Half Sigma

Japanese workers told to go home early to have sex

A reader sent me a link to an article about how Japan's workers are being urged to go home from work early in order to have sex.

A study by Durex found that the average [Japanese] couple has sex 45 times a year, less than half the global average of 103 times.

Clearly, the modern lifestyle which encourages marriage at a late age and long commutes to work isn't very compatible with the naturally low Japanese sex drive.

Flynn Effect nonsense

The comment section is littered with nonsense about the Flynn Effect. People have supposedly gotten a lot smarter over the past one hundred years because scores on a certain subset of tests, most notably Raven’s Progressive Matrices, has increased.

As I’ve pointed out every time this topic comes up, SAT scores have not gone up, yet the SAT is highly correlated with g. It’s hard to imagine that g could increase so much yet have no effect on SAT scores. Thus I conclude that Raven’s Progressive Matrices tests a narrow subset of skills and abilities compared to the SAT, so Raven’s is actually measuring g plus something else, and the something else is what has gone up.

The persistent Flynn Effect commenter keeps mentioning allegedly better nutrition causing an increase in g. The problem is (1) why hasn’t this nutrition caused SAT scores to go up? (2) Why haven’t the exact nutrients been identified? Part of the Head Start program has been to give the children better food, but it has been shown that the Head Start program has little if any long term effect. (3) Just about every article you read about nutrition has been critical of the modern diet, and insistent that children are being fed “junk food” instead of "nutritious food" the way they used to be fed in the past. (On the other hand, maybe McDonald's Happy Meals are really the most nutritious food you can feed to children?) (4) People have gotten bigger, but there isn’t any clear evidence that a large body size directly causes higher intelligence. The East Asians are small people, but score higher on tests than the average American. Fat people tend to score lower on tests, not higher. Looking at white Americans only, there is a small positive correlation between height and IQ, but this is can be easily explained by cross assortative mating. (Also, see my post Fat people more religious than skinny people.)

How did people in the late 1700s get together and form such a sophisticated government as the United States if g was so low back then?

My explanation for the Flynn Effect is that the modern educational system has been coaching people to do better on pencil and paper multiple choice tests. Toys given to toddlers and pre-school children now resemble the sorts of questions given on early childhood IQ tests. They’re being coached to take those tests. But tests for which people have always studied and prepared for, like the SAT, are immune to the Flynn Effect because they have always reflected the post-coaching score increase.

More people who don't know that Africa is a continent

A commenter linked to a Youtube video from a Family Feud TV game show in which they question is "name a country other than the United States that you admire." The family selected two "countries": Europe and Africa. This demonstrates how it's common for people of below average intelligence to not know that Africa is a continent and not a country.

It's worth noting that the video was posted in May 2007, long before anyone ever heard of Sarah Palin.

A quick IQ comparison

Barack Obama: 150. Magna cum laude, Harvard Law School. Author of well written memoir.

Half Sigma: 145. Smart enough to qualify for the Triple Nine Society. Not smart enough to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, but smart enough to graduate top 10% from Arizona State University College of Law.

John McCain: 120 125. This is the toughest one to guess. I don't believe the 133 he allegedly scored on an IQ test. He did graduate bottom of the class from the Naval Academy, but I think he underperformed. The estimate is based on his IQ when he was younger. IQ declines with age, and McCain is quite old.

Michelle Obama: 120. Helped by affirmative action, but she still got admitted to Harvard Law School.

Joe Biden: 115. Barely smart enough to pass bar exam and graduate bottom of the class from a third tier law school.

Sarah Palin: 103. I recently said 100, but I discovered she got good grades at the crappy Hawaii Pacific University where the average student scores 965 on the SAT, so I bump her up to 103.

Todd Palin: 97. College dropout. But promoted to high-paying foreman position at blue collar oil field job. But then, subtract points for having a pregnant unmarried high school dropout daughter.

Todd Palin: 105. Todd Palin is an oilfield production operator, which is a skilled blue collar job, kind of like an auto mechanic, except he has to maintain oilfield equipment instead of cars. As a high-end skilled blue collar worker, his IQ would be higher than the average blue collar worker. But he did drop out of college, and he has no educational aspirations for his children, so he's probably no more than just slightly above average.

Because more women than men attend college at this IQ level, it's common to see men without college degrees married to women with college degrees, but the men have better paying skilled blue collar jobs.

Michelle Obama

Steve Sailer has a blog post about Michelle Obama. She seems like the kind of person I would hate if I had to work with her. Luckily, I don't.

Whenver I post about Governor Palin's low intelligence, I get some angry commenters who bring up Michelle Obama for some reason. I don't see how that's a relevant comparison at all. Michelle never ran for any office. If Obama dies in office (which is unlikely given his relatively young age), Joe Biden is going to take over the job and not Michelle.

