Global Warmers Won't Give Up Easily

Mark Steyn:

Hysterical queens like Gordon Brown are demanding we introduce global taxation, micro-regulation of every aspect of your life, massive multi-trillion dollar transfers from the productive sector to eco-rackets and transnational bureaucracies, bovine flatulence levies and extraterrestrial surveillance of once sovereign states on the basis of fevered speculations for which there is no raw data:

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years...

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building...

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The global warming scam is transparently an attempted power grab by the globalizers, and they won't go quietly. The head of the IPCC says you can't touch us:

There is "virtually no possibility" of a few scientists biasing the advice given to governments by the UN's top global warming body, its chair said today.

Rajendra Pachauri defended the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the wake of apparent suggestions in emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that they had prevented work they did not agree with from being included in the panel's fourth assessment report, which was published in 2007.

The emails were made public this month after a hacker illegally obtained them from servers at the university.

Pachauri said the large number of contributors and rigorous peer review mechanism adopted by the IPCC meant that any bias would be rapidly uncovered.

"The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report," he said.

Peer review, the new touchstone of so-called integrity, is now being used to shut out dissenting opinions.

Besides the scheme to regulate just about everything, one of the main features of global warming is transfer payments, from the wealthy and white nations to the poor and non-white. So it's no wonder that the U.N., Obama, and Brown are all for it: it's a part of the plan to further their interests and power by any means necessary.

Peer Review and the Gramscian March Through the Institutions

James Delingpole: Peer review is dead:

Here’s what poor Ed doesn’t get. It’s perhaps the single most important fact to emerge from the Climategate scandal. Peer-review is dead. Meaningless. Utterly void of credibility. More irredeemably defunct than a Norwegian Blue. [...]

What the CRU’s hacked emails convincingly demonstrate is that climate scientists in the AGW camp have corrupted the peer-review process. In true Gramscian style they marched on the institutions – capturing the magazines (Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc), the seats of learning (Climate Research Institute; Hadley Centre), the NGO’s (Greenpeace, WWF, etc), the political bases (especially the EU), the newspapers (pretty much the whole of the MSM I’m ashamed, as a print journalist, to say) – and made sure that the only point of view deemed academically and intellectually acceptable was their one.

Neutral observers in this war sometimes ask how it can be that the vast majority of the world’s scientists seem to be in favour of AGW theory. “Peer-review” is why. Only a handful of scientists – 53 to be precise, not the much-touted 2,500 – were actually responsible for the doom-laden global-warming sections of the IPCC’s reports. They were all part of this cosy, self-selecting, peer-review cabal – and many of them, of course, are implicated in the Climategate emails.

Now peer-review is dead, so should be the IPCC, and Al Gore’s future as a carbon-trading billionaire. Will it happen? I shouldn’t hold your breath.

Those who lead the campaign against Medical Hypotheses, which is not peer-reviewed, cite peer review as the basis for complaints. But as Climategate shows, the peer review process is susceptible to corruption, to the long march through the institutions. It may be as difficult to publish a scientific paper that goes against the consensus as it would be for a conservative to get hired in a university sociology department.

PC and Lies

Commenter M. Johansson suggested that the correlation of an idea with political correctness is a useful indicator of whether we should or should not place any trust in it:

If something is politically correct it's probably false. The more politically correct something is, the farther from the truth. The truth doesn't need protection from PC but falsehood does.

I wrote recently on PC as anti-knowledge (Steve Sailer's formulation). PC does not require that that whereof we cannot speak, we must remain silent; rather, it requires that of those things of which we can speak, but which annoy the thrones and powers, we must remain silent.

PC amounts to an attempt to silence ideas, so that we ought to be suspicious of anything PC. Here's a good example: Elen Goodman on global warming, February 2007:

I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

Translation: global warming "deniers" are so evil and stupid that they can be compared to Nazis, and therefore we ought to ensure that they are silenced. One way of looking at a statement like Goodman's is to ask oneself, do particle physicists, zoologists, chemical engineers, or molecular biologists ever talk like that? Of course, these examples may be less directly relevant to human life, but on the other hand, the scientists in these fields usually feel no need to silence opponents. If a theory or experiment is shown to be false, the proper and normal response is to revise the theory and/or move on to greener pastures.

