The Canard of Racial Profiling

An article about Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio has the following, all too typical of what passes for intelligent public discourse:

But the king of local immigration enforcement is still Arpaio.

Arpaio, a 78-year-old ex-federal drug agent who fashions himself as a modern-day John Wayne, launched his latest sweep Thursday afternoon, sending about 200 sheriff's deputies and trained volunteers out across metro Phoenix to look for traffic violators who may be here illegally.

Deputy Bob Dalton and volunteer Heath Kowacz spotted a driver with a cracked windshield in a poor Phoenix neighborhood near a busy freeway. Dalton triggered the red and blue police lights and pulled over 28-year-old Alfredo Salas, who was born in Mexico but has lived in Phoenix with a resident alien card since 1993.

Dalton gave him a warning after Salas produced his license and registration and told him to get the windshield fixed.

Salas, a married father of two who installs granite, told The Associated Press that he was treated well but he wondered whether he was pulled over because his truck is a Ford Lobo.

"It's a Mexican truck so I don't know if they saw that and said, 'I wonder if he has papers or not,'" Salas said. "If that's the case, it kind of gets me upset."

Sixty percent of the nearly 1,000 people arrested in the sweeps since early 2008 have been illegal immigrants. Thursday's dragnet led to four arrests, but it wasn't clear if any of them were illegal immigrants.

Critics say deputies racially profile Hispanics. Arpaio says deputies approach people only when they have probable cause.

Basically what's being touted here by the writer and by everyone else who writes in these terms is that immigration enforcement is quasi-illegitimate, and police may investigate immigration crimes only during the course of the investigation of other, real, crimes. The Arizona law was of course drafted specifically in mind of successful judicial and political attempts to kill similar laws. The reality is that virtually all illegal immigrants in the American Southwest are Mexican or other Hispanic, so stopping people for suspected illegal immigrant status will always be open to the absurd charge of racial profiling.

Furthermore, if I am merely walking down the street or driving legally in my car, a cop can ask me for ID; I am asked to show identification at the bank, when using a credit card, and used to be when buying alcohol, all of these cases being of considerably less import than illegal immigration. If somehow a cop were to ask me to show that I am in the country legally, I would do so by showing ID - then maybe I'd have a laugh.

The job of the police is the enforcement of the law, not just laws that liberals like. "Racial profiling" is a canard designed to prevent the police from doing the part of their job that liberals don't like.

Manic Depression and IQ

Genius and creativity have long been popularly associated with a stormy temperament. Consider such figures as, off the top of my head, Schumann, Beethoven, Shelley, and Mussorgsky. A recently published study takes a look to see whether this popular assumption has any merit: Excellent school performance at age 16 and risk of adult bipolar disorder: national cohort study. The abstract:

BACKGROUND: Anecdotal and biographical reports suggest that bipolar disorder may be associated with high IQ or creativity, but evidence for any such connection is weak. AIMS: To investigate possible associations between scholastic achievement and later bipolar disorder, using prospective data, in a whole-population cohort study. METHOD: Using individual school grades from all individuals finishing compulsory schooling in Sweden between 1988 and 1997, we tested associations between scholastic achievement at age 15-16 and hospital admission for psychosis between ages 17 and 31, adjusting for potential confounders. RESULTS: Individuals with excellent school performance had a nearly fourfold increased risk of later bipolar disorder compared with those with average grades (hazard ratio HR = 3.79, 95% CI 2.11-6.82). This association appeared to be confined to males. Students with the poorest grades were also at moderately increased risk of bipolar disorder (HR = 1.86, 95% CI 1.06-3.28). CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide support for the hypothesis that exceptional intellectual ability is associated with bipolar disorder.

It appears that the association is real. Perhaps real genius in the arts requires some combination of high IQ and emotional instability, the latter present in varying degrees. Too manic depressive or not high enough IQ, and no works of genius result, but the right combination and you scale the heights of Olympus.

The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, by Tom Dardis, chronicles the link between the writing and drinking careers of four American writers, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and O'Neill, all of whom were alcoholics. Since alcohol can be a form of self-medication, perhaps depression was a motivation behind their drinking. (Hemingway of course killed himself, evidence of depression.) Interestingly, O'Neill was the only one who quit drinking and who then went on to write his most important works, while the creativity of the others deteriorated over time due to their alcoholism.

A Successor to Medical Hypotheses

The late, great Medical Hypotheses will get a successor, the just-launched Hypotheses in the Life Sciences. (Great logo, too.) The Scientist covers the story.

