American Diversity Outreach

The Joy of Curmudgeonry's Deogolwulf has a simply amazing post on the agenda of the United States government to promote diversity, that is the promotion of minority groups at the expense of the majority, along with extensive propagandizing of the latter, in... France. Deogolwulf's source is Wikileaks, and the cited words are all from the American Embassy in Paris, the "Minority Engagement Strategy". Here's a sample, see the link for the rest:

“[W]e will continue and intensify our work with French museums and educators to reform the history curriculum taught in French schools, so that it takes into account the role and perspectives of minorities in French history.” [2]

We will create or support training and exchange programs that teach the enduring value of broad inclusion to schools, civil society groups, bloggers, political advisors, and local politicians.

“Finally, a Minority Working Group will integrate the discourse, actions, and analysis of relevant sections and agencies in the Embassy. This group, working in tandem with the Youth Outreach Initiative, will identify and target influential leaders and groups among our primary audiences. It will also evaluate our impact over the course of the year, by examining both tangible and intangible indicators of success. Tangible changes include a measurable increase in the number of minorities leading and participating in public and private organizations, including elite educational institutions; growth in the number of constructive efforts by minority leaders to organize political support both within and beyond their own minority communities; new, proactive policies to enhance social inclusion adopted by non-minority political leaders; expansion of inter-communal and inter-faith exchanges at the local level; decrease in popular support for xenophobic political parties and platforms.

State Department apparatchiks will now not only teach the French about the proper understanding of their own history, but also look like they're actively promoting the Islamisation and Africanisation of France. That's pretty close to what the government and its media enablers already promote here, so why not let France have the best America has to offer?

We have met the enemy, and he isn't us, but he's very closely related.

The Global Elite Causes a Global Awakening

It's little appreciated among conservatives (in my estimation) that much of the responsibility for the overthrow of the Tunisian government and now the riots in Egypt were caused by the global elite. More specifically, the decision by Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. government, and the European Union to print money has caused a spike in commodity, including food, prices. The riots in Tunisia started as a response to those food prices and the inability of the average Tunisian to afford them. Egypt is the world's largest wheat importer. In Jordan, thousands of demonstrators called for the prime minister's resignation amid anger about "rising prices, inflation and unemployment." Take a look at a recent chart of the Continuous Commodity Index, and note that it's near an all-time high.

The constituents of the CCI can be seen here; note that food including grains, as well as energy - which also impacts food prices and increases the cost of living to the common people - make up a majority of the index. The rise of the CCI, just like the rise of global stock markets, can be directly attributed to money printing. The recipients of newly printed money largely consist of major banks, which sell their Treasury bonds to the Fed, and which in turn invest that money in assets, in this case real assets, i.e. commodities.

Zbigniew Brzezinski - remember him? - has called the recent riots and demonstrations the start of a "global political awakening", and being a fully paid-up member of the global political elite, he thinks that a bad thing.

The global elite has screwed up badly. All of their money-printing and bailouts of the politically connected has caused inflation of the basic materials which people need to live, mainly food and energy. As such, their program of developing and/or imposing an increasingly globalized government is at major risk of coming undone. The Keynesian program caused Egypt.

In the course of writing this, I came across a column by Larry Kudlow that specifically blames Ben Bernanke for the food riots in North Africa - so this isn't just my own fevered imagination.

Update: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

The surge in global food prices since the summer – since Ben Bernanke signalled a fresh dollar blitz, as it happens – is not the underlying cause of Arab revolt, any more than bad harvests in 1788 were the cause of the French Revolution.

Yet they are the trigger, and have set off a vicious circle. Vulnerable governments are scrambling to lock up world supplies of grain while they can. Algeria bought 800,000 tonnes of wheat last week, and Indonesia has ordered 800,000 tonnes of rice, both greatly exceeding their normal pace of purchases. Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Bangladesh, are trying to secure extra grain supplies.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said its global food index has surpassed the all-time high of 2008, both in nominal and real terms. The cereals index has risen 39pc in the last year, the oil and fats index 55pc.

My Weight-Gain Experiment

I recently read Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Body, which is currently number one on the Amazon Bestsellers list. All in all, it's an interesting and unusual book, worth reading by anyone interested in health and physical fitness, assuming that one has a fairly high tolerance for its author's terminal smugness, name-dropping, and flaunting of a hipper-than-thou attitude. Granted, Ferriss has accomplished some tremendous things at a young age, such as two national bestselling books, so perhaps he can be cut some slack for his boasting.

One of the book's chapters deals with fast weight gain, that is, in the bodybuilding sense. A post on Ferriss's blog, From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks, outlines the concept, which is fleshed out in greater detail in the book. Since over the past year I've been in a health recovery mode, and since up until the end of December I had put on 20 pounds via weightlifting, I decided to give the one-month weight-gain trial a go, and now that the month is nearly over, I can report results.

First of all, having read Ferriss's book, I also read another one that he recommended, McGuff and Little's Body by Science, which I can also recommend. Body by Science could be subtitled "Everything You Know About Exercise Is Wrong", and one of the main takeaway points from this book is the amount of rest one needs between workouts, which is far greater than current wisdom has it. In fact, McGuff and Little recommend only one workout a week, and back their claim with appropriate scientific references. I'm still having a hard time believing it, but nevertheless cut back my gym visits to one every four days, which appears to have led to a vast improvement in my progress, since when I work out I have no residual fatigue from the last visit. Cutting back on weightlifting sessions also figures greatly in Ferriss's one-month weight-gain program. I also began practicing McGuff and Little's recommended high-intensity workout mode, which is a killer.

Also figuring greatly is eating and, long story short, I had a tough time with that. Psychologically, I'm not attuned to eating more than I want; rather the opposite. But I gave it the old college try, doing things like drinking half-and-half by the glass, and eating larger quantities of my usual semi-paleo fare, such as meat, cheese, eggs, sour cream, with supplemental whey protein shakes and BCAAs, and so on.

