Science Keeps Proving HBD Right

From the Dept. of Duh: Impatient people have lower credit scores

Is there a psychological reason why people default on their mortgages? A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people with bad credit scores are more impatient – more likely to choose immediate rewards rather than wait for a larger reward later.

The new paper is by two economists who were working at the Federal Reserve’s Center for Behavioral Economics and Decisionmaking in Boston at the time they did the research. People at the Fed are very interested in understanding how the default crisis came about. “Most often, the reasons economists put forward are, maybe there was not enough screening for mortgage applicants, or securitization, or other institutional reasons,” says Stephan Meier, who is now at Columbia University. His coauthor, Charles Sprenger, is at Stanford University. ”That’s definitely important, but in the end humans make those repayment decisions. So there must be more psychological factors that explain how people make those decisions to default or not?”

During tax season, Meier and Sprenger recruited 437 low-to-moderate income people at a community center in Boston that was offering tax preparation help. Each person was given a questionnaire in which they made choices between a smaller, immediate reward and a larger reward later. This is a common test for seeing if people are willing to delay gratification. The questions offer different time periods and different amounts. The participants also agreed to let the researchers access their credit scores.

Impatient people had lower credit scores. A low credit score can indicate some problems with credit in the past, like failing to pay bills or defaulting on a mortgage. “Conceptually, it does make sense that how people discount the future, i.e. how impatient they are, affects their decision to default on their loans,” Meier says. “Individuals accumulate debt and then have to decide whether to repay the money or use the money for something else?” If they don’t pay off their debt, they will have short-term benefits – any cash on hand is available for something else – but the costs/problems come much later, when a landlord, mortgage lender, or someone else sees their bad credit report.

The paper, and the economist quoted in the article, make much of a "decision to default", as if "impatient" people, i.e. those with lower future time orientation, went around doing a lot of deliberating about their life choices. But some people have choices, others have choices thrust upon them. And still others make their choices without any thought for the future.

The article says nothing about how income correlated with "impatience", but it's a good assumption that lower credit scores correlate with income, hence with impatience.

The denialists will say that were we to teach the merits of deferred gratification, then this problem could be ameliorated. Unfortunately for them, the Big Five personality traits are about 50% heritable - and nobody knows where the other 50% comes from.

The Problem with Buying Local

The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) is

North America's fastest growing network of socially responsible businesses, comprised of over 80 community networks in 30 U.S. states and Canadian provinces representing over 22,000 independent business members across the U.S. and Canada.

BALLE believes that local, independent businesses are among our most potent change agents, uniquely prepared to take on the challenges of the twenty-first century with an agility, sense of place, and relationship-based approach others lack. They are more than employers and profit-makers; they are neighbors, community builders and the starting point for social innovation, aligning commerce with the common good and bringing transparency, accountability, and a caring human face to the marketplace.

No doubt most of you have seen some version of this in your own areas: an effort to encourage people to buy from local businesses. Another part of it encourages moving bank deposits from the major banks to local institutions. On its face, it all sounds reasonable, even something reactionaries can support, preaching as it does the building of community.

Unfortunately, in my view, most of the people doing the encouraging as well as many if not most of the businesses involved are the usual gang of hipsters, SWPLs, left-liberals, environmentalist goofballs, AGW promoters, anti-racists, and people who want to control every aspect of everyone's life in the name of "sustainability" or whatever other faddish nonsense is the latest to come down the pike. In short, I can't see any good reason for allying myself with these people. Most of them will be against everything I believe in, and the few that aren't are too cowered to do anything but go along. In general, they are as responsible as anyone for the mess that this country and our people are in today. If one were to raise the issue of curtailing immigration and enforcing the law against illegal immigration in order to raise employment for native-born Americans, even though building community and helping local people is their main objective, they would be the first to denounce you as a rabid, racist wingnut.

Not that big business in general is a whole lot better, but at least they don't want me to pay extra for the dubious privilege of helping someone who may be local but who is most definitely not on my side.

Why Goldman Sachs Needs to Penetrate the Corridors of Power

Paul Craig Roberts - admittedly not someone whose opinions I would normally consider balanced - believes that "Goldman Sachs has taken over". He thinks that something's off regarding the fact that a German bond auction failed while an Italian one succeeded, and while he may have a point, the real meat of the issue is this:

In my opinion, the failed German bond auction was orchestrated by the US Treasury, by the European Central Bank and EU authorities, and by the private banks that own the troubled sovereign debt.

My opinion is based on the following facts. Goldman Sachs and US banks have guaranteed perhaps one trillion dollars or more of European sovereign debt by selling swaps or insurance against which they have not reserved. The fees the US banks received for guaranteeing the values of European sovereign debt instruments simply went into profits and executive bonuses. This, of course, is what ruined the American insurance giant, AIG, leading to the TARP bailout at US taxpayer expense and Goldman Sachs’ enormous profits.

