Half Sigma

More about red meat

Since my post earlier today on the red meat study, there was a comment with a link to an article critical of the study, and a kind reader emailed me the actual journal article.

The article linked to above points out the most serious problem with the study—that red meat causes a similar increase in all types of deaths. The study tracked four types of deaths: (1) cancer; (2) cardiovascular disease; (3) injuries and sudden deaths; and (4) all other deaths. For men, deaths from all four causes increased with red meat consumption, but for some strange reason, women who ate more red meat were less likely to die from injuries and sudden death, but there weren’t enough deaths in this category for the result to be statistically significant.

The mechanism by which meat might cause death by cardiovascular disease is that the cholesterol in the meat causes atherosclerosis which causes heart disease. But why does meat also cause death by cancer, all other diseases, and even accidents? Is meat just such a vile substance? Or is low meat consumption indicative of someone from a higher social class and who has access to better healthcare, and has higher future time orientation and therefore is less likely to partake in risky behavior?

The study itself claims to have accounted for confounding factors, including education, marital status, BMI, smoking history, alcohol intake, vitamin supplement use, fruit consumption, and vegetable consumption. It should be noted that all of these factors are related to each other. According to the data printed in the journal article, people who ate less red meat were less likely to smoke, had more education, were more likely to exercise, and ate more fruits. Important confounding factors related to social class which are missing include income, wealth, and IQ. And all college graduates are lumped together, so someone with a graduate degree from Harvard is considered to be in the same category as someone with a bachelor’s degree from a public commuter college obtained at the age of 35.

If you’ve played around with a lot of multiple regression analyses, you would know that sometimes, when you throw in a lot of variables that are correlated with each other, you get some weird results. For all we know, the particular confounding factors tracked in the study where cherry picked to achieve the desired results while creating the illusion that confounding factors were considered.

More bogus politically correct science in the NY Times

The New York times screams that RED MEAT IS BAD FOR YOU!!!!

This conclusion is based on some journal article. I can’t read the entire text of the article in the Archives of Internal Medicine (god forbid they allow people to read the detailed version of what these fluff science pieces are based on without paying for it), but the quote from the abstract:

There were 47 976 male deaths and 23 276 female deaths during 10 years of follow-up. Men and women in the highest vs lowest quintile of red (HR, 1.31 [95% CI, 1.27-1.35], and HR, 1.36 [95% CI, 1.30-1.43], respectively) and processed meat (HR, 1.16 [95% CI, 1.12-1.20], and HR, 1.25 [95% CI, 1.20-1.31], respectively) intakes had elevated risks for overall mortality.

You will note that there is nothing in there about accounting for confounding factors.

What’s going on here is that red meat has become characterized, whether fairly or unfairly (most likely unfairly) as being “unhealthy,” thus upper class people, who are more concerned with following behaviors perceived to be healthy because of their higher future time orientation, eat less red meat, and upper class people live longer than lower class people for reasons no one fully understands, but upper class people lived longer long before red meat was perceived to be unhealthy.

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The last time I made such a post, rude commenters said something to the effect of "who are you to judge the work of professional researchers?" However, I understand the problems of confounding factors in these types of analyses better than the typical epidemiologist. Or maybe they understand that their conclusions are bogus, but they don't care, because they get more research money when they "prove" what the establishment wants to hear.

When I have bothered to rigorously investigate a study with a politically correct result, as in my breast feeding study, I proved beyond any doubt that the study with the politically correct result was using really bad science.

The NY Times article on the achievement gap

Steve Sailer commented on this first, which is a NY Times article on No Child Left Behind and the "achievement gap":

Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide…

The achievement gap is caused by genetic differences between the races, and that can’t be changed by Congress passing a law which the President signs.

So the important issue that readers should ponder is, will people learn anything about HBD (that’s human biodiversity) from the failure of NCLB to close the “achievement gap”? Unfortunately, there’s no indication in the article that anyone learned anything. Because NCLB was a Bush law, liberals can gleefully blame Bush while ignoring reality.

Thoughts on Chrysler holdouts

The latest news is that some senior creditors of Chrysler, mostly hedge funds, don’t want to voluntarily agree to accept 33 cents on the dollar for their debt. Obama criticizes them for not being willing to “sacrifice” for the best interests of the country.

