Worst Timeline Ever

Have you seen the Gizmodo article, "Silicon Valley's Obsession With Fertility Has Spawned 'Sperm Races?"

The hed is not perfect, the Silly-Con Valley obsession is about white (and to a much smaller degree Asian) fertility, because they are concerned about "mud people" outnumbering them.

It's racism, baby!

Are men okay? The answer is a resounding “No.” Case in point: a new sport is taking over Silicon Valley: Sperm Racing. The sport, if you want to call it that, works pretty much how you’d imagine: it’s like marble racing except with, well, the output of someone’s marbles. And the teenager who created it just raised $10 million in a (sigh) seed round to take the event mainstream, according to the San Francisco Standard.

So, Sperm Racing. How it works, according to the company, is that young men offer up their sperm, which are then “cleaned” and diluted until there are about 200 lively sperm cells ready to race. The microscopic racers are then placed on what has to be the world’s smallest racetrack, a mold made through a similar process to fabricating silicon computer chips. The sperm are then tracked via computer vision and given enhanced visuals, like when NHL broadcasts make the puck glow so you can track it.

 Men are OK.  Tech bros are not OK.  They have never been OK, and they will never be OK. 

I'm not sure right way to explain their pathologies, I'm an engineer, not a psychologist, dammit,* but there is something profoundly wrong with these folks.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

I Did Nazi That Coming

It looks like there are a bunch of tech bros out there want to have huge numbers of children so that their (perceived) genetic superiority can be spread throughout the world.

This sh%$ is straight out of the pre-WWII eugenics movement, beloved by Francis Galton, Winston Churchill, J.H. Kellogg, and that unpleasant short German man with the tiny mustache.

I am not surprised.  Much like the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the "science" of eugenics is beloved by ordinary people who through luck and privilege achieve some success in life:

Sitting in their toy-filled family room on a sunny September afternoon, Simone and Malcolm Collins were forced to compete with the wails of two toddlers as they mapped out their plans for humankind.

"I do not think humanity is in a great situation right now. And I think if somebody doesn't fix the problem, we could be gone," Malcolm half-shouted as he pushed his sniffling 18-month-old, Torsten, back and forth in a child-size Tonka truck.

Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents' calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.

If they succeed, Malcolm continued, "we could set the future of our species."

So this guy does not have the vaguest notion of how this all works.

First, they have not factored in deaths which will reduce the number who will reproduce, and second, you are going to start seeing intermarrying at the second, (legal in all US states) third, or fourth cousin level.

This becomes even more likely when one realizes that families tend to live closer to each other than random people, and in this case, they would all be living in the same cult compound.

Malcolm, 36, and his wife, Simone, 35, are "pronatalists," part of a quiet but growing movement taking hold in wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles. People like the Collinses fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization. It's a theory that Elon Musk has championed on his Twitter feed, that Ross Douthat has defended in The New York Times' opinion pages, and that Joe Rogan and the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen bantered about on "The Joe Rogan Experience." It's also, alarmingly, been used by some to justify white supremacy around the world, from the tiki-torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting "You will not replace us" to the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who opened his 2019 manifesto: "It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates."

And, of course, that, "Unpleasant short German man with the tiny mustache."

This is all about the idea that non-white people are untermenchen, and so white people must have many children to prevent said, "Mud People," from taking over.

The reason that this sounds like a fever dream inspired by The Turner Diaries, is because, this is where eugenics of humanity inexorably takes you.

………

I reached out to the Collinses after I received a tip about a company called Genomic Prediction, where Musk's OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman was an early investor. (Altman, who is gay, also invests in a company called Conception. The startup plans to grow viable human eggs out of stem cells and could allow two biological males to reproduce. "I think having a lot of kids is great," Altman recently told an audience at Greylock's Intelligent Future event. "I want to do that now even more than I did when I was younger.")

