Half Sigma

Green buildings that waste energy

What I figured out from the NY Times article about certified "green buildings" that actually use up more energy than the average non-green building, is that the key to making a building energy efficient is small windows.

Waffle House wedding

Everything you’d expect from a prole wedding:

Fat people
Strange facial hair
Guests wearing t-shirts
Cigarette smoking
Tattoos
Bride and groom already have kids together
Reception at the Waffle House!

David Alexander gets it

David Alexander writes:

"High achieving poor kids are mostly white. Liberals hate that and hate them."

Arguably, that's what fuels theories that society is racist. When you have poor whites doing well, while rich blacks are failing, outside of HBD, the only "reasonable" explanation is racism. The problem is that nobody wants to admit to HBD because it essentially means the permanent uselessness and de facto inferiority of black people . . .

That’s a point I've made before. If HBD is off the table as an explanation for black under-performance, racism becomes the only reasonable explanation for the phenomenon.

The Game

I finished reading The Game by Neil Strauss, the autobiographical story of how a short, bald, mild-mannered reporter becomes a great Pickup Artist (PUA) named “Style.” The reader is treated to raunchy stories about the exploits of Style and other PUAs, and the strange story of how a bunch of PUAs try to live together in a mansion called “Project Hollywood.” Besides the author, the other main character in the book is Mystery, who was a major leader in the PUA movement. The book also teaches us the rules of “game,” which is the term used to describe how to pick up women.

My impression is that only a few super-top-level PUAs such as Style himself are able to use game to pick up regular women. The other PUAs are merely picking up sluts. But the thing about sluts is that they normally only sleep with alphas (called “AMOGs” in the book for “alpha male of the group”). Learning game allows the PUAs to also sleep with their share of sluts.

I don’t think Roissy would disagree with me, as he wrote something similar about sluts in his blog. This book has helped me to understand what Roissy is talking about in his blog. But after reading the book, I think the real winners are neither the PUAs nor the alphas, but rather the beta guys who married their high school sweethearts and never had to deal with the dysfunctional dating scene among twenty and thirty-somethings.

Greg Mankiw HBD awareness

In response to a NY Times column with a graph showing that kids from higher income families score higher on the SAT, Harvard professor Greg Mankiw writes:

This graph is a good example of omitted variable bias, a statistical issue discussed in Chapter 2 of my favorite textbook. The key omitted variable here is parents' IQ. Smart parents make more money and pass those good genes on to their offspring.

In contrast, liberals believe that rich parents are buying something with their money which causes higher SAT scores.

NY Times article about the plight of Top 14 students

A few people have tried to point me to the NY Times article about how students at Top 14 law schools (not called the Top 14 in the article, but the only schools mentioned in the article are Top 14 schools) are having trouble finding work because BIGLAW hiring is down 50%.

This article contains no real useful information about the legal job market, which is that if you don’t go to a Top 14 law school, your career prospects will suck even when times are good. The New York Times has failed to get out this warning.

Big Debt, Small Law had the same reaction, especially to the NYU student quoted as saying, about not being able to find a job, “Quite frankly it would be an absolute disaster. I don’t know what I’d do.”

Since you’re obviously at a loss for words, allow us here at Big Debt to flesh-out your future: Welcome to reality, comrade. You’re barreling head-on into the Stalag 17 of temporary doc review hell! Welcome to $28 an hour straight time, along with cockroach infested basements and retina-burning hours of staring mindlessly into a computer screen. Did I mention the complete lack of health insurance? The lying, pimp-daddy temp agencies who skim 20% of your paycheck each week, cut rates and overtime mid-project, and do everything short of fellatio to keep the sociopathic, money-grubbing Biglaw partners happy at all costs?”

Yes. This; my friend, is “what we do” for a living here at Big Debt. The absolute disaster that you try to “avoid imagining” is the stark reality that many of us 2nd tier grads have been living in for years. Scant media attention has been paid to us, and few barrels of ink have yet been drained writing of our plight. But that doesn’t make it any less real, or any less painful.

Some justified schadenfreude if true, but I suspect that even in bad times the NYU grad will have better luck than the typical ttt grad in good times. (Ttt is internet-speak for any law school that sucks, which is all of them except the Top 14.)

The NY Times has not reported the real story about law school, which is the story of the people who go to the law schools not mentioned in the article.