The results: rather than Ferriss's 34 pound one-month gain, or Casey Viator's 45 pound gain - 63 pounds of muscle minus 18 pounds of fat - I gained a grand total of 6 pounds over the past 30 days. (I don't know my before or after body fat percentage.) So, that brings my 8-month total weight gain to 26 pounds, from 135 to 161 pounds, and I'm still wearing the same waist size as before. (Sorry, no shirtless photos.)

What accounts for my relative failure to really pack on the pounds? Well, it's either me or the theory. I may simply have not eaten enough, though Lord knows I tried. The theory may not account enough for genetics, as Ferriss, Viator, and some others may simply be genetically gifted that way - although Ferriss got himself tested with the result that he was cut out for endurance, not resistance, training, but managed his feat anyway. Another thing is my age (55); it's known that the older one gets, the more difficult it is to make muscle.

In any case, I'm not done with either weightlifting (I'm now an addict) or trying to add more muscle, so we'll see how it goes.

Geographic Explanations for the West Make No Sense

It's become pretty clear to me that Ian Morris is, in his book Why the West Rules, concerned that he lay no responsibility (or blame) on biological/racial factors, because as he describes various measures of progress, it's obvious that whites innovated, prospered, and conquered inordinately compared to others. His geographic explanations might make some sense when dealing with the long term and with the era before much East-West contact, but one of his set-piece examples of Western superiority occurred in the 19th century, namely the 1840 Battle of Tinghai during the First Opium War. In this battle, British ships essentially annihilated Chinese opposition in about ten minutes of naval bombardment.

So, the problem for the geographic explanation is that the Chinese, or anyone else, were free to copy from the West once they learned about it. The Japanese, once confronted with Western military and technological superiority, did so, and within 80 years had come within an ace of conquering almost the entire Eastern Hemisphere, and today are in the forefront of technical innovation. Given the Japanese similarities in IQ and other characteristics to those of China, one has tentatively to conclude that cultural factors trump others. One of these cultural factors is, I believe, trust, which enables the rise of corporations.

On this map of indices of global corruption, Japan is a clear outlier in Asia, with a corruption index of 7.8, which compares favorably to Britain at 7.6 and Germany at 7.9. China ranks 3.5, India 3.3. If we take corruption as highly correlated with trust, then the Japanese have much higher levels of trust than the rest of Asia. It is no coincidence that Japan modernized first.

The link between trust and modernization lies in administration. An article called "Why Arabs Lose Wars" (HT: Extropolitica) goes into great detail on why, given the best modern training, Arab armies have a pathetic track record, the reason mainly boiling down to lack of trust in the military and by extension in society as a whole. (Moshe Dayan was once asked the secret of his success, and he replied, "Fighting Arabs.")

To take another example of the notion that nations with the will and the ability could play catch-up in technology and power, the article "Being the educational world leader helped Prussia catch up in the Industrial Revolution" shows how Prussia was determined to master the Industrial Revolution, and did so.

Zone of Arrogance

I once met a young exchange student from Azerbaijan who had to be among the most arrogant young men I've ever met. Completely full of himself and so sure that everything he did and said was right, he reminded me of the experience of my travels in the Middle East, where that type of mindset appears to be common. Later it occurred to me that the further east one goes, starting in Eastern Europe, the more common this type of thinking becomes. We might call the geographical expression of this mindset "the zone of arrogance". Now, hbd chick has a translation of some new Danish research on gelotophobia (a new word to me), which is the extraordinary fear of being laughed at.

“Humor Researcher and psychologist Martin Fuhr from Aalborg University have studied how sensitive the Danes is for others scorn. He has done so by measuring a particular social phobia, called gelotofobi, which means that they fear others’ ridicule and consider it humiliating. According to Martin Fuhrer study is 1.67 percent of Danes gelotofobe to a slight degree. In comparison, between 11 and 13 percent of British, Germans and Spaniards gelotofobe and in Asia and the Middle East is the figure as high as one in six and one third of citizens. So Denmark is one of the nations of the world which are least gelotofobisk.”

So, gelotophobia is lowest in Denmark and presumably the rest of Scandinavia, and increases greatly as one goes east, until in the Middle East and (Central?) Asia, up to one third of the people have this condition.

It would seem that gelotophobia must be related to arrogance, for if one is arrogant one has an inflated sense of self that hates being brought down to earth by ridicule. Also, the gelotophobe will be easily roused to violence, which would indicate adherence to the old school of honor, in which honor is determined by what others say about one, rather than one's sense that one has behaved honorably. This used to be common even in the West, and lead to the fighting of duels to avenge insults to one's honor. That duels are no longer fought in the West and that most people would consider them absurd implies that gelotophobia may be learned. On the other hand, insults to honor appear to drive much gang violence. Also, Islam requires vengeance to insults upon its honor, so it will be no coincidence that the core areas of the zone of arrogance are heavily Muslim.

Liberalism and Free Speech in Denmark

Malcolm Pollack has published the statement of Lars Hedegaard, the president of the International Free Press Society, and writes that he hopes that "every other blogger who cares about the extinction-by-assisted-suicide of European civilization, will reproduce in full." For the statement, I'll refer you to Malcolm's blog, and preface my comments by saying that of course I support Hedegaard's and every other European's and American's right to free speech. This show trial is a travesty.

But, here's what Hedegaard has to say about the "true victims":

In conclusion permit me to mention the true victims in this case. The public prosecutor has not considered the 20,000 women in the Muslim world who every year fall victim to so-called honour killings, or the 50,000 Muslim girls in Germany who the federal police consider threatened with genital mutilation, nor the hundreds of thousands of little girls in Muslim majority societies who have been sold into marriage with much older men and who must therefore live a life of constant rape, while Islamic scholars preach that this is in complete accordance with religious orthodoxy.

