Mangan's

Liberals Rediscover IQ

2012-01-27T10:25:00.000-08:00

Whenever the subject of intelligence testing comes up, especially in the context of racial and ethnic differences in intelligence, or disparate outcomes in education, liberals can always be counted upon for their skepticism towards the entire subject of IQ testing. They will usually claim that the tests are either biased or don't measure anything real - as in "IQ measures the ability to take an IQ test". This is of course ironic, since individual differences in intelligence as measured by IQ testing is the most established and robust finding of modern psychometrics, and liberals constantly proclaim their devotion to science, only inbred conservatives being opposed to scientific findings.

But liberals become IQ believers when something like this happens: Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice.

Some of the quotes from the article show how a study like this operates. For instance:

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority."

I guess smart liberals believe that a mother working outside the home full-time couldn't possibly have any downside for family life, and that their indoctrination of schoolkids in things like environmentalism, global warming, and the essential evilness of America's past don't constitute teaching children to obey their authority.

The essential point to make here is that the average Democratic Party member is very likely not as intelligent as the average Republican, since the Democratic Party contains more minorities, who on average score lower on IQ tests than whites. But once you point out something like that, liberals go into IQ denial.

Supply and Demand, II

2012-01-26T10:55:00.000-08:00

The Feds Had Better Stop Alabama…Before Everyone There Has a Job!

Oh no! It’s happened again. Alabama’s unemployment rate continues to plummet.

Ever since Alabama began implementing its immigration enforcement law, H.B. 56, in late September, the state’s unemployment rate has been dropping like a stone. In just the first month the law was in effect, unemployment in Alabama shrank from 9.8 percent of the workforce to 9.3 percent. And now the latest figures are in…and the news couldn’t be worse (for the Obama administration, the illegal alien lobby, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that is): Alabama’s unemployment rate checked in at 8.1 percent in December. That’s more than a 17 percent reduction since September.

This shows just how easy it could be to put a major dent in the country's unemployment problem. But the current administration appears to be much more interested in race-replacing native-born Americans than in actually doing something about jobs.

Obama's egregiously ridiculous veto of the Keystone pipeline - at the behest of George Soros and Warren Buffett, perhaps - also shows that jobs just aren't very important to our elite. Right now the lowest unemployment rate in the country is had by North Dakota, due to the oil and gas drilling that that benighted state has encouraged.

Supply and Demand

2012-01-25T11:09:00.000-08:00

The inimitable Thomas Friedman has the number one most read article at the NY Times today, Average Is Over; in it he discusses some structural reasons for high unemployment. Such reasons include cheap, hardworking Chinese tech labor, as well as ever-increasing automation and advances in technology. At the end, he pushes the solution he always gravitates toward, more education.

In a world where average is officially over, there are many things we need to do to buttress employment, but nothing would be more important than passing some kind of G.I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education.

"Nothing would be more important" than sending every American, qualified or not, to college, in a never-ending arms race of more education, with Americans scurrying along to compete against the Chinese and each other.

Oh, and with around 1 million legal immigrants a year, and plenty of illegal immigrants too. It's almost as if Friedman and other allegedly economically literate folks have never heard of supply and... what's the other one?.. yes, that's it, demand! (Thanks to Martin B. for that idea.)

But, no, mustn't ever mention the immigration-driven unemployment of Americans. That would be to, I don't know, question diversity, or worse, to question whether immigration could possibly have any downside whatsoever. I mean, immigration can't possibly have any opportunity cost, any impact of social trust or the welfare rolls, or the current record-high unemployment rate. No, immigration is a pure, unalloyed good, which is why Friedman can so easily forgo any mention of it in a discussion of factors that affect unemployment.

So, we must continue to blow up the education bubble, which has the added bonus of higher employment for the diversitycrats and all those others who take Thomas Friedman seriously.

Would That Be So Bad?

2012-01-23T07:27:00.000-08:00

In The New Republic, Robert Kagan writes on "the myth of American decline". The myth of decline, according to Kagan, rests on two pillars; one is the wake of the financial crisis, which has left the U.S. in an enduring economic rut, and the other is an alleged decrease in military power relative to the rest of the world. Kagan avers that both of these are mistaken.

In economic terms, and even despite the current years of recession and slow growth, America’s position in the world has not changed. Its share of the world’s GDP has held remarkably steady, not only over the past decade but over the past four decades. In 1969, the United States produced roughly a quarter of the world’s economic output. Today it still produces roughly a quarter, and it remains not only the largest but also the richest economy in the world. [...]

Here [in "military hegemony"] the United States remains unmatched. It is far and away the most powerful nation the world has ever known, and there has been no decline in America’s relative military capacity—at least not yet. Americans currently spend less than $600 billion a year on defense, more than the rest of the other great powers combined. (This figure does not include the deployment in Iraq, which is ending, or the combat forces in Afghanistan, which are likely to diminish steadily over the next couple of years.) They do so, moreover, while consuming a little less than 4 percent of GDP annually—a higher percentage than the other great powers, but in historical terms lower than the 10 percent of GDP that the United States spent on defense in the mid-1950s and the 7 percent it spent in the late 1980s. The superior expenditures underestimate America’s actual superiority in military capability. American land and air forces are equipped with the most advanced weaponry, and are the most experienced in actual combat. They would defeat any competitor in a head-to-head battle. American naval power remains predominant in every region of the world.

With regard to the ongoing economic / financial crisis, many economic critics claim - and I agree - that FedGov is playing a game of "extend and pretend" by printing money, that many of our biggest banks, as well as those in Europe, are for all intents and purposes insolvent, and that all this will not end well. Nevertheless, Kagan's point that relatively we are still on top, and my point that economic forecasting is notoriously difficult - not even economists can do it consistently right - are worth keeping in mind. The future isn't certain, at least in the short term.

Kagan also argues that the U.S. is not "overstretched" militarily, and that we can easily afford our military expenses. Here lies Kagan's real concern: the projection of power abroad. He takes it as a given that this is necessary.

But here's why Kagan doesn't wish Americans to take seriously the idea of decline:

BUT THERE IS a danger. It is that in the meantime, while the nation continues to struggle, Americans may convince themselves that decline is indeed inevitable, or that the United States can take a time-out from its global responsibilities while it gets its own house in order. To many Americans, accepting decline may provide a welcome escape from the moral and material burdens that have weighed on them since World War II. Many may unconsciously yearn to return to the way things were in 1900, when the United States was rich, powerful, and not responsible for world order. [emphasis added]

See, the funny thing is, is that a nation should be run for the benefit of its citizens. So, at least, one would think. Would it really be so bad if we ceased to be the world's policeman, i.e. we had "a welcome escape from our [alleged] moral and material burdens"? For whose benefit are these burdens anyway? More Americans are cottoning to the notion that, insofar as it affects them, they carry all the burden while the elite who run the country gain the benefits.

Would it be so bad if we returned to a situation in which "the United States was rich, powerful, and not responsible for world order"? But to do that would mean abandoning much of the elite project, that is, halting quasi-genocidal levels of immigration, halting the export of the manufacturing base as well as other jobs, and putting an end to the endless, purposeless, foreign wars. It would mean a nation whose purpose was aligned with its people.

The Great Class Divide

2012-01-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

Charles Murray has an article in the WSJ called The New American Divide, which outlines the theme of an emergent cultural shift among white Americans, from his much-discussed new book. After an exposition of the characteristics of the new divide, such as in rates of marriage, illegitimacy, workforce participation, and crime, Murray elaborates on some of the reasons for its emergence.

Why have these new lower and upper classes emerged? For explaining the formation of the new lower class, the easy explanations from the left don't withstand scrutiny. It's not that white working class males can no longer make a "family wage" that enables them to marry. The average male employed in a working-class occupation earned as much in 2010 as he did in 1960. It's not that a bad job market led discouraged men to drop out of the labor force. Labor-force dropout increased just as fast during the boom years of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s as it did during bad years.

As I've argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.

But, for practical purposes, understanding why the new lower class got started isn't especially important. Once the deterioration was under way, a self-reinforcing loop took hold as traditionally powerful social norms broke down. Because the process has become self-reinforcing, repealing the reforms of the 1960s (something that's not going to happen) would change the trends slowly at best.

Meanwhile, the formation of the new upper class has been driven by forces that are nobody's fault and resist manipulation. The economic value of brains in the marketplace will continue to increase no matter what, and the most successful of each generation will tend to marry each other no matter what. As a result, the most successful Americans will continue to trend toward consolidation and isolation as a class. Changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy won't make a difference. Increasing scholarships for working-class children won't make a difference.

It's all a matter of incentives. While lower class people may have - on average! - lower IQs, higher time preference, greater impulsivity, and the like, they, like people everywhere, act in their own self-interest. If it's just as easy to remain outside the workforce as inside it, or as easy to have a child without a pesky husband around, then people will do these things.

One area where I would disagree with Murray is when he writes that the "average male employed in a working-class occupation earned as much in 2010 as he did in 1960." While from a strictly numbers-based standpoint that may be true (I haven't looked up the figures), reality says otherwise. The "reforms" of the 1960s included immigration "reform", and besides that we've had massive illegal immigration as well. Before the 60s, a working-class salary would have sufficed for one to raise a family in a low-crime, white neighborhood with good public schools. Today, not so much. The numbers don't properly reflect the reality.

Another aspect of work now is its uncertainty. Whereas the working stiff pre-60s could reasonably expect to work nearly a lifetime at a decent, possibly union, job, today that worker faces a shifting work environment that could result in a layoff at any time. This will also cause men to be wary of launching into the enterprise of starting a family and working hard toward it.

And then there's no-fault divorce. The upper classes don't worry as much about this because upper-class women are more inclined to have the sort of values that make them stick around and care for their families. Even if awareness of divorce theft is only now dawning on the average man, subconsciously many men must realize that the odds of keeping one's family intact have dropped considerably. That's another impact on incentives.

I'm old enough to remember when cohabitation was very much frowned upon, and I still have the attitude that it's something a decent person - especially a woman - doesn't do. But there don't seem to be too many like me left. Even people older than myself accept it. This touches upon another reason for the social changes Murray describes: the older generation has abdicated some of their moral responsibility, and society as a whole no longer believes in expressing disapproval or shaming the objects of that disapproval.

Hollywood Wants to Kill the Internet

2012-01-19T11:22:00.000-08:00

It's been widely thought that Congress wanted to enact the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in a fit of absence of mind. Supposedly, the "moronic" Congress didn't really know what it was doing until the various online strikes, such as by Wikipedia, forcibly brought the seriousness of the matter to its attention. But it appears that Hollywood, i.e. money, has been behind much of the impetus toward passing the legislation. Big Hollywood:

But Hollywood moguls … took this as a declaration of war. “We just feel very let down by the administration and Obama for not supporting us,” one chief explained to me. “At least let him remain neutral and not go against it until we can get the legislation right. But Obama went against it. I’m personally not going to support him anymore and not give a dime anymore,” one movie mogul who’s also a well-known Obama supporter told me this week….

Several moguls have informed Obama’s newly anointed Hollywood re-election liason to the entertainment community Nicole Avant and her husband who is helping her, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos, that they are pulling out of major fundraisers planned over the next few days and won’t participate in any more headed by Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (whom they see as in the pocket of the Internet giants like Google).

Hollywood wants to kill the internet, or at least to kill any website that doesn't meet with its full approval.

As usual, this isn't a case of stupidity or cluelessness, but of Who? Whom? A group of moguls with money are trying to kill the internet. While that attempt seems thwarted for now, we won't be hearing the last from them or from others with vested interests.

Top Contributors to Romney and Paul - updated

2012-01-16T11:21:00.000-08:00

Via OpenSecrets.org, here are the top financial contributors to the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney. (In the interest of brevity, I list only the top ten. OpenSecrets emphasizes that these contributions are not from the organizations themselves, but from employees, their family members, and the organizations' PACs - though why the last one doesn't count as coming from the organizations themselves is beyond me.)

Goldman Sachs	$367,200
Credit Suisse Group	$203,750
Morgan Stanley	$199,800
HIG Capital	$186,500
Barclays	$157,750
Kirkland & Ellis	$132,100
Bank of America	$126,500
PriceWaterhouseCoopers	$118,250
EMC Corp	$117,300
JPMorgan Chase & Co	$112,250

So, Romney's contributors come from the usual suspects, namely those people and groups that would like to hold on to the American financial status quo. I think that these contributors are wholly correct that Romney would be their best president, although Obama might be even better.

Out of curiosity, I looked at the contributor list for Ron Paul. Here's the top ten.

US Army	$24,503
US Air Force	$23,335
US Navy	$17,432
Mason Capital Management	$14,000
Microsoft Corp	$13,398
Boeing Co	$10,620
Google Inc	$10,390
Overland Sheepskin	$10,350
IBM Corp	$8,294
US Government	$7,756

PS: Here's something also worth noting: in Iowa and New Hampshire, half of the votes cast by those under 30 years of age went to Ron Paul. Half. Normally I wouldn't put much emphasis on votes from the young and callow, but I think it shows that younger people have little interest in keeping things the way they are. They know that Social Security is a gigantic Ponzi scheme which they're unlikely to collect on - but will pay for - and probably don't see endless foreign wars to be in their own interest. Among other things.

Fear and Loathing in San Clemente

2012-01-14T10:11:00.000-08:00

Whenever we're treated to reports of racist hate crimes directed against whites, the media still likes to caution that a "backlash" may be coming, as if the worst thing about whites getting killed or getting the sh*t kicked out of them is that some other whites might react. (They never do.) That mindset is hard at work in San Clemente, California: Brutal Attack Spurs Worries of Racial Backlash:

Amid rumblings of possible racial overtones to a Jan. 6 street brawl that left two men injured and one in a coma, a county group is urging calm and unity.

"This is not a brown-white issue," said Rusty Kennedy, executive director of OC Human Relations, which works to prevent racial violence and foster ethnic understanding and tolerance. "It's an issue of violent gangsters."

Three Hispanic men -- including two allegedly affiliated with the Varrio Chico criminal gang in San Clemente -- have been charged with attempted murder and assault for allegedly beating three white men, one of whom was fighting for his life late Tuesday after being bashed in the head with a brick.

The motives behind the attack remain unclear, but racially charged rumblings in some parts of the white community have already begun in comments posted on Patch and other media outlets. Some in the city's Hispanic community--many of whom are proud of their civic involvement and efforts to stop gang crime over the last few years--fear a possible backlash.

It's too bad that those members of "the city's Hispanic community" aren't a little more concerned with stopping brutal gang violence emanating from said community. As it stands, the city's white community is getting a warning here: don't you dare even think about doing anything, just sit back and take it like you always do.

Interestingly, some comments at the original article reporting the attack display a working knowledge of the concept of anarcho-tyranny. To wit:

The cops are out busting tourist for letting their parking meters run out and harassing locals for posting garage sale signs while gangs beat up our children, illegals loiter rite aid with not an inkling of fear and jerks rob our banks. Good job guys!

One might also say that the warning against a "backlash" illustrates the dictum that anti-racist means anti-white. Since the alleged concern in the article and among the Hispanic community is to "foster ethnic understanding", that is, anti-racism, but only whites are being both attacked and warned against a backlash, the whole setup is objectively anti-white.

To make my own position clear, I'm not calling for a backlash; what I'm calling for is for the police to do their job, and for the government to enforce the immigration laws. But I fear it's too late for San Clemente.

And by the way, San Clemente is a surfing mecca and an idyllic beach city. Or at least it was.

Path to National Suicide

2012-01-12T12:05:00.000-08:00

Whatever that path might be and whoever is taking it, at least in one respect Israel is not: Israel upholds citizenship bar for Palestinian spouses (link thanks to eh):

Israel's Supreme Court has upheld a law banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship.

Civil rights groups had petitioned the court to overturn the law, saying it was unconstitutional.

"Human rights do not prescribe national suicide," Judge Asher Grunis wrote in the judgement. [emphasis added]

Note that, considering this issue, Judge Grunis appears to be sound on what exactly constitutes a nation, that is, it consists of a people, not anyone who can manage to get to a physical location.

In other developments, Israel is pulling out all the stops in its effort to deport illegal immigrants. The efforts include what we here stateside might call racial profiling. Prime Minister Netanyahu supports the new laws, and he's characterized the influx of non-Jewish immigrants as an existential threat to Israel. He's an intelligent man - supposedly with an IQ of 180, making him perhaps the smartest world leader since Frederick the Great - but the key point is that he appears to be allowed to say things like that because of the absence of certain restraints. While there are indeed people in Israel who want the country to refrain from expelling the illegals, another, perhaps widespread attitude is the following:

"Go to south Tel Aviv and you'll see people there living in fear," Cohen said. "Anyone who wants to steal a wallet from a person, or a box of goods from a store or a bike from a private garden just does whatever he wants. If we don't put an end to this, the issue will not stop."

One wonders also whether Israel got serious on this issue because the new arrivals are Africans.

The mainstream media in the US doesn't even consider the maintenance of our historical population a fit topic for national discussion, yet in Israel they're not only discussing it but doing something about it.

(PS: Comments will be moderated for awhile.)
(PPS: That's over. Comment at will.)

Buchanan Off MSNBC

2012-01-09T11:22:00.000-08:00

Patrick Cleburne asks whether Pat Buchanan has been "cornered at last", having gone missing from his regular MSNBC post as a commentator and being dissed by the head of that network.

“During the period of the book tour I asked him not to be on,” Mr. Griffin said. “Since then the issue has become the nature of some of the statements in the book.”
Mr. Buchanan argues in “Suicide of a Superpower” — which has the subtitle “Will America Survive to 2025?” — that the “European and Christian core of our country is shrinking,” which is damaging the nation “ethnically, culturally, morally, politically.” The book also contains a chapter titled, “The End of White America.”

Mr. Griffin said, “The ideas he put forth aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC.”