Joe Biden is probably at about the same level of intelligence as Michelle. If Joe were black, then he too would have been accepted to a better law school and would have been an attractive BIGLAW candidate. As long as we didn't talk politics, I probably wouldn't mind working with Biden.

Michelle Obama is more properly compared to Cindy McCain. Cindy was born filthy rich, so she never had to work at a real job, or take advantage of her husband's connections to land an overpaid hospital administrator job.

Barack Obama deserves credit for sticking by his wife. McCain, in comparison, dumped his wife for a hot younger richer one. McCain may be a war hero, but Obama is the domestic hero, demonstrating conservatism and family values through his commitment to his family. For some reason, I doubt very much that Obama's daughters will turn out to be unmarried teenage pregnant high school dropouts, unlike the daughter of a certain governor of Alaska.

No one wants to hire you if you have a law degree

A National Law Journal article reports:

When Dina Allam graduated last spring from Ohio State University with a joint law and master of business administration degree, she thought the combination would catch the eye of employers who could appreciate a mix of analytical skills and business know-how.

But after months of looking for a nonlawyer job that would put all that education to work and help pay off some of the nearly $85,000 in student loan debt, Allam began to think she'd made a mistake by going the law degree route.

"People don't see the value in the joint degree. They think I'm confused," she said.

That's what I found. No one wants to hire you if you have a law degree. You're better off leaving it off your resume (if you're looking for a non-lawyer job).

Hat tip: Thinking on the Margin.

How smart do you have to be to be a lawyer?

In order to get accepted to law school, you need to score higher than the median on the LSAT. As we can see from this web page, a score of 151 or higher represents the top half of test takers, and a score of 150 or lower represents the bottom half.

Even at a crappy TTT law school like Syracuse University College of Law, the school that Joe Biden attended, 75% of the students scored 152 or higher on the LSAT.

The LSAT is only taken by college graduates, who come from the top half of the bell curve. And probably a person with just an average IQ (such as governor Palin), who is barely smart enough to get a four year degree if she takes five years to do it, is not the type of person interested in pursuing more education so she wouldn't be taking the LSAT exam in the first place. LSAT takers therefore have higher average intelligence than the typical college graduate, only only the top half of LSAT takers will get accepted to law school. Thus I give one standard deviation above the median (in other words, and IQ of 115) as the minimum intelligence of nearly all lawyers.

The second hurdle lawyers face is that they have to pass the bar exam. There are a few law school graduates, generally from the worst law schools, who find they are unable to pass the bar exam and thus cannot become lawyers. The bar exam can't be passed merely by memorizing a lot of facts. You have to apply reasoning in order to write a passing essay answer and to get the correct answer on most of the multiple choice MBE questions. Anyone who has taken the bar exam will attest to this. A person of merely average intelligence would never be able to pass the bar exam.

It has been reported that 22% of black law school graduates are never able to pass the bar exam even after taking the test multiple times, demonstrating that because of affirmative action, black students are accepted to law school even though they don't have sufficiently high intelligence to pass the bar exam (which is a rather cruel thing to do--law school is a huge waste of time and money for such students).

If someone is a lawyer, you can assume with good confidence that they are in the top 16% of the population, intelligence-wise. Of course that's a ballpark figure; maybe it's 20%, maybe it's 12%, but it's around there.

Hawaii Pacific University

Here is a link to the SAT Profile for Hawaii Pacific University. This is the school that Sarah Palin attended for one semester before leaving for mysterious reasons. We see that the typical student at Hawaii Pacific scores below the average for college-bound seniors.

Hawaii Pacific is obviously a school for people who aren't smart enough to attend a real college. Yet despite Hawaii Pacific's rather unintelligent student body, Palin left after one semester of majoring in business. I suspect that she couldn't handle the math classes. Perhaps she scored below 420 on the math section of the SAT, putting her in the bottom 25% of Hawaii Pacific students?

After leaving Hawaii Pacific she transfered to a community college.

Palin's defenders (who seem to have Reverse Palin Derangement Syndrome) insist that "smart" people attend community college to save money. There's no evidence that this motivated any of Palin's college decisions. Why attend a private school in Hawaii when the tuition at the University of Alaska Fairbanks is really low, and Fairbanks is a much less expensive place to live than Hawaii? The answer is either (1) Sarah wanted to get the hell out of the icebox; or (2) she didn't score high enough on the SAT or ACT to get accepted to UAF.

I should also point out that people who want to save money graduate in four years and not five years. The primary reason people take five years to graduate is that they aren't smart enough to handle it in four years.

Is a person who's not smart enough to get admitted to the University of Alaska really the kind of person who should be a national political figure?

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A thanks to "Her?" for pointing out Hawaii Pacific's low student body test scores.