If any of the European sovereign debt fails, US financial institutions that issued swaps or unfunded guarantees against the debt are on the hook for large sums that they do not have. The reputation of the US financial system probably could not survive its default on the swaps it has issued. Therefore, the failure of European sovereign debt would renew the financial crisis in the US, requiring a new round of bailouts and/or a new round of Federal Reserve “quantitative easing,” that is, the printing of money in order to make good on irresponsible financial instruments, the issue of which enriched a tiny number of executives.

It may be recalled (for those of you who follow this stuff closely, anyway), that the 50% "haircut" on Greek debt that was negotiated was deemed "voluntary"; strange, that, why would it matter? For the reason Roberts avers above: an involuntary haircut on the debt would amount to a "credit event", and thus require the writers of CDSs like Goldman to either put up billions in collateral or actually pay in cash, that is, cash it doesn't have. This is, as Roberts notes, what brought down AIG. Guess no one has learned their lessons there.

Looking around a bit, one can confirm the above. JPMorgan Joins Goldman Keeping Italy Derivatives Risk in Dark (Bloomberg):

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), among the world’s biggest traders of credit derivatives, disclosed to shareholders that they have sold protection on more than $5 trillion of debt globally.

Just don’t ask them how much of that was issued by Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, known as the GIIPS. [Love the PC formulation here: they're usually known as "PIIGS". - ed.]

As concerns mount that those countries may not be creditworthy, investors are being kept in the dark about how much risk U.S. banks face from a default. Firms including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan don’t provide a full picture of potential losses and gains in such a scenario, giving only net numbers or excluding some derivatives altogether.

U.S. Banks Dangerously Exposed to European Markets - Fitch:

U.S. banks are dangerously exposed to a "negative shock" from the spreading Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, Fitch Ratings warned.

Someone remarked that the Eurozone crisis has felt like being run over by a glacier: it just seems to go on and on with no resolution. But a financial shock, which looks increasingly likely, will hit the U.S. hard and would possibly ruin GS and the other banks that have long positions in European sovereign debt. (And writing a CDS amounts to being long.)

Exercise vs. Nutrition in Aging: Lift Those Weights

A perhaps standard view of the relative importance of exercise versus nutrition for overall health and especially in aging is that decent nutrition is important, while exercise may be effectively relegated to the minimal. This view says that, say, going for a walk several times a week may be about all that we need to remain in decent health.

One problem with this view, one that should make us suspicious, is that it's largely a part of the low-fat, cholesterol-causes-heart-disease paradigm, which has been all but completely discredited. Granted, there's a slightly different paradigm, one which recommends low fat and low cholesterol but which also emphasizes lots of exercise, notably running. The paleo paradigm, one to which I subscribe, emphasizes the importance of diet - a diet of real, unprocessed food, generally high-fat and low-carb - but in general doesn't have much to say about exercise (with some exceptions of course).

Consider the following paper: Increased muscle PGC-1alpha expression protects from sarcopenia and metabolic disease during aging. This study found that a mildly increased genetic expression of a key molecule, in mice, protected against mitochondrial dysfunction and metabolic disease in aging. The mechanism ought to be applicable to humans.

Mitochondrial dysfunction plays a key role in aging, so much so that an entire theory of aging has been developed around it. Whether or not mitochondria play a central (i.e. causative)  role in aging, it remains indisputable that their dysfunction accompanies aging and metabolic disease (like diabetes), and that increasing mitochondrial function ameliorates the aging process.

As noted above, increased PGC-1alpha is protective; the main way that one can increase levels of this, and thus to improve mitochondrial function and protect against aging is through exercise.

Consider: Resistance Exercise Reverses Aging in Human Skeletal Muscle. The title is self-explanatory: the study this time involved humans, who reversed aging in their muscles as evidenced by a profile of genetic expression that more closely resembled that of a younger cohort:

Our data strongly supports the concept that mitochondrial dysfunction is associated with aging in humans. The important and novel finding is that resistance exercise training reverses many aspects of the aging transcriptome signature. This implies that a functional improvement in aging muscle due to resistance exercise is associated with a global improvement in the molecular signature of aging particularly for transcripts related to mitochondrial function.

There are a number of lines of evidence supporting the hypothesis that mitochondrial dysfunction is a characteristic of human aging in skeletal muscle[6], [19], [38]. Studies have found lower mitochondrial enzyme activity[38], lower mitochondrial protein synthesis[39], an increase in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) deletions[26], a reduction in mtDNA content[38], and an increase in oxidative stress[27], in skeletal muscle from older adults. Importantly, a strong association has been found between skeletal muscle atrophy and the accumulation of mtDNA mutations and mitochondrial dysfunction in humans[6]. Although various aspects of the “mitochondrial theory of aging” have come under increasing scrutiny in the last several years[40], [41], two recent reports that transgenic animals with a mutation in polymerase γ (mutator mice) show many of the characteristics of human aging[9], [15], suggest that mitochondria may be involved in the pathogenesis of aging.