It seems to me that when someone buys senior debt, they agree to a lower return on the assumption that, if there’s a bankruptcy, they get paid before everyone else. Why would they want to accept 33 cents on the dollar when billions are going to be paid to junior creditors and Chrysler will continue to recognize various long term contracts (such as union contracts) which normally are not recognized as valid interests under bankruptcy law?

Liberal arts graduate degrees, not smart

Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, writes in a NY Times op-ed:

[Y]oung people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

But the question is, if everyone knows that graduate degrees (excluding professional degrees) are such a bad deal, why do so many enroll?

Well, I guess the answer is that SWPL culture highly values liberal arts graduate degrees, and U.S. society encourages people to have an optimism bias (no one in America likes a pessimist), so if only 10% of graduates get a decent job, 100% of students anticipate that they are going to be in the top 10%.

There's also the factor that many of these students have rich parents, so they don't really care if they can't find a job, their parents will carry them.

Maybe, the real mystery is how can the university faculty look themselves in the mirror each morning knowing how they are screwing over their students?

Atheists go public

There's an article in the NY Times about atheists going public. The primary goal is to improve the public's view of atheists.

My advice to atheist activists is that, in order to win the hearts and minds of Americans, you need to get Hollywood to load movies and TV shows with cool and likeable atheist characters. That's how the gays did it.

Why do nerds like comic books?

I’ve never, not once, in my entire life, read more than one or two pages from a comic book. I get Star Trek and Dungeons and Dragons, and even WoW (will soon write a review of the game), but my nerdiness doesn’t embrace comic books. Hopefully, someone will be able to explain what people like about them.

Neuroenhancing drugs

There’s an interesting article in the New Yorker about “neuroenhancing” drugs. Students at Ivy League schools are commonly using ADHD drugs like Adderall and newer stuff in order to give them an edge over other students, allowing them to study hard, but also party hard.

(This thought is somewhat tangential, but I attended Arizona State for law school, and this school often comes up on lists of top party schools, but the undergraduates I encountered always struck me as slackers rather than hard partiers. I think there is a correlation, among college students at least, between studying hard and partying hard.)

This future, where people need to take neuroenhancing drugs in order to compete, reminds me of the Unabomber Manifesto in which Ted Kaczynski warned that future brain-improvement drugs would lead to the end of our humanity. Ted may have been a big weirdo, but he was also a deep thinker. This is a future that Mr. Kaczynski dreaded, but people who call themselves “transhumanists” look forward to it. (A blog reader once asked, "Why don't you ever blog about transhumanism?" I don't know, it's just not something I'm interested in.)

I can’t get through a day without a cup of coffee, which is supposedly the norm for SWPLs. When I tried to withdraw from coffee, after the week of headaches finally passed, I still didn’t feel “normal,” and gave up on the experiment. (Strangely, there was very little information I could find about caffeine withdrawal besides that the headaches go away after a week or so. You would think it would be studied more.) Is being addicted to a neuroenhancing drug invented by scientists and manufactured in a pharmaceutical laboratory somehow different than being addicted to caffeine which is a naturally occurring neuroenhancing drug?

If neuroenhancing drugs become common, it’s easy to predict that this will increase the divide between the upper and lower classes, because we will see the upper classes taking these drugs in order to compete in upper-middle-class class professions, but poor people won’t waste their money on them—they don’t need better memory or concentration for their jobs at McDonalds.

The New York Times LOVES Michelle Obama

link.

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The headline of this post reminds me of a quote from a movie: "Blue Horseshoe loves Anacott Steel."

WoW: team combat for nerds

In the comments to my last post about World of Warcraft (WoW) being nerdy, people have hypothesized that sports are manly and non-nerdy because they are proxies for physical combat.

But most video and computer games popular among nerds are also proxies for physical combat. Most of the time spent in WoW is spent fighting virtual monsters, or fighting other players. At lower levels, WoW plays like a solo computer game in which other people are playing at the same time. But at the top level of WoW play, only teams of players are able to defeat the most powerful monsters, thus WoW is a team combat sport just like football, the primary difference being that it takes physical prowess to play football, but someone unathletic and/or fearful of getting physically hurt can enjoy WoW.

It's also interesting to note that football and WoW are both played most heavily by the same age group: teenagers. Although WoW skews older, because practically no one outside of professional NFL players plays football after they've graduated from college.

Are white women racist for wanting to date white men?

There’s a post at the Larry Auster blog about whether white women who are unwilling to date outside of their race are racist.

