Half Sigma

Question for anti-Semites

I have a friend who would self-identify as Catholic (he regularly attends church), however his father is Jewish.

His wife is pure Catholic (even attended Catholic school) of European ancestry, and they have five children, all raised Catholic. They used to live in a blue state, but now they live in a red state.

They have five children. Are their children Jewish under the anti-Semitic view of the world? Are they white?

Their oldest kid will soon be applying to college. If she gets admitted to college, is your reaction "it's good that they are admitting some white people from red states," or "damn, more Jews in college"?

No, I did not make up these facts. I also don't think think they are that out-of-the-ordinary. Lots of Jews marry non-Jews, and more often than not, the children are not raised Jewish. There are also lots of people moving from blue states to red states. Steve Sailer has written a lot about how people move to red states after they have kids, which is what has happened here.

Anti-Semitic comments will be allowed if they are relevant to answering the questions posed by this fact pattern.

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This fact pattern demonstrates that while the percent of the population which identifies as Jewish is decreasing, the percent of the population with Jewish ancestry is simultaneously increasing. If one of this guy's kids ever gets a job at a Federal Reserve Bank, the anti-Semites will say, "look the Jews are dominating the financial system," but these people don't ordinarly show up on any survey as being Jewish.

Usury laws

Once upon a time, I would have agreed with the libertarian position that the government shouldn’t interfere with the free market with respect to high-interest and/or short-term loans.

But these days, I have a much more sophisticated understanding of how the world works.

For starters, the vast majority of people taking out these loans are too stupid and/or have such low future time orientation that they don’t realize what a bad deal they are getting and that these loans are not good them. Libertarianism only works between people who are smart enough to understand the contract they are getting into and have equal bargaining power.

Futhermore, this type of lending is a value transference activity and not a value creation activity. Lending activities can create value if they allow capital to be used in a manner which will create real value, but in this case, the losers borrowing the money will buy some crap they don’t need, which was probably manufactured in China, and some will default and be passed on to debt collectors, and I’ve previously written about how debt collection is a negative sum activity.

Who donates the most money to Ivy League universities?

A commenter suggested that Ivy League universities like to admit Jews out of financial self-interest, because Jews donate a lot of money. He was certainly correct about that.

Sanford Weill, Jewish, donated $250 million to Cornell
Walter Annenberg, Jewish, donated $260 million to Penn (source). Annenberg also donated $50 million to Brown.
Peter Lewis, Jewish, donated $233 million to Princeton

Other huge Jewish contributors to Ivies:

Abramson Family
Leonard Goldenson
John Loeb

It’s not just that Jews have donated a disproportionate amount of money to Ivy League Schools, but large Jewish donations just totally blow away large WASP donations. There are only two WASP donors in the same league as the above: Paul Mellon and Edward Mallinckrod. See this list for some guidance.

* * *

Also there is John Kluge, who is a WASP, but who ways that 85% of his friends are Jewish and he has also donated large amounts of money to Jewish organizations, and he has been incorrectly identified as Jewish at anti-Semitic websites.

Whom do elite universities discriminate against?

The topic of elite universities allegedly discriminating against poor whites still has legs. There’s an article about it at Time Magazine.

If I may go off on a tangent for a moment, the following paragraph from the article is most interesting:

The original provocation was this: Two Harvard faculty members had observed that if you look at the black undergraduate students at Harvard, the majority were not what most people have in mind when you talk about the beneficiaries of race-based affirmative action. In other words, the majority of the black students at Harvard were not descendants of the American slave population but rather they were first- or second-generation immigrants with parents from the Caribbean or Africa or they were multiracial students.

It’s a rather significant finding: if you skim off the top 1% of “black” people in the United States, that group is disproportionately composed of voluntary immigrants and people who are “multiracial.” This is consistent with HBD. For example, the old Scarr Weinberg study (previously blogged about) showed that half-black adoptees had higher IQ scores than full-black adoptees; this is not surprising given that half of their genes come from a higher-IQ race, and Arthur Jensen hypothesized that blacks who have romantic relationships with whites have higher IQs than the typical black. And I’ve long suspected that African immigrants disproportionately come from the top half of the African bell curve.