Science says:

Bains [the new editor of HyLS] says he found a welcome home at the University of Buckingham, the United Kingdom's only private university, where Charlton is a visiting professor. The university's controversial Vice-Chancellor Terence Kealey—a passionate libertarian who, according to the Guardian, "may just be the most reactionary man in Britain"—strongly supports the new journal, Bains says. "They're not likely to cave in in the face of criticism if a paper produces controversy, like Elsevier did," adds Charlton. The University of Buckingham Press publishes five other journals. 

My emphasis.

Seth Roberts interviews Bruce Charlton on the Medical Hypotheses affair, the economics of scientific publishing, and what Charlton believes are the personal motivations behind the MH shutdown.

Sex Differences Now a Fair Question

Steve Sailer mentioned that New York Times writers seem increasingly willing to expound on ideas that look like they came straight from Sailer's blog and other writings. (Sailer doesn't mention Ross Douthat, whose latest column made him look like Steve's undercover brother.) Among these NYT writers is Nicholas Kristof, whose latest column is Don’t Write Off Men Just Yet. In it, he muses on sex differences between men and women and the possible ramifications of these for the modern workplace.

Malcolm Pollack notes what's going on here:

Leaving aside that anybody who is just now getting around to wondering “if a new age of femininity is dawning” must have spent the last 40 years in a mine-shaft, what is remarkable about this is that the notion of innate cognitive differences between men and women is suddenly “a fair question”. It certainly was not, for example, a “fair question” when Lawrence Summers asked it a few years ago at Harvard, even though he raised exactly the same point about intelligence distribution that Mr. Kristof does in today’s piece, namely that female intelligence is more clustered in the middle, while there are more males at the high and low ends of the scale.

The reason that the matter of innate sex differences has become "a fair question" is that now women are thought to possess some innate differences that work to their advantage, as illustrated by a quote from Hanna Rosin in Kristof's column:

The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today — social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus — are, at a minimum, not predominately male. In fact, the opposite may be true.

So, a Lawrence Summers brings up the possibility that men vastly outnumber women at the far right side of the bell curve of IQ, and he gets harangued and ultimately fired for his pains. Rosin mentions the particular psychological qualities of women and how they happen to coincide with the demands of the modern workplace, and it's a fair question.

Aside from the issue of innate differences, I don't believe that it's a mere coincidence that women, who allegedly have more "social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus" than men, just happen to be better equipped for the workplace. Rather, the workplace has been remade in the image of women. The BSDs of Wall Street are probably much better equipped when it comes to cementing deals and making boatloads of money for their companies, it's just that their kind of behavior has been effectively outlawed in most workplaces.

Heroism, Another Casualty of Diversity

TGGP wrestles with the ideas of Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, and wonders how we can get public servants to take more life-threatening risks. The idea is that someone, say a cop or fireman, has to be paid an awful lot to risk his life on the job, especially when push comes to shove, when one must fire that gun or charge into a burning building. Ariely cites an instance of Coast Guard men who wouldn't dream of firing on drug smugglers - it's just not worth it. TGGP:

His response is “How can we change this situation?” He first considers paying them enough that they consider it worth risking their lives, but then decides that it would be better if they knew society held them in great esteem for taking such risks. He then extrapolates that to suggesting that we improve our childrens’ education not through standardized-testing or performance-based salaries but by rethinking school curricula to “link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, et.c) and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society”. He argues that when children see the point of education they will become more enthusiastic and motivated. I haven’t done any more research than him on the subject, but that kind of idea brought to my mind the bee-sting theory and Promises I Can Keep. More cynically, it occurs to me that these are already areas society holds up as very valuable, and by suggesting that we collectively signal the value we ascribe to them Ariely is doing the same thing as the psychologists described by Robyn Dawes.

Pretty funny. I would argue that this problem is another one that non-diverse societies with lots of social trust, i.e. European and American societies of the ancien regime (>50 years ago), managed to avoid. In the America I grew up in, perhaps the main reason that boys so often said that they wanted to be firemen or cops when they grew up was because the jobs were seen as heroic. Everyone assumed that some day, the gun would have to be fired or the burning building charged.

Heroism with little thought to how much it paid would seem to be the norm for non-diverse, European societies. When the society is an organic whole, and its people united by race, religion, and a common sense of purpose, risking your life for that society makes sense. When your nation's highest value is "diversity", not so much.

