Open Thread 110

I’ll resume regular poasting on the morrow, but for now, a shakshuka recipe:

  1. Fry jeera powder (cumin), paprika, chilli powder in butter. Add garlic, then onions, bell peppers & hot peppers. Then tomato sauce (though proper method is to use cubed tomatoes).
  2. Clear up gaps & fill them with eggs.
  3. Own “innovation”: Add grated parmesan cheese on top.

 

Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.

 

Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.

 

Apart from writing booksreviewstravel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.

Comments

  1. Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.

    If you are new to my work, start here.

  2. Huevos rancheros got cumin and coriander from the Old World while shakshuka got peppers and chilis form the New World. Probably independent developments but both made possible by the globalization in the 16th century.

    However there are some nonbelievers. In Sichuan probably nobody believes that their hot dishes owe to the imported chilis by Portuguese from the New Word just like most Italians do not believe that their pasta, macaroni and spaghetti were Chinese inventions.

  3. songbird says

    Kimchi started to be made with pepper in order to save salt. It began as a government mandate in the 17th century. Of course, Korea wasn’t introduced to pepper directly from Europeans. They got it from the Japanese, I believe.

  4. Ah, Shakshuka – don’t get me started.

    The best shakshuka I ever had was in this tiny, dirty dhaba that catered to Israelis in a small village up the mountain from Dharamsahla, cooked by an old Indian man.

    I still do not understand how it was so good. I ate it every day for a week, then sadly has to move on.

    It’s amazing how the New World transformed world cuisine – tomatoes, essential in Italian food and Indian curries. Peppers, of course, so popular in so many places.

  5. Welcome back!

  6. Thanks. Early kimchi also did not have garlic and the main ingredients were cucumbers and radishes. Using chilis became widespread in 19th century as well as the main ingredient napa cabbage that also was introduced to Korea at the end of 19th century from Japan.

    It is interesting that many national dishes associated with various countries and cultures are relatively recent. Hungarian obsession with paprika is also relatively recent.

  7. Thulean Friend says

    I’m glad that my bullying of car drivers is going mainstream, e.g. this. It’s not just New York City. Paris Major Anne Hidalgo has pledged to ban cars altogether from even more streets in her re-election bid. The long term trends are clear. Western cities are increasingly going to be no-go zones for carcucks.

    https://i.imgur.com/ULXZ01G.jpg

  8. “Clear up gaps”?

    Could you please be a little bit more specific?

    Looks really good.

    I’ll try the classic dish as is, although I’ll add the cheese on top as you do, but why not dice up a little bit of ham or sausage and throw it into the mix too – shakshuka done Denver style? 🙂

  9. Kent Nationalist says

    Who wouldn’t want to spend more time in a confined space with violent blacks (etc.) who are allowed to act with increasing impunity?

  10. Hyperborean says

    This may sound a bit vague.

    For the commenters raised in America, I am curious how the education system (perhaps also churches?) portrays/portrayed American history.

    Which eras and topics were given focus and how were they depicted? If it is not too probing, perhaps also some details like national region, urban/rural status or time period of education.

  11. As of July 13, private laboratory services “helix” and “Invitro” found antibodies to COVID-19 in almost 20 % of St. Petersburg residents who passed their tests.”
    https://paperpaper.ru/papernews/2020/07/13/antitela-k-koronavirusu-nashli-pochti-u-20/

    If the assumption that a significant part of the population has innate immunity to Covid is correct, then network immunity ceases to be a myth

  12. The new oppressed minority: TRANS- Negroes

    https://youtu.be/C6ZVU_ZPKQ4

  13. Not Raul says

    For a second, I thought he was Sam Hyde.

    Then I remembered that Sam died in a shootout with the ATF.

  14. Blinky Bill says
  15. How is high school in Russia, do they also have East Asian style cram schools, is the process of getting from a high school in Russia do an elite school like LMSU or SPSU as difficult as it is in the US? Are LMSU and SPSU as selective as HYP in the US?

  16. A. Hipster says

    so what’s the story … Putin , his Ukrainian born(?) Minister of Defense Karjakin, Parisian gentleman mr Kramnik …

    Grand Masters for Aeroflot?? or what?

