Statsaholic

Supreme Court orders California to release 23% of its prison inmates

2011-05-23T15:48:00.004-04:00

The AP reports:

The Supreme Court on Monday narrowly endorsed reducing California's cramped prison population by more than 30,000 inmates to fix sometimes deadly problems in medical care, ruling that federal judges retain enormous power to oversee troubled state prisons.

The court said in a 5-4 decision that the reduction is "required by the Constitution" to correct longstanding violations of inmates' rights to adequate care for their mental and physical health. In 2009, the state's prisons averaged nearly a death a week that might have been prevented or delayed with better medical care.

The order mandates a prison population of no more than 110,000 inmates, still far above the 80,000 the system was designed to hold.

There were more than 143,000 inmates in California's 33 adult prisons as of May 11, so roughly 33,000 inmates will need to be transferred to other jurisdictions or released.

So that's the answer to not having enough prisons relative to your inmate population.

I suppose building more prisons would be out of the question.

The court's four Democratic appointees joined with Kennedy in upholding a court order issued by three federal judges in California, all appointees of President Jimmy Carter.

Justice Antonin Scalia said in dissent that the court order is "perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation's history" and that it did not comply with the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a 15-year-old law intended to limit the discretion of judges in lawsuits over prison conditions.

Justice Clarence Thomas joined Scalia's opinion, while Justice Samuel Alito wrote a separate dissent for himself and Chief Justice John Roberts.

Michael Bien, one of the lawyers representing inmates in the case, said, "The Supreme Court upheld an extraordinary remedy because conditions were so terrible."

The ruling comes amid efforts in many states, accelerated by budget gaps, to send fewer people to prison in the first place. Proposals vary by state, but include ways to reduce sentences for lower-level offenders, direct some offenders to alternative sentencing programs and give judges more discretion in sentencing.

"There's a growing consensus that there are better ways to run criminal justice systems," said Michael Mushlin, an expert on prisoners' rights at Pace Law School in White Plains, N.Y.
California did not immediately comment on the ruling.

Eighteen other states joined California in urging the justices to reject the population order as overreaching. They argued that it poses a threat to public safety. State attorneys general said they could face similar legal challenges.

Alito said he, too, feared that the decision, "like prior prisoner release orders, will lead to a grim roster of victims. I hope that I am wrong. In a few years, we will see."

Kennedy acknowledged the concern, but said the judges gave state officials flexibility in complying with the court order, including offering "early release only to those prisoners who pose the least risk of reoffending."

The 23% of the inmates in California who pose the least risk of reoffending must be safe to release, right?

But it stands to reason that states in the past which were made by the court system to release inmates would've also tried to release the least dangerous subsets of their prisoner populations, and yet Stephen Levitt showed court mandated prisoner releases to be correlated with increases in the crime rate which were extremely large relative to the number of prisoners released:

The Effect of Prison Population Size on Crime Rates: Evidence From Prison Overcrowding Litigation

The Sinew of War

2011-04-30T00:03:00.004-04:00

The following is a passage from former senior U.S. intelligence official Michael Scheuer's book Imperial Hubris:

Just under the noise, death, and rhetoric yielded by the foregone episodes lies a largely ignored factor that may constitute al Qaeda's main war effort-the steady bleeding of the U.S. economy. In late 2002, Abu-Ubayd al-Qurashi wrote an essay in Al-Ansar called "A Lesson in War" wherein he described al Qaeda's intention to follow Clausewitz's principle of attacking its foes "center of gravity." He said al Qaeda would unrelentingly focus on identifying that point and make "sure to direct all available force against the center of gravity during the great offensive." Al-Qurashi wrote that al Qaeda had studied North Vietnam’s victory over the United States, and found that Hanoi had “fully understood that America’s center of gravity lay in the American people,” and by killing America’s “dearest ones…the war ended with victory on the Vietnamese side.” Al Qaeda took this lesson to heart, Qurashi wrote, but believes that current center of gravity is its economy.

...A conviction has formed among the mujahedin that American public opinion is not the center of gravity in America. The Zionist lobbies, and with them the security agencies, have long been able to bridle all the media that control the formation of public opinion in America. This time it is clearly apparent that the American economy is the American center of gravity. This is what Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin has said quite explicitly. Supporting this penetrating strategic view is that the Disunited States of America are a mixture of nationalities, ethnic groups, and races united only by the "American Dream," or, to put it more correctly, worship of the dollar, which they openly call "the Almighty Dollar." May God be exalted greatly above what they say! Furthermore, the entire American war effort is based on pumping enormous wealth at all times, money being, as has been said, the sinew of war.

Leaving aside jargon about Zionists and conspiracies, al-Qurashi's depiction of al Qaeda's intent seems to mesh with reality. The 11 September attacks, of course, devastated the U.S. economy; it is only now, in early 2004, recovering. But beyond the immediate impact lie massive expenditures-at all levels of American government-that will add permanently to the size and cost of government. In addition to the cost of hiring thousands of federal employees for homeland security purposes; acquiring buildings, equipment, and training to make them effective; and requiring proportionate upgrading at state, municipal, and local level; there lie what must be substantial amounts of unpredictable expenditures for overtime wages-in government and business alike-whenever Washington raises the threat level, or when high levels of security are provided at public places or functions heretofore not seen as serious security risks.

Likewise al Qaeda is at the core of massive increases in defense spending, costs that are likely to accelerate as U.S. officials find the military is not organized, manned, trained, or equipped to fight the kind of wars being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq. Finally, economic planning by government and business must be experiencing significant difficulty in projecting expenditures, given threats of a WMD attack in the United States; the enormous monetary, materiel, and manpower costs of running several wars; the steady diet of shocks thrown into business by steady call-ups of reserve-soldier employees; and-especially in the transport and tourist sectors-by such events as the "emergency" cancellation of flights from Western Europe to the United States in late 2003 and early 2004. Beyond the sound of bombs, then, al Qaeda's attack has continued since 11 September on its notion of the U.W. "center of gravity." Without a second 11 September-like attack, al Qaeda has stimulated immense unanticipated spending, much of which will become fixed in budgets at all levels of government. "Aborting the American economy is not an unattainable dream," al-Qurashi wrote in Al-Ansar. Perhaps he is correct.

It should be noted that even though what Scheuer writes here both was and is true, the fact remains that al Qaeda hasn't done nearly as much to attack America's center of gravity since 9/11 as they could have.

The basic cause of this is that apparently since the 19 hijackers were sent to America to perform the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda has refrained from sending another team into American soil.

So far all the post-9/11 attacks which could possibly be traced to al Qaeda have either been against non-American targets or have involved single individuals such as the underwear bomber.

While the underwear bomber did quite a good job of provoking an overreaction, the damage the Nigerian did was small potatoes compared to the kind of damage a team of terrorists could've done.

Also there's the issue that individual terrorists are profoundly vulnerable to entrapment by undercover FBI agents, as they so often are moved to seek help from people they met on their own.

In contrast self-contained terrorist teams are nearly invulnerable to undercover agents as they have no need to seek help from anyone but the confederates they met in this or that non-American training camp.

This raises the question: "Why has al Qaeda refrained from launching self-contained team based attacks on America since 9/11?"

I suppose the interesting issue here is whether it's a question of massive tactical failure on al Qaeda's part or rather a rational choice driven by some grand strategic insight which can only be guessed at.

The American Government's outstanding debt to GDP ratio (1790 to 2009)

2011-04-26T00:03:00.000-04:00

As can be seen in the above chart provided by reader Marius, the American Federal Government's outstanding debt to Gross Domestic Product ratio has never, with the exception of WWII and its immediate aftermath, been higher than it is now.

It's of interest how the WWII debt was steadily paid off every year after the war ended until it was back to what it was before America got involved, and how sharply this contrasts with how the very large amount of debt incurred since 1980 has never been paid off more than fractionaly.

To quote from the Jan. 2010 Jim Jubak article 'Approaching the Debt Tipping Point':

The threshold is when government debt rises above 90% of national gross domestic product (GDP), economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff argue in a paper headed for publication in the American Economic Review.

After looking at data from 44 countries spanning 200 years, they’ve concluded that at ratios of debt to GDP up to 90%, there’s not much correlation between government debt and economic growth.

Above 90%, however, median economic growth rates fall by one percentage point and average economic growth rates fall by about four percentage points.

That makes the 90% level a kind of make-or-break point for countries that are hoping to grow their way out of debt. If the government debt load climbs above 90% of GDP, economic growth slows so much that growth is no longer a viable solution to reducing that debt.

Above the 90% level, governments serious about reducing their debt load have to increasingly rely on “solutions” such as reducing wages and depreciating their currencies, which might over time increase global economic competitiveness enough to give a boost to national economic growth. In the short to medium term, however, these “solutions” inflict real pain on the citizens of the countries since they reduce standards of living.

The scary thing about Reinhart and Rogoff’s conclusion is how close the United States and other major developed world economies are to the 90% cutoff thanks to the global financial and economic crisis.

The United States finished 2009 with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 85%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). On current trend, the United States will finish 2010 at 94% and 2011 at 98%.

According to the Reinhart and Rogoff study:

1. When America has had a debt to GDP ratio of less than 30 percent, it's averaged GDP Growth of 4.0%.

2. When America has had a debt to GDP ratio of 30 to 60 percent, it's averaged
GDP growth of 3.4%.

3. When America has had a debt to GDP ratio of 60 to 90 percent, it's averaged
GDP growth of 3.3%.

4. When America has had a debt to GDP ratio of more than 90 percent, it's averaged GDP growth of negative 1.8%.

The the study finds a similar pattern in the totality of twenty Advanced Economies it looked at, with a medium growth rate of 3.9% when they had less than 30 percent debt to GDP, a medium growth rate of 3.1% when they had from 30 to 60 percent debt to GDP, a medium growth rate of 2.8% when they had 60 to 90 percent debt to GDP, and a medium growth rate of only 1.9% when they had a 90 percent of more debt to GDP.

Of course correlation shouldn't be assumed to prove causation here, as Paul Krugman has pointed out, but this fact may be less important than Krugman seems to think.

A correlation can have predictive power irrespective of whether it's based on one variable causing the other.

An update on Hadji Murad's people

2011-04-02T00:03:00.000-04:00

Auster recently wrote an entry entitled "The Islamization of Chechnya" containing the following quotation from an article by Aymenn Jawad:

A recent report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), entitled "You Dress According To Their Rules," should highlight the growing need for policymakers in Moscow to counter the increasing entrenchment of sharia in Chechen society.

HRW's analysis documents extensively the enforcement of Islamic law vis-à-vis women's rights in Chechnya, as part of Chechen President Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov's "Campaign for Female Virtue." In fact, Kadyrov, who was first appointed president of the Chechen Republic by the Kremlin in February 2007, has never disguised his advocacy of sharia. Soon after becoming president, he defended polygamy as part of Chechen tradition, and in 2009 he praised the male relatives of seven young women whom they shot in the head and dumped by a roadside as part of a series of honor killings. Speaking to journalists on a Friday afternoon outside a mosque in Grozny, the capital of the Chechen Republic, Kadyrov said that the women had "loose morals," thereby deserving death, and that "no one can tell us not to be Muslims." Even so, polygamy and honor killings are unambiguously prohibited according to Article 14 of the third chapter of the Family Code of the Russian Federation.

A key aspect of Kadyrov's drive towards sharia has been forcing women to wear the hijab. By the autumn of 2007, the Chechen president had publicly stated on television that all women working for state institutions had to wear headscarves, and that such an unwritten law should be implemented immediately. The results were soon evident as female television anchors, government officials, teachers and staff-members of the ombudsman's office began wearing headscarves to work by the end of that year. In schools and universities, where the hijab was introduced under Kadyrov as part of mandated uniforms in 2007, students who refused to wear the hijab were simply denied entry to their respective offices and academic institutions, even though no legal basis existed for this new requirement.

It's notable that the only part of the Russian Federation socially conservative and patriarchal enough to produce a president like Ramzan Akhmadovich also has a Total Fertility Rate far higher than other parts of the Russian Federation:

Total fertility rate (TFR) in Chechen republic exceeds the replacement level.

In 2008 it was 3.40 per woman at the age of 15-49.

For comparison, in the same year TFR in neighboring Republic of Dagestan was 1.95, in Republic of Ingushetia it was 1.96, in the whole South Federal Districtit was 1.67 and in the whole Russian Federation it was 1.49.

Note I do not deny the possibility that the Chechans are taking social conservatism too far under the leadership of Kadyrov.

However, two things need to be pointed out:

1. They certainly aren't taking things too far in one direction more than the West is taking things too far in the opposite direction.

2. The Chechen way of doing things is more adaptive and natural than the current Western way of doing things.

Building a Mystery

2011-03-25T00:02:00.003-04:00

San Francisco becoming a child-free zone as youth population declines

Despite efforts to stem the tide of family flight, the population of children in San Francisco continues to ebb.

Families that remain in The City are bucking the trend that has plagued San Francisco for years as the number of children — defined as people up to 17 years old — has dropped from 181,532 in 1960 to 107,524 today, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau figures. The 2000 census counted 112,802 youths.

The decrease is disappointing news for city officials, who have attempted to counter the family-flight trend by creating more affordable housing, improving schools and cutting costs, such as a college savings account for kindergarten enrollees.

“It’s definitely not a hopeful sign that we have 5,000 less kids,” said N’Tanya Lee, the executive director of San Francisco-based advocacy group Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, which lobbies City Hall on budget and housing issues.

There's no possible explanation. How can it be that the number of children in San Francisco dropped so much since 1960 in spite of the total population remaining stable? How can it be that San Francisco has continued to see a reduction of the number of children over the last decade in spite of city officials creating more affordable housing, improving schools, and offering college savings accounts to kindergarden enrollees?

We So Excited

2011-03-19T00:04:00.004-04:00

I think Bob Dylan is really singing about how Society as a whole only appreciates the reward of a task and not the process. It's looking toward "The Weekend" and sees the week as something to be suffered through.

Winds of Change

2011-03-06T07:45:00.007-05:00

A German Newspaper reports:

An opinion poll in France found that right-wing politician Marine Le Pen would defeat President Nicholas Sarkozy, Le Parisien reported on Saturday, March 5.

The poll results, to be published in the Sunday edition of the French daily, showed the 42-year-old leader of the Front National party would receive 23 percent of the vote in the first of the two rounds of presidential elections due to occur in France next year.

Center-right Sarkozy would only receive 21 percent of the vote according to the poll.
"This poll makes me believe that Nicolas Sarkozy will lose this presidential election," Marine Le Pen said at a news conference in northern France.

Part of Le Pen's platform so far has included comparing Muslims in France to an occupying force. Meanwhile, Sarkozy has initiated a national debate on the role of Islam in France, a move that some feel is designed to neutralize Le Pen.

No margin of error was published for the poll, conducted between Feb. 28 and March 3 with 1,618 people aged 18 and up.

France's next presidential elections are set for May 2012.

It would be huge if Marine Le Pen was elected President of France. I'm not aware of anyone in the last 60 years being elected head of a European state as restrictionist on immigration as she is, and certainly nobody has ever been elected head of an EU member on a platform of pulling out of the European Union.

"She [Marine Le Pen] echoes traditional FN calls to halt immigration, wrest French sovereignty back from the European Union, restore the death penalty for certain crimes and practice "national preference" to reserve jobs, financial aid and public housing for French citizens over foreigners..." -Time Magazine

Given that the EU is an entity which was brought into existence by a coalition of French and German financial elites, there's reason to think losing France would lead to the EU's demise.

At Least the EU is Consistent in its Raving Insanity

2011-03-02T00:03:00.004-05:00

I can hardly believe this, it's like some kind of joke:

The European Union's highest court on Tuesday barred the insurance industry from charging different rates for men and women, saying the widespread practices amounts to sex discrimination against millions.

The ruling ordered changes effective Dec. 21, 2012, to auto insurance, life insurance, medical coverage and other plans, potentially affecting tens of millions of customers across the continent. For example, many women driver would see their car insurance costs rise even though they are considered safer on the road.

EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said it was "now clear that an insurance company must not distinguish between women and men; all customers must be treated equally."

"This is a matter of respect for fundamental rights. It is now also becoming a matter of good business practices," Reding said.

Insurers grudgingly accepted the ruling, but say their current policies are statistically fair and the change will be bad for customers because it will force cost hikes across the board.

The whole point of insurance is that you charge different people a different rate based on how likely you are to have to pay out to them!

But there's more:

Currently millions of insurance policies take gender into account, with insurance companies arguing it is typically easy to check and is statistically sound. The court said that is inappropriate, since there are myriad other factors that could also be considered.

What?

"Taking the gender of the insured individual into account as a risk factor in insurance contracts constitutes discrimination," the court said in a statement.

The Belgian consumer group Test-Achats, which brought the case, said the decision is a "historic ruling."

"The equal treatment of men and women must be absolute," the group said in a statement.

Why exactly?

Even if women are considered safer drivers, the question remains whether a man should be punished by paying more despite taking special care to drive safely. Test-Achats says there are other ways insurance companies can make a distinction, for example, by taking the accident history of a driver more into account.

In traffic-choked Rome, Antonello Parenti welcomed the ruling.

"Men and women are equal, so it has to be a matter of equal opportunities, so it's not fair that women pay less," he said.

I don't blame the Italian gentleman for feeling this way. After all, it's so strange for the principle of equality to be used to help men at the expense of women, as opposed to the other way around.

But this doesn't change the simple fact that the ruling is insane. It's based on illegalizing the technique which allowed the insurance industry to arise in the first place.

If it's not fair to discriminate in insurance based on sex, why not also make it illegal to discriminate by age?

If you do that no young person is going to be retarded enough to get insurance and thus be forced to subsidize the elderly.

Test-Achats also questioned why a woman who smokes and lives more dangerously should be assessed for medical or life insurance by the standards of an average woman while a man who works out, eats healthily and does not smoke cannot see his lifestyle taken into account.

Because it makes more sense to do it that way on average, obviously. Women live longer than men on average. Unless a man is willing to have a very thorough physical to prove that he's so much healthier than the average man that he'll outlive the average woman of his age, there's absolutely no reason not to charge him more than the average woman.

You set insurance rates with the data you have, not the data you might want or wish to have at a later time.

"You have to complement the statistical approach but one which is more respectful of the rights of each individual taking lifestyle into account," the group said.

Never mind that this will make getting insurance an invasive and hellish ordeal!

There's also the issue that this will make it more expensive for insurance companies to set rates, an added expense they'll undoubtedly pass on to their customers:

Philip Jarvis, head of insurance at the international law firm Allen & Overy, said it was tough to put financial figures on the change, but that it was clearly a major ruling.

"It is nontrivial, it is a significant change to the industry," he said in an interview.

He expects overall charges to rise. Since the gender analysis is out, insurers have to spend more money figuring out pricing. Insurers could push up charges across the board to protect themselves or fine tune other, more expensive ways to differentiate between people, he said.

Parting thought: If the EU says insurance discriminates against men because it makes them pay higher premiums than women, can Affirmative Action for white basketball players be far behind?