Leave it to a technocrat/economist like Ariely to lobby for linking education even more to "social goals" like "elimination of poverty", as if our education system was little better than propaganda as it is; and leave it to someone like him not to see the bleeding obvious about diversity.

Footnote: I've read Ariely's book and found it enlightening, well worth the read; it's heartening that a book such as that can become something of a bestseller. However, when I read on the jacket cover that Ariely, who holds a prestigious chair at Duke, is an immigrant from Israel, I was disappointed, not because he's Jewish or from Israel, but because here's another (undoubtedly) high IQ immigrant taking a position that is in very limited supply, one that if not for him and for our elite could have gone to a native. Also, while his subject matter has interesting insights for human behavior, I would hardly consider it the sort of cutting edge research for which we need to import professors from abroad. He could easily do that, as well as write his books, from his own country.

The AIDS-Industrial Complex

Malcolm Potts, UC Berkeley professor and an obstetrician with an impressive biography, writes on the AIDS-industrial complex:

20,000 participants are meeting in Vienna for 18th International AIDS conference. One person not invited is Peter Duesberg, a world renowned virologist who challenged the idea that AIDS is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus. I think Peter is totally wrong, but in some ways he may have more integrity than a few of those in Vienna spinning data and contriving new ways to get even more money into what I call AIDS-industrial complex. [...] Today, I think the evidence is overwhelming that HIV causes AIDS, but the vitriol, hatred and persecution that have been directed at Duesberg comes straight out of the medieval Inquisition.

In May this year a useful scientific journal called Medical Hypotheses was destroyed when the publisher, Elsevier, caved in to HIV/AIDS fundamentalists who insisted the editor expunge an article Duesberg had written. Medical Hypotheses was unique in NOT peer reviewing articles, so that new ideas could be launched. The editor, Bruce Charlton an excellent scientist from Newcastle, England, and many of the board of Medical Hypotheses have resigned. Anyone who has published a lot learns that the best ideas often get rejected by prestigious journals.  Anyone who is afraid of someone’s hypothesis and wants it expunged is not a scientist –they are a religious fundamentalists, a scientific Taliban, a medieval Inquisition.

Potts' analogy of the AIDS establishment to the military-industrial complex is a good one. Huge amounts of money are being doled out by governments to organizations that employ thousands of scientists, doctors, and other careerists who stand to lose greatly should their views be shown to be wrong. Doubters and skeptics must be silenced, and as we've seen, they are often successfully shut up.

For what it's worth - not much really - I do not think that Peter Duesberg "is totally wrong". He may not be totally right, but it seems clear enough that much more is going on with HIV/AIDS than the AIDS establishment lets on.

An example of what Potts discusses can be seen in AIDS conference chief lashes out at world leaders - he wants more money, and believes that the developed countries should foot the bill for "universal access", i.e. guaranteed lifetime employment for everyone in the AIDS establishment.

Anti-White Racism of the Hostile Elite

NYT's Ross Douthat on the roots of white anxiety:

In March of 2000, Pat Buchanan came to speak at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Harvard being Harvard, the audience hissed and sneered and made wisecracks. Buchanan being Buchanan, he gave as good as he got. While the assembled Ivy Leaguers accused him of homophobia and racism and anti-Semitism, he accused Harvard — and by extension, the entire American elite — of discriminating against white Christians.

A decade later, the note of white grievance that Buchanan struck that night is part of the conservative melody. You can hear it when Glenn Beck accuses Barack Obama of racism, or when Rush Limbaugh casts liberal policies as an exercise in “reparations.” It was sounded last year during the backlash against Sonia Sotomayor’s suggestion that a “wise Latina” jurist might have advantages over a white male judge, and again last week when conservatives attacked the Justice Department for supposedly going easy on members of the New Black Panther Party accused of voter intimidation.

To liberals, these grievances seem at once noxious and ridiculous. (Is there any group with less to complain about, they often wonder, than white Christian Americans?) But to understand the country’s present polarization, it’s worth recognizing what Pat Buchanan got right.

Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students,” leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites.

But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”

This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

What we have here is evidence of massive anti-white and/or anti-Christian discrimination being practiced by some of America's most prestigious and important institutions, which control entrance into the elite. All this is aided and abetted by the feds.

Let the lawsuits begin. Let Harvard, Yale, and the rest be bankrupted defending against or settling, or even better, losing those suits. Let the next administration, with a different attorney general than the black supremacist Holder prosecute university administrations everywhere.

Later in his column, Douthat says that this date fuels "racially tinged conspiracy theories" such as "that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants". I don't know where Douthat has been, but all the evidence points toward this conspiracy theory being right on the money. Because that's what's happening, and it's not because the American people want it.