I can’t resist italicizing the word racist because the word has come to represent the most evil thing you can possibly do. Something that evil needs italics.

That’s why I prefer to use the word mean-spirited. Beating someone up because he’s black, that’s mean-spirited. But the natural desire to be with other people like yourself, that’s not mean-spirited, it’s just part of human nature, and if black people want to hang out with other black people, and white people want to hang out with other white people, and everyone’s happy, why is it evil?

The SWPL type of liberals equate the desire to be with other people like oneself to be a type of original sin when it’s applied by race. So under this type of definition of racism, how is it really so different if (1) a group of white people form a club and don’t want any black people to be members; or (2) a white woman wants to partner with a white man, thus forming a group of two whites? These two situations are both manifestations of the desire to be with people like yourself.

The hypocrisy of SWPL-liberalness is that upper class whites have managed to arrange the world so that they primarily are part of a mostly white group. The typical gathering in Manhattan will be a mostly all-white affair, with one or two token blacks, and a white guy with an Asian wife or girlfriend.

The favorite SWPL city is Portland, Oregon, one of the whitest cities in the country. SWPL’s avoid working with minorities by avoiding blue collar jobs, and also by avoiding engineering and IT jobs which, while white collar, are heavily Asian and Indian.

The favorite place for wealthy New York whites to summer is the Hamptons, a place where you rarely see anyone who isn’t white. The Hamptons even manages to exclude Asians who, although rich enough to be seen in the Hamptons in proportion to their percentage of the New York City area population if not even more so, generally see the cost of summering in the Hamptons to be a big waste of money.

It’s middle class and prole whites, unable to exclude undesirable minorities by outspending them, who get in trouble for being racist. Rich whites can form an exclusive white enclave in the Hamptons which excludes blacks by being ridiculously expensive and far away from where there are any jobs, but prole whites living in white neighborhoods in Queens or Brooklyn have to resort to fear and intimidation (which is mean-spirited behavior, for sure).

So yes, I don’t see any harm in telling SWPL-liberal-whites that they are racist when, under their own standards, they are indeed racist.

WoW vs. watching sports

In response to my post about how World of Warcraft is considered nerdy, Peter writes:

A guy who spends six hours every Sunday sitting in front of his wide screen HDTV eating Cheetos while watching the NFL is as NON-nerdy as you can possibly be.

This is a valid comparison. Countless man-hours are spent vegetating in front of the television watching football, baseball, and basketball. But this type of passive entertainment is considered far less nerdy than playing WoW, which to its credit requires a lot more interaction from the user than watching sports on TV.

One benefit of watching sports is that you can bond with your coworkers by talking about Sunday’s game when you go to work on Monday.

Furthermore, no one doubts that the people who play professional sports are very manly and non-nerdy, so perhaps some of that rubs off on the spectators.

New York Times to go bankrupt?

I was asked to comment on the Henry Blodget post explaining that the New York Times is on the verge of bankruptcy.

It’s not surprising that the New York Times is having a bad year. The internet has been stealing away readers from print newspapers, but only the Wall Street Journal has been able to successful monetize its website by charging subscription fees. Help wanted ads used to be a major source of revenue for the New York Times, but nowadays people go to internet sites like Monster.com.

On top of that, we’re in a severe recession, so ad revenue is down.

According to Blodget, even before interest expense the Times has a negative cash flow, so maybe it’s not a viable business model even after a bankruptcy reorganization.

Who will report the news if the Times disappears?

Miss California and gay marriage

I was asked to comment on the story about Miss California at the Miss USA pageant. Apparently, some gay guy who calls himself Perez Hilton explained that California legalized gay marriage, and asked, "Do you think every state should follow suit? Why or why not?" She responded:

You know what, in my country, and in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman - no offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised. And that's how I think that it should be between a man and a woman. Thank you."

This was obviously the wrong answer, because the liberal types who run Hollywood are in favor of gay marriage.

First of all, I think it’s outrageous that this question was asked at all. A divisive political question like this is completely inappropriate for a beauty pageant. The judges are supposed to ask some fluff question like “How will you make the world a better place?”

It's also outrageous that support for gay marriage would have been better received by the judges. Support for gay marriage is not the majority viewpoint, otherwise it would be legal everywhere.

