Half Sigma

Zimmerman wore size 38 pants

I saw that mentioned in a story in the Kansas City Star.

What does this mean? It means that although Zimmerman weighed a little bit more than Martin (20 pounds, and not the 100 pound originally reported by the MSM), a significant amount of the extra weight was stomach fat and not muscle.

Zimmerman witnesses who changed their story

There’s an article at the Huffington Post written by a law professor at Pace University (a pretty crappy law school, and top-10 among law schools which lead to the most debt ) about how four witnesses in the George Zimmerman case changed their story in a manner unfavorable to Zimmerman when they were interviewed weeks later by agents of the special prosecutor.

Were they pressured to change their story? “Corey and her staff may have re-interviewed these witnesses not with the neutral purpose to seek impartial justice but with the self-serving purpose to bring murder charges against Zimmerman.“

Another possibility that I will throw out there is that these witnesses saw so much media coverage of the event in which they were told over again about how George Zimmerman was the most evil person alive and how he’s some huge guy who beat up a skinny little kid, they changed their story match the “true” events as told by the media.

Who is Amanda Brooks?

In the New York Times, there’s an excruciatingly detailed article about Amanda Brooks, a woman who is OK-looking but not stunningly gorgeous, has no discernible job skills but has cool jobs where she doesn’t seem to do any real work (“a lot of her job seemed to involve attending fashion shows, where she was a front-row regular, and going to openings and galas”), and lives in an apartment in Manhattan with a really huge walk-in closet full of expensive clothes and shoes. And she’s moving to a farm in England. Good riddance!

Whomever she is, she’s not important enough to merit an article at Wikipedia, not even a stub article, so Wikipedia considers he to be a lot less important than Lawrence Auster who has a very detailed Wikipedia article.

She has a really beautiful golden retriever. I'm sure the dog had good breeding.

IMPORTANT UPDATE!

I discovered her 2001 NY Times wedding announcement:

IF a social anthropologist had to write about one couple on the face of the planet who simultaneously combined the most traditional and also the most fashionably up-to-the-minute sensibilities, there might not be a better study sample than Amanda Harwood Cutter and Christopher Brooks.

Amanda is also described as a “patrician blond beauty” who “looks as if she's ready to pull out an ostrich-feather fan and pose for the ghost of John Singer Sargent.”

Did Amanda write this herself? Is Alex Kuczynski, the author of the wedding announcement, just that eager to suck up to this WASP power couple? It should be noted that Alex, who is female, is Peruvian, and an Ivy League graduate (Barnard), and her father, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, recently ran for president of Peru and is also a Princeton grad. There are a lot of other famous people in her family. It's always worth pointing out the majority of NY Times writers are from extreme elite backgrounds.

It should be noted that (1) the Brooks are WASPs and not Jews (WASPs secretly run the country and Jews are their bitches); and (2) Christopher Brooks, the artist, is 16 years older than Amanda.

BEE-SHYUAN CHANG

Bee-Shyuan Chang, who wrote the article about Amanda in today’s NY Times, went to a Top-14 law school (GULC) and then worked at BIGLAW (Schulte Roth & Zabel) for a one year before becoming a freelance writer who contributes to the NY Times on fashion topics. She is probably 31 years old based on her graduation from college (state school, not Ivy) in 2003.

MUSEHOOD

In a 2009 article at WMagagzine, she talks about her job as a “muse”:

People propose me to kind of work as muse for other people and it just hasn't ever really worked since [Tuleh] and I haven't ever really wanted to do it because it's so much about the relationship between two people. You can't tell someone you don't like something unless you really love them. It is very hard to criticize someone that you don't love. To inspire them they have to trust you, so it really is really trusting each other and loving each other as people—and you can't force that.

ART HISTORY AT BROWN

Amanda double-majored in Art History and Visual Arts at Brown. She told Annabel Tollman: “When I was an art history major I absolutely refused to study any art pre-20th century. I’m not interested in anything before the ’60s. I don’t even watch black and white movies.”

Exercise might be unhealthy

Six years ago (wow, I sure have been blogging for a long time) I wondered whether exercise causes better health or if people with good health just enjoy exercising more.

Maybe we are closer to an answer today, with the finding that for some people, exercise actually increases heart attack risk factors.

Face-eating victim is Stuyvesant grad

That's right, we both graduated from the same high school. Who would have guessed? You can graduate from a quality high school but still wind up being a homeless person.

Charles Taylor and bad lessons for other "leaders"

Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, has been sentenced to fifty years in prison for crimes against humanity.

