Half Sigma

About moving to a foreign country

There were some comments again suggesting this as a smart strategy for Americans to take advantage of the allegedly lower cost of living in some third world country.

Five years ago, I explained why this is a bad idea. And I wrote that before the real estate crash. The reasons for living in the United States are even more compelling today. You can buy a house in Florida really cheap, a state with no individual income tax. If you want to stay an American citizen, then your taxes are lower in Florida than they’d be in any foreign country. And in Florida you can live near the beach. Although Florida is 15% black, the state is generally less black than that if you say out of Broward county check the NY Times census map before you move , and a large percentage of “Hispanics” living there are Cubans who are more like white Europeans from Spain. There’s a reason for why retiring to Florida is a cliché.

Against ostentatious displays of wealth

Randall Parker speaks out against ostentatious displays of wealth:

Ostentatious displays of wealth among an elite whose wealth has been growing for decades far faster than the overall amounts to rubbing salt into a wound. I morally disapprove of ostentation on the part of the upper classes. It is unnecessary cruelty.

I agree. Also, there’s a good reason why the true upper class, like Mitt Romney, don’t like to parade their wealth around (except that Mitt has violated the rule by running for political office, which makes his immense wealth part of the news every day).

In contrast to Mitt Romney is the much more uncouth Donald Trump who enjoys showing off how rich he is.

Romney is constantly criticized for being “uncomfortable” with his wealth, but I see that as one of his redeeming quality. If Donald Trump were running for president, when asked about his wealth he would use that as an opportunity to brag about how rich he is.

There is even a lesson for the non-rich upper-middle class. Their smaller ostentatious displays of wealth (such as unnecessarily expensive cars) not only elevate themselves at the expensive of making the less successful feel bad about themselves, it’s also a waste of money which could be better spent in other ways.

Worst states to retire?

This list came up by clicking links from Google News.

I’m not sure I agree with this in all cases. For example New York and Massachusetts are both big states, and the high cost of living in New York City and Boston shouldn’t be used to ding the much lower cost of living in upstate New York and western Massachusetts. Also, western Massachusetts is a very white place (and even whiter in the winter). Although whether you want to deal with the cold weather in those places in your retirement is another story. A lot of people like to retire where there is warm weather and there are beaches (in other words, Florida).

It’s also interesting that West Virginia is mentioned as a state that’s actively trying to attract retirees. West Virginia has previously been mentioned around here as one of the nation’s whitest states, but it has high murder rate for such a white state, leading me to conclude that the whites who live there are very low class and may not make for such good neighbors as would be first suggested by their skin color. On the other hand, I’d pick West Virginia over states with large black populations such as Tennessee, Louisiana, or Mississippi (except that Louisiana and Mississippi have warm weather and beaches).

Why so few Jews at Stuyvesant?

This question was asked in the comments to my previous post. The thinking goes like this: there are lots of Jews in New York City, Jews are really smart, so why is Stuyvesant High School 70% Asian and not 70% Jewish? Didn’t Stuyvesant used to be 70% Jewish? Where did all the Jews go?

Back when I went to Stuyvesant in the early 1980s, the school seemed to me to be about 70% white (and the chart in the NY Times seems to back that up), and I’d guess that half of the white kids were Jewish, and wouldn’t be surprised if more than half were Jewish, although there were definitely gentile whites there as well, and also kids who were half Jewish who may not have appeared to me to be Jewish. But it’s hard to say for sure, it’s not like anyone wore Yarmulkes to school, or huge stars of David, or talked about religion much if at all. One of my best friends at Stuyvesant was actually from an Islamic family, but he lied to me and told me he was Episcopalian. I credit him for being embarrassed about his parents’ religion. His parents were very nice people, and once I spent a weekend with them at their cabin in the Poconos, and never did they give me any hint of being Muslims. But I digress from the main point of this blog post.

Middle class whites with children have mostly left New York City and moved to Long Island, Westchester and New Jersey if they are still in the New York City area at all. A lot of middle class whites moved to California and other places out west. My father’s sister moved to Arizona, I have first cousins living in Arizona, California, and Washington (the state, not the city), and far upstate New York many hours driving distance from Manhattan.

