Hola amigos, BenKenobi here. Been a while since I rapped at ya.
The end of an era. Steve-a-rino leaves the Unzitariat for greener pastures. Never thought I’d see the day. I’ve been away too long.
I’ve been sent back until my task is done. I come back to you now… at the turn of the tide.

Video Link

As the Talmud says “פותחין בכבוד אכסניה” = “One must begin by honoring the host” (See, it’s not all about the baking of matzah with the blood of Christian children!) so thanks to Mr. Unz for his hospitality.

Ditto!

Perhaps Steve is done here since he has multiple attested followers in the actual White House.
Whereas Mr. Unz, who is clearly a smart and educated guy who is willing to work, has gone off the rails.

If Ron has the text of every comment which Steve approved and also every comment which Steve trashed couldn’t he just train a GPT/LLM to reject every comment Steve would have rejected and approve every comment Steve would have approved?

Feed the GPT the body of the comment and ask it to produce a one word “approve” or “reject.”

(Better yet, have it inform the commenter what the offending thing he said was – make a recommendation on what to change to get approved.)

This assumes, of course, that you want to create a community which is moderated in a similar fashion to how Steve did it.

In light of the previous Whimming, this should be interesting:

Moderating these iSteve comments would be a nuisance, so I’ll add a bit of code that automatically approves all comments for individuals considered established members of the “iSteve Community.” Right now, that will include all commenters who have had at least 50 approved iSteve comments since the beginning of 2024, though I can easily adjust the parameters based upon feedback. Other comments will be held in moderation, and every now and then I or someone else will go through and see about approving those. Commenters who severely misbehave can be removed from this automatic approval list.

I’ve an UNZyPass for now, I guess.

You’ll need a new name, though, like Russian Reaction Community for the devotees of the know-it-all sword guy who succumbed to COVID.

Maybe HBD Tree Fort?

Well, here’s a test.

This a litmus test for Trump and MAGA. Mr Sailer has commented several times in the past about this pivotal issue.

But do you honour the Host?

(not all Christians do, by any means. No Holy Communion in a Baptist church)

I was never a prolific commenter, and too lazy to go back and check my comment count, so I’m just chiming in here to see if I made the cut.

I suppose it’s just my midlife crisis, but all I see for the remainder of my life is loss after loss of all that I once loved.

I’ve an UNZyPass for now, I guess.

Apparently not — 90 minutes of moderation and counting.

Thank you very much, Mr. Unz, both for listening to the advice and for implementing this deal so quickly!

A special thanks to Mr. Unz for providing this opportunity. Even though I do not post frequently, I enjoy and value the information shared by the various authors and the various individuals who post/comment.

I wish Steve well with his journey moving forward.

Thank you, Mr. Unz.

Thanks, Ron. Has Steve been in contact with you at all recently? If not, it seems odd Steve would just ‘drift off’, given that a huge body of his work is hosted here.

Did I miss something? Did Sailer go dark on us?

Charles Murray once wrote something to the effect that there is much political cracked pottery at both the tooth and the tail of the Bell Curve.
Nonetheless, I am Mr. Unz’s constant reader.

Ron and the Sailer commenters.

Thanks

https://www.outdoorlife.com/survival/fishermen-save-hunting-dogs-mississippi-lake/

“I suppose it’s just my midlife crisis, but all I see for the remainder of my life is loss after loss of all that I once loved.”

No, it’s not your midlife crisis. Good things are disappearing, replaced by nothing, and most everything is getting worse.

There’s a lot less communication than I would have thought, Dr. Rock. By that, I mean between the writers and the hosts, and this writer and us commenters. I guess you don’t turn in a resignation letter to Mr. Unz – you just quit submitting posts. Mr. Sailer has already written that “I’m on Substack” post that could serve as a goodbye.

I don’t want to ask about payment arrangements, as I wouldn’t expect to get an answer, but I hope Mr. Sailer is making good enough money to feel comfortable leaving. Surely, those of us who’ve read him and written for years and won’t sign up on substack* will miss him but not each other if we want.

My feeling is that Mr. Sailer wants to disassociate himself from some of the most controversial views on here, if it’s just that readers will see other article titles that don’t sit well. That’s too bad. He’s moved on though.

.

* Again, for the record: It’s not the $10/mo. It’s that I don’t want yet another venue for using up my day, after my blog and here (after I’d quit for ~ a year).

HBD Tree Fort?. Ha, not bad, but the conversation is really not so much about HBD* anymore. It’s been about lots of things, among people generally more knowledgable and calmer than commenters in other threads here (from what I’ve seen).

BTW, that “LOL” out of you made no sense. I wasn’t being humorous, and a sarcastic LOL doesn’t fit either.

Next, per our conversation under that Ron Paul post, perhaps I could link to some of that and finish writing about the whole whimming/moderation/censorship stuff here. Let me know.

.

* In fact, I look at most of the iSteve substack posts that I”m allowed to, and I am really sick of the test scores business. I just don’t care – Government schooling is fake and gay!

And that’s another thing. If you’re still reading here, Mr. Unz, I am very appreciative of your having hosted iSteve for about a decade. I remember his old blogspot site. Blogspot and WordPress are usable, but they suck in comparison to your well-working site.

I also appreciate your chiming in quite a bit, more than Mr. Sailer did, even if I don’t agree one bit with you some times. You spend a lot of time with us, when you should be reading an additional 23 books a day instead. ;-}

I liked this recent comment from nebulafox and think it would be a shame for it to go unread at the end of a post which has been off the front page for a while now.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/my-substack-stevesailer-net/#comment-7027513

And Corvinus posted a very iSteve relevant link about NAEP recently (at the end of a thread with comments now closed) which might be worth discussion. Thanks, Corvinus.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-rights-weird-new-age/#comment-7034326

You said “It’s easy to rank states by their raw scores on the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress test”

Well, your days of data analysis are numbered here. Thanks Trump.

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/education-department-cuts-agency-compiles-nations-report-card/story?id=119735831

From that link.

It issues a congressionally mandated test called the National Assessment of Education Progress — better known as the “Nation’s Report Card” — which, since 1969, has been considered the gold standard of testing to compare the academic performance and progress of students across all 50 states in math and reading across several grades.

But as of this week, nearly all of the agency’s 130 staffers have been fired, according to the former employees, gutting the agency and raising questions about how it can continue its work to measure the performance of the country’s 18,000 school districts and efficacy of any policy changes.

“We are baffled, because thought that we would be spared, that we would be moved, because our work is mandated by law,” one statistician with more than a decade of experience at the agency told ABC News. “We thought any administration would want to measure how successful their policies are.”
…
It also coordinates the country’s participation in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures the performance of American students against others around the world.

The cancellation of agency contracts has also frozen essential data collection for the agency, former employees told ABC News. That, together with mass layoffs, could jeopardize the quality and value of future reports the agency — in whatever shape it is left in — is required by Congress to produce.
…
While it’s not clear what will happen to the agency, former employees speculated that the Trump administration could follow the recommendations of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposal and merge NCES with the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau.

“If things get handed over, it won’t be a great host,” Weko said. “Do they have good statisticians and survey methodologists? Yes. Do they have a deep understanding of the policy and practice of education in the United States? No.”

I hope they manage to retain the good parts of the testing regimen. It seems a decent test of the Trump/Musk chainsaw approach to cost cutting.

Here is a 2021 iSteve piece using the NAEP data.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/whats-the-long-term-impact-of-crt-in-schools/

Here is the Nation’s Report Card site. The 2024 results were released in January.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/

Scott Alexander discusses the 2024 results here. With 27 comments from iSteve.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-happened-to-naep-scores

Here is Steve’s own piece a few days later. Paywalled.
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/naep-test-scores-mississippi-miracle

I am really sick of the test scores business. I just don’t care – Government schooling is fake and gay!

Oops. I guess you won’t like my comment just above then. You do have to give test scores credit for us having iSteve though.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-happened-to-naep-scores/comment/99859271

Steve Sailer 5d
My entire career originated with Congress allocating in the famous 1964 Civil Rights Act the sum of one … million … dollars to James S. Coleman to demonstrate quantitatively that the reason for the racial gap in test scores was due to less spending on black than white students.

I would ask you to reconsider though. For one thing, NAEP is not just about public schools.
https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/about/private_school_quick_data.aspx

More importantly, the test score data is some of the best HBD evidence (both within and between countries) that we have. This document linked by iSteve discusses demographic adjustments. If only they would release the coefficients. How illuminating that would be.
https://apps.urban.org/features/naep/naep-technical-appendix.pdf

Don’t mind me, I’m just testing to see if I get auto-approved. If so, that will be a first for me.

Is that Scottish Matthew Kelly?

I see what you did there.

Wasn’t there a “The Far Side” bit that was essentially this same idea? Anyway most apt.

In appreciation of your oeuvre, a short, inadequate homage…

Commenter Desanex did do a test

To see whatever in life was best

When his comment went thru swimmin’

With ebullience he was brimmin’

Said he, “on to the lamentations of their whimmin’”

Put it in Limerick form, or you WILL be ticketed and towed moderated. Stay in your lane, man. ;-}

(S)he’s a man, baby! (I think it’s a play on “great handle”.)

for the devotees of the know-it-all sword guy who succumbed to COVID.

Karlin? Is it true?

If yes, I’m really sorry.

As I wrote before- Danes and Norwegians have a high incidence of cancer.

https://www.wcrf.org/preventing-cancer/cancer-statistics/global-cancer-data-by-country/#global-cancer-incidence-both-sexes

Global cancer data by country

Denmark -349.8

Norway – 340.3

US -303.6

Mexico- 135.6

France- 316.6

The US & Mexico are shit-eating fat countries (the US with, of course, better health care).

Scandinavians are lean, outdoorsy, everyone is involved in some kind of natural physical activity, mostly stress-free & healthy eating habits. Ecologically great.

So- why?

He has explained that it’s a play on “get a handle.” He used to post as an anonymous and people kept urging him.

Personally I like having girls in our treehouse, but I guess that’s obvious.

Okay, so now my comments will show up quickly again. Thanks Ron.

Oh, I’ve seen him on Substack but didn’t make the connection. So many authors are on multiple forums etc., that I assumed he was just branching out.

Thanks for the info!

He’s on it.
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/will-doge-cancel-naep

Well, I should be on the “approved” list. So, I will find out.

But where will we find the news about golf, baseball stats history, movie reviews (remember movies?) and the other dozens of faves from iSteve?

The answer is Substack, but that seems to be pretty corporate and confusing.

Here on Unz we can see what the neo-Nazis are thinking, if at all. Or the conspiracy theory de jure.

While I’m sure iSteve has the March Magic bracketeering all done up, I’m not too interested.

Maybe iSteve will visit here again, now and then. Tout his latest Substack pieces.

I hope he’s making money there. Or he just spiffing up his venue to gradually edge onto those Fox News chat shows?

For now, I’ll hang out for a time at Mr. Unz’s Smoky Pool Hall of Ideas. Eventually we throw out the obnoxious ones and crazies. Maybe visit Substack if I ever get a real date…

Yes, “Get a handle!” was the last retort sometimes used by others arguing with those posting anonymously. I came up with it in the middle of a comment thread when Mr. Unz “nudged” us by arbitrarily restricting our contributions.

“Succumbed” as in fell for it.

Don’t you remember his arrogant disdain for the dempanic skeptics?

Saw Steve’s Substack on a planned remake of Starship Troopers. Very good news that it will be based on the book rather than the last movie…which was one of the worst pieces o’ crap I can remember watching…as a long time Heinlein fan I was appalled

BTW, that “LOL” out of you made no sense. I wasn’t being humorous, and a sarcastic LOL doesn’t fit either.

It appeared at the time that some of us were still being moderated. See ## 3 and 8, which if the Whimming is over apparently won’t be renumbered as blueberries.

Thanks, pal. Yes, I am semi-brimmin’ with semi-ebullience!

OK, 4001. Just to see if I make the cut.

Here’s my most recent limerick, which I posted on X yesterday (I won’t link to the X post, because I know you don’t like the jumping-around). Check me out on X, all you guys, and give me some likes.

Elon Musk

Though his nerdiness signifies asex-
uality, or even gay sex,
he has been success-
ful with limp-wristed Tes-
la and, gayest of all, sissy SpaceX.

OK, he’s alive then.

Lutefisk.

Can this thread be accessed from the Isteve page or is it a seperate link?

I’ll miss Hari, Steve’s Filipino manservant who moderated the bulk of the comments sent to iSteve, particularly in the later years. He was feisty, but fair.

Other comments will be held in moderation, and every now and then I or someone else will go through and see about approving those. Commenters who severely misbehave can be removed from this automatic approval list.

Hopefully HA and Corvirus get left behind!

Great idea Ron, and thanks for doing this.

I am delighted that Jack D has joined the campaign to update the definitions of certain words to modern realities.

See the following comments by Jack D :

The third wave, which is where the Men of Unz are stuck, is that the Southerners dindu nuthin (WNs are a form of wigger).

https://www.unz.com/isteve/deconciliation/#comment-6320862

The Men of Unz are really wiggers in that regard.

https://www.unz.com/isteve/oak-park-vs-austin/#comment-6805502

This is why I say that WNs are wiggers.

https://www.unz.com/isteve/my-new-column-on-the-jewish-donors-strike-in-the-ivy-league/#comment-6314847

Of course, I was saying this, and using the correct definition of the term, many years before Jack D, so he is late to get on the train, and is just adopting what I invented. But it is good that he has joined the cause, which increases awareness of the correct, new definition of this word and others.

Remember that I wrote two songs years ago to strengthen the cultural depth of this meme :

i) “Little Shop of Wiggers”
ii) “The Marriage of Wigger-O”

Looks separate. Also note that there is no earlier article link on this page.

Perhaps radiation from various British nuclear reactor wastes, both on the North Sea coast and the Atlantic/Irish Sea coats, has poisoned them. The Gulf Stream sends it up the Scandinavian coast.

Plus the Danes, using industrial factory ships, hoover up all the sand eels in the polluted North Sea, which used to provide food for puffins, guillemots and other seabirds, in order to feed them to pigs in their factory farms, and thus more pollution, radioactive or not, is concentrated in Danish bacon.

But there is a time in a young man’s life when girls are pretty uninteresting, although not completely. I can still remember who the prettiest girls in my primary school classes were, but from around 9 to 12 I was only interested in fishing. I remember being sad when one of our fishing gang, a tad more advanced in puberty, discovered girls and was suddenly more interested in bra sizes than hook sizes.

On June 6th, when the coarse season opens in the UK, we would all be up at 4 am to get a few hours fishing in before school began.

On the front page of the website the open thread link sits right above Steve’s last post under his section header.

It does, but it does not appear here:
https://www.unz.com/isteve

Also, as I said above, there is no earlier post link on this article. And no later post link on the Conclave post. This one is some kind of odd special case. Hopefully the open thread posts will have earlier/later links to each other.

You’ve been a pleasure to read.

You’re a treasure.

Thank you.

Farewell Steve Sailer.

Negative. I’ve got some Scottish in me but the Kelly hails from Ireland.

Yes, like Sailer he was saved by Big Pharma as their inferiors were culled by the COVID.

Be that as it may, though, there’s clearly a difference between being in the Corona demographic risk group and dying because you do not have access to a vaccine because of state distribution failure, and dying because you are too lazy, paranoid, and/or have had your brain destroyed by conspiracy theories to get vaccinated. These people’s obstinacy makes life modestly more uncomfortable than it has to be (e.g. I resent being vaccinated and still being formally obligated to wear a mask on the Metro and other public indoor places). But the key point is that to the extent they now die of Corona, it is now through their own conscious choices – that is, it is now more of a Darwin Award than a tragedy. If one is of a cynical disposition, one might even salute their unwitting sacrifice for the Russian budget and pensions system.

Anatoly Karlin, June 10, 2021.

So the political side of HBD is actually pretty hostile to Whites from what I can see. They are especially freaked out by “White populism” or whatever. All the main HBD pundits are attacking Trump, Elon, etc. on a regular basis with a passion they never had for any previous President.

Which kinda confirms our earlier suspicions. They were never on our side. They were just laying elaborate time-wasting traps.

Time to find new things to love.

Or different things.

No, it’s not odd at all for Mr. Sailer to leave this fine opinion webzine in this fashion. More than likely, it was about the Benjamin’s—renovating several closets and buying better dogfood is now iSteve’s focus.

“I guess you don’t turn in a resignation letter to Mr. Unz – you just quit submitting posts.”

It was about money. I didn’t expect him to say thanks to those who posted here for years. He has Substack. He has his (Jewish) publishing benefactor. Why get mushy when a “hey, go to my Substack” was his obvious swan song.

“My feeling is that Mr. Sailer wants to disassociate himself from some of the most controversial views on here”

You certainly contributed to that. Thanks!

On COVID vaccines and on Ukraine (Putin is the aggressor), he was generally on point.

On the 2020 election, he knows Biden won fair and aware—no steal.

On family formation policies, he strangely stopped posting on that topic.

On current political issues, he punted. He didn’t want to put himself in a position where he had to admit he was wrong, so he would respond cagily or in code or with humor that was out of place.

On HbD, he steered clear from the religious arguments opposing it. My vague impression is that he didn’t have a cogent response to it—the cognitive dissonance is just too great to deal with.

On Jews, well, that is still in his wheelhouse. Where is JackD to pull his Uncle Leo imitation?