I'm afraid that Mr. Griffin is correct; this particular instance isn't a matter of this network, which after all bills itself as liberal, not wanting Buchanan's commentary, but a matter of PC becoming so intense that views that were mainstream not so long ago are now no longer a matter for discussion and are considered hateful. As evidence for that assertion, I adduce the fact that no other network appears to want Buchanan - though that may change of course. Buchanan is a former, fairly successful presidential candidate, former White House staffer and speechwriter, so one might think off the top of one's head that he might be in demand on television. In other words he's not just another bloviator, of which TV has more than its share these days. (Actually, since I don't watch it, that could be incorrect, but last I checked that was true and one of the reasons I don't watch it.)

So, being concerned about "the European and Christian core" of the USA is off the table as a matter for debate. Seems as if none of the presidential candidates will mention this either; most of them don't even dare to say much about immigration.

Did Fukushima Cause American Deaths?

2012-01-08T10:34:00.000-08:00

A paper (pdf), An Unexpected Mortality Increase in the United States Follows Arrival of the Radioactive Plume from Fukushima: Is There a Correlation?, argues that there have been "excess deaths" in the U.S. that may have been caused by the nuclear accident in Japan. The abstract:

The multiple nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima plants beginning on
March 11, 2011, are releasing large amounts of airborne radioactivity that has
spread throughout Japan and to other nations; thus, studies of contamination
and health hazards are merited. In the United States, Fukushima fallout
arrived just six days after the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdowns. Some
samples of radioactivity in precipitation, air, water, and milk, taken by the
U.S. government, showed levels hundreds of times above normal; however,
the small number of samples prohibits any credible analysis of temporal
trends and spatial comparisons. U.S. health officials report weekly deaths by
age in 122 cities, about 25 to 35 percent of the national total. Deaths rose
4.46 percent from 2010 to 2011 in the 14 weeks after the arrival of Japanese
fallout, compared with a 2.34 percent increase in the prior 14 weeks. The
number of infant deaths after Fukushima rose 1.80 percent, compared
with a previous 8.37 percent decrease. Projecting these figures for the entire
United States yields 13,983 total deaths and 822 infant deaths in excess of
the expected. These preliminary data need to be followed up, especially in the
light of similar preliminary U.S. mortality findings for the four months after
Chernobyl fallout arrived in 1986, which approximated final figures.

I've no idea whether or how to argue with this; for instance, do death rates normally fluctuate by that degree? Is it plausible that the amount of radiation seen in the U.S. following the accident could cause these excess deaths? The excess deaths were allegedly mainly due to influenza and pneumonia in infants, and one wonders whether airborne radiation could cause this.

The authors appear to be activists of some sort, which doesn't make them wrong of course; here is the press release about their study put out by their organization.

Also, that radiation is associated with hormesis could mean potential healthful effects of the radiation, which might have happened in Chernobyl. But again, that would depend on the dose of radiation.

Forgetting Human Nature

2012-01-06T11:13:00.000-08:00

Several examples of various scientific and scholarly findings which I've come across today strike me as being statements of the obvious. Now, one realizes that most people probably think that their own opinions are merely statements of the obvious that everyone should agree upon, but let's take a look at a few of them to see whether we can make anything else out of it.

Men and women really do have large personality differences. (Courtesy of Malcolm Pollack. Here's the original study: The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality.)

If men and women at times seem to be from different planets, it may be because there are large differences in their personalities, a new study suggests.

The results show that about 18 percent of women share similar personalities with men, and 18 percent of men share similar personalities with women. But the majority of women have personality traits that are quite distinct from those of men, and vice versa, the researchers say.

Men tend to be more dominant (forceful and aggressive) and emotionally stable, while women tend to be more sensitive, warm (attentive to others) and apprehensive, the study found.

"Psychologically, men and women are almost a different species," said study researcher Paul Irwing, of the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom.

Bet you didn't see that one coming. Nevertheless, the article quotes a couple of "researchers", one of whom is a professor of a pseudo-discipline known as "women's studies", to the effect that the results are mistaken. As I understand it, the two who dispute the findings are committing a sort of sexual Lewontin's Fallacy by insisting that average differences aren't so great, i.e. that there's more variation within sexes than between.

Bryan Caplan on Daniel Kahneman: people who care less about money actually... earn less money! Caplan (and Kahneman) of course do not claim that that is the entire story behind income inequality, nor do they specify an effect size, but my (wild, speculative) guess is that the effect is very large.

Megan McArdle wonders what we really know about losing weight. One of the points she makes is about obviousness: everyone who is of normal weight thinks it's just obvious what one needs to do to be that way. But look at an example from an extended quote:

The Bridges will occasionally share a dessert, or eat an individual portion of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, so they know exactly how many calories they are ingesting.

The Bridges are an obese couple struggling to keep some weight off. That they would occasionally - or more than occasionally - eat ice cream makes about as much sense as an alcoholic having an occasional drink, or a lung cancer patient an occasional smoke. The "obvious" point here is weakness of will, or lack of future time orientation, or just not giving a sh*t, however you want to put it.

All of these are examples of human nature which we have either deliberately forgotten or conned into thinking were wrong. That the sexes have different personality traits, that some people have greater avidity for money and thus devote more of their lives to earning it, and that gluttony is a factor in being overweight are all things that everyone used to know. But the insistence that human beings are all the same has led to an abandonment of common sense. Of course, the insistence that we're the same must be seen in the light of Who? Whom?

It's not that the studies and articles above shouldn't have been done, but not too many years ago, most people probably would not have seen the need.

McCain Endorses Romney; Will Paul Be "Allowed" to Win?

2012-01-04T15:36:00.000-08:00

Read all about it. If I had any doubt before, I now know for sure that I won't be voting for Romney.

I wonder how Romney feels about getting the endorsement of a petulant, globalist, pseudo-patriotic traitor. Like one himself?

Another thing that I'm seeing a lot of on blogs and sites that support Ron Paul: the notion that Paul will not be "allowed" to win, the idea being that TPTB have already ordained who is acceptable and who is not. And Paul is not. He threatens lots of interests, including the money interest, the war machine, the bureaucracy, the diversity racket, and probably lots more.

The thing is, despite we on the alt-right being of an unusually cynical nature, last I checked, the U.S. was still a democracy and each registered voter gets one vote each. What's behind the idea that Paul won't be allowed to win is that those in charge will pull out all the stops to prevent it. The media will intensify its attacks on him, and... what else? It all depends on the media being successful in its attacks, and from what I can see, they aren't working so well at the moment.

National Crisis: Adderall Shortage

2012-01-02T10:07:00.000-08:00

It seems that the scourge of ADHD, hitherto confined mainly to young boys who refused to sit still in boring, feminized classrooms, has been spreading like wildfire through America's fruited plains and SWPLized farmers markets. Major metropolitan centers too. Adderall shortage:

A shortage of Adderall, which is used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, shows little sign of easing as manufacturers struggle to get enough active ingredient to make the drug and demand climbs.

Adderall, a stimulant, is a controlled substance, meaning it is addictive and has the potential to be abused. The Drug Enforcement Administration tightly regulates how much of the drug's active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) can be distributed to manufacturers each year.

The system is designed to prevent the creation of stockpiles that could be diverted for inappropriate use. Adderall and other stimulants are popular with students who may not have ADHD but are seeking to improve their test scores.

The DEA authorizes a certain amount of the API in Adderall - mixed amphetamine salts - to be released to drugmakers each year based on what the agency considers to be the country's legitimate medical need.

Increasingly that estimate is coming into conflict with what companies themselves say they need to meet demand for the drug, which is reaching all-time highs. In 2010, more than 18 million prescriptions were written for Adderall, up 13.4 percent from 2009, according to IMS Health, which tracks prescription data.

Just to demonstrate how serious this development is, the New York Times most emailed list now contains "F.D.A. Finds Short Supply of Attention Deficit Drugs".

The number of adult, middle-class (probably mainly white) people, who have no discernible mental illness, yet who wrangle prescriptions for drugs like Adderall or Ritalin is an open secret, according to weighty anecdotal evidence collected by this blogger. Although he has a small social circle, he knows several people of both middle age and middle class who have complained to their respective doctors about their inability to focus their minds, and have been rewarded with prescriptions to what were formerly known as mother's little helpers. It appears that many physicians have little hesitancy in prescribing them; they are, after all, legal, and perhaps more importantly, it's a lot easier than arguing with demanding patients.

In a similar development a few years ago, after major league baseball banned stimulant use except for medical exceptions, the number of baseball players unfortunately diagnosed with ADHD skyrocketed. Presumably many of them suddenly found that they couldn't focus on fielding the ball without chemical assistance.

Nature conducted a survey a few years ago and found that

One in five Nature readers -- mostly scientists -- say they up their mental performance with drugs such as Ritalin, Provigil, and Inderal. [...]

While only a fifth of the poll's 1,400 respondents admitted to drug use to improve concentration, nearly two-thirds said they knew of a colleague who did. And if there were "a normal risk of mild side effects," nearly 70% of the scientists said they'd boost their brain power by taking a "cognitive-enhancing drug."

New Year's Resolutions

2012-01-01T10:14:00.000-08:00

Weakness is the only failing we cannot put right.

- La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

The purpose of new year's resolutions seems to be an artificial way of overcoming our weaknesses. For we already know what we need to do, but have been too weak of will to do so. By wiping the slate figuratively clean, that is, by acknowledging that the past (year) is gone, we try to give our will a boost. While resolutions can be of value, this is probably the wrong way to go about it. What is needed is training; like weightlifting, if we train ourselves in small things we can eventually strengthen ourselves for larger things.

Thus, William James had a more hopeful view of our weaknesses than did La Rochefoucauld.

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

The contrast betweem James and La Rochefoucauld may be likened to that between optimism and pessimism; but it should be noted that James's optimism is quite restrained, requires real effort, and therefore is much more realistic than the generic optimism which our uplifters of today urge us to adopt. James uses the word "asceticism" in the passage above, wholly appropriately, as the root of the word is askesis, "training".

New year's resolutions are an almost proverbial exercise in futility, easily made and quickly broken. But if they can give one a needed start toward the kind of training that James advocated, perhaps they're worthwhile.

Fined for Hiring Illegals

2011-12-30T13:29:00.000-08:00

Restaurant's owner and manager fined for hiring illegal workers

Reporting from San Diego—
The owner and the manager of a French restaurant in San Diego were sentenced in federal court Thursday to serve probation and pay fines after pleading guilty to knowingly hiring undocumented immigrants.

Michel Malecot, 59, the owner of French Gourmet, was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay $396,575 in fines, authorities said. Richard Kauffmann, 59, the manager, was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to pay $2,500 for his role in hiring the undocumented immigrants to work in the restaurant's bakery and catering businesses.

U.S. Atty. Laura Duffy said the convictions and sentences should act as a warning to other businesses.

"When employers do not comply, we will take vigorous enforcement action to ensure they do not profit from this illegal tactic," Duffy said.

Laura Duffy for U.S. Attorney General!

This sort of enforcement seems as if it would be sufficient all by itself to take care of the vast majority of the country's illegal alien problem. Despite hand-wringing from government officials about how enforcement won't work because of the magnitude of the problem, and how we couldn't possibly ever build a border fence because... well, because, if enough employers lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, no one will hire illegals. Yes, I know, that makes too much sense for anyone in our government.

I will hazard a guess that plenty of federal, state, and local prosecutors would be more than willing to do what Laura Duffy has done, but likely are being restrained by their various bureaucracies. Furthermore, prosecuting employers could be much more politically palatable and closed to charges of racism, etc.

Some People Are Beginning to Understand

2011-12-29T14:28:00.000-08:00

Even in the mainstream. (Via the Chateau.)

Classical Liberal Values and Culture

2011-12-29T13:42:00.000-08:00

James Delingpole explains why he can't support the Occupy movements despite sharing many of their concerns.

Here's the weird thing though: I agree almost entirely with this analysis. As I've argued before, the greatest division in the Western world today lies not between rich and poor, working class and upper class, or Left and Right, but between on the one hand the rapacious, unaccountable Bankster/Corporatist/Political establishment and on the other everybody else. Why then, aren't I standing with the Occupy St Paul's crowd right now, making this point more vociferously?

Simple. Because though my analysis of the problem may be quite similar to the Occupy crowd's, my solution couldn't be more different. This is why – as the above video explains – Tea Party types like me are unlikely ever to find common cause with Occupy. We're classical liberals who believe in low taxes, limited government, property rights and equality of opportunity [emphasis added], whereas they are progressives who believe in greater government control and wealth redistribution in order to create equality of outcome.

This is good, as far as it goes, and partially sums up my own position. But, where do the classical liberal values of low taxes, property rights, limited government, and so on derive? All of these come from Europe and America, and have rarely if ever been found outside the areas of European influence. When that influence has faded, for example with decolonization, the values have almost always departed as well.

Not only have these values come from European, and more specifically mainly Anglo-American culture, but they're not likely to be adhered to in a multiracial society, which is of course what our betters are determined to foist upon us, and so far pretty successfully. People generally only want to be fair to their co-ethnics, and in a multiracial or multiethnic society, governments become the providers of patronage and favoritism, which are very much antagonistic to classical liberalism. The whole system becomes one of do unto others before they do unto you.

I think this points to a huge flaw in the thinking of many or most mainstream conservatives, and especially those who promote American exceptionalism. (Ron Paul might even fall into this category.) That is, you can't have classical liberal values, including limited government, in a multiethnic society, or at the least it must be very difficult. As Lee Kuan Yew noted, in such a society people vote their ethnic interests, and aren't much interested in abstract notions of fairness.

On Second Thought

2011-12-27T16:40:00.000-08:00

I deleted the last post, as I'm tired of being negative.

Hipsters Ask for Criticism, Want Only Praise

2011-12-26T10:42:00.000-08:00

This story from The Daily Mail was good for a laugh: 'They say I'm a disgusting woman': Military Wives soloist with tattoo on her chest reveals how she's become the victim of cruel internet trolls

A mother who led the Military Wives choir to the top Christmas spot says she has been abused online because of her tattoos.

Yesterday's victory was bittersweet for Soloist Samantha Stevenson, 28, who was the victim of a cruel campaign on Facebook and Twitter.

She was branded a 'skank' on internet forums and her tattoos were described as looking like 'temp garish things' that made one Twitter user 'balk'.

But she has vowed to celebrate her chart success by adding a remembrance poppy tattoo to her collection of bright inkings.

'There were loads of nasty comments,' the mother-of-two told The Sun.

'It was hurtful. My tattoos make me stand out from the rest of the girls.

More...

Military Wives are the Christmas number one after selling 556,000 copies in a week
'I've drunk a bottle of wine already!' A jolly Imogen Thomas joins host of celebrities in sharing their Christmas Day snaps

'Most people are lovely and supportive. But I've been really shocked by the reaction to my tattoos by people on the internet.

'They say I'm vile, I'm a disgusting woman with disgusting tattoos and I shouldn't be allowed on TV.

'You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, I am who I am and I like my tattoos. It doesn't make me a bad person. The internet stuff isn't going to put me off.'

Wait, "you shouldn't judge a book by its cover"? Then why is she having herself defaced with tattoos that everyone within eyeshot can see? Oh... she only wants praise for being such a non-conformist, but no criticism please. See, hipsters are all about making sure everyone knows that they're on the leading edge of trashing public decorum and smashing bourgeois values, but they want only adulation for it. When the bourgeoisie whose values are getting trashed abject to it, the hipsters cry out, "Don't judge me!"

We see this phenomenon in everything from OWS to the juggalos. Now, even "military wives" want to be hip and accepted at the same time.

For the record, this woman does indeed look disgusting.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-24T18:00:00.000-08:00

Nativity scene by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Flemish painter, diplomat, and spy.

A very Merry Christmas to to all of you who read here.

Ron Paul: Best of a Bad Lot?

2011-12-23T12:21:00.000-08:00

OneSTDV writes today on a theme he's touched on before: Ron Paul's alleged lack of nationalistic and/or patriotic fervor. For instance, Paul has claimed that Michele Bachmann "Hates Muslims" and has suggested that "Islamophobia" is behind opposition to the Ground Zero mosque.

I'm agnostic on whether or not Paul is any of the things that One claims for him, and I wouldn't defend him for the above statements, but I wonder who One, or those like him, will vote for? Romney? More of the same establishment nonsense that got us into this mess in the first place? Gingrich, the man who will make Bush's policy of immigration, invasion, and indebtedness (the 3 I's) look like a warmup? And so we could go on to the rest of the candidates: while they each have individual and common flaws, virtually none of them that I can see possess more patriotism or nationalism than Paul does. If they seem as if they care about this country, it's only lip service, because they plan to do nothing about the 3 I's. If Paul seems less nationalistic, it could be because he's merely more honest than the others - which I realize is damning with faint praise.

Another reason for Paul's statements could be his going along with the zeitgeist in an appeal to more liberal voters. The recent attacks on Paul for racism and Paul's disavowal of his old newsletter illustrate this, for I strongly suspect that his denial isn't wholly truthful and that he still believes like he formerly did, but understands that he can't get elected president if he stands by them. Again, that isn't to excuse Paul for going with the flow, but may explain him.

The fact that the establishment, and most especially the media establishment, so obviously hates Paul and everything he stands for is the best sign that Paul will move the country in the right direction. (I wouldn't say that for just anyone the establishment hated, but they never seem to hate anyone on the Left, no matter how far left and how marginal his views.) Paul isn't my ideal candidate; someone like Pat Buchanan would be, but Paul might get us to a place where electing someone like Pat would be at least possible.

The other candidates are just more of the same.

PC and the War on Christmas

2011-12-19T17:30:00.000-08:00

This is strictly anecdotal, but my experience this year has been that the War on Christmas has gotten worse, and not because the opponents of Christmas have become stronger, but because of capitulation on the side of ordinary people. Everywhere I turn, whether it's on my favorite classical station on the radio, to greeting cards, to signs in businesses, "Happy Holidays" is the order of the day. If you were from Mars, even if you asked a local you might have a hard time discovering which holiday was being referred to.

