One Word: Iceland

Gregory Clark, author of the groundbreaking A Farewell to Alms, replies to open-borders libertarian (fanatic?) Bryan Caplan, who argues that virtually every measure of "idea production" has some positive correlation to population size. Therefore, the argument goes, if we want more technological change and a better world we should promote, or at least not be worried about, a larger world population. Clark figuratively replies in one word: Iceland:

Iceland has a population of 318,000, of whom 292,000 are native Icelanders. The native population speaks Icelandic, a language with a complex grammar similar to Old Norse. It has evolved little since the twelfth century. Icelandic is spoken by no one other than Icelanders.

300,000 people is a very small number of people. Equivalent sized cities in the US are Anchorage, Alaska and Stockton, California.

We would on Caplan’s theory of population expect this isolated community to have about as much prospect as the Tasmanians of pre-industrial Australia.

Yet Iceland has maintained a vibrant local culture and is a notable presence on the international scene. Start with the film industry. The 300,000 people of Iceland produced 70 films (features, documentaries etc) between 2000 and 2010, in Icelandic! I recently saw one, Jar City, which was very well done.
Iceland also has maintained a substantial literary tradition. Halldór Kiljan Laxness won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. Arnaldur Indriðason is an internationally successful crime writer. In music also we have Björk..

The 300,000 people of Iceland are enough to sustain a respectable university. Iceland is host to an innovative project to map the DNA of hundreds of inhabitants from many different families (Decode Genetics). It is also the home of CCP Games, the company that developed the large and successful game EVE Online.

And of course, it was wildly innovative in its banking arrangements.

If population size is so crucial to innovation and economic activity, how come we hear so much about these obscure Icelanders? (And please don’t tell me it because of their good economic management!).

I'm actually surprised that Caplan makes such a crude argument, since he seems well aware of and not averse to honestly discussing the nature-nurture debate, the importance of IQ, and its large heritability. Clark's reply encapsulates the most important counterpoint: the quality of people matters as much as or more than their quantity. According to NationMaster, Iceland also ranks number one in Nobel Prizes per capita - followed by the notably low population states of Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway. (Maybe we could amend Caplan's thesis to say that idea production is positively correlated to the Scandinavian population. The analogy would be to Milton Friedman's reply to the economist who said that there was no poverty in Scandinavia: "Interesting. There's no poverty among Scandinavians in America either.")

Cities are of course more likely to be the scene of idea production than rural areas, so urbanization seems a more likely candidate for a positive correlation with it than mere population. But does anyone think that the world doesn't have enough or large enough cities? Even so, Lagos or Dhaka don't seem to be hotbeds of new technologies.

A Reactionary's Memorial Day Prayer

Dear Lord, we gather before you now to remember the dead of all America's wars, and beseech you to fill the hearts of our rulers never to send any other Americans off to fight and die in the same senselessness that characterized virtually all of our wars.

The men whom we memorialize today died believing that they were fighting - and killing - in the cause of protecting our people and our nation. But, dear Lord, they were for the most part sadly mistaken, for most of our wars have been fought not to defend our nation against foreign invasion and subsequent rule by outsiders; rather, they were instigated at the behest of a government seeking to extend its powers and rally the people to it, and by powerful interests allied to that government. To be sure, these governments and powers always cloaked their interests in starting these wars in the rhetoric of national defense, or "making the world safe for democracy", or stopping the evils of Nazism and Communism, although strangely they didn't refrain from actions like allying with Stalin or making total war on fellow Americans of the South.

The men who fought and died did so for us, their brothers and sisters, their parents and children, or so they thought. And we brothers and sisters, parents and children, rallied behind them. But in almost every war that the United States has fought, the killing and dying, at least of Americans, was avoidable. The Revolutionary War began over irritants that not only would sound trivial today, but which our own government now visits upon us. The Civil War resulted in a carnage of both attackers and defenders alike, all because the defenders did not wish to be governed from Washington, D.C. The World Wars, Korea, Vietnam: none of these had much to do with defending the U.S. and its people from attack. And, dear lord, let us not even mention the travesties of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The one war that seems to have resulted in lasting benefit to these United States, the Mexican War, is the one that is most deplored as an act of imperialism on our part, so perverted have our notions of our best interests become. (And our casualties were few!)
And let us not neglect to mention that our government neglects to stop a real invasion across our borders, occurring even now.

Protect us from our government, and save us from having to commemorate any more Americans dead in war. Defend us from the progressives, the liberals, the neoconservatives and, yes, even the conservatives, who all lobby the government to make war for their pet causes. And finally, open the eyes of our fellow Americans, so that they may understand the great injustice that has been and continues to be done to them.

(Complete bilge, I'm sure.)

No Assortative Mating?