Here it's worth noting a quote from Angelo Codevilla's recent piece on the ruling class:

Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a "machine," that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels' wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges -- civic as well as economic -- to the party's clients, directly or indirectly.

Radiation Hormesis and Cancer

I haven't posted on health-related matters in a while, but this paper is too good to pass up. From the abstract:

Effects of Cobalt-60 Exposure on Health of Taiwan Residents Suggest New Approach Needed in Radiation Protection

The conventional approach for radiation protection is based on the ICRP's linear, no threshold (LNT) model of radiation carcinogenesis, which implies that ionizing radiation is always harmful, no matter how small the dose. But a different approach can be derived from the observed health effects of the serendipitous contamination of 1700 apartments in Taiwan with cobalt-60 (T1/2 = 5.3 y). This experience indicates that chronic exposure of the whole body to low-dose-rate radiation, even accumulated to a high annual dose, may be beneficial to human health. Approximately 10,000 people occupied these buildings and received an average radiation dose of 0.4 Sv, unknowingly, during a 9–20 year period. They did not suffer a higher incidence of cancer mortality, as the LNT theory would predict. On the contrary, the incidence of cancer deaths in this population was greatly reduced—to about 3 per cent of the incidence of spontaneous cancer death in the general Taiwan public. In addition, the incidence of congenital malformations was also reduced—to about 7 per cent of the incidence in the general public. These observations appear to be compatible with the radiation hormesis model.

Got that? From a sample of over 10,000 people living in apartments constructed with steel that had been contaminated with cobalt-60, their cancer death rate was reduced to next to nothing. The radiation-cancer model currently in use predicts that this population should have had 302 cancer deaths: "232 natural plus 70 caused by radiation". The actual figure for cancer deaths was 7.

A strong inverse correlation exists between the incidence of skin cancer and stomach, colorectal, liver and gallbladder, pancreas, lung, female breast, prostate, bladder and kidney cancers - see here. This phenomenon is usually ascribed to vitamin D production by the sun, but one has to wonder whether solar radiation in general prevents cancer via hormesis.

Transnational Christianity

The New York Times reports that Obama is gaining evangelical Christian allies on the issue of immigration "reform" - which always means amnesty. The allies include some prominent pastors like this one:

“I am a Christian and I am a conservative and I am a Republican, in that order,” said Matthew D. Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a conservative religious law firm. “There is very little I agree with regarding President Barack Obama. On the other hand, I’m not going to let politicized rhetoric or party affiliation trump my values, and if he’s right on this issue, I will support him on this issue.”

Christians have always claimed that God and their religion had the first claim on their loyalties, so nothing new there, but rarely has any nation considered that a problem. In the past, Roman Catholics have of course been accused of a kind of dual loyalty, perhaps with some justice, but generally in the U.S., "Christian" and "patriot" have been nearly synonymous.

So why do these pastors feel the need to support amnesty? I'd say that, since transnational anti-racism is the dominant ideology of the elite, the pastors find that, hey, Christianity just is transnational anti-racism, in fact it's the original version. The dominance of an ideology always exerts pressure to go along, and in this case that ideology says that those who do not go along are bad people ("racists").

Then there's the issue of power: many of these pastors have built up large churches and organizations, and now some of them have the president's attention. The expanding Mexican population in the country, some of whom are evangelicals, has the pastors wanting to expand their base.

But consider this strong counter-evidence for those who say that the West cannot return to sanity without Christianity. Not only are many Christian leaders able and willing to play along with the hostile elite, in the case of immigration they can find no support in their religion for refraining from doing so.

Raising the Birthrate in Georgia

This photo appeared on the front page of today's Wall Street Journal, captioned:

Children are baptized during a mass baptism ceremony in the town of Mtskheta outside Tbilisi, July 13, 2010. About 700 children were baptized by the Georgian Orthodox church during the 12th mass baptism ceremony led by Patriarch Ilia II.

Over a year ago I posted on how the Patriarch of Georgia singlehandedly raised the birthrate by 20%, with his promise to personally baptize any baby born to parents of more than two children. The Georgian Orthodox Church called the results "a miracle". Looks like the miracle is rolling along.

You want good news, here it is.

Teach for Race Replacement

Caption: "Julianne Carlson, a graduate of Yale, taught a prekindergarten class in Spanish last week at an elementary school in Houston."