Resistance exercise = weightlifting.

A practical model of low-volume high-intensity interval training induces mitochondrial biogenesis in human skeletal muscle: potential mechanisms. This study involved sprint cycling, a form of high-intensity training (HIT) - not endurance training.

Epigenetic oxidative redox shift (EORS) theory of aging unifies the free radical and insulin signaling theories.

According to EORS, sedentary behavior associated with age triggers an oxidized redox shift and impaired mitochondrial function. [...]

The low mitochondrial capacity for efficient production of energy reinforces a downward spiral of more sedentary behavior leading to accelerated aging, increased organ failure with stress, impaired immune and vascular functions and brain aging. Several steps in the pathway are amenable to reversal for exit from the vicious cycle of EORS.

The literature in this area is immense, so anyone interested can follow the links and find much more to sate the intellectual appetite. For a number of reasons that I won't get into here, resistance training appears to have much greater benefits than endurance training when it comes to aging and overall health.

The point I want to make is this: while good nutrition is important in that it can lead the body to function optimally and without disease, in a sense it is merely passive. Exercise, most especially in the form of resistance training, actively promotes health as well as retards the aging process. It does this in part through increased mitochondrial biogenesis, with additional effects on insulin signaling.

The well-nigh universal recommendation among the manosphere to get into the gym and lift weights appears to have a solid foundation.

Goldman Sachs Rules the World (?)

If Goldman Sachs doesn't rule the world, at least the firm is doing a grand job of getting its alumni into places of influence, including the premierships of Greece and Italy and the head of the European Central Bank. (Via James Delingpole.)

Now, what could be wrong about former GS players making their way into the seats of power? On its face, it might seem fairly normal that men who have worked at the world's most important investment bank extend their careers into important economic and political positions. An analogous situation might be a Boeing executive going to work for NASA.

But the fact is that these are the same sorts of men who got us into this mess in the first place. A reasonable assumption would be that they're wedded to the status quo and will do everything in their power to keep it going. The first impulse of Hank Paulson, the former Treasury Secretary and former CEO of Goldman, was to bail out the banks.

For you conspiracy theorists out there, the new Italian premier, Mario Monti, is also a member of the Trilateral Commission. Probably just his hobby.

The Odious Gingrich

Newt Gingrich is, astonishingly, leading or nearly so in polls for the Republican nomination. Three items at VDare remind us why the alt right / reactionaries shouldn't even think of considering him a worthwhile nominee.

Peter Bradley, in a column on how Gingrich sabotaged reform of affirmative racism - as Gingrich himself called it at one time - writes:

More than any other person, Newt Gingrich is responsible for the continuation of anti-white racial preferences in America.

And Matthew Richer writes, in Newt Gingrich: The Aspiring Americano President:

The Americano is the bilingual "conservative" webzine that Gingrich founded in 2009. The self-proclaimed purpose is to advance the "Hispanics are conservative Republicans who just don't know it yet" theory—and to provide an outlet for Hispanic identity politics within the Republican Party.

In his opening remarks, Gingrich claimed that it is impossible to deport 11 million illegal immigrants. He also claimed that:

"We have to find policies that extend to every American, and that includes people who are not yet legal . . . In the next five to ten years everyone living and working the United States will be legal." [Video]

Yes, folks, Newt Gingrich really did start a website called The Americano, "a company of Gingrich Communications".

And Patrick Cleburne reminds us that Gingrich is little more - or less - than another corrupt Washington player.

Do we need to add the stuff about Gingrich divorcing his wife while she was in the hospital with cancer?

Why Men Earn More Than Women

The whole story about why men earn more than women would include things like men taking the most dangerous jobs, more willingness on the part of men to work longer hours or to move when required; but it also includes the fact that men do the jobs that are in demand and for which others are unable or unwilling to step up to the plate.

Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary

Methodology Annual pay for Bachelors graduates without higher degrees. Typical starting graduates have 2 years of experience; mid-career have 15 years. See full methodology for more.

Business Insider has a slightly different version:

Here are the lowest paid majors:

Not only are women vastly underrepresented among the engineering jobs and vastly overrepresented among the social psychology and similar jobs, but I'd bet 10-1 that most of the OWS crowd tends to follow the women's representation among these jobs, and not the men's.

IQ Affirmation and Denial in the Times

In Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters, David Hambrick and Elizabeth Meinz, both associate professors of psychology, give the lie to the notion that practice counts for all differences in talent. They assert the commonsensical idea that intelligence - euphemistically described in the headline as "talent" - matters.

