from Pharma fascism. The fighting is so fierce because the stakes are enormous. We are fighting to preserve human life as we know it from the most predatory and corrupt industry in the world. (read more)

Cary Watkins confirms embalmer Richard Hirschman's story about the telltale blood clots

Watkins has over 50 years experience embalming people. Hirschman showed Watkins the clots more than four months ago. Watkins had never seen anything like it.

Overview

• Cary Watkins has been embalming people for over 50 years

• I interviewed him in a short 5 minute phone interview available on Rumble

• Watkins confirms Hirschman’s story about unusual blood clots that only started happening after the vaccines rolled out. Hirschman showed him the clots 4 months ago. He’s never seen anything like these clots in his career either.

• Hirschman is seeing these clots in 65% of his cases making this a leading cause of death in his area.

• The clots are seen with even higher incidence rates in other areas of the country. Other embalmers report recent rates of between 50% and 93%.

• The clots are not consistent with life: you cannot live for very long with these clots.

• The fact checkers could not explain away what was happening. Their attack was predictable, and I predicted on Substack the seven reasons they would fail.

• The CDC is not investigating this at all. The mainstream media isn’t either. They should be since these clots appear to be a major cause of death in America and can explain the completely unexpected and unexplained 40% rise in deaths of people under 65 reported by OneAmerica.

• Recently, two high school basketball players died on the same day, a Black Swan event. Both exhibited symptoms consistent with a vaccine-caused death. Nobody is asking any questions.

(read more)

Spike-Only Vaccine a Colossal Blunder: Michigan State University Shows SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Escape is Due to Vaccination

Earlier analyses had shown correlation of new COVID-19 cases with vaccine uptake, indicating vaccine escape. Now that causality is confirmed, the question is: Will policy makers stop making it worse?

Yesterday, I published a mathematical analysis that showed that the Barnstable County, Massachusetts (CDC data) supports the conclusion of negative efficacy (vaccinated people more likely to be diagnosed with COVID-19). Earlier, I had published and announced in a public speech (Harrisburg) that the vaccine program had failed, in part based on my findings that the number of new cases was highest in countries with highest vaccine uptake (See article here). The Israeli and UK data showed more cases in the vaccinated than in the unvaccinated, and my analysis yesterday should silence the pedestrian response “that’s because there are more people who are vaccinated”. I’ve pointed out (as have others) that Fauci’s “go home until you are sick enough to need emergency care” makes people variant incubators.

Now a new study has found the specific mutations by which the SARS-CoV-2 lineages have escaped the vaccine. The study, which is behind a paywall (US$40), reports that these mutations lead to less infectivity compared to the original SARS-CoV-2, but, according to the authors, “can disrupt existing antibodies that neutralize the virus”.

That sounds like disease enhancement to me.

“By tracking the evolutionary trajectories of vax-resistant mutations in more than 2.2 million SARS-CoV-2 genomes, we reveal that the occurrence & frequency of vax-resistant mutations correlate strongly with the vaccination rates in Europe and America.”

Their analysis went well beyond mere correlation of the rise of the vaccine-resistant variants and vaccination rates. Specifically, these authors had previously predicted the precise amino acid location in the receptor binding domain (RBD) at which vaccine escape variation would likely emerge as a result of targeting the spike protein with vaccines. Now that we see those specific amino acid residue positions changing, and, importantly, changing in ways that alter infectivity, the evidence is strong that the rise in these mutations was caused by the vaccination program.

They wrote:

“(I)n early 2020, we successfully predicted that residues 452 and 501 ‘have high changes to mutate into significantly more infectious COVID-19 strains’. In the same work, we hypothesized that ‘natural selection favors those mutations that enhance the viral transmission’ and provided the first evidence for infectivity-based natural selection. In other words, we revealed the mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 evolution and transmission based on very limited genome data in June 2020.19 Additionally, we predicted three categories of RBD mutations: (1) most likely (1149 mutations), (2) likely (1912 mutations), and (3) unlikely (625 mutations).19 To date, almost all of the RBD mutations we detected fall into our first category.3,20 Moreover, all of the top 100 most observed RBD mutations have a BFE change greater than the average BFE changes of −0.28 kcal/mol.”

The BFE measurement is a very strong predictor of infectivity to the ACE2 receptor in humans.

What this means to the authors is that vaccine-breakthrough and antibody-resistant mutations will increase transmission once most people are carrying antibodies through either vaccination or infection. The authors call for use of this information in vaccine programs (!). That, of course, will lead to further selection pressure.

