From my review of the Best Picture Oscar contender Conclave in Taki’s Magazine:

Robert Harris’ heroes are clearly on the side of Vatican II. When Ralph Fiennes’s English cardinal accuses him of ambition, Stanley Tucci’s American cardinal notes that every cardinal has already picked out the name he would be known as when pope. Fiennes’ papal name, for instance, would be John XXIV.

A reader once suggested to me that the prime mover of the vast cultural revolution of the later 1960s, which in America is often attributed to the Pill, the electric guitar, the baby boom, the Vietnam War, or the assassination of JFK, was instead Pope John XXIII’s unforced decision, at the peak of the Roman Catholic Church’s prosperity and strength, to convene a council of reform:

Ever since 1789, the West, broadly, had sought a happy medium between the poles of Revolution and Reaction, and the Catholic Church represented the latter pole. In Vatican II, the Church seemed suddenly to leave the field, or indeed, seemed to throw itself on to the other pole.

But, as usual in Harris’ tales, even the bad guys get smart things to say: The right-wing Italian villain drops by the left-wing Anglo-American heroes’ lunch table to point out to the leftist English-speaking cardinals that because not even cardinals can comfortably carry on a conversation in Latin anymore, all the tables are divided up by language, unlike in the good old days before Vatican II (rather resembling Charlton Heston’s famous anecdote about how lunch on the set of Planet of the Apes was segregated by species).

Read the whole thing there.

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

The Right’s Weird New Age
Steve Sailer

February 12, 2025

With the left depressed in 2025, much of the cultural energy belongs to the right. But where’s it going to go?

One increasing possibility appears to be that newly self-confident right-wingers are getting into various kinds of New Age woo-woo, the occult, gnosticism, RFK Jr. junk science, paganism, Indian esotericism, Chinese numerology, health food fads, etc. …

Yet, generally speaking, in the English-speaking world, this sort of stuff has historically been associated with the left, with the friends of Chesterton’s great frenemy George Bernard Shaw. Down through the generations, the left has been more associated with the Big 5 personality trait of “openness.� Shavian socialists drove George Orwell, a leftist with a rightist pro-chud personality, crazy, as Paul Laity notes:

“Socialism,� George Orwell famously wrote in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ (1936), draws towards it “with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.� His tirade against such “cranks� is memorably extended in other passages of the book to include “vegetarians with wilting beards,� the “outer-suburban creeping Jesus� eager to begin his yoga exercises, and “that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.�

I must admit, though, that I like fruit-juice drinking. And women in yoga pants are not the worst thing about the 21st century.

Read the whole thing there.

I started actively posting to my Substack at SteveSailer.Net last May and it’s been going very well. Drop on by and take a look.

From the New York Times science section:

Astronomers Are Keeping an Eye on This Asteroid’s Odds of Hitting Earth

Researchers say there’s a 1.3 percent chance that the space rock 2024 YR4 could strike our planet — but not until December 2032.

By Robin George Andrews

Jan. 29, 2025

You may hear about a large asteroid headed toward Earth. Don’t panic.

The chance it won’t hit Earth is 98.7%!

Just after Christmas Day, astronomers spotted something zipping away from Earth: a rock somewhere between 130 feet and 330 feet long that they named 2024 YR4. Over the next few weeks, they simulated its possible future orbits. They now say, based on the most up-to-date information, that there is a 1.3 percent chance that this asteroid will strike somewhere on Earth on Dec. 22, 2032.

… Should it strike a city, the damage would not cause anything close to a mass extinction, but the damage to the city itself would be catastrophic…

And the odds may diminish over time, as astronomers gather new data about the object…

A more accurate estimate could be made using radar, but that won’t be possible until the asteroid makes another close, but perfectly safe, pass by Earth on Dec. 17, 2028.

… A 130-foot asteroid is comparable to the Tunguska impactor, a meteor that exploded over a remote patch of Siberia in 1908 and decimated an 800-square-mile forest (that’s over twice the size of New York City). A 330-foot asteroid would cause far greater localized damage: A strike on a city would destroy much of it. If the object survives its journey through the atmosphere and strikes the ocean just offshore, the resulting tsunami could devastate nearby coasts.

… But based on just a few observations, the prediction uncertainties for 2032 were initially very large. As the number of observations grew to the hundreds, he said, “the impact probability has gradually increased over the last month and has now surpassed 1 percent, an important threshold.â€�

I’m reminded of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer in which amateur astronomers discover a comet. When they calculate its trajectory, it’s headed right toward Earth. But they all agree that that’s just what it looks like at first glance and when they gather more data, no doubt it will merely come close to us, putting on a spectacular sky show but doing no damage. After all, space is very big.