Those findings [that differences in musical talent are correlated with hours of practice] have been enthusiastically championed, perhaps because of their meritocratic appeal: what seems to separate the great from the merely good is hard work, not intellectual ability. Summing up Mr. Ericsson’s research in his book “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell observes that practice isn’t “the thing you do once you’re good” but “the thing you do that makes you good.” He adds that intellectual ability — the trait that an I.Q. score reflects — turns out not to be that important. “Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,” he writes, “having additional I.Q. points doesn’t seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.”

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, restates this idea in his book “The Social Animal,” while Geoff Colvin, in his book “Talent Is Overrated,” adds that “I.Q. is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, I.Q. predicts little or nothing about performance.”

The article's authors continue to show that both Gladwell and Brooks have got it wrong - not that they would ever be guilty of deliberate obfuscation, of course.

The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage. [emphasis added]

They also state what should be obvious about confusing correlation with causation in the case of practice.

Not surprisingly, there was a strong positive correlation between [musical] practice habits and sight-reading performance.

Anyone who has ever seen classical music performances will know that at the higher levels, most practitioners - whether conductors or soloists - forgo the use of printed music and play or conduct from memory, something that has always seemed to me a task requiring enormous memory (hence intelligence), especially given the size of the repertory that most of these practitioners know.

Yet Thomas Friedman, the New York Times' very own Candide, doesn't get it: in How About Better Parents?, he notes that children of parents who often read to them have better PISA test scores, and then totally confuses the correlation with causation. Smarter parents - those more likely to read to their children, or read at all - have smarter children, and the latter also possess the parents' genes. I guess you could come to Friedman's conclusion if you are a total denialist of the heritable nature of intelligence.

In a recent thread about IQ, there was a fair amount of skepticism about the relation between intelligence and success, some commenters asserting that in a society as messed-up as our own, it isn't obvious that high IQ got many of those who are on top where they are. But, while getting to the very top may require a lot more that raw intelligence, for example it may require political connections, obeisance to PC, or sitzfleisch, to the extent that the society is technocratic and meritocratic at the same time, IQ will have a high correlation to success, though it may be a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Do What You Love

A post by a venture capitalist, Doing What You Love (via Ilkka) caught my eye because this phrase is a pet peeve of mine. The idea is of course that you should "do what you love" in order to be truly successful. The idea is easily refuted but has a ridiculous tenacity in American popular culture.

It's probably true that people become successful by doing what they love.

But it's also probably true that most people who do what they love don't become successful.

Here's what I think is the actual mechanism of action:

1) Great success comes from doing something original.
2) By definition, the original isn't understood at first.
3) Only people who are doing what they love will persist long enough for the world to catch up.
4) But there's no guarantee that something original will ever be accepted.

So, "doing what you love" is perhaps a necessary but not sufficient cause for becoming very successful. (Although, all those "millionaires next door" who got that way by owning junkyards or apartment buildings would seem to refute the notion that doing what you love is even necessary.)

Why should we care? Because this mantra enchants and fools legions of young people. It's akin to the idea that if you practice 10,000 hours you can be an expert at anything, or that anyone can be president. People who take the mantra seriously - and since the average inhabitant of our benighted land is so uneducated and culturally illiterate that he is unlikely to have the wit and examples at hand to refute it easily - can go on to put a serious dent in their life prospects. I suspect that all those OWS folks who feel entitled to earn a living through puppetry or bachelor's degrees in anthropology are following this script.

The mantra seems part and parcel of American exceptionalism in general. Do what feels good, says modern-day exceptionalism, and there's something so mysteriously wonderful about the United States of America that nothing can go wrong. Do what you love, and you harness the mysterious, universal force of, I don't know, karma, and you can't help but succeed.

The Backlash Against Feminism

Feminists have complained for years of a growing backlash against it. Someone even wrote a book about it, alleging that there is (or was) "an undeclared war against American women". But, now that American feminism has gone from strength to strength and has just about won that war, a phony war to the extent that anyone but feminists ever waged it, the real backlash has begun.

Dalrock lays it all out in a compelling post: 40 years of ultimatums. His belief is that feminists and social conservatives have made a tacit agreement amounting to "you hold him down while I rob him".

The backlash is that men are starting to catch on to the fact that marriage is a bad deal for them. For the purposes of this post, let's set aside the notion that half of all marriages end in divorce, with the subsequent pillage of the man's assets, children, dignity, and happiness, because the argument always comes up that smart, upper middle class types have a low rate of divorce. (Even though we should be concerned about what this does to society, even if we ourselves go through marriage unscathed.)

The real scandal would appear to be that women are encouraged to engage in promiscuous sex before marriage, to put education and career ahead of marriage, and to treat their men like crap, all of these being celebrated by contemporary feminism. As Dalrock shows, many Christian leaders and social conservatives have nothing to say against all of this.

