Half Sigma

The end of New York City

A major news organization reports:

At 4:32 p.m. Tuesday, every single resident of New York City decided to evacuate the famed metropolis, having realizing it was nothing more than a massive, trash-ridden hellhole that slowly sucks the life out of every one of its inhabitants.

Employers discriminating against men

Amazing news from Time Magazine:

[A]ccording to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. In two cities, Atlanta and Memphis, those women are making about 20% more. This squares with earlier research from Queens College, New York, that had suggested that this was happening in major metropolises. But the new study suggests that the gap is bigger than previously thought, with young women in New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego making 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers, respectively. And it also holds true even in reasonably small areas like the Raleigh-Durham region and Charlotte in North Carolina (both 14% more), and Jacksonville, Fla. (6%).

This is pretty amazing considering that men are majoring in practical subjects in college such as engineering and accounting, but women with their English and Communications degrees go out into the job market and earn more money.

It makes you wonder about what advice to give students entering college. I guess my previous advice to major in accounting was probably dead wrong. As Steve Sailer alluded to on Monday, immigrants work in careers in which employers perceive that employees don’t need good communication skills, and this has lowered the wages of those careers. (I use the word “perceive” because I find nothing more annoying than having to deal with a computer programmer who can speak barely understandable English, but no one else seems to chare my concern.) These tend to be male-oriented jobs. Immigrants can’t compete in marketing-oriented jobs which attract more women because they are perceived as being about communications.

College students today should probably major in marketing, because that's the only thing America is good at.

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Going back to the reasons for why women earn more than men, a big part of the story also has to be simply that employers are either paying women more money to do the same job as men, or hiring women into higher paying career tracks in the first place.

Glenn Beck’s nondenominational monotheism

This appears to be a transcript of Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally.

He mostly talks about God, but never mentions Jesus once. Many times, he specifically tells listeners to go to their churches, synagogues, or mosques. That’s right, the word “mosque” was used many times.

Glenn Beck is preaching some non-existent religion which I would call nondenominational monotheism. How exactly is this different than unitarian universalism? Only that the former is conservative and the latter is liberal. And unitarian universalism is more accepting of non-monotheistic religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, while Beck tells us we must believe in a single God.

Universalists believe that all religions reveal some universal Truth, but nondenominational monotheists believe that only monotheistic religions contain the Truth about a single God we should worship, while other religions are just plain wrong.

Nondenominational monotheism is for the Proletariat, while unitarian universalism is for the Bourgeoisie.

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Glenn Beck also believes that God takes sides, and that America is His chosen nation. This is the traditional role of religion, to give people the belief that they’re a member of the correct team. In contrast, Unitarian universalism doesn’t make people feel good about themselves because it tells people that a Buddhist in China is just as good as you or I. How is that supposed to raise my self-esteem?

Rich people still support Obama

Everyone who hangs out on right-leaning blogs should read this:

Obama's approval rating has plummeted by 24 percentage points among those with a household income that is less than $50k annually. He's dropped 13 points within the $50k to $100k bloc over the same period. And he's fallen 17 points within the $100k to $150k bloc.

What about those households with income exceeding $150k? Obama has merely declined 4 points, based upon Gallup polling from February-March 2009 (after Obama's honeymoon ended) to June-July 2010.

Obama has tested his upper class support more than any modern presidency. He's continuously pledged to oppose tax hikes on everyone but the wealthy. That pledge is at the center of the current debate over extending the Bush tax cuts. The healthcare overhaul will increase wealthy voters' tax burden. And financial reform was hardly celebrated by the investing class.

This is why The Wall Street Journal headlined a story last summer, "Democrats' New Worry: Their Own Rich Voters." But polls have continuously shown that Democrats have far more reason to worry about those who are anything but rich. This is partly because upper class Democrats are not voting on tax policy. If they were, they'd be Republicans.

. . .

That wealthiest bloc [$250K household income, top 3% of households] represented the largest marginal shift in support of any income bracket between 2004 and 2008. Obama won 52 percent of their support. George W. Bush won 63 percent of the bloc four years earlier, according to exit polls.

Yet households earning at least 150k offer a bigger picture of the affluent voter. This bloc constituted 12 percent of the 2008 electorate. It includes not only top earners but also those who can more-reasonably expect to be top earners someday. The larger sample size also offers a more accurate statistical measure.

