Half Sigma

Profit from HBD

The ultimate goal of knowing about HBD is being able to profit from it, but unfortunately I don’t have any slam dunk ideas in this area.

I’ve previously written about HBD investing, which is a subset of how to profit from HBD, but of course in order to make money from investing, you either (1) need to have money to invest; or (2) you need to be in a position to profit by investing other people’s money, which is how hedge fund managers become rich. Which is why I strongly recommend getting an MBA from Wharton, which is a ticket to getting a job in a high-paying industry like hedge funds, which is a much better route to getting rich than knowing anything about HBD.

I still adhere to my advice to invest in Australia by buying the EWA ETF.

In a recent blog post, I pointed out that companies like Microsoft and Google prospered because they hired people based on IQ (or proxies for IQ) rather than using the clueless hiring strategies which pervade the vast majority of corporate America. However, the secret of Google is out, and Microsoft is probably no longer the same company it was twenty years ago.

If it were possible to take over a company with decent potential but bad hiring policies, and institute HBD-aware hiring, I think it would be really profitable. But it’s not something you could do openly. And if you are in the position to get people to invest in your corporate takeover ideas, you are probably already rich, no doubt because you were smart enough to get an MBA from Wharton and use it to get a job in the investment banking industry.

Starting a company from scratch using HBD principles sounds good in theory, but it’s easier said than done. Knowing how to hire high-IQ employees doesn’t mean that you have customers or a product to sell to them.

* * *

Some other HBD investing advice:

Other countries you can invest in with ETFs include Japan and Singapore. They both have good high-IQ populations and are also Pacific Rim countries. The Japanese stock market has had a decade of bad performance, so right now might actually be a good time to get in.

You should avoid investing in India which is a low-IQ country that has probably already peaked. Every Indian smart enough to learn how to program in Java is already doing that. The rest of the country is poor and stupid.

Beware of NAM girls

Everyone who reads this blog knows to be careful of young NAM males, but young female NAMs are also dangerous. A 63-year-old man was stabbed by a gang of NAM girls after he told them to be quiet.

Food stamp weigh-in

One of the reasons why poor people are fatter today than they were in the past, seldom mentioned by the MSM, is food stamps. When you give people free food, it’s obvious they will eat more and thus weigh more.

I propose a weigh-in to be eligible for food stamps. If someone’s BMI is higher than a certain number, that’s proof that they don’t need free food from the government.

This is something that conservatives might even convince liberals to go for, because SWPLs hate fat proles, and the talk of the New York City ban on large drinks is an example of how the SWPL class is now more willing to crack down on fat poor people.

Modern women too fat even for beta males? I don't think so.

This is a meme that has been popping up among bloggers and commenters who read the blog formerly known as Roissy in DC. It’s that women today are all obese, and this reduce the pool of acceptable non-obese women.

I am almost sure that perception of women being “too fat” even for beta-males is entirely false.

For starters the obesity “epidemic” is primarily a problem among NAMs. Every day I see some massively fat black woman on the subway, but it’s pretty rare that I see a white woman with that body type. And of the few fat white women I know, they seem just as likely to be married as thin women (although their fat probably increases the chance that their husband has prole tendencies).

People work out a lot more today than they did 40 years ago (for example, Sean Connery was considered a “bodybuilder” back in the day, but he’d be skinny compared to most bulked-up modern actors), so some of the extra BMI that people have today compared to the past is caused by more muscle rather than more fat.

Modern orthodonture, as well as other types of medical improvements (such as better acne medicine and plastic surgery), means that women today have probably never been objectively better looking.

What’s different today is the abundance of high-resolution full-color images of Hollywood-perfect women. We are bombarded with these images in a way that wasn’t the case forty years ago. After seeing all of these images of perfect women, the average woman who is objectively is prettier than the average woman of forty years ago, subjectively seems less attractive.

The last James Holmes post?

I don’t want it to be the last post, but there doesn’t seem to be any more news stories about him. So of all of the mass murders during the years since I’ve been blogging, this one remains the most mysterious.

The other mass murderers showed obvious signs of mental illness or weird behavior (Jiverly Wong, Jared Loughner, Seung-Hui Cho) or an obvious motive (Nidal Hasan [motivated by Islam], George Sodini [angry at women], Anders Behring Breivik [angry at leftists]).

Holmes showed no obvious signs of mental illness or schizophrenia (which is the inability to distinguish reality from fantasy) up until the day he committed his massacre, even though he was planning it for several months. He may have had bad grades at school, but that’s hardly evidence of mental illness, merely of low conscientiousness or other normal problems. His lawyer claims he was a “patient” of the woman who is the Director of Mental Health Services as his school, but this seems to me to be just a legalistic argument to suppress evidence (because he mailed some incriminating stuff to her). There is nothing indicating that he was seeing this woman on a continuing basis for some serious mental problem.