I fail to see how Muslim women are the "true victims" of a prosecution aimed at punishing the natives of European nations. Hedegaard seems touchingly naive here, using an appeal to the victim status of a doubly "victimized" group, Muslims and women, to bolster his case; he hopes that an appeal to liberalism will help him garner support. But it is precisely liberalism that is putting him on trial.

Of course Muslim women are generally treated poorly, and one hopes that one day they can be free of abuse, but I'm not going to make that issue my fight. That is for Muslims themselves to do, for they are the only ones who can change the situation. Furthermore, plenty of Muslim women, perhaps the majority, are in league with the rest in agreeing with the necessity of sharia law.

In this particular case, it is the Danes who are the true victims, the victims of their own hostile elite in the government. I don't know anything about poll numbers there, but I'm guessing that most Danes are perfectly fine with the punishment of "hate speech". That's what needs to change.

Why Ian Morris Can't Explain Why the West Rules

Since I've noticed a couple of articles about it already, I thought I'd take one for the team and go ahead and read Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, by Ian Morris, a professor of history at Stanford. So far, it's interesting enough, but as for unbiased insight into the true drivers of history, I think you can forget about it. Take the following not unrepresentative paragraph; after explaining why he believes that the Out of Africa theory of human evolution is the correct one, that human beings are much the same when considered as groups, and therefore that "why the West rules" cannot be explained by biological differences, Morris writes:

Racist theories grounding Western rule in biology have no basis in fact. People, in large groups, are much the same wherever we find them, and we have all inherited the same restless, inventive minds from our African ancestors. Biology by itself cannot explain why the West rules.

This passage demonstrates so much obtuseness on so many levels that one hardly knows where to begin. First of all, the opinionating. Any theory that purports to explain East-West differences on the basis of biology, according to Morris, is "racist", which I hardly need explain is a term of abuse, not science. Instead of using the more neutral "racialist" or even "biological", Morris goes for the term that means he could not possibly find the theory correct, because anyone who does is ipso facto evil. Earlier, Morris had written that we must not reject "racist" theories because they are evil, but because they are wrong, yet he goes on to use the same loaded term throughout.

As Cochran and Harpending have pretty much conclusively shown, and contra Gould and his Marxist ilk, evolution did not stop 50,000 years ago. Therefore, the fact, if it is a fact, that Homo sapiens came out of Africa and replaced all other human lineages does not for a moment mean that no differences between human groups have not developed since then. Natch, Cochran and Harpending merit no mention in Morris's book.

Another scholar who has convincingly argued that recent human evolution is responsible for a major East-West difference, Gregory Clark, the author of A Farewell to Alms, also goes unmentioned and unindexed. Clark believes that the Industrial revolution began in England due to human biological differences. One would think that this would be of major interest to the author of a book that purports to explain the West, but alas, it is not. To include Clark's theory in his book would have meant grappling with the "racist" notion that we are not all the same.

The notion that people everywhere, or at least in the East versus the West, are enough the same as to not matter very much would be an argument worth making. We know, for instance, that East Asian IQ averages a few points higher than white Western, and we know of many other differences, for example in sex hormone levels, aggressiveness and docility, growth and aging, and so on. Maybe at the level of civilization these aren't enough to make a difference, perhaps cultural effects override them, perhaps other explanations are out there. But Morris merely states that, since we all came from Africa, we're all much the same at the group level, and never grapples with any of this.

Then there's the PC interjection: "our African ancestors", and presumably by extension Africans in general, bequeathed us their "restless, inventive minds". Please. I get enough of this whenever I turn on the TV. It's a good thing for Morris that in his argument about East vs. West, he can safely omit any discussion of South, for explaining that would blow much of his argument to shreds.

The only mention of IQ in this book is of the Flynn Effect, which he ascribes to improved aptitudes in test-taking, but which if he knew anything about bell curves and health outcomes, would know that improved nutrition is the likelier explanation.

Morris goes at his topic much like Jared Diamond did, determined that any biological explanation will not only not get a fair hearing, but is ruled out of court to begin with. So like a modern college professor.

Trust, Corporations, and the West

Awhile ago we discussed Ian Morris and his book, Why the West Rules - For Now, and concluded both that Morris was off-base with his geography-centered explanation, and that the real challenge lies in explaining why the West became far more powerful than China. Now, a review of Morris's book by Timur Kuran - with a name like that I suspect he knows a bit about the rise and fall of civilizations - comes to much the same conclusions. Here Kuran notes the different types of explanation historians have used:

Students of civilizational development have tended to approach disparities between the development of regions in two ways. The first, called "long-term lock-in," asserts that some essential advantage, such as a location with an abundance of natural resources, efficient governance, or values conducive to innovation, makes a civilization fundamentally and inevitably superior. For example, in explaining the rise of Europe, some scholars argue that the rise of Christianity under the political control of the Roman Empire prepared the West for modernization and ultimately the Industrial Revolution, which reinforced its superiority.

The second approach identifies some short-term accident as the cause of a temporary gap or reversal of fortune. When Christopher Columbus set sail for India and found a continent blocking the way, so goes a popular short-term accident theory, he initiated a string of events that accelerated the West's economic development and allowed the West to dominate the world. Another such theory holds that the Middle East was developmentally handicapped because of the devastation the Black Death wrought in the fourteenth century.

The examples Kuran uses here obfuscate as much as they explain. Take the natural resources explanation: Switzerland has one of the worst pieces of terrain in Europe, yet by any account has been one of the most successful nations ever. On the other hand, precisely because it was located in those inaccessible mountains, it could never become populous or powerful enough to take over any of its neighbors. We might call this an explanation from adversity. The opposite can be seen with the example of Columbus. In the century after his discovery, Spain became a world power, but the nearly effortless riches flowing from the New World enervated the country, gave it a bad case of imperial hubris, and caused or in any case exacerbated a Spanish tendency to depreciate work and frugality and esteem nobility and leisure, the result being bankruptcy and loss of empire. As another example, in the 17th century, Sweden, with its inhospitable climate and small population, became a European Great Power.

