Jerry Pournelle on Donald Trump

A take on Trump that is entirely more interesting than my own on the man:

Trump is probably the least qualified candidate who ran for the Republican nomination this year. If you didn’t know that, you’d have to be a hermit to avoid finding it out. He also has far more delegates than any other candidate. I would think that would send a clear message to the Republican elite, particularly the country club establishment; but like the Bourbon kings of France restored after the Revolution, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Wouldn’t I want a more qualified, somewhat more experienced candidate? Well, of course. But the establishment wasn’t about to let anyone not within its ranks to get anywhere close to the nomination. In 1956 the goal was “anyone but Reagan” among the Republican elite. Now it’s anybody but Trump. Before Trump they made it clear to all: it’s going to be one of us, like it or lump it. We can deal with upstarts.

But they didn’t intimidate Trump, and now he’s laid all of their compliant candidates low, and they’re turning to an old enemy, Cruz, in despair. The notion is that he’ll “grow” in office; it’s for sure that Trump won’t grow under their definition of grow.

But in fact he’s likely to. He has some good advisors and he has a definite point of view that may be hard to discern because it’s masked by his blatant – loudmouthed and irritating, if you like – tactics. But he has never wavered on his desire to fill the Supreme Court with Justices as near in scholarship and view to Scalia as possible; that alone would be enough to get me to the polls for Trump if he’s nominated.

He has consistently said we need to turn control of the schools to the local districts and stop dictating to them from Washington. This has been taken as meaning that he doesn’t know what to do on a nation al scale. Well, I have news: neither does anyone else, and the attempt, even with the best of will, will always fail. The schools worked better, over all, when they were paid for by local school district taxes and run by local school boards elected by the people who paid those taxes. If you don’t believe that, get a copy of the California Sixth Grade Reader from a hundred years ago and compare it to your child’s present day ninth grade reader. Then weep.

No, he’s not a “movement conservative”, but I’m not sure I still am, and I was a protégé of Russell Kirk and Stefan Possony, and a friend of Bill Buckley and Willmore Kendall. I’ve been in that “movement” a long time. Long enough to see National Review use the egregious Frum to read most of us out of the movement.

Trump is not a movement conservative, but his inclination is to set goals and get people working on them, not to jail and fine them for not doing so. He understands that being served by mindless minions is not the path to glory or wealth. Compared to Hillary or Sanders or anyone in Obama’s train, I’ll take Trump any day. I would prefer someone with government experience – some, not one whose only experience is in government – but we seem to be fresh out of those. I suppose I’d rather have establishment country club Republicans than anyone likely to be nominated by the Democratic establishment even if a plague took all the present candidates; we tried that with Bush I, who cleared the White House of Reagan people the day after inauguration, and proceeded to saddle us with the Americans With Disabilities act and a new Federal bureaucracy; but that’s another story.

Trump is a pragmatic populist. I can live with that.

Considering the manifold failures of what we’ve been told are principled ideology, pragmatic populism is sounding pretty good right now. Whatever gets the borders closed and starts the respections. Say what you will about Dr. Pournelle, but he’s not only smart, he has accumulated a fair bit of wisdom along the way.

Homeschool or Die: 2016 edition

Now even the girls are killing each other in the public schools:

A 16-year-old girl died Thursday after fighting with other girls in a bathroom at Howard High School of Technology in Wilmington, Delaware, authorities said.

“There was an altercation that initially started between two people, and my understanding is that additional individuals joined in against the one person,” said Gary Fullman, chief of staff to the Wilmington mayor.

The student was badly injured and transported by helicopter to A.I. DuPont Hospital for Children, where she died, Fullman said.

Any bets on the races involved?

A portrait in SJW convergence

The dark side of Wikipedia:

The promise of accurate, neutral articles and privacy for contributors is often just a mirage, according to two insiders. They say they’ve been left battle-scarred after troubling personal encounters with the world’s most popular encyclopedia.

It’s billed as “the encyclopedia anyone can edit.” But for many, it’s the opposite.

Greg Kohs is among the blocked. Banned, he says, for challenging Wikipedia policies.

Kohs: Just in the past four hours, 500 IP addresses and users have been blocked from editing Wikipedia.

In 2012, Kohs helped start an opposing website called, “Wikipediocracy,” to expose what he calls Wikipedia’s “misinformation, defamation and general nonsense.”

Sharyl: So Wikipedia does censor users?

Kohs: Absolutely. In a given day, Wikipedia administrators typically are blocking about 1,000 different IP addresses.

Sharyl: 1,000 a day?

Kohs: 1,000 a day. Yes.

When Kohs ran afoul of Wikipedia, he was drawn into an unseen cyberworld. One where he says volunteer editors dole out punishment and retaliation, privacy is violated and special interests control information.

Sharyl: Most people don’t know what?

Kohs: Wikipedia is often edited by people who have an agenda.

As I wrote in SJWAL, the near-complete convergence of social media is the reason that it is necessary for the alt-right to develop superior, broad-spectrum alternatives to everything from Twitter and Tumblr to Facebook and Wikipedia.