I really do think that this is a case of beta-male rage, which is a term coined by a commenter at this blog who used to go by the pseudonym of “Commander Shepard.” The term is now being picked up by other bloggers. I think that beta-male rage is going to be an increasingly obvious phenomenon. It’s because “nice guys,” that is guys who did well in school, are polite to people, and generally follow the rules, but who lack an aggressive and extroverted personality, these guys now have a very difficult time finding girlfriends. In the past, they were considered good boyfriend material. I think that if Holmes had a girlfriend, all those people wouldn't be dead or injured.

There would probably be many times more instances of beta-male-rage shootings, except that beta-males have been pacified by video and computer games (such as Xbox and World of Warcraft), web surfing, readily available internet porn, big screen TVs, DVDs, and the like, which distract beta-males from being angry.

Jeff Bezos, another super-rich liberal

Jeff Bezos, who is the founder of Amazon.com, donated $2.5 million to support gay marriage.

This is just another reminder that the super-rich are liberals and not conservatives. Which is why I don't understand why conservatives are so intent on lowering their taxes. Higher taxes for Jeff Bezos means less money for him to donate to left-wing causes.

Don’t read too much into the latest Holmes news

A motion filed by Holmes’s attorney claims that he was a “psychiatric patient” of Dr. Lynne Fenton, who is the person he sent a package to which contains info about his intent to massacre a bunch of people.

The MSM is reading way too much into this. There’s a good chance that the defense attorney is being creative in trying to get evidence taken away from the prosecution. It’s possible, for example, that the full extent of Holmes’s relationship with Dr. Fenton is that he had a 15-minute talk with her about his bad grades.

James Holmes and gun control

The MSM is trying to change the James Holmes mass murder into a story about gun control. “Gun control, gun control, gun control” the MSM blathers on.

I am not as pro-gun as the typical right-wing nut. Knowing what I know about HBD, I don’t want criminal NAMs (or even prole whites) walking around packing heat.

However, only a complete ban on all gun ownership would have stopped Holmes from using rifles to kill his victims. And no one is proposing that kind of a total ban. And for good reason. Statistics show that vast majority of crimes committed with firearms are committed with handguns. For example, 57% of murders are committed with handguns, while only 3% are committed with rifles. (These statistics are nearly 20 years old, but I doubt the handgun to rifle ratio has changed much.)

So it should be obvious why nearly all gun control proposals that ban any class of gun focus on banning handguns. And yes, I do think that a ban on handguns would reduce the number of firearms crimes. The fact that handguns are concealable enables their more frequent use, and means that some hothead lowlife has one easily available. Carrying around a rifle takes a much bigger commitment, and announces the fact that you are armed to the guy you intend to kill as well as to the police.

The other types of things that gun control advocates propose, such as waiting periods and permits, also would not have stopped Holmes.

Permits prevent people with criminal histories, with low future-time orientation, and who can’t afford the permit fee, from buying guns. People who have a problem obtaining a permit are the type of people you don’t want owning guns. But Holmes wouldn’t have had a problem obtaining a permit. Until his crime, he looked like a perfect model citizen on paper.

Waiting periods are designed to prevent hotheads from going out and buying a gun because he’s pissed at someone and wants to kill them. Hopefully, a week later, he’s no longer pissed. Because the typical murderer has such low future-time orientation, waiting periods probably do help to reduce firearm crimes. But James Holmes planned his crime for several months, so a one-week waiting period wouldn’t have made a difference.

* * *

Jason writes:

The typical murder is a dispute over drugs, and the murderer is a gang member, often living in a city with gun controls, up to and including a complete gun ban.

This is exactly why handgun bans are so effective. These low-lifes often arouse the suspicion of the police, who then stop and frisk them. When the cops find a gun, the low-life instantly goes to prison and is kept off the streets, thus lowering the crime rate.

* * *

For the people who were too lazy to read my post, or too stupid to understand it, I do NOT advocate for a complete ban on all guns, and I clearly stated that gun control would not have prevented James Holmes from committing mass murder.

I've also previously recommended a Ruger 10/22 as a first gun if you want to go buy one. I don't own a gun myself, but I really don't care if any of my readers want to buy on. I'd probably buy one if I lived out in the country and had stuff to shoot at.

McCarren Pool update: convicted felon selling locks

The guy at the McCarren pool trying to make money by selling locks was discovered to be a convicted felon:

Wilburn, 49, has been in prison three times — twice for grand larceny and attempted robbery and once for drug possession, records show — and he has been charged with public lewdness 14 times and has multiple orders of protection filed against him by women, police sources said.

Of course this guy is black, and not a white hipster.

* * *

ed writes:

Sounds like he finally does something good and useful with his life, and they arrest him for the bogus crime of "unlawful vending."

This is kind of a valid point. It's not truly a bogus crime, but it's one that the zillions of cops patrolling the pool ignored until they discovered his criminal past.