Genomic Prediction is one of the first companies to offer PGT-P, a controversial new type of genetic testing that allows parents who are undergoing in vitro fertilization to select the "best" available embryos based on a variety of polygenic risk factors.

Rather ironically, if there is a genetic connection found to homosexuality, preventing gay children will become one of the, if not the, most common uses of the technology, because people are bigots.

That Altman does not "Get It" is a mark of his sense of privilege, and his deep stupidity.

………

They [the Collinses] both said they were warned by friends not to talk to me. After all, a political minefield awaits anyone who wanders into this space. The last major figure to be associated with pronatalism was Jeffrey Epstein, who schemed to impregnate 20 women at a time on his New Mexico ranch. Genetic screening, and the underlying assumption that some humans are born better than others, often invites comparisons to Nazi eugenic experiments. And then there's the fact that our primary cultural reference point for a pronatalist society is the brutally misogynist world of "The Handmaid's Tale."

If your movement is associated with Jeffrey Epstein and that, "Unpleasant short German man with the tiny mustache," you might want to reexamine your life.

………

The payoff won't be immediate, Simone said, but she believes if that small circle puts the right plans into place, their successors will "become the new dominant leading classes in the world."

Wow, I did Nazi that coming.

………

While pronatalism is often associated with religious extremism, the version now trending in this community has more in common with dystopian sci-fi. The Collinses, who identify as secular Calvinists, are particularly drawn to the tenet of predestination, which suggests that certain people are chosen to be superior on earth and that free will is an illusion. They believe pronatalism is a natural extension of the philosophical movements sweeping tech hubs like the Silicon Hills of Austin, Texas. Our conversations frequently return to transhumanism (efforts to merge human and machine capabilities to create superior beings), longtermism (a philosophy that argues the true cost of human extinction wouldn't be the death of billions today but the preemptive loss of trillions, or more, unborn future people), and effective altruism (or EA, a philanthropic system currently focused on preventing artificial intelligence from wiping out the human population).

No, EA is a way of justifying enormous wealth and making it appear virtuous, because you will be making donations (in the distant future) to help people in the far more distant future.  It is morally bankrupt, or as one Twitter wag put it, "It's a prosperity gospel for agnostics."

It is camouflage for greed and bigotry.

………

According to tech-industry insiders, this type of rhetoric is spreading at intimate gatherings among some of the most powerful figures in America. It's "big here in Austin," the 23andMe cofounder Linda Avey told me. Raffi Grinberg, a pronatalist who is the executive director of Dialog, said population decline was a common topic among the CEOs, elected officials, and other powerful figures who attended the group's off-the-record retreats. In February, the PayPal cofounder Luke Nosek, a close Musk ally, hosted a gathering at his home on Austin's Lake Travis to discuss "The End of Western Civilization," another common catchphrase in the birth-rate discourse.

Here, once again, I have to go back to the real world experiment that some call history, and note that after the Black Death killed half of Europe, living standards rose further and faster than at any time in history.

The elites did not see the benefits of the increased productivity, because they had to pay their workers more, and passed laws to suppress wages, but in some cases (Poland) where contemporaneous records of the Black Death are absent, we know that the plague hit them because of the post plague wage spikes.

A declining population, one where the average Joe pays 10% more in old age benefit taxes, but earns 40% more is good for everyone, except the holders of capital, like Musk or Nosek.

………

These worries tend to focus on one class of people in particular, which pronatalists use various euphemisms to express. In August, Elon's father, Errol Musk, told me that he was worried about low birth rates in what he called "productive nations." The Collinses call it "cosmopolitan society." Elon Musk himself has tweeted about the movie "Idiocracy," in which the intelligent elite stop procreating, allowing the unintelligent to populate the earth.

"Productive nations," and "cosmopolitan society," huh?  What they mean is "Wipipo".  They might as well just say that they are worried about N*****s taking over.

As to basing your philosophy on Idiocracy, I would suggest that you go with a far better movie from Mike Judge, Office Space.  Elon Musk already has the role of William Lundberg, so marvelously played by Gary Cole in the original, down pat.