Jews who live in New York City today can be divided in to five major categories:

1. Rich Jews. They mostly live in Manhattan but also rich parts of the outer boroughs such as Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope or Riverdale, for example. They send their children to private school, and they wouldn’t think of having their children attend Stuyvesant where they’d be surrounded by poor Asian kids. Thirty years ago, some people in this group did send their children to Stuyvesant if they passed the entrance exam, but not anymore.

2. Young Jews. Their parents used to live in New York City but moved to the suburbs. But they moved back here after college. If they get married and have children, then they leave the city when their children are old enough to attend school if they’re not rich enough to afford private school.

3. Hasidic and ultra-orthodox Jews. They have their enclaves certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn and they send their children to Yeshivas (which is Hebrew for school, but it refers to Jewish religious schools). Thus you don’t find them at Stuyvesant, and this has been the case for decades because, as I wrote above, I don’t recall seeing any kids at Stuyvesant wearing Yarmulkes in the early 1980s.

4. Prole Jews. I know that some readers don’t think these Jews exist, but they do. If you meet prole Jews from the New York City area, you will probably think they are Italian (or Irish if fair skinned). They will speak with a low-class New York accent like the people from the MTV reality show Jersey Shore. This group has a very high intermarriage rate with the prole Italians and Irish because that’s their main social group. They don’t hang out with the rich Jews on the Upper East Side just because their great-great-grandfathers came from the same shtetl. Their children don’t go to Stuyvesant because they aren’t smart enough to pass the entrance exam.

5. Russian Jews. Really a shorthand for all Jews who emigrated to the United States from Soviet Union countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As you recall, the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. The largest community of these Jews is in southern Brooklyn centered around Brighton Beach (a neighborhood on Coney Island). There are also communities of these Jews in Queens and Staten Island. If they knew better, they'd settle in other places in the United States, but for some unknown reason the word among Jews in the Soviet Union was that New York City was the place to go. I suspect that a large percentage of the white kids who attend Stuyvesant today come from this group. This is a group that didn’t even exist when I attended Stuyvesant.

And then there’s a category of Jews who don’t live in the five boroughs:

6. Middle class to upper middle class Jews. As previously mentioned, they have all moved out to the suburbs of Long Island, Westchester and New Jersey. Their children can’t attend Stuyvesant because it’s only for kids living in the five boroughs.

Too many Asian kids at Stuyvesant

That seems to be the real point of the article at the NY Times lamenting the lack of black and Hispanic kids at Stuyvesant High School which is 72.5% Asian and getting more Asian every year. How dare those Asians score so high on tests!

The word “diversity” is mentioned several times in the article. How interesting that a school that’s only 24% white still lacks diversity.

An interesting reason why there are even fewer black kids in Stuyvesant than there might otherwise be is that most of the black kids smart enough to pass the admissions test for Stuyvesant are highly coveted by elite private schools who offer them free scholarships in order to increase their diversity, something the elite private schools highly value.

The basement

Taken with the Olympus E-PM1 and the Lumix 14mm f/2.5 lens.

Obama, the evil genius crypto-anti-neo-colonialist

“lil mike” from the blog Mike Street Station left the following comment:

We went to war to supported the Libyan opposition even though Libya was no threat to us. Therefore, using Obama foreign policy logic, we won't do much more than talk and some minor covert stuff, since Syria is one of the two middle eastern powers that are actually enemies to the US and our interests.

Yes, Obama was eager to undermine the friendly government of Mubarak’s Egypt. And then Gadaffi wasn’t really a great ally, but for the last decade he has been leaving us alone and not bothering us, and Obama was all gung ho about toppling him even though the obvious result would be a lawless Libya that would be a haven for groups like Al Qaeda. Obama said we needed to intervene in Libya to prevent a “massacre” even though no one had actually been massacred.

But now we seem to have the perfect storm for intervening in Syria. Syria’s present government has been openly hostile to us and funds terrorists and is allied with Iran. There really are massacres going on in Syria. Yet Obama does nothing.

