Broadcast Note

I'll be livestreaming tomorrow at 2PM Pacific Time, interviewing a German friend about life there today.
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Science Too!

A lady neuroscientist behind something called Me Too Stem is, quite predictably, catching hell for being a flake and maybe a crook:

An outspoken campaigner against sexual harassment in science is facing a crisis of leadership at MeTooSTEM, the volunteer organization she founded last year to support victims and hold perpetrators and institutions accountable.

Since November, seven members of the leadership team have resigned, citing concerns about the behavior of its founder, BethAnn McLaughlin, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

In their resignation letters, former MeTooSTEM leaders said that McLaughlin kept them in the dark about key decisions and reacted with hostility when they asked about the small organization’s finances and legal structure. They also worried that McLaughlin had alienated allies through her combative tweets.

Me Too Stem claims "women in STEM have the highest rate of sexual harassment outside of the military" and deplores that of an annual 37 billion dollar National Institute of Health budget not a cent of grant money has been diverted from "abusers" to, say, Me Too Stem.

McLaughlin won the "Disobedience Award" from these folks:

Don't laugh. The cash award is 250,000 dollars.

She's already lost a tenure track position for alienating her allies. I like to think it's Karma for this:

BethAnn McLaughlin has no time for James Watson, especially not when the 90-year-old geneticist is peering out from a photo on the wall of her guest room at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Banbury Center.

“I don’t need him staring at me when I’m trying to go to sleep,” McLaughlin told a December 2018 gathering at the storied New York meeting center as she projected a photo of her redecorating job: She had hung a washcloth over the image of Watson, who co-discovered DNA’s structure, directed the lab for decades—and is well-known for racist and sexist statements. 

The washcloth image was part of McLaughlin’s unconventional presentation—by turns sobering, hilarious, passionate, and profane—to two dozen experts who had gathered to wrestle with how to end gender discrimination in the biosciences. McLaughlin, a 51-year-old neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) in Nashville, displayed the names of current members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) who have been sanctioned for sexual harassment. She urged other NAS members—several of whom sat in the room—to resign in protest, “as one does.” She chided institutions for passing along “harassholes” to other universities. “The only other places that do this are the Catholic Church and the military,” she said.

Summer Re-run

Requiem for Mystery

the bond of blood exacts in price,
its own kind drawn from other types,
man too must take his pay in kind,
and pray relief from the divine.

Or so it was, not long ago,
but now men's bellies all are full,
blood and bonds are history,
entombed with Guilt and Mystery.

no blood no burden,
thus no Divine,
pray forgiveness, in such a time?
our hands are clean our minds are pure,
but can we be so very sure?
for
he that suffers away unseen,
bears that burden, for you, and me

The Natural

President Trump, the ultimate political outsider, is a far better politician than executive.

He may be hopelessly ineffective, he may be abandoning patriotic immigration reform, he may be selling out to the neocons out of exhaustion or stupidity, but his trolling remains on point.

After immigration the issue most responsible for his election was law and order. It's hard to imagine his election to president without Obama's second term of racial demagogy and rioting. Support for police was a popular theme.

The crime bill makes political if not moral sense. The political utility of the bill was almost certainly a leading factor in Trump's embrace of it. It's politically clever, but morally disastrous. He accepts the very premises upon which Obama-era demagogy is based. This is a little case study in democratic corruption and the limits of political trolling--to win election Trump adopts the Democrats' most corrosive and dishonest narratives, the lie of a legal system biased against blacks. He helps, incidentally, the progressives in their effort to establish a sort of privilege for blacks in the criminal justice system.

Politicians hate him because he's not one of them. But Donald Trump has spent his life campaigning, on behalf of Donald Trump. He was born a politician.

Solo Nightstream

Power and the Power of Suggestion

James Damore's firing, the recent brave missive from a Google engineer complaining the company's "outrage mobs will hunt down any conservative, any Christian, and any independent free thinker at Google who does not bow down to their agenda", cases of these same "mobs" lobbying already activist CEOs for even more censorship of "hate" and "fake news", Jack Dorsey says conservatives don't feel safe at Twitter; the socials and higher education are microcosms of the world they have planned for us. A world where right-wing, conservative or nationalist sentiment isn't possible because expression of it is swiftly suppressed by a diligent community--what Steve Sailer calls the "voluntary auxiliary thought police". The socials are home of that force's elite corps.

Something like the dynamic of the university--indoctrinated students organizing to demand of indoctrinating institutions more indoctrination--plays out in the socials, where even an outright activist CEO like Tim Cook or Jack Dorsey isn't safe from the mob. Profit still reigns, but it has to pay off social justice. Increasingly, where matters of social justice intrude, no one is quite in charge. Mob rules, but the mob is just being a stickler regarding the rules of the respectable.

A tiny subset of the population contrives their own drama and its resolution determines the course of society. "Me too" was spawned in the universities in the early nineties with the first wave of "rape culture" propaganda.

Elite and mob are in perverse harmony. It's hard to tell where power ends and popular resentment begins. Look how little it took to get a British rail service to take down advertisements for Morrissey's latest record

Adverts for the new album by the former Smiths singer have been taken down on the Merseyrail network.

Morrissey has previously expressed support for the far-right For Britain party and earlier this month wore a badge with its logo on during a TV show, but he denies he is a racist.

Merseyrail apologised and said the posters did not reflect its "values". 