The photo illustrates a NYT article, A Chosen Few Are Teaching for America, about the huge number of Ivy League and other top university grads who have applied to Teach for America. The main motivations for joining are given as a bad economy, as well as "the chance to help poor children and close the achievement gap".

In the photo we see the nice, pretty, young white girl, graduate of Yale - major not stated - who, instead of getting married and having a few smart white children will be using some of the best years of her life trying to "close the achievement gap" - in their own language, no less - of the disadvantaged minority that we've imported and are still importing into the country. The image also suggests the reality of a foreign power colonizing the U.S. by having its emigrants crank out the kids; it appears that every one of the children in the photo is Hispanic, at the age of five already in need of assistance from a smart white woman using her fertile years to teach the offspring of Mexican immigrants instead of having children of her own. An imperial strategy that could hardly be improved upon, even if a bit slower than tanks and divisions, which wouldn't work in this case anyway.

The article states that, in New York City, 85% of the Teach for America teachers had left by the fourth year. So the program at least appears to be useful for knocking some sense into the brains of previously clueless elite university grads, sense that in a healthy society they would have picked up in college, if not long before.

College kids who wanted to help the poor and maybe change the world used to have to join the Peace Corps to do so, but now their venues are just a short bus or subway ride away.

Reader Links

In the last links post, a number of readers graciously submitted a number of good links themselves. In case you haven't seen them, here they are.

Martin B: Not all Eastern European immigrants are high IQ entrepreneurs. (Killer of Cosby's son a Ukrainian immigrant.) Ditto: the Great North Hollywood Shootout.

Eileen: The Thai political crisis: a Chinese-Thai conflict? The Malaysian Chinese Association: a specifically ethnic Chinese party, one of the three largest in Malaysia. How's that working out?

Kudzu Bob: White girl dragged by her hair and beaten by black girls. Warning: disturbing video. No one tries to help. MnMark commented: "One video like that being seen widely is worth more in terms of educating naive whites than every word ever written on any blog. Nothing matches the impact of seeing violence like that."

eh: Bay Area Muslim student driver hits 6 - count 'em, 6! - pedestrians in a crosswalk. Presumably the student driver period will last a bit longer now.

Some English schools told "no swimming lessons during Ramadan" - because Muslims might accidentally swallow water, thus breaking their Ramadan fast. Aside from the absurdity of modifying one's culture to suit cultural aliens, add the absurdity of doing so to help those aliens perform their alien religious duties, which they're presumably unable to figure out for themselves.

Teen Idols and Hypergamy

Satoshi Kanazawa wonders why teenage girls don't swoon for middle-aged billionaires.

Here’s another question that poses a puzzle only for evolutionary psychologists, not for anyone else. Why do pubescent teenage girls swoon for teen heartthrobs like Justin Bieber and Taylor Lautner, but not for middle-aged billionaires like Bill Gates and Richard Branson?

Throughout human evolutionary history, and in contemporary tribal societies today, girls get married soon after reaching puberty and thus at the peak of their reproductive value. They typically marry much older men of high status, great political power, and ample resources. A typical marriage, both throughout human evolutionary history and in contemporary tribal societies, is between a newly pubescent teenage girl and a middle-aged or elderly tribal chief, who marries her as his third or fourth or eleventh wife. Young boys in their adolescence and early adulthood are almost never able to marry, until they are much older and have acquired the means and status to do so.

Kanazawa oversimplifies a complex subject, perhaps necessarily for a blog posting. At first I thought he overlooked something obvious, but now I'm not so sure.

The overlooked obvious is that "throughout human evolutionary history", social equality has been the norm, something we discussed in Why We're Unhappy: The Truth of the Noble Savage. Inequality only became widely possible with the advent of agriculture and the subsequent ability to store wealth, obtain land, and form a caste of robber barons, also known as governments. In turn this allows those on top to have their pick of women - rather, young girls, as Kanazawa emphasizes. So, smoothing over inevitable differences in the vast time and space that constitutes man's evolutionary past, there probably wouldn't have been many men capable of supporting the vast domestic army of wives to which Kanazawa refers as the norm.

But, women are attracted to men of higher status than themselves or than other men. Why aren't teenage girls pining for Warren Buffett? For one thing, even hypergamy has its limits. In the West, most women historically have married men only a few years older than themselves; in the U.S. for instance, the current average is something like three years difference, and that hasn't changed much over the years. While in other countries, e.g. in South America, the age gap can be wider, there are still limits, and it's unusual to see young, nubile women married to much older men. Those teen heart-throbs that the girls like so much are a few years older, and being celebrities they have higher status. Nothing unusual there.

