Half Sigma

Shots fired at BET Awards

Shots were fired after a fight at the BET (that’s Black Entertainment Television) Awards.

The difference between the guidos and the blacks is the that guidos only get into fistfights, while the blacks start shooting at each other.

MTV's Jersey Shore

I highly recommend that all of my readers watch the first season of the MTV reality show Jersey Shore for the following three reasons:

1. Learn about proles. There’s a meme in the comment threads in which white proles are glorified for being salt-of-the-earth type of people, but here you see the reality of proles, the loud and boorish behavior. As fun as the cast of the show is to watch on TV, you probably wouldn’t want to live next door to them.

1a. Learn about guidos. Guidos are a subset of proles from the New York City area, and probably the epicenter of guidoness is Staten Island. I do mention guidos from time to time on this blog. The Jersey Shore gives you an opportunity to observe this specific type of white prole for yourself.

2. Learn about game. I never write about “game,” but yet the theme shows up in the comments all of the time. One particular character on the show, Mike “The Situation” is a master of game. Nearly every episode he brings back girls for soaking in the hot tub and sometimes casual sex. Of course all of the girls he brings back are prole girls who like guidos. I’m not sure how he would fare if he tried to pick up upper-middle-class girls.

3. It’s hilarious. And for this, I credit not the morons being filmed, but the people behind the cameras and the people who do the editing. There is also some lesson there in value transference. This show made a group of low-IQ nobodies rich and famous, while the people doing the real high-IQ value creation work, the people behind the scenes, just got paid their regular salary or hourly wage and no doubt are still middle class.

Some other comments and observations:

a. Prole girls, at least of the guidette viariety, like “juiceheads.” That is, guys with so much muscle they probably have to be doing steroids. And they also have fake tans. These guidette girls have zero interest in dating pale and skinny but rich and smart investment bankers, for example. They’re not even that much into facial looks; it’s all about the muscular body.

b. Proles like to get into fistfights. OK, I already knew that, but on the Jerse Shore you can see it happening. One of the differences between proles and the higher classes is that proles have to always be ready to do violence while the upper classes don’t have that attitude.

c. Proles have casual sex and they often get so drunk that they throw up and black out.

d. “Creeping” means to go out and try to pick up girls. “Grenades” are fat ugly girls. “Landmines” are skinny ugly girls. The guys on the show will hilariously insult the ugly girls in a manner that’s extremely politically incorrect and impolite.

e. “Snooki” was actually quite cute. Now I know why she became the show’s breakway star despite being short and not especially pretty. She acts like a little girl and makes funny noises; it’s all very endearing and entertaining to watch.

f. “The Situation” is also quite enjoyable to watch, especially the way he constantly refers to himself in the third person as “The Situation.” “The Situation” also refers to his extremely defined abs. “Girls love The Situation,” or so he says. “The Situation” is the only guy on the show who doesn’t have any tattoos.

g. The proles on the show are happy being proles and have no desire to move up in class. Their “self-actualizaton” (to use a term from Maslow) is to be the best guidos or guidettes that they can be.

You probably want to call it quits after Season One. I started watching the second season, but for starters the second season was filmed in Miami where the cast were like fish out of water (or like guidos out of the tristate area) and the emphasis was mostly on some possibly manufactured relationship drama. The first season is obviously the only season where they act like their original selves, when they are still nobodies. By Season 2, they are already celebrities and on their way to becoming wealthy, although becoming wealthy didn’t magically give them any class.

Half Sigma's Instinct Hierarchy

Half Sigma’s Instinct Hierarchy is based on Maslow’s Need Hierarchy, concepts I’ve previously written about in my blog, and a comment someone recently left here.

I think it’s more correct than Maslow’s hierarchy. Note that all of the higher level instincts exist to support the lower level instincts. You need to be alive in order to have sex and reproduce. Conforming to your tribe means they won’t kick you out so you won’t die alone in the wilderness. More status means more resources for your children and better access to mates.

What Maslow calls “self-actualization” is just having a higher level of status compared to merely not being a loser.

