vdare--2020-12-10--Because The Names Thomas Jefferson And George Mason "Hurt" Black Students, Falls Church, VA Votes To

Because The Names Thomas Jefferson And George Mason "Hurt" Black Students, Falls Church, VA Votes To Remove Their Names From Public Schools

It was never going to stop with just Confederate statues/monuments/street names/schools.
It’s a project in removing the celebration/memory of all Dead White Males across America.
The Great Replacement has consequences.
The Falls Church School Board in Virginia voted 7-0 to change the names of Thomas Jefferson Elementary and George Mason High Tuesday night.
The vote comes despite an October community survey that found 56% opposition to changing the school names.
“After deep and careful consideration of everything I’ve heard and read, I conclude that renaming both schools is in the best interest of our students and a necessary part of our equity work,” Greg Anderson, chair of the Falls Church School Board, said Tuesday.
The name change is a school board initiative that began in the summer at the height of social unrest and included a survey of the Falls Church community taken in October.
The survey revealed that 56% of the community overall asked that the names stay on the schools, including 61% of the parents of Thomas Jefferson Elementary students and 57% of George Mason High parents.
Although the vote stands in contrast to the survey, the school board chairman said the school board listened to the community.
“I considered the survey results and the community discussion that followed, and I revisited our public hearings … I conclude that the public is split, and if you go beyond the simple number, I’ve heard reasoned perspectives from those in favor of retaining the names and from those in favor of changing the names,” Anderson said.
One of the speakers at the meeting, Dr. Jennifer Santiago, said she represented the minority voice in the survey and agreed with the board’s decision.
“While there are many times majority rules works in issues of equity, it is the opposite that is needed,” Santiago said. “If the majority rule worked for traditionally marginalized groups, we would not have systemic racism.”
A major reason survey participants said they were against changing the school names is because George Mason and Thomas Jefferson were “Founding Fathers” with significant contributions to Virginia and the nation.
Former Thomas Jefferson and George Mason student William Henneberg said changing the names against what the majority desires will set a bad precedent for the future.
“Do not encourage our students to be victims or to use offense as a means to shut others down,” Henneberg said. “Encourage our children to be critical thinkers.”
Santiago disagreed, saying the majority’s decision-making has ruled for a long time, and its actions are being tackled with the current name-change discussions.
“We need to listen very strongly to the minority response to this survey,” Santiago said. “Because the voices making up that number are the ones most negatively affected by the lives and legacies of these two men.”
School board members said that they thought long and hard about the issue, with some members saying their thinking evolved over the months in favor of changing the school names.
Some members said they had reached an understanding of the hurt the Jefferson and Mason names can cause African American students.
“The voice of some African Americans in our community who spoke up pushed me off the fence on to the side of seeing that it is essential we change the names. What I heard from them is that this matters,” said school board member Shannon Litton.


vdare--2020-12-11--Happy St. Gregory III Day! Oh, And Also Hanukkah

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Happy St Gregory III Day! He was born in Syria, then recently conquered by the Muslims, and became Pope in 731, the last non-European Pope until Pope Francis in 2013.
Interestingly, Gregory III is famous for resisting the Byzantine Emperor Leo III's campaign against the veneration of religious images—sometimes called "The First Iconoclasm," and a recurring feature of Byzantine life, arguably in response to the military success of Islam, which notoriously opposed all representational art.
This year, the U.S. has also seen an unprecedented outbreak of iconoclastic vandalism.
The difference, however, is that unlike the Byzantines, or the Protestants of the Reformation, who genuinely preferred simpler art, these iconoclasts clearly intend to replace the images with new, Politically Correct icons. Steve Sailer is not wrong to say, after the Falls Church VA School Board voted unanimously to rename Thomas Jefferson Elementary School and George Mason High School,
What names will replace them? I’m leaning toward Mohammed Atta Elementary School and Tokyo Rose High School, but I could see Kim Il-sung and Sirhan Sirhan.
It's the Great Replacement In action.
Oh, Hanukkah begins too on December 10. But it's now a multicultural must that no religious festival can be mentioned without also mentioning the nearest festival of some other religion, just as Christmas can no longer be mentioned without a reference to, well, Hanukkah.
Somehow, however, the MSM neglects to provide the nearest Saint's day in the Christian calendar to each year's Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover—and there are a lot of saints! So it has become a VDARE.com service (as so often) to fill the gap.
This year, Hannukah doesn't overlap with Christmas at all (it ends on the evening of December 18) so there's even less excuse than usual for insisting on equal time with with Christmas. For the record, here's more confirmation that it's actually a minor Jewish festival, inflated only because of its proximity to Christmas: Hanukkah 2020: When it is and what to know (no, it's not the 'Jewish Christmas'), by David Oliver, USA Today, December 10, 2020.
VDARE.com has many Jewish writers and donors (God bless them every one). And, unlike the unpleasant War On Christmas perpetrators, we wish all our readers, writers and donors a Happy. We mean it.


vdare--2020-12-10--In Post-Election News: An Elderly Democrat Leader Is Senile and a Biden Is Corrupt

Earlier: There Is No Way Hunter And Joe Biden Aren't Corrupt
In news that couldn’t possibly have been reported before the election for Reasons, it was announced this week that 87 year old Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) is over the hill cognitively and that, yeah, Hunter Biden likely is a crooked influence-peddler.
As you’ll recall, Twitter and Facebook shut down discussion of the latter before the election, while Capitol Hill insiders kept the former locked up, in part due to not wanting to reflect analogously on the Democratic candidate.
In other upcoming news that nobody could possibly have known about until, at the earliest, November 4, COVID seldom kills people in the prime of life, and that Pfizer would have announced the success of its vaccine on November 2 if it had followed its published clinical profile, but it wasn’t in the mood.
Also, there has been a whole lot of looting and shooting since Memorial Day.
[Comment at Unz.com]


vdare--2020-12-10--Why Is Half the Pfizer Vaccine to be Warehoused Unused for First 3 Weeks?

So the FDA panel voted 17 to 4 with one abstention to approve the Pfizer vaccine. But that still isn’t official FDA approval, which is expected to come “within days.” (Why not tonight? Does the FDA brass have something more important on their schedules?)
Here’s a question I have about the initial rollout plan. From the New York Times news section:
The U.S. will initially hold back half the first vaccine supply. By Katie Thomas
Published Dec. 9, 2020
Updated Dec. 10, 2020, 2:48 a.m. ET A top federal vaccine official said Wednesday that 2.9 million doses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine will be shipped around the country in the first week after it is authorized by the Food and Drug Administration — half of the initial shipment from Pfizer. On a call with reporters, Gen. Gustave F. Perna, the chief operating officer for Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to speed a vaccine to market, said that 2.9 million doses would be sent out once the vaccine is authorized, and 2.9 million saved for booster shots, which are given three weeks later. The remaining 500,000 of an available 6.4 million doses are to be held in reserve, in case they are unexpectedly needed. Health care workers and nursing home residents will be the first groups to receive the vaccine. General Perna said he had decided to set aside the doses earmarked for the second shot out of caution. “Eventually, we will become much more confident in our manufacturing, our distribution process, state handling, et cetera,” he said. “And then the requirement for reserve won’t be necessary.”
With so many old people in danger of dying in January, as the Third Wave spreads from the Upper Midwest to the country in general, instead of the current plan of leaving half the existing doses in a warehouse for three weeks, why not focus instead on maximizing the number who get the first dose as soon as possible, even if their second dose might might be delayed by a week or two?
My reading of the data suggests the first dose alone has roughly zero efficacy during the first 10 days after injection, but by days 14-21 it’s up near 85-90% efficacy. The second dose, after 3 weeks, boosts efficacy only up to 95%. So, wouldn’t it make more sense to use the first 5.9 million doses to get 5.9 million people up to 85-90% efficacy rather than to get 2.95 million up to 95% efficacy?
Granted, there is fear that the a one dose regimen would wear off faster than a 2 dose regimen. So I’d be all in favor of using subsequent deliveries to get the already inoculated their second dose, but I would rely on just-in-time deliveries of newly manufactured doses for the second dose rather than warehouse the inventory needed for second doses.
Am I crazy to risk patients having to wait 4 weeks instead of 3 weeks for their second dose? Perhaps. But somewhere in the Pfizer clinical trial database there is data on the volunteers who didn’t get their second dose right on time 21 days after the first dose. My vague recollection is that Pfizer kept people in the trial who took up to 42 days after the first dose to get their second dose? What efficacy was seen in people who were late getting their second dose? Does anybody know?
[Comment at Unz.com]


vdare--2020-12-10--Crossing The Potomac? No, Trump Isn’t Caesar—But He’s Building A Resistance That Will Last