What this means to me is that the infamous “new variants” Delta and Omicron variants have the mutations in the RBD now make all existing spike-only vaccines obsolete. Once Omicron dominates, another evolutionary arms race will take place - as long as we are targeting only the spike protein in so many people.

Our best bet is to foster immune health so when people are inevitably infected, they have a better shot at very long-lasting immunity via neutralizing antibodies, memory B-cells and memory T-cells to the 55 other epitopes from other SARS-CoV-2 virus proteins that I reported in April 2020.

The latest news that using different vaccines during boosters to the spike-protein-only vaccinated appears to confer stronger short-term immunity confirms that multi-epitope immunity is superior to spike-only immunity to SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Natural immunity is multi-epitope immunity. It’s time we start testing for t-cells immunity to SARS-CoV-2 proteins other than spike. We urgently need to know who is immune and who is not so people who are naturally immune can stay productive with far less concern over infection.

Those with natural immunity will be a valuable asset to society as we try to recover from the pandemic and the vaccination program that has made it much worse.

Stop blaming the unvaccinated for the rise of variants. Science says you’re wrong, and that the vaccinated who accepted spike-only vaccines are making things more difficult than they need to be.

I’m an evolutionary biologist, so I don’t pray much. But my hope is that pathogenic priming in the vaccinated can be minimized by the Brownstein protocol.

(read more)

Widespread Vaccine Failure is the Reproducibility Crisis in Public Health - Will They Adopt Science or Continue a Failing Denialist Agenda?

The Costly Taboo Against Expecting Rational Criticism from Public Health is Ending

In my podcast, “Unbreaking Science”, my initial goal was to bring guests on who were willing to discuss the perils of continuing down a path on which data manipulation and other less egregious problems with observational studies as conducted in public health. The goal was not iconoclastic; rather, it was to help nudge Science into a position in which critical analysis of individual studies - and sets of studies if need be - was again considered normal and healthy - even if the consequence of that analysis was to draw vaccine safety into question.

The goal of science - understanding and discovery - are at complete odds with taboo against rational criticism of vaccines. Rational criticism is usually conducted via peer-review; however, CDC’s main publication outlet, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, is not peer-reviewed.

What has happened in the public health literature is an inversion of rational thought. Studies (like mine) that identify potential problems with vaccines are targeted for retraction. If Science is a way of knowing, then the quest of scientists should be the truth, that is, reality. The quest to have our knowledge match reality as closely as possible is not possible when the goal of those who claim they are conducting science is to prevent rational criticism at all costs - as if the vaccine science literature is thorough, complete, and finished, at least on the question of benefits and risks - and also as if each and every vaccine recommended by ACIP is the same entity year after year.

Clinical science that sought to seek to use cell lines to understand cancer have been criticized based on somatic evolution - the evolution of cells lines away from the ancestral tumor tissue from which they were derived - as well as evolutionary shifts along the way, making comparisons of results using the same-named cell lines irreproducible given the effects of evolution during serial propagation.

This has been well-documented in the literature with a bombshell study by Ben-David et al. (2018) (see Literature Cited, Evolving Cell Lines). The response to the empirical evidence that cells lines cannot be counted on to reflect the native tissue from which they were derived was met with shock by the cancer research community, which then set about establishing protocols to help ensure similarity between cell lines used in cancer research and actual, bona fide tumors. In other words, reason prevailed following rational discourse about unwelcome news.

The precise mechanisms that made cell lines less useful than they could be have afflicted vaccines given the time between the present day and the time the pathogen was isolated to create a given vaccine. Bacteria like Pertussis evolve most slowly, then DNA viruses like Varicella, and then RNA viruses like the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Acellular Pertussis vaccines have been announced to be failures due to their failure to prevent asymptomatic infection that can lead to transmission by James Cherry; SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have escaped vaccines to the point where immunogenicity has waned and now vaccines and boosters can only be expected to yield detectable antibodies for 3-4 months. SARS-CoV-2 placed vaccine failure due to vaccine selection into a highly visible process witnessed by everyone in a short enough period of time for the public to understand that available SARS-CoV-2 vaccines target (extinct) ancestral virus, the Wuhan-1 variant. Example:

“This study found a similar viral load in vaccinated and non-vaccinated HCWs infected by SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.1.7, suggesting potentially reduced efficacy of BNT162b2 in preventing transmission of B.1.1.7.” (Ioannou et al., 2021)

I wrote about the problem of waning immunogenicity prior to COVID in an article on Medium, a platform that thanked me with a ban from publishing there again. I republished my article in April 2019 on jameslyonsweiler.com, with a face-to-face promise from that webhost provider to never censor articles on vaccines.