Disparate Impact

2011-02-24T00:32:00.007-05:00

Richard Spencer writes:
In 2007, the advocacy group Adversity.net examined the racial hiring practices of Washington’s Executive Departments and Independent Agencies, from the Department of Education to NASA. The group discovered that with a very few exceptions, federal entities dramatically overfulfill their “Diversity” quotas. Indeed, the best agencies at hiring Blacks put the Post Office of lore to shame: the Controlled Substance Ordering System, the Government Printing Office, and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, for instance, overhire Blacks at 800, 500, and 400 percent, respectively. Even the “worst” agency for employing African-Americans, über-nerdy NASA, overhires Blacks at a clip of 50 percent.

Spencer thinks this explains why on January 8 the chief of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernake, announced publicly that there would be no Fed-led bailout of state and local governments.

His idea is that they think they need to keep all the money they can in the Federal system, where it can be used to pay off Blacks not to riot.

One problem with the presentation of this theory is that, with the exception of Wisconsin, Spencer failed to provide information on the demographics of the public employees in States which are facing budget problems.

Of course Bernake wouldn't have said what he said just based on the demographics of Wisconsin.

At the same time it's very doubtful to me that any state has employee demographics as slanted toward Blacks as the Federal Government does, much less the average state in need of a federal bailout to avoid layoffs.

So whether it's intentional or not, there is an element of racial favoritism to be found in the Federal Reserve's privileging of Federal Government over State Government.

Twilight of the Teen Idol: Justin Bieber's Sinister Ideology (Plus Thoughts on Lara Logan)

2011-02-17T11:45:00.002-05:00

The website CafeMom reports the chilling news:
Did Bieber Fever just take a turn for the super-scary? Earlier today, Slate joked that Justin Bieber could easily grace the cover of Lisa Simpson's beloved Non-Threatening Boys Magazine, but then Rolling Stone magazine released a bit of a racy interview with the pop sensation, in which he strongly states he doesn't believe in abortion. Whoah. That's no catchy, non-threatening pop song.

What Justin Bieber must not understand is how this anti-choice statement, however nonchalant (and naive) it might have been, is going to travel at lightning speed around the Internet, and all his bazillion teen-aged girl fans are going to ponder it. I don't have a problem with girls pondering this topic, of course. Please ponder it!

However, how do we talk to our teens about abortion after their favorite teen idol makes such a strong statement against it?

Indeed. How will we talk to our children about how wonderful abortion is now that the evil Justin Bieber has poisoned their minds with his regressive worldview?

But as important as this news is, it's still only the second most popular story on Cafemom today. The top rated story is a thought provoking piece entitled: 'Lara Logan Was Right to Put Her Career Before Her Kids'.

After all, what have Lara Logan's kids ever done for anyone? Why should their so called needs encumber the right of their mother to galavant all over dangerous areas of the World for months at a time?

They have a father, for all I know, so what right would they have to complain if their mother was gunned down in a war zone?

2011-02-11T13:51:00.003-05:00

Racism's Forgotten Victims

2011-02-08T00:03:00.017-05:00

A blogger, The Cold Equations, points out that "nobody sheds a tear for racism's forgotten victims - white drug abusers who go to the ghetto to buy drugs."

It turns out these drug abusers are profiled by police.

But of course The Cold Equations isn't really wording things correctly. Usually when people talk about someone being the "victim of police profiling" they do so in reference a person who lacked illegal intent but was treated with suspicion by authorities for probabilistic reasons.

At least I hope that's what people complain about, as opposed to complaining about the fact that profiling made it harder for this or that criminal to commit his chosen crime.

So racism's real forgotten victims are whites who visit the ghetto for some reason other than to buy drugs, but who are hassled by police due to the stereotype that whites in black ghettos are more likely to be there to buy drugs.

This is similar to the stereotype that Westerners in Thailand are more likely to be there to abuse children than random Thai who are there just because it's where they come from and live.

Both are contexual stereotypes based on the concept of selection bias.

The fact that police are sophisticated enough to use a context dependant stereotype, and in the case of the many police officers who are white to use it against members of their own group, is interesting.

For one thing it shows how foolish it is to think that police profiling is merely an expression of "institutional racism".

It is true that innocent people are sometimes subjected to profiling.

But it's important to understand that the alternative to profiling is not the cessation of this phenomenon, but rather the extension of it to the entirety of the population.

Well, at least in certain situations where the prevention of violence and mayhem is of great monetary importance to large corporations:

As part of the increased security surrounding the Super Bowl, NFL and federal authorities are limiting what fans can bring to Cowboys Stadium.

Everyone entering the stadium must pass through a magnetometer, such as those used at airports, and get a patdown as part of the screening process. The majority of fans will enter through checkpoints on the east side of Cowboys Stadium.

Small bags are allowed, but will be searched, and jackets will be X-rayed.

Not allowed
Items fans can't bring into Cowboys Stadium:

Weapons, mace/pepper spray, fireworks
Camcorders, tripods, camera cases and binocular cases
Umbrellas, strollers
Grills, tents, poles, sticks
Banners, noisemakers, horns, beach balls, Frisbees, laser lights and pointers
Containers of any type, coolers of any size, backpacks
Bottles, cans, hairspray

When it comes to less important situations where human life is all that's at stake, of course, the rejection of profiling would more often be accomplished via its substitution with the use of a nearly worthless "scattershot method".

At least the scattershot method makes people feel like something's being done to protect them, so perhaps it isn't an utter and complete waste of government resources in that sense.

"Instead of actually playing with your kids"

2011-02-04T12:22:00.001-05:00

Malthusian Egypt?

2011-01-31T00:59:00.009-05:00

Steve Sailer just had a post entitled "Malthusian Egypt", and I think it's much more pro-Malthusian than the evidence warrants.

If a country was actually pushing the limits of its land's carrying capacity, you'd expect the per capita food production to decline.

But it looks like per capita food production in Egypt has actually expanded.

In 1961 Egypt had a population of 28.5 million and a food production per capita index of 51.

By 2007 Egypt's population had expanded to 80 million, and in spite of this the food production per capita index doubled to 102.

This suggests that Egyptian agriculture is under less strain now than when the population was only 36% of what it is now.

It is true that Egypt imports a lot of food. However, it's worth noting that World food production per capita has also increased in spite of the profound increase in overall population:

At the very least we can say that Egypt hasn't yet entered a Malthusian Trap in spite of a very great increase in population over a short period of time.

And really, if Afghanistan could have a DECLINE in its food production per capita index from 1961 to 2007 without it leading to a slackening of their population growth, Egypt with its increase in food production per capita doesn't look to have anything to worry about anytime soon.

"What is waste depends on what your objectives are"

2011-01-29T00:57:00.002-05:00

Sailer called it (Lebanon)

2011-01-27T00:02:00.009-05:00

Steve Sailer on June 24, 2005:
"The Babe Theory of Democracy: Babes or Babies?"

The chaos ground on for another half dozen years, turning into a Mad Max struggle between clan-based neighborhood gangs, until Syria conquered most of the country in 1990.

In early 2005, during the Beirut demonstrations against Syrian occupation, there was much fatuous commentary in America about the inevitable triumph of democracy. One blogger got a lot of publicity for a expounding the flattering idea that pro-American democracy must triumph in Lebanon because all the hot babes go to the anti-Syrian demonstrations. Babes attract TV cameras and television rules the world, right?

This was particularly ironic because the weakness of the Babe Theory in Lebanon was that those hot babes haven’t been having enough babies. For generations, the stylish Christian women have been losing the Battle of the Cradle to the Shi'ite women, who are too covered up to have to worry about losing their babealicious figures. If there were real, one-person one-vote democracy in Lebanon instead of the "confessional gerrymander", the hot babes would be wearing shapeless sacks tomorrow.

New York Times on January 24, 2011:
"Hezbollah Chooses Lebanon’s Next Prime Minister"

A prime minister chosen by Hezbollah and its allies won enough support on Monday to form Lebanon’s government, unleashing angry protests, realigning politics and culminating the generation-long ascent of the Shiite Muslim movement from shadowy militant group to the country’s pre-eminent political and military force.

Hezbollah’s success served as a stark measure of the shifting constellation of power in this part of the Middle East, where the influence of the United States and its Arab allies — Egypt and Saudi Arabia — is seen by politicians and diplomats as receding, while Iran and Syria have become more assertive.

American diplomats tried to forestall the triumph of Hezbollah’s candidate, Najib Miqati. Although the final votes will be cast Tuesday, Mr. Miqati won the decisive vote from a politician who said he had to deal “with the reality on the ground.”

The Shameful Legacy

2011-01-23T00:07:00.003-05:00

Uncharted Territory

2011-01-17T00:01:00.003-05:00

Comparing America's Outstanding National Debt to its Gross Domestic Product, we find that in 1900 the outstanding debt only came to 10.4% of GDP.

In 1910 outstanding debt came to only 7.9% of GDP.

Then partly because of World War I, by 1920 outstanding debt came to 29.3% of GDP.

But by 1930 a lot of debt had been paid off, and outstanding debt was down to 17.8% of GDP.

Then because of the Great Depression reducing tax revenues, and FDR's "New Deal" ramping up federal government spending, in 1940 outstanding debt went up to 42.4% of GDP.

On account of war spending associated with World War II, in 1950 outstanding debt went up to 87.6% of GDP.

But very significantly this debt was greatly reduced by the time we got to 1960, by which time outstanding debt was down to 54.4% of GDP.

Then in 1970 outstanding debt was down even further to 35.7% of GDP.

This was certainly high by the standards of the first couple decades of the 20th Century, as well as by the standards of all of the 19th Century other than the Civil War and its aftermath.

But it still showed willingness on people's part at that time to actually not just "break even" in economically good years, but to actually PAY OFF a significant amount of the old debt.

As will be seen, the economic good times of the 1990's didn't lead to a single penny in net outstanding debt being paid off.

In 1980 outstanding debt decreased slightly to 35.6% of GDP.

By 1990 the deficit spending policies of Ronald Reagan, policies inspired by the delusions of a madman named Laffer, helped outstanding debt increase back up to 55.7% of GDP.

Then the boom times of the Clinton years in the 1990's actually involved outstanding debt increasing, in spite of all his meaningless crowing about "balancing the budget", to 57% of GDP in 2000.

Incredibly, the relatively peaceful 2000's saw the largest decadal leap in unpaid debt since World War II, as outstanding debt increased to 92.7% of GDP by 2010.

Stuxnet + Election

2011-01-13T00:04:00.000-05:00

Outgoing Mossad chief Meir Dagan recently concluded his term saying Iran was still far from being capable of producing nuclear weapons and that a series of malfunctions had put off its nuclear goal for several years. Therefore, he said, Iran will not get hold of the bomb before 2015 approximately.

If he's right, then it makes the 2012 election result absolutely crucial from a geopolitical standpoint.

If someone at least somewhat capable of independent thought, like Obama or Romney, is elected it would almost certainly give Iran enough time to get a nuclear deterrent.

On the other hand, if someone less capable of independant thought is elected, it stands to reason it would mean war.

In Spring of 2010 Pew did a poll of global attitudes showing that 66% of Americans surveyed were willing to consider military action to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

That's the highest rate of 22 countries they surveyed, with the exception of Nigeria.

This must mean that a large majority of Republicans support the idea.

So if a Republican crazy enough to go through with it wins in 2012, and Iran doesn't get a nuke before the swearing in, there's every reason to think said Republican would go through with attacking Iran.

But if a crazy Republican president is all it takes to get a war with Iran, why wasn't there one at the end of Bush's term in office?

The answer is partly that George W. Bush was less crazy than Dick Cheney, who tried to talk him into doing it.

If Bush was incapacitated and replaced by his vice president, that would've led to war with Iran.

If McCain won the 2008 election, that would've led to war with Iran.

It's quite possible that a McCainesque war hawk could win the 2012 Republican primary. In that case, it seems Obama's reelection would be the only thing standing between the world and utter catastrophe.

A Conflict of Visions

2011-01-05T10:19:00.018-05:00

"But the nature of the universe is such that the ends never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end."
— Aldous Huxley

Point

The Future Will Be A Totalitarian Government Dystopia

I am sad to say that for all our efforts in the name of freedom, the future shall be a bleak one, indeed. Such visionary authors as George Orwell and Robert Heinlein have mapped out the hellish future that awaits.

By the end of this century, the Earth will be controlled by a single unified world government–a government solely dedicated to perpetuating itself and keeping the populace under control. The first and greatest casualty of this New World Order shall be personal liberty.

Humans will live in identical, low-ceilinged, one-roomed concrete dwellings, outfitted with little more than a bed and a telescreen, arranged in endless grid patterns stretching to the horizon. Our bleary-eyed descendants 100 years hence shall shuffle between their assigned tasks in gray, one-piece coveralls. What few possessions they enjoy will be meted out by the government, and even these spare trinkets will be small and inexpensive–a plastic comb, a morsel of chocolate, a new pair of shoes when the old ones have worn to unwearability.

Citizens will be assigned to various vocational fields, the most common being propaganda, bureaucracy, and the police. Those who perform with unerring loyalty will be rewarded with slightly larger dwellings and the right to lower the volume of their telescreens.

Unremovable electronic trackers will be implanted in our brains, monitoring our whereabouts and thoughts at all times. Citizens who harbor anti-authoritarian sentiments will be swiftly seized by jackbooted secret police and either put to death–a procedure filmed and displayed via telescreen as a grim warning to other would-be dissenters–or rehabilitated into blind servitude through torture and brainwashing.

Food will be prepared by machines and served in drab public mess halls. No fruits and vegetables for future-man: Every meal will be a flavorless, grainy paste designed to provide just enough nutrition to sustain life and nothing more–any more energy and the powers that be risk rebellion.

Oh, how I dread the future.
_______________________________________________________________

Counterpoint

The Future Will Be A Privatized Corporate Dystopia

I beg to differ with my colleague. Having read the futuristic accounts of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Philip K. Dick, the path our future shall take will be bleak, indeed–but in a much different way.

When the ongoing trend of corporate mergers reaches critical mass in 2030, the scant handful of corporations that remain will be too powerful to resist and will ultimately supplant all government. National borders will crumble, replaced by warring corporate armies who deploy vat-grown Yakuza assassins to take down enemy CEOs in the name of commerce.

The future will be every color but gray–not that the future will be worth living in. Giant videoscreen billboards will cover the exposed surface of every skyscraper, bombarding our consciousness with advertising for anything and everything. Looking up will expose us to giant orbiting mylar superscreens bearing more logos and slogans. A citizen will be unable to walk down the street without encountering roving clouds made up of billions of microscopic nanoprobes that form corporate logos right before their very eyes.

Which is not to imply that the average citizen will do much walking: When every inch of space is privatized, it will cost money to walk from your living room to the kitchen. The average citizen will spend nearly all of his waking hours neurally jacked into the futuristic grandchild of the Internet, roaming cyberspace rather than moving and interacting in the inelegant, inconvenient three-dimensional world.

When we do log off the CyberNet, the very walls of our apartments will teem with droning media messages. Tolerating such in-home advertising will be the only way the average citizen will be able to afford an apartment at all. Only the wealthiest will be able to afford a quiet, dark room in which to sleep. The rest of us will simply become desensitized to the 24 hours of stimuli attacking our minds.

All media will consist of some form of advertising–print, audio, video–with some actually beamed directly into our brains. The theme song to every TV show will be a product jingle. Newscasters will segue straight from war reports into soft-drink pitches without batting an eye.

To the powers that be, a citizen will be no more than a potential receptacle of consumption, only as valuable as his or her electronically catalogued personal wealth. All transactions will be conducted instantaneously by retinal scan, and credit fraud will be a crime worse than murder.

Oh, how I pity future generations.

The Age of Irresponsibility

2011-01-04T10:06:00.026-05:00

Slate recently had a very interesting article about Japan.

I was quote shocked to find out that that they've reached a point where 25% of their tax revenues are going to pay the interest on governmental debt!

Japan was thought to possess a miracle economy before it all went to hell in the early 1990s following a spectacular real estate bust. Today the popular perception is that Japan is stagnant but stable. After the economy slowed down, the Japanese government lowered taxes and increased spending, sending deficits, and also government debt, way up. But the debt hasn't been a problem, because Japan's risk-averse populace—which became even more risk averse after the collapse of the technology bubble a decade ago—has sunk its considerable savings into government bonds, known colloquially as JGBs. What could be safer than government debt? As a result, the vast majority of Japanese debt is funded by its own residents—in stark contrast to the United States, which sells a sizable chunk of its debt overseas. And as deflation struck the Japanese economy, the interest rate on its outstanding debt has fallen to an average of a mere 1.5 percent.

In sum, the Japanese government has been able to increase its debt without driving borrowing costs up because of falling interest rates. That fortunate circumstance has allowed Japan to ramp up government spending even as tax revenue has dropped by nearly one-third .The not-so-lucky part is that even at today's low interest rates, Japan's interest on its debt is eating up a scary proportion of its tax revenue—more than 25 percent (not including the funds that come from issuing yet more debt), according to government figures. In addition, much of Japan's debt is relatively short-term in nature, meaning that the government last year had to "roll" at least 140 trillion yen in debt (i.e., replace retiring debt with new debt) even as it issued some 50 trillion in fresh debt to fund the growing gap between what the government spent and what it took in.

As Bernie Madoff would tell you, this is a game you can play only so long. Japan's savings rate, which was once in the mid-teens, is quickly approaching zero. Meanwhile, the country has the oldest population in the world, with basically no immigration. When people retire, what do they do? They start to withdraw money from the banking system. You begin to see the problem.

Why, you might ask, can't Japan do what us profligate folk in the United States do—sell its debt to international investors? Well, it could, but it would likely have to pay a much higher interest rate than 1.5 percent. After all, if you were an investor, why would you buy Japanese debt yielding 1.5 percent when you could buy U.S. or German debt that paid you more? My source thinks Japan would have to pay roughly 4.5 percent interest on 10-year debt to be competitive, and he says that's a conservative estimate. But that would create a different problem. If Japan's interest rate merely doubled, from 1.5 percent to 3 percent, then interest expense would be more than half of the government's tax revenues. "Any meaningful re-pricing of Japanese sovereign risk would push yields to a level the government would be unable to pay," writes Grice.

But how could this be?

It turns out that in 2009 Japan had a Total Government Gross Debt (% of GDP) which was an amazing 2.6 times as large as America's.

That explains it.

Even though most of the public debt in Japan is held by Japanese citizens in low yield bonds, there's just so much total debt that the interest payments add up to a lot.

Upper Class to Itself: Go Extinct

2010-12-28T12:51:00.014-05:00

The Daily Telegraph reports:
Under-age girls who become pregnant are most likely to have an abortion if they live in prosperous areas, figures show.

In some of the wealthiest parts of England four out of five under-age pregnancies end in an abortion, but in poorer areas under-age girls are twice as likely to keep their child.

Experts say it is the aspirations of well-off families that lead to a higher abortion rate, as girls opt not to miss out on their education.