If you buy into the idea that Obama wants what’s best for the United States, it doesn’t make any sense. Maybe he’s just not smart enough to have a foreign policy that makes sense. However, if you believe that Obama is a secret anti-neo-colonialist then his actions make perfect sense. Instead of the bumbling fool, he’s really an evil genius, using his power as President of the United States to undermine our influence in the world, while using his high verbal IQ to trick Americans into believing he’s on our side.

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I've previously explained that the belief in neo-colonialism is a form of HBD denialism.

Gulf Arab states push U.S. to intervene in Syria

According to this news article, Gulf Arab states are pushing the U.S. to intervene in Syria.

This contravenes the anti-Semitic spin that everything we do in the Middle East is about protecting Israel and that our foreign policy is run by a secret cabal of evil Jews. In fact, it’s Muslim nations who are trying to get us involved.

And why would they want that? The obvious reason is that the Gulf Arab states are Sunni, and the current government of Syria is controlled by Alawites who are offshoots of Shiite Islam and are chummy with Iran, a country the Gulf Arab states fear. Note that even Hamas, the Sunni terrorist group, is turning against Syria.

Is an overthrow of the Alawite regime good or bad for Israel? Well on the one hand, the Assad regime is no friend of Israel. Syria aids and abets terrorists. On the other hand, the Muslim Brotherhood will probably take over Syria, and the Muslim Brotherhood controlling both Egypt and Syria is probably worse for Israel than the status quo.

Lawrence Auster on Obama

Lawrence Auster quotes Sage McLaughlin:

I have a theory about Obama's political success, and especially his success among self-described centrists. We all know that it rests on the outrageous notion that he is a moderate, a centrist, non-ideological, coolly rational, and uncommitted to any particular view of the world beyond what "the facts" say is best for America. People on the right, like me, have always been stunned that anybody could believe this, but it is exactly what millions of people believe. Years ago, during his election campaign, I saw why this was, but have never committed it to print.

The bad news is that he is extremely good at what he does. People who believe he is a bumbler, or has a low IQ, are engaged in wishful thinking, or perhaps they are victims of confirmation bias. Anyway, what Obama has mastered is using words, phrases, and images to mean more or less the exact opposite of what a conservative means when he says them, or indeed what most anyone means when he says it. He is able to couch self-evidently socialist ideas in language that most people identify as fuzzily conservative.

This is the masterful use of language of a guy with a super-high verbal IQ, smart enough to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. But Obama probably doesn’t have as high an analytical IQ as his very smart half-brother who has a Master’s degree in Physics from Stanford (and as I keep pointing out, that’s not the major of a stupid person who got into Stanford on affirmative action). Barack Obama, Sr. passed on high-IQ genes to his children.

"Black Dog" Obama

Racist Muslims in Afghanistan parade effigy of "Black Dog" Obama.

Remember that dogs are ritually unclean animals to Muslims, and black dogs are considered to be evil devils in animal form.

HBD investing: buy Australia

What’s the benefit of knowing the truth about HBD if it doesn’t make you money? But the HBD blogosphere is severely lacking in good HBD investment advice.

Although I believe in the future of China, I don’t think this is a good place to actually invest your money. My recommendation is to invest in Australia, and there’s a really easy way to do this buy buying the EWA ETF. If you have a brokerage account with TD Ameritrade, you don’t even have to pay a commission when buying the EWA (or 99 other commission-free ETFs).

The key to Australia’s future is:

(1) The population is 92% white, and the non-white population is mostly Asian (a good minority). There are also some aborigines (a bad minority) but they are only 2% of the population.

(2) Unlike the United States, Europe, or Japan, Australia has only a tiny budget deficit and may run a surplus in the near future, and total debt is only 30.3% of GDP (according to the CIA World Factbook).

(3) Australia exports a lot of raw materials to China’s growing economy. So if you think that China will continue to grow, the place to invest is Australia and not China.

(4) The EWA has a 4.6% dividend yield. Wow! That’s a lot more yield then you’ll get by investing your money in the United States.

(5) If the U.S. dollar ever ceases to be the world reserve currency, there will be a collapse in the price of the dollar. So it’s smart to have investments in other currencies. Especially a quality currency like the Australian dollar.