The adverts, which contain no political message, were removed after a traveller on a Southport service to Moorfields contacted the company to ask if it agreed with Morrissey's opinions.

The man, who asked not to be named, told the BBC he was not "offended" by the posters and did not demand they were taken down.

He said he just questioned the company on whether they were appropriate.  

No one actually did anything. Nothing really happened. Someone asked a ridiculous question and down came the offending adverts that no one seemed to be offended by.

Honk honk went the train.

The Specter Haunting AI

Lost internet connection explains my absence from the stream at the end. I was not raptured after all.
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A Bright Shining Lie

Rumors of Barack Obama's brilliance appear to have been greatly exaggerated. As for the legendary eloquence I saw no signs of it; so many others testify to it I have to concede it's there.

His speech at the Democratic National Convention should be noted for its dishonesty, a paean to unity from the future president of Black Lives Matter rioting and deliberate ethnic "transformation". As it is, no one seems to remember a word of it, especially those who praise its brilliance.

At this stage we're fortunate he's a bit of a fraud--a higher energy Obama would be truly dangerous. As it is he seems to have lapsed quickly into irrelevance after having had a successful two-term presidency, like George W. Bush before him. Both got the big initiatives they wanted; both failed to produce "comprehensive immigration reform" against the gale force headwinds of popular rejection. Aside from whether or not they were good for the country, they were good for their respective factional alliances.

If Bush proved knowledge and intelligence weren't necessary for a successful administration Obama proved engagement wasn't necessary either. Barack Obama behaved as if he was deigning to lead an unworthy nation--a nation that declared him worthy just for showing up. I suspect those are related somehow. It's almost as if Obama disdains the nation because he knows better. He occasionally showed the good sense to tamp down the groupie-like expectations of his Democratic fan base.

But like Bush it's remarkable how little influence he seems to have after leaving office. American presidents tend to fade out quickly once we're done with them; still, Obama's relative youth, activist origins and the phenomenon around him were supposed to make him different. But a post-presidency career doesn't run itself for the most part like the executive office. One has to be creative. After telling his personal story--which really isn't that interesting after all--and repeating progressive platitudes, the man doesn't have much to say.

Even leftists sometimes wondered if he wasn't something of a low energy guy.  Gawker in 2011:

Barack Obama is at the nadir of his political popularity and effectiveness. He has been maneuvered into an economic corner of 9%-plus unemployment by a relentlessly nihilistic Congress. His achievements—killing bin Laden, saving the auto industry at negligible cost—are written off as flukes. Plus all this 9/11 anniversary stuff! We hear the New York Times is looking into whether it's all starting to get to him—like, clinically.

We're told by a source inside the Times that the paper is preparing a story arguing that Obama no longer finds joy in the political back-and-forth, has seemed increasingly listless to associates, and is generally exhibiting the litany of signs that late-night cable commercials will tell you add up to depression. Or maybe Low T.

Either way, the investigation was described to us as taking seriously the notion that Obama may be suffering from a depressive episode. Of course, absent a telltale Wellbutrin prescription or testimony from the man himself, it's really impossible to achieve a reliable diagnosis. And a story like "Obama Appears to Suffer From Depression" can be easily downgraded to "Political Travails Begin to Take Personal Toll on Obama." So the story in question, if it ever comes out, may not end up supporting the depression thesis. But rest assured: There are people at the Times who, based on the paper's reporting, believe Obama is depressed—the kind of depression where, if he weren't the president of the United States, he wouldn't be getting out of bed in the morning.

The Democrats have a Barack Obama problem: there is not much there:

Of course, before any serious endorsement conversation can commence, Obama has to finish his book (between rounds of golf and raising millions for his foundation). The writing has been going more slowly than he’d expected, and according to several people who have spoken with him, the 44th president is feeling competitive with his wife, whose own book, Becoming, was the biggest release of 2018 and is on track to be the best-selling memoir in history.

This all suggests Obama has no control over Michelle Obama's camp.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others in this story, these sources note he’ll occasionally point out in conversation that he’s writing this book himself, while Michelle used a ghostwriter. He’s also trying to balance the historical and political needs of a project that will be up to his standards as a writer, and not 1,000 pages long. Obama’s research process has been intense and convoluted, and it’s still very much ongoing, from the legal pads he had shipped to Marlon Brando’s old island in French Polynesia, where he spent a month in March 2017, to the interviews that aides have been conducting with former members of his administration to jog and build out memories.

"Remind me what happened again?" Pity the editors. Remarkable that this man sold as a great communicator actually tends toward reticence. The words have to be dragged out of him.

As with Becoming, this book will have more than a standard release. Aides expect Obama to go on tour, with a rush of interviews in which he’ll be expected to talk not just about what he’s written, but about Trump and whatever political news is unfolding that day. When that conversation has come up internally, according to people involved in the discussions, he often says simply, “I can handle it.”

Can he?

Today in Justice

Napoleon said "what is history but a fable agreed upon?" So is social justice. More famously Churchill said "history is written by the victors." Victorious social justice does history's victors one better: it writes the present. Now it wants to write the future.

The Narrative proceeds as continuous real-time fable-making and up-to-the-minute historical revision. The progressive left casts the future as a utopia always receding on the horizon--it works like the promised return of a messiah. Nobody really wants it or knows what it means, but their faith in it is their bedrock, until it becomes no longer tenable. The utopia is now a problem for the powerful who rule by the mandate of "social justice"--like the messiah it isn't coming and if it did it would mean the end of the game and a surrender of power.