Theories whose partisans try to silence and demonize opponents are those most worthy of distrust.

Index of Suspicion

The Man Who Is Thursday, in response to "Seeing Through All the Lies, says "don't let the lies make you paranoid".

Now, I should say that on some things we are being lied to by those in power. Two of the biggest shocks in my life came when, first, I discovered the truth about race and intelligence through people like Steve Sailer, Arthur Jensen, Charles Murray, Vince Sarich and then later discovered the truth about women and sex through Roissy and the seduction community generally. Suddenly, things that you have seen all around you start to make sense. You realize that, "Oh my God, I've been lied to all my life." The temptation is to start disbelieving everything you have been told. Everything is a lie.

Thursday argues that we must be aware of this temptation to think that everything we are being told is a lie, and I agree with him. The outer reaches of human thought contain some crazy ideas, many of which claim that the truth is being hidden. We should be cautious about becoming latter-day gnostics who believe we can find the hidden truth.

Curiously, however, Thursday's examples of topics on which he thinks the consensus is correct, namely fiat money, "climate change", and HIV/AIDS, are ones I'd be inclined to disagree with, especially the first two. He seems to believe that Ron Paul exemplifies "dumbfounding economic illiteracy", while Megan McArdle is the voice of reason; it's hard to see how anyone can disagree with "climate change", as it is well known that the climate changes. And regarding HIV, he says, "It doesn't surprise me that a lot of people who died of "AIDS" there may actually have died of some other disease, especially since some of the people collecting the stats may have wanted to inflate the rate of AIDS in Africa." Well, there you go: if the stats are hugely inflated, the epidemic of HIV-caused AIDS does not exist. (Not an attempt at a complete refutation - there are many other arguments against HIV as the cause of AIDS.)

How are we to decide whether the consensus is correct or whether it is a deliberate deception? Thursday quotes Robin Hanson on Climategate:

It is a shame that academia works this way, and an academia where this stuff didn’t happen would probably be more accurate. But even our flawed academic consensus is usually more accurate than its contrarians, and it is hard to find reliable cheap indicators saying when contrarians are more likely to be right.

Yet in the comments to Hanson's post, many commentators disagree that that is how academia works, that most academics would find such behavior deplorable.

We need something like an "Index of Suspicion", which would quantify the degree to which we should be suspicious of a consensus opinion. The index would contain in its numerator the amount of money in grants, taxes, profits, or other funding received by those whose livelihood depends on the opinion being accepted as true. The denominator might contain the fraction of experts who believe the notion to be true. The higher the index, the greater should be our suspicion.

For instance, take statins. Drug companies make huge profits on them, I believe the figure would be in the tens of billions of dollars annually. Yet a substantial fraction of experts believes not only that cholesterol lowering does not prevent heart disease, but that statins are actively harmful for most people. Our index of suspicion would be high.

As another example, take astrology. I doubt that one could find even one authority in the areas of astronomy or psychology or genetics that believes that astrology has any basis in reality. These authorities also have no money riding on this belief. Therefore our index of suspicion in astrology as false ought to be very low.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

WUMPS

WUMPS stands for white upper middle pot smokers. (I just made it up.) A reader, apropos of yesterdays post on cannabis vs. alcohol in society, writes:

"A little time around old potheads who smoked dope for a couple of decades would dispell anyone of the notion that chronic marijuana usage does not have a bad effect on your mind. Those folks are very cloudy in their speech, cant retain a train of thought over a complex subject, and generally are slow of even physical movement (seemingly very lazy)."

Just between you and me, please (or if you must publish this, please do so anonymously):

I've been smoking pot with varying regularity for over 40 years. I think I am not flattering myself excessively to imagine that I am capable of retaining a train of thought over a complex subject, and that my use of language is not conspicuously cloudy. (At the very least, I can spell "dispel", and use it correctly.) I also hold [a high] rank in one of the world's most physically demanding martial-arts systems, and at [50 something] I regularly mop the training-hall floor with athletes half my age.

Furthermore, I am acquainted with a great many highly intelligent people from all walks of life, and am continually startled to find how many of them also enjoy the stuff.

