Half Sigma

Where did Whiskey's blog go?

I was just reading it earlier today. But now it's gone.

http://whiskeys-place.blogspot.com/

Did Whiskey intentionally take down his blog? Or did Google shut him down for being politically incorrect? Or maybe he was hacked?

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False alarm! It's back.

News media out to get Romney

As reported by the Center for Media and Public Affairs :

Frontrunner Mitt Romney is getting by far the most negative press of the GOP field, according to a new study of television news coverage by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University. The study also found that the campaign horse race is getting over six times as much coverage as the candidates’ positions on policy issues. According to CMPA director and George Mason University professor Robert Lichter, “The media love a horse race and hate a frontrunner.”

This is consistent with what I have been telling you the last several weeks. The media has been rooting for Newt because they want a horserace so they have something to cover and get high ratings, and also because I suspect that the liberals in the media want Newt to win because (1) they think Obama will have an easier time defeating him; and (2) even if he wins, he’s pro-immigration, his hypocrisy on being pro-family values while he has cheated on his wives makes liberals feel good about being liberal, and they figure he can’t be all that bad if he appeared on an anti-global warming TV ad with Nancy Pelosi.

National Review commenters sick of Palin

Commenters at National Review are sick and tired of Sarah Palin. It’s about time. I saw through her from day one, but apparently it took others four years.

So here are some comments in response to Sarah Palin’s suggestion that you should vote for Newt in order to “annoy a liberal”:

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I tried hard to give this woman the benefit of the doubt. Despite the fact she is at best an average mind, I thought she was shrewd. Going from nothing to national political figure requires a certain degree of cleverness. Now, I wonder if it was just serendipity. Her recent babbling about Newt Gingrich representing the rank and file conservative suggests she has no clue about any of this.

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With all due respect to former Governor Palin, but isn't the purpose of a primary to choose the best candidate for the general election? What does "annoying" people have to do with a primary vote? By the way, Senator Christine O'Donnell and Senator Sharron Angle say hi !

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If she were an organ she would be the appendix.

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Yeah, it's really going to annoy a liberal when Republicans vote for a progressive who spews the rhetoric of a right wing ideologue. The longer this process goes on the more convinced I am that a Gingrich nomination exponentially increases the likelihood of an Obama victory in 2012.

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Defeating President Obama will annoy a liberal a lot more than a vote for Newt.

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From the person who tooks nearly a year to tease out that she wasn't running for President, now she's going to take months to tease out that she endorses Gingrich. The govenor who resigned endorses the congressman who was forced to resign. Just like the womanizer (Cain) who dropped out of the race endorses the womanizer who is in the race.

The problem I have with what Palin is saying is you don't vote for someone as a tactic or to annoy someone else. You vote for them because you want them to win. So the queen of "will she or won't she" won't actually say if she wants Newt to win overall or not.

The people who like Palin, and I was one until recently, are being played in her own game of aggrandizment. She and Newt must be two peas in a pod.

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Do we really need any more evidence about how what sort of person we are dealing with Sarah Palin? Newt and Palin are made for each other, they're both con artists that can easily sucker brain dead conservatives.

A leaders' effectiveness does not derive from how much they annoy the opposition. Believe me, if Palin got the nomination, she would annoy liberals, but they would be licking their chops at a 15 point landslide.

I love how Palin gets this "street cred" that she's tough and doesn't mince words, but she's not even brave enough to make a formal endorsement.

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It won't really annoy liberals. All the Democrats I know in open primary states are voting for Newt themselves. Newt's victories amuse them greatly -- after South Carolina, my inbox was choked with a fake Washington Post page that showed a 'Newt wins South Carolina' headline next to a big photo of Obama laughing.

Even if it DID annoy liberals, though, I don't think that behaving with the same general motivation as a 5-year-old advances the GOP cause or the country.

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Sarah Palin is apparently annoying a lot of people these days. Mrs. Palin please tell me where Gingrich is bucking the establishment. Is that with regard to Medicare reform? Individual mandate, global warming, etc, etc, etc? He now has changed (for the campaign) on a whole host of these issues and says he was wrong but his manner and his demeanor portray expediency, not bucking the establishment. The only establishment Newt is bucking is establishment of consistency.

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Based on the fact that Newt trails by like 14 points to Obama in the swing states, I would think you'd please the liberals by voting for him.

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Pat Buchanan disses Newt

Read it here

“[I]n the Reagan White House, Newt Gingrich was considered quite frankly by a lot of folks to be something of a political opportunist and who was not trusted and who had played no role whatsoever,” [Pat] Buchanan said. “He was a Rockefeller Republican in the great Goldwater-Rockefeller battle, where conservatism came of age.”

. . .

Later Buchanan reiterated his criticisms of Gingrich, recalling his opposition to Reagan’s 1986 veto of a South African anti-Apartheid sanctions bill and about how Gingrich used it to score points against Reagan.

