Half Sigma

Will New Seaside Heights be SWPLized?

There’s no profit in serving guidos. Maybe in New Seaside Heights, the fried clams will be replaced by sushi, the zeppoles by red velvet cupcakes, the greasy sausage and peppers heroes by organic free-range chicken breasts on focaccia bread, the frozen custard by gelato. The saltwater taffy places will be replaced with farmer's market stands featuring locally grown healthy fruits and vegetables. The cheap t-shirt shops (like the one that Snooki, “The Situation,” and those guys worked at in Season 1) will be replaced by Juicy Couture—wait, that’s not much of a difference.

More about counting the number of Jews in the United States

As I’ve previously pointed out, there is a lot of miscounting of Jews.

Most estimates of Jews in the United States is based simply on people’s response to polls such as the General Social Survey. I checked the GSS again, and for the years 2000-2010, 2% of respondents said Jewish in response to the question “In what religion were you raised?”

However, the way anti-Semites count Jews, the number is much larger than that, because they use a one-drop rule, and someone who wasn’t raised Jewish still gets classified as Jewish because they have a parent or a grandparent or even a great-grandparent who was raised Jewish.

Although the percent of people who respond “Jewish” in surveys like the GSS is decreasing, the percent of people who are Jewish based on a one-drop rule is increasing.

If you follow the link above, you will see that I previously explained that others have estimated that there are 10 million people in the United States who qualify for Aliyah to Israel, and that would be 3.33% of the population or 5% of the white population. And this is my guess, but probably 4% of the population and 6% of the white population would be classified as Jewish under the anti-Semitic one-drop classification. That’s double the number of people who self-identify as being raised Jewish.

The percent of Jews increase dramatically if you only look at people with college degrees. Based on the same 2000-2010 GSS years, 4.7% of people with at least a college degree are Jewish, and 7% of people with graduate degrees are Jewish.

If one assumes that part-Jews who do not self-identify as Jewish attend college at the same rate as self-identified Jews (and I think that’s a reasonable assumption), then maybe 9.5% of college graduates are Jewish using the broader definition. And because a college degree is a prerequisite to work in any notable profession, that’s an important number. So if some profession is one-third Jewish based on the way that anti-Semites count Jews, then this might seem like a large percentage compared to the 2% of the population who self-identify as Jewish, but it’s not such a big number at all compared to the 9.5% of college graduates who are Jewish under a one-drop rule.

Also, it’s completely unrealistic to think that those 9.5% of college graduates who are Jewish will be perfectly evenly represented in all professions. No, it’s more realistic that Jews will like some professions and industries more than others, and that Jews will be over-represented in some professions and under-represented in others. It’s no more a black conspiracy that there are a lot of black NBA players than it is a Jewish conspiracy that there are a lot of Jewish stand-up comics.

One also needs to factor in that Jews are not evenly geographically distributed. There are a lot of Jews in New York and not so many in Texas. Thus in industries based in Texas, such as the oil and gas industry, you shouldn’t expect to find a lot of Jews. But in industries based in New York, such as finance, law, media and fashion, you would naturally expect a much higher percentage of the people to be Jews.

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just numbers plus HBD. If you anti-Semitic white gentiles want to have the career success of Jews, then you should get good grades in school, and go to the most prestigious college and graduate school you can get into. This is EXACTLY the advice I give all the time on my blog. You sound like the NAACP, which would rather sue the city of New York because not enough blacks get admitted to Stuyvesant, than tell black parents that they should make their kids study for the test.

Indian racism

Commenter asdf writes:

[R]acism is still alive and well for non whites. If you get an Indian department head then the department soon becomes all Indian. So promotions and hiring take on a racial conflict angle because you know racial favoritism is going to be there. By contrast in the all white department there was none of this and it was much more merit based and cooperative.

My personal experience (based on a sample size of one, this only anecdotal) is that asdf is completely correct. At a company I have worked for, we used to have a lot of white people doing web programming. But an Indian guy was made the Director of that group, and after that about 90% of the people who were hired were Indian. I think that right now, the department has zero non-Indian programmers (there was an Israeli programmer and a Russian programmer who both quit). The original white programmers who still work there have all been promoted to management.