* * *

There have been some comments recently in which some people have wrongly said that it’s OK to go to a school outside the Top 14 if it’s a cheap state school. I disagree. It’s still a waste of three years that could have been used to earn money and experience at something else, and unless you can live with your parents while attending law school (something no one in their twenties wants to do because girls like Kate look down on it) you will still wind up borrowing money that can’t be paid back with the lousy job prospects.

2009 SAT scores: good news for Asians

2009 SAT score results are in.

Good news for Asians, their scores are higher than last year, up 8 points on math and 3 points on the Critical Reading section. Asians now outperform whites on the Writing section. (Kate’s complaint in the previous post that Asian men lack verbal skills has no basis in fact.)

Bad news for everyone else, especially NAMs, “the score gap generally widened between lower-performing minority groups and white and Asian-American students.” Experts who deny HBD are stumped by the results.

* * *

Found the link to the official College Board report.

Hoofed and dangerous: Britain's killer cows

Hoofed and dangerous: Britain's killer cows:

Four people have been trampled to death by cows in just over eight weeks this summer, prompting British farmers and the Ramblers Association to warn yesterday of the potential dangers.

Kate complains about Asian men

Kate, a 27-year-old Asian woman, left the following comment:

I wish Asian men would stop acting like they own women just because they share a race. You're not guaranteed a certain type of women in dating so stop complaining when you get out competed. I'm an Asian girl and recently I started dating white men. To be honest, I only started because while I was in med school I was really stressed out and my lovely Asian guys all told me to go jump off a bridge if I'm scared and anxious of not doing well.

So lesson number 1: Learn some empathy. You know that pesky SAT verbal section that you ignored because you knew you would get a 800 in math? Well, turns out it will actually serve some purpose in life when discussing feelings and being humanistic. Women like feelings. We like men who understand our feelings especially when we are scared.

Lesson 2: You may be nice, honest, and loyal but if you don't pay any attention at all to your body I'm never going to want to sleep with you. As much as I try, I can't force myself to be sexually attracted to a man with skinnier arms and smaller shoulders than me. I'm 5'8" and 120 lbs but most of the Asian guys who hit on me are pretty much scarecrows. You know, lift some weights now and then, it's the 21st century. Having a professional degree and a basic wardrobe isn't going to cut it.

Lesson 3: Stop being so gloomy and bitter. God....it just screams loser. Please. At least pretend to have a positive outlook on life...

Lesson 4: Let go of Mommy and stop living at home! So many Asian guys I know live with their parents and don't understand why they are single at 30. Please! If the only place you have to be alone with a girl is in your car or the park...you're not going to score a chick whose alternative is a Caucasian guy with a apartment on the Upper East Side even if he is a known womanizer.

Lesson 5: Be more flexible. I had a Asian guy friend once who I dated in the past. I knew that he wanted to marry me and I probably would have out of high school loyalty if only he didn't say no to just about ever demand I made of him. Would it really hurt him to put on a pirate costume and go out with me on Halloween? Really? If it's important to me even if he is just a nerdy engineer who is terrified of attention, do it to show me you care. Make an attempt. What do you have to lose?

So there we go. These are just my pet peeves from dating Asian men. At the age of 27 I think I can say now that if I don't marry outside of my race, I'm hitting up a sperm bank.

My thoughts:

#1: My guess is that Asian men don’t talk about their feelings because they are introverted and not because they lack verbal ability. According to actual 2008 SAT scores statistics from the College Board (click here), Asian men and Asian women have the exact same average score on the “Critical Reading” section of the SAT: 513. This is slightly below the average white score, but higher than the score of any other ethnic group identified by the College Board. Unfortunately, the statistics don’t separate out Asian test-takers who were born overseas. I suspect that if Asians born overseas were excluded, the average Asian male would score the same as the average White male, if not higher.

#2: Asian men are born skinny, they can’t help it. I’m sure they would prefer to be big and buff if they had the choice. I still think that more than 75% of Asian men weigh more than 120 lbs and have thicker arms than Kate.

#3: Asian men are probably gloomy and bitter because of the stuff Kate wrote in #2.

#4: Immigrants just don’t understand the American custom that children should live away from home. It really doesn’t make any economic sense, and Asian immigrants tend to be very frugal because they grew up in poorer countries. Even for Asian men born in this country, their frugality is handed down to them by their parents. It takes a few generations to wear off. Frugality is also associated with higher future time orientation, and I suspect that Asians have a genetic predisposition to higher future time orientation than whites. It's these same factors which caused Jews to be stereotyped as being cheap, but after many generations of living in the United States, Jews have finally learned to be spendthrifts like other Americans.