Obama won this affluent bloc by a 50 to 48 percent margin. Bush won 60 percent of the bloc in 2004.

Democrats have become the party of the elites, of the value transferors.

Also, I don't understand why people oppose raising taxes on people with $250K household incomes when that class itself actually supports Obama. I say, let them get what they deserve!

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I just love this comment written by “jason” to a blog post at the WSJ Wealth blog:

As one of these “wealthy” dems, I can safely say with 1000% certaintly that I would certainly like to pay lower taxes. But even MORE than that I don’t want anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-first amendment, global warming and evolution deniers who think Obama is a reverse racist anywhere near the white house. Its amazing that this editorial utterly ignored the sorts of social issues that so clearly make the most educated (who also happen to be the wealthiest) recoil at the thought of Presidents Palin or Gingrich. So I will take 39.6 taxes if it means people are free to be gay, atheist, and black. And if it means that laws are based on science, not religion.

I’m not saying that I agree or disagree with “Jason,” but I think this sentiment accurately reflects why a substantial percentage of rich people won’t vote Republican.

Marx, the Tea Party, and blacks

I wrote that the Tea Party is Marxist back in February, showing that I just keep recycling the same ideas but forget that I even had them before.

Marx’s favorite class was the Proletariat. Marx’s Proletariat consists of the people who had to work for someone else, and they comprised the majority of the population. They are not the bottom-most class (people who don't do honest labor but who are criminals and beggars), but rather the regular people. Marx hated the Bourgeoisie because they took the value of the labor of the Proletariat to make themselves undeservedly rich. He also didn’t like the Lumpenproletariat much, unlike modern liberals for whom the lumpenproletariat is their favorite class.

Paul Fussell’s classes are social classes rather than economic and political classes, but if you had to match the Proletariat against Fussell’s classes, the Proletariat would consist of what Fussell calls “proles,” as well as what Fussell calls the middle class. Paul Fussell’s upper middle class would correlate with Marx’s Petit-Bourgeoisie.

I think that if Marx were analyzing classes in the United States, he would put blacks into their own class. Why is that? Because blacks will never develop class consciousness because they have what I would call race consciousness. For starters, a significantly high percentage of blacks are in the Lumpenproletariat class, and Marx said that this class would not develop class consciousness, and this is even more true today when the Lumpenproletariat benefits from the welfare state—why would they want to change anything? Working class and middle class blacks, as far as I can tell, prefer to stand with their black elites and black lumpenproles rather than join up with a multi-racial Proletarian political movement. The black lumpenproletariat supports affirmative action for higher class blacks, and the higher class blacks support welfare benefits for the lumpenproletariat which is disproportionately black.

Marx very well understood that loyalty to some group other than one’s class would prevent the development of class consciousness. This is why Marx disliked religion. When it was Catholics against Protestants, or in the present, anti-abortion people against pro-abortion people, what happens is that the anti-abortion Proletariat supports the anti-abortion Bourgeoisie and the pro-abortion Proletariat supports the pro-abortion Bourgeoisie, and these divisions allow the Bourgeoisie to keep transferring value from the Proletariat class to themselves.

Nationalism is another type of loyalty which stands in the way of class consciousness, which is why nationalistic movements are seen as rightwing movements and never leftwing movements. However, modern liberals are anti-nationalistic but at the same time they don’t care too much for the Proletariat.

I hope the above is further evidence that the Tea Party movement represents a rising class consciousness of the American Proletariat. And I hope people can get over the irony that a class conscious movement can be opposed to the Democratic Party, but the fact is that the Democratic Party has abandoned regular Americans in favor of both the Lumpenproletariat and the SWPL-elite. It’s also obvious that Republican elites wish to control the Tea Party movement and just use it as a way to get votes for the same-old politicians who represent Big Business and the value transferors rather than the regular people who create value. Also, Christians want to ruin the Tea Party by making it an anti-abortion movement rather than a Proletarian movement.

Time Warner Cable incompetence

I was just watching CNBC HD on Time Warner Cable (which is a 16:9 formatted channel), and a Time Warner Cable advertisement comes on. The ad was shot in a widescreen 16:9 format, but it was shown in a letterbox format with black bars on the top and bottom, causing the actors to appear squished.

I thought that this was a most pathetic display of incompetence; Time Warner runs the cable network, but they can’t get their own ad to display in the correct format.

The Tea Party is a Marxist movement

Yes, in case you haven’t figured it out by now, the Tea Party is a Marxist movement.