So, I'd say that that women somehow balance their (unconscious) desires for reproductive success with a high status man with their desires for a man who satisfies sexual needs. No one claims that physical beauty in a man is completely irrelevant to his attractiveness.

One last point is that if women are hard-wired to be attracted to high status men, and if social status has only evolved in the past 10,000 years, that means that either this hard-wired attraction is new, or has a large cultural component.

Links

Bruce Charlton, who's now writing for Alternative Right, has some thoughts on Solzhenitsyn and totalitarianism.

Richard Hoste and I dispute the need for high-IQ immigrants. He's pro, I'm con.

Talleyrand on the end of social obligation.

Foseti on the near impossibility of firing a government employee.

Robert Stacy McCain points out the bleeding obvious that needs pointing out: criminals commit crime. Lonnie Franklin, Jr., the alleged "Grim Sleeper" serial killer, was a career criminal who consistently got short or nonexistent sentences, and was thus free to murder.

Mel Gibson is a race realist. Maybe he's crude, but he's a truth-teller.

Al Gore in his office. The photo comes from Time's ridiculous paean to Gore from last year, and made me laugh out loud. What has he got, three wide screen monitors? Presumably so he can keep tabs on global weather patterns. And look at all those stacks of papers and journals - the man is seriously studious! Which is why he got a D in natural sciences - an obviously fluff course called "Man's Place in Nature" - and a C plus in Natural Sciences 118, another obvious liberal arts survey course.

That was the year Gore's classmates remember him spending a notable amount of time in the Dunster House basement lounge shooting pool, watching television, eating hamburgers and occasionally smoking marijuana. His grades temporarily reflected his mildly experimental mood, and alarmed his parents. He received one D, one C-minus, two C's, two C-pluses and one B-minus, an effort that placed him in the lower fifth of the class for the second year in a row.

But he's now an intellectual.

Seven years ago, a northern California police officer mistook a handgun for a Taser and killed someone; the Hispanic policewoman faced no charges. (Hat tip: Accept the Challenge.

Random Thought: The Agency Problem in Democracy and Nationalism

The agency problem, or principal-agent problem, arises whenever a principal hires an agent, and is common in the world of business and bureaucracy. A prime example would be corporation executives, whom the shareholders hire to manage their property, the company. The interests of the executives and the shareholders do not align precisely, hence the principle-agent problem. Executives often do all sorts of things, from ill-thought mergers, to paying themselves bonuses, or simply not caring enough about the company and too much about their own careers, that are not in shareholders' best interests.

The same could be said about a nation. Although the agency problem is usually most often discussed in terms of bureaucracy, we should look at the entire government as agents whom we have hired to run the show. As such, they're necessarily short-timers, and those who possess enough ambition to make a long career out of political office succeed by paying attention to the squeakiest wheels among their constituents. Getting the people's will done is hard.

I'd say this explains a lot about our immigration problem. Polls consistently show that a majority of the public wants it decreased; that can be seen in the polls related to Arizona. But the will of the people continues to be frustrated. The politicians, regardless of party affiliation, don't care. This phenomenon can also go a long way toward explaining the "hostile elite", since it's but a short step from the agency problem to not caring at all what the people think.

One can also see the agency problem in terms of the actual citizenry. We are the heirs to a nation that has entrusted us with a precious possession to run during our terms of employment, i.e. our lives. But our interests in running the nation do not necessarily, and in most cases do not, coincide with the nation's best long-term interests.

Old Blue Eyes

Blue eyes are disappearing in the United States:

Cohort effects in a genetically determined trait: eye colour among US whites
M. D. Grant‌1 and D. S. Lauderdale‌
1Department of Family Medicine, Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, Maywood, IL, USA

Background : While the inheritance of eye colour is likely polygenic, blue eye colour is thought to follow an inheritance pattern similar to that of a recessive trait. Consequently, age-related differences in the prevalence of blue eye colour would be unanticipated. Aim : This study explores the finding and explanation for birth cohort differences in the prevalence of blue eye colour in the US white population. Subjects and methods : Data from the first (1971-1975) and third (1988-1994) US National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES-I and NHANES-III), nationally representative surveys of the US population, were analysed. Trends in eye colour prevalence by birth cohort were analysed together with mortality rates according to eye colour. US census data (1980) were examined to explore cohort differences in ancestry and assortative mating by ancestry. Results : The prevalence of blue eye colour among non-Hispanic whites in NHANES-III was 57.4% (95% CI: 50.1-64.7) for individuals born between 1899 and 1905 compared to 33.8% (95% CI: 31.3-36.5) for those born between 1936 and 1951. No association was found between survival and eye colour, nor was a cohort effect evident for primary ancestry. However, proportions reporting only one ancestry in census data declined with successive birth cohorts. Conclusions : A cohort effect in blue eye colour prevalence was found for the US white population. A secular trend of decreasing assortative mating by ancestry is the likely explanation. [My emphasis.]