Reverse Palin Derangement Syndrome

“Palin Derangement Syndrome” is a term that conservative bloggers made up because they think it mocks people who have anything negative to say about Sarah Palin. But after reading the responses to my previous post about Palin’s merely average intelligence, I see that the real problem is Reverse Palin Derangement Syndrome. Palin’s supporters become deranged and unhinged when you present evidence that Palin is not very smart.

The comments on this blog have seldom been as nasty as the ones generated by posts negative about Palin. This demonstrates that blogging the truth about Palin causes cognitive dissonance. Ad hominem attacks are often the standard response to cognitive dissonance. Thus, one guy went on and on saying how dumb and unaccomplished I am. Hey, the post wasn’t about me, it was about Sarah. Attacking me may make you feel better, but it doesn’t change the fact that Palin was one of the least intelligent vice presidential candidates in our nation’s history.

Even Steve Sailer may be partially under the grip of Reverse Palin Derangement Syndrome. Steve Sailer is the blogger who carefully proved that George W. Bush is smarter than Kerry, and he has researched every minutia of Obama’s life, but he apparently is unable to apply the same logic, consistency and research skills to Palin. In response to my post about Palin, he copied an article about Biden’s plagiarism incident. This is an example of a red herring argument. Whether or not Biden is an honorable person is not relevant to assessing Palin’s IQ.

As I stated before, one’s intelligence has to be one standard deviation above the median in order to be able to graduate from law school and pass the bar exam. Yes, just about every single lawyer is in the top 16% of the population. But the interesting thing about intelligence is that it’s relative. If your intelligence is two standard deviations above the median (top 2%), a guy who’s intelligence just barely makes the top 16% cutoff will often appear to be stupid. And someone who’s intelligence is only average, like Palin, will often appear to be a complete moron.

I once knew a lawyer who didn’t know that Washington DC was a district and not part of another state. How could a lawyer not know such a thing? This is why it’s so perfectly believable that Palin didn’t understand that Africa was a continent and didn’t understand the difference between South Africa and southern Africa. (And no, this story is not a hoax. Why don’t the people who said it go on the record? Obviously because once you go on the record of telling the truth about the stupidity of your boss, you’ll never get another job in politics ever again. People shamefully value their careers over informing the American public.) Not understanding that Africa is a continent is exactly the type of ignorance displayed by someone who’s just a regular person and not above average. People who insist the story has to be false because there’s no way a governor of a state could be ignorant of such basic geography are in a strange state of denial.

Reverse Palin Derangement Syndrome causes people who have it to blame everything on liberal media bias. Actually, as far as I can tell, because Palin is a woman, the liberal media has been very reluctant to really dish it out on her. If a man as unintelligent as Palin were nominated, we really would have seen some serious bashing. This was part of the calculated strategy that went into selecting her—because she was a woman, they knew that the press would be afraid to attack her. But the problem for the political operatives who thought her selection was a good idea is that they didn’t know about the science of intelligence, otherwise they would have seen the signs.

The final symptom of Reverse Palin Derangement Syndrome that I will mention in this blog post is the refusal of the afflicted to admit that Palin hurt McCain in the polls. They will scream, “SHE RALLIED THE BASE!!!” But an examination of the CNN exit poll shows what a disaster Palin was for the McCain campaign. For example, 32% of voters said that Biden was unqualified to be President, and 80% of those voters voted for McCain. But a whopping 60% of voters said that Palin was not qualified to be President, and 82% of those voters voted for Obama. The exit poll data shows the prescience of my statement from August 29th, the very day that her selection was announced. I wrote, “after the excitement over picking a woman dies down, this is going to seriously backfire.”

Palin's estimated IQ is 100

Steve Sailer has been an inspiration to a lot of bloggers for his tireless devotion to spreading the truth about topics such as IQ and human biodiversity. It is thus, with great disappointment and regret that I criticize his position on Sarah Palin.

For a guy who trumpeted the movie Idiocracy as the greatest cinematic accomplishment of the decade, it’s rather weird that when the movie actually comes to life in the form of Sarah Palin, he remains silent on the whole topic. And finally, after the election is over, he writes a post claiming that Palin is as smart as Biden.

Sorry Steve, that’s just not true. Biden was smart enough to graduate from law school and pass the bar exam, indicating a minimum intelligence level of one standard deviation above the norm, or a little more. Biden graduated near the bottom of the class at a mediocre law school, so he’s not a genius. I would prefer to see people smarter than Biden in public service, but at least he has enough intelligence to not be a total embarrassment to our country.

Steve has fallen for the type of blank slate analysis that he’s only too happy accuse liberals of. This analysis holds that Palin only seems less intelligent than Biden because she hasn’t been exposed to same environment. Sorry, this doesn’t cut it. There are books, newspapers, and even the internet in Alaska. If she hasn’t learned much about national affairs by the age of forty-four, nothing is going to change in another few years.

