Half Sigma

Smoking gun article: liberals, Democrats, poor people and non-Asian minorities caused financial crisis

A reader sent me a link to yet another smoking gun NY Times article from 1999 demonstrating how the current credit crisis came about.

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

We see that the motivation behind loosening credit was to give more loans to minorities. Liberals failed to consider that these minorities were inherently bad credit risks, because we all know that credit standards are how the white racist majority keeps the black man down.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

We see that the Democratic Clinton Administration was pushing for looser credit to help minorities. There's also a mention of stock holder profits. It was wrong that anyone was profiting from the implicit assumption that the government would stand behind bad Fannie Mae debt. It's an example of making money through value transference--transferring value from the taxpayers to Fannie Mae.

[Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer, and also a black man, said:] ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''

"Too many" borrowers have bad credit. So the solution to this perceived social problem is not to change the behavior of the borrowers (if that's even possible given their genetic deficits), but to just lower lending standards.

Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market.

Yes, lending standards be racist.

''From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,'' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''

A conservative warns of the problem, but he is ignored by Democrats because Democrats and liberals know that the conservative is motivated by racism.

The change in policy also comes at the same time that HUD is investigating allegations of racial discrimination in the automated underwriting systems used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to determine the credit-worthiness of credit applicants.

It's all clear. The big financial mess we're in today was due to failure of liberals and Democrats to acknolwedge the genetic deficits of the poor and of non-Asian minorities. Proper lending standards are called "racial discrimination," and something had to be done about it.

UPDATE

I didn't mean to imply that non-Asian minorities are morally responsible for the crisis. After all, it's not their fault they are born with bad genes. The moral responsibility is with liberal elites who refuse to acknowledge the genetic problem and insist against all evidence that everyone is born with exactly the same cognitive attributes.

Smoking gun video showing Democrats caused financial crisis

Link. Hat tip: NoSpeedBumps.com.

Fundraising drive

Many other bloggers ask for money. I too need your help, but it won't cost you anything. I'm just asking you to help increase the search engine visibility eDateReview.com, my website of online dating reviews. I just need you to link to the site from your blog or website.

The anchor text (the text inside the link) should read “online dating” and not something else, like “eDateReview.” This is because Google determines ranking based on the anchor text. Currently, eDateReview comes up on the fourth page when you search for online dating. The problem is that no one ever gets to the fourth page of the search engine results pages (SERPs). You have to be on the first page to get any good traffic. By increasing the number of inbound links with the proper anchor text, I can move up in the SERPs, and then more people will find the site.

This is how you would write the link in HTML:

<a href="http://www.edatereview.com/">Online Dating</a>

In addition to helping me, you will be helping everyone else, because eDateReview contains a lot of information that's genuinely useful to people searching for information about online dating.

The last time I posted this request, I got a lot of nasty comments about how I should make it on my own without any help from anyone. That's not the way the world works. Most people with good careers had help from their families to get them onto the right career track. Where would Bill Gates be if his mother didn't introduce him to the CEO of IBM? Unfortunately my family is poor and can only introduce me to blue collar people. But I consider my blog readers to be my extended family, so it's only natural that I reach out to you for support.

Thanks in advance to everyone who helps.

Paranoia about Jewish conspiracies

Jews are said to be paranoid, but I think that there's far greater paranoia about a supposed Jewish conspiracy to control the United States government and use it for the sole purpose of protecting the security of Israel.

If this is true, then it has to be the least effective conspiracy ever. The most obvious way for the United States to protect a foreign country is to put a military base there. The existence of a U.S. military base means that an attack on that country also becomes an attack on the United States, the most powerful military in the world.

There are major U.S. military bases in the following countries (source):

Bahrain
Belgium
Germany
Greece
Iceland
Italy
Japan
Netherlands
Portugal
Saudi Arabia
South Korea
Spain
Turkey
United Kingdom

Israel is not on the list. One can only conclude that defending Israel is actually a low U.S. priority compared to defending countries like South Korea and Spain.

There is also the historical fact that the United States didn't do much to help Israel during the Yom Kippur War. We sent them some supplies, but no troops. The United States stepped in after Israel starting winning to protect Arab countries. To quote Wikipedia:

Egypt was totally dependent on the United States to prevent Israel from destroying its trapped army, which now had no access to food or water. The position could be parlayed later into allowing the United States to mediate the dispute, and push Egypt out of Soviet influence.