Most conservatives just haven't understood this, mostly in my opinion out of willful ignorance, and we're regularly treated to columns by the likes of Kay Hymowitz and William Bennett telling young men that they need to "man up", do "the right thing", and marry. Conservatives through the years have generally offered only the most token opposition to feminism, said opposition appearing to be nil these days. (This is one factor in the emergence of an alternative right.)

Factor in divorce rape of men, the huge number of overweight women, the declining earnings opportunity of men, the sexually used nature of many women of marriageable age, and you've got men losing interest, despite the fact that surveys report that men actually want and value marriage more than women.

Low Conscientiousness

Bryan Caplan (via Foseti) writes:

Right-wingers should spend a lot more time reading left-wing ethnography of the poor. It may seem strange, but when leftist social scientists actually talk to and observe the poor, they confirm the stereotypes of the harshest Victorian. Poverty isn't about money; it's a state of mind. That state of mind is low conscientiousness.

And low IQ, but the two seem to go together.

Here's a quote from the book Caplan links to, called Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage:

Conflicts over money do not usually erupt simply because the man cannot find a job or because he doesn't earn as much as someone with better skills or education. Money usually becomes an issue because he seems unwilling to keep at a job for any length of time, usually because of issues related to respect. Some of the jobs he can get don't pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss.

Actually, left-wingers (like Caplan) ought to spend more time reading ethnography written by right-wingers, since they figured all this out a long time ago. The above quote about why men won't take or keep certain jobs shows the underclass in all its glory, with all the talk of "respect". Although on average most jobs come with an equal dose of respect - in fact, those employed in higher paid jobs seem more likely to be disrespected, because performance is expected (phrase not culled from Jesse Jackson) - men employed in lower paid jobs will be more likely to have a hair trigger on their disrespect-detecting mechanisms.

In any case, left-wing ethnographers, assuming that it's correct to say that they blame low conscientiousness for the poverty of their subjects, almost always go on to blame someone or something else for the situation. They absolve their subjects of responsibility by blaming "structural racism", for instance, or "lack of opportunity".

Leftist anthropologists and ethnographers are only reinventing the wheel when they blame poverty on low conscientiousness. Conservatives and reactionaries have long since had this covered.

More Flag-Flying Controversy

Pretty self-explanatory: some so-called Brits have about zero loyalty to their country. (HT: VDare.)

Small correction: the councilor toward the end who threatened to resign if the flag wasn't flown said that "this is a great country". "Was". No offense intended to any Brits who are reading, for the same could be said about my own country.

Schools may censor display of American flag

Not Safe to Display an American Flag in an American High School. A federal judge ruled that a school in California was within its rights to ban the display of the American flag because Mexican-"Americans" threatened the bearers of the flag with violence. If you read the description of the facts from the above link at the Volokh Conspiracy, it's clear that many of the Mexican students feel that the Mexican flag is "their" flag, and that display of the American flag is "racist".

One has to congratulate these Mexican students for their perspicacious grasp of the zeitgeist. No education gap for them; they've picked up a solid understanding of the world around them. And now a judge has backed them up.

It would be interesting to consider the consequences of, say, Americans in a Mexican school - in Mexico that is - demanding that the Mexican flag be banned as racist. Or consider if the students threatened with violence were gay, or black. I rather doubt that the outcome would have been the same; no, the school would have gone all out in the protection of their rights.

At least the students who wanted to display the American flag will now be disabused of any idea that the American nation will back them up.

Penn State Scandal Widens

Can Penn State scandal get even worse?

The Penn State scandal is tragic, clearly, but rumors are it may get even worse.

Pittsburgh radio host Mark Madden dropped two potential bombshells in an interview Thursday morning, just hours after longtime Penn State coach Joe Paterno was fired and angry football fans rioted.

Madden said:

* Former assistant Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky was forced by Penn State to retire in 1999 in exchange for a university coverup of his actions with underage boys.

* Rumors are being investigated that Sandusky and Second Mile, a non-profit Sandusky founded in 1977 to help children, was pimping young boys to wealthy donors.

Madden, who has covered the Sandusky story for more than a decade, made his comments on “The Dennis and Callahan Show” when the hosts asked what the next development in the story would be.

Sandusky rumored to have pimped out young boys to wealthy donors. Can this story get any better (worse)?

Now that Coach Paterno - "the winningest coach in major college football" - has been fired, along with the athletic director and the college president, Penn State could face $100 million in civil damages, although it seems to me that given the breadth and shocking nature of the scandal, sympathetic juries might be inclined to award even more than that.

Showing how seriously some people take their football, Penn State students have rioted over the loss of Coach Paterno, and the graduate assistant who originally reported seeing Sandusky abusing a boy has been threatened.