  17. Is there a good argument to making elite colleges less selective? Like if someone is smart enough to understand the basic concepts of engineering, and so smart enough to pass a licensure exam, he should be able to get into Caltech or MIT? Rather than Caltech of MIT only allowing someone who has the IQ of a noble physics or economics laureate to be admitted, I mean a bachelors degree should really be only about learning the basics of a course, so that someone has a very decent chance of passing a licensure exam, if someone want to go into really advance study, he should go get a masters or a doctorate.

  18. A. Hipster says

    I remember having read that the Italians were convinced tomatoes were poisonous fruits, good only as an ornamental plant until around 1800 … might be a myth though —

    interestingly tomato, potato, tobacco and red pepper/chili are all from the Solanaceae family of plants …

    Tobacco, the Red Man’s revenge … (A. Hitler)

    Italy’s maize porridge polenta is also a considered a national food, I think

  19. brabantian says

    It was a Russian Tsarist WW1 flying ace hero, Alexander de Seversky (1894 -1974), who visited Hiroshima & Nagasaki right after the August 1945 ‘nuclear’ attacks, and first tipped off the truth, publishing in Reader’s Digest 1946, how nothing was different than in the napalm firebombings of other Japanese cities, even flagpoles underneath the alleged ‘nuclear fireball’ still standing.

    In the last decade, the ‘smoking gun’ in US war records was discovered, showing that a 66-plane napalm firebombing feet in fact bombed Hiroshima that day.

    So, along with mushroom clouds being chemical – as shown in many factory explosions, see photo below – and much other evidence, it is now clear that there were no nuclear bombs used in 1945, and very likely not since then, either, with 10 ‘nuclear weapons’ powers all pretending ‘Hiroshima was hit by an a-bomb’ and able to steal literally trillions from taxpayers on this pretext, as well as terrorise the world’s peoples.

    It was the total disappearance of much of wooden-house Tokyo in a March 1945 napalm raid, killing over 100,000 Japanese in one night, that emboldened the USA to pull off the ‘nuclear bomb’ hoax. Tsarist hero de Seversky wrote:

    To my surprise, Hiroshima looked exactly like all the other burned-out cities in Japan … buildings structurally intact, topped by undamaged flag poles, lightning rods, railings, signs, and other comparatively fragile objects … I could find no traces of unusual phenomena … It simply is not true that matter was vapourised … tree trunks and walls with growing vines disprove the claims of superheat … it was fire, just fire, that took such high toll of life.

    https://i.ibb.co/X3ctwFL/mushroom-clouds-chem-factory.jpg

  20. Kent Nationalist says

    Italy’s maize porridge polenta is also a considered a national food, I think

    If it is it shouldn’t be. Perhaps the blandest form of staple carbohydrates there is.

  21. Kent Nationalist says

    What about all the witnesses (including civilian bystanders) to nuclear tests in Nevada etc.?

  22. anonymous coward says

    do they also have East Asian style cram schools

    No. Those kids who have serious goals attend a more elite school starting with grade 5. (There are entrance exams to those, BTW, and they’re quite hard.)

    …is the process of getting from a high school in Russia do an elite school like LMSU or SPSU as difficult as it is in the US?

    No. In the US the process is 90% bullshit and humiliation, and 10% skill. In Russia you just need to be good at math. (Or history or whatever.)

    Though academics is like professional sports – unless you start in early childhood or are genetically endowed with insane amounts of talent, you won’t ever be good. (See above – by grade 5 you’re already supposed to have been training hard for years.)

    P.S. Math training is logic, puzzles and spatial reasoning. What Americans call “math” isn’t really; that kind of stuff is taught to remedial students with alcoholic parents in Russia.

  23. Max Payne says

    Cycling is for weak, timid, and untrustworthy homosexuals (shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but I guess that would involve REAL cardio plowing through fields and hills on an actual bike. Can’t abuse the asphalt and concrete roads designed for motorized vehicles).

    Cycling on motorized roads is socially irresponsible. It’s akin to those assholes flying their commercial drones near an airport.

    Cars are an important part of balancing the ecology for humans to co-habitat with wildlife. Shit one summer I must of run over a whole extended family of raccoons, possums, foxes, squirrels, mice, frogs, seagulls, and crows (and a handful of control arms). And that was only MY contribution. It’s so common the city has teams collecting roadkill. Animals that would have caused all kinds of mayhem and destruction to property.

