Half Sigma

Response to a VDARE letter about college admissions

A commenter, today, quoted a letter posted at VDARE.com. Let me reproduce it below:

An Angry Chicago Father Says America’s Top Universities Shut His Daughter Out Because She’s White; etc.

From: Philip Sanchez (e-mail him)

Spring is a time of passage for many high school seniors who will learn the admission decisions from America’s best universities.

But it can also be, as it was for my daughter, the worst time in an aspiring student’s life.

”Jane” attends one of Chicago’s best, most diverse and most academically-driven public high schools.

Over the past four years, Jane has worked hard to gain admission to one of the top schools.

She has a 3.94 cumulative GPA, a 32 score on the ACT, four years of Chinese language study, attended a Chinese university last summer at the U.S. State Department’s expense, and has achieved the highest scores on all five of her advanced placement tests.

Jane hopes to major in Foreign Affairs and continue her Chinese language education.

Despite her glowing resume, Jane received rejection letters from Yale and Stanford and was wait-listed at Georgetown's Walsh School for Foreign Service.

On the other hand, her minority fellow students were accepted into Ivy League schools even though they had significantly lower GPAs and test scores.

While those kids and their families celebrated, my hard-working daughter, overwhelmed with a sense of rejection and failure, cried her eyes out.

Simply stated, since Jane identified herself as Caucasian on her application, she was held to an entirely different standard than the minority students.

My daughter just learned that as a white person in America, the deck is stacked against her. The elite take any possible reason to choose minorities over whites.

The irony is that, even though we have a Hispanic surname because my stepfather adopted me when I was a small child, my daughter and I have always refused to put down anything other than Caucasian on questionnaires. Both of my biological parents are white.

But we know that, if she had applied as a Hispanic and with her grades and test scores, all the universities would have accepted her.

As long as the liberal elite use race to select who gets an opportunity and who doesn't, then racism will live on.

Neither my ancestors nor I had anything to do with slavery, Yet 150 years later, Jane based on her skin color paid for those transgressions from long ago.

America is headed in a direction that would make our ancestors spin in their graves. I am ashamed and completely sick to my stomach.

Peter Brimelow comments: I wrote this reader: “Please tell your daughter that the system is completely corrupt and will collapse before she reaches my (admittedly advanced) age.”

The publishing of this letter along with the one line comment at the end demonstrates why I never read VDARE except for Steve Sailer articles, because the rest of that website is generally not very interesting.

[According to a Yale Daily News article, Yale's class of 2010 is 81.6% white and Asian.] Thus, the daughter of the guy who wrote the letter was unable to successfully compete for admission against the whites and Asians who represent 81.6% of the Yale student body. While it’s true that that it’s a lot easier for a black or Hispanic, but especially for a black, to get admitted to Yale, this does not mean that Mr. Sanchez’s daughter would have gotten into Yale even if the admissions were colorblind.

Mr. Sanchez’s daughter had excellent grades in school, and a 32 on the ACT is equivalent to a 1420 on the SAT which is a pretty high score. [Explanation: that's 1420 on the old 1600 point scale after it was renormed in 1996, which is equivalent to 1370 before 1996. 32 is equivalent to 2160 on the new 2400 point scale.] But, as I’ve blogged about before, Yale has rejected applicants with perfect scores on their SAT. If you want to get into Yale as strictly an academic egghead, a 32 on the ACT just isn’t good enough.

Here is the most important secret about applying to elite colleges: they are looking for leadership. (Please click on the leadership link and read it if you haven’t read it before.)

Mr. Sanchez, obviously from a middle class and not an upper middle class background, naïvely assumed that because his daughter had really high grades, and because she used her summer to do extra studying at a Chinese University, this means she’d be a shoe-in for Yale.

If Mr. Sanchez’s daughter had attended a private school instead of a public school, the private school would have groomed her for Ivy League admissions by making sure that she participated in sports and leadership activities which look good on a college application. Elite colleges claim their admissions are “need-blind,” but they are very clearly not class-blind.

Mr. Sanchez is evidently pissed, and he has a right to be pissed because he thought that he was doing the right thing to ensure his daughter had a bright future ahead of her. But instead of being pissed at the fact that the admissions criteria favor upper-middle-class applicants with parents and private school college counselors who know how to game the system, he’s pissed about affirmative action.

I also think it’s rather stupid of him that he encouraged his daughter to check the white box when she has an Hispanic surname and a legitimate claim to an Hispanic cultural background via her grandfather. This demonstrates some sort of naïve middle class honor. The upper middle class will game the system any way possible in order to get their children into the best schools.