(See: “WANING IMMUNOGENICITY, VACCINE-DRIVEN EVOLUTION AND HYPERIMMUNIZATION: WE CAN NO LONGER DENY THE OBVIOUS” on jameslyonsweiler.com)

The problem is not an “anti-vax” or “pro-vax” problem. The problem is that evolution in cultured pathogens used in live attenuated vaccines is inevitable, and evolution in the wild-type pathogen guarantees loss of waning immunogenicity.

See also “Eberhardt, C. S., & Siegrist, C. A. (2017). What Is Wrong with Pertussis Vaccine Immunity? Inducing and Recalling Vaccine-Specific Immunity” and articles by James Cherry (below).

Sadly, the failure to address vaccine selection in Polio in Pakistan has resulted in a vaccine escape variant of the poliovirus, which has now made its way to Africa (See Science Magazine: In new setback for eradication campaign, poliovirus from Pakistan shows up in Africa).

As we return to remembering what we had learned before COVID-19, we will remember that schools filled with vaccinated children had clinical mumps outbreaks; that the US Navy USS Fort McHenry had to quarantine a ship for four months as mumps spread throughout the sailors on board - all of whom were up-to-date on mumps vaccination (See Business Insider).

We also remember that the Disneyland outbreak involved a large percentage of “vaccine type” clinical measles cases (See Roy et al.).

The issues of vaccine selection and vaccine escape cannot be solved by additional boosters. These issues must be addressed frankly and objectively. Evidence of the inability to be objective on this issue includes personal attacks on reputations and “credibility”, which of course does nothing to address the coming crisis of widespread vaccine failure.

The solution is that wild-type pathogens should be sequenced annually and compared to the vaccine-target type with special focus on mutations in the epitopes involved in antibody production. FDA should permit substitution of more recent pathogens to be included or to replace extinct variants.

This is not a radical, out-of-the-box solution; in fact, it was called for in the 1950s by scientists who recognized that measles vaccines would evolve away from the measles virus (and vice versa). They predicted that efficacy would be too low in 2022, and now we’re here. We’re masking kids in school for COVID-19, and it’s hard to tell if that is preventing a mass measles outbreak. However, the expectation is that we will start to see measles in adults, and that CDC will start pushing for vaccination against measles (and mumps) via the MMR vaccine.

Everything, however, seems to be on hold until a ruling is made in the Merck MMR whistleblower case in which two virologists allege that their supervisors told them to spike human samples with rabbit antibodies to make the MMR appear sufficiently protective (95% efficacy) to compete with other vaccines that were being proposed. One of the whistleblowers was threatened with jail time (See 2015 article on Biospace), and there appears to be a media black-out on the case since 2015 (See Reuters, 2015).

A related problem with live attenuated virus-based vaccines is the evolution of new functions, including the potential for new pathologies, including (potentially) measles inclusion body encephalitis (MIBE) and subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) (See Beaty & Lee, 2016).

While the FDA is at it, they should require the removal of unsafe epitopes: those that are likely to cause autoimmunity.

And they should embrace the fact that HPV Vaccine Failure is worse than mere failure: the rare, more lethal non-vaccine-targeted types have emerged since the vaccine has reduced the frequency of vaccine-targeted HPVs, as I and others predicted: the type replacement data were all published during the last two years, during COVID-19. I gave a presentation of this issue in Ohio, and published evidence of HPV type replacement in CDC’s own data in Mary Holland et al.’s book “HPV Vaccine on Trial”.

The analysis is also here:

(See: “WANING IMMUNOGENICITY, VACCINE-DRIVEN EVOLUTION AND HYPERIMMUNIZATION: WE CAN NO LONGER DENY THE OBVIOUS” on jameslyonsweiler.com)

Will they adopt Science? Or will they continue supporting CDC’s agenda of vaccine failure, vaccine risk, vaccine injury and vaccine death denial?

Hasn’t that cost us all enough? (read more)

Justin Trudeau Destroyed Canada to Extend Policies That Have Already Failed

Yet another entry in pointless discrimination and division due to COVID policy

Nearly everyone is aware by now that for several weeks, a massive number of Canadian truckers have been protesting vaccine mandates and COVID policies in Ottawa and other parts of the country.

