Half Sigma

Peter Curtin, marathon victim

The New York Times finally has an anti-marathon story. It profiles Peter Curtin, the 23-year-old who died running the Baltimore Marathon. Doctors were unable to determine the cause of his death. His body just died after running 25 miles. It turns out that Peter was a Princeton graduate and a graduate student at M.I.T. Unlike boxing deaths, which affects the lower classes, marathon deaths affect the SWPL class.

The article also mentions that there were “at least” six other marathon or half-marathon deaths this fall. Will anyone die tomorrow?

The 40-Something Dependent Child

There’s a NY Times Room for Debate topic on the “The 40-Something Dependent Child.”

I would like to point out that the current belief that children should leave their parents and strike out on their own is an aberration; the historically normal societal arrangement is that extended families live together, and communally chip in with their labor. Until the last century or so, nearly all of the labor was manual labor involving farming.

I would then like to point out how today, more so than at any time in the entire history of humanity, the labor of young people is valued less than the labor of older people. Back in agrarian times, an 18-year-old could contribute more labor than a 60-year-old. But today, if we are talking about the upper middle class in America (the kind of people who read the NY Times), the 60-year-old might be able to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, but the labor of the 18-year-olds is considered essentially worthless, even though he may be physically healthy and of above-average intelligence for 18.

OK, so the debate was about 40-somethings and not 18-year-olds, but it’s easy to see how the earning power or saved capital of the parents can vastly exceed that of the 40-year-old. Back in the old days, the middle class and upper class would train their children to take over the family trade or run the family holdings. Children weren't expected to strike out on their own and become successful without the help of their parents. It's the modern expectations which are messed up.

There was a brief period in the earlier part of the twentieth century when it was fairly common for children to have more earning power than their parents; that time is now over, but unfortunately it persists in our memories as what should be normal. But it's no longer normal. In the present and the future, it is more common for parents to have more earning power than the children. Parents need to go back to the old ways of taking a more active role in ensuring their children's earning power.

Anyway, it seems to me that no one understands the issues.

Bad precedent in Honduras

This Honduras deal sets a bad precedent, because it says that America supports the existing leader of a country, even if he acts against his country’s constitution and tries to set himself up as president-for-life. America, led by Obama, is rewarding the bad guy. Reagan would have supported the pro-American Micheletti government which kicked him out.

It remains to be seen if anything bad comes of this. Bad would be violence, Zelaya retaliating against the people who kicked him out, or Zelaya not leaving his office at the end of January.

Thomas Friedman column

Thomas Friedman (whose wife is super-rich) complains in his NY Times column that we’re not reducing our “footprint” in Afghanistan.

I thought Obama was supposed to withdraw all of our troops from “wars” that Bush started, thus saving the country huge amounts of money. What ever happened to that plan? The budget deficit is the highest in history, and our troops are still everywhere.

NY Times LOVES the Obamas

The NY Times Magazine preview demonstrates that the MSM still loves the Obamas.

OK, I confess I didn’t read the whole article, maybe somewhere in there it turns out that Jodi Kantor actually hates the Obama. But I did look at the slide show, which shows Michelle and Barack being all lovey-dovey.

Judaism, part 1

Intro: ideally, this should be a huge post like Mencius Moldbug likes to write, but I can’t write that much at once, so I’ll have to split this into several posts, if I don’t get bored with the topic first.

* * *

As readers of HBD blogs know, Jews have the highest IQ of any identifiable ethnic group. It’s usually estimated at 110-115, significantly higher than the white Gentile average of 100. Readers of this blog also know that intelligent people are less religious. American Jewish secularism is compounded by the fact that they live in a Gentile society. It’s hard to believe in something when the majority believes in something else. The end result is rather weird: Jews identify with a religion that most don’t truly believe in.

So what does Judaism stand for if not actually believing that the Torah is the word of God and that Jews must follow God’s laws?