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However, there may be a housing bubble in Australia. But some argue that there's nothing to worry about.

Iran warns of pre-emptive military strike against U.S.

At least that’s the implication:

Iran warned Tuesday it would strike against an "enemy" threatening it if needed to protect its national interests -- even if the enemy didn't attack first.

Gen. Mohammad Hejazi, a deputy head of Iran's armed forces, said his country "will no more wait to see enemy action against us," according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.

"Given this strategy, we will make use of all our means to protect our national interests and hit a retaliatory blow at them whenever we feel that enemies want to endanger our national interests," Hejazi said.

Saddam Hussein’s biggest mistake was to allow the U.S. to build up a big invasion force and doing nothing about it, allowing the United States to get the initiative by attacking first. And he made this mistake twice.

I don’t think the people running Iran are going to make that mistake. As I’ve pointed out before, surface ships are sitting ducks against missiles, and the United States has a lot of ships in range of Iranian missiles. The issue here isn’t that the United States can’t defeat Iran in an all-out war, but that Iran can go down doing a lot more damage to U.S. forces than Saddam did.

I think that Obama is going to mess this up.

Donald Trump says vote for Romney, not Santorum

Reported at CNN:

"There's nothing - there's no gift, no Christmas gift, that could be given better than Rick Santorum to the Democrats," Trump said in a radio interview which aired in Michigan. Democrats, he continued, "are just salivating at that. And, you know, I don't think they believe it's going to happen. But boy, would they like it to happen because that would be an easy election."

I agree. But does Trump’s support of Romney carry any weight? I’m still annoyed at Trump for saying that he had these private investigators looking into Obama’s background and implying that they found some shocking stuff. But then they never found anything. What happened, Donald?

I don’t think that Trump carries much weight with Santorum supporters who are evangelicals. Trump isn’t a religious figure. He’ a Presbyterian (not a sect associated with the Christian Right) who only seems to believe in God when he’s doing interviews, otherwise he appears to not respect the sanctity of marriage very much, and I won’t forget the episode of The Apprentice in which he made fun of one of the male contestants for being a virgin.

Jenny Hyun's "racist" tweet

It’s preserved here.

Who the heck is Jenny Hyun? She’s some unknown songwriter for Korean pop groups. At least she’s unknown to me. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Korea, but she was born here and grew up here.

According to the latest post on her blog:

Jenny Hyun has been admitted to a hospital today. She is a paranoid schizophrenic and has been battling mental illness, a debilitating disease for many years.

Friends and family of Jenny want to extend their sincere apology for any harmful statements made verbally or via the web that Jenny has made while she was in the height of a psyshosis episode. We appreciate your understanding during this difficult time for her.

So saying that you don’t like black people is now grounds for being checked into a mental hospital and being reprogrammed to have proper thoughts about race. It sounds rather scary and Orwellian. And reminiscent of the former Soviet Union which used to put political dissidents into mental hospitals.

I scrolled through several pages of Jenny Hyun’s blog, and during the last week or two, she authored several posts about blacks of the type that you’d find at Lawrence Auster’s blog. But the Stormfront crowd will be disappointed to discover that Jenny likes Jewish people a lot and she is very pro-Israel.

* * *

So as an update, it should be pointed out that Jenny Hyun really did have some mental health issues, although I would say that her mental health problem here is that in writing this tweet she threw away her career for the brief feeling of telling off black people, and she appears to have been angry because some black people didn't respect Asian basketball player Jeremy Lin.

Note her following blog post:

I had a long talk with Aaron on the phone and for the past couple of days, I’ve been feeling very normalized. It’s not that I’ve stopped switching personalities, but they are syncing up so well that I can hardly tell the difference between them. Besides dealing with my personalities I still have other issues to address and I think the only time anyone notices myself switching is on the internet.