As a result, the United States exerted tremendous pressure on the Israelis to refrain from destroying the trapped army, even threatening to support a UN resolution to force the Israelis to pull back to their October 22 positions if they did not allow non-military supplies to reach the army

Because of U.S. aid to Egypt and other Arab countries, Israel is probably less safe today than it was in the 1970s. Yuval Steinitz wrote in 2003:

The Egyptians have exactly the same U.S.-made F-16 airplanes as the Israel air force, and approximately the same number - 240. They have the same Apache helicopters, which now are to be upgraded to the Longbow version. They have very modern and efficient Abrams tanks which are parallel to the Israeli Merkava, and modern frigates and missiles boats from Holland, Spain, and the United States.

If the U.S. were controlled by a secret Jewish Conspiracy, then Egypt would not have hundreds of advanced F-16 fighters and other advanced U.S. weapons.

Yesterday, an anonymous commenter wrote:

From my view, US "support" for Israel has been a disaster for Israel. They have a savage population of Muslims living right next to them, the Palestinians. It is in Israel's best interest to boot the Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza and into Jordan or somewhere else and make their Muslim brothers take care of them. (But of course other Arabs hate the Palestinians even more than they hate Jews). But who steps in every time to make sure the useless and farcical "Peace Process" keeps going? The US.

Indeed, an effective Jewish Zionist Conspiracy would have accomplished such a goal a long time ago.

Look at the cute couple

People actually meet online and get married. Who knew?

The bride is a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant and an Ivy League graduate. The bridegroom...well apparently his online dating profile had a "lot of kindness," making up for his lack of prestige.

Can high IQ make you illogical?

The Audacious Epigone reports that high IQ people are more likely to vote.

Does this mean that voting is the logical thing to do? Not necessarily. If you calculated the cost of the time spent voting versus the personal benefit of your one vote, voting is probably not a very logical thing to do.

People with high IQs tend to reflexively do what society considers to be the moral and correct thing. This also explains why high IQ people are more likely to recycle and be “green.” Once there is some sort of consensus reached (even if it’s just a consensus of a vocal plurality) that a specific activity is the morally correct thing to do, high IQ people will reflexively do it without giving it much logical thought.

This explains the paradox found in the General Social Survey in which respondents with high Wordsum scores are less likely to believe in religion, but are actually more likely to regularly attend religious services. In certain social circles (but not in Manhattan), weekly attendance of religious services is considered the morally correct behavior.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -Weighted N		WORDSUM
		1 0-5	2 6	3 7-10	ROW TOTAL
ATTEND	Do not attend every week	74.0 6,685	71.5 3,537	69.4 6,220	71.7 16,442
	Every week or more	26.0 2,350	28.5 1,408	30.6 2,739	28.3 6,496
	COL TOTAL	100.0 9,035	100.0 4,944	100.0 8,959	100.0 22,938

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -Weighted N		WORDSUM
		1 0-5	2 6	3 7-10	ROW TOTAL
BIBLE	1: WORD OF GOD	47.7 2,417	33.4 997	19.7 1,053	33.3 4,467
	2: INSPIRED WORD	39.6 2,007	53.6 1,600	58.5 3,124	50.2 6,732
	3: BOOK OF FABLES	11.9 603	12.5 372	20.8 1,111	15.6 2,086
	4: OTHER	.9 43	.6 19	1.0 52	.8 114
	COL TOTAL	100.0 5,071	100.0 2,987	100.0 5,340	100.0 13,398

Dan Morgan says that Palin should bow out

Conservative blogger Dan Morgan says that Palin should bow out. Conservative bloggers are now starting to realize that Palin is just not intelligent enough to be Vice President. Perhaps the Katie Couric interview was the tipping point.

I predict that she will not bow out, but that she will withdraw from the debate.

It's pretty pathetic how Palin avoids talking to the press. After last night's debate, Biden talked to the press about it. Palin remained hidden. Biden is neither a genius nor a brilliant orator, but he was smart enough to pass the bar exam and he has decades of experience talking about national issues.

Barely smart enough to pass the bar exam is at least a standard deviation higher than barely smart enough to graduate from the University of Idaho with a gut major.