Judaism, for some, fulfills the very strong need that humans have to belong to some sort of group. Jews can’t belong to Christian groups without believing in Christ, so for many Jews, belonging to a Synagogue fulfills the void in their life that they can’t fill by going to a Christian Church, even though they don’t actually believe in all that Torah nonsense.

In order for a religion to survive for thousands of years, it must possess some strategy for continuing its existence. Like most other religions, part of the strategy is encouraging its members to have lots of children, and to make sure the children are indoctrinated in the religious beliefs. An important part of the strategy has been to strongly encourage the children to marry other Jews—this is an important strategy for any minority religion, for without this survival strategy, the minority religion would be eaten up by the majority in a matter of a few generations.

Most religions keep up their numbers by attempting to convert the unbelievers. This strategy has not been pursued by Jews for hundreds of years, and it makes Judaism a rather unusual religion. If a gentile inquires about becoming Jewish, he or she will be discouraged rather than welcomed with open arms. In another quirk of Judaism, the children of a marriage between a Jewish man and a Gentile women are not considered Jewish unless they formally convert. Jews don’t understand why this attitude towards converts puts Gentiles off. From the Jewish perspective, they are doing Gentiles a favor by not trying to convert their children. But some Gentiles see the Jewish attitude towards conversion as some sort of conspiracy which involves keeping away outsiders.

The biggest threat to Judaism has always been that people will leave the religion because it sucks so bad. In order to be an observant Jew, you can’t eat any good food, you have to deal with eight days of Passover where hardly any normal food is allowed to be eaten, and then there is Yom Kippur when you have to starve yourself. You can’t do anything fun on Saturday, you have to deal with religious services which are hours upon hours of chanting in a language which no one understands, you have to spin a sad little plastic dreidle while the rest of the country is enjoying Christmas. And for all that you have to give up, Judaism doesn’t even offer you Heaven.

The traditional weapon against the temptations of not being Jewish has been guilt. In Jewish Atheist’s blog post, he explains how Jewish parents use guilt to ensure that their children marry within the religion and remain Jewish. When I was little and I asked my father why we couldn't eat bread during Passover (or why we had to comply with any of the other seemingly infinite number of Jewish laws), his response was “GUILT! It's GUILT!”

Comments on Jews and liberalism

I believe that the comments in response to the Steve Sailer article on Judaism and liberals are more informative than the actual article. Here are some of the good comments:

Bob:

"the left has for the last four decades been more anti-Semitic than the right."

Listen to any mainstream right-wing media source and you see endless attacks on: lawyers, hollywood, teacher unions, New York City, professors, etc.

It's not the mainstream right hates Jews per se, they just hate all the main Jew-heavy demographics.

Grizzlie Antagonist:

I have never had much time for the neocon/paleocon struggle.

For me, liberalism has always been the primary enemy.

I am both an individual of Jewish ancestry and a reactionary nut, and my eternal shame has always been the prevalence of Jewish liberalism.

I have always been proud of my ancestry and deeply and utterly ashamed of my contemporaries.

I commend the efforts of both Norman Podhoretz and Steve Sailer to come to grips with the shame that is the prevalence of Jewish liberalism.

But I still have not much time for the paleo/neo struggle.

Bob:

"Thus Jewish demonization of immigration reform patriots..."

Unfortunately "immigration reform patriots" are a group that overlaps with and does not completely disavow anti-semites.

Big Mistake.

In politics you have to pick your fights.

"Don't f-- with the Jews is good advice." It really also applies to any group with high verbal IQ: gays, indians, etc.

If you can't find anything nice to say, and you actually care about your cause, then say nothing at all. I guess your excuse is you're a journalist first and a activist second.