Returning to the issue of whether there is discrimination against poor whites, I suspect that the Ivy League admissions process is meritocratic except with respect to the highly desired minorities of blacks and Hispanics, but especially blacks, who are given a big boost relative to other applicants.

But what does meritocratic mean? It does not mean that the Ivies simply admit the applicants with the highest SAT scores and other standardized test scores, or the best high school academic records, or some combination of the above. As I’ve written before, the Ivies place a very strong emphasis on “leadership activities.” The Ivies believe that an applicant with leadership activities has much greater merit. (Of course, the leadership requirement would be extremely relaxed for a black applicant; Harvard would no doubt gladly accept a black nerd who spent all of his free time playing World of Warcraft if he demonstrated high grades and high test scores.)

I suspect that the emphasis on leadership activities began mostly out of a desire to load the Ivies with children of privilege and to keep out those nerdy Jews who got really high test scores. Thus it’s rather ironic that in the anti-Semitic corner of the blogosphere, people are blaming an admissions policy which was initially motivated by anti-Semitism to be some sort of secret Jewish plot. What happened is that the Jews learned that their children were being denied admissions because they weren’t doing sports and other leadership activities, so they adjusted their child rearing strategies to give the Ivies what they wanted, and now Jews are part of the elite along with WASPs and the admissions policies which originally worked against them now work in their favor. (The preceding sentence applies to the well-off Jews. Believe it or not, there exist prole Jews who are in the same boat as prole gentile whites with respect to the college admissions process.)

Reliance on non-academic leadership traits may have been instituted to discriminate against Jews and benefit the WASP establishment, but they continue primarily because of HBD-denialism. Because blacks score lower on tests than whites, it’s assumed that there is something inherently wrong with tests, because any fair measure of merit would rate blacks and whites equally. Relying on leadership traits also has financial benefit, because any admissions measure which recruits more rich children will lead to higher revenues for the Universities. Not only do rich children pay full price, their parents sometimes give gifts above and beyond the regular tuition price. Sometimes way beyond.

The group of people that these admissions policies most heavily discriminate against is Asians; especially first-generation Asians whose parents don’t have the slightest understanding of the admissions policies of elite universities and who naively think that it’s most important for their kids to have really high grades and play the violin. Furthermore, for HBD reasons, Asians probably naturally lag behind whites in non-academic propensities, because Asians tend to be less extroverted and less athletic.

Beyond Asians specifically, the admissions policies discriminate against children who come from a social class that’s not in on the game; children who attend public or religious schools whose students don’t normally apply to elite universities and whose guidance counselors are completely clueless. Because of the high value given to athletics, the policies also discriminate against unathletic kids, and this is something that being rich can partially compensate for because the elite private primary and secondary schools can find some sport for the less athletic kids to participate in so that their college application isn’t devoid of highly desired athletic activities.

Bottom line is that it’s beneficial to your children if you are rich, and it’s beneficial if you use your money to send them to private school, assuming that you want them to attend an elite university. There exists a group of right-wingers who normally say how much they hate places like Harvard and they don’t want to send their children their anyway, so it’s ironic that they are complaining about being discriminated against by the very institutions they most hate.

Global Warming part 1

Where did people get the idea that the climate should be exactly the same year after year, century after century? The real story is that the Earth’s climate has been cyclical for quite some time. Ice ages give way to interglacials which give way to new ice ages. Furthermore, within interglacials, the climate has mini-cycles. During the last thousand years, the Earth experienced a warm period known as the Medieval Warm period, and a cold period known as the Little Ice Age.

In response to the question, “is the Earth getting warmer?” the answer is yes, the Earth has been getting warmer since the end of the last ice age approximately 11,000 years ago, and since the end of the Little Ice Age approximately 150 years ago.