Steve Sailer also wrote that mothers are more interested in their children than things such as national and international issues. Sailer is obviously unfamiliar with Palin, because whatever she’s interested in it’s not her children. Her son Track spent his senior year of high school in Michigan, the daughter Bristol was living with her aunt in Anchorage (when she wasn’t having sex with her boyfriend or doing drugs). Three days after Trig was born, Sarah was back at work giving speeches. Bristol seems to spend a lot more time taking care of Trig than Sarah does. Sarah Palin is obviously a lot more interested in her career than her children. Not that I blame her for this. Running a state sounds a lot more interesting than changing the diapers of a retarded baby. But this disproves Steve’s theory that Sarah was too interested in her children to bone up on the issues.

Those defending Palin’s intelligence seem to be living in a state of cognitive dissonance. They can’t believe that a Republican could be of only average intelligence. This is pretty stupid analysis. The average person is of average intelligence, and the Republican Party now celebrates its appeal to average Americans and not the elites. Someone from the ranks of the average inexplicably rose to governor of a state, and was then inexplicably selected as McCain’s running mate. Those two accomplishments don’t prove her intelligence. One thing I learned from this election cycle is that voters don’t put much value in a candidate’s intelligence. Until now, there has been a behind-the-scenes selection process which weeds out people of average intelligence before any regular voters get to cast a vote. For whatever the reason, the usual process didn’t weed out Palin.

By average intelligence, I mean that half the people are more intelligent than Palin, and the other half are less intelligent. Based on the convention that the average IQ is 100, this means my estimate of her IQ is 100. This estimate shouldn’t shock anyone. After all, if you randomly selected a hundred people, the average random person would have an IQ of 100. Of course it’s highly unusual for the governor of a state to have merely an average IQ. As I wrote above, the process normally weeds out people of average intelligence. Usually, in order to get to the point where your name is on the ballot, you have to have accomplished something that requires an above average IQ. For example, most candidates for a governor of a state are rich. A disproportionate number of rich people have above average IQs. Also, governors often have prestigious educational credentials, which require above average IQs.

Sarah’s accomplishments prior to becoming governor did not require an above average IQ. Being the part owner of a snowmobile rental business, and getting elected as mayor of a town of 6,000 people, these accomplishments do not require an above average IQ. A small town election is a popularity contest, not an IQ contest. A pretty woman with a perky personality does not need a high IQ to win a popularity contest.

You don’t need an above average IQ to graduate from college, if you graduate from an easy college like the University of Idaho with an easy major like Sports Journalism, take five years to do it, and obtain a lot of your credits from community colleges. Smart people don’t attend community colleges. As I’ve written before, I get the impression she couldn’t handle the business major at Hawaii Pacific “University,” probably because she couldn’t handle the math required for such a major, and that’s why she only attended for one semester.

Let us review the other indicators of Sarah Palin’s only average intelligence:

(1) Smart people have smart children. Track isn’t going to college, and Bristol dropped out of high school. There’s no evidence that Willow is smart.

(2) Smart people marry other smart people. Sarah Palin married Todd who never finished college.

(3) Smart people make sure their teenage daughters don’t get pregnant.

(4) Smart people read newspapers and magazines. Sarah Palin couldn’t name any she reads in the interview with Katie Couric.

(5) Smart people have intellectual hobbies. Sarah Palin hunts moose. (In contrast, Biden's hobby is teaching a law class at Widener University.)

(6) Smart people who majored in journalism would have written something. Sarah Palin never wrote anything. Whatever criticism people may have of the quality of Michelle Obama’s Princeton paper, at least she put words to paper. The op-ed article that once appeared in the New York Times under Sarah Palin’s name was obviously ghost written.

(7) Smart people have smart siblings. Sarah’s sister married Mike Wooten, a guy who tasered his own stepson.

(8) Smart people have smart friends. I can’t find the link to the video of the women from Wasilla who were Sarah’s friends, but they didn’t appear to be very smart.

While there's all this evidence of Sarah Palin being only average, there's no believable evidence that she ever did anything smart. The only evidence of above average intelligence either comes from testimony from family members (the sister who married Mike Wooten says Sarah is smart), or people who are obviously sucking up to her, like the National Guard guy who got promoted right after he gave an interview praising her.

The cognitive dissonance people, the ones who can’t accept that a Republican could be any less than a genius, keep bringing up various gaffes made by Obama and Biden. A gaffe is not an indication of low intelligence. Anyone with common sense should know this. Obama accidentally saying that there are 57 states is a gaffe. Sarah Palin not understanding the difference between South Africa and southern Africa is not a gaffe, it’s an indication of a lack of reasoning ability and a lack of general knowledge.

A person's political beliefs should not be taken as an indication of high or low intelligence. Political ideologies, like religions, are memes that infect the brains of smart people. Smart people are capable of thinking logically, but often choose not to. Romney's devotion to Mormonism makes no sense, Biden's devotion to left wing causes makes no sense, but neither proves low intelligence.