Fred:

Christianity is a tempting religion. Judaism has fast days; Christianity has feast days; Judaism has unleavened bread; Christianity has Easter chocolates, etc. Many reform and middling-religious Jews feel threatened that their children will be tempted to convert. That's not the same has being anti-Christian. Two facts belie that. 1) Jews wouldn't live in a majority Christian country if they were anti-Christian. That just wouldn't make sense. 2) 50% of Jews marry outside the faith; the vast majority of them marry Christians. Again, that wouldn't make sense if Jews were anti-Christian.

There is one group of Jews that has contempt for one group of Christians, and that is the liberal elite Jews who have contempt for Evangelists -- not because they are Christians, but because the liberal elite Jews view them as the sort of anti-rational rubes who were big enough dupes to vote for Republicans like Bush. Liberal elite non-Jews have the same contempt for these Christians, for the same reasons.

Whiskey:

Your intellectual blind spot like Buchanan's is Israel and Muslims. America's problem is not Jews in Israel. It is the spread of technology creating equalizers that allow shaky regimes to corner the oil in the Gulf at extortionate prices, while spreading nukes like wildfire. Insuring nukes get used to kill Western cities (eventually, the regimes there view it as a "super car bomb") and ushering in a new Dark Age of poverty and conquest. If Israel *never* existed in the first place simply substitute Jordan or Egypt for Iran's ire and the issue would be the same.

Indeed, I previously pointed out how it makes no sense for white supremacists to be anti-Israel, except that they hate Jews so much they can’t see that being anti-Israel doesn’t advance the movement.

Fred:

From a previous thread: Jews make ~25% of the American charitable donations of over $10 million. 90% of those large charitable donations made by Jews go to non-Jewish charities.

Most Jews donate their money to universal, not Jewish organizations and causes (e.g., such as hospitals, medical centers, non-Jewish universities, etc.): "Two studies, both conducted in recent years but with different methodologies, show that Jewish philanthropists contribute the overwhelming majority of their dollars to universal, rather than Jewish, organizations and causes. In 1998, professor Jack Wertheimer studied the 232 foundations in America that self-identified as giving at least $200,000 to Jewish causes. He found that even these foundations gave nearly two-thirds of their annual funding, $487 million, to non-sectarian causes. Similarly, a 2003 report by Dr. Gary Tobin and colleagues at the Institute for Jewish and Community Research examined the 865 philanthropic gifts of $10 million or more made by all American donors between 1995 and 2000. While nearly 25 percent (188 gifts totaling $5.3 billion) were made by Jews, the Jewish mega-givers made fewer than 10 percent of their gifts to Jewish or Israeli organizations."

Fred's point is made in response to people who insist that Jews only look out for their own interests. I suspect that 10% of charitable donations given to Jewish charities is in line with the percent of charitable donations from Christians which to go Christian charities.

Football is not healthy

Congress is hearing testimony about the brain damage suffered by football players. That’s right, football is not a healthy activity.

Neither is marathon running a healthy activity, but unfortunately, marathons are immune from scrutiny because it’s a SWPL activity. Last year, two people died running the New York Marathon. How many will die this Sunday?

* * *

Toyota is using the Marathon to advertise the Prius because Toyota has figured out that the Prius is the ultimate SWPL car, and the Marathon is the ultimate SWPL sporting event.

The Toyota marketing department must have read the SWPL blog: #27 Marathons, #60: Prius.

Republican Jewish Coalition

A coalition for Republican Jews seems like a good idea. I hope they are accomplishing something.

I recently read Steve Sailer's article on why Jews are liberal, and I’m not sure it’s the whole picture, but a big part Jews voting Democratic is because the Republican Party has become the Christian party and Jews don’t identify with Christianity.

I will have to write more about this topic in the future.

Tim Pawlenty gets involved in NY politics

Interesting news:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty waded into the politics of a New York special election for the U.S. House Monday by endorsing a Conservative Party candidate over the Republican candidate.

Pawlenty is supposedly conservative, yet also a loyal party guy. This surprise move must be some kind of maneuvering for the 2012 presidential election campaign, which could backfire on him. Mitt Romney has stayed out of this controversy.