Because no one knows what caused the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age, or even what causes the big ice ages and interglacial periods, no one can really explain why the temperature has been getting warmer. But what we do know about these climate cycles is that they occurred before man started burning large amounts of fossil fuels. Thus the Occam’s Razor answer to “why is the Earth getting warmer?” is that it’s just a natural cycle unrelated to anything that humans have done, because that is what caused all other warming and cooling trends.

The cost of being elite

Tuition at the most prestigious private high schools in New York City now exceeds $35,000/year.

Losing the global warming battle

Global warmists disgust me, but it’s a battle I’m losing. Ross Douthat, the NY Times’ conservative columnist, has an op-ed today in which he writes that “conservatives who dismiss climate change as a hoax are making a spectacle of their ignorance.”

Green is becoming the new religion of the elites, and Harvard graduate Ross Douthat hangs with the elites.

In the future, the Democratic party will revert to being the Christian party and the Republican Party will become the Green/Gaian party. This will happen as we begin to see anti-abortion NAM candidates win Democratic primary elections.

New comment policy

I’ve rewritten the comment policy.

James Webb op-ed

Democratic Senator James Webb from Virginia, has an anti-affirmative action op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal :

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy.

I think this op-ed is extremely significant, not because of its content, but because of who is saying it: a U.S. Senator from the Democratic Party.

Of course, he doesn’t touch the taboo topic of HBD. Liberals will point (as well as believe themselves) that there is a gap in outcomes between the average Hispanic and the average white, and this can only be explained by pervasive racial discrimination against Hispanics because we all know that there are no genetic differences between races, and therefore affirmative action programs are not about giving special privileges to Hispanics but are about combating the scourge of racism. Racism is the most evil thing in the world, and it can’t be justified by the fact that the victims of the racism happen to be recent immigrants.

Q & A WITH A LIBERAL

Conservative: Mr. liberal, if there is a big gap in outcomes between white Baptists and other whites, doesn’t this mean that there is pervasive discrimination against white Baptists which needs to be remedied through affirmative action?

Liberal: Mr. Conservative, you confuse cause and effect. Only a stupid person could find Baptism to be a rewarding religion; smart people will find better religions, leaving behind only the dumb people.

Conservative: But wait, aren’t most blacks Baptist? If only stupid people could find Baptism to be a rewarding religion, doesn’t that mean blacks are stupid?

Liberal: The pervasive racism of society prevents blacks from converting to better religions.

Mel Gibson is a moron

I've been thinking of writing a post entitled "Mel Gibson is a moron" since I found out about him punching his ex-girlfriend in the face, but Lawrence Auster has done such a good job with this topic that I have nothing else to add.

HBD and the law school scam

Below is a message to a law school scambusters group in which certain leftist members want to ban me because I blog about HBD. Below is my response to them.

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I'm not sure what the goals of your group are. To get out the message that law school is a bad deal, financially? Years before I wrote the essay at my old Calico Cat blog, I was posting at the Vault under a different pseudonym getting out the same message. I've been trying to get this message out long before most of you went to law school. But, eventually, you move on, and now I have other things to write about.

The famous blogger Instaundit has always had a link to Gene Expression which has always promoted the taboo truth about IQ and heredity, but Glenn Reynolds has never been tarnished in the manner that you suggest. So you should grow some cojones in this regards.

Education is highly g-loaded task (g being the general factor of intelligence, and g-loaded meaning that doing well at education is highly correlated to one's intelligence). Therefore, it's impossible to have a REAL discussion about educational policy without being aware of this issue. And law school is a subset of educational plicy.

This is why our country's education policy is complete garbage. Our policy is based on the assumption that everyone is born equally, and it's education which makes people smart. So if we could just get everyone in the country to go to graduate school, everyone would be really smart, and no one would have to work at unskilled jobs--everyone could be a lawyer making a six figure salary. (I wonder who would do necessary menial labor like stocking the shelves of the super markets if everyone had a law degree?)