#5: Kate's boyfriend should have taken her out for Halloween. However, Asian men tend to be introverted, and dressing up in a costume is more of an extroverted activity. Kate admits that it was outside of his comfort zone.

In conclusion, I think that Kate just likes white men better than Asian men, possibly because watching television taught her to value those male characteristics more commonly found in white men than in Asian men, but Kate feels sort of guilty about it, so she is trying to blame Asian men for stuff that isn't really their fault.

Asian trophy wives

There was a link to this article about Asian trophy wives in the comments.

Here’s my take: it’s not as easy to find a trophy wife as it used to be. While, by definition, these rich old men are alpha-males, they are alpha not because of their personality and physical appearance, but rather because of their wealth and/or fame.

Young Western women, today, are more likely to be grossed out by the idea of having sex with a withered old man. Marrying a man for his money has become less socially acceptable than it used to be. This is especially true among smarter, college-educated, upper middle class women. A rich man who wants a young white trophy wife may have to settle for a slutty prole white woman.

So I think that this phenomenon (if it really is a phenomenon and not something the author made up in order to write an article about something) is a result of Asian women not being as grossed out by old men because Asian culture is a generation or so behind Western culture. The author of the article mentions how the Asian trophy wives are well educated with good careers—that’s the type of white woman who is least likely to be interested in being some old man's trophy wife.

* * *

Lee writes in a comment:

In addition to white men conquering our lands in East Asia by stealing our gunpowder invention, now they're stealing our women. This is why a lot of Asian men are bitter, because or your imperialistic past and taking things from our lands, and now you're taking over women? Another reason why we're bitter is because while you white guys with yellow fever can get Asian girls, we can't get white girls in return because of all the stereotypes you white guys created to "disenfranchise" us of all women.

Also, if these white men are to date outside their race, why pick a race where the guys get screwed over the most and have little to choose from? In other words, if you white guys dated Latinas, the Latino guys wouldn't get screwed over since they'll still enjoy access to white women to make up for the Latina women going over to white guys. On the other hand, Asian guys can't do that, while white guys get Asian girls, Asian guys can't make up for that shortage since white women don't want them. So why do you white guys pick a race where the male side get screwed over the most? Keep your damn fetishes to yourself and stop screwing us Asian men over with the negative externality you have created upon us.

Lee has some valid complaints.

* * *

Roissy, who is an expert on women, writes in his blog:

It’s now my belief that most white women harbor a deep distrust, even jealousy, for Asian women. They see the Asian girl, like they see foreign women fresh off the boat, as competitors for the white men they have come to expect will bow and scrape before their precious white American vaginas. This jealousy contrasts sharply with the indifference they feel towards black and latino women taking their white men.

Big Debt Small Law strikes again

Another awesome post from “Big Debt, Small Law.”

My favorite excerpt:

Biglaw never really wanted to “dip into” these shitty Non-Top 14 schools in the first place, and when they did they held their nose and cringed, like a husband fishing his wife’s wedding band out of a septic tank. They looked for the few “diamonds” to pluck from what was otherwise a festering puddle of excrement. This “tier-two trolling” was necessitated by the insane credit bubble and alphabet soup of shitpaper that had to be pushed during Bush’s ”boom” times: CDO’s and CDS’s and other worthless securities and phony “investments” engineered by Biglaw’s criminal pals on Wall St.

Now those days are forever gone. The large firms have a veritable Tiffany’s of jewel-encrusted job seekers from which to pick, and are unlikely to ever again stick their toes in the Tier 2 mud puddles for “talent.” Why pan for gold when stacks of bullion surround you?

I also laud the blogger for demonstrating HBD-awareness:

Shit, every time New York tries to raise the passing score by a tenth of a point the gutter schools start screaming “racism” and lobbying for “extra time” for their special needs grads to sharpen their Crayolas and wipe the drool from their chins. Pathetic.

Black man marries white woman

[Photographer asked me to remove the link. I decided to comply, because the link was actually HELPING his business by boosting his Google PageRank, and for all I know, there might even be a blog reader in NC in need of a wedding photographer, so if he doesn't want people to find his website, so be it. If he doesn't want the whole world to see his photos, he shouldn't post them on the internet in the first place. Next time I link to a wedding, I'm going to use indirect linking.]