Distribution of IQ

Supposing that Jews are 2% of the population of the United States, and Jews have a median IQ of 115, and gentiles have a median IQ of 100, and both groups have a standard deviation of 15, the following chart shows the percentage of Jews at various IQ breakpoints:

	Gentiles	Jews
Entire pop.	98%	2%
IQ > 100	96.7%	3.3%
IQ > 115	94.0%	6.0%
IQ > 130	87.5%	12.5%
IQ > 145	74.4%	25.6%

Jews, despite their tiny population, would naturally be a much larger percentage of people in careers that require high IQs. This would be even further distorted if Jews had a cultural tendency to prefer certain types of careers over others, such as writing over hard science.

Writing Hollywood screenplays is a very highly g-loaded task, thus Jewish people comprise a very high percentage of screenplay writers. Stand-up comedy also seems to be highly g-loaded.

With the exception of folk rock, pop music is not so highly g-loaded so Jews aren’t as disproportionately represented among pop musicians.

Just as there’s not a white conspiracy keeping blacks from scoring well on the SAT, there is not a Jewish conspiracy keeping gentiles from writing screenplays. It’s just about the distribution of IQ.

Is Palin a secret strategy by McCain to get revenge on evangelical Christians?

Commenter "sk73" at the Crunchy Con blog presented this intriguing hypothesis:

Revenge is a dish best served cold. In 2000, religious conservatives torpedoed John McCain. In fact, he called them "agents of intolerance." He now exacts revenge on them by selecting one of them as his running mate, a choice that made them ecstatic. Selecting Sarah Palin changed religious conservatives from indifferent to enthusiastic McCain supporters overnight. His choice gave them the opportunity to display their shallow grasp of reality. He was unlikely to win this election anyway, so he chose to lose in a way that will make it harder for religious conservatives to be taken very seriously for a long time.

Larry Auster gets it

I've just been reading Larry Auster’s blog, and I discovered that here is a blogger who truly gets it.

He has noted that Sarah Palin lacks intelligence:

[T]here is as yet no evidence that this candidate for vice president of the United States can discuss national and international issues with any intelligence, or, indeed, whether she is intelligent at all, in the sense of being able to reason about and understand complex subjects.

He has correctly pointed out that Bush has bought into egalitarian-liberalism:

[I]n a fantastic irony that could only happen in late liberal society, liberals are attacking Bush’s supposed patronage of his greedy capitalist pals as the cause of the disaster, when in reality Bush was fully onboard the racial egalitarian project that was the true cause of the disaster, or at least its principal cause.

It goes beyond the Fannie Mae issue. Many policies of Bush that liberals hate so much are actually a result of Bush believing in liberal dogma. No Child Left Behind is a result of Bush buying into the liberal idea that non-Asian minorities are just as smart as whites, and all that’s needed is the correct government program to fix the problem. The occupation of Iraq is a result of Bush buying into the liberal idea that it’s evil for the United States to attack its enemies, so the United States must redeem its morality by leaving Iraq better off than it was before the attack. Bush also buys into the liberal notion that Muslims in Iraq are just like us—the reality is that Islam is incompatible with democracy. Islam only works in countries like Turkey where the government is controlled by non-religious elites.

Is Palin doomed in upcoming debate?

According to liberal talk-radio host Ed “Big Eddie” Schultz:

Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people are more than concerned about Palin.

The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as "disastrous." One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, "What are we going to do?" The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is "clueless."

Maybe Schultz is just trying to spin this to make the party he’s voting against look bad. But, if Palin has only an average IQ of around 100 as I previously surmised, barely high enough to allow one to graduate from college, then she just isn’t smart enough to handle the kind of debate that we saw last night between McCain and Obama.

UPDATE

It has been pointed out to me that conservative columnist Kathleen Parker has opined at National Review Online that Sarah Palin is "out of her league" and should withdraw.

Thoughts about the debate

I was rather disappointed with McCain’s performance in last night’s debate. McCain let Obama get away with implying that eight years of McCain/Bush led to a huge economic crisis. McCain should have said, “Bush isn’t standing on this podium, I’m running for President. I served in the Senate under Reagan and Clinton. During my time in the Senate, the country recovered from the economic malaise of the 1970s and benefited from a huge economic expansion.” McCain said he would veto earmark spending, but he could have said “Bush didn’t veto a single bill during his first six years of office. When I’m president, I assure you that I will not let Congress walk all over me.” Maybe his campaign advisers specifically told him not to say anything negative about Bush because the evangelical Christian “base” loves Bush? I’m sick and tired of these evangelical Christians running the party.