Why am I still writing about this after the election? Because other people are still writing about it, because people still refuse to accept what a huge mistake it was for McCain to choose Palin, because people are even talking about Palin 2012. Until everyone realizes that Palin is not smart enough to be President of the United States, it's worth writing about.

eHarmony settles with New Jersey over gay members

eHarmony settled an action with the New Jersey Attorney General. Allegedly, eHarmony violated New Jersey's anti-discrimination laws because eHarmony only serves heterosexual members. Here is the eHarmony press release about the settlement agreement.

There are many reasons to be outraged about this.

(1) For starters, states shouldn't be messing with online businesses that operate in compliance with federal laws. It's a huge burden on a business to have to comply with the laws of all fifty states. Who even knows what all those laws might be? There are a lot of shoestring internet businesses out there which simply don't have the resources to research the laws of every state.

(2) I think it's very obnoxious that a company is forced to service an activity that some people consider morally wrong. The eHarmony founder is a religious Christian, and part of his intent was to provide a Christian-friendly website, even though the Christian connection isn't explicitly advertised.

(3) It's not economically efficient to force a general purpose website to cater to every single minority interest. There already exist websites explicitly catering to gays, so how many gays would sign up for eHarmony even if it accepted gay members? The answer is not very many, and the ones who signed up would discover that there were no other gay members to be matched with, and they'd leave.

(4) The actual settlement is pointless. eHarmony still won't provide matching services for gays on its eHarmony site. Instead, eHarmony is going to create a new site for gays, and include a link to the gay site somewhere on the eHarmony site. eHarmony will offer free membership to the first 10,000 people to sign up, which might sound like some sort of concession to people unfamiliar with marketing online dating sites, but in fact it's standard practice because no one is going to pay for a membership on a site where there are no other members they can meet.

eHarmony has between $150 and $200 million of revenues per year, so giving $50,000 to the state of New Jersey, and spinning off a completely different website was merely deemed less risky than fighting it out in the courts. But I sure wish that someone would stand up to these types of shakedowns.

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And for those who haven't been around this blog that long, yes, I'm programming my own online dating site, MatchStation.com. And I haven't programmed it to do homosexual matching, but since I'm not going to charging any money for it, I'm pretty sure it's outside of New Jersey's jurisdiction. Maybe I'll put a link to a gay dating site on the home page--that way I'll make some money from an affiliate sale in case some gay person stumbles upon the link.

Another word on bankruptcy

Despite my post from yesterday, people still don’t seem to get how Chapter 11 allows the business enterprise to continue.

After filing for Chapter 11, payment on all old debts are suspended, but payments on new debts are allowed to be made. Thus, everyone feels confident doing business with a company in bankruptcy, because it’s only the people who did past business who are screwed. The company now has plenty of money to operate because it doesn't have to pay anything to the old debt-holders.

It’s a lot safer to buy a car from a company in bankruptcy, because you’re buying the car post-bankruptcy and thus you’re protected. Theoretically, the bankrupt car company could legally screw past buyers by not honoring warranty agreements, but that wouldn’t actually happen because the bankrupt company is allowed to maintain its customer relationships. The bankruptcy courts understand that the long run value of the company would be diminished if customers were screwed over.

Bankruptcy does not mean that the companies will be liquidated or destroyed. It's not going to happen. The auto companies are just worth too much as ongoing enterprises, but practically nothing in liquidation. After Chapter 11, the company is run for the benefit of the creditors. Creditors will make sure the companies continue to operate so their debts will be worth something.

More Japan stuff

For some more interesting stuff about Japan, read my blog post from last summer about Japan's Sex Volunteer Corps, and the problem of virgin wives (women legally married who have never had sex with their husbands, or any other man).

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By the way, I hope that people don't think these posts are anti-Japanese. I really like the Japanese people. The Japanese are the funnest people in all of Asia. And Japanese women really seem to like nerdy white guys. If only white women liked nerdy white guys as much as Japanese women.

Mitt Romney agrees with me. Partially

Mitt Romney agrees with me that we should let the auto companies file for bankrupcy. Strangely, this is currently the most-emailed article at the NY Times.

But then he writes:

I believe Washington should raise energy research spending to $20 billion a year, from the $4 billion that is spent today.

A big thumbs down. I see no evidence for why the government needs to spend such a huge amount of money when there's nothing essentially wrong with energy markets. The only problem is a regulatory environment which prevents nuclear power plants from being built, and oil and gas from being drilled for, but the government doesn't need to spend another $16 billion a year on research to fix that. It's not even clear what the $4 billion is being wasted on.

Romney is supposed to be a conservative, but with no results show for $4 billion a year in research, throwing another $16 billion dollars a year at the problem is not conservative, or sensible.

Do Japanese women like smaller men?

"whiskey" writes in a comment:

Japanese women are not having sex because they'd prefer more macho, and socially dominant men. Few of them exist in Japan, because modern industrial nations depend on male cooperation not "Big Men" that women desire.