I am pretty sure this is a middle class wedding for the following reasons:

(1) Pretty good quality wedding photography.
(2) Nice church.
(3) Methodist, mainline protestant denomination.
(4) Band, not a DJ.
(5) Reception took place at UNC alumni club, so someone graduated from college.

But indications of proleness:

(1) Interracial marriage. *
(2) Men have weird facial hair.
(3) Fat bridesmaid.

Notice how black men like their women on the voluptuous side.

* It's my theory that upper middle class white women are more likely to say there's nothing wrong with marrying a black man, but are less likely to actually do it themselves. On the flipside, there's no indication of proleness when a white man marries an Asian woman.

* * *

Peter says about white man Asian woman marriages:

My impression is that it's usually quite the opposite. At least if you exclude mail-order bride situations.

I agree, the typical white man in those marriages is smart and well educated (thus from a middle or upper middle class background), but introverted. However, an Ivy-League-educated white woman once told me that she looks down on white men who date or marry Asian women, and she feels that they do it because they can't attract a white woman.

* * *

A commenter noted that her shoes are Pesaro, which are cheap shoes. Of course, it makes sense to not spend a lot of money on shoes that you're only going to wear once, but the typical bride likes to blow a lot of money on her wedding outfit. A lot of bridal dresses cost enough money to feed a family in a third world country for several years.

I find the use of her school colors in the wedding theme to be pretty middle class. (On the other hand, using the colors or emblems of a professional sports team would be very prolish.) She was wearing a plastic watch in her dressing room, but I don't see it on her after she left, so I think she was just using it to know what time it was and she knew it didn't match her bridal outfit. (The custom of the wedding photographer taking photos of the bride getting ready is weird but well established.)

Regarding the bride, she's pretty enough to attract a lot of white beta men. She's voluptuous, not fat, and she looks pretty cute in the first photo where she's holding up her cheap shoes. She, no doubt, chose this guy because of his more masculine characteristics. He's probably pretty buff underneath his suit. He may have been a college athlete, which would further help to explain the wedding's college theme.

Cow kills 9-year-old boy

As reported by Fox News:

A 9-year-old Alaska boy has died after he was dragged several hundred feet by his own cow at the Kenai Peninsula State Fair in Ninilchik.

And it was his own cow too! You really can't trust those things. Turning on his owner.

It's great that readers keep emailing me these cow articles! Thanks.

Family Ties: Give Your Uncle Arthur a Kiss

I watched another episode from Season 1 of Family Ties, “Give Your Uncle Arthur a Kiss.” In this episode, a coworker of Steven Keaton’s, Arthur, makes some inappropriate physical contact with the daughter, Mallory.

Steven Keaton dresses down Arthur, and in the last scene there is a tender bonding moment between father and daughter. Mallory says that she was afraid to tell dad about Arthur because he was Steven’s friend, but Steven explains that nothing is more important to him than his family, and then they say how they love each other, and they hug. End of show.

This is really exactly the sort of thing that’s missing from television today; a show depicting a responsible man who looks after his family.

Unfortunately, I didn't find this episode funny because the subject matter was too serious.

* * *

Justine Bateman, who played Mallory, was 16 years old during the first season, and she looked awfully cute. Somehow she lost her cuteness as she grew older. I think it was because they made her lose weight, and this caused her face to look drawn and less cute.

Where the Hasidim eat in the summer

For only $12, Hasidic men get an all-you-can-eat buffet in a run-down basement. Apparently, the Hasidim still go to “bungalow colonies” in the summer, something that secular Jews stopped doing a long time ago. (See the movie A Walk on the Moon — I quite enjoyed it). If the men had seen the movie, they might not want to let their wives spend the summer away from them.

The NY Times must be running out of stuff to write about.

What happened to shows like Family Ties?

I watched an episode from the first season on Netflix (as a streaming video), and it was hilarious. It may be 25 years old (recorded in 1982), but it has held up really well.

The question is, what happened to shows like Family Ties? In other words, shows that demonstrate good middle class values: two parents still married to each other, who have responsible jobs, and who care about their kids and always have time for them.

How are kids in the ghetto supposed to learn how to behave properly if there are no TV shows teaching them proper middle class behavior?

* * *

Of course, my pet peeve with all TV shows portraying teenagers is that the teenagers are always too old. Michael J. Fox was 21 years old in 1982, but playing a 17-year-old. He was picked for the role because he was short and therefore youngish looking for 21. By the time of the last season, Tina Yothers, who played his little sister Jennifer, looked like the bigger sister.