Another major issue in my life is my Anorexia, but I have experienced something so terrible because of it that I’m becoming traumatized to eat more, and my medication is also helping my appetite. My eating disorder has always been the culprit of most of my mental illnesses, especially when it came to my depression earlier on. In fact, it may have had a lot to do with the onset of my mental illnesses. In the past few months, I had started to lose my appetite so much that I would either forget to eat, and when I did eat, it would give me an upset stomach. The final straw was when I figured out that the less I ate, the angrier my voices became. My voices started to abuse me so much and as soon as I ate something, they would actually be happier. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that nutrition isn’t only for physical health, but mental health, since our brains are a physical part of our bodies.

So is it still Orwellian that she was sent to a mental hospital by someone? I think it's still a little Orwellian yes given that her commitment was triggered by crimespeech and not the post half a year earlier when she wrote about hearing voices.

Zardoz

This was a really horrible science fiction movie from 1974, and I don’t want any of my readers to make the mistake of actually watching it, which is a mistake that I sadly made.

However, I did make some interesting observations about how body types have changed since 1974. The movie stars a shirtless hairy-chested 43-year-old Sean Connery. Today, you never see men with hairy chests unless they are someone who is being mocked, but Sean Connery had a hairy chest and he was a sex symbol back in the day. Secondly, Sean Connery was skinny compared to male actors today. He was in decent shape, but he didn’t have huge biceps or ripped abs. Male actors today either lift more weights, or take steroids. All the other men in the movie were skinny ectomorphs, although they were supposed to be "eternals" who considered themselves more evolved than humans. I don't even know if a casting director today could find so many skinny ectomorphic actors. Obviously the movie was wrong in its prediction that, in the future, men would get skinnier.

The movie also feature a lot of gratuitous bare breasts. And I couldn’t help but notice that the breasts were a lot smaller in 1974. Today, a large percentage of bare breasts that you see in movies are augmented by plastic surgery. In 1974, the breasts were natural.

* * *

If the movie had any insight into the future, it was in predicting memes that are now prevalent in "manosphere" blogs. The female eternals are feminazis, and the men are so beta that they can't even get an erection. Then hairy-chested shirtless alpha-male Sean Connery comes along, and the eternal women secretly, or maybe not so secretly, want him to rape them.

Illegitimate births in the NY Times

The most-emailed article at the NY Times right now: For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage.

How can that be? The article actually does a pretty bad job of explaining things. Marriage is now only for the college-educated, who marry late and have kids late, so a lot of them aren’t having children until they are in their thirties. But the kind of women who have illegitimate kids give birth younger.

The article says:

Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.

Now, I strongly believe that the disintegration of marriage is one of the worst things to happen to the United States. However, a lot of the correlation between being born outside of marriage and doing poorly in school and not making a lot of money has to do with HBD. Low-IQ people have illegitimate children, and they pass on their low-IQ genes to them. So merely getting low-IQ people to marry each other won’t magically make their children smarter. But I do think that the two-parent family is much better for passing on middle-class values, which are important for an orderly society.

Furthermore, without the institution of marriage, alpha males have a disprortionate share children, which means each subsequent generation becomes significantly more alpha than the previous one, and in just a few generations we will completely wipe out centuries of breeding for beta qualities, and it's the beta qualities which are necessary for civilization. However, that's the kind of analysis that you will NOT find in the NY Times.

What do people do?

This is kind of a skeletal outline for some sort of possible future blog post.

Value creation – necessities: food, clothing, shelter
Value creation – in-between necessity and luxury (automobiles)
Value creation – scalable luxury goods (movies, televisions to watch them on)

Supply chain – transportation, wholesale, retail
Value transference – finance, marketing
Labor-intensive luxuries – food services, other personal services
Helping occupations – education, health care, social work
Government administration

What do you think?

Obituary for Gary Carter

I was there at Shea Stadium on opening day in 1985, Gary Carter’s first day playing as a New York Met. In the bottom of the 10th inning, Gary Carter won the game by hitting a home run. The crowd went wild! Everyone was shouting “GARY! GARY! GARY!” for the next fifteen minutes as we walked out of the stadium (we were in the cheapest seats so it was a long walk).

Now, both Shea Stadium and Gary Carter are no more.