It’s sad that we’re just a bunch of animals trying to reproduce. Actually, if there’s anything unique about humanity, it’s that we get so caught up in the higher level instincts that we sometimes do that to the detriment of the lower level instincts. This explains why birth rates are severely declining. On the other hand, it simply might be the case that instincts which in our past led to more children now lead to less children in a society in which conformity means NOT having a big family and in which status is at odds with having children because children are expensive and get in the way of purchasing positional goods.

NY Times article about Stuyvesant and cheating

The Stuyvesant High School described in the NY Times article is NOT the Stuyvesant I remember. I don’t recall this cutthroat high-stress environment that’s described in the article.

I went to Stuyvesant in the 1980s. Things may have changed since then. Stuyvesant was majority white when I attended, and now it’s overwhelmingly Asian. Chinese exchange students cheat a lot, but I don’t know if that applies to the average Asian student at Stuyvesant. If there was a racial angle, I’m sure the NY Times would NOT report on it.

The 12th Imam and Yom Kippur

Today, Ahmadinejad gave his annual speech to the United Nations about the 12th Imam. He has been doing this since 2007. I found a transcript of today’s speech:

Mr. President, Friends and Dear Colleagues,

Creating peace and lasting security with decent life for all, although a great and a historic mission can be accomplished. The Almighty God has not left us alone in this mission and has said that it will surely happen. If it doesn't, then it will be contradictory to his wisdom.

-God Almighty has promised us a man of kindness, a man who loves people and loves absolute justice, a man who is a perfect human being and is named Imam A1-Mahdi, a man who will come in the company of Jesus Christ (PBUH) and the righteous. By using the inherent potential of all the worthy men and women of all nations and I repeat, the inherent potential of "all the worthy men and women of all nations" he will lead humanity into achieving its glorious and eternal ideals.

-The arrival of the Ultimate Savior will mark a new beginning, a rebirth and a resurrection. It will be the beginning of peace, lasting security and genuine life.

-His arrival will be the end of oppression, immorality, poverty, discrimination and the beginning of justice, love and empathy.

-He will come and he will cut through ignorance, superstition, prejudice by opening the gates of science and knowledge. He will establish a world brimful of prudence and he will prepare the ground for the collective, active and constructive participation of all in the global management.

-He will come to grant kindness, hope, freedom and dignity to all humanity as a girl.

-He will come so mankind will taste the pleasure of being human and being in the company of other humans.

-He will come so that hands will be joined, hearts will be filled with love and thoughts will be purified to be at service of security, welfare and happiness for all.

-He will come to return all children of Adam irrespective of their skin colors to their innate origin after a long history of separation and division linking them to eternal happiness.

-The arrival of the Ultimate Savior, Jesus Christ and the Righteous will bring about an eternally bright future for mankind, not by force or waging wars but through thought awakening and developing kindness in everyone. Their arrival will breathe a new life in the cold and frozen body of the world. He will bless humanity with a spring that puts an end to our winter of ignorance, poverty and war with the tidings of a season of blooming.

-Now we can sense the sweet scent and the soulful breeze of the spring, a spring that has just begun and doesn't belong to a specific race, ethnicity, nation or a region, a spring that will soon reach all the territories in Asia, Europe, Africa and the US.

-He will be the spring of all the justice-seekers, freedom-lovers and the followers of heavenly prophets. He will be the spring of humanity and the greenery of all ages.

-Let us join hands and clear the way for his eventual arrival with empathy and cooperation, in harmony and unity. Let us march on this path to salvation for the thirsty souls of humanity to taste immortal joy and grace.

Long live this spring, long live this spring and long live this spring.

As usual, this will NOT be reported by the mainstream media. There are two reasons why this won’t be reported.

(1) Reporters are all atheists, and therefore they don’t understand religious belief. They simply don’t understand that the leader of a nation could believe this 12th Imam nonsense. That is if they even know about the Shiite 12th Imam beliefs; the only thing the MSM seems to know about Islam is that it’s a “religion of peace.”

Interestingly, nearly all of the websites writing about the 12th Imam are Christian websites. This is because those with faith in God and Jesus are better able to understand the Shiite Islamic faith in Allah and the 12th Imam.

(2) The MSM avoids any sort of reporting that might make American readers distrustful or fearful of Islam.