There will be many challenges, not least of which is resisting the temptation to be bought out by these ludicrously well-funded profitless corporations. I have no doubt that Facebook, for one, will expertly play the Microsoft strategy of acquire and conquer. But those challenges must be met, all the same, because leaving the intersection of money, technology, and media under the control of SJWs means the intellectual enchainment of humanity.

And this behavior on the part of SJW Wikipedians goes well beyond creepy and reaches downright scary. Notice the typical SJW behavior of targeting their opponents’ jobs.

Kohs sees himself as an equalizer. His business helps clients, including supposed victims of unfair edits, navigate Wikipedia’s unbridled landscape. Wikipedia banned him for violating the policy against paid editing and when Kohs criticized the policy and continued under a borrowed account, Wikipedia editors targeted him.

They went to great lengths to track him, using inside information and computer addresses. They researched where Kohs grew up, and traced his movements all the way to Orlando, Florida, where he was making edits while on vacation.

Sharyl: Wikipedia editors that you didn’t know at the time were tracking your movements, speculating that you went home for Thanksgiving?

Kohs: That’s absolutely correct.

He only discovered that he was being tracked because somebody leaked internal Wikipedia discussions about him.

Kohs: And then somebody chimed in, ‘looks like someone went home for Thanksgiving to visit mom and dad,’ so you think you’re editing with some degree of privacy, but if they want to they can really start to investigate.

Book of the weekend

This week, I’m a little late on the book of the week, which essentially makes it a book of the weekend, but for those who are interested in the subject of the Singularity, Dr. Miller, my past and future debate opponent, has made the audio introduction to his book on the technofuture, Singularity Rising, available for listening. How will the Singularity affect our daily lives—our jobs, our families, and our wealth?

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World
focuses on the implications of a future society faced with an abundance
of human and artificial intelligence. James D. Miller, an economics
professor and popular speaker on the Singularity, reveals how natural
selection has been increasing human intelligence over the past few
thousand years and speculates on how intelligence enhancements will
shape civilization over the next forty years.

Miller considers several possible scenarios in this coming singularity:

  • A merger of man and machine making society fantastically wealthy and nearly immortal
  • Competition with billions of cheap AIs drive human wages to almost nothing while making investors rich
  • Businesses rethink investment decisions to take into account an expected future period of intense creative destruction
  • Inequality drops worldwide as technologies mitigate the cognitive cost of living in impoverished environments
  • Drugs designed to fight Alzheimer’s disease and keep soldiers alert on
    battlefields have the fortunate side effect of increasing all of their
    users’ IQs, which, in turn, adds a percentage points to worldwide
    economic growth

Singularity Rising offers predictions
about the economic implications for a future of widely expanding
intelligence and practical career and investment advice on flourishing
on the way to the Singularity. Sadly, no word on okapis.

A question for the readers

Which would you rather have first, A Sea of Skulls or SJWs Always Double Down? I’ve been focusing on the former, given how long Selenoth fans have been waiting, but it occurs to me that it might make sense to, you know, actually ask the core market what it prefers.

On a somewhat related note, the first novel in what could reasonably, but will not be, described as a New Heinlein series, Mutiny in Space by Rod Walker, will be published soon. It’s an intentional attempt to capture the style and spirit of Robert Heinlein’s classic SF juveniles. I think you’ll find it is considerably more successful in doing so than some of the previously declared New Heinleins.

UPDATE: The readers have spoken. The current schedule will remain in place. First A Sea of Skulls, then SJWs Always Double Down.

Minnesota mourns

The artist known as Prince has died. He was 57.


Prince’s body was discovered at his Paisley Park compound in Minnesota early Thursday morning.


Multiple sources connected to the singer confirmed he had passed.

I’m very sorry to hear this. Like many who grew up in Minnesota, his music was the soundtrack to my youth. Playing on stage at First Avenue was surreal, because it was the stage he had owned. Playing on stage at his own club, Glam Slam, was an incredible experience. I met him several times, usually at The Perimeter, and he was unfailingly civil. For a world-famous pop superstar, he was astonishingly approachable, and I never heard anything negative about him from my many friends and acquaintances who encountered him everywhere from the nightclubs and recording studios to the car wash.

There are some people who seem larger than life, and it seems impossible that they can die. Prince Rogers Nelson was a unique musical talent who had a special relationship with his hometown. His music will live on. Here is hoping that his huge collection of unreleased recordings will one day be released to the world.

Convergence at ESPN

It’s no secret that ESPN is fully SJW-converged. But now they’re not even bothering to hide it:

ESPN has fired Curt Schilling over his recent anti-transgender comments on social media.

Schilling, a baseball analyst for ESPN and former Boston Red Sox pitcher, shared a Facebook post this week that lampooned critics of recent laws passed in North Carolina and other states restricting transgender men and women from using the public restrooms that correspond with their gender preferences. Schilling added his own comment to the post, criticizing transgender people.