McCain could have pointed out how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were Democratic babies, and that Democrats consistently opposed tighter regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Perhaps McCain doesn’t truly understand the different philosophies of left-wing liberals and economic conservatives?

McCain sounded a lot more knowledgeable when talking about military matters and foreign policy. But Obama’s simple message, that the “war” costs hundreds of billions of dollars, will win over some voters. How did Republicans ever allow the occupation of Iraq to be considered an ongoing “war.”? I guess it was because they figured that Americans would support a “war” but not an “occupation.” The unfortunate result is that everyone now thinks that Republicans “lost” the “war.”

At any other time in the history of the world, taking over the enemy’s country in three weeks would have been considered an overwhelming victory. It took the Romans two years to take over Carthage. The Romans totally destroyed the city, killed most of the residents, and made the rest of them slaves. The Romans knew how to make sure that the countries they conquered would never threaten them again. But under the modern definition of “winning” and “losing,” the Romans “lost” that war because they didn’t turn Carthage into a peace-loving democracy.

One cool thing that McCain said is that “we cannot allow a second Holocaust.” Obama responded to this by misquoting Kissinger. McCain understands what’s at stake, and he knows what side he’s on. I give him lots of credit for not being wishy-washy.

Can an elephant be a god?

From a NY Times blog:

I was moving around the [kindergarten] classroom checking students’ writing when a question popped up out of nowhere. One of my American students, David, called out, “Ms. Shunnarah, can an elephant be a god?”

I froze. This was one of those moments when the cultural iceberg was tapped, challenging my Judeo-Christian upbringing.

. . .

I told him yes, and described Ganesh and his place in the Hindu religion.

Someone named Bilal left the following comment:

Before you go patting yourself on the back for your superficial knowledge of Hinduism, consider that saying an elephant could be god are fighting words to any devout Muslim (you took a chance that there weren’t any present). In fact, it could very well get you executed in some Muslim countries.

Debate tonight

Yesterday a commenter wrote:

OK, now I'm convinced you are deliberately ignoring the ONLY story that matters (John McCain's pullout of the debates). :)

I was ignoring the story because I thought it was premature to say anything about. The latest news is that the debate will go on, thus my hunch proved accurate.

McCain and Obama are both experienced debaters. The fun debate will be the Palin-Biden debate. Palin may look really bad in that one.

Where is Thomas Jefferson when you need him?

Pirates from a Muslim African nation are attacking ships:

Somalia’s notorious pirates staged perhaps their most brazen attack yet, seizing a Ukrainian ship carrying dozens of heavy tanks , maritime and diplomatic officials said Friday.

We need Thomas Jefferson for president. He didn't let African pirates get away with this stuff.

Education more important than intelligence when it comes to earning money

Jason Malloy has blogged about IQ, education, and income at GNXP, using data from the GSS, and he has discovered the same thing that I've found previously: that educational credentials are more correlated with income than Wordsum score, and that for people with just a Bachelor's degree, there is no correlation between Wordsum and income at all.

Certain Charles Murray groupies have become convinced that intelligence is everything and education is irrelevant, but actual research shows that, in the United States today, education is everything.

Actually, I believe that career tracks are everything, and that educational credentials are the most important predictor of getting onto a higher-income career track.

"Green" people contribute the most carbon emissions

A commenter mentioned this article in yesterday's Guardian which says that "green" people actually contribute the most carbon emissions:

According to the researchers, people who regularly recycle rubbish and save energy at home are also the most likely to take frequent long-haul flights abroad. The carbon emissions from such flights can swamp the green savings made at home, the researchers claim.

Stewart Barr, of Exeter University, who led the research, said: "Green living is largely something of a myth. There is this middle class environmentalism where being green is part of the desired image. But another part of the desired image is to fly off skiing twice a year. And the carbon savings they make by not driving their kids to school will be obliterated by the pollution from their flights."

This is the type of whiterpeople liberal hypocrisy that I hate so much.

I don't understand why John LaBruzzo is evil

John LaBruzzo proposed paying poor women to be sterilized. This sounds like a smart idea to me.

Liberals consider this plan evil and immoral. I don't understand why it's evil and immoral.

The women would be voluntarily undergoing the procedure. No one would be sterilized at gunpoint. In fact, it seems a lot more humane to me than military conscription.

The bottom line is that poor people are disproportionately non-Asian minorities, and under the liberal view of morality, passing any laws when you know that the result of the law is that there will be fewer non-Asian minority babies is the most horrible and evil thing in the world. Why is this evil? It's voluntary. I don't get it.