Good evening, everyone!

I’m just poasting this comment to see if I have had at least 50 approved iSteve comments since the beginning of 2024.

Cheers! ☮

I LOVE THE MODERATOR!

I never commented much here, and probably do more at Steve’s Substack, but I pay about as much there as I did annually to his LONG solicitations for support here.

I hope he does keep dropping some posts here. Otherwise I’ll move on and avoid the numerous cranks that post every conspiracy theory de jour.

Here’s something few Americans realize: A much smaller and weaker Ukraine
(i.e. rump Ukraine) is in the national interest of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania,
and Russia, but only Hungary’s Orban (and obviously Putin) are willing to
admit it

I think I’m a boy!

I wonder what deal Steve has worked out with the megaphone to go crooked and support many of their insane causes in recent years.

Yet just last month, when I said pretty much the same thing:

Substack feels like a proprietary silo.

That’s how this blog struck me here at TUR. But apparently Whimming (mine always eventually come through) is no longer a high enough paywall to suit Mr. Sailer.

• Troll: Corvinus

You’re really not dealing well with the changes around here. Pick a shtick.

Personally I like having girls in our treehouse, but I guess that’s obvious.

You like having girls in your treehouse?

Is that some kind of sexual innuendo*, Buzz? We expect nothing less of you.

*innuendo: Italian for suppository

On COVID vaccines and on Ukraine (Putin is the aggressor), he was generally on point.

Yeah – those COVID vaccines worked so well. Why COVID all but dried up and blew away in 2021, didn’t it?

Saagar Enjeti is an American journalist, podcast host and political commentator currently co-hosting the American political news and opinion series Breaking Points. A truly interesting man.

Maybe iSteve will visit here again, now and then. Tout his latest Substack pieces.

That would be interesting, too, but Mr. Sailer may shy from unWhimmed engagement.

Relatedly, has no one else Noticed Mr. Unz’s sales pitch

Meanwhile, for those interested, here are some of my own most recent articles:

at the end of this Open Thread 1?

El Presidente Trump is all things to all men.

White nationalists, the Working Class, Isolationalists, Evangelical Christians, Venezuelan Emigres, the list goes on and on.

The man is a Rorschach Test.

Did I make the list?

I think only Andrew Anglin could do justice to this white straight conservative, unless he’s wearing the shirt for amusement.

More like this:

The kind of thing Steve would have been all over in his “Is Love Colorblind” days.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/mar/18/the-blond-advantage-fair-hair-completely-changed-my-life-but-is-it-time-to-give-it-up

It is no coincidence that fairytales make so much of “flaxen hair”: I felt both charmed by the world and charming, as if I might coax songbirds to do my bidding.

For the first few weeks, out in public, I could feel people’s eyes on me, not because I was any more attractive – I didn’t kid myself – but because I felt more attractive and perhaps more visible. I moved confidently through the world, my honeyed head held high.

The so-called “halo effect” proved real, and aptly named. As a brunette, my most disagreeable traits – such as my tendency towards pedantry, debating and generally bringing down the vibe – had been obvious. Being blond softened those harsh edges, as though my every word and deed was implicitly tagged with lol – just kidding. It wasn’t just that I was having more fun. I was more fun, if not fun for the first time.

From this at 19 (‘I wanted to signal I had chosen books over looks’)

To this at ?? Nice to see the Austrian barmaid dirndl look is coming back.

The benefits don’t seem to distinguish between bottle blondes and natural-born. Studies have shown that blond (and, again, white) women receive more male attention than brunettes.

That may not be your idea of fun – but blondes also have more funds. A 2008 study found blond female door-to-door fundraisers solicited more and larger contributions than their brunette counterparts. In an experiment reported on in 2012, waitresses wearing blond wigs received more and larger tips (though only from men). The so-called “blonde wage premium” has been shown to be equivalent to the return from an extra year of education. But a chunk of it, I would guess, goes back into the blond upkeep.

When I sent a child to a private school I noticed both the much larger number of blondes collecting their kids, AND the much larger blonde cohort in the playground and on the sports fields. Wealthy males have perhaps a larger mate choice and either tend to prefer blondes or more blondes are attracted to them.

“You know, there comes a time in every man’s life, and I’ve had a lot of ’em.”
— Casey Stengel

Did I ever tell you guys about the time I made out with Christina Aguilera in a hot air balloon floating over the Coachella Festival? We were throwing these little plastic bags full of filtered Fiji water down onto the sun-stroked, dehydrated hipsters, BUT… we put a goldfish inside each baggie, to see what the PETA ethics of the hipsters would be: would they kill the goldfish and drink the water to save themselves, or just wait for The Warning to come onstage and kill everyone regardless?

Huh. Guess the auto-approve function actually works.

I wonder what deal Steve has worked out with the megaphone to go crooked and support many of their insane causes in recent years.

So do I.

BTW I think you’re a boy too.

I took a quick look at a not-too-far-away private school, at the sports teams because all Brit schools have got the memo and showcase diversity on the front page.

5 out of 10 in the U-13 netball squad were blonde, and at that age I like to think no dye is involved.

“It is very much a class performance,” says Jennifer Berdahl, a sociology professor at the University of British Columbia who studies women and work. Her research suggests that even the purported advantages of being a blond woman – more money, attention, opportunities – are inextricable from the disadvantages. Though there is, of course, no truth to the airhead stereotype (a 2016 study confirmed blondes are no more likely to be unintelligent), Berdahl has found that they might enjoy more success because of the association with stupidity, not despite it.

It’s a class performance because wealthy guys and blondes go together – as witness my kid’s school. I was probably one of the least wealthy parents there.

As rare as it is, still, for women to hold top roles in business, academia and government, those who do are disproportionately likely to be blond. In her unpublished 2016 paper, Berdahl put it at 48% of female S&P 500 chief executives and 35% of female US senators. (Male leaders, however, were no more likely to be blond.) To Berdahl, the finding presented a paradox: why would having blond hair – associated with youth, innocence, even lack of intelligence – be advantageous for leadership? What she found was that a woman was seen as equally competent and independent, whether she had blond or brown hair – but, with lighter hair, she was perceived as significantly more attractive and warmer, and generally “more acceptable” as a leader.

(I note I’m still moderated, despite hundreds if not thousands of comments. But I did change my handle around 2018!)

Psychoanalysts call that chapter of childhood the latency period. I’ve experienced a fair amount of psychoanalysis, and I think it’s a crock, but I know what you say is generally true. However, I did have crushes at that age and even a “girlfriend” in fifth grade (age 10-11.)

Very impressive, BTW, you British boys up and motivated at 4 am. Cheers!

OK, so re the other question, do you want me to paste stuff and continue regarding that interesting discussion about the working os moderation/whimming/banning here? It doesn’t belong in Ron Paul threads, but it’s water under the bridge here at this point. Still, I can wait until the next Open Thread here and get into it, because we’d already started. Reply yes or no on this.

BTW, yes, “Get a handle!” Duh! I’ve written that too before to people. There’s no way to keep track of the Anons (the 3-digit number doesn’t stick), so you don’t know if it’s the same guy writing back. I’m glad you got one.

There is at present a small delay, not too long, for my comments as well, “Your comment is awaiting moderation.” Not bad, and much better than it was.

Your thoughts on blondes are interesting. I commented here a few years ago that I have noticed a prevalence of them in certain environments. For example, there were a lot of them at my college, and I speculated that their affluent fathers and family line preferred that. My own father did, and I turned out blonde too.

Funnily, I developed a bit of a fascination for little brunettes (not always, though!) probably because they are different. A lot of blonde women just look like my sisters and my mother.

Similarly, I have noticed that people in more affluent towns where I live are better-looking. I mean objectively taller, more fit, and just more good-looking. It’s easy to see this where we live, because you can go from one town to another and the socioeconomic level changes. I know my conclusion can be called subjective, but I think there are certain standards of attractiveness that are somewhat universal.

I see nothing wrong with Mr. Unz’s sales pitch there. From reading some of the threads under his American Pravda articles, I notice that the iSteve crowd is not well represented. This is just good marketing, and considering there are no ads, hype,* and crap here, things work well, and it’s FREE, I don’t at all mind.

While we’re at it, here’s my pitch: Check out Peak Stupidity. BTW, I got to writing here when I first tried to comment and saw that no real info. was required and that I could put in links, like to … you guessed it! That’s been MY marketing strategy, but then, I didn’t go to business school.

Dedicated to Ron Unz. “You cannot learn from books.”

Video Link

.

* I was into The Gateway Pundit for a while. It’s still OK for headline news, but, man, the ads are NASTY, and the hype is all “Watch this guy DESTROY this other guy in a tweet that got a LOT of LIKES!” That’s news there, half the time. (The other half is informative, but still annoying.) The latest at GP is their showing an over-hour-long video of girls in bikinis at Ft. Liquordale on Spring Break, due to the story of evil illegal betting on a boxing match between 2, you guessed it, girls in bikinis! That there’s news, my friends.

Hey, where did all the commenters go…? What are those magazines you’ve got in your treehouse… oh, you’ve got internet up there? [/Newhart]

Test

I was mostly joking about lamenting the loss of Steve here at Unz, but not so much about the pervasive and overwhelming sense of loss in general. Most of what I’m losing are not things easily replaced.

I can look to my own kids and my nieces and nephews to assuage the grief of dying friends and family, but the death of the society I grew up in makes it difficult to feel positive about their futures.

I suppose it’s all midlife crisis, but I’m confused how this ever translated to “gonna divorce my wife, buy a Corvette, and wear gold chains” to any male, ever. All I want to do is go to war and burn it all down.

Aye, thanks to Mr Unz. Mind you, it was Mr W S who wrote Shakespeare.

OK, so re the other question, do you want me to paste stuff and continue regarding that interesting discussion about the working os moderation/whimming/banning here? It doesn’t belong in Ron Paul threads, but it’s water under the bridge here at this point. Still, I can wait until the next Open Thread here and get into it, because we’d already started. Reply yes or no on this.

No offense, but you may be the last of the groupies to have finally seen that Mr. Sailer moderated on the bases of (i) concurrence/dissent to his opinions (in his long overdue admission, “Quality of commenter”) and (ii) sending him money (about which he never came clean).

If anyone else is interested, though, they can see an unWhimmed, thorough discussion — including a real time proof, starting with comment #90 — at https://www.unz.com/aanglin/biden-has-covid-white-house-mammy-says-that-it-doesnt-matter-how-he-got-it-because-everyone-gets-it/
Just keep in mind that the upthread blueberries are no longer apparent in the Sailer threads; that’s why we had to talk about it under a different author.

You can, of course, say whatever more whenever and wherever you think worthwhile at this point.

As poverty goes up, the suicide rate will probably go up. Remember that the Trumpist want poor people to go away.

Wondering why Mexico is so low.

Wondering how good is that study: sampling; protocols; etc.

It turns out The Science shows SAT/ACT scores matter

by Steve Sailer
March 18, 2025

A new study of elite colleges finds that high test scores predict freshman GPA better than high high school GPA.

At the high end, college admission testing is much more predictive of freshman college grade point average than is high school grade point average […]

Part of the problem is credential inflation: Both test scores and GPA are much more inflated these days. […]

At my pretty good private Catholic school, two of the 181 in the Class of ‘76 had perfect 4.0 GPAs. My vague recollection is that I was seventh out of 181 with a 3.81 GPA. These days with the 1.0 bonus just for taking Advance Placement classes, a GPA of 4.40 is common.

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/wow-it-turns-out-the-science-shows

I hear what you see.

It’s a thing to come to terms with what could have been versus what we’ve got.

Does War Pay?

by Steve Sailer
March 18, 2025

Out of fashion for 100 years, wars of conquest are once again becoming more thinkable in 2025. Is that wise?

With pundits proclaiming a new era of realism in foreign relations in which Great Powers like Russia, China, and the United States can’t be expected to restrain from bullying and/or conquering internationally recognized states for all that sweet, sweet rare earth (total global market value of rare earth mining in 2024: $3.9 billion), it’s worth reviewing why wars of conquest, long the chief employment of kings, faded from popularity in the decade after the 1918 Armistice.

I wrote three sizable blog posts in August 2006 when the neocon fever swamps of D.C. were aflame with demands that the United States start a war with Iran to restore Israel’s wounded amour propre. Or something.

Back in the summer of 2006, Israel and Shi’ite Hezbollah in southern Lebanon got into a modestly scaled war after a number of provocations by Hezbollah such as cross-border raids capturing a few Israeli soldiers (compared to what Hamas did on October 7, 2023 to hundreds of Israeli civilians, Hezbollah’s behavior toward a handful of Israel soldiers seems practically Arthurian). The Muslim troops then retreated to their fortified rural bunkers and, by all accounts, put up a tougher fight against the Israel invaders than Israel had expected.

What turned out to be roughly a draw apparently humiliated Israel, which then devoted the next 18 years to its remarkable project to blow up Hezbollah leaders with explosive-packed beepers. (Unfortunately, in order to carry out such a prodigious plot against Hezbollah, Israeli intelligence appears to have taken their eye off Hamas: after all, how much mischief could they get up to?)

Hezbollah fighting the Israeli invasion to roughly a tie on Hezbollah’s home turf also drove American neoconservatives into paroxysms over the Shi’ite Menace to America’s Interests, such as, besides Israel, well … But that was not the point, the point was that American must gear up to fight … somebody, somewhere (beyond our already fighting in Iraq, then in its most violent year, and Afghanistan).

Whom should we attack in our third concurrent war?

Probably Iran.

Reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page in the summer of 2006, I started to worry about the sanity of the center-right, so in late August 2006 I wrote three blog posts laying out my theory of why, increasingly, war does not pay. […]

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/does-war-pay

_________

Steve Sailer’s August 2006 essays against the then-real prospect of a foolish, invade-the-world war against Iran — similar to what Trump and Israel are up to in 2025 — are:

– “Who exactly will Iran invade?” (also archived at this website: https://www.unz.com/isteve/who-exactly-will-iran-invade/)

– “War! What is it good for?” (also archived at this website: https://www.unz.com/isteve/war-what-is-it-good-for/)

– “The Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies” (also archived at this website: https://www.unz.com/isteve/woody-hays-chair-of-national-security/)

(Note that these essays were all published soon before Steve Sailer moved to blogspot to host his writings, which allowed comments for the first time. The sometimes-much-vaunted “Sailer commentariat” was limited to email exchanges before then.)

Why cutting federal spending isn’t like cutting Twitter spending

Elon Musk hasn’t overcome a fundamental problem with the difference in incentives between for-profit and government managers.

by Steve Sailer
Mar 17, 2025

When Elon Musk overpaid for Twitter, he immediately set about retrieving some of his money by firing a large majority of Twitter employees. This was widely predicted by his enemies to bring about the immediate collapse of Twitter.

But that famously didn’t happen. It turned out that with the help of some expert Twitter insiders who turned coats and became Musk loyalists (Musk’s authorized biographer Walter Isaacson focuses, for example, on engineer Ben San Souci as a Twitter worker who could explain to Musk’s team what could be safely cut and what couldn’t be), Twitter could survive with only about one-quarter as many employees … as long as they were the right quarter of the original workforce.

Hence, Musk is trying to apply the same method to federal government agencies.

It’s not hard for outside buyers to make big cuts in employment in private industry (e.g., Twitter). Michael Milken’s gang made a fortune in the 1980s by buying random companies with junk bonds and ordering severe cuts. Sometimes the cuts were too severe and the junk bond holders took a bath, but other times Milken’s minions could persuade insiders to tell them what could be safely cut. How? Because the newcomer takeover artists could find good workers within the organization who will make the smart cuts you are too unfamiliar with the organization to figure out for yourself because you offer them a big bonus, a promotion, stock options, etc.

But how does that work with the federal civil service?

After all, you aren’t allowed to do much of that with federal employees — the highest allowable general schedule salary for a federal civil servant in the expensive D.C. metro area is $195,200 — so it’s hard to find experienced old-timers who understand exactly what is going on within their organization and who can make smart cuts and want to make smart cuts for you.

I mean, what’s in it for them? If you are a GS15, much of your compensation is in having a lot of people working for you. Why would you want to betray your loyal underlings by telling Musk which ones you could actually do without if he’s not going to make you substantially richer for it?

So, instead, if DOGE tells you to fire 500 people, the obvious step is sabotage: make DOGE look bad by firing the 500 people who do the work that to the press and public seems the most obviously valuable. After all, what does DOGE know about how things actually work in countless agencies. Not much.

It’s almost as if DOGE wasn’t carefully planned ahead of time to focus first on the worst examples of waste and fraud, which allows bureaucrats to easily sabotage its efforts with bad PR.

Trump often cancels DOGE’s worst mistakes, but not until after DOGEists dream up why, actually, that wasn’t a mistake, that was 4D chess.

These mistakes are probably not insoluble, but thought and political capital needs to be expended in changing the incentive structure to make cuts smarter, instead of DOGE continuing to flail and step on every upside-down rake of a PR fiasco that bureaucrats have carefully laid in its path.

[Link to a Simpsons clip of Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes and repeatedly hitting himself in the face and stumbling off, only to step on another rake that hits him again.]

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/why-cutting-federal-spending-isnt

Mexico, India….are low because they die from other causes, not living long enough to get cancer.

Maybe low levels of Vitamin D from living in the far north?

Seems like a reasonable idea. (I was confused at first, because why was Steve referring to himself in the third person, but then I figured out that it was Ron who was posting, not Steve). I wonder if Steve will read/reply here?