Geoffrey Chaucer responds:
"Hear, comrades, we're of one mind, as each owns;
Let each of us hold up his hand to other
And each of us become the other's brother,
And we three will go slay this traitor Death;
He shall be slain who's stopped so many a breath."
...
"Now, sirs," said he, "if you're so keen, in brief,
To find out Death, turn up this crooked way,
For in that grove I left him, by my faith,
Under a tree, and there he will abide;
Nor for your boasts will he a moment hide.
See you that oak? Right there you shall him find.
God save you, Who redeemed all mankind,
And mend your ways!"- thus said this ancient man.
And every one of these three roisterers ran
Till he came to that tree; and there they found,
Of florins of fine gold, new-minted, round,
Well-nigh eight bushels full, or so they thought.
No longer, then, after this Death they sought...

The Myth of the Machine

2010-12-25T06:50:00.018-05:00

'It would be consoling to believe that the constructive and destructive sides of the megamachine cancelled each other out, and left a place for more central human purposes to develop, based on previous achievement in domestication and humanization.

In some degree this actually happened, since vast tracts of territory in Asia, Europe, and America were only nominally conquered, if at all, and apart from paying taxes and tribute their inhabitants led a largely isolated and enclosed communal life, sometimes overelaborating their own provincialities to the point of self-stultification and ruinous triviality.
...
But perhaps the greatest threat to the megamachine came from within: from its rigidity and repression of individual ability, and from a sheer lack of rational purpose.

Apart from the destructive animus of the military machine it had many inherent limitations. The mere increase in actual power had the effect on the ruling classes of releasing the obstreperous fantasies of the unconscious, and giving play to sadistic impulses that had hitherto had no collective outlet.

And at the same time, the machine itself was dependant for operation upon weak, fallible, stupid, or stubborn human members; so that the apparatus was liable under stress to disintegrate. These mechanized human parts themselves could not be permanently held together without being sustained by a profound magico-relgious faith in the system itself, as expressed in the cult of the gods.

The fact is, happily, that human society could not be made to correspond exactly to the theoretic structure that the cult of kingship had erected. Too much of common everyday life escapes effective supervision and control, to say nothing of coercive discipline.
…
As noted before, the most massive collapse of the megamachine seems to have occurred at the early period when the Pyramid Age, to judge by its mortuary remains, was at its height. Nothing short of a revolutionary uprising can account for the inter-regnum of some two centuries that separates the ‘Old Kingdom’ from the ‘Middle Kingdom.’
...
While the actual incidents that brought on and effected this overthrow of the central government are unrecorded, we have, apart from the eloquent testimony of silence, along with the falling off of construction, a vivid account of changes that could only have followed from a violent revolution, as detailed by an adherent of the old order, Ipu-wer. His lament gives an account of the revolution, seen from the inside, as graphic, if no less fictionalized, as ‘Dr. Zhivago’ does of the Bolshevik revolution.

“Doorkeepers say ’Let us go and plunder.'…A man regards his son as his enemy.…Nobles are in lamentation while poor men have joy.…Dirt is throughout the land....There are really none whose clothes are white in these times....They who built the pyramids are become farmers....The [stored] grain supply of Egypt is now on a come-and-get-it basis.”

At this point, obviously, reality had broken through the imposing theological wall and toppled the social structure. For a time the cosmic myth and the centralized power dissolved, while feudal chiefs, big landowners, regional governors, town and village councils, restored to the service of their lesser local gods, took over the burden of government.

All this could hardly have happened had not the grim impositions of kingship, despite the superb technological achievements of the megamachine, become intolerable.

What was happily proved by this early revolution is something that we perhaps need to be reminded of again today: that neither exact science nor engineering is proof against the irrationality of those that operate the system. Above all, that the strongest and most efficient of megamachines can be overthrown, that human errors are not immortal. The collapse of the Pyramid Age proven that the megamachine exists on a basis of human beliefs, which may crumble, of human decisions, which may prove fallible, and human consent, which, when the magic becomes discredited, may be withheld.

The human parts that composed the megamachine were by nature mechanically imperfect: never wholly reliable.

Until real machines of wood and metal could be manufactured in sufficient quantity to take the place of most of the human components, the megamachine would remain vulnerable.'

-Lewis Mumford (1971)

TSA Frisks Groom Children to Cooperate With Sex Predators, Abuse Expert Says

2010-12-20T15:00:00.000-05:00

FoxNews.com reports:
An expert in the fight against child sexual abuse is raising the alarm about a technique the TSA is reportedly using to get children to co-operate with airport pat-downs: calling it a "game".

Ken Wooden, founder of Child Lures Prevention, says the TSA's recommendation that children be told the pat-down is a "game" is potentially putting children in danger.

Telling a child that they are engaging in a game is "one of the most common ways" that sexual predators use to convince children to engage in inappropriate contact, Wooden told Raw Story.

Children "don't have the sophistication" to distinguish between a pat-down carried out by an airport security officer and an assault by a sexual predator, he said.

The fact that the TSA agents tell the children they "pat-down" the exact same thing sexual predators tell the children they assault is certainly quite striking.

A relatively charitable explanation for this is that the TSA agents feel the need to tell the children their groping at the hands of a stranger is a "game" because they couldn't give them an actual reason.

Even a child knows that there haven't been any terrorist attacks against airplanes or airports either carried out by or involving children.

So rather than just admit that they're molesting small children for no reason other than that they were ordered to do so by their governmental overlords, the TSA agents do something which will make the children more vulnerable to pedophiles.

In other news, ABC reports:

A Surprising Moment of Lucidity

2010-12-14T14:55:00.002-05:00

Hugh Hewitt: Well, that’s a fascinating exchange. You also go on to say Putin’s given you lots of reasons to be disappointed in him since.

George W. Bush: Well, he did. And the last anecdote in the book about Putin is at the opening games in China, and Putin is sitting down the aisle from me and Laura, and they had just invaded Georgia. And I had just had a pretty tough conversation with Medvedev, and so Vladimir came down, and you’re trying to have this heated conversation with a smile on your face, because the TV cameras are watching you. And the last thing I said was I’ve been telling you for years that Saakashvili was hot blooded. Vladimir said I am hot blooded. And I said no, Vladimir, you’re cold blooded. And the reason I told him that is because I was convinced at the time that Russia was headed toward Tbilisi. And Georgia was a democratically-elected ally. I mean, they had a democratically-elected leader, and the country was an ally. And I was real concerned that we were watching a re-assertive Russia use force to change the neighborhood.

Hugh Hewitt: So what was that, did he just head fake you then when you first met him in the story of the cross? Or do you think he changed as the weight of the office…

George W. Bush: I think to a certain extent, he changed. You know, in that very same conversation, the first conversation was about Soviet debt saddling the Russian Federation. And one of the later conversations we had was he was asking me how their mortgage-backed securities were doing. So in other words, he’d gone from creditor, I mean, from debtor to creditor.

Tryin' To Make a Move, Just To Stay in the Game

2010-12-13T00:04:00.018-05:00

Market alarm as US fails to control biggest debt in history

US Treasuries last week suffered their biggest two-day sell-off since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The borrowing costs of the government of the world’s largest economy have now risen by a quarter over the past four weeks.

Such a sharp rise in US benchmark market interest rates matters a lot – and it matters way beyond America. The US government is now servicing $13.8 trillion (£8.7 trilion) in declared liabilities – making it, by a long way, the world’s largest debtor. Around $414bn of US taxpayers’ money went on sovereign interest payments last year – around 4.5 times the budget of America’s Department of Education.

Debt service costs have reached such astronomical levels even though, over the past year and more, yields have been kept historically and artificially low by “quantitative easing (QE)” – in other words, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s virtual printing press. Now borrowing costs are 28% higher than a month ago, with the 10-year Treasury yield reaching 3.33% last week, an already eye-watering debt service burden can only go up.

Few on this side of the Atlantic should feel smug. The eurozone’s ongoing sovereign debt debacle has pushed up Germany’s borrowing costs by 27% over the last month – to 3.03%. The market has judged that if Europe’s Teutonic powerhouse wants the single currency to survive, it will ultimately need to raise wads of cash to absorb the mess caused by other member states’ fiscal incontinence.

While the UK isn’t ensnared in monetary union, gilt yields have also spiralled 18% since the start of November – to 3.55%. British Government debt is officially £1.05 trillion. We are fast approaching a debt-to-GDP ratio of 100%, compared to 30% just a decade ago. If you add off-balance-sheet liabilities to Government estimates, including the bank bail-outs which disgracefully remain “off the books”, the UK already owes more than an entire year’s national income. In the medium-term, this is surely incompatible with a Triple AAA credit rating.

Even with gilt yields ultra-low, courtesy of British QE, the UK is still spending £42bn a year servicing sovereign debt – up 50% since 2008. The Coalition is talking tough about reining-in the annual budget deficit, but our burgeoning debt stock means interest payments are anyway set to reach £70bn – twice the defence budget – by 2015. And those numbers rest on low gilt-yield assumptions that will be blown out of the water if this recent bond market implosion is the start of a trend.

Some say that growing signs of a US economic recovery are positive for stocks, which means money is being diverted out of Treasuries, so lowering their price, which pushes up yields. That’s wishful thinking. Sovereign borrowing costs have just surged in the US – and therefore elsewhere – because a politically-wounded President Obama caved-in and extended the Bush-era tax cuts, combining them with a $120bn payroll tax holiday.

Lower taxes, and the certainty of lower taxes, may bolster business investment and growth. That’s the logic employed by those painting last week’s global yield spike in a positive light. Government borrowing costs rose in America and elsewhere, they say, as a re-bounding US economy is now drawing investors’ cash away from sovereign bonds and towards more productive uses.

The reality is, though, that the market is increasingly alarmed at the rate of increase of the US government’s already massive liabilities. America’s government debt is set to expand by a jaw-dropping 42% over the next few years, reaching $19.6 trillion by 2015 according to Treasury Department estimates presented (amid very little fanfare) to Congress back in June. Since then, government spending has risen even more. So US debt service costs, like those of many other Western nations, are expanding rapidly in terms of both the volumes of sovereign instruments outstanding, and the yields on each bond.

The new worry in the market is that this latest round of tax cuts could add another $1 trillion to the US deficit, on top of the already horrendous numbers produced in June. With opinion now deeply split about the wisdom of yet another round of QE, bond investors are getting increasingly worried that the Fed will turn off the funny-money and the sugar-rush will fade. Meanwhile, the US has very few plans – and none of them remotely credible – to get to grips with the biggest debt in history.

Timing

2010-12-08T00:04:00.008-05:00

"Next year, the first of the 79 million Baby Boomers will hit 65 — retirement age." -USA Today

There's been eleven recessions since World War II in America. The one that started in 2001 was the longest lasting up to that point.

But then the one starting in 2007 came along, and put all the other recessions to shame!

The thing I find remarkable about this is how soon it's happened.

All the Baby Boomers are still of working age (just barely). This is crucial because the Baby Boomers had a much larger percentage of them be of European descent than those generations which came after them, AND because the Baby Boom generation is so much bigger than the generations which came after them.

For this reason when a Baby Boomer reaches retirement age it has a twofold negative effect on the American economy.

One negative effect comes from the fact that European-Americans are more productive workers than most of the non-European descended people who are part of the American workforce.

Thus when a Baby Boomer retires it leads to the average American worker being less productive, which hurts the economy.

The other negative effect comes from the fact that when a Baby Boomer retires, he goes from paying into Social Security to taking out of it.

Since Baby Boomers were so much larger a generation than those that came after, this creates a situation where the retirements of Baby Boomers simply aren't going to be made up for by enough young people entering the workforce.

Given that the old are so into voting, this creates a situation where taxes will likely be raised to avoid cutting Social Security benefits.

This would be murder on the economy.

The fact that we're in the worst recession since World War II right before the asteroid of Baby Boomer retirement hits America is staggering.

An Israeli on Obama's Middle East Peace Initiative

2010-12-05T00:04:00.000-05:00

Daniel Gavron writes in Newsweek:
Are the Palestinians the last Zionists? It would seem so. The situation of Israel has become surreal. Just as we Israelis are making a stupendous effort to ensure the dissolution of the Jewish state, envisioned by Theodor Herzl in 1896, by hanging onto the occupied territories, the Palestinians, led by President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, are working to ensure the survival of the Zionist enterprise by striving to establish a Palestinian ministate in the West Bank and Gaza.

Let us be very clear on just what is happening here: the Palestinians are doing their best to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza on a mere 22 percent of British Mandate for Palestine, which would afford us Zionist Jews a predominantly Jewish state on the remaining 78 percent. This is surely more than we could ever have envisaged when we set out to create a Jewish state and guarantees the survival of the state of Israel. Against this, we Israelis are fighting to keep the West Bank, which will soon result in an Arab majority and the end of a Jewish majority state.

Moreover, the Palestinians are supported by the Arab and Muslim nations, who are offering, via the Arab initiative, normal relations with the Jewish state. They are even prepared to accept our settlement folly by means of land swaps, which will leave a majority of the Israeli Jews who settled illegally in the West Bank during the past four decades inside the state of Israel.

The Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians are, of course, backed by virtually the entire population of the planet, led by the United States. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is devoting a significant portion of her time to finding a formula for peace, including an agreement with Syria in return for our withdrawal from the Golan Heights. This will result not only in our dreamed-for Jewish state, but also will go a long way toward neutralizing the threats to Israel posed by Iran, Hizbullah, and Hamas.

And how are we Israelis responding? We are mobilizing every possible means of obstruction and delay. We are continuing to build in locations in the West Bank that will preclude the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state and in East Jerusalem, which is scheduled to be the Palestinian capital—as opposed to West Jerusalem, Israel’s capital.
...
The Obama administration’s effort to establish a small Palestinian state, accompanied by withdrawal from the Golan Heights and peace with Syria, will finally ensure survival of the state of Israel. Why are we Israeli Jews trying so hard to prevent it?

Statsaholic:
Hubris.

Considering They Just Kept the One Child Policy, Maybe They'll Do This Stupid Thing As Well

2010-12-02T00:04:00.006-05:00

Here's an interesting article from two weeks ago by CNBC.com senior editor John Carney:

Perhaps the biggest irony in global economics right now is the double-standard applied to economic planning.

When the Federal Reserve in the United States tries to ease our economic slump through quantitative easing, we hear cavils about debasing the money supply and distorting the economy. But when the Chinese government, which has inflated its money supply far faster than the US, endorses price controls on consumer goods to tame inflation it gets praised for its action.

Earlier this week, China's State Council announced that it may impose price caps on "important daily necessities." This is a quite typical reaction of a government that has adopted an inflationary monetary policy but wants to avoid the unavoidable consequence of higher prices.

[Note that it's only that China "may" impose price caps; though the very fact that they're foolhardy enough to consider it is news enough.]

Importantly, it has never, ever worked. What has happened every single time this has been tried is that the government puts the country on a treadmill to economic hell. Inflation leads to higher prices, which leads to price controls. Price controls start at the consumer level but then must be forced ever further backward on the production line. You control the price of food, and soon you have to control the price of fertilizer and fuel used to produce the food.

It doesn't end there. Price controls breed shortages, which leads to government rationing. They also encourage hoarding, which leads to a government crack-down on hoarding.

This is already underway in China. At the same time the State Council indicated it might implement price controls, it announced a new campaign against speculation in vegetables, grain, cooking oil and sugar. Which is to say, it announced that it would begin cracking down on anyone stocking up products in advance of the shortages that will be caused by artificially low prices.

You would think that the long, grim history of price controls would discourage anyone from praising price controls. Instead, China is getting praised for its efforts to "tame inflation."

“This is about the strongest signal the government could give of its determination to slow price rises,” Mark Williams, a London-based economist at Capital Economics Ltd. and a former China adviser for the U.K. Treasury, told Bloomberg. “Whether or not controls end up being widely implemented, the government will hope that the mere fact of the announcement will help to rein in inflation expectations.”

Utter nonsense. Actually, the opposite is likely to happen. Announcing potential price-controls in advance of actually implementing them is probably the worst idea possible. It will encourage hoarding in advance of the controls, which will accelerate rising prices. Because this dynamic is so easy to anticipate, price-controls will actually increase inflation expectations.

In other words, China has adopted a price control policy at war with its monetary policy and that is bound to backfire.

Why aren't we hearing the panic bells go off from our self-styled China experts? All too often, they seem convinced that China is different. The normal laws of economics do not apply, as if the laws of supply and demand get changed when translated into Mandarin. But, as an old Chinese proverb goes, "Crows are black everywhere." And price controls backfire, everywhere and always.

Why are American Jews so Socially Liberal?

2010-11-29T14:59:00.012-05:00

A comment to my recent post Status Competition pointed out that Barbara Boxer, a Senator who recently made a statement supporting the repeal of DADT, is of Jewish heritage.

This led commenter Hail to write:
They don't care that it would reduce effectiveness, making normal men uncomfortable being in close quarters with gays, showering together, sleeping nearby, etc.

They just want to tear down all walls of 'bigotry'. "If walls exist, they can be used against Jews, too."

Statsaholic replies:
I think it will reduce effectiveness, not least because the US Military probably gets a disproportionate portion of its recruits from more socially conservative segments of the population.

They just want to tear down all walls of 'bigotry'. "If walls exist, they can be used against Jews, too."

That's may be part of it.

At the same time I think there's an ancient historical motive plaing an important role in driving Jews to support the policy platform of homosexuals.

The thing to understand about Jews is that the transition from Paganism to Catholicism was viewed very negatively by the Jews in Europe.

The thing is that under Paganism Europeans never tried to convert Jews from their race-based religion.

But with the rise of the Catholic Church, a situation obtained where the leaders of Jewry felt constantly threatened by the possibility that their followers might at some point all become incorporated into European Christendom.

This was a problem for them on account of their doctrine of Jewish supremacy over all gentiles, even ones close to them in genetics.

Then there was the issue that the early Catholic Church put serious restrictions on Jews.

This created the conditions for the Jews in Europe to be selected for the quality of feeling animus toward Christendom.

Those Jews feeling such animus would be more attuned to the orientation of a group which constantly found itself in conflict with the Church, thus likely giving those Jews a selection advantage within the Jewish group.

American Jews overwhelmingly come from stock where their ancestors spent a long time in Europe during the time period where Jews and the Church were having a lot of conflict.

I think this has created a situation where American Jews tend to have something resembling an instinctual animus toward what I would call traditional post-pagan Western Culture.

The irony of this is that the hatred of the Jews has often continued long after the conflict which selected for the hatred ended.

Neither Catholics nor Protestants any longer seek to convert Jews, neither Catholics nor Protestants any longer seek to shield European gentiles from Jewish dominance and ethnic networking.

One of the linchpins of traditional post-pagan Western Culture was the tabooizing of homosexuality.

It, along with the tabooizing of abortion and extra-marital sex, was absolutely central to how the early European Christians managed to demographically outcompete European Pagans.

Ever since then these three taboos have been central to all traditional post-pagan Western Culture.

Many Jews seek to undermine these taboos because deep down they want to destroy post-pagan Western Culture.

They want to destroy post-pagan Western Culture in spite of its current pro-Jewish stance for the simple reason that it “rubs them the wrong way”.

The reason it rubs them the wrong way is because of the centuries of conflict their ancestors went through against it.