Here's the abstract to a paper, posted on Barking up the wrong tree, which outlines a study that shows that whom people date and, presumably, eventually marry, is much more influenced by availability than by preferences (via Roissy):

Marriage data show a strong degree of positive assortative mating along a variety of attributes. But since marriage is an equilibrium outcome, it is unclear whether positive sorting is the result of preferences rather than opportunities. We assess the relative importance of preferences and opportunities in dating behaviour, using unique data from a large commercial speed dating agency. While the speed dating design gives us a direct observation of individual preferences, the random allocation of participants across events generates an exogenous source of variation in opportunities and allows us to identify the role of opportunities separately from that of preferences. We find that both women and men equally value physical attributes, such as age and weight, and that there is positive sorting along age, height, and education. The role of individual preferences, however, is outplayed by that of opportunities. Along some attributes (such as occupation, height and smoking) opportunities explain almost all the estimated variation in demand. Along other attributes (such as age), the role of preferences is more substantial, but never dominant. Despite this, preferences have a part when we observe a match, i.e., when two individuals propose to one another.

Source: "Can Anyone Be “The” One? Evidence on Mate Selection from Speed Dating" from IZA Discussion Papers, number 2377.

If this study is more generally applicable, then assortative mating is a much weaker phenomenon than heretofore thought. Another excerpt on the blog quotes the author of the study, who says that preferences account for only 2% of mate selection, with market availability accounting for the other 98%. In other words, we date and eventually marry from those who are around us, not necessarily those with whom we have a lot in common.

Any given social class or ethnic group will be more likely to live and work among people similar to themselves, so availability will be greater. Knowledge workers will work among other knowledge workers, blue collar among blue collar, which would account for the apparent illusion of assortative mating.

Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve predicted that IQ stratification would become greater as the society becomes more meritocratic and social mobility increases. It would seem that this would also cause the smart and ambitious to be together more and hence they will marry each other. Because of the heritability of intelligence, this could produce an elite social class that, because of proximity, will tend to perpetuate itself. Perhaps this result isn't any different than if preferences rather than availability were the cause.

The most interesting result of this paper is that a phenomenon widely assumed to be an important explanation of trends in society appears barely to exist.

Update: hbd chick calls total b.s.

Fountain of Youth, Part 2

Time out from our regular programming. I want to call the attention of anyone interested to the following paper: Branched-chain amino acids, mitochondrial biogenesis, and healthspan: an evolutionary perspective. The three authors also contributed to a paper that I previously discussed.

The paper's main focus is on branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) as a calorie-restriction mimetic, i.e. BCAAs can produce some of the same rejuvenating effects, mainly mitochondrial biogenesis, as calorie restriction does, without the bother of actually restricting food intake. The BCAA supplement used (details in the paper) has an amino acid profile almost exactly like whey protein. To give an idea of what it can do, following are some excerpts from the paper.

"Of interest, isoleucine, valine, and leucine changes showed the classic pattern of DAF-16 dependence, making BCAAs strong candidates for having a causal role in long life [25]."

"In search for CR-mimetic compounds, we recently investigated the effects of a balanced amino acid mixture with a high content of branched-chain and other essential amino acids (BCAA-enriched mixture, BCAAem; % composition: leucine 31.3, lysine 16.2, isoleucine 15.6, valine 15.6, threonine 8.8, cysteine 3.8, histidine 3.8, phenylalanine 2.5, methionine 1.3, tyrosine 0.7, tryptophan 0.5) which had been found to improve age-related disorders in animals and humans (see below). We demonstrated that BCAAem oral supplementation (1.5 mg/g body weight/day beginning at 9 months) increases the average, but not maximal lifespan of male mice [12]. Along with increased survival, BCAAem-supplemented middle-aged (16 months) mice showed up-regulated PGC-1α and SIRT1 expression and enhanced mitochondrialbiogenesis and function in cardiac and skeletal muscles but not in adipose tissue or liver. Further, the BCAAem preserved muscle fiber size and improved physical endurance and motor coordination in middle-aged mice [12]."

"The prolonged survival due to BCAAem supplementation was also associated with increased expression of genes involved in antioxidant defense and marked reduction of ROS production in cardiac and skeletal muscles of wild type but not eNOS-/- mice. Of interest, BCAAem-mediated effects were even more remarkable in long-term exercise-trained (running 30 to 60 min 5 days/week for 4 weeks) middle-aged mice. In young animals (4-6 months old), the mixture was ineffective."

There's much more in the paper that shows that BCAA metabolism may be intimately linked with CR and its longevity effects and that BCAA (whey) supplementation increases "healthspan", that is, it delays aging and the appearance of age-related diseases, such as cancer and heart disease. Most of the results above were reported in mice, but there have been a number of human trials that showed highly beneficial effects on functional capacity.

I've previously written a few items about whey protein supplementation, and am now more convinced than ever that it has very favorable effects on health.

Blaming the Victims

After a discussion of the phenomenon of "planking" and the stupidity of it all, Lawrence Auster writes:

Collective suicidal behavior meriting the Darwin Award is no joke. Given the immigration and race policies that are being assiduously followed by every historically white country, the entire white race arguably deserves the Darwin Award. Which raises an interesting question. How can Darwinian evolution, consisting of random genetic mutations which are naturally selected because of their power to help their possessors survive and produce offspring, have produced an entire race that is committing suicide? The wholesale adoption of Darwin Award-winning behavior by the white race would seem to suggest that the Darwinian theory of evolution is not true. 