The Occam’s Razor explanation for why Ahmadinejad uses his one chance each year to address the world to talk about the 12th Imam is because he actually believes that the 12th Imam is coming. Part of the 12th Imam belief is that He will return after a period of war and chaos. So it logically follows that Ahmadinejad hopes to trigger a war that will bring forth the 12th Imam. Which explains Iran’s actions. The people running Iran don’t want peace, they want war, because war is required for the return of the 12th Imam.

College graduates who become farmers

A reader alerted me to a NY Times article which appeared earlier this week about college graduates who become farmers.

It was harvest time, and several farm hands were hunched over a bed of sweet potatoes under the midday sun, elbow deep in soil for $10 an hour. But they were not typical laborers.

Jeff Arnold, 28, who has learned how to expertly maneuver a tractor, graduated from Colorado State University. Abe Bobman, 24, who studied sociology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, was clearing vines alongside Nate Krauss-Malett, 25, who went to Skidmore College.

I think this article demonstrate two separate trends that are happening, both of which are very interesting.

The first is something I wrote about a year ago. The U.S. is reverting to an agricultural economy “because all the jobs created by the industrial revolution are either moving to China and India, or are reserved for children of the rich,” thus people without connections to get into the quality career tracks are reverting to pre-industrial ways. My previous post was about poor people who farm, but we see that people from college-educated middle-class backgrounds are also doing it.

Secondly, there is also a SWPL connection. There is a subset of the SWPL community that is revolting against value transference, and they seek jobs that are more directly related to value creation and doing real work. For example, two of the male characters in the HBO series Girls, Adam and Charlie, were both carpenters. Despite the common perception that SWPLs are flaming liberals, this trend is actually very convservative. Maybe more hipster SWPLs will actually leave Brooklyn and move out to the countryside.

Smartphones keep the poor people poor

As reported in today’s WSJ:

More than half of all U.S. cellphone owners carry a device like the iPhone, a shift that has unsettled household budgets across the country. … [A]s more people paid up for $200 smartphones and bills that run around $100 a month, the average household's annual spending on telephone services rose to $1,226 in 2011 from $1,110 in 2007, when Apple Inc.'s iPhone first appeared.

Seems to me that the “necessity” of owning a smartphone is preventing people from paying off their debts and doing other activities which might be better for their spiritual well-being than being able to send and receive emails and texts 24/7.

Graduate degrees and class

While few things scream “PROLE!” louder than not having a college degree by the age of 25, lack of a graduate degree doesn’t signal that much.

A large percentage of school teachers have graduate degrees, because such a large number of public school systems reward a bogus Master’s degree in Education with a salary increase or even require it to stay employed. And remember that school teachers are only a middle class profession, and closer to the prole side of middle class than the upper-middle-class side of middle class. Also, a lot of social workers have master’s degrees, and they fall near the same place on the class spectrum as school teachers.

Most people from the top-out-of-sight class have nothing more than a bachelor’s degree.

A graduate degree from a prestigious program or from any medical school is a marker of the upper-middle class more than the upper class, although it could indicate that the degree holder is a member of the working upper class. Or a graduate degree holder could be any upper-middle-class to top-out-of-sight person who enjoys school. Getting a degree just because you enjoy school and not because you expect it to help your career is an indicator that you’re higher than mere middle class and is also a marker of SWPLness.

College and middle class vs. prole

Is the four-year college degree the bright line demarcation between prole and middle class? Well it’s an important marker of class, but after thinking about this issue I think the answer for people in their twenties is that it’s extremely rare that someone is middle class if they don’t have a college degree by the age of 25, and many people with college degrees are still prole.

I think that back in the 1950s, there were many members of the middle class who did not have college degrees. But there have been several trends since the 1950s that have caused this balance to change. (1) An increasing percentage of the population is graduating from college; (2) there is what Paul Fussell calls “prole drift” which means that there is a long-term trend in which the middle class is becoming more prole; and (3) there is the whole “shrinking middle class” phenomenon talked about by politicians and pundits. If only 25% of the population is middle-class are higher right now, and 33% have college degrees, this means that there’s a significant number of people with college degrees who are still prole.

For examples of proles with college degrees:

(1) George Zimmerman is prole, but he almost completed a college degree, and probably would have if he hadn’t gotten out of his car looking for a thuggish black kid. Completing a college degree when you are older than the age of 24 marks you as prole and not as middle class.