The headline of the article reads Charles Taylor’s heavy sentence a stark warning to world leaders. Yes, I agree that world leaders will head this as a warning, but the message they are receiving is not “I should be a good guy so this doesn’t happen to me” but rather “I better do whatever it takes to hold onto power until the end, because once I leave power it’s either life in prison or worse.”

Yes, if we want bad guys to peacefully give up power, we need to provide them a cushy retirement like we did for Napoleon and Jefferson Davis.

Yet another "gap"

The liberals used to think that if only poor kids would have computers like rich kids, they would become just like rich kids and there would be no more “gaps.” Guess what? It didn’t happen that way.

In the 1990s, the term “digital divide” emerged to describe technology’s haves and have-nots. It inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families.

Those efforts have indeed shrunk the divide. But they have created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government now wants to fix.

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

. . .

“Despite the educational potential of computers, the reality is that their use for education or meaningful content creation is minuscule compared to their use for pure entertainment,” said Vicky Rideout, author of the decade-long Kaiser study. “Instead of closing the achievement gap, they’re widening the time-wasting gap.”

It’s shocking. Who could have possibly predicted that computers wouldn’t be the magic bullet that would close all “gaps”?

Of course, this was completely predictable using HBD principles. And five years ago I wrote that “Publicly funded computers for … students are just a big waste of the taxpayer's money.”

As I wrote four years ago:

Why do people think that computers are some sort of magical panacea that will help poor kids do as well in school as middle class kids? This is leftist-liberal thinking. Leftist liberals like to think that all inequalities have to do with wealth and discrimination. They think that there is something that rich parents buy for their children that makes them smarter that poor parents can’t afford. The leftist liberals refuse to comprehend that poor kids are born less intelligent, and then, to make matters worse, their parents teach them lower class values instead of middle class values.

Teaching middle class values to poor kids would be inexpensive and the most effective possible policy to improve life outcomes of poor kids. But this is something leftist liberals refuse to do because it would be an admission that lower class values are inferior to middle class values. It would be an admission that poor people are partly responsible for their own poverty. It would be an admission that the poor scholastic performance of poor children isn't the fault of right-wing politicians.

Rich parents send their kids to private schools without any computers. Just a few months ago, “sabril” wrote in a comment: “Probably it won't be too long before NAM underperformance is blamed on the presence of computers. Which are after all a big distraction.” It looks like “sabril” should get some sort of award for predicting that.

Are smartphones worth the money?

In addition to the up-front cost of the phone (let’s say $200), you have to sign a 2-year data contract for $30/month.

Is a smartphone really worth $920 for two years (plus tax and other hidden fees) over the cost of sticking with my old stupid telephone?

Dewey & LeBoeuf LLC files for bankruptcy

Dewey & LeBoeuf LLC filed for bankruptcy.

The reason for why the firm went bankrupt is that it switched from being a partnership to being an LLC. Partnerships don’t go bankrupt except under extreme circumstances. When a partnership’s profits decrease, the payouts to partners simply go down proportionately. And partners will do anything possible to avoid a bankruptcy because they are personally liable.

Dewey & LeBoeuf changed to an LLC so that they could pay massive salaries to chosen shareholder/employees using borrowed money. The result is that those shareholder/employees walk away rich (although without a guaranteed future source of more millions unless they can get hired at a high-level position with another law firm, which might happen or might not), and creditors get left unpaid. It also sucks for the junior employees.

Did it really benefit society to change the rules to allow law firms to become LLCs? I don’t think so. Law firms don’t need access to capital in order to invest in anything value-creating such as R&D or building new factories. They just use the money for zero-sum or even negative-sum competition purposes involving poaching rainmakers from other firms.

Who lives in Queens?

Lawrence Auster posted the following comment from a reader:

I grew up for half of my childhood in Forest Hills, Queens, NY. I moved there with my family in 1977 when I was ten years old and left in 1987 when I was twenty. I hadn’t been back until this weekend for twenty-five years. While on its face the old neighborhood has not changed too much, the demographics and the “vibe” has changed considerably. When I was growing up, Forest Hills was predominantly Jewish with more working class Italians, Irish and German as you moved outwards away from the wealthier sections of Forest Hills Gardens. It is now heavily, heavily Asian. And when I say Asian I don’t just mean Chinese and such. But tons of Indians, Indonesians and a sprinkling of Hispanics. What white people are left is a few old Jewish holdouts whose homes will no doubt be bought by Asians and soon as they die off.