The very best programmer the company has is a nerdy white American guy who works off-site. He's worth at least four Indian programmers, in my opinion, although I am sure he doesn't get paid four times as much.

* * *

Jake asks:

Do you think this is racial or just that Indians are cheaper to hire?

The Indians don’t make THAT much less money than white American programmers, especially after you factor in the hassle of dealing with H-1B issues. And based on my informal opinion that one white American programmer is worth two Indians, it’s a false economy.

A white American programmer is beyond doubt worth 20% more than an Indian, which is probably what the real salary differential is.

Mormons vote for Mormons

Chart at Steve Sailer’s blog shows that Reuters poll shows that Romney has 87% of the Mormon vote.

Maybe not that surprising, but it shows that Mormons behave the way that anti-Semites think that Jews behave.

And no, it’s not just about Mormons voting Republican. For example, there is the prominent Democratic Mormon Representative Jim Matheson from Utah.

The aftermath of Frakenstorm

I walked outside this morning, and there was no doorman. I had to open the door by myself!

Clearly, in the aftermath of this apocalyptic storm, the New York area is returning to a primitive pre-industrial state where people have to open their own doors by themselves.

When the Frankenstorm coverage jumped the shark

After they reported that the New York Stock Exchange trading floor was buried under three feet of water, and it turned out to be a fake story (probably something someone made up on Twitter), I turned off the television.

Frakenstorm crane collapse

The crane atop the tallest residential building under construction, One57, had a partial collapse a short time ago.

Readers of my blog will remember that I previously blogged about that building. And just last evening, I was looking up at that crane and wondering how it would survive a hurricane.

Arthur Jensen, 1923-2012

I was informed from Steve Sailer’s blog that Arthur Jensen died last week.

How did I not know? Because there was a complete blackout by the mainstream media, even though he was the preeminent researcher of human intelligence.

With Jensen and J.P. Rushton both dead, this may also be the death of HBD research.

UPDATE

Jensen finally gets his NY Times obituary on November 1, 10 days after his death.

Live Frankenstorm update

It's heavily overcast and windy outside, but it's not raining yet.

The city is quieter than normal for a Sunday evening. Many stores and restaurants that would normally be open at this time are closed. Yet many are also still open. The restaurants that are open look pretty busy. There was a line of people at Gristedes buying last-minute supplies. Every place is sold out of bottled water; don’t people know that they can just fill an empty bottle with tap water?

How to know if you're a racist

As Steve Sailer points out, Jon Krosnick, a professor at Stanford University, uses the following question to measure racist attitudes:

It’s really a matter of some people just not trying hard enough; if Blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.

I presume that agreeing with this statement makes one racist, which makes me not a racist because I would disagree. The IQ gap between whites and blacks is such that no amount of trying harder will ever enable blacks to be as well off as whites, not in a country in which those with IQs below 100 aren’t qualified for decent career tracks.

Of course denialism of HBD is taken as a given, so the assumption is that agreement with the statement means that the respondent denies the “fact” that massive racism is preventing blacks from being as well off as whites, and such denialism of racism is considered to be racist.

NY Times article about too many Asians getting into Stuyvesant

Earlier this weekend, the NY Times published an article about the “problem” of Asians scoring too high on the entrance exam for Stuyvesant and other “specialized” NYC high schools.

Of course, HBD denialism is in full force, because the high Asian scores are strictly explained as result of Asians studying too much, and this is bad for Asians (because they waste their childhood studying for tests) and bad for blacks (because… well I’m not sure why it’s bad for blacks, because if studying is bad, and blacks aren’t doing it, then that should be good for blacks).

There are those who have the opinion that if the truth of HBD were widely known, this would be really bad for blacks, because they would give up or get low self esteem or something like that. But it seems to me that blacks already believe in HBD and are aware that they aren’t as smart as Asians, which is why they don’t bother, and why the NAACP prefers to sue the state over the admissions test rather than tell black parents that they should make their kids study harder.