(2) Several cast members from The Jersey Shore have or almost completed college degrees, and those people are prole through-and-through. In fact, I intend to write about The Jersey Shore in the near future.

DC’s new HBD-realistic education policies

Thanks to commenter “Camlost,” here’s an article at the Washington Post about how the city of Washington is instituting HBD-realistic goals for it schools. Schools with white and Asian kids have much higher goals, with respect to student test scores, than schools with black kids.

It’s good news that this is happening because it means we are moving closer to the day when the elite will finally admit that black children are less genetically capable of doing well on g-loaded tests compared to white and Asian children.

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In other news about g-loaded tests, SAT verbal scores are down again. The downward trend has been going on for decades. The Flynn Effect has no effect on SAT verbal scores.

Slave revolt at Apple factory

There was a slave revolt at an Apple factory in China, but Chinese police put down the revolt so that rich people in the west can get their cheap cotton iPhones.

Great tax idea from Mitt Romney!

Mitt Romney proposes no capital gains taxes for people making less than $200,000/year. This is a GREAT idea because it benefits people like me.

Based on this somewhat old chart, I am pretty sure I have more capital gains than the average person making between 100K and 200K. The very best tax cuts are those that benefit me more than they benefit other people. This increases my relative status, which is much more important than how much total income I get to keep. If, for example, everyone got a 5% tax cut, prices for everything would just go up by approximately that much and I’d receive no relative benefit.

We also see that 77% of capital gains taxes are paid by people making more than $200,000, so this tax break won’t cause too much of a loss of government revenue. This tax proposal would be even better if it raised capital gains taxes on the very wealthy back to the 28% that it was under Reagan's tax reform.

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I should also add that regular people (those making less then $200,000/year) are less able to divert their income into capital gains because they can't afford to hire the best tax lawyers and they are less able to negotiate with their employer to divert their income into forms that are taxed as capital gains because they just aren't bigshots.

NY Times column about parents who give children financial support

There’s a Your Money column in yesterday’s NY Times in which Ron Lieber writes about how some parents help their children financially and some parents don't. And he references the very important essay by the Canadian journalist, which I previously blogged about.

Steve Sailer sarcastically writes “Breaking News.” But his take is wrong. The fact that some parents help their children and some don’t, and the extent to which that help matters, is a very hidden part of our economy. People who receive help from their parents don’t talk about it. People who complain about not getting help are considered whiners and losers. In a sidebar blog post, Lieber writes:

So if you’re someone who has made it with no help at all, do you make a point of saying so to job interviewers and others? And if you’ve had plenty of help along the way, do you think you deserve less credit for accomplishing whatever it is you have achieved?

I’ve never heard of a single person who publicly takes less credit because he or she received parental help. And I can’t imagine how you could possibly put on your resume that your parents are poor and stupid and gave you no help when you were younger, and have that in any way increase your chances of getting a job.

But I’m happy to see that this topic is finally coming out of the closet into the mainstream media.

Russia and Iran

Russia supports Iran, not because they have any great love for Iran or Shiite fanatics, but because Russia is a rival of the United States and anything that weakens the United States strengthens Russia.

Russia’s greatest hope, probably, is that there’s a military confrontation which results in a lot of Persian Gulf oil facilities being destroyed, and that those Sunburn anti-ship missiles that Russia sold to Iran sinks a whole bunch of American ships. As a petroleum exporting nation, Russia wants the price of oil to go as high as possible, and they would also enjoy seeing the United States suffer a military defeat at the hands of Russian military technology, because that would weaken the United States and give Russia a profitable business in selling their missiles to anyone who wants to buy them.

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I should also point out that it’s a really bad idea for the United States to keep expensive warships in the Persian Gulf where they are sitting ducks. They ought to be parked in the Indian ocean, out of range of Iranian missiles, from which point we can relatively safely bomb them back into the stone age.

Chinese buying DNA sequencing firm

A few weeks ago, I wrote that China and not the United States would take the lead in genetic engineering for humans.

It was reported two days ago that a Chinese company is buying a U.S. DNA sequencing firm.