The Tea Party movement is accused of being right-wing, and people are accustomed to associating Marxism with the left, so some will be surprised, even shocked, that the Tea Party is a Marxist movement.

We should be clear that the Tea Party is not promoting Communism (an idea which turned out to be really bad), but rather that the Tea Party movement represents the rising class consciousness of the Proletariat, as predicted by Marx.

The modern left doesn’t promote the interests of the Proletariat; it’s the Lumpenproletariat that the left is most concerned about. The Democratic Party relies upon the Lumpenproletariat to win elections, and once elected uses the power of government to advance its own moral agenda which is adverse to the interests of the Proletariat.

The people who write columns in newspapers opining how much they hate the Tea Party movement come from the class most closely analogous to what Marx called the Petit-Bourgeoisie

Good morals come from the elites

In Nigeria, church pastors identify children as witches, and then charge their parents money to deliver them from Satan.

Comments in previous blog posts have said, without religion telling them what’s moral and what’s not, how will people know how to behave? But we see that, in Nigeria, churches are not providing very good moral guidance.

Moral guidance requires elites, whether religious or secular, to tell the proles and the lumpenproles how they should behave. In the United States, the secular elites are doing a bad job of this, but it’s not because they lack religion, it’s because they have too much liberal guilt and don’t feel they are worthy of telling the proles and the lumpenproles how to behave.

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This is the first time I’ve used the term “lumpenprole.” I kind of like it. It has a much better sound to it than “the underclass.”

Levi Johnston: not sorry

When asked about the apology he issued to Sarah Palin after saying some unfriendly things about her family in that [Vanity Fair] article, Johnston said he only said he was sorry because that’s what his then-fiancee, Bristol, wanted. “I don’t really regret anything, but the only thing I wish I wouldn’t have done was put out that apology because it kinda makes me sound like a liar, and I’ve never lied about anything.” [EW ]

More thoughts on religion and politics

I’ve been accused of applying a double standard to Obama with respect to whether or not he’s Christian—and yes, to a certain extent, this is true. And to a certain extent, Obama’s background is extremely unusual. He is the first president the nation has ever had who had a parent who was not of some Christian denomination.

As I’ve stated before, announcing to the voters of the United States that you are an atheist is the kiss of death for a politician. Someone can probably point to a politician somewhere who has publicly announced his atheism, but it’s pretty rare.

Luckily for those running for office, the bar to not being an atheist is pretty low. Sure, there will be some far-right bloggers who accuse various liberal politicians of being atheists, but few people besides those who would never vote for a liberal anyway are paying attention. As long as you don’t loudly say “I AM ATHEIST! HEAR ME ROAR!”, you get credited for belonging to the religious tradition of your parents, even if you haven’t publicly proclaimed your belief in such religious tradition. And politicians are good at being subtle about stuff like that, otherwise they wouldn’t be politicians.

When it comes to getting elected for political office in the U.S., being a Jew, or even being a Muslim, isn’t as big of a negative as being an atheist. This is one example of how the precepts of unitarian universalism have become part of our nation’s shared beliefs. Most voters believe that all religions are a path to God, so as long as you believe in some religion then you’re not an evil godless atheist. Even George W. Bush seems to believe this.

Do I want politicians who believe that the only path to salvation is belief in Jesus and all non-believers are doomed to go to Hell? Hell no. So I should be happy about Obama's religious beliefs. In fact, it’s Mitt Romney’s Mormonism which continues to irk me. Mitt goes above and beyond the duty of showing up at church on a regular basis; all five of his sons have gone on missions to convert people to Mormonism. There’s evidence that, for Mitt, Mormonism is more than just a religious tradition he was born into, but rather the One True Religion to which he believes the world should be converted—why else would he have encouraged his children to spend two years of their lives converting the non-believers? As I’ve stated before, it would be a lot more American if he had instead encouraged his children to spend two years in the military, serving their country instead of serving the proselytizing efforts of a minority religion.

Unitarian universalism or some other type of non-denominational monotheism serves most politicians pretty well. How can a President who believes that one sect holds the Truth and all others are going to Hell be able to represent all Americans? Furthermore, if someone holds such beliefs, and the word gets out, it’s going to alienate all of the voters who don’t hold those exact same beliefs. On the other hand, all but the most fanatical religionists are content to vote for a guy who believes their religious tradition is a legitimate path to knowing God even if he’s not from the exact same faith. The Unitarian universalist passes the belief test without offending any voters.