In contrast, most Jews in America and Europe didn’t have their ancestors go through centuries of conflict with Muslims.

This is because their ancestors left the Middle East before the rise of Islam.

This largely explains the paradox of so many Jews supporting mass Muslim immigration into Europe today.

The Jews in Europe weren’t selected for the ability or desire to compete with post-pagan Middle Easterners, instead only being selected for the ability and desire to compete with post-pagan Europeans.

For this reason on a gut level Jews in Europe view the European gentiles as more of a threat than the Middle Easterners, even though the opposite situation so obviously obtains.

In conclusion, Jews like Boxer want homosexuals to serve openly in the US Military because they want to undermine what's left of the taboo against homosexuality.

They want to undermine this taboo because it is a linchpin of post-pagan European culture, and the Jews tend to feel an instinctive sense of rivalry and competition toward that culture.

This sense of rivalry evolved under the conditions of intense conflict which existed between Jews and Christendom for centuries, especially during the Middle Ages.

Epistemological Closure in the Propaganda State

2010-11-28T00:03:00.003-05:00

This just came off the wire eight minutes ago:

US: WikiLeaks Release Endangers 'Countless' Lives

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration is warning online whistleblower WikiLeaks that its expected imminent release of classified State Department documents will put "countless" lives at risk, threaten global counterterorism operations and jeopardize U.S. relations with its allies.

In a letter sent Saturday to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the State Department's top lawyer says publication of the documents could do massive harm to America's standing by exposing secret military operations and revealing dissidents' charges against foreign governments. The cables are expected to be released on Sunday.

State Department legal adviser Harold Koh sent the message in response to a letter from Assange and his lawyer in which they asked about the safety of people who might be named in the cables.

Koh says the U.S will not cooperate or negotiate with WikiLeaks.

Meritocracy

2010-11-26T00:04:00.004-05:00

Richard Spencer noticed that Salon just did a list of the "Hack 30," an attempt to compile the 30 biggest hacks in the punditry business.

Here are two of the more interesting "representative quotes" from the list:

Jeffrey Goldberg on October 3rd, 2002:

There is not sufficient space, as well, for me to refute some of the arguments made in Slate over the past week against intervention, arguments made, I have noticed, by people with limited experience in the Middle East (Their lack of experience causes them to reach the naive conclusion that an invasion of Iraq will cause America to be loathed in the Middle East, rather than respected).

Jonah Goldberg on March 24th, 2004:

In today's syndicated column I trot out the cliche that "hindsight's always crystal clear." Several readers have already reminded me that I wrote a column arguing exactly the opposite in June of 2002. This is the danger of cliches. I was trying to make a general point which everyone understands but also ended up communicating an even more general falsehood. Like saying violence never solves anything, people understand what I mean even when in reality what I'm saying isn't true.

Status Competition

2010-11-21T00:21:00.006-05:00

Barbara Boxer says:
“We now stand -- with this rule -- with countries like Iran, North Korea and Pakistan in banning gays and lesbians from military service... Let's not stand with Pakistan, and with North Korea and Iran. It's just wrong. This is the moment to move our country forward.”

Statsaholic:
If it was demonstrated that people in Pakistan, Iran and North Korea all ate food, would you respond by going on a hunger strike?

Also, it's funny how there's a 66.67% overlap between the countries Boxer is ragging on and George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil".

I can't understand why unemployment is so high in Nevada

2010-11-12T00:32:00.013-05:00

Now look here.

I trust you to fly this plane, but I'm just not quite at a point where I trust you not to sneak explosives onto it in your underwear.

The Transportation Security Administration has ramped up airport security after two plots by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. A Nigerian man hid a bomb in his underwear last Christmas and the group tried to send package bombs via U.S. cargo carriers but none of the explosives detonated.

To thwart such attacks, TSA is deploying body scanning machines to U.S. airports but travelers and pilots have complained about potential health risks and that they are too intrusive. The alternative is a physical patdown by a TSA officer.

"Pilots are not the terrorist threat," said John Prater, president of the Air Line Pilots Association and a veteran pilot for United Continental. "Seeing scarce security resources being used on pilots makes absolutely no sense."

Some pilots, male and female, have complained the patdowns make them feel uncomfortable. The group urged any pilot who feels unfit for duty afterward to "call in sick and remove themselves from the trip."

They're actually making the PILOTS go through the scanners?

How hard is it to understand the logic of what's wrong with that?

But wait, there's more...

Unions representing U.S. Airways pilots, American Airlines pilots, and some flight attendants are advising their members to skip the full-body scans, even if it means that their genitals are touched. Air travelers are speaking out online, with a woman saying in a YouTube video her breasts were “twisted,” and ExpressJet pilot Michael Roberts emerging as an instant hero after he rejected both the body scanning and “enhanced pat-downs” options and was unceremoniously ejected from the security line from Memphis International Airport…

TSA’s official blogger, who uses the apparent pseudonym Blogger Bob, went so far as to say this week that: “There is no fondling, squeezing, groping, or any sort of sexual assault taking place at airports. You have a professional workforce carrying out procedures they were trained to perform to keep aviation security safe.”…

TSA has “always done pat-downs,” but until recently they haven’t been so aggressive, says Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel at the ACLU in Washington, D.C. “The pat-downs never used to go up a woman’s skirt.”“It’s become troubling,” Calabrese says. “You’ve got these controversial naked strip search machines that they’re rolling out at airports across America. And if you choose not to go through the naked strip search machine, you’re subject to this (level of intrusive physical contact). It seems punitive. It seems designed to drive you to the naked strip search machine.”

Exporting Our Way to Stability?

2010-11-07T00:45:00.013-04:00

Barack Obama writes in the NY Times:
As the United States recovers from this recession, the biggest mistake we could make would be to rebuild our economy on the same pile of debt or the paper profits of financial speculation. We need to rebuild on a new, stronger foundation for economic growth. And part of that foundation involves doing what Americans have always done best: discovering, creating and building products that are sold all over the world.

We want to be known not just for what we consume, but for what we produce. And the more we export abroad, the more jobs we create in America. In fact, every $1 billion we export supports more than 5,000 jobs at home.

Statsaholic Replies:
Did you hear that? It only takes $1 billion in exports to "support" 5,000 American jobs.

That's $200,000 of exports per job supported.

But what's really absurbist about this NY Times op-ed, aside from the shockingly frank "confession in advance" that creating a pile of debt would be a big mistake, is that it only looks at one side of the trade equation: exports from America to other Countries.

What about trade from other Countries to America?

Like his predecessor, Barack Obama pretends that international trade only goes one way, when in fact it goes more in the opposite direction.

The Age of Reptiles

2010-10-24T00:04:00.004-04:00

This chart is from the classic Spearhead article "The End of Marriage":

Spearhead contributer Novaseeker responded thusly:

Interesting article.

The data I have seen suggests substantial disparities in marriage rates based on socio-economic slice, such that in the “dual educated, dual working with combined income over 100k” slice, marriage rates are high, still, and divorce rates are low. Of course that is a very small demographic slice, but it seems significant because it describes how the elites are living — in the world of the elites, there is no marriage crisis, because when they look around at each other, they see most of each other are married and a rather small number have ever been divorced — so the reality of what is happening to marriage in the culture as a whole is less “real” to the elites who are in a position to change policy and so on. So the problem perpetuates itself, and marriage becomes increasingly an elite institution, while it effectively dies in the rest of society.

Certainly people are cohabiting rather than marrying — that’s a given. And outside the socio-economic elites, women are avoiding marriage as much as men are, because there really isn’t that much of a benefit for them either unless the guy brings a substantial amount to the table. The reason for this is fairly simple — old marriage was based on a division of labor between husband and wife. That division of labor pretty much no longer applies outside of the elite because most cannot afford that division of labor. So that model of marriage is pretty much scrapped — the new watchword is independence, and the social model has been created to support that. Among the elites, the new model that has emerged is the “consumption marriage”, which is held together by the raw consumptive power of two incomes creating a lifestyle that only one of them would be hard-pressed to replicate alone — > these are couples that are not super-rich like movie stars, but folks who depend on the dollars from both incomes to support their upper middle class lifestyles.

They tend to not divorce a lot, because the cost is high in terms of lifestyle hit. And they tend to marry a lot because the benefits, in economic terms, are clear. Trouble is — that model only works for people who earn a lot of money. In lower socio-economic rungs, it just doesn’t work because there isn’t enough economic “there” there. So there really is no viable social model (i.e., one that is based on brass tacks interests of the spouses rather than emotional fulfillment) that supports marriage in most socio-economic demographics.

As we move forward, we will see the results of this experiment as to whether an advanced civilization can sustain itself for very long with most of the demographic not having stable marriages, or even marriages at all.

No precedent for that, of course, so it’s brave new world for everyone. And as far as the elites are concerned, they don’t see an issue, because in their small demo there isn’t an issue.

The other point I’d like to make is that we need to lose our sentimentality about this culture. If it is to end, which seems more likely than not but clearly not a given, it is to end. The world will go on, and men will go on, long after any demise of the West. It was a good run, for a while, but it’s foolish to tie yourself to the fortunes of the West. It may very well be nearing the end of its run.

Rearranging the Deck Chairs

2010-10-21T00:11:00.000-04:00

Why most economists are not hopeful about "quantitative easing," the Fed's latest idea to help the economy.

The U.S. economy's biggest problem, businesses and policymakers agree, is widespread lack of demand. If only people and companies would buy more stuff, the theory goes—a car, an office park, a forklift—then the stores and companies that make and sell that stuff would hire more workers, who would then spend more money, and just like that (or almost)—economic growth.

One way the Federal Reserve has spurred economic growth traditionally has been to lower interest rates, which has a known and a tested impact. If the Fed lowers rates, money becomes cheap and the economy heats up. But the federal funds rate, the Fed's main lever, is now near zero.

So the Fed is turning to a policy known as "quantitative easing." Essentially, the Fed is using its license to print money. (Technically, it doesn't have a license, but it knows someone who does.) On Nov. 3, the markets expect the Fed to announce that it has decided to create somewhere between $500 billion and $1.2 trillion that it will then spend to help goose economic growth. Rather than buying space in office parks or forklifts, though, the Fed—which purchases only government-backed assets, like bonds—will probably pick up long-term Treasury debt. The strategy has been termed "QE2" because it is the second time the Fed has used this arcane monetary policy tool. The Fed makes money ex nihilo, pulling it out of thin air rather than taking it from its coffers. Then, it pushes the money into the economy by buying up assets from banks.

The problem is that the strategy is indirect. The Fed cannot just buy up goods and services, so it is trying to convince investors to invest and banks to lend more, creating more economic activity. And a many prominent economists, ranging from the wonks at the libertarian Cato Institute to liberal Nobel-winner Joe Stiglitz, are skeptical. Even Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke sounds uncertain. "Monetary policymaking in an era of low inflation has not proved to be entirely straightforward," he sighed in a speech earlier this month.

QE largely succeeded the first time the Fed used it, Bernanke says. From late 2008 through 2009, the Fed created about $1.7 trillion and used the funds to purchase debt in housing-finance firms like Fannie Mae, Treasury bonds, and a whole lot of mortgage-backed securities—tripling the size of its balance sheet to $2.3 trillion. That helped clean some bad assets from the banks' books and reassured spooked markets. But in 2009, the government was trading cash for mortgage-related assets nobody wanted. In 2010, it wants to try to trade cash for an asset that is essentially as safe as cash. If QE2 is to work, it will have to work differently than QE did—and probably won't work as well.

So how might it work? One hope is that by giving banks cash in exchange for assets, the Federal Reserve will induce banks to lend. With more cash on hand, the banks will be more willing to make loans to homeowners and businesses. But the reason for the banks' current stinginess has little to do with the size of their reserves—banks are sitting on excess capital, as are the big companies they like to lend to. Banks are not making loans because they don't see anyone or thing worth lending money to. Just because they have $500 billion or even $100 trillion more to lend doesn't mean they will decide to lend it...

Another hope is that by trading non-interest-bearing assets (cash) for interest-bearing assets (bonds), the Federal Reserve will reduce the supply of bonds and make them more expensive, prodding big institutional investors to invest less in government debt and more in the American economy. The problem with this theory is that the bond market is huge—really huge—and international. To have any sort of impact, the Fed would need to buy a lot of bonds. Economists worry it won't buy enough. Paul Krugman, for one, says the Fed would need to buy $8 trillion to $10 trillion to have an effect.

A third hope is that by pushing up the price of bonds, the Fed could improve the balance sheets of some big investors. (Firms like PIMCO, for example, already hold hundreds of billions of dollars in government debt.) That might make them feel wealthier, increasing their appetite for risk. The problem here is that the Fed isn't changing the economic fundamentals. If big investors thought there was money to made in the economy right now, they'd be out there making it—just as if banks thought there were worthy lenders, they'd grant them loans.

The Groanings of Empire

2010-10-17T00:06:00.004-04:00

'The aim of Operation Moshtarak in February was to capture the city of Marjah in Afghanistan's war-torn Helmand province. Fifteen thousand troops, mainly American, British and Afghan, were to take on between 400 and 1,000 Taliban insurgents holed up in a city of 80,000 people.

Commanders talked of a "new model war". An Afghan administration and police force would move into Marjah behind the soldiers. Engineers would maintain power and water supplies. "We've got a government in a box, ready to roll in," said the then-US General Stanley McChrystal.

But as the offensive unfolded, reported Taliban casualties were few, and Marjah turned out not to exist. Faithfully reported by global news media, it was in fact invented by US military officials. "This is all a war of perceptions," McChrystal said. As The Washington Post reported, the decision to launch the offensive was intended to influence US public opinion on the effectiveness of military action in Afghanistan by showing it could win a "large and loud victory". In reality, Marjah is a vaguely-defined area of villages, markets and family compounds. If there are tens of thousands of people, they are spread across 125 sq miles. Marjah was invented because a military operation has to have a clear-cut goal to be deemed a victory. President Obama had doubled the total US troop deployment, but public support was waning. The generals needed a victory, so they created Marjah and planned Operation Moshtarak to capture it.'

-From Lawrence to the Taliban

_______________________________________________________________________

'Petraeus is a bull-feather merchant who gained primacy in the U.S. officer corps through sheer genius for self-promotion and wizardry at public relations. Though he is celebrated as our “best general” and enjoys a reputation as the military genius who “wrote the book” on counterinsurgency, he has in fact been singularly and purposefully responsible for entangling us in a long war that he himself admits cannot be won but that we will likely continue to fight for at least another generation.

Bob Woodward’s latest book-length spin surgery, titled Obama’s War, quotes Petraeus as saying “I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. … This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.” Petraeus supposedly blurted this and other uncomfortable revelations to Woodward “after a glass of wine on an airplane.” If Petraeus’s tongue can be yanked that loose with a single glass of wine, the guy’s as much of a drinker as he is a general. Maybe that explains a few things, like how the 190,000 AK-47s he handed out to Iraqi security force recruits vanished like a wallet on a New York City sidewalk and wound up in the hands of militants.

If, as prominent warmonger Lindsey Graham suggests, King David Petraeus is “our best hope,” our ship of state is already on a bow-first vector for the ocean floor. Lamentably, the state of American military wisdom is so pitiable that Petraeus may in fact be the sharpest utensil in a drawer otherwise inhabited by spoons.'

-Long Warfare Theory

Mystery Date

2010-10-15T17:27:00.004-04:00

It was interesting how this Fox News video from yesterday includes the claim that "at least" three seperate US Intelligence Officials told the reporter that "terrorist chatter is at an all time high".

Also interesting how the mystery terrorist is evidently from the mountainous tribal area of Pakistan, one of the purest vestiges of that ancient form of social orginization called the Tribe left in this increasingly Americanized and individualistic World.

No Social Security COLA expected for 2011

2010-10-11T10:03:00.010-04:00

In 1975 Social Security started having an automatic inflation based cost of living increase.

The only two years where there's been no cost of living increase have been 2009, and just now it was announced 2010 won't have a cost of living increase either.

That's an awfully big coincidence, the only two years in 36 coming one right after the other like that.

The oddity of this AP article on this situation is that the obvious question isn't addressed in any way: "Has there really not been any inflation over these last two fiscal years, or is it more that the Government's starting to go broke?"

In any event I find this interesting given there's a serious argument that Social Security payments to old people are one of the most important causes of the breakdown of Western Society.

For all of Human History the primary responsiblity for caring for an old person was that of the old person's children.

This created a World where it was important to do the following if you wanted to have a comfortable old age:

Contribute to the welfare of society by having children, and then contributing to society further by going through the trouble of teaching them to respect their elders and inherited moral strictures.

This created a situation where people had a personal and easy to understand incentive to act in the interest of their society's long term interest.

But now with Social Security we have a dangerous situation where the old people who didn't have children are mooching off the hard work of the old people who did have children.

The money for Social Security doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from young workers.

And why do we have the benefit of young workers?

Because of the dedicated people who went through the profound trouble and expense of having children.

They tilled the field, they planted the seed, they watered the land, but then they have the crop taken out of their hands and divided up in such a way that they get nothing more than those who did nothing to help.

This creates a situation where the childless are able to party and spread sexually transmitted diseases at the expense of the people who have children, the people who make it possible for society to continue existing for more than a few decades.

I think one of the key reasons why sub-Saharan African countries have such high birthrates, and European countries have such low birthrates, is simply because sub-Saharan African Countries are too chaotic and/or tribal to set up social security programs for themselves.

In tragic contrast the European countries are stable and individualistic enough that they've been able to set up social security programs for their citizens, and thus a crucial link between the generations has been weakened near to breaking.

"But I'm Saying It Anyway"

2010-10-08T12:32:00.005-04:00

David Cameron to Middle Class: Go Extinct

2010-10-05T09:33:00.005-04:00

David Cameron has so far turned out to not be as awful a Prime Minister as I expected based on him acting in public like the politician in a movie made by someone who hates the guts of politicians and wants them all to die.

It was good how he stood up to the EU when they tried to bully him into giving Brussels control of the UK budget.

That was crucial because if you give the EU control of the budgets of its member states, you effectively make the EU immortal.

At the same time his Government just pulled a dirty trick:

Stay-at-home mothers hit by child benefit cut

Three million families will lose the universal benefit, worth more than £1,700 a year to families with two children, from 2013, under plans unveiled by the Chancellor. Families have been entitled to the payments since 1945.

Mr Osborne chose to announce on breakfast television that he had decided to scrap child benefit for the better off despite repeated assurances during the election campaign that the benefit was safe.

Child benefit will be removed from any household with a higher-rate taxpayer from 2013. This will penalise households with one earner on a salary of more than £43,875.

You can see it really is like they decided to go out of their way to hurt stay-at-home mothers.

Instead of going by combined income of the couple to determine if they’re “too rich” to get the child tax credit, they instead go by the whichever of the parents has the most income.

And then there’s the issue that they’re deliberately discouraging people who are relatively high income, which correlates within a Country with higher productivity, from having children.

But on second thought, why would we want the economically productive people having children, anyway?

What do they do that’s useful, except stopping everyone else from starving to death?