Comments on hiring practices

Here’s a story about how Leprino Foods (which sounds like some kind of food distribution company that hires a lot of low-prole type of workers to move stuff aound the warehouse, load trucks, and that sort of thing) paid a $500,000 fine and had other sanctions for using an ability test to hire workers (thanks to Gucci Little Piggy for finding this link).

First of all, let’s point out that the reason why companies can’t do this is not because of the Constitution, but because of statutes passed by Congress, statutes that Republicans themselves collaborated on, unfortunately.

The next important point is that when companies get in trouble for discriminatory hiring based on objective tests, it’s nearly always about giving tests to blue-collar workers. I’ve never heard of a company losing a lawsuit like this because they used a computer-programming test to hire computer programmers, or something like that. (In fact, quizzing job applicants on computer-programming trivia is the norm when hiring those types of workers.) The belief of the liberals who control the Department of Labor is that ability to do well on written tests has nothing to do with being a blue-collar worker, but there is more leeway granted to hiring white-collar workers.

The DoL of course, is 100% wrong. There is a pretty good correlation between ability tests and any type of job. Anti-test people will argue that work ethic is more important than score on a test, but the reality is that there is a very powerful correlation between higher IQ and other good behaviors such as showing up to work on time, and doing what the boss tells you to do.

Any hiring practice that gets you better workers than just random choice is going to discriminate against NAMs, and especially against blacks, but there are many types of hiring practices that no one ever gets sued for, most notably:

Criminal background checks
Drug tests
Educational credentials

There are also a lot of companies that look at grades in school as an important evaluative factor, and I never heard of any company getting in trouble for doing that.

I know that there are a lot of people reading my blog who have this false belief that most companies know that they want to hire high IQ people and wish to give IQ tests, and settle for college degrees knowing that it’s the best they are allowed. But the real truth is that most companies are pretty clueless about all of these things, and the HR people at these companies are a bunch of liberals who have the exact same beliefs as the people who work at the DoL. At a major company I am involved with, the hiring managers are very strongly encouraged to hire “diverse” employees and get dinged when they don’t meet these goals. But HR is completely unconcerned if any of the new hires are actually smart. But this company is also a monopoly, so they don’t need to be especially good at what they do to make profit.

I believe that any company which uses scientific hiring practices based on real research and HBD principles has a huge advantage over the other 95% of clueless companies. I think that the early success of companies like Microsoft and Google had a lot to do with this. (But today, I think that Microsoft has gone away from that and now just loads up on a lot of mediocrities from India. Perhaps a reader who works at Microsoft would have some insight on that?)

* * *

Also, very importantly, there’s a very high correlation between IQ and future-time orientation. Which means that even if the higher-IQ person is not inherently conscientious, he is more likely to do what is necessary to not get fired because he’s more likely to care about the negative consequences of getting fired.

Parents who pay their kids' rent

Here’s my favorite quote from a NY Times article about Emma Koenig (who is a cute girl into "hookups" who had a Tumblr blog I never heard of which lead to a $10,000 advance for a book):

To aid in their decision-making on how much to help their daughter, Ms. Bass made a spreadsheet of all her daughter’s friends who were in the performing arts. “I wanted to see who was making a living, who was making a living in their art and who was being supported by their parents,” she said. In a graph of 45 young adults, only 3 were getting no help whatsoever, and those 3, Ms. Bass said, were working full time either in a restaurant or baby-sitting, and had limited energy left over to pursue what they had studied.

“It made me see that Emma’s social context was such that our helping with her rent was legitimate,” Ms. Bass said. “I didn’t feel like we were indulging her. I felt like it was a necessary fifth year of college where she had to stabilize herself without the structure and positive feedback of school.”

Another lesson not to do something creative unless you have parents willing to pay your rent to live in Manhattan for two years.

* * *

Emma’s older brother graduated from Columbia and is the lead singer of an Indie rock band.

The UC Riverside mystery

From an LA Times article:

Ritchie Duong, a 24-year-old student at UC Riverside, went to middle school and high school with Holmes in San Diego and to college with him at UC Riverside. Duong said he last saw Holmes in December in downtown Los Angeles when the two joined some other friends to have dinner and see the new "Mission Impossible" movie.

"He didn't seem to change very much from high school," Duong said. "We knew him as the same guy. We would call him Jimmy James. We would laugh all the time about it.

"Everything came easy for him," Duong said by phone Saturday. "I had one college class with him, and he didn't even have to take notes or anything. He would just show up to class, sit there, and around test time he would always get an A."

Duong said he did not believe Holmes was on prescription medication. He called Holmes a “pretty athletic kid” who frequented the gym. Duong said that Holmes had several friends and that he had no apparent problem with women.

“He did see girls,” Duong said, adding that Holmes had never introduced him to a girlfriend.

When someone with a very high IQ attends a bogus school like UC Riverside, the result is that he gets As without having to do any work at all.

Why did he attend such a bogus school if he was so smart? Holmes’s father is said to have degrees from Stanford, UC Berkely, and UCLA, so surely his father is familiar with quality schools. Why would he let his son go to UC Riverside?