Jocks v. Tavernier; nothing interesting here

Emily Bazelon, a journalist with a law degree from Yale (what a waste of a Yale law degree, she could be a partner at BIGLAW) has an article in Slate where she complains that Sonia Sotomayor isn’t liberal enough for her because of her behind-the-scenes activities in the case of Jocks v. Tavernier, 316 F.3d 128 (2nd Cir. 2003).

Ms. Bazelon is probably a crazed liberal, because I don’t see anything to get excited about at all in reading the court’s decision (which Sotomayor didn’t write). It’s not a referendum on whether someone deserves to win $600,000 for being jerked around by an *ssh*l* cop, or whether the jury made the correct decision. It’s a narrow issue about whether a perpetrator’s invocation of an emergency can negate probable cause, and the Court concluded that it can’t, which makes sense to me. My guess is that it's an issue which Sotomayor felt strongly about it because it came up in a case when she was working as a prosecutor.

Jocks is more about rebuking the Judge for giving the wrong jury instruction and an excuse to write about an obscure legal doctrine than it is about anything else. The real world implications of the decision sucked for the plaintiff (who I don’t think deserved such a huge reward, even if his version of the facts are true, and they sound like they could be, in which case the cop was indeed being an *ssh*l*). However, appellate judges tend to live in an ivory tower in which they ignore the real world results of their decisions. Sotomayor’s assertion that she uses her rich Latino experiences to produce better decisions doesn’t seem to apply here. This case is more of a classic example of how appellate decisions turn on subtle and minor legal issues seemingly insignificant to the non-legal observer. Or maybe Sotomayor wanted to rule against Jocks because he was a white guy and Tavernier was a black guy? (I in fact have no knowledge of either litigant's race, although Tavernier sounds like a black name. Probably someone reading this blog post will figure it out.)

A DIFFERENT VERSION OF THE STORY – IT’S ALL ABOUT RACE

Thanks to a link provided by a helpful commenter, here’s a version of the facts, probably the way Sotomayor saw them.

A big white guy, Jocks, comes up to Tavernier, a small black man, and calls him a nigger, and then bashes him in the face with the telephone. Despite the obvious guilt on the part of Jocks (after all, anyone who uses the “n” word is guilty), the racist jury ruled in favor of the white man and awarded him $600,000.

This would explain why Sotomayor felt compelled to convince the other two judges on the panel to come up with a ruling to help out Tavernier.

Why is anyone suprised about Sotomayor?

Some commenters here, and other conservative bloggers, are outraged over the Sonia Sotomayor pick. I think all of my outrage was used up this year. Sotomayor is exactly the kind of Supreme Court Justice I always knew Obama would appoint, so there’s neither surprise nor any outrage (because outrage requires a little bit of shock). In a September, 2008 blog post in which I explained why I was voting against Obama even though he is smarter than McCain, I wrote:

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

Half Sigma told you so, but I don’t really consider it a big moment to brag about my prescience because this was such an obvious prediction you would have had to be a moron not to see it coming.

Sonia Sotomayor’s low future time orientation

People have been talking about Sonia Sotomayor’s financial disclosure forms. After much Googling (it was strangely hard to find something everyone has been talking about), I found them here.

Yes, Sotomayor isn’t much of a saver. Her only assets are a Citibank checking account and a Citibank savings account. The Checking account is valued at $15,000 or less, and the savings account was between $15,001 and $50,000 in 2005, and increased to between $50,001 and $100,000 in 2007. This probably demonstrates low future time orientation. On the other hand, she seemed to have high enough future time orientation to get good grades at Princeton.

It's also interesting how she has no interest in investing in stocks or mutual funds. All of her money is in a savings account. That's how my grandfather who lived through the Great Depression saved his money.

UPDATE -- SHE'S RICH AFTER ALL

As a commenter pointed out, according to Brad Delong (who deletes comments), her federal pension plan as a net present value of $2.5 million and she has $1 million of equity in her Tribeca condo. Getting a law degree from a Top 14 school pays off after all.

The Alpha male

This guy fathered 21 children with 11 different women. By definition, this makes him an alpha male.

Economists who deny HBD

Tyler Cowen has a blog post today where he asserts that “Steve Sailer is wrong,” and he’s talking specifically about human biodiversity.