Couple of points here. I'm not sure how seriously Auster means for us to take his criticism as an actual criticism of the theory of evolution, but assuming it is meant seriously, the fact that one's offspring may be of a different race - or no race at all if those offspring fail to materialize - doesn't impinge on the truth or falsehood of evolution. Humans, like other animals, are driven to have sex, not to produce offspring. After all, for most of humanity's existence, the fact that sex results in babies must have been unknown, and of course still is unknown to non-human animals.

The other and more important point: the white race is not committing suicide. Others are trying to kill it. The vast majority of whites likely believe the diversity, pro-immigration, multicult propaganda spewed by government and media, and a small number of whites are actively against it. In turn, a small number of whites, allied with minority groups, acting in the pursuit of power, are running the anti-white regime that's in place.

I don't know why Auster would try to blame whites for the demise of their own nations and their natural majorities in those nations. Most whites may be willfully obtuse on this matter, but they're victims, not self-murderers. Blame for this situation must be sought elsewhere.

Update, 5/26/11: Steve Burton criticizes - thoughtfully and thoroughly - Auster's attack on Steve Sailer.

Another update, 5/26/11: Malcolm Pollack responds to the same post of Auster's as above, and makes a good point about defective cultural software: "...natural selection’s contribution to the scenario was simply the creation of a flexible machine for running behavioral software. That some software, however, might contain lethal bugs is itself no more an indictment of Darwinism than is the historical fact that the fate of nearly every species that has ever lived has been extinction."

A Glimmer of Consciousness

Whites Believe They Are Victims of Racism More Often Than Blacks (via ParaPundit):

Whites believe that they have replaced blacks as the primary victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America, according to a new study from researchers at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School. The findings, say the authors, show that America has not achieved the "post-racial" society that some predicted in the wake of Barack Obama's election.

Both whites and blacks agree that anti-black racism has decreased over the last 60 years, according to the study. However, whites believe that anti-white racism has increased and is now a bigger problem than anti-black racism.

Anyone who believes that America would become a "post-racial society" must be delusional. America is obsessed with race.

The author of the study appears to believe that anti-black discrimination can be the only thing that could account for black underachievement. It's a sad state of affairs when a psychology professor knows nothing about evolutionary psychology or human biodiversity.

"It's a pretty surprising finding when you think of the wide range of disparities that still exist in society, most of which show black Americans with worse outcomes than whites in areas such as income, home ownership, health and employment," said Tufts Associate Professor of Psychology Samuel Sommers, Ph.D., co-author of "Whites See Racism as a Zero-sum Game that They Are Now Losing," which appears in the May 2011 issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Meanwhile at the NY Times, David Bernstein assures us,

Discrimination against African-Americans is a significant social problem. Discrimination against whites, well, not so much.

Good to know. Evidence? Bernstein follows up with this bit of sophistry:

While affirmative action advocates don’t perceive of such preferences as anti-white discrimination, many whites do. Given the overt nature of such preferences, and many whites’ own perceived self-interest in the matter, it's not terribly surprising that whites subjectively perceive discrimination against members of their own group as an especially significant and growing problem, even though, objectively speaking, bias against blacks is far more pervasive, problematic and ill-intentioned. Whether affirmative action preferences are compatible with harmonious race relations in the long run remains to be seen.

See, the perception on the part of whites that they are being discriminated against is a matter of "self-interest" and is "subjective", while discrimination against blacks is "objective" and is "far more pervasive, problematic, and ill-intentioned", i.e. whites are evil bigots, and whenever blacks think they're the victims of racism, they're correct. Thanks, Professor Bernstein, we've been told that over and over for the past few decades, but lest we forget it's good to have you and the NY Times re-enforcing the message almost daily.

Conservative Moron of the Month

"Wild Bill for America"? I've never heard of this guy but found the video at Moonbattery, where it seems meant to be taken as an expression of the allegedly still-extant Spirit of America.

"A message for the barbarians of Islam: jihad works both ways." Right, while we send masses of young white Americans over to Afghanistan and Iraq and soon Libya to be killed in senseless wars, you guys will be immigrating, reproducing, and building mosques all over this once-great nation, while deluded asshats like myself somehow still believe that there's an America where we matter.

"...you see sniveling cowards like Harry Reid, and a clueless man-child trying to play president." And you see knaves like nearly all the Republican so-called opposition. You see the Tea Party whose number-one concern seems to avoid being called racist.

"What you don't see is the men of America" - who are sending their sons and sometimes their daughters off to fight in those senseless Middle Eastern wars, all because they think that they're "patriots", but most of whom don't have the first clue as to what's happening in the U.S. Yes, these so-called men also quiver like jelly at the thought that someone might call them a racist, which happens whenever someone wants to close the borders.

"Now you've met the U.S military" - who do only what they're told to do, have become one of the main bastions of diversity and AA, and who willingly sacrifice themselves at the altar of the neo-Bolshevist state, aka the USA.

I can't go on. Guys like this think that if we only get Republicans into office, buy a few more handguns, and increase the military budget, all will be well in America. But sadly they don't realize that the offensive against Americans is now being waged by other means, while they're off fighting the last war.