My problem with Obama is not that he’s not a real Christian but rather that he’s not a real American. Some of the formative years of his childhood were spent outside of our culture. He considers himself a citizen of the world rather than a citizen of the United States, and that makes him the wrong person to look out for American interests.

Obama the unitarian universalist

A commenter pointed me to a 2004 interview in which Obama talks about his religious beliefs. So here we can get Obama’s religious beliefs directly from the horse’s mouth. (And this is a good time to note that Barack Obama is named after the winged horse which allegedly took the Prophet Mohammed to Paradise).

We must of course note that this all of Obama’s statements are self-serving. He’s running for the Senate in 2004, and Obama knows that people who claim to be atheists don’t get elected, so if he wants to be a Senator then he needs to say something religious enough to get himself elected.

How Obama describes his religious beliefs can best be classified as unitarian universalist. As I’ve written before, unitarian universalism is the religion of the elites. Unitarian universalists believe that the major religions of the world are inspired by God and therefore they are all good and one can get closer to God by following the beliefs of any religion.

Obama explains that (1) he doesn’t believe in a literal Heaven or Hell; (2) he doesn’t believe that belief in Jesus is a path to salvation; he only believes that Jesus was a teacher of moral values; (3) he admires Ghandi who is a famous univeralist;

Obama says that his grandparents attended a Universalist church. (That of course, would be his white grandparents. I presume that his black grandparents and his adopted Indoneisan grandparents attended a mosque, but Obama conveniently avoids talking about that.)

If Obama is unitarian universalist, does that make him Christian? Unitarian Universalists themselves make these two important points:

(1) “Unitarian Universalists are not Christian, if by Christian you mean those who think that acceptance of any creedal belief whatsoever is necessary for salvation. Unitarian Universalist Christians are considered heretics by those orthodox Christians who claim none but Christians are ‘saved.’”

(2) Even under a less orthodox standard, “some Unitarian Universalists are not Christian. For though they may acknowledge the Christian history of our faith, Christian stories and symbols are no longer primary for them. They draw their personal faith from many sources: nature, intuition, other cultures, science, civil liberation movements, and so on.”

There is evidence from Obama’s interview that he is not Christian based on the second category because he draws his personal faith from many sources:

“I was born in Hawaii where obviously there are a lot of Eastern influences.”
“intellectually I've drawn as much from Judaism as any other faith”
“at night [in Indonesia] you'd hear the [Muslim] prayer call”
“my mother was deeply spiritual person, and would … give me books about the world's religions, and talk to me about them.”
“I am a follower, as well, of our civic religion."
“my politics are informed by a belief that we're all connected” (a Gaian concept).

So we see that those people who think that Obama is not Christian have a legitimate basis for such belief. If I were to credit Obama for believing the stuff he says in the interview, then I don’t think he’d consider himself Christian if he were not a U.S. politician; he would say that he’s spiritual and that all religions reveal certain universal truths but that he’s not a follower of any one particular religion. But I'm not certain that he actually believes in a higher power; even in the interview, he's rather cagey about that.

A Marxist question

Under the Marxist class system, what class does a college professor belong to? The Proletariat or the Petit-Bourgeoisie?

The mosque

Until now, I haven’t written anything about the mosque. What mosque is that? The only mosque anyone is talking about these days, the one that’s going to be built a block north of the site of the old World Trade Center.

Conventional interpretation of the First Amendment prevents the government from discriminating against the Muslims because of their religion. There’s a famous church nearby, so why can’t Muslims build a mosque? I think perhaps we need to rethink the First Amendment given the Islamic threat, but that’s a different blog post, and strangely, a topic that hasn’t been adequately discussed elsewhere given everyone’s feeling about the mosque.

What I do note here is the usual double standard. Liberals are overly eager to come out in support of the Muslims’ First Amendment rights compared to, say, the rights of the KKK or neo-Nazis to have a peaceful public rally (as they like to do from time to time). Most (but not all) liberals will reluctantly concede that the KKK and the neo-Nazis have some First Amendment rights, but they will never say anything bad about the inevitable protesters who come to exercise their own First Amendment rights. In comparison, the people protesting the mosque are looked down upon as bad people who are too stupid to cherish the Constitution.