Some may wonder whether Cowen is a closet HBD believer who needs to assert his political correctness in order to keep his cushy job as a professor at George Mason University, or if he’s just politically incorrect. I suspect the latter. HBD-believers tend to overestimate the number of closet HBD-believers. Few people, even smart people, are free thinkers, and most smart people decide what to believe based on what other smart people believe, and everyone believes that there are no genetic differences between races which respect to intelligence. But strangely, a lot of HBD-believers read Cowen's blog, and Cowen doesn’t want to tell a large segment of his readers to go away because he likes having a lot of readers. So the result is this rather wimpy ant-HBD post which will appease the liberal faculty of GMU but at the same time tease his readers into thinking that he’s open to new ideas.

I think there’s a bigger issue here regarding economists who deny HBD. Economics is the study of a specific type of human behavior, and because human behavior is largely influenced by our genotypes, ignoring this important influence results in false economic theories. Even worse, most economists substitute the reality of human behavior for the ridiculous assumption that every person is a hyper-rational calculating machine when making economic decisions. Computer scientists refer to this as “garbage in, garbage out.”

Economists' denial of human behavior tends to show up especially in their incorrect understanding of the relation between "human capital" and education.

I believe that Robert Frank is the economist most likely to be a closet HBD-believer. It's also interesting that Frank tends to favor liberal rather than conservative policy recommendations. Maybe his guilt about believing in HBD makes him act more liberal to counterbalance his inherent sinfulness.

Why Justice Cardozo was Hispanic

It’s important that we insist that Cardozo was Hispanic so that Obama can’t take credit for appointing the first Hispanic Justice.

I’m sure that Portuguese Americans check the box when it’s to their advantage, even though they have nothing in common with Mexican and Latin American immigrants. What idiot wouldn’t check a box if it meant getting a better job or getting into a better school?

It's not clear why Hispanics should get any benefits from checking a box in the first place. Our white ancestors didn't bring them here as slaves, they moved here voluntarily. (I should mention that my own white ancestors were living in Europe at the time in countries not involved slavery.) Furthermore, Hispanics aren't even considered a "race," and most Hispanics consider themselves "white." Well, if they are white, and if they were born here and thus face no language issues, how the hell can they claim that they are discriminated against? If the discrimination is all in the Hispanic surname, well Cardozo's surname was Hispanic.

If Democrats don’t like Cardozo being considered Hispanic, they control Congress, they can create an official definition of what they think “Hispanic” should mean, since it was a government-created term in the first place. Their new definition can exclude Cardozo if they want. Then Cardozo would no longer be Hispanic.

Anthony Weiner to keep his cushy job

Anthony Weiner explains that the he will not run for Mayor of New York City. That shows some good personal common sense. Why give up a cushy job as a U.S. Representative, which he can probably keep for life given how difficult it is to topple an incumbent, to wallow in the muck of a New York City mayoral campaign?

Some of you are thinking, “who the heck is Anthony Weiner.” Some guy whom Chuck Schumer groomed to take over his House seat when he became Senator. If you’ve seen Weiner on TV (he used to appear on Hardball a lot, but I haven’t been watching those talking-heads news shows for a long time), he doesn’t really look like the typical alpha male politician. You can see some rather low quality photos here.

Do we like our jobs?

Commenter “uselessidiot” wrote something I can agree with (and I wish I had written myself):

[re: ]"I thought we all pursued work in our fields of interest because we wanted to do that work?"

If this is really a question, the answer is "No, we don't." I would unscientifically guess that about 5-10% of the population actually has the job they want. Maybe 25% if you include people working "near" their field, like a make-up artist who wants to be an actress or a wannabe doctor working as a receptionist at a hospital. I'd even bet that about 50% of the population wouldn't "enjoy the work" at any job, unless you include things like wine taster, bikini contest judge, food critic, etc.

Do you really believe that most accountants just love accounting? If they got a check from the government for the same amount of money without having to work, how much of their time would they spend accounting?

What happens more often is that people get sucked into this or that field, then justify after-the-fact that they "like it" so they don't have to admit to themselves that they spend half of their waking hours doing something they do not particularly enjoy. This is why welfare is such a dangerous concept for a society - most of the jobs that contribute to our well-being require someone to do something that they wouldn't otherwise do.

A way of looking at income by state

The following table shows the number of non-Hispanic white people, with college degrees, between the ages of 18 and 65, with total personal income greater than or equal to $50,000.

The most obvious trend is that states with large cities (or bordering large cities in a neighboring state) have a higher percentage of respondents with $50K+ income.

Normally people think the Deep south is the poorest region of the country, but for the demographic group being examined, the lowest income states (where less than 40% of the demographic group have income greater than $50K) are: Iowa, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia. Of those states, Oklahoma is the only one with a significant black population (8.4%), but even that's below the national average of 13.1%.

The highest income state, DC, has the highest black population (55.7%).