Much of Morris's explanation relies upon commerce and the corporation:

But for centuries, Europe had been building a new type of economic infrastructure, based on impersonal exchange and a commercial life dominated by large, durable, and structurally complex profit-making enterprises. Those are the developments that fueled Europe's global exploration in the first place and prepared the ground for the Industrial Revolution. They also set the stage for the West's colonial empires. In fact, the roots of the West's economic modernization stretch back to the beginning of the second millennium, when, according to Morris' development index, China under the Song dynasty led the world. It is then that Italian families in the West started forming private medieval "supercompanies," or firms that pooled the resources for dozens of investors over generations, to conduct finance and trade. These enterprises enabled private capital pooling and accumulation on an unprecedented scale.

As they grew, these supercompanies faced coordination, communication, and enforcement problems, which induced experimentation with ever more complex organizational structures and business techniques. By the sixteenth century, profit-making European enterprises were already using a corporate form of organization. Comparably complex private enterprises could be found nowhere else, not even in the rest of what Morris defines as the West.

So, why the rise of the corporation? I believe that the answer lies in the high levels of trust found in the West. But to push further, why does the West have higher levels of trust? Christianity may very well have something to do with it, with its concern for the helpless and its enforcement of monogamy. What I wonder is whether one's degree of trust is heritable, so that Christianity spurred the rise of the West via a eugenic mechanism. As against that, Rome became the world's great power before the rise of Christianity.

The recent uproar over Amy Chua and her tiger-mothering is a reminder that the Chinese penchant for test-taking and doing well in structured activities goes back all the way to ancient China. Not that the West hasn't had something similar, but in China the very foundations of the state centered on passing exams in a way never seen in the West. Whether that has a cultural or genetic explanation, or both, is a good question, but one suspects that a society so given to passing exams may have fostered lower levels of trust - since so many were excluded from full participation in the state and in society - whereas in the West, the notional equality that Christianity endorsed may have bred (literally?) higher levels of trust and the rule of law, paving the way for the rise of corporations, industry, and empire.

Liberal Eliminationist Threats Against Conservatives

Lawrence Auster writes that Eric Fuller, the Arizona shooting victim who was recently arrested for making a public death threat against a Tea Party leader, also spoke of his desire that Bachmann, Palin, Limbaugh, Hannity, and Dick Cheney all be tortured and mutilated - their ears severed and made into a necklace. Since, as Auster says, this has not been covered by the mainstream media but buried in an article in the NY Post, this story needs a little more publicity, which is why I'm posting it.

Note that Fuller could be something of a nutcase, as ordinary people don't usually go around saying things like that. Or, he could merely have a criminal mind. But also note that his behavior manifestly was motivated by rhetoric coming from the liberal camp, in contrast to the shooter Loughner, who despite accusations that Republican rhetoric inspired him, appears to have a wildly inconsistent philosophy concocted by a schizophrenic mind.

Also related and noteworthy is Steve Sailer's post on how Paul Krugman used the word "eliminationist" to describe the mindset of conservatives, a word originated by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen to describe what he believed was ordinary Germans' complicity in the Holocaust.

So, Krugman accuses conservatives of having a Nazi essence. (A commenter here recently questioned my assertion that Krugman calls opponents of Obamian socialism Nazis, so here it is.) Will he call for a Nuremberg trial and hangings next?

Keeping with the theme, and since I haven't mentioned it here before, Sarah Palin has been the recipient of "an unprecedented level" of death threats.

Freegold

The blogger known as FOFOA ("Friend of Friend of Another" - don't ask) has become something of a sensation among gold investors (and only gold investors - FOFOA doesn't like silver) for his theory of "Freegold". As I understand it, the theory goes like this.

Gold has been an important part of the world monetary system since about forever, and still is, with gold listed on the balance sheets of world central banks such as the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. Most countries of the world strive to increase their gold reserves. But, the world is now so awash in debt, that there's no chance it can be paid back, and increasingly even the interest payments are looking doubtful.

Enter "freegold". Freegold separates the functions of money, said functions being that of "numeraire", currency, and store of value. Under freegold, gold will be the store of value, paper money will still be currency and numeraire. Allegedly, freegold is inevitable, since it's the only way, according to FOFOA, that the U.S. and the world can emerge from our debt crisis with something resembling intactness. Or intactivity. Or whatever.

The kicker, and perhaps the main reason FOFOA has gained such a following, is that gold will have to be revalued at perhaps a minimum of $50,000 an ounce, possibly much more, and furthermore, governments will allow, even encourage their citizens to hold gold privately. So anyone buying gold now before the "reset", which FOFOA says will occur almost literally overnight, stands to become filthy rich.

Now, my understanding of freegold may very well be flawed, but in part that's the point of this post. FOFOA needs a river of words to describe freegold. The concept seemingly cannot be put into fewer words than what he has on his blog, which is to say by now probably millions. Anyone who questions freegold is usually scoffed at and told to hit the books (his blog). Freegold advocates seem to have a similar attitude as Marxists: this is the future, and if you don't believe it, study harder.

Another problem here is that, besides the arcane financial and monetary concepts that need to be thoroughly understood to in turn understand freegold, I know of no other thinker in this area that takes it seriously. Many credible analysts call for a future gold price of up to $10,000 or more, but no one but FOFOA (that I've read) projects $50,000 or higher.

So, while one would dearly love freegold to be true, as one could obviously profit immensely, I remain skeptical until a concise explanation is available.