For me, it calms my hyperactively analytical mind and allows me to think more holistically, and in particular, more musically. It is less damaging to the body, I think, than chronic alcohol use is, and while drunks are frequently aggressive and violent, marijuana seems to have the opposite effect.

I'm all for legalizing the stuff.

It's been my experience that a fair number of white professionals indulge in pot smoking. As for legalization, I'm of at least two minds on that. As with alcohol, there will be a number of people who cannot partake moderately, abuse being their only mode. And in this day and age, no one is allowed to abuse substances if it leads to mental or physical health problems; no, they become public charges. As against that, abuse of marijuana undoubtedly causes fewer individual an social problems than alcohol abuse - not to speak of the money we spend enforcing the prohibition against pot.

Cannabis vs. Alcohol: Social Sanctions

The Vanity Fair piece about a murder in Perugia, Italy, in which a young American woman is a suspect, tells us that everyone involved or suspected seems to have been using large amounts of marijuana daily. While I rather doubt that marijuana use was a factor in the murder, though it may have been, this brought to mind a question I've wondered about, and that is the social permission or sanction of alcohol versus cannabis.

Cannabis use has been known to the Western world at least since the time of Herodotus, who described Scythians getting high on it. Yet, so far as I know, its use has been rare in the West until this century. Why is that? Marijuana would seem to be even easier to obtain than alcohol; the former requires merely growing a plant and drying it, the latter growing, processing, fermenting, storage of a bulky product that can spoil, and so on. From an economic point of view, cannabis would seem to have the edge.

Has there been a general social proscription on its use in the West for the past thousand years, and if so, why? The dangers of alcohol with regard to drunken violence and skid row alcoholism have been common knowledge for a long time, yet aside from various subcultures like Mormons or Adventists, its use has been generally sanctioned.

Maybe it's the case that not many people enjoyed a cannabis high, and therefore it was not in demand. Yet many peoples outside the West have used it with gusto apparently throughout history, and it's even been suggested that the use of cannabis and opium inspired the invention of agriculture, the oldest agricultural remains discovered being opium and hemp seeds from circa 40,000 B.C. (From Richard Rudgley's The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age - an excellent book.) Therefore, unless Western people have some peculiar psychological traits that make them generally dislike cannabis, one would have to reject that hypothesis.

More tantalizing is the idea that social traditions against the use of cannabis, assuming that they exist (other than in the American 20th century), embody some sort of wisdom against its use, wisdom engendered by episodes such as the murder discussed in the Vanity Fair article. Maybe our ancestors have had social experience with it that led to its use being relegated to dark corners of society, and only now, with the ascension of liberalism and its figurative defenestration of all social wisdom, has cannabis use become widespread.

Against the notion that social wisdom embodies knowledge of marijuana's dangers is a more scientific view, such as Estimating Drug Harms (pdf), by David Nutt (aptronym alert), who asserts that both alcohol and tobacco use are more harmful than cannabis. For that, he was recently sacked from a government advisory position in the UK. (Thanks to Bruce Charlton for the link.) So society doesn't want to hear that, which of course doesn't mean it is correct in doing so.

Global Warming Exposed as the Greatest Scandal in Modern Science

By now you are no doubt au courant with the global warming scam being exposed for what it is. A leading climate "research" organization had its servers hacked and 60 MB of emails and other data have been posted on the internet. (See Mish, Karl Denninger, Lubos Motl, Andrew Bolt, NY Times, Wikipedia.) The takeaway point from the exposed emails is that the scientists in question had an agenda that they promoted, that is they were and are not doing disinterested science. Their actions border on fraud, and may amount to the greatest scandal in modern science.

James Delingpole: Climategate: how the MSM reported the greatest scandal in modern science shows how the media have become advocates for the promotion of the global warming agenda.

One especially interesting email from Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann details efforts to suppress research not to the liking of AGW promoters.

As with anything, follow the money. The Global Warming Industry receives billions of dollars in grants, Al Gore and others have turned it into a lucrative crusade, and governments see it as a tempting source of tax revenue - not to mention a source of new power.

Nations to seek billions in 'climate debt':

CENTRAL American nations will demand $US105 billion ($114.2 billion) from industrialised countries for damages caused by global warming, the region's representatives say.
Central American environment ministers gathered in Guatemala overnight to discuss the so-called "ecological debt" owed to them and to set out a common position ahead of climate talks in Copenhagen next month.