Earlier (January, 2017) : "It Will Come To Blood"—Reflections On The Left's Anti-Trump Inauguration Tantrum
The Main Stream Media seems oddly silent about the upcoming pro-Trump rally in Washington D.C. this Saturday [Trump supporters plan DC rally to 'demand transparency' before Electoral College vote, by N'dea Yancey-Bragg, USA TODAY, December 10, 2020] Perhaps they were dismayed by the extraordinary success of the November 16 Stop The Steal Rally march, or maybe they’re just preparing to downplay the usual Leftist violence. But I’m planning on attending the rally. I see great potential in the grassroots movement that has been energized by President Trump. It will outlast him and give shape to the legitimate resistance (as opposed to the Left’s pop culture #Resistance) that will emerge in response to any Biden/Harris Regime.
The Main Stream Media’s strange idea that President Donald Trump is going to pull a Caesar is, of course, projection [Decline and fall: what Donald Trump can learn from the Roman emperors, by Natalie Haynes, The Guardian, December 4, 2020]. The great American Republic has already fallen. We are already at the point where the government has essentially lost control of key parts of its territory. We are already at the point where the rule of law is nonexistent—something that was presaged by the collapse of immigration law enforcement. We are already at the point where massive corporate, media, and extralegal entities control the political system. We’re even at the point where foreign countries brag about it.
We’re going to get one form of Caesarism or another. It will either be a heroic personality who can save the Historic American Nation—or it will be a more unaccountable, dishonest, and concealed class dictatorship ruling over a glorified shopping mall.
Let’s be clear about one thing at the beginning – President Trump, several states, and 106 Republican congressmen are simply raising legitimate legal challenges entirely within the existing framework [106 House Republicans back Texas challenge of election results at Supreme Court, by Melissa Quinn, CBS News, December 10, 2020]. There’s nothing radical about this. Of course National Review is characteristically sounding retreat [Texas’s Frivolous Lawsuit Seeks to Overturn Election in Four Other States, by Andrew McCarthy, December 9, 2020]. But there’s no reason the GOP/GAP should go along with election results that are this suspicious, based upon rules that were made up on the fly during unprecedented circumstances.
As Ann Coulter noted just yesterday, election fraud has been used by Democrats to capture seats for many years now. All Trump and at least some Republicans are doing is fighting back—for once.
Yet there’s a deeper, more fundamental issue. The GOP Congressmen backing Trump are being called “traitors,” a term which was trending a.k.a. approved by the censors on Twitter yesterday [Meet The 106 House Republican Traitors Who Betrayed America For Trump, by Jason Easley, PoliticsUSA, December 10, 2020]. In its countersuit against Texas, Pennsylvania accused the Lone Star State of a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.”
Again, one must ask… treason to what? Sedition against whom? Once in office, Joe Biden wants to essentially abolish what few barriers remain to mass immigration, essentially displacing the American people in their own country. The names of the Founding Fathers are being torn down from schools and streets all over the country. The Chinese calmly describe the reality of the American “Deep State which really runs the show here,” the American government openly prefers foreigners over American workers. And now we discover that the financial ties between China and Hunter Biden, which the MSM suppressed during the campaign, were all real [Both of the Media’s Reasons for Suppressing The Hunter Biden Story Turned Out To Be ‘False,; by Shelby Talcott, Daily Caller, December 10, 2020].
Is there an America left to defend or rebel against? Pundits imply that there is and that President Trump is somehow undermining it. For example, there’s now one of those curiously coordinated waves of hit pieces against Trump supporters, this time the “Oath Keepers”:
The lede from the supposedly “conservative” Washington Times:
Militiamen, white nationalists, and so-called Proud Boys are set again to be among the supporters of President Trump participating in protests being held for him this weekend around Washington D.C.
In contrast, in Portland OR, there’s been yet another “autonomous zone” set up within a major city [Protesters Erect New Autonomous Zone in Portland to Prevent Black Family’s Eviction, by Matthew Impelli, Newsweek, December 8, 2020] with “activists” warning journalists not to take photos or videos [Portland protesters warn people not to film red zone ‘autonomous zone,’ by Natalie O’Neill, New York Post, December 10, 2020].
And of course the “journalists” will comply. They are too busy writing stories about how the president is supposedly creating a threatening environment among Republicans [As Trump Rails Against Loss, His Supporters Become More Threatening, by Nick Corasanti, Jim Rutenberg, and Kathleen Gray, New York Times, December 8, 2020]
But at the same time, reporters shrug at an explicit statement from a Democratic state senator telling “soldiers” who “know how to do it” to make Trump supporters “pay” [Detroit lawmaker says video wasn’t meant to threaten Trump supporters, but she doesn’t regret it, by Malachi Barrett, Michigan Lives, December 9, 2020].
Somehow, amidst all of this, it’s Trump who is being accused of authoritarianism [Despite drift toward authoritarianism, Trump voters stay loyal. Why? By Edward Lempinen, Berkeley News, December 7, 2020].
Yet the fact is that, whatever Trump’s virtues and achievements—and they are not nothing— he’s unquestionably been the weakest president in recent history.
There is a virtual industry of former supporters, friends, or business partners cashing in on past relationships with Trump and being hailed as heroes on MSM programs. Major Big Tech platforms censor him, not his opponents. He doesn’t even seem to control his own Administration, let alone the country.
In his response to the COVID-19 pandemic, President Trump was far too open and it is his supporters who are protesting lockdowns, forced vaccination schemes, and travel restrictions. If Donald Trump really were an authoritarian nationalist, he was given a priceless opportunity to seize power. Instead, he largely governed as a conventional conservative, even a classical liberal.
President Trump clearly projects strength and looks like what we think a nationalist should be. However, he hasn’t actually followed up on these things. Consider these failures:
There was no remittance tax to pay for the wall, no Official English, and no challenge to Birthright Citizenship
Though he ran as an economic populist in 2016 and called for more stimulus payments before the election, he governed much more like an economic conservative.
He has no health care policy, and neither does the GOP.
He never tamed Big Tech when he had the chance.
Above all, he never directly confronted the Black Lives Matter Blood Libel against White America, or Democrat politicians’ complicity in Communist rioting across the country, apparently hoping Americans would just draw the right conclusion all by themselves .
Boomer, all too Boomer. President Donald Trump mastered not the Art of the Deal, but the art of public relations. He was a media hero for decades, but I suspect he never quite learned that a single man can’t take on the entire Main Stream Media. Instead, he’s still playing by the old rules, and seems stunned that his side isn’t getting a fair hearing.
Thus, recently pardoned Michael Flynn’s call for President Trump to use Lincoln-like tactics to save the country and re-do the presidential election seems wildly unrealistic [Freshly pardoned Michael Flynn shares message telling Trump to 'suspend the Constitution' to hold a new presidential election, by Kathryn Krawczyk, The Week, December 2, 2020]. If President Trump was the type of man who could metaphorically “cross the Rubicon” and declare martial law, he wouldn’t be in this position to begin with.
In any case, action against media monopolies and ensuring social media access for his supporters would have been a far more effective tactic than legal maneuvering anyway–and this should have been prioritized day one.
I have no doubt the Supreme Court will simply duck the Texas case. Chief Justice John Roberts is yet another “conservative” appointee who has shifted left once taking the big chair, and most other justices are similarly unimpressive. Even proven fraud is being ignored and, without free speech online, the evidence can be censored.
However, that doesn’t mean the Sorelian Myth of a nationalist march on Washington, or Trump crossing the Potomac in lieu of the Rubicon, isn’t useful. After all, we already know the outright tyrannical measures that the Democrats are openly planning to impose on the American people. It is important that ordinary Americans recognize the coming Regime is illegitimate, that the GOP failed them and that, if President Trump lost, it was because he was too cautious and compromising, rather than audacious and bold.
Before even discussing breaking up the boundaries within states, forming a Third Party, taking over the GOP, or even the extreme solution of secession, people need to believe that resistance is at least possible.
And, as Peter Brimelow always reminds me, we just don’t know what Trump will do. The former casino owner might, out of sheer self-preservation, decide to throw it to the wind and declare alea iacta est—or at least give the Ruling Class one more hysterical fit.
James Kirkpatrick [Email him |Tweet him @VDAREJamesK] is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc. His latest book is Conservatism Inc.: The Battle for the American Right. Read VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow's Preface here.


vdare--2020-12-10--Central Americans Think Trump On The Way Out, New "Caravans" Forming in Honduras

Down in Central America, they think Trump is on his way out, and they are forming "caravans" again.
Jose Luis Gonzalez, who coordinates an NGO called the Guatemala Red Jesuita con Migrantes ("Guatemalan Jesuit Migrant Network for Migrants") had this to say:
“There are going to be caravans, and in the coming weeks it will increase. People are no longer scared of the coronavirus. They’re going hungry, they’ve lost everything and some towns are still flooded.” [Migrant Caravans Head to U.S. Border in Early Test for Biden, by Michael D. McDonald and Eric Martin, Bloomberg, December 9, 2020]
Gonzalez is talking about the recent hurricanes in Central America. Yes, but hurricanes are part of life in that region, not a justification for the mass migration of Central Americans to the U.S.A.
As for the coronavirus, we are #1 in COVID-19 cases and deaths, and don't need any more.
Gonzalez also said this:
“When there is a change in government in the U.S. or Mexico, caravans start to move because they are testing the waters to see how authorities respond. What they see is that the one who said he was going to build a wall and hated Latinos is on his way out.”
That's how they see it.
From the New York Post:
Hundreds of Honduran nationals have formed a caravan heading toward the United States, following a pair of natural disasters that tore through the region. The caravan was organized on social media following two major hurricanes that hit the Central American country last month, just two weeks apart, with groups announcing on platforms when and where they would begin their travels from. As of Thursday [December 10, 2020], there are currently two caravans in the works, according to Bloomberg, one scheduled to leave in the coming days and one in mid-January. [New migrant caravan en route to US from Honduras , by Emily Post, December 10, 2020].
Trump was able to greatly reduce immigration from Central America by putting pressure on Mexico to control its own border with Guatemala. Obviously, these Central Americans think the Trump Era is nearing its end.
The exodus of Hondurans from their home country could serve as President-elect Biden’s first major challenge.
"President-elect" as declared by the media.
The 46th commander-in-chief has pledged to reverse President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, but has not explained how he plans to handle the tens of thousands of migrants that Mexico has kept at bay at their own southern border under Trump.
The article is already calling Biden "commander-in-chief".
According to a senior Mexican official, speaking on condition of anonymity to the Washington Post last week, there are concerns among those in the government that any moves by Biden to undo some of Trump’s security measures could cause their southern border with Guatemala and Belize to become overwhelmed. “Our southern border was a mess, and it’s under control now,” the official said.....
Now that's interesting. This Mexican official points out that it's not in Mexico's interests to have Central Americans stampeding across Mexico's borders at will.
This anonymous Mexican official says that "Central America needed financial assistance to prevent a mass exodus of its people. “They can’t wait for private investment to arrive.”
Maybe, if it's done properly, but the Central Americans can't be sending waves of immigrants AND be receiving big bucks from the United States.
The article quotes another Mexican official:
“We still need migration to be orderly. We can’t just have an endless stream of unidentified people transiting through the country with no authorization,” another senior Mexican official told the paper.
Amen to that, which goes for any self-respecting country.
What about Guatemala?
Guatemala, which sits between Honduras and Mexico, is now sounding the alarm over the impending potential crisis, with President Alejandro Giammattei warning that without help from wealthier nations, his citizens would flee to other nations as Hondurans invaded their borders. “If we don’t want hoards [sic, should be hordes] of Central Americans looking to move to other countries with better living conditions, we have to make a wall of prosperity in Central America,” he said at an event in Honduras last month.
So what does the Biden Camp have to say?