Tattoos in the NY Times

This morning I was staring at the neck of a relatively attractive white woman with some flowers and the name “Mabel” tattooed on the back of her neck. I thought to myself, why would she do that? Can’t she just wear a name tag?

The New York Times was thinking the same thing today.

In a mysterious and inexorable process that seems to transform all that is low culture into something high, permanent ink markings began creeping toward the traditional no-go zones for all kinds of people, past collar and cuffs, those twin lines of clothed demarcation that even now some tattoo artists are reluctant to cross.

I think they have prole drift backwards. The higher classes are taking on the habits of the lower classes.

It still seems incredibly stupid to get a tattoo. What happens when they go out of style? It’s still not considered upper class. Why permanently prevent yourself from ever being upper class?

Nevertheless, I see many white people in Manhattan with white collar jobs and probably college degrees who have tattoos. I suspect that they are all voting for Obama. College gradautes with tattoos just has a left-wing feel to it, but I can't pinpoint why. Normally, left-wing people have no qualms about hating low-class white culture like hunting and NASCAR. It’s a real shame that the General Social Survey has never asked any questions about tattoos.

John LaBruzzo

John LaBruzzo, a Louisiana politician, wants to pay women $1,000 to get their tubes tied.

This sounds like a really good idea. I wonder if he has been reading my blog?

Ahmadinejad says it's the Jews' fault

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says:

The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a miniscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers [Jews control the Federal Reserve] as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the US in a deceitful, complex and furtive [furtive=Jews are sneaky] manner. It is deeply disastrous to witness that some presidential or premiere nominees in some big countries have to visit these people, take part in their gatherings, swear their allegiance and commitment to their interests in order to attain financial or media support.

This means that the great people of America and various nations of Europe need to obey the demands and wishes of a small number of acquisitive [acquisitive=Jews are greedy] and invasive people. These nations are spending their dignity and resources on the crimes and occupations and the threats of the Zionist network against their will. [full speech]

In other words, all of the world's problems are the Jews' fault. The Jews secretly control everything behind the scenes.

Ahmadeinejad actually sounds a lot like Ron Paul.

The only route to salvation is a divine straight path. Otherwise, God's hand of power [nuclear weapons?] will emerge from the sleeve of oppressed nations and will make your life difficult, and will put an end to your hegemony.

Translation: Iran will use its nuclear weapons to put an end to infidel "hegemony."

Abortion statistics

The Washington Post has an article with some abortion statistics.

the proportion of abortions obtained by women younger than 20 dropped steadily, falling from 33 percent in 1974 to 17 percent in 2004

Is this because young women aren't getting pregnant as much, or because there's no long a stigma to being an unmarried teenage mother?

In 2004, there were 10.5 abortions per 1,000 white women ages 15 to 44, compared with 28 per 1,000 Hispanic women of that age and 50 per 1,000 black women.

Abortion seems to be having a good eugenics effect. A good reason to support it.

Fraudulent transfer and Wall Street

I know Wikipedia isn't an authoritative legal source, but the article on fraudulent transfer seems to be an adequate explanation of the doctrine.

In a regular bankruptcy, the court can undo pre-bankruptcy transfers within two years of the filing date if they are found to be unfair to creditors. In the case of these investment banks, they transfered huge sums of money to insiders, in the form of salary and bonuses, and therefore did not maintain an adequate capital reserve to pay creditors in case the value of their assets declined in value, which was a reasonably foreseeable event.

As I said in the last post, investment banks behave like general partnerships. A corporation is supposed to exist to benefit the shareholders, but the investment banks seem to exist to benefit their employees. Most of the profits are handed out to the employees in the form of huge salaries and bonuses instead of being paid out to shareholders.

It's based on this reasoning that I think the government should retrieve the excessive salaries and bonuses paid out during the last two years. I consider excessive anything above $200,000 per year.

Punishment for rich Wall Street people

Every employee of a firm bailed out with taxpayer money should be required to give back all compensation in excess of $200,000 per year received during the last two years of employment. The money should be put in trust, and used to cover any government losses.

Question: does Congress have the Constitutional authority to do that? Would this be an Ex Post Facto law, or violate the Fifth Amendment? [A commenter pointed out that this doesn't violate the Contracts Clause--I guess I need Barack Obama to reteach me Constitutional Law.]