Guatemalan environment minister Luis Ferrate said the $US105 billion ($114.2 billion) price tag was "an estimate" of the damage done by climate change across 16 sectors in Belize, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama.

Ferrate minister said the region "had never faced" so much drought, aridity, flooding, and precarious food security.

A formal proposal will be presented in Denmark, officials said.

His Nicaraguan counterpart Juana Arguenal said that Central America would press industrialised countries to reach concrete decisions to reduce "greenhouse" gases at Copenhagen.

"We hope for a deal that is ethical and moral," she said.

This article demonstrates AGW for what it is: a scheme to rob ordinary people of their money and freedoms.

PC Is Anti-Knowledge, and the Human Resources Rule of PC

In the course of his entertaining and brutal evisceration of Malcolm Gladwell, Steve Sailer wrote:

As a commenter pointed out, this debate over NFL quarterbacks is really a stalking horse for the debate over IQ and race, which, in turn, influences practically every other concept about how the world works. (See Gladwell's 2008 bestseller Outliers for examples.) Political correctness is essentially anti-knowledge. [My emphasis.]

That's a great and pithy expression that gets to the core of PC. Being politically correct means that one must ignore information that leads to conclusions that cast "minorities" in a less than favorable light. Consequently, however, ignoring the facts means that what's wrong in society cannot be corrected. So long as the science of intelligence testing and the other findings of psychometrics ignored, AA, mass immigration, and scapegoating of whites won't end.

One reason PC endures is the hold it has in the workplace. Ben Tillman pointed out that coworkers of Nidal Hasan failed to report him to his and their superiors not because they held politically-correct beliefs (though they might have actually believed them), but because anyone in the workplace is well aware of the consequences of noticing bad qualities in a "minority". We might call this the Human Resources Rule of PC: notice a hatefact, lose your job. Take a look at Begging for Lawsuits: 7 Stupid Things Supervisors Say from HR Daily Advisor: companies can be sued when supervisors say innocuous things or make commonplace observations; it's no wonder that HR directors are so cognizant of the zeitgeist.

Vitamin D Dosage

The NY Times features Vitamin D Shows Heart Benefits in Study. The study showed that those in the lowest tertile of vitamin D levels "were 77 percent more likely to die during the follow-up, 78 percent more likely to have a stroke and 45 percent more likely to develop coronary artery disease than those with normal levels. They were twice as likely to develop heart failure as those with normal levels."

But at the end of the article we find the same tired assertions for a low-dose vitamin D regimen, out of fears of toxicity. An amount of 1000 IU daily is called a "much higher dose". The fact is that the vast majority of people will never reach sufficiency on that dose. Five thousand would be more like it. Toxicity has never been seen with doses up to 10,000 IU daily, and in fact, 20 minutes in the midsummer sun will give you 20,000 IU.

If you follow official government recommendations for vitamin D dosage, you'll be more likely to end up in the group with heart disease and stroke.

The Ivy Portfolio

With the stock market meltdown over the past couple of years, one thing that became glaringly obvious was how few investors and pundits had any clue that the market was going to tank. To the sorry list of television and internet market gurus, we can add well known names in value investing, including people such as Warren Buffett, Ken Heebner, David Dreman, and many more. Some of the lesser known but highly regarded investors - Mohnish Pabrai comes to mind - saw their portfolios utterly tank, with losses greater than 50%. Investors like John Paulson, who was up over 500% in 2007 by virtue of shorting subprime mortgages, were a rarity.

Faced with this, what is an investor to do? Biases in investing, such as loss aversion or anchoring, often haunt investors, making him his own worst enemy. Add to that the fact that virtually no one can predict where the market and economy are headed, and that individual investors are known to be poor stock pickers, and you have a recipe for taking large losses while transfixed like the proverbial deer in the headlights. The simple system outlined in Mebane Faber and Eric Richardson's The Ivy Portfolio: How to Invest Like the Top Endowments and Avoid Bear Markets can help the investor beat markets and preserve wealth through diversification and not losing.