It gives me no joy to write this.

Pareto and Divorce

Number of long-lasting marriages in U.S. has risen, Census Bureau reports. (Via Diversity Is Chaos.) The article states that "among black women, half of first marriages end in divorce, a rate that is far greater those for white, Hispanic and Asian women." It also says that those without a college degree, a proxy for IQ, are three times more likely to get divorced than those with one. Not stated there is that second or third marriages are much more likely to end in divorce than first marriages.

All this leads me to wonder - and I don't have the mathematical or research skills to figure this out myself - how greatly the much-vaunted high divorce rate is skewed by either blacks or the left side of the bell curve or those getting married and divorced multiple times, these categories not being mutually exclusive. It appears that college-educated white (and Asian and Hispanic) people stand a low chance of divorce.

The Pareto Principle says that many phenomena are highly skewed as to cause and effect; specifically, it's often the case that 20% of causes are responsible for 80% of results. Could this be the case for divorce? Does the divorce rate conceal as much as it reveals?

Nothing But the Best from Denmark

BBC: Business booms for Danish sperm:

Selecting a potential father for your children, it turns out, is not unlike shopping online.

"A lot of our clients typically want their donor to be at least 180cm [5ft 11in] tall and have blue eyes," says Peter Bower, director of Nordic Cryobank, who is showing me his database of sperm donors.

Customers narrow their computer search to eliminate men who are under or over a certain weight in kilos.

They can click on a candidate's profile and, for a fee, download an audio interview and a photograph of him as a baby.

Staff also provide a few sentences giving their impression of donors - a physical description or an illuminating detail, Mr Bower says, such as "that he enjoys chatting in the lab after he has donated, dresses nicely or is very interested in a particular sort of music".

Or that he resembles Wotan in his prime.

Peter Bower says single British women are "at the forefront" in choosing this service, but foreign uptake in general is booming. According to the latest figures from the Danish Department of Health, in 2008 2,694 non-Danish women came to Aarhus and Copenhagen for insemination, while in 2010 that number leapt to 4,665.

Just one data point. I don't know how many in vitro fertilizations are done with anonymous donors worldwide, but nearly 5,000 going to Denmark alone in one year makes it seem as if a lot of women are well aware of what they want in their baby, and that good genes are a necessary condition for that. Are any (white) women going to fertilization clinics in Nigeria or Mexico? I know it probably sounds bigoted to say that, but I'm just asking. Women will be generally unlikely to make decisions concerning their own children for merely politically correct purposes; they prefer intelligence, height, and good looks, and if they have the means to get those for their kids, it looks like a good number of them do so.

The only reference in the article to the intelligence of sperm donors was to a woman who said that she was looking for "academic qualifications". I'd bet that for a good number of these women, "academic qualifications" are at the top of the list, though naturally the BBC won't say so.

Kanazawa to Get Watsoned

See the report by the BBC on those calling for Kanazawa to get the sack. I wrote a longer post on this topic but then thought it unnecessary, as my thoughts on this ought to be obvious. Those who want Kanazawa fired are a bunch of fascists who can't tolerate anything critical about certain protected groups. First Watson (on Africans), then Summers (on women), (or the other way around, I can't remember), then Bruce Charlton (he actually didn't say anything, he just published Duesberg and then refused to back down), now Kanazawa.

Whites, heterosexuals, and Christians can, of course, still be openly criticized.

Who's Defending Strauss-Kahn, and the Sweet Irony of It All

Bernard-Henri Levy and Ben Stein. This is pretty hard to figure out: on the one hand, you've got a leftist French philosopher, on the other you have a conservative (or at least neoconservative) American, both insisting on the presumption of innocence. Why would these two worthies take to the press to defend a known womanizer and cheat? One would have thought that defense and offense would be politically polarized, especially since the alleged criminal is a Davos Man, a global banker.

Which is fine, he may very well be innocent - though I have my doubts, since his story has changed since yesterday from he was having lunch with his daughter to the accuser wanted it.

An anonymous commenter left this comment about the sweet irony of this case:

I'm following a French nationalist blog, and the irony of this story is sweet beyond words. The best screenwriter couldn't imagine such a scenario, which means life beats movies, anytime:

- It seems the victim is not only a Black immigrant from Ghana, but also a practicing Muslim who usually wears a hijab.
- DSK is known as one of the most fanatical pro-immigrationists in France, a staunch supporter of the invasion of France by foreigners.
- As a Jew, he's also a fanatical Israel-firster, which he admitted publicly (he doesn't want Muslims in Israel, but France is OK: after all, it's not the country of his allegiance).
- Which means that it is a conflict between two protected species: the influential and rich Socialist Jew who raped a Black Muslim.
- DSK, morally burried by a member of a group that he wholeheartedely welcomes in France, at the expense of the natives!
- besides, all his friends from the French political, mediatic and financial circles defend him now, against all logic, for a crime against a victim who shares all the traits they favor: Black, Muslim, immigrant, single mother.
- it can't be funnier than that, can it?