Note for example the failure of No Child Left Behind. It is based on the assumption that every child in the United States can read at grade level if given the proper eduction. But this is not true; reading ability is a highly g-loaded task, and many children are simply not born smart enough to read at grade level, because grade level is defined as something the average child is capable of, and below-average children are not capable of this. NCLB will eventually be abolished, but unfortunately instead of anyone admitting the REAL reason for NCLB's failure, they will simply blame George Bush.

With regards to law school, it's a huge economic inefficiency that we make people attend seven years of post-secondary education and rack up huge student loan debts in order to be a lawyer. The extra three years of education do not make people smarter. There's no reason why law can't be an undergraduate major instead of something requiring a graduate degree. If we did that, we wouldn't have people graduating from law school with boatloads of debt. Of course, with law being such a highly desirable career track (to people who don't know the truth), there would probably be several times as many students majoring in law at the undergraduate level than there are law school students today. However, career-wise, this would probably not be any worse for the student than majoring in Psychology, English, Communications, or Political Science, to name some popular majors which don't prepare people for a specific career track.

Hypocrisy of the proles

In a comment to the previous post, toni writes:

The Mexicans in CA are culturally Catholic, but no longer religiously Catholic insofar as paying attention to the moral teachings of the Church. Take a look at the birth announcements in any local paper in the state and you will see not only the absolutely staggering number of Hispanic births but also the equally staggering number of those births to non-married couples.

I can’t make this point too many times, that as social class and IQ increase, behavior consistent with conventional morality increases even though religiosity decreases.

We don’t need to look at Mexicans in California to appreciate this. My favorite example is the Palin family. Sarah Palin supposedly represents the moral Christians of America, but her children were doing drugs and her oldest daughter gave birth out of wedlock.

In contrast, the atheist high-IQ Obama family with well-behaved children represents the perfect model of moral behavior. (I in no way imply that the Obama family is the typical black family. But sadly, the Palin family is a typical prole white family.)

Just as religious prole whites vote their religion despite their hypocrisy in following its moral teachings, the same goes for the Hispanics.

* * *

The group of young people most likely to obey the prohibition against pre-marital sex is Harvard Students. To quote the Harvard Crimson, “According to a Crimson survey of the class of 2009, in their four years at Harvard, 52 percent of the students had one or zero sexual partners.”

Hispanics, religion, and the Republican Party

Steve Sailer has another blog post where he ridicules the idea that Hispanics will become Republican voters. But Steve avoids talking about the important background issues which concern the role of religion in political identification.

The main reason why some people think that Hispanics will become Republican voters is because Hispanics are pretty religious. Most are heavily into Catholicism, and when they do convert to Protestantism, they tend to convert to the more low class evangelical type of Protestantism associated with the Right rather than upper-class mainline and politically liberal Protestantism.

The mistake people make is to assume the religiosity and other “conservative” issues are inseparably linked together. Historically, the opposite has been the case. Religiosity has normally been associated with populism, populism being short-sighted policies which are attractive to poor people. The switchover of religious people to the Republican Party was the result of the leftist takeover of the Democratic Party. Leftism is hostile to Christianity. Republican strategists saw that there were a lot of religious people voting Democratic out of habit and not because the leftist Democratic Party leadership was in any way addressing issues that religious people cared about. So the Republican Party morphed into a pro-Christian party. Now, people like Lawrence Auster believe that one can’t be a “conservative” without being a Christian (but Lawrence is still one of my favorite conservative bloggers because he gets a lot of stuff that other conservatives don’t).

The recent NY Times article about evangelical churches supporting Obama’s leftist immigration policy is a real sign of the future and not just something that a liberal journalist made up.