The PhD program in Colorado is probably the first time Holmes attended classes that required a lot of effort get good grades. Holmes was not prepared for it because of his crappy schooling up until that point. This may have contributed to his mental collapse. I blame his parents for not sending him to a quality undergraduate school.

* * *

I also wonder what Duong meant about him “seeing girls.” If he had “no problem with women,” how come he never had a girlfriend?

* * *

Commenter Alex writes:

I had a friend in high school who got in to an elite school, but without a scholarship. His Dad was a socially clueless STEM type, but well off enough financially that he could have afforded the tuition.

Instead he insisted his son, who wanted to be a lawyer, go to a second rate school where he had a full scholarship because he concluded it was a better value.

So thats one way those type of things can happen.

I also think that this might have been the case with James Holmes.

Holmes now has female groupies on Twitter

Read the article.

Holmes was involuntarily celibate when he was a nice but shy and socially awkward guy with a decent (but not elite) career ahead of him in neuroscience. But now that he’s a mass murder, he’s finally getting the attention from females that he always craved.

I guess his plan worked.

James Holmes update

James Holmes has been acting crazy in jail and spitting at everyone. Except for the people who bring him food.

Many of the prison workers think it’s just an act and that he’s not really crazy.

Besides the news about Holmes’s behavior in jail, there have been no new stories where anyone says Holmes was acting the least bit crazy before the massacre, except that someone from a gun club thought his answering message was too weird to allow him to join the club. But maybe this was just a socially awkward attempt at a funny answering machine message (which used to be common among young people) and not an indicator of mental illness.

* * *

Comment from asdf:

There are a ton of people like Holmes. When I was in college I played WoW, and I knew a lot of people in my guilds real life story. Many of them were like Holmes, and used WoW as an escape.

There are a ton of Holmes out there but most just become herbivores. They get some shitty job, live in a shitty apartment, eat shitty food. But with an internet connection, the world is theirs. Medicate on videogames, porn, and cheap carbs. No status in real life? Get some in game status. Joke in real life? Become a guild leader and boss people around. There was a show called "The Guild" which went through that these people's lives are like, and is probably way to sympathetic because its meant for entertainment.

As perverse as it sounds, Holmes decision to take action (misguided, pointless, tragic) at least took more balls then most of the herbs I knew just waiting to die in WoW.

* * *

I interpret some new stories as evidence that Holmes drifted through his education without actually doing much studying, which he was able to do at a bogus college like UC Riverside. But he didn’t like doing actual boring work, he preferred playing video games.

* * *

There’s an article in the LA Times pointing out that a lot of news sources immediately reported that Holmes was a white male. But the person who wrote the article admits that the standard in journalism is to never report the race of a criminal suspect.

So there’s a double standard. If the shooter was muslim or black, it would have taken a lot longer to find out about that.

* * *

Conquistador writes in a comment:

I know a guy that wants to end himself but the only reason he goes on is because he's looking forward to the next major movie, comic book, and video game release. I kid you not.

I think that it’s likely that video games PREVENT violent behavior like suicides and mass killings by pacifying people. Probably the opposite of the MSMs take whenever they discover that some mass killer played WoW.

Holmes’s mother’s words twisted by ABC

James Holmes’s mother, Arlene, says that ABC twisted her words:

Reading a statement she attributed to James Holmes' mother, Arlene, San Diego-based attorney Lisa Damiani said Arlene Holmes' comment "You have the right person" to an ABC reporter referred to herself, not James Holmes as some media have suggested.

Arlene Holmes made the comment when the ABC reporter phoned her early Friday morning and asked if she was Arlene Holmes and if James Holmes was her son, Ms Damiani said. Her comment has been misconstrued to suggest she was not surprised by her son's alleged involvement in the shooting.

This is relevant because people have been saying that the mother knew her son was crazy.

I think the real portrait emerging of Holmes is that he gave off absolutely no evidence of schizophrenia or other type of mental health problems. I don’t think he's any more mentally ill than a Muslim suicide bomber. I think that Holmes’s Joker shtick is an act and that maybe he thinks the Joker is a really cool character (because nerds think stuff like that about comic book characters), but he knows that his Joker shtick is an act and that he’s not really the Joker.

Nursing is a borderline prole profession

Yes I know that RNs have bachelor’s degrees in Nursing, and yes I know that nurses make a decent high five-figure salary. And I know that a high five-figure salary can get you a comfortable life in flyover country. I wonder if the people who think that I don’t know this stuff have actually been reading my blog? I blog about these topics all the time. I have been writing for years that nursing will become a male profession because it’s one of the few growing fields where someone of average intelligence can make a decent middle class salary. See this post, for example.

But proleness is about more than just income. Nurses are prole for a large number of reasons.

Nurses primarily come from prole backgrounds, and never from upper middle class backgrounds. You will never see someone from an upper middle class family want to become a nurse.