Nevertheless, Miss USA gave the wrong answer. She should have thought of some neutral answer which would offend no one. Something like, "Gay marriage is a very divisive issue, and that's why I'm so glad that I live in a country like the United States where the democratic process will determine the best outcome. I'm sure that the voters and the legislatures in the other states will work towards an appropriate solution."

I am reminded of the moron who couldn't answer a bar exam question about family law because, in the question, the two "married" people were of the same sex. I hate liberals as much as anyone, but if that question were on my bar exam, I would have just followed the instructions and addressed the issues of law.

WoW nerdier than chess?

When I wrote about playing chess, it didn't evoke the kind negative comments I got when I wrote that I ordered World of Warcraft from Amazon.com. For example, Peter writes:

My suggestion: if you play WoW, and meet a woman somewhere else, do *not* tell her right away that you play the game unless she tells you that she plays it herself. Otherwise you'll risk ending the relationship before it even begins.

Apparently, as nerdy as Chess is, WoW is a whole level of nerdiness beyond chess.

Or maybe it's that chess is for cool nerds while Wow is for loser nerds?

Perhaps Chess is perceived as an extreme mental challenge (although not necessarily as g-loaded as people think), while WoW is mostly perceived as vegetating in front of the computer monitor.

A list of other super-nerdy activities includes Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, and playing the game Magic: The Gathering.

Why is Magic the Gathering nerdier than Scrabble? I suppose because women play Scrabble.

Science fiction/fantasy involving spaceships or Hobbits is nerdy, but vampires are not nerdy because girls like Vampires. Nor is science fiction involving time travel.

Junk science from the New York Times

A New York Times article implies that you can improve your health by having more friends:

A 10-year Australian study found that older people with a large circle of friends were 22 percent less likely to die during the study period than those with fewer friends.

However, it seems more plausible to me that healthy people attract more friends than sickly people.

There may also be a social class issue. Upper class people have a larger circle of friends, and it has been well documented that being upper class results in a longer life. This is an example of a confounding factor.

More lousy science reporting from the New York Times.

World of Warcraft

I just ordered the World of Warcraft Battle Chest from Amazon.com. I know I’ve made fun of this game in the past, but I feel that I have a responsibility as a blogger to see what the fuss is about firsthand.

Does anyone have any suggestions for what race and class I should play, or what server I should join?

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Kudzu Bob writes:

A buddy of mine got divorced by his neglected blonde bombshell of a wife because he spent all his time in the den messing with Word of Warcraft, and now, hundreds of thousands of dollars poorer but wiser, he has since sworn off all forms of gaming. And I know a gorgeous 29-year-old bellydancer in the process of leaving her clueless lawyer boyfriend over the exact same thing.

Luckily Unfortnately, I’m not married to a gorgeous 29-year-old bellydancer.

Awake writes:

As much as people dog on WoW players as nerds- I know a ton of incredibly smart, competitive people that play the game and love it.

Comic Sans, value transference, and winner-take-all markets

There’s a WSJ article about the typeface Comic Sans, one of the world’s most popular typefaces (though also one of the world’s most despised typefaces).

The man who created Comic Sans, Vincent Connare, has not made any money from the typeface because he was an employee of Microsoft at the time. This is an example of how corporations transfer value from the workers to the value transference class.

On the other hand, it should be noted that typefaces are a type of winner-take-all competition, because only a few typefaces can rise to the top. The popularity of Comic Sans is due to Microsoft including it for free with Internet Explorer and then with later versions of Windows. Undoubtedly there are better typefaces than Comic Sans whose creators have gotten not even any recognition.

Kindred the Embraced, best vampire series

While I'm blogging about vampires, the best vampire series ever was Kindred the Embraced. There are eight episodes available on DVD, and you can rent them from Netflix. Light years more interesting than Twilight, the only downside is that the series leaves you hanging without any resolution, because it was canceled on account of the main actor dying in an accident shortly after the last episode was filmed.

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I also liked Angel, but you have to appreciate campy humor. Even though it's a show based on campy humor, Angel is a more believable vampire than Edward Cullen, because Angel is neither perfect nor invincible.

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There is also Sesame Street’s Count von Count.

Preppy vs. SWPL

In response to my blog post on Twilight , in which I used the phrase “preppy-SWPL vampires,” CK writes:

What do SWPL have to do with preppies? In my experience most SWPL hate preppies and vice versa.

Preppy and SWPL are both subsets of upper-middle class behaviors.