Send a Mensch to Congress

This ad (via Richard Spencer) says a lot more about Southern California congressional candidate Dan Adler than he probably wanted to let on. Notice that the ad says "Asians are 15% of voters here" (in the district) but, playing his own minority card, he does not refer to himself as white, but as Jewish. (And then brags about being married to a Korean.) And am I alone in thinking that the Asians in this ad, though of course it's scripted, come across as petulant, petty, and only interested in what's in it for them? Imagine if Adler had said that he wanted to be elected to Congress to represent the interests of white people - he would already have been flogged to death by the NY (and LA) Times, and all the other usual suspects.

Pretty brazen message here: minorities need to stick together in order to stick it to whites.

Fashions in Women's Ideal Weight

Amy Alkon (The Advice Goddess) proclaims the truth about beauty, which is a good piece but which will be old news to anyone who understands sex differences and evolutionary psychology. An interesting tidbit was this:

And while Western women do struggle to be slim, the truth is, women in all cultures eat (or don't) to appeal to "the male gaze." The body size that's idealized in a particular culture appears to correspond to the availability of food. In cultures like ours, where you can't go five miles without passing a 7-Eleven and food is sold by the pallet-load at warehouse grocery stores, thin women are in. In cultures where food is scarce (like in Sahara-adjacent hoods), blubber is beautiful, and women appeal to men by stuffing themselves until they're slim like Jabba the Hut.

There does appear to be some positive correlation between availability of food and the ideal woman's body weight, but how would that work? One would think that the ideal, say, waist-hip ratio, would be similar in all cultures, due allowance being made for HBD issues (e.g. blacks preferring higher, Asians preferring lower ratios). One could also see how, in a culture of low or sporadic food availability, or in one where infectious disease remains a threat, a heavier woman might be more likely to bear surviving children, thus the preference is reenforced. An example of this from the paleolithic era, in which food was scarce, is the Venus of Willendorf.

In our own culture, however, weight preferences have markedly changed over the past century, and even over the past couple of decades. Yet especially in the latter case, food availability hasn't changed in the sense of there being enough to go around - though it has changed in the sense that it is now everywhere. Maybe the fact that so many women are and are expected to be breadwinners has contributed to the change in preference, as well as the fact they do not and are not expected to bear as many children.

But ultimately, there seems something arbitrary to the current fashion in thin women. It's pushed by Hollywood and the media, which ought to be grounds for suspicion, and perhaps they push it precisely because it makes women seem less fertile.

Europe Upended by an Arrest?

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and leading candidate for President of France, has been arrested for sodomy. (Thanks to several readers.)

The French political bigshot who heads the International Monetary Fund was arrested for allegedly sodomizing a Manhattan hotel maid today — getting hauled off an Air France flight just moments before takeoff from Kennedy Airport, police sources told The Post.

Three Port Authority detectives pulled Dominique Strauss-Kahn from the plane’s first-class cabin just two minutes before it was due to depart for Paris, the sources said.

Strauss-Kahn, 62, was turned over to NYPD officers from the Midtown South precinct, and the case is being investigated by the Special Victims Unit.

IMF Managaing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn shakes hands with then-president George W. Bush in 2008.

The trouble began around noon today, when a housekeeper entered Strauss-Kahn’s room at the Sofitel on West 44th Street.

Strauss-Kahn was in his bathroom, said sources. He emerged from the bathroom naked, said the sources, and grabbed her.

Then, Strauss-Kahn allegedly threw the housekeeper on the room’s bed and forced her to perform oral sex on him, said the sources.

Seems doubtful now, whatever the outcome, that Strauss-Kahn will be the next president of France. That leaves the field wide open to Marine Le Pen, "France's (Kinder, Gentler) Extremist" (according to the NY Times), in other words, she speaks frankly and declares that the French people have the right to decide the fate of their own nation.

Dominique just couldn't resist a sudden impulse, it seems. (While many false accusations of rape have come to light and many more undoubtedly exist, on the face of it this case doesn't look anything but genuine.) If this throws the election Le Pen's way, prepare for a change in European politics.

Update, May 16: Over at In Mala Fide, blogger Human Stupidity asks whether DSK is the victim of a false rape charge, and notes a number of startling anomalies in this case and supplies some possible motivations.

A Reaction to a Reaction

Foseti critiqued a statement by OneSTDV:

It’s not often that I disagree with OneSTDV, but I disagree with this:

Basically what I’m trying to say is that reactionary politics might not really be all that great. It isn’t going to make you a better person and it definitely won’t make you feel better going to sleep at night.

Who was happier than H. L. Mencken? The pessimist, after all, is never disappointed. The proper reactionary attitude to mainstream society is detached amusement. You know which things you can control and influence and you see to those things. You laugh at the rest. (In fairness, I think One’s point may be that your political beliefs themselves shouldn’t be a source of happiness. With this point, I agree).

As for One's statement, yes, reactionary politics definitely won't help you sleep better, but then that's not what it's supposed to do.

As for Foseti's assertion that hardly anyone was happier than H.L. Mencken, and that was due to Mencken's pessimistic, reactionary outlook, maybe, but happiness or the lack of it has so much to do with whether we're born with it or not that I doubt whether one can draw many conclusions from it. Admittedly, conservatives tend to be happier than liberals, but on the other hand optimists tend to be happier than pessimists.