The Hedge Fund managers and other assorted millionaires will have plenty of money for having children even without the credit, and that's the important thing.

Phonics

2010-10-02T00:06:00.003-04:00

I noticed this excerpt from a Newsweek profile of Nevada Senate Candidate Sharron Angle:

Angle’s past might offer a portrait of her style of legislating. In the state Assembly, where she sat from 1999 to 2005, Angle, several Democratic and Republican colleagues recall, was reflexively disapproving. When the body met every odd year (Nevada has a part-time citizens’ legislature), Angle would always keep to herself. Frequently, she would vote that way too. It became a running joke in the legislature that fairly germane bills, such as increasing teacher incentives or requiring candidates to report campaign contributions, passed “41 to Angle” (out of 42 members). Angle was the sole 'no' vote 39 times. Twice as often, it was Angle and fellow conservative Don Gustavson, now a candidate for a seat in the state Senate, who bucked the rest of the bipartisan legislature.

On other votes, Angle mostly fell in line with many in her caucus. But some of the bills Angle pushed herself proved unpopular; some even confused her fellow GOP colleagues. Twice she tried to push an education bill requiring that elementary schools only use phonics to teach reading, essentially ignoring the conventional wisdom of the day that students learn in different ways.

That's interesting.

Phonics is the only way to teach children how to read which actually makes sense.

If you were trying to teach someone how to do math who didn't know anything about it, how would you start out?

You'd start out by teaching them what the individual numerical symbols mean.

In the same way if you were trying to teach someone how to read, you'd start out by teaching them what the individual letters mean.

One of the most simple principles of effective education is that if a complex technique is build on a simpler technique, you teach the simpler technique first.

But somehow a lot of American teachers got the idea into their head that it would be a good idea to skip past the simple technique of learning what letters mean, and instead to jump straight to trying to teach the students how to read whole words.

I tried to find a peer reviewed study addressing these issues and found a meta-analysis entitled: “Systematic Phonics Instruction Helps Students Learn To Read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel”:

A quantitative meta-analysis evaluating the effects of systematic phonics instruction compared to unsystematic or no-phonics instruction on learning to read was conducted using 66 treatment-control comparisons derived from 38 experiments. The overall effect of phonics instruction on reading was moderate, d = 0.41. Effects persisted after instruction ended. Effects were larger when phonics instruction began early (d = 0.55) than after first grade (d = 0.27). Phonics benefited decoding, word reading, text comprehension, and spelling in many readers. Phonics helped low and middle SES readers, younger students at risk for reading disability (RD), and older students with RD, but it did not help low achieving readers that included students with cognitive limitations. Synthetic phonics and larger-unit systematic phonics programs produced a similar advantage in reading. Delivering instruction to small groups and classes was not less effective than tutoring. Systematic phonics instruction helped children learn to read better than all forms of control group instruction, including whole language. In sum, systematic phonics instruction proved effective and should be implemented as part of literacy programs to teach beginning reading as well as to prevent and remediate reading difficulties.

Note even though the study calls the effect size of +0.41 for Phonics instuction moderate, it actually comes out to a difference equal to 41% of a Standard Deviation.

It would be interesting to determine if the effects persist into adulthood.

Thilo Sarrazin and the Question of Population Genetics

2010-09-28T00:48:00.005-04:00

Thilo Sarrazin, a German Central Banker, said not that long ago that "all Jews share the same gene".

This is interesting semantic territory because, of course, if you want to get technical there are innumerable gene variants shared by all Jews.

It just is that these gene variants are probably also found in all Humans.

Now with the Ashkenazi Jews, they might be inbred enough that there's a gene where it somehow managed to reach a rate of 100% in Ashkenazis, while not reaching 100% in non-Ashkenazis.

But it would be a situation where the Ashkenazis had a rate of 100%, while other Caucasoids had it at 90% or thereabouts.

(Note that even a 10% difference between Ashkenazis and another Caucasoid group on a particular gene variant would be unusual. For example, even looking at the non-isolated European population most dissimilar to Ashkenazis, Russians, the average gene variant was found to have a 1.37% difference in the rate found in Russians as compared to the rate found in Ashkenazis.)

The genetic distance between Ashkenazis and other Caucasoids, especially Caucasoids descended from one or the other of the Ashkenazis' parent populations, is small enough that any process which put a gene variant at a 100% rate in Ashkenazis would also have put it at a very high rate in other Caucasoids.

What makes Ashkenazis distinct from other Caucasoid populations is the tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of gene variants which are found a little bit more in Ashkenazis, and a little bit less in other Caucasoids.

It has not yet been determined if all full-blooded Ashkenazis are always more related, in terms of the number of identical base pairs, to the average full-blooded Ashkenazi than to the average member of non-Ashkenazi groups.

But it seems probable that this is the case.

The thing is that Ashkenazis have a large Middle Eastern component to their genetics which pulls them further away from Europeans than you'd think based on how long they've been in Europe.

At the same time, they have a large European component to their genetics which pulls them away from Middle Eastern groups.

Anyway, I suppose part of why some took offense at Sarrazin's comment is because it made Jews seem more genetically distinct from others than they actually are.

Even if a gene exists which is fixed in Jews, while not being fixed on the species level, this gene would certainly be found in millions of non-Jews, and possibly billions of non-Jews.

It's large scale combinations of genes found more in Jews than non-Jews which make the Jews genetically distinct from non-Jewish populations.

How to Avoid Divorce

2010-09-24T22:29:00.005-04:00

In 1988 a survey was done of American White women, as part of the national survey of family growth.

It asked them if they were they were married, when they were married, if they were virgins when they were married, and whether the marriage ended in divorce.

The American White women who were married from 1965-1969 had a 50% chance of divorce if they weren't virgins when married, but only a 30% chance of divorce if they were virgins when married.

That's a 67% elevated risk of divorce for the non-virgin White women.

The American White women who were married from 1970-1974 had a 46% chance of divorce if they weren't virgins when married, but only a 30% chance of divorce if they were virgins when married.

That's a 53% elevated risk of divorce for the non-virgin White women.

The American White women who were married from 1975-1979 had a 34% chance of divorce if they weren't virgins when married, but only a 21% chance of divorce if they were virgins when married.

That's a 62% elevated risk of divorce for the non-virgin White women.

And finally, the American White women who were married from 1980-1983 had a 24% chance of divorce if they weren't virgins when married, but only a 14% chance of divorce if they were virgins when married.

That's a 71.4% elevated risk of divorce for the non-virgin White women!

This is a remarkably strong and consistent effect.

The women who are virgins when married were FAR less likely to have had their marriages end in divorce.

Note: The divorce rate of later marriage cohorts tended to be lower due to more recent marriages having less time to end in divorce.

H/T: The Social Pathologist

Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking

2010-09-22T00:59:00.003-04:00

Someone on Jewamongyou's Blog says:

The fact that Muslims run the majority of failed states outside of Africa isn’t a mystery.

This statement makes very little sense.

According to the IMF, the average European Country had an average per capita GDP of $27,634 in 2009, as compared to the average West Asian Muslim Country's average per capita GDP of $20,950.

That really isn't that large a difference.

Even though there’s more to being a “failed state” than having a low per capita GDP, this still makes me think West Asian Muslim Countries, far from being second only to African Countries in dysfunction, are actually ahead of the average Country outside sub-Saharan-Africa.

This is confirmed by the fact that the average West Asian Muslim Country has a per capita GDP that's 28% higher than other Countries outside sub-Saharan-Africa, and 94% higher than the per capita GDP of non-European Countries outside sub-Saharan Africa.

But They Made The Weather And Then They Stand In The Rain And Say...

2010-09-21T00:06:00.004-04:00

Neocon rag The Weekly Standard is whining that Britain and France don't spend enough money on their respective militaries.

What they don't seem to get is that it's Neocons like The Weekly Standardites who helped make war look stupid and wasteful with their pointless invasions of different Countries in the Middle East.

What they don't seem to get is that the Neocon supported scam called NATO was the thing which robbed Western Europe of the will to defend itself, or to pay for its own defense, in the first place.

Inadequately Resourced UK Military Faces Further Cuts

European governments have long forgotten that their primary task is the defense of those they govern. The two most prominent European powers, France and Great Britain, spend only 2.3 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively, of their GDP on military spending – amounting to less than what Djibouti and Namibia each spend on their militaries, in proportion to their GDP. The economic crisis has provided perfect political cover for those who have long favored slashing European defense spending even further to start getting their way – and they’re proposing greater cuts, anywhere between 25 percent to 40 percent of the military budget.

The degradation of the military is not a recent phenomenon. The UK has done defense on the cheap for years. Former prime minister Gordon Brown decided in 2007 that defense minister was not even a full-time job, asking a cabinet loyalist to do both that role and be secretary of state for Scotland. The current deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, believes that Britain should get rid of Trident, its nuclear deterrent. Last month he claimed that “It's going to be difficult for someone who is going to receive less housing benefit… to understand why we should spend huge, huge amounts of money on replacing Trident.” To put this in context: the Department for Work and Pensions receives over £150bn a year and the National Health Service nearly £94.5bn. The total cost of replacing Trident – which will last between 25 and 35 years – is £20bn. Yet the Treasury is breaking with tradition by refusing to fund it, meaning that the Ministry of Defense will have to – an outlay that will account for over 50 percent of its total budget.

As a result, it will be virtually impossible for the UK to offer any meaningful military assistance to the U.S. in the future. The overstretched and under-equipped Ministry of Defense can barely function as it is. The major shortage of helicopters in Afghanistan is now well established, with a parliamentary committee reporting last year that the lack of helicopters was having “adverse consequences” for Britain. Up to two-thirds of the Apache attack helicopter fleet has been described by the Ministry of Defense as “unfit for purpose.” Last July, a plan to severely diminish the threat of Taliban improvised explosives devices (IEDs) – responsible for more NATO troop deaths than any other tactic – was scrapped due to insufficient troop numbers and helicopters. A month later, British soldiers were forced to protect the remains of a senior officer killed by a roadside bomb for three days before a helicopter was available to collect his body.

Once you eliminate the impossible

2010-09-17T00:20:00.001-04:00

Lawrence Auster writes:
Meanwhile, Bill O’Reilly, about whom I have rarely said anything very positive, did an excellent job in the “talking points” segment of his show tonight summarizing the O’Donnell situation. First he laid out O’Donnell’s astonishingly poor resumé—her total lack of any kind of career, accomplishments, or income; her mortgage foreclosure, etc. But then he switched perspective and showed the ideological differences between O’Donnell and her Democratic opponent, an all-out leftist named Christopher Coon, who has called himself a Marxist. Suddenly, O’Donnell’s lack of life accomplishments didn’t matter very much. Given the choice between these two, whom do you want in the U.S. Senate? Obviously O’Donnell. Yet the odious spinner Karl Rove and the full-of-it sage Charles Krauthammer (who again did his sneaky Krauthammer thing, talking like a conservative even as he surrenders to Obamacare and tells us to surrender to it) seemed to be positively striving to make O’Donnell lose. She’s already won the nomination. The Republican voters chose her over Mike Castle. So what’s the point of making such a big deal about her credentials now—unless Rove and Krauthammer want her to be defeated by the Democrat?

Statsaholic Replies:
That is the point. Rove and Krauthammer want O'Donnell to be defeated. Smart of you to figure it out, Auster, considering that to my knowledge nobody else has noticed this.

The reason I'm pointing this out is that so often people refuse to see obvious things like this. So often they fail to look at the context of Human Behavior, which the only proper praxis for the determination of motive, or at least the central part thereof.

Solidarity

2010-09-15T00:39:00.012-04:00

Christine O'Donnell won the Delaware Senate Republican Primary over noted hack Mike Castle.

Castle's response:

A Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) campaign source confirmed to The Hill late Tuesday that the longtime congressman will not be endorsing Christine O'Donnell.

The Tea Party-backed O'Donnell defeated Castle for Delaware's Republican Senate nomination.

As to whether the national party would back O'Donnell, a Castle campaign source said the campaign has no knowledge of their thinking but said "they should save their money."

Update: Inteprid Journalist and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum has determined Christine O'Donnell advocated a "Chaste Lifestyle":

http://www.frumforum.com/odonnell-advocated-for-chaste-lifestyle

The New Republic's Schizophrenia

2010-09-14T00:30:00.012-04:00

Steve Sailer had a posting on Sunday quoting an article in The New Republic.

So: Cordoba House in New York and a Predator war in Pakistan—graciousness here and viciousness there—this should be our position.

I honestly thought it had to be irony of some kind, at least for a few moments I reacted to it like it was.

But of course then I checked the context and it turns out it was serious.

For some reason this quotation reminds me of an interlude from the song "A Boozehound Named Barney", from The Simpsons episode "Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious":

Sherry Bobbins:
In front of a Tavern, flat on his face
A booze-hound named Barney is pleading his case...

Barney:
Buy me a beer...two bucks a glass...
C'mon help me i'm freezing my ass...
Buy me brandy...a snifter of wine
Who am i kidding, i'll drink turpentine...

Moe (wielding rifle):
Move it! Ya drunk...or I'll blast your rear-end

Barney:
I found two bucks

Moe:
Then come in my friend..

Tory Prime Minister of England Attacked From Left by Tory Mayor of London

2010-09-10T16:10:00.010-04:00

Boris Johnson turns on party over immigration and demands cap is scrapped
By Gerri Peev, 9th September 2010

Boris Johnson has warned that plans to limit the number of migrants to Britain will damage the economy.

In remarks that put him at odds with his Conservative colleagues, the London Mayor called for a ‘major rethink of government policy’.

His broadside will come as a blow to David Cameron’s authority and is a sign that Mr Johnson has not limited his political ambitions to the capital’s City Hall.

At odds: Boris Johnson's negative stance on the Conservative's migration policy is blow to David Cameron's authority

His response to the government’s consultation on imposing a cap on immigration was leaked Thursday night.

Mr Johnson, who was also lobbying on behalf of the City of London, which seeks to lure top talent from around the world to its boardrooms, said, ‘A major rethink of Government policy is required’ as the cap would ‘have a significant negative and disproportionate impact on London’.

It will ‘put the economic recovery at risk by creating skills gaps and placing London at a competitive disadvantage in the global competition for talent and inward investment’, he said.

The coalition government wants to limit the numbers of workers from outside the EU as Britain’s own people are increasingly shut out of the tight jobs market. Net migration to the UK soared by 20 per cent last year to 196,000, despite the recession.

[How'd that happen?]

While the government is powerless to block migrants from the EU, it wants to whittle down the number of workers from outside Europe to the tens of thousands.

Resolute: Immigration minister Damian Green is determined that British businessess should end their reliance on migrant workers

But Mr Johnson argued that foreigners made a ‘substantial contribution to [the] UK economy’. Businesses were ‘unanimous in their opposition and hostile to the proposal’, he added.

‘They warn that the limit will damage small, medium and large businesses, prevent inward investment, talent and trade opportunities coming to London, and thereby materially damage London's competitiveness,’ he said.

The temporary cap imposed earlier this year was ‘already causing businesses significant recruitment problems’.

Immigration Minister Damian Green said: ‘Businesses are going to have to reduce their reliance on migrant workers as this has done nothing to help the millions of unemployed.

‘The Government will also introduce measures to support British people.

‘Alongside limits will be action to get Britain back to work and provide business with the skills they need from the resident workforce - reducing the need for migrants at the same time as we reduce their number.’

He went on: 'This Government believes that Britain can benefit from migration but not uncontrolled migration.

‘I recognise the importance of attracting the brightest and the best to ensure strong economic growth, but unlimited migration places unacceptable pressure on public services.’

This is not the first time that Mr Johnson has been at odds with Mr Cameron. He warned against the bonus tax imposed on bankers by the last government but supported by the Tories.

And he has also supported an amnesty on illegal immigrants – which has also been backed by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

Imitation

2010-09-09T00:04:00.005-04:00

Some Preacher in Florida says he's going to burn a Koran.

Some guy with a popular Blog responds by saying this Preacher should say that burning the Koran is just wild and crazy performance art.

In other words, if it's okay for the US Government to fund "art" which consists of desecrating symbols Catholics and/or Protestants consider sacred, that somehow justifies desecrating something Muslims consider sacred.

This is the Neoconservative cultural position in a nutshell: White Gentiles must become to Muslims what Jews are to White Gentiles.

If Jews fund films and artwork that blasphemes this or that religion popular with White Gentiles, White Gentiles should turn around and do the same thing to Muslims.

If Jews cut White Gentiles off from traditional gender roles by popularizing Feminism, then White Gentiles should turn around and inflict Feminism on the Muslim.

An interesting side effect of this is it forces the White Gentile to come out foursquare in favor of what Liberals did to his society.

If Feminism's so great that we need to die trying to bring it to Afghanistan, surely there's no reason to complain about its triumph in the West.

If desecrating holy books is so awesome that Preachers have to get in on it, surely there's no reason to complain about the massive media campaign to tear down religion, tradition, and sexual restraint.

After all, the only problem with that campaign is the hypocrisy.

Yeah, the only problem's the hypocrisy that they go after Catholics and Protestants so much while leaving the more exotic Sunni and Shia alone.

It was fine to arrest Dale McAlpine for quoting a passage of the Bible the Liberals don't approve of.

The problem is the hypocricy of not also arresting Muslims who quote passages of the Koran the Liberals don't approve of.

If only Liberals were consistent nihilists.

Update: I just noticed that almost all the Neocons who've written anything about this issue are against the Preacher burning a Koran.

As of this writing, however, they remain firmly in favor of inflicting Feminism and other assorted impostures on the Islamic World.

U.S. Troops In Iraq Excited To Finally Return To Afghanistan

2010-09-08T00:24:00.005-04:00

Members of the U.S. Armed Forces were reportedly overcome with feelings of joy, nostalgia, and optimism this week after learning they would soon be withdrawn from Iraq and allowed to finally return home to Afghanistan.

"I never thought this day would come," said Cpl. Douglas Robinson, who hasn't seen the barren hills and smoking craters of his beloved Kabul in nearly six years. "Being away from those you left behind, for this long, it definitely starts to take a toll on you."

Added Robinson, "I can't believe I'm going home again."

In 2003, thousands of American soldiers were unexpectedly uprooted from Afghanistan and sent off to fight in a long and bloody war overseas. After serving multiple tours of duty in Iraq, the vast majority of these troops said they couldn't wait to get back and have their lives return to normal.

"It's going to be great to be surrounded by all those familiar faces again," said Pfc. Shawn Brunner, staring wistfully at an old and faded photograph of the bleak wasteland. "The tribal sheiks, the frightened villagers, all that wonderful rubble near the Id Gah Mosque. When I'm finally back on Afghan soil, I'll probably kiss the ground."

Like Brunner, marines stationed at Camp al Qaim in Iraq said they longed for the comforts of home, whether it's stopping off at a local eatery for a hot meal of sabzi challow, or spending Sunday afternoon cheering on their favorite buzkashi team.

According to military officials, the announcement of the long awaited homecoming has greatly improved morale, with U.S. soldiers looking forward to returning to the one place where they truly felt like they belonged.