    How many species are culled cycling? A handful of mosquitoes? Sounds weak. I kill millions with my grill just driving to my mailbox.

    When cars stop driving on roads is when you get coyotes moving back into areas threatening school parks and children. You’re probably the type of guy who is okay with children getting mauled by animals. You can thank scary noisy cars for keeping the animals corralled in the few nature areas around the city.

    Worse yet is public transportation. Those cucks have accepted living like subhuman cockroaches huddled underground shuttled to-and-from places in filthy stale chemical-laden air. Water and piss and rat shit flowing down every time it rains, evaporating and leaving stained moisture on the walls and in the air. Forced to go ass-to-crotch with other human beings. And the cost of public transportation isn’t even reasonable. One dollar to get around the city and catch chlamydia? I say that’s two dollars too many. YES unless public transportation PAYS YOU to ride just get a car.

    Automotive industry is pretty huge, I assure you it has cars to meet your budget and serve your homosexual tendencies (like a hybrid or some gay shit).

    Better yet is to make a train system in which I can park my car onto a trolley and it shuttles me to a station which I can drive from. NOW THAT would be useful public transportation. Take a 500km train ride to the next city and undock ready to cruise around or take the train INTO the city from the suburbs with your car. Avoid the hassle of dodging illiterate pedestrians while snaking through backstreets to get to downtown. Saving gas, reducing emissions, connecting people and keeping the world safe for humanity.

    The day cars are banned in cities is the day cities stop being useful and instead become a cesspool to dump homeless people in. Luckily the trend of skyscrapers having megaplex underground parking has only accelerated. Hopefully more cities will accept having subterranean expressways connected to surface main roads instead of wasting time digging tunnels for subways and other uselessness archaic tech.

    Most “cyclists” sober up when father winter shits 30cm of snow in -27c as they crawl back into their winter SUVs and then cry why there aren’t enough parking garages in the city.

    https://i.pinimg.com/originals/87/a6/45/87a645bb4787f0550d9a9fce8c336de4.jpg

    At least when this guy hits my car it won’t scratch the paint.

  24. anonymous coward says

    That’s kind of the system in some European countries – they let randos in, and then flunk them out first year when it turns out they don’t have the work ethic and IQ for serious university.

    It can work, but of course it’s a very wasteful system. You’re effectively dragging out entrance exams during a whole year.

  25. anonymous coward says

    Americucks, ladies and gentlemen.

    P.S. Just come out and say it – America has no public transportation because of negroids. Or would that be “raycisst”?

  26. Europe Europa says

    I wonder if a lot of the reason BLM got “cancelled” is because the ongoing “mass gatherings” (riots) with no social distancing and minimal mask wearing were proving to many people that coronavirus is nonsense.

    The fact these “mass gatherings” are not resulting in a huge spike in cases in the same areas is awkward for the narrative the government and media have been promoting for the last few months. To start with the media tried to ignore the coronavirus thing in relation to BLM, but it’s getting harder and harder to do so.

  27. My point is, what is the minimum IQ to be a decent an acceptable civil engineer, i.e. someone who designs an adequate bridge to lives up to its specifications and does not collapse, is that 110? Or a car does not fall into pieces that first five miles you drive it. My point is that maybe MIT or Caltech should be somewhat less selective, be more realistic with its demands and just accept people who are good enough to be decent engineers, in order to reduce admissions pressures while still letting in qualified people, i.e. good enough to pass a licensure exam, instead of only restricting its intake to future noble laureates. The same could also apply to Harvard, undergraduate economics students do not need to be THAT intelligent, of course if you are talking about a doctorate in economics, that is a different matter, but there is no sense in having a 140 or even 130 IQ cutoff for what is really just being familiar with the fundamentals of economic theory, when 115 in good enough. Basically it is like the T-34 and Sherman is a good enough tank for their roles, so anything more sophisticated with gee whiz bells and whistles like a Panther or a King Tiger is basically an overkill, and you run into diminishing returns to complexity.