Their efforts have been generally successful, with numerous provinces lifting some or most of their COVID mandates and restrictions, and on the ground conversations with protestors have revealed valid questions and eminently reasonable concerns.

But perhaps their greatest success has been exposing Justin Trudeau as a delusional, incompetent authoritarian.

Trudeau’s likely unconstitutional invocation of the “Emergencies Act,” meant in theory to deal with terrorist uprisings, gives the government extraordinary power to seize bank assets, for example. His language, describing truckers and protestors as racists while ignoring his own history of blackface, has become increasingly extreme.

The policy has been met with anger, resentment and embarrassment among many Canadians and disdain on the international stage.

Trudeau added to the national outrage the other day by accusing a Jewish MP of standing with swastikas and repeatedly refusing to apologize for his astonishing ignorance and demonization.

It’s not hard to pile on his frequent missteps and disturbing lack of decorum and awareness, but what’s most infuriating about his incredible dedication to COVID mandates is that the policies he’s defending demonstrably do not work.

[...]

Justin Trudeau’s inexcusable, dangerous, divisive rhetoric has been in defense of policies that have provably failed to accomplish anything in his own country, no matter where you look.

His determination to continue these policies, well after it’s been conclusively determined that there is no benefit and obvious demonstrable harms, is utterly bewildering.

There is no conceivable excuse for continuing these discriminatory policies; vaccinated people can easily get and spread COVID, mask mandates have been completely useless against the spread of a highly infectious respiratory virus, just as we always knew they would be. Vaccine passports have proven ineffective, everywhere on earth.

There is also no scientific data or evidence to suggest that forcing vaccine mandates on truckers, many of whom are already vaccinated or have likely contracted COVID, will accomplish anything valuable whatsoever.

Refusing to accept reality has been a hallmark of COVID policy throughout the pandemic, and Trudeau’s dedication to a policy with no clear societal benefit and massive harms is the latest example of a politician committing to nonsensical, disproven measures to avoid admitting their own failure and maintain an illusion of control.

Trudeau could easily acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that the policies and mandates are unnecessary, but instead he’s inflamed tensions and increased divisions over interventions that are completely useless. His only accomplishment has been to turn his country into a disturbing punchline — yet another bookmark for historians to refer back to in the years to come to illustrate the dangerous effects of government overreach during COVID. (read more)

Why People Believe Wrong Things

How so many people can believe demonstrably false things, and persist in their beliefs for years despite mountains of contrary evidence, is a great problem. There are of course liars and grifters, some of them in positions of great authority; and there are many others who are simply deceived or misinformed. A far worse problem, though, are all those who espouse obviously wrong things, while being well-informed and perfectly sincere. A great part of the maskers, the lockdowners and even the vaccinators, are like this. There are some cynical and evil voices, and there are some stupid people, but then there are all the others, who simply believe ridiculous things despite it all. There are social, psychological and emotional explanations, but being wrong is above all an intellectual problem, and it is so pervasive, because of our intellectual limitations.

A pervasive feature of human perception and cognition, is that it depends on what you might call models. We do not directly act on the information provided by our senses. Instead, our brains first process this information to build a running, constantly updated model of our environment. It is within this model that we act, and this model that constitutes our subjective sensory experience. Our eyes, for example, supply high resolution imagery for only a very small part of the visual field – far smaller than you realise. Our brains construct from this limited, disjointed information a broader theory of our surroundings, thus painting in the gaps and granting us the internal sensation of rich visual experience. This explains why unexpected events seem to come out of nowhere; why we can search the same room twenty times for a missing object, which all the time is in plain sight; and why witnesses often disagree about such elementary things as the colour of an automobile or the height of perpetrator.

Our intellectual processes are much the same. Many years ago, Thomas Kuhn wrote a book on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he argued that science does not advance through the accumulation of new discoveries and information. Scientists are not always and forever refining their repository of facts about the universe. Rather, scientific views change in fits and starts, through a kind of punctuated equilibrium.