Nursing as a major is prole because it’s strictly vocational. The upper middle class seek college majors that are more theoretical.

Nursing, as a career, is seen as something unglamorous that you do strictly for the money. The upper middle class seek self-actualization from their careers.

Why would anyone become a nurse if they can become a doctor? Nurses are people who are either not smart enough for medical school, or have a low future-time orientation (they want to start earning money as soon as possible and not “waste” time on edumacation), or come from a family background that makes them feel that they can’t afford medical school, in other words a prole family background.

But I think that the most telling evidence of the proleness of nurses can be seen in observing who nurses marry. And I found a great source for this information: a nursing forum where a nursing student innocently asks if any nurses marry doctors. Here are some of the answers:

I myself am happily married to a firefighter (we were married before he became a firefighter). The fact that he had a job and ambition when we met was enough for me. I myself am more concerned with a person's personality, the chemistry between us, that sort of thng. –RNinMay

I'm engaged to a police officer, not an MD. – KC Chick

What I think is interesting is the number of Nurses who are married/partnered with Cops, Fireboys,EMT/Paramedics, etc. It's like we are magnetically attracted to them. Oh and BTW, I married a computer geek too.....it was 36 years in June. – P_RN

I did have my dreams come true with my present husband of 19 years--He is a lumber broker! – fiestynurse

I like that when I call my husband at work (he's a restaurant manager) he is happy to hear from me. – misti_z

None of the qualities of these doctors are anything I would want to marry into. I'm proud to be married to my husband! He is in the Air Force and was a firefighter for 7 years before changing career fields. His qualities outweigh anything that a doctor thinks he could offer – NurzofFaith

You couldn't pay me to marry any of the docs I know. The only single ones I meet are either a$$es or gay or old. – fergus51

My class of 22 had 5 students married to Firemen, 3 to Police Officers and two that were dating EMT's. – burger914

Just for the record...I'm married to a police officer too! – Forevermomof5

My husband is in nuclear power. – BBNurse34

My hubby was a FF in CA before moving to FL – RNinMay

Me, personally, I married an electrical engineer. Love him to death, and he doesn't carry a beeper . If you're in the market for a spouse, I highly suggest marrying a 'nerd.' They make GREAT husbands. Loyal, very loving, and darn handy around the house...especially with computers. LOL!! – JennieBSN

I married a self-proclaimed "techno-weenie." CPA-turned-computer-consultant. Great with computers and kids. – Zee_RN For the record I have never dated any Dr's but i have dated a police officer and I think RN's go out with police officers/ firemen as they are pretty much on similar schedules/pay scale and live in the real world – Joolsdoc

No, I'm not married to a Doc. I'm married to a handsome computer geek. – mom22

Well, I was married to a policemen for 18 years. I guess we are attracted to them due to our strange sense of humor. As to wanting to marry a doctor, NOT!. Girls been reading too many Harlequin novels methinks. I would think 1/10 doctors is worth talking to. – leesonlpn

Here in south florida the trend is nurses are with firefighter/paramedics, its like supermodels and rockstars@ Some are married to cops as well. the monly one's that marry doctors are doctors themselves, since they spent all this time together in med school and/or residency! – ERDIVA2B

I am married to a paratransit driver (bus driver) and I wouldn't trade him for the world. – essarge

Personally give me a working man: mechanic, construction, etc for a good balance for a nurse. – normarae

My husband runs the information systems department at one of the local hospitals – maryb

ANYONE can get a doctor. However, I would recommend the cops, firefighters, etc, that these wise women have found. – proudtobeanuse

As we can see, nurses do not marry people with upper middle class careers. Nope, nurses marry husbands with prole careers like firemen and policemen. These careers are well suited to nurses because they are male prole careers which pay well. Most nurses actually have contempt for doctors. They are not sexually attracted to doctors.

We also see that when nurses do marry someone with an office job, they nearly always marry someone in a technical field like computers or engineering. We know that technical people tend to come from prole backgrounds themselves.

The exception is the nurse who is married to a “lumber broker,” but that sounds kind of like a prole office job and not something that a man who graduated from Harvard would do.

* * *

I am writing about this topic because it relates to the big topic of the last few days, which is the mass murder perpetrated by James Holmes. James’s mother is a nurse and his father is some sort of computer person, so we see that this is a typical nurse marriage.

I still am of the opinion that James’s mother is from a prole background and has only an average IQ (just smart enough to graduate from nursing school), and that his father is also from a prole background and is very nerdy and clueless as is not entirely uncommon among people with doctorate degrees in Statistics.

Batman mask found in Holmes’s apartment

Batman mask found.

What does this mean? Absolutely nothing. I’m sure there are lots of nerds who own batman stuff.

What’s important and that’s being overlooked is that Holmes wanted to blow up his entire apartment building. Which should have happened, because he left with loud music playing and his door open. Someone was supposed to open the door to tell him to shut off the music, and blow the place sky-high, but that never happened.