I think there is some evidence that college educated whites who live near blacks have higher incomes than college educated whites who don't.

Data was compiled from the 2007 Census ACS data available online from IPUMS-USA.

Not the first Hispanic Justice

Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, is being billed as the first Hispanic Justice, but clearly under the definition of Hispanic, “persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central or South American, or others Spanish or Portuguese culture or origin, regardless of race,” Benjamin Cardozo, whose surname is Portuguese, was the first Hispanic Justice.

Everyone says that Bill Richardson is an Hispanic governor, and I don’t see how Bill Richardson is any more Hispanic than Benjamin Cardozo.

Sotomayor’s assertion that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male” really rubs me the wrong way.

* * *

Peter A writes;

Portuguese are not Hispanics. Anyone who has lived in an area with a significant Portuguese population knows this. That's like saying Sicilians are Hispanic.

If your point is that Portuguese are white Europeans, then my response is, “of course they are!” But whiteness has nothing to do with the official definition of Hispanic. Why do you think we always have to use the phrase “non-Hispanic white” when talking about U.S. Census and other survey data? Because respondents are allowed to say they are white and Hispanic.

“Hispanic” is an incredibly dumb definition. People really want to talk about race and not whether someone’s last name is Spanish or Portuguese. White Americans whose families moved here from Spain or Portugal have none of the social problems associated with non-White minorities.

When people use the word “Hispanic” they are probably thinking of people from the Americas other than Canada and the United States with at least some Amerindian ancestry. In other places someone of mixed Amerindian and white ancestry is called “Mestizo,” a phrase which liberals won’t use because they think it implies that there’s something wrong with mixing the races. “Mulatto” isn’t a very popular term either.

Because “Hispanic” implies non-white, even though it’s not part of the official definition, is why most Americans with Spanish and Portuguese ancestry don’t want to be called “Hispanic,” because they want to be considered regular white Americans like people who moved here from other European countries. Liberals might say this makes them sort of racist for not wanting to be grouped with non-whites.

Great photos in the NY Times

There’s a NY Times article about a high school in Georgia where there are two proms, a black prom and a white prom. Yes, it’s rather shocking to find any vestige of segregation remaining anywhere in the United States, but apparently the setup is legal because the proms are not run by any public employees.

But what I really liked about the article is the accompanying audio slide show, which features many photos of prole southern white girls with big breasts wearing revealing prom dresses.

If it didn’t suck to be poor: why Europe is different

Please read this post, because it explains everything that until now has been a mystery to liberal and conservative economists alike.

I recently pointed out that the primary reason why it sucks to be poor is that you have to live near other poor people. And the reason you don’t want to live next to poor people is because they have underclass values.

But, what would happen if poor people had the same middle class values as everyone else? Well, if that were the case, a major motivation for not being poor would be removed. People wouldn’t be motivated to work extra hard in order to insulate themselves from poor people. This explains why Europe is different than the United States.

The problem with the United States is that we have, for a long time, had a substantial minority of blacks who have an average IQ of only 85 and also have higher extraversion and aggression. The result is an underclass with far worse values than in countries without any low-IQ minorities. Of course there will always be inferior values among the poor than among the rich, but in homogenously ethnic countries there will be much less difference in values between the lower and upper classes. A poor person in Norway is living next to other white Norwegians who are part of the same Norwegian culture and whose values aren’t that much worse than wealthier Norwegians. In contrast, living in a housing project in an American city with a substantial black population is a scary proposition for a white person with middle class values.

In Europe, there is less of a penalty for being poor, therefore there is less motivation to work hard to move up a notch. This is why Europeans enjoy shorter working hours and get many more weeks of vacation. They don’t have to work their asses off in order to insulate themselves from the black minority. According to Wikipedia, Europe is only 1% black, and most of the blacks are more recent immigrants—the percentage of blacks was even less fifty years ago. European countries, such as France, which have let in a lot of low-IQ immigrants, will no doubt become more like the United States in their social attitudes.

There is a second factor which contributes to how much it sucks to be poor, and that is population density. In a heavily populated area, there is a premium placed on living in a central location, and this motivates people to make more money to avoid living some place where it takes two hours each way to commute to work. This explains why densely populated cities have higher per capita income, and it explains Japan, a very densely populated nation with a high per capita income. Although the Japanese have a high per capita income, their standard of living sucks relative to their income because the typical resident of Japan faces long commutes, tiny living spaces, and even more hours worked per year than in the United States. The same could be said when comparing the New York City metropolitan area to a part of the United States where there is low population density and a low minority population, such as the northern Midwest or Maine (which is the nation’s whitest state).