“I don’t think he has a core,” Buchanan said. “I don’t think he has a fundamental, ideological and political core. I think, look he moved, he was a Rockefeller Republican, he comes up — I remember meeting him in ’78 when he came to town, you know he is knocking Reagan. … Reagan believed that sanctions on South Africa would cripple the economy that the Africans would inherit. So it was a tough decision. Reagan vetoed it. And he scored points off us by you know voting for the sanctions and doing that. I don’t think he has an ideological core. I think he moves from one issue to another to another.”

Newt is not a real conservative and was not there with Reagan. And this latest rebuke by Pat Buchanan demonstrates a pattern in which the majority of the people who actually worked with him dislike him. This indicates to me that Newt is lacking in the executive abilities needed to be President.

I used to like Newt (and you can find that attitude in some of my old blog posts), but now I realize that I was fooled. Unfortunately, he’s still fooling a lot of the Republican primary voters.

Half Sigma scores 24

That’s on Charle’s Murrays quiz. (Which I didn’t know about until today when Steve Sailer mentioned it.)

The reason I scored 24 is likely because I fit into the following category: “A first- generation upper-middle- class person with middle-class parents. Range: 11–80. Typical: 33.”

No doubt if I had a better class of parents, I would have scored lower.

Charles Murray needs to reword the bus question to exclude the new New York to Washington bus services that a lot of poorer SWPLs are now taking because it’s a fraction of the price of Amtrak. However, I've never taken that bus so it hasn't unfairly raised my score.

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I have some problems with some of the other questions:

“Have you ever walked on a factory floor?”

Only 10% of jobs are in manufacturing. I think there are other jobs that blue collar people are more likely to have done.

And in the past, I walked on the factory floor when was a programmer/analyst for a medical device manufacturer in Phoenix, Arizona, so you can have a white collar job and to this. (On the other hand, if I had a more prestigious white collar job like doctor, lawyer, or banking/finance, I wouldn’t have had a job that involved factory floors, so maybe there’s still a point in there.)

“What military ranks are denoted by these five insignia?”

Do people really remember this even if they served in the military? And women wouldn’t know the answer. I knew that the bird was a colonel and that two stars is for a two-star general, so I got one point on this question.

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Based on the comments, a lot of readers scored near where I am. HBD blogs obviously don't appeal to the true elite who would score below a 10. Most of my readers have some sort of middle class or prole family background.

Mitt Romney on budget deficits and government spending

Mitt Romney writes in his book:

Like most Americans, I recognize the need for government spending, but I cannot fathom the argument that it’s fine to spend more than we earn year after year. Passing on ever-increasing debt to our children is not just bad policy, it is morally wrong.

There are people in both parties who see the budget as something of a game of chicken. Some Democrats are eager to spend so much that Republicans have to raise taxes, and some Republicans, on the other hand, are intent on lowering taxes so much that Democrats have to cut spending. Both sides take great satisfaction in their respective battle plans: the Democrats for spending more and the Republicans for taxing less. My vote is for the Republicans, but in either case, deficits cannot be accepted as part of political tactics; there is simply too much at stake.

Our big government debt problem is not a Democrat problem—it is a Democrat and Republican problem. When President Bush and Republicans were in charge, they grew government, grew spending, and grew debt just like the Democrats. Neither party has been willing to say no to the people who want more and more from government. Saying yes wins votes. Saying no means concession speeches. But what America faces today calls for truth, and having just experienced a brush with economic collapse, the American people are ready for truth. They know that if we go on borrowing, we will do to the country what was done to Lehman and AIG and General Motors and to millions of homeowners. Except in the country’s case, there is no one that could bail us out.

If we wisely begin to reform entitlements and commit to live within our means, we will accomplish for our children what our parents did for us: Bestow upon them an America that is stronger and more prosperous even than what we have known.

Is Mitt Romney too “liberal” to be president? I don’t think so. In fact, this whole theory about Mitt Romney being “liberal” is ridiculous. Most of the stuff in his book could have come out of the conservative editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.

And notice that he has the guts to criticize Bush, something McCain refused to do. Or maybe McCain was just clueless as to Bush's faults.

Healthcare in Massachusetts

So long as we are going to give free medical care to people who show up at a hospital without insurance, it’s only common sense to force everyone to buy insurance in order to prevent the free rider problem and to lower healthcare costs for everybody.

In theory, I am intrigued by the idea of pay-as-you-go healthcare where no one has insurance, where doctors display their prices in their office the way that New York City requires parking lots to display their prices, and if you can’t pay we let you die in the streets. But not a single Republican is proposing that (not even Ron Paul who would say that the government forcing doctors display their prices would be taking away their “freedom” to rip people off).

In the absence of any support for the pay-as-you-go model, the health reform in Massachusetts makes a lot of sense.

Anti-Semitic Ron Paul

Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty website has been promoting the sale of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And then tried to cover it up by deleting the page and denying that it was there.

That’s the book where Ron Paul gets his nutty ideas about the Federal Reserve. Anti-semitic conspiracy theorists believe that the Federal Reserve is part of the plot for Jewish world domination.

Anti-global warming op-ed in Wall Street Journal

There’s an important anti-global warming op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal. It’s signed by sixteen scientists with important-sounding titles.