"Hopefully we'll stay put for a while," said Cpl. Michael White, adding that he couldn't wait to hear the familiar strains of neighbors speaking Dari in the streets. "With any luck we'll be in Afghanistan for another 10 years."

While most remained enthusiastic about the trip home, a small percentage of military personnel expressed concerns that Afghanistan had drastically changed since they were called off to war. Others worried that it would now be awkward to interact with local warlords.

"I don't want people to treat me weird just because I've been away for so long," Lt. Gerald Karshner said. "I'm sure there will be a period of adjustment. You know, just getting reacquainted with the sounds of slightly less mortar fire, or that special tear gas smell that only Afghanistan has. Still, it'll be great to sleep in my old metal bed again."

The journey back will be bittersweet for some. Pvt. Michael Tagle, 24, said he could still remember a more innocent time in his life, when he would drive around all day in a tank with friends, several of whom, sadly, are no longer around.

"We had our entire lives ahead of us," said Tagle, who "pretty much grew up" in Kandahar. "Anything was possible. Going to college. Maybe starting a family someday. Even making the world a better place."

Added Tagle, "It's funny the things you picture for yourself when you're young."

Amid all the fanfare, there was some unpleasant news. Troops in the 11th Marine Regiment were ordered early Tuesday morning to ship off to the United States, a distant foreign land, filled with bizarre customs, strange beliefs, and millions of people they do not know or understand.

Time

2010-09-03T00:04:00.012-04:00

Old People and the Military are Eating Us Alive!

2010-09-02T00:50:00.027-04:00

A staggering 44% of the 2009 Federal Budget went to programs exclusively for people over the age of 65 (Social Security and Medicare).

This is in spite of the fact that only 13% of the US population is 65 or older!

Then another 24% went to the Military.

That adds up to 68% of the money we pay to the Feds either going to old people or the military.

Are we getting our money's worth?

It sure seems to me that so many of the old people in this society are spending their time living it up in creepy childless apartment complexes, not passing on their wisdom and experience to the young at all.

And don't get me started about the military.

I suspect what this all comes down to is that the Elderly are much more likely to vote than the Young, and Jews are much more likely to cut fat donation checks to politicians than Gentiles.

He who pays the piper...

Hitting the Nail on the Head

2010-09-01T00:09:00.000-04:00

"What naive conservatives like Beck and Palin and their followers don’t understand is that all our national symbols have been taken over by liberalism. Therefore, as long as conservatives fail to recognize and criticize this fact, their support for various national symbols, such as the military, is support for liberalism."
-Lawrence Auster

Bring Back the Drachma

2010-08-31T01:37:00.007-04:00

Auster points to a very interesting article by a CFR Globalist lamenting the possibility of the European Union falling.

The most interesting part was this:

"The E.U. is now just trying to keep the machine going," a member of the European Parliament told me recently. "The hope is to buy enough time for new leaders to emerge who will reclaim the project."

If only Greece could find the courage to default on its debt, as Germany should've defaulted on the noxious terms of the Versailles Treaty.

That would put the dagger in the heart of the EU.

The way it could happen, I suppose, would be if the organizations involved in national strikes could manage to effect the overthrow of the current Government, which is basically just a pack of EU vetted stooges and sellouts.

It's in the best interest of Greece for the EU to be destroyed, it's in the best interest of all of Europe.

"This Kind of Behavior is Beyond Comprehension Unless..."

2010-08-30T12:23:00.004-04:00

The Wisdom of the Ancients

2010-08-28T00:06:00.000-04:00

This intelligent and important comment was recently left at In Mala Fide:

Actually, as much as I hate to say it, No Fault Divorce is not the lynch-pin that many Men's Rights Advocate’s claim it is – and it should be noted that I have considered to be so myself.

However, upon reading of the history of the suffragette and 2nd wave movement, it becomes clear that creation of No Fault Divorce was merely society catching up with the court system of the day.

Divorces were always given freely to women who wished to have them, except that it usually had to be done under the “fault” of “Cruelty.” – read “The Case for Father Custody” and/or Belfort Bax’s “The Fraud of Feminism” – basically, according to these gentlemen, before no-fault-divorce, a woman who claimed “cruelty” basically won the right to divorce each and every time under this claim of “fault” whether the man was guilty of cruelty or not – the creation of No Fault Divorce was basically just a way for the courts to stop lying about what they were doing – which was basically the way the courts have always worked: Give the little lady what she wants, which includes placing all the blame on the man.

Granted, the divorce rate skyrocketed in the few years after the creation of No-Fault-Divorce, but in reality, things didn’t change much in regard to things – Women have always left men more than men left women, and the courts have always favoured women over men. (We could go all the way back Joseph and Potiphar’s wife falsely accusing of Rape as an act of vengeance – and getting away with it).

Men will always be held to be more responsible than women because, well, men are more responsible than women. This is why, up until around the 1860′s, assumed father custody was the norm.

This changing of custody from the father to the mother is what started the divorce craze. In fact, “The Case for Father Custody” claims that in the 50 years from 1870 to 1920, the divorce rate rose by over 15 times! Granted, there were only a few thousand divorces a year when men were guaranteed custody of the children born in wedlock – but the numbers don’t lie. The divorce rate started increasing from this point onwards, after remaining relatively constant for thousands of years, and it has risen in a more or less linear fashion ever since up until the present day.

A return to presumed father custody (not that shiboleth “shared parenting”) is far more accurate of a path than no fault. Basically, the only reason women are able to hose men through no-fault divorce is because they have presumed mother custody – in which the most irresponsible parent turns the children into mutilate beggars by virtue of her, and the children, becoming poorer for leaving their husband/slave.

Therefore, because the woman has custody of the children, the courts justify taking money from the man to feed these mutilated beggars.

Leave the children with the man, and there are no more mutilated beggars. When women cannot get custody of the kids, they apparently are much more reticent to leaving – especially since without the kids, they have no income they get the courts to steal from the man.

'Walking Sleep'

2010-08-26T00:31:00.006-04:00

Sen. John McCain wants to allow U.S. citizens to be arrested, held indefinitely

McCain Shrugs Off Early Scare, Trounces Hayworth

Master Morality

2010-08-23T07:56:00.017-04:00

Lawrence Auster writes:
As Diana West chillingly reports, all the indications point to a massive Russian cover-up of the truth about the airliner crash in Russia last April that decapitated the Polish political elite. If things are as they increasingly seem, the crash was not an accident but one of the great crimes of modern history, and Putin's Russia is as monstrous as Brezhnev's or Stalin's.

Statsaholic responds:
The assassination of 96 prominent Poles would be one of the greatest crimes of modern history? That's hardly the case.

And Brezhnev's somehow the equivalent of Stalin? That's absurd, much less the idea that Putin is.

Anyway, if the Russians actually did this it's extremely hard not to admire them for it.

There's something beautiful about it, a kind of ungratitious but highly effective genius expressed in a movingly audacious manner.

Plus considering the Polish government at the time was allied with America, a Country that has been going around trying to assassinate the elite of its ideological enemies in Pakistan, I'm not sure what right the Polish president and his elite followers have to complain, if it so happens Russia played a role in the plane they were on crashing.

Note: I really don't understand why Auster has been so Anti-Russian lately, Russian Jews are treated perfectly well in "Putin's Russia".

That's perhaps part of why the recent Russian Jewish immigrants in Israel are trying to get their Government to amend its stupidly Anti-Russian stances, such as their propping up of the American stooge Saakashvili in Georgia.

Strategic Depth

2010-08-22T05:14:00.008-04:00

A while ago I wrote an article pointed out the importance of Iran responding to being attacked by attacking the World Economy.

In this context a recent statement by Iranian President President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is quite interesting:

Referring to Israel's occasional threats against Iran's nuclear facilities, Ahmadinejad called any attack unlikely, but he said if Israel did, the reaction would be overwhelming.

"The scope of Iran's reaction will include the entire earth," said Ahmadinejad. "We also tell you — the West — that all options are on the table."

Hopefully this shows an understanding on Ahmadinejad's part of the strategic issues his nation faces in the event of an Israeli and/or American attack.

The key thing is to hit the World Economy, which is very fragile at this time (especially the American part of it), while avoiding the infliction of too many civilian fatalities on America.

In the same way that National Socialist Germany's mass killings of Slavic Whites in places like the Ukraine needlessly galvanized them behind their Left Wing overlords, killing too many American civilians (at least on American soil) would needlessly galvanize them behind their Left Wing overlords.

Iran needs to play tough but fair, that is the road to victory.

Obama Vs. Bush

2010-08-21T13:10:00.011-04:00

The Gallup Polling company just did a survey finding Obama's Job Approval rating at 42% approve versus 51% disapprove.

To contextualize this information it's important to note that Gallup found that at this point in his second term, George W. Bush's Job Approval rating was 42% approve versus 54% disapprove.

One way of looking at this is that Obama has gone nearly as much down the drain in two years as it took a smirking and mass murdering incarnation of vacuity six years to manage.

But of course there’s the issue of the economy.

The economy is in much worse shape now than it was in August of 2006, so that could be having an effect.

Also there’s the issue of war fatigue.

War fatigue is progressive. This means that if one President starts a war, the President who continues his war policy tends to suffer more of the political consequences of increased discontent caused by the war.

It's ironic how new Presidents always feel the need to continue wars they had nothing to do with starting in the first place.

This is especially so when one of the central reasons they were elected in the first place was because the voters wanted to express their dissatisfaction with the Republicans for starting the wars.

Of course the elites in favor of the war(s) stay the same, for the most part, though the President changes.

Actually, Obama has done well to resist calls to invade Iran.

The key is for Iran to get Nuclear Weapons before the 2012 election.

A Republican wouldn't have done nearly so well on this metric as Obama has, and there's no reason to think a Republican who gets to be President in the context of Iran lacking a Nuclear deterrent will do nearly so well either.

That is unless one of the rare Republican politicians who are sensible on foreign policy, such as Rand Paul, gets the nod in the primaries.

Heroic Cancer Sufferer Inspires Others To Get Cancer

2010-08-20T01:16:00.009-04:00

SAN DIEGO–Diagnosed three months ago with terminal lymphoma, David Bradley, 46, has stood as such a stirring example of courage in the face of disease that he is inspiring others in his community to get cancer.

"Seeing David and the way he's bravely battled this thing, I couldn't help but follow his lead," said neighbor Timothy Willis, injecting himself with a concentrated dose of the carcinogen trichloroethelene in an effort to contract the disease.

"David understands that every day is a precious gift. Pretty soon, I'm going to realize that, too." Said Mandy Pitnick, 14, chain-smoking three unfiltered Camels: "I want to be a symbol of hope just like David."

The Strait of Hormuz, Part Three

2010-08-19T01:09:00.005-04:00

Ferdinand Bardamu wrote something on his Blog negative about Iran, saying they would be flattened in event of war. The Irishman Pat Hannigan replied thusly:

Yeah, I dunno about your point re Iran not being the threat it’s cracked up to be. The Iranians are pretty cluey pricks and nothing like the dopey Sunni Jihadis who have no strategic sense, or a nation to build.

Unlike the Sunni Jihadis, Iran is a state based actor with imperialistic designs. It can do a tonne of damage to Saudi Arabia and other Mid East countries in retaliation for air-strikes. The USA is in no economic shape to withstand a massive disruption to oil supply. Militarily the US is already too stretched to maintain another ground assault which is what will be required if Israel goes the Iranian’s nuclear plants (if they have them?).

From a paleos perspective (and I understand that there is some perception that Buchanan is a bleeding heart Palestinian lover), we should look to be ensuring the Israelis don’t threaten Iran because if they do we’re in for more problems. We need to understand that Iran couldn’t give a crap about the Palestinians just as the Israelis don’t. But the Iranians are using them to further their goals just as they did with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In general to those reading:

I don’t understand why White Americans (and Australians it would seem) keep wanting to send our White men off to die in battles, which they win, so that we can all ensure that we get more and more non-Whites immigrating to our lands. If the paleos are bleeding hearts on the Palis, the same can equally said about those White people who are bleeding hearts on the Jews in Israel.

We should act in our national and ethnic interest. Ceasing all non-White immigration is in our interest. Ensuring that we have economic access to those primary resources our economies rely on is in our interest. Interminable wars for “democracy” are not in our interest. Making sensible, non nationally compromising alliances are in our interest.

I know we like to think that we’ve got big swinging dicks and can go all Rambo anytime we like but, after the smoke has cleared, our lands are the ones being invaded, peacefully, and the lands we invaded, like Iraq, rely on the enemy, Iran, to keep and maintain the peace.

Has the USA overcome the Global Financial Collapse of 2008? Is the USA prepared for a crippling, however temporary, blow to her economy all to prop up Israel’s “right” to exist? Why do White Americans fight to maintain a Jewish Israel as these same White Americans are actively replaced in their own land?

But, I’m led to believe that the Iranians are the stupid ones who will be easily overcome.

First Things Comes Out In Favor of Polygamy

2010-08-18T01:06:00.015-04:00

Judge Walker’s Rational Basis for Supporting Polygamy

First Things
Thursday, August 5, 2010, 6:00 AM
Joe Carter

If there was any doubt that Judge Vaughn Walker would allow his personal views of homosexuality trump legal reasoning, he removed that with his ruling today overturning California’s ban on same-sex marriage. Fortunately, the reasoning is so jaw-droppingly stupid that it will be overturned on appeal when it reaches the Supreme Court. [That's what you think.] Since Walker is (presumably) not a stupid man, he has to know that his ruling is weak and has no basis in actual reason. The only explanation is that he decided that sending a message of support to his friends in the gay community was more important that applying coherent legal reasoning to interpret the law.

Admittedly, this is a serious accusation. Yet I think it can proven with a simple test: Ask Judge Walker if his reasoning applies to polygamous marriage. [There is no reason to ask a Judge his opinion on a question that isn't being brought before his court at this particular time, unless it is during his confirmation hearing.] In the decision he handed down, Walker find no rational basis for denying this fundamental right to same-sex couples. But every one of his reasons applies equally to polygamy. [Darn tootin'!]

I am not claiming that his reasoning leads to an argument ad absurdum. That would be a lateral move from one absurdity to another. What I’m claiming is that, if he is consistent, Walker would have to conclude that his rational basis criteria effectively overturns not only the ban on same-sex marriage, but the ban on polygamy.

Here are key excerpts from his opinion. (I assure you that this summary (which was compiled by the Wall Street Journal) comes from the actual opinion and not from The Onion.)

This one is straightforward: replace “polygamous partners” for “gays and lesbians and it would be equally as applicable.

Proposition 8 places the force of law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians, including: gays and lesbians do not have intimate relationships similar to heterosexual couples; gays and lesbians are not as good as heterosexuals; and gay and lesbian relationships do not deserve the full recognition of society. (Page 85)

Proposition 8 has had a negative fiscal impact on California and local governments. (Page 90)

Even for an opinion riddled with idiotic reasoning, this justification is exceptionally ridiculous. Almost every law passed has a negative fiscal impact on California. That does not make them unconstitutional.

Nevertheless, if preventing homosexuals from marrying has a negative fiscal impact, the same must hold true for denying polygamists the right to marry.

Proposition 8 increases costs and decreases wealth for same sex couples because of increased tax burdens, decreased availability of health insurance and higher transactions costs to secure rights and obligations typically associated with marriage. Domestic partnership reduces but does not eliminate these costs. (Page 91)

The same holds true for polygamists.

Proposition 8 singles out gays and lesbians and legitimates their unequal treatment. Proposition 8 perpetuates the stereotype that gays and lesbians are incapable of forming long-term loving relationships and that gays and lesbians are not good parents. (Page 93)

The same holds true for polygamists. [Certainly, that's part of why the laws against Polygamy are so unjust. There's a tragic history in this Country of Polygamists being hounded and discriminated against by the Government; see for example the extermination order against the Mormons passed by the tyrannical Governor of Missouri in 1838.] Both research and common sense support the idea that children function better when they have both a mother and a father. In a polygamous marriage, the child would generally not only have a mother and father but a spare parent as well. Imagine the benefit of having both parents at work and yet still having a parent who can stay home with the children.

[Indeed.]

Since many children in America already have multiple stepparents, why would it be any more detrimental to their psychological health to have all these parents living under the same roof?

The Proposition 8 campaign relied on fears that children exposed to the concept of same-sex marriage may become gay or lesbian. The reason children need to be protected from same-sex marriage was never articulated in official campaign advertisements. Nevertheless, the advertisements insinuated that learning about same-sex marriage could make a child gay or lesbian and that parents should dread having a gay or lesbian child. (Page 105)

Relative gender composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and obligations of marriage under California law. Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals. (Page 113)

Even Walker isn’t dumb enough to believe that gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage. But if that’s the reasoning we are using, then the multiplication of genders would not change the conclusion.

In the absence of a rational basis, what remains of proponents’ case is an inference, amply supported by evidence in the record, that Proposition 8 was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples. Whether that belief is based on moral disapproval of homosexuality, animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate. (Page 132)

Unlike gay marriage, polygamy has been widely practiced throughout history. There are few civilizations, religions, or cultures where polygamy has not taken root.

In fact, almost ever religion has, at some point in their development, accepted the legitimacy of polygamy. All of the major world religions—Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity—have condoned the practice of taking multiple spouses. In contrast, none of them has ever tolerated, much less openly accepted, same-sex marriage.

The same holds true for most every culture on earth. Out of 1170 societies recorded in Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas, polygyny (the practice of men having more than one wife) is prevalent in 850. Even our own culture, which has an astoundingly high divorce and remarriage rate, practices a form of serial polygamy.

The reasons for favoring gay marriage while excluding polygamy are completely arbitrary and based on personal preference. If you truly believe that gays have a legal right to marry then you have no grounds for barring polyamorous groups from doing the same.

This leaves proponents of same-sex marriage with two choices. They either have to accept that polygamy is just as legitimate as gay marriage or they must admit that there is no inherent “right” to expand the definition of marriage. In the past, they’ve been hesitant to defend the practice because it is politically unpopular.

However, as studies have shown, most homosexual do not have an actual objection to polyamourous relationships, so we can expect that their political clout continues to grow, they will feel more comfortable admitting that they don’t really oppose polygamous marriage.

Walker may be willing to admit this already. He is able to say, with a straight fact, that there has never been a rational basis for denying homosexuals the right to marry. And if it is true, as he claims, that same-sex marriage fall within the purview of the equal protection clause, then polygamy must also have to be included.

But If it is not an inherent Constitutionally protected right, then the citizens retain the ability to decide the legal status of matrimony—whether gay, straight, or polyamorous. The people could even lobby their legislatures to allow same-sex marriages while excluding polygamous unions since the legislative branch has a greater degree of latitude in making arbitrary distinctions than does the judiciary.

Of course if they did, Judge Walker would conclude—based on his rational basis criteria—that the legislature did not have a proper basis on which to legislate. For him, unelected judges—not the people, not the rule of law—are the final arbiters of what is proper and reasonable.

If this is the standard then he should at least be consistent: If the courts have the authority to decide if a woman can marry another woman, then they must afford the same right to a woman, a woman, and a man.

[Finally someone is talking sense.]