The future of the Democratic Party is that the majority of Democratic primary voters will be Hispanic or Black, and they will vote for religious populist candidates and not the SWPL leftist candidates who currently control the Democratic Party. Once the Democratic Party kicks out the anti-religion leftists, the lower class evangelical churches will join up with the Democratic Party, which will become a pro-NAM populist party.

Unfortunately, this means that SWPLs will join up with the Republican Party which will champion the new religion of Gaianism which now seems to have too big of a following to die out. The future religious battle will not be Christians vs. atheists, but will be Christians vs. Gaians.

More praise for my old law school essay

An Anonymous commenter writes about my 2004 law school is a big lie essay:

In 2005, I was in my first semester of law school. Thinking that maybe I had made a mistake, I google searched "law school" and "mistake" and found this essay. It was literally THE ONLY THING out there at the time that dispelled all of the lies and misinformation generated by the law school industry.

I wish I had listened. The Calico Cat blog is the Beowulf of the Law School Scam bloggers.

Another Anonymous writes:

That essay is a beautifully written classic.

* * *

People may say, “Half Sigma it’s kind of low of you to brag like this.”

Well, since the law degree just left me with student loans and no useful career track, the least I can do is enjoy some rare praise for something I wrote. I’d much rather be getting paid $300K/year to write legal memos.

Sneakers

Asian of Reason has a fascinating blog post about sneakers.

HBD-denial causes a principal to be fired

There’s an article in today’s New York Times about how a school principal in Vermont is being fired because her school has been classified as underperforming, and her school district has to fire her in order to be eligible to receive millions of dollars of federal education grants.

Clearly, the intent of the article is to make you feel sympathetic to the principal and outraged at the cruel federal government bureaucracy. Many of the comments express outrage at Bush for No Child Left Behind, ignoring the fact that Obama continues to carry out its mission and is now just as culpable as the previous president.

This is another topic that’s pointless to discuss without bringing up HBD. According to liberals, blacks and whites are equally capable of academic achievement, and the most common explanation for the achievement gap is bad schools. Decades ago, Arthur Jensen pointed out that the black-white IQ gap is demonstrated at the age of 5 before the beginning of any formal schooling, but liberals nevertheless love to blame schools because schools are something that can be fixed by government spending and liberals can blame Republicans for the educational gap because they are too stingy to properly fund the schools. Blaming black parents makes liberals very uncomfortable, and blaming genetics is evil and racist.

So if we buy into the idea that bad schools are the cause of the educational gap, then firing the principal makes perfect sense. No matter how many hours she worked, nor how dedicated she may have been, obviously she failed to close the gap, so she should be fired and a more capable principal brought in.

Of course I believe that she probably did to the best job she could, and she probably is a more dedicated and harder working principal than average, but I believe that because I also believe in HBD. If one believes that bad schools cause the educational gap, then the empirical evidence demonstrates that she deserves to be fired.

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Steve Sailer also blogged about this article, but he was mostly interested in pointing out to everyone that there are African refugees living in Vermont. Yeah, there are also African refugees living in Maine. Letting in African refugees makes liberal SWPLs feel really good about themselves and helps to alleviate some of the guilt they feel for living in a very white state.

I am the grandfather and I am prescient

The bad economy has caused a proliferation of blogs about how law school is a scam. It turns out that I am the grandfather of this movement, as documented at this blog post reprinting my original 2004 Calico Cat post about how law school is a big lie. (I give permission for people to copy my blog post as long as I am properly credited for it.)

I really love the comments. Anonymous writes:

Unbelievable. Prescient.

JD Underdog writes:

I love love love the Calico Cat. This very post forever changed my attitude toward law school, higher ed and the legal market! Thanks for bringing back this timeless masterpiece!

Another Anonymous writes:

Prescient. Exactly.

This adulation is making my head grow.

* * *

I thought it was weird that I was referred to as a top 10% graduate of a “tier 1” law school, but to my surprise, my JD alma mater has moved up in the rankings to number 38. But really, there’s no such thing as a “tier 1 law school.” Law schools are either Top 14 or TTT.