So, at the turn of the 20th century a clear majority of whites had blue eyes, now a clear minority. Note the explanation regarding assortative mating: we marry according to things like social status, education, and IQ, not whether our chosen mate belongs to our own, perhaps northern European, ethnic group. Since brown eyes are a dominant trait, they dominate - just as it seems that their bearers are coming to dominate the country.

Here's a prediction: the prevalence of blue eyes will increase. An increasing influx of Mexican invaders immigrants has caused interracial matings to decrease, since there's now a greater ability to mate with one's own due to a larger pool of co-ethnics, and as the same thing is happening with other ethnic groups like Indians and Chinese, then whites will start marrying more among their own. OK, it's a wild prediction, but as I see it, especially among the classes that comprise the non-manipulators of symbols, racial/ethnic stratification may increase, though I don't have any real data to back that up.

Also, whites will become more racially conscious, which will have the same effect. Again, just a guess, but if it can happen to me, it can happen to almost anyone.

Agressive Alphas Die Younger

From The New York Times, Bob Probert, 45, Renowned Hockey Brawler, Dies. Since I don't follow sports, much less ice hockey, I'd never heard of this gentleman before, but his death might illustrate the idea that aggressive, alpha-like men die younger. Apparently, the average life expectancy of NFL players is 55, with the average for a lineman being 52.

The media seems to regard high body weight as partly responsible for football players' early deaths, and indeed that may have a lot to do with it, but the men who become professional football players must be in the 99.99 percentile in terms of aggressiveness, being able to pack on muscle, fitness in hot and humid weather, speed, and so on, and a great deal of these qualities will be highly heritable. Their body types are on an extreme end of a range, and that end is characterized by growth and early maturation.

According to the theory, early maturation is necessarily accompanied by faster and earlier aging, since aging is merely the flip side of growth. Faster growth equals faster aging. One reason for lower life expectancy following events like wars and famines is because the earlier and faster maturing, and thus stronger, individuals are those likelier to survive extreme events. They necessarily age faster and thus die younger.

Probert was 6'3" (191 cm) and 225 lb.(102 kg), and was renowned for fighting in a sport itself renowned for it.

He was 45, and left a wife and children.

Best Way to Solve the Budget Problem

Blaming the Victim

Steve Sailer's latest column, Ellis Island Kitsch: Jeb Bush And Robert Putnam Blame Americans For Modern Immigrants' Failure To Assimilate, gives people like me at least a couple of reasons to justify our pessimism. One is that Bush and Putnam are mainstream, or maybe even a tad right of the mainstream, and they show no concern whatsoever for the United States as an historical nation beyond its function as a place for immigrants. Listening to them, one would think that accepting immigrants is the only thing the nation is good for. Furthermore, as Sailer emphasizes, any failure on the part of immigrants to assimilate - assuming that word still has any meaning whatsoever - is to be blamed on you and me, the native inhabitants, as a consequence of our anger and miserliness.

The second reason for pessimism is Bush and Putnam's, depending on how one looks at it, rank stupidity, imprudence to the point of criminal negligence, or malevolent designs for the country disguised as disinterested advice. They have no conception of immigration, or if they do they conceal it, beyond the notion that it must continue at all costs, and untoward consequences to the native-born be damned.

If Putnam labored in the natural instead of the social sciences, one wonders whether he would have a shred of reputation left after delaying publication of his research so that he could counter his findings with his own proposals "to compensate for the negative effects of diversity". That he did this shows him to be an ideologue who inserts his political opinions into his science. It also shows just how scientific social science is.

While opinion pieces like Bush's and Putnam's, and even those on VDare and elsewhere, drift into consciousness before making their swift disappearance into the graveyard of journalism, America's immigration disaster rolls onward, deconstructing the nation to a point beyond recognition. Jacques Derrida couldn't have hoped for more.

Independence Day

Hunter Wallace lists the reasons that being proud to be an American "lost its appeal" to him "a long time ago"; Rick Darby wonders whether there's anything left to celebrate, and answers in the negative. I'm inclined to agree with both.