vdare--2020-12-11--Supreme Court Turns Down Texas Suit

Supreme Court Turns Down Texas Suit

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The Supreme Court decided this afternoon not to consider the Texas lawsuit against the results in Pennsylvania. The vote was 7-2, with Alito and Thomas dissenting on procedural grounds, but without implying they’d uphold the Texas lawsuit (i.e., it wasn’t close).
With more careful planning ahead of the election, the Trump Administration might have put together a stronger legal and empirical case (although, frankly, forethought was never their thing). But it was never very likely that the 6-3 GOP majority on the Supreme Court would open themselves up to certain vengeance down the road by Democratic court-packers merely to give Donald Trump another term.
What happens next?
As I wrote several weeks ago:
It's almost as if Trump has a multi-decade track record of playing hardball within the legal system, then accepting what the courts decide. — Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) November 23, 2020
Trump is an extraordinarily resilient personality, so I’m sure he’ll think of some next step in his remarkable career.
For those talking about secession, I listed the practical problems that make that highly unlikely last February in “Secession Studies.”
[Comment at Unz.com]


James Flynn, RIP

I haven’t seen confirmation of this yet, but it appears that the philosopher-scientist James Flynn, discoverer of the Flynn Effect of rising raw IQ scores, has died.
Flynn was not the first to notice that IQ test creators had to periodically make their tests harder to keep their average score at 100, but, like Columbus, after him the Flynn Effect stayed discovered.
Numerous leftists complain at length about the science of intelligence, but Flynn was the only man-of-the-left of the latter 20th Century to make a major empirical discovery in intelligence research, one that rightly lowered the confidence of psychometricians.
The lengthy epistolary dialog between James Flynn and Arthur Jensen over Flynn’s discovery of rising raw IQ scores should be taught in Philosophy of Science courses as an example of how to do science right. Flynn brought the Flynn Effect (as it was named in The Bell Curve) to the attention of Arthur Jensen in the 1970s (IIRC). Jensen was initially skeptical about the significance of Flynn’s findings, and offered a list of scientific challenges. Over a number of years of research, Flynn patiently answered each one, earning Jensen’s admiration.
I’ve written a couple of times at length about the Flynn Effect
Here’s my 2007 book review in VDARE.com of Flynn’s What Is Intelligence: Beyond the Flynn Effect
Here’s my 2015 Unz Review post on “The Flynn Effect: IQ Testing Across Space and Time“
In short, tremendous efforts had been made to make IQ testing more valid across space (e.g., to avoid cultural bias, the non-verbal Raven’s Progressive Matrices invented in the 1930s look like something that would be inscribed on the monolith from 2001). But little attention had been devoted to keeping the scores of IQ tests stable across time, with the Raven’s being particularly susceptible to a huge Flynn Effect, with raw IQ scores rising several points per decade in the 20th Century.


vdare--2020-12-11--Rush Limbaugh Joins VDARE.com In Warning About The Possibility Of Secession

Here at VDARE.com, we’ve been discussing secession as a viable option for patriots for many years, as Americans try and salvage something of the Historic American Nation for their posterity. Most recently, Faith Goldy noted:
Well, we’ve reached a point where more and more prominent individuals on the right-side of the spectrum are talking about the viability of secession, including a man who was recently honored with a Medal of Freedom during Trump’s 2020 State of the Union.
Yes, Rush Limbaugh is now discussing the idea of secession with his massive audience, and the gatekeepers at Media Matters aren’t too happy:
RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): All right. Mr. Snerdley is asking if we’re ever going to be able to win. And he’s talking about elections. Votes. Are we ever gonna be able to win without taking back some of these cities? He’s talking about blue cities like New York, Philadelphia. I assume you mean Detroit? Do you include Milwaukee in this? Definitely, all right. What about Oakland, California? Too far gone. San Francisco? You think we can get San Francisco? Look, we won election after election after election without winning these cities or the states they’re in. I thought you were asking me something else when you said, “Can we win?” I thought you meant, “Can we win the culture, can we dominate the culture.” I actually think -- and I’ve referenced this, I’ve alluded to this a couple of times because I’ve seen others allude to this -- I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York? What is there that makes us believe that there is enough of us there to even have a chance at winning New York? Especially if you’re talking about votes. I see a lot of bloggers -- I can’t think of names right now -- a lot of bloggers have written extensively about how distant and separated and how much more separated our culture is becoming politically and that it can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way. And I know that there’s a sizable and growing sentiment for people who believe that that is where we’re headed, whether we want to or not -- whether we want to go there or not. I myself haven’t made up my mind. I still haven’t given up the idea that we are the majority and that all we have to do is find a way to unite and win, and our problem is the fact that there are just so many RINOs, so many Republicans in the Washington establishment who will do anything to maintain their membership in the establishment because of the perks and the opportunities that are presented for their kids and so forth. [Rush Limbaugh: “There cannot be a peaceful coexistence” between liberals and conservatives: Limbaugh: “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession”, Media Matters for America, December 10, 2020]
Unfortunately, Limbaugh immediately walked back his comments when they went viral, by claiming he was “misunderstood”:
Then on Limbaugh’s Thursday program, the host seemed to backtrack by claiming that he was only speaking to what bloggers and people on Twitter have been saying. “I simply referenced what I have seen other people say about how we are incompatible, as currently divided, and that secession is something that people are speculating about,” the host added. “I am not advocating it, have not advocated, never have advocated it, and probably wouldn’t.” [Rush Limbaugh Goes Viral for Talk of Secession, Now Claims It Wasn’t His Idea, by Peter Wade, Rolling Stone, December 10, 2020]
Let’s be honest: it doesn’t matter if Limbaugh said he was “misunderstood.” His audience listening to his program probably all nodded their heads, knowing there is something seriously wrong with the state of the country and how secession is a viable option to ensure America stays actual American in large sections of the country.
For our posterity, right Mr. Limbaugh?


vdare--2020-12-11--TIME Magazine Names Its Hair of the Year

Assa Traoré and racial-justice organizers are TIME's 2020 Guardians of the Year https://t.co/5OFcHqlzR2 pic.twitter.com/xyidngMWia — TIME (@TIME) December 11, 2020
Rather than black women purchasing their hair extensions from India, Assa Traore is teaching black women everywhere to purchase their hair extensions from the Mother Continent.
Traoré was born in January 1985 to a polygamous family, wherein her father had four wives.[9] She grew up with 17 siblings.[6] Her father, Mara-Siré Traoré, had emigrated from Mali at 17,[10] before marrying his respective wives, and dying of lung cancer in 1999,[11] due to his frequent exposure to asbestos.[12] The family lived in Beaumont-sur-Oise,[13] where Mara-Siré was a construction worker. Traoré once said that although French society is critical of polygamy, she had a very comfortable upbringing.[9]
I bet she did, courtesy of the French taxpayers.
The Biden-Harris ticket represents something historic.
Person of the Year is not just about the year that was, but about where we’re headed #TIMEPOY https://t.co/H4uzUe8Pli pic.twitter.com/YMylCvbkZT — TIME (@TIME) December 11, 2020
Is the arrowhead pointing from Joe to Kamala tell us something about where we are headed?
How do a man and a woman form the singular Person of the Year? Time should have skipped Person of the Year and just gone for Pronoun of the Year: “They.”
[Comment at Unz.com]