The genetic IQ of a nation’s residents also has a big impact on national income, a fact which has been well documented within the HBD community. See Steve Sailer’s review of the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations. But IQ doesn’t explain all differences. Until my blog post, it has been a mystery why the United States has much higher per capita income than Western Europe, despite the fact that Western Europe has a higher average IQ because of lack of dilution by low-IQ minorities. Conservative types have insisted that it’s socialism which is keeping Europe down. But in fact, socialism is a symptom of the differences between Europe and America, and not the cause. As Steve Sailer has explained quite frequently, there is a greater inclination to want to help out your fellow citizen with socialist programs when your fellow citizen is just like yourself. Our minority underclass causes people to work harder and make more money to avoid living near them, and it also causes people to be less in favor of socialist government programs.

The best place in the world to live would be a country with a homogenous racial population with a high IQ, and a low population density. That describes places like Sweden and Norway pretty well, places which liberals in the United States consider utopias to be emulated. All we need to do to get there is kick out the minorities and lower our population density—of course that can’t happen, they are citizens too, most of them anyway. The United States is forever doomed to be not like Sweden or Norway. But we could prevent our country from getting worse by halting immigration.

* * *

The black minority in the United States also explains why the United States has grown to be more automobile dependent than Europe, an issue I discussed recently in my post on why it’s less expensive to own a car. Living in a community where you need to own a car is a great way to insulate yourself from people who are too poor to own a car. This is the reason why “walkable communities” are only for the rich, because a walkable community affordable to the average blue collar worker would attract undesirables.

The decline of intellectual conservatism

Richard Posner, a guy whom I greatly respect (except for when he wrongly dissed Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities) writes:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

(Hat tip to "David Hume.")

I have been saying mostly the same thing.

Regarding “the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives,” the problem is with the stupidity of the objectives. Had the objective been to give Iraq an ass-whooping for failure to abide by the terms of surrender in the first Gulf War, then the objective would have been successfully met with minimum American casualties. But the objective of transforming an Islamic country in the Middle East into a peaceful secular democracy is a dumb objective for a military.

Posner is also wrong about global warming. It's bogus, a creation by Gaia cultists to fulfill the religious need for an end-of-the-world which a religion's followers can prevent by acting in a holy manner.

Anti-Semitic Ron Paul evidence

Thanks to a reader for emailing me this link. The blog Little Green Footballs reports:

[O]n the YouTube channel of a vile racist freak going by the name of “NonJewMedia,” the only subscriber is ... whoever runs Ron Paul’s official YouTube channel.

I regularly get a bunch of angry responses whenever I point out Ron Paul’s anti-Semitism.

After Sarah Palin, Ron Paul is the Republican I most wish would go away.

* * *

UPDATE: the guy from Little Green Footballs changed the wording of his post. "NonJewMedia" subscribes to Ron Paul and not the other way around. Which makes the find a lot less interesting--I think everyone already knew that Ron Paul is the favorite politician of anti-Semites.

Manual labor sucks, and you shouldn’t let your children do it

There were a few comments critical of my previous post on liberal arts grads working on organic farms. They said I was looking down on people who do blue collar work, or something like that.

I’m not embarrassed or ashamed to say that I think that manual labor sucks, and I’m glad I don’t have to do it. Especially outdoor manual labor. If the prospect of doing hard labor in the hot summer sun or freezing winter isn’t bad enough, the pay also sucks. For this reason, agricultural work has to be one of the worst possible jobs, which explains why a lot of this work is done by Hispanic immigrants (both legal and illegal).

Of course I am aware that someone has to do this work, and also that more than half the people have IQs below 100 and aren’t qualified to do intellectual work, and wouldn’t enjoy such work anyway. I have nothing against blue collar workers, so long as they have middle-class values and not poor-people values.

I am aware that there used to be a social norm that teenagers and college students would do unskilled labor jobs after school and during their summers. That norm has changed a lot. Even back in 1981, John T. Molloy in his book Live for Success (which purports to give advice on how to become more upper class) advised you not to let your children work in such jobs, because they don’t learn any useful career skills and may even pick up lower class values towards work which would hurt them in the future rather than help them.

Today, the norm for upper-middle-class children is that they are busy building up their resumes with unpaid extracurricular activities [including sports] and internships. Upper-middle-class parents know what they are doing. If you want your children to have a shot at a good career, you should do follow their lead. College graduates without any experience in the field they wish to work aren’t highly valued, which is why those unpaid internships are important to create the impression that they have relevant work experience.