Obama said that "being an American is not a matter of blood or birth", which gets to the crux of the matter. When anyone can become an American just by managing to get here physically, being an American has no more meaning than being a shareholder in a corporation: it's not a matter for pride, but for profit. When your own president lectures you on your "resentment" against illegal aliens, when his administration sues a state trying to defend itself against foreign invasion, the collectivity known as the United States of America has ceased to have much meaning.

It seems to me that the relative permanence of the changes in the country is a crucial point. During various periods in American history, many Americans have passionately hated certain presidents or political figures, yet most of those Americans never lost their patriotism. Indifference to or hatred of the nation has been mainly a province of leftists, and anyone sure that a given administration meant the end of everything they held dear had, in general, only to wait until the next election.

But it's become obvious that the next election won't solve anything now. The country has been spun-off - or merged, depending on how you like your metaphors - into a globalistic entity, and a national election will have about the same level of effect as the election of a new board of directors for Microsoft. In short, the changes in the country are, if not permanent, much more durable than past changes. After all, the entity that has replaced the American people, but is now known by the same name, elected Obama.

America now officially discriminates against and vilifies its majority people, the descendants of the founding stock and builders of the country. The multicultural, anti-white left has captured the flag.

Republicans Call for Steele's Resignation

Conservatives Call for Steele's Resignation Over Afghanistan Comments: The Atlantic lists a number of conservatives who have called for the resignation of GOP chairman Michael Steele, most notably William Kristol and David Frum, but also including someone named Erick Erickson and blogger Ann Althouse.

Strange, but back when Steele, who is of course black, was race-baiting Republicans and spending their money at strip clubs, criticism was muted. Now, he's screwing around with their pet project, eternal war abroad, and that's a bridge too far.

I don't know what's worse: that the media deems the likes of Kristol and Frum to be conservatives, that they deem themselves to be, or that the wretched public thinks that they are somehow on the right. These conservatives' remarks about Steele show that they're foursquare behind the war, as Kristol puts it,

It’s an affront, both to the honor of the Republican party and to the commitment of the soldiers fighting to accomplish the mission they’ve been asked to take on by our elected leaders.

Since we'll have soldiers fighting there 50 years from now if Kristol has his way, there would appear to be no time at all in which it's considered decent to criticize Afghanistan.

Of course, Michael Steele should be seen for the moron that he is. Republicans have no one to blame but themselves for their affirmative action hire.

By the way, Althouse apparently voted for Obama, so it's hard to see why she's considered a conservative, nor why conservatives should care what she thinks.

Atheism

Bruce Charlton believes that "atheism provides zero guidance for life", in contrast to Christianity.

While in a sense he's correct about atheism, most of his essay is philosophically naive. For instance he equates atheism with "a focus on short term, selfish pleasure", and "a simple hedonism of seeking pleasure and avoiding suffering", as well as fostering "demotivation and alienation". This implies that the only motivations anyone has are ultimately driven by belief in God, which is clearly false. Family, nation, money, sex, status, and so on all motivate people to attempt projects and delay gratification.

One large problem with his thesis is that, while Christianity provides guidance, we don't know whether it's correct or not. In many ways, its guidance has been harmful, since among other things it preaches a radical equality among human beings, an equality which many people have taken all too literally in the past few decades. That being said, it's probably impossible to decide whether Christianity has been a net benefit or detriment to society. (This means as opposed to any religion, since all societies have had and appear to need some form of religion.)

These questions will of course not be settled here. For our purposes, the conundrum for the atheist on this side of the political spectrum is well-expressed by Malcolm Pollack:

[I]t puts me in the difficult position of accepting that my culture as a whole may benefit from fostering beliefs that I personally believe to be nothing more than persistent, and often horribly destructive, delusions.

Again, this cannot be settled here, though I tend to the conclusion that religious beliefs are likely socially necessary, and even if not, they aren't going away any time soon.

That leaves another dilemma, namely how to discuss theism and atheism. In a venue such as this, I believe it perfectly appropriate, as no one should be coming here with the notion that none of their ideas will be challenged, nor should I expect that mine will not. Yet I do get many casually hostile comments when my unbelief comes up.

In the larger scheme of things, namely the fate of the nation and of the West, an atheistic conservative ought to be willing to remain quiescent before society as a whole, and not disturb its religious sensibilities, always assuming that free speech and a time and place for theological dispute continue to exist.