  28. Thulean Friend says
  29. Hyperborean says

    My point is that maybe MIT or Caltech should be somewhat less selective, be more realistic with its demands and just accept people who are good enough to be decent engineers, in order to reduce admissions pressures while still letting in qualified people, i.e. good enough to pass a licensure exam, instead of only restricting its intake to future noble laureates.

    While their reputation could maintain them for a bit, if they did that they would eventually just end up moving down to second-tier ranked universities.

    American universities already have a lot of dead wood with legacy candidates, athletes, AA blacks and mestizos, though it is politically unacceptable to acknowledge this it would be the easiest way to clear up new spaces.

    Also, “just good enough” workers and employees usually has “unintended” (though predictable) consequences.

  30. Like for example the Japs made good enough economy cars in the 90s up to the mid-2000s, like they may not have all the advanced tech, but they are very reliable and parts are affordable.

    I mean this shows that the IQ needed for a lot of jobs is not as high as many people assume, like for an accountant 110 is enough, and for a lawyer 115 in enough, for a doctor 120 is enough, and for various engineering jobs 110 is enough to be a competent non-Noble prize awardee genius of geniuses engineer.

    https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx

  31. Like what? If someone is good enough to pass the engineering to pass the engineering licensure exam, he is good enough to build a bridge or build a road, or design an adequate car or plane, end of story. Perfectionism just runs into a lot of diminishing returns to scale, do the majority of econ undergrads, even from decent schools, use the advanced maths that they learned in school during their everyday jobs anyway? Why do you need an advanced laser gun or a King Tiger when an M1 Garand or a Sherman Firefly is more than adequate to do the job. Athletes are another matter, you may be offended but the vast majority of legacy whites and Asians are actually smart enough to get anyway, so whining about them is not the useful.

  32. History is portrayed about as you’d expect. The American Revolution is depicted, followed by slavery, slavery, slavery, trail of tears, more slavery. Then the Civil War, followed by a small amount about the Gilded age, WWI and Wilson, followed by the Depression and heroic FDR, along with WWII. From there history trails off, with maybe tiny bits about the Korean or Vietnam War, as it gets too close to modern times. Usually students will get a year of state history, but that obviously varies state to state. The history as written is entirely focused on American crimes, real or imagined. Any unit on Andrew Jackson will spend at least half or more of its time discussing the Trail of Tears, for example. It’s not hard to understand why many of the current crop of young left wingers have no pride in their country, because that’s the exact message the public schools have been giving them.

    To give a wild example, though not common, Howard Zinn is used as supplemental material in a lot of classrooms nationwide. Zinn’s supposition is that the American colonists rebelled in order to get richer, and he phrases this all like it’s some grand conspiracy theory. A few states have gone to the length of banning his work from schools, which only lets you know how popular he is with some teachers.

  33. Blinky Bill says
  34. Blinky Bill says
  35. Maybe it will be better to just consolidate the tier 1 and tier 2 engineering schools into 1 large school, as long as the tier 2 schools are still turning out satisfactory graduates, I mean is it acceptable for the US to lack engineers, and for colleges like MIT and Caltech to reject perfectly adequate students who are good enough just to maintain their street cred. How well does IQ translate to military feats, because you have dumb people like Arabs, Mongols, Serbs, and Afghans, trouncing their supposedly more intelligent opponents.

  36. Hyperborean says

    In the Feudal and Early Bourgeois eras the lack of education meant a large portion of the population was underutilised.

    The spread of mass education means that t his is no longer the case. You mentioned diseconomies of scale. Expanding university education to the point where it is mear universal (ex. one of UK PM Blair’s “reforms”) is a waste of time, real money (people’s in case of private universities, the state’s in public ones) and potential money in the form of lost economic production and opportunity cost.

    For the UK:

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/news/news/oneinthreegraduatesovereducatedfortheircurrentrole

    For USA:

    https://izajole.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40172-017-0053-4

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/03/many-us-workers-are-over-educated-relative-to-their-jobs-the-economist.html

    However, since employers increasingly over the past decades use Bachelor degrees as intelligence/competence filters over high school grades there is a tragedy of the commons problem that can’t be solved by individual defection.

    Then there are also the socially destabilising psychological effects of having people who believe, rightfully or not, that they should have attained a better status in life than they really did.