So remember, Holmes didn’t just want to kill a bunch of random people attending the opening of a Batman movie, he also wanted to kill all the people he lived with in his apartment building.

James Holmes had a Match.com profile and played World of Warcraft

See here. It was recently updated with his orange hair and headline "Will you visit me in prison?"

This is probably really bad publicity for Match.com.

* * *

Also, Holmes was heavily addicted to World of Warcraft or some similar game:

A former classmate from the University of Colorado told the Daily Mail: ‘James was obsessed with computer games and was always playing role-playing games.

‘I can’t remember which one but it was something like World of Warcraft, one of those where you compete against people on the internet.

‘He did not have much of a life apart from that and doing his work. James seemed like he wanted to be in the game and be one of the characters.

'It seemed that being online was more important to him than real life. He must have lost his sense of reality, how else can you shoot dozens of people you don’t know?’

It should be pointed out that there are a lot of online gaming addicts, but they don’t normally go postal (Anders Behring Brevik being an exception, of course).

Holmes's background doesn't add up

Four years ago, I stated that “People with exceptionally high IQs but inadequate parents often have poor life outcomes because of the mismatch.”

There are two key elements of James Holmes’s biography which makes me wonder about his parents.

First and most importantly, he attended UC Riverside, which is a crappy commuter school that’s 37% NAM and only 17% white. Why would his parents let (or maybe even encourage?) him to attend such a crappy school?

Secondly, it has been reported that “for a time, he worked part time at McDonald's after finishing college.” Why did he have to work at such a loser job? I get that he couldn’t find a job in Neuroscience, but only people from low prole backgrounds would sink to working at a McDonalds.

However, Holme’s father is said to have a doctorate in statistics and is described as a “manager” at a software company. I would think a guy with a decent white-collar background like that would be less clueless about his son’s choice of college.

James’s mother is said to be a RN, which is a lower middle-class type of career track; she would probably be clueless about the importance of going to a proper college. Maybe James’s dad is aspergery, and his mother inadequately handled the decisions about James’s education and after-work employment?

* * *

The Unabomber has been mentioned a few times during the last three days. It should be noted that the Unabomber had an exceptionally high IQ and prole parents. His father worked in a sausage factory.

Was it the stress of living in a NAM-infested neighborhood?

From the NY Times:

Neighbors from his gang-ridden neighborhood in Aurora described him as a solitary figure, recognizable as one of the few white residents of a largely Hispanic neighborhood, and always alone.

Is there a connection?

* * *

Whiskey has an excellent blog post explaining how the demonization of white males led to this tragedy.

White girl beat up by black girls at McCarren Pool

Latest news is that a gang of black teenage girls beat up a 13-year-old white girl at the McCarren Pool. They broke her nose and she required surgery.

This incident actually happened ten days ago, but it has been hidden from public knowledge until today.

It should also be noted that, as usual, the MSM hides the fact that this was a hate crime. If a bunch of white girls beat up a black girl, they’d be all over this story.

Would a girlfriend have prevented a senseless tragedy?

A commenter writes:

You guys are completely batshit crazy if you think that someone who shoots 70 people and kills 12 of them would have been totally fine if only he'd had a girlfriend. Sorry, but would YOU want to be his girlfriend? People pick up on loony vibes. There are thousands of geeky graduate students living in shitty apartments eating Ramen and not getting laid and they don't go on a shooting rampage. And he'd only started his program last year, so it's not like he could be considered some sort of giant failure - you study and get paid for it, not so bad.

The guy was fucking nuts.

Actually, I do think he would have been totally fine if he had had a girlfriend. And just because the vast majority of “geeky graduate students living in shitty apartments eating Ramen and not getting laid” don’t succumb to beta-male rage, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of them on the edge.

So far, the news reports haven’t turned up any evidence of schizophrenia, so I don’t think this guy is any “nuttier” than Japanese Kamikaze pilots.

Also, I think that as other commenters have pointed out, fifty years ago this same person would probably have been set up with a nice girl and have maybe even been married, despite sending out “loony” vibes. I don’t think that someone truly loony could do so well in school.

But hey, evidence could surface in the next day or two to prove me wrong about my hunch.

* * *

Also, this NY Times article confirms my theory that Holmes was not loony, just shy and socially awkward.

“There was no way I thought he could have the capacity to do commit an atrocity like this,” said Mr. Kromka, who is from Aurora. Mr. Kromka said that Mr. Holmes’s “disposition was a little off,” that he was usually socially awkward, one of the quieter people in the lab. He spent much of his time immersed in computer, often participating in role-playing online games.

. . .

A spokeswoman for the University of Colorado Denver-Anschutz Medical Campus, Jackie Brinkman, said Mr. Holmes was in the process of dropping out of school because of academic problems. She said the university was unaware of any incidents with campus police or disciplinary problems involving Mr. Holmes while he was enrolled.

It wasn’t the same as with Seung-Hui Cho who was known around his campus as having mental health issues.