Yes, the elites really believe that HBD is false

This is a topic that keeps coming up in the comments. Commenters insist that the elite secretly believe in HBD because they are too smart not to see the truth, and the elites sometimes behave in a manner that commenters perceive to be consistent with secret belief in HBD, such as sending their children to private school.

This is like saying that religious people are secret atheists. A commenter might say “So-and-so is way too smart to believe in that Jesus nonsense, he must be a secret atheist.” But in fact, there are smart people who believe in the Jesus nonsense, and even more smart people who believe in the HBD-denialism nonsense, because people believe what other people believe and don’t really think for themselves. Fewer people believe in the Jesus nonsense because it’s no longer taboo to say that you don’t believe in Jesus. You can blog about it without getting fired from your job. Not the same with HBD.

Occupy protests and the Bourgeoisie

Glenn Reynolds writes:

Professor Kenneth Anderson of American University has suggested that the Occupy movement is best understood as a struggle between the upper and lower tiers of the elite. In recent years, the upper tier, composed of bankers, financiers, etc., has become decoupled from the lower-tier sub-elite of "Virtue Industry" workers in fields like education, nonprofit activism, social work and the like—with the latter feeling betrayed and abandoned.

Mr. Anderson writes: "It was, after all, the upper tier New Class, the private-public finance consortium, that created the student loan business and inflated the bubble in which these lower tier would-be professionals borrowed the money. It's a securitization machine, not so very different from the subprime mortgage machine. The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well. It's not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites. The downward mobility is real, however."

Yesterday I wrote that there are two groups of Bourgeoisie which I called the rich Bourgeoisie and the not-rich Bourgeoisie. There were no members of either group of Bourgeoisie at the Occupy protests because as the beneficiaries of the status quo, the Bourgeoisie have nothing to complain about. (Although many left-leaning members of the not-rich Bourgeoisie had warm fuzzy feelings towards the Occupy movement.) True members of the not-rich Bourgeoisie are quite secure in their class position, and although not filthy rich they are financially well off.

However, a good portion of the Occupy protesters were people who wished they could be members of the not-rich Bourgeoisie, and they blamed the rich Bourgeoisie for their inability to achieve that class goal. But this is why their protest movement was doomed. They didn’t truly think of themselves as members of the proletariat and therefore lacked the class consciousness to succeed in their goals.

Could the elites become racist?

We are talking about the same HBD-denying elites who run society. John Derbyshire says that they might.

Rich bourgeoisie vs. not-rich bourgeoisie

Although the bourgeoisie are normally thought of as the owners of capital, as I’ve written before this is no longer a good descriptor of a social class in the modern economy. Few people today who are rich are rich because they own transferable capital. They are rich because they get paid a lot of money for their labor; they have a lot of non-transferable human capital. Today, the people who own the transferable capital are stockholders like you are me, and I’m not rich. Sure, a disproportionate amount of transferable capital is owned by the rich on account of the fact that they’re rich, but for the most part their partial ownership of companies is a store of wealth rather than a source of income.

Also, the bourgeoisie don’t have to be rich. The bourgeoisie are the people who benefit from the labor of the proletariat through the means of value transference. The not-rich bourgeoisie includes, for example, college professors, people who work in the not-for-profit arena, writers, and artists. These are people who have a comfortable life doing something they find fun and interesting and that a hard-working regular member of the proletariat wouldn’t consider to be real work, and the labor of the not-rich bourgeoisie doesn’t produce anything that members of the proletariat would want to consume. Both the rich and not-rich bourgeoisie are beneficiaries of the status quo.

Remember that in modern times, doing nothing is not considered a mark of the rich. As we learned from watching the documentary Born Rich, it’s very important for the rich today to spend their live doing something, or at least to give the impression to other rich people that they are doing something. If someone is sitting home all day watching television, this marks them as a member of the idle poor; there is no longer any such thing as the idle rich.

Although the Republican Party is still considered the party of the rich and therefore the party of the bourgeoisie, the not-rich bourgeoisie votes overwhelmingly Democratic. The rich bourgeoisie are more Republican, but not as overwhelmingly Republican as non-members of the rich bourgeoisie like to imagine. Famous rich Democrats include George Soros, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. And Steve Jobs when he was still alive. If there’s a demographic that’s most staunchly Republican, it would be those people making between $100,000 and $250,000 per year in value creation jobs who empathize with the rich bourgeoisie and whom should probably be considered petit bourgeoisie

Remember the Half Sigma politics chart?