Another Side to Chinese Moms

I recall that when I was at Stanford, a female Chinese grad student in electrical engineering killed herself. (Note, the fact that she was found in the trunk of her car led some, especially the family, to believe it was murder. But, relatives are notoriously reluctant to believe that a family member could have killed himself, and as I recall, the police found that she had overdosed on Benadryl.) It turns out to be a common phenomenon.

The Growing Rate of Depression, Suicide Among Asian American Students

Asian American women ages 15 to 24 lead in the highest suicide rate amongst all ethnic groups, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Students at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. were shocked last year when three of their classmates committed suicide almost consecutively. Junior Brian Go, senior Jackson Ho-Leung Wang, and graduate student Long Phan ended their lives within a three-month period and left the campus searching for answers. Wang was within days of his graduation.

Their deaths brought attention to a persistent problem currently on the rise: student suicides. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported that Asian Pacific Americans are more likely to commit suicide than the average American.

The article goes on to discuss what is considered the main factor in Asian-American suicides: academic pressure. It is claimed that Asian students are attempting to live up to the expression "model minority", but I don't see any social pressure directed at Asians in that regard. The real pressure has got to be coming from their families.

Besides pressure from families, presumably Asian culture itself is at work here, because Jewish students don't commit suicide at nearly the same rate (in fact, I believe the Jewish suicide rate is lower than the average), and one imagines that they are under some pressure to excel.

Chinese students' high scores in international tests come at a cost:

"I carry a strong feeling of bitterness," Chen Weihua, an editor at the state-run China Daily, wrote in a first-person editorial. "The making of superb test-takers comes at a high cost, often killing much of, if not all, the joy of childhood."

Hey, what's the small cost of killing all the joy of childhood, so long as parents like Amy Chua get a vicarious thrill out of your "success"?

We Can't Get Away From Each Other

I don't have the energy today to come up with anything exciting on my own, nor was I able to think of an appropriate response to Malcolm Pollack's perceptive comment, which he elaborated upon on his blog:

But it is becoming increasingly clear that the tension between Left and Right in this country is moving far beyond mere matters of policy — and as I wrote in a comment at another website today, the level of animosity now on view, as expressed in a million tweets and emails and blog posts, rivals any of the deep-seated antipathies that have ever torn nations apart in ethnic or religious civil wars. The tension is fundamental, axiomatic, and visceral; it is getting worse, not better; and it has taken on an increasingly Manichean, moral aspect. Try as I might, I see no path to reconciliation opening before us.

Looking forward from here, I see it becoming increasingly clear that the real problem is that in America as it is, the Left and the Right cannot get away from each other — though get away from each other they surely must, if they are ever again to be happy and at peace. Suddenly I’m truly beginning to despair for this great country; in the most vital sense of the word “nation”, the U.S. has just about ceased to be one. I wonder how much longer it can last.

Perhaps readers can formulate a response to Malcolm, if indeed any good ones exist.

More Hate - updated

Is there anything quite so demented as a white liberal? The level of hate expressed for Sarah Palin seems to be not only a manifestation of self-hatred - but of the incredible smallness of their minds. They're incapable of saying anything other that conservatives in general and Palin in particular should die.

Sigmund Freud himself would be unable to devise a theory that would explain why such an anodyne politician as Sarah Palin inspires such sociopathic loathing as comes from these people. Perhaps they all secretly want to murder their mothers and marry their fathers?

Update: Kettle, meet pot. Paul Krugman admonishes commenters:

1. Obscenity will get your comment deleted; I suspect that a fair number of commenters don’t even realize they’re doing it, because that’s the way many of us #$%^! talk these days. But think about it, and don’t waste your time or mine.

2. Stay on the topic of the post.

3. New rule, if you haven’t seen it: Nazi/Hitler references are out unless clearly relevant.

4. Get your insults right. There is, I believe, a fair bit of evidence against the hypothesis that I’m stupid. What you mean to say is that I’m evil.

No, Krugman is both stupid and evil. That a complete tool like Krugman could dare to formulate something like his "new rule" (reference number three above) after insinuating that anyone who doesn't believe in socialism and massive Keynesian money printing is a Nazi takes hubris to a whole new level. When will the NY Times stop publishing this loose cannon?

Why Chinese Mothers Aren't Superior

An article in the WSJ by Amy Chua, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, illustrates why they aren't, or at least why Chinese mothers in the mold of Chua aren't.

Even as an aficionado of classical music, I found Chua's focus on music lessons in violin and piano absurd. The object lesson from this article is supposedly the Chinese mother's relentless efforts to make her children excel and be successful in the world; yet the fraction of classical instrumentalists (or vocalists, for that matter) who have spent their entire lives studying and practicing, and then successfully enter the real world of classical music, is tiny. I once read somewhere that American conservatories graduate over 300 pianists a year, and I would guess that the fraction of them who go on to careers in classical music, other than giving lessons to the next generation who in turn won't enter the field, must be very low. Chua is setting her kids up for failure; and if it's argued that music lessons are a good in themselves, which they may be, why does Chua treat them like a matter of life or death, making her kids and herself miserable over them?

Chua's treatment of her kids is an exercise in narcissism, focusing on them all her own ambitions and insisting that they turn out exactly like herself. In some instances, she treats them practically like her slaves. I'm all for parental discipline and a decent, even difficult education for children, but this is too much. She never lets the kids go on "play dates"; does she ever even let them outside to play?

I'm also wondering when the Wall Street Journal will be publishing the rebuttal, "Why White Mothers Are Superior". Right. Only the celebration of the other is permitted.

The Progressive Climate of Hate

Michelle Malkin has an excellent roundup of the hatred and bile spewed by liberals and leftists over the past decade. The degree of psychopathic venom spewed at George W. Bush and Sarah Palin marks the left as having a significant number of violent lunatics among it.