But, thankfully, progressive utopia is laughable as a possibility and no one really wants it anyway. Not the various ethnic groups coalescing around "social justice", certainly. They all have their respective visions of it--with them on top, or near as can be, and whitey on the bottom. It would be comic if it didn't involve our demise.

No, the left now fears only the future. The present is in the bag, the past has been ritually killed, but the future looms outside control.

A bogus research non-profit calling itself AI Now is worried about AI:

RESEARCH FINDINGS 

There is a diversity crisis in the AI sector across gender and race. Recent studies found only 18% of authors at leading AI conferences are women, and more than 80% of AI professors are men. This disparity is extreme in the AI industry: women comprise only 15% of AI research staff at Facebook and 10% at Google. There is no public data on trans workers or other gender minorities. For black workers, the picture is even worse. For example, only 2.5% of Google’s workforce is black, while Facebook and Microsoft are each at 4%. Given decades of concern and investment to redress this imbalance, the current state of the field is alarming.  

One of the paper's recommendations of course is more data "transparency" and progress reports. If activists have their way, of course, these become federal requirements. Boldface added: social justice is blind. Those "decades of concern and investment" aren't the industry's failure but social justice's failure--if anyone was paying attention, this argument would be a laughable self-own.

The AI sector needs a profound shift in how it addresses the current diversity crisis. The AI industry needs to acknowledge the gravity of its diversity problem, and admit that existing methods have failed to contend with the uneven distribution of power, and the means by which AI can reinforce such inequality. Further, many researchers have shown that bias in AI systems reflects historical patterns of discrimination. These are two manifestations of the same problem, and they must be addressed together.  

The paper conflates two goals, diversifying the ranks of AI tech and, more importantly I suspect, beginning the groundwork for taking control of its content and direction; among its recommendations is AI that looks too threatening to dogma should be forbidden from the start.

The overwhelming focus on ‘women in tech’ is too narrow and likely to privilege white women over others. We need to acknowledge how the intersections of race, gender, and other identities and attributes shape people’s experiences with AI. The vast majority of AI studies assume gender is binary, and commonly assign people as ‘male’ or ‘female’ based on physical appearance and stereotypical assumptions, erasing all other forms of gender identity. 

The left simply couldn't ease up on the transsexualism front if it wanted to, so their momentum and trajectory has them heading for direct conflict with basic science. Algorithms using what would have been non-controversial assumptions before--definitions of "man" and "woman", say--are problems now--problems of the left's own making in its trans enthusiasm.

Fixing the ‘pipeline’ won’t fix AI’s diversity problems. Despite many decades of ‘pipeline studies’ that assess the flow of diverse job candidates from school to industry, there has been no substantial progress in diversity in the AI industry. The focus on the pipeline has not addressed deeper issues with workplace cultures, power asymmetries, harassment, exclusionary hiring practices, unfair compensation, and tokenization that are causing people to leave or avoid working in the AI sector altogether.

In one breath he social justice industry bemoans a lack of minority achievement in higher education and in the next in condemns industry for its lack of diversity--as if the latter wouldn't necessarily follow from the former. A compliant press allows them to get away with this and a lot worse, but the fact there was something called "pipeline studies" suggests someone over there understood the problem wasn't hiring bias but minority ability--and they appear to have failed miserably. The paragraph above is a declaration there will be no more acknowledgement of this massive contradiction, not that there was.

The use of AI systems for the classification, detection, and prediction of race and gender is in urgent need of re-evaluation. The histories of ‘race science’ are a grim reminder that race and gender classification based on appearance is scientifically flawed and easily abused. Systems that use physical appearance as a proxy for character or interior states are deeply suspect, including AI tools that claim to detect sexuality from headshots, predict ‘criminality’ based on facial features, or assess worker competence via ‘micro-expressions.’ Such systems are replicating patterns of racial and gender bias in ways that can deepen and justify historical inequality. The commercial deployment of these tools is cause for deep concern.

The future looks bright--like a mushroom cloud on the horizon.

Dysphoria Dollars

thumbnail: Look magazine cover (1/27/1970), featuring article title "Transsexuals: Male or Female?"

You say dysphoria, I say disorder, let's call society off. Talking about transsexualism and profit with Holly and ecce lux.

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Monetizing Madness

Incremental change means you have to stop sometimes and step back to appreciate just how insane things are. Ironically the one place you don't want to look is in the psychiatric profession.

The American Psychiatric Association's DSM still effectively lists transsexualism as a mental disorder--only now it's "transgenderism" and it's classified as "dysphoria". The distinction is politically motivated and narrative-crucial: as far as I can tell, if you have a disorder you're ill, nuts in old-speak, if you have dysphoria you're just unhappy. In fact, you're unhappy because society is ill, with its traditional gender roles. That's implied in the DSM and shouted through the Megaphone.

But there remains a contradiction here for an opposition to exploit, should one develop.

Nantional Review interviewed a Canadian academic and trans heretic who worked on the DSM and was temporarily booted from Twitter for giving a clinically correct, politically incorrect opinion

Madeleine Kearns: You believe transsexualism and gender dysphoria to be a mental disorder. Am I correct in saying that’s how it appears in the DSM-5 [the current edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the bible of psychiatry]?