Since Derbyshire slunk off, his minion has been MEH 0910.

Will you be the one spamming here for Sailer?

I think I’m a boy!

A boy boy or a “stunning and brave” boy?

Ron,
Any love for old times sake? Neither a frequent nor regular commenter as just an occasional lurker.

The Rare Earth Bubble Is Over

In 2024, global revenue from mining rare earth elements was less than $4 billion, 0.1% of oil & gas revenue.

by Steve Sailer
March 17, 2025

You hear a lot about rare earths these days: in Ukraine, in Greenland, in Canada.

But this market research report estimates that the total global rare earth market last year was a Dr. Evilesque four … billion … dollars! In contrast, global oil and gas revenue was over $4 trillion dollars, more than one thousand times as much.

So why is everybody talking about rare earths?

Well, from 2020 to 2022, global revenue from rare earths more than doubled, due to supply chain disruptions due to covid and politics, rapid growth in demand for electric vehicles, China tightening exports, and speculators’ excitement over the larger role rare earths play in the then fashionable green technologies like electric vehicles and wind turbines.

But then the market came crashing back down to earth in 2024, as the Biden Administration promoted rare earth mining in California and processing in Texas after decades of hassling by environmentalists, and the dominant Chinese responded with lower prices to punish foreign investors.

This is not to say that rare earths will be a bad investment in the future the way they’ve been very recently. Research reports forecast growth in the range of ten percent annually.

Rare earths aren’t actually all that rare. They are found all over, but they are hard to find in large concentrations that can be mined without much environmental degradation. […]

[Rare-earth mining] methods produce mountains of toxic waste, with high risk of environmental and health hazards.

So, China currently dominates mining and refining of rare earth elements because the Chinese government doesn’t care as much about pollution.

But that also means that there’s no shortage of rare earths in an absolute sense, just at the paltry prices we are accustomed to paying.

It seems pretty crazy to organize foreign policy around rare earths, because they are so common.

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/the-rare-earth-bubble-is-over

This post should have been signed by Ron Unz.

Will DOGE cancel NAEP?

Probably not, But that’s not stopping Trump/Musk cultists from dreaming up why that would be a genius 4-D chess thing to do.

by Steve Sailer
Mar 16, 2025

It is widely believed by both the left and right that the social sciences completely uphold leftist ideology. The left believes that this shows the social sciences are True and the right believes that this shows the social sciences are Fake.

A small number of observers, however, point out that the best research in the human sciences seldom vindicates wokeness. Not too many people pay attention to what we notice, but the ones who do tend to be the ones you ought to most want to influence.

I had a girlfriend (as in holding hands and sharing our state-supplied school milk) aged 7, when I went to school in Wales and was called “the limey kid” for being English. It was ten years before the next one!

Forty years later I idly googled her name and found her obituary.

Your thoughts on blondes are interesting. I commented here a few years ago that I have noticed a prevalence of them in certain environments. For example, there were a lot of them at my college, and I speculated that their affluent fathers and family line preferred that. My own father did, and I turned out blonde too.

I wonder if your college was located in a state with a lot of Scandinavian genes.

Blonde women certainly seem to be more popular on Fox TV. And a large bust doesn’t harm job prospects either. Trump’s new spokes-secretary mannequin definitely has that Scandinavian look too.

Blondes may look better in some mystical way on a TV screen, but are they really more attractive to men, even when the blondness is obviously out of a peroxide bottle? To me personally they seem a little too vanilla or chamomile

I live in Ecuador and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that every single woman has black hair and yet they seem to have remarkably little difficulty attracting male attention and producing children. And it seems like the conquistadors must have liked them from the get-go.

It seems to be 100% customary for nearly all women in the US to dye their hair when it starts to turn grey, so this is a massive industry in the US, and it is well known that it is chemically much easier to dye to a light color than to a darker color, and that it requires less touch-ups at the roots.

It also seems to be very common for Jewish women to do a Barry Manilow and barter to blonde and try to look less semitic.

So perhaps tinting to blonde is a way of preparing for greyness, especially if you work in TV and want to avoid looking croneish for as long as possible.

I was given automatic approval here on Steve’s blog. I opposed the Covid hysteria and the “Putin is the new Hitler” hysteria after that and Steve let me say what I wanted. I did notice, though, that commenters here who encouraged those hysterias were more likely to fall under Steve’s “quality commenter” category and filled up his comment sections. In the end, though, all their verbiage made no difference. I am old enough to know you can whip people up into a hysteria on a temporary basis, but in the long run common sense prevails. I have seen it multiple times in the past 68 years.

After the hysteria is over, everyone feels slightly embarrassed about it and do not want to even talk about it. No one talks now about people hiking in parks getting arrested for not wearing a face mask, pushing for children to get vaccinated for a disease they are little at risk of, government officials falsely saying the vaccine would stop disease transmission, closing small businesses but not crowded Walmarts and other absurdities.

The same thing is happening with the idea that Russia is such a threat that we need to start World War III to stop its Ukraine invasion. Cooler heads are starting to prevail. Putin is not going to take over the world any more than the dominoes were all going to fall and the Commies were going to take over the world if we did not stop them in Vietnam.

Video Link

No offense, but you may be the last of the groupies to have finally seen that Mr. Sailer moderated on the bases [sic] of…

No offense either, but can you not remember a few days back when I explained that for your (ii), my experience was just the opposite? No, that proves nothing, but it means I wouldn’t have SEEN (ii), even were it the case.

Just keep in mind that the upthread blueberries are no longer apparent in the Sailer threads; that’s why we had to talk about it under a different author.

This is a particular bug that just appeared in this thread. It has something to do with Mr. Unz’s playing with the moderation scheme in software. I’ll put it in the Bugs& & Suggestions thread sometime.

It seems pretty crazy to organize foreign policy around rare earths, because they are so common.

Indeed. Pretty crazy.

Greenland may have minerals, but there is absolutely nothing to stop US mining companies from doing deals to mine there, just like they do all over the world, like the Barrick goldmine in the Dominican Republic.

For purposes of defense, it is understandable that the most hated nation on earth wants to defend itself from all angles, but the US already has at least one base in Greenland and since Canada, which has much of the frozen north used to be an ally of the US until a few weeks ago, why go to Greenland?

Pretty crazy then to want to give 60,000 Greenlanders 2 senators in exchange for some melting permafrost.

And Ukraine. No doubt it has minerals and some good earth, but to what extent are they commercially exploitable? No one really knows. If it is Lithium you want, then it would be better to invade Bolivia.

Anyway, I am pleased to see that Steve Sailer is calling out Donald Trump as “pretty crazy”. Good man!

Any outrage in the States at the new air assault on Gaza, killing hundreds?

Our Glorious UK Leader, Two Tier Free Gear Kier Starmer, is remarkably quiet for a man who likes to tell Putin what’s what.

Thanks, Mr. Hail. I’m not sure what Mr. Sailer would think of it, but I’ve thought that it’d be nice to put comments like yours, summarizing his ss posts, near the top (if you can keep on top of it) and we can discuss them here instead of on substack. It seems a bit underhanded though, but I dunno. It’s still eyeballs f0r Mr. Unz and more understanding of/for Mr. Sailer. I don’t think for Steve Sailer it’s all about the money or we some people would still be reading him on National Review.

On this one, I have written before about this same phenomenon as practiced by Feral Gov’t officials during these occasional shutdowns. (Note that Trump is scared of one, hence his pushing for the passing of the CR which did nothing but keep the before-DOGE spending going into September.*) It’d always be the 0.01% of the spending, National Parks, etc. that would get closed to show the people how much then “need” the US Gov’t for their well-being. This seems to work.

.

* I’m pleased with Trump’s work so far, maybe in the manner of Charlie Brown, but I am most definitely on Congressman Massie’s side in this matter. Also, Trump showed his petty vindictive side again – as with Jeff Sessions 6 years back – when he threatened to work against Massie next primary. I hope he’s not that stupid to put his money where his mouth is on this.

No offense, but you may be the last of the groupies to have finally seen that Mr. Sailer moderated on the bases of (i) concurrence/dissent to his opinions (in his long overdue admission, “Quality of commenter”) and (ii) sending him money (about which he never came clean).

I think you mean ‘basis’, but never mind.

I got unmoderated posting quite quickly after 50 posts, having discovered Steve’s blog at the same time that I was investigating the University of Virginia rape hoax.

1). I hardly ever concur with Steve,

2) I have never sent money,

3) The quality of my posting is universally agreed to be terrible.

I think you were more likely to get unmoderated “instant” posting if you knew English grammar and could spell properly, didn’t make too many typos, and didn’t make ad hominem attacks on other posters.

Oops, that was supposed to be:

• Agree on (3): Achmed E. Newman

“Downing Street rejects Lammy’s claim Israel broke international law in Gaza”

Starmer, like Trump, is wholly owned by Israel.

I’m doing quite fine here. You, on the other hand, continue to have Jew rot on the brain and bemoan how your comments should not be whimmed, but they are, and deservedly so.

“He’s on it.”

Not really. Mr. Sailer said “But I can’t find much evidence that the Trump Administration is seriously thinking about canceling the NAEP, so this sounds like a scare story in the NYT”, but he could not muster the requisite evidence to back up his statement.

And Mr. Sailer outright refuses to NOTICE this trend–the Trump Administration IS about purging federal data AND/OR using it for his own ends. I get it, why go out on a limb when he is making money hand over fist at his new site!

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5165410-trump-administration-data-conundrum/

https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/trump-manipulate-economic-data-fesac/

“wealthy guys and blondes go together…”.

There is another heritable trait which seems to be linked to wealthy guys, and renders the future supply of blondes somewhat uncertain.

https://twitter.com/FarroYossi/status/1901439094300750082

“Such a beautiful moment—the Orthodox Jewish daughter and granddaughter of the President of the United States learning to bake challah with a Chabad Rebbetzin. One of the fundamental traditions of a Jewish home! Love to see it.”

The plural of “basis” is “bases.”

Any outrage in the States at the new air assault on Gaza, killing hundreds?

Egged on by Trump’s war against the Houthis.

“Trump and Rubio have failed, badly. MAGA Amateur Hour, run by Israel.” — Patrick Henningsen summarizing Trump-II foreign policy.

“It took less than two months for Trump and Israel to instigate another round of conflagration in the Middle East.” — Michael Tracey

“In one night of narcissistic megalomania, Donald Trump gave up the title peacemaker, exchanging it for warmonger, and put himself on the path of becoming America’s greatest loser. […] And starting a war with Iran will go down in history as one of the worst self-inflicted wounds an American President ever committed.” — Scott Ritter

“Turn off Fox News for one second. The Houthis stopped attacking ships in the Red Sea, like they said they would, after Israel agreed to a ceasefire to end the Gaza genocide. When Israel started a 100 percent humanitarian blockade on Gaza, the Houthis said ‘F*ck that,’ and started in again. Trump is such a coward that he’d rather bomb Yemenis than ask his owner (Netanyahu) to let some flour into the enclave.” — Gerald Celente

“President Trump: stop bombing Yemen and exit the Middle East!” — Ron Paul

I think you were more likely to get unmoderated “instant” posting if you knew English grammar and could spell properly, didn’t make too many typos, and didn’t make ad hominem attacks on other posters.

See if you can find any of mine — they always did come through — falling short on any of these bases.

They live long enough to get cancer?

I live in Ecuador and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that every single woman has black hair and yet they seem to have remarkably little difficulty attracting male attention and producing children. And it seems like the conquistadors must have liked them from the get-go.

And the conquistadors were famously spoiled for choice? As it seems you lost track, the matter at bar is the relative attractiveness of blondes vis-à-vis others. What the conditions in contemporary Ecuador, where by your own admission, blondes are notable chiefly for their non existence, or the conquistador experience has to do with this question is not immediately apparent.

Not really. Mr. Sailer said “But I can’t find much evidence that the Trump Administration is seriously thinking about canceling the NAEP, so this sounds like a scare story in the NYT”, but he could not muster the requisite evidence to back up his statement.

So your point is Steve couldn’t muster evidence to prove that he couldn’t find much evidence?

JFC, what did YOU expect? Trump admires dictator and autocrats. That is how he created his empire, by employing their tactics. Ask Michael Cohen regarding Trump’s shady shenanigans.

Remember, YOU voted Trump into office, so live with the consequences of dead Palestinian babies and the elderly at the hands of Israel (cue JackD, our resident Uncle Leo).

Yet, my vague impression is you are no fan of these brown people, so you are simply using their plight to further an agenda.

Interesting idea. I wonder if Ron does have all of the rejected comments. It would be interesting to analyze those as you describe. For each moderator.

My point is that Mr. Sailer is purposely ignoring a pattern, which I thought he was a recognized expert on such matters–Trump and Musk are destroying the American data collection infrastructure used to guide important decision making. And, as a consequence, will significantly hamper Mr. Sailer’s efforts to make sense of such information. Isn’t that his alleged bread and butter?

t seems a bit underhanded though, but I dunno.

Perhaps, but the commenting system (and commenters!) are better here than at Substack!

Musk isn’t destroying the American data collection infrastructure. He’s hijacking it. Musk and his fellow posthumanists live in a head space wherein legacy humans like us are already gone.

Thanks for doing this, Ron. Could you please add me to the commenter list? I don’t comment often, but you can see that I have done so off and on productively for the last 8 years. And I’ve been reading Steve regularly since December 2002, amazingly enough.

I think Steve should have had the decency to formally say goodbye to this site, though I guess he considered his Feb 6th post mentioning his substack for the first time to be that.

It’s sad because it’s the end of the era.

Thanks. As Steve notes there he wrote about the preprint here a year ago. I need to see if anything happened with the points I made in this linked comment, but don’t have time right now.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-the-misguided-war-on-the-sat/#comment-6353558

I wonder if Jonathan Wai will engage with this as he did with the preprint.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-the-misguided-war-on-the-sat/#comment-6355688

I understand Steve perfectly – after a certain age (and Steve is 67) you begin
to feel that life is too short to be wasted on endless arguments, and on
constantly making enemies (or constantly adding to one’s karmic debt, to
use an Eastern term). You want to enjoy life, and focus on humanity
at its best, not humanity at its worst. Plus, due to his bout with cancer in 1997,
he obviously needs to watch his health

Basically agree with you, but note that not being willing to talk about things does not mean they are not still happening.

pushing for children to get vaccinated for a disease they are little at risk of,

Here is a current CA vaccine schedule. 4 Covid vaccines by 18 months. And again before kindergarten.
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/immunization/Babies.aspx

More detail here. Divided by 6 months-4 years, 5-11 years, 12+ years (including adults).
https://eziz.org/assets/docs/COVID19/IMM-1396.pdf

I’m glad to see that Sailer and (and Anglin) have picked up on my 2022 comment on why “rare” [sic] earths are not really rare, and invocations of “rare earths” are usually a fig leaf for something else.

Pretty crazy then to want to give 60,000 Greenlanders 2 senators in exchange for some melting permafrost.

The interesting question is how those senators would vote. Few enough people there it would be easy to tilt the playing field.

Rather than natter on about blondes and brunettes, let’s discuss a FAR more serious hair issue: namely, the fact that the overwhelming majority of women under age 60 or so are completely hairless (not on their heads, duh). According to my research it’s in the range of 85% to 90%. Even the last few holdouts – lesbians, Asian women and hippie chicks – are giving in.

I do not know why women all want to look like prepubescent little girls. It can’t just be to satisfy men’s pedophilic fetishes.

* In fact, I look at most of the iSteve substack posts that I”m allowed to, and I am really sick of the test scores business. I just don’t care – Government schooling is fake and gay!

I see. Not a big fan of empirical data then?

Government schooling may be gay–really gay now days–but it certainly isn’t “fake”. It is the schooling that 90% of American children get. Knowing how it is working–where and where not, why and why not–seems pretty important. Not the most important issue facing America, but whether the following generations can carry the load, or are a bunch of turnips is rather important.

If you don’t like this sort of post hard to see why you ever bothered with iSteve in the first place. Steve’s “what’s really going” data analysis on various demographic patterns, but especially things like his test score work with PISA is the core of his work–his great contribution. Basically demonstrating the importance–usually dominance–of HBD and debunking the minoritarian/immigrationist/globohomo b.s.–roundly parroted by establishment media, Corny, etc. etc.–that America’s success has nothing to do with the genes and culture of boring, oppressive Western European stock “white bread” Americans who actually built our nation but rather “the Constitution” (properly re-interpreted), magic dirt, etc. and we’ll be just fine waving the entire world in and “make it up on volume” or something.

Turns out any apparent “success” of the “progressive” program turns out to be completely illusory, based on quality source material–“hey it works ok with upper middle class college educated white people”–and usually manages to make even superior “source material” function worse–education, crime, marriage, divorce, children, productivity, economics–than in the old order. Minoritarianism essentially a project of our parasitic verbalist overclass looting and running down the civilizational capital laboriously built up by our ancestors.

If you don’t like Steve debunking with data, not sure why you’re here?

Off to see what Ron says about the Earl of Oxenford.

My list of childhood vaccines back in the sixties was quite short. I had Chickenpox and Mumps rather than getting vaccinated for them. I can only remember getting vaccinated for Polio, Tetanus, and Tuberculosis. That was obviously enough since I am still here at 68. I think a lot of parents back then would have questioned the need for as many vaccines as the list you provided.