………

Once pronatalists reach critical mass, the Collinses hope, they can begin to shape society around their needs.

"You have to create cultures that reward" and have structures for large families, Simone explained. Pronatalist pet issues include everything from increasing housing development to changing laws around car-seat regulation (one study found that people would stop having children when they couldn't fit any more car seats in their vehicle). During the coronavirus pandemic, the Collinses tried to raise money for a family-friendly "startup town" they called Project Eureka, where all community rules would be "ultimately set — all disputes resolved" by the Collinses.

When fundraising stalled, they redirected their focus to the Collins Institute for the Gifted, a specialized online lab school that is partnering with the Bari Weiss-cofounded University of Austin and the Thiel-backed 1517 Fund. (Musk similarly created a boutique education program, Ad Astra, for his family and employees' children that has since expanded into the online school Astra Nova.)

The logic behind the Collins Institute reflects their thinking at large: "If you want to make the future better for everyone and you could choose to dramatically increase the educational outcomes of the bottom 10% of people or the top 0.1% of people," the Collinses say to choose the 0.1%. 

The Collinses are paraphrasing William Edward Hickman, who kidnapped and dismembered a little girl in 1927, and said "What is good for me is right."

They benefit from lobbying for a future in which all of society's resources are directed toward them, because this is all that they concieve of.

It should be noted that Ayn Rand described that Hickman quote as, "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard."

To be fair, Hickman's victim, Marion Parker, was born October 11, 1915, which means that she would be dead now, so according to the ethics put forward by "Effective Altruism," it's all good.

Ha Ha!

It appears that Donald Trump's efforts to f%$# with the US Census will come to naught, because there are data processing issues that will not allow them to get the final results in time:

In a blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to strip unauthorized immigrants from census totals used for reapportionment, Census Bureau officials have concluded that they cannot produce the state population totals required to reallocate seats in the House of Representatives until after President Trump leaves office in January.

The president said in July that he planned to remove unauthorized immigrants from the count for the first time in history, leaving an older and whiter population as the basis for divvying up House seats, a shift that would be likely to increase the number of House seats held by Republicans over the next decade.

But on Wednesday, according to three bureau officials, the Census Bureau told the Commerce Department that a growing number of snags in the massive data-processing operation that generates population totals had delayed the completion of population calculations at least until Jan. 26, and perhaps to mid-February. Those officials spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the Trump administration.

………

Under law, the White House must send a state-by-state census tally to the House of Representatives next year that will be used to reallocate House seats among the states. On Mr. Trump’s order, the Census Bureau is attempting to compile a separate state-by-state tally of unauthorized immigrants so that their numbers can be subtracted from official census results before they are dispatched to the House.

Good.

This is a Big Deal

A federal judge has issued an injunction preventing the Census Bureau from terminating operations while a lawsuit against the Trump administration's attempt to sabotage the decennial count.

This is not a victory, it's just a hold until the suit can progress, but it does imply that there is a reasonable chance of their prevailing:

A federal judge has ordered the US Census Bureau for the time being to stop following a plan that would have had it winding down operations in order to finish the 2020 census at the end of September.

The federal judge in San Jose issued a temporary restraining order on Saturday against the Census Bureau and the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency.

The order stops the Census Bureau from winding down operations until a court hearing is held on 17 September. The once-a-decade head count of every US resident helps determine how $1.5tn in federal funding is distributed and how many congressional seats each state gets in a process known as apportionment.

The temporary restraining order was requested by a coalition of cities, counties and civil rights groups that had sued the Census Bureau, demanding it restore its previous plan for finishing the census at the end of October, instead of using a revised plan to end operations at the end of September. The coalition had argued the earlier deadline would cause the Census Bureau to overlook minority communities in the census, leading to an inaccurate count.

The September hearing should be interesting.

Lawless Criminals

Trump has ordered the US Census not to count illegal immigrants, in yet another attempt to corrupt the census for partisan purposes.