Ray Blanchard: Yes. The diagnostic entity is called gender dysphoria in DSM-5. It was first introduced in DSM-III under the name transsexualism, and it was still called transsexualism or gender-identity disorder, I forget which, in DSM-IV, but in DSM-5 the name of the entity got changed to gender dysphoria. But the diagnostic criteria are fairly similar.

Kearns: Why was there a name change then? Was that to avoid the word “disorder”?

Blanchard: Yes, it was primarily to make patients and also trans activists and transsexual-activist groups feel happy or that they had been listened to, but I would say that the name change probably owed more to — or owed as much to politics as it did to any change in the science.

There's more than keeping trannies happy here. As if pacifying the emotions of our growing class of drama queens on hormones isn't one impossible task too many already. The APA's adjustment means trans folk can have their cake and eat it too--specifically they can have their normal status and insurance coverage too

Kearns: Is it anything do with the fact that, obviously for insurance and medical providers, there would need to be a medical problem in order for it to justify treatment?

Blanchard: Absolutely. There has to be a diagnosis in order for third-party payment. Whether we are talking public or private insurance, there has to be a diagnosis of some disorder to pay for sex-reassignment surgeries or for people who have drug plans in order to pay for testosterone injections or estrogenic medications for biological males. So this is something that for the trans activists is a stumbling block. If there isn’t a disorder of some sort, then all individuals who wanted to have sex-reassignment surgery or exogenous hormones would be paying the whole cost themselves. 

Kearns: It seems to me that many activists hold two contradictory positions simultaneously. One is that transgenderism is not a mental disorder and the other is that gender dysphoria is a mental disorder. How does one make sense of that? 

Blanchard: I think it’s this kind of Talmudic reading of the DSM. It’s like, well, gender dysphoria is a mental disorder because that’s now listed in the DSM. But transsexualism isn’t a mental disorder because that’s no longer a word used in the DSM. It’s just this kind of weird, naïve outsiders’ literalist interpretation of how the DSM is written.

The battle next be over the extent to which we will be compelled to pay for the transsexual revolution. If we foot the bill we not only pay to perpetuate the problem we probably increase the ranks of the transsexual, already trending upward, encouraged by political propaganda romanticizing the individual transsexual as heroic and, of course, good old American commerce joining in.

If we could force everyone who wants such as gender reassignment surgery to pay for it, we'd probably get a lot less of it. If we can be forced to pay for it, we'll get a lot more of it. Disturbingly, a lot of people stand to profit from this market.

Summer Re-run

Summer. Nineteen eighty-something. We were parting the traffic on the 605 southbound for Huntington Beach; I was wearing nothing but shorts and sandals, one hand holding on to the motorcycle seat, the other cradling a six-pack of beer, football-style. We leaned headlong into the wind like a pair of ski-jumpers, as P. effortlessly weaved the stodgy Honda CB350 through the cars, rendering them still as haystacks. I peered into them as we passed, looking for girls. My head rocked with spontaneous energy, to some silent beat, the effect of the youth spending itself within me. The exquisite expiration of childhood. We shouted back and forth in the gale we carried along with us, laughing through mouths windswept into lunatic grins; we cheerfully harried the odd fellow who was momentarily abreast and sharing our direction. We turned with the road into a direct and endless path toward a sun that will never set...

Quantum Mechanical Cherokee Midnight Moon Stream

Talking Comanches, God and women.

 Indian killer George "Comanche Bill" Porter interviewed by the Davenport Gazette in 1871:

There has been stopping in this city for a couple of days past one of those characters who have made for themselves a celebrant for their bravery and daring on the plains of the far West, among the Indians and the buffalo, in recounting whose deeds and hair-breadth escapes and peculiar lite the pages of romance are filled. The person to whom we refer is no less a character than "Comanche Bill," who is reputed to be the slayer of no less than 183 Indians.

He has been nine years on the plains, part of which time he has been in the employ of the Government as scout. He has hunted and killed Indians for the pleasure and sweets of revenge, and hunted and trapped of necessity. He us now on his return to his old life in the West, having been on a visit to his early home in Minnesota. He is about 28 years of age, of slender build, sandy complexioned, with a profusion of hair that he wears long on the neck. His dress is a pair of buckskin pants, ornamented from the outer seaius with a row of steel buttons, a coarse shirt, an old coat and a broad-brimmed hat. His eye is piercing keen, and he has a grip like a dozen blacksmiths. In response to our questions he said : 

"My name is George W. Porter. I have been on the plains since '62. I was in the Minnesota massacre, near New Ulm, the 18th of August of that year. All my folks were killed except me and my little sister three years old, whom they took prisoner." 

" Where were yon?"
"I was away at the military station on business; went the day before. " The first I knew of the massacre, I was coming along the road on my way home, when I saw a little way ahead of me a wagon filled with women and children, that the settlers had sent to the station for protection. Just then I saw the Indians pounce upon them, and I dodged into the woods. I could hear the hatchets crushing into their heads. They killed 'em all, every one." 

" What did you do ? "
"They scalped 'em, and when the coast was clear, I got out and pretty soon along came a company of cavalry, and we buried them." 

"Why didn't you follow after the Indians?"
"I had no horse, and the captain didn't want his men to go. You see that was in '62, and everything was topsy-turvy." 

" Did yon visit the scene of the massacre at New Ulm?"
"Yes. I went there the next day, and saw my father and mother all scalped and cut up, and my sister was gone. I swore by the eternal God that I would never rest until I had had revenge — a bloody revenge."  