A classic case of beta-male rage

The perpetrator, James Eagan Holmes, was a shy and quiet white guy and a neuroscience graduate student. A female classmate told NBC News:

"I always thought that he was a little strange. I could never put my finger on it, but something told me to not get to close to him, female instincts I guess," the female student told NBC News. "I had tons of classes with him and lived across from him in the Honors dorms. He was a very smart guy though. He was a little bit of a weird guy, but we were honors students, so weird people were kind of common."

So she avoided him because he was “a little strange,” but she hinted that she felt the same way about a lot of the male honors students. I guess a guy like him can't get a girlfriend.

This is a classic case of beta-male rage.

Aurora Colorado shooter

I predict that he's a white or Asian male who doesn't have a wife or girlfriend.

A bold prediction given that the majority of violent criminals in prison are black or Hispanic.

Christian Right lies about abortion

Commenters sympathetic to the Christian Right have been perpetuating the following lies about abortion:

1. Legalization of abortion caused the massive increase in illegitimate births, and if we make abortion illegal again, this will end the problem of unmarried women giving birth.

2. Liberals “glorify” abortion.

3. Adoption is the solution, not abortion.

4. Abortion it the second-most evil thing in the world. The most evil thing, of course, is racism.

So here are my responses:

1. Watergate also happened in the 1970s, but no one’s blaming Watergate for the increase in unmarried births.

A more correct history is that there was a “sexual revolution” which began in the 1960s. Before the sexual revolution, there was a stigma to having premarital sex. Today there is a stigma to being a virgin; having premarital sex is considered the norm.

What contributed to the sexual revolution was that both birth control and antibiotics drastically reduced the negative consequences of sexual promiscuity, and those negative consequences were getting pregnant and getting a venereal disease. At least getting pregnant used to be considered a negative consequence. More on that later.

The increase in premarital sex led, not surprisingly, to an increase in the number of women getting pregnant, because women from the bottom half of the bell curve are too stupid to properly use birth control. But not all women took advantage of legalized abortion like they were supposed do. The increasing numbers of unmarried women giving birth led to the destigmafication of unmarried motherhood. The expansion of welfare benefits of the 1960s also contributed to the destigmaficaiton of unmarried motherhood because now we actually pay women money when they have children they can’t support on their own, which seems like a reward to me.

Now that everything has been destigmafied, making abortion illegal is NOT going to stop the premarital sex because no one cares about becoming an unmarried mother any more. At this point in time, making abortion illegal will only mean MORE illegitimate babies and MORE welfare payments. I say no thanks.

2. This is just plain untrue. I haven’t seen anyone glorifying abortion since the movie Cider House Rules (which was a really good movie). Liberals, today, are primarily glorifying homosexuality; it’s hard to turn on the television or go to a movie without seeing homosexuality shown in as good a light as possible.

But on the other side of the political spectrum, the Christian Right is busy glorifying motherhood. This is contributing to the destigmification of unmarried motherhood.

3. If you add up the numbers, adoption is not a solution at all. 41% of births are now to unmarried mothers, there simply aren’t enough potential adoptive parents out there.

On the other hand, there’s the odd fact that people who want to adopt a white baby can’t find. Heck, people can’t even find domestically-born black babies to adopt so they’ve been adopting black kids from Africa. The reality is that women do not give up their babies for adoption. Not in any meaningful numbers. The Christian Right only talks about adoption when they are arguing with a liberal about abortion. Out there on the street they are encouraging motherhood. They know that it’s a lot easier to convince a woman to give birth and collect welfare than it is to convince a woman to give up her baby for adoption.

4.Who can say what’s evil and what’s not? They are both rather new ideas. No one in the Roman Empire, for example, gave a hoot about either racism or abortion. The Romans allowed fathers to kill their living children. Why would they care about a fetus? Jesus never mentioned abortion, and it's not mentioned anywhere in the Torah. Abortion being the ultimate evil is a newly invented concept.

* * *

The best comment was written by Eugenick:

We need a one-child policy like that of China, in which women who are pregnant the 2nd time either pay up the fine (or call it "tax" if you like), or are forced to abort and are then presented with the aborted fetus as psychological torture for the premeditated damage to society's average IQ and time preference (they fully deserve it, I believe).

It's the only way if you want to avoid the dystopian future depicted in the movie Idiocracy. But if Christian fanatics want their descendants to live in a society in which science cannot be done because there is no one left who is smart enough to understand the work of the forefathers, than go ahead. Oppose abortion. Promote stupidity. China will most certainly be thanking you for bringing down the intelligence of White nations.

McCarren Pool violence, again

NY Daily News article has photos of blacks engaged in massive brawl. Police had to use pepper spray. Three blacks arrested.

Big business supports Democrats

The new CEO of Yahoo is a big Democratic fundraiser.

I keep linking to articles like this in order to present compelling evidence against the widely held belief that big business is Republican, or that the top elite rich people (and the new female CEO of Yahoo is certainly a member of this group) are Republican.