I was astounded. The first block I lived on in Forest Hills was almost all Jewish. I will never forget seeing all the tents go up during the Jewish observance of “Sukkot.” I had no idea at the time what they were for. I remember thinking as a child that it was odd yet fun that people would be camping out in their front yards? Now the front yards no longer have Sukkot tents but many have gardens of bamboo stalks that are as tall as small trees! I saw one Chinese man and his wife tending to them. The saying is true. You can’t go home again. Yes, all these new Asian residents are clean and upper middle class and they cause no problems in the neighborhood, as would be the case with a large black or Hispanic population. But it was still very, very disturbing. The culture I knew? The neighbors who all knew each other and would sit out in their front yards on a hot summer day with a glass of iced tea and talk to one another? The kids who would be playing stickball or hockey in the street? It is gone. Dead and buried. There is no longer any life or personality. I have come to the conclusion that it is over for whites in most of Queens, NY. There are a few pockets and holdouts but for the most part it is over.

It’s as I mentioned in a response to a comment to my recent blog post about the racial makeup of CUNY colleges, there aren’t very many middle class whites left in New York City. The middle class whites have moved to New Jersey and Long Island. What’s left in the city are elite whites who wouldn’t send their kids to a CUNY and neither would they condescend to live in Forest Hills (which actually has pretty convenient and fast subway access to Manhattan if you live near an E or F subway stop.). And then there are prole whites such as the guidos who live on Staten Island and some parts of Brooklyn.

However, what the Auster reader didn’t mention is that a lot of immigrant whites from the former Soviet Union have moved to Queens. This is the new white middle class of New York City, but they are outnumbered by Asians.

Copper Bell Light Beer

It was only $5.99 for a 12-pack of cans at Whole Foods. I couldn’t believe it. Every other beer was $9.99 or more for 6 bottles. How can they make the beer so cheap? This has to be the cheapest beer in Manhattan.

I believe that Copper Bell is a house brand of Whole Foods. There is speculation on the internet that it's re-branded Genesee.

It doesn’t have much flavor, but I can’t say that it has any less flavor than Bud Light or Miller Lite. Too bad they didn’t have the non-light version in stock.

Girls, Episode 7

As usual, Peter has a very detailed review, and there is a less detailed review from Otis.

This week’s episode was hilarious, the funniest and best episode to date. And it goes to one of the reasons why I like television better than movies. Because television series stretch out over a much longer period of time, you get to know the characters a lot better. One of the reasons why this episode is so funny is because we see how the characters we all know behave at a huge warehouse party in Bushwick. But if I had watched this one episode never having seen the previous episodes in the series, it wouldn’t have been half as funny.

What each character wore to the party is perfectly indicative of their character. At the one extreme, there’s Jessa who always wears outrageous outfits, and she’s wearing some crazy outfit to this Bushwick party. Jessa does whatever she wants, acts crazy, and doesn’t worry about being embarrassed or of the possible consequences (such as what happens when you throw a bottle of wine off of a walkway above people, and then insulting those people you almost hit with the bottle of wine).

At the other extreme is Shoshanna, who is dressed like a JAP and she looks completely out of place, like she belongs on the Upper East Side or Murray Hill and not in Bushwick. Almost as unhip as Shoshana is Marnie, who is just too stuck up to wear a hipster outfit. Hannah is dressed hipster but without Jessa’s outrageous flair.

Charlie already has a new girlfriend, a short, vivacious scantily-clad girl named Audrey who is dressed appropriately hipster. Thus is Charlie revealed as a greater beta. His prominent position in a band, which was playing that night at the Bushwick party, gives him a high status among hipsters. He might be an alpha if he had a more aggressive personality, but he’s too nice of a guy to be a true alpha. Dominance over other men as well as women means you can’t be nice to people all the time.

I think that Audrey is a downgrade as far as looks, but no doubt Audrey has a much prettier personality.

Marnie is incredibly pissed that Charlie has a new girlfriend. Then she goes finds Elijah, who was Hannah’s gay boyfriend from college, and she starts telling him all of her “problems,” as if he’s a cool gay sidekick character like Stanford from Sex and the City. But Elijah wants no part of it, and he tells her how selfish she is and reminds her of how she made out with him while Hannah was sick with mono, pointing out what a crappy friend she is.

Last week I was going to write about why Adam seems beta, and one of the reasons is that he appears to be a shut-in who never leaves his apartment. But tonight, we see him at the party! Another reason I was going to say he is beta is because he has no apparent male friends. And this still holds true tonight, because Adam attends the party with a group of lesbians (who are better looking than most real-world lesbians). Also, we see Adam dancing with abandon and with complete disregard for how dorky he looks dancing. I think that Adam is beta who is too clueless to realize he’s a beta, which tricks Hannah into liking hm.