“A man is a man no matter what they call themselves,” Schilling wrote. “I don’t care what they are, who they sleep with, men’s room was designed for the penis, women’s not so much. Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.”

The original post featured a man in a wig with his breasts exposed, captioned, “LET HIM IN! to the restroom with your daughter or else you’re a narrow-minded, judgmental, unloving racist bigot who needs to die.”

After first announcing Wednesday that it would review Schilling’s comments, ESPN announced later in the day that it had fired him. “ESPN is an inclusive company,” the network said in a statement. “Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable and his employment with ESPN has been terminated.”

I quit reading ESPN years ago. But they are clearly an excellent demonstration of my Impossibility of SJW Convergence in action, which states: The more an institution converges towards the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice, the less it is able to perform its primary function. 

ESPN can’t even employ an intelligent Hall-of-Fame commentator to discuss baseball if he doesn’t publicly submit to the SJW Narrative. That is full convergence. Sports is no longer ESPN’s primary function.

Why I support Donald Trump

At the Heat Street editor’s request, I wrote an article explaining why I support Donald Trump for the Republican nomination and the U.S. presidency:

I am often asked why I, a Christian libertarian and intellectual, would publicly support Donald Trump, a man of no fixed ideology, no apparent religious beliefs, multiple marriages, visible ties to the Clintons, and whose taste and sophistication tends to resemble that of a nouveau riche rhinoceros. It is a reasonable question. After all, how can anyone support a candidate whose public statements are, to put it mildly, inconsistent—when they are completely self-contradictory.

The answer is as simple as it is conclusive and convincing. Donald Trump is the only candidate in either major party whose personal interests are aligned with those of the American public rather than with the interests of the anti-nationalist elite who see America as nothing more than lines on a map and Americans as nothing more than 300 million economic units in the global economy.

The reason I trust Donald Trump, despite all his rhetorical meanderings, is that he is a traitor to his class. Unlike Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz, both ordinary people who sold their souls in order to be granted a seat at the table of the Great Game, Donald Trump was born a member of the elite and he has always been welcome in the inner circles of both political parties. When I met him in 1988, it was at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, where he was the personal guest of George Bush in his private suite there. Like the Bushes, like the Clintons, Trump is truly neither Republican nor Democrat. He is a lifetime member of America’s bi-factional ruling party.

Read the rest of it at Heat Street. And much respect for Louise Mensch, who could not be more opposed to Trump, but nevertheless asked me to make what I considered to be the best case for him.

Target goes full-tranny

If you’re opposed to the latest SJW Narrative, take Target off your list:

The Target department store chain has jumped into the transgender bathroom debate by declaring that men who claim to be women may use whatever bathroom or changing room they choose.

“Inclusivity is a core belief at Target,” a new company statement reads. “It’s something we celebrate. We stand for equality and equity, and strive to make our guests and team members feel accepted, respected and welcomed in our stores and workplaces every day.”

The retailer added, “We welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity.”

“Everyone deserves to feel like they belong,” the statement concluded. “You’ll always be accepted, respected and welcomed at Target.”

Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder added that the policy statement is a public confirmation of its longstanding policy. “It’s just us being very overt in stating it,” she said.

Customers and potential customers almost immediately spoke out against Target’s decision to ignore the biological difference between men and women.

The thing is, there is nothing wrong with unisex bathrooms. In Japan, for example, many of the bathrooms are unisex because space is at a premium and there is only room for one bathroom in many establishments.

But we’re not seeing the elimination of sex-segregated bathrooms, we’re seeing the demonic “five lights” strategy, forcing people to submit to the Narrative and admit to something they know to be untrue.

All ur hashtag are belong to us

The Global Warming charlatans are planning a propaganda push. This is from a science activist mailing list.

Climate Feedback works like this: Using the new web-annotation platform Hypothesis, scientists verify facts and annotate online climate articles, layering their insights and comments on top of the original story. They then issue a “5-star” rating so readers can quickly judge stories’ scientific credibility. Recognized by NASA, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and California Gov. Jerry Brown among others, Climate Feedback is already improving journalistic standards by flagging misreported climate science in mainstream outlets; earlier this month, for example, scientists took apart Bjorn Lomborg’s misleading op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. This is only a hint of what Climate Feedback has in store as it begins to aggregate those credibility scores into a wider index, rating major news sources on their reporting of climate change as part of a new Scientific Trust Tracker.

To that end, Climate Feedback is launching a crowd funding campaign on April 27 around the hashtag #StandWithScience, supported by leading climate minds like Profs. Michael Mann, Naomi Oreskes and others. I invite you to take a look at this sneak preview of our campaign (NOTE: please do not share publicly before April 27). The Exxon climate scandal has already made its way into the 2016 election season, but few have discussed the role the media has played enabling corporate interests to sow doubt about the science of climate change, which has long confused the public and undermined political support for dealing with the issue. As 350.org founder Bill McKibben said of Climate Feedback: Scientists are just about ready to come out of the lab and get more active and when they do, it will make a remarkable difference.

Let’s disrupt it. VFM, you know what to do. Political activism is not science. #StandWithScience.