As another example of a double standard, if an American organization wanted to build something in a foreign country, and the people who lived in the country got offended by the plan, then the American elite would put pressure on the organization to change their plans so as not to offend the foreigners. In all likelihood, the organization itself would back down without any such pressures. But it’s different with the mosque. Instead of saying “oops, this plan was a mistake, we apologize for offending you,” the people behind the mosque instead are adamant about going ahead with the plans in order to show off their First Amendment rights, the very rights that non-Muslims don’t have in most Muslim-majority countries.

The Imam behind the project, Feisel Abdul Rauf, is a Sufi, and liberals love Sufism because it’s a sect of Islam that’s more like Christianity and Buddhism than the rest of Islam. But the irony behind liking Sufism it that it’s an admission that the majority of Muslims, who are not Sufis, are bad Muslims and they follow a religion that has very different views of morality than what we are used to in the West. It is true that Sufis believe in spreading Islam through voluntary conversion rather than through military victories, but all Muslims believe that the goal is to spread their religion, and Sufis like all Muslims believe that Mohammed is the Prophet, and Mohammed spread the religion he created through warfare. The secret funding for the project probably comes from Saudi Arabia, which is a big spender in spreading Islam throughout the world. Sufis and Wahhabis work together for the common Islamic goal.

The goal of Islam is to conquer the world. The conquest will not be a big military invasion involving aircraft carriers and tanks. It will be a conquest from within, in which the Muslims take advantage of our freedoms to become a significant percentage of the population through immigration, higher birthrates, and conversion of the low-IQ elements of society. Black people, especially, seem to like Islam. Muslims haven’t converted many white people, but white people will be a minority of the country in a few decades anyway. Islam has a very high future time orientation.

Gambling at Aqueduct: a project doomed to failure

From the Wall Street Journal:

Genting Berhad, the growing Malaysian casino giant that is on the verge of getting final state approval to operate the city's first gambling parlor at Aqueduct racetrack, has lofty dreams for the Queens raceway as well as the rest of the country.

While the Queens operation, Genting's first in the U.S., will initially be limited to 4,500 slot machines and electronic table games, Genting hopes it will eventually expand into a destination resort that would include upscale hotels and attract international travelers.

That’s going to be an investment doomed to fail. Aqueduct is in an ugly neighborhood off of the Belt Parkway near Kennedy Airport at the border between Brooklyn and Queens. It’s not the cool part of New York that attracts upscale international travelers. The only decent gambling casinos in the United States are in Nevada. If New York decided to allow table games in Manhattan, then we might be talking something interesting. But upscale international travelers are not going to go to Queens in order to play slot machines.

This slot machine casino will attract the scum of New York who normally who can’t even afford the cheap bus ride to Atlantic City. These people will reliably lose money on the slot machines, but they aren’t going to spend anything on expensive food and hotel rooms.

Asian companies have a long track record of making really bad real estate investments in New York City. Does anyone remember how the Japanese got screwed over by overpaying for Rockefeller Center?

Redshirting

Last Friday, Steve Sailer blogged about the trend in which affluent parents try to ensure that their kids start kindergarten later, so they can be bigger and more mature than the other kids.

It’s the opposite among poor people, who see kindergarten as free child-care and can’t wait for their children to start.

This is a rather ironic dichotomy, because the poor kids, on average, have innately lower g than rich kids, so they are less able to handle the academic rigors of school.

In any event, whenever we look at test scores, we should compare test scores by age and not be grade. It’s hardly a fair comparison to say that test scores have improved if the average age of the test-taker is older today than in the past.

This is at topic I’ve previously blogged about.

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Also, what I previously wrote about the Zodiac and Virginity:

Using the General Social Survey, I discovered that 5.8% of male respondents born in the U.S. are virgins. But 7.2% of men born under the sign of Sagittarius are virgins, and 7.0% of Scorpios are virgins.

Have I discovered that there really is something to this astrology thing? I don't think so.

Sagittarii are born between November 23rd and December 22nd. Many school systems have a grade cutoff of December 31st. Children born January 1st or after will be in a lower grade in those school systems. This means that Sagitarrii are likely to be the youngest children in their grade, and thus the least mature physically, emotionally, and intellectually. This puts them at a disadvantage relative to their older classmates and more likely to grow up lacking the social skills necessary to lose their virginity. This is the same effect as the findings about adolescent height and labor market outcomes.

Scorpios are born between October 24th and Novermber 22nd, which explains why they are also more likely to be virgins.