vdare--2020-12-12--White House Prods FDA Into Approving Vaccine

First , from the bottom of my heart I want to thank VDARE.com readers for rallying to support our Year-End Appeal—the time when VDARE.com traditionally raises the bulk of its funds .
As of today , donations have reached just over $ 78,000 , some 39 % of our $ 200,000 goal .
And we know some checks will still be snail-mailing their way to us .
( See below ) .
Second , I have to report some very bad news : on Friday morning , our payment processor of several years standing abruptly sent us an email announcing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its Service agreement , which it did not specify , it intends to stop working with us after Sunday , December 13 .
At this point , I do not know if VDARE.com will be able to process credit card donations beyond that date .
We all know that these are dark days for America .
This is further proof .
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From my blog on Thursday evening:
So the FDA panel voted 17 to 4 with one abstention to approve the Pfizer vaccine. But that still isn’t official FDA approval, which is expected to come “within days.” (Why not tonight? Does the FDA brass have something more important on their schedules?)
From the New York Times Friday morning:
Covid-19 Live Updates: F.D.A. Expected to Issue Pfizer Vaccine Authorization on Friday Evening The accelerated timeline comes after President Trump’s chief of staff threatened the F.D.A. head’s job if he didn’t get it done on Friday. The Trump Administration will buy another 100 million doses of Moderna vaccine. The Food and Drug Administration accelerated its timeline for issuing an emergency authorization for Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine after President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the agency’s leader, to consider looking for another job if the vaccine was not approved Friday, according to a senior administration official. Regulators had been planning to authorize the vaccine for emergency use early Saturday. But on Friday morning, Dr. Hahn told officials at the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research to act by the end of the day, according to one person familiar with his directive. It is unclear whether shaving a half-day off the timetable for authorization would speed up the delivery of vaccine shipments to sites around the country or simply placate the White House’s desire for action. Several officials said that the delivery timetable was already set. The pressure also did not alter the outcome of the process. F.D.A. had already determined it would approve Pfizer’s vaccine for emergency authorization after an advisory panel of experts on Thursday recommended that it do so, according to multiple administration officials. But it nonetheless showed that even at the 11th hour, the White House was unwilling to allow regulators the independence to work according to their own plan as they processed key documents, including instructions to physicians for use of the vaccine and a fact sheet on the product.
Can you imagine how bad the anti-vax propaganda in the New York Times would be if Pfizer had announced its vaccine worked on November 2 and that had flipped 1 out of every 300 votes, giving Trump a 269-269 Electoral College tie and likely victory with House delegations voting by state? The mainstream media would be screaming right now about how nobody can trust the vaccine.
You can understand why Pfizer shut down lab work on the World’s Most Important Trial from late October until the day after the election, when it discovered belatedly that it had more cases on hand than it had specified for the first, second, and even third interim analyses.
From the New York Times Friday evening:
F.D.A. Clears Pfizer Vaccine, and Millions of Doses Will Be Shipped Right Away
An initial shipment of about 2.9 million doses of the vaccine will be sent around the United States over the next week. By Katie Thomas, Sharon LaFraniere, Noah Weiland, Abby Goodnough and Maggie Haberman
Dec. 11, 2020, 9:10 p.m. ET The Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use on Friday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it. The action means millions of highly vulnerable people will begin receiving the vaccine within days.
These vaccinations should start lowering the death rate around Biden’s inauguration day, if it takes 14 days for the first dose to start working at reducing infections, and then there’s a 22 day lag on average between infections and subsequent deaths, that sounds like the good effect will kick in about January 20. Expect coverage of how President Biden is already saving lives around January 21.
In other vaccine news, Britain’s AstraZeneca will be teaming up with Russia’s Sputnik V in a clinical trial. The highly touted Oxford-designed vaccine reported mediocre results for most of the sample (62% efficacy) but serendipitously botched its way to 90% efficacy among a subsample who had incompetently been given a first dose only half as strong as planned. The Russians claim 92% efficacy in a small clinical trial. The Russians use two different vectors for their two doses, which sounds in theory like it might work better than the Brits’ original plan of using the same vector twice. The Anglo-Russian alliance is now considering making one dose the Russian vaccine and one the British vaccine, so some other combinations.
And from StatNews, bad news on the French Sanofi vaccine trial that is reminiscent of the AstraZeneca screw-up:
Sanofi suffers major setback in development of a Covid-19 vaccine
By HELEN BRANSWELL @HelenBranswellDECEMBER 11, 2020 … The problem relates to inadequate results in older adults in Sanofi’s Phase 1/2 trial, which the company traced back to an inadequate formulation of their vaccine, Su-Peing Ng, global medical head for Sanofi Vaccines, told STAT in an interview. Ng said both Sanofi and GSK are committed to continuing work on the vaccine, and plan to begin a Phase 2b trial in February. “We’re disappointed that there is a delay,” she said. “I think, though, that we’re encouraged that we have enough information, enough of the results from preclinical and clinical [studies] to tell us that we have a path forward. We need to optimize this formulation.” In effect, participants in the trial received too little vaccine. While the too-small dose generated adequate levels of neutralizing antibodies in adults aged 18 to 49 in the trial, adults 60 and older generated lower levels of neutralizing antibodies than are seen in the blood of people who have recovered from Covid-19 infection, Ng said. Perplexed by the findings, the company set out to figure out why the vaccine underperformed. It discovered two commercial reagents used to measure how much antigen — active vaccine — was included in each dose were giving false readings. In fact, Ng said, the concentration of the antigen “was insufficient.”
Much the same thing happened to AstraZeneca’s vaccine, except their botch turned out to work better.
Because it will be harder to get volunteers in 2021 for trials with a 50% chance of getting a placebo, Sanofi is inquiring if it can do a clinical trial versus one of the mRNA vaccines that are 95% efficacious.]
[Comment at Unz.com]


vdare--2020-12-11--Decline Of Politics, 2021, Race Denialists Dig In, And Ending Academic Testing, Etc.

01m54s The decline of our political culture. (Comedy, tragedy.)
09m52s 2021: a first look. (Two things that will certainly happen.)
14m57s Race denialists dig in. (The point they've arrived at.)
20m48s Ending law enforcement. (Mug 'em again!)
29m21s Ending academic testing. ("Holistic" = completely subjective.)
34m00s Chuck Yeager, RIP. (A great West Virginian.)
36m13s Alone in the cosmos? (Seems like a waste.)
40m30s Miss BumBum lives! (At Cambridge University.)
42m48s Signoff. (With a gifted violinist.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Two weeks to Christmas Day, and this is of course your holistically genial host John Derbyshire with some reflections on the passing charivari.
And yes, I know I should pronounce it "shivaREE." The problem here is, I picked the word up in childhood, from reading not from listening. I liked to read the British weekly humor magazine Punch every chance I got, and Punch promoted itself as, quote, "the London charivari."
Bookish kids learn a lot of words they don't know how to pronounce right; and when you've spent your early formative years saying a word to yourself one way, it's hard to switch to saying it another way. The sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon created a character, also a bookish kid, who first saw the word "misled" in an advertisement somewhere and pronounced it to his infant self as "mizzled."
Sorry, I'm rambling here. Let's get to the 天 下 大 事, the great matters under Heaven.
[Permalink]
02 — The decline of our political culture. A wise man once observed that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel. Well, we can all think and we can all feel. We can even do both things simultaneously. Hence the expression "I don't know whether to laugh or cry."
That's the mood I'm in with regard to our political culture today. The thinking Derb looks at the transparently bogus ways our ruling class rigged this recent election and can't help but laugh. Do they really think we're taken in by it? It's like watching a really incompetent stage magician.
You know the ways, but let me just list some of the most transparent.
Keeping Joe Biden hidden from sight. In a Presidential election campaign, the candidates are all over the place. Yes, I know about Bill McKinley's "front porch campaign." McKinley wasn't hiding on that porch, though; he was out there speechifying to anyone who showed up — and thousands did show up. The point of hiding Biden was, (a) to keep his senility well out of sight, and (b) to keep Trump front and center, so that the legions of Trump-haters got daily reminders of how much they hated him.
Suppressing any negative news about Biden. Most flagrantly, suppressing the revelations that came out just before the voting about Hunter Biden's laptop, and the Biden family's shady business dealings with foreign companies and governments. The newspapers of course, the big TV networks, public radio and public TV — you know, the ones we pay for from our taxes — the big online social-media outlets, … They all did a full-court press in unison to stop us learning that Joe Biden is for sale.
Although in fairness I should mention exceptions there. Among newspapers, the New York Post splashed the laptop story. And among big TV networks, Tucker Carlson at Fox News gave over a big chunk of his show to an interview with Tony Bobulinski, a guy whose name you would otherwise never have heard. Listeners grumble to me about Fox News, and I understand the grumbling; but they did that when the other channels were squealing "Russian disinformation!" … when they weren't just keeping shtum.
Rigging the pre-election polls. I still haven't seen a plausible alternative explanation for the polls having been so wrong, and all in the same direction. Pollsters don't work for nothing any more than you or I do. They get paid. Who pays them? Who are the customers for what they're selling? Why, the media and the political consultants, big Wall Street players who want to place their bets the right way, probably the Silicon Valley goombahs. Ruling class, much?
The Big Pharma companies holding back release of their coronavirus vaccines until after the election so that President Trump wouldn't get any of the credit. Our own Steve Sailer has been all over this: nobody else much has thought it worth mentioning. Some unknowable number of Americans have died to prevent Trump getting a small positive pre-election boost.
And so on. There are other items you can add to the charge sheet. I'm just making the point that the stage magicians here aren't even bothering to practice real sleight of hand. This is Tommy Cooper, not David Copperfield. They know they can pull off their stunts without much art because nobody of importance will call them out. All the people of importance are anti-Trump.
So, yes, you can't help but smile at their artlessness. It's so blatant, so obvious. That's the comedy.
Then there's the tragedy: A great and beautiful country brought down into the dirt — into the soft totalitarianism of a corrupt Third World petty despotism — by a venal, ruthless, and cynical elite class.
U.S. politics has never been spotless, of course, although it's generally been cleaner the higher up you go — big-city mayoral campaigns dirtier than Presidential ones. And even at those highest levels the ruling elite, with their media allies, has often leaned strongly for or against one particular candidate.
I remember how they leaned against Richard Nixon, and indeed managed eventually to destroy him. In the 1968 and 1972 campaigns, however, which I followed attentively from foreign parts, Nixon got a mostly fair hearing — way fairer than Trump has gotten. Nixon's opponents in those campaigns, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern, were smart, capable, and articulate politicians of substance, not mumbling zombies.
There's been a falling-off in our political culture, just as there has been in our popular and high culture. If you find yourself humming a tune, odds are it was composed more than forty years ago. If someone quotes a line of poetry to you, it's not likely the poet is anyone later than Robert Frost, who was born in 1874. If your wife wants to hang a picture to give some color to the dining-room, whose work does she pick? Not likely anyone younger than Andrew Wyeth, born 1917.
A real falling-off: From clever, capable, worldly politicians jousting for the voters' favor to a tawdry media mock-up. There's the tragedy.
[Permalink]
03 — 2021: a first look. Do we have anything better to look forward to in 2021? I doubt it.
It's hard to call the future, of course, but here are two things that undoubtedly will happen in 2021, one domestic and one foreign.
Domestic: The trials in Minnesota state court of the four police officers who arrested George Floyd back in May. These trials should take place in March 2021. I'm not a lawyer, and for sure not a Minnesota lawyer, but as best I can understand the charges — second-degree unintentional murder, manslaughter, and the aiding and abetting thereof — there's a decent chance of acquittals.
The 1992 Los Angeles riots, remember, were triggered by the acquittal of the officers who arrested Rodney King. Sixty-three people were killed in those riots, only ten at the hands of police. If the Minnesota defendants are acquitted: Katy, bar the door.
The 1992 Los Angeles riots, remember, were triggered by the acquittal of the officers who arrested Rodney King. Sixty-three people were killed in those riots, only ten at the hands of police. If the Minnesota defendants are acquitted: Katy, bar the door. Now foreign: [Clip: 沒 有 共 產 黨 …] That was of course a brief clip from everyone's favorite: "Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China!" I once sang the first couple of verses to an extremely baffled gathering of National Review staffers at the home of the late Kate O'Beirne.
The people of mainland China will be hearing that a lot next year — hearing the song, I mean, not hearing me singing it. July 23rd 2021 marks the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party.
This will be a huge event. I was in China for the 80th anniversary in July 2001, and that was a huge event. The centenary will be huger. A hundred beats eighty, and the ChiComs are richer and more confident now than they were twenty years ago.
Why should you care? Well, if you read the December issue of Chronicles magazine you will have seen my prediction that, quote from self: "There is a high probability — I would put it north of 90 percent — that China will attack Taiwan at some point in the next four years." End quote.
It would be entirely consistent with the current mentality of China's leadership to celebrate the Party's centenary with some such deed. For my best guess as to how such an attack would affect the U.S.A., I refer you to the Chronicles article. Short form: No, not Armageddon, only a national humiliation — ours, not theirs.
Although as a footnote to that I should add that when I discussed such an attack the other day with Mrs Derbyshire, whose father actually was an officer in the People's Liberation Army, she pooh-poohed my prediction. The ChiCom officer class, she said, have zero war-fighting experience and are deeply corrupt. Our own officer corps may be woke, but they do at least know how to fight. I'll leave a fuller discussion of that for a future podcast.
So there are two certainties for 2021: state trials for the Minnesota cops, and the ChiCom centenary. One or both might pass without incident, but there is potential for big trouble in both.
[Permalink]
04 — Race denialists dig in. The core ideology of our ruling class, which citizens contradict at peril of losing their livelihood, is race denialism. Statistical differences in outcome by race cannot possibly be biological in origin. The only reasons for those differences you may discuss in public are social: poverty, oppression, lack of self-esteem. And in fact all of those reasons have a single root cause: systemic racism on the part of whites towards other races.
There are at least two problems with this race denialism. Problem One: Half a century of efforts, including massive favoritism towards blacks, expenditures of trillions, and the election of a black President, have made only a slight dent in the differences of outcome. Problem Two: East and South Asians, who are now richer and more successful on average than whites.
You might therefore think that the evidence against race denialism is now so glaringly obvious as to force denialists to some reconsideration, some doubts as to the soundness of their theory.
That, however, would be to underestimate the fanaticism of the race denialists. Once a big idea has a real grip on believers, mere logic has no power to dislodge it. Think of those religious cults that proclaim the Second Coming on a certain date. The faithful assemble on a mountain-top the day before to await the blessed event. Nothing happens. Do they realise the folly of their belief? Not at all. The cult leader just revises his calculations and announces a new date. When the new date arrives, there are the faithful, waiting on the mountain-top again.
There are two social zones in which differences in outcome by race are most plain and have proven most intractable: law enforcement and academic achievement. Decade after decade, social program after social program, administration after administration, black Americans end up in jail at rates stupendously higher than whites and Asians, and black Americans perform academically at rates dismally lower than whites and Asians.
Nothing works, nothing changes; the statistics stay stubbornly the same. What's a race denialist to do? Well, he could abandon his faith and become a race realist; but as I've already noted, that's asking the psychologically impossible. So what to do?
Here's what the race denialists have come up with at last: Stop generating the statistics! Too many blacks getting arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed? Stop arresting them! Blacks' academic test scores are way lower than whites' and Asians'? Stop testing!
This is actually the point race denialism has arrived at. I'll take the two topics, law enforcement and academic testing, in turn in two separate segments.
Before I launch the first of those segments, though, let me just alert you to a new book from very occasional VDARE.com contributor Ed Dutton, a/k/a The Jolly Heretic. The book is called Making Sense of Race and it came out from Washington Summit Publishers the week before last. It's a good, long, solidly-researched debunking of race denialist dogma. Incredibly, it seems to me, it's available at Amazon.com. I'm wondering how much longer that will be the case, once the Thought Police get wind of it.
OK, let's look at those two zones, law enforcement and academic testing, where the race denialists are digging in. First, law enforcement.
[Permalink]
05 — Race denialism gone wild: (1) Law enforcement. Monday this week the city of Los Angeles, California, home to our country's largest prosecutor's office and biggest nonfederal jail system, got itself a new District Attorney: 66-year-old Cuban immigrant and ex-cop George Gascón.