It’s just as I predicted.

Why isn’t Iran scared?

We have three carrier battle groups in striking distance of Iran. Why aren’t the Iranians scared? Didn’t they see what we did to Saddam Hussein? They should be surrendering all of their nuclear weapons stuff and begging us for mercy. Why are they still so belligerent?

Here are some suggested answers:

(1) They don’t take the threat seriously, because Obama is a big wuss and they figure the U.S. is tired of wars after Iraq.

(2) They think they can hold their own in a military confrontation, because they have a huge stockpile of missiles to use against our planes and ships.

(3) They don’t care about losing a war because they believe the war will cause the Twelfth Imam to appear, and if they die in the war they go directly to Paradise.

The irony of Marxism

A commenter wrote: “Class struggle and Marxism will come back.”

The irony of Marxism is that the super-rich and the elite, the people who Marx hated, are most likely to be Democrats, the party associated with Marxism.

The group that Marx loved, the non-elite working people who create value and have that value transferred to the bourgeoisie, are the main supporters of the Republican Party, and most likely to hate any of the words associated with Marx like “socialism” or “communism” or "Obamacare."

Michael O. Church's classes

A commenter left a link to Michael O. Church’s blog post about classes. It’s worth looking at, although I don’t agree with it 100%.

Church’s depiction of the bottom classes correspond perfectly to Paul Fussell’s bottom classes. There’s an underclass which combines two Fussell classes, the destitute and the bottom-out-of-sight. And then Fussell’s low prole, mid prole, and high prole classes correspond perfectly to Church’s L4, L3 and L2 classes.

I also agree that there is more subtlety to the higher level classes, perhaps, than just distinguishing between middle class and upper middle class, although Church doesn’t make that distinction between those specific two classes strongly enough. But Fussell didn’t really capture the importance to the higher classes of seeking self-actualization through their jobs, and his Class X seems to have become part of the SWPL class, that is if SWPL is an independent class separate from the upper middle class.

Church’s “E2” class corresponds to what Paul Fussell and I call the top out-of-sight class.

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Also, you may want to reread my other blog posts about the top out-of-sight class.

Response to comments
Culture and beliefs

Teachers are middle class

In a column from Saturday’s USA Today, Richard Whitmire writes:

The awkward fact is that teaching in America has become a quasi blue-collar profession mostly shunned by top college graduates.

Whitmire is absolutely correct that teaching is not the highest class of profession, but I don’t really characterize it as blue-collar. I have always considered teaching to be the quintessential middle-class occupation. “Top” college graduates aspire to upper-middle-class occupations, so that’s why they aren’t interested in teaching.

Evidence of teaching being almost as low class as nursing is that a lot of teachers are married to cops (according to an online forum).

Some of the factors contributing to teaching being merely middle class and not upper-middle class are as follows:

1. You need a vocational degree to teach (except in private schools, so private school teaching is higher class)

2. Union membership (elite liberals support unions, but union jobs are for the proles)

3. Increasing use of scientific methods for evaluating teachers and decreasing control over their lesson plans lowers the prestige of the profession, because that type of micromanagement is for low-level employees and not for elite professions.

There is also the fact that there are 3.8 million primary and secondary school teachers. There are just too many teachers for the profession to ever be upper-middle class. It’s too common of an occupation.

I forgive Cat Stevens

Thanks to YouTube, you can see his appearance on a talk show in 1989, under his Islamic name Yusuf Islam, where he appeared to approve of the fatwa of death against author Salman Rushdie.

A lot of people were shocked, because the singer-songwriter formerly known as Cat Stevens was known for his songs about peace and love.

But being pissed off at Yusuf Islam is the equivalent of shooting the messenger. After devoting his life to seriously studying Islam for more than a decade, it made sense to Yusuf that Rushdie should be killed for his improper depiction of the prophet. The lesson we should get from this is not that Yusuf is inherently evil, but that the Muslim religion can corrupt even someone like Cat Stevens who was previously a messenger for peace and love. And Yusuf later repented of his statements.