The Torino Scale is a tool for communicating how concerned the public and policymakers should be about an asteroid. It ranges from 0 (the likelihood of a potentially deadly collision is effectively zero) to 10 (a collision is certain and may imperil all of human civilization).

2024 YR4 currently sits at 3: a close encounter, less than a decade away, meriting attention by astronomers, one that has a chance of 1 percent or greater of a collision capable of localized destruction.

This is the second-highest rating ever given to an asteroid. Only Apophis, an asteroid once thought to be a threat, briefly reached a 4. But as we learned more about Apophis, we found it had no chance of striking Earth for at least a century. …

The same story will probably unfold with 2024 YR4. “The most likely outcome is that further observations will rule out an impact,� Mr. Rankin said.

Every month, the data is recalculated and Lucifer’s Hammer, a name given the comet by astronomy buff Johnny Carson *, just keeps coming right at Earth. But most of the human race feels very sophisticated and blasé based on the initial announcement that of course only rubes think it would actually kill most of the human race.

2024 YR4 is getting extremely faint as it travels away from Earth, meaning most telescopes are going to struggle to track it. “However, given this is a special case, members of the community have requested (and received) time on some of the larger and more capable facilities,� Dr. Rivkin said. “Those should do OK through April.�

Astronomers will also have an even greater opportunity to refine their predictions during the December 2028 flyby. But until then, it’s possible that an impact in 2032 won’t be entirely ruled out.

“We expect the impact probability to go to zero rather than 100 percent,� Dr. Rivkin said. “But it may take a few years before we get the data to show that.�

Guys, please work hard on getting the data by April 2025, not by 2028.

The human race in 2025 actually has a lot more hope of getting enough rockets into space by 2032 to push a medium-size asteroid out of the way than it did even a decade ago, largely due to Elon Musk’s astounding entrepreneurship. But every month of warning helps.

Musk, himself, seems more focused on sending, say, four fertile couples to Mars, like in Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 hippie cult novel Stranger In a Strange Land. ** About 22 years ago, Musk sat next to sci-fi director James Cameron at a charity dinner, who told him that

But, Elon, please, I like Earth more than I like Mars. Save Earth.

* As I’ve mentioned before, the short chapter told from Johnny Carson’s point-of-view in Lucifer’s Hammer in which the two astronomy nerds who have discovered the comet go on The Tonight Show and Carson figures out on the fly how to make this boring science stuff interesting to 10 million sleepy Americans is one of my favorites in all of genre fiction. I presume Niven and Pournelle had been on the Carson show and Johnny made them look good. So they returned the favor by recreating at their leisure just how the all time greatest American talk show host did it at an order of magnitude higher speed than even they could think.

** By the way, Heinlein, the dominant sci-fi writer of his generation, was really on a kick from about 1955-1961 in toying with his readers’ assumptions about the race of his futuristic characters. In his fine 1955 juvenile novel Tunnel in the Sky, we discover at the end that narrator, Rod Walker, is a different race than we’d assumed; in his 1959 militaristic cult novel Starship Troopers, we discover on the next to last page that the narrator Johnny Rico grew up speaking an unexpected language in an unexpected place. And in his 1961 hippie/druggie cult novel Stranger In a Strange Land, we read about how the four couples sent on the first mission to Mars fall apart when the first human baby on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith, is born and the putative father suddenly realizes that his colleague has cuckolded him.

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

Less publicized is that Cooper DeJean, a white cornerback, will likely start for the Eagles in the Super Bowl. The last white cornerback to start a Super Bowl was Jason Sehorn two dozen years ago in 2001.

A rookie out of the U. of Iowa, DeJean took over the starting job midway into the season, started nine regular-season games and all the playoff games, and made the Pro Football Writers Association All-Rookie team as a cornerback.

No nonblack player had been a regular starter at cornerback since 2003 (the white Sehorn and the half-white and half-Thai Kevin Kaesviharn started at cornerback that year, but both shifted to safety in 2004).

But this year, DeJean’s former teammate at Iowa, Riley Moss, started fourteen games at corner for the Denver Broncos. (A third, Ethan Bonner of the Miami Dolphins, played a few snaps at corner over the past two seasons.)

Why were there no white cornerbacks over the past two decades, until the U. of Iowa apparently discovered a niche it could exploit?

There used to be a saying in the corporate world that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Similarly, few coaches got fired for playing white quarterbacks or black cornerbacks. Granted, you could eventually get fired for consistently losing while playing stereotypical players at their stereotypical positions, but a coach’s nightmare was getting fired on Monday morning because his white cornerback got burned for two touchdowns in a single loss.