Researchers agree on a basic set of assumptions and theories about the nature of their subject and the purpose of their work. These assumptions and theories, taken together, constitute a paradigm. Paradigms are simply intellectual frameworks, comparable to the environmental models your brain constructs on the basis of sensory information. All paradigms are necessarily imperfect, because natural phenomena are of untold complexity and our knowledge is very incomplete. Nevertheless, reigning paradigms are favoured because of their explanatory power; they fit the evidence and the research well enough, and they guide what Kuhn calls “normal science” – everyday research and inquiry within the paradigm, which aims to refine reigning theories and fit them ever more closely to reality.

Here and there, there are anomalies which the paradigm cannot explain. Researchers engaged in normal science will ignore or downplay these anomalies as long as they can, because they cannot be understood or processed with the intellectual tools that their paradigm grants them. These anomalies require a new paradigm, a different set of fundamental assumptions, and this is inconceivable, until there are so many anomalies, that the reigning paradigm is discredited and the field enters a crisis. It is at this point that you end up abandoning the miasma theory for the germ theory of disease, or setting aside the geocentric solar system for a heliocentric one.

Paradigms, then, not only make interpretations and predictions. They also establish the kinds of questions it is appropriate to ask, and how these questions are to be answered. When you are inside of a paradigm, it does not seem so much true, as unquestionable, or even invisible. This accounts for the strange ability of theories almost to make reality, and to form closed, inviolable worlds of thought unto themselves. Any set of data and observations can support multiple hypotheses, but under the spell of a theory, you see in the data only confirmations of what you already believe. Contrary, falsifying proofs don’t even seem disqualifying, so much as boring or bizarre, and above all unimportant.

Kuhn elaborated his concept only in the context of the sciences, but it is plain that paradigms govern everything, from political discourse to the study of Shakespeare. The sustained study of natural, historical or literary phenomena, doesn’t make you smarter or better at understanding the world. As the sophistication of theory and interpretation increases, the scope of inquiry narrows, and the possibilities for self-deception and absurdity only multiply. Hence the familiar jokes, about the ridiculous ideas that only someone with a doctoral degree could propagate. It is the same with Corona, and political matters, and everything else. There are errors and mistaken interpretations to which low-information observers are subject, but high-information, critical thinkers also build intellectual worlds that are subject to deeper, harder errors, and these people will never be convinced they are wrong.

Kuhn and others have noted that scientific knowledge does not advance so much by discovery, as by the deaths of prior scientists:

Copernicanism made few converts for almost a century after Copernicus' death. Newton's work was not generally accepted … for more than half a century after the Principia appeared. Priestley never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic theory, and so on. … Darwin ... wrote: “Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume ... I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine ... ” And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”1

One of the biggest problems here, is that the error and the source of the error are not the same. People are most demonstrably wrong in their conclusions, but they arrived at these wrong conclusions via a broader intellectual framework that they leave mostly unstated, and that isn’t even subject to ordinary falsification.

It doesn’t help, that academics tend to surround themselves and their intellectual production with a lot of credentialism and gate-keeping, which serves to protect the reigning theories of consensus scholarship from criticism, and which the right-thinking public accepts as prerequisites for being right. Shallow political demands to Follow the Science will just tether the whole world to the eccentric, careerist intellectual production of a bunch of unaccountable academics, who cannot afford to be wrong and will never alter their views, whatever the evidence.

(read more)

Yesterday I Was Levi’s Brand President. I Quit So I Could Be Free.

I turned down $1 million severance in exchange for my voice.

When I traveled to Moscow in 1986, I brought 10 pairs of Levi’s 501s in my bag. I was a 17-year-old gymnast, the reigning national champion, and I was going to the Soviet Union to compete in the Goodwill Games, a rogue Olympics-level competition orchestrated by CNN founder Ted Turner while the Soviet Union and the United States were boycotting each other. 

The jeans were for bartering lycra: the Russians’ leotards represented tautness, prestige, discipline. But they clamored for my denim and all that it represented: American ruggedness, freedom, individualism. 

I loved wearing Levi’s; I’d worn them as long as I could remember. But if you had told me back then that I’d one day become the president of the brand, I would’ve never believed you. If you told me that after achieving all that, after spending almost my entire career at one company, that I would resign from it, I’d think you were really crazy. 

Today, I’m doing just that. Why? Because, after all these years, the company I love has lost sight of the values that made people everywhere—including those gymnasts in the former Soviet Union—want to wear Levi’s.

My tenure at Levi’s began as an assistant marketing manager in 1999, a few months after my thirtieth birthday. As the years passed, I saw the company through every trend. I was the marketing director for the U.S. by the time skinny jeans had become the rage. I was the chief marketing officer when high-waists came into vogue. I eventually became the global brand president in 2020—the first woman to hold this post. (And somehow low-rise is back.)