Faber and Richardson divide their book into two dissimilar sections. In the first, the top-performing Yale and Harvard Endowment funds are examined, showing that diversifying does what it's supposed to do. Holding a well-diversified portfolio of major asset classes, including U.S. and foreign stocks, commodities, real estate, and bonds, would have generated market-beating returns with less volatility than any one asset class alone.

The second, to me more interesting section, outlines a simple system of market timing using a price moving average. If one had used this system going into the 2008 meltdown, one would have been entirely in cash or bonds before the crash happened. Over the past 35 years or so, the system would have beaten the S&P 500 while drastically reducing volatility and drawdowns.

Why does this system work, and will it continue to work? The short answers are behavioral biases in investing, and yes, because behavioral biases are not going away any time soon. Think of it as human biodiversity in investing: we're hardwired to make the same mistakes again and again.

Warren Buffett's top two rules for investing read, "1. Don't lose money. 2.Don't forget rule number one." The Ivy Portfolio can show you how to avoid bear markets, while participating in bull markets, and at least partially help you to conform to Buffett's rules.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who manages his own portfolio. However, almost all the information in the book can be found in reading Mebane Faber's paper, A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation, together with his blog.

PS: The system also works for houses and gold.

Quoted on Derb Radio

John Derbyshire, in his weekly podcast at National Review Online, Radio Derb, approves of my take on the poor math skills of CUNY students. (Starts at the 31:00 mark - you can't advance the tape on the site, so you'll need to download to do that. But of course you'll want to listen to the whole thing.)

The Derb, after noting the CUNY math story, says, "Those of us who understand that the whole business of school performance scoring is a political racket, were much less surprised. About 1/10 as surprised, or 0.1. Blogger Dennis Mangan's comment on this story can't be improved upon." He then proceeds to quote my comments.

Apologies for talking my book, but you need to know just how significant this blog is. Thanks to reader AS for the notice.

CUNY's Math Problem

Ninety percent of freshman can't do basic algebra:

More city kids are graduating from high school, but that doesn't mean they can do college math.

Basic algebra involving fractions and decimals stumped a group of City University of New York freshmen - suggesting city schools aren't preparing them, a CUNY report shows.

"These results are shocking," said City College Prof. Stanley Ocken, who co-wrote the report on CUNY kids' skills. "They show that a disturbing proportion of New York City high school graduates lack basic skills."

During their first math class at one of CUNY's four-year colleges, 90% of 200 students tested couldn't solve a simple algebra problem, the report by the CUNY Council of Math Chairs found. Only a third could convert a fraction into a decimal.

The most notable thing here is how unsurprising this is. Of the 90% who can't do basic algebra, probably 90% of them don't belong in college. However, the powers that be want college enrollment to increase - I mean, hey, we've got to be prepared for all those high tech jobs that barely exist anymore. - and if these kids can't do algebra, then we'll just have to increase the numbers of H-1B visas.

The Most-Read Paper in Social Science Over the Past Year

Let's diverge from politics for a bit. The most downloaded paper on the Social Science Research Network over the past year is Mebane Faber's A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation, which details a simple system of market timing using five asset classes. (See here. It appears to be number 7 in the all-time ranking.) Why is this noteworthy? For one thing, Mebane is not an academic, and in fact his education is in biology. For another, he's a blogger.

And to see why this paper was downloaded so often, take a look at this chart:

This shows that if you had followed the system given in the paper, you would have all but avoided the market meltdown of the past year. That makes this paper definitely worth reading, and heeding. I recently ordered Mebane's book, The Ivy Portfolio: How to Invest Like the Top Endowments and Avoid Bear Markets , which has received rave reviews on Amazon.

By the way, gold just hit a record high.

Fighting While White

Martin B commented:

General Casey's disgraceful comments are more proof, if indeed more proof were needed, that whites shouldn't join the armed forces. You may, out of deep patriotic feeling, desire to serve your nation, but that is not what you will be doing.

Instead, you will be a soldier in Xerxes army, fighting for an empire that despises you and your kin. Your own generals will be indifferent to you being murdered by your enemies, while on base on your own soil. They are more concerned with the delicate feelings of those who would kill you, than with your safety and morale. They will sacrifice you in order to win the diversity brownie points needed for their promotion.