In the late seventies I started going to a local organic health food store where most of the customers were long haired sandal wearing hippie types. If you had told me then that 45 years later many Republicans would be rejecting big pharma drugs and vaccines and showing an interest in organic food and nutritional supplements, I would have been surprised. It would have also surprised me if you had told me then that one of those vaccine skeptic and organic food proponent future Republicans would be a Kennedy.

The US & Mexico are shit-eating fat countries (the US with, of course, better health care).

Scandinavians are lean, outdoorsy, everyone is involved in some kind of natural physical activity, mostly stress-free & healthy eating habits. Ecologically great.

So- why?

I think you answered your own question. Everybody has to die of something. Stroke, heart attacks, and and cancer are the big three killers that get most people in the long run. Since non-obese Scandinavians are less likely to die of cardiovascular disease they are more likely to die of cancer. (Basically what Almost Missouri said — “They live long enough to get cancer.”)

I wonder if Ron does have all of the rejected comments.

Perhaps, but we can be sure the NSA does.

Well, OK, so Buzz & AnotherDad & AlmostMissouri are here. That’s good enough for me.

invocations of “rare earths” are usually a fig leaf for something else

Why did Steve Sailer decline to inquire about the name “rare-earth minerals,” given that they are not rare?

People back in the early-mid 19th century, when some of these elements were being discovered, it seems believed the elements were rare. Their mistake trickles down to today, two centuries later, served up on a rhetorical-demagogic-tough-guy-mafioso-extortionist platter for DJT.

The glamorous name, “rare-earth elements,” may itself have attracted the attention of the deeply narcissistic hype-man, sometimes called a b.s. artist “who got very lucky,” as John Derbyshire has described him (and who is, somehow, today the U.S. president; one who is pursuing an endless stream of personal vendettas and making the USA a bit of a laughing-stock, but there he is).

The term “rare-earth element” sounds so cool. It was bound to attract DJT’s attention. If we know nothing else about him by now, we should know that. We also know the man rarely if ever follows up for more info; He goes with instinct (and/or with whatever the various Kushner-types around him urge him to do).

Trying to extort Ukraine for its supposed “rare-earth mineral wealth” was a bad idea for many reasons, but I wonder if the cause of this unfortunate gambit wasn’t that its name is an anachronistic misnomer.

Been a while

An absence of 3 ½ years, Mr. Kenobi?

And a dramatic return-entrance one day after word spread that Steve Sailer (p.b.u.h.) has fled the field, temporarily we think, and elements of the commentariat have ascended the ramparts and erected a giant banner bearing the words “Open Thread”?

Not a big fan of empirical data then?

I didn’t say that, asshole. I have just heard enough about it for myself. That doesn’t mean I think Mr. Sailer hasn’t been right about that stuff for years and that I didn’t use to be interested and take it all in.

Also, it’s his new blog, and I think writing about that is better for any newcomers to read about than say, movie reviews, as entertaining as most of his are.

Everything you’ve got say about it checks out with me too. I just commented that I’m sick of it myself. Get over that.

If you don’t like Steve debunking with data, not sure why you’re here?

That wasn’t HERE – it was on his blog. Steve writes about so much else, as his book Noticing exemplifies. (Excellent book – I’ve got 2 left – not sure if the one guy remembers I lent one to him.)

SAT scores, blah, minoritarianism, blah, blah, OK, I get that.

… –his great contribution.

Nah, there’s plenty of other empirical stuff he’s done that’s newer to me and more interesting.

Touche!

Thanks.

I’ve known some very pretty Jewish girls, even been out with a few – but they all had dark hair. Are there any non-bottle Jewish blondes?

“I do not know why women all want to look like prepubescent little girls.”

The trouble with doing that is that you either have to do it twice or more a week (with associated moisturising etc – it’s a pretty delicate area to be shaving) or have stubble, which rather ruins the little girl look.

But thank you for your service in doing the research us older guys who want to stay married won’t do.

So, what caused Steve to finally leave? Was it the yoga pants controversy?

Also, will discussion of golf course architecture continue here?

Yes, I went to university with several.

Many women get waxed, which enables them to keep the smooth prepubescent look for considerably longer. Consider the nationwide chain European Wax Center.

I am not unaware that some men do the same. In that case, however, it has a tangible benefit, namely making them look bigger.

Sailer made more typos than most of his readers when he was in his cups while posting.

Tiny Duck had instant moderation – remind me about his grammar again?

And those that donated absolutely received instant moderation privileges, and I’m not really inclined to believe much of what you say either way.

Destroy, hijack…the fact remains that public accountability by way of government statistics is being purged by Trump and Musk, and Mr. Sailer is either too ignorant or too proud to NOTICE.

You yourself seem to be hung up on the prepubescent thing. It’s irrelevant anyway, unless you consider shaving armpits and legs (and waxing facial hair) to be a pedophilia fetish?

Are women who prefer men who shave their faces also guilty of a secret pedophilia fetish?

The reality is that women find body hair unsightly and feel that it makes them look more masculine in some cases.

You’re trying a little too hard to make men seem like creeps and it’s kind of backfiring on you.

Nice(, but I reread that first section a few times because of who the “author” is listed as …)

Many women get waxed, which enables them to keep the smooth prepubescent look for considerably longer.

I don’t think it is a case of trying to look prepubescent. Most of them are not doing a full wax on their privates.

Some women naturally have short leg hair.

Other women get pretty long leg hair. I mean like flowing with the wind long.

They’d rather have it neat and trimmed just like they don’t want too much hair on their heads.

Long armpit hair isn’t a good look for either gender.

I watched that whole 50 min. Trump/Zelensky press conference / diplomatic meltdown 3 weeks back, with commentary here. You probably read that, Mr. Hail. The 2nd funniest thing was President Trump’s over and over calling this group of metals “raw earth” – not plural either, but just as if we want some of that uncooked dirt they got over there!

Hey, I don’t expect him to know it all – it was just funny. I assume he’s been corrected since.

The deal over the minerals – metals for weapons – is disgusting to me, letting alone that per commenters above, it’s not worth much in the grand scheme of things, making it the kind of bad deal that Trump ought to stay away from. Or he could have some respect for the Constitution and get us OUT, whether he brokers a peace or not.

On the latter thing, it was just my one set of data, but I had a (likely non-causation) negative correlation, Mike. I’d donate money yearly for 3-4 years then stopped, but for the 1st 3 out of 8 I did NOT have instant moderation. All of a sudden I did, and I don’t recall it being at the same time of that last donation or so.

Maybe Mr. Sailer just didn’t keep track of me well on his spreadsheet or never did match my name with my handle.

It was pretty unusual for Americans to get the tuberculosis vaccination, although the BCG was common in Europe and the West Indies.

George Orwell was one of the last famous people to die of TB. He lived long enough to have streptomycin injections imported for him from the United States, but unfortunately he had an allergic reaction to the drug and was unable to continue treatment.

“George Orwell was one of the last famous people to die of TB.”

I was surprised to find when I read their biographies that Robert Heinlein and Dashiell Hammett contracted tuberculosis as young men. If I remember correctly, Heinlein got a partial disability pension from the navy after contracting TB while serving in it and that diverted his career over to writing. Heinlein lived longer than Hammett. Hammett also had a serious drinking problem, which shortened his lifespan. Hammett, like his fellow heavy drinker Raymond Chandler, did little writing in his last years.

I only donated money to Steve a couple times. My comments got put on automatic approval right after I mentioned that National Review was a better magazine when he was writing for it back in the nineties. I think Steve’s youthful dream was to be a star writer for National Review and it really irked him that, rather than publishing him, they started publishing writers inferior to him like Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg and David Frum.

Hey Ron,

Has the Trump Administration released this year anything that wasn’t already available to the public on Epstein or JFK?

Anybody else seeing a spike in spam calls? The past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting 20 a day. All showing up as a local number. I run a small business and my cell phone is the business line, so I hate not answering local calls that are not in my address book.

I’m pretty much an anti-interventionist, but a few drone strikes on Indian call centers couldn’t hurt.

My primary research source is the r/normalnudes subreddit. Women post nude photos of themselves, and as the photos seldom include faces it is likely that most of the women are not involved in the porn/Only Fans/stripping/hooker fields. There are as many as 35 to 50 new women posting each day.

It is from this source I have concluded that at least 85% of women are hairless.

Caution: make sure to display photos ordered by “Hot.” If you order them by “New” you will get countless photos of men waving their d*cks, as the subreddit accepts both genders and many men are exhibitionists.

“…I can only remember getting vaccinated for Polio, Tetanus, and Tuberculosis. …”

Small pox? For years I had a small pox vaccine scar but it seems to have gone away at some point.

“On HbD, he steered clear from the religious arguments opposing it. …”

What are you talking about? Is this like the religious arguments opposing the theory of evolution?

https://twitter.com/ImportantPollsX/status/1902154285963461064

It would be nice Steve to show more respect to your readers if you are no longer going to post out here.

A simple action on your part.

“Small pox?”

I may have had a small pox vaccine too. We are talking about sixty years ago so my memory is a bit hazy. Jonathan Mason questioned whether I received a tuberculosis vaccine as a child in the sixties. My memory is I did receive it. When my mother passed away she left behind some of my childhood records but my vaccination records were not among them. She saved all my elementary school report cards but not that.

In any case, the number of vaccinations I received as a child was much lower than the number children receive today and I grew up to be a healthy adult. We do not really know the effects of children getting such a large number of vaccinations. Hopefully, RFK Jr. will direct more funding into researching whether all these vaccines are doing more harm than good when it comes to children.

prosa123 hasn’t seen a new nude woman in over 20 years, so I would take anything he says with a grain of salt

Baptists take communion, just not every week necessarily.

“The frequency of communion observance varies among Baptist churches, reflecting the diversity and autonomy inherent in the Baptist tradition. Unlike some denominations that observe communion weekly or even daily, Baptist churches typically practice communion less frequently, often on a monthly or quarterly basis. This variation in frequency is rooted in the theological and practical considerations that shape the worship practices of individual congregations.”

https://christian.net/theology-and-spirituality/when-do-baptists-take-communion/

OT —

Also.
Remember how Bai Dien was building an IRS army? Turns out it was specifically to rape people who work with their hands, no millionaires targeted.
Your fair share.
https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2022/02/07/irs-targets-lower-middle-income-earners-with-600-reporting-requirement/

It’s irrelevant anyway, unless you consider shaving armpits and legs (and waxing facial hair) to be a pedophilia fetish?

I was in a train car in Sweden in the ‘80s and two Swedish girls about our age enter the cab with me and my buddy (we were on our first European trip). One was a brunette who was forward in an American way, actually more forward than most American girls, but spoke English comfortably although with an accent. The other was a pretty blonde who nevertheless had a light smattering of blonde hairs on her legs and was silent. I was trying to avoid staring at her legs but it was hard to do as it was unexpected and the contrast, pretty face, pretty figure and hair on her legs threw me for a loop. I just couldn’t get over the sight of hair on a girls’ legs. I must have been obvious because the brunette matter of factly informed us that many Swedish girls don’t shave their legs and that her friend didn’t speak English and didn’t know we were talking about her. She then revealed that her father was an American and her mother Swedish and that her family had moved to Sweden when she was much younger. I wondered then and later how many adult American men had the same experience during the late ‘60s and how quickly before the shock wore off.

The since 2024 criterion is unfairly biased against those of us who work for a living imo.

https://twitter.com/FreyjaTarte/status/1901755706568593492

The attempt to stigmatize Whites (and only Whites) who defend themselves as a group is a failed smear campaign from 20 years ago. Please update yourself.

In fact, the most advanced, richest and highest IQ Whites are the ones embracing or edging near a pro-White worldview today.

Note: “White nationalism” is an ideology from the past which is different from simply being pro-White.

I see Ron Unz, or some unknown actor with access to his system, has eliminated the “automatically convert “Twitter” links into displaying long, screen-distorting versions of themselves. Those who want a Tweet text to be read widely by whoever is reading this “Open Thread” or others, will have to copy-paste:

Freyja™
@FreyjaTarte

After hearing this conversation I don’t think we even need the JFK files to understand what happened.

[Link to montage video of JFK shooting and somebody saying LBJ hired someone named Mac Wallace to shoot JFK. No sourcing, no corroboration, nothing but a cool two-minute video stamped with the seal of approval of pro-Trump female social-media personality]

Mar 18, 2025 | 4.4 million views

Asking why Achmed E. Newman is here, of all people, is a bit strange.

In which Steve Sailer disparages the intellectual capabilities of David Hogg (Harvard, BA, Political Science, May 2023), and ties him to a politicization of Harvard since the 1990s through a typically Sailerian mechanism: test-score inflation:

The David Hoggization of Harvard

How the College Board inflating SAT scores by ~150 points over the last 30 years gave Harvard more leeway to admit not-so-sharp leftist celebrities and scions.

by Steve Sailer
March 19, 2025

In response to this morning’s post on SAT/ACT scores, a reader writes:

It is under-appreciated how the SAT recentering of 1995 helped birth the elite undergraduate world of today, with its emphasis on resume-padding activism.

Before scoring on the SAT-Verbal test was made easier in mid-1995, the SAT-Verbal subtest was, in the judgement of anthropologist-geneticist Henry Harpending, the best high-end IQ test in the world.

The SAT had originally been set up so that the verbal and math tests each had a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100.

But they’d been normed on the student bodies of Atlantic Seaboard prep schools. Whatever else you might want to say about Choate and Groton, they had high standards for verbal precision.

So, as more and more public school students took the SAT, the mean score for the Quantitative subtest stayed pretty stable. But Verbal scores crashed down into the 420s as more of the unwashed masses with their dubious grammar signed up to take the SAT. From Wikipedia:

SAT Verbal scores were so low before 1995, with the number of perfect 800s being given out annually barely into double figures, that the score was pretty valid out to somewhere between and three four standard deviations above the mean.

In contrast, even before the score inflation of 1995, scoring an 800 on the SAT Math section was a little too common for fine discrimination. I can recall a conversation at Rice U. in the late 1970s, when one STEM major was praising a classmate’s brilliance:

“He’s a pure 800 on Math!”

Somebody replied, “But you got 800 on Math, didn’t you?”

The first responded, “Yeah, but I got a low 800, he got a real 800.” And all the Rice STEM majors nodded their head with comprehension at this distinction.

[The Sailer correspondent continues:]

I arrived at Harvard in 19XX [pre-1995]. The one 1600 in our class was a minor celebrity (and heck, even my 800 verbal as a 15yo was worthy of note). The guy was actually a quite miserable and misanthropic person, interested only in his academic specialty (and he is a professor now, as far as I know). And yet, Harvard had to admit him. With only so many 1600s to go around, if other schools had them and Harvard didn’t, that would dent Harvard’s precious prestige.

After the 1995 recentering,

when about 70 or 80 points were added to SAT Verbal scores and about 20 points to SAT Math scores

we entered a world where there were more 1600s than slots at Harvard.

The loss of resolution at the top of the scale handed immense power to the admissions committee. Untrammeled by the need to accept visibly superb minds in order to preserve prestige, Harvard could filter instead for “character” or “having had Daddy pay for a trip to Honduras to build wells” or “having founded a non-profit at 16!”

And then in 2017, verbal scores were boosted another 39 or so points and math scores about 18, so current overall SAT scores on a 400 to 1600 scale are now about 150 points inflated over pre-1995.

I consider an example of this effect identified by my correspondent after the paywall.

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/the-david-hoggization-of-harvard

‘If Ron has the text of every comment which Steve approved and also every comment which Steve trashed couldn’t he just train a GPT/LLM to reject every comment Steve would have rejected and approve every comment Steve would have approved?’

Did Steve actually trash very many comments?

I know that mine didn’t appear if I referred to blacks using [the bad word], but otherwise I can only recall some of my remarks he apparently found uncongenial taking several days to appear. It made it hard to fight with JackD — which may have been the intent.

Steve Sailer suggests 19th- and 20th-century magazines were superior to today’s micro-influencer social-media-personality influencers out-“hot taking” (out-demagoguing) each other:

“When the Going Was Good”

“Vanity Fair” journalists used to get paid $17 per word.

by Steve Sailer
March 19, 2025

Having spent a sizable fraction of the first 45 or 50 years of my life standing in front of magazine racks reading for free until my feet couldn’t stand it anymore, allow me to nostalgically reflect that the good old days of magazines were pretty glorious.

Vanity Fair was never my favorite magazine, but it was awfully good at what it did: it was a sort of highbrow tabloid, reporting the scandalous downfalls of the rich and famous at length in fine prose with reliable factchecking in between beautiful ads for merchandize I’d never afford.

Reporter Bryan Burrough [b.1961], co-author of the Wall Street takeover bestseller Barbarians at the Gate, reviews in The Yale Review the new memoir by Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, the lavishly profitable slick magazine where Burrough was on staff for half of each year from 1992-2017:

I’ve never talked much about what it was like to write there. Because I have always worried about how I’d come off. I mean, the money alone. I’m probably breaking some unwritten law of publishing, but here it is: For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.

Then there was the Hollywood money. Every third or fourth article I wrote ended up optioned for the movies. Most were in the $15,000 to $25,000 range for a renewable eighteen-month option. A handful crossed into six figures. (You haven’t lived until you’ve sat across from Robert De Niro on a film set as he reads your own words back to you—although, sadly, that adaptation of my piece “The Miranda Obsession” never made it past development.) This was an era when management allowed writers to keep that movie money. These days? One magazine I love takes 90 percent off the top.