Over my two decades at Levi’s, I got married. I had two kids. I got divorced. I had two more kids. I got married again. The company has been the most consistent thing in my life. And, until recently, I have always felt encouraged to bring my full self to work—including my political advocacy. 

That advocacy has always focused on kids.

In 2008, when I was a vice president of marketing, I published a memoir about my time as an elite gymnast that focused on the dark side of the sport, specifically the degradation of children. The gymnastics community threatened me with legal action and violence. Former competitors, teammates, and coaches dismissed my story as that of a bitter loser just trying to make a buck. They called me a grifter and a liar. But Levi’s stood by me. More than that: they embraced me as a hero. 

Things changed when Covid hit. Early on in the pandemic, I publicly questioned whether schools had to be shut down. This didn’t seem at all controversial to me. I felt—and still do—that the draconian policies would cause the most harm to those least at risk, and the burden would fall heaviest on disadvantaged kids in public schools, who need the safety and routine of school the most. 

I wrote op-eds, appeared on local news shows, attended meetings with the mayor’s office, organized rallies and pleaded on social media to get the schools open. I was condemned for speaking out. This time, I was called a racist—a strange accusation given that I have two black sons—a eugenicist, and a QAnon conspiracy theorist.

In the summer of 2020, I finally got the call. “You know when you speak, you speak on behalf of the company,” our head of corporate communications told me, urging me to pipe down. I responded: “My title is not in my Twitter bio. I’m speaking as a public school mom of four kids.” 

But the calls kept coming. From legal. From HR. From a board member. And finally, from my boss, the CEO of the company. I explained why I felt so strongly about the issue, citing data on the safety of schools and the harms caused by virtual learning. While they didn’t try to muzzle me outright, I was told repeatedly to “think about what I was saying.”

Meantime, colleagues posted nonstop about the need to oust Trump in the November election. I also shared my support for Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary and my great sadness about the racially instigated murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. No one at the company objected to any of that.

Then, in October 2020, when it was clear public schools were not going to open that fall, I proposed to the company leadership that we weigh in on the topic of school closures in our city, San Francisco. We often take a stand on political issues that impact our employees; we’ve spoken out on gay rights, voting rights, gun safety, and more. 

The response this time was different. “We don’t weigh in on hyper-local issues like this,” I was told. “There’s also a lot of potential negatives if we speak up strongly, starting with the numerous execs who have kids in private schools in the city.”

I refused to stop talking. I kept calling out hypocritical and unproven policies, I met with the mayor’s office, and eventually uprooted my entire life in California—I’d lived there for over 30 years—and moved my family to Denver so that my kindergartner could finally experience real school. We were able to secure a spot for him in a dual-language immersion Spanish-English public school like the one he was supposed to be attending in San Francisco.   

National media picked up on our story, and I was asked to go on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News. That appearance was the last straw. The comments from Levi’s employees picked up—about me being anti-science; about me being anti-fat (I’d retweeted a study showing a correlation between obesity and poor health outcomes); about me being anti-trans (I’d tweeted that we shouldn’t ditch Mother’s Day for Birthing People’s Day because it left out adoptive and step moms); and about me being racist, because San Francisco’s public school system was filled with black and brown kids, and, apparently, I didn’t care if they died. They also castigated me for my husband’s Covid views—as if I, as his wife, were responsible for the things he said on social media.

All this drama took place at our regular town halls—a companywide meeting I had looked forward to but now dreaded. 

Meantime, the Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the company asked that I do an “apology tour.” I was told that the main complaint against me was that “I was not a friend of the Black community at Levi’s.” I was told to say that “I am an imperfect ally.” (I refused.) 

The fact that I had been asked, back in 2017, to be the executive sponsor of the Black Employee Resource Group by two black employees did not matter. The fact that I’ve fought for kids for years didn’t matter. That I was just citing facts didn’t matter. The head of HR told me personally that even though I was right about the schools, that it was classist and racist that public schools stayed shut while private schools were open, and that I was probably right about everything else, I still shouldn’t say so. I kept thinking: Why shouldn’t I?  

In the fall of 2021, during a dinner with the CEO, I was told that I was on track to become the next CEO of Levi’s—the stock price had doubled under my leadership, and revenue had returned to pre-pandemic levels. The only thing standing in my way, he said, was me. All I had to do was stop talking about the school thing.