RESPONSE TO COMMENTS

Ted's comment in response to other comments:

HS's advice on preparing kids of high-end careers is spot on. Some posters here seem to prefer to wallow in their resentment of the upper class rather than plot methods of getting their kids into it.

Look who wants to be a farmer

According to the NY Times, liberal arts students want to spend the summer working at organic farms.

I thought the reason people went to college in the first place was to avoid blue collar work like farming.

One student tried to report her boss for giving antibiotics to a sick sheep, but the “national organic regulations” allow using antibiotics to treat illness.

I wouldn’t hire one of these kids to work on my farm (if I owned one). Organic farm owner Kristie Knoll agrees:

“These are kids who are not used to living in a small trailer or doing any kind of work,” Ms. Knoll said. “Most of them are privileged and think they want to try something new. They need structure. We need farmhands.”

Lionshead beer

I bought a sixpack of Lionshead beer yesterday, because it was the cheapest beer at Morton Williams. For $5.99 plus a bottle deposit, one could argue that it’s not that cheap, but the fact that everything in Manhattan that’s in walking distance from my apartment is ridiculously overpriced is an issue addressed in my recent blog post on why it’s less expensive to own a car.

The label says it's made in Pennsylvania, which to me says that it’s a quality product. Quality in the sense that I don’t have to worry about the beer being poisonous. I can’t say the same thing for the beer next to it which was imported from China.

The Lionshead website euphemistically says that the beer is a “college favorite.” This implies that it’s an ideal beer for people on a budget who just want to get drunk and don’t care how the beer tastes. The label says that it’s a “deluxe” beer, but that's an example of what contract lawyers would call “puffing.”

So how does it taste? Like beer. I couldn’t really say if is is any better or worse than Budweiser or Miller. It lacks the heavy bitter taste of imported European beers. I’d buy it again if it’s still on sale.

Why did I buy the cheapest beer if I’m willing to spend a lot of money for expensive whiskey? I don’t know. Whiskey seems like something for which you should appreciate the taste, while beer is just to quench your thirst and give you a bit of a buzz. (What ever happened to those beers my grandfather used to drink, like Schlitz, Piels, Schaefer, and Pabst Blue Ribbon?)

Moissanite sales down

Charles & Colvard, the company which manufactures moissanites, reports that sales are down 26%.

As you may or may not know, a moissanite is a gemstone so similar to diamonds that no one can tell the difference upon a casual inspection. Naturally occurring moissanites are even rarer than diamonds, but they are artificially manufactured by Charles & Colvard which sells them for about one-tenth the price of diamonds.

One might think that, during a recession, people would substitute moissanites for more expensive diamonds, but that thought would be wrong.

It would be too bad if the company went out of business. Who wants to spend thousands of dollars on an overpriced diamond for an engagement ring when a one carat moissanite sells for less than $500?

See my previous blog post on the diamond scam.

* * *

Do I recommend CTHR as an investment?

On the one hand, the company is trading for a fraction of its book value, and there is no debt (and thus no danger of an immediate bankruptcy). But the problem is that CTHR's book value is primarily composed of a huge unsold inventory of moissanites. Who knows if that stuff is really worth anything?

Companies with market caps of $9 million tend to delist from the NASDAQ under the explanation that the costs of maintaining NASDAQ compliance aren’t worth it, and the company is better off trading on the Bulletin Board. But then the stock becomes illiquid and unsellable, and without the public scrutiny of a NASDAQ listing the company management pays themselves big salaries while the company keeps losing money until there is nothing left for shareholders.

So no, I’m not investing anything in CTHR right now, even though it would be a ten-bagger if they somehow manage to turn themselves around and don’t delist.

* * *

A company called Diamond Nexus Labs sells diamond simulants (not clear how it's different from cubic zirconium) for only $100/carat. Now THAT's cheap. (Actually, it's darn expensive for a tiny chip of rock, and a lot more expensive than regular CZ, but compared to diamonds it's really cheap). I guess consumers don't see the value proposition of a moissanite when it's not a "real" diamond but yet it's five times the price of other diamond simulants.

Washington Post vs. New York Times

A reader emailed me a link to a Washington Post article which explains what it’s like to be poor. Surprise! It sucks!

The irony is that, according to the Washington Post, what sucks most about being poor is that you can’t afford to own a car. But last week, I wrote about the ridiculous New York Times blog post about how much better off we'd all be if we didn't own cars.

Will the liberal news media make up its mind?

* * *

It should be pointed out that the real reason it sucks to be poor is that you have to live next to other poor people, a reason which is too politically incorrect for the Washington Post to acknowledge. The article mentions something about dangerous neighborhoods, as if some strange geographical or geological phenomenon causes crime and not other poor people. Nearly all of the failings of poor neighborhoods can be explained by the simple fact that they are full of poor people.