  37. High IQ societies like Korea, Japan, and China have universal college education, that said college education costs should only be 10 percent of what they really cost. And the fact that there is an IQ difference between high school and college graduates shows that there is a difference in cognitive levels between typical high school and college subject, and in Asia having a college diploma is tied to social prestige and intelligence, which is borne out in IQ scores.

  38. I should add that subsidized tuitions costs in public colleges Singapore, Japan, and China are a fraction of what they are in US state colleges, even for in-state enrollees.

  39. Hyperborean says

    High IQ societies like Korea, Japan, and China have universal college education.

    It has been a long time since the USA has had East Asian demographics.

    But quantitative data is better, so let us examine OECD countries’ level of university education with GDP per capita, PPP-adjusted.

    https://jacobsfoundation.org/app/uploads/2019/09/OECD_higher-ed-rise-768×1293.jpg

    https://en.irefeurope.org/Publications/Online-Articles/article/GDP-Per-Capita-of-OECD-Countries-Good-News#doc1401

    Even with a cursory view it can be seen that the correlation for wealth and amount of population engaged in tertiary education is rather weak.

  40. I think this already exists with public (state) university school system. For chemical engineering for example, top program nationwide is (or was) in Minnesota, not Harvard or MIT or whatever. And in general, engineering programs from flagship state campuses are very highly regarded – University of Michigan, Ann Arbor comes to mind.

    You will need high IQ if you plan on going into research – if your desire is to get PhD in biophysics, then yea. You don’t need very high IQ for much else really. Even for building bridges, well, we have been doing that for centuries, you just need to follow a checklist and be able to talk to guys who drive bulldozers. Japanese cars are of high quality because they standardized and automated as much as possible, as long as you can follow a checklist, you will make same product every time.

    In the military, the most important thing is unit cohesion, which also does not require soldiers to be Einsteins. Quality and quantity of drill as well as soldier bonds determine unit cohesion rather than IQ. Soldiers who can hold their ground under fire will win over soldiers who run away and abandon their posts. High IQ is actually harmful here because rationally, the first soldier to run maximizes his personal survival chances by dooming his comrades to death.

    This is why Mongols killed the entire units that had deserters in them, and British drill infantry was some of the best in the world with their Red Coats. You could run in Red Coat, but you couldn’t hide – that ensured British infantry stood their ground to the end and maintained cohesion under fire.

  41. AltanBakshi says

    Mongols and Buryats get very high results in IQ tests. https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html

    Mongolic people can be angry and violent, but stupid they are not.

  42. Hyperborean says

    How well does IQ translate to military feats, because you have dumb people like Arabs, Mongols, Serbs, and Afghans, trouncing their supposedly more intelligent opponents.

    Against which nationalities are Serbs and Mongols “dumber” and which did they beat and what time period?

    As for Middle-Easterners, they are still dumb, the difference is merely that contemporary one-sided and hypocritical “ethics” prohibit acting the way they act.

    Otherwise it can be done.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Libya

    https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29441383

  43. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d99/d99t187.asp

    Actually it shows here that a majority of male high school graduates enrolled in a college, even back in the 60s. Actually Western European countries have a higher percentage of their population with a college degree compared to the US, and tuition costs of tuition there are very cheap.

  44. The Serbs did pretty well in guerilla warfare vs. the Germans, and they also did pretty well preserving their military assets in the Kosovo War, considering what they were up against, and even managing to shoot down a stealth fighter, I think that the low Serb score in PISA may be due academic disinterest rather than low IQ per se, I mean the Mongols beat the high Northern and Southern Chinese, which were agrarian societies, and agrarian societies with the complexity of the Chinese tend to have high IQs than nomads.

  45. Hyperborean says

    I think that the low Serb score in PISA may be due academic disinterest rather than low IQ per se

    So Serbs are not really dumb? In which case you invalidated your example.

    I mean the Mongols beat the high Northern and Southern Chinese, which were agrarian societies, and agrarian societies with the complexity of the Chinese tend to have high IQs than nomads.

    Mongols had great cavalry, however they also made significant use of the conquered populations’ engineering abilities as seen in siege weaponry.

    However, the general issue is that your epistemology is flawed. These two examples don’t prove anything about the utility of national “IQ” in warfare in the same way that choosing the single variable of population data and then finding a few examples of wars that proves anything.

