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Article By James Fulford on 10/03/2023

On MSNBC, far-Left lesbian activist Rachel Maddow just (October 2, 2023) attacked VDARE.com and Editor Peter Brimelow by name.

She started out by talking about National Review’s purges, one of which hit Peter Brimelow.

The distance between the, you know, not just not governing, but really far out there, sort of non-respectable fringe and the actual governing part of the party.

Here’s a story.

About 25 years ago, 1997, the flagship conservative magazine, the National Review, went through one of its periodic purges. They realized, as they periodically do, that they were employing some writers, they were publishing some pieces that were just too racist.

She showed a screenshot of the SPLC’s (much later) August 2012 Prominent White Nationalists Fired from National Review. One of the allegedly “Prominent White Nationalists” was former National Review columnist John Derbyshire. The other was university professor—now also former National Review columnist—Robert Weissberg who, as even the SPLC admitted, was making a non–“White Nationalist” speech.

Quote from the SPLC:

The speech, titled “A Politically Viable Alternative to White Nationalism,” argued that any movement expressly based on white racial identity is “dead on arrival” and must be repackaged in order to win recognition.

Weissberg is of course Jewish.

She went on:

They have periodically realized this over the course of the history of this magazine. They have to do this when they have ended up publishing people who claimed that, you know, white people are naturally more intelligent than everybody else, that white people are genetically superior to all other races.

While National Review has published material on the white-black IQ gap and The Bell Curve (not so much since John OSullivan was fired as Editor), I don’t know that they’ve actually fired anyone because of it.

Maddow continued:

They were publishing a guy who argued that white parents and Asian parents should teach their children to avoid black people.

(That’s John Derbyshire’s “The Talk, Non-Black Version” which actually appeared in TakiMag, not National Review. While advising young people to avoid the Trayvon Martins of the world, Derbyshire also added: “There are nonetheless many intelligent and well-socialized blacks. (I’ll use IWSB as an ad hoc abbreviation.) You should consciously seek opportunities to make friends with IWSBs.”)

Of course this reasonableness did

Letter By VDARE.com Reader on 10/03/2023
From: Kidist Paulos Asrat [Email her] I am rereading (now for the third time) Larry Auster’s formidable Our Borders, Ourselves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism, published in 2019, four years ago. Therefore, I am confused as to why Patrick Cleburne’s article Patrick Cleburne: My Correspondents Say Darien Gap Immvaders Better Than Other Illegals. I Say: SO WHAT? makes no mention of Mr. Auster’...
Post By Paul Kersey on 10/03/2023
Shot. A Decade of Wooing Wins a Harlem Store for Target, by Stephanie Clifford, NY Times, August 13, 2009 Target’s first Manhattan store opened late last month in Harlem with great fanfare. The chain’s mascot, a miniature bull terrier, rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Miss New York, Doug E. Fresh and Jerry Seinfeld attended a pre-party. Crowds lined up outside the store, the l...
Post By Steve Sailer on 10/03/2023
Andrew Gelman, the professor of statistics at Columbia whose skeptical blog has done a lot over the years to better standards of statistical analysis, blogs: We’ve been hearing a lot about glamorous scientists who go on Ted and NPR, write airport bestsellers, get six-figure speaking gigs . . . and then it turns out, first that their work does not replicate, and next that their fame and fortune we...
Post By Steve Sailer on 10/03/2023
When Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and William Dean Howells founded the Atlantic Monthly in 1857, their highest priority was round-the-clock coverage of World War Hair. Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic proudly carries on this tradition by posting random nonsense about black women’s hair. These days, most world-class athletes are fanatics about conditioning, which means they don’t do much...
Article By John Derbyshire on 10/02/2023

Doomed, doomed.     As advertised in my September 22nd podcast, I have been listening, via Audible, to Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave, just published this month. If you’ll excuse me repeating myself:

The subtitle is: ”Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma.” It’s about the, yes, coming wave of technology—most particularly Artificial Intelligence and bio-tech—that will transform the world we live in.

Suleyman, that Turkish-sounding name notwithstanding, is another Brit (although he now lives in Silicon Valley), and one well qualified to pronounce on his subject. He was a co-founder of DeepMind back in 2010, and has been a leader in AI research ever since. He has interesting and important things to say …

He sure does. No one knows better than Suleyman how fast things are moving in those two areas of technological advance.