Based on my politics chart, Mitt Romney is definitely conservative.

Those entertaining Iranians

In response to Obama’s threat of even tougher sanctions, Iran announced today (1) new breakthroughs in its nuclear programs; and (2) plans for finding other customers for its oil exports.

Jimmy Carter was undone by the Iranians. Will Obama be victim as well?

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Looks like people who said that sanctions won't work were 100% right? Will Obama ever admit that he was wrong? Not likely.

* * *

And if it isn't Iran, Egypt putting 16 Americans on trial for alleged crimes is eerily similar to what happened to Americans in Iran after Carter pulled support for the Shah.

Charles Murray and the future

There has been a lot of internet chatter recently about topics related to Charles Murray’s new book. I haven’t read the book, but apparently it’s about the class divide between well-off white people and poor white people, a topic liberals have ignored because they like to see inequality in the United States as being a story about racism and “white privilege.” The existence of poor and obviously not privileged whites undercuts the liberal worldview. But as I’ve pointed out in the past, the liberal elite actually has a very strict and conservative attitude towards poor whites; liberals excuse any bad black behavior as being the fault of racism, but they have no problem looking at poor whites and just thinking that their poverty is their own fault for being lazy and stupid.

What’s going on in society today is a result of the intersection of many different social forces.

(1) A meritocratic society that has for decades been focused on creating opportunities for the poor has succeeded in stripping the poor of those with the genetic potential to not be poor, and the result is that today’s poor comprise the genetic garbage of society. Yes, harsh words. The obvious solution is to have eugenic policies that discourages this class from giving birth, but that’s never going to happen.

(2) The upper classes used to look down on the lower classes like parents look down at their children. Children aren’t allowed to be independent and do what they want. Parents strictly force them to go to school, don’t allow them to have a diet consisting only of candy and cake, they don’t allow them to hang out with their friends after dark, because it’s for their own good and because children lack the intelligence and wisdom to make smart choices for themselves. The upper classes used to treat the poor this way. But the liberal worldview has gotten in the way. The correct liberal way of viewing the poor, especially poor minorities, is that they are just as smart and wise as the wealthy, and that they are merely victims of an unfair society. The liberal worldview has been disastrous because it has allowed important social norms to be destroyed, such as the importance of not having children unless married, the importance of work and other responsible behaviors.

(3) There has been a massive increase in “worker productivity.” This sounds really good, but what it means is that a smaller number of workers can produce everything we need. What are the rest of the workers supposed to do? Well, it hasn’t been as bad as this, because the rich like to use their wealth to gorge on unnecessary labor-intensive luxuries. At the same time, the social problems of the poor has created an ever-growing need for government social workers to help them get through life. I’d put school teachers into the same category as social workers. It’s the new white man’s burden.

(4) In addition to the increase in worker productivity, today there are a billion people in China willing to work for much lower salaries than American workers.

What does it all mean for the future? The inevitable prediction is that the trends will continue. The future is a lower class of people who don’t do any work and who don't get married, a middle class of government-employed social workers who help the poor and who share some of their social pathologies, and an upper class who insulate themselves as much as possible from the lower classes. America will decline as the world’s superpower, because all of our resources will go towards suppression of ever-increasing social problems, while China will take over.

The question we should be asking ourselves is not how we can prevent the inevitable but how we can profit from it.

Disproving atheism

In response to another blogger whom I read regularly, disproving the truth of a large number of “facts” in the Gospels or the Torah is quite easy, and as I wrote before, I have strong doubts that there was even a historical person named Jesus who had any similarities to the Jesus described in the Gospels. But disproving that there is a single all-powerful supernatural entity is as difficult as disproving that there isn’t such an entity, or that there are multiple Gods, or that there’s an overlord ruling a far-off galaxy whose name is Xenu.

Jews are NOT to blame for vegetarianism

An HBD blogger has been spreading the false notion that Jews are to blame for vegetarianism.