Man or woman?

Looks like a gay man to me.

The NY Times article about the incident shows that the NY Times editors don’t understand the difference between the words “gender” and “sex.” The dictionary defines gender as “the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex.” The issue isn’t whether Caster Semenya behaves like a man, but whether biologically she (or he) is entirely of the female sex.

Law school employment statistics should be audited

A commenter at the WSJ Law Blog wrote:

[T]here needs to be reform/abolition of the ABA’s law school accreditation and new, uniform, SEC like reporting requirements for law school admission and employment statistics.

As far as I know, I was the first person to suggest that law school employment statistics need to be treated like public corporations’ financial statements. They need to be reported according to standardized principles, and they need to be audited by independent auditors.

My idea is finally being spread about.

The WSJ Blog post quotes an anonymous lawyer from Texas explaining the reality of solo practice:

Most of the solo attys I know here in Texas are about to go broke, at least from what I am hearing. Family law and criminal defense attys have really been hit hard. It’s always been that way. Come to think of it, going solo is usually followed by going into another profession entirely.

This is the outcome of supply and demand. There are zillions of law school graduates with nothing else better to do. The 80/20 principle probably applies to solo practitioners, that is there are 20% who are doing pretty well, and the other 80% are as described above.

Because of marketing economies of scale, all of the most profitable legal work goes to BIGLAW.

A thanks to Exposing the Law School Scam for pointing me to this WSJ blog post.

Don't go to law school (unless it's Top 14)

Reader “king obama” sent me a blog post about how much it sucks to be a temporary document reviewer in New York City. This is what happens to people who go to bogus law schools, which are all law schools except for the Top 14.

New York’s also-ran diploma mills like Brooklyn, Cardozo (called Car-Bozo by employers), Pace, St. John’s, Hofstra, Touro, and the infamous New York Law School (whose motto is a chagrined “no, we’re not NYU”), are essentially fathering a new breed of white-collar underclass: heavily indebted, sporadically employed, poorly paid, bereft of health insurance and stuck in dead-end temp jobs that pay lower hourly rates (after student loans are deducted from salary) than many unskilled day laborers earn.

The only part of the blog post I disagree with is how much he disliked the law school curriculum. I liked law school, but I suppose law school is geared towards only the smartest people, people who have high enough LSAT scores to get admitted to a Top 14 law school. So that’s another reason to only got to a Top 14 school, because if your LSAT scores aren’t high enough to get admitted to Top 14, you probably won’t enjoy law school anyway.

Smart people cooperate better

In an AEI article, Jason Richwine writes about the finding that “diverse” neighborhoods lead to lack of trust and cooperation. (Steve Sailer pointed me here.)

I wondered the same thing as Jason, but I will put it more bluntly. Is it really diversity that causes this problem, or one specific minority group, blacks? I find it hard to imagine that there is lots of trust in homogenously black neighborhoods. Just the opposite, all-black neighborhoods are the most crime-ridden. I would suspect that the percentage of the people with IQs below some threshold number, such as 85, is what leads to bad communities.

As un-PC as it is for Robert Putnam to point out that diversity is bad, it's even more un-PC for him to point out that black people are bad.

This reminds me of my old Apprentice blogging. In season three of The Apprentice, Donald Trump separated the participants into the college educated team and the non-college-educated team. Here is what I wrote about one episode:

The task for this episode was to run a run-down motel in Seaside Heights (boy, those places looked vaguely familiar!). The non-college educated team lost, and the project manager, Brian, was fired. And deservedly so.

In this episode we begin to see the difference between the college educated and the non-college educated, which is basically the difference between the lower classes and the middle/upper-middle class. The non-college educated team, basically, lacks class. They were screaming and yelling at each other, using the "F" word, and putting off the motel guests with their loudness. The ritualistic polite behavior of the college educates allows them to work better as a team.

Brian is supposedly a "self-made millionaire" at the age of 29. But he's also an abrasive moron with absolutely no self control. This proves that you can be a person with few redeeming qualities and still be successful in real-estate sales. A very important life lesson there.

The college-educated group, in other words the high-IQ group, cooperated better with each other. This was seen in many episodes from that season. Here is what I wrote about the famous cucumber episode:

Last week, Magna had the more creative idea and the executed it a lot better. It actually made sense to me, it shows the cucumber being washed, and then when the guy turns out to be homosexual, that part does add a new “twist.” It may not be suitable for broadcast TV, but I liked it nevertheless.