I think that to blacks, HBD is equivalent to the n-word. Blacks relish in calling each other “nigger” while they get outrageously angry at any white person who dares to say the word “nigger.” It’s the same thing with HBD. Among themselves, blacks behave consistent with the belief that they aren’t as smart as whites or Asians, but get outraged at any white person who dares to hold to publicly state that, or even those that dare to publicly state that blacks should just study harder.

Will the issue over testing finally wake Asians up to the fact that blacks are their enemies, and any political party that is the friend of blacks, such as the Democratic Party, is the enemy of Asians?

* * *

Regarding the issue of whether or not studying helps, I am sure that the obsessive Asian studying is boosting their scores by at least half a standard deviation and maybe even a whole standard deviation over whites, which makes it more difficult for white kids to get into Stuyvesant. But blacks are so far behind Asians with respect to their average genetic intelligence that there is no amount of studying they could ever do to make up the IQ gap.

The hunt (how can these people afford that co-op?)

Commenter “JerseyGuy” brought to my attention a recent NY Times article from the “Hunt” series, about how people find places to live in New York City.

Matt is a music teacher at public high school in Westchester, and Kate is a “freelance television producer.” The commenter wondered how they can afford to buy a co-op in Morningside Heights for the asking price was $869,000 and, which on top of that, has a monthly maintenance fee $1,750. Although there’s no real estate tax because it’s included in the monthly maintenance fee, that does seem like a lot of money considering they both have what I would guess to be jobs with only five-figure salaries. “Freelance” is usually a codeword for not steadily employed and not making a lot of money, and even a producer with a full-time job only makes a median salary of $58,585.

There’s also the mystery of where they are sending their six-year-old son to school. A public school in Morningside Heights is probably a public school full of blacks and mulatto Hispanics where a little white kid will get beaten up. But surely a public school teacher married to a possibly unemployed low-level person in the media industry can’t possibly afford to send their kid to an expensive Manhattan private school?

Sadly for Matt, both of his parents died recently and at a fairly young age given modern life expectancies. But fortunately for him, his father was one of the country’s top heart surgeons, so Matt could have easily inherited quite a bit of money. His father was probably making $500,000 a year. He could have saved up several million dollars, and even divided among three children, Matt might have inherited enough money to pay cash for the co-op. (Also, here is mother’s obituary if you are interested.)

I have not been able to find out much about Kate’s family background. All I know is that she grew up in Larchmont, which is one of the wealthiest villages in Westchester. Her parents are retired and living in Miami, Florida. They may be quite wealthy given that they are from Larchmont, or they might just be merely well off, but it’s impossible to say for sure. They don’t have much of an internet presence.

The bottom line here is that they were able to afford the co-op because Matt inherited money from his parents, and Kate may also be receiving parental assistance. And that's how a public school teacher gets to live like a member of the elite. How can you compete if your parents are merely middle-class?

* * *

UPDATE: "The Engineer" informed me that salaries of public employees are online. Matt makes $71,624/year. Not a bad salary for a public school teacher (which points out that well-connected children of wealthy parents manage to get decent salaries even at jobs which don’t normally pay that well), but it’s not enough money to afford an $869,000 co-op which has a $1,750 monthly maintenance fee on top of that.

The nanny murders

I guess this is worth a blog post, because we wonder whether it will make rich people in Manhattan think twice about abandoning the care of their children to poor Hispanic immigrants. How many other Hispanic immigrant nannies harbor such resentment against the rich brats they take care of that they’ve thought of doing the same thing?

* * *

Kevin Krim, the father, has a high-level high-paying job with CNBC.

* * *

The wife, Marina (sounds Russian but she grew up in an affluent Southern California family), is a stay-at-home mom. (Her part-time “job” teaching art to children at a local playground isn’t a real job, it’s a hobby.) Why do they have a nanny? Because it’s pretty common for rich men to have non-working wives who still have a nanny.

Frankenstorm 2012 and the election

The coming super-storm, dubbed “Frankenstorm” by the National Weather Service, could knock out power throughout the northeast for more than a week. This will depress voter turnout, and natural events which depress voter turnout always benefit Republicans because Democratic voters have lower future-time orientation.