Another commenter objected to this, pointing out the patriotic policemen and firemen and those who joined the military in the wake of 9/11.

Well, that that was then, this is now. Why indeed would a young and patriotic white man think that going off to fight and possibly be killed or wounded in Afghanistan or Iraq be worth his while, or a service to his people? Why would anyone want to serve under General Casey, who is "more concerned about the delicate feelings of those who would kill you", and with preserving our nation's precious so-called "diversity"?

Young white men: the leaders of this nation hold you in contempt. They are intent on displacing you from the labor force with people who will work cheaper, on stealing what wealth you may be able to obtain to give to those who have no moral claim on it, and on sending you off to die or be mutilated in meaningless foreign wars that benefit very few of us, all the while allowing enemies to immigrate and holding "diversity" a higher value than your lives.

For those who will say that patriotism and racial identity are not synonymous, I say that history provides abundant evidence that multicultural empires eventually fail to command the loyalty of their subjects. When the inhabitants of the polyglot - and highly diverse - Austro-Hungarian Empire figured out that their leaders didn't have their subjects best interests at heart, and plunged them into wars that meant nothing but suffering to those who fought them, they withdrew their loyalty, and the country collapsed.

Defeatism

One STDV wonders about a "defeatist attitude" among conservative bloggers, citing me among others.

Such a pessimistic, defeatist view ostensibly undermines the larger goals of conservatism and the specific goals of the Steveosphere. How can a group of iconoclasts succeed if they've accepted defeat prematurely? How can we save the West, or at least motivate a marked improvement, if the leaders of this "rebellion" view acquiescence as the only viable solution?

Is it defeatism or realism? Maybe the best reply to this is the comment of Thrasymachus in a previous post:

Note that the conservative faction is on its fourth uprising in the last 50 years to take back the Republican party, achieve electoral victory and turn back the march to socialism. It's never worked before and it's not going to work now.

If defeatism in this context means that one has given up on the U.S., then maybe the word fits. But my post was more about loyalties, about where one should place one's hopes and direct one's actions.

It is indeed my view that the U.S., as a political entity formed by and for white Americans, is just about irretrievable. The country has slipped from our grasp, and the huge demographic changes of the past 45 years - since the passage of the National Suicide Pact and the surge of illegal immigration from Mexico - look permanent. Demography is destiny. Most of these immigrants and their children have a vested interest in government preferences; conservatives have been trying to abolish affirmative action for decades now, unsuccessfully. Unless the populace suddenly embraces the political outlook of Milton Friedman, most of then will continue to clamor for government goodies, for race-based jobs and lawsuits, for family reunification, for amnesty.

I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do claim that we need to look at the situation realistically. Electing new politicians or even passing constitutional amendments are Band-Aids because, after all, we already have a Constitution, but it has been ripped to shreds by judges who were appointed by the politicians we elected.

While it is true that politics is a never-ending business, one that we cannot refuse to join, a politics that denies reality cannot succeed.

Loyalty and Indifference

Ferdinand Bardamu writes:

I lost any loyalty I had to this society when it started conspiring to screw me over.

At his link, we read:

We all know that society is sick and civilization is waning, but how is an individual supposed to react to this? Once you’ve learned that following the rules is a sure way to get screwed over, you can’t go back to being Boobus Americanus (to borrow from Mencken). Western civilization, in its politically correct, feminized state, demands that you bend over and grab your ankles in order to be a good citizen, and breaking the rules will earn you the contempt of society at large – and yet, breaking the rules is the only way to survive. There’s no proper ethical code in existence that requires people to submit to tyrants who seek to bind them in chains.

The thought popped into my head the other day that I doubt that I would be willing to fight for my country. I've never served in the military, but I've always thought it an honorable institution, and still do. The problem is that I no longer think my country an honorable institution, but more importantly, it no longer feels like my country. As Ferdinand says, our country seems intent on screwing us over, at least those of us who are white, male, and native-born. The entire political and social apparatus is designed to elevate the untalented and undeserving, to steal money from taxpayers to give to Wall Street and its enablers in the federal government, to plunder and ruin men in divorce courts, to dilute our valued citizenship with the constant issuance of stock, and to fight foreign wars that provide no benefit for the people as a whole, and of which the allowance and even encouragement by the government of potential enemy aliens to settle here makes a mockery.