It's also been noted that the prosecutor who originally looked into the case has been missing since 2005 and is presumed dead.

As they say on the internet: Wow. Just wow.

All of this occurred for one or several of at least three reasons: a) everyone involved valued their football more than they valued reporting a homosexual pedophile to the police, and b) those involved thought that they might be accused of "homophobia" for reporting the crime, or c) Sandusky was such a powerful figure that some involved here, for instance the grad assistant, thought they would be canned for reporting the incident. Regarding this last, why else would the grad assistant not go immediately to the police, instead of this presumably macho football dude doing such pansy behavior as calling his father and wondering what to do?

All of this for... football. As attested by the behavior of almost everyone involved, including thousands of Penn State students, they value a game more than they do the shattered lives of young boys.

Is it any wonder that the country is going to hell? T. Boone Pickens has donated almost $500 million of his fortune to Oklahoma State, mainly for its football program. Football earned Penn State over $50 million a year.

Our priorities are seriously screwed up.

Update: Penn State puts assistant coach "on leave", i.e. he was canned. This is the man who originally witnessed Sandusky having at it in the showers with a ten-year-old boy. 1. You can see from the photo that he is a big dude, probably a football player at one time himself, and he could have easily handled the situation when he first saw it, but chose not to do so. 2. A reasonable inference is that he went to his father instead of calling the police because he was afraid that he wouldn't get that prized career as a Penn State coach that he was angling for. Corruption for the sake of greed, money, and a game, as far you can see.

Journalists' IQ Problem?

Charles Murray says that maybe it's journalists who have the IQ problem (HT: G.L. Piggy).

A few days ago, the Washington Post ran an article on the “gifted gap” whereby white students in gifted programs around Washington are highly overrepresented. It was an unremarkable article—gifted programs throughout the country are overrepresented with whites, East Asians, Southeast Asians, and South Asians. But toward the end of the article came this remarkable sentence:

In nearly every local system, white students are disproportionately represented, even though most gifted programs explicitly target students with natural talents and aptitude, which are spread evenly across racial groups and social classes.

Ignore the assertion about racial groups. I am told that disputing that assertion can get one into trouble. Just think about the assertion that natural talents and aptitudes are evenly spread across social classes.

Murray goes on to say that there are only two possible ways that the WaPo writer's assertion could be true: if parents never passed on traits that make for success to their children; or if a totalitarian society ensured that ability had no relation to success.

Murray doesn't say so, but the writer's assertion typifies the thinking and/or propaganda of the liberal elite. If one takes the assertion in good faith, it means that the writer believes that education - and presumably the rest of the system - is incorrigibly racist, for there could be no other reason than racism, whether overt or "structural", for the racial disparity in gifted education programs. This implies that the education system, arguably the most liberal sphere in public life today, just can't help its racist self when it comes to choosing who should be in a gifted program.

The other possibility is that the assertion is offered in bad faith, the writer knowing that it couldn't possibly be true, but she just wants to stick it to white Americans one more time. Knowing how PC works, she knows that hardly anyone her side of Charles Murray will dare to dispute it.

There is actually a third possibility, namely that the writer knows the truth, is too afraid to say so, and felt that she (I presume) had to put that in to satisfy the PC gods.

Latest Cain Woman a Serial Accuser

AP Exclusive: Accuser filed complaint in next job

Is it any wonder that corporations want to offshore as much work as possible? One great advantage of the developing world economy is that it doesn't give succor to these kinds of shakedown artists.

The Cain brouhaha nicely illustrates the definition of sexual harassment: a sexual advance from an unattractive man. Attractive men's sexual overtures we strangely never hear much about, because they're accepted by the object of the overture.

The fact is that sexual harassment law has become just another way for an army of lawyers and women - not mutually exclusive - to obtain protection money from wealthy individuals and businesses. These entities appear most of the time to settle out of court, rather than pay the exorbitant costs of defending themselves or risk the enormous damages arising out of a conviction by a female-majority jury.

Laws against such things as sexual battery already exist, and the crime isn't lightly punished. Yet the feminists have created an entirely new category of law that holds hostage any business and any male employee. Furthermore, any manager that abuses his position, for example in demanding a sexual quid pro quo, should be answerable to his own company management or shareholders, for his crime in reality resembles a kickback.

The current Cain mania also shows the power of PC: the debate centers around whether Cain really did any of the things he's accused of, rather than whether the charges are ridiculous in themselves.

Penn State Lesson

So, some football coach at some football power school got arrested for sexually abusing young boys. In all the media hubbub, I haven't seen any mention at all that the arrested man is in a normally celebrated category: gay.

I'm not sure what lessons our illustrious media will draw from this incident, but there seems a really obvious one to me, one that will studiously avoid being drawn by the good and great.

It's probably a mistake to allow homosexuals to get anywhere near kids.