There’s a whole blog devoted to SWPLs, but what’s a preppy? Preppy is a derivative of college-preparatory school, a phrase which, if taken literally, is meaningless today because the liberal educational establishment believes that everyone should go to college so all schools exist to prepare their students for college. Even the worst school in the ghetto is viewed as a college-preparatory school. But more narrowly, the phrase refers to private schools which feed into Ivy League universities, and the Ivy League is very SWPL, at least according to Christian Lander who is the sole arbiter of SWPLness. (Or maybe he has some Asian co-author, I can’t remember.)

Back when I was in high school in the early 1980s, preppy kids wore heavy cotton pinstripe shirts with button down collars and a Ralph Lauren polo pony logo, worn with the sleeves rolled up, but tucked into the pants because people tucked in their shirts in the 1980s. During the winter, a solid wool sweater, also with the polo pony, would be added the ensemble. The sleeves of the shirt underneath could be rolled up over the sweater. Solid polo shirts with polo pony logos were also popular, sometimes even worn underneath the pinstripe button-down! My parents were too cheap to buy me this gear when I was in high school, and I still haven’t forgiven them.

There was also a book by Lisa Birnbach which I’ve never read. I should probably order a used copy from Amazon.com.

Today, preppy seems to have a less specific connotation than it did in the eighties. Among high school kids, it just refers to whatever the rich popular kids wear to school. Abercrombie and Hollister are real popular among that crowd. Preppy guys are often on sports teams, and preppy girls are often cheerleaders. These are the popular kids. When I was in high school, nerdy kids could be prep, so long as they put on some Polo. Back then, Abercrombie & Fitch was just a store at the South Street Seaport which sold casual clothes for wealthy middle-aged Wall Street types. It was 1980s preppy. Boy has that brand morphed.

SWPLs like thick sweaters, which was preppy clothing in the 1980s, but no longer.

Unlike SWPLs, preppies have no social conscience, it’s purely about status and fashion. Christian Lander’s SWPLs are liberals who care about organic food and saving the Planet and helping poor people and that kind of silly stuff. Heather Eisenlord, the 36-year-old Skadden Arps associate who’s going to use her $80,000 and a year off from work “to teach English to monks in Sri Lanka and possibly help bring solar power to remote parts of the Himalayas” is pure SWPL.

Now, the final answer to this question is that the good vampire family in the movie Twilight wore what high school kids today would consider to be preppy clothing, but they also appreciated SWPL stuff like vegetarianism, architecture, classical music and kitchen gadgets, so this is why I called them “preppy-SWPL vampires.”

Twilight

I watched this movie recently on Blu-ray disc, not because I expected to be that good, but because sometimes it’s important to watch what’s popular so you can better understand the popular culture. Twilight met my expectations; it wasn’t that good.

There are spoilers ahead, but I don’t think that knowing the plot in advance is going to hurt your appreciation of the movie; it might actually help.

American journalist sentenced to 8 years in Iranian prison

Iran has convicted an American journalist for spying, and sentenced her to 8 years in an Iranian prison.

Now that was stupid of Iran, even if she really was spying. A journalist is the one type of person that other journalists care about the most, thus guaranteeing Iran a lot of bad press (which is why this is the top story on the NY Times website). Iran should have convicted an oil and gas worker; the news media wouldn’t have cared. They would have figured it served him right for working in an industry which harms the Planet.

What will Obama do?

New York Times says we need MORE immigration in order to "compete"

I was asked to comment on this New York Times article in which executives at technology companies say that we need MORE, MORE, MORE foreign workers, otherwise the United States will not be able to “compete” with the rest of the world. The sympathies of the journalist who wrote the article clearly lie with the technology executives.

Immigrants like Mr. Mavinkurve are the lifeblood of Google and Silicon Valley, where half the engineers were born overseas, up from 10 percent in 1970.

How did the United States ever manage to compete in 1970?

The answer is that in 1970, more Americans became engineers. In 2009, what white American would want to go into an engineering-type profession when half the people there weren’t born in this country (and thus generally speak poor English), and a good percentage of the half that were born here are Asian-Americans? Despite the SWPL love of “diversity,” young SWPLs always choose to work in fields where everyone else is white and born in this country. (Very few of the white computer programmers I've worked with were SWPL whites. In contrast, just about every student at NYU Law school seemed to be a young SWPL.)