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

GRE score by major

Razib writes about GRE scores by intended major (hat tip Steve Sailer).

There aren’t any huge surprises. People who took the GRE to major in stuff that sounds low class or vocational had the lowest scores: Social Work, Criminal Justice, Nutrition, Education, Nursing.

The smartest people intended to major in: Physics, Philosophy, Classical Languages, Classics, certain types of engineering including nuclear and aerospace. And economics scores pretty high.

Some majors with surprisingly low scores (relatively speaking, still higher than Social Work and Criminal Justice): Drama, Art History, Pharmacology, Biology, Computer programming, Petroleum Engineering.

Pharmacology is strictly a vocational major for people who want a safe career that pays $100,000/year. It’s probably a major that more people should consider. On the other hand, with pharmacies coming to be dominated by a very small number of big chains, I suspect this will put heavy downward pressure on salaries because pharmacists will have less bargaining power.

People intending to go to law school, medical school or business school take a different test, so we don't know how they would fit in.

Mormons are NOT Protestant

David S. Reynolds says that Mormons are Protestant. I’ve never heard Mormons called Protestant before. Mormons don’t consider themselves Protestant.

Some people say that Mormons are "Restorationist," but I say that Mormonism is a new religion, because an angel gave Joseph Smith gold tablets which, after translated from ancient Egyptian, tell the real truth, some of which contradicts what Protestant Christians and Catholics believe. I would say that Mormonism is to Christianity as Christianity is to Judaism.

No link between junk food in schools and obesity

There’s a NY Times article about a study which determined, based on a large amount of data, that there’s no correlation between junk food sales in schools and childhood obesity.

The authors examined this association using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class. Employing fixed effects models and a natural experimental approach, they found that children’s weight gain between fifth and eighth grades was not associated with the introduction or the duration of exposure to competitive food sales in middle school. Also, the relationship between competitive foods and weight gain did not vary significantly by gender, race/ethnicity, or family socioeconomic status, and it remained weak and insignificant across several alternative model specifications.

Although the authors miss what I see as the obvious takeaway, which is that body mass index is so powerfully determined by one’s genetics that the presence of easily-purchasable junk food has no impact on BMI.

There’s also the point that “healthy” fruit juice has more calories than “unhealthy” soda, so if children just substitute high-calorie food that’s conventionally considered “healthy” for high-calorie food that’s conventionally considered “unhealthy” then there’s not going to be any weight loss associated with banning the “unhealthy” food.

The political correctness and bad scientific reasoning around the issue of what food you should eat is staggering. Whether we are looking at climate change, diet, or HBD, “scientists” can no longer be trusted because so few people who call themselves "scientists" apply the scientific method to their reasoning.

Classic Half Sigma post on Mormonism and Romney

I just reread my post It’s the underwear stupid, musing about Mormonism and Mitt Romney’s problems in the early 2008 primaries.

I no longer care about the Mormonism issue. I've gotten over it.

Newt says Romney is too conservative???

Newt Gingrich ran a Spanish Language ad accusing Mitt Romney of being “anti-immigrant.”

And this morning Newt said that” Mitt Romney lacks concern for some illegal immigrants’ humanity.

Newt is NOT the real conservative. Romney is. The only thing Newt is good at is the performance art of being outraged at liberals during debates.

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And yesterday, Newt had the gall to say that his history of cheating on his wives makes him a better candidate than Romney:

He goes on to say that, “it may make me more normal than somebody who wanders around seeming perfect and maybe not understanding the human condition, and the challenges of life for normal people.”

There used to be a time when normal meant living just like Romney; staying married to your wife and not cheating on her. Our society is sadly degrading when a Republican criticizes another candidate for just doing what he’s supposed to be doing.

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Today Newt criticizes Romney for his involvement in private equity, but just two years ago he was praising private equity:

Newt Gingrich, the Republican presidential candidate who has criticized rival Mitt Romney for his role in the buyout business, was paid more than $60,000 at a meeting two years ago to deliver a speech that extolled the private-equity industry, according to the meeting’s organizer.

“This gentleman praised private equity more fulsomely than I could ever do it,” Paul Levy, managing director at JLL Partners Inc., said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “InsideTrack” today. “He was great. He gave a great evening. Everybody had fun. He fielded a lot of questions. He gave us a lot of time. Nobody praised private equity, risk-taking, capital more fulsomely than Newt Gingrich.”

Newt is a guy who will say anything for the right price. Which means he will also say anything to become president. What does he really believe? Who knows. Newt even changed his religion to Catholicism to make his wife happy.

Once upon a time I used to like Newt. It’s because I just like his ability to sound righteously angry at liberals. I now know to look beyond the theatre and see the real Newt.

State of the Union

I dozed off in the middle, but I remember Obama saying some good stuff about making the rich pay their fair share in taxes. Although if we just raise taxes on dividends and capital gains, without some sort of crackdown on partnership taxation, we will just see the rich move their money from public equity (publicly traded stocks) to private equity (partnerships). Obama didn't address that.

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By the way, in case people forget what my own personal proposal is for capital gains and dividends taxes, read my proposal here.