vdare--2020-12-12--MEMO FROM MIDDLE AMERICA:  As I’ve Been Saying, U.S. Election System Worse Than Mexico’s

Earlier, by Ann Coulter: Voter Fraud Never Happens! (Except in These 10,000 Cases)
The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected Texas’ lawsuit that documented malpractice in the 2020 presidential election [Supreme Court denies Texas, Trump appeal over election results in four other states, by Tyler Olson, Bill Mears, Michael Ruiz, Shannon Bream, Fox News, December 11, 2020]. And the Leftist Mainstream Media want you to know President Trump’s claim that vote fraud delivered victory to Sleepy Joe Biden are “false” and baseless,” as The Associated Press put it [AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s claims of vote rigging are all wrong, by Hope Ye, Ali Swenson, Amanda Seitz, December 3, 2020]. Trump is wrong, we are told, to say “this was like from a Third World nation,” as he has declared more than once [Remarks by President Trump at the Presentation of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Dan Gable, White House.gov, Dec. 7, 2020]. Biden is “president-elect.” But Trump is right. The relatively low trustworthiness of U.S. elections was known even before 2020 and can be demonstrated by comparison with (another?) Third World country: Mexico.
In The Electoral Integrity Project’s report, based on a study of international elections from 2012 to 2018, the U.S. came in near the bottom of the second highest group for honest elections…tied with Mexico [Electoral Integrity Worldwide by Pippa Norris and Max Gromping, May 2019].
Countries fell into five categories, Very High to Very Low, on a 100-point scale. Scores were based on 11 factors: laws, procedures, district boundaries, voter registration, party and candidate registration, media coverage, campaign finance, voting process, vote counts, results and electoral authorities.
Some countries, among them China, home of Eric Swalwell’s former Main Squeeze and Hunter Biden’s benefactors, were not included. But Americans would be shocked to know their elections don’t rate the top grade. We only make the second highest group.
Here’s the breakdown:
Very High (70 and above): Australia, Canada, Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Portugal, and an array of European countries from France to the Baltics, Poland and Scandinavia;
High (60-69): Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Britain scored 66, Argentina 65, and Brazil 64. Embarrassingly, the United States scored 61, tied with Mexico, Panama and Grenada.
Moderate (50-59): India, Bolivia, Botswana, India, and Ukraine.
Low (40-49): Russia and Venezuela; and,
Very Low (Below 40): Iraq, Mozambique, Nicaragua
What our score will be next time is anyone’s guess. We can only hope our election scores higher than Botswana’s!
Living in Mexico at the time, I was embarrassed about the Bush-Gore fiasco in 2000, particularly because that year’s Mexican election went smoothly.
The 2005 Carter-Baker Commission was set up in response to that 2000 election.
Named for former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, the commission offered many suggestions to improve our electoral system that could have helped avoid what unfolded in the last month:
They called on states to increase voter ID requirements; to be leery of mail-in voting; to halt ballot harvesting; to maintain voter lists, in part to ensure dead people are promptly removed from them; to allow election observers to monitor ballot counting; and to make sure voting machines are working properly. They also wanted the media to refrain from calling elections too early and from touting exit polls. All of this may sound eerily similar to the issues in the prolonged presidential election battle of 2020. But these were among the 87 recommendations from the 2005 report of the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, known informally as the Carter-Baker Commission. [7 Ways the 2005 Carter-Baker Report Could Have Averted Problems With 2020 Election by Fred Lucas, Daily Signal, November 20, 2020]
Now let’s look at those seven ways in detail [Building Confidence in U.S. Elections: Report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, September 2005].
VOTER IDS
That’s something I’ve been writing about for years, contrasting our slipshod system with Mexico’s, where all voters get an official voter ID card. To obtain one, a Mexican must demonstrate, with documentation, his nationality and residence.
The card displays a photo of the voter along with other security features.
On election day, every polling station has a book with the photograph of every voter in the precinct. This book is available to the poll workers and observers from various parties to match the card against the voter.
North of the border, only 36 states require or request ID on election, and only six states require photo ID.
What a joke!
MAIL-IN AND ABSENTEE VOTING RISKS
For years, living in Mexico, I voted in the U.S. by absentee ballot. But I had to request the ballot from afar, and I had to keep up with it. They sent me the ballot with three envelopes in which to put it.
Nowadays, we have too much early voting and too many absentee ballots. For too many voters, it’s a convenience. It must be strictly limited and controlled.
Then there’s “ballot harvesting,” whereby operatives gather ballots en masse and turn them in. Incredibly, that practice is legal in the majority of U.S. states [‘Dangerous and Foolish’: How Legal Vote Harvesting Prompts Illegal Conduct by Political Operatives, by Fred Lucas, The Daily Signal, October 24, 2019].
The Carter-Baker Commission recommended ending that practice.
AVOIDING DUPLICATE REGISTRATION ACROSS STATE LINES
I have voted in three U.S. States in my life. I never cheated by voting in two states, but I easily could have.
That’s because, as the Carter-Baker Commission said, “invalid voter files, which contain ineligible, duplicate, fictional, or deceased voters,” the Commission reported, “are an invitation to fraud.”
You don’t say!
The solution, according to the Commission:
[T]o assure that lists take account of citizens moving from one state to another, voter databases should be made interoperable between states. This would serve to eliminate duplicate registrations, which are a source of potential fraud.
ELECTION OBSERVERS FOR INTEGRITY
In the 2020 election, accusations have surfaced that Democrats blocked GOP election observers from watching the vote count. Imagine what we’d say if that happened in a Third World country!
RELIABLE VOTING MACHINES
The Carter-Baker commission also suggested that voting machines produce a paper record so the voter can verify that the machine correctly records his vote.
It’s funny, but before 2020, Democrats complained about that.
One America News Network dug up a 2017 CNN report that discussed the danger of hacking voting machines, even including a prediction from an expert that the 2020 election would be hacked [Exclusive CNN Report From 2017 Exposes Dangerous Vulnerabilities In U.S. Voting Machines, OANN, December 10, 2020].
MEDIA CALLING ELECTIONS
The Main Stream Media must stop calling tight races. The MSM should exercise restraint, but we can’t expect that, especially when an ally of the MSM is on the ballot.
PROSECUTING VOTER FRAUD
The Carter-Baker commission recommended vigorously prosecuting voter fraud, something that is not done often enough. Of course, it doesn’t help that Leftists deny that fraud even occurs.
After all that, consider this from the same Jimmy Carter, or at least the people who run the Carter Center: The center applauded “a successful audit process” [The Carter Center Congratulates the State of Georgia on a Successful Audit Process] despite what was obvious, massive fraud.
Yet Georgia Republican Chairman David Shafer and President Trump have filed a criminal complaint in Fulton County, Georgia, alleging tens of thousands of illegal votes. Frighteningly, that total includes more than 60,000 underage voters [Trump Lawsuit: Thousands of Fraudulent Votes in Georgia Cast by Felons, Dead, Underage Voters, by Jordan Davidson, The Federalist, December 7, 2020]. Somehow, the Carter Center missed those.
That is what Trump was up against, and yet SCOTUS tossed Texas’ lawsuit that was at least as serious a challenge to Biden’s victory as Gore’s was to Bush’s 20 years ago.
But Trump can try again, as Fox reported, and must fight to the end.
Most Republicans would have long since surrendered and commenced licking Democrat boots. And some actually have, like those in Georgia. Not Trump.
If any other Republican were in the White House, Americans might never have known how bad the fraud was. Thanks to Trump, now they do.
And they need to know. Honest elections and the smooth transition of power are points of pride with Americans, but if Biden takes the oath on January 20, they might be a thing of the past.
Of course, the MSM will fight fanatically for Biden, as will his crazed supporters inside Social Media:
[W]e will start removing any piece of content…that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. [Supporting the 2020 US Election, The YouTube Team, December 9, 2020]
As we descend into Third World status, we can expect Third World politics. As we import Third World voters, a key plank of Biden’s immigration plan, we can expect more Third World elections.
It’s a grim outlook for the Historic American Nation.
American citizen Allan Wall (email him) moved back to the U.S.A. in 2008 after many years residing in Mexico. Allan's wife is Mexican, and their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here; his News With Views columns are archived here; and his website is here.