Completely wrong if you believe this article:

Both Shirakawa and his girlfriend like the fact that she weighs more than he does, and is the leader of the couple. "She's a lot stronger than I am, can lift heavy things and go drinking until dawn. I admire that about her, and feel protected when I'm around her," he said. Older than he by five years, it was Shirakawa's girlfriend who made the approach, started the dating process and decided what course their relationship would take.

Supposedly, the ideal size for a young man in Japan is 5'8" and 125 pounds. I'm not sure if I buy into that.

SAT predicts good scholastic outcomes

There's an excellent op-ed article in today's NY Times written by a SUNY professor who documents what happened when some SUNY colleges placed more emphasis on SAT scores in their college admissions decisions, while others did not.

The colleges which placed more emphasis on SAT scores realized significant increases in their graduation rates.

Here we see powerful evidence of how the SAT is able to predict good scholastic outcomes independent of high school grades.

Strange map, indeed

At the blog Strange Maps, there's a map comparing the county vote for Obama to cotton production in 1860. The correlation between the two maps is amazing.

The reason for the correlation is that blacks voted overwhelmingly for Obama, and it would seem that a large percentage of blacks never moved away from the counties in which their ancestors were slaves.

Chapter 11

This is a quick explanation of bankruptcy from someone who is not a bankruptcy lawyer (unfortunately). Bankruptcy is not a required subject in law school, and it’s not on the bar exam. This post only contains common knowledge that every educated citizen should know.

Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows a company to continue to operate after it files for bankruptcy. The purpose behind Chapter 11 is to protect creditors. Most companies are worth a lot more as a going concern than they would be if liquidated.

Generally what happens is that the current debt holders are converted to equity holders, and the current equity holders lose everything—although in some bankruptcy plans, the equity holders do get a small scrap—sometimes ownership of as much as 10% of the new company.

General Motors and Ford would both be profitable companies without their crushing liabilities. As I wrote yesterday, GM alone has $186 billion in liabilities. Under a Chapter 11 plan, those liabilities would be converted into stock in the new company, and the company that emerges from Chapter 11 would have a solid balance sheet.

Chapter 11 also allows a company to cancel its contracts. GM and Ford have a lot of bad contracts, and they can get out of all of them, perhaps even union contracts (once again, I'm not an expert), under a Chapter 11 reorganization.

Under Chapter 11, a company is allowed to receive debtor in possession (DIP) financing, which is senior to all other debt. Payments can be made on the DIP debt even while payments on all other debt are suspended. I doubt that there would be a problem with GM or Ford getting such financing, and if not, then that would be a good point for the government to step in to lend money to the DIP lender.

Without a Chapter 11 reorganization, any money lent to GM or Ford will just disappear, because the companies currently aren’t profitable after making payments on their huge liabilities.

Let them file for bankruptcy

Glenn Reynolds asks a rather naive question:

Since total market capitalization for the Big Three is about $7 billion, why are we talking about loaning them $50 billion?

Does he not realize that GM alone has $186 billion in liabilities?

It should be pointed out that GM and Ford are the third and fourth largest American non-petroleum-related companies from an annual revenues perspective, behind only Walmart and GE. These are big companies.

However, I don't support a government bailout. The bankruptcy system is well suited to dealing with the issues related to restructuring GM and Ford.

Bankruptcy would also be a huge boon to bankruptcy lawyers. I'm not sure how much legal fees we are talking about. $100 million? This kind of pisses me off that BIGLAW lawyers will get richer than they already are.

Eric Cantor speaks

Today's Washington Times has an interview with Eric Cantor.

I'm not one to say I'm the right guy, but I would hope, my case for this position is, I very much believe our party is one of limited government, lower taxes, belief in free markets, belief in a strong national defense posture with a cautious approach to making sure that happens.

"I also believe, though, that the country is not only poised, it is desperate for us to use those principles to fashion solutions to everyday challenges, and I believe that this country will accept that because we're not a country that is all about big-government solutions, and I think that's where the other side goes."

Here's a guy who can succinctly state conservative principles and sound like he really means it. He's also against amnesty to illegal aliens. It's too bad that McCain didn't pick him for the vice president position.

Governor Paterson: a Democrat I could vote for

There's a budget battle in Albany between Democratic governor Paterson (the first black man to be governor of New York, and the nation's first blind governor) and Republicans. Paterson wants to cut billions from the budget, and Republicans are opposed. Paterson wants to cut money for education and healthcare facilities, and raise tuition at state universities. Republicans are against it.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Paterson is also opposed to raising taxes.

"[T]he higher we tax even the wealthy, the more we lose population and the less job creation there is," Gov. Paterson said in an interview Friday. "We're pretty resigned to the fact that we're going to have to do this with spending cuts."