"Did you get any traces of your sister?"
"Why, yes; they was the Yankton, Swanee and Sioux Indians, and I knowed them pretty well. I learned that they had her. I knowed what they'd do with her."  

"'You have not been successful in your efforts to secure her?"
"No; you see, single-handed and alone, a man don't stand much chance. That's what I had been doing all the time. Once, in Arizona, I was right in sight of her. The way I knowed it was her was, I had been on the trail of the band of Sioux that had her a long time, and she was the only white person they had. This was in '65, and then she looked just like mother. I waited, and watched, and picked an Indian off every little while, when he'd get a mile or two from camp, but 'twas no use. They kept too close watch over her."  

"Were you ever captured?"
"Yes. The Blackfeets captured me and Jim Braden in '64, when we were out hunting. They came on us with a rush, but they didn't get us, though, until I had killed one young buck." 

"What did they do with you you?"
"They marched about twenty-five miles to their camp, and there they stripped us of everything we had, and tied us up to a stake and let the women pound us with clubs. They did this every day tor eight days. We were tied with buckskin thongs, and one night it ruined and we slipped out of 'em when they got wet. Jim got away all right, but just as I 'was gettin' my things on, an old squaw woke up and gave the alarm. There was but four Indians in camp. The rest had gone on a hunt. I run, with only my knife. They came up to me, and I had a desperate fight. One shot hit me in the left arm (exhibiting scar. I cut and slashed the buck that got hold of me, and finally give him one under the ribs, so he wont tie any more thongs. And he cut me, too, here, and here, and here (showing the scars on his arm, neck and breast). The other buck never came near, for I'd got this buck's gun afore he'd reached us."

For a minute there I thought Porter must have been the inspiration for a favorite film of mine as a child, Jeremiah Johnson, but no, that story is about a man of that name who's claimed to have killed hundreds of Crow Indians to avenge their killing his wife--a squaw.

Guest Jennifer Scharf has a theory proving the existence of God through quantum physics. Claire Khaw passed along this communication she received:

"Hello Jennifer Scharf and Claire Khaw. I ran across your online dialogues a week ago, and despite having studied many extremes of human thought over the years, I found the two of you, both individually and together, to be a unique and arresting phenomenon: two women, alt-right-adjacent but with imperious and idiosyncratic intellectual agendas, fighting it out in an almost unnoticed corner of philosophy Youtube.

I've tuned into two or three streams by now, I made a few comments in the chat, but I wanted to get in touch in a more formal way. As well as hello, this email is a step towards goodbye, because I do need to return to my own intellectual universe. But I felt that it is more civilized to send a personal communication, rather than just slip away as an anon.

I feel that my most substantial remarks are for Jennifer. I hesitate to make them, since they are a criticism of her physics, which to a great extent seems to be the jewel in the crown of her intellectual pride, and it might be a net loss if she were to suspend her philosophical barnstorming, because of doubts about her personal theory of everything. Nonetheless...

I read "Quantum Chemistry Teaser" in an attempt to see what your point is, regarding the periodic table. What I see is that you have a kind of combinatorial scheme, which serves to generate a number of types of "atom", matching the the number of elements in the periodic table.

However, the variety of atoms in the world already has an explanation, in terms of possible electron wavefunctions, indexed by four quantum numbers; and there are specific reasons why those numbers can take the values that they do. I simply don't believe that your explanation is remotely compatible with that other explanation; and that other explanation is part of a larger framework which can, for example, explain the emission spectra of atoms, in terms of energy differences between orbitals.

What I believe you have done, is attempt to prematurely forge a connection between physics and metaphysics. Such a connection provides a qualitative and intuitive interpretation of physics that is missing from any purely calculational framework. But you're doing this in a way which negates large and verified parts of the calculational framework. Never mind skepticism about the standard model; despite your use of quantum notation, what you're doing appears to be something already inconsistent with the kind of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics that describes orbitals.

I never yet heard of someone who made a seriously deviant personal theory of physics, and then abandoned it for orthodoxy. At least, I can't think of any such person. I suppose one reason for it is the mathematical difficulty of advanced physics. If you really want to know the truth, but for whatever reason aren't willing to spend however long it takes to learn gauge field theory and similar formalisms, it must be tempting to just keep finetuning your own creation.

So, as a bridge between your efforts and the kind of physics that any actual university lab utilizes in order to understand Bose condensation and a hundred other phenomena, I would like to point out the work of Michael Atiyah on "complex geometry of nuclei and atoms" and "geometric models of helium". Atiyah was a very eminent mathematician who died earlier this year, and who in his final years, very sensibly decided to go for it, and began to speculate much more than in his previous works. Although physics contains a number of examples of surprising alternative descriptions of the same thing, I think it is very unlikely that this work of his actually connects to reality; but perhaps it will be stimulating for you to investigate.

And as for Claire... I regret that I have much less to say to you. As your interests are political and practical, they don't face the same kind of critique as a new theory of nature, and frankly my political thinking is not as evolved as my scientific thinking. I guess all I will say is that I think I understand your motives, and that secular Quranism is an ingenious attempt to use the material provided by humanity's historic civilizations and the current western situation, to restore patriarchy; but it probably has the most chance of being successful, in the places that need it the least.