Political correctness has a certain genius about it, almost as if it had been created by Sun Tzu in order to get the enemy to undermine himself. For the fact is, virtually all of the War on Christmas, barring the very public fights over nativity scenes in city halls and the like, is about self-censorship. No one has stopped anyone from saying or writing "Merry Christmas", yet it seems most people have stopped saying it anyway. People sense that wishing Christmas cheer has become politically incorrect, so they self-censor.

That classical station plays plenty of Christmas- and Christian-themed music, yet its announcers can't bring themselves to acknowledge it. (Kind of figures, it's in SF.) Face it, there is no Hanukkah, Eid, or Kwaanza music. European Christians invented this season and everything that goes with it - which is why PC wants to stifle it.

Obama Struggles Among White Voters

2011-12-18T13:57:00.000-08:00

Ronald Brownstein reports the results of a recent poll, and they don't look pretty for Barry O.

Obama is now facing dismal approval ratings in all corners of the white community. In 2008, he carried 52 percent of those college-educated white women, but attracted much smaller shares among college-educated white men (42 percent), white women without a college degree, the so-called waitress moms (41 percent), and the non-college white men (just 39 percent). The new survey shows that with all four groups his approval rating is appreciably lower than his 2008 performance. He's fallen to 42 percent of the college-educated white women, 37 percent among the college-plus white men, just 34 percent among the non-college white men, and all the way down to 30 percent with the waitress moms.

Since this is just another poll, you may ask, why is this so interesting? For readers of this blog, you'll notice that the poll results put a serious dent in our friend Whiskey's thesis that white, educated women are the core group driving the country towards leftism and ruin.

Obama is arguably the most leftist president the country has ever had, perhaps not so much in his policies and practices, bad as they are, but what the man seems to hold as his main beliefs, namely (IMO) cultural Marxism. In 2008, some 52% of white, college-educated women voted for him, hardly the screaming endorsement Whiskey says they gave, and for the "waitress moms" he's currently down to a miserable 30% support. Looks to me like white women are about as unsatisfied with the country's direction as white men.

But some things don't change:

The groups that have proven most resistant to this trend are Hispanics (where Obama's latest approval rating has slipped just three percentage points from his 2008 vote share); seniors (where he's actually running slightly ahead) and families earning at least $100,000 annually (where he's also fallen just three percentage points.) Some other surveys - like Gallup's nightly tracking poll - show Obama receiving lower ratings among all three of those groups than the Heartland Monitor does.

Black voters still prefer Barry at a 95% level.

As for those over $100K a year families, well, they're following the SWPL script.

Governments Against Low-Carb

2011-12-18T06:17:00.000-08:00

Not from The Onion: Finnish officials mull taking children into care over low-carb diet:

Finnish officials have told a family of low-carbohydrate enthusiasts that their children would be taken into care if they failed to heed nutrition advice, provincial paper Iisalmen Sanomat reported Sunday.

Ursula Schwab, a clinical nutrition specialist at the University of East Finland, said at least one family had received such an ultimatum after parents ignored healthcare staff's warnings about the dangers of an imbalanced diet for children.

"If a child's growth slows down because of a poor diet, one must send a wakeup call to parents," Schwab told the Finnish News Agency.

"Should this prove ineffective, the child must be moved to a place where he receives enough nutrition."

Schwab added that she knew of parents who had put toddlers on so-called low-carb diets.

"A strict low-carb diet is very fatty, and it suppresses hunger. If you down eggs and bacon for breakfast it will take hours before you can even imagine eating again."

"A growing child needs a varied diet."

Imagine that: bacon and eggs for breakfast leaves you so satisfied that you're not hungry until lunchtime. With that sort of thing going on, it will take until adulthood and a change of dietary habits before the poor child become obese. We can't be having that.

So, now governments, including allegedly civilized, Western ones, will rip children away from their parents for the reason that they don't like the food that the parents feed the kids.

The state has become so powerful that it can dictate what sort of food is proper and right. And of course they got it all wrong.

Denmark recently instituted a "fat tax", but unfortunately the government decided to tax butter and cheese and other fatty foods, rather than pasta or sweet drinks, so the tax will make Danes less healthy.

Anarcho-tyranny works for every sphere of life.

Anarcho-Tyranny

2011-12-16T11:00:00.000-08:00

The late Samuel Francis coined and defined the word "anarcho-tyranny":

What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through "sensitivity training" and multiculturalist curricula, "hate crime" laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny. [...]

The laws that are enforced are either those that extend or entrench the power of the state and its allies and internal elites ... or else they are the laws that directly punish those recalcitrant and "pathological" elements in society who insist on behaving according to traditional norms—people who do not like to pay taxes, wear seat belts, or deliver their children to the mind-bending therapists who run the public schools; or the people who own and keep firearms, display or even wear the Confederate flag, put up Christmas trees, spank their children, and quote the Constitution or the Bible—not to mention dissident political figures who actually run for office and try to do something about mass immigration by Third World populations.

It could almost be said that anarcho-tyranny is the ruling principle of government today, and even more so since the advent of the Obama administration. Take for instance this bit of news: Justice Dept. goes after Sheriff Arpaio, accusing him of, of course, discrimination in his zealous execution of his official duties. The anarcho-tyranny lies in the fact that illegal immigration has been now made all but legal - since the feds are taking only as much action against it as needed for show - while the same government sues a county sheriff for doing the job they won't do.

Here's a slightly different example: Muslim gunman murders several and wounds over 100 in Belgium. The Belgian government vigorously enforces laws against defamation and hate speech, meaning that anyone who had been publicly skeptical of the gunman's presence in Belgium before the crime, and maybe even after, would likely be prosecuted by the Belgian state. At the same time, the Belgian authorities allowed the gunman to live in their country and even released him from prison early.

And yet another example, in this instance a small victory over the forces of anarcho-tyranny: Congress overturns incandescent light bulb ban. The same politicians who won't do a thing about mass immigration in a time of record unemployment wanted to regulate this private aspect of Americans' lives, viz. what sort of light bulbs they should be allowed to buy and use.

Anarcho-tyranny serves the purposes of the globalizing elite: those laws which hinder them go unenforced, those which serve them are enforced.

PS: I forgot one; call it anarcho-tyranny in the UK: Taxpayer spends £1m a week funding visa appeals
The taxpayer is spending almost £1 million a week to fund appeals against family visa refusals after cases increased six fold in a decade.

Where did they get the gold?

2011-12-15T10:36:00.000-08:00

Gold and silver have fallen sharply in price over the past few weeks, leading some - more or less mainstream - commentators to call an end to the gold and silver bull. (I highly doubt that.) It appears that a fair amount of gold has been leased from central banks or other entities, and sold into the market, thereby lowering the gold price. Where did that gold come from? Jeff Nielsen thinks that maybe the gold came from Greece and Libya:

As we all know, when Greece (finally) forced the bond parasites to absorb 50% “haircuts” on their holdings that was a default event. What happens when a debtor defaults on a debt? Collateral is seized. The latest statistics from the World Gold Council on official government reserves show Greece sitting with over 111 tons of gold. And as victims of the MF Global collapse have learned the hard way, our criminal governments (and the bankers who pull their strings) no longer see it as necessary to even report when they have taken something from people. Thus the bankers could have looted every ounce of Greece’s gold from its people and it could be months, years, or never before we finally find out about it.

One hundred and eleven tons is a lot of gold to lease, but it’s certainly not the only gold hoard onto which the bankers could have recently latched their talons. Those who followed the “Libyan revolution” will have recalled a remarkable flip-flop by the West.

At one moment, we had the vastly superior military forces of Muammar Gaddafi steamrolling the rag-tag, disorganized rabble we knew as the “Libyan rebels”. They were on the verge of collapsing. All hope was lost. Western leaders lamented that the lack of “UN authorization” prevented these upstanding citizens of the global community from doing anything to assist the rebels – and there was absolutely no sign of any “movement” in those negotiations.

The next moment, the same disorganized rabble which didn’t even have a military command structure (let alone a nation to command) announced they had created a “central bank”. About ten seconds after that announcement, Western leaders announce a “sudden breakthrough” at the UN, and a drafted-and-approved resolution instantly materialized. And before the ink was even dry on that document, war-planes from several Western nations were on the way to Libya to enforce a “no-fly zone”.

Now, I know that gold advocates have a record of being a little off the radar when it comes to their notions of what goes on behind closed doors at the highest levels of finance and government. (Any difference between the two these days?) But consider an undoubtedly sober commentator (not that Mr. Nielsen isn't), Jim Rickards, an investment banker and financial expert who's been invited wargaming with the Defense Department and who wrote the book Currency Wars. Rickards calls the U.S. "the Saudi Arabia of gold" and believes that one possible endgame to the current financial crisis is the seizure of gold held in the U.S., not merely private gold but that of other nations held here, most notably Germany's. With that move, the U.S. could dictate the dollar's terms and it would again be king of the global currencies and the world's reserve currency.

So, why wouldn't the U.S. start by seizing the gold it can get, like that of Libya? Could this be the real reason behind the war?

Recently, Hugo Chavez had all of Venezuela's gold, held in London, shipped to his own country for safekeeping. He's a smart man.

Republicans, Except for Paul, Bow and Scrape

2011-12-13T14:43:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Not exactly a huge fan of Jon Stewart, but he exactly nails the absurdity of a slew of presidential candidates vying to be winner in the "I Put Another Country Ahead of my Own" sweepstakes.

PS: Support for Ron Paul is surging, with Paul now running just one percentage point behind the slimy newt. See here.

Emma West is a political prisoner

2011-12-11T11:18:00.000-08:00

There's not much I can add to commentary on Emma West coming from other conservative and alt-right blogs. Two very good commentaries are those by Rick Darby and OneStdv. One calls his post a "begrudging defense"; you can also see the video that got West arrested at either of the above links.

Emma West's outburst is of the nature of something that might get one thrown off a train or airplane (as happened to Alec Baldwin recently, and he was not arrested), or perhaps a citation or maybe even an arrest for disturbing the peace. However, far more serious disturbances take place without their perpetrators being arrested.

Instead, West has been arrested and is being held indefinitely and her young boy taken away from her, the reason being that she dares to question the multicult, which is the means by which the Marxist rulers of Britain are proceeding with the replacement of the indigenous population. She questioned the presence of huge numbers of immigrants in Britain, which Britain's rulers have deemed not a subject for debate.

Undoubtedly you've all seen this news report: Girl gang who kicked woman in the head while yelling 'kill the white slag' freed after judge hears 'they weren't used to drinking because they're Muslims'

Yobs ripped lump of hair from Rhea Page's head during High Street attack
Three sisters and cousin escape with six-month suspended sentences
Maximum term for assault occasioning actual bodily harm is five years' jail
Judge: 'Those who knock someone to the floor and kick them in the head can expect to go inside, but I'm going to suspend the sentence'

Note: the normal maximum term for this type of crime is five years in prison, but the judge let the girls off based on a flimsy excuse, even though this was clearly a racially motivated and brutal assault. In contrast, what sort of sentence will Emma West receive for a "crime" - if it is indeed one - orders of magnitude less serious?

Academic Frauds

2011-12-10T11:34:00.000-08:00

An article about academic frauds reveals "ten of the worst frauds, fakers, and phonies ever to pull the wool over the bespectacled eyes of the academic world". Of the ten frauds discussed, I count four as belonging to the social sciences - the others being in physics, biology, and medicine - and all four of these involve leftists or leftist ideas. The most recent and well known case if that of Diederik Stapel, who produced regular studies documenting alleged "stereotyping" and how meat-eaters are more selfish.

Others included the case of Michael Bellesiles, who fabricated data that buttressed his case for gun control; Ward Churchill: and the famous Sokal case, in the latter the fraud being that a leftist journal bought the hoax in its entirety.

It's been remarked that the reason these frauds were successful is because they told stories that people wanted to hear. Why couldn't right-wing academics perpetrate similar fraud? Well, for one thing, there are hardly any of them, and even if some of them did, they wouldn't have much of a market for their papers. An academic who wants to write fake papers does so for a reason: advancing his career, and fake reports of a conservative bent wouldn't do that.

Conservatives and libertarians might be more likely to fall for things like cold fusion.

Hollywood Shooter: Freelance Terrorism? - updated

2011-12-10T09:58:00.000-08:00

See this video.

If you can believe the witness interviewed (starting at 2:42), the gunman was shouting "Allahu akbar!" Oddly enough, neither the news reporter in the video nor any other sources that I've seen mentions this or what it might mean.

Strange, this news reporting.

Update: Shooter has been identified, and appears to be a garden-variety white male.

The Indefinite Detention Bill

2011-12-08T10:16:00.000-08:00

Here's a good summary of the Indefinite Detention Bill:

The recent passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (Senate Bill 1867), otherwise known as the “Indefinite Detention Bill,” should scare the heck out of anyone who loves the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This bill effectively hands over control to the military to arrest, torture and even kill terrorists on American soil. It also allows the military to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely without a trial or due process. This applies to both non-citizens and citizens of the United States! With this bill, you are not innocent until proven guilty. You are guilty until proven innocent, and you may never get a trial to defend yourself. There is surprisingly little written in the mainstream media about this Senate bill that passed 93 to 7 at the end of November.

The bill is a terrible violation of the Constitution, but there's more here than meets the eye, as Jew Among You argues in "Hijacking the term "American". More mainstream commentators (such as in the former link) make much of "American citizens" being subject to the bill's provisions. But these citizens are not people "whose ancestors arrived with the Mayflower". They are people whom the elite, in all their wisdom, have allowed into the country in recent decades, people from the bastions of civilization in the Middle East and elsewhere who have zero love for this country, quite the opposite in fact.

The same elite/government/media complex demonizes anyone who questions the wisdom of letting these people in. So the complex has given us a double whammy: it has allowed potential terrorists into the country, made them citizens, and then uses the consequences of this process to take away the constitutional rights of all Americans, all the while denouncing those who want to put a stop to this insanity.

Nice work.

Diversity Is... Sex-Selective Abortions

2011-12-07T12:44:00.000-08:00

In NRO, Steven W. Mosher writes about evidence that many Indian(dot not feather)-Americans are having abortions when they discover that the sex of the fetus is female. (Thanks to a reader.)

“There is such a thing as too many daughters, but not too many sons,” Dr. Sunita Puri was told by the Asian-Indian women she was interviewing.

The physician, who practices in the Bay Area, wanted to find out why so many immigrant Indian women in the United States were so eager to find out the sex of their unborn children, and why so many of them choose abortion when they found out they were carrying a girl.

What she discovered over the course of 65 interviews conducted over several years profoundly shocked her. Fully 89 percent of the women carrying girls opted for an abortion, and nearly half had previously aborted girls.

Puri’s report, published in Social Science and Medicine this last April, makes for grim reading.

The husbands and fathers were also involved:

They also made clear that they were not free actors when it came to reproductive “choice.” Many, when it was learned that they were carrying girls, became the victims of family violence. Some — in an effort to make them miscarry — had been slapped and shoved around by angry husbands and in-laws, or even kicked in the stomach. Others were denied food, water, and rest in order to coerce them into aborting their unwanted girl babies.

Wait, what? The heads of both feminists and immigration enthusiasts must be exploding just about now. The feminists believe in abortion for any reason whatsoever, that it's all just a "choice", even when that choice is that the parents don't like little girls. Even when that choice is made not by the mother, but by the father. (Actually, seems only fair that the father has a say, whether yea or nay, in an abortion, assuming that women are going to have them.) The irony that the feminists wind up supporting the deaths of members of their own sex is, well, ironic.

The immigration enthusiasts believe that this once-great nation can only be enriched by the vibrant diversity with which the planet has generously gifted us. Family values, Rio Grande - or in this case, the Ganges - and all that. But one imagines that we couldn't have come up all on our own with the new uses that some foreigners have for abortion.

Jason Abrevaya of the University of Texas analyzed U.S. birth data and found unusually high boy-birth percentages after 1980 among later children (most notably third and fourth children) born to Chinese and Asian-Indian mothers. Moreover, using maternally linked data from California, he found that Asian-Indian mothers are significantly more likely both to have a terminated pregnancy and to give birth to a son when they have previously only given birth to girls.

Columbia University economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund also found clear evidence of sex-selective abortions in what they called “son-biased sex ratios,” that is, a higher ratio of boys to girls than would occur in nature. Looking at the sex ratio at birth among U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian-Indian parents, they found that first-borns showed normal sex ratios at birth. But if the first child was a girl, the sex ratio jumped to 117, and if the first two children were girls, then the sex ratio jumped to 151. That is to say, for every 151 boys, there were only 100 hundred surviving girls. The rest had been eliminated.

However, Mosher later has this to say:

Racism kills as well, to judge from the fact that the abortion rate among blacks is about five times higher than the American average. Blacks are only 12 percent of the population but have 37 percent of the abortions. This suggests that their abortions, too, are more than just a matter of personal choice.

Wait, what? (Again.) Mosher appears to be blaming white people - the only racist around - for the abortions of blacks. He says that these are somehow "race-selective", but he doesn't say that anyone is coercing these women to have abortions. Mosher does know that accusing some entity or practice or person of "racism" is just about an unanswerable argument, so he whips it out (so to speak) to use in his own cause.

Global Warming Religion

2011-12-06T14:50:00.000-08:00

In the WSJ, Bret Stephens asks how religions die:

Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

There may have been a time when AGW looked more like a science, when there was some doubt as to whether the climate was in a warming trend. Although, there doesn't seem to have been any debate at all as to whether global warming might be a good thing; no, it was all doom and gloom, rising sea levels (via Malcolm), and the extinction of polar bears, when the reality was more likely to be extended growing seasons, more clement weather, and sunbathing in Nova Scotia.

But it has never been about anything other than Who? Whom? Stephens:

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.

The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won't be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won't make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they've spent it all on Greece.

Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent's heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. "Green" technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.

All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don't die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.