I previously predicted that Pawlenty would be the 2012 Republican nominee, and my specific political predictions never come true. I’m better at identifying long-term trends rather than short-term popularity contests.

I previously wrote:

My reasoning for predicting that Tim Pawlenty will win is based on the fact that he’s the most boring candidate who’s commonly mentioned as a possible contender in 2012. Boring seems to be a big plus factor when it comes to raising money and not doing anything to screw up.

This move makes Pawlenty less boring.

* * *

Talking about New York politics, I saw governor Patterson on CNBC this morning. That guy is a real conservative. His message was that New York has to cut its spending or we’ll end up like California. He’s definitely the nation’s best Democratic governor, which probably explains why Obama opposes him despite being a fellow black Democrat. He’s too good for the Democratic party.

Ivanka Trump, convert to Judaism

According to People, Ivanka Trump converted to Judaism before getting married.

I know several of these “converts” to Judaism. I always wondered, did they one day just stop believing in Jesus just like that? The only born again former Jew that I know claims that he felt Jesus come to him while he was studying for the bar exam. Does this work in the opposite direction for “converts” to Judaism? Do they feel Jesus leave them? I suppose I should ask them, but it just doesn’t feel like an appropriate topic for conversation.

None of the “converts” I know seem especially pious or religious. For example, they never keep kosher. One may point out that most Jews also don’t act religious or keep kosher. This is true, but Jews by birth are just born into the religion without ever having made any conscious choice in the matter. It should be different for people who are theoretically proclaiming that they suddenly believe in the Torah and in God’s commandments and laws.

I also don’t understand why the Jewish spouse-to-be would require his fiancé to make a show of converting to Judaism if he isn’t religiously observant himself. What’s the point? Why not just make a clean break and live an atheist life free of guilt?

* * *

I hope, at least, that they didn't serve any pork or shrimp at the wedding.

Is organic food cheaper at a food coop?

In the comments to the previous post, people wondered why organic food is cheaper at a food coop. If it’s cheaper, here are the reasons in declining order of importance:

(1) Free labor. The coop requires people to work 2.75 hours every four weeks. The article implied that the coop still needs to hire some outside labor, but let’s assume that the food coop has about one-third the labor costs of a regular supermarket.

(2) $100 membership fee. It costs $100 to join the food coop, and that has to be deducted from the “savings.” It’s also implied from the article that a lot of people join, but then can’t keep up with the labor commitments, so they never recoup the $100 fee.

(3) No one owns the residual profits. This is the least important reason, in my opinion, as most supermarkets have pretty low profit margins. Nevertheless, the 3% or so of the price which would have gone to greedy capitalists goes back to the owners of the coop in the form of lower food prices.

Whether or not it’s truly worth joining the coop depends upon the value of your labor. If you get paid $50/hr, then you are contributing an extra $150/month in labor, which pretty much wipes away any savings. On the other hand, most members of the coop probably consider this a labor of love rather than real work, sort of like volunteering at a church. (Except for those who complained that the work isn’t meaningful.)

Food coop

I learned a little about food coops. I actually think it’s kind of cool that the people who work at the coop are the same people who buy the food, instead of illegal immigrants and poor people from the ghetto like at most supermarkets.

But the author spends most of the article complaining about how difficult it was to find 2.75 hours of time every fourth week, and that the work wasn’t meaningful. I just want to yell at her, STOP WHINING AND GO BUY YOUR FOOD ELSEWHERE IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT.

Ivanka Trump no longer single

Ivanka Trump is getting married. The lucky guy’s father is also a real estate tycoon. I didn’t know the Trumps are Jewish.

Annie Leibovitz bias

Annie Leibovitz is known for her edgy celebrity portraits which don't always flatter their subjects. She certainly didn't flatter Bush, as you can see here.