This Just In: Science and Math Are Difficult

The New York Times' number one most-emailed article, Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard), discusses the huge dropout rate in STEM (science, technology, mathematics, engineering) college majors and what to do about it.

Politicians and educators have been wringing their hands for years over test scores showing American students falling behind their counterparts in Slovenia and Singapore. How will the United States stack up against global rivals in innovation? The president and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math. All the Sputnik-like urgency has put classrooms from kindergarten through 12th grade — the pipeline, as they call it — under a microscope. And there are encouraging signs, with surveys showing the number of college freshmen interested in majoring in a STEM field on the rise.

But, it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors. [my emphasis]

I'd wager that the high dropout rate from STEM majors might just be connected to the encouragement of unqualified students to enter these fields as well as the encouragement of more and more people to go to get a higher education in general. Another good reason for the dropout rate could be due to a perfectly rational reason on the part of students: many of these fields, especially in pure science, pay abysmally, even assuming that one can do science with merely a bachelor's degree, which is rarely the case.

Massive levels of H1-B visas have all but ethnically cleansed Americans from certain fields, notably computer programming, and certain people are still unsatisfied that Americans continue to be represented in technical fields at all, couching their support in terms of Americans being too dumb to work in them and too lazy to start their own businesses.

This chart came from an article by Steve Sailer in which he broke down PISA reading scores by ethnicity. (As he says, the PISA science scores by ethnicity appear to be a state secret.) If the reading scores are correlated to any large degree with the science scores, and there's no reason to believe that they aren't, then white and Asian Americans are doing just fine.

If the government would just stop interfering, the number of unqualified students going into these fields ought to drop of its own accord, and the number of qualified would rise.

Also, encouraging women to enter these fields might not be a good idea either. (PS: Last link courtesy of Malcolm Pollack.)

America to Remain on Top?

In The Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes that "world power swings back to America":

The American phoenix is slowly rising again. Within five years or so, the US will be well on its way to self-sufficiency in fuel and energy. Manufacturing will have closed the labour gap with China in a clutch of key industries. The current account might even be in surplus.

Assumptions that the Great Republic must inevitably spiral into economic and strategic decline - so like the chatter of the late 1980s, when Japan was in vogue - will seem wildly off the mark by then.

Telegraph readers already know about the "shale gas revolution" that has turned America into the world’s number one producer of natural gas, ahead of Russia.

Less known is that the technology of hydraulic fracturing - breaking rocks with jets of water - will also bring a quantum leap in shale oil supply, mostly from the Bakken fields in North Dakota, Eagle Ford in Texas, and other reserves across the Mid-West.

"The US was the single largest contributor to global oil supply growth last year, with a net 395,000 barrels per day (b/d)," said Francisco Blanch from Bank of America, comparing the Dakota fields to a new North Sea.

Total US shale output is "set to expand dramatically" as fresh sources come on stream, possibly reaching 5.5m b/d by mid-decade. This is a tenfold rise since 2009.

There's more including rising costs in China causing manufacturing to move back here, a higher American fertility rate compared to the rest of the world, and the "circus" of the European Union.

I think that Evans-Pritchard may have a point. While the U.S. has certainly seen better days, in comparison to much of the rest of the world, things don't seem all that bad, so relatively speaking, we could remain on top. And I am in agreement with him that the energy situation in this country is looking better all the time: we appear to have up to 100 years worth of natural gas in the ground, if only the environmentalists will let us get it.

Then we have wild cards like cold fusion, for which, on the other hand, great skepticism is in order, I believe, though some of those in the know aren't so skeptical. (Rossi, the promoter, apparently has a Ph.D. from a diploma mill.) If that were to work out in a big way, it could be goodbye for Saudi Arabia and much of the Middle east, though doubtless on a longer time frame than the next five years.

So this gives some reinforcement to my thought that the future won't be so grim as some think. We will almost surely continue our long decline, but the key word there is "long". Japanese bond yields have been declining for decades - the short Japanese bond trade has become known as "the widow maker" - and the same could happen for U.S. treasuries, which are in a 30-year bull market with no sign of stopping. (They beat the S&P 500 over that time.)

I'm not making a prediction, I'm only saying that predicting the future is hard, very few get it right, and more surprises will be in store.

A huge possible downside to a resurgent America is that politicians will be remain reluctant to enact needed reforms, and the immigration disaster will continue.

ADL Denounces Buchanan

Literally: ADL Denounces Pat Buchanan's Bigoted Views In Recent Book; Urges MSNBC To Reconsider His Role With The Network

New York, NY, November 2, 2011 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) voiced grave concern today that Pat Buchanan, a political analyst for MSNBC, continues to openly express anti-Semitic, racist and anti-immigrant views.