For comic relief, Shoshanna accidentally smokes crack, and goes running out of the party on a crack high, with Ray (who is revealed as a nice guy like his friend Charlie) following after her because Jessa abandoned Shohanna after promising to be her “crack spirit guide” in order to flirt with her boss (more on Jessa’s boss later). When Ray catches up to Shoshana, she uses her self-defense training on him which appears to effectively knock him into the ground, and then she realizes that he was there to help her, so she makes it up to him by giving him a “non-sexual” groin message which she learned how to do from her “sports therapy class.”

Jessa accidentally invited her boss, Jeff, to the party because she gets a text message from an unknown number asking her if she wants to hang out, and Jessa being the way she is (flirtatious and unconcerned with anyone else’s feeling and beyond embarrassment) invites the uknown texter to the party, and he turns out to be the father of the children she looks after as a nanny. Jessa does hang with him at the party for a while, but by the end of the episode, after the guys she dropped the wine bottle on punch out Jeff, she seems to see him as a creepy old pervert. Is this the end of the Jeff storyline? We never found out about his mysterious non-job.

Also at the end of the episode, Hannah has this big stupid grin on her face riding in the taxicab with Marnie, Adam, and Adam’s bicycle; apparently Hannah thinks she got some sort of boyfriend commitment out of Adam (after a funny conversation with Adam’s lesbian friend Tako and after Hannah leaves with Adam to go “scrapping,” riding in front of Adam on his bicycle). But Marnie’s not happy, she wanted Adam and Hannah to break up because Marnie doesn’t like her new role being the one who’s not part of a happy couple.

* * *

The address, “45 Bushwick Place,” is actually in Williamsburg and not Bushwick, although that’s the bad part of Williamsburg near the Bushwick border, and near the housing project where my mother lived when she was a girl. However, I think this is just a fake address the writers made up because it sounds like it’s in Bushwick.

* * *

There were no non-white people at this party that I noticed. The whiteness crisis continues! Tako, despite the Japanese sounding name, might be a white Hispanic, but it's hard to tell. I also have the suspicion that the character who plays Adam might be a small part American Indian. But the point is, here we are in one of the blackest neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and there's this big party where everyone is white. I presume there are real parties just like that in Bushwick, but I'm not hip enough or young enough to attend.

OK, I lied. Re-viewing the party scenes, there were a handful of obviously black extras. But there must be hundreds of extras at the party and the vast majority were white. I didn't see a single Asian extra. Realistically, there would probably be one or two Asian girls at a party like this. I think the elite white writers and casting directors don't like Asians very much. The only three Asian people we encountered so far have been the know-it-all girl who worked at Hannah's internship, the unseen girl that artist was sleeping with, and one of the nannies at the park.

Big Problem at CUNY: too many Asians

There’s a NY Times article (from a few days ago) about a big problem at the five “best” CUNY schools. With an accompanying graph. Because they have become more competitive, the percent of black enrollment has declined significantly. Even Hispanic enrollment is down since 2001.

But guess what. The percent of non-Hispanic white enrollment is also down since 2001!

What has happened is that Asian enrollment has skyrocketed, and along with increasing Asian enrollment comes much higher SAT scores of admitted students.

The declining non-Hipsanic white enrollment has created great angst among liberals because the wrong minority is benefiting from it. Asians are the minority that elite liberal whites hate.

Tax return fraud

There’s a massive problem of criminals filling out false electronic tax returns so they can claim a refund and get the refund on a prepaid debit card. All you need is someone’s social security number, which is stolen from various organizations like schools and healthcare providers which use them.

The obvious solution to the problem was found in a NY Times comment:

Just like with EBT food stamp cards which can be traded around and easily used for fraudulent purposes, the Democrats insist of debit card tax refunds because they claim to be concerned about people without bank accounts. News flash: People without bank accounts don't pay taxes and shouldn't get refunds! But of course there are the welfare checks known as Earned Income Tax Credit that Dems want to give to their constituents. So Dems then say you need debit cards to give these people money because they don't have bank accounts. And the fraud follows.

Solution: send tax refunds only to an American, identifiable bank account with the taxpayer's name on it. Problem solved. But, of course, Dems prefer fraud when weighed against the possibility of any limitation on the ease of welfare payments. Just an ancillary result of government dependency programs that hurt all law-abiding taxpayers. As long as these debit card refunds exist, there is no solution. How many billions are you willing to pay criminals (and subsidize their crime gangs) in the name of political correctness?