vdare--2020-12-11--An Urgent Message From Lydia Brimelow To VDARE.com’s Credit Card Donors

Earlier: Fund VDARE.com Into 2021: Donate Today!
First, from the bottom of my heart I want to thank VDARE.com readers for rallying to support our Year-End Appeal—the time when VDARE.com traditionally raises the bulk of its funds.
As of today, donations have reached just over $78,000, some 39% of our $200,000 goal. And we know some checks will still be snail-mailing their way to us. (See below).
Second, I have to report some very bad news: on Friday morning, our payment processor of several years standing abruptly sent us an email announcing that because of “violations” of its Service agreement, which it did not specify, it intends to stop working with us after Sunday, December 13.
At this point, I do not know if VDARE.com will be able to process credit card donations beyond that date.
We all know that these are dark days for America. This is further proof.
Right now, I must implore you: if you were intending to make a donation to VDARE.com before the year’s end to take advantage of the tax deduction, and wanted to use a credit card, please do so immediately.
We will always accept snail-mailed checks and money orders to PO Box 211, Litchfield CT 06759. Cryptocurrency addresses are also available..
VDARE.com intends to survive, but right now we need all the help you can give us.
DONATE TO VDARE.COM HERE.Many thanks,
Lydia Brimelow


vdare--2020-12-10--A Patriot Lawyer Comments On The McCloskeys' Black, Female, Prosecutor Being Removed

Re:Trump Fights Back: Invites The McCloskeys And Nick Sandmann To Speak At RNC
From: Fabrizio Evola [Email him]
I just saw that Kim Gardner, the (black, female) District Attorney prosecuting the McCloskeys for defending themselves against a BLM mob in St. Louis, was dismissed from the case by the Judge. [Judge dismisses St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner from Mark McCloskey case, by Christine Byers, KSDK, December 10, 2020 ]I have been practicing criminal law for a long time, both prosecution and defense, and I have never seen that happen. I vaguely remember a senior attorney telling me it happened once several years prior in the early part of his career, but it is a very rare occurrence. I also had another attorney ask my advice about filing such a motion in her case, but the case got dismissed instead.
It is rather common to have a prosecutor voluntarily recuse themselves when they or their office have a personal interest. For instance, if the District Attorney is a victim of a crime it is common practice to hire a special prosecutor. I have even served as a special prosecutor on such occasions. This case, however, appears to be quite different. The Judge in the case actually cited the Rule of Professional Conduct in deciding that Gardner should be forcibly removed from the case. From my perspective, that is kind of a big deal and could result in disciplinary action.
I am hoping that this ruling commences an ethics investigation into her behavior. She should become the next Mike Nifong, the prosecutor who lost his license for his handling of the Duke Lacross case. From the beginning, it was obvious that Gardner was using this incident to enhance her national profile rather than serving the interests of justice.
James Fulford writes: If she wanted to convince either a Judge or a jury that this wasn't a purely politically motivated prosecution, she should not have used the case in a fundraising email.


vdare--2020-12-12--MAKING SENSE OF RACE   Debunks Race Denialist Dogma

Let me alert our readers to a new book from very occasional VDARE.com contributor Ed Dutton, a/k/a The Jolly Heretic. The book is called Making Sense of Race and it came out from Washington Summit Publishers the week before last.
It's a good, long, solidly-researched debunking of race denialist dogma. Incredibly, it seems to me, it's available at Amazon.com, including on Kindle. I'm wondering how much longer that will be the case, once the Thought Police get wind of it.


vdare--2020-12-12--Department of Veterans Affairs Puts White Vets At Back Of Line For Vaccines.  Hate Or Science?

Eugene Volokh writes that "The Department of Veterans Affairs will apparently be prioritizing "Black, Hispanic, and Native American" veterans for the coronavirus vaccine", quoting a DVA document that includes "Race and ethnicity. Data shows that some groups of people have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. These include Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities."
Volokh goes on to say
But this would violate equal protection rights. (The Equal Protection Clause by its terms applies only to states, but Supreme Court precedents have held that similar principles apply to the federal government, including in the distribution of government-provided benefits.) Vaccination by Race, and Why It's Unconstitutional by Eugene Volokh, Reason.com, December 10, 2020
Lets assume that this DVA plan is based on hatred for whites.
Steve Sailer wrote recently
It would seem like there are several different possible goals when drawing up a priority plan: A. Minimize deaths B. Minimize quality-adjusted life years lost C. Minimize cases D. Minimize economic harm E. Maximize happiness F. Show you care more for sacralized groups than for demonized group
The demonized group is white Americans, of course. But is there any scientific justification for such a priority?
In Race for the Vaccine Racial politics must not warp a question of public health, by Sally Satel, Persuason, November 16, 2020, Satel, who is an MD, writes
First, let’s consider what we know about risks to Blacks and Hispanics. Members of these groups are infected with the virus at three times the rate of Whites and die at least two times as often. Their risks of exposure are increased because they are more likely than Whites to work lower-paying jobs that require interaction with the public and to travel to those jobs by public transportation. Blacks and Hispanics are also more likely to live in homes with many family members sharing close quarters. The National Academies—non-governmental institutions that offer expert advice on science policy—have proposed an allocation plan giving priority to communities that rate high on the Centers for Disease Control’s Social Vulnerability Index, which takes into account poverty, unemployment and health-insurance rates, among other socioeconomic vulnerabilities. The index would be applied to each of several priority phases, the first being healthcare workers, the second being those who are medically at risk due to concurrent illness and age, and so on. Since certain minorities are more likely to be socially vulnerable to infection with the virus—a status with roots in past discrimination—they will disproportionately receive the vaccine early under that approach, consistent with the public-health goal of maximizing communal benefit. But a person’s race, per se, does not put him or her at greater risk for becoming infected or dying from Covid-19. Race is a correlate but risk is the cause. Therefore, allocating the vaccine based on the moral impulse to correct past injustice would not maximize communal benefit.
What Satel is saying here is that minorities aren't experiencing differential outcomes because of their genes, but because of their behavior. Behaviors include working at low-wage frontline jobs, crowded homes, and I would include not social distancing, and not following general sanitary guidlines, partly because many don't really get the germ theory of disease. (The idea that differential behavior is caused by genes is not to be spoken of.)
Volokh goes on to say
And, as Hans Bader (Liberty Unyielding) notes, this means that the government must use such race-neutral alternatives, instead of using race as a proxy for risk, or using vaccination as a sort of group compensation for the disparate impact of the illness on certain racial groups. Just as the government is generally not allowed "to use race as a proxy for gang membership and violence" even in prisons, and just as "[r]ace cannot be a proxy for determining juror bias or competence," so race can't be used as a proxy for vulnerability to illness, especially when the other factors that Dr. Satel identifies can gauge risk better.
The thing is, there is a lot of scientific evidence that coronavirus varies by race:
So while I distrust the DVA's motives on this, it may be true that blacks are genetically more in need of the vaccines than whites. (Satel, by the way, ought to know this, she wrote an article called I Am a Racially Profiling Doctor for the NYT in May of 2002.) If that's true, and the government is persuaded by these arguments, it would be a case of the phenomenon I call "Civil Rights Law Doesn't Care If You Die", but applied to blacks, for once.
That's unlikely to happen, though. Despite the Constitution, the Courts rarely uphold "Equal Rights For Whites".