I am aware of peers who did just as well. Nowadays, though, such windfalls are a distant memory. Today, for a rare magazine article, I’m lucky to receive two dollars a word, or $20,000 for that same ten-thousand-word story. …

Two dollars a word …

The staff’s perks were posher still. Breakfast—any breakfast—could be expensed. Dinner parties at one’s home could be catered on the company’s dime. Town cars famously stood ready to whisk you anywhere. Editors received interest-free loans to buy new homes; Condé Nast even covered moving costs. Cash advances were a signature away. There was an “eyebrow lady” who swanned in to tweeze everyone’s brows.

Keep in mind, this was never even a full-time job. Vanity Fair stories took maybe six months of my year; the rest I spent on a book.

Then along came the Internet.

One thing that’s fascinating about the Internet is how bad it is at aspirational advertising. It’s fine at showing me ads for, say, the kind of furnace filter it knows I have to replace regularly. But for some reason my laptop’s 16” screen is not good at showing me beautiful photos of expensive stuff that I wish I could afford the way a slick paper magazine could do so well.

By the way, how long until artificial intelligence platforms start selling product placement ads integrated into the AI’s answer to your question?

You know that’s the future.

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/when-the-going-was-good

Anybody else seeing a spike in spam calls? The past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting 20 a day. All showing up as a local number. I run a small business and my cell phone is the business line, so I hate not answering local calls that are not in my address book.

I’m pretty much an anti-interventionist, but a few drone strikes on Indian call centers couldn’t hurt.

Or, can the calls be charged as long distance even if they somehow masquerade as local?

I was thinking about this. Charging a dollar a call for calls to non-local, non-800 numbers wouldn’t cramp the style of anyone making a genuine call — but it would kill the spammers.

#metoo

” public accountability by way of government statistics”

You’re too funny.

“I’ve known some very pretty Jewish girls, even been out with a few – but they all had dark hair. Are there any non-bottle Jewish blondes?”

In a previous life, I wasted four of the best years of my life on a Jewish cutie-pie, who was a blue-eyed, natural blonde (very blonde).

I looked her up a couple of years ago, and learned that she had aged very poorly, while I see a pretty, young face in my bathroom mirror every morn.’* (My gentile, blonde, ex-girlfriends have also aged very poorly.)

I went to junior high school with a tall, beautiful, sweetheart of a Jewish girl whom I believe was also a natural blonde (brown eyes).

*There’s something wrong with my GP’s examining room mirror, because it distorts my youthful beauty.

It made it hard to fight with JackD — which may have been plainly was the intent.

There’s still an unWhimmed, thorough discussion — including a real time proof, starting with comment #90, that documents the favor shown and cover given Jack D and That Would Be Telling in a contemporaneous Sailer thread — at https://www.unz.com/aanglin/biden-has-covid-white-house-mammy-says-that-it-doesnt-matter-how-he-got-it-because-everyone-gets-it/
Just keep in mind that the upthread blueberries from people like you are no longer apparent in the Sailer threads; the tracks were always covered each time someone returned to the page.

For clarity and convenience, here’s comment #90 in that Anglin thread, with a cite to the contemporaneous Sailer piece:

/ Public Service Announcement /

A golden opportunity to see Disparate Whimpact in realtime is Mr. Sailer’s just posted “Putin Takes the Lead in the Global Struggle Against White Supremacy.” Commenters Jack D and That Would Be Telling are already all over the thread, including tag teaming.

Watch .. take notes with each reload of the thread .. learn.

Amy Schumer?

That other comedienne who likes black guys?

…automatically approves all comments for individuals considered established members of the “iSteve Community.”

To Steve and his 23andme so-called better half but moreso the other half which he takes no pride, those of us genetic kin of his unproclaimed, uncelebrated misbegotten other side, Steve…

Come on home, mate.

Video Link
We already miss you.

Who will edit me now that you’re gone?

Graydon Carter anecdote:

Carter was said to have some kind of connection with Catholicism: Catholic school? Youthful flirtation with Jesuitry or the priesthood? I’ve never been able to pin it down, and public info on his early life is oddly scarce.

At any rate, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, before he ascended to the Olympian heights of Vanity Fair, he was the editor at Spy, which was sort of a downmarket, snarkier version of Vanity, but which occasionally did some investigative reporting too. In this time, which was before the Catholic priest [mainly homosexual] pedo scandals were widely known, Carter was holding a story pitch meeting where his writers tossed article ideas at him to see what would stick.

One writer said something like, “Hey how about an article on those Catholic priests sexually abusing children?” Carter looked appalled, and, interpreting Carter’s reaction as ignorance, the writer went on, “Yeah, there’s loads of ’em and no one is reporting on it!” This caused Carter’s face to turn bright red and rather than jump on this journalism opportunity (“million dollar bill lying on the sidewalk”), Carter hastily brought the meeting to a close.

Embarrassment on behalf of the Church? Or a more, uh, personal cause? I can’t say, and sadly have fallen out of touch with the writer who relayed this anecdote to me.

Wikipedia notes that Carter also quashed early reporting on Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual exploitation of girls.

So, draw your own conclusions, I guess.

The things you have to do to get to $498,141/year, eh?

He was probably agog with the sheer chutzpah of this kike editor who’d only last week told him to shut down a national scandal about Chabad-Lubavitch preying on two year old goy Whites sacrificed in ceremonial execution in the subterranean channels of their infestation of Washington DC and New York.

It’s not unusual, as a matter of fact it’s typical and a modus operandi for Jews to cast aspersions to a fitting minority while they hide behind the cloak of their facade persecution complex. See only the ADL and its founding.

You should get a grip on reality, mate.

It’s a good idea, but … telephony is an odd industry in that it is century-old, with a hundred years of accumulated regulation (and regarding international telephony, a hundred years of international treaties) such that it takes a literal act of Congress to change something, but with a recently bolted-on internet module whose users skate over, around, and through the accumulated regs.

So on the one hand, if the spam callers are using traditional telephone service to reach you (less likely), Congress—or at least the sclerotic (and now DOGEd?)—bureaucracy have to act, or if the spammers are using Voice-Over-IP or other modern technology to reach you (more likely), they may not be paying any tariff at all, so changing the tariffs won’t affect them.

This may be an argument for why it was a bad idea to let the internet interface with traditional telephony in the first place, turning an ordered, reliable service into a semi-wasteland. The executives of Big Phone at the time had an underpants-gnome-like idea that somehow inviting these young computer entrepreneurs with their internet thingy into the staid world of telephony was going to make them all rich(er). Instead it did pretty much the opposite: comfy oligopolic margins gave way to commodity pricing (approaching zero), reducing former national champions to marketing shells or simply to dust, and allowing every prick on the make from Nigeria to Nauru access to your home’s (and pocket’s) intimate personal communicator and alarm system. But those execs got to retire on their stock options before it all went bad, I suppose.

Can you explain this “blueberry” thing, please?

That chart shows several interesting details.

First is the serious decline in intelligence of the college-bound during the 1960s and 1970s. Some of this is the increased testing of the previously non-college-bound social strata, but some of it must be the secular decline in intelligence in those years that was self-evident to anyone who lived through them.

The second detail is the heretofore unknown (to me) score recovery from the ’80s to the aughties. Is this the Asian Invasion? Increased test prep industry? Increased cheating technology? A moderation of the former quest to send everyone to college? A combination? The fact that the recovery was more evident in Math than Verbal implies the former.

The third detail is the Return of the Wane starting rather precipitously in 2005. Why 2005? Too late for 9/11, too early for the Mortgage Meltdown. Whatever the reason, it seems to herald the continuing secular decline that the 2017 rescaling can distract from but can’t hide.

Finally, there is the epic but unsurprising score crash following the panicdemic and the school closings. Who could have foreseen this? /s

Right now, that will include all commenters who have had at least 50 approved iSteve comments since the beginning of 2024, though I can easily adjust the parameters based upon feedback.

Are there logs of previous moderation per commenter? If so, I suggest auto approving every comment with at least N comments (say 20) and an approval rate of at least p (say 0.95). Or perhaps p would be a decreasing function of N, with p=1 for small N and p=0.95 for large N.

I have only 25 comments since 01/01/2024, but over 200 going back to 2016, with 100% approval rate, I’d like to think due to only speaking up when I actually have something to contribute.

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

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

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

I understand that most women in the world don’t shave their legs, which is fine. But being conditioned here in the US, seeing a women with hairy legs (especially dark hair) is a turn off.

However, I’m sure I would get over it quickly if a hot Swedish girl with blonde peach fuzz on her legs was into me.

With Steve-o gonzo I’m dunz with Unz!

In the UK for a time I was getting about two calls a week, probably from a large shed in Hyderabad. The accents were invariably from the Subcontinent…

Mr. Hail, I clicked over there due to my wanting to know what the deal is with David Hogg and Harvard, but much of it was paywalled. I’m guessing the point is he got admitted due to his being a victim .. of “The Gun Violence” (rather than more likely the big picture of young people being given way too many “beneficial” psycho. drugs).

Regarding what I said earlier, yeah, the writing about college admissions is also getting old to me too. Please, you all don’t take that personally that I state that. I appreciate Mr. Sailer’s other topics, unless they are Sportsball and Golf Architecture.

For what it’s worth, I got a 1200-something on the PSAT we all took, but got up to 1420 in the old system on the real SAT by taking some sample tests (with a timer) on my own. Yeah, a little practice and a strategy do help – they alone got me 220 pts., as I didn’t learn a bunch more math and English in that interval – which is why standardized test makers ways to negate that now through the use of computerized test on-the-fly-making and taking. (Spoiler alert – sucks for me at least. I’d hate it.)

My point here is that it’s been a long time since college. I’m guessing that goes for most people on here. I had a good time, and I learned a lot, and it helped me have a career. However, that’s as far as it goes when caring about Ivy Leagues, college admissions, etc. for me. I am glad my Dad did not push me to go to one of the Ivy Leagues, as I could have (money would have been something else). He didn’t believe in my becoming one of the elite, and I would not have enjoyed that world. Same for my kid.

It’s important the AA and its roided-up successor D.I.E. be squashed, so I understand the motivation Mr. Sailer’s analysis. Over the last few years though, it’s obvious to me that the explanation of a whole lot is the approach of Peak Stupidity. People really are getting dumber.

I got a new number a couple of years ago that used to belong to some Thadeashia or what-have-you (I was getting a few text messages early on). Well she must have given out her number to any business or website that asked, because I’m on some damn lists. I will get 10 calls within an hour sometimes, though, thankfully, the daily rate is usually not much more.

If I’m not sure one is SPAM due to the phone company’s warning, I’ll turn off the ringing, just in case there’s an important voicemail.

I’m pretty much an anti-interventionist, but a few drone strikes on Indian call centers couldn’t hurt.

Agreed, Sam! Alas thankfully I’m not the President.

A “blueberry” is the first — and only the first — appearance of a previously moderated comment, which at TUR is shaded blue and also has Next New Comment in faint font upper right. On a level playing field, they’re basically all together at the end of a thread. If you leave and then return, or even merely refresh the page, the tint and Next New Comment no longer appear on those comments, but do on any newer ones. It’s a nice reader convenience.

This is also what made it easy to see Sailer’s temporal variation of shadow banning. Because comments he suppressed were let through minutes, hours, or days later, the “blueberries” appeared sporadically — and, again, only once, thus the need to report the results of my demonstration under the Anglin column — way up and throughout the thread. Time and again, they in gross disproportion consisted of comments that refuted his or those of his Establishmentarian pets, with an apparent exception from Whimming afforded some donors.

Let me know if you’re still unsure about what I’ve said.

Right, A.M. Colin’s idea would especially not fly with young people who see things differently. The internet has made all sorts of comms inherently free – basically defying the economic maxim of “There is no free lunch.” (Grubs-Hub would beg to disagree.)

This started with emails of course. Nigerians or not, just send out 2 million, and even if you get a 0.1% response, you’ve got 2,000 people to work with. We could just change email accounts though. Now, it’s so much worse. Your phone is more of an annoyance than a tool, at least for some apps. Keep in mind, for young people “phone” means “hand-held computer”, and the telephone (telephone?!) is just one of many apps on the thing.

As to Voice-over-IP, man, in this modern world the cheap-assedness of Corporate people amazes me. We have a helpdesk that’s in India. I spent half an hour, no exaggeration, trying to get my PW changed. No go. I had no PW for 3 weeks. Besides the Indian accent and lack of real understanding of the language, the sound had a delay and was so bad I’d though it was coming through an undersea cable bitten by a school of sharks. (I told her that, but she didn’t get it.)

Interestingly, PC aside, I have talked to 3 other employees – one was going through this as I talked to her – she also gave up – telling them directly that “I’m NOT talking to India again, about anything!” Even in front of other people, they heartily agree. Is this the Trump Effect? I think so.

.

Finally, about 20 years ago I really enjoyed the web pages made by a group of Canadians who would scam the Nigerian email scammers. It would take a lot of effort and patience, but they’d get a few bucks out of the Nigerians and make fun of the to boooot. For the phone scams and India, there are people into this too. The hackings and the lamenting of the dot-Indians is one of the best things in life, but better is the fun (I think it’s) this guy has with it all and the frustration of the Indians.. I wish I could do his voice, but he’ll act like an old man and go “OK, so I’ve got the map out, and I’m trying to find this bitcoin shop… Not so fast, sonny! Now, where’d I leave my car keys?”

the writing about college admissions is also getting old

I understand and share the feeling, but …

standardized testing is one of the few relatively objective yardsticks in the socially crucial but woke-plagued field of psychometry. A large amount (much larger than it should be) of national (and global) power, influence, money, opportunity, and prestige really is doled out based on the testing, grading, and attendance of 17-24 year-olds. Chewing through the details of how that is done is kind of tedious, but the consequences of the subject are immense, world-defining even.

People really are getting dumber.

Not me. Every time they re-norm the SAT, it turns out I get smarter!

No, it’s not your midlife crisis. Good things are disappearing, replaced by nothing, and most everything is getting worse.

Nice short pithy summary. The destruction of a nation, a civilization is both ugly and depressing.

Are you suggesting that Unz has done away with Steve?

Thanks for posting this topic. An underlying theme presented here is that of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a natural aspect of the human condition. As one ages, one tends to review personal elements and experiences from the past. Topics on nostalgia are sometimes broken down into two categories, reflective and restorative. For the individual who is “longing for the past,” this desire is a form of restorative nostalgia. For the individual who embraces the unique opportunities that they experienced in passing through life, this perception is a form of reflective nostalgia. For Mr. Sailer, it appears that he values the nostalgia that he experienced with going to the local bookstore to peruse and purchase hard copy magazines (Vanity Fair in this article). I can appreciate his memories and experiences. I used to frequent Waldenbooks, B Dalton, and later Borders, Barnes & Noble in my early years. In the present, I like to escape into local used book stores and explore what is available at the moment that I am in the store. Thanks

Contra copium, Democrats would not necessarily have won if only “everyone showed up.” After decades of failed wars and a collapsing standard of living, young people really are turning right. [My own personal life drastically and instantly materially improved the minute I embraced right-wing values after years of libtardism. It’s almost like left-wing politics is a luxury not supportable in hard times.]
https://archive.is/3ztnd

How about drugs as a partial explanation for one and two?

No Child Left Behind was 2001-2 which seems good timing for a 2005 decline. Though it is unclear to me if the effect on grades 7-12 was similar to that on younger students.
https://nancyebailey.com/2019/02/12/how-nclb-is-still-destroying-reading-for-children-%EF%BB%BF/

One thing I find interesting is the NAEP tests don’t show the same trends.
https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2012/2013456.aspx

Two possibilities I see for that divergence.
– Who is taking the SAT matters more than we think.
– Games are being played with one of the datasets.

Any other ideas? What do you think?

My guess would be the NAEP data is less reliable. In particular, how they norm the early results. They seem more concerned with “progress” (increasing scores and decreasing gaps) than accurate measurement.

It would be interesting to see NAEP longitudinal data for the 1/5/25/50/75/95/99 percentiles of whites. I think that would give a good idea of how consistent the scoring has been.

I like to think that “wife goggles” are a thing, when you’ve been married a long time you still see the face you married.

Thanks. Did you get a sense of whether (or not) Hartog was a true believer with an agenda? Many nice people are IMHO.

Hopefully they will find a way to rehire the people who are competent at designing and analyzing tests while getting rid of the true believers and deadweight. But I am less than optimistic.

I’m pretty much an anti-interventionist, but a few drone strikes on Indian call centers couldn’t hurt.

Agreed, Sam! Alas thankfully I’m not the President.

Indeed. I find it amazing how ineffective they (e.g. governments, regulators, cell phone companies) are at dealing with this problem. It is almost like they don’t want it solved.

How do powerful people deal with this? Flunkies screening their calls?

High tariffs on Canadian and Mexican agricultural exports will rapidly resolve this issue.

Another win for the new administration.

Back in 2007, Peter Brimelow published a 10,400-word exposé of mine on the Duke Rape Hoax. Fee: $400 (not quite four cents per word).

“Nicholas Stix’ Absolutely Definitive Account of the Incredible Disappearing Duke Rape Hoax”

https://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2017/04/ten-years-later-everything-you-ever.html

The things you have to do to get to $498,141/year, eh?