But the attacks would not stop. 

Anonymous trolls on Twitter, some with nearly half a million followers, said people should boycott Levi’s until I’d been fired. So did some of my old gymnastics fans. They called the company ethics hotline and sent emails.

Every day, a dossier of my tweets and all of my online interactions were sent to the CEO by the head of corporate communications. At one meeting of the executive leadership team, the CEO made an off-hand remark that I was “acting like Donald Trump.” I felt embarrassed, and turned my camera off to collect myself.

In the last month, the CEO told me that it was “untenable” for me to stay. I was offered a $1 million severance package, but I knew I’d have to sign a nondisclosure agreement about why I’d been pushed out. 

The money would be very nice. But I just can’t do it. Sorry, Levi’s. (read more)

Toxic Fentanyl, Meth Smoke Make Seattle’s Transit System Unusable, Authorities Say

• Seattle’s transit system has become unusable after reports of toxic fentanyl and meth smoke, volatile behavior and dangerous work environments, which has scared off travelers, local authorities said, The Seattle Times reported Monday.
• The city plans to release a new Safety, Security and Fare Enforcement Initiative in February, incorporating surveys and comments from 8,000 people, the Seattle Times reported. The plan hopes to improve the dangerous environment on transit while showing compassion, especially to homeless people. It is “a necessary step on its journey to becoming an anti-racist mobility agency,” according to the King County website.
• Crime has surged in Seattle recently, with shootings increasing 46% in 2020, the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported.

Seattle’s transit system has become unusable after reports of toxic fentanyl and meth smoke, volatile behavior and dangerous work environments, which has scared off travelers, local authorities said, The Seattle Times reported Monday.

King County Metro Transit workers filed 398 security incident reports regarding drug use in 2021, compared to 73 in 2020 and just 44 in 2019, according to the Times. Amalgamated Transit Union Local 587, representing over 4,000 King County Metro Transit workers, said the public transportation system needs stronger enforcement to remove the growing numbers of drug users.

Active duty cops have been punched, spat and threatened while also dealing with surging drug smoke from fentanyl and meth, the Times reported. Narcotic smoking surged last summer, surpassing needles and marijuana complaints.

The city plans to release a new Safety, Security and Fare Enforcement Initiative in February, incorporating surveys and comments from 8,000 people, the Times reported. The plan hopes to improve the dangerous environment on transit while showing compassion, especially to homeless people.

The plan is “a necessary step on its journey to becoming an anti-racist mobility agency,” according to the King County website.

The Metro Transit Authority (MTA) has avoided using law enforcement against the homeless population after widespread protests triggered by the death of George Floyd, according to the Times.

Unarmed Securitas monitor the metro and have zero authority to arrest or remove people from public transportation, the Times reported. Seattle police officers do not regularly patrol the transit vehicles and illegal drug use is considered a “lower priority than violent crime,” Seattle Police Detective Patrick Michaud told the Seattle Times.

The union representing the group of transit workers endorsed Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s mayor, who ran as a law and order candidate but has struggled to address the growing crime and drug use in the city, the Times reported. Since the summer of 2021, over six operators had to stop driving mid-shift, while 14 reported headaches, dizziness or irritated breathing.

Users usually light the bottom of a piece of aluminum foil that heats the drugs, which is sucked down using a straw, according to the Times. The smoke is carried forward from the device, and some transit vehicles do not have windows that open.

“It smells like burnt peanut butter, mixed with brake fluid,” King County Metro Transit operator Erik Christensen told the Times.

Seattle’s transit use rose roughly 50% in the 2010s, the highest rate of any U.S. city, the Times reported. Roughly 750,000 people used the transit system on a daily basis prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re after the criminal activity, the smoking drugs, the assaults, the deterioration of transit,” Local 587 Vice President Cory Rigtrup told the Times. “The solution is to restore transit, make it welcoming, bring back passengers.

Seattle residents pay the country’s highest transit tax, spending roughly $1,200 yearly per capita. Meanwhile, ridership and fare income dipped by over 50% during the pandemic.

“We should not be coming down on a totally punitive side,” Metro General Manager Terry White told the Times. “We should figure out how we serve community.”

“Hopefully we’ll be putting some things in place, where you’ll see more police on a coach,” White said, adding the city also plans to implement updated outreach programs for the homeless.