Several times in real life I've been asked what I get out of blogging about the topics I do. Some have implied, others have said directly, that I would be happier if I left aside things largely out of my control, like politics, and concentrated on living my life. While this may be true, it's obviously beside the point, as the same could be said of anyone dissatisfied with the status quo and trying to do something about it. Once, some journalist asked Charles de Gaulle whether, with all the trials and tribulations of his life, he was happy, and de Gaulle replied, "What do you take me for, an idiot?"

No, the question of a reactionary outlook is its truth value. Whether anyone chooses to make a stand is a personal decision, but some people find that they can't help but do so. Those are the people who change the world. Those reactionaries who are really out there fighting at some personal risk (and I don't include myself among them) may have a mixture of motives, from egoism to idealism, but if change is to come, it's through them.

Blogger Is Back Up

Blogger has been down for the past day or so but appears to be back now. A couple of my posts that I wrote yesterday are still missing, but Blogger says that they'll be restored. Also, it appears that comments can now be posted.

The (lack of) information coming from Blogger has been maddening; they only have said that they were doing some kind of maintenance. On another site, someone said that we have no right to complain because Blogger is a free service; but G--gle makes money from Blogger, at least that's my understanding. That means that they make money from bloggers; therefore we have every right to complain.

Running and Sitting

Paul Jaminet wonders whether endurance exercise promotes cancer, and says that there are good reasons to think so, especially when combined with the high-carb diets that runners usually consume. Mechanisms include increased oxidative stress and inflammation. Aside from the possible physiological mechanisms that could be responsible, it seems clear that our evolutionary history didn't equip humans for long-distance running. Hunter gatherers just don't run marathons.

There's also good evidence that marathoning can cause heart disease (see also here).

On the other hand, the opposite extreme, sitting, isn't so great for you either. Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives.

Is the link between sitting and mortality correlation or causation? A bit of both, probably. In the linked article, it's mentioned "that for each additional hour of television a person sat and watched per day, the risk of dying rose by 11 percent." People who watch a lot of television are likely to have lower IQ and generally worse health habits. (Don't know if there's evidence for that, but that's my guess.) But, since excess sleep also correlates with increased mortality, maybe the level of (in)activity itself is the causative factor.

Obama Pushing More Invasion

President Obama gave a speech in which he said he wanted, like Bush and just about everyone else before him, to "reform" immigration.

Obama is pushing the familiar three-part strategy: tighter security controls at and behind the border; a more liberal regime for highly skilled immigrants; and a pathway (maybe a too-difficult pathway) to legal status for the 11m illegal immigrants already in the country. It is essentially the same formula that George W. Bush proposed, and that once-moderate Republicans such as John McCain used to back. It was good policy then and still is.

In El Paso Obama emphasized the progress made on security. He was rather modest, in fact, preferring not to draw attention to the surge in deportations on his watch--an achievement that would give his target audience pause. He was right to mock Republicans for first insisting on better border security and then refusing, now this has been addressed, to move on the rest of the plan. Nothing is good enough for the GOP, he said. "Maybe they'll need a moat. Maybe they'll want alligators in the moat."

His three-part strategy is a piece of sleight-of-hand: tighter border security has nothing to do with either "a liberal regime for highly skilled immigrants" nor anything to do with "a pathway' to legality for illegal aliens. It's just political dealing in which he offers something to the "conservatives" namely more border security. But it's obvious that it's a grudging offer so that he'll get what he really wants: more immigrants.

Did he say anything about the unprecedented level of unemployment? Not that I heard. It's just that Obama, like the rest of the elite, affirmative-action elite or otherwise, can't stand to have so many whites hogging the country they built. Must have more diversity.

He also crows about increased security on his watch. That's not how I see it: until no illegals get across it, and until the Mexican drugrunners are driven out of Arizona and wherever else they may be, the border isn't secure enough.

Alligators in a moat sounds pretty good to me.

Crisis Consilience

Among observers of many different political stripes, there's a widespread agreement that the world is entering or has entered a period of crisis. What that crisis entails and what has caused it as well as what could possibly cure it are areas of disagreement.

For example, many observers of the financial/economic scene are worried about the massive printing of money globally, and believe that a return to sound money, perhaps in some form of a gold standard, can lead us out of crisis and into the promised land. Obviously, many other aspects of the crisis exist, and while writers on finance and economics may emphasize sound money (or the opposite, as Keynesians like Paul Krugman insist), they may do so not because they believe that money is the most important aspect of the crisis, but because that is simply the area of their expertise. Nevertheless, one gets the distinct impression that for many of them, solving the money problem solves the crisis.