That wasn’t what Carter was bringing in, that was what the peons writing for him were making. Carter himself was raking in much more.

I am delighted that Jack D has joined the campaign to update the definitions of certain words to modern realities.
…

LOL. A Jewish guy bashing white gentiles. Film at 11! Seriously talk about a “dog bites man” story.

Jack has already gifted a dozen or more comments, tens of thousands of words telling us “boring” white breads America would be a pathetic economic basket case, a nuke-less dumpster of cousin marrying yahoos without Jews–and suffering a deficit of exciting Hollyweird entertainment to boot.

Even putting aside the actual history of the United States–and more broadly the history of Europe and the rise of the nations of most productive civilization in the history of the world, the West–simple “revealed preference” is all you need. Israel’s been around now–really beckoning for Jews to come!–for coming up on 77 years now. Yet American Jews–including the white bread bashers–overwhelming just don’t seem to want to go there. Life is just so much juicier glommed onto us boring stale pale white breads and our stuff. The “who is dependent upon whom”, “arrow of parasitism” is crystal clear.

As for Indians like you. My best friend is a–very sharp–Indian guy from my physics grad school days. As he puts it “Indians come here, live in million dollars houses and whine that they are oppressed”.

Logically you’d think that the attitude of various minorities in white nations would be “thank you”–a grateful appreciation of what white people have built. But that of course is not how human psychology works for a lot of folks. Some groups and personality types are just “butt hurt” by the reality that other people built nice stuff without them and don’t need them around at all.

metals for weapons

I hear radio ads on WIND-AM (560 Chicago) for a company called Military Metals (https://www.militarymetalscorp.com/) that is apparently looking for investors.

They are citing Antimony as a reason to invest.

According to the International Antimony Association:

Antimony Industry Reacts to China’s New Export Restrictions

The International Antimony Association (i2a) takes note of China’s recent decision to impose new export restrictions on a range of antimony substances, including antimony ore, metal, and oxides. These restrictions are slated to take effect on 15 September 2024 and are expected to have significant implications for the global antimony supply chain.

While the full details of China’s decision have yet to be disclosed, i2a is closely monitoring all aspects of the announcement, as it anticipates potential disruptions in Europe and the US for users of antimony metal and the different antimony substances. “Many industrial European users have diversified their sourcing of antimony products to include suppliers outside of China in recent years”, said Hans Vercammen, President of i2a and Director at Campine. “So the direct impact on i2a members is expected be limited at first” Vercammen added.

Data from Eurostat shows a significant decrease in Chinese antimony metal imports into the European Union from 18% in 2023 to just 6% in the first half of 2024. Similarly, market shares of Chinese antimony oxide suppliers in the US have dropped from 72% in 2023 to 63% in the first half of 2024. Both regions are however still considerably exposed to the Chinese export restrictions.

https://www.antimony.com/download/19/press-releases/1017/i2a-china-export-restriction-press-release-20-august-2024

So its of concern to Sb consumers.

LOL!

Regarding your previous reply, all I’ve been getting at is that it’s boring at this point to me. Perhaps that’s because I’ve seen iSteve stats for years and as far as my area of the country, believe you me, not many people need to see stats after they’ve been around certain demographics for a large portion of their lives.

Those folks reading from California, Cambridge, Mass, etc, sure, they really might believe the tragic dirt / blank slate bit. Some, I think, really KNOW the truth inside, but they keep it not only from others but keep it buried and hidden from themselves. If they needed to say 2 + 2 = 5, they could get themselves to believe 2 + 2 = 5.

Is Mr. Sailer reaching these people? He may reach them, I should say, but they don’t want to know. Normies who don’t live in areas like mine – I hope he helps them learn.

According to the IQ-blogger Pumpkin Person (see here), a score of 1200 around the time you took the test would be IQ=130; and a score of 1420 at the time would be IQ=145.

The shifting of an individual’s “standardized-test” score by an entire standard-deviation is a big jump, which in theory shouldn’t be possible. In practice we see effects of that same magnitude commonly — most notably among test-prepper cultures. It’s one reason why these tests are not 1:1 representations of IQ (“g”), but are only correlated to a certain degree.

The average scores of a hundred randomly selected individual test takers might correlate closely with IQ, but those with high-end scores are often getting scores considerably above their IQs, which is in part how they ended up in those institutions (also correlating, probably, being high GPAs in schools: often the difference between a 3.25-GPA student and some 3.75-GPA student is not the latter is x-IQ-points smarter, but that the latter put much more effort into maximizing IQ as a kind of game similar to SAT-score maximization through aggressive test-prep and such strategies.

a little practice and a strategy do help

There is no doubt about it. The problem is: why doesn’t eve

I’ve long observed that European-origin, White-Christian-origin people have a negative attitude towards striver test-preparation culture in academia. We view it as a form of cheating, in a moral sense. We like learning, but we dislike test-preparation. We find highly distasteful the extreme manifestations of test-preparationism, as found throughout Asia. We may not say such things, if asked, and may not even be aware that we think them. But we do; hence the failure to ever evolve a test-preparationist-stiver academic culture of our own at any kind of scale.

By Asian logic, Western people should long have faded back into the hills and seas by now, for being lazy do-nothings who don’t even cram for tests. (Maybe there is some evil scheme behind Western success after all: they don’t even cram for tests and chain children to study-desks for 23 hours a day!) Somehow it happened that White-Western people invented the modern world and got to the Moon, a long series of lucky accidents no doubt, aided by magic spells?

I detect in your comments, Mr. Newman, the traditional White-Western view of “test-prep culture”-style academia: not something good, not something admirable; something which, to whatever extent we come into contact with it, is to be almost disparaged and recalled without pride.

We view the world through a moral “lens” of a kind that asks questions like these:

Mr. Hail, what you’re doing is good marketing for iSteve. I would hope he’d appreciate this. He really is a good writer, as I can see whether I’m interested in the topic or not. (75% yes.)

I first thought possibly that “/p/” in the URL was for “paywalled”, but no. Could you let us know which ones are paywalled or not? I see, on the ones I can, that Mr. Sailer is doing great with comments now. Good on him.

Yes, his writing is still very good, but the commenting system can’t hold a candle to this one. That does matter to me, but there’s not anything Steve Sailer can do about it. Substack could, I suppose…

The more mediocre the Jew, the devoted he is to his tribal identity.

I’m not sure what the powerful people do, but I enjoy the work by the semi-powerful who know networking software. I forgot to include this in my previous post this morning. I hope this one is a good one – he’s got a bunch of videos. (Don’t mind his purple hair. He’s an OK guy.)

LOL! “You need beating now.”

Have this video been on Evangelical websites?

Rather than natter on about blondes and brunettes, let’s discuss a FAR more serious hair issue: namely, the fact that the overwhelming majority of women under age 60 or so are completely hairless (not on their heads, duh).

I very much doubt that “completely hairless” is anywhere near a majority, much less an “overwhelming” one.

There is–obviously–a huge selection effect going on whether you sample by personal experience (promiscuity)–or via the Internet (“look at me!” exhibitionism).

Nonetheless, it is interesting that this fashion fad moved from porn sluts to “normal” women in seemingly a very short period of time. This would seem to be something a bit more substantial than choosing a bob or a perm or straight or cascading curls etc. or raising or lowering hemlines. But I assume like most fashions, it will have its day, then recede.

~~

It strikes me the really serious issue with women is how a bunch of modern trends have converged in young women so that they have chosen appearance, behavior and attitudes to make themselves much less appealing as marriage partners for young men. Essentially all the elements of femininity that would encourage a young man to make the economically dubious–but emotionally and genetically rewarding–decision to go “all in” with a girl, young women are casting aside to be slutty, opinionated, unpleasant “you go girl” harpies, overweight and ugly to boot … all displayed proudly on social media.

The carnage, personal and social and civilizational is massive.

The West is dying now in an ugly estogenic ooze… staring at cell phones.

It’s way above your intellectual pay grade. I’ll try to simplify–the diversity seen in biology is viewed as a reflection of God’s creative power and design, rather than a flaw. As a result, this notion that blacks and browns compared to whites are utterly incapable of understanding and implementing “Western civilizational values” is sophistry.

It’s actually even worse. If the swine can just get you to speak, they will glom on to you.

The explanation is that if they can just get enough samples of your voice, they can have ‘you’ sign up for a timeshare in Hawaii or whatever.

Be that as it may. Answering the phone will definitely encourage them. We have a neighbor who is an elderly shut-in, and has evidently fallen victim to this. So her number is on their list. My wife likes to look out for her; but she doesn’t phone her anymore.

That led to them having my wife’s number — and she started getting flooded with calls She literally had to get a new phone number…which, whatever the truth of the matter, did ameliorate the problem.

‘It’s way above your intellectual pay grade.’

I take it you didn’t realize the irony of you writing that.

The good news: in March-2025 dollars, in inflation-adjusted terms, that rate ($4.00 per 100 words in March-2007 dollars) would be $6.25 per 100 words.

__________

It’s said there were plenty of people out there, in the 2020s, accepting freelance writing rates below $1 per word.

The bottom of the market supported a lot of people at 5-cents-per-word rates and lower. At the extreme end were the “content mill” people, an industry that arose in the 2010s. A scourge of the Internet.

One guy on the Steve Sailer Substack writes this:

Negrolphin Pool

I once worked for a content mill called Textbroker. I made about 1.3 cents per word. And that was what they referred to as the “5-star” level. I remember reading agrammatical drek in 2018 Vanity Fair and concluding the journolass who puked it out wouldn’t make 5-star on Textbroker.

Write 10,000 words for a “content mill,” get $130. Good luck with paying for anything. Maybe drive for an app-based food delivery thing when the fingers are too tired to keep cranking out that “content”?

I assume a lot of those jobs, which proliferated in the 2010s and may have peaked in the early 2020s, have now been outsourced to the “chatbots” (among the big problems of which is reliability, and making something that is real, of value, and which people want to read; there is “still” great value of professional writers despite what some have been proclaiming to be a sci-fi-esque techno-apocalypse for all writing).

Another Substack commenter says:

Reader

How much did you make with UPI Steve? We used to pay $1 a word to freelancers at a boring trade magazine where I worked in the mid 90s. I made $1 a word writing for Yahoo Internet Life, a paper magazine about the Internet in the late 90s. I’d make 25 cents per word just writing for small local or regional publications as a freelancer in the late 90s.

Steve Sailer

If I recall correctly, I made about as much per year as Burroughs made per month.

This is ambiguous because the author earned $498,141 from Vanity Fair per year but only worked six months of the year. Is Sailer dividing by 6 or by 12? If dividing by 6, the UPI salary of $83,000 per year. In those few years before turning to full-time blogging and column-writing on his HBD and racial views. That seems quite good. I believe he’s making above that on Substack now, although not without wider costs. (The Substackization of writing is another story…)

But do you honour the Host?

(not all Christians do, by any means. No Holy Communion in a Baptist church)

Please read about American churches before adding your limey commentary, thanks.

https://classroom.synonym.com/protestant-communion-bread-wine-12085963.html

And now with the release of JFK files, Mr Unz will have additional work to do in breaking it down.

I don’t know why Jonathan Mason thinks that Imperial Blumpf would seize Greenland by force and then willy-nilly make it a U.S. state with two members of the U.S. Senate.

A Blumpf-controlled Greenland would just be a play-thing possession. There would be several Kushner-supervised, Trump-branded ice casinos. (And probably a series of listening-stations for the Mossad.) It definitely would not be a U.S. state.

The Trump invade-and-annex Greenland plan. Such a bad idea. Pointlessly antagonistic to allies. Bad for U.S. prestige and honor. Immoral. Unnecessary for any real purpose, except to he who sees the planet as a globe-shaped Risk board-game.

Bullying the EU and carrying out the invade-and-annex Greenland plan may be even worse that this man’s invade-and-annex Panama pledge.

Even if there were a major domestic movement within Greenland that clamored to be annexed by the USA, even then, prudent statesmanship would be very careful about doing it given (among other reasons) that Europe is our ally. Prudent statesmen would likely simply would decline to do it, in most circumstances, even when conditions aligned for it. You don’t just blunder into things based on some barstool-rant-based idea.

You are correct, of course. I just dragged that in as an eye-catching number.

Carter’s number would be higher, but I didn’t—and still don’t—know what it was.

What’s the significance of this?

It’s Epstein making claims. In any case, if you have some sort of notion anyone thinks Donald Trump is a paragon of celibacy, may I sell you a bridge?

People who deal with Asians or with “higher education” saw it much more, much earlier. A longtime Steve Sailer commenter, EdRealist (https://educationrealist.wordpress.com), often says such things

A classic from Ed Realist:

https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/an-asian-revelation/

An Asian Revelation

by educationrealist
June 28, 2013
1500 words

So regular school is over and I’m back teaching Asian summer school, otherwise known as Book Club/PSAT. Week 1, I had still been teaching, so I only covered the afternoon class in PSAT prep. Week 2 was the first week we had both classes, and as usual, I started out with a lecture that goes something like this:

“Anyone in here have a GPA below 3.9?”

No hands.

“Yeah. Okay, you’re sick little punks.” They laugh. No, really. “So you just wrote an essay about goals, and you all said you wanted to become better readers and writers, and I know you said that because you think that’s what I wanted to hear, even though I told you otherwise. What you really want, most of you, is an A. And that’s what your parents want, too.”

Laughs again.

“But here’s the thing: I don’t grade you. There is no A to be gotten here.”

Silence.

“So that’s what you have to consider, boys and girls, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Vietnamese, and my lone Nepalese. What does it mean to do well in a class that doesn’t have grades? How do you actually become a better reader and writer?”

Silence.

“I’m waiting.”

“Um. A higher PSAT score?” […] (continued)

https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/an-asian-revelation/

too lazy to go back and check my comment count,

You have 658 comments. You must indeed be the laziest man on earth if you cannot make a single click to check your post count.

Indeed. I find it amazing how ineffective they (e.g. governments, regulators, cell phone companies) are at dealing with this problem. It is almost like they don’t want it solved.

They created the problem when they outsourced tech support to India. The tech support infrastructure in India is also used for scam calls, usually by the same employees.

Of course they don’t want it solved, because it’s provides a nice income stream by selling “fraud protection” (protection racket) services.

The global fraud detection and prevention market size was valued at USD 52.82 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow from USD 63.90 billion in 2025 to USD 246.16 billion by 2032, exhibiting a CAGR of 21.2% during the forecast period. North America dominated the global market with a share of 41.56% in 2024.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/cna-insider/tech-support-scam-baiters-india-call-centre-big-money-2876366

What’s the significance of this?

Trump is the president of the US and I thought it was interesting.

Why didn’t you ask the significance of the fight club clip in #110?

We have posters in this thread talking about blond hair, telling jokes, talking about COVID, making a TV/movie references, but I post a video of Epstein talking about Trump in a political forum website and you question the significance? Is that right?

It’s Epstein making claims. In any case, if you have some sort of notion anyone thinks Donald Trump is a paragon of celibacy, may I sell you a bridge?

I never described Trump as a paragon of celibacy nor did I infer that in any post.

Please quote me directly next time instead of using your imagination, thank you.

My problem with Education Realist is that she is not evidence-based and weaves in her strong personal bias against Asians and those more successful than she along with occasionally good observations about education. She only gets accolades from white supremacist types who are emotionally committed to the idea that people of another race can’t possibly be better than whites in anything cognitive. For her and them, when whites are good at something, it’s because they are natural or geniuses at it. Meanwhile when Asians are good at something, it’s not natural – they cheat, game the system, grind, copy, etc.

I like to think that “wife goggles” are a thing, when you’ve been married a long time you still see the face you married.

If it works out well, it could be like that.

A friend of mine married a woman in 1982 and judging by recent photos I have seen she is still stunningly attractive and charismatic at the age of 76, and regularly travels the world and sometimes hobnobs with celebrities.

With the money that she has in retirement she is probably able to dress better and spruce herself up more than when young. She had a hip replacement, but never any cosmetic surgery. And she is not even my wife.

However when I look at myself as best man in a cream suit in their wedding photos in 1982, I see the young Richard Gere, but when I look in the bathroom today I see Boris Karloff.

My es-wife said (many years ago) there was something odd about my nose in this photo.

https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/1477812372885720/

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

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

This one is actually more interesting:

I had not seen the videos until recently and I found them interesting but you obviously don’t want them posted.

Maybe next time I’ll post a clip of fight club so you don’t get offended.

You are no different than some MSM producer.

There is information that you don’t think the masses should see.

You’re just another control freak that thinks the little people should be sheltered from politically unwanted information. Well cry more. Epstein said Trump was a close friend for 10 years. Sorry if that shatters your precious delusions.

Yes.

The telephone is a great tool for speaking at a distance if you are very rich and can employ multiple grunts. Everybody I know does text messages and e-mail only 99% of the time. I have lost track of the number of consecutive times I slipped up and said “I will call you” and the reply is “I never answer the telephone” or “My telephone ringer is always muted.” Just send me a text message.

I watched most of this just now, and it didn’t end with this guy hacking the Indians’ computers as he’s done before. However, he has a lot of fun with this.

Watch some of this, and tell me that this isn’t what Peter Brimelow should have done with Leticia James’ office. He can’t get himself to be like this. I can. What a blast!

As per Colin Wright, I don’t want to answer with even a “Hello” as the fact that there is a person on the line flags one as someone to be put on lists for many more calls.