He goes on to say that the new Climategate emails have put a decided crimp in the process of the transfer of wealth from producers to non-producers, whether the "non" are Goldman Sachs (cap and trade) or the Maldive Islands.

But I can't help but think that the alarmists will just keep ratcheting up the rhetoric. After all, a lot of money and power is at stake. How much has been wasted on this issue so far? Undoubtedly hundreds of billions, when you count the grants, taxes, conferences, regulations, and Lord knows what else. And, the crucial point, some people and entities have made that money. (Well, it went into their pockets, anyway.)

The whole thing is one great globalist heist, so don't expect it to go away.

Don't check "Asian"

2011-12-04T11:23:00.000-08:00

Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian':

Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.

"I didn't want to put 'Asian' down," Olmstead says, "because my mom told me there's discrimination against Asians in the application process."

For years, many Asian-Americans have been convinced that it's harder for them to gain admission to the nation's top colleges.

Studies show that Asian-Americans meet these colleges' admissions standards far out of proportion to their 6 percent representation in the U.S. population, and that they often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission. Critics say these numbers, along with the fact that some top colleges with race-blind admissions have double the Asian percentage of Ivy League schools, prove the existence of discrimination.

Welcome to our world, Asians. You see, white people in the U.S. are also deemed to be too successful, therefore they must give away some of their rightful places in college (and elsewhere) to other, minority, ethnic groups. It seems possible that Asians might be more discriminated against, relative to their test scores, than whites are, a rule of thumb being the higher the score the greater the bias.

The problem here for comparison purposes, however, is that Asians expect admission to college (and elsewhere) based purely on merit, and decry discrimination - perhaps rightly - when that doesn't appear to happen based on an analysis of the numbers. But whites are expected to give up places in college (and elsewhere) purely because they are in the majority; Asians face no such barrier. Whites are expected to give up places in college (and elsewhere) because of a "legacy of discrimination", and Asians face no such barrier. Quite the opposite, actually.

I can't recall when an article in the MSM decried discrimination against whites in higher education, but apparently it's alright to denounce such discrimination if the victims are not white.

PS: As an aside, there's a current of thought in the rightist blogospshere that some people, e.g. myself, tout the merits of the theory of human biodiversity and racial IQ differences because in many measures of the prerequisites of social success, e.g. IQ, conscientiousness, and low rates of various types of social pathology, Asians come out on top, ahead of whites. Thus the purveyor of this kind of analysis allegedly gets a pass on charges of discrimination.

But those who say this need to distinguish between science and advocacy. On this blog, we do both.

Republicans (Israel Division) Bar Ron Paul from Debate

2011-12-02T18:15:00.000-08:00

Matt Welch in Reason: Republican Jewish Coalition Bars Ron Paul From Presidential Debate, Saying He's Too "misguided and extreme":

On Wednesday, Dec. 7, the Republican Jewish Coalition will host a presidential-candidates forum featuring Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum. Not invited is the GOP candidate currently polling around third in New Hampshire and second in Iowa: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). The explanation:
Paul was not invited to attend the RJC's candidates forum because the organization - as it has stated numerous times in the past - "rejects his misguided and extreme views," said [RJC Executive Director Matt] Brooks.
"He's just so far outside of the mainstream of the Republican party and this organization," Brooks said. Inviting Paul to attend would be "like inviting Barack Obama to speak."

We certainly can't have any Republican candidate going around without pledging his undying support to a foreign country. I mean, that would almost be as if he were running for the presidency of an actual, independent, sovereign power, in which foreign policy is set at the highest levels, rather than by lobbyists for another sovereign nation. It's long since been decided that the USA doesn't fall into that category, hence Paul's utter uselessness.

Here's Abe Foxman speaking some real truth (for a change). David Frum also makes an appearance:

Anti Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman has a perhaps unintentionally interesting take about Paul, U.S. politics, and Israel:
with the exception of Ron Paul, there is not much difference between the parties
And no orthodoxy-definition would be complete without David Frum:

Of the 8 candidates competing for the Republican presidential nomination, 7 declared themselves intense supporters of the State of Israel, the sole exception being crank no-hoper Ron Paul.

Since the only candidate who has suggested that he would place the interests of the U.S before that of Israel is Ron Paul, he of course must be stopped.

The Race-IQ Issue

2011-12-01T09:09:00.000-08:00

In the current media dustup over race and IQ, I'd say that something important has been omitted from the discussion. First, to get you up to speed, links and all, here's OneSTDV:

Sigh...the race-intelligence debate has flared up as a widespread blogosphere issue for the first time since James Watson's infamous (and accurate) statements back in 2007. I won't deluge you with a whole bunch of links, so see Chuck's listing, along with thoughts from HBDers Sailer and Roissy/Heartiste. There's nothing new here - media personality (Andrew Sullivan) supports racial differences in intelligence and liberals go hysterical, offering arguments almost entirely comprised of insults interspersed with discounted work by Stephen Jay Gould and other dishonest liberal creationists.

(Saved me some work and gave credit where due.)

Heartíste (link above) wrote a good response laying out a few of the ramifications of the debate. This some might not think necessary, but it never ceases to amaze how clueless some in the mainstream are:

Lest we forget, there’s a reason why emotions run so hot on this issue. Not only does it cut straight to the beating heart of equalist ideology — the predominant ideology, arguably, of the last 150 years in the West — but the ramifications of the subject under debate are huge. [...]

This dismissive hand-waving about “a certain kind of test” reveals more than it conceals. It is meant to assuage egos and smooth the airwaves for sensible, rational discussion on the topic. But egalitarians and the SWPL industrial complex know that these softening words cannot contain the horrible, unrelenting, monstrous truth that stalks every cooing syllable. IQ is F***ING [my edit] HUGELY IMPORTANT to your chance to live a happy, successful life filled with wonder and glee and gadgets and crime-free neighborhoods in a modern, technofantastical, information-highwayed, cognitively stratifying first world Western nation.

The enemies of truth know this, and that is why they tirelessly work to shut down any talk about it, and to smear and slander and shun those who would deign to lift the veil of lies for a peek underneath.

Several times lately on this blog we've noted the fact that a (relatively) higher IQ is a necessary if not sufficient condition to get to the top in a meritocratic, technocratic society. So while many who have commented on the contretemps have asserted that bringing up the issue of race and IQ serves no purpose and only publicly hurts feelings (of black people, mainly), they're wrong.

But, why can't we just not discuss this and let the cultural process of the smarter people getting ahead proceed? Because our opponents in this matter constantly blame white people for the failings of non-Asian minorities - strangely we never get credit for Asians' success, which we ought to if we're so damned powerful - and then they want whites to pony up for their alleged depredations.

Is it any wonder that some, mostly white, people want to keep bringing this issue up? Professional blacks like the wonderfully named Ta-Nehisi Coates do almost nothing but blame whites for everything wrong with their race, other than when they're demanding compensation for it.

Raising the race and IQ issue is, for whites, merely a matter of self-defense, and of the truth.

Science Keeps Proving HBD Right

2011-11-30T08:40:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-28T08:31:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-27T13:12:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-25T13:49:00.000-08:00

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 (?)

2011-11-24T18:00:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-22T11:22:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-21T10:40:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-20T11:50:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-19T12:15:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-17T12:28:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-16T10:49:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-14T10:49:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-12T10:27:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-11T08:16:00.000-08:00

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?

2011-11-10T09:51:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-09T09:45:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-07T19:10:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-05T15:16:00.000-07:00

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?

2011-11-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

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

2011-11-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

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

2011-11-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

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.

Despair Porn of the Alt Right

2011-10-31T11:06:00.000-07:00

OneSTDV, in a post about modern commercial culture as exemplified by a couple of... commercials, writes:

In opposition to the despair porn of much of the alt-right, I've posited that a conservative renaissance lies unawakened within the masses, illustrated by anti-Obama rage and last year's Tea Party movement. However, the media, academia, and government inhibit the means by which these apprehensive conservative-leaning individuals find each other and, more importantly, discover the social sanction to express their anti-PC views. Commercials can do much to convince people that others like them exist, that others romanticize about a return to traditionalist America - the one we see in our parents' black and white photos and hear our elders reminisce about wistfully.

I'm not sure who he exactly has in mind when he writes of "the despair porn of... the alt right", but since I've seen comments around the 'sphere regarding this blog's alleged undaunted grimness, I'll see whether I can answer the charge.

Optimism or pessimism are states of mind and as such are facets of reality. That doesn't mean that these states, which are meant by their possessors to reflect a true state of the outside world, are themselves accurate, only that any attempt at an assessment of the true state of affairs in this country and the world must take them into account.

But, rather than optimism or pessimism, my impression is one of complacency and acquiescence, on the part of those whom we want to motivate, to the powers that be. The people of whom One writes, that is those that have the older values - patriotism mainly - are living in a fantasy land. They believe that a change of government to Republican leadership is going to make a difference, and that a resurgence of patriotic fervor can make the country what it once was. They don't understand the concept of a hostile elite, one that is diametrically opposed to virtually everything that the patriots want, whether the issue is gay marriage, affirmative action, or, above all, immigration.

The patriots don't see that the elite wants to replace them, that the elite is no longer comprised merely of the more successful of their countrymen, but rather is comprised of a class of people with just about zero loyalty or fellow feeling for those who are at least nominally their own people. The patriots, with all of their embedded anti-racism, fail to see that the importation of a new people is part of a strategy to divide and conquer, for the immigrants and their offspring are mainly on the side of the elites.

The old America celebrated in that advertisement that One likes so much is just about gone, and nostalgia for it won't make it return.

In the last thread, there was a debate about how much responsibility the people of a country bear for the mess that's being made of it. While the elites with their mind-controlling PC do make it difficult to see clearly and to oppose when necessary, I'm inclined to think that that isn't much of an excuse.

As for the pessimism of the alt right, until (mainly white) Americans decide to put away their play stations and their football obsession and their belief that electing Romney or Cain will change much of anything, that pessimism is fully justified. But I can only speak for myself.

Blair Celebrates His Role in the Downfall of Britain

2011-10-29T10:03:00.000-07:00

Blair defends opening the door to mass migration and says it had a very positive impact on Britain

Tony Blair has defended Labour’s controversial mass immigration policy by claiming that Britain cannot succeed unless it opens its borders to more people from different backgrounds.

Blair is as irredeemably illiterate as so many of his fellow Brits these days, having no cognizance of the fact that Britain practically ruled the world before it was bestowed with the gift of vibrancy. He also seems to think that just because he's the former PM that we will all believe his blatant lies.

The former prime minister said it was 'right’ that the country was made up of different cultures and faiths mixing together.

"Right", n., whatever advances the agenda of the left, esp. concerning a genocidal assault on European and American people.

Mr Blair added that migrants had made Britain 'stronger’ and said those calling for greater curbs on foreigners entering the country were wrong.

"Wrong", adj., right. "Stronger", adj., weaker.

His comments come just days after official figures revealed that the population is expected to soar by the equivalent of a city the size of Leeds every year for the next decade.

A defiant Mr Blair insisted his party’s policy on immigration was the right one. He said: 'It’s been a very positive thing and there is no way for a country like Britain to succeed in the future unless it is open to people of different colours, faiths and cultures.’

Under Labour, up to 5.5million people born outside the UK arrived as long-term migrants.

His comments also came just days after it was determined that non-white immigrants and their "strengthening" offspring comprised a majority of those arrested in the recent massive riots all over England.

Up is down, black is white, diversity is strength, population replacement is an opening to the world: these are the lies that people like Blair tell on a daily basis and then expect that we'll believe them. The reality is the PC has most people so cowed that they won't question the lies, which is the very purpose of both PC and the lies.

The Indoctrination of the French

2011-10-27T11:22:00.000-07:00

The video (thanks to a reader) describes the effort to indoctrinate French schoolchildren into the multicult. The announcer and several interviewees say that the new history textbook is an instance of political correctness gone mad, and while it is that, one can't expect anything else in a system that has imported millions of non-French who feel zero ties to France. PC is just a system of thought control to stop anyone from expressing truths or opinions that might be detrimental to the reigning powers. In this particular case, I assume that it's the French government that has promulgated the textbook, the same government that has allowed those millions of aliens to live in France.

While it's great that some people in France are fighting back, this is a problem that's not going away. At the root of it all is the false notion of what makes a nation, a true nation being one that is largely connected by ethnicity, language, and religion. So long as large numbers of the residents of France share none of these with the historical French nation, and with many of them being actively hostile to French civilization, the problem of how one teaches the next generation will remain.

Porn Is Addictive

2011-10-26T13:57:00.000-07:00

An article in Psychology Today notes that "porn-induced sexual dysfunction is a growing problem". This problem is being seen in the form of erectile dysfunction in men as young as their early 20s.

Recent behavioral addiction research suggests that the loss of libido and performance occur because heavy users are numbing their brain's normal response to pleasure. Years of overriding the natural limits of libido with intense stimulation desensitize the user's response to a neurochemical called dopamine.

Dopamine is behind motivation, "wanting" and all addictions. It drives the search for rewards. We get little spurts of it every time we bump into anything potentially rewarding, novel, surprising, or even anxiety-producing.

So, porn is addictive at least in the sense that it causes habituation, i.e. a stronger dose is needed to cause the same effect as a lower dose did previously. This causes heavy porn users to lose interest in sex with a real woman, or become incapable of it.

Humans have learned how to intervene in the brain circuits that evolved to produce evolutionary desirable outcomes. Pornography, drugs including alcohol and nicotine, violent video games, junk foods that stimulate food reward, gambling, even successful stock trading: all of these stimulate dopaminergic neurons that cause pleasure. We thus get the pleasure without the outcome, or with radically altered and undesirable outcomes like ED and obesity. Also, the evolutionary-desired outcomes are short-circuited, in this case reproduction, although men's sexual desire isn't the bottleneck in the frequency of sex; it's women's. Even so, this wasn't predicted to be among the consequences to widespread availability of porn, so it remains to be seen what consequences flow from this in turn.

Ever since they've been able, humans have desired to do this. One theory of the origins of agriculture states that it was the desire to grow drug-producing crops that led to farming; opium and cannabis seeds are some of the oldest archaeological traces of agriculture.

One wonders how the ubiquity of porn plays into the current sexual dynamic. Do beta men tend to be heavy users of porn, and does end up making them even less desirable to women? Could one major characteristic of alphas be that they simply don't look at pornography, and thus retain a healthier sex drive?

Group Wants Buchanan Fired

2011-10-25T17:06:00.000-07:00

The irony is delicious- that is, if you're a connoisseur of irony. Otherwise, it just pisses you off. A black advocacy group wants Pat Buchanan fired for, well advocating for his own people.

African American political advocacy group Color Of Change has called for MSNBC to fire longtime analyst (and even longer-time lightning rod) Pat Buchanan for what it called his "white supremacist ideology."

The advocacy group sent petition letters to its members on Tuesday. The letter said that MSNBC gives Buchanan a platform to pass off his often loaded remarks as "legitimate mainstream political commentary."

While Color of Change cited comments made by Buchanan from as early as March 2008, the advocacy group highlighted Buchanan's new book "Suicide Of A Superpower" and a Saturday appearance on the controversial radio show "The Political Cesspool" (whose host has described his ideology as "pro-white") as current reasons the network should fire Buchanan.

"Buchanan has just published a book which says that increasing racial diversity is a threat to this country and will mean the 'End of White America.' This weekend, to promote his book, he went on a white supremacist radio show..." read the "Fire Pat Buchanan" petition letter.

Buchanan also appeared on NPR's "The Diane Rehm Show" on Tuesday and further discussed his new book and radio show appearance on "Political Cesspool."

He defended his decision to visit the radio show and asked "Am I supposed to go and vet all the people on these shows and get the list from [Anti-Defamation League chief] Abe Foxman on what shows I can go on to?"

He added, "The individual was very interested in the race issue...but I wouldn't be on the program if somebody started calling racial or ethnic names. Or rather, I'd be on it, but I'd say that's the last time we're going on that one."

Buchanan also told Rehm that "the argument that diversity is a strength is a canard. It is nonsense."

Yes, Mr. Buchanan, I believe all guests are required to be vetted by Abe Foxman. Besides, you said that "diversity is a strength... is nonsense", and I believe the expression you denigrated is written into the Constitution, possibly in the 14th Amendment.

The group that wants Buchanan fired, Color of Change, says about itself:

ColorOfChange.org exists to strengthen Black America's political voice. Our goal is to empower our members - Black Americans and our allies - to make government more responsive to the concerns of Black Americans and to bring about positive political and social change for everyone.

They should have added, "... and to silence white people, for their job is to go quietly into that good night." Hey, black people have group interests, but any whites who voice a positive opinion about and interest in the continuity of their own people are just raciss'.

The Autism and Obesity Epidemics: A Connection?

2011-10-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

As Yogi Berra once said, "You can see a lot just by observing."

Research proposes common link between autism, diabetes

"It appears that both Type 2 diabetes and autism have a common underlying mechanism -- impaired glucose tolerance and hyperinsulinemia," said Rice University biochemist Michael Stern, author of the opinion paper, which appears online in this month's issue of Frontiers in Cellular Endocrinology.

Hyperinsulinemia, often a precursor to insulin resistance, is a condition characterized by excess levels of insulin in the bloodstream. Insulin resistance is often associated with both obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

"It will be very easy for clinicians to test my hypothesis," said Stern, professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Rice. "They could do this by putting autistic children on low-carbohydrate diets that minimize insulin secretion and see if their symptoms improve."

Apropos of Yogi Berra's remark:

Stern said he first realized there could be a common link between Type 2 diabetes and autism a few years ago, but he assumed someone else had already thought of the idea.

So, what else has increased at about the same time and rate as autism? What other disorder is linked to diabetes? Obesity.

Just as it seems likely that there must be some link between the severe cultural changes of the past 40 years and the obesity epidemic, so it could very well be that there's a link between the obesity and autism epidemics (the link being diabetes), and in fact it looks so obvious in hindsight that Stern felt certain that others must have thought of it and discarded the idea.