The problem is not Yusuf Islam, the problem is Islam itself. So I recommend that you enjoy his Cat Stevens music without feeling guilty about it. His best album ever is Teaser and the Firecat, but my favorite Cat Stevens song is Oh Very Young which seems to be a song about the impermanence of life and the hope that the next generation will create a better and more loving and peaceful world, before they get too old to care. There’s also a line about flying a great white bird into heaven, which I believe is based on Chinese mythology in which white cranes can fly to heavenly worlds.

Sufi Islamic sites being destroyed

No, it’s not the Jews destroying these sites, it’s Salafi Muslims who don’t believe that Sufi Islam is legitimate.

Although my understanding of the various sects of Islam is still in the learning stage, it’s my understanding that Sufism is a strain of Islam that’s less crazy and more able to get along peacefully with other religions. When you see an imam on TV saying peaceful-sounding stuff, he’s most likely a Sufi imam. Sufis are also a minority of Muslims, and the more hardcore sects like the Salafis are growing in influence.

Half Sigma right, so far, about Muslim protests

As reported today by The Telegraph:

The violent backlash against an American-made amateur film mocking the Prophet Mohammed spread to new countries in the Islamic world, dashing hopes in the West that the furore might fade away.

On Thursday, I wrote:

Once the Muslims get riled up it goes on for weeks. The Danes had several of their embassies set on fire and their embassy in Pakistan was bombed. This will happen again. It will be the major story going into the elections.

So far, my prediction is holding. I’ve definitely gotten better at predicting the future. And I am still optimistic that this is going to help Romney.

Advice from Marc Andreessen

E. Rekshun left a link in a comment to an article about Marc Andreessen's advice for college majors and the future of haves and have-nots. E.Rekshun seems to think the major takeway is to study STEM, but actually Andreessen seems to be reading my blog because what he actually said was “We're in a bubble for people with a non-Ivy League, non-technical education. If you have a degree in English from a tier B state school, you're not prepared."

Andreessen seems to agree with me that in the future, the people at the top will have Ivy League degrees and work in “product development [and] marketing.” And implicitly in Adreessen’s current occupation, venture capital.

But if you can’t get into a top career like that, then majoring in STEM does sound like a better idea than majoring in a non-technical field from a “tier B state school.” Although it’s not clear to me that the kind of person who can only get into a tier B state school in the first place is smart enough to do engineering or computer programming.

I agree with Andreessen’s statement that “There's no such thing as median income; there's a curve, and it really matters what side of the curve you're on. There's no such thing as the middle class. It's absolutely vanishing.” Settling for just being middle class is not an option today the way it was fifty years ago. You must shoot for the top or likely wind up at the bottom.

Santorum, please go away

Santorum is in the news for saying, “we will never have the elite, smart people on our side."

Well if you want them on your side, that’s the wrong way to go about it. And any political movement with only stupid people is doomed.

As I wrote earlier this year, “Once the primaries move to Romney-friendly areas of the country, Santorum is finished. Good riddance. The GOP needs smart people like Romney, not religious nuts with unexceptional mental abilities.”

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula

Looks like the real creator of this movie may be a Coptic Christian named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. A guy who was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for bank fraud. And who probably violated his parole by using the internet to publicize his movie. And I am sure they are going to throw the book at the guy, because we need a scapegoat.

But there is irony to mobs of Egyptians attacking the U.S. embassy because of a movie created by a fellow Egyptian who was previously sentenced to prison by the very U.S. government the Egyptians are attacking.

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An unnamed U.S. law enforcement official told AP that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is behind the film.

I predict that he’s going to go to back to prison, not directly for his free speech, but because he is now public enemy number one, and the guy is a known crook on parole, and I am sure that once we put all the law enforcement assets of the FBI behind a massive investigation, they will find some validly legal reason to put in back in prison.

Although this should make people nervous. Citizens, even citizens on parole, should be able to engage in free speech without fear of reprisal from the U.S. government.

Muslim prediction

This is going to be as bad or worse as the Danish cartoon controversy. The Muslims hate us more than they hate the Danes, and the movie in question was much more directly anti-Muslim than those silly cartoons. Once the Muslims get riled up it goes on for weeks. The Danes had several of their embassies set on fire and their embassy in Pakistan was bombed. This will happen again. It will be the major story going into the elections. It will help Romney become president.