That phrase in the book’s subtitle, ”the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma,” refers to the great good these changes could accomplish, the great evil they might unleash, and how we steer the human race towards the good and away from the evil. The latter part of that—steering us away from the evil—Suleyman discusses at much length under the heading ”containment.”

The central problem for humanity in the 21st century is how we can nurture political power and wisdom, technical mastery, and robust norms to constrain technology and ensure they continue to do far more good than harm …

But:

The odds are stacked against us in making this a reality.

For a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist like me, the book is a banquet. Has the COVID panic got you worrying about possible leaks from big, expensive labs staffed by credentialed scientists under careful surveillance? Very soon, perhaps already, a hobbyist tinkering with synthetic biology in his garage could kill a billion of us. (Suleyman is actually quoting a biotech expert there, but he seems to believe it.)

Suleyman did have me shaking my head a few times, to the degree my headset would allow it. I suspect he is uncritically Woke. In Chapter 14, for example, we get this:

A few years ago many Large Language Models had a problem. They were, to put it bluntly, racist. Users could quite easily find ways to make them regurgitate racist material, or hold racist opinions they had gleaned while scanning the vast corpus of text on which they had been trained. Toxic bias was, it had seemed, ingrained in human writing and then amplified by AI.

This led many to conclude that the whole setup was ethically broken, morally nonviable. There was no way LLMs could be controlled well enough to be released to the public, given the obvious harms.

But then LLMs, as we’ve heard, took off. In 2023 it’s now clear that, compared with the early systems, it’s extremely difficult to goad something like ChatGPT into racist comments.

Is it a solved problem? Absolutely not; there are still multiple examples of biased, even overtly racist, LLMs, as well as serious problems with everything from inaccurate information to gaslighting. But for those of us who have worked in the field from the beginning, the exponential progress at eliminating bad outputs has been incredible, undeniable.

Suleyman doesn’t give us his definition of ”racist,” but I suspect it is congruent with Ibram X. Kendi’s. Thence to the question: What happens to truth—truth that contradicts social dogma—when AI supplies us with all our knowledge?

I’ll guess that LLM knowledge bases strongly resemble Wikipedia: handy if you want to look up Dirichlet’s Theorem or the Battle of Lepanto but deeply unreliable on anything—or anybody—connected to social dogma on race or sex.

And Western World Wokery is a pale, weak thing by comparison with social dogmas elsewhere. What would a Chinese LLM have to say about Mao Tse-tung’s great famine, or the Tiananmen Square protests? What would a North Korean LLM tell me about the Kim family?

And with North Korea in mind: If one guy fiddling in his garage can kill a billion of us, what might a malevolent nation do?

Mustafa Suleyman does his best to offer hope, scolding what he calls ”techo-pessimists” and urging us to more enlightened regulation, better international cooperation, etc. He sounds worried, though. So he should. ”Nurture political power and wisdom”? Has Mustafa Suleyman ever attended a session of the U.S. Congress?

Twenty years ago I reviewed a book by

Post By A.W. Morgan on 10/02/2023
The National Border Patrol Council correctly says that Traitor Joe Biden’s illegal-alien Great Replacers must be deported because the “asylum” claims they file are bogus, as VDARE has reported many times. But the union also predicts riots if what would obviously be a GOP POTUS tried to deport them. That will be true only if the president tries, which is hardly a certainty. In turn, that is why endi...
Post By Former Agent on 10/02/2023
Earlier this week, Elon Musk called out the media for not covering the border crisis [Elon Musk calls out lack of ’legacy media coverage’ on border crisis, Andrew Chapados, The Blaze, September 21, 2023].   Since I live and breathe border disaster, I was interested to know how much the media is or isn’t the border. Usually, they cover some aspect of it, if only a bare minimum to say they did cover...
Post By Steve Sailer on 10/02/2023
California governor Gavin Newsom announced in 2021 that if Senator Diane Feinstein finally kicked the bucket, he’d appoint a black woman to fill out her term on the grounds that there were no black women in the Senate. (Of course, the reason there were no black women in the Senate was because California senator Kamala Harris had been kicked upstairs to preside over the Senate as Vice President.) O...
Article By Washington Watcher II on 10/01/2023

Most of the 230,000 illegal aliens encountered at the southwest border in August were released to roam free (and those were just the illegals the Border Patrol caught—hundreds of thousands got away). But we’ve been reading that story for months now. We’ve also been reading about the Illegals who land in Blue Sanctuary Cities such as New York and Chicago, and how those municipalities struggle to pay their bills. But we haven’t read much about the invaders who colonize flyover country with GOP donor assistance. The Daily Wire’s Spencer Lundquist recently reported that a developer and Stupid Party moneyman has built a shanty town in Red State America, which shows just how greedy and unscrupulous donors can be. They’ll do anything to make a buck, even if the buck is made on dispossessing and replacing the Historic American Nation [Inside Colony Ridge: The ‘Fastest Growing Development’ In The U.S. Is A Magnet For Illegal Immigrants, September 16, 2023]. GOP/GAP lawmakers must crack down hard on these developers, big campaign donations regardless.