    Using such a methodology I could easily prove either positive or negative the hypothesis “Countries with larger populations generally win wars”, however the result would be worthless.

  46. Sorry..I clicked somewhere and posted the photo before I had a chance to write an explanation. Putin, often called crude by the U.S., visited the Russian chess team prior to the chess World Olympiad. Sept. 2018. To honor them, and give a pep talk. He discussed ways of further popularizing chess in Russia. I now think of this visit, because U.S. leaders celebrate looters and vandals.

  47. Hyperborean says

    Actually it shows here that a majority of male high school graduates enrolled in a college, even back in the 60s. Actually Western European countries have a higher percentage of their population with a college degree compared to the US, and tuition costs of tuition there are very cheap.

    State funding of university education is not same as the general level of attendance (though American exorbitant tuition fees has many fathers).

    Nor are you arguing the topic of whether or not increased university attendance is beneficial. So far you are merely making a statement and expecting it to carry you forwards.

    An example of what would happen. In France, before moderate reforms a few years ago 60% of first-year students were unqualified or unready for their initial choice.

    After Parcoursup was introduced in the 2018-19 academic year, 47.5 per cent of admitted undergraduates went on to pass their first year.

    This might still sound like a huge attrition rate − and it is − but it is a marked improvement on the 40 per cent success rate of the previous year (a “horrendous” level of failure, Ms Thompson said).

    Failing the first year in France does not necessarily mean students drop out for good. They might pass on their second go or find success after transferring to a more suitable course. But the rate of failure was seen by critics as wasteful and demoralising.

    Prior to the reforms, “kids would go into a psychology degree, having done a literary baccalaureate [at high school], and think: ‘I’ve done literature, so I can go and do psychology, I don’t need maths,’” she said.

    To counter this, the Parcoursup platform tells potential applicants the subjects that previous successful students have studied and what the universities expected of them.

    At the Sorbonne University in Paris, “we’ve had better students on the whole; students who know better why they are coming to us”, explained Marie-Céline Daniel, vice-president for lifelong learning. There has been a “serious increase” in success rates of first years, she said.

    The dropout rate of students at Cergy-Pontoise University, based just outside Paris, has reduced by about 10 per cent, estimated president François Germinet. “But it is only the beginning,” he said, adding that he hopes to halve dropouts in the next five years by developing new curricula for students who normally fail.

    https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/french-university-admissions-reform-has-cut-dropout-rate

  48. Big Mac index is useful to the extent (aside from people who want to eat a Big Mac), it generally produces ranking of countries with lower minimum salaries in inverse correlation to the price of the Big Mac.

    Big Mac index tracks inversely how little you can pay employees in each labour environment, because Macdonald’s generally is one of the most brutal and clever companies in succeeding to pay its employees a minimum possible salary, and uses different legal strategies to achieve this.

    Actual raw food materials used in Big Mac are more constant across countries and depends a lot on international markets, but cost of Macdonald employees can vary by an order of magnitude between countries.

  49. Thulean Friend says

    American universities already have a lot of dead wood with legacy candidates, athletes, AA blacks and mestizos, though it is politically unacceptable to acknowledge this it would be the easiest way to clear up new spaces.

    All of that is true, but most of the riff-raff is cleaned out by the time you get to grad school. Plus America is still the #1 magnet for international talent and will remain so. I think people are overplaying this point, even though it is true. The impact isn’t just as big as people presume.

  50. Thulean Friend says

    Even with a cursory view it can be seen that the correlation for wealth and amount of population engaged in tertiary education is rather weak.

    One of the biggest misconceptions about human capital is confusing inputs with output. As Lant Pritchett likes to say: Schoolin’ ain’t learnin’!

    I read some absurd statistic that in Korea, something like 1/3rd of all cab drivers have a university exam. That is a pathological sign of societal disarray, with credentialism and status-signalling taken to an extreme level. We should all be a bit more like the Germans, especially the Germans themselves as they are now slowly starting to buy into the same nonsense as everyone else.

    University should be free but it should be demanding and selective. No more than 10-15% of the population should ever get in. I’d rationalise a lot of courses. 4-year undergrad is a joke. If you need remedial classes, you don’t belong there.