David Brooks on CEOs

According to David Brooks, boards of directors are selecting the wrong kinds of CEOs:

Steven Kaplan, Mark Klebanov and Morten Sorensen recently completed a study called “Which C.E.O. Characteristics and Abilities Matter?”

They relied on detailed personality assessments of 316 C.E.O.’s and measured their companies’ performances. They found that strong people skills correlate loosely or not at all with being a good C.E.O. Traits like being a good listener, a good team builder, an enthusiastic colleague, a great communicator do not seem to be very important when it comes to leading successful companies.

What mattered, it turned out, were execution and organizational skills. The traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work long hours.

I have to start out by warning my readers not to always believe David Brooks when he presents psychology and sociology research, because he has been fantastically wrong on issues like genius and IQ and the black-white achievement gap, and that's just during the current month! But there doesn’t seem to be a political correctness angle here, so maybe the current article is truthful enough.

Right-wing economists and bloggers claim that CEOs make such a huge amount of money because boards are selecting the absolute best candidates for the job, and being the best is worth a lot of money when companies have billions of dollars in revenues. But we see the truth is that boards have no idea how to select the best CEO, and it’s likely that the traits needed to become a CEO aren’t what’s needed to be the best CEO.

The correct explanation for CEO pay is that it’s structural. The way corporations are set up, the guy who’s the CEO is able to transfer huge sums of money from other stakeholders to himself, regardless of whether he’s doing an especially good job as a CEO.

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In a comment, “athelas” writes:

Where in the article does it actually say that "boards have no idea how to select the best CEO"? Brooks presents his argument as counterintuitive to the average reader but that does not mean that boards are not looking for organizational talent.

Of course! Members of the boards of directors are geniuses with god-like understanding of business and economics. Too bad we can’t get these people to run the government. Things would get better.

But wait, they are running the government! Michelle Obama was a director of TreeHouse Foods, a public company traded on the New York Stock Exchange. How happy we should all be to know that the country is in good hands, as long as Barack listens to his wife.

She was paid $51,200 a year for her services. How do I get a cushy job like that?

The Muslim menace

Four Muslim ex-cons were arrested for trying to blow up some synagogues. Luckily they were stupid Muslims--what they thought were bombs were actually fake bombs provided by the FBI.

Conspicuous consumption and the status illusion

This John Tierney NY Times article is rather interesting. It explains how people buy luxury consumer goods because, subconsciously, they believe it will increase their status and thereby attract friends and mates. But the reality is that is that wasting money on overpriced luxury goods doesn’t really produce a whole lot of status improvement. And also, people have an irrational desire to impress strangers. Rationally, you shouldn't care that much about what people you will never see again think of you.

Portland in the WSJ

There’s an interesting article in the WSJ about how Portland is a magnet for young college educated (intra-national) migrants, but when they get to Oregon they can’t find any jobs at all, and have to settle for underemployment like food service or dog walking, and many eventually move away after extended unemployment.

Is there an opportunity for businesses to open offices in Portland to take advantage of the excess college graduates? Or are the type of people who move to Portland the slacker types who don’t really make such great workers?

As I’ve pointed out again and again, Portland is the nation’s whitest major city, so we see how SWPLs (educated bohemian liberal white people) are willing to put up with underemployment in order to not live near blacks and Hispanics. (Of course they would never frame their desire to live in Portland that way, because that would be racist, but that's what's really happening.) What does this tell us about the wisdom of allowing massive Hispanic immigration?

Minorities Affected Most as New York Foreclosures Rise

Steve Sailer makes fun of the latest NY Times headline, and then it occurred to me, has there ever been a headline which reads something like “whites hit hardest”?

Also, the NY Times clearly means NAMs and not minorities. Not a single one of the minorities mentioned in the article is either East Asian or South Asian.

And it should be obvious that blacks and Hispanics would be hit hardest by foreclosures, because banks were more likely to make them imprudent loans in order to avoid the appearance of discrimination

There also seems to be some truth to the assertion that certain lenders were taking advantage of the low IQs of black borrowers (the average black person has an IQ of only 85) by overcharging them on their interest.

We really need to bring back usury laws. People who aren't good enough credit risks to qualify for some maximum interest rate shouldn't be borrowing money at all.

Meghan McCain

This is written in response to comments critical of Meghan McCain’s intelligence.

There are some Meghan McCain videos here.