Another classic from Ed Realist:

Asian Immigrants and What No One Mentions Aloud

By educationrealist
October 8, 2013
3500 words

Many people, reading of the clear discrimination against Asians, become all righteous, thinking of those poor, hardworking Asians. Come to America, work hard, and look how the system screws them.

But that reaction ignores the stereotype.

The stereotype, delicately put: first and second generation Chinese, Korean, and Indian Americans often fail to embody the sterling academic credentials they include with their applications, and do not live up to the expectations these universities have for top tier students.

Less delicately put: They cheat. And when they don’t cheat, they game tests in a way utterly incomprehensible to the Western mind, leading to test scores with absolutely zero link to underlying ability. Or both. Or maybe it’s all cheating, and we just don’t know it. Either way, the resumes are functional fraud.

Is it true for every single recent Chinese, Korean, or Indian immigrant? Of course not. I know far more recent Asian immigrants than most people, a fair number of whom effortlessly exceed their academic records, with style points to boot. That doesn’t make the stereotype any less relevant. Or less accurate, as stereotypes go.

This piece will focus on recent Asian immigrants and cheating. I hope at some point to put together a piece on Asian nationals and cheating, but the one that’s hardest of all is the second part of the stereotype, the one that says okay, so they don’t always cheat—maybe—but even if they don’t, their test scores don’t match what we consider reality. […] (Continued)

https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/asian-immigrants-and-what-no-one-mentions-aloud/

How about drugs as a partial explanation for one and two?

Interesting suggestion. I don’t know what the drug use statistics are, other than they went way up during the ’60s and ’70s. Anecdotally, the popular drugs in the ’60s and ’70s were of the depressive, sedative type: pot, hashish, hallucinogens, heroin; while the popular drugs of the 1980s were of the stimulative, performance-enhancing type: cocaine and steroids.

To get a little meta though, behind the matter of drugs lies the matter of what induces people to use drugs in the first place? Most drugs aren’t new, so something started in the 1960s that a lot of people wanted to use drugs. Whatever that thing was seems entangled (to use a quantum metaphor) with a lot of other “1960s” stuff.

No Child Left Behind was 2001-2 which seems good timing for a 2005 decline.

A reasonable explanation I hadn’t thought of.

the NAEP tests don’t show the same trends

Interesting point.

– Who is taking the SAT matters more than we think.

Could be. Presumably, someone has data that could verify or falsify this.

– Games are being played with one of the datasets.

Also could be. Do you mean that the data as acquired are dubious, or that the data handlers (NAEP) are doing something dubious with data already acquired?

My guess would be the NAEP data is less reliable. In particular, how they norm the early results. They seem more concerned with “progress” (increasing scores and decreasing gaps) than accurate measurement.

It is curious that the NAEP are showing a “closing of the gaps” while every other dataset always shows the gaps are practically immovable. And the rare exceptions usually turn out to involve fraud. Possibly a red flag.

Anecdotally, whenever I hear of a NAEP test fraud scandal (teachers passing out answers, supervisors adjusting scores), it’s in a black area. Whenever I hear about an SAT cheating scandal (electronic answer transmission), it’s Asians.

It would be interesting to see NAEP longitudinal data for the 1/5/25/50/75/95/99 percentiles of whites. I think that would give a good idea of how consistent the scoring has been.

Yes, that would be a verification yardstick.

Interesting story, both yours and Vox‘s.

But re Vox, after Levitz introduces Shor as the guy who has the real lowdown on why the Dems lost, it turns out that Shor is still kinda confused himself. Also, wittingly or not, they are both dancing around the unusual fraud in the 2020 election, trying not to notice.

And then there is the unspoken but omnipresent frame of their discussion: “How can we trick voters into trusting us again?”

Dude, that you have to trick them into supporting you is the problem.

Mr. Sailer is doing great with comments [on the Sailer Substack]

The number is certainly larger.

The quality is another question. The way people consume Substack is a problem on that account. Substack-engagement habits owe much to the social-media model: large surges of activity in narrow windows of time; people zapped towards posts by an algorithm, and never seeing them again after one engagement. These and other features are not necessarily good for the stability of a “commentariat” in its development stage.

Could you let us know which ones are paywalled or not?

There have been 23 posts in March 2025 so far, of which 9 are designated as paywalled. The paywalled posts have a large amount of their content “above the paywall.” You can get the gist of the paywalled posts but lack punchlines and juicy details in many cases.

The true rate of Sailer-Substack paywalled-material is now around 20% ([9*.5] / 23).

I was in the habit of using the “Next New Comment” feature to harvest those “blueberries”, but I don’t suppose everyone did as I did. And then sometimes I left the page, intentionally or accidentally, in such a way as to blank out the blues.

I notice this page we’re on now has a bit of the opposite thing: “whiteberries”(?), comments that are new but don’t get the blue coloring. Maybe these Open Thread pages have a slightly different algorithm.

I never described Trump as a paragon of celibacy nor did I infer that in any post.

Please quote me directly next time instead of using your imagination, thank you

Alright.

Have this video been on Evangelical websites?

Now I’ve quoted you directly.

‘…I had not seen the videos until recently and I found them interesting but you obviously don’t want them posted…’

You appear to be under the misapprehension that I’m a Donald Trump fan.

I’m not. I was arguing back in 2016 against people who thought he was the Second Coming.

It’s just that then, in 2020, and now, I keep finding he’s preferable to the alternative.

Has the Trump Administration released this year anything that wasn’t already available to the public on Epstein or JFK?

Asking others to do heavy lifting research for you is pretty lazy, wouldn’t you agree?

The JFK stuff just came out this week. The Epstein stuff has been out for a month or two but researchers of that (I suspect tabloid writers and TDS sleuths) have said not much of interest.

So far, “no new names” on the flight manifests…

Mr. Unz may have an interest in that but to casually ask him to do magic eight ball answers for you is really more about you.

Have you personally ever done any tedious document research?

Come back in six months and I’m sure some good links about “secret good stuff” will be available.

score recovery from the ’80s to the aughties

The evident line-movements are exaggerated visually due to how much the graph is “zoomed in.” The blue-circle line’s gap between the late-1960s relatively high scores and its 1980-81 low-ebb I think amounts to <15% of a standard-deviation, around a 2-point "IQ-point loss" equivalent.

The blue-circle line (Math, "1995 scale" back-projected to the 1960s) shows something like a 1975-to-1995 trough. It bottoms out in 1980-81 (test-takers: the born-mid-1960s cohorts). By the late 1990s, it's back to its early 1970s level. Math scores were steady in the 2000s and 2010s, moving within a ten-point band.

The Verbal scores show a persistent drop. Due to fewer native-speakers taking the test? Or maybe the valid measure is "students of native-speaker family-stock. It's possible these scores would have displayed a similar trough-pattern as Math except that they were having serious downward-pressure exerted on them as more and more Non-Western-migrant-stock teenagers were being waved in to the process to take the test.

There was a movie, Stand and Deliver (released in 1988, set in 1982) about what an amazing novelty it was that a group of born-1960s Hispanics in East Los Angeles, under a genius teacher, did well on standardized math tests. This kind of inspirational movie would’ve been a lot less effective twenty years later (2008) — for being a lot less novel.

The notion that brown immigrants, too, can “succeed at school” had become a cliche; everyone knew that a huge, well-oiled machine existed by the 2000s to shuffle any high-performers up to the highest level. I know of no movie like this from the past fifteen years or more, because it’s not interesting to people. A system fully empowering and celebrating people like this exists: any Hispanic with any academic promise at all eventually gets shuffled along into the college-application route. The entire society preaches the mantras of Stand and Deliver.

If I’m right about 1988’s Stand and Deliver being impossible by 2008 and if my reasoning is right, I’d argue we see the results in the SAT-Verbal lines there, failing to recover along with the Math line.

“To get a little meta though, behind the matter of drugs lies the matter of what induces people to use drugs in the first place? Most drugs aren’t new, so something started in the 1960s that a lot of people wanted to use drugs. ”

Are you including alcohol and nicotine? Or just referring to illegal drugs/narcotics?

Logically you’d think that the attitude of various minorities in white nations would be “thank you”–a grateful appreciation of what white people have built. But that of course is not how human psychology works for a lot of folks. Some groups and personality types are just “butt hurt” by the reality that other people built nice stuff without them and don’t need them around at all.

Kind of instantly made me think of a recent “nonracial/ethnic” incident demonstrating this.

When Zelenskyy (note the politically correct dual “y”!) was on camera w/ Trump and Vance.

Mr. Z mumbling on and on about his “needs” whereas JD gave him the lecture on gratitude.

The counterintuitive emotional response to receiving aid (for most men and non grifters) is to feel resentment over being helpless and needy.

If you make them earn it, they may feel gratitude about the opportunity. If you gift it, the emotion is sulky resentment.

Test post, but Unz comment system is still miles ahead of Substack.

Substack-engagement habits owe much to the social-media model: large surges of activity in narrow windows of time; people zapped towards posts by an algorithm, and never seeing them again after one engagement. These and other features are not necessarily good for the stability of a “commentariat” in its development stage.

I quote from someone active in both comment-sections:

Almost Missouri

“Blogrolls” sort of exist in Substack, only instead of the “blogger” (Substack writer) making the “blogroll” (endorsements), Substack’s algorithm makes the endorsements … to other Substack content.

Giving over blogroll/endorsement control to the platform is one the intangible compromises that Substack writers make. It may be one of the more costly ones, for the commons if not for the writer.

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/when-the-going-was-good/comment/101772637

‘…There was a movie, Stand and Deliver released in 1988, set in 1982, about what an amazing novelty it was that a group of born-1960s Hispanics in East Los Angeles under a genius teacher did well on standardized math tests. This kind of inspirational-feel-good movie would’ve been a lot less effective twenty years later (2008), for being a lot less novel…’

Alright! Red herring time!

I was a teacher in East LA a few years after that film was made — and of course it was a frigging lie.

The real story is edifying enough — but set on Planet Reality, not fantasyland.

Jaime Escalante did not inspire gang kids to take up calculus, nor did he spark genius from a random collection of Garfield High Hispanics.

He went through the transcripts of incoming freshmen, then went down to enrollment, and sat behind the counselors. ‘I want him. I want her. I want him…’

These were good children, intelligent and hard-working, with supportive parents — and in a well-run high school with a cracker-jack principal. Garfield, not at all coincidentally, is in a relatively good part of East LA, where people own their own houses and work hard at steady jobs. That’s why Escalante was able to do what he did.

As to his results being questioned, that’s because aside from the statistical improbability, all the students had left behind strikingly similar scratch papers or something. I would imagine they also missed the same questions.

That was because Escalante had rigidly drilled them on exactly what to do. I can relate: on a lower level, I did that as well.

It works. It’s not about becoming inspired and having visions of the wonders of mathematics. It’s about knowing what to do to get the right answer and practicing it over and over until you’ve got it.

The truth actually is an inspiring story. Not as exciting as the movie, but a good example of what really is possible, if we try.

Here I will note my latest question about recent “court rulings” by lower federal courts trying to prevent DOGE and Trump from drastically cutting federal govt. employee head counts and huge amounts of (presumably) previously congressionally approved budgeted spending.

While there have been prior references to “impounding” such spending (what does that exactly mean?) I am unaware that in prior Executive branch departments and agencies there was some rule or law that made “not spending” an entire budgeted sum of funds illegal or unconstitutional.

Yes, the old joke about buying a years’ worth of copy paper on the last day of the budget year so as to not reflect a dreaded spending “shortfall” exists. But when was any law or decision made that said that NOT SPENDING every authorized budget dollar was a crime?

If Trump orders his department heads to spend less, that seems a legitimate Executive branch decision and function. Surely, after a war or emergency is declared (as in the past) some agencies are told to increase spending (say, Defense) whereas other departments (say, Transportation) might be ordered to decrease spending below authorized upper limits.

Where is the law that says departments “must spend every dollar’?

If Trump says, no more AID spending this year, why is that “illegal’?

To date the discussions, I have read about this matter appear to ignore this issue.

Budgets normally constrain upper spending limits, not mandate spending 100% of budgeted amounts.

‘…Whereas Mr. Unz, who is clearly a smart and educated guy who is willing to work, has gone off the rails.’

I contemplated that assertion for a minute.

I think the truth of the matter is that what is considered to be ‘on the rails’ these days is at least as looney as what is ‘off the rails.’

For example, Ron Unz asserts that the Corona Virus was a CIA plot or something. Okay, so I don’t buy that — but the official story was that it was just a natural virus that inadvertently spread to humans.

Why is the official version preferable to Ron’s?

We live in what has become the intellectual equivalent of the Tower of Babel. Everyone has to roll their own. It’s not just the virus: consider Black Lives Matter, good little Israel, ‘undocumented migrants,’ ‘antisemitism,’ and transexuals. It’s all evil nonsense — and it’s only getting worse. Why should I listen to CNN rather than Ron Unz?

Is this reliable? Is Epstein answering about Trump?

If yes- then it is both devastating & nothing really new.

‘If Trump says, no more AID spending this year, why is that “illegal’?

To date the discussions, I have read about this matter appear to ignore this issue.

Budgets normally constrain upper spending limits, not mandate spending 100% of budgeted amounts.’

More broadly, I think that it’s a matter of there being a huge establishment — and millions of civil servants, contractors, et al — who are dependent on things continuing unchanged. And they’ll fight like mad cats to keep them from changing.

We are facing the same problem that the late Ottoman Empire and Ch’ing China did. There is a vast and ossified bureaucracy that cannot survive change, knows it, and will fight to prevent it.

It’s good to see that some of the former regulars are still around. It saddened me when I realized it had been a while since Buffalo Joe posted.

An absence of 3 ½ years, Mr. Kenobi?

Don’t time fly when you drunk as hell!

It’s adorable how, after ‘covid’, you think Americans live in a nation governed by laws. Goys like you and Karl Denninger make me laugh. Uncle Samantha will do whatever theys wants and you will comply. No limit! For example, ‘covid’ ended after Putin invaded the Ukraine and the Democratic Party arbitrarily gave you permission to remove your facediaper and peaceably assemble without hindrance or limits. Uncle Samantha rules us viz raw power, utterly unconstrained by “laws”.

I can’t get beyond the cognitive dissonance of these stereotypes about Asians that 1) on the one hand, Asians are drone-like grinders who conform and do not take risks and 2) on the other hand, they get ahead, because they cheat, i.e. break rules and incur the attendant risks that could be catastrophic for their future careers.

The role of COVID 19 was to create an environment wherein the global release of the mRNA technology could be administered, studied and refined for the production of human variants. CIA may have had a minor role in the Wuhan lab scandal. The rest of it was planned and executed by an elite who dream of being gods, using their myriad assets across the planet.

You must indeed be the laziest man on earth if you cannot make a single click to check your post count.

Surely the laziest man on earth wouldn’t post at all?

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1902344051766260192

At a certain point, you come to hate Charlie Brown and to feel bad for Lucy.
https://twitter.com/StopAntisemites/status/1902458315512410473

“It’s way above your intellectual pay grade. I’ll try to simplify–the diversity seen in biology is viewed as a reflection of God’s creative power and design, rather than a flaw. As a result, this notion that blacks and browns compared to whites are utterly incapable of understanding and implementing “Western civilizational values” is sophistry.”

This doesn’t make a lot of sense. Suppose the existence of kangaroos is a reflection of God’s creative power and design. This doesn’t mean kangaroos are capable of understanding and implementing “Western civilizational values”.

I expect Sailer prefers to engage with arguments that make a certain amount of sense.

behind the matter of drugs lies the matter of what induces people to use drugs in the first place

Good point. That could be the root cause. Whatever it is, exactly.

Drug OD deaths seems a decent proxy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_drug_overdose_death_rates_and_totals_over_time#1968%E2%80%932022
Assuming it is not a statistical artifact, the sharp 1978 to 1979 decline might fit the score increase.

Do you mean that the data as acquired are dubious, or that the data handlers (NAEP) are doing something dubious with data already acquired?

I’m not really sure. The data could be manipulated on the input side by:
– Cheating
– Tweaking the questions to dis/favor different groups and/or make the test easier/harder without changing the scoring.
– Selecting the students who actually take the tests.

The data could be manipulated on the output side by:
– Outright fraud in scoring or choosing whose scores to report.
– Making “adjustments” affecting the scoring.

My guess is the simple answer is they norm the tests to give stable scores from year to year. At least to some extent.

It is curious that the NAEP are showing a “closing of the gaps” while every other dataset always shows the gaps are practically immovable. And the rare exceptions usually turn out to involve fraud. Possibly a red flag.

Agreed. One caution is they choose a single baseline year (1971 for reading and 1973 for mathematics) for their gap reporting (though they do give a 2008 baseline as a comparison). Contrast the graphs just above the gaps table with more data points. They really should give graphs showing the gaps over the years for different ages.

My take is with 1971/3 as baseline there really is some true gap closing. But I think that largely ended a while ago.

My question is who we are better off having analyze this data:
– The experts from the DoEd with extensive domain experience but the standard goodthinker biases.
– The experts from the Census with lesser domain experience but possibly different biases.

Surely the laziest man on earth wouldn’t post at all?

It was a joke.

“While there have been prior references to “impounding” such spending (what does that exactly mean?) I am unaware that in prior Executive branch departments and agencies there was some rule or law that made “not spending” an entire budgeted sum of funds illegal or unconstitutional.”