If government recommendations to eat a low-fat diet were in any way causative of the obesity epidemic, then, talk about unintended consequences. Guess FedGov got more than it bargained for there.

BTW, here is a longish UPI article which notes the apparent absence of autism among the Amish - who also don't vaccinate their children.

Fareed Zakaria, American

2011-10-24T15:03:00.000-07:00

Fareed Zakaria: Americans should give half of inheritance to government

Time magazine columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria says Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s “9-9-9” tax reform plan is “sloppy and, in parts, bizarre.”

So he offered his own version of a tax reform plan in his weekly column in Time. In it, Zakaria argues that Americans should give the federal government half of what they inherit.

“I would enact a 50 percent inheritance tax, because nothing is more un-American than an inherited elite that perpetuates itself,” Zakaria wrote for the magazine.

Only in America: an Indian Muslim immigrant, who wasn't even a citizen until recently, is given space by Time and airtime by CNN to lecture Americans on what it means to be American.

Why should we care about what a two-bit pundit has to say about the meaning of America? Precisely because some of our fellow Corporate-Americans believe that his opinions are worth listening to.

In reality, nothing Zakaria says or does will ever make him an American. He's an outsider because he acts like one: virtually everything he says promotes the changing of America from what it traditionally was, and to some extent still is, into something else more to his liking.

Zakaria is a good example of one thing that immigration has done to this country. Rather than assimilate to American norms (whatever they are these days), Zakaria and other immigrant political entrepreneurs - Soros comes to mind - set about changing the nation in ways adverse to the native population. It all ends up like this: they end up lecturing you on the meaning and ideals of your own country, as well as telling you what you may or may not do with it.

"Prejudice" Against Mormons

2011-10-23T12:28:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Zimmerman of the Christian Science Monitor asks, Why is it OK to be prejudiced against Mormons?

You can’t be openly racist, sexist, or anti-Semitic in America. But anti-Mormon? Go for it. Maybe a White House run by Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman will shine enough light on actual Mormons to make us put aside the fears and fantasies about them.

By Jonathan Zimmerman / October 18, 2011

I have a dear friend who grew up in Utah and teaches at a major east coast university. When she first arrived at her job, a colleague asked her if she was a Mormon. She said yes.

“But you don’t really believe that stuff, right?” the colleague said.

Imagine if my friend were Muslim or Jewish. In the liberal confines of academia, no one would ever inquire if she “really” believed in her religion: The very question would be offensive, because it implies that the religion is somehow unbelievable. But my friend is a Mormon, so people feel free to ask.

And that tells you all you need to know about anti-Mormonism in America right now: It’s a prejudice you can get away with. You can’t be openly racist, sexist, or anti-Semitic. But anti-Mormon? Go for it.

It’s thoroughly bipartisan, too. Amid the recent controversy over Republican attacks on GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith, it would be easy to conclude that conservatives have a monopoly on anti-Mormon bigotry. But it would also be wrong.

If anything, liberals are more prejudiced against Mormons than conservatives are. In a poll last June by the Pew Research Center, for example, 31 percent of Democrats – as compared to 23 percent of Republicans – said they’d be less likely to support a presidential candidate if he were Mormon. And in a Gallup survey taken the same month, 27 percent of Democrats – as opposed to 18 percent of Republicans – said they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon for president.

To put these numbers in perspective, only three percent of respondents in the Pew survey said they’d be less likely to vote for a candidate if he were African-American. The real fraction of racists is probably much higher than that, sociologists say, because respondents are afraid to reveal anti-black biases. But they’re not nearly as reticent to express prejudice against Mormons. And that, too, speaks volumes about which kinds of intolerance our society is willing to tolerate.

The conservative brand of anti-Mormonism often takes an openly theological form. Consider Southern Baptist minister Robert Jeffress, who recently introduced his friend Rick Perry to the conservative Values Voter Summit as “a genuine follower of Jesus Christ.” The comment was a backhanded swipe at Mr. Romney’s religion, implying that Mormons aren’t really Christians at all.

And later that day, in a discussion with reporters, Mr. Jeffress made it explicit. Mormonism, he said, was a “cult.” And come election time, Jeffress added, every born-again Christian “ought to embrace a Christian over a non-Christian” – that is, a Perry over a Romney. Never mind that the Constitution – which conservatives like Jeffress also revere – explicitly bars any “religious test” for public office.

Allow me to offer my commentary to Zimmerman's piece: Zimmerman is a maroon.

First of all, the idea that any sort of critical remark amounts to "prejudice" is an example of the brain-dead, stifling, PC-infused public square that we all know and love in today's America. Uttering "prejudice" in the face of criticism is mere;y a way top get critics to sit down and shut up, "prejudice" being the general category under which is subsumed "racism", a very bad form of prejudice. We might say that "a bigot is someone who's winning an argument with a liberal". Zimmerman's first anecdote, about his Mormon friend and the allegedly prejudiced things said to her, shows that he doesn't understand the difference between criticism and prejudice, or deliberately obfuscates it. That the academic in question wouldn't say the same to a Jew or Muslim only means that Mormons aren't protected under the current PC dispensation; they can't play the bigot card in return.

Then Zimmerman criticizes - or is this really just Zimmerman's bigotry - the Baptist minister Jefress for asserting that Mormons aren't true Christians and that he, Jefress, would prefer a Christian like Perry for president. Zimmerman goes on to say that Jefress was out of bounds for the reason that the Constitution prohibits a religious test for public office, as if that had any bearing on whom Jefress would prefer as president. That Mormons aren't real Christians is a standard opinion among evangelicals and probably lots of others; just because the Mormons claim they are does not make it so.

Besides their inability to play the bigot card, Mormons also suffer from their religion's modern origins, the same debility under which the Scientologists or other cults labor. The main world religions get a pass because their origins are shrouded in the mists of time, because they have been believed so long and are so embedded in the cultures of their respective lands, and in the case where majorities within political boundaries are believers, because, well, they're the majority. Therefore critics feel less free to criticize. Not so with Mormons.

All this is not to say that, in everyday life, one should not be polite. But in the world of ideas and politics, Mormonism is as just a legitimate target of criticism as any other idea.

McCain Threatens Putin, Assad, the Chinese

2011-10-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

'Dictator' Putin May Be Nervous After Qaddafi Death, McCain Says

Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and other "dictators" should feel nervous after the death of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, U.S. Senator John McCain said.

"I think dictators all over the world, including Bashar al-Assad, maybe even Mr. Putin, maybe some Chinese, maybe all of them, may be a little bit more nervous," McCain said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. late yesterday. "It's the spring, not just the Arab spring."

Qaddafi was killed yesterday after an eight-month armed conflict that left thousands dead.

Putin, 59, a former KGB officer who has been in power since 2000, may be at the helm for as long as 24 years after deciding to return to the Kremlin next year by pushing aside his protege, President Dmitry Medvedev. This would make Putin Russia's longest-serving leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

"I think it's very possible that you will see people protesting a government that is clearly one that is not democratic in a fashion that I think the Russian people had the hopes and aspirations for once the Soviet Union collapsed," said McCain, the Arizona Republican who was his party's presidential candidate against Democrat Barack Obama in 2008.

Well, one can imagine that if McCain said that to the face of Putin or Assad or one of the leaders of China, their reaction might be, "Is that a threat? It sure sounds like one."

After the ignominious role of the U.S. government in the killing of Qaddafi - there's now to be a UN inquiry, probably because it looks like he was shot at point blank range - high officials in said government like John McCain seem to feel free to go around and threaten leaders of nations with which we have no beef whatsoever, and with whom it would be much better to stay on friendly terms. The U.S. now seems to be the biggest global supporter of revolution, taking over for the late, unlamented USSR.

In the case of Libya, once protests started, the US and other NATO nations declared themselves justified to intervene militarily, resulting in the death of Qaddafi. So, if protests break out in Russia or China, the wisdom and big mouth of McCain hint that we might do the same in those countries. There have already been protests in Syria but, since we're not on friendly terms with Assad, we seem to be letting him off the hook. Such is the perversity of our foreign policy that only our friends need to worry about us.

Hillary is 100% behind the killing of foreign leaders too. (Video hat tip: Richard Spencer.)

The Capitalist Network That Runs the World

2011-10-20T10:44:00.000-07:00

New Scientist: Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs). [...]

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

A big problem of the 2008 financial crisis was the so-called "too big to fail" (TBTF) banks, and as can be seen, they are virtually all on the list of globally interconnected companies. Once a bank or other financial institution becomes TBTF, the risks arising from its failure affect the entire financial system and economy. Therefore it would be better if no financial institution becomes TBTF.

Of the top 50 companies on the list, it appears that fully 49 of them are financial institutions: banks, insurance companies, investment banks, and the like. It's a common criticism to say that the finance sector does no "real" work - unlike, say, China Petrochemical Group, the number 50 company on the list. It's possible that the financial sector has grown too large, but one can't say a priori how big it should be.

However, concentrations of wealth and ownership have the power to affect political considerations, including the consideration to further line the pockets of the already wealthy. If these institutions were kept smaller, as part of a deliberate calculation, the possibility of corruption would be lower.

Woman Demands and Gets Rescue from Antarctic Job

2011-10-18T09:16:00.000-07:00

A woman "engineer" - in reality she appears to be an administrator, i.e. she was doing typical woman's work - demanded and got a rescue operation to get her out of the South Pole. The folks in charge of the station hadn't wanted to rescue her, as it's winter down there, and travel back and forth from the Pole is exceedingly dangerous for all concerned. In other words, something in the nature of a plane crash could kill the whole crew, therefore anyone who goes to the Pole must have at heart the interests of everyone concerned.

From the article, it doesn't appear that this woman is very ill:

"Back at hotel now to chill out," Douceur wrote. She added, "So nice to see green and smell freshly cut grass, flowers, birds chirping, insects, etc., since it's now been over a year on the flat polar plateau of just ice and snow." She landed in Christchurch on Monday.

Douceur, 58, is a Seabrook, N.H., resident who worked as a manager for research station contractor Raytheon Polar Services Co. She asked for an emergency evacuation after having what doctors believed was a stroke in August, but officials rejected her request because of bad weather, saying that sending a rescue plane was too dangerous and that her condition wasn't life-threatening.

Looks like the officials were right that her illness isn't life-threatening, not if she's "chilling out" at a hotel.

If you do a search on this woman's name, you quickly find a number of sites that popped up to pressure officials to rescue her, for instance this one, in which the writer paints the engineer as a victim of (presumably male) oppression:

We were successful in getting her the small things that were being denied to her and we couldn’t have done that without your help. [...] Our little voice was heard worldwide and we made a little dent into big corporational “NO” bucket. When they kept saying no, we made ourselves a little louder and we got some Yes’s. Thanks again!

Wonder what they would have said if the plane had crashed killing all aboard. There's also, of course, a Facebook page making the same demand, Evacuate Renee-Nicole Douceur from Antarctica Immediately.

Feminists constantly whine that women don't make as much money as men. But from Fukushima to the bowels of the earth, men take the most dangerous jobs. Over 90% of workplace fatalities are that of men.

If they can't take it like a man, then they shouldn't be there.

State of the Science?

2011-10-18T08:52:00.000-07:00

This must be some sort of bad joke:

The Research on Supplement of Glutamine in Sports
Dunhai Wang, Yubo Han and Ancun Jiao

Abstract
By the method of documents and datum, This article describe the characteristics of metabolism of Glutamine and its physiological function. Its discuss the impact of exercise performance on Glutamine and the impact of exogenous Glutamine on improving exercise performance. The supplementary of Glutamine is very important in some area,such as antioxidant capacity for the body, immune function, measure the over-training, enhance hormone levels and other aspects. This article offers references for researching the application of Glutamine in sports.

This is obviously written by the authors themselves, or someone like them who isn't fluent in English, and also obviously not given a jot of editing, yet it's published by Springer, a respected scientific publisher. Are scientific publishers just throwing things up on their websites, sans editing, these days? Was this thing reviewed in any form whatsoever? And, what's behind its publication in a journal called "Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing"?

The mind boggles.

Bump in the Road to Globalism

2011-10-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

Pat Buchanan - who apparently can't get booted out of the national conversation due to, what, tenure? - asks whether the NWO is unraveling:

Why is the New World Order suddenly going in reverse?

A primary reason is the resurgence of nationalism. Nations are putting national interests ahead of any perceived global interests.

A second reason is the decline of a West whose project this was. We no longer dictate to the world, and the world no longer marches to our tune. The deficits and indebtedness of Western nations preclude more of the big wealth transfers in foreign aid that once bought us influence.

A third reason is demography. Not one European nation has a birth rate sufficient to replace its population. Europe's nations are aging, shrinking, dying. A depopulating Germany cannot carry forever the deficit-debtor nations of Club Med. The oldest nation, Japan, is on schedule to lose 25 million people by 2050, as is neighbor Russia.

Militarily, America remains the most powerful nation. But Iraq and Afghanistan have bled the country and left us without the certain attainment of our goals. Old allies like Turkey go their separate ways.

Ethno-nationalism also explains a disintegrating world order. Aspiring nations like Scotland, Catalonia, Padania, Flanders, Ingushetia, Dagestan, East Turkestan, Kurdistan and Baluchistan seek a place in the sun, free of the cloying embrace of the mother country.

The desire of peoples for nations all their own, where their own language, faith and culture predominate and their own kind rule to the exclusion of all others, is everywhere winning out over multiculturalism and transnationalism.

The architects of globalism have counted upon one major item to further their project along: prosperity. In the West, while declining religious belief and the rise of feminism and divorce - the latter two closely related of course - have led people away from two traditional sources of stability and loyalty, rising prosperity has been available to keep the people content. Much of that prosperity has been due to rising levels of both public and private debt - in other words, a lot of the prosperity has been phony. But love of money has a way of overriding other concerns, so most people and nations have gone along.

But, I would say that the quest for the NWO has much in common with the quest for an egalitarian society. Society can't be remade according to the leftist model because people differ in their abilities and their pathologies, which are largely hardwired. And the New World Order is experiencing difficulties because declining prosperity means that people are more willing to fall back onto ancient loyalties, such as nationalism.

Since culture flows from human nature, and it's human nature to want to live in a nation that is controlled by people who share the most basic qualities - race, language, and religion, mainly - until the globalists abolish human nature or guarantee rising and universal prosperity, their project is in danger.

Ignorance of human biodiversity results in a society full of lies, much like the old Soviet Union. Ignorance of the ethnonationalist impulse results in a New World Order in trouble. They probably should have thought this through a bit more.

Heartiste recently noted a list of cultural items that America has been promoting for export:

obesity
feminism
multicult
ethnomasochism
wage gutting insourcing/outsourcing
parasitic oligarchism and
self-abnegating national suicide

These products and byproducts of the globalist initiative are beginning to make some of the recipients gag.

The U.S. vs. Christians in the Middle East

2011-10-14T13:01:00.000-07:00

A post by Raymond Ibrahim discusses (and dismisses) a rumor that Hillary Clinton had promised to intervene in Egypt on behalf of the Copts, who have suffered many deaths and other massive abuse at the hands of Egyptian Muslims.

Any American must instinctively recognize such rumors as false: our political leaders do not say or do such things. But alas, some Christians in the Middle East, who have no direct experience of the West, still think of the U.S. as a "Christian" nation that will surely empathize with their plight and take action—hence why this rumor began and resonates.

Yeah, well, once upon a time, but this is now.

Ibrahim goes on to mention killings and other human rights abuses of Middle Eastern Christians. Lo and behold, most of these are in precisely the places where the U.S. has intervened in some form or another to promote democracy: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Egypt. Pakistan, another buddy of ours, appears intent on catching up to the others.

So, it appears that, just as the U.S. intervenes through its ambassadors to promote anti-nationalism in Finland or Sweden, Islam and the multicult in France, and gay pride parades in Serbia, so does it intervene in the Middle East with the end result of pogroms against people who at least nominally share our beliefs.

In the old days of the waning of the Ottomans, the Western powers looked upon themselves as the protectors of Middle Eastern Christians, with each power having their particular favorites, e.g. the French looked after the Maronites, the British the Middle Eastern Protestants, and the Russians the Orthodox. Now, we have the perverse situation of our own government undermining peoples with whom we ought to have some common ground.

The neo-Bolshevist state strikes again.

Bloomberg at it again

2011-10-13T12:20:00.000-07:00

NYC Mayor: U.S. Needs More Foreign Tech Talent

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the U.S. is committing "national suicide" by limiting the number of green cards and visas available to hi-tech talent from overseas.

"In today's global marketplace, we cannot afford to keep turning away those with skills that our country needs to grow and to succeed," said Bloomberg, at a speech sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Partnership for a New American Economy. "I've called it national suicide--and I really think it is."

Bloomberg cited a number of studies that he said showed that immigrants working in hi-tech fields help to create jobs for Americans through investments, entrepreneurship, and by helping U.S. companies become more competitive globally. "These high-skill workers will not only help create thousands of jobs, they'll also give us knowledge of foreign markets that will help U.S. businesses increase their exports."

Bloomberg might think he's convincing some of his audience with his emphasis on immigrants skilled in technology, but the record also shows that he's in favor of illegal immigration, the better to keep golf courses neat and tidy without having to pay an actual American a decent wage.

Even so, the notion that we should be importing tens of thousands of foreigners because it will help the jobs situation, in the face of 10% unemployment, is ludicrous. About now, plenty of highly-skilled Americans would be willing to take those golf course jobs.

Face it, Bloomberg doesn't care about jobs, that's only his excuse. He's merely a perma-fan of mass immigration, and none of the facts on the ground will ever change his mind.

The Cultural Revolution and the Obesity Epidemic

2011-10-11T14:34:00.000-07:00

A recent paper by a couple of economists, The Socio-Economic Causes of Obesity, shows how clueless are the mainstream theories of obesity.