One more thing, for you both. Are you aware of vixra.org? This is the free-for-all twin of arxiv.org, a site where academic physicists, computer scientists, and biologists post preprints of their papers. vixra was started by physicists who were being excluded from arxiv, but has since expanded to accommodate papers on all kinds of subject matter. Essentially anything can be posted, so long as it is not a work of libel or plagiarism. If either of you wishes to codify part of your thought in the form of a PDF, it could be another medium to use. 

Best wishes to you both, Mitchell Porter"

White Indians and Black Thoughts

I don't know how true this is

So there was a bit of traffic back and forth between America and Comancheria in the 19th century. White people being captured and raised by Comanches. The captives being recaptured years later and taken back into normal white society. Indians being defeated and settled on reservations and taught to adopt white lifestyles. And throughout the book's description of these events, there was one constant: 

All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives.

The "last Comanche chief" Quanah Parker was born to a white mother, who was
unhappily repatriated

Parker was adopted [kidnapped--Wikipedia!] by the Comanche and lived with them for 24 years, completely forgetting her white ways. She married a Comanche chieftain, Peta Nocona, and had three children with him, including the last free Comanche chief, Quanah Parker. 

At approximately age 34, Parker was discovered and forcibly relocated by the Texas Rangers, but spent the remaining 10 years of her life refusing to adjust to life in white society. At least once, she escaped and tried to return to her Comanche family and children, but was again brought back to Texas. She found it difficult to understand her iconic status to the nation, which saw her as having been redeemed from the Comanches. Heartbroken over the loss of her family, she stopped eating and died of influenza in 1871.

As for Quanah Parker he seems to have thrived, even after finally surrendering to the US government and moving on to the reservation.

Herman Lehman was kidnapped by Apaches as a boy but ended up a Comanche

A few months after Lehman's capture, the Apaches lied and told Lehmann they had killed his entire family, depriving him of any incentive to attempt escape. The Apaches took Herman Lehmann to their village in eastern New Mexico. He was adopted by a man named Carnoviste and his wife, Laughing Eyes. A year after his capture, General William T. Sherman passed through Loyal Valley on an inspection tour. Augusta Lehmann Buchmeier was granted a private audience with Sherman to plead for his assistance in finding her son. 

The Apaches called Lehmann "En Da" (White Boy). He spent about six years with them and became assimilated into their culture, rising to the position of petty chief. As a young warrior, one of his most memorable battles was a running fight with the Texas Rangers on August 24, 1875, which took place near Fort Concho, about 65 miles west of the site of San Angelo, Texas. Ranger James Gillett nearly shot Lehmann before he realized he was a white captive. When the Rangers tried to find Lehmann later, he escaped by crawling through the grass... 

Around the spring of 1876, Herman Lehmann killed an Apache medicine man avenging his killing of Carnoviste, his chief and master. Fearing revenge, he fled from the Apaches and spent a year alone in hiding. He became lonely and decided to search for a Comanche tribe that he might join. He observed a tribe all day long then entered the camp just after dark. At first they were going to kill him, however, a young warrior approached him that spoke the Apache tongue. Lehmann then explained his situation—that he was born white adopted by the Indians and that he left the Apaches after killing the medicine man. Another brave came forward verifying his story and he was welcomed to stay. He joined the Comanches who gave him a new name, Montechema (meaning unknown). 

Lehman fought the Texas Rangers until he was brought on to the reservation by Quanah Parker after holding out longer. He never fully adjusted to civilization, eventually returning to his Apache friends, after spending some time as a celebrity

 Throughout his life, Herman Lehmann drifted between two very different cultures. Lehmann was a very popular figure in southwestern Oklahoma and the Texas Hill Country, appearing at county fairs and rodeos. To thrill audiences, such as he did in 1925 at the Old Settlers Reunion in Mason County, he would chase a calf around an arena, kill it with arrows, jump off his horse, cut out the calf’s liver, and eat it raw.

That the nomadic life might be preferable to the modern, all else being equal, is certainly believable.

And the phenomenon of whites preferring the Indian lifestyle wasn't just limited to the Comanches of the 19th century. A paper by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (I wonder if they're related to Steve) notes that: "By the close of the colonial period, very few if any Indians had been transformed into civilized Englishmen. Most of the Indians who were educated by the English - some contemporaries thought all of them - returned to Indian society at the first opportunity to resume their Indian identities. Ont he other hand, large numbers of Englishmen had chosen to become Indians - by running away from colonial society to join Indian society, by not trying to escape after being captured, or by electing to remain with their Indian captors when treaties of peace periodically afforded them the opportunity to return home." 

It then goes on to quote no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin, who had independently noticed the same phenomenon: 

"When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language, and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. But when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived a while with them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them."

History must be full of instances of nomads coming up against settler cultures, but few must have been across such a chasm of difference as that between nomadic Indians and modern westerners. It must have been like stepping into a time machine for both sides. And of course the nomads were the chads

Whites who met Comanches would almost universally rave about how imposing and noble and healthy and self-collected and alive they seemed; there aren't too many records of what the Comanches thought of white people, but the few there are suggest they basically viewed us as pathetic and stunted and defective.

Like Nietzsche, the Comanche saw modern Christians as "botched" people. But then the Germans romanticized American Indians, so he may very well have known of and been influenced by the phenomenon mentioned above.

Do we pay for modern life with the vitality we saw in those Comanches?