Net Worth lost the cucumber body wash assignment because they couldn’t get along. As I explained a few weeks ago, the ritualistic polite behavior of the college educates allows them to work better as a team.

Video of prole wedding

This video of a prole wedding has been viewed more than twenty million times.

Sometimes proles have more fun than their betters.

CLASS APOLOGY

I goofed, the bride went to college, that makes her middle class. I should have known better, I thought the bridesmaids had a middle class look and not a prole look about them.

Also, this is a Lutheran Church, which is a mainline Protestant denomination, and thus higher class than evangelical Christian denominations.

* * *

"Wade Smith" writes:

That display was so tacky that it makes them prole regardless of any other attributes they may have.

Famous Robert Capa photo a fake

There’s a NY Times article about how evidence shows that Robert Capa faked his famous photo of a falling soldier.

I believe it’s a fake because it’s a lot easier to stage a soldier falling than to actually capture it live. (What's the chance of having the camera pointed at the soldier at exactly the right point in time? Very small. Add to that the evidence that the "death" took place in a location where there was no fighting, that's more than enough to convince me that the photo is a fake.)

Cows kill English farmer

A reader, "Stopped Clock," alerted me to the fact that another farmer in England was killed by cows.

Don Imus is back

As I was reading the article about how the Fox Business channel wants to bring in Don Imus (remember Don Imus?) to host a show, I keep thinking, what does Don Imus have to do with business news?

I guess that Fox Business is going to give up on being a business channel and just be a talk show channel.

* * *

I watch CNBC for business news, but I still don’t forgive them for ruining Squawk Box by splitting up the best news gang in history: Mark Haines, Joe “the Kahuna” Kernen, and David “the Brain” Faber.

Bad news

Went to Whole Foods today, the line was just as long as ever. The boycott is not working.

Remember the days?

In her NY Times column, Alina Tugend says that “about half of American children 12 years and older have cellphones.”

Remember the days when cellphones were for adults?

Razib analyzes 2008 election

Razib has done some fascinating analysis of the 2008 election, and discovered that white people in New England were more pro-Obama than white people in Kansas and Texas.

Good news

From ABC news:

Joshua has been taking the bus to his local Whole Foods in New York City every five days for the past two years. This week, he said he'll go elsewhere to fulfill his fresh vegetable and organic produce needs.

"I will never shop there again," vowed Joshua, a 45-year-old blogger, who asked that his last name not be published.

This is good news because if other people follow Joshua’s lead, maybe the lines at the Columbus Circle Whole Foods won’t be as long.

* * *

It's also gratifying to see liberal SWPLs realize that Whole Foods is just another big corporation. Here's a heads up to you SWPLs: Apple is also a big corporation.

George Sodini was kicked out of his church

The first evidence I’ve seen that he wasn’t able to be completely normal. He was kicked out of his church in 2004:

Church officials had learned that Mr. Sodini was "bothering" a woman in the congregation, and the board of seven deacons removed him from the ministry.

"It wasn't that he was trying rape her or breaking into her home, he was bothering her," said Charles Matone, chairman of the board of deacons.

Who gets kicked out of a church?

* * *

A woman who worked at Don Steele’s dating seminar didn’t think that Sodini was the killer type:

Erin Micklow was 19 when she was hired to work at a dating seminar in Whittier, Calif., that George Sodini attended.

She told "Inside Edition" how uncomfortable Sodini appeared, but despite his unease, the shootings were the last thing she expected.

"George was the last person I would expect to do this, which is the most frightening because, basically, you always have to have your guard up around people because people always surprise you," Micklow said.

"He was really uncomfortable socializing, and it was hard for him to have a fluent natural conversation," she added.

Micklow, who was at the seminar to give the men feedback, said Sodini's shy manner didn't give off any warning signs.

"He was like the George Clooney type. He was a good looking man. He was really muscular. He looked like a tough guy, but not in a scary way," she said.

The key to understanding him is to note his discomfort in social situations.

Should officers in Jewish charities commit adultery?

There’s a New York Times article about how the woman who was the CFO of Hadassah had an affair with Bernie Madoff.

Strangely enough, there’s nothing in this article that addresses the issue of whether it’s in any way hypocritical for a high level person in a Jewish charity to be committing adultery and violating one of the Ten Commandments—you know, those Commandments that God allegedly gave to Moses after He freed the Jews from slavery in Egypt?