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AE wrote:

It seems that Romney's response to the embassy attacks has hurt him; he really drew a lot of flak for immediately attacking the president. My prediction is that if he overseas chaos gets too much out of control, the media will sweep it under the rug for the sake of the president. As you know, they're all giant liberals and wouldn't want to report on things that would make the president look bad.

It is true that Romney drew “flak” for his response, but that’s an example of media bias in action. If a Democratic candidate had been attacking a Republican president, there wouldn’t have been as much, if any, flak.

And while I agree that the media will always spin things in a manner favorable to liberals, they are not going to sweep massive protests under the rug because they love reporting about this stuff, and it brings in ratings.

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And about what Romney said, that Obama sympathizes with the people attacking our embassies, he’s right about that. As I previously wrote, Obama is a crypto-anti-neo-colonialist.

And it’s also interesting that I wrote in that previous post that the obvious result of toppling Qaddafi would be “a lawless Libya that would be a haven for groups like Al Qaeda.” And sure enough, we have Americans massacred by a lawless mob possibly instigated by Al Qaeda.

Arab-Americans

I think it’s interesting that the Mohammed video was likely the creation of Arab-Americans. According to the Wikipedia article, 63% of Arab-Americans are Christian and only 24% are Muslim.

Muslims go crazy

I have to admit that I'm enjoying the reaction in the Islamic world to the Youtube video produced by they mysterious Sam Bacile from California, a man no one knows anything about and it's not even clear if he's an Israeli Jew or an Egyptian Christian.

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The Wall Street Journal article begins:

The U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other American diplomats were killed when suspected Libyan religious extremists stormed the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi late Tuesday …

“Religious extremists”? What religion?

In my recent blog post about media bias, a commenter said the Wall Street Journal was a conservative paper, but that’s clearly wrong. The editorial page is conservative, but the Wall Street Journal follows the same reporting conventions as the rest of the MSM, and most of the journalist who work there come from the same background and same political beliefs as journalists for any other newspaper.

This article doesn’t contain any false information, but it frames the story in a manner that liberals would want it framed. The hidden suggestion is that there’s nothing wrong with Islam; it’s extremism for any sort of religion that’s the real problem. Extremists like Hasidic Jews or Catholic monks are just as bad as Islamic extremists.

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Turns out that Sam Bacile is a pseudonym who doesn't exist. It's funny how the MSM reported as fact a lot of very specific information about a guy that doesn't exist. Nothing the MSM reports as fact can truly be trusted. Evidence points to the filmmaker being a Coptic Christian from Egyptian, and all of the people knowingly involved with the film were Christians, mostly from the Middle East, and that many of the actors and actresses were people they hired who were duped into thinking they were making a film about everyday life in ancient Egypt; the Mohammed stuff was dubbed in after filming.

I watched it on YouTube and it was really bad, but it might be the sort of movie that is so bad it's actually good. You probably have to know about the life of Mohammed to get the jokes.

Birth rates and social proof

I’ve recently written about social proof and declining birth rates.

One of the reasons why industrialization is correlated with plummeting birth rates is because the poor people get access to televisions, and on TV they see people with small families or no children at all (when’s the last time you saw a movie or television show in which a family had more than three children?), and they start emulating those people they see on TV. How people behave on TV is very powerful social proof.

Unfortunately, the connection between birth rates and TV is not my original idea; I read about it in the comments.

Chuck Norris supports Mitt Romney

The top political video this week is an anti-Obama video featuring Chuck Norris.

In a rational world, people wouldn’t care what an actor thinks about a political candidate. Exactly what knowledge does an actor have that makes him a respected expert on politics?

But we don’t live in a rational world, we live in an irrational world based on emotion and not logic. People vote for a candidate because other people are voting for that candidate and not because they understand how our foreign and domestic policies might change if that candidate were elected. In this emotional world, the endorsements of celebrities provide very strong social proof. And this puts Republicans at a strong disadvantage because the majority of celebrities are Obama-loving liberals.

According to Aileen Lee, celebrity social proof is one of the five major types of social proof. If we ever want HBD to catch one, it would help our cause immensely if some celebrities would sign up. This would be a hundred times more useful than having the endorsement of a college professor who spent his whole life studying HBD like Arthur Jensen.