But the Leibovitz photo of the Obama family is a boring photo which could have been taken by a Sears portrait studio. (Dont believe me? There's a smiling black family on the Sears website similarly posed.)

Annie Le update

I have been asked to write an update about the Annie Le saga. What’s going on is that the arrest and search warrants remain sealed. What’s interesting is that, not only is Ray Clark’s public defender arguing that they should be sealed because it was interfere with his right to a fair trial, but Annie Le’s family also wants them to remain sealed. This makes me think, perhaps, that the warrant contains information about Annie that would taint her memory.

The Yale Daily News reports:

Ira Grudberg ’55 LAW ’60, a trial lawyer at the firm of Jacobs, Grudberg, Belt, Dow & Katz on Orange Street, said court records usually do not remain sealed for this long.

Grudberg and New Haven defense attorney Paul Carty both said it was unusual for the family to get involved in this kind of issue. As a result, the family’s request will probably have weight with the judge, Grudberg said.

What’s in there that everyone want hidden? Undoubtedly, juicy stuff that would make Ray appear more guilty but which would also embarrass the Le family.

Another black woman who lied about being raped

I definitely sense a trend going on here. Woman Recants 2007 Tale of Kidnap and Assault.

The turn of events represents a striking reversal in a racially charged case that led to the conviction of seven people, all but one of whom are serving lengthy prison sentences.

Seven white men are in prison for a crime they didn't commit.

Another cute college girl gone missing

A cute college girl is missing, but without the Ivy League/runaway bride angle, apparently it’s not such a big story.

Too much preventive medicine

It is often argued, primarily by liberals, that more spending on preventive medicine would save money in the long run.

However, according to a NY Times article, the American Cancer Society admits that there is too much screening for breast cancer and prostate cancer, which is leading to unnecessary medical expense for screenings and treatment of stuff which didn’t need to be treated.

The new white flight

A reader sent me this link:

As the college educated flock to these progressive El Dorados [ie: Portland, Oregon], many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip?

That’s an interesting way of looking at it: SWPLs congratulating themselves for moving away from black people.

Meghan McCain's breasts

Readers have asked me to write about Meghan McCain’s breasts. I don’t know what to say about them, except that they are quite large. Meghan has stopped updating her blog, and is now a columnist at the Daily Beast.

Meghan has figured out how to transfer her father’s fame, her girliness, and her cleavage, into some sort of job as a columnist, though it’s not clear if she’s living off her writing money or her mother’s money.

There would be a certain amount of schadenfreude if she lost her money and fame and had to work at a real job.

Three die at Detroit Marathon

Link.

This insane SWPL "sport" is killing people. When will people wake up?

The Gaia people are winning

BBC News:

The UK faces a "catastrophe" of floods, droughts and killer heatwaves if world leaders fail to agree a deal on climate change, the prime minister will warn.

Stuff like this is a reminder that the Gaia people are winning. Unless rationalists on the internet can spread the word that this climate change stuff is religion and not science, the world will soon enter another dark age, like when the Catholic church controlled everything.

Smart guys on Wall Street?

A reader asked me to look at the NY Times op-ed article Wall Street Smarts, which contends that “The financial system nearly collapsed … because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.”

The point was that Wall Street people used to come from the bottom of the class at the Ivy League, and those older Wall Street people weren’t smart enough to invent derivatives.

Indeed, my synthesis of various information, such as the Dale & Krueger study and the lacrosse conspiracy, indicate that the highest paying jobs, such as Wall Street jobs, go to the guys from Harvard who had lower-than-average SAT scores (for Harvard) but played sports. These are the “good ol’ boys” of the Northeast establishment.

A kid who gets accepted to Harvard because of his athletic ability, even though his SAT score is lower than most other Harvard students', and attends Harvard, will likely earn far more money over the course of his life than an unathletic kid with a perfect SAT score who attends a state school.