Crime has surged in Seattle recently, with shootings increasing 46% in 2020, according to an annual report by the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported. A massive gunfight erupted on Feb. 7 in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood with over 40 gunshots reported.

Multiple men allegedly kicked and punched a 23-year-old and left him unconscious on Jan. 25, among a string of violent assaults and robberies, the DCNF reported. Police also found a man near a city homeless encampment on Jan 20. with a crossbow [?] sticking out of his chest following a purported altercation.

The Seattle Police Department and Metro Transit Authority did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. (read more)

Tesla gets all its Supercharger cables stolen at brand new station

Tesla was the victim of a theft that resulted in having to shut down a brand new Supercharger station, as all the cables on the eight stalls were cut off.

The automaker is currently working to triple the size of its Supercharger network over the next two years.

It is currently growing at a record pace.

Tesla went from 23,277 Superchargers at 2,564 stations at the end of 2020 to 31,498 Superchargers at 3,476 stations at the end of 2021.

We are seeing Tesla open several new stations every day.

One of those new stations is a new eight-stall V3 Supercharger station in Oakhurst, California.

However, when members of the Tesla Motors Club forum wanted to go check out the new station, they found that all stalls were missing their charging cables.

A closer examination shows that they were completely cut off.

Tesla Supercharger stations have been subject to vandalism in the past.

A Supercharger station in Utah had to be shut down a few years ago after people intentionally damaged it.

This new instance in California could be vandalism, but the goal was most likely to steal the cable for the copper inside.

They managed to cut all of them clean off undetected, which could point toward criminals who knew what they were doing.

This can be a problem with charging stations, as they are often unattended, and in this case, it was a brand new station that Tesla owners didn’t even know about just yet.

It looks like charging station operators are unfortunately going to have to take vandalism and theft into account for their operations to keep the stations online as much as possible.

If this continues to be an issue, investing in some surveillance equipment is also not going to be a luxury. (read more)

Who needs to be told not to eat soap?

Contortion Nation

[...] Just days before the event at the White House, US domestic natural gas producers were dealt yet another senseless gut punch when a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit revoked two federally approved permits to complete the critically important Mountain Valley Pipeline project, which is already 94% constructed. Here’s how RBN Energy reported on the developments:

“For those holding onto a glimmer of hope that the long-delayed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) — a big and important greenfield Appalachia natural gas takeaway project — would finally come to fruition this year, it’s safe to say those dreams were shattered last week. On January 25, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit vacated federal permits from the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management that were needed to complete a 3.5-mile stretch of the mainline through the Jefferson National Forest along the West Virginia-Virginia border. The ruling said the permit approvals were premature — issued before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) environmental assessment — and failed to comply with the Forest Service’s 2012 Planning rule. The decision effectively sends the project back into the review process for the second time since construction began in 2018.”

The immediate consequences of the ruling are as follows. First, incremental natural gas produced in Appalachia will be stranded there, driving down prices in that region while increasing prices for the rest of the US market, which was counting on ready access to Appalachian production to meet their future needs. Second, the decision will limit the ability of US LNG export terminals to meet global natural gas demand, further eroding our geopolitical power and emboldening our adversaries – forcing us to make unseemly alliances with despots like the Emir of Qatar. Finally, the decision will make it even harder to attract much-needed capital for future domestic energy development projects. The Mountain Valley Pipeline project received its Certificate of Convenience and Necessity from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on October 13, 2017 and construction began months thereafter. That it is still in political limbo more than five years later sends a loud and clear message to energy investors: look elsewhere to deploy capital. Here’s another quote from an earlier piece by RBN Energy which foreshadowed the consequences of the latest events:

“It’s no secret to anybody paying attention to U.S. natural gas markets that Appalachia has long been bedeviled by midstream constraints, often leading to deep gas price discounts. There have been brief respites when new capacity has come online, allowing more gas to flow out, but if you've been reading our blogs and natural gas reports lately, you know we've been sounding the alarm about the growing specter of constraints reemerging. Across the country, the boom in pipeline reversals, greenfield projects, and pipeline expansions that characterized much of the 2010s is pretty much over, with just a couple of approved expansions left, and it’s gotten much harder for projects offering additional capacity to gain traction, especially in the Northeast.”

We wish we could close this piece on an uplifting note but are instead exhausted from unfurling the contortions of our political establishment. What’s clear is that we are an unserious people in a do loop of unproductive contradictions rapidly hurling towards parts unknown. (read more)