The rationale for this is that Wall Street bigwigs made billions of dollars of extraordinary income based on phantom profits, and now the taxpayer has to pay for the losses. This is sort of like theft from the taxpayers. Under traditional bankcrupty law, fraudulent pre-bankruptcy transfers can be recovered. But (1) these bailouts aren't bankruptcies, and (2) I'm not sure if they would qualify as fraudulent transfers if the firms did file for bancruptcy--I'm not an expert on bankruptcy law.

Dennis and Liz

Disgusting liberals attack the SAT (again)

There’s an article in the NY Times about the need to get rid of the SAT because “the test scores appear to calcify differences based on class, race/ethnicity and parental educational attainment.”

Liberals hate the SAT almost as much as the hate “Big Oil.”

The comments have been surprisingly critical of the idea. Maybe there are more non-liberals reading the NY Times these days. I wonder if the comment I wrote will get past the censors:

Without standardized tests, there's no way to compare quality of high schools, or quality of students between high schools. The end result will favor the rich who send their kids to private high schools that feed the Ivies.

If the only reason for getting rid of the SAT is because non-Asian minorities do poorly on it, that's a very bad reason for getting rid of it.

It has been shown that SAT + high school grades is a better predictor of college success than either SAT or high school grades alone. That's why the SAT is used.

[Made it past the censors.]

SECOND NY TIMES COMMENT

Since they published the first one, I wrote a second comment:

It was reported here, in the NY Times, less than three weeks ago that intelligence is primarily a genetically inherited trait:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/garden/04twins.html

In our modern economy which values thinking and reasoning skills, the wealthy class will be made up of the more intelligent members of society.

Because intelligence is genetic, that means their chidren will also be born smart. Most of the differences in SAT scores between test-takers is due to differences in genetically inherited intelligence.

The SAT is not CAUSING class differences, as the article suggests, but merely reporting the fact that the economically better off are genetically different than the economically worse off. Getting rid of the SAT won't change this. The SAT is the bearer of bad news (if you consider this to be bad news) and not the cause of it.

Getting rid of the SAT will not make things fairer for those born into the lower classes. It will, in fact, make things less fair. Because of the random nature of genetic pairings and the imperfect correlation between wealth and intelligence, there are quite a number of smart children born to parents whose economic and social backgrounds don't allow them to give their kids the kind of gold-plated resumes that prestigious colleges are looking for. The SAT allows those kids to break through the class barrier by demonstrating that they are actually more intelligent than the kid from The Dalton School who worked at a prestigious intership (thanks to his Dad's connections) the summer before his senior year of high school, and who plays Lacrosse or some other highly desired Ivy League sport.

The Gaia Cult, or post-Christian Mother Nature worship

I’ve called it post-Christian Mother Nature worship. The commenter “Bob” left me a link to a website whose author seems to have carefully researched this new religion. He calls it the Gaia Cult:

Gaians claim that “we are part of Nature and Nature is part of us, therefore God is part of us, and God is everywhere, and everything is God”. In reality Gaia is actually a revival of the “Earth-goddess” found in many ancient pagan religions. The current Gaia Cult is a cunning mixture of science, paganism, eastern mysticism, wicca and feminism. While researching this subject I have been astounded by how many prominent environmental leaders, politicians, scientists, and religious leaders profess a literal belief in Gaia. Gaians appear to have infiltrated every level of power at the United Nations and risen to prominent positions in many Governments. I strongly believe that they are the most dangerous and devious cult on the face of the planet.

Christianity has been disproved by science, thus some new religion is forming to fill in the void. The human brain is very unhappy unless there is something supernatural to worship.

The best way to fight this religion is to spread the word that the religion actually exists. The U.S. Constitution, for example, provides for separation of church and state, but there is no Constitutional protection from the religion of Gaia unless people call it a religion.

Sergey Brin and global warming

I thought that the NY Times would probably censor my comment about Sergey Brin because I responded to earlier comments about “climate change.” But it got published, and I duplicate it below:

There is no such thing as man-caused global warming. There is more than enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to absorb all of the infrared rays being bounced back from the earth. Adding more carbon dioxide won’t increase the amount of heat retention.

So why do so many people believe in it? For some strange reason, the human brain is programmed to want to believe in the end of the world. Global warming is a post-Christian replacement for Armageddon.