In contrast, "Republican" Mayor Bloomberg wants to raise taxes in New York City, which already has among the highest taxes in the nation. Paterson is right. It's easy to move out of New York, especially for the rich. Connecticut is right next door, and [the income tax is a lot lower there, but not zero as I originally incorrectly stated].

New York's governor blames the state's current shortfall, in part, on its failure to better manage revenue during the years of soaring Wall Street profits. "What's actually more embarrassing than the fact that we have such a huge deficit now, when bonuses are down and capital gains are down, is the fact that when there was...wealth, we overspent," says Gov. Paterson.

I sure am glad that Spitzer got caught visiting a prostitute and had to resign so that we now have a quality governor leading the state.

Not enough women in computer science

There’s a NY Times article about how there are not enough women in computer science. This causes a lot of liberal angst, which results in the same article being published every few months.

See my April 2007 blog post about this very issue.

In a tangential blog post, I wrote about the fact that most girls find chess boring. I believe that they also find computer programming boring.

To the extent that there are a few girls who don't find chess or computer programming boring, they probably do find it discouraging that there are no other girls doing that activity. The same thing happens to straight men who like musical theater, but Steve Sailer seems to be the only person concerned about that issue.

In Japan, not much sex

“Underachiever” left a link, in a comment, to a news article about how many couples in Japan are giving up on sex.

A new study by Dr. Kunio Kitamura has revealed that more than one third of all couples in Japan have effectively given up on sex, with most complaining they are too tired after work or that it is "boring."

"The results are a surprise because the numbers keep going up each year," said Dr. Kitamura.

In 2004, 32 per cent of Japanese admitted to not having sexual intercourse in the previous month. That number has now risen to 37 per cent, according to a report that will be presented to the Ministry of Health and Welfare next year.

I think this demonstrates some interesting hbd concepts (none of which are actually mentioned in the article).

(1) Asians have lower sex drives than whites, who have lower sex drives than blacks.

(2) Sex drive decreases with age. Because Japanese are delaying the age of marriage, by the time they do finally get married, in some cases the couple’s sex drive is too low to really enjoy sex.

Japanese need to get married younger. I can’t imagine a horny teenager ever being too “tired” or “bored” to have sex.

* * *

According to Japanese government statistics, "the mean age of first marriage was 30.1 for men and 28.3 for women in 2007."

Sarah Palin didn't know that Africa is a continent, part II

There is a news story about a hoax, in which a fake persona named Martin Eisenstadt took credit for the leak about how Sarah Palin didn’t know that Africa was a continent.

I just want to remind readers that the hoax involves the source of the story and not its veracity.

The pranksters behind Eisenstadt acknowledge that he was not, through them, the anonymous source of the Palin leak. He just claimed falsely that he was the leaker--and they say they have no reason to cast doubt on the original story. For its part, Fox News Channel continues to stand behind its story.

So yes folks, it is still presumably true that Sarah Palin didn’t know that Africa was a continent. And it’s a perfectly believable story because it’s the kind of stupidity you’d find in the average American, and there’s no evidence that Sarah Palin, who was barely smart enough to graduate from an easy college with an easy major, is any smarter than the average American.

RESPONSE TO COMMENTS

Tschafer:

Why are you still banging away about this over a week after the election? Why do you care?

Long before this election, I wrote about IQ. I wrote about hoaxes in which pretty women were a front for smart men. Like the lonelygirl15 hoax. Sarah Palin is like lonelygirl15. People WANT so badly to believe, for some unknown reason, that this person would have been a competent president if McCain won the election and then died in office. This is exactly the kind of stuff I've always written about.

Why do I care that someone of only average intelligence was one of two vice presidential candidates? You may as well ask why I care enough about anything to bother to have a blog. I held back during the election because I wanted McCain to win.

Christoper Tracy:

I seriously believe that even the average American knows that Africa is a continent. HS, you think too little of the common man.

U.S. society is segregated by IQ, so most people with IQs in the top 10%, the kind of people who read this blog, dont' have any close friends who are just average, and may not even have any family members who are just average.

I have the dubious privilege of having dumb relatives, so I know how stupid the average person can be.

Furthemore, the relevant statistic is not whether the majority of people of average intelligence know that Africa is a continent, but whether this knowledge is universal among people of average intelligence, and I assure you it's not.

A person of average intelligence will possess gaps in his or her knowledge that smart people like us find shocking. So if 10% of average intelligence people don't know that Africa is a continent, and 10% don't know the difference between astrology and astronomy, etc, if you take any average person and ask them a lot of general knowledge question, you will find a stupid answer. If you were trying to prepare a person of average intelligence for a new conference or a debate, this would become quite obvious.

So I certainly believe the story. I find it hard to believe that someone of Palin's very average IQ would not have some gap in general knowledge such as this.

If people think that not knowing that Africa is a continent is a problem for a vice president of the United States, then they should be pissed off at McCain for picking her and not at me, the messenger.