vdare--2020-12-12--The Latest Crisis: English Gardeners Who Are Racist Against Immigrant Plants

James Wong is some sort of Media Presence in Britain:
Not surprisingly, he has Strong Opinions about how English gardeners are racist toward plants.
I was once asked to present a planting concept for E London to a room of (100% white) critics.
Feedback was that international planting ‘didn’t fit the area’ and I ‘should do native wildflowers’
The site was founded by Romans & an immigration epicentre for +2,000 yrs. — James Wong (@Botanygeek) December 12, 2020
The only way to beat his anti-English racism is to outflank it to the left: James Wong is an imperialist biological appropriationist. Kew Gardens is an example of the British Empire appropriating the wealth of diverse cultures, just as the Benin bronzes and the Elgin marbles are.
For a moment, I thought I might have made up a new bit of Woke craziness, but … no, it’s a real thing. For example,
The time has come to decolonise botanical gardens like Kew https://t.co/0kt294Eluc — Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) December 12, 2020
[Comment at Unz.com]


vdare--2020-12-12--Confederate-American Have Rights In Colorado

Law professor and First Amendment stalwart Eugene Volokh has a post on a political discrimination case in Colorado
Firing for Off-Duty Pro-Confederate-Flag Speech May Violate Colorado Statutes So held a federal judge, I think correctly, interpreting those particular statutes, in a lawsuit against United Airlines. Eugene Volokh, Reason.com, December 11, 2020
A woman in Colorado was fired from United Airlines, where she had worked for many years, for posting very mild things in support of the Confederate Flag, based on a campaign to trash the mascot at her old High School. United Airlines filed for "summary judgement" dismissing the suit, and the Judge said "No".
Quotes below are from the judge's decision:
Sometime in August 2017, on her personal time and computer, Plaintiff re-posted to her private Facebook page her support for preserving the "Rebels" mascot of her high school, Weld Central High, including a cartoon soldier superimposed on a Confederate flag (the "Rebels mascot post"
Sometime also in August 2017, Plaintiff re-posted to her private Facebook page a video of an African American male in front of a Confederate flag who, among other things, opined that the Confederate flag is not the evil that many people say it is (the "Confederate flag post").}
Defendant learned of those messages, investigated them, found other issues with Plaintiff's on-the-job conduct, and terminated Plaintiff based on its purported findings that Plaintiff's negative interactions with subordinates irreparably damaged her ability to supervise…. [1.] Under Colo. Rev. Stat. § 24-34-402.5: It shall be a discriminatory or unfair employment practice for an employer to terminate the employment of any employee due to that employee's engaging in any lawful activity off the premises of the employer during nonworking hours…. This law "was meant to provide a shield to employees who engage in activities that are personally distasteful to their employer, but which activities are legal and unrelated to an employee's job duties." … Plaintiff contends she was terminated because of her private activity in posting material to her own Facebook account…. [T]he record contains … evidence Plaintiff was terminated for her Facebook activity…. The termination letter dated October 16, 2017 begins with the statement that Plaintiff posted "inappropriate and racially insensitive" material to her Facebook account. It states that this posting "was a clear violation of our United Social Media Policy and the [UAL] Guidelines." It informs her that, as a result of the Facebook post, she was being disciplined and investigated. The letter also accuses Plaintiff of "continu[ing] to deny that the racially insensitive Facebook post was inappropriate and that there was anything wrong with posting the racially offensive video on Facebook, where a number of your direct reports could see it."
The point is that this is the employer's political discrimination—like the discrimination against us by payment processors, and against Jared Taylor by Twitter—and that's illegal in Colorado, as well as California, where many major Tech Totalitarian companies are headquartered.
Volokh writes
For more on the state statutes like those discussed here, see this article (and in particular pp. 313-15 on the potentially broad scope of "political activity," as extending beyond election campaigns).
Note, by the way, the date on which this woman posted in support of her Rebel High School mascot--August, 2017. That was the date of the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, which inspired what Patrick Cleburne called a Post-Charlottesville pogrom. This woman was one the victims of that.


vdare--2020-12-11--Nicholas Kristof Shuts Down Pornhub—Should We Cheer Him?

Censorship of the culturally controversial is not my usual topic of interest. But with pornography, I’m starting to wonder.
The other day Visa and Mastercard yanked services for Pornhub, one of the world's biggest pornography operations. It was prompted by the occasionally airheaded Nicholas Kristof's writing: An Uplifting Update, on the Terrible World of Pornhub, December 9, 2020.
I have mixed feelings. Immigration patriotism, white advocacy and other conservative causes know the sting of deplatforming by payment method providers (not to mention every other institution, excluding government).
But porn is bad stuff. If Jesus instructed us to "flee sexual immorality", the ceaseless flow of raw sexual material from the Internet makes it hard to run away fast enough. Children can click on it with ease.
The technical objection is that it’s powerfully addictive. Dopamine gets released, creating compulsions that are difficult to control. Descriptions of the lock porn can put on watchers are alarming.
It can harm relationships, and may disincentivize young men from going out into the world to find actual young women.
Then there's the issue of the seemingly thousands of people making a life-altering decision by appearing in videos that will last for eternity on the Internet. It's quite unlike the pre-Internet days when there were a few dozen well-known performers who'd committed to infamy.
Who are all these people? Are they so numerous now that future mates, employers and social media users won't even notice?
Alt-right circles seem to have taken an anti-porn position, See Another Reason Not to Watch Porn by Hubert Collins, American Renaissance, June 15, 2020, which points out that PornHub (which is, in effect, YouTube for porn) has been using its ill-gotten gains to fund the SPLC!
And here's the New York Times telling us last year that objections to pornography are the equivalent of mass-murdering anti-Semitism:
Among Some Hate Groups, Porn Is Viewed as a Conspiracy, by By Rob Kuznia, June 7, 2019
Nicholas Kristof [Email him] excluded, obviously.
Legally, there aren’t the First Amendment concerns you might think. "Obscenity" is a perfectly legitimate category, and both porn companies and their lawyers know that prosecutors could come for them at any minute. [It’s High Time to Prosecute Obscene P*rnography. Here’s How. FamilyAlliance.com, February 11, 2020]
I've never been convinced that pornography was "speech" in the pure sense of ideas and arguments being conveyed. That's a bastardization of the liberal jurisprudence of the last half-century.


vdare--2020-12-12--US Special Operations Chief To Black Officers' Group: "Diversity And Inclusion" A Major Priority

Earlier: USAF Recruiting Service Commander Declares Reducing The Number of White Male Pilots A "War-Fighting Imperative"
So what’s the point of a military again, when our ever increasing diversity should be the ultimate shield against foreign invasion and threats from China and Russia? From an official Tweet quoting Gen. Richard Clarke, who is the commander of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM):
“Diversity and inclusion requires action. It requires decisions and it requires leaders that must put themselves out there and must make purposeful decisions,” Gen. Richard Clarke, commander, USSOCOM speaking at Tampa ROCKS, Inc. over the weekend. Diversity strengthens #SOF.
The Rocks, INC, is a black officers' group dating from the 1960s, when anti-black discrimination in the military was still credible. There are no white officers groups, and if their were, no Generals would be speaking to them.
For those unaware of how vital USSOCOM is, here’s a quick explanation:
MISSION USSOCOM develops and employs fully capable Special Operations Forces to conduct global special operations and activities as part of the Joint Force to support persistent, networked and distributed Combatant Command operations and campaigns against state and non-state actors to protect and advance U.S. policies and objectives. WHAT USSOCOM DOES -Civil Affairs -Hostage Rescue and Recovery -Counterinsurgency -Military Information Support Operations -Counterterrorism -Security Force Assistance -Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction -Special Reconnaissance -Direct Action -Unconventional Warfare -Foreign Humanitarian Assistance -Preparation of the Environment -Foreign Internal Defense VISION Empowered SOF Professionals, globally networked, partnered and integrated, relentlessly seeking advantage in every domain to compete and win for the Joint Force and the Nation.
For those keeping track at home, here’s an equation for you: Diversity and Inclusion > Protecting America…
I’d say military leaders within the Chinese and Russian military aren’t too worried about the long-term prospects of the United States military’s capabilities…
[Comment at Unz.com]


vdare--2020-12-12--John Derbyshire: Race Denial Fanatics Vs. Law Enforcement, Academic Reality