The Sea

2010-08-17T12:43:00.005-04:00

The Strange Duality of Jewish Power

2010-08-10T12:05:00.004-04:00

"But the power-gifts which the Washington regime has made to Russia are not explicable entirely by simple stupidity, simple incapacity. There is the further factor at work that the Zionist Washington regime is on both sides of most power-questions in the world. Its sole firm stand is its fundamental anti-German position: Germany must be destroyed, its young men must be slaughtered. In Algeria, Washington is on both sides: it is with the French Government, as its 'ally': it is with the rebels by virtue of its world-program of "freedom" for everybody. In Egypt, the Washington regime told Palestine, England and France to attack, and when Russia rose, it told them to stop. It was, within a week, anti-Nasser and pro-Nasser. It occupied Lebanon, then evacuated. It held back Chiang when from his island, he would have attacked China with whom the Washington regime was then at war. It defended South Korea, but helped the Chinese maintain their supply line to the front. During the Chinese War in Korea, it made war and negotiated peace at the same time, for years. In Cuba it forbade exportation of arms to the loyal Batista and thus helped Fidel Castro; now it is committed to the overthrow of Castro.

It is a psychological riddle, decipherable only thus: the Zionists have two minds, which function independently. As Zionists, they are committed to the destruction of the Western Civilization, and in this they sympathize with Russia, with China, with Japan, with the Arabs, and as such they anathematize Germany, which is the mind and heart of the Western Civilization. As custodians of the United States, they must half-heartedly remain at least the technical and political domination of that Civilization even while destroying its soul and its meaning. In a word, they are working simultaneously for and against the Western Civilization. Quite obviously they are thus doing more damage than conferring benefit! If a commander of a fortress sympathizes with the enemy, but yet insists in defending the fortress rather than surrendering it, he has surely found the highest formula of destruction."

-Francis Parker Yockey, THE WORLD IN FLAMES (1961)

2010-08-07T05:50:00.003-04:00

You've Got To Be Kidding Me

2010-08-06T01:03:00.006-04:00

Read this, it shows nothing has been learned and that Steve Sailer typed in vain:

The Return of the $1,000 Down Mortgage

It Happened In Canada

2010-08-05T01:12:00.016-04:00

Federal district court knocked down California's homosexual marriage ban. This is what I've long expected.

Auster was surprised though:

But I still think it’s unlikely that the plaintiffs will prevail. There are (un)constitutional bridges too far, even for radical liberal judges.

Now what would surprise me is if this doesn't lead to Homosexual Marriage being legalized in all 50 States by ruling of the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court can square Government mandated sexual and racial preferences in hiring with equal protection, they can certainly square a little thing like forcing the States to recognize same sex marriage.

It's not like I can think of anything in the Constitution that specifically forbids having same sex marriage. All I can think of are things that would stop the Federal Government from forcing the States to do it.

But of course these are also the things in the Constitution that should've stopped the Supreme Court from ramming legalized pornography and abortion down the throats of the States.

These are the things in the Constitution that should've stopped the Congress and White House from imposing all sorts of things on the States.

It's key to understand that all of the Federal Government was prohibited from doing this sort of thing by Constitution, back when the Constitution was in force, NOT just the Supreme Court.

Perhaps when the Congress and/or President impose their constitutionally unauthorized will on the States it's a little bit more Democratic, but this doesn't change that the Founders of this Country would've been just as dead set against it.

The Straight of Hormuz, Part II

2010-08-04T00:35:00.010-04:00

This article by Fred Reed illustrates an important point previously made by the War Nerd:

I wonder whether Americans realize that they have a Vienna-sausage military at filet-mignon prices. The sorry performance in recent wars is just one example of the ongoing rot, but the whole enterprise has become unbalanced, aimed at fighting the kinds of enemies we don’t have instead of the ones we have recently chosen to make.

The Navy is a fine example. The carrier battle group, the heart of the Navy, is a hugely expensive way to get relatively few combat aircraft to a remote place...

But the Navy has not fought a war for sixty years, certainly not one it needed to win, and it shows. Today’s battle groups, CVBGs as we say, are almost indistinguishable from those of 1945, except for the upgrading of weapons. Instead of five-inch-thirty-eights, we have Standard missiles. Instead of F4F Hellcats, the F-18 Hornet. Yet the carrier is still the Mother Ship, protected by screens of cruisers and destroyers, with interceptors flying CAP. The problem is that the enemy has changed.

Bear in mind that a great many countries fear attack by the United States, among them such trivial nations as Russia, China, and Iran. None of these has the money to build carrier groups to oppose those of the Navy.

All of these have thought about cheap ways to overcome the US behemoth. Four solutions soon came to hand:

1.Very fast sea-skimming cruise missiles, such as the Brahmos and Brahmos II (Mach 5+).
2.Supercavitating torpedoes, reaching speeds of over 200 miles an hour.
3.Very quiet submarines, diesel-electrics in the case of poor countries.
4.Anti-ship ballistic missiles, such as the one attributed to the Chinese.

Any military buff knows that the Navy cannot defend itself against these. It says it can. It has to say it can. In fleet exercises against submarines, the subs always win—easily. The Pentagon has been trying to invent defenses against ballistic missiles since the days of Reagan (remember Star Wars?) with miserable results. If you have close friends in the Navy, ask them over a few beers what scares the bejesus out of them. Easy: Swarms of fast, stealthy, sea-skimming cruise missiles with multi-mode terminal guidance.

Add to the brew that today’s ships are fragile, based on the assumption that they will never be hit. Go aboard a WWII battleship like the Iowa, BB-61 (I have) and you will find sixteen-inch belt armor and turrets designed to withstand an asteroid strike. Now go aboard a Tico-class Aegis boat (I have). You will find an electronic marvel with big screens in a darkened CIC and an amazing SPY-1 phased-array radar that one burst of shrapnel would take out of commission for many months.

Now note that cruise missiles have ranges in the hundreds of miles. Think: Persian Gulf. A cruise missile can be boxed and mounted on a truck, a fast launch, or a tramp steamer. The Chinese ballistic missile has a range of 1200 miles, enough to keep carriers out of aircraft range of Taiwan. I wonder whether the Chinese have thought of that?

In short the day of surface navies seems to be coming to a close, at least as strategically decisove forces. So does the day of the manned fighter as Predator-style “drones” improve.

What happens now? Nothing—for the moment.

To understand the problem, assume for the moment that the Navy knew beyond doubt, and openly admitted in internal discussion, that it could not protect its surface ships from modern anti-ship missiles. What would it do? What could it do?

Nothing. Why? Because, apart from the missile submarines, which have no role in combat, the Navy is the surface fleet. Many, many billions of dollars are invested in carriers and careers, in escorts for carriers, in countless men trained to run them. Mothball the carriers, and the Navy becomes a few troop ships useful for unopposed landings. Maintaining a large fleet only to support the Pentagon’s preferred role of massacring half-armed peasants would just be too costly.

So: Does the Navy say to Congress, “We really aren’t of much use any longer. We suggest that you scrap the ships and put the money into something else”? Mankind doesn’t work that way. The appeals of tradition, ego, and just plain fun run high. (Never underestimate the importance of ego and fun in military policy.) A CVBG is a magnificent thing, just not very useful. The glamor of night flight ops, planes trapping ker-whang!, engines howling at full mil, thirty knots of wind over the flight deck, cat shots throwing fighters into the air—this stuff appeals powerfully to something deep in the male head. The Navy isn’t going to give this up.

Thus it can’t admit that its day comes to a close, whether it knows it, suspects it, or refuses to think about it.

The carrier is forever. Unless one gets sunk.

Which (I suspect) is unlikely, because the admirals won’t risk the test. I don’t know what Iran has but, if a shoot-out came, and half a dozen ships appeared on international television smoking and listing with large holes in them, that would be the end of the Navy’s credibility. Remember what happened in when an Iraqi fighter hit the USS Stark with two French Exocet missile: The missiles worked perfectly, and the Stark’s multitudinous and sophisticated defenses failed utterly. The Navy produced all manner of face-saving explanations.

Note: Plus it seems the US Navy is promoting people to officer not based on merit, but rather on Affirmative Action (!!):

The Navy is listing dangerously in politically correct water

"We Just Kept Sending Them Money"

2010-08-03T06:08:00.001-04:00

The Genetic Structure of Eurasia

2010-08-01T05:23:00.009-04:00

This fascinating chart on genetic distance can be found in the online book "Erectus Walks Among Us".

One of the interesting things about it is that the genetic distance between the six non-African groupings and Bantus is almost perfectly predicted by the genetic distance between those groupings and East Africans.

The pattern is consistent, the pearson correlation between them is very strong .993, with a P Value of .0001 in spite of the very small sample size.

                Bantu   East Africans
India          2202      1078
Near East 1779        709
Korea        2668      1475
S. China    2963      1664
English      2288      1163
Australia   3272       2131

As can be seen every non-African group is closer to East Africans than to Bantus.

This combined with the correlation suggests that all similarity between Caucasoids, Mongoloids, and Australoids relative to Bantus is merely the consequence of their relationship with East Africans, and indicates that West Africans didn't play a meaningful role in the peopling of Eurasia.

Also interesting is the pattern that Caucasoids (Near East, English, India) are closer to East Africans than Mongoloids (Koreans, South Chinese) are.

This may in part be because a large number of East Africans, for example Ethiopians, are partly Caucasoid by ancestry, genotype, and skull shape.

Since the gene flow came from the Middle East, this helps explains why the Near Eastern Caucasoids are more similar to East Africans than other Caucasoids.

Strong evidence for meaningful gene flow from the Middle East into East Africa can be found in the fact that the East Africans are 64% closer to Near Easterners than they are to English, while Bantus are only 29% closer to Near Easterners than they are to English.

Another thing that stands out is that though Caucasoids are more similar to East Africans, East Asian Mongoloids are more similar to Australoids.

Even the Indians, thought to have fractional Proto-Australoid ancestry by some, are further away from Australian Aborigines than the Mongoloid populations are.

                    E.Af    India   N.E.    Kor. S.C.   Eng.
Australia   2131    1176    1408   850   1081   1534

Especially notable is how close, relatively speaking, the Koreans are to Australoids. I think the ancestors of the Ainu had something to do with this, given the similarities found between their skull shape and the skull shape of Australian Aborigines.

But the most interesting thing about the chart is just how hard the break is between Caucasoids and Mongoloids, and how tightly the Caucasoid groups cluster together relative to the total diversity found in Eurasians.

For example, even the Indians who seem to have Proto-East Asian genetic ancestry are more than 3 times closer to the English than they are to their South Chinese neighbors (also they're 4.2 times closer to the English than to Australoids).

What's The Use Of Happiness If It's Just A State Of Mind?

2010-07-31T06:31:00.003-04:00

This is an except from "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse":

Sternberg's basic idea, that emotions play a biological regularity role, hearkens in some way to the three psychologists' "general theory of love". More importantly, it hearkens to Darwin. Roughly since the Enlightenment, study of the mind had been flavored by the Cartesian contention that abstract thought is the calling of the brain, it's high function; emotional states are low functions, base handicaps people should work to overcome. This view was challenged by Darwin who, in the years after publishing On the Origin of Species, became haunted by the notion that if physical characteristics evolved, then emotional states may have evolved too. Darwin spent a decade on this question and the result was his last work, a little-known book called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872.

Darwin speculated that moods, feeling, and psychological qualities must possess some or national selection would have eliminated them. Being afraid of packs of wolves holds an obvious survival benefit. Loyalty, for instance, could have improved the survival chances of early humans by causing them to care for one another. To Darwin, the idea that psychological states evolved was a hopeful one, helping explain why there was goodness in the world. The admirable emotions, he assumed, had been rewarded by national selection.

But while Darwin's views on biology conquered the intellectual landscape, his views on emotions were quietly dismissed by tastemakers. Freud was about to propose a much more negative interpretations, that consciousness is steeped in self-delusion and that human emotions are the repellent byproduct of infantile sexual compulsion. This view has not stood the test of time; much of Freud has been discredited by subsequent research. But the sheer pessimism of Feud's thinking-he once memorably said that the most the typical person could hope for was to rise from crippling neuroses into-"ordinary unhappiness"- appealed to the negative intellectual Zeitgeist that prevailed around the beginning of the twentieth century. Darwin's more affirmative take on emotions was forgotten.

The Black Death Was Different Than Low Birthrates

2010-07-30T07:04:00.019-04:00

Note: I certainly agree with Brimelow that the Japanese are and will be better off than they would've been without their highly restrictive immigration policies. However, I disagree with his theory that Japan's low birthrate could be in any way beneficial, and find his analogy to the Black Death to be profoundly invalid.

Peter Brimelow writes on VDARE:
Japan’s population may or may not decline (demographic projections are notoriously uncertain) but declining populations are not neccessarily bad. Here’s Wikpedia (July 28 2010) on the economic consequences of the Black Death:

In many ways the Black Death and its aftermath improved the situation of surviving peasants, notably by the end of the 15th century. In Western Europe, labourers gained more power and were more in demand because of the shortage of labour. In gaining more power, workers following the Black Death often moved away from annual contracts in favour of taking on successive temporary jobs that offered higher wages.

Statsaholic:
One thing that really needs to be borne in mind here is that the Black Death killed young people AND old people.

In contrast the low birthrate of the Japanese today is the demographic equivalent of only killing the very young, while leaving the old alone.

For this reason it may well be that all the extra money made by the young due to labor scarcity, and then some, will be eaten up by the old. They will thus almost certainly be far worse off due to the low birthrate.

This is especially the case given that the young will have even less voting power than they have now.

If the young are handing over a massive percentage of their earnings to the old now, can you imagine how much they'll be handing over once their relative voting power is even smaller than it is now?

The birthrate in Japan is low enough at 1.2 children per woman that each generation is significantly smaller than the generation that came before it.

This means that even if even if the life expectancy stays the same over time, each new Japanese generation is more outnumbered by its elders than the last.

Now because of their restrictive immigration policies and relatively high population the Japanese have a lot of time to reverse their birthrate problem before they go extinct.

But the problem is that as long as they stay a Democracy, a Country where the young refuse to have children unless they have a lot of money, and a Country with cheap and legal birth control, the low birthrate seems irreversible in the absence of significant and effective state intervention.

The only other possible hope is if the fertility suppressing forces of technology, feminism, and materialism are somehow rejected and/or overthrown.

In other words if they go back to being patriarchal primitives, incipient rebels against the modern World like we now find so often in the Islamic World.

"Some People Had Doubts, But Now They're All Dead"

2010-07-28T06:52:00.008-04:00

Year of the woman in politics?

ALBANY -- Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat in charge of recruiting candidates to expand her party's majority in the state Senate, had a simple message for the crowd of party brass, labor leaders, lobbyists and political consultants: "I believe this is actually the year of the woman."

They all clapped, including U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand -- who was being feted at the June 14 "Women for Gillibrand" luncheon of Caesar salads and chocolate mousse at the Crowne Plaza -- and Ellen Malcolm, the founder of the national group EMILY's List, which funnels money to female Democratic candidates.

As did three other women in the room: Didi Barrett, Susan Savage and Joanne Yepsen. The three are part of a class of 10 women challenging state Senate Republican incumbents -- all of them older men -- and join 10 women already in the chamber. Eight of them are Democrats.

Eric Blankenbaker, a spokesman for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, said that in a year in which Democrats -- who control all the levers in Albany, including the Senate -- are running a slate to bring a "fresh perspective" to Albany.

But why so many women running now, and why are Democrats -- anxious to grow their razor-thin 32-30 majority in the Senate -- turning to them as insurgents?

"The guys kind of screwed things up a bit for all these years, and maybe they're realizing that," said Liz Abzug, founder of the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute, an organization named after her mother, a former congresswoman. "When you see now how it's fallen apart, and how nothing passes through, and you see the three guys in control, it shows that you're not moving forward. We're not moving. So why not? It's a perfect time for women to seize the reins."

"A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered."
-Andrea Dworkin

Bradley Manning, I Salute You

2010-07-27T00:03:00.018-04:00

June 25th was a good day.

Leaks create fresh doubt about Afghan war, secrets

The monumental leak of classified Afghan war documents threatened Monday to create deeper doubts about the war at home, cause new friction with Pakistan over allegations about its spy agency and raise questions around the world about Washington's own ability to protect military secrets. [This is important. It is especially valuable to help people in foreign governments realize that this nation of idiots called America has bred a government of idiots, and that they are showing this government of idiots FAR more deference and respect than is deserved or necessary.]

The White House called the disclosures "alarming."

The torrent of more than 91,000 secret documents, one of the largest unauthorized disclosures in military history, sent the Obama administration scrambling to assess and repair any damage to the war effort, either abroad or in the U.S. The material could reinforce the view put forth by the war's opponents in Congress that one of the nation's longest conflicts is hopelessly stalemated.

The leaks come at a time when President Barack Obama's Afghanistan war strategy is under congressional scrutiny and with polls finding that a majority of Americans no longer think the war there is worth fighting.

Still, the leaks are not expected to prevent passage of a $60 billion war funding bill. Despite strong opposition among liberals who see Afghanistan as an unwinnable quagmire, House Democrats must either approve the bill before leaving at the end of this week for a six-week vacation, or commit political suicide by leaving troops in the lurch in war zones overseas.

The Pentagon also was looking at possible damage on the ground in Afghanistan.

"Someone inadvertently or on purpose gave the Taliban its new 'enemies list,'" declared Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., who said the White House indicated the disclosures compromised a number of Afghan sources.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs emphasized that the documents covered the period before Obama ordered a major increase in U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan, and the administration denied they would cause any policy shift in the fight against Taliban insurgents.

[Just as well. We need the military ground down to dust in Afghanistan to reduce the chances of an invasion of Iran. The good thing about these leaks is that they're important enough to significantly damage US morale, while not being important enough to cause the pig-headed types running the war to actually withdraw.]

Indeed, despite the furor over the publication of the reports on the WikiLeaks whistleblower website, the information did not reveal any fundamentally new problems in the war effort. Military officers, current and former, described the documents as mostly tactical spot reports, including hunches about possible suspects and bomb plots that couldn't be verified. Some of the reports contain errors; others appear to be based on flimsy evidence.

Still, much of the material is anything but encouraging.

Underscoring the difficulties the U.S. faces, the documents include the first publicly released indication that the Taliban has used portable surface-to-air missiles against U.S. helicopters. One report on a June 2005 incident said a Black Hawk helicopter used evasive measures to avoid getting hit east of Kandahar by what its crew chief identified as a portable missile.

The documents also report potential Iranian support of an Afghan terrorist group.

They said that on Jan. 30, 2005, Iranian intelligence agencies brought the equivalent of $212,800 in Afghan currency across the Iranian border and transferred it to a 1990s-model white Toyota Corolla station wagon occupied by members of Hizb-i-Islami, a Taliban-allied insurgent group led by former Afghan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. [Good for Iran, this is wise of them.] The money trail was lost.

Col. Dave Lapan, a Defense Department spokesman, said the military would probably need "days, if not weeks" to determine "the potential damage to the lives of our service members and coalition partners."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the release of documents was just the beginning. He told reporters in London that some 15,000 more files on Afghanistan were still being vetted by his organization.