    Too little agency is given to younger researchers and scientists. Most innovation happens when you’re young. Excessive deference is given to boomers lodged in their department seats, hogging most if not all of the funding decisions. Paul Romer has spoken eloquently about this, but it rustles the aging has-beens academia is filled with.

  51. “…were convinced tomatoes were poisonous fruits…” – Nightshade family plants produce toxic alkaloids but not that much in the edible parts.

    Tomatoes, peppers and potatoes had a very slow start in Europe except for Spain and Canary Islands. In Paris first time tomatoes were used in dishes was during Napoleon in early 1800s.

    BTW, in North America tomatoes and potatoes came from varieties developed first in Europe. Even the domesticated turkey was domesticated first in Europe and brought back to America. It is very likely that the Pilgrims had turkeys brought form Europe so they did not really need the wild turkeys brought by Indians for the first American Thanksgiving dinner.

    Do not forget about many varieties of beans that also came form New World. They greatly enlarged the family of legumes known to Europeans who before Columbus had peas, lentil, chickpea, fava beans and lupins. Lupins where pretty much abandoned though they may be having a comeback as another superfood craze.

  52. I was not really gone though I have to admit that covid+blm reactions by the UR commentariat exposed its full deplorableness. As the rednecks say you can’t fix stupid. No more discussions with the enemies of humanity. They need to be got rid off. Libertarians first.

  53. If you are talking about the top 10% or 15% that is for really for postgraduate degree already, now if the IQ needed for postgraduate degree is 120 or 115 (CFA is basically equivalent to somewhere between a masters and a PHD in finance, and an IQ of 115 is enough to pass the CFA, if you have a very good work ethic), and the IQ needed to graduate from high school is 90 to 95, then that leaves a very large gap of people who are too intelligent for high school and not intelligent enough for graduate school, so you need an undergraduate level to address that, as for college is so expensive in the US, and how by infiltrated by cultural marxism it is, thus making it useless, that is another problem altogether. In a lot of countries, especially in East Asia and countries like the Philippines and Indonesia, employers also use a college degree and a person’s grades in college to look at a potential candidate’s work ethic and how socially polished a person is.

  54. Does’t the heritability of IQ mean that those legacies are pretty intelligent themselves? Well maybe a little bit laid back in terms of studiousness, but intelligent nevertheless.

  55. A new bar was opened near my parents house in St. Petersburg

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrgcseBXgAIAKHR.jpg

    These guys should also have a black bartender and be the center of meetings of “Russian nationalists”

  56. Millionaya says

    Cool. Gypsy music and goulash! Please let me have the address.

  57. VinnyVette says

    Looks great… Needs a healthy side of bacon!

  58. A. Hipster says

    No, it means most of them don’t belong there … the regression toward the mean/mediocrity

  59. EldnahYm says

    Christopher Columbus, American Revolution, Civil War, Great Depression, World War 2, Civil Rights era. Those are the big topics. Trail of Tears and the Louis and Clark Expedition also got a lot of play in my education, along with some fables about Washington, Lincoln, Franklin, and Jefferson. The French and Indian War and World War 1 are mentioned, but are afterthoughts. The Mexican American War isn’t emphasized. The War of 1812 is a footnote. If you take a contemporary history course, in addition to a ton on Civil Rights and Jim Crow you will get more on the Cold War(especially the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis) and Watergate. There are also usually courses on state history, which at least in my case were the courses with the most historical detail. If you want to learn about other states, there are no opportunities in school.

    Almost the entire period of English settlement before the Revolutionary War is ignored. Even in universities, it seems like American Literature courses actually cover these topics more than history departments do. Forget about learning anything about New France or New Sweden. Other than that people came over to escape religious persecution and suffered hardships, the only thing you really learn about the pre-revolutionary period of English settlement is that thanksgiving happened. An attentive student would have heard of the French-Indian War and could tell you something about a chap named Squanto.

    At least in my case, the Christopher Columbus story was totally sanitized. I only heard about some of the more unpleasant things Columbus did because I took an anthropology course in high school. American Revolution is depicted in a fairly shallow way, the colonies getting freedom from the British, along with stories about Paul Revere, Boston Tea Party, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and how some soldiers didn’t have shoes in cold weather. For WW2, what a student will come away remembering is Pearl Harbor, Hitler, the Holocaust, and a feeling that Americans saved everyone else’s ass. Soviet war efforts are not mentioned. The Civil War generates the most enthusiasm for military history, you might at least be expected to know the names of one battle(this may be a product of being from the south though?).