Passing politics, or deep structure? Until recently it looked like the former, but lately it appears that the U.S. has taken on at least some of these features permanently. What is one to do? While I haven't quite yet given up on the struggle to change the nation into something better, something a lot closer to what it used to be, it begins to appear a lost cause.

Is rebellion the only option? Another option is indifference and looking out for oneself, which, for now, seems to me the best option.

Addendum: I forgot, another thing the political apparatus does is constantly debase the currency, rewarding debtors and penalizing the prudent. "Our leaders dilute dollars for the sins of everyone."

Proximity to Canada Engenders Trust

A recent Gallup Poll, Utah, South Dakota Best Places in U.S. to Lose Your Wallet, asked residents of different states whether they would expect a neighbor who found a wallet or purse that contained $200 to return it. California ranked third from the bottom on this poll, ahead only of Nevada and Mississippi. (Via The Inductivist.)

That ethnic homogeneity engenders trust, and that the secret of the success of the Anglo world lies in their superior quantity of social trust, have become fairly commonplace ideas.

The northern Midwest and the Northwest are filled with ethnic Germans and Scandinavians; the South, with blacks and Scotch-Irish; California, with Hispanics and Scotch-Irish. (The latter is an exaggerated attempt at humor, but quite a few Scotch-Irish did make it to California.)

Bottom Line

Seventy percent of Americans nationwide express trust in their neighbors, as measured by a question about whether a lost wallet (or purse) would be returned, but trust in one's neighbors varies greatly across regions. A number of Western and Midwestern states, along with other states with smaller populations, top the list of high-trust places, whereas Southern and highly populated states are more prevalent on the low-trust list. People living in high-trust states have higher overall well-being, possibly due to greater access to the resources and services needed to lead an optimal life.

See also Trust, social capital, and economic growth.

More HIV Skepticism

In the comments, in response to the statement that "[i]t seems well established that HIV progresses to AIDS", Ben Tillman wrote, "Indeed, in much the same way that it's established that human races are identical and humans should get 70% of their calories from carbos. Indoctrination."

There are many reasons to be skeptical of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, one of them being that so much of what our betters want us to believe simply isn't true. That races are essentially the same in all qualities that matter does not hold up to a moment's scrutiny, yet the NY Times, along with all the great and good, repeat this idiocy on a nearly daily basis. One can almost always find an article in the NY Times, decrying the state of education or crime while laying the blame on (white) society.

The reference to a dietary composition of 70% carbohydrates is perhaps even more apropos, because on this issue even the establishment is slowly but surely coming around. But this same establishment impeded the emergence of the truth at every step. Just like the AIDS establishment, they accused the dissenters of killing people.

In a "Bad Science" column, Medical Hypotheses fails the Aids test, Ben Goldacre accuses Peter Duesberg of misrepresentation.

This is a simple, flat, unambiguous misrepresentation of the Lancet paper to which they refer. Antiretroviral medications have repeatedly been shown to save lives in systematic reviews of large numbers of well-conducted randomised controlled trials. The Lancet paper they reference simply surveys the first decade of patients who received HAART – modern combinations of multiple antiretroviral medications – to see if things have improved, and they have not. Patients receiving HAART in 2003 did no better than patients receiving HAART in 1995. This doesn’t mean that HAART is no better than placebo. It means outcomes for people on HAART didn’t improve over an 8 year period of their use.

Yes, that Lancet paper they reference shows that HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy) is still killing people at the same rate as a decade ago. Furthermore, Goldacre says that "[a]ntiretroviral medications have repeatedly been shown to save lives in systematic reviews of large numbers of well-conducted randomised controlled trials." References, please. This is what I keep seeing, but have there in fact been randomized, controlled studies of HIV positive patients with no other lifestyle risk factors, such as IV drug abuse or multiple male sexual partners versus the same on HAART?

In short, there is a powerful AIDS establishment that receives billions of dollars from governments and employs thousands - probably tens of thousands - of highly-educated people, including scientists. They have every motive in the world to throw out clouds of obfuscation and silence their opponents, which is exactly what they are successfully doing right now. Is there any reason at all to trust them?