Blame Evolution. New web site. What's going on in Russia? Unnoted footnotes.

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Even as I gave my speech entitled Blame Evolution for our Distress, I knew that I would have to polish it up and redeliver it. I left out one very important point, the shifting balance from the rights of society to the rights of the individual. Hand-in-hand with that is the decline of religion. People don't feel any obligation to the society into which they are born. Having children and perpetuating that society is far and away the biggest such obligation.

The other thing I left out is my own coinage.  If you look in Wikipedia you will find the concept "purifying natural selection" discussed. It is the process by which the gene pool is cleansed of unfortunate mutations as the less fit failed to reproduce generation after generation. My coinage is "putrefying natural selection," which would be what happens when the most fit make the most enthusiastic use of birth control and take the greatest pleasure in using sex for recreation rather than reproduction.

In planning to redo this video I am revisiting a project that has been on my mind for a long time. How do you include links and footnotes in a video? Every approach is clumsy. The most common is to speak in the video about the sources of one's information and include links in the text accompanying the video. There is not room for a whole lot.

I'm already doing something that few others do – superimposing PowerPoint over the video image of myself. That gives me the opportunity to present short notes. Here is my plan. I'll continue to use the PowerPoint. At the beginning of the presentation I will present a link to the written script I am following. I will post them on my website. The link will be simple enough that a viewer can copy it. Something like "See grahamseibert.com/V/Blame_Evolution.pdf for text with links and footnotes."  I don't think it is asking too much of a viewer to pause the video and write down that much information if they are interested.

This approach required that I do something that I had not done for five years – update my website.  I developed it more than a decade ago using Microsoft FrontPage. That product is long gone. Microsoft Word has been claiming that it can create webpages, but the process is extremely cumbersome.

Yahoo Small Business originally hosted the site. They have sold the hosting business two or three times since, with the quality of technical support decreasing every time. I grudgingly gave them their hundred dollars a year and gave up trying to update it.

I find in 2023 that they sold it once again, this time to a company called turbify.  I called their technical support to figure out my account name and to get a new password, and then fiddled around and learned how to use their software. I also figured out how to construct webpages using Microsoft Word. It is an ugly process, but I have made it work well enough. You will notice that I have the most trouble with pictures. I may or may not get around to straightening them out, but they are not essential to using a website.

I am sure one of you can recommend a web development tool that would be much more powerful. The question is whether or not I want to bother learning a new tool when the clumsy old one does a "meets minimum" job. Please post advice if you feel like it.  I'm not likely to act on it immediately, but I will remember it.  Here is the new if somewhat ragged web site.

Edward Slavsquat is the only guy out there who writes regularly and credibly about what besides the war is going on in Russia. Perhaps about the war as well. Everybody has an opinion. What I like about him is that he links to credible people who have different opinions. The single thread that remains consistent throughout everything he writes is that Russia is just as much a part of the New World order as Joe Biden's United States.  With that preamble, here is a cynical take on both sides of the war, and another one on the incidence of vaccine injuries in Russia. 

Nice to read about Russia. My inbox continues to be flooded with news about the millions of excess deaths attributable to the injectable biological products in the West. More significantly, the press is finally reporting widespread skepticism about not only the Covid vaccines but vaccines in general. This is a seachange.

Chasing valuable references is one of the pleasures of reading. Matt Thornton included a great many good references in The Gift of Violence. One of them was to three very intelligent, accomplished commenters on the situation of blacks in America. Listening to them you would not know that they were themselves black. They use a broad, standard academic vocabulary and speak in unaccented English.  The time was when we voted for black politicians because we believed in their competence. Edward Brooke represented all the people of Massachusetts. Tom Bradley did a credible job of representing all of the people of Los Angeles. That was many decades ago. Since that time they have learned to get elected by appealing to the average black voter. That is not somebody who speaks like Glenn Loury and his fellow panelists in the links below.

Admittedly, there is often a heavy price for pursuing the truth wherever it might lead. Consider the case of Roland G. Fryer, Jr., a world-class academic whom I favorably cite elsewhere in this book. I have no special insight into the specific charges made against him beyond what’s been reported, but one thing is clear: if your research findings challenge certain orthodoxies and you dare say taboo things from within the system, as Fryer has done, the system will have a powerful immune response that will remain active until you are destroyed or neutralized. For the specific charges against him, see Jim Tankersly and Ben Casselman, “Star Economist at Harvard Faces Sexual Harassment Complaints,” New York Times, December 14, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/business/economy/harvard-roland-fryer-sexual-harassment.html. For a different take on the story, see Stuart Taylor, Jr., “Harvard, the NY Times and the #MeToo Takedown of a Black Academic Star,” Real Clear Investigations, January 29, 2019, www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/01/27/harvard_the_new_york_times_and_the_metoo_takedown_of_a_black_academic_star.html; “Harvard Canceled Its Best Black Professor. Why?” YouTube video, uploaded by Good Kid Productions, March 9, 2022; and Glenn Loury, “The Truth about Roland Fryer,” Glenn Loury (Substack), March 13, 2022, glennloury.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-roland-fryer?s=r. See also Zac Kriegman, “I Criticized BLM. Then I Was Fired,” Common Sense (Substack), May 12, 2022, bariweiss.substack.com/p/i-criticized-blm-then-i-was-fired?s=r; Paul Rossi, “I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated,” Common Sense (Substack), April 13, 2021,

I first ran across linguist John McWhorter in the course of reading books on the evolution of language.  I ran across Thomas Sowell decades ago reading about economics. There is a special pleasure in learning that an impressive personality just happens to be black. This is absolutely the opposite of people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, about whom the first thing you learn is the color of his skin as he is trotted out as some exotic specimen, a dark hued astrophysicist. Is it so remarkable?

It happens even in Russia. This from Wikipedia: Pushkin was born into the Russian nobility in Moscow. His father, Sergey Lvovich Pushkin, belonged to an old noble family. His maternal great-grandfather was Major-General Abram Petrovich Gannibal, a nobleman of African origin who was kidnapped from his homeland by Ottomans. He was freed by the Russian Emperor and raised in the Emperor's court household as his godson. 

I am at the point of having to talk to my son Eddie about race. Kids of 11 really do think in black-and-white. I have to convince him there are shades of gray. While there is no doubt in my mind that Ukraine is better off not having significant non-European minority populations, he should nonetheless be courteous to those he meets and not be shocked if some of them are quite talented. You have to take people as they are.

But on the other hand, you can't afford to let yourself be pushed around. Picking up daughter Zoriana from kindergarten yesterday I saw a five-year-old wearing a shirt with a character splashed all over the front painted in the gay pride rainbow.  Oksana sent me this link to a Disney cartoon about two male dinosaurs who want to start a family. With 15 minutes to wait I noticed that the kindergarten staff was listening to a female singing in English on the radio. I didn't understand the lyrics, maybe it's only my imagination, but it seemed to me she was singing about how she loved another girl. That's not exactly the conversation I want to have with a five-year-old. For goodness sake, she's just learning to be a kid!

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the good looking woman had a photographer over this morning to take our pictures. She had him photograph her music session as well. Expect to see them soon.

Graham