Abstract:
An increasing number of Americans are obese, with a body mass index of 30 or more. In fact, the latest estimates indicate that about 30% of Americans are currently obese, which is roughly a 100% increase from 25 years ago. It is well accepted that weight gain is caused by caloric imbalance, where more calories are consumed than expended. Nevertheless, it is not clear why the prevalence of obesity has increased so dramatically over the last 30 years. We simultaneously estimate the effects of the various socio-economic factors on weight status, considering in our analysis many of the socio-economic factors that have been identified by other researchers as important influences on caloric imbalance: employment, physical activity at work, food prices, the prevalence of restaurants, cigarette smoking, cigarette prices and taxes, food stamp receipt, and urbanization. We use 1979- and 1997-cohort National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) data, which allows us to compare the prevalence of obesity between cohorts surveyed roughly 25 years apart. Using the traditional Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique, we find that cigarette smoking has the largest effect: the decline in cigarette smoking explains about 2% of the increase in the weight measures. The other significant factors explain less.

Most of the factors mentioned and tested are other versions of the "calories-in, calories-out" thesis of weight gain, which has been pretty much demolished. For instance, taking into account the level of food prices assumes that if food is cheaper, people will eat more; and that more urbanization equals less exercise. Both of these ideas don't consider that more exercise normally translates into increased appetite and thus higher food intake, or that lower (higher) food prices don't increase (decrease) people's appetites. The fact that all other factors besides cigarette smoking account for less than 2% of the explanation would agree with this.

The obesity epidemic started around the mid-70s, and it will not escape notice that this was also around the beginning of enormous cultural changes in the U.S. and the world. That the U.S. has been among the leaders in the epidemic and that other countries, such as in Europe, have lagged slightly might also indicate a cultural influence, since the U.S. has arguably been in the lead (so to speak) in cultural changes. The changes I have in mind are feminism, the rising divorce rate, increased labor participation of women, broken families, increased commuting times, and others.

All of these have led to a huge increase in consumption of fast food. Food dollars spent in restaurants as a percent of total food purchases increased by 31% between 1977 and 2006.

The food reward hypothesis of obesity says that certain foods, the so-called cafeteria diet, in other words, fast food, stimulate certain brain reward centers and thus reinforce their intake.

So, fast food might be the direct cause of the obesity intake, but it's our broken culture that brought on the increased availability of and demand for fast food. By now, however, lots of people are essentially addicted to the stuff, so even were the culture to return to civilized norms, the epidemic wouldn't likely go away. But a return to these norms might be a prerequisite to abolishing the epidemic.

Illegals Fleeing Alabama

2011-10-10T11:33:00.000-07:00

Ala. Immigration Law Worries Latino Parents. What NPR should have said is "Immigration Law Worries Lawbreakers"; but in any case, thousands of illegals have fled or are apparently in process of fleeing Alabama, thanks to the new immigration law, which the Feds have generously decided that the state is allowed to have.

As Audacious Epigone (whence comes the link) also points out, when Eisenhower carried out Operation Wetback in the 50s, up to eight times as many illegals self-deported as were forcibly expelled.

So, this gives the lie to the notion that the U.S. either lacks the capacity to deport illegals, or would be breaking down doors at dawn to do so. Make conditions inhospitable to illegals, and many if not most will leave of their own accord.

It seems to me that the states are where the anti-immigration action will be. Mississippi may well be the next state with a tough anti-illegals law. If other states see an increasing number of illegals entering after leaving the states with tougher laws, they too will want to enact their own laws.

Avoiding Hedonism

2011-10-08T13:02:00.000-07:00

A lot of the game/manosphere blogs discuss "lifestyle" choices under the new sexual dispensation, the one that has made a mockery of marriage and has turned the beta provider role for men into one with a high probability of becoming a loser to alimony and child support, enforced at the barrel of the family court gun.

Most of these lifestyle choices revolve around travel, living abroad, "adventure", going where the women aren't of the masculinized and overweight type that's increasingly typical of American women. The choices also involve skipping the 9 to 5 cubicle culture of deadening boredom and kowtowing to the HR ladies, sucking up to the boss, etc.

But there's got to be a better way. While I'm mostly in agreement that the man who wants to get married and have a job ought to tread very carefully across the landmine-strewn field of marriage, feminism, divorce, and tax theft, the alternatives as set forth across the manosphere seem pretty unappealing to this blogger. Sitting on a beach? Yeah, I could do that for a few days, after which it would get old in a hurry. Clubbing? Nah, a pursuit for young (under 25) guys. Travel? Been there, done that, in spades.

One needs a sense of purpose in life, one that goes beyond the pursuit of pleasure, and I don't see that taken very seriously by these blogs. To each his own of course, but hedonism is a vapid ideology in which pleasure must run ever faster just to stay in the same place. There also seems to be little acknowledgement of the life of the mind, something important to many of us. And what of fighting for one's beliefs?

Avoiding the pitfalls of the modern scene while also avoiding dissolving oneself in the aimlessness of hedonism: that is the question. Finding one's purpose is all-important.

America Under Siege

2011-10-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

The image comes from Michael Panzner, who highlights a recent report, Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment (pdf). From the report:

During the past two years the state of Texas has become increasingly threatened by the spread of Mexican cartel organized crime. The threat reflects a change in the strategic intent of the cartels to move their operations into the United States. In effect, the cartels seek to create a “sanitary zone” inside the Texas border -- one county deep -- that will provide sanctuary from Mexican law enforcement and, at the same time, enable the cartels to transform Texas’ border counties into narcotics transshipment points for continued transport and distribution into the continental United States. To achieve their objectives the cartels are relying increasingly on organized gangs to provide expendable and unaccountable manpower to do their dirty work. These gangs are recruited on the streets of Texas cities and inside Texas prisons by top-tier gangs who work in conjunction with the cartels. [...]

America’s fight against narco-terrorism, when viewed at the strategic level, takes on the classic trappings of a real war. Crime, gangs and terrorism have converged in such a way that they form a collective threat to the national security of the United States. [emphasis added]

It's long been my view that this is exactly the sort of thing that will finally cause some measure of enforcement against illegal immigration. If the U.S. is to remain an ongoing entity, even one that is safe for globalization, big business, and Wall Street, it can't allow foreign criminal gangs to operate in its territory. Absent even that, the American people (or what's left of them) will demand that the government take action. Just in the news today was the first arrest under the new Alabama immigration law, you know, the one that Eric Holder and Barack Obama want quashed post-haste. And guess what? He isn't working mowing lawns or washing cars; he's Mohamed Ali Muflahi, a 24-year-old from Yemen, and the report also states that "illegal weapons and other items deemed dangerous" (explosives?) were seized. This is the sort of immigrant that our admin wants America made safe for.

Occupy Wall Street: Just Leftist Nonsense

2011-10-05T07:12:00.000-07:00

Those who may be tempted to sympathize with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations - possibly a fair number of readers - should take a look at a "proposed list of demands for Occupy Wall Street movement" (via Malcolm Pollack). A sampling:

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

Demand four: Free college education.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

These demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy. [emphasis added]

Like radical environmentalists - green on the outside, red within - Occupy Wall Street has another agenda than the one they say they have. Ostensibly protesting Wall Street's unreasonable influence with the government, a position even Ron Paul supporters could get behind, what they're really after is the full slate of leftist demands. If these people really wanted jobs, they would demand that open borders, which we essentially already have, should be stopped. But it appears that the elementary notion of supply and demand is lost on them. Those expensive college degrees were even more worthless than they thought.

An anomaly of Occupy Wall Street is that its demands are congruent with Wall Street itself: privatize profits, socialize losses. The sign that was held by one protester has already become iconic:

At 21 years old, I am...

-One semester from graduating college with a degree no one seems to hire

-In massive debt because of that once "dream degree"

-About to become a mother to a baby whose illness has gotten us booted off government health insurance...at 9 months pregnant...

-Scared for our future

-I am the 99%-

One can assume that if this woman had real prospects in the job market, she would be more than willing to keep the added income for herself, but since she faces a dire future, she wants the rest of us to help her out of her problems. Since she's about to have a baby, won't her husband support the family? But of course she probably doesn't have one, and wants her fellow Americans to support her bad life decisions. What was that degree in anyway? Women's Studies? Educational Leadership?

Blue Zones and Ethnic Identity

2011-10-02T10:27:00.000-07:00

Demographers have given the name "blue zones" to those areas of the earth in which people live to a much greater age and where centenarians are much more common. The term "blue zone" has, as far as I can tell, no intrinsic meaning - in other words, the color blue has nothing to do with longevity - but seems to have been used for the first time in the following paper: Identification of a geographic area characterized by extreme longevity in the Sardinia island: the AKEA study. The paper's authors found a region in Sardinia with a high incidence of centenarians and furthermore, one in which there were many more male centenarians as a fraction of the total than either in other parts of Sardinia or elsewhere.

Dan Buettner worked with National Geographic to identify the world's blue zones, those areas where centenarians existed in numbers ten times that of the U.S., and found five of them:

Okinawa, Japan
Sardinia, Italy
Loma Linda, California
Nicoya, Costa Rica
Ikaria, Greece

By studying what these areas had in common, Buettner came up with a list of 9 rules that make for greater longevity. Some of them are concerned with diet and exercise, others with stress reduction and purpose. However, a few of the rules are not easily reproducible. These include:

7. Family First

Living in a thriving family is worth a half a dozen extra years of life expectancy. Invest time in your kids, nurture a monogamous relationship and keep your aging parents nearby.

8. Belong

Recommit, reconnect or explore a new faith-based community. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist. People who show up to their faith community four times a month live an extra 4-14 years.

9. Right Tribe

Your friends have a long-term and measure impact on your health and longevity. Taking stock in who your friends are and expanding your social circle to include healthy-minded, supportive people might be the most powerful thing you can do to add years to your life.

Now, it's been often noted that black Americans have high self-esteem, higher than whites. It's thought that they have higher self-esteem due to ethnic identity:

Young blacks might experience slightly higher self-esteem overall because they often have a strong ethnic identity, while many young whites do not, she said.

Not only do they have that ethnic identity, but blackness in the present era is celebrated in the media, while the social pathologies in the black community are downplayed.

White ethnic identity is not only not celebrated, but is condemned. So what effect might that have on white longevity? Nothing good, would be the short answer. The government and media campaigns against white identity, the demonization of any form of white ethnic awareness, probably affect the health of white people, through psychological mechanisms. The people of the blue zones live longer in large part through a strong ethnic, religious, and family identity, which are denied white Americans. The fact that Christianity is largely ridiculed in public probably has its effect as well.

It also almost goes without saying that this goes double for white men, who are ridiculed in the media, and whom modern divorce and child custody laws often rip apart from their families.

Juggalos

2011-09-30T16:07:00.000-07:00

James Edwards has posted a video, "American Juggalo", which he terms an instance of "decadence so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization."

After watching this video, one can only agree. Juggalos are hardcore fans of Insane Clown Posse, a rap group that appears to be comprised, as far as I can tell, of white men - or should I say "white" "men", because the little music that I've been able to stand to listen to sounds no different than the usual black rap. According to the Wiki page, ICP has made a small fortune with their "music".

The video on the Juggalos shows us a motley, highly unappealing collection of the most idiotic, most pierced morons that one could imagine. None of them seem to be able to use any other adjective but f**kin' or m*****f**kin', nor to say anything that makes much sense. All of them appear to be on massive quantities of drugs and/or alcohol. (One scene shows a bunch of them sniffing whipped cream propellant. (I forget what that's called.)) Virtually all them are fat and don't mind displaying their mounds of flesh. One of the most repellant aspects of the Juggalos is the way they have themselves convinced that they comprise some sort of brotherhood, that they receive a form of acceptance from each other that "normal" society has somehow denied them, when in reality, if push came to shove, they look like they'd be running for the hills to save their sorry asses.

In short, they appear to be among the most worthless human beings on the planet. Unfortunately, almost all of them are white.

If these clowns represent anything close to the future of the white race, we're doomed.

US ambassador urges Serbia to secure gay pride

2011-09-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

September 28, 2011 — BELGRADE, Serbia (AP)

— The U.S. ambassador to Serbia has urged authorities to provide security for an upcoming gay pride march that has faced threats from extremists.

Mary Warlick said in a statement Wednesday that pride marches present an "important and widely-accepted vehicle" for the gay community to advocate their rights. Serbia's pride march is set for Sunday, but there are fears it could erupt in violence similar to last year's when more than 100 people were injured. A right-wing group has scheduled its own gathering on the same day.

Warlick praised the Serbian authorities for securing last year's event despite the attacks, and urged them "to do everything possible to facilitate a successful and safe event this year as well."

The U.S. government is relentlessly enforcing its mission of multiculting the world. In the case of Serbia, we actually went to war with them in order to make their neck of the woods safe for Muslims, so now the Serbians must be wondering what we'll do if they don't bow down before our latest mandate.

One might think that our government has bigger fish to fry than "encouraging" a European country to have a gay pride parade, but apparently not.

(Thanks to Matra.)

Perry Says "Sorry"

2011-09-28T16:29:00.000-07:00

Perry apologizes for 'heartless' comment on immigration question

Rick Perry said Wednesday that he was sorry for saying at last week's Republican debate that those opposed to providing an in-state tuition break to the children of illegal immigrants "did not have a heart."

“I was probably a bit over-passionate by using that word and it was inappropriate,” Perry said in a interview with Newsmax. “In Texas in 2001 we had 181 members of the legislature — only four voted against this piece of legislation — because it wasn’t about immigration it was about education.”

But Perry stood by his argument that building a fence along the entire Mexican border was unwise. The Texas governor said that the fence would likely be expensive, ineffective and violate the property rights of those who owned land on the border.

"...violate the property rights of those who owned land on the border." Ha! Good one. Perry seems never to have heard of eminent domain, nor with his Chamber of Commerce mentality does he believe that securing the border is more important than protecting private landowners - likely including many wealthy people, oil companies, and so on - on the border.

He also excuses his support for in-state tuition for children of illegal immigrants by the fact that quite a few of his fellow Texas legislators are all for open borders too.

“In the metropolitan areas where the fencing actually can play a positive role, absolutely,” he said. “But you have to have boots on the ground … having an obstacle without observation is no obstacle at all. So just the idea of building a fence and saying, ‘That will take care of it, let’s just build a fence,’ has never worked in the history of mankind.”

Plus, he's a defeatist who believes that those he's speaking to are morons.

Perry is toast, which is just as well, because Texas politicians can't be trusted.

Another Evolutionary Psychologist Attacked

2011-09-27T10:39:00.000-07:00

Race intelligence professor accused of dishonesty (thanks to kiwiguy):

Controversial former Aarhus University developmental psychologist and “intelligence researcher” Helmuth Nyborg is once again being charged with scientific dishonesty. This time for claiming that immigrants are lowering Denmark’s IQ average.

The article, published in April in the British journal 'Personality and Individual Differences', presents a statistical model for how average IQ levels in Denmark will fall steadily over the years as a direct result of immigration from what Nyborg called “low IQ countries”.

Nyborg's article on immigration and declining average IQ in Denmark was discussed here.

But three researchers from Aarhus University and Aalborg University have argued that Nyborg’s annuity model is unscientific and twists the facts. They claim, moreover, that he plagiarised it from the work of an economist with connections to the nationalist, anti-immigration organisation Den Danske Forening, reports Information newspaper.

“It’s a model where you have a completely hypothetical idea that certain [immigrant] population groups have the same birth rates as people in the country they came from. But it doesn’t take into account what is known about demographic changes,” Jens Mammen, a professor emeritus from Aarhus University, one of the three researchers who filed the complaint against Nyborg, told Information.

Besides sloppy science, Mammen and the others have accused Nyborg of outright plagiarism.

They claim that the annuity model in Nyborg’s article was actually created by Jørn Ebbe Vig, who they claim is an economist and statistician for Den Danske Forening.

Den Danske Forening does not publish the names of its members or leadership, but its website claims, in English, that its objective is “to safeguard Danish culture, language and traditional lifestyle” and “to warn against the dissolution of our cultural identity which is now under threat of being swamped by an enormous influx of immigrants from countries plagued by overpopulation”.

The plagiarism charge appears to me without merit, at least according to the present article. The critics claim that he got his idea, "the annuity model", from elsewhere; plagiarism is the wholesale copying, without attribution, of another's work, usually considered word for word. Again, as far as I can see, Nyborg didn't do that.

Then there's this statement: “It’s a model where you have a completely hypothetical idea that certain [immigrant] population groups have the same birth rates as people in the country they came from. But it doesn’t take into account what is known about demographic changes”. It could be that changes to the model need to be made regarding immigrant birthrates, but this hardly amounts to "scientific dishonesty", especially since the critic who asserts this doesn't know what birthrates will be. Either way, conjecture is involved.

But Nyborg's real crime is that he used data from an organization whose mission is “to safeguard Danish culture, language and traditional lifestyle” and “to warn against the dissolution of our cultural identity which is now under threat of being swamped by an enormous influx of immigrants from countries plagued by overpopulation”. According to the article, this is the main point of contention; it's not that the data is wrong, it's not how it is used, it is the data's source.

The critics aren't interested in matters of scientific honesty, and if they believed that Nyborg's analysis was mistaken, then they need merely publish their criticism in an academic journal. No, they clearly want to shut him up and encourager les autres. Anyone who dares to believe in one's native culture and desires to protect it must be silenced.

Be Prepared (updated)

2011-09-26T18:17:00.000-07:00

Update: Daily Mail: Was the BBC's trader from hell one big hoax? Claims greedy dealer praying for a recession in which to get rich was a FAKE

Dennis here: I doubt that he was a "FAKE", but even if he were, he spoke a lot of truth. A quote from the article put it best: "One user said: 'It doesn't matter if it was Alessio Rastani or The Yes Men. What he said reflects how traders really think.'"