If immigration were cut off, then there would soon be a shortage of tech workers, and salaries would increase, and more college students would therefore major in engineering, and the United States would continue to compete just as well as before except that people born here would be earning higher salaries.

Who's controlling the economy now?

Now here’s a news story which pisses me off to no end.

Now that liberal Obama is president, the EPA, already stacked with people who follow the religion of post-Christian Mother Nature worship, has made the “scientific” conclusion that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” that the EPA is allowed to regulate without any new action of Congress.

Roger Martella, general counsel at the E.P.A. during the Bush administration, said the finding marks the official start of an era of controlling carbon in the United States.

“The proposal, once finalized, will give EPA far more responsibility than addressing climate change,” Mr. Martella said. “It effectively will assign E.P.A. broad authority over the use and control of energy, in turn authorizing it to regulate virtually every sector of the economy.”

In reality, carbon dioxide is not a “pollutant,” it’s a harmless gas which has always naturally occurred in the atmosphere, and there isn’t even any valid scientific conclusion that it causes “climate change.” This is no different than Christian scientists concluding that there is "intelligent design," except that the Constitution protects us from Christian scientists but not from Gaia-cult scientists, because people don't realize that the Gaia-cult is a new religion.

Spiritual and religious in the GSS

Someone suggested the General Social Survey. Lo and behold! Preliminary 2008 questions and results are now available on the UC Berkely archive site, and there is a brand new question about "spiritual" and "religion." Unfortunately, the text of the question is missing, and the complete text of the responses are cut off, but let's look at this chart:

1: I follow a religion and consider myself to be a spiritual person interested in the sacred and the sup
2: I follow a religion, but dont consider myself to be a spiritual person interested in the sacred and
3: I dont follow a religion, but consider myself to be a spiritual person interested in the sacred and
4: I dont follow a religion and dont consider myself to be a spiritual person interested in the sacred

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -Weighted N		RELSPRT
		1	2	3	4	ROW TOTAL
POLVIEWS	1: EXTREMELY LIBERAL	2.3 12	1.8 5	3.1 9	7.5 11	2.9 37
	2: LIBERAL	7.4 38	10.1 30	19.5 57	11.7 16	11.4 142
	3: SLIGHTLY LIBERAL	7.1 36	11.1 33	13.5 40	17.1 24	10.7 133
	4: MODERATE	36.5 185	41.5 124	39.0 115	39.2 55	38.6 479
	5: SLGHTLY CONSERVATIVE	21.2 108	13.1 39	13.8 40	12.6 18	16.5 205
	6: CONSERVATIVE	21.0 107	18.6 56	10.2 30	9.2 13	16.5 205
	7: EXTRMLY CONSERVATIVE	4.5 23	3.7 11	.9 3	2.6 4	3.2 40
	COL TOTAL	100.0 508	100.0 299	100.0 294	100.0 141	100.0 1,241

Thus we see that people who are not religious, but spiritual, are liberal, while people who are both religous and spiritual are conservative. We also see that the terms "conservative" and "liberal" have become very closely associated with being or not being a religious Christian. Which explains why Obama is president. Rich people tend not to believe in religion (even if they believe in spirituality), so they want to vote for the more liberal candidate. Thus did the rich prefer the "liberal" Obama over the "conservative" McCain.

Spiritual but not religious, an oxymoron?

Razib at Gene Expression posted an endorsement of a new blog, Your Religion is False! (But so is everyone else’s). I see that the topmost post is entitled spiritual, but not religious.

Yes, as others have pointed out before, the phrase is an oxymoron. “Spiritual” is a synonym for “religious,” and “religious but not religious” is a nonsensical phrase. Yet I finally get it. The phrase really means “religious but not Jewish or Christian.” Read in that context, it makes perfect sense.

If a person is religious, but not Jewish or Christian, what religion is she? Well she is a member of the religion that I have previously named the Gaia Cult or post-Christian Mother Nature worship. This is my name for the religion. The people who adhere to it don’t even realize that they are a member of a new religion. Eventually, the new religion will have some sort of name. I doubt it will be called the Gaia Cult because that’s something atheists like myself have named it. I also doubt it will just be called “spiritual but not religious.” It will likely have some name which reflects the perception of its adherents that their religion is the truth and non-belief is evil.