Colony Ridge is a Texas community 400 miles away from the border. Just north of Houston, the unincorporated locale has a population of at least 50,000. It’s larger than mid-sized cities like Asheville, North Carolina, and Fayetteville, Arkansas. Most of those residents are suspected illegals, and the area looks more like a favela—Brazilian Portuguese for slum or ghetto—than a suburb. Video footage shows the Third-World hellhole growing in the heart of Texas.

Properties in Colony Ridge are sold by one William “Trey” Harris. Unlike other real estate entrepreneurs, Harris doesn’t require buyers to show the normal qualifications to purchase a property. They don’t need to present a Social Security number, proof of income, or a credit rating. That

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By James Fulford on 10/03/2023

On MSNBC, far-Left lesbian activist Rachel Maddow just (October 2, 2023) attacked VDARE.com and Editor Peter Brimelow by name.

She started out by talking about National Review’s purges, one of which hit Peter Brimelow.

The distance between the, you know, not just not governing, but really far out there, sort of non-respectable fringe and the actual governing part of the party.

Here’s a story.

About 25 years ago, 1997, the flagship conservative magazine, the National Review, went through one of its periodic purges. They realized, as they periodically do, that they were employing some writers, they were publishing some pieces that were just too racist.

She showed a screenshot of the SPLC’s (much later) August 2012 Prominent White Nationalists Fired from National Review. One of the allegedly “Prominent White Nationalists” was former National Review columnist John Derbyshire. The other was university professor—now also former National Review columnist—Robert Weissberg who, as even the SPLC admitted, was making a non–“White Nationalist” speech.

Quote from the SPLC:

The speech, titled “A Politically Viable Alternative to White Nationalism,” argued that any movement expressly based on white racial identity is “dead on arrival” and must be repackaged in order to win recognition.

Weissberg is of course Jewish.

She went on:

They have periodically realized this over the course of the history of this magazine. They have to do this when they have ended up publishing people who claimed that, you know, white people are naturally more intelligent than everybody else, that white people are genetically superior to all other races.

While National Review has published material on the white-black IQ gap and The Bell Curve (not so much since John OSullivan was fired as Editor), I don’t know that they’ve actually fired anyone because of it.

Maddow continued:

They were publishing a guy who argued that white parents and Asian parents should teach their children to avoid black people.

(That’s John Derbyshire’s “The Talk, Non-Black Version” which actually appeared in TakiMag, not National Review. While advising young people to avoid the Trayvon Martins of the world, Derbyshire also added: “There are nonetheless many intelligent and well-socialized blacks. (I’ll use IWSB as an ad hoc abbreviation.) You should consciously seek opportunities to make friends with IWSBs.”)

Of course this reasonableness did

By John Derbyshire on 10/02/2023

Doomed, doomed.     As advertised in my September 22nd podcast, I have been listening, via Audible, to Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave, just published this month. If you’ll excuse me repeating myself:

The subtitle is: ”Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma.” It’s about the, yes, coming wave of technology—most particularly Artificial Intelligence and bio-tech—that will transform the world we live in.

Suleyman, that Turkish-sounding name notwithstanding, is another Brit (although he now lives in Silicon Valley), and one well qualified to pronounce on his subject. He was a co-founder of DeepMind back in 2010, and has been a leader in AI research ever since. He has interesting and important things to say …

He sure does. No one knows better than Suleyman how fast things are moving in those two areas of technological advance.

That phrase in the book’s subtitle, ”the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma,” refers to the great good these changes could accomplish, the great evil they might unleash, and how we steer the human race towards the good and away from the evil. The latter part of that—steering us away from the evil—Suleyman discusses at much length under the heading ”containment.”