A few readers have asked me in comments and via email what I think about the current markets, what will happen, and what one should do. As for trading advice, it would be foolish for me to give any, and as for which way markets will go, who knows? I do, however, firmly believe that the level of debt in the U.S. and the Eurozone is unsustainable, that central banks worldwide will "solve" problems by printing money to recapitalize bank and buy government debt, all at the expense of ordinary people, savers and investors, everywhere. Therefore the best advice was that given by the trader: you have to protect your assets. Protect them from government money printing, aka stealth confiscation. There are a number of ways to do that, which the interested reader will need to learn about.

Update 2: BBC Releases Official Statement On Alessio "The Trader" Rastani: He Is Perfectly Legit And The Interview Was Not A Hoax

How the West Lost by Being in the Lead

2011-09-26T11:12:00.000-07:00

Warning: highly speculative.

The West used to make war in the firm and true belief that most of the rest of the world didn't matter much. Before the Age of Exploration, this almost must have been the case, since travel was severely limited. (Glaring exception: the Crusades.) After the AoE started, most Western confrontations with other-than-European forces were easy victories. John Derbyshire wrote:

The Hitler-Stalin duel was the end of an era in which white Europeans made major war against each other. It was the end of an era in which we could do so, secure in the belief—the true belief, at that time—that the rest of the world didn’t really matter much. With the exception of Japan at the very end of that era, the non-white non-European world was too backward and/or too underpopulated to matter. That is no longer the case. [...]

That white, European, Christian Germans made ferocious total war against white, European, Christian Russians will seem as preposterous to my children as it seems to me that English people once fought English people, that Britons fought Americans, that Americans fought each other. What on earth were they thinking of?

Good question. So, first thesis: by being so far in the lead economically and militarily, the West could duke it out, notably in World Wars I and II, while the rest of the world sat. We thus weakened ourselves considerably.

Second thesis: the west industrialized first. One important consequence of the rising standard of living was lower birthrates. For a long time, this didn't matter, because of higher death rates in the rest of the world. But after the invention of vaccinations and the discovery of the importance of sanitation, population growth in China, India, and Africa as well as elsewhere meant that in terms of population, the West fell behind. China, India, etc., were able to experience high population growth without industrialization because of Western technology and expertise.

Third thesis: the relative unimportance of ethnic consciousness in the West came about precisely because those other countries didn't matter for so long. (As opposed to, say, the consciousness of being English vs. that of being French.) While there were many other factors involved in this, the fact that Western (white) ways were so superior led to a near abandonment of ethnic/ racial consciousness. People are closer to the racial roots of their being when they lack other, compensatory factors, such as wealth and power (as in the case of the elites), or even just a secure, middle-class job. This in turn led, eventually, to the idea that race doesn't matter, a peculiar position that is only held by whites, all other races thinking that it matters very much. And in turn, this led to mass immigration from a now virtually unlimited Third World population, one that was directly caused by the West.

Genocide Watch "Upgrades" South Africa

2011-09-25T11:43:00.000-07:00

Genocide Watch Upgrades South Africa to Stage 6 "Preparation" on Countries at Risk Chart

Genocide Watch believes that the whites of South Africa are being "prepared" for genocide, basing this on the rise of Julius Malema, characterized as "one of the most important leaders of the new South Africa". Malema wants to expropriate all white farms and at rallies sings "Kill the Boer". Genocide Watch also characterizes him as "a racist Marxist-Leninist", which seems apt. Marxist-Leninists do not shy from mass murder.

Genocide Watch: "South Africa has not yet reached actual genocide, which is Stage 7, but the preparations for it are ominous."

Don't expect the world to lift a finger to help South African whites. The ANC leaders are heroes to the globalist/media complex, so they won't deign to notice. Malema's alleged plans make apartheid look like simple shoplifting.

Sorry for the downbeat post, but someone has to say it.

Putin to Reclaim Russian Presidency

2011-09-24T16:33:00.001-07:00

The NYT reports that Vladimir Putin will likely return to the Russian presidency next year.

Maybe he's a dictator, I couldn't say. There seems little doubt that Russia is a fairly corrupt place and that murder is among the sanctions against anyone who gets in the way of the ruling class. Murder, but significantly, not mass murder, unlike under the former rulers of Russia.

That aside, can there be any doubt that Putin will do what is in the interests of the Russian nation? Unlike Western leaders, who disdain their own people and shout down or arrest anyone (such as Wilders) who too vocally questions the immigration and diversity mandate, Putin isn't beholden to any PC nonsense about the strength of diversity or the peacefulness of Islam.

Furthermore, Putin is personally quite the alpha, and it wouldn't be too much to say that with him, the personal is the political. His masculine style - and I say that without irony - carries over into his politics. Or maybe it's his politics carrying over into his style. Whatever, Putin eschews the feminine, emotionally laden politics of the West. While he seems to care deeply about the Russian people, you'll never hear him say, "But what about the children."

In a sane world, we would forgo the absurd, thankless, and impossible tasks of trying to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into Western doppelgangers, and revert to the older, great power form of foreign affairs. And we'd see Russia for what it is: a potential ally.

Social Engineering on an Unprecedented Scale

2011-09-23T10:07:00.000-07:00

hbd chick has her own post replying to Ron Unz's open-borders propaganda, assimilation is a two-way street (or why endogamy means mexicans will find it hard to become middle-class anglos). In a nutshell, higher levels of inbreeding - cousin marriage - produce lower levels of trust due to the resulting clan-based culture. hbd chick has produced many posts of late on the topic of cousin marriage, and has shown that those societies that banned cousin marriage earlier were precisely those that produced stable, prosperous democracies later.

So far, so good. Bryan Caplan likes ethnic diversity precisely because it undermines ethnic solidarity, which has a way of hindering his pet projects, mainly the free market.

The claim isn't that open borders will "destroy" solidarity or the welfare state, but merely that open borders will undermine both. And while free-marketers may well agree that some degree of solidarity is good, it's also hard for free-marketers to deny that current levels of solidarity are excessive. Solidarity stands in the way of free-market reforms in pensions, education, health care, taxation, agricultural policy, and much more.

By juxtaposing the posts of these two bloggers here, we can see that the link between racial/ethnic makeup and the sort of society produced as a result, is barely understood. Caplan would destroy arguably the most successful society ever seen in the history of the world because it isn't "free" enough for his taste. Of course, he would deny that he wants any such thing, but my point is that we can't possibly know enough to monkey around with large-scale changes like mass immigration, and not believe that it will unleash massive changes that will override anything that Caplan and his kind wish for.

It's often been asserted by reactionary types that Western civilization is inextricably linked with the white race. But what sort of mechanism could provide the link? Gregory Clark has demonstrated one, namely that greater reproductive success among the wealthy ended up filling an entire nation with people who had the values of the rich: productivity, deferred gratification, non-violence, and so on. hbd chick has extensively documented another mechanism: outmarriage, which in turn leads to lower levels of clannishness, higher trust and cooperativeness, and so on. No doubt there are plenty of other considerations both racial and otherwise, such as geography, the latter being hugely important in the case of the U.S., precisely because it shielded the country from invasion and... immigration.

Enthusiasts of mass immigration are engaging in social engineering on an unprecedented scale, and Western civilization itself could hang in the balance. The problem is that the engineers don't have so much as a slide rule. A better analogy would be that they're more like surgeons who have zero training, cutting into an unimaginably complex product of millions of years of evolution without so much as knowing what a pancreas is.

As Ron Unz said, "The racial transformation in America’s national population may be without precedent in human history." The civilizational transformation will also be without precedent, and the odds are that they won't be good.

Ron Unz's Magnum Opus on Immigration

2011-09-22T06:25:00.000-07:00

Ron Unz, the editor of The American Conservative, has written a long - and apparently long-awaited - article on immigration, the Sailer Strategy (Republicans should seek white votes), and the racial transformation of America. As I said, the article is long, which seems necessary given the counter-intuitive logic of his argument; following are what I think are representative quotes that get to the heart of his reasoning.

The racial transformation in America’s national population may be without precedent in human history.

Now I think a strong case can be made that such a process of deliberate racial polarization in American politics might have numerous adverse consequences for the future well-being of our country, sharply divided as it would become between hostile white and non-white political blocs of roughly equal size. But given the extremely utilitarian mentality of those who practice electoral politics for a living, the more important question we should explore is whether it would actually work, purely on the political level. Might this strategy of racial polarization be applicable across the country as a whole?

These examples lead to the suspicion that the history of bitter racial politics across most of the Deep South may represent less a conflict of white vs. non-white than one of white vs. black, and this seems quite plausible. [...] The history of black/white racial relations is arguably the single most significant element in American political history, so we should hardly be surprised if it continues to heavily influence the politics of numerous states and cities, including those outside the South.

By contrast, although relations between whites and various other groups—Asians, Hispanics, and American Indians—have sometimes been hostile or even violent, these conflicts have never been nearly as long nor intense and are more like the often contentious relationships between various white ethnic groups. As our schoolbooks endlessly emphasize, black/white relations do indeed constitute a unique aspect of American history.

The results seem conclusive. The correlations between the Hispanic percentage of each state and white voter preferences are approximately zero for all presidential elections, implying that the presence of large Hispanic populations appears to have virtually no impact upon white political alignment, either one way or the other.

By contrast, the evidence for apparent black/white racial conflict being the driving force that prompts whites to vote Republican seems very strong: the correlations between the size of the black population and the degree of white GOP support range from 0.43 to 0.70, with a mean of 0.55, being both quite substantial and very consistent over time.

Meanwhile, harsh Republican rhetoric or policies that target these groups would naturally tend to drive them into the arms of the Democrats. Under such a scenario, the GOP loses millions of non-white votes without gaining any white votes in exchange, resulting in political disaster.

Many of the leading factors driving populist opposition to immigration, such as perceptions of high crime rates or anti-white ethnic hostility, seem completely incorrect. As I demonstrated in a 2010 article, all available evidence indicates that most immigrant groups tend to have approximately the same crime rates as white Americans of a similar age, or perhaps even a bit lower. Similarly, there is overwhelming evidence that today’s immigrants want to learn English, gain productive employment, assimilate into our society, and generally become “good Americans” at least as much as did their European counterparts of a century ago.

The notion that masses of non-white immigrants, legal or not, will turn our cities into violent battlefields or support ethnic separatist movements which shatter national unity are total absurdities, and the people who believe such claims are fools. And as we have seen above from the accumulated voting data of the last couple of decades, after a brief transition period, whites and non-white immigrant groups seem to coexist perfectly well, or at least as well as did the various white ethnic groups on the East Coast 50 or 60 years ago.

Unz ends his piece with a long peroration on his preferred solution. Are you ready? Raise the minimum wage. This will effortlessly turn America into the ~~polyglot~~ English-only, multiracial society of the future.

Executive Summary: The real racial divide in America is black/white, not non-white/white. Most Americans like and get along with the new immigrants and their children, and those nasty people who want to restrict immigration and who argue that the fact that 30% of Mexico has moved here isn't a good thing, and that overall, immigration means that whites are doomed to minority status, are not only wrong and misguided, but are helping to prevent the country from realizing its glorious, post-white future, along with the welcoming rule of our new alien overlords. The Republican Party must embrace immigration or be doomed. By raising the minimum wage, we can end class warfare, save the middle class and Social Security, and keep the US from becoming the next Brazil.

In essence, Unz seems to argue from the opposite premise of many diversity promoters, who believe that all "people of color" have a common, anti-white interest. Unz argues that, because the new immigrants are not black, they and the white natives can and will unite in a kumbayah circle of renewed American exceptionalism.

However right or wrong Unz may be - and I believe his relatively sanguine attitude toward the Hispanicization of the US is completely misplaced - one thing is clear: he in no way can claim to be a conservative, ironic considering the magazine of which he's editor. He has no interest in the preservation of white, American civilization - you know, the one that virtually ruled the world and produced the highest standard of living for its citizens for a good part of the 20th century. For him, there is no turning back the tide, and in fact we shouldn't even try, because it just makes our new alien overlords angry at us, and some other whites think it's mean and nasty. He should rename his magazine The Latin American Conservative.

Unz gives people who are too clever by half a bad name.

The Anti-White Left in Wisconsin

2011-09-20T09:26:00.000-07:00

Linda Chavez - about whom I agree with a commenter that she's not to be trusted - writes about what happened in the wake of the Center for Equal Opportunities report about the massive extent of affirmative action (red: anti-white pogrom) in Wisconsin.

CEO has published studies of racial double standards in admissions at scores of public colleges and universities across the country with similar findings, but none has caused such a violent reaction.

Instead of addressing the findings of the study, the university's vice provost for diversity, Damon A. Williams, dishonestly told students that "CEO has one mission and one mission only: dismantle the gains that were achieved by the civil rights movement." In fact, CEO's only mission is to promote color-blind equal opportunity so that, in Martin Luther King's vision, no one will be judged by the color of his or her skin.

Here's Damon A. Williams, an employee of the state of Wisconsin, whose mission and job depend on anti-white discrimination.

Egged on by inflammatory comments by university officials, student groups organized a flashmob via a Facebook page that was filled with propaganda and outright lies about CEO wanting to dismantle their student groups. More than a hundred angry students stormed the press conference at the Doubletree Hotel in Madison, where CEO president Roger Clegg was releasing the study.

The hotel management described what took place in a press statement afterward: "Unfortunately, when escorting meeting attendees out of the hotel through a private entrance, staff were then rushed by a mob of protestors, throwing employees to the ground. The mob became increasingly physically violent when forcing themselves into the meeting room where the press conference had already ended, filling it over fire-code capacity. Madison police arrived on the scene after the protestors had stormed the hotel."

Gee, what happened to all that civility in debate that the progressives have been so worked up about? Rather than debate the issue, a debate which would publicize the blatant anti-white discrimination at the University of Wisconsin, the liberals resort to violence. They're the shock troops of liberalism: mainstream liberals love what they do, and will never denounce them, since they keep whites, conservatives, and reactionaries in line.

Students take offense to study claiming UW-Madison discriminates

"We believe deeply in what we are doing at the university and every student has the potential and the academic profile to be successful at UW-Madison," Damon Williams, UW-Madison's chief diversity officer and vice provost for diversity and climate said.

"The commentary offered by CEO fails to recognize this point and that the presence of social diversity enhances the excellence of our institution in so many ways."

Overall, minority students made up only a small fraction of the admitted students in 2008. More than 85% of accepted students were white.

"Students of color and students of lower socio-economic status are being told that basically, we're not supposed to be here," said UW student Blaire White of the CEO study.

The university informed students Monday night of the study's impending release. Students responded by storming the group's press conference Tuesday morning.

About a hundred students locked out of the Doubletree hotel in Madison rushed through the doors and into the meeting room chanting, "Power to the people. People, power."

Several students gathered around Clegg chanting, "[We are] more than our scores."

Clegg packed up his brief case and left.

New employee to help implement ~~anti-white pogrom~~ diversity strategy

Eric G. Williams has joined the Office of the Vice Provost for Diversity and Climate, where he is expected to play a critical role in helping the university drive a cohesive, integrated diversity agenda.

He will work with such programs as the Pre-College Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence (PEOPLE), Posse, the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives and the Center for Educational Opportunity, says Damon Williams, UW–Madison’s chief diversity officer and vice provost for diversity and climate. [...]

Eric Williams comes to UW–Madison from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), where he has been director of the university’s Multicultural Academic Opportunities Program.

Mr. Williams is eminently qualified to ~~be hetman of his band of Cossacks~~ enrich UW.

Eric Williams has a doctoral degree in educational leadership and policy studies from Virginia Tech, as well as a master’s degree in higher education and college student personnel from Kent State University and a bachelor’s degree in African-American community and cultural studies from Virginia Commonwealth University.

The other Mr. Williams:

Pale and Male

2011-09-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

Daily Mail:

Speaking at the conference earleir [sic], Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg told delegates that he wanted the party to shake off its 'too male, too pale' image.

'Increasing the diversity of our elected representatives is an absolute priority for me and the Liberal Democrats,' the Deputy Prime Minister said.

'To best represent Britain, we need to have candidates from all walks of life and all backgrounds.'

Here's the freakazoid that Clegg got: still male, but no longer very pale.

Somehow I don't think that a psychotic monstrosity was the sort of diversity Clegg had in mind.

Hormetics

2011-09-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

Awhile ago I noted a study that found that epicatechin, a component of chocolate and likely the most important to its health effects, "enhances fatigue resistance and oxidative capacity in mouse muscle". Now that I've had a chance to read the full paper, I'd say that the results seem astounding.

The investigation found that giving mice a relatively small dose of epicatechin twice daily for 15 days, with and without exercise, dramatically increased exercise capacity and mitochondrial volume in muscle. What this means essentially is that epicatechin functions as an exercise mimetic, conferring many of the benefits of exercise without actually exercising. Exercise combined with epicatechin boosted the effects even further.

Lower mitochondrial volume and decreased exercise capacity are hallmarks of aging, so epicatechin from chocolate could be an anti-aging substance. Dark chocolate contains about 50 mg/100 g catechins (i.e. in one full bar); however, only (-)-epicatechin is the active substance.

Most researchers in this field, including those in the present paper, insist on the antioxidant capacity of health-promoting substances, but this is almost certainly not the case. The results are more likely to be due to hormesis, i.e. the ingestion of low amounts of a toxic substance that then improves the body's defensive capabilities. Without sugar, chocolate is bitter, which gives a clue as to its toxic status. Since epicatechin appears to function as an exercise mimetic, it's worth noting that exercise also improves health through hormesis.

Taylor on White Identity

2011-09-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

White Identity: What It Is and Why It Is Necessary from American Renaissance on Vimeo.

Jared Taylor here gives an excellent discussion of white identity and why it's needed. Little or nothing in the video will be unfamiliar to readers here, but preaching to the choir is obviously not Taylor's intention. Ordinary white Americans need to see this video - though I'm not sure how that would come about.