In his new book, Suicide of a Superpower, Buchanan reiterates many of his bigoted views, which are nearly identical to those of self-declared "white nationalists." Some of his outrageous claims include blaming the downfall of the U.S. on "racial diversity" and attributing the decrease in the Jewish population to a "collective decision" to have abortions. Buchanan recently appeared on The Political Cesspool radio show, which is run by white supremacist James Edwards, to promote his new book. It was his third appearance on the show.

The really interesting thing here is that the ADL doesn't even bother to dispute any of Buchanan's claims or statements; they merely say that his views are "outrageous" and "bigoted". For instance, the ADL doesn't bother to dispute whether or not "the downfall of the U.S." is or is not taking place, or has or hasn't occurred. Does the ADL think that everything is hunky dory and that we shouldn't bother to look for solutions to our problems, or do they believe that "diversity" couldn't possibly be (at least in part) responsible for our current situation? If diversity couldn't possibly be responsible, why not? Inquiring minds want to know. Why is it bigoted to point this out?

"Buchanan has shown himself, time and again, to be a racist and an anti-Semite," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "It is especially disturbing that he continues to be given a platform to espouse his views at a mainstream network like MSNBC, where he is presented as a knowledgeable and respected analyst. Buchanan continues to show his true colors by espousing hateful, bigoted statements in his new book."

Again, content-free denunciations from Foxman, who calls for Buchanan to be fired.

I could quote more from the ADL, but it's just more of the same, with nothing in it whatsoever to refute any of Buchanan's statements of alleged facts, and really nothing to explain why his views are bigoted. It's just supposed to be self-evident.

On this same topic, James Edwards writes (in words I can't improve upon):

This is the double standard that never ceases to amaze me. When European Americans attempt to speak out on their own behalf, they are shouted down as “Nazis,” “racists,” “bigots,” or worse. However, when minorities do the exact same thing, it’s not only allowed, but celebrated.

Am I missing something here?

I certainly don’t wish any misfortune upon minorities, as the media so often likes to pretend. Nothing could be further from the truth. But, what is love if not loving your own family a little bit more than everyone else? I’m naturally going to want to gravitate toward the folks who share my history, culture, heroes, and faith, just as the minorities do. Isn’t it perfectly normal to want to preserve and protect your cultural heritage? Why are whites denied this God given right? Why are we subjected to malicious name-calling for seeking a level playing field?

Record Number of Americans on Government Benefits

Americans ‘Hooked on Government’ as Record Number Get Benefits

Oct. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Political dysfunction is often blamed for Congress’s inability to curb the U.S. budget deficit. An even bigger obstacle may be the American public.

A record 49 percent of Americans live in a household where someone receives at least one type of government benefit, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And 63 percent of all federal spending this year will consist of checks written to individuals for which the government receives currently no services, the White House budget office estimates. That’s up from 46 percent in 1975 and 18 percent in 1940.

Those figures will climb in coming years. The 75 million baby boomers have only begun their long march into retirement, while President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul will extend insurance coverage to more than 30 million additional people. [...]

The number of Americans receiving food stamps alone is up 72 percent over the past five years, to a record 45.3 million. Their annual cost, projected this year to reach $80 billion, tops the yearly budgets of most federal agencies.

This speaks to a point that's come up here recently: the extent to which a fraction of the population actively - or at least as actively as food stamp recipients ever get - support elite policies. The Democratic Party, to which the majority of the elite belong, want to extend the government's reach over just about everything, as well as to increase benefits so as to get more votes. (Not saying that the Republicans are a whole lot better.) So naturally, those on benefits will tend to support elite policies at least in this area.

Same goes for immigration. To the extent that the recipients of government bennies are non-white, or themselves immigrants, they will see the current immigration regime as one they support. This does presuppose, however, that they see a common interest in policies that are to the detriment of the white and/or native population, since, say, a Somali living ion the U.S. wouldn't seem to have any great interest in amnesty for Mexican illegals. But, if the benefits recipients perceive that more and more non-whites / immigrants will keep the pressure on to keep the benefits flowing, they will be for it. Although all of the above presupposes that the recipients actually take an interest in politics beyond what they can get in cash, which is perhaps doubtful.

A common meme lately at rightist blogs is that the money is going to stop flowing at some point, and then we'll have a real crisis on our hands, as those cut off from government goodies riot, commit street crime, etc. Then comes a crackdown, then civil strife, and so on. I doubt it. Unless someone like Ron Paul were to become president, or ardent libertarians take over Congress, the current policy of money printing to finance massive government spending, including that of entitlements, will continue. Since the money can't possibly be raised through taxation, it will still come out of the pockets of the productive, saving class through debasement of the currency. TPTB will see the continuance of benefits (as well as lucrative government jobs) to be as necessary for the nation's political health as they see supporting the banks to be necessary for its financial health. Never mind that they're wrong.