    The post-Civil War, pre-WW2 era is all blended together. As I said, the Great Depression is the biggest takeaway, though a number of things ranging from American inventors, Prohibition, Spanish-American War, Gilded Age etc. will get a mention, but not much more. You don’t hear about blacks again until the Civil Rights era, then you get your fill. Even worse if you take a contemporary history class. In case it needs to be said, Martin Luther King is depicted as a saint.

    Legal history isn’t covered much, unless you take a law studies course. Brown vs. Board of Education is probably the most well known case. Religious history is ignored. Great Awakenings are not even mentioned.

    Learning history without geography is not very useful, and many years ago Americans educators decided to stop teaching the subject. Geography was replaced by courses like social studies. Always remember this context when evaluating Americans younger than middle age.

    There is really no reading of primary sources. Maybe excerpts from the Declaration of Independence.

    This is from the perspective of a 90s-2000s Florida suburbanite. I had been to a private Baptist school when young, a Christian elementary school, a “good” public elementary school, and a middling junior and high school. The general thrust in history teaching was the same in all of them, other than I probably had more geography in the Baptist school.

    Other than WW2 and the Civil Rights, I wouldn’t say the rest of the subjects were very woke by today’s standards when I was in school. Maybe it’s different nowadays. As a kid, my biggest complaint at the time was how repetitive history was. You learn mostly the same subjects every year, and the degree of detail and/or difficulty of the subjects doesn’t go up that much every year.

  60. Why do St Petersburg hipsters use so much English language in their branding? I mean, if I’m a tourist, I can take a selfie with English language sign at home in front of Denny’s. Boring.

    No, I want something cool and mysterious, like “Цыгане и Евреи” in old school pre-revolutionary Russian. That would be impressive for an Instagram photo. English is bland and mundane. It’s basic marketing 101.

    And everyone has smartphones now, so it’s not like that sign is even needed for navigation.

  61. Regarding the alleged Russian hacking of vaccine-research secrets: Why ARE THERE vaccine secrets? When the vaccine hunt first began, I read a comment written by a vaccine expert, who said what is needed is an information-sharing system. He called it a “switchboard.”

    This seemed so obvious that I was surprised he took the trouble to write it. Yet, this apparently has not happened. I assume it is a matter of money. Therefore, there is a U.S. governmental money solution to this, to reward efforts, and to lavishly reward promising results. I must be missing something. But the existence of Covid Secrets is not a new development; there have been countless closed-door meetings and briefings.

  62. To me, cars and car culture have always symbolised freedom to travel within your own country. It’s largely a bugman thing to agitate for banning cars.

  63. Blinky Bill says

    AK starting a Revolution across Eurasia.

    Culinary Revolution !

    https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1284678059296124928?s=20

  64. Why has the occurrence of eight and nine figure lottery winnings dropped precipitously…if your answer is not nefarious based…you’re probably wrong?

  65. Thorfinnsson says

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/blood-banks-face-a-generation-gap-in-giving-11594993713

    (use this extension to bypass WSJ paywall: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome)

    Blood supplies in the United States are dwindling, apparently because younger generations are less willing to give blood.

    As usual I implore you all to donate, which in addition to saving lives benefits you by reducing ferritin accumulation and thus hematopathogenesis.

    However, this story is also of interest in that it suggests declining public spiritedness in younger American age cohorts. The Baby Boomers come in for a lot of flak, much of it deserved, but for better or worse they were the last generation to grow up in a more or less in tact society. This is reflected in widespread prosocial attitudes and behaviors among them.

    People who expect things to improve when the boomers fade from public life are likely to be rudely disappointed.

  66. Cyclists tend to be deeply unpleasant people. They’re petty tyrants. A bit like vegans.

  67. University should be free but it should be demanding and selective. No more than 10-15% of the population should ever get in.

    Yep.

  68. People who expect things to improve when the boomers fade from public life are likely to be rudely disappointed.

    Yep.

  69. Blinky Bill says