Yes, tax return fraud turns out to be another problem created by political correctness and Democrats.

Trayvon Martin video analysis

The Conservative Treehouse has some hilarious Trayvon Martin 7-11 video analysis. Did Trayvon know the three weirdos who are seen in the store after Martin walks out of camera view but doesn’t actually leave? Highly recommended viewing.

MacRanger says that FDLE coerced Zimmerman witnesses

According to MacRanger

According to two witnesses who spoke directly to me by phone today told me that FDLE investigators used strong armed tactics to get witnesses to change testimony.

It’s a investigator tactic. During my time it these kinds of tactics occurred a lot. In the vernacular it’s called “guidance”. Witnesses told me that investigators used such guidance and in one case actually threatened the witness with charges for “obstruction” if they didn’t “cooperate fully” with the investigation.

“I really felt that no matter what I told them I saw and heard, they had a story in mind that they wanted me to articulate, not what I witnessed”

Yes witnesses change their minds sometimes after time, but not in large groups. When you see this happen it almost always means that witnesses tampering took place.

Of course, MacRanger has previously provided “inside” information about this case that later turned out to be bogus.

Paul Fussell is dead at 88

The New York Times obituary is here.

I only know him from his masterpiece of comedic sociology, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983), and from his horribly bad but aptly named follow-up book, BAD: Or, the Dumbing of America (1991). I’ve never written about BAD because it is just too bad to write about.

I regret that I didn’t know about him when I was attending the University of Pennsylvania and passed up the opportunity to take a class with him.

I should probably read his book about World War I.

More on Girls ep 6

Turambar wrote in a comment:

This is also an interesting episode because it shows Hannah can’t go back. Actual sex with someone who is interested in her is no longer enough. Better to reign in hell than serve in Heaven- she couldn’t work as a florist in Michigan, she would require a professional job. However that kind of stupid job that she and her friends have is fine in NY.

I think the show is demonstrating exactly what conservative and game bloggers have been writing about for the past several years. Hannah’s sluttiness and sleeping around with alphas (even a guy like Adam who’s not a real alpha, but rather a beta masquerading as an alpha based on advice from PUA resources) has ruined her for a relationship with a nice-guy beta-male provider like the pharmacist.

However I’m going to backtrack a little on the issue of New York City vs. Lansing Michigan. It’s understandable why a smart and elite-college-educated person of either sex wouldn’t want to work in a dead-end retail job at a florist. Doing crappy internships in New York City is more likely to eventually lead a quality professional career. Although “more likely” doesn’t mean “definitely,” and it doesn’t even mean “more likely than not,” it just means that it’s more likely to go somewhere than working retail in Lansing Michigan. People in their twenties, God bless them, tend to be overly optimistic about these things, but unfortunately it also explains why they are willing to go into massive debt to get a law degree from a non-Top-14 law school.

Latest poll on Zimmerman

Latest Rasmussen poll shows that 40% think that Zimmerman acted in self defense, and only 24% think he committed murder.

Of course a person’s guilt is judged by a jury and not by public opinion, but given that the real evidence of the case is far more favorable to Zimmerman than what most of the poll respondents heard about from the MSM, this suggests that the prosecution won’t be able to get a jury to unanimously convict.

* * *

If Zimmerman didn’t have a gun on him, I think that Martin (if he had been found) would have been prosecuted for aggravated assault, and he would have been convicted. He just would have become another member of a pretty very large cohort of young black males convicted of aggravated assault. No one would care about the case at all.

People might say that if Martin were alive, he’d tell a different story, but the reality of the vast majority of criminal trials is that the defendants say nothing in their own behalf. If he was stupid enough to say anything to the police, his statement would be more likely be incriminating than of any help to his defense. Nothing you say to the police is every helpful in court, even if you are innocent. (I am sure that Zimmerman will find this out at trial, because he probably embellished the story to make himself look more innocent, and any inconsistencies will be picked apart by prosecutors as an implication of guilt.)

So anyway, if without the gun being fired this would be an open and shut case of aggravated assault, how can it not be self defense that he fired, while on the ground and unable to run away, to prevent a continuing aggravated assault?

Girls Episode 6

As usual, Peter has written an excellent synopsis of the episode.

This episode takes place in Michigan where Hannah is visiting her parents, who hare having a 30th wedding anniversary. This means we don’t get to see any of the Brooklyn gang. Except for Adam, but more on that later.

Hannah finds hanging out with her parents extremely boring. Her mother gets annoyed at her for texting during the DVD they are watching in their living room. Then Hannah goes to the kitchen and stuffs her face with food. As if she’s not fat enough already.