This has come up before. Wikipedia has an article about it which says in part:

“Many other presidents have followed Jefferson’s example. From time to time, they refused to spend funds when they felt that Congress had appropriated more funds than was necessary.[citation needed] However, the impoundment power had limits. For example, in 1972, Richard Nixon attempted to impound funds on an environmental project which he opposed. Congress had previously overridden Nixon’s veto of the project. The Supreme Court in Train v. City of New York (1975)[2] ruled that the impoundment power cannot be used to frustrate the will of Congress under such circumstances.”

“The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was passed as Congress felt that President Nixon was abusing his authority to impound the funding of programs he opposed. The Act effectively removed the impoundment power of the president and required him to obtain Congressional approval if he wants to rescind specific government spending. President Nixon signed the Act with little protest because the administration was then embroiled in the Watergate scandal and unwilling to provoke Congress.[6]”

The women in Japan age incredibly well. Many women remain attractive into their 60s. Unfortunately for them, Japan has a major focus on youth, such that young girls are sometimes sexualized when they should not be and older women who are truly attractive are considered dried up and past being interesting.

We recently traveled to Singapore and there the contrast between the Chinese, Malays, Indians, Thais, etc and the Caucasians was shocking. The “minorities” are all thin and healthy looking even into old age, but the Caucasians are universally overweight and often gross-looking (skin and personal grooming) and slovenly dressed after their 30s. Caucasian women de-sexualize themselves by gaining weight, wearing shower-curtain clothes, and cutting their hair short. It’s pretty shocking.

I don’t believe this is a racial thing. Something went wrong in Anglophone culture in the mid-20th-century. Jogging, low-fat vegetarian craze, restaurant portions, feminism, universal car ownership…

‘The role of COVID 19 was to create an environment wherein the global release of the mRNA technology could be administered, studied and refined for the production of human variants. CIA may have had a minor role in the Wuhan lab scandal. The rest of it was planned and executed by an elite who dream of being gods, using their myriad assets across the planet.’

Offhand, I suspect you assume the existence of a malignant but intelligent and rational all-controlling force. Like, we’re the sheep, and this force is Farmer Bob. Sure, he intends to have us killed and eaten — but in the meantime, he’ll make sure we have food, water, are protected from predators, etc.

Sadly, it’s worse than that. Farmer Bob doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. We’re fucked.

With pundits proclaiming a new era of realism in foreign relations in which Great Powers like Russia, China, and the United States can’t be expected to restrain from bullying and/or conquering internationally recognized states for all that sweet, sweet rare earth (total global market value of rare earth mining in 2024: $3.9 billion), it’s worth reviewing why wars of conquest, long the chief employment of kings, faded from popularity in the decade after the 1918 Armistice.

That old faggot should stick to writing about women’s hair. America does not recognize Taiwan, and China has respected Ukraine’s sovereignty by not recognizing Russia’s annexed territories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_the_Donetsk_People%27s_Republic_and_the_Luhansk_People%27s_Republic

In 1918 Taiwan was a part of Empire of Japan. In 1919, American and Britain carved off Shandong and handed it to Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shandong_Problem

That’s like China carving off Massachusetts and handing it off to Canada. Then later accusing Canada of imperialistic designs on America.

Asking others to do heavy lifting research for you is pretty lazy, wouldn’t you agree?

I was merely asking Ron Unz for his opinion, which he is often more than happy to give, and whether he had heard anything.

No need to rant.

The first thing that Chinese and Japanese observed from dealing with whites is that whites had zero honor in dealing with each other.

As soon as one white country became weak, the others whites would prowl upon him as hyenas.

As soon as one white country become strong, the other whites cower like sycophants, or put down their blood feuds and team up against him.

“Peoples of Europe, preserve your most sacred goods!” by Herman Knackfuß

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril

The sweet camaraderie before the Boer concentration camps, First day on the Somme, the slaughter at Verdun, the gas attack at Ypres that blew back to British lines, and the starvation blockades against German civilians.

Since the Supreme Court decision in Bruen, many blue states have introduced new extreme gun control laws; is that reflective of total victory by the billionaires?

William Kirk discusses the matter of US v. Peterson, where a three judge panel of the 5th Circuit ruled that suppressors are not protected arms under the Second Amendment. The new AG doubles down on that ruling.

AG Pam Bondi has hired Prof. Robert Leider to serve ATF Chief Counsel which is a very, very positive development.

https://twitter.com/gunpolicy/status/1902379988239712699
https://twitter.com/FenixAmmunition/status/1902407284438794662
https://twitter.com/RandyEBarnett/status/1902492821359133166

🚨THE JFK FILES: AUSTRALIA, THE CIA & A 60-YEAR COVER-UP 🚨
The official story is DEAD. Declassified docs prove JFK wasn’t killed by a lone gunman—it was a coup, covered up by intelligence agencies worldwide. (Fun conspiracy stuff!)

https://twitter.com/NationFirstAust/status/1902227923194806552

As Colin Wright said, so what? These tapes are a low-life liar talking about a former rival and possible ex-friend. Did Trump make passes at European models? Undoubtedly. I would too if I were a billionaire with access to them. Did he specialize in seducing the wives of his married friends? Unlikely. Where are the complaints from these men and women, or are they all still married decades later and so disdainful of the limelight? Ha!

Trump’s old comment about Epstein–“he likes them young”–shows that he knew there was something a bit off about Epstein, and it’s confirmed by the Mar-a-Lago club ban on Epstein he imposed , showing that he knew Epstein was a predator. Photos of them together show them at public parties where there were lots of guests, not like the Prince Andrew photo with Giuffre, and they seem not to have had contact for a long time before 2015.

Trump’s choices of women as girlfriends show he likes voluptuous women –no hebephile he! Witness depositions universally confirm Trump was not involved with Epstein’s girls.

Trump was also “friends” (whatever that means) with Bill “safe legal and rare” Clinton, but facilitated the end of Roe vs Wade. So, what do his previous associations mean for our politics today? Essentially nothing.

These Daily Beast pieces and videos are an embarrassment of credulousness to those who make much of them. That’s why they’ve never gotten more traction in the MSM or in campaigns.

I was going to reply, “Yeah but how many since 1/1/2024?” assuming there’d be no easy way to filter by year. But I actually got off my [metaphorical] ass and checked my comment count and, hot damn, Ron’s got it all nailed down. So, yeah, I’ve got nearly 300 comments since the beginning of 2024.

I didn’t see any way to filter them by what author I was commenting on (NB: I didn’t look too hard; see above about being the laziest man on Earth), but I’d bet >90% of the commentary is here so, you know, whatever. It’s all moot now anyway.

I guess my point is, nice work on the comment count stuff, Mr. Unz. Also I’m lazy AF.

The latter.

People have been using alcohol and nicotine consistently for centuries or millennia.

America does not recognize Taiwan.

Yeah, some of us Geography buffs do. It’s that light yellow island 100 miles off the coast of The People’s Republic.

That’s like China carving off Massachusetts and handing it off to Canada. Then later accusing Canada of imperialistic designs on America.

Not exactly. It’s like American patriots losing a war to the coming Communist Potomac Regime, escaping to Catalina Island, and then holing up there with a mass of weaponry for 3/4 century… feasting on buffalo I might add.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s no longer America’s job to defend that island nation (the Cold War having been over for 35 years), just as it wouldn’t be, I dunno, Uruguay’s job to defend us patriots on Santa Catalina.

Since you spent a lot of time on this one, I wanted to wait until I had time to write a good response Mr. Hail.

Yes, you’ve pretty much got my attitude right. I do remember being at my desk with a 1 1/2″ thick SAT practice book, because to me it was a matter of not making stupid mistakes and knowing how much time I needed to spend on the different questions. My parents weren’t pushing me like Tiger Moms and Dads. It was not that kind of world for me.

This was really about that there was one kid in our class (each grade had under 50) who thought he was smarter, and I wanted to disabuse him of that notion. After I kicked his ass on this 2nd test (SAT vs. PSAT), another kid heard my score and said “Achmed” “laid the hammer down”.

America did not need to be a nation of 12-hour schooling, and crowded teeming cities where one needed that much academic work, not to get smarter, but to get ahead among all that competition. (It sounds like some of iSteve’s writings on the NYC Kindergarten admissions, if you recall.) We are bringing that attitude here, which goes with the new more-crowded landscape and stress. When I took that test there were around 200-250 million Americans, and I never saw but 2 Chinese people – from Taiwan of course – that I recall, until college. Those 2 were completely assimilated.

The cheating is another story. In China, the yearly college entrance exams are guarded like the Hope Diamond. (In China, getting into college is the hard part – once there, it’s easy to get through.) So obviously, hanky-panky is expected.

Pointing out Trump has lots of flaws is not hard to do. In his first term he added seven trillion dollars to the national debt, failed to make much needed cuts to the military budget and initiated the economically destructive Covid lockdowns.

He was still preferable to Harris, though. The only Democrat that I might have even considered voting for, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., had too many roadblocks put up against him by the Democrat establishment to be able to get the nomination.

Until the Democrats drop the crazy woke leftism, they will not have a chance to win. Their wokeism almost requires that they pick an affirmative action incompetant Black female as their presidential candidate. It also almost requires that they support an open borders immigration policy, a vast welfare state and overseas wars to spread their woke ideology.

Here comes Steve Sailer taking a victory-lap related to Wokeness, elite academia (especially Harvard), and “standardized testing” politics.

Of interest to Ron Unz (Harvard, BA, 1983, double-major in physics and ancient history) and portions of the Sailer-commentariat. Sailer again stakes a flag in the sand on the Covid Lockdownism debate towards the end:

Who could have guessed? Harvard’s test-optional admissions flopped

Harvard had to introduce remedial instruction in junior high school algebra and geometry last fall.

by Steve Sailer
March 19, 2025
1450 words [non-“paywalled”]

For generations, Harvard was the Goldman Sachs of higher education: the Smart Money.

From mandating the SAT test in the 1930s to dropping its Jewish ceiling in the 1950s to speedrunning through various types of affirmative action in the 1970s (initially, naively looking for Diamonds In the Rough from the ghetto, which led to some unfortunate incidents in the dorms) before settling on admitting well-socialized upper middle class blacks and selling it to the Supreme Court in the 1978 Bakke decision not as Reverse Discrimination Reparations to give blacks a leg up, which might violate the 14th Amendment, but to help everybody enjoy the more intellectually vibrant campus discussions that Diversity surely brings … well, Harvard was out front.

Harvard’s fame only grew. For example, I’ve mentioned “Harvard” at least 1,250 times over the years in my posts, only a few dozen times less than I’ve mentioned “Yale,” “Princeton,” “Stanford,” and “MIT” combined.

But then came the Great Awokening, and Harvard’s various self-inflicted humiliations, such as believing the Theory of Intersectionality and hence picking a black woman plagiarist to be its president, and suspending its legitimate superstar black professor during Me-Too for, basically, acting like a straight black guy.

Claudine Gay: Black female, selected in late 2022 to be Harvard president, replacing a Jewish-male president (tenure, mid-2018 to mid-2023). Those old enough to remember 2020-2024 will recall that the late-2022 selection and mid-2023 handover were celebrated as a victory for Wokeness; and that Claudine Gay’s termination, a few months later, was seen as a defeat for Wokeness.

The real reason Claudine Gay was terminated: Her neutrality in the Palestine–Israel conflict. (Incompetence was not quite enough or she’d never have been appointed at all.) A drumbeat of attacks on her peppered the news-cycles regularly, between October and December 2023. She was terminated officially on January 2, 2024.

Claudine Gay was one of the victims of the Israeli attacks (still ongoing in mid-2025) that followed the Hamas “jailbreak” surprise-attack of October 7, 2023.

Back to Steve Sailer:

As I’ve been mentioning, after some degree of sanity started to return to elite culture around 2022, MIT has taken the lead from Harvard by usually being first to roll back the worst craziness of the last decade, such as by dumping DEI Loyalty Oaths, cutting black admissions from a nutty 15% to 5% in an attempt to show it at least respects the Supreme Court (while still practicing some affirmative action), and being first to make admissions tests mandatory again.

Harvard has repeatedly lagged behind MIT and gotten burned.

In my day, we took algebra in 9th grade. These days, most kids who would traditionally be considered Harvard Material take algebra in 8th or 7th grade.

But, of course, Harvard, which had sponsored the rise of the SAT from the 1930s onward under president James Conant in order to find smart students from outside of its usual Saint Grottlesex feeder boarding schools, switched to test-optional admissions during covid.

And then, Harvard insisted on keeping test scores optional due to the Racial Reckoning through at least 2026.

What could possibly go wrong without test scores?

Besides admitting a bunch of students into Harvard who need remedial algebra?

That’s another Harvard Humiliation that flew under the radar for a few months. From the Harvard Crimson last September:

Harvard Launches New Intro Math Course to Address Pandemic Learning Loss

By S. Mac Healey and Angelina J. Parker, Crimson Staff Writers

September 3, 2024

The Harvard Math Department will pilot a new introductory course aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills among students, according to Harvard’s Director of Introductory Math Brendan A. Kelly. […]

He said the Covid-19 pandemic led to gaps in students’ math skills and learning abilities, prompting the need for a new introductory course.

I guess that makes me an established commenter. I’d like to thank the Unz Academy for bestowing on me this honor.

As I recall, the original of that image, “Völker Europas”, was presented by Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany to his cousin Czar Alexander of Russia as a token of alliance … shortly before World War I. So you can see how well that worked out.

I have a comment about comments: The Unz comments system is far and away the best I have stumbled across on the Web.
I wonder if there’s a way it could be packaged and commercialized.
Excellence should be rewarded. and more filthy lucre is always good.

“Surely the laziest man on earth wouldn’t post at all?”

I take great umbrage, sir! (Note to self: is “umbrage” actually a word?)

Surely *I* am the Laziest Man on Earth! If I weren’t, how comes it then that you are all not worrying yourselves silly over my total dictatorship of all life forms on this local planet? You better hope I never get out of bed and start actually doing stuff!

Meanwhile, bow before my would-be Empress! (I don’t actually lust after Billie the way I once actually did lust after PJ… it’s just that she’s literally the only individual in this culture whom I’ve found interesting and impressive for more than twenty years….)

Although the German Kaiserreich was not responsible for the 1914-18 war, Kaiser Wilhelm II had a bad influence on foreign policy and stability in Europe.

It was thanks to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s bungling that stable relations between the three big continental empires in central-eastern Europe — Germany, Austria, and Russia — faltered. The Kaiser fired Bismarck in 1890 and Russia eventually broke ranks, then even entered into an alliance with France in the mid-1890s. This Franco-Russian dalliance might have faded away, if there were a better German foreign policy posture between the mid-1890s and mid-1910s. Kaiser Wilhelm II was personally too much of an adventurist and too many such people were empowered in Germany in these years.

Some say the slogan “Yellow Peril” itself was hugely boosted by the very same Kaiser Wilhelm II (as “Gelbe Gefahr“), urging unity in a then-proposed project to neutralize the constant menace of instability in China. The kind of problem seen with the anti-White massacres of the Boxer Rebellion about that time, the Boxer massacres and upheavals being merely the largest of a long string of such attacks, and Ch’ing China’s sclerotic, antiquated regime had long since become a laughing-stock. The overconfidence with which Kaiser Wilhelm II proposed this grand adventure was typical of his thinking in these year. He was still in his late thirties, and only began to mellow out in older years.

It’s funny, though, this picking apart Germany’s mistakes in the post-Bismarck, pre-August 1914 years. Because many other belligerents behaved just as stupidly, or more stupidly at times. Even the sometimes-revered Teddy Roosevelt had a great deal of Kaiser Wilhelm’s imperial bluster to him (the difference was the USA was in such a much-stronger geopolitical position so damage from the kinds of interventions Teddy Roosevelt demanded and pursued, were much more limited).

It was a joint effort by Europe’s diplomatists and politicos and yellow-pressmen and others, that allowed the system to get locked into a “diplomatic-political doomsday machine” (as Henry Kissinger called the status of things in the decade before the diplomatic-political disaster of the unnecessary war of July 1914).

Among the motivations by the artists who sketched the various “Yellow Peril” sketches of the late 1890s must have been: (1.) thinking back to the Bismarckian days of broad peace and stability, plus (2.) giving an aspirational message of White-European Unity.

One good thing about the Ukraine War, is the galvanization of the pro-Ukraine side within the EU: at its best, this shift gets quite close to a positive European Unity in ways people have hoped for, for generations. By this late date, in the 2020s, the alternative may well be for a multiculturalized Europe to end up as a series of colonies ruled, one way or another, by China (and a handful of petty neutralized states in between).

Third Worlders are not dying at 40 anymore. The life expectancy gap has shrunk quite a bit.
Age-adjusted cancer incidence is higher in the first world, and higher in the urban Western diet eating part of the third world.

This gives a clue which is the fat percent of calories correlate with cancer incidence.

One good thing about the Ukraine War, is the galvanization of the pro-Ukraine side within the EU: at its best, this shift gets quite close to a positive European Unity in ways people have hoped for, for generations. By this late date, in the 2020s, the alternative may well be for a multiculturalized Europe to end up as a series of colonies ruled, one way or another, by China (and a handful of petty neutralized states in between).

This narrative omits Uncle Sam, who mongered the Ukraine War to expand and secure his European colonies.

What are trying to accomplish here about that? Will “a positive European Unity” still include Washington?