Similar observations could be made of writers on other topics relevant to the crisis. Here's an ad hoc list of possible elements contributing to crisis:

Finance and economics/free trade
Nationalism/ethnicity (tends to be emphasized in the reactionary blogosphere, partly because it's given little attention elsewhere)
Governmental oppression
Foreign relations and war
Demography and fertility
Religion and its decline
Human biodiversity

Consilience is the notion that knowledge is unitary and must fit together. Somehow it seems that a consilience of crisis must exist, i.e. all the elements listed above (and perhaps others too) must be unitary, interact with each other in causing crisis, be responsible in some proportion, and brought into proper alignment for a resolution of the crisis. What that would all look like is probably not within the purview of any one person and in any case there will always be disagreement and debate.

A sound distrust of monolithic solutions to the crisis is warranted, and that's useful to keep in mind. But I suspect that a consilience of crisis is not even possible in theory. One would need to be omniscient to put it all together. Furthermore, "crisis" is just a way of referring to an almost incoherent jumble of events confined in time to a space of several years.

Maybe none of this makes a lot of sense. Some of these thoughts were inspired by reading Brett Stevens' Class war in reverse.

Cheap Chalupas and Car Thieves

Tyler "Cheap Chalupas" Cowen blames a string of carjackings in Maryland which were committed by Nigerian nationals on... Nigerian government tariffs on imported cars. No kidding. Because immigration, even by Nigerian car thieves, is so wonderful and enhances the quality of American life so dramatically that one can never point out that some immigrants are criminals. After all, in this case the carjackers were just doing an end run around unjust government restraint of free trade. From the original article in the WaPo, International theft rings steal hundreds of vehicles in D.C. area every year:

The men who carjacked Dunkley on March 17 were professional thieves, members of a sophisticated transatlantic car theft ring, police said. The plan -- thwarted by Prince George’s County detectives who arrested two men they say are key players in the ring -- was to ship her 2009 silver Toyota thousands of miles to Lagos, Nigeria, authorities said.

While most cars are swiped for joy rides or cash from selling parts, authorities say the ring and others like it make up a complex, multimillion-dollar network.

Prince George’s police officials lauded the arrests of the ring’s high-ranking members. But they and other law enforcement authorities across the region acknowledged that the international car thieves are difficult to catch and the problem has become almost unsolvable.

“These guys are going to be replaced,” said Prince George’s Sgt. David Mohr, who works on the auto theft team.

Wouldn't it be amazing if someone, say, in the government, actually began to see that protecting the lives and property of American citizens demanded that immigrants be screened a little more carefully? Or maybe even if someone, this time let's say from the government - you know, that institution created and sustained for the purpose of protecting the lives and property of citizens - decided that the costs of immigrants from certain countries - let's just pull one out of a hat and say, oh, Nigeria - outweighed the benefits?

That would be just as amazing as some libertarian economist admitting that his favored policies, while faithful to theoretical constructs that have been mathematically proven to be true, harmed actual Americans. You know, the ones already living here.

But then, those economists would lose their NY Times writing gigs and be excluded from the company of the best and the brightest.

Why Did They Dump the Body?

Out of everything in the story of Osama bin Laden's death, the confusing and conflicting stories put out by the White House, whether Pakistan was hiding him or betrayed him to us, how the Seals got through air defenses in a heavily protected region of Pakistan, and I'm sure many others, the dumping of bin Laden's body at sea is the most mystifying.

The body was dumped ("buried at sea") before any news of the operation came out. Why would they do this? Plenty of conspiracy theories have already been spun, of which the most prominent seems to be that the entire operation was some sort of hoax, that Osama bin Laden has in reality been dead many years.

The major aspect of conspiracy theories that makes the vast majority of them unbelievable is the sheer number of people that would have to be in on the conspiracy, making it very likely that someone at some time will talk. In the 9/11 theories, aside from the weight of the available evidence, the fact that perhaps thousands of government agents would have to be a part of the conspiracy makes the whole scheme untenable. (N.B.: not an invitation to discuss putative U.S. government involvement in 9/11.)

So, despite my allergy to conspiracy theories, the dumping of bin Laden's body smells suspicious. The stated reasons for the dumping have already been well dissected: Muslim imams have already disputed that it is in accord with Islamic law, the administration's original justification - maybe their only one; the treatment of Saddam Hussein as well as that of his sons argues against a different treatment for bin Laden, although a mitigating factor is that of different administrations - whether the current one is more Muslim-friendly than Bush's is arguable, however.

The dumping is either a colossal blunder, since they must have known that it would fuel conspiracy theories, or there was a hidden motive, such as that the body was not really bin Laden's. Maybe an autopsy would have revealed powder burns, such that it became known that he was killed execution-style, and Obama didn't want that known.

But the sheer audacity of a hoax makes no sense (to me), since the consequences of getting caught would be so severe. It would mean the end of any chances for Obama's reelection. So, why did they dump the body? I'm inclined to think that it's because they're idiots.

No Invasion Here!

John Derbyshire says of a recent issue of The Economist devoted to "Where did California go wrong?"