[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]
The core ideology of our Ruling Class, which citizens contradict at peril of losing their livelihood, is Race Denialism. Statistical differences in outcome by race cannot possibly be biological in origin. The only reasons for those differences you may discuss in public are social: poverty, oppression, lack of self-esteem. And in fact all of those reasons have a single root cause: “systemic racism” on the part of whites towards other races.
Of course, there are at least two problems with this Race Denialism.
You might therefore think that the evidence against Race Denialism is now so glaringly obvious as to force Denialists to some reconsideration—some doubts as to the soundness of their theory.
That, however, would be to underestimate the fanaticism of the Race Denialists. Once a big idea has a real grip on believers, mere logic has no power to dislodge it.
Think of those religious cults that proclaim the Second Coming on a certain date. The faithful assemble on a mountain-top the day before to await the blessed event. Nothing happens. Do they realize the folly of their belief? Not at all. The cult leader just revises his calculations and announces a new date. When the new date arrives, there are the faithful, waiting on the mountain-top again.
There are two social zones in which differences in outcome by race are most plain and have proven most intractable: 1) law enforcement; and 2) academic achievement. Decade after decade, social program after social program, administration after administration, black Americans end up in jail at rates stupendously higher than whites and Asians, and black Americans perform academically at rates dismally lower than whites and Asians.
Nothing works, nothing changes; the statistics stay stubbornly the same. What's a race denialist to do?
Well, he could abandon his faith and become a race realist; but as I've already noted, that's asking the psychologically impossible.
So here's what the Race Denialists have come up with at last: Stop generating the statistics! Too many blacks getting arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed? Stop arresting them! Blacks' academic test scores are way lower than whites' and Asians'? Stop testing!
This is actually the point Race Denialism has arrived at.
Law Enforcement
Monday December 7, the city of Los Angeles CA, home to our country's largest prosecutor's office and biggest nonfederal jail system, got itself a new District Attorney: 66-year-old Cuban immigrant and ex-cop George Gascón.
At his swearing-in ceremony on Monday, Mr. Gascón [Tweet him] promised a sweeping, top-to-bottom relaxation of law enforcement for the city. No more cash bail; no more prosecutions of most first-time, nonviolent offenders; no more enhanced prison sentences for accused gang members; a review of thousands of old cases to reduce sentences or overturn convictions altogether.
A whole slew of misdemeanors will no longer be prosecuted by DA Gascón's office at all. They have essentially been de-criminalized.
Driving without a license, or with a suspended license? No prosecution. Public intoxication? No prosecution. Open soliciting for sex? No prosecution. Vagrancy? No prosecution.
You're a small-business owner and customers can't get into your store because of bums sleeping in the street outside—or, when not sleeping, shooting up with drugs, picking fights with passers-by, or crapping? Don't bother calling the cops, they won't respond.
Most incredibly, DA Gascón will no longer prosecute for resisting arrest. How will that work?
If anyone in authority sincerely wanted to reduce the shooting of suspects by police, there would be no better strategy than to mount a massive long-term publicity campaign to tell people not to resist arrest. Conversely, if some lunatic wanted to increase the shooting of perps by cops, the best way to do that would be to encourage people to resist arrest—by decriminalizing it, for instance.
Apparently, DA Gascón is that lunatic.
As Heather Mac Donald wrote:
The vast majority of police shootings … could be eliminated tomorrow, if all suspects complied with officers' commands. Resisting arrest is the biggest predictor of officer use of force. ‘No bail’ just part of it: LA’s new DA totally eviscerating basic law, NY Post, December 9, 2020
And I must say, for such a powerful official of the law, DA Gascón's grasp of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence seems not very firm. Quote from him at Monday's swearing-in ceremony
There's no question that the murder of George Floyd shook the conscience of this country in many corners where people were not concerned about this work before. [‘A Tsunami of Change’: How Protests Fueled a New Crop of Prosecutors, By Tim Arango, NYT, December 8, 2020]
So the Los Angeles DA pronounces a murder verdict on the Minneapolis police officers three months before their trial is scheduled to open.
Is this really a guy Los Angelenos want supervising their city's law enforcement?
Apparently, it is. They elected him: In fact he prevailed in a runoff election against Jackie Lacey, who (a) is female, (b) is black, and (c) had the support of every big political player in Southern California, including the Mayor of L.A.
It's not just Los Angeles, either. The New York Times—which, by the way, in their "news" story about DA Gascón's swearing-in above, also mentions, quote, "the killing of Mr. Floyd," although no killing has yet been proved, he may have died of an overdose—that the decriminalization of crime is a nationwide trend. Quote:
The dynamics that propelled Mr. Gascón to victory played out in similar fashion in Austin, Texas, where a candidate vowing to end prosecutions of some drug sales won, and in Orlando, Fla., where voters elected Monique Worrell, whose background includes investigating claims of wrongful convictions.
…followed by approving mentions of similar cases in Georgia, Michigan, Colorado and Ohio.
Those of us with long memories have been here before. My favorite example, which I have pulled out from my own long memory at least once before, features "Turn 'em Loose Bruce." Longish Quote from self:
Back in the late 1980s, there was a judge in New York City named Bruce Wright, known to all as "Turn 'Em Loose Bruce" for his lenience towards the criminals who came up before him. This was one of those liberal judges who had an excuse for every felon, even for those too stupid or obstreperous to have prepared an excuse for themselves. Well, one day Judge Wright [pictured right] got mugged in the street near his home. He was off work for a few days. It was a big story in the tabloid newspapers, and a lot of people were making jokes about it. When Judge Wright returned to the bench, he made a point of starting off that day's session with an announcement: "As I'm sure you all know, I was the victim of a criminal assault the other day. I want to make it clear that this experience will in no way change my sentencing policies on this bench!" As he paused to let this sink in, someone called out from the back of the courtroom: "Mug him again!"
To judge from the results of these DA elections, a substantial part of our country is now infected with what I hereby christen "Turn 'Em Loose Bruce Syndrome."
Mug 'em again!
Academic Test Scores
Here the Race Denialists have gotten a big assist from the Coronavirus panic. Resistant as I am to conspiracy theories, I'm starting to wonder if perhaps this virus was sent to us by Satan in order to destroy civilization.
Use of the SAT and ACT standardized tests is fading fast. Here's a typical announcement from the University of California at Los Angles:
UCLA will not consider SAT or ACT scores for admission or scholarship purposes through fall 2024. Freshman Requirements, UCLA Official Website
It's like that all over. Here’s the University of Texas:
High school students who apply to The University of Texas at Austin for fall 2021 undergraduate admission will not be required to submit an ACT or SAT test score as part of their application. Standardized Testing Policy FAQs, UT Austin Official Website
The Ivies, too—Yale University:
Applicants who are unable to complete an exam or who choose not to report exam scores will not be disadvantaged. Standardized Testing Requirements & Policies, Yale Official Website
The official explanation for all this dropping of SAT/ACT requirements: a lot of the test centers have closed, so that students who want to take the tests, can't. The InsideHigherEd website claims that more than half of the students who registered to take the SAT on September 26th, couldn't.[ More Bad News for the SAT, by Scott Jaschik, September 28, 2020]
I don't see any reason to doubt that official explanation. But it plays right into the hands of the Race Deniers, who've been agitating to kill standardized tests since way before the coronavirus showed up. The University of California was being sued in state court last year by activists seeking to get rid of SAT and ACT requirements. (Carol Christ, [Email her] the chancellor of the Berkeley campus naturally sided with the activists.) [Should The SAT Test Be Outlawed?, by Richard Vedder, Forbes, December 16, 2019]
So how should colleges select the most promising students from among their applicant pools? Holistically. The word "holistic" shows up time and again in college statements about their admissions processes.
What does it mean in practice? Nine years ago at the Claremont Review of Books I reviewed Andrew Ferguson's book titled Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kids Into College. I wrote:
Ferguson closes a long paragraph on "holistic" admissions with the observation: "A more practical and accurate term for holistic admissions is 'completely subjective.” Which I think we all kind of knew.
John Derbyshire [ email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire's writings at VDARE.com can do so here.


vdare--2020-12-12--Will Anyone Have The Nerve To Tell "Dr. Jill" Biden To Stop Insisting On Her Comic Title?

Earlier: Biden's Low IQ: How Dumb Is He? Everyone Should Be Starting To Notice!
Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D. by Joseph Epstein, December 11, 2020
Personally, I kind of like using honorifics for people. It adds a little color to life: e.g., I might write “Even Sir Mick has admitted that his lyrics for ‘Brown Sugar’ might be …”
So I often refer to a person with Ph.D. rather than an M.D. as “Dr. So-and-So.”
But insisting that other people call you Doctor, especially when you got a doctorate in Education (which 95% of the time is just a way to pad your pay from the public school district), is pretty tacky.
Mick Jagger, I’m guessing, doesn’t stop people who say “Mr. Jagger, may I have your autograph” and tell them, “Address me only as ‘Sir Mick:’ I have been knighted by Her Majesty.” Or maybe he does. Who knows?
In general, the Bidens seem like people of run-of-the-mill IQs (e.g., Beau, the late Good Son, failed the admittedly tough Delaware bar exam three times) who are insecure about their merely normal brainpower, and overreact embarrassingly. Thus, this incident on the campaign trail in 1987:
For the facts, see:
In his statement today, Mr. Biden, who attended the Syracuse College of Law and graduated 76th in a class of 85, acknowledged: ”I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school and my recollection of this was inaccurate.” As for receiving three degrees, Mr. Biden said: ”I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science. My reference to degrees at the Claremont event was intended to refer to these majors – I said ‘three’ and should have said ‘two.’ ” Mr. Biden received a single B.A. in history and political science. ”With regard to my being the outstanding student in the political science department,” the statement went on. ”My name was put up for that award by David Ingersoll, who is still at the University of Delaware.” In the Sunday interview, Mr. Biden said of his claim that he went to school on full academic scholarship: ”My recollection is – and I’d have to confirm this – but I don’t recall paying any money to go to law school.” Newsweek said Mr. Biden had gone to Syracuse ”on half scholarship based on financial need.” In his statement today, Mr. Biden did not directly dispute this, but said he received a scholarship from the Syracuse University College of Law ”based in part on academics” as well as a grant from the Higher Education Scholarship Fund of the state of Delaware. He said the law school ”arranged for my first year’s room and board by placing me as an assistant resident adviser in the undergraduate school.” As for the moot court competition, Mr. Biden said he had won such a competition, with a partner, in Kingston, Ontario, on Dec. 12, 1967. Mr. Biden acknowledged that in the testy exchange in New Hampshire, he had lost his temper. ”I exaggerate when I’m angry,” Mr. Biden said, ”but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.” Mr. Biden’s questioner had made the query in a mild tone, but provoked an explosive response from Mr. Biden.
[Comment at Unz.com]


vdare--2020-12-12--Ed Dutton's MAKING SENSE OF RACE   Debunks Race Denialist Dogma