White Supremacy on Death Row

"Spare the white man, kill the nigger!"
--Confederate troops at the Battle of the Crater

Every assistant D.A. in the Bronx … shared Captain Ahab’s mania for the Great White Defendant. For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, “What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail.” It wasn’t that it was morally wrong … It was that it was in bad taste. So it made the boys uneasy, this eternal prosecution of the blacks and Latins.
--Bonfire of the Vanities

"Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit..."
--Elmer Fudd*

Seeing a quote in a New York Times article from a prosecutor opposed to California's moratorium on capital punishment--

“Of the 24 or so who are presently eligible for execution, half of them are white men,” she said. “So let’s execute them.”

--I assumed I'd find a minority voice behind it. Off I went to get, as the song says, my fair share of abuse. Alas, the prosecutor is a white girl. A Becky; as such contending with Straight White Male for object of greatest abuse by the burgeoning new order.

Some reward that for years of betrayal of white men. Heartbreaking the reaction of white women in public life to the "Becky" campaign seeking their relegation to second-class status: doubling down on their condemnation of straight white men.

Prosecutors naturally fall to the right on the issue of crime, despite the Soros-funded efforts of recent years to elect progressive district attorneys and lower black incarceration rates yielding such as Kim Foxx and Dallas' lawfighter DA.

As more of these emerge, it will be interesting to see if they find their own law-and-order conservatism in cases involving whites. They've already all but announced their bias in that regard--coming in with the declared mandate to "lower incarceration rates". Relaxing laws is the first, most obvious means. It allows a minority of white criminals to ride the "reform" out of jail (perhaps--I suspect bureaucratic discretion in reducing sentences is biased against them) despite the reform being intended entirely for the benefit of their black fellow convicts.

But such measures will produce more crime and quickly realize diminishing returns in equalizing incarceration rates before they come up against reality. Something more will have to be done.

I think the experience of school discipline "reform" suggests what that will be. Reportedly one means of equalizing student suspensions between aggressive blacks and placid whites--without the literal blood sacrifice of murdered teachers that would come from complete capitulation--is to stringently enforce even the smallest rules in the case of non-black students, thus "equalizing" the numbers. One white kid suspended for cracking wise equals one black kid suspended for trying to choke the same white boy out, at the level of that statistic.

Progressive prosecutors for whom equality in incarceration is a noble goal are probably already doing this. And they are virtually unopposed. The Megaphone remains on message regarding criminal reform, blaring out all dissent and seducing the callow Trump and leading to his ill-advised First Step Act.

In our perverse order whites have long been their own persecutors--and executioners, enthusing over and acquiescing to their own demise. The spectacle of the California prosecutor's woke enthusiasm only makes this explicit and direct. We are now literally killing ourselves off to appease them.

Think it'll work?

*

Life is Curious

Boards of Canada, Buckie High

Some of the best bands produce some of the best fan videos.

Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're Alexander

I asked my favorite violent man James LaFond a question:

Do you know of any histories or studies of various defeated peoples?

I was thinking of this http://dennisdale.blogspot.com/2019/05/after-fall.html

First, I disagree with Sailer on one thing, the fall of the Soviet Union was not a defeat for the Russian People but one of the three triumphant comebacks of a people who have suffered more than most.

Dennis, thanks for this great question and the link to your thoughtful article.

Before I start naming resurrected peoples off the top of my head, let’s keep in mind that many of the fiercest folk in human history became conquerors because of the fact that they got their asses kicked and then moved on until they found asses soft enough for them to kick.

Below is a brief litany of nine racial rises from the verge of ethno-cultural [1] extinction:

-The Proto-Greek tribes who became the five major ethnicities we know as the Greeks, including the Attic Athenians and the Dorian Spartans, got their asses handed to them by someone in the interior of southern Russia and moved down into the Aegean Basin to spawn conquerors for 2,000 years and even now remain as diner operators around the world and the canary in the coal mine of European economics.

-The Trojan survivors of the Greek sack of their city are said to have migrated to Italy, where they became the Romans, and thence the Italians, a people who after many defeats are among the few national populations in fading Europe to contest their ethnic replacement.

-Most of the nations of Modern Western Europe were founded by the aristocracy of ancient Germanic tribes, such as Franks, Goths, Angels and Saxons who were defeated and driven like chaff on the wind by Asiatic nomads such as the Huns, only to kick in the doors of the rotting House of Rome and set up almost 2,000 years of ethnic freedom. Who knows if they or their waste people expelled to colonize America and Australia might rise again from the ashes of the current ethno-cultural suicide attempt?

-The Mongols were beaten to the verge of extinction with barely a few women and boys to carry on and rose to rule the greatest land empire in history and yet retain a sovereign nation.

-The Aztecs were defeated by some unknown tribe in what is now the southern U.S., migrated to Mexico, were enslaved by the Toltecs, rose up and overthrew them, then got nearly wiped out and colonized by the Spanish, and now, are taking over the U.S. drug, food, landscaping and construction business and reoccupying the territory that they were driven from by [my guess is Apaches] almost a thousand years ago.

-The Crow people, Sacred Ravens, were driven from their homeland around the Great Lakes in the early modern period, perhaps the early 1700s and eventually migrated to the Rocky Mountains, allied with the U.S., fucked over their ancestral enemies as the bloodhounds of the Great Satan, and yet remain in their second home, albeit as a client people. Who knows if they will emerge distinct when the U.S. collapses?