Stuff like derivatives was the nerds’ response to the good ol’ boy network. Unable to transfer wealth to themselves by backslapping and handshaking, they figured out how to transfer wealth to themselves through more complicated financial instrument. The wealth transfer seemed to involve a temporal element, in which future wealth was transferred to the smart guys on Wall Street, thus hiding what they were doing at the time.

Regarding whether any good comes out of Wall Street, yes, the economy needs a means for borrowers to find lenders and investors to find investees, but the reason why the people working on Wall Street make so much money is because they engage in cartel-like behavior in which barriers to entry are erected to keep out just anybody who wants to get rich, and in which companies which are supposedly competitors cooperate far too much among themselves, and because they take advantage of predictably irrational behavior in which people tend to waste a lot of money when large sums of money are involved. (For example, the company that is miserly with giving out office supplies to its employees in order to save $100,000 a year on pens and note pads will ignore the fact that it’s paying a $70 million dollar service fee in order to offer a billion dollars of securities to investors.)

Emasculated by the economy

I feel bad for the guy in the NY Times article who had his pay cut in half by his employer, and now he makes less than his wife who’s a fourth grade school teacher.

In online dating, whites are the most liked race

This OKCupid blog post (that’s a free online dating site) has a chart showing the likelihood of a female responding to a male sender.

The strange results are that women of all races are more likely to respond to a white man than to a man of their own race.

Apparently, people join this particular free online dating site in order meet white people. Non-white people probably have some other means to meet people of their own race.

The least liked race is blacks. Even black women are less likely to respond to black men than men of any other race.

* * *

Roissy wrote about this topic last week.

Another dumb school policy to appease NAMs and liberals

A girl gets expelled from school for a year because her grandmother sends her to school with a cake for the class, including a knife to cut the cake? Does stuff like this make any sense? If you’re a liberal, and your primary concern is not being biased against NAMs, the answer is yes:

Education experts say that zero-tolerance policies initially allowed authorities more leeway in punishing students, but were applied in a discriminatory fashion. Many studies indicate that African-Americans were several times more likely to be suspended or expelled than other students for the same offenses.

“The result of those studies is that more school districts have removed discretion in applying the disciplinary policies to avoid criticism of being biased,” said Ronnie Casella, an associate professor of education at Central Connecticut State University who has written about school violence. He added that there is no evidence that zero-tolerance policies make schools safer.

The school authorities should determine if the kid is a good kid who made an honest mistake, or a bad kid up to mischief. But because black kids are disproportionately bad and up to mischief compared to white kids, obviously more black kids are going to be disciplined.

Interpreting CNBC

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On CNBC this morning, talking heads say the economy is getting better despite the rising unemployment rate. What they really mean is that the economy is getting better for the elites in the financial services industry, for CEOs and high level corporate executives, and for the residual owners of corporate profits. The economy is getting worse for the common person, and a LOT worse for the people who were employed last month but not this month.

HBD acceptance leads to more liberal elite?

ca writes:

In the real world, acceptance of HBD would lead to a more liberal elite, who would understand that their advantages are due to nothing more than a lucky roll of the genetic dice. We live in a country that glorifies the virtues of hard work. Republicans live off the "Don't penalize me for working harder than you!" rational against high, progressive taxation. When people realize that hard work is merely a prerequisite for success, and that the true indicator of success is an immutable number that everyone is assigned at birth, the Republicans will lose one of their biggest moral platforms.

In one sense, acceptance of HBD is the very opposite of what modern liberals believe. On the other hand, ca is 100% correct about how HBD is at odds with standard Republican beliefs. If the rich are rich because of a combination of lucky breaks and lucky genes, why not tax them to help the less lucky? Even hard work isn't something we have much control of, because some people are born genetically predisposed to work harder.

Man dies running Baltimore Marathon

And he was only 23 years old. Link. (Thanks "Days of Broken Arrows.)

Why do people participate in this stupid sport?