Given that the Supreme Court has already ruled against his putting a citizenship question on the tally, in Dept of Commerce v. New York, and the same 5 votes that ruled against him in that case are still on the court, and they ruled against him because he and his Secretary of Commerce lied to them.

I think that either

• He is hoping that Ginsberg is going to die soon.
• He is hoping that the wheels of justice will grind slowly enough to allow Republican states to gerrymander extremely enough to skew the house for most of the next decade.

This is truly contemptible.

Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Tuesday instructing the US Census Bureau to exclude undocumented immigrants from the population totals that determine how many seats in Congress each state gets. It’s an unprecedented move that seems to be an attempt to preserve white political power.

The American Civil Liberties Union said immediately that it would sue and the action is likely to be met with a flood of legal challenges. The Trump administration appears to be on shaky legal ground – the US constitution requires seats in Congress to be apportioned based on the “whole number of persons” counted in each state during each decennial census. The constitution vests Congress with power over the census (though Congress has since designated some of that authority to the executive).

Republicans in recent years have been pushing to exclude non-citizens and other people ineligible to vote from the tally used to draw electoral districts. In 2015, Thomas Hofeller, a top Republican redistricting expert, explicitly wrote that such a change “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites”.

The White House memo, titled “Excluding Illegal Aliens From the Apportionment Base Following the 2020 Census,” argues that the term “person” in the constitution really means “inhabitant” and that the president has discretion to define what that means. The memo also argues that allowing undocumented people to count rewards states with high numbers of undocumented people.

“My administration will not support giving congressional representation to aliens who enter or remain in the country unlawfully, because doing so would create perverse incentives and undermine our system of government,” Trump said in a statement. “Just as we do not give political power to people who are here temporarily, we should not give political power to people who should not be here at all.”

This is so deeply and profoundly venal and corrupt that it actually exceeds my already low expectations.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

The New York Times editorial board has strongly condemned the proposal by the Trump administration to add a question about immigration status to the 2020 census:

In a last-minute move that would give Republicans an advantage in maintaining control of the House of Representatives, the Trump administration is reinstating a question about citizenship to the 2020 census. Coming from an administration that has been hostile toward immigrants, the change was not surprising, but it’s galling nonetheless.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced the decision Monday, less than a week before the Census Bureau, which his department oversees, is supposed to send final questions for the 2020 census to Congress. If his decision stands — the attorney general of California has filed a lawsuit to block it, and other elected officials are preparing to do so — it would be the first time in 70 years that the federal government has asked people to specify their citizenship status on the census form sent to every household.

………

Even Mr. Ross acknowledged in an October House hearing that adding questions to the census reduced response rates because “the more things you ask in those forms, the less likely you are to get them in.”

………

By now, many people have come to expect that Mr. Trump will inject politics into every decision. But even by this administration’s low standards, trifling with the census, which is required by the Constitution and is a foundation of American democracy, represents a serious breach of trust. 

Unfortunately, the Times editorial board does not have the guts to say what is really going on:  This is a nakedly partisan attempt to suppress responses to the census in Democratic locations, with the hope that they can juice the numbers to effectively Gerrymander the Congressional map even further.

This is patently and transparently corrupt.

This is Brilliant

Trump is trying to add a question to the 2020 Census about citizenship status, likely for a court challenge to reduce Congressional representation for blue states by depressing immigrant responses.

Thankfully, this process is rather involved.

Gerard Magliocca looks at the question, and comes up with a brilliant question to add to the census:

I have a separate suggestion. If we are going to add new questions to the census about citizenship, then I would propose reviving one that was asked in the 1870 census. The modern version would ask all citizens above the age of 18 whether their right to vote has ever been "denied . . . or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion or other crime." This is language from of Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that if states deny or abridge suffrage to presumptively eligible voters to excess then their representation in Congress shall be reduced.

It's never gonna happen, but that made my day.