And don't forget Omar "I killed the racists" Thornton, who clearly believed that workplace discipline was a manifestation of the racism that the liberals and the MSM accuse whites of constantly, and thought that whites deserved to die for it. (HT: The Cold Equations on that one.)The writer of the linked article excuses feelings of sympathy for the murderers Thornton and Ferguson on the grounds that every black knows what it's like to experience racism, therefore in some sense the murders were justified.

Ferdinand Bardamu believes that "Jared Loughner has pushed the West closer to Armageddon" and, while I can generally agree, the blame lies not so much with Loughner and his vile act, but with the media and the leftists capitalizing on it in an attempt to silence dissent.

I hope that I don't have to write about this issue any more, I find it so disgusting.

Female British MP Wants All Men in Bristol Swabbed for DNA

The case of Joanna Yeates, a young architect who was murdered three weeks ago in Britain, has been in the papers ever since. Now, a woman Labor MP has called for every man in Bristol to have a DNA swab.

An MP has called on police to DNA test every man in Bristol in a bid to track down the killer of Joanna Yeates in what could be the biggest ever screening carried out by British police.

Kerry McCarthy, Labour MP for Bristol East, wants swabs to be taken from the entire male population - around 250,000 people. [...]

Police have said there was no evidence Miss Yeates had been sexually assaulted but they have not ruled out a sexual motive.

What makes Kerry McCarthy, MP, believe that a man committed the murder? Isn't this the sort of bigoted stereotyping that leftist women like her constantly decry?

One can well imagine the uproar that would ensue is there had been some evidence that a black man or a Muslim was suspected and a politician had called for all blacks or Muslims within a certain area to be swabbed for DNA. There would be calls for a resignation, or apology, and all right-thinking people would be aghast at such "discrimination". Yet men as a class can be subject to calls for an intimate invasion of their privacy and dignity - especially white men.

In the U.S., a mass search like this would not - I hope - fly, although come to think of it, at airports everyone now gets treated like a potential terrorist. It appears that in Bristol, all men are now suspected of being murderers.

Of course, McCarthy is almost certainly correct that a man killed Joanna Yeates, but men are just about the only group around whom it is acceptable to stereotype.

Krugman Already Blaming Republicans

Paul Krugman has wasted no time in blaming Republicans for the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, writing that "violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate." This coming from a man and a party who demonize both Republicans and whites whenever possible. They call us racists for opposing open borders and health care "reform", and if that isn't creating "a climate of hate", I don't know what is.

Krugman is a nasty piece of work, determined that his party hold on to power at all costs.

Women Live Longer Than Men, Part 2

The blogger Hail to You has attempted to see whether there might be other evidence for the notion that women live longer than men due to evolutionary considerations, specifically due to a past of polygamy and violence. He does this by

Comparing sex-based differences in life-expectancy in U.S. blacks vs. U.S. whites. Black-African societies practiced polygamy, whereas Northern-Europeans never have. So, if Mangan’s theory is true, black-females should live longer relative to black-males than white-females live relative to white-males.

I'm not sure about that "Northern-Europeans never have" practiced polygamy. It may be that we have little historical evidence for it (I don't know actually), but evolution goes a long way back, and the fact that sexual dimorphism exists among Northern Europeans might argue that they did in fact practice it at some point. However, there could be other factors involved in sexual dimorphism, basically the need to compete and to survive violent encounters; but surviving violent encounters may still lead back to the sexual factor. As an illustration of this, see the Rape of the Sabine Women which, though legendary, I assume depicts a real-world situation.

In any case, Hail finds that American black women have a greater longevity advantage over American black men than American white women do over American white men, thus providing some support for the notion that a polygamous past is a factor in the greater lifespans of women.

A point of contention for this idea is whether in fact men do age faster than women, or whether other factors such as more smoking, drinking, or stress causes higher death rates. (We'll leave aside violence and accidents because, as Hail points out, all we need do to factor these out is look at life expectancy at advanced ages, say at 70; these do in fact show that men have lower life expectancies at any age.) Here's what Mikhail Blagosklonny, the originator of the theory that aging is a quasi-program, has to say on this:

Women live longer than men. Yet, it is believed that men do not age faster than women but simply are weaker at every age. In contrast, I discuss that men age faster. From evolutionary perspective, high accidental death rate in young males is compatible with fast aging. Mechanistically, hyper-activated mTOR (Target of Rapamycin) may render young males robust at the cost of accelerated aging. But if women age slower, why then is it women who have menopause? Some believe that menopause is programmed and purposeful (grandmother theory). In contrast, I discuss how menopause is not programmed but rather is an aimless continuation of the same program that initially starts reproduction at puberty. This quasi-program causes over-activation of female reproductive system, which is very vulnerable to over-activation. Mechanisms of aging and menopause are discussed.

Another objection voiced by several commenters was that females in fact mature earlier than males. But, males grow more, which leads to faster aging. As for earlier maturing, what was meant was males who mature earlier will be more likely to survive violent encounters than males who mature later. As for female maturation, it's well-known that age of menarche has dropped fairly dramatically over the past few centuries, so I'm not sure how well we can extrapolate from today's maturation rates to those of the past.

Finally, Blagosklonny mentions one reason that the disposable soma theory finds so much agreement: it's easier to understand.

But another reason for DST popularity seems to be that one needs no knowledge of biology or medicine to understand the theory. This is appealing. In contrast, understanding of TOR-centric theory requires knowledge of molecular mechanisms of signal transduction, clinical and experimental medicine and the genetics of model organisms. But there is a pay-off: We can make predictions and explain observations and suggest a therapy. Just by drawing signaling pathways from insulin and nutrients to mTOR with feedback inhibition of insulin-signaling, we can predict that low insulin levels (by not activating mTOR) extend life span (good health), whereas low insulin responsiveness can be a feedback response to over-activated mTOR, which shortens lifespan (bad health). In contrast, DST cannot explain this, thus creating paradox.