Post-Christian Mother Nature worship is interesting because, unlike most religions which are top-down religions, this new religion is a bottom-up religion. In other words, there is no single “prophet” responsible for the new religion the way Joseph Smith created Mormonism (although there are some top-level influencers like Al Gore). Instead, the new religion is funneling up from the bottom, created by the SWPL masses which reject Christianity because it has been disproven by modern science, yet still craving some sort of religious belief, the irrational belief in the supernatural being something which has been biologically programmed into our brains for some bio-evolutionary reason.

It’s actually quite interesting to be present at the birth of a new major religion. Major world religions are only created every thousand years or so. On the other hand, let us not forget the Chinese adage about “interesting times.” New religions are scary things. Christianity has learned to adapt itself to freedom and democracy, Who knows what paths this new religion will take? The natural tendency of a religion’s True Believers is to indoctrinate the young, and the punish heretics. At the blog post linked to above, Joel writes about how children in the Los Angeles school system are being indoctrinated into this new spirituality. And while the Constitution protects us from Christianity, the Constitution seems to offer no protection from post-Christian Mother Nature worship, because its adherents are convinced that their beliefs are not a religion at all, but merely enlightened scientific understanding of the world.

It should be pointed out that most religions start out in a pseudo-scientific manner. Once upon a time, the description of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis was as believable an explanation of our origins as any other competing explanation. But science has subsequently disproven it. More recently, Mormonism started out pseudo-scientific, with its references to an ancient Egyptian language (subsequently shown to be non-existent), and its incorporation of nineteenth century understanding of astronomy with its explicit reference to other worlds such as Kolob, thus embracing the very scientific understanding of the universe for which Galileo was put on trial by the Catholic church. Whenever I think of Mitt Romney, I wonder how someone as smart as him could believe in something as stupid as Mormonism. But “spiritual but not religious” is also pretty stupid. How much do you want to bet that Heather Eisenlord, the Skadden Arps attorney who is going to use her $80,000 pay for not working to install solar panels in the Himalayas, identifies herself as “spiritual but not religious”?

Personality is an hereditary trait

Steve Sailer found an article from New Zealand explaining that personality is determined at birth:

Personality types are linked with structural differences in the brain - which could explain why one child grows up to be impulsive and outgoing while another becomes diligent and introspective.

Anatomical differences between the brains of 85 people have been measured and linked with the four main categories of personality types as defined by psychiatrists using a clinically recognised system of character evaluation.

The researchers said the brain differences are structural and can be measured as variations in the size of specific regions of the brain that appear to be linked with each of the four personality types.

As an HBD expert, my response to this is “duh!”, but this article is more significant for the fact that it was written in the first place. Yet I predict that it will be ignored by the politically correct left which enforces the religion of egalitarianism and the dogma that everyone is born the same. Because once one concedes that personality is a genetically influenced trait, one then should realize that some personality profiles are correlated with higher earning power, and that some races have, on average, different personality profiles than other races.

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What the heck are these personality types?

The four personality types were classified as "novelty seeking" - characterised by impulsive actions; "harm avoidance" - marked by pessimism and shyness; "reward dependence" - with an addictive personality; and "persistence" - who are people who tend to be industrious, hard-working and perfectionist.

What happened to the Big Five personality factors? “Novelty seeking” sounds like extraversion/introversion, “harm avoidance” like emotional stability/neuroticism, and “persistence” like conscientiousness. I don’t think that “reward dependence” has an analogous Big Five factor. And whatever happened to what Han J. Eysenck called “psychoticism”?

I’ve also come to believe that future time orientation is a very important personality factor which is positively correlated with IQ, and which may or may not be a component of conscientiousness.

As little as we know about intelligence and IQ, we know even less about personality factors.

Bill Clinton's father

From an article about Bill Clinton’s 60 Minutes interview:

On the front porch of boyhood house in Hope, Ark., Mr. Clinton told Rather about his stepfather, Roger Clinton, the second husband that his mother, Virginia Kelley, married. His nickname, says Mr. Clinton, was “Dude,” and he was an abusive alcoholic.

“I do not believe that she would have married him if he had ever abused her -- before they got married. That’s something that happened afterwards,” says Mr. Clinton. “But you might say that – maybe mother liked guys that were a bit rakish. She probably thought she could tame them. They liked her.”

But Virginia couldn’t tame Roger Clinton or stop him from attacking her with his fists, a pair of scissors, and even shooting his gun at her.