The central problem for humanity in the 21st century is how we can nurture political power and wisdom, technical mastery, and robust norms to constrain technology and ensure they continue to do far more good than harm …

But:

The odds are stacked against us in making this a reality.

For a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist like me, the book is a banquet. Has the COVID panic got you worrying about possible leaks from big, expensive labs staffed by credentialed scientists under careful surveillance? Very soon, perhaps already, a hobbyist tinkering with synthetic biology in his garage could kill a billion of us. (Suleyman is actually quoting a biotech expert there, but he seems to believe it.)

Suleyman did have me shaking my head a few times, to the degree my headset would allow it. I suspect he is uncritically Woke. In Chapter 14, for example, we get this:

A few years ago many Large Language Models had a problem. They were, to put it bluntly, racist. Users could quite easily find ways to make them regurgitate racist material, or hold racist opinions they had gleaned while scanning the vast corpus of text on which they had been trained. Toxic bias was, it had seemed, ingrained in human writing and then amplified by AI.

This led many to conclude that the whole setup was ethically broken, morally nonviable. There was no way LLMs could be controlled well enough to be released to the public, given the obvious harms.

But then LLMs, as we’ve heard, took off. In 2023 it’s now clear that, compared with the early systems, it’s extremely difficult to goad something like ChatGPT into racist comments.

Is it a solved problem? Absolutely not; there are still multiple examples of biased, even overtly racist, LLMs, as well as serious problems with everything from inaccurate information to gaslighting. But for those of us who have worked in the field from the beginning, the exponential progress at eliminating bad outputs has been incredible, undeniable.

Suleyman doesn’t give us his definition of ”racist,” but I suspect it is congruent with Ibram X. Kendi’s. Thence to the question: What happens to truth—truth that contradicts social dogma—when AI supplies us with all our knowledge?

I’ll guess that LLM knowledge bases strongly resemble Wikipedia: handy if you want to look up Dirichlet’s Theorem or the Battle of Lepanto but deeply unreliable on anything—or anybody—connected to social dogma on race or sex.

And Western World Wokery is a pale, weak thing by comparison with social dogmas elsewhere. What would a Chinese LLM have to say about Mao Tse-tung’s great famine, or the Tiananmen Square protests? What would a North Korean LLM tell me about the Kim family?

And with North Korea in mind: If one guy fiddling in his garage can kill a billion of us, what might a malevolent nation do?

Mustafa Suleyman does his best to offer hope, scolding what he calls ”techo-pessimists” and urging us to more enlightened regulation, better international cooperation, etc. He sounds worried, though. So he should. ”Nurture political power and wisdom”? Has Mustafa Suleyman ever attended a session of the U.S. Congress?

Twenty years ago I reviewed a book by

By Washington Watcher II on 10/01/2023

Most of the 230,000 illegal aliens encountered at the southwest border in August were released to roam free (and those were just the illegals the Border Patrol caught—hundreds of thousands got away). But we’ve been reading that story for months now. We’ve also been reading about the Illegals who land in Blue Sanctuary Cities such as New York and Chicago, and how those municipalities struggle to pay their bills. But we haven’t read much about the invaders who colonize flyover country with GOP donor assistance. The Daily Wire’s Spencer Lundquist recently reported that a developer and Stupid Party moneyman has built a shanty town in Red State America, which shows just how greedy and unscrupulous donors can be. They’ll do anything to make a buck, even if the buck is made on dispossessing and replacing the Historic American Nation [Inside Colony Ridge: The ‘Fastest Growing Development’ In The U.S. Is A Magnet For Illegal Immigrants, September 16, 2023]. GOP/GAP lawmakers must crack down hard on these developers, big campaign donations regardless.

Colony Ridge is a Texas community 400 miles away from the border. Just north of Houston, the unincorporated locale has a population of at least 50,000. It’s larger than mid-sized cities like Asheville, North Carolina, and Fayetteville, Arkansas. Most of those residents are suspected illegals, and the area looks more like a favela—Brazilian Portuguese for slum or ghetto—than a suburb. Video footage shows the Third-World hellhole growing in the heart of Texas.