-The Japanese were humiliated by the filthy, jabbering Gajin and forced to join the modern world, then took revenge on it by rising to be the fourth greatest military power in the world, surpassing Great Britain by every measure, maiming Imperial Russia and Nationalistic China, only to be done dirtier than any warring nation as the only people to be nuked. And where are they now? The Japs have one of the only sovereign cultures on the planet and I predict them to be the last remaining nation when the Ice Age sweeps civilization before it.

-The Russians were crushed by the Mongols, toiled under the Yoke for hundreds of years before turning on their masters and conquering half of Asia, were then nearly murdered by the Germans in WWI, decapitated in their collective hospital bed by the Soviets and have now remerged to be the third greatest power in the world.

-The Hebrews were the slaves of the Egyptians and got out of that, the slaves of the Babylonians, and got out of that, the slaves of the Romans and—oops, they only got out of that with 1 in 10 left, losing their home for the third time—only to become the bean counters for Christ and the pimps and slavers for the Prophet and eventually rising as the financiers, educators, doctors and narrative crafters of the post Christian world. The Jews stand as a testament to the fact that defeat is not the end—necessarily—but possibly the seedbed for a rebirth, literally confirming the biological fact that getting fucked sometimes bears wonderful fruit.

Notes
1. I refuse to consider race as a purely biological state. Without culture we are just meat.

Katie Did

NOTE: The video accompanying this post has been taken down due to intemperate remarks made by a guest. 

Katie was a teenage alt-righter:

In the spring of 2011, Katie McHugh was a student at Allegheny College. She grew up in western Pennsylvania and was attending the region’s oldest private college but wanted to make it to Washington and join the conservative movement. She was a quiet young woman who hadn’t ventured very far from where she’d grown up. Her reading had taken her to some unusual places, however, for a young person.

Katie ended up writing and editing for Breitbart in the heady days of Trump's campaign, becoming  a producer for Steve Bannon's Sirius radio show before being sacked for a relatively tame anti-Muslim tweet, after drawing attention for associating with antisemitic accounts.
She bounced out via Charles C. Johnson's Got News and now works a regular working class job (shudder, says Buzzfeed). She's tried recanting in a tell-all article she can't get published; when she shopped it to the Atlantic they declined but offered her the role of snitch:

The friend with whom I’d previously interacted on Twitter reached out to show me an essay McHugh wrote about her experiences. I showed the piece to my editors at the Atlantic — where I was then a staff writer but soon to leave to work on a book — but we discussed it and agreed that our role was to approach her as a journalistic subject rather than publish a piece by her. McHugh attempted to get her essay published at the UK magazine the Spectator, but it never was. “We were interested in the story — and the curious cast of characters involved — unfortunately we just couldn’t quite make it work as a Spectator piece so we encouraged her to place it elsewhere,” Spectator editor Freddy Gray said in an email. (In their statement about this story, the Breitbart spokesperson said, “She is a disgruntled ex-employee and has been shopping this story around here and overseas for well over a year, and nobody with credibility would publish it.”)

Instead, McHugh began to act as a source for me, something she now wants people to know.

In addition to McHugh being offered as a cautionary tale, another Reefer Madness-like hype job, Buzzfeed claims to expose a white nationalist pipeline running from somewhere around Peter Brimelow's evil lair (Katie was a close friend), through Breitbart and on to the White House.

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After the Fall

The race that could erect such buildings and gather such treasures as the Temple of the Sun possessed, and could conquer and rule a dominion of fifty days' journey from north to south, must have been a strong and in its way gifted race. It is hard to believe that it was the ancestor of those stolid and downtrodden Indians whom one sees to-day, peddling their rude wares in the marketplace of Cuzco. It is their old imperial town, but there is scarcely one among them above the rank of a labourer; and during the last three centuries few indeed have emerged from the abject condition to which the Conquest reduced them. 

The sudden fall of a whole race is an event so rare in history that one seeks for explanations. It may be that not only the royal Inca family, but nearly the whole ruling class was destroyed in war, leaving only the peasants who had already been serfs under their native sovereigns. But one is disposed to believe that the tremendous catastrophe which befell them in the destruction at once of their dynasty, their empire, and their religion by fierce conquerors, incomparably superior in energy and knowledge, completely broke not only the spirit of the nation, but the self respect of the individuals who composed it. They were already a docile and submissive people, and now under a new tyranny, far harsher than that of rulers of their own blood, they sank into hopeless apathy, and ceased even to remember what their forefathers had been.

James Bryce, South America, Observations and Impressions, 1912

White nationalist historical triumphalism (aside from being a mouthful) does not account for the reality of Western dominance--achieved by an elite exploiting a people domesticated and tamed for the purpose. With that elite given over to degeneracy and post-racialism and hostile to the people, paeans to Western Civilization and the Faustian spirit mock us.

Western elite hostility is a remarkable thing. The wealthy and powerful will never forgive us for letting them exploit us through history, it seems--indeed, it's the common man who'll answer for colonialism and slavery, for his "exploitation" of the poor brown and black, whose rough ancestors are moving in next door, thanks to that magnanimous white elite.

The mild virtues the old elite cultivated and exploited--conformity, rule-following, faithfulness--now serve only to make the common white man more easily exploited by the new trans-national order. His mild evolved nature makes it harder for him to understand he is in fact being exploited. He trusts, still.