The next morning, her mom sends her off to buy menopause medicine, but first she stops at a coffee place where the girl behind the counter is Heather, a smoking-hot ditzy airhead blonde who apparently went to high school with Hannah. The gorgeous blonde former classmate tells Hannah about this girl Carrie who disappeared while on a trip.

Then Hannah goes to the pharmacy, where the pharmacist is also a former classmate of Hannah’s. He says he owns the place with his father, and then he flirts with her by giving her free lubricant for her mom’s menopause, and they arrange a date, which means that Hannah has to skip going out to dinner with her parents for their wedding anniversary.

On her date with the pharmacist, they go to the benefit for Carrie in which they watch a poorly choreographed dance routine starring the beautiful Heather. I was too busy observing how beautiful she was to notice the bad dancing, but Hannah noticed it for me.

Then Hannah and the pharmacist have awkward vanilla sex at his place. He’s not interested in having Hannah satisfy any weird sexual fetishes.

Then Hannah returns home, and her father is flat out on the floor of the bathroom where he slipped having sex with Hannah's mother. Luckily, the father is OK. Then we see his naked penis. Yuck! I so regret stating last week that the show needs a naked penis. That was disgusting. Luckily, the dad was OK.

Then Adam returns Hannah’s phone call, and they have the first real conversation like a boyfriend would have with a girlfriend since they’ve been seeing each other.

The end.

* * *

The best part of the phone conversation is Hannah’s description of the pharmacist’s apartment:

I was just so amazed by his apartment, it’s huge, it’s like twice the size of yours and he paid like nothing for it, and it just made me think, like why doesn’t everyone struggling in New York move here and start the revolution? It’s like we’re all slaves to this place that doesn’t even really want us.

That’s a good question, why doesn’t everyone just move to a white place with a low cost of living, especially if they don’t even have real job that requires them to live in New York?

* * *

And here is Otis’ lost review:

Boring ep because it all took place in Michigan with Hannah's parents. Hannah hooked up with some really boring beta guy. They had sex but it seemed kindof bleh. During, Hannah seemed frustrated that this boring nice guy wouldn't tell her what to do and it may be that one reason she puts up with Adam's bizarre fantasies is because going along with it is so easy for her.

Adam calls Hannah up and has a conversation with Hannah where you really see the contrast between him and the "nice guy", who presumbly functioned as some sort of stand in for every bland nice guy in America. Yeah, Adam is gross and weird and a jerk and not very good looking but at least he is somewhat interesting and he is a good fit for Hannah's offbeat personality. He is still using PUA tactics: calling her "kid", as a pet name to establish dominance or something I guess.

Worst episode of the series so far.

Up next week: Charlie is with a girl that is even hotter than Marnie, and Marnie isn't happy about it. Hannah runs into Adam at a party dancing with some other girl. Jessa appears to finally make a move on unemployed dad. Shoshana smokes crack.

The relevance of the THC in Martin’s blood

In the 911 call, Zimmerman said something like “it looks like there’s something wrong with him, like he’s on drugs or something” (I’m writing this from memory, so I probably got that quote slightly wrong).

The Zimmerman-haters assume that Zimmerman is just too racist to know the difference between a sweet 12-year-old kid like we see in the photos and a suspicious person on drugs.

However, now that the real evidence has come out, we saw a video from the 7-11 in which Martin stumbles around in a weird zig-zag pattern, indeed like he’s on drugs. And then there’s a cigarette lighter on his person, and there was THC in his blood which means he smoked a joint during the previous 24-hour period.

No, marijuana does not necessarily make Martin more violent, but there are plenty of arrests of people who commit violent crimes while on marijuana, so there’s lots of evidence that smoking a joint doesn’t make violent people too mellow to commit violent crimes.

Martin’s drug use goes to both Zimmerman’s motive for calling 911, and Martin’s motive for running away. For all we know, Martin had a bag of joints on him, and he ran away to hide them somewhere (a more likely scenario than Martin being scared to death of Zimmerman). And no, Martin doesn’t deserve to be shot for smoking a joint, but that’s not why Zimmerman shot him. Zimmerman shot him because he was getting beaten up.

And as to whether Martin was just minding his own business, the homeowners association has a legitimate interest in not letting people smoke drugs in their community. Smoking marijuana is against the law in Florida, isn’t it? In fact, possession of 20 grams or less is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison, and I understand that this crime is heavily prosecuted in Florida.