Properties in Colony Ridge are sold by one William “Trey” Harris. Unlike other real estate entrepreneurs, Harris doesn’t require buyers to show the normal qualifications to purchase a property. They don’t need to present a Social Security number, proof of income, or a credit rating. That

By Carl Horowitz on 09/30/2023

See, earlier The Fulford File: Ann Coulter On Willie Horton, Joey Fournier—And What Life Is Really Like and Ann Coulter: Bush's Finest 30 Seconds—The Willie Horton Ad

The sight of the Great Replacement invasion at the southwest border should provoke outrage. It hasn’t, but it could, and in very much the old-fashioned way: with the same type of “Willie Horton ad” that catapulted George H.W. Bush into the White House, despite being behind Democrat Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the polls at the end of July 1988 [The Shadow of Dukakis Looms Over Biden, by David Catron, The American Spectator, August 7, 2020].

Think back to 35 years ago, when William Robert Horton, now 72, a convicted felon, commanded the national spotlight. That was due to an independently produced campaign TV ad aimed at Governor Dukakis for championing a weekend prison furlough program through which Horton committed additional felonies.

Horton had earned a prominent place in the annals of American crime on the night of October 26, 1974, when he and two accomplices robbed a gas station in Lawrence, Mass. One of the perps stabbed Joey Fournier, a 17-year-old attendant, 19 times and then stuffed him in a barrel where he died [35 years after Horton murder, victim’s kin carry on his memory, by Laurel J. Sweet, Boston Herald, October 26, 2009]. In May 1975, all three defendants were convicted of armed robbery and murder. Horton got life without parole. It wasn’t his first stretch in prison. He’d done three years in the slammer in South Carolina for assault with the intent to kill. Unfortunately, this time he had a way out.

In 1972, the Massachusetts legislature had enacted a law, signed by Republican Governor Francis Sargent, authorizing weekend furloughs to prisoners. First-degree murderers were ineligible, but the next year, the state Supreme Court decreed that they were. In 1976, during Michael Dukakis’ first term as governor, the legislature passed a bill overturning the ruling, but Dukakis vetoed it because it would “cut the heart out of efforts at inmate rehabilitation.”

Cut to a decade later. Willie Horton had received nine furloughs. The tenth would be his last. On June 6, 1986, a cop pulled him over for an apparent traffic offense. Rather than comply with the officer’s directive, Horton sped off, crashed the vehicle, escaped to Florida, and resettled in Maryland.

On April 3, 1987, he invaded the Oxon Hill, MD, home of an engaged white couple, Clifford Barnes and Angela Miller. He pistol-whipped and tied up Barnes, raped his fiancée twice, stole her car and drove away. The couple survived. Equally gratifying, Prince George’s County police arrested Horton after a chase and a shootout. He received two consecutive life sentences in addition to his sentence in Massachusetts [Debunking the Willie Horton Ad Controversy, by Carl M. Cannon, Real Clear Politics, December 9, 2018].

Michael Dukakis seemed unconcerned. He not only refused to tighten the requirements of the furlough program, but also declined to meet with, or even apologize to, the traumatized Maryland couple. He even attempted to stonewall a full-scale investigation of the program by the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, which eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for its efforts [Horton case linked newspaper and president, by Lisa Kashinsky, Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, December 6, 2018].

The Horton fiasco became common knowledge. In April 1988, during a debate on the eve of the New York Democratic primary, candidate Al Gore raised the

By Edward Dutton on 09/29/2023

The hashtag #roman empire has reportedly been viewed over a billion times on TikTok, with most videos women asking men the question: How often do you think about the Roman Empire? The surprising answer: a lot. Feminist historian Mary Beard, of course, says it’s because of male chauvinism [How often do you think about the Roman Empire? Expert has thoughts on the new TikTok trend, SkyNews, September 27, 2023]. Well, here’s one reason to think about it: I believe the rise and fall of Rome coincided with the rise and fall of Roman intelligence. Rome fell because its people were becoming less intelligent. And the same thing is happening today.

Many theories attempt to explain the Roman Empire’s collapse. It was overstretched, meaning it could no longer efficiently transport the necessary raw materials. Or it came up against problems that its elite could not solve, leading to the populace losing faith in these elites. The problem with these explanations is that they invite obvious questions. Why did Rome gradually become less efficient? Why were its elites decreasingly able to solve the problems of running a large empire?

The essence of intelligence is “solving problems.” Group-level intelligence is associated with all of the markers of civilization: wealth, numeracy, education, democracy, social trust, obedience to the law and just authority, and, importantly good health and public hygiene achieved with plumbing and sanitation. (This is explored in the book Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences, by the late Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen.)

We would then expect civilization to weaken selection for intelligence because it reduces environmental harshness and leads to improved living conditions: again,

 

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