Similarly, coaches didn’t get fired for punting on fourth down. These days, advanced analytics have shown that teams punted too much, so the four teams in the conference finals on Sunday punted only seven times but went for it on fourth down fourteen times, succeeding ten times. …

Read the whole thing there.

I don’t really get the RFK Jr. cult.

Sure, he’s got a following who probably helped in the election, but that doesn’t mean Trump can’t stab him in the back afterward. So why the loyalty to a guy who is obviously bad news?

Baseball hitters are reasonably scared of being hit by an inside pitch. Only one major league baseball player has been directly killed by being hit with a hardball pitch, Ray Chapman in 1920, but many, such as Tony Conigliaro, have been badly hurt.

Pitchers use hitters’ fear to gain an advantage over them. For example, Bob Gibson looked terrifyingly mean on the mound, which meant that hitters would be reluctant to crowd the plate for fear of being hit, so they had a harder time putting the sweet spot of the bat on a pitch on the outside edge of the plate.

Can we quantify how nasty or nice pitchers are? We have Hit By Pitch statistics for pitchers. The problem, though, is that there are two main reasons pitchers hit a lot of batsmen: they intentionally throw inside or they are just wild in general.

We can get a better sense of intentional nastiness by dividing HBP by two measures of wildness: Wild Pitches and Bases on Balls. (We have data on intentional bases on balls from 1928 onward, but I didn’t bother subtracting that.)

For example, fastballer Nolan Ryan hit a lot of batters, but not all that many relative to how many he walked or how many wild pitches he threw. In contrast, Greg Maddux didn’t hit all that many batters, but more than you’d expect considering his otherwise superb control.

Here are all Hall of Fame pitchers (excluding 19th Century, Negro Leagues, and new electee C.C. Sabathaia-congratulations) ranked from Nastiest to Nicest by the sum of their Combined rankings on HBP/WP and HBP/BB:

The Nastiest is Dead Ball Era pitcher Iron Man Joe McGinnity, while tied for Nicest are Sandy Koufax and Lee Smith.

After McGinnity come two much admired Millennium-era pitchers, Pedro Martinez and Mariano Rivera. Martinez, who had superb command of his pitches, said, “When I hit a batter, it was 90% intentional.”

Video Link

Fourth nastiest was three-term U.S. Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY).

Some of the rankings are due to when pitchers pitched. Dead Ball Era pitchers hit a lot of batters, but after Chapman’s death in 1920, baseball culture changed and pitchers chose to throw inside a lot less. (One reason for the huge offensive statistics seen between the wars was that pitchers were voluntarily eschewing to a greater extent their most feared weapon.)

Sal “The Barber” Maglie reintroduced inside pitching in the 1950s. And the batting helmet was introduced in 1955 and much later finally became fairly effective. More batter’s armor was introduced with time. And umpires became quicker to eject pitchers who seemed to be retaliating.

Despite his fearsome reputation, Bob Gibson ranks in the middle of the pack, #30 out of 67.

It’s interesting to compare teammates pitching in the same years in the same ballpark. One apples-to-apples comparison is Dodger teammates Don Drysdale (#6 Nastiest) and Sandy Koufax (tied for Nicest). As a rookie, Drysdale had a locker next to Maglie and listened carefully to his advice.

Koufax, in contrast, had a boyish conception of himself as the white-hatted hero of a cowboy TV show. Koufax intentionally hit Lou Brock in 1965 in what his biographer said was the only time he ever threw at a batter. In Koufax’s final season, 1966, he went 27-9 over 323 innings without hitting a single batter.

The Atlanta Braves around the Millennium had the greatest pitching staff over a long time, with three Hall of Fame starters: Greg Maddux (#10), Tom Glavine (#40), and John Smoltz (#53).

There doesn’t seem to be much relationship between popularity and position on the Nasty/Nice scale. Carl Mays might have made the Hall of Fame if he hadn’t killed Chapman and had a number of other controversies. Otherwise, not really …

President Trump is issuing Executive Orders rapid fire. What’s your favorite (so far)? What the worst?

Video Link

Video Link

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine, “Is Los Angeles Doomed?”

But that tactic depends upon having men and, especially, aircraft close by. Unfortunately, nobody knows where the fire will break out next. Los Angeles County is home to almost 10 million people over 4,000 square miles—roughly a square 64 miles across.

And low-level water bombers can’t fly with sustained winds over 40 mph.

A military analogy is the millennia-long debate over the utility of fortifications versus mobility. Since May 10, 1940, when the German tanks blitzkrieged around the end of the Maginot line, fixed lines have been unfashionable.

But technology changes. For example, in the current war, the Russians have been investing much more in hardening their defensive barriers than the Ukrainians. We shall see which strategy proves most prudent.

The next revolution in firefighting might involve increased mobility, such as …

Read the whole thing there.