Hbd censorship at Loyola University

A reader (who asked not to be named) forwarded me a link to an article about an apology issued by Loyola University on behalf of remarks made by a professor Walter Block:

"Professor Block's response to a question about the differences between average earnings of African-Americans and whites in America, which maintained that the disparity could be explained by differences in average productivity, was offensive, and we are sincerely sorry for it," read a letter from the economics faculty and the Adam Smith Society.

"Professor Block's remarks also included offensive comments regarding the source of wage disparities between men and women. We are deeply sorry for these remarks and the harm they have caused."

What Block said was so horrible that it couldn't even be referred to in the apology!

But the reporter contaced Professor Block:

He said he'd told the audience that differences in IQ might account for why blacks and women earn about 30 percent less than their white, male counterparts.

Walter Block is one of the good guys. Political correctness prevents the truth from getting out.

Proposition 8

Last week, Californian's voted to ban gay marriage, which was a "right" created by the California courts, obviously in opposition to what the people of the state really wanted.

The exit poll shows that the proposition had very strong support among blacks. 70% voted for it and 30% voted against it.

If only whites were allowed to vote, this proposition might have been rejected. The exit poll shows that only 49% of whites voted for it, whichs is 1.01% short of a majority. But the margin of error is such that we can't say for certain. Furthemore, some whites might have been lying to the poll takers because they understand that supporting gays is the politically correct thing to do, even if they secretly oppose gay marriage.

If I had been in California, I would have voted for Proposition 8 (in other words, I would have voted to ban gay marriage). I would have done this not because I believe that Jesus commands it, but because marriage represents an endorsement by the government that two people have done something meritorious, and I just don't see what's so great about what gay people are doing.

Marriage between a man and a woman is good because it's the best way to raise children. And once again, this is not because the Bible commands it that way, but because of human nature. Gay couples don't have children, thus society doesn't benefit from gay marriage. By weakening the meaning of real marriage, I think the effect of gay marriage is overall harmful to society. (See what I wrote five years ago.)

Most non-religious white people voted against the proposition, thus in favor of gay marriage. These white people have been brainwashed by the Hollywood mission to promote homosexuality. If this vote had taken place about fifteen years ago, before the pro-gay media blitz, an overwhelming percentage of white people would have voted for the proposition (against gay marriage).

So does anyone find it ironic that, if only whites were allowed to vote, we'd have gay marriage but John McCain as president? I don't, because conservative economic policies and Christian policies do not naturally go together. It would be far more natural for the socialist party to be the Christian party, and the free market party to be the secular party.

NY Times still gloating

The NY Times is still shamelessly gloating over the Obama victory.

The spin of the article I linked to, which is somehow #1 on the Most Emailed list, is that the racist South is finally marginalized and no longer relevant to national elections. Thank Gaia for that!

Pro-life third party: bring it on!

In response to my recent post about making the Republican platform pro-choice, Peter replied that a pro-choice Republican Party would lead to the formation of a pro-life third Party.

Well I say, bring it on! Why do people think that a pro-life party would, in the long-run, weaken conservatism? As I've explained before, libertarian econmic policies are not a natural mix with Christian pro-life teach Creationism stuff. (Intelligent people are more likely to be libertarian on economic issues and less likely to be religious.)

Republicans should actively encourage the formation of a socialist pro-life party that would steal votes from the Democratic party. I envision all the poor blacks and Hispanics voting for this new party, and then moderate Democrats would switch to the Republican Party because they are no longer scared off by the hardcore Christian stuff. The Democrats would only be left by a small group of hardcore leftists unable to win any elections.

Who would want to marry into $100K of debt?

On Friday, Steve Sailer had a blog post about bachelorettes in debt. For some reason, Steve was writing about credit card debt, but the real killer debt is student loan debt.

A woman who went to law school or some other expensive graduate program could easily have more than $100,000 in debt. Who would want to marry into that? This is yet another reason to be against student loans which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy is a great thing. It forces lenders to be properly cautious when lending money, and it ensures that no one winds up in such huge debt that they are enslaved to their debt for the rest of their lives.

Obama to bring back slavery

Rather ironic that the nation's first black president wants to bring back slavery. But there it is on his website:

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.

People will be forced to work for free. It worked well for plantation owners in the pre-Civil War South, so why not for liberal Democrats?

UPDATE

The text at the link above has changed since this morning when I copied it. Obviously, it was changed in response to reaction in the blogosphere.

A certain commenter accused me of dishonesty and lying. Sorry, I copied what was on the page, no dishonesty here. Maybe the Obama transition team is being dishonest.

UPDATE II

Someone left a link to a screenshot of what looks like the original page.

Is the real desire of Obama to draft all young people into service for Marxist causes, but he knows that won't fly, so he has to tone it down until people are ready to accept living in a proper communist country?