Men have higher levels of testosterone, growth hormone, and IGF-1, all of which cause greater growth, and obviously, men grow more than women. But greater growth equals faster aging. In evolutionary terms, there must be a reason for greater growth in men, and that is the ability to survive violent encounters in competition with other men and/or over acquisition of resources.

That Women Live Longer Than Men Is Due to Polygamy and Violence in Our Past

An article in Scientific American purports to explain why women live longer than men. The theory is that of the disposable soma, wherein our bodies are only vehicles for our genes a la Dawkins, but that women's bodies are less disposable than men's, since they bear children. Women allegedly have better repair mechanisms than men and hence age slower and live longer.

That this cannot be true is explained by Mikhail Blagosklonny in "Why the disposable soma theory cannot explain why women live longer and why we age".

Let us consider that it is not lack of resources that renders soma unusable. According to TOR-centric model [2,3], as one of examples, there is another cause that kills us first. And this cause is not accumulation of random molecular damage. Yes, random damage accumulates with age. Yes, this eventually would make soma unusable. Eventually. But accumulation of random damage does not drive aging as we know it. Molecular damage does not cause that aging that kills us (and short-lived worms). That aging is an aimless, unintended, purposeless continuation of developmental growth and development is not driven by damage of course. While development is programmed, aging, however, is not. It is quasi-programmed (a quasi-program is an unintended continuation of a program that was not switched off after its completion [4,5]).

The reason that women live longer than men is connected to sexual dimorphism, i.e. men are larger and stronger than women. It's been noted that in highly monogamous species, males and females are nearly the same size, while in highly polygamous species, males tend to be much larger than females. Humans are somewhere in between, indicating a degree of polygamy in our past, and that is evidenced by the fact that historically around 80% of women have reproduced, while the corresponding figure for men is under 50%.

So, what does that have to do with aging? Facing competition from other males, and having far higher rates of death from accidents and warfare, men have had to become bigger. Bigger and earlier-maturing men are more likely to survive their injuries. Since aging is, as Blagosklonny notes, a quasi-program, the flip side of growth, earlier maturity and greater growth necessarily equate to faster aging. And the bigger they are, the faster they fall.

So, that women live longer than men is connected to polygamy, to sexual dimorphism, in short to our evolutionary past.

See also Aggressive Alphas Die Younger, The Revealed Slow Aging Hypothesis, and Why Men Die Younger but Reproduce Longer.

Penicillin

The photo is of Anne Sheafe Miller, the first person whose life was saved by penicillin. On the right is Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin (with what appears to be a cigarette in his hand); at the left is Dr. Francis Blake, Dean of the Yale Medical School. In March 1942, Miller had been delirious and near death with a fever of 107 due to a streptococcal infection, when her doctors obtained a small amount of the then-experimental drug. The next day she was able to sit up and eat. She died in 1999, age 90.

Japan Needs More Immigrants

From the NY Times, Japan Keeps a High Wall for Foreign Labor

KASHIWA, Japan — Maria Fransiska, a young, hard-working nurse from Indonesia, is just the kind of worker Japan would seem to need to replenish its aging work force.

But Ms. Fransiska, 26, is having to fight to stay. To extend her three-year stint at a hospital outside Tokyo, she must pass a standardized nursing exam administered in Japanese, a test so difficult that only 3 of the 600 nurses brought here from Indonesia and the Philippines since 2007 have passed.

It just seems so unfair that someone hoping to earn permanent residence in Japan should have to pass a test in her profession given in the Japanese language.

Despite facing an imminent labor shortage as its population ages, Japan has done little to open itself up to immigration. In fact, as Ms. Fransiska and many others have discovered, the government is doing the opposite, actively encouraging both foreign workers and foreign graduates of its universities and professional schools to return home while protecting tiny interest groups — in the case of Ms. Fransiska, a local nursing association afraid that an influx of foreign nurses would lower industry salaries.

In this news article, the Times declares that Japan is suffering from a labor shortage, grandly relying on no sources other than itself. And to think that the Japanese government actually has the gall to protect the interests of native Japanese! Why, it's almost as if the government is on their side.

At least one Japanese immigrant booster knows the real reason that the country should take more immigrants:

“The shrinking population is the biggest problem. The country is fighting for its survival,” said Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, an independent research organization. “Despite everything, America manages to stay vibrant because it attracts people from all over the world,” he said. “On the other hand, Japan is content to all but shut out people from overseas.”

Japan's appalling lack of vibrancy means that the country labors under a glaring deficiency of inter-ethnic strife. It has no Filipino or Indonesian Caucuses, no arguments over birthright citizenship, and no burritos. Boring!

Most of all, Japan needs to take in immigrants who have IQs beyond the 2 SD range on the right side of the bell curve, as the country's lack of innovation threatens to reduce its global competitiveness.

Health Disparities Are Not Explained by Inequality

Tino Sanandaji writes that Nicholas Kristof makes a fool of the NY Times due to this column, in which Kristof wholly endorses the spurious theory that social inequality lies at the root of health problems. (I have to disagree with Tino here: the NY Times' foolishness already approaches its asymptote, so another Kristof column, just like another Friedman column, only infinitesimally increases it.) Here's some of Kristof:

Researchers have found that when people become unemployed or suffer economic setbacks, they gain weight. One 12-year study of American men found that when their income slipped, they gained an average of 5.5 pounds. [DM: Assuming that gaining weight after unemployment can be ascribed to inequality is a leap, to say the least.] [...]

Professors Wilkinson and Pickett crunch the numbers and show that the same relationship holds true for a range of social problems. Among rich countries, those that are more unequal appear to have more mental illness, infant mortality, obesity, high school dropouts, teenage births, homicides, and so on.

They find the same thing is true among the 50 American states. More unequal states, like Mississippi and Louisiana, do poorly by these social measures. More equal states, like New Hampshire and Minnesota, do far better.