In 1993 and 1994, the General Social Survey asked the question “And how often do you refuse to eat meat for moral or environmental reasons?” The majority of Jews responded “Never.”

Eating meat is in fact a traditional part of Judaism. The Torah very clearly endorses the consumption of meat, beginning in the book of Genesis in which God seemed to have higher esteem for Abel the shepherd than for Cain the farmer.

I’m sure that Jews are disproportionately represented at the higher echelons of the vegetarian movement just as Jews are disproportionately represented at the higher echelons of every movement, even the HBD movement (Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein), because Jews have higher IQs than gentiles. Hunting writer and blogger Melissa Bachman is probably Jewish.

I really getting sick and tired of HBD bloggers blaming everything on the Jews.

New gap discovered

And it’s not a gap between black and whites. No, it’s a gap between rich and poor. As reported by the NY Times:

Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.

As you should know if you follow HBD blogs, we suspect that the “gap” between blacks and whites has narrowed because it’s not being measured properly. For example, instead of using standard deviations to measure the distance they use raw test scores, and the appearance of a narrowing gap can be created by making the tests easier. As well as downright cheating by schools in black neighborhoods.

Now to understand the rising gap between high income and low income students, you need to know what they mean by high income and low income. The studies are defining this as students in the top 10% of income and the bottom 10% of income. So the 80% of students in the middle are being excluded.

The rise in this gap makes perfect sense when you consider the increasing IQ stratification of society. If you’re in the bottom 10% of family income, it means you’re pretty stupid, especially if you have children. (People from good social background are often in the bottom 10% of family income when they are young and in college, but they pass through that phase of life without having any children who are in school.) It makes sense that the top 10% would have an average IQ of 113, and the bottom 10% would have an average IQ of 83. That’s a two standard deviation difference, which is twice as large as the black/white difference. The ironic result of a meritocratic society is that the poor are a lot stupider and represent the genetic garbage of society.

Mitt Romney on education

I finished reading the chapter in his book about education.

Let’s start with the bad news. Mitt Romney appears to buy into HBD denialism. But is this Mitt Romney’s fault? The sad truth is that any major politician who admits to understanding the truth of HBD will be considered a racist and would have no future in politics.

There are, however, some promising things in this chapter of the book.

1. Romney cites studies which show that smaller class sizes did not help education results at all, so he concludes we are wasting money on small class sizes. This is promising that Romney is willing to believe studies that challenge the conventional wisdom. It shows that Romney has an analytical mind. And it shows that Romney thinks about the economic costs of policies that sound good but don't produce results that justify the expense.

2. Romney hates teachers unions. He points out that teachers unions promote small class sizes because they create more jobs for teachers.

3. Romney talks about the importance of providing better education for the better students who are also falling behind in international comparisons. It is very good that Romney acknowledges this, because the typical leftist doesn’t care about improving education for the best students (their own children hypocritically excepted) because they are already advantaged

4. Romney says the most important thing we can do for education is stop single motherhood because studies show that children with two married parents do much better in school. I’m not so convinced of the cause and effect, but the fact that Romney believes that single motherhood is a very big national problem shows that he’s a true conservative in my book, even more conservative than those evangelical idiots who applauded Sarah Palin for having an unmarried pregnant teenage daughter.

Romney and caucuses

It’s rather strange at first glance that Romney did really well in caucuses in the 2008 elections, but he lost last night in those very states that he won in 2008. What happened?

Well in 2008, everyone bought into the idea that Romney was more “conservative” than McCain. Now everyone (except me) buys into the idea that Romney is the least “conservative” candidate. All of the single-issue anti-abortion voters are coming out to vote against Romney, and now Santorum is the not-Romney flavor of the week.

I feel really bad that caucus voters are rejecting the smartest Republican to run for president in recent memory. Santorum just doesn’t strike me as being that smart; he’s probably smarter than Perry, but not up there in the brains department with Newt or Romney. I previously pointed out that Republicans are the party of stupid and caucus voters are unfortunately striving to prove me right.

The good news for Romney is that Gingrich seems out of the picture.