She definitely sounds smarter than Sarah Palin. I don’t think her IQ is below 115, one standard deviation above the norm, which normally is not smart enough to get into Columbia if your mother isn’t filthy rich and your father isn’t a well known Senator. She majored in Art History, an easy major if her desire was to merely to pass the classes and she wasn't Columbia material in the first place.

Meghan is obviously not interested in appearing scholarly or serious. She’s happy to effect a ditzy sorority-girl demeanor. She is not interested in pursuing any sort of difficult career like medicine, law, finance, engineering, etc. She can do whatever she wants because of who her parents are—she doesn’t need to earn money because her mother is rich, and people will pay attention to her writings and videos, and even pay her a lot of money for them, because of who her father is.

At least she’s not an embarrassment to her father, and in fact she’s a plus because people like to watch a perky blonde and they overlook her lack of ambition and her spoiled rich girl attitude. Nevertheless, I think it’s stupid for people to anoint her the new voice of the Republican Party (if that article is really true). I’m sick and tired of people becoming politicians based on who their relatives her, and I’m sick and tired of Republican “strategists” who think it’s a good idea to hype as politicians people who have no interest or understanding of conservative policy issues.

And yes, I think she's adorably cute.

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Also, the photography on her blog really sucked. Something about that really rubs me the wrong way. She has her friend, supposedly a "professional photographer," tagging along with her on her dad's campaign, and everyone is oblivious to the fact that the friend doesn't seem to know anything about digital photography.

I guess that obvious displays of incompetence among the privileged really annoy me.

Bristol Palin, high school graduate, but still unwed teenage mom

Look here, Bristol Palin graduated from high school, a year too late. There’s absolutely no explanation as to why she didn’t graduate from high school a year ago when she was supposed to. Is she just too stupid to finish high school in four years? Was her mother too busy promoting herself to notice or care that her daughter was screwing up her studies? Or was she unable to complete high school because she was pregnant with some other baby besides Tripp (who was allegedly born seven months after she should have graduated high school originally and therefore shouldn’t have prevented her from graduating). Whatever the answer, it doesn't reflect well on Sarah.

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In other interesting political news, Meghan McCain is apparently a spoiled brat (but at least she graduated from an Ivy League college and she's not a single mom), and Todd Palin was seen palling around with Greta van Susteren.

UPDATE: OOPS, SORRY

Bristol Palin was born 10/18/1990 according to her speeding ticket record. I now confess to being somewhat confused about whether she is graduating on time or not.

Maybe I just assumed she didn’t graduate on time because she never seemed to be actually attending high school. Maybe those "distance learning classes" really work.

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Yes, she's definitely graduating on time, even though she stopped attending high school in the middle of her junior year.

I personally would like to see any tests she took or schoolwork she did to see if she really learned anything.

Stereotyping computer people

An LA Times article about a computer science school perpetuates negative stereotypes about people who study computer science:

"I don't think anybody has enough fun at Neumont -- it's a bunch of people addicted to sitting in their mom's basement playing World of Warcraft and drinking Dr Peppers," said Murray, who himself was drinking a can of Dr Pepper at 8 a.m. on a Friday.

He might have a point. Instead of Mardi Gras, students hold Nerdi Gras, a video game party featuring "nothing that would ever happen at Mardi Gras," according to organizer Keith McIff. And though the student commons doesn't have couches or fast food (or for that matter, any hot food at all), it does have a "Star Trek" pinball machine, a pingpong table and a flat-screen TV frequently hooked up to Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

Some of Neumont's female students, who make up about 5% of the 266 enrolled this year, are on a mission to get their peers to tune in to the world around them. In October, one posted a message on Neumont's Web forums protesting what she called "offensive odors."

"The truth is there are people in this school who just don't smell pleasant at all," she wrote.

If you become a computer programmer, you will have to work with these people. See my post on why a career in computer programming sucks.

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And if you think maybe that a quality school like MIT attracts less nerdy individuals, then read this story about the WoW Pod, invented by MIT students. It has everything you need to play World of Warcraft in a pod: computer, food, and toilet, so you never have to leave the game in order to take food or bathroom breaks.

NY Times still loves Michelle Obama

The latest worshipful article features a picture of the First Lady showing off her buff arms to a class of third graders.

What does pro-life mean?

The Gallup Poll reported Friday that 51 percent of Americans now call themselves pro-life rather than pro-choice on the issue of abortion, the first time a majority gave that answer in the 15 years that Gallup has asked the question. [link]

Unfortunately, “pro-life” seems to have no relation to any other traditional family values. Just the opposite, it seems to give single mothers a justification for being single mothers. It would be far better if opposition to single motherhood were rising instead of opposition to abortion.