Hey, Kristof stumbles upon the "proximity to Canada" explanation, which we might call "the fundamental constant of American sociology". Kristof again:

Granted, humans are not all equal in ability[DM:!!!]: There will always be some who are more wealthy — and others who constitute the bottom. But inequality does not have to be as harsh, oppressive and polarized as it is in America today. Germany and Japan have attained modern, efficient economies with far less inequality than we have — and far fewer social problems.

Hmmm, what is it exactly about Germany and Japan that makes them more egalitarian societies than the U.S.? I can't figure it out.

As it happens, I wrote a post for Alternative Right about 10 days ago on intelligence, lifespan, and race, in which I noted the strong correlation between IQ and lifespan, and which appears to have a biological basis, citing among others Ian Deary and Linda Gottfredson. Inequality has nothing to do with it.

The efforts of those like Wilkinson and Pickett (whose theory Tino Sanandaji has demolished, so read his post and others for a thorough critique) are patently obvious and tendentious attempts by socialists to expand socialism in more than one country.

Europe's Young Grow Agitated Over Lack of Government Jobs

NYT:

LECCE, Italy — Francesca Esposito, 29 and exquisitely educated,

Wait, stop right there. "Exquisitely educated"? According to the same article, she speaks five languages and

She has an Italian law degree and a master’s from Germany and was an intern at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

So, she's fit to be a government bureaucrat, and apparently Italy already has enough bureaucrats. Besides, as my Dad used to say, being fluent in other languages in Europe qualifies you to be a waiter.

“I have every possible certificate,” Ms. Esposito said dryly. “I have everything except a death certificate.”

Besides having every possible certificate, at age 29 she looks like she's getting as fat as a typical American woman. I wonder whether she's ever thought about getting married and having children.

“They call us the lost generation,” said Coral Herrera Gómez, 33, who has a Ph.D. in humanities but still lives with her parents in Madrid because she cannot find steady work. “I’m not young,” she added over coffee recently, “but I’m not an adult with a job, either.” [...]

Ms. Herrera is at the lower end of the spectrum. Fed up with earning 600 euros a month, or $791, under the table as a children’s drama teacher, Ms. Herrera said she had decided to move to Costa Rica this month to teach at a university.

See, these young people thought they could get degrees in easy subjects, ones that required of them no math or science, no finance or engineering or technology courses, and then they could just cruise through life with a government job and retire at age 55 or whatever. Those days are over, just as they shortly will be in the states.

Charlton's "Questions for the Secular Right"

Bruce Charlton asks what he considers "four tough questions for the secular right".

1. What do you want? And what do you not want? [...]

2. Having listed these requirements, is it possible to sustain a society which gives you what you want, and not what you do not want? What are the mechanisms by which your ideal society would be maintained? Are they plausible? Are they strong enough? [...]

3. How would your ideal society stop itself recapitulating the course of all existing Western societies?

In other words, what is to prevent the re-emergence of radicalism, communism, socialism and political correctness? - in other words, what is to prevent the return of that suicidal embrace of active self-destruction which prevailed in all Western societies, at more or less the same time, apparently independently.

4. In such a society as you conceive, what will motivate people? And are these motivations plausibly strong enough to resist relentless, implacable and dedicated foes who cannot be convinced of the virtues of your favoured society and who are prepared to sacrifice pleasure, experience pain, and even willingly to die to get what they want?

Because these are people which will try to destroy modernity and which must therefore be-stopped for modernity to survive; and since they will not voluntarily stop themselves from doing this, who will stop-them? [...]

And why, in your ideal society, will the people who matter, really do this, actually make their best efforts to stop implacable and highly-motivated foes when we know that such people will not do so at present (will indeed assist the implacable foes of modernity).

*

At root this is just one question: what would be different about your desired secular society which would plausibly make it self-maintaining when all previous secular societies have become progressively more self-destroying?

What do we want? We want justice, I think would be the simplest answer. Justice includes the right of a peoples' self-determination, i.e. the possibility, if that's what they want, of having their own nation without a hostile elite attempting - successfully so far - to destroy it through population replacement or by other means. Justice includes the right of people to earn and keep the fruits of their labor, without government-imposed affirmative action telling them whom they must hire or what qualifications they are allowed to require. (I do believe that, in a historically multiracial society such as ours, non-discrimination in matters of public accommodation is reasonable and perhaps a necessary measure for keeping the peace.)

Is it possible to sustain this society, and what would keep it from recapitulating the course of all Western societies? Here, Charlton is strongly hinting about his favored state of affairs, one in which Christianity is central to the people and perhaps the state. But the West once was Christian, and our current state of affairs has obviously come about, so there's nothing inherently stable about a Christian-oriented condition. Japan, for instance, is far more secular than the U.S. and possibly Europe as well, but the Japanese seem to be resisting political correctness quite well, albeit they could use a boost in the birthrate. However, the latter has more to do with prosperity, I reckon, and I rather doubt that, since the drive to be prosperous seems to be hardwired in humans, the drive toward prosperity will be turned back. But that's another question.

Charlton asks how we will be motivated (without religion) and what will stop our "implacable and dedicated foes". But our biggest foes are themselves secular - I leave aside Islam, as Muslims in the West could easily be dealt with given the will to do so - and if they are implacable and dedicated, how is it that they are so without religion? If they can be implacable and dedicated, why cannot we be so? There may indeed be reasons for this, such as that defense is more difficult than offense in this situation, but as a matter of logic, no difficulty exists. Furthermore, signs abound that the PC brigade in power is on the defensive, and they seem to have the will to defend their regime. The will to power is, if Nietzsche was correct, universal, or nearly enough.

The plain fact is that nothing is guaranteed. In the long run, no society endures, change is a constant, and success is never final.

The West was once thoroughly Christian, and we are where we are now, so even if we became Christian again, what would prevent us from recapitulating the course of history?