Although Republicans themselves stubbornly and self-destructively cling to the myth, because they keep pushing for tax breaks and other benefits for this supposed constituency.

Shabby mansion in Brooklyn

I mentioned in my Brooklyn walkabout post that many of the houses in Victorian Flatbush were in a shabby state of disrepair, and the photo of this mansion on Albemarle Road (the most prestigious road in Prospect Park South) demonstrates my point. It looks like some of the wood is warped and rotting and a lot of the paint is peeling off.

It probably costs a lot of money to make a house like that look new again.

* * *

And this rent-control horror story from the NY Post demonstrates why you shouldn’t rent out a Victorian mansion in New York City:

For a mere $1,040 a month, Bernard Haggerty, 39, lives in the rent-controlled Flatbush mansion with five bedrooms, a den, a living room, a kitchen, a dining room and a bathroom. The home's owners would like to move in -- but are stuck instead in an apartment next door.

The Wallach family has owned this palatial home for 61 years. Back in 1941, the monthly rent was $75. In the late 1960s, landlord Lee Wallach wanted to evict tenant George Haggerty, his wife and his three sons and move in himself. But his request for owner occupancy was denied, and the Wallachs wound up living next door instead.

Haggerty's grown sons moved out, and when he and his wife passed away, his son John Haggerty gained succession rights by claiming that he had been living in the house all along. In order to inherit the right, a tenant had to have been residing in the rental for the previous two years.

The landlord believed that John Haggerty, the second-generation tenant, still lived in the enormous Brooklyn home -- but The Post learned that he too passed away.

"I'm third-generation," Bernard Haggerty said, as he walked up to the double wooden doors of his huge place.

* * *

"The Engineer" provided me with a link to a very in-depth article about this very mansion, 1305 Albemarle Road (what a wonderfully WASPy name for a road in Brooklyn), documenting it's poor state of repair.

This link is very much worth clicking on, there are a lot of photos of this mansion, and if you scroll down to the bottom of the page there's a comment by a relative of one of the former owners who said that the owners she knew sold the house in the 1970s after several burglaries (because remember, this mansion was in the middle of what was a ghetto neighborhood in the 1970s, but which has improved somewhat since then because of gentrification of the areas around Prospect Park).

Making friends when you're older than thirty

There’s an article in the NY Times about the difficulty of making friends once you’re over the age of thirty.

This is a topic that Steve Sailer has written about many times (for example, he mentioned it in this blog post), so maybe the NY Times has once again been trolling the blogosphere for topics for articles.

This must have something to do with the way our brains change as we grow older. Put two small children in a room together and they become instant playmates. Adults don’t work that way.

As parents, there’s a dark side to the way children make friends so easily; children make friends first, and then they adopt their values to match the values of their friendship circle. So you had better make sure you children make friends with the right kids. Which is probably easier than it sounds, because given that children do make friends so easily, all you have to do is drop them into the right activity and they instantly make friends with the right class of children.

Adults know who they are, so if they meet people who aren’t like themselves, they just shrug them off rather than try to change themselves to become friends.

* * *

The thirty-year threshold for friend-making has important ramifications for career advancement and general well-being. By the time you reach thirty, it’s important to be settled into your career and your geographic location, because after that it’s a lot harder to get started. The friends you make in college and in your first jobs when you are in your twenties will help you throughout your life. But if you don’t have a career until your thirties, or you move around, or you attend a crappy community college where the students are losers who will never be able to help you move up, then you lose this very important source of social capital.

The article also demonstrates the benefits of being married and having children, because then you can become friends with the parents of your children’s friends. Although there’s a darkside to that, because I know some people who were sort of best friends with their child’s best friend’s parents, and then their children had a falling out, and that ended the adult friendship.

This also means that there's a hidden benefit to sending your children to an elite private school. You will become friends with quality parents that way. It's a much better networking opportunity than sending your kids to public school.

The Hasidim stay indoors to beat the heat

In the post about my Brooklyn walkabout I wrote:

Even though the temperature was in the upper eighties and extremely humid, the Hasidim wear these heavy outfits. Maybe that explains why I didn’t see very many of them about. Who wants to walk around in the heat dressed like that?

It turns out that I guessed right! From a recent NY Times article about how the Hasidim wear heavy clothing in the summer:

Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York who specializes in Orthodox Jewry, pointed out that Hasidim did not spend idle time outdoors, at best going “from the shop to the yeshiva to the study hall to the house.”

“They spend a lot of time indoors, and they’re not Amish or Luddites, so they have air-conditioning,” Dr. Heilman said.

Hasidim believe that casual time outdoors exposes them to the temptations of the streets, not the least of which are skimpily dressed New Yorkers, said Alexander Rapaport, a Hasid who runs the Masbia soup kitchens in Brooklyn and Queens.

Maybe the Hasidim have more sense than SWPLs who spend unnecessary time outdoors?