Diseases, on the other hand, are very real. By promoting the concept of sharing genetic information, Brin is hoping to speed up the process of scientific discoveries.

I found the comparison to Michael J. Fox insightful. No one has ever had anything bad to say about Fox for funding Parkinson’s research, but everyone is fulled with anger that Brin is interested in finding cures for this and other diseases.

I did my duty to promote the truth about the global warming farce.

Intelligence and the President of the United States

The short answer is, yes, intelligence helps the President do a better job.

The long answer:

I’ve previously written about the lack of any correlation between high intelligence and high income after educational credentials are held constant. (On the other hand, there is a definite correlation between intelligence and income for people in the bottom half of the bell curve.) This led me to conclude that career tracks are more important for earning money than intelligence. As long as a person has sufficient intelligence to meet the floor requirement for a career track, having extra intelligence doesn’t seem to be of much help.

This may have led some to conclude that intelligence greater than the floor requirement doesn’t help one to do a better job. That is something I never said. I believe that higher-intelligence employees are passed over for promotion despite the fact that they are doing a better job. In most corporations, job performance simply isn’t a very important criteria when it comes to promoting people. Yes, I know this is hard for some people to believe, because it goes against the anarcho-capitalist philosophy that value creation and wealth are perfectly correlated.

But what happens when people with mediocre intelligence are promoted to high positions? Many people who work in corporate America have seen these high level but not-so-bright executives make dumb decisions that cost their companies a lot of money. I believe that if companies were more g-aware in their hiring and promotion policies, they’d have a strong competitive advantage. Two companies known to be g-aware, Google and Microsoft, have done extremely well.

It’d hard to prove that intelligence specifically helps the President of the United States. The sample size is very small, there’s no good way to compare Presidents’ IQs, and there’s no good way compare job performances. But it is my informed hunch that high intelligence is important for the President of the United States just as it’s important for high level executives in corporations.

Does this mean you should vote for Obama because he’s the smartest guy in the race? (Obama’s superior intelligence is demonstrated by his magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, his ability to write an excellent memoir, and his half-brother who has a Master’s degree in physics from Stanford which is further evidence that Barack Obama, Sr. passes on high-IQ genes to his children).

The answer to the question above is no, because Obama will use his high intelligence to pursue left-wing policies which are bad for the United States. I suspect that Obama sees himself as being the person who will solve America’s racial problems, and he will walk down the standard liberal road of thinking that with enough government spending, all blacks will become just like whites.

Obama will appoint liberal justices to the Supreme Court. Most people seem to think that the Supreme Court does nothing except decide abortion cases, but the reality is that the Supreme Court has a huge influence over our nation’s laws, and the record shows that justices appointed by liberal presidents attempt to push the laws in all sorts of left-wing directions.

McCain has the humility to admit that he’s not an expert on economics, and that he will rely on his economic advisors. That sounds good enough for me.

Furthermore, McCain won’t let Muslim religious fanatics in the Middle East push him around. Obama will let Iran obtain nuclear weapons without doing anything to stop it.

If Obama were running against Palin, I might support Obama, because I truly think that Palin would be a disaster as President. But as Vice President, she just gets an office in the Old Executive Office Building where she will do her Christian thing and McCain will ignore her. People make a lot out of the fact that McCain is old, but it’s pretty unlikely that he will die in office. Presidents of the United States tend to live a very long time. The last president who died before his 80s was Lyndon B. Johnson. Nixon lived to 81, Ford lived to 93, Carter is still alive at 84, Reagan lived to 93, and George H.W. Bush is still alive at 84.

Charles Murray in the NY Times

Charles Murray, in an interview with the NY Times, says that 80% of college students aren’t smart enough “to deal with college-level material, traditionally understood.” I agree with that.

Murray, however, says two things I disagree with.

(1) Murray says that college-bound 18-year-olds should instead strive to become first-rate electricians.

I think that the demand for these types of often-cited high-paying blue collar trades are relatively limited. If I looked carefully at the situation, I’d probably find that in most cases there are barriers to entry behind the relatively high salaries.

This doesn't mean there aren't too many people going to college. It only means that without college, they'd wind up in the same jobs anyway, but without a boatload of student loan debt and four lost years of savings.

(2) Murray gives his unqualified endorsement to McCain/Palin, saying that “intellectuals” make lousy presidents. It’s hard to believe that the guy who says that IQ is correlated with everything good makes a single exception for the President of the United States.