Taylor says at one point that the doctrine that diversity is a strength is so wrong that only highly intelligent people could convince themselves that it's true. He also states that no journalist will ask politicians the tough questions about immigration and diversity. What this means is that our public arena lives in a fantasy life, no different from the USSR, in which questioning the benefits and truth of communism was unthinkable, at least for anyone who wanted to live a decent life. (Or earlier, to keep it.) Even for the academics, scholars, writers, and politicians who may genuinely believe the diversity nonsense they spout, the fact that either they themselves nor anyone else is allowed to question it on pain of ostracism, marks them as knaves and poltroons.

Pushing the Multicult on the World

2011-09-16T09:54:00.000-07:00

Why Are We Pushing Multiculturalism On France, Russia, The World?

By Henry McCulloch on September 14, 2011

A "Festival of the Cultures of Islam" is now (September 7-17) in full swing in Paris. You're paying for it. Why?

This bit of multiculti showbiz was ginned up by the City of Paris and the U.S. Embassy—which has gone so far as to lend the Stars And Stripes (see right) to the islamopropaganda—along with (what a surprise) Harvard University.

The Institut's website says the Festival has been "organized through a partnership (réalisé en partenariat )between the City of Paris, the United States Embassy in France and Harvard University." Such réalisations always cost you money.

Since Barack Hussein Obama sent former Muppets CEO Charles Rivkin to be the U.S. Ambassador to France (what did his bijou post cost him, I wonder?), Rivkin has pursued a "Minority Engagement Strategy " designed to endear himself to, while increasing the political power of, those residents of France who are not, well, French. [In Smart-Power Shift, U.S. Now Actively Cultivating Muslim Minorities In The EU, By Garret Martin, European Affairs, April 2011] [...]

Charles Rivkin, who is billed as a French-speaking lifelong Francophile, evidently has decided to thank the country that has brought him such joy over so many years by doing what he can to destroy it. A graduate of Yale and Harvard and son of a Kennedy-administration ambassador, Rivkin may also serve as yet another example of how our most "elite" institutions are busily breeding an elite that is bent, for whatever reasons, on ruining the country that has offered them so much. Is it coincidental that New York had to endure the spectacle of a "Festival of the Cultures of Islam" in the very week that marks the 10th anniversary of the Muslim jihad-strikes against New York and Washington?

Mr. McCulloch goes on to say that while the U.S. has meddled constantly in the internal affairs of other nations, this was always done in the interests of great power politics, i.e. in the perceived interests of the USA. However, I don't see that as being any different from the current situation, in which the American ambassador to Finland openly criticizes Finnish nationalism, or the American embassy in France engages in diversity outreach.

The reason its no different is that the multicult has captured FedGov, and FedGov is acting in the interests of those who run it. The globalists, the Davos Men, the mass immigrationists, Wall Street and the hedge funds - in short, the usual suspects - these are the people and groups running the show, and they feel that it's in their interest to diversify - I almost wrote "diversify the world", but that is clearly not their aim, which is to diversify the white world only. (However, the Duke of Qin has made the case that the Chinese elite are no less willing to sell out their countrymen than the Western elite. If so, this isn't necessarily a phenomenon confined to white elites, but elites almost everywhere.)

That the U.S. engages in the promotion of Islam in France is just another example of the neo-Bolshevist state doing what it's designed to do.

Kanazawa apologizes (updated)

2011-09-15T07:25:00.000-07:00

Sort of. LSE scholar admits race analysis was 'flawed' (HT: Diversity Is Chaos.)

Evolutionary psychologist issues mea culpa in wake of critical LSE inquiry. Jack Grove writes

A scholar who sparked an international row with his claim that data analysis showed that black women were uglier than those of other races has apologised for bringing his institution into disrepute.

Satoshi Kanazawa, reader in the department of management at the London School of Economics, caused uproar in May when he wrote a blog posting on the US-based website Psychology Today titled: "Why are black women less physically attractive than other women?"

The Japanese evolutionary psychologist based his findings on a survey in which white, Asian, black and Native American men and women were asked to rate each other's attractiveness based on photographs. Black women scored lowest, Asian women highest.

Dr Kanazawa, who has worked at the LSE since 2003, said this was because black women had higher testosterone levels than others and therefore more masculine features.

As I recall, Kanazawa speculated that higher testosterone levels might be one of the causes, not said, a crucial difference.

However, serious concerns were raised about his work. In a letter to Times Higher Education, 68 of his peers in the field of evolution and human behaviour accused him of poor-quality work and of failing to engage in scientific dialogue.

THE also published a letter from a number of evolutionary psychologists defending Kanazawa, but that apparently doesn't bear mentioning.

The LSE has now published the findings of an internal investigation into the affair, ruling that Dr Kanazawa had "brought the school into disrepute" and barring him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed outlets for a year.

The inquiry, details of which were released to staff on 15 September, also concludes that he had "ignored the basic responsibility of a scientific communicator to qualify claims made in proportion to the certainty of the evidence".

It found that "some of the arguments used...were flawed and not supported by evidence, that an error was made in publishing the blog post" and that Dr Kanazawa had not given "due consideration to his approach or audience".

If this article is an accurate and reasonably complete account of the LSE's report, then note that the main complaint is that Kanazawa embarrassed LSE by publishing a politically incorrect blog post, and by wording it in a way that was deemed insensitive.

In addition to the 12-month ban, he will not teach any compulsory courses this academic year.

In a letter to Judith Rees, director of the LSE, Dr Kanazawa says he "deeply regrets" the "unintended consequences" of the blog and accepts it was an "error" to publish it.

"In retrospect, I should have been more careful in selecting the title and the language that I used to express my ideas," he writes.

"In the aftermath of its publication, and from all the criticisms that I have received, I have learned that some of my arguments may have been flawed and not supported by the available evidence."

He adds: "In my blog post, I did not give due consideration to my approach to the interpretation of the data and my use of language."

Imagine, using flawed arguments in a blog post! One doubts that even Becker and Posner and similar bloggers have never used a flawed argument, and virtually the entire blogosphere would be out of business if anyone who had ever used a flawed argument were banned from blogging. Or threatened with the sack.

The LSE reprimanded Kanazawa for one reason only, and that's the uproar created when he implicitly criticized a protected minority group, besides implying that standards of beauty are relatively fixed.

Addendum: Just want to emphasize that this post wasn't meant to cast any blame on Satoshi Kanazawa for doing what he did in order, presumably, to keep his job. I assume - but don't know - that he has a family to support, and academic jobs in evolutionary psychology aren't exactly growing on trees these days. In fact, I'd guess that were he to be fired from LSE, he might be all but unemployable. Furthermore, he admitted to nothing stronger than giving offense and perhaps using a mistaken argument.

On the other hand, LSE wouldn't look too good if they fired him because outside, non-academic forces were offended with something he wrote for the popular media. LSE is, after all, supposed to be dedicated to scholarly pursuit of truth, not Stalinist show trials or Maoist reeducation camps.

Minorities Up to 1500 Times More Favored in Wisconsin University Admissions

2011-09-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

New Studies Show Severe Racial Discrimination at University of Wisconsin (thanks to a reader):

(Madison, WI) Two studies released today by the Center for Equal Opportunity reveal severe discrimination based on race and ethnicity in undergraduate and law school admissions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with African Americans and Latinos given preference over whites and Asians.
[...]

The odds ratio favoring African Americans and Hispanics over whites was 576-to-1 and 504-to-1, respectively, using the SAT and class rank while controlling for other factors. Thus, the median composite SAT score for black admittees was 150 points lower than for whites and Asians, and the Latino median SAT score was 100 points lower. Using the ACT, the odds ratios climbed to 1330-to-1 and 1494-to-1, respectively, for African Americans and Hispanics over whites.

For law school admissions, the racial discrimination found was also severe, with the weight given to ethnicity much greater than given to, for example, Wisconsin residency. Thus, an out-of-state black applicant with grades and LSAT scores at the median for that group would have had a 7 out 10 chance of admission and an out-of-state Hispanic a 1 out of 3 chance—but an in-state Asian with those grades and scores had a 1 out of 6 chance and an in-state white only a 1 out of 10 chance.

This study uses the "odds ratio", which is "the ratio of the odds of an event occurring in one group to the odds of it occurring in another group". The odds ratio depends of course on what one decides is the significant variable, but in the case of using the ACT, Hispanics were almost 1500 times more likely to be admitted to UW Madison than a comparable white, with blacks not far behind.

Is it any wonder that, as Ronald Brownstein says, that there's a "sharp move to the right among older whites resistant to activist government and uneasy about the rapid demographic change transforming the United States"; the goods, like universities, that Americans established for the good of their states are being co-opted by the diversity left. But, as Brownstein also explains:

Those striking changes capture the other major demographic force reshaping American politics: the rise of a huge, heavily nonwhite generation of youths that needs public investments in education and health care to ascend to the middle class. The contrast between their needs and the hardening antigovernment attitudes of the aging baby boom could sentence the nation to sustained conflict between the brown and the gray, unless the United States forges a new social consensus between them.

Basically, Brownstein, who's probably quite representative of "common-sense" liberalism, wants whites to soften up their "sharp move to the right" for the common good, i.e. the younger, heavily non-white, generations.

But, as the Wisconsin study shows, non-whites are already being heavily favored in the University admissions area, and whites are being penalized. Hopefully, the white move to the right will become even sharper; the common good here appears to be what's good for minorities.

Meanwhile, in a recent post on whites getting more merit-based scholarships, Malcolm Pollack quotes the late Eric Hoffer:

A nation is on its way out when it devotes much of its wealth and energies to the care and welfare of the least-endowed segment of its population and puts a low ceiling on those who ceaselessly strive and achieve.

Yup, by that criterion I'd say that we're on our way out.

Journalistic Priority: Pro-Diversity Spin

2011-09-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

There's only one reason why the 9/11 commemorations were portrayed as a celebration of diversity and tolerance: journalists themselves wanted it that way. The Society of Professional Journalists, an organization that dates back to 1909, handed down a ukase that decrees how any journalist with any conscience whatsoever should cover the news, namely by spinning it. Following are some excerpts from the Guidelines for Countering Racial, Ethnic and Religious Profiling.

— Portray Muslims, Arabs and Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans in the richness of their diverse experiences;

— Seek out people from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds when photographing Americans mourning those lost in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

— Seek out people from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds when photographing rescue and other public service workers and military personnel.

— Do not represent Arab Americans and Muslims as monolithic groups. Avoid conveying the impression that all Arab Americans and Muslims wear traditional clothing.

— Use photos and features to demystify veils, turbans and other cultural articles and customs.

— Make an extra effort to include olive-complexioned and darker men and women, Sikhs, Muslims and devout religious people of all types in arts, business, society columns and all other news and feature coverage, not just stories about the crisis.

— Seek out experts on military strategies, public safety, diplomacy, economics and other pertinent topics who run the spectrum of race, class, gender and geography.

— When writing about terrorism, remember to include white supremacist, radical anti-abortionists and other groups with a history of such activity.

— Do not imply that kneeling on the floor praying, listening to Arabic music or reciting from the Quran are peculiar activities.

You can read more at the link, but I think this gives a representative flavor of the progressive minds at the SPJ.

Note that these the journalist wrote these guidelines specifically to counter alleged bigotry on the part of white Americans. They just assume that we're all a bunch of bigots, and that "racial profiling" constitutes a significant enough problem that the need to counter it overrides the need for journalism, i.e. the reporting of facts.

One can't help but notice that the SPJ Board of Directors hasn't exactly embraced diversity among its own membership. By my calculation, it's over 95% white.

Patriotism and Estrangement

2011-09-12T12:23:00.000-07:00

OneSTDV writes:

Of course, as with all nations, this comes to down race. In essence, is American patriotism now just the empty slogan of a disjointed collective? The cry of an enervated people who have little to unite them besides sterile propositions and philosophical ideas? [...]

So where does this leave the race-conscious reactionary? Does he give up on the country he founded, the country inexplicably linked to his genetic lineage? Perhaps the previous discussion would have one presume otherwise, but I say no. All too often amongst the alt-rightosphere, commenters seek to criticize and lament the current situation. And since much of this despair is entirely reflexive, they repudiate mainstream patriotism as well. Further, they argue that America has been lost to inimical political and cultural forces that stigmatize whites (men).

Much as I would like to agree with One as to keeping alive a sense of red-white-and-blue patriotism, I'm finding it difficult. the 9/11 commemorations - seen through print media only, since I don't watch television - left me cold. (And no disrespect intended to anyone who lost family or friends that day.) It all looked to me like another excuse to celebrate diversity, as well as our feel-good tolerance of Islam in America. We've done very little to achieve real security from more terrorism, and what we have done has infringed mightily on American freedoms, not to mention killing a good number of young American men. (And tens of thousands of Iraqis.) And the maudlin sentimentality on display is unworthy of any people that consider themselves part of a great nation.

The point, as evinced by the commemorations, is the estrangement from what is supposed to be our own country. On 9/11/2001, many of us were as patriotic, or more so, than the average American. But since then, with ever more mass immigration, with the government and the media waging a sub rosa struggle against the notion that the descendants of those who populated the country and made it what it was have any claim to hold onto it, patriotism comes to look like foolishness, an expression of loyalty to an entity that has no intention of returning the favor.

Speaking Out

2011-09-12T11:59:00.000-07:00

This morning I had a brief conversation with an older woman who lives at the senior apartment complex that I previously wrote about. (The complex is undergoing extensive renovation, most of which appears to be carried out by illegals, or at the least, very few white Americans were working there.) She asked me if I heard the noise from the project, and I replied that while I did, what bothered me more was the lack of Americans working there. I told her, delicately skirting the racial issue, that it looked like they couldn't find any Americans to work there. Not at all to my surprise, she agreed with me that it was a bad situation, asked me what could be done about it, and so on.

This isn't the first time that I've spoken to people about immigration or the decline of white America, though I don't know this women well and normally I would be talking to good acquaintances or friends. In this particular case, since it bothers me every morning I walk past the complex, and since I wrote about it here, I felt it would be cowardly not to mention it. Anyway, what prompted this post was Unamused's post on talking about race:

Talking face to face with ordinary (i.e., liberal) white folk (I’ll get around to the non-white folk eventually, I promise), looking them in the eye, telling them about race riots or lynch mobs or media bias (or flat-out censorship) or crime stats or intelligence research or human genetics or African atrocities or white racial consciousness (or all of the above), was an incredibly encouraging experience.

Talking about illegal immigration, as I did, is a bit easier than Unamused's subject matter, since the vast majority of Americans favor immigration enforcement. Nevertheless, I have spoken to others about racial matters, and like Unamused, I've generally had encouraging experiences.

We need to get over the anti-racist (read: anti-white) media fog that surrounds us, and which convinces some of us that everyone else thinks like the media, and talk to our friends and family about these matters. The internet is great for bringing us together and encouraging each other, but we should take some more concrete action as well.

Why We Get Fat

2011-09-10T10:01:00.000-07:00

There's been a recent internet debate on the causes of obesity, conducted by, among others, Stephan Guyenet, Paul Jaminet, and Gary Taubes. Taubes is the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, a tour de force that had everything to do with changing my own mind as to the lipid hypothesis and the wisdom of low-fat diets. Taubes' latest book is Why We Get Fat, which I just finished reading. WWGF is much like GCBC, but shorter and friendlier to the layman, ommitting much of the history of nutritional research that comprised the latter book.

In WWGF, Taubes reaffirms the carbohydrate theory of obesity, discusses where nutritional research went wrong, and why the calories in, calories out notion of obesity is mistaken. It's a compelling read.

Nevertheless, in my opinion there are some important aspects of obesity not covered. Taubes asserts that the idea that the obese become that way due to personal failings is untenable, which is a corollary of the untenability of calories in, calories out. For instance, he explains the greater prevalence of obesity among the poor as due to higher carb intake. No doubt that is a factor, but the poor are different not only in the food they eat, but in psychological aspects as well. The poor - on average, if it needs saying - will have lower IQs, higher impulsiveness and lower future time orientation. This can be seen in the fact that they smoke more and drink more. As such, they will probably be less likely to take steps toward losing weight. I'd say that there's much more to the notion of personal responsibility than Taubes allows.

Furthermore, among the not-so-poor, say your average office worker, plenty of them frequent fast food outlets daily and can often be seen with those 32-ounce cups of soda pop. Presumably, most of these people are in a position to know that the stuff causes weight gain, but most of them appear to care more about their soda fix than about their guts or butts. Anecdotally, I know that when people are told about paleo or low-carb eating, a very common response is, "I could never give up bread." Personal responsibility again.

People with anorexia nervosa appear to lose weight by sheer willpower. Now, that's a pathological condition, but it says to me that the idea that people can't permanently lose weight by willing it is wrong. Plenty of non-pathological people must have done so as well.

These considerations don't explain the obesity epidemic, since it wouldn't seem that impulsivity or other genetic/psychological factors have increased over the past 30 years. However, elsewhere in the book, Taubes notes - and dismisses - the notion of a "toxic environment", i.e. one in which bad food choices surround us. If the toxic environment idea has any merit, and I think it does, since those 32-ounce beverages didn't exist in any quantity until relatively recently, then the non-obese would simply be the ones that have either the knowledge or the conscientiousness and will to resist the siren calls of toxic food.

Obesity existed before the epidemic, of course, and much of it may very well be due to the eating of excessive carbohydrate, perhaps along with a genetic predisposition to overweight. In the main, I believe that Taubes has got it right, but I can't go as far as he does in dismissing the notion of personal responsibility for one's weight and one's health.

PS: Something else occurred to me. Taubes writes at some length about the failure of traditional, calorie-restricted diets to cause any great number of people to lose weight permanently. But, the problem is sample selection; the subjects were all overweight/obese and therefore following the logic of what I wrote above, they were known to be heavily weighted (so to speak) toward people with lower willpower (or lower future time orientation, or greater impulsivity, etc.) So of course the (calorie-restricted) diets didn't work - for them. People who maintain a lean body weight may be consciously following a low-calorie diet constantly, and it works for them.