Now there’s a story that’s repeated over and over again. Woman is sexually attracted to a bad boy, and thinks she can reform him if they marry, but instead she just gets beaten up by him. It’s this story which should make people rethink the wisdom of arranged marriages. Roger Clinton is not the kind of guy that parents would want their daughter to marry.

The good-for-nothing Roger Clinton fathered Bill Clinton’s half brother, the good-for-nothing Roger Clinton, Jr., who served time in prison for distributing cocaine.

But who fathered Bill Clinton? Probably not William Jefferson Blythe, Jr, the guy his mother was married to when he was born, because that guy was stationed in Italy nine months before the birth! (According to unsourced internet rumors.) Whoever really fathered Bill Clinton, he passed on superior upper-middle-class genes. Bill Clinton went to Ivy League schools, married another Ivy League graduate, and raised a respectable daughter (unlike Sarah Palin whose children are all losers and sluts).

The Bill Clinton story is a story of how genes trump environment. Yet it was his unique prole environment which enabled him to have such great success in politics. Voters don’t like to elect a guy with upper-middle-class genes who was actually raised in an upper-middle-class environment. Voters prefer a guy they can imagine drinking a beer with, a guy who looks like the guy they work with and not like their boss. Bill Clinton’s prole upbringing allowed him to connect to these voters despite his upper-middle-class genes.

Yet Bill Clinton’s father passed on one bad trait to him: the predisposition to philandering. According to testimony from Arkansas state trooper L.D. Brown, Bill cheated on Hillary with countless numbers of women:

Q. Well, in your comments to The American Spectator, The American Spectator says that you said you solicited new sexual partners for Clinton throughout the state over a hundred times. Was that a true statement?

A. That's what I estimated it at, but not all of them came to their fruition, if you will, that I know of.

Q. Some of them did, according to what Clinton would tell you?

A. Right.

This is the inevitable outcome of the declining role of marriage and increasingly common single motherhood. When women have sex with men they aren’t going to marry, they have sex with men whom Roissy would say have “game,” which is internet slang for the ability and desire to get women into bed. Bill Clinton didn’t get his “game” from reading blogs or usenet groups, Bill Clinton was born with natural game which he inherited from his father who gamed his mother into having sex with him while her husband was in Italy.

Although Bill Clinton and his unknown father are smart men with upper-middle-class genes, the more typical guy with game who fathers out-of-wedlock children is Levy Johnston, the unemployed high-school-dropout with a drug-dealing mom who allegedly fathered Bristol Palin’s son Tripp.

Half Sigma was right

As the NY Times article says, Obama wants to “virtually reinvent [the economy] with sweeping changes in health care, energy and education.”

As I predicted back in June, in response to people who said that there would be no difference between a Republican president or Obama, and that Obama would actually lower government spending by pulling out of Iraq:

Obama is to the left of Clinton and even to the left of Carter, and he will have more support from Congress than either of those two presidents had. If he becomes president, he will do the most damage to the nation since Lyndon B. Johnson. History shows that any big spending initiative and new government programs created during the Obama administration will live on in perpetuity. Any money saved by pulling out of Iraq a few years earlier will be spent many times over in the long run.

We are seeing my prediction come completely true.

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I am confident that I will also be proved right about my suspicions about Palin pregnancy issues. With the National Enquirer taking interest again, hopefully things will blow soon.

"Levi and Johnny had a big blowup during their sophomore year in high school when Levi and Bristol hooked up while she was still with Johnny.

Bristol seems, to me, like the kind of girl who would get pregnant twice within a relatively short period of time. And being pregnant twice is the best explanation for why she was mysteriously removed from high school during her senior year and never graduated.

Disgusting

“kim” writes in a comment:

Half Sigma, can you start a thread to discuss the deal that Skadden is offering all of its fifth and sixth years - take a year off from work, travel the world and enjoy yourself and get paid 70 or 80k to do so - and then come back in a year to your old job - I think this is an interesting subject

She must be referring to the NY Times article with the following quotable content:

Although [36-year-old Heather Eisenlord is] not yet sure exactly what she’ll be doing on her trip, she has some ideas. She would like to teach English to monks in Sri Lanka and possibly help bring solar power to remote parts of the Himalayas. She’ll probably hit 10 to 15 destinations around the world, most likely practicing not-for-profit law wherever she can be helpful.

The best part of all: Skadden is paying her about $80,000 to do it.

This disgusts me on so many levels.