The documents are described as battlefield reports compiled by various military units that provide an unflinching view of combat operations between 2004 and 2009, including U.S. frustration over reports that Pakistan secretly aided insurgents fighting U.S. and Afghan forces. [Good for Pakistan.]

The material portrays Pakistan as playing a double game when it came to the struggle against Afghan militants, with security officials secretly providing insurgents with aid. Both the U.S. and Pakistan say that view is outdated, but one American analyst said it probably is correct.

"The Pakistan government gave up claiming that it could control its intelligence agencies around the time they invented them. I don't think they even try," said Paula R. Newberg, director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.

In Islamabad, the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the leaked documents "misplaced, skewed and contrary to the factual position on the ground." And it said that U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism cooperation against "our common enemies" will continue.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley argued that there is a "new dynamic" in the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan since the period covered by the leaked documents. He acknowledged, however, that the U.S. remains concerned about weaknesses in the relationship, including the problem of corruption in the Afghan government.

WikiLeaks, a self-described whistleblower organization, posted the reports to its website Sunday night. It did not say who provided the documents.

Crowley said it was unclear whether the leak was related to a U.S. military intelligence analyst who is being held in Kuwait, on charges of mishandling classified information on military computers in Baghdad.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., said the documents released so far "reflect the reality, recognized by everyone, that the insurgency was gaining momentum during these years while our coalition was losing ground." [And I suppose the insurgency isn't gaining ground now!]

The Taliban's resurgence led Obama to announce in December 2009 a major increase of forces to Afghanistan as part of a new civil-military strategy, Lieberman pointed out. [It's so stupid how Lieberman is trying to spin this.]

Shortly after the documents were posted on the Internet, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said they raised questions about whether the U.S. was pursuing a realistic policy with Afghanistan and Pakistan. He said they showed the urgency of making the "calibrations" necessary "to get the policy right." [Whatever that means???]

Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the leak disturbing.

"The damage to our national security caused by leaks like this won't stop until we see more perpetrators in orange jump suits," Bond said. [Visit Guatenamo Bay, Kit. You'll see plenty of perps in orange jumpsuits and then everything will be okay again in your empty skull.]

The military has detained Bradley Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst in Baghdad, for allegedly transmitting classified information. But the latest documents could have come from anyone with a secret-level clearance, Lapan said. "These documents highlight issues we've long known about," Crowley said.

Francis Parker Yockey And The Big Picture

2010-07-26T00:39:00.006-04:00

Yockey & Russia, by Mauryk2

Nothing separated Francis Parker Yockey more from the primitive-minded American Right than his position on Russia (& the USSR). Yet it’s essential to his thought & practice. Dr K R Bolton, in this essay from the late 1990s, provides the necessary overview. Dr Bolton is a Far Right, conservative and Social Credit researcher based in New Zealand. The entire essay can be downloaded at Kerry Bolton Collection.

YOCKEY & RUSSIA by Dr K R Bolton (excerpts)

Russia is pregnant with meaning for our own time. The actions of Russia are pivotal for the future of civilization against the globalizing tendencies of the USA and international finance capitalism. Russia has undergone a brief interregnum of subordinate status to liberal-democracy and oligarchy inaugurated by Gorbachev and maintained by Yeltsin. The rise of Putin was something of a partial coup at least against plutocracy and globalism.

American-born Western Destiny philosopher Francis Parker Yockey was one of the seminal Thinkers to ascertain the situation of Russia from the perspective of realpolitik at a time when the American Right was serving globalizing and cosmopolitan interests by lining up behind the US Establishment to beat the war drums against the USSR with the the advent of the Cold War.

Yockey from the start of his post-war ideology seems to have considered Russia to be very much of secondary concern in relation to the liberation and destiny of Europe, in contrast to the USA. The first was seen as representing the crass impacting on material existence; the second as a virus eating at the very soul of Europe through pervasive culture distortion.

Yockey reiterates that Russian occupation of Europe would be less harmful than American. Like the barbarian invasions of other Civilizations, Yockey believed that the superior Western culture would be resistant to military occupation and the Russians would eventually succumb to a symbiotic relationship, which would open the way for the European culture-bearing stratum to infiltrate the Soviet bloc at all levels and into the Kremlin itself. The occupation of Europe by Russia would not result in Russification, but the Europeanization of Russia resulting in a peaceful new Europe-Russia Symbiosis.

Another significant positive factor Yockey saw in Russian occupation in preference to America, is that Soviet occupation would mean the elimination of the inner-traitor, the class of politicians epitomized by Churchill, who while being part of the Western cultural inheritance, acted against European interests.

Yockey correctly perceived that the USSR had changed orientation since the ouster of Trotsky. He correctly identified two ‘bolshevisms’ in the sense that ‘bolshevism’ in Yockean terms means an attack on the Western cultural organism: that of Moscow and that based in Washington and New York. He saw the militaristic ‘bolshevism’ of ‘Russian barbarism’ as less dangerous in the long term to the Western cultural organism than the ‘cultural bolshevism’ emanating from America.

On hindsight it would seem that the Yockeans of the time underestimated the power of Culture Distortion. One needs only to consider the global ramifications of George Soros for creating a subversive network pushing everything from the ‘color revolutions’ in the former Soviet bloc and elsewhere to feminism and marijuana liberalization. Soros would today be considered by Yockey as perfectly epitomizing the Culture Distorter.

Yockey however was correct in considering the enduring religious and land-based soul of the Russian, as virile and ultimately having the potential to throw off this global spiritual and cultural contagion. Russia is yet to fulfill an historical mission that might liberate the Western Cultural organism and create a new symbiosis of Russia and Europe (and those cultural colonies further afield) predicted by Yockey but on terms that would now recognize the Russian People-Culture-Nation-State as by no means inferior to that of the West.

The Front Line Of An Inevitable War

2010-07-24T00:04:00.000-04:00

Note: This important exchange occured in response to Mark Hackford's recent AltRight article "The Rape of Europa."

Bogolyubski Writes:
As Dr. Phil likes to ask: "How's that workin' out for ya?" The Poles and other Eastern European countries would be better off allying with Putin's Russia than joining the prison of nations headquartered in Brussels. Unfortunately, the lingering bad taste in their mouths from 45 long years of being Soviet client states prevents a realistic assessment of what the EUSSR actually is. They merely left one prison of nations to become inmates of another, far more destructive and deadly one.

LH Responds:
Good comment. The top nationalist parties in Hungary (Jobbik), Slovakia (Smer, SNP), Bulgaria(Ataka) are all against further surrender to the EU and on the record for closer alliances with Russia. Poland has actually improved relations with Moscow. There are other good signs here and there. Russia is still a long way off from what passes today for Western "cultural" domination, which frankly means the ghetto/gay vomit out of America.Will the aptly named EUSSR collapse? Very few people really ever thought the USSR would and now you can buy your very own Lenin Medals on E-Bay. And to think it might all start in Greece again....

Getting Our Money's Worth?

2010-07-23T07:30:00.001-04:00

Increasing Number Of Americans Unable To Point Out Map

WASHINGTON—-An alarming new study released Tuesday by the Department of Education found that nearly 70 percent of Americans are incapable of pointing out a map when presented by researchers with a map. "Not only did a majority of people just stare blankly ahead, but nearly half pointed to nearby desk lamps in their attempts to guess correctly," said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who called the findings endemic of the nation's failing school system. "In fact, 14 percent of all Americans claimed they had never 'even heard of no map,' and asked if being prompted to locate one was some kind of trick question." According to Duncan, the Department of Education has suspended all further studies and will instead be spending the next six months just screaming into a pillow.

H/T: The Onion

Why Females Are More Likely To Be Bastards

2010-07-22T08:03:00.010-04:00

This is really interesting.

It turns out that someone did a working paper where they looked at whether a woman not living with a spouse or partner before the conception of her child increases or decreases the chances that it will be a son.

"In a sample of 86,436 human births pooled from five US population-based surveys, I found 51.5% male births reported by respondents who were living with a spouse or partner before the child’s conception or birth, and 49.9% male births reported by respondents who were not (v2 ¼ 16:77, d:f : ¼ 1, p < 0:0001).

The effect was not explained by paternal bias against daughters, by parental age, education, income, ethnicity, by year of observation, and was larger when comparisons were made between siblings. To my knowledge, this is the first direct evidence for conditional adjustment of the sex ratio at birth in humans, and could explain the recent decline in the sex ratio at birth in some developed countries."
-Partnership status and the human sex ratio at birth

This makes sense to me because when it comes to perpetuating your germline into the future girls are the safe bet and boys more the cocksure gamble.

Reproductive variability is much greater with males than females. If you produce a son you're more likely to hit the jackpot in terms of getting lots of biological grandchildren, this is true, but the trouble is that you're also more likely to come up snake eyes.

If you're a man who's going to stick around and invest a bunch of time and money raising your children, it seems to me it would be more adaptive to produce sons.

At least this is the case if by sticking around it had the effect of improving your child's reproductive chances.

Better to improve the reproductive chances of a son than a daughter, considering there's more potential upside there.

But if you aren't going to invest time and energy into helping the child out, better to have a daughter. Even if it hurts her reproductive chances, the lower variability of female reproductive success means there's a better chance she'll produce children than a similarly neglected son.

Therefore I'd say this sex ratio pattern may represent an adaptation to a time period, possibly still ongoing, where having a father in the household had a mortality rate independent positive effect on a child's chances of reproductive success.

Note: All the above reasoning also applies from the perspective of the mother.

I Blame Larry Gelbart

2010-07-16T00:45:00.001-04:00

Attitudes Toward Mel Gibson in Los Angeles

2010-07-14T07:03:00.029-04:00

SurveyUSA just did a poll of 500 adults in LA on their attitudes toward Mel Gibson.

There's a consistent pattern of LA Whites hating on him more than anyone else:

Mel Gibson Favorablity Rating
Whites -41
Blacks -18
Hispanics -4

Will Mel's image forever be tarnished?
Whites     +8
Blacks     -20
Hispanics -45

Also those under 34 are less likely to disaprove of Gibson than the old:

Mel Gibson Favorablity Rating
18-34 -14
35-54 -27
55+     -26

I'm not sure what's driving these patterns. Maybe because of this being LA the poll picked up a lot of Jews who don't like Mel for pointing out how they cause all the wars in the World.

And maybe the LA Hispanics tend to live in close enough proximity to Blacks to take an understanding attitude toward Mel's concerns about what packs of them are capable of doing.

But what I find most interesting is the Blacks being less offended than the Whites, even though the media's only really attacked Gibson for "Anti-Black racism."

They don't care about the whole allegedly punching his girlfriend in the face thing, and I doubt many of the people polled were aware of that aspect of the story.

Anyway, I think this may indicate that the really liberal type of Whites you have in LA are more hostile to race realism than actual Black people are, and ironically enough this may especially be the case with forms of race realism that make Blacks look bad.

The thing is that I checked and Jews are only about 5.9% of the LA population, so even if 100% of them disapprove of Mel Gibson it still means the White gentiles polled in LA disaprove of Gibson more than the Black gentiles, assuming a representative sample.

Computers and Education

2010-07-13T00:20:00.013-04:00

Given the recent ramdomized study showing a negative effect from video games on academic achievment, I thought this article from the NY Times was interesting:

Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

Ofer Malamud, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is the co-author of a study that investigated educational outcomes after low-income families received vouchers to help them buy computers.

“We found a negative effect on academic achievement,” he said. “I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they weren’t surprised, given their own experiences with their school-age children.”

Professor Malamud and his collaborator, Cristian Pop-Eleches, an assistant professor of economics at Columbia University, did their field work in Romania in 2009, where the government invited low-income families to apply for vouchers worth 200 euros (then about $300) that could be used for buying a home computer.

The program provided a control group: the families who applied but did not receive a voucher. They showed the same desire to own a machine, and their income was often only slightly above the cut-off point for the government program

This a good example of a randomized study, even though I should double check exactly how much of an average income gap there was.

In a draft of an article that the Quarterly Journal of Economics will publish early next year, the professors report finding “strong evidence that children in households who won a voucher received significantly lower school grades in math, English and Romanian.”

Aha!

...The principal positive effect on the students was improved computer skills.

At that time, most Romanian households were not yet connected to the Internet. But few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.

In the United States, Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd, professors of public policy at Duke University, reported similar findings. Their National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “Scaling the Digital Divide,” published last month, looks at the arrival of broadband service in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005 and its effect on middle school test scores during that period. Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers passed four.

The Duke paper reports that the negative effect on test scores was not universal, but was largely confined to lower-income households, in which, the authors hypothesized, parental supervision might be spottier, giving students greater opportunity to use the computer for entertainment unrelated to homework and reducing the amount of time spent studying.

That makes sense, but there's also the issue that children from lower-income households might have less of the mental discipline required to avoid using the computer as a distraction from schoolwork.

The North Carolina study suggests the disconcerting possibility that home computers and Internet access have such a negative effect only on some groups and end up widening achievement gaps between socioeconomic groups.

Okay, here's the Liberal idea that it would've been great if something had an equally negative effect on ALL the students, and that making the lowest aptitude students do worse is only bad because it increases inequality.

H/T: Auster

Samuel Johnson on the Masses

2010-07-12T10:25:00.004-04:00

When man sees one of the inferior creatures upon a tree or basking in the sunshine without any apparent endeavor or pursuit, he often asks himself or his companion, "on what that animal can be supposed to be thinking?"

Of this question, since neither bird nor beast can answer it, we be content to live without the resolution. We know not how much the brutes recollect of the past or anticipate of the future; what power they have of comparing or preferring; or whether their faculties may not rest in motionless indifference till they are moved by the presence of their proper object or stimulated to act by corporal sensations.

I am the less inclined to these superfluous inquiries because I have always been able to find sufficient matter for curiosity in my own species. It is useless to go far in quest of that which may be found at home; a very narrow circle of observation will supply a sufficient number of men and women who might be asked with equal propriety, "on what they can be thinking?"

It is reasonable to believe that thought, like everything else, has its causes and effects; that it must proceed from something known, done, or suffered; and must produce some action or event. Yet how great is the number of those in whose minds no source of thought has ever been opened, in whose life consequence of thought is ever discovered; who have learned nothing upon which they can reflect; who have neither seen nor felt anything which could leave its traces on the memory; who neither foresee nor desire any change of their condition, and therefore neither fear, hope, nor design, and yet are supposed to be thinking beings.

To every act a subject is required. He that thinks must think upon something. But tell me, ye that piece deepest into nature, ye that take the widest surveys of life, inform me, kind shades of Malebranche and of Locke, what that something can be which excites and continues thought in maiden aunts with small fortunes; in younger brothers that live upon annuities; in traders retired from business; in soldiers absent from their regiments; or in widows that have no children?

Life is commonly considered as either active or contemplative; but surely this division, how long soever it has been received, is inadequate and fallacious. There are mortals whose life is certainly not active, for they do neither good nor evil, and whose life cannot be properly called contemplative: for they attend neither to the conduct of men or the works of nature, but rise in the morning, look round them till night in careless stupidity, go to bed and sleep, and rise again in the morning.

And Now For A Word From Our Sponsor...

2010-07-11T00:20:00.009-04:00

My Word! Ann Coulter Makes an Irrational Foreign Policy Argument

2010-07-09T00:50:00.009-04:00

In her latest column Ann Coulter writes:

At this point, Afghanistan is every bit as much Obama's war as Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson's war. True, President Kennedy was the first to send troops to Vietnam. We had 16,000 troops in Vietnam when JFK was assassinated. Within four years, LBJ had sent 400,000 troops there.

In the entire seven-year course of the Afghanistan war under Bush, from October 2001 to January 2009, 625 American soldiers were killed. In 18 short months, Obama has nearly doubled that number to 1,124 Americans killed....

Statsaholic responds:

We can't give Obama all the credit for this, though.

According to Wikipedia: "Deployment of additional US troops continued in early 2010, with 9,000 of the planned 30,000 in place before the end of March and another 18,000 expected by June. The Pentagon anticipates that US troops in Afghanistan will outnumber those in Iraq for the first time since 2003."

So at the absolute most Afganistan has had 27,000 extra US Troops thanks to Obama's delightful idiocy, or only 37% more than there were when Obama took office.

And yet according to Miss Coulter in 87 months under Bush 625 American troops were killed, for a kill rate of only 7.2 a month, but under Obama we've gone up to MUCH higher kill rate of 62.4 a month.

That's a 767% improvement in kill rate!

Clearly this 767% improvement in kill rate can't be explained merely by 37% increase in US Troop levels.

What could be happening here?

I really don't know, but saying the increase in US Troop fatalities in Afghanistan is being caused by Obama's troop surge is clearly incorrect.

And then there's the issue that Ann Coulter is comparing LBJ's 2,400% increase in US Troop levels in Vietnam to Obama's mere 37% increase in US Troop levels in Afghanistan!

Try to get your facts straight next time, Ann Coulter.

Alvin Greene on Job Creation (America as the New Mauritius)

2010-07-08T07:00:00.003-04:00

Alvin Greene on job creation: Produce Alvin Greene action figures

The buzz surrounding surprise Senate nominee Alvin Greene has gone international as Republican incumbent Jim DeMint's Democratic challenger described an unusual plan for job creation to a British newspaper this week.

Calling Greene "America's most unlikely politician," a reporter from the Guardian of the United Kingdom traveled to South Carolina to interview the mysterious candidate who came out of nowhere to beat former judge and state legislator Vic Rawl in the June Democratic primary.

The result was a standard "who is Alvin Greene" article similar to what many news organizations have written since Greene's perplexing victory. However, one thing that stood out in the Guardian's story was Greene's interesting plan to spur job growth in the Palmetto State.

"Another thing we can do for jobs is make toys of me, especially for the holidays," described Greene. "Little dolls. Me. Like maybe little action dolls. Me in an Army uniform, Air Force uniform, and me in my suit. They can make toys of me and my vehicle, especially for the holidays and Christmas for the kids. That's something that would create jobs."

Greene knows most politicians wouldn't list personalized action figures at the top of their economic plan, but he says that's what makes him a good candidate. "I think out of the box like that," Greene told the Guardian.

"It's not something a typical person would bring up. That's something that could happen, that makes sense. It's not a joke."

Greene will face DeMint and Green Party candidate Tom Clements in the November election. According to a June poll released before Clements entered the race, DeMint led Greene by 21 points. Greene has said he is planning a debate with DeMint, though exact details have not been released.

Wednesday afternoon, the Manning NAACP announced Greene will be the guest speaker for their monthly meeting on Sunday, July 18 at 4:00pm at Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church.

NAACP, have you no standards whatsoever!

I mean, the guy was credibly accused of shocking acts of sexual harressment against a college student, plus he's clearly not even close to being right in the head, and yet you want him representing your org and race?

I guess too many decades of Whites refusing to judge American Blacks, partly to avoid being called racist, has allowed even the Black leadership to give up on even trying to project a positive image.

It's like how the Dodo lost the ability to fly on that Island where there weren't any predators.

But will it play in Peoria?

2010-07-06T05:42:00.004-04:00