Doing a scan of that 11,000-word Special Report in search of Abominable Words, I came up with these counts: “immigration” — 0, “Mexican” — 0, “illegal” — 0, “undocumented” — 0, “border” — 0, “Spanish” — 0, “Latino” — 0, “Hispanic” — 1 (“half of California’s pupils are Hispanic, and 40 percent of those hardly speak English”), “welfare” — 2 (“many Californians have lost their homes, jobs, health care and welfare services, [Governor Jerry] Brown implied” and “it seemed as though cities would have to close parks and counties would have to deny their residents medical and welfare services [i.e. after the 1978 Proposition 13 vote]“), …

This struck me as very strange. I knew of course that The Economist is open-borders libertarian; but 11,000 words on California’s problems with barely a mention of the Mexifornia Factor? Come on.

Of course, it's a deliberate decision on the part of The Economist not to mention these things. Whatever other things the editors and writers for The Economist might be, stupid is not one of them. But, since the magazine is basically the in-house journal of Davos Man, its readers likely don't want to hear it anyway, and would probably start cancelling their subscriptions if things like the Mexican invasion mentioned with any regularity.

However, they also seem to think that the rest of us won't notice, in which case they've vastly overestimated their own powers.

Bin Laden's Economic War

From The Atlantic, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who has written a book called Why al-Qaeda Is Winning, writes that bin Laden's "war of a thousand cuts" will go on:

A key facet of bin Laden's anti-American warfare has always been economic. It's a lesson he drew from the Afghan-Soviet war, in which he first served as a financier of mujahidin efforts and then as a fighter. He watched the Soviet Union withdraw from Afghanistan in defeat and then dissolve altogether in 1991. Bin Laden asserted on multiple occasions that the mujahidin were responsible for destroying the Soviet empire. Whether or not he's right, he clearly believed that the high costs imposed by the Afghan-Soviet war prevented the Soviet Union from adapting to other challenges, such as grain shortages and a collapse in world oil prices.

After declaring war on America, bin Laden compared the U.S. to the Soviet Union on multiple occasions, arguing that al-Qaeda would undermine America in the same way the mujahidin undermined the Soviet economy. His strategy of economic warfare went through several iterations over time, as al-Qaeda responded to external events, seized upon opportunities provided to it, and incorporated lessons learned by the group over time.

Hard to disagree that bin Laden's strategy is working. Consider merely the effort to capture and kill him personally. Did we spend billions on it? Probably. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and now Libya: is the bill up to a trillion yet? Probably.

Concerning just the 9/11 attacks alone:

In a video he released in October 2004, he emphasized the cost effectiveness of the attacks. "Al-Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event," he said, "while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost -- according to the lowest estimate -- more than $500 billion, meaning that every dollar of al-Qaeda defeated a million dollars."

I've no idea whether these figures are correct, but they're believable. One might argue that we couldn't help being attacked by terrorists, but the fact is that we allowed these people into the country, and while we may allegedly be screening out terrorists now, we still allow people who in other, saner times would be classified as "enemy aliens": Pakistanis, Saudis, and so on.

This analysis shouldn't be carried too far. Bin Laden isn't responsible for out-of-control entitlement spending or baling out Wall Street. Yet, at the margin, we can't afford our multiplying, mutating foreign wars, so his strategy appears to be working.

We fell into his trap. Bin Laden, following Patton, might just as well have said, "America, I read your book!"

Obama Kills Osama

Excuse me for my cynicism, but I can't see how the death of Osama bin Laden changes much of anything. Although there is symbolic value in his death, at this point he's only one of any number of terrorist leaders, most of whom one would think will be more, not less, motivated to terrorism now. They will want revenge. (Then we will want it, in a never-ending cycle.) The Daily Mail reports that "[s]ecurity experts fear that Osama Bin Laden's death will only strengthen the resolve of Islamic extremists to bring terror to the Western world."

His death doesn't change the fact that the U.S. is at war in Afghanistan, with little way out to be seen, or the fact that we started a war in Iraq that killed or maimed thousands of Americans and cost us hundreds of billions of dollars, not to mention radically destabilized the country and led to the death of countless Iraqis - albeit mainly at the hands of their fellow Iraqis. Bin Laden's actions were a necessary but not sufficient cause of the war, and it could be postulated that the war is exactly what bin Laden wanted.

Steve Sailer notes that Pakistan has likely been scamming the U.S. for billions of dollars while top officials actively hid bin Laden. Just how stupid are we, anyway?

According to the L.A. Times, "Bin Laden's body will be handled in accordance with Islamic practices, U.S. officials said." This is the usual political correctness in fighting a war, kowtowing to Islamic sensibilities. I mean, are we really worried about what Muslims would think if we treated the body in some other way?

The crowds of people chanting "USA! USA!", while perhaps understandable, are deluded. The U.S. looks to be in near terminal decline, and this has been brought about partly by our reactions to bin Laden. His death doesn't change or solve any of our problems. This isn't a hockey game. As Richard Spencer writes,

Can anyone claim that Osama bin Laden hasn’t, in some ironic way, won?

A dispassionate observer might conclude that the mysterious Saudi didn’t merely kill 3,000 people on September 11, 2001, but, in fact, laid waste to a country already in advanced decline.

Update: Malcolm Pollack sent me this story at NightWatch (a source unknown to me until now) which concludes that the U.S. must have had help or cooperation from the Pakistani government, and suggests that bin Laden had become a liability to them. Therefore Pakistan betrayed him to us.