Matt Gutman backpedals on Zimmerman

Matt Gutman, the ABC News reporter responsible for making George Zimmerman public enemy #1, is now backpedaling in his latest report for ABC News, even suggesting that the charges should be dropped:

Two prominent U.S. lawyers are among the skeptics questioning whether evidence in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin supports the second-degree murder charge against George Zimmerman, given the confessed shooter's apparent injuries and freshly released eyewitness accounts.

. . .

Previously unknown particulars, including the scrape on Martin's knuckle and photos of Zimmerman's battered and swollen face -- which were taken moments after he shot and killed Martin in what he says was self defense -- coupled with eyewitness accounts that back up Zimmerman's story, suggest for some that the prosecutor overreached.

Males in female health professions: Half Sigma predicted this

Back in December 2009, Half Sigma predicted that nursing, and implicitly other female-dominated health professions, will become male:

The demand for nurses increases every year, but at the same time there’s declining demand for decent-paying traditionally male blue collar jobs. As a result, you see more men going into nursing today than you did ten or twenty years ago.

. . .

Currently, there is still a stigma attached to male nurses, and this scares away most men from nursing. But as the number of male nurses increases, there will eventually be a tipping point at which time the stigma will go away and men will flood into the field. After the tipping point, nursing will rapidly become a predominately male profession.

Two and a half years later, the New York Times has caught up with my prediction:

A male dental assistant, Mr. Alquicira is in the minority. But he is also part of a distinctive, if little noticed, shift in workplace gender patterns. Over the last decade, men have begun flocking to fields long the province of women.

Little noticed by most people maybe, but it was noticed by Half Sigma.

Mr. Alquicira, 21, graduated from high school in a desolate job market, one in which the traditional opportunities, like construction and manufacturing, for young men without a college degree had dried up. After career counselors told him that medical fields were growing, he borrowed money for an eight-month training course. Since then, he has had no trouble finding jobs that pay $12 or $13 an hour.

He gave little thought to the fact that more than 90 percent of dental assistants and hygienists are women. But then, young men like Mr. Alquicira have come of age in a world of inverted expectations, where women far outpace men in earning degrees and tend to hold jobs that have turned out to be, by and large, more stable, more difficult to outsource, and more likely to grow.

“The way I look at it,” Mr. Alquicira explained, without a hint of awareness that he was turning the tables on a time-honored feminist creed, “is that anything, basically, that a woman can do, a guy can do.”

I love that last remark. Anything that a woman can do, a man can also do.

The NY Times article even addressed the stigma issue:

In interviews, however, about two dozen men played down the economic considerations, saying that the stigma associated with choosing such jobs had faded, and that the jobs were appealing not just because they offered stable employment, but because they were more satisfying.

I was two and a half years ahead of the New York Times in spotting this trend.

Did Trayvon smoke a joint that day? Was Half Sigma right once again?

On March 29th I wrote :

Looking at a map, it seems like the nearest 7-11 is only one mile away. Still, it seems like a really long walk in the rain just to get Skittles and an ice tea. The story makes no sense. Trayvon making up some excuse to leave so he can do some drugs makes a lot more sense. And would be consistent with Zimmerman's comments on the phone call that Trayvon looked like he was on drugs. And the fact that Trayvon was on a ten-day suspension from school for drug activity.

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People assumed that Zimmerman is just too stupid and racist to know the difference between a guy on drugs, and a sweet innocent kid walking home with candy for his little brother, but maybe Zimmerman was right about that part. I'd love to find out what's in the toxicology report.

The released evidence shows the following:

1. Martin had a cigarette lighter on him.
2. He had THC in his blood.

I think the amount of THC found in his blood is consistent with him smoking a joint the same day as the incident, but not immediately before the altercation. ("I think" means I'm not sure about what the results mean and I don't trust the MSM.)

I think that Martin looked kind of high in the 7-11 video. He may have smoked a joint before walking to the 7-11.

Read some Zimmerman evidence

Some evidence was posted by MSNBC.

While the police interviewed a lot of people, only one guy was able to clearly explain the last few seconds of the fight:

On 2/26/2012 at approximately 2105 hours I interviewed *** ***. *** stated that while inside his residence he heard a commotion coming from the walk way [sic] behind his residence. When he investigated, he witnessed a black male, wearing a dark colored “hoodie” on top of a white or Hispanic male and throwing punches “MMA (mixed martial arts) style”. He stated he yelled out to the two individuals that he was going to call the police. He then heard a “pop”. He stated that after hearing the “pop”, he observed the person he had previously observed on top of the other person (the black male wearing the “hoodie”) laid out on the grass. Upon inquiry, *** stated he did not witness how the confrontation started between the two individuals, and that he could not positively identify either one due to the lighting conditions. *** stated he was in his living room at the onset of the commotion, and looked out of his sliding glass door, which place him approximately 30 feed directly in front from where the physical altercation between Martin and Zimmerman was taking place. *** provided a written statement, and his interview was audio recorded and submitted into evidence. ***

I have no idea what this “MMA style” punching is, but is it related to Trayvon Martin running an amateur fight club?