You read it here first

Tyler Cowen has a blog post about zero marginal product workers. But I wrote about this four years ago in my post when humans become worthless.

Ross Douthat and "White Anxiety"

Ross Douthat’s op-ed column is entitled The Roots of White Anxiety, and it’s about the study, previously blogged about by Steve Sailer, showing that lower class whites from rural areas and flyover country face a considerable disadvantage in the Ivy League admissions process.

Without bringing up HBD, this is a useless issue to even talk about. Liberals believe that the average black is born just as capable as the average white when it comes to the ability to excel academically at elite colleges. People who call themselves conservative believe it to. I’ll even presume that Ross Douthat believes it also because he hasn’t written otherwise.

If it is true (which it’s not, but let’s pretend it is) that blacks are indeed born just as academically capable as the average white, then the huge achievement gap between blacks and whites indicates that there is pervasive racism holding back backs from achieving what they are capable of achieving. On the other hand, there’s nothing holding back whites from achieving except for their own laziness.

Whites complaining about affirmative action are inherently racist because they are saying they deserve more privilege when they are already the beneficiaries of privilege at the expense of black people.

HBD is the only way to refute this argument.

What other people think of District 9

After I wrote the earlier review of District 9, I surfed the web looking for what other people had to say about the movie. District 9 received very positive reviews from most reviewers. Typically, reviewers wrote something like “how wonderful it is that this movie shows the world the evils of apartheid.”

A little bit more of the plot is revealed in this post, so read at your own risk.

District 9, South Africa and HBD

Before watching this movie, I was worried that it would just be a simplistic story where humans are bad and aliens are good as in the movie Avatar. But as it turned out, the morality of District 9 is way more complex than Avatar, making District 9 the far superior movie, even though Avatar is far more polished

As usual, it’s impossible to say anything interesting about District 9 without giving away important elements of the movie, and in fact I think the movie would be more fun to watch the first time if you didn’t read this review or any other review, so proceed at your own risk (even though I don't write anything about the main plot or the ending).

Bogus health advice in the NY Times

Remember the admonition from the CNN article about whether or not coffee is good for you?

Another obstacle in pinpointing the benefits of coffee is that it's difficult to isolate the effects of coffee from other healthy habits or lifestyles associated with coffee drinking. A 1999 study of coffee and tea consumption in Scotland, for instance, found that coffee drinkers were younger, had higher incomes, and were healthier in general than tea drinkers.

Coffee drinkers in the U.S. seem to fit a similar profile. Seventy percent of Americans with an annual household income of $150,000 or more drink coffee, compared with 54 percent of Americans in a household making less than $25,000 a year, according to consumer market research firm Experian Simmons.

Research has shown for decades that poorer people are more likely to die from virtually any cause than people with a higher socioeconomic status. Wealthier people are more likely to be physically active and eat healthier, and less likely to smoke -- behaviors that could prevent some of the conditions assumed to be affected by coffee.

"That's the problem [with most of the studies done on coffee]," says Vinson. "There's no perfect study out there because they can't control all the variables. The problem with a human study is everybody's different."

This warning should be contained in all articles about health research, but of course it’s not, especially when the article confirms that something that SWPLs like to do is good for you.

And this brings me to yesterday’s post from the crappy NY Times Well blog (and this blog is crappy because it routinely posts these kinds of bogus conclusions.)

Men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars (as passengers or as drivers) had a 64 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less. What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting.

Proles entertain themselves by watching TV. Affluent people have active hobbies. And people who spend a lot of time driving probably have a prole job like being a driver or they live really far from their job because they are too poor to afford to live in a better neighborhood.

So this bogus study is just showing what we already know: rich people live longer than poor people. Considered in light of the fact that people with sedentary white collar jobs have much longer life expectancies than people with jobs involving physical labor (because such jobs are prole jobs), there's no evidence that watching TV will cause a heart attack.

Proof of HBD coming from China

Proof of HBD will soon be coming from China!!!

[The Beijing Genomics Institute] is about to embark on a search for the genetic underpinning of intelligence. Two thousand Chinese schoolchildren will have 2,000 of their protein-coding genes sampled, and the results correlated with their test scores at school. Though it will cover less than a tenth of the total number of protein-coding genes, it will be the largest-scale examination to date of the idea that differences between individuals’ intelligence scores are partly due to differences in their DNA.

Dr Yang is also candid about the possibility of the 1,000-genome project revealing systematic geographical differences in human genetics—or, to put it politically incorrectly, racial differences. The differences that have come to light so far are not in sensitive areas such as intelligence. But if his study of schoolchildren does find genes that help control intelligence, a comparison with the results of the 1,000-genome project will be only a mouse-click away.

I’ve figured out a while ago that proof of HBD would come from China because the Chinese don’t care about political correctness (and in fact they will be proud of their race when they prove they are genetically smarter than the average white or black).

Benefits of private school for getting admitted to elite colleges

Today Steve Sailer blogged about how the elite college admissions process is stacked against poor whites and all Asians.

There is no surprise here, or to anyone who has been reading my blog for a long time. As I previously wrote in a blog post about the best high schools:

I previously blogged about the kid with the perfect SAT score who was rejected from Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. Is it any surprise that the kid went to a public high school in New Jersey? If he went to an elite private school, they would have groomed him such that his CV would have had the leadership activities that top universities are looking for. One of the differences between a top private school, and a regular public high school, is that the private schools see their mission as preparing kids for entrance to top universities, while regular public high schools just care about whether all the kids pass the reading and math test so that they don’t get dinged by NCLB.

Prole high schools and prole parents are clueless with regards to what the elite colleges are looking for in applicants, so students from those backgrounds are at a severe disadvantage because they don’t build up the CV of activities that elite colleges are looking for.

I don’t believe that colleges go out of their way to discriminate against poor kids because they are poor, but admissions officers are completely unsympathetic that they don't know how to game the system the way that rich kids do. Probably, most admissions officers are in denial that the system is a game in the first place.

I suspect that kids from prole backgrounds who do get admitted to Ivys are predominately high school athletes. Elite colleges like athletes. Private schools know this, which is why they have zillions of teams and a small number of students so even relatively unathletic kids can participate in sports if they attend a private school, while at a prole high school the kid actually has to be good at football, baseball, or basketball in order to be get sports experience.

Too bad I never finished the series Why Private Schools which I started last year.

Response to Obsidian

Traditionally, Republican voters are smarter than Democratic voters. After all, the Republican party used to be known as the party of the rich, and rich people, on average, have higher IQs than poor people. But the trend during the last two decades is for prole whites to shift from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, and for rich whites to shift from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party.

This has very little to do with whether one party is right or wrong, and a lot to do with how the Republican Party is marketing its message (for example, choosing Sarah Palin to be the vice presidential nominee). As I alluded to earlier today, people choose their political beliefs based on what other people in their social class believe, and not by using their IQ to figure out the actual best way to govern the country.

I think the Republican Party is being extremely short-sighted by ignoring this problem.

At least 73% of Tea Party supporters deny HBD

From a Newsweek article about whether Tea Partiers are “racist.”

When read the statement that "if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites," 73 percent of the movement's supporters agreed, while only 33 percent of people who disapproved of the Tea Party agreed.

This is supposed to be evidence that Tea Partiers are “racist.”

If I were to answer that question, I would choose the supposedly non-racist answer; as someone who understands that there is a significant IQ gap between the average white and the average black, I know that no matter how hard blacks try, they will never be “just as well off as whites.” People who agree with this statement are actually buying into the liberal HBD-denialist zeitgeist that there are no IQ differences between blacks and whites.