* * *

A commenter pointed out that in the 7-11 video posted at CNN, Martin doesn’t look like a tiny little kid. He looks much bigger than the clerk.

Zimmerman evidence to be released today!

The Orlando Sentinel reports:

Never before seen evidence in the case against George Zimmerman will be released after 5 p.m. today, according to Special Prosecutor Angela Corey's office.

The evidence will reveal new details of Zimmerman's fatal encounter with 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26 in Sanford. Expected among the documents: Trayvon's autopsy, eyewitness accounts, cell phone records and police records.

The documents are to be released as a result of the discovery process, during which state prosecutors were required to turn over their evidence in the case to the Zimmerman's defense.

The Sentinel will review those documents as soon as they become available.

We will finally know the Truth.

I don’t understand why O’Mara wanted to keep this stuff a secret. If public opinion turns in favor of Zimmerman on the basis of the real evidence, the feds probably won’t prosecute him for a “hate” crime, and Judge Lester may feel more comfortable dismissing the case before it even goes to a jury.

Non-Hispanic whites a minority of births

As reported by the NY Times, in the 12-month period ending July 2011, non-Hispanic white babies were only 49.6% of all births. There’s accompanying graph which shows that white births have fallen off a cliff since the year ending July 2006, while non-white births have increased. It’s a pretty big change in just five years, and it makes you wonder what the graph will look like in another five years.

The tone of the article is giddy. Reading between the lines, the reporter is saying that the United States has been a racist country for so long. Whites enslaved blacks and genocidally killed off the American Indians. When whites become a minority, we will finally have purged our nation of its evil whiteness.

The last two paragraphs read:

And the fact that the country is getting a burst of births from nonwhites is a huge advantage, argues Dowell Myers, professor of policy, planning and demography at the University of Southern California. European societies with low levels of immigration now have young populations that are too small to support larger aging ones, exacerbating problems with the economy.

“If the U.S. depended on white births alone, we’d be dead,” Mr. Myers said. “Without the contributions from all these other groups, we would become too top-heavy with old people.”

This kind of nonsense is bought into by liberals and conservatives alike. Because of modern technology, there has been such a massively huge increase in worker productivity that we do not need a pyramid scheme of ever-larger numbers of young workers in order to provide food, clothing and shelter for “old people.”

There may be some limits with respect to the amount of labor-intensive healthcare we can provide, but there has never been a rational discussion of that issue.

I enjoyed the following comment by a NY Times reader:

I am curious about the comment that "...increasingly diverse young population is a potential engine of growth ...".

Does this imply that a homogeneous population is not an engine for growth (ie. China, India and Germany using the classifications in the article would be fairly homogeneous.)

Does it imply that "white" people are not a viable engine for growth due to some deficiency or other?

I am not quite sure what the point of this statement was intended to be.

Does coffee make you live longer?

I'd like to think so, and it would be easy to agree with the crappy MSM reporting, but I think it's more likely that upper-class people drink coffee and lower-class people drink soda, so the study is just showing us that upper-class people live longer.

A big thumbs down to MSM "science" reporting.

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And it looks like I blogged about this exact same topic two years ago, but the previous post contains actual data about the social class difference of coffee drinkers.

Race censorship by the MSM

Hat tip to Lawrence Auster for finding this article by Kyle Rogers in which Rogers presents actual accounts from newspaper insiders about how they intentionally censor race from crime reporting.

People who follow alt-right blogs know that this has been happening based on the mountains of evidence supplied by bloggers such as Auster, but I think this is the first time I have read about the actual process newspapers use to censor these stories.

Also, the MSMS censors know what they are doing. Regular people would have much different views about race, views that the liberal elite don’t want people to have, if they routinely read news reports which include the race of criminal perpetrators.

Trayvon Martin's knuckles were injured

Latest news is that Trayvon Martin’s autopsy showed that he had injuries to his knuckles, consistent with Martin punching out Zimmerman. Which means that the funeral director lied, but reading between the lines there were no other injuries to Martin. So the evidence is completely consistent with Trayvon throwing the first punch and beating up Zimmerman who was incapable of fighting back.