However, the “correct” liberally-approved explanation for blacks not being as well off as whites is that it has nothing to do with IQ and nothing to do with blacks not trying, but rather the problems are racism and starting out in life economically disadvantaged. To the liberal, it is “racist” to believe that blacks can solve their own problems by trying harder.

* * *

I do believe that if blacks behaved in a manner consistent with having higher future-time-orientation and other middle class values, they would be at least somewhat better off than they are now.

I also believe that children can be trained to behave in a manner consistent with having higher future-time orientation and middle class values, and that if the schools put more effort into this, blacks would be better off.

Who’s to blame for the crappy economy?

In order to avoid being destroyed by Republicans in the upcoming elections, Democrats need to convince people that George Bush and Republicans are to blame for the crappy economy. (But wait, George Bush isn’t running for reelection, so why does it matter if he’s to blame? The answer is that voters associate him with Republicans, and Republicans running for office are afraid to disassociate themselves from Bush because disloyalty to the party will hurt their ability to raise funds.) The natural tendency for the voting public is to blame whomever is in power, and so far Obama and the Democrats have done a bad job of pinning blame on George Bush and the Republicans.

With that said, who is really to blame?

I place the blame on two factors: (1) HBD-denialism; and (2) high-IQ groupthink.

FACTOR #1: HBD-DENIALISM

It has been observed that people who own their own homes are, on average, better citizens than those who don’t. So how do we make the non-owners better citizens? The answer is to get them to become homeowners.

The paragraph above describes the reasoning of the people promoting more home ownership. It’s a classic causation argument, frequently made by even the smartest people (and the ease of duping smart people is discussed below in Factor #2). For the most part, the causation goes the other way: good citizenship causes home ownership, or at least the confounding factors which cause good citizenship also cause home ownership. High-IQ and future-time-orientation are the factors which generally lead to home ownership, because both of these factors lead to people having stable careers and the desire to settle down.

The short of it here is that liberals and Democrats are to blame. Generally because liberals are the main proponents of the idea that everyone is the same, and any differences such as gaps between NAMs and whites can be fixed with the correct government policy. And specifically because Democrats opposed Republican-initiated reforms which would have tightened-up loose Fannie Mae lending.

FACTOR #2: HIGH-IQ GROUPTHINK

As I’ve pointed out before, proles are more likely to think for themselves while it’s the people from higher classes (and thus higher IQs) who mold their thought patterns and behaviors in order to conform with their peers. This is what’s behind the mass belief in global warming. It also explains economic bubbles. Rational observation of housing prices led free and independent thinkers to observe that there was a problem, but this problem was ignored by the majority in the financial world because no one else was concerned with it.

What’s the chance of getting the Federal Reserve controlled by independent thinkers who can ignore financial groupthink? Not very likely because people who get appointed to high level political positions are by their very nature political players who got to their position by getting along with other and not by thinking for themselves. But if people had a willingness to be aware of this problem, then we could avoid the worst effects of groupthink.

I see liberals as being more behind groupthink than conservatives, because liberals are the ones who dominate the media and dominate what’s considered to be enlightened high-IQ thought. For example, most people who oppose the global-warming groupthink come from the conservative side of the political spectrum.

Chris Christie 2012

Since I wrote that blog post a year ago, Chris Christie has emerged from out-of-nowhere to be the most talked about dark horse candidate for the 2012 presidential election.

I like him better than most of the front-runners. Too bad he’s weak on immigration.

The 2012 election is tailor-made for a guy like Christie. It’s going to be the kind of election when people will be eager to vote for a guy who doesn’t look or sound like the typical politician and who has a proven track record of being tough on runaway government spending. It’s now or never for Christie.

2012: the year of the Newt?

He may run.

I wrote in June, 2009:

Newt Gingrich – too good to be true. And he’ll be 69 in 2012, which makes his old age a negative, although that didn’t prevent John McCain from winning the nomination just before his 72nd birthday.

Anna Chapman, spy babe

I’m a week late linking to these photos.