Frankenstorm could cause Pennsylvania, which has been trending pro-Romney, to swing into the red.

The $5 million offer that Obama will refuse

As I suspected, Trump was full of hot air again. He doesn’t have any big revelation about Obama’s background. He just has an offer, of $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choice, if he makes public his college applications and transcripts and releases his passport history.

Obama is going to refuse because he’s hiding something. Why else would he refuse the offer of $5 million to some left-wing charity?

And I predict the MSM will ignore Trump rather than do any investigation at all into what Obama might be hiding.

Fake hate crime in Louisiana

CNN Reports:

A Louisiana woman who said she had been set afire by white supremacists inflicted her injuries herself, police said Tuesday.

Sharmeka Moffitt was found in a city park in Winnsboro, in rural northeastern Louisiana, on Sunday night with burns over 90% of her body. The 20-year-old told police she had been attacked and set ablaze by three men who wrote "KKK" on her car, but Winnsboro Police Chief Lester Thomas said Tuesday afternoon that evidence found on a cigarette lighter and a bottle of charcoal lighter fluid showed "this was not an attack, but a self-inflicted incident."

Thanks to readers for alerting me to this news.

If there’s a message here, it’s that black women too often make up fake crimes committed against them by whites, and the gullible MSM is always fooled by it, because the liberals who control the MSM really want to believe that there are all these crimes being committed by whites against blacks.

And how about the Monday posting by some DailyKos moron ranting about how the crime wasn’t yet officially called a hate crime (despite the fact that without any perpetrators the point is moot because there’s no one to charge with a crime).

But it sure is pretty whacked that she would set herself on fire just for publicity.

Autumn Pasquale murdered by blacks

I got very suspicious when I saw news stories that “two teens” were arrested for the murder of a prole 12-year-old blonde-haired white girl, but no photos of the accused and no mention of their race.

Well, if you watch the video here, you see that the teens were black.

Police caught them because the morons posted incriminating evidence on Facebook.

If her parents had warned her to stay away from black boys, Autumn might still be alive.

More death threats against Romney. MSM double-standard

Infowars continues to report on the death threats against Romney by black Twitter users.

The MSM has been silent about this issue. Only Matt Drudge has made me aware of it. There’s obviously a double standard. If, for example, “neo-Nazi whites” were tweeting similar threats about Obama, it would be a really Huge Issue that the MSM and the Secret Service would be taking very seriously.

Big news about Obama from Donald Trump

The NY Daily News reports:

Real estate tycoon and armchair political analyst Donald Trump pushed his way back into the campaign cycle on Monday, promising to disrupt the election with a "very big" revelation about the President on Wednesday.

"Stay tuned for my big Obama announcement," Trump wrote on Twitter, following it up with a later tweet in which he told followers to "just wait and see!" "It's very big. Bigger than anybody would know," he later told "Fox & Friends," hinting it could "possibly" change the election.

Michael Cohen, an executive at the Trump Organization who serves as special counsel to "The Apprentice" host, declined to shed any more light on the announcement, reiterating only that it would be "very big."

I truly hope that he found something genuinely big and game changing, and he’s not just full of hot air the way he usually is.

Homosexual propaganda campaign working

After being bombarded with images from TV series and movies showing cool homosexual characters, the result is a massive increase in the percent of the population claiming to be “lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.” See the chart in the NY Times.

8.6% of white women and 9.6% of black women, between the ages of 18 and 29, claim to be in the LBGT category.

Last debate

9:53 MID-DEBATE REPORT

Obama has completely reversed his speaking style since the first debate. Tonight he sounds like a confident leader. I suspect the MSM will be happy to declare Obama the “winner.”

But the reality is that Obama is a lying scumbag on foreign policy issues. He talks about promoting the interests of the United States, but I know that he’s a crypto-anti-neo-colonialist.

I can only hope that Obama makes some sort of gaffe between now and the end of the debate.

10:03 Instead of a gaffe, we get a great speech about how he got Bin Laden. This debate sucks.

Mitt Romney, the pro-choice Republican

Last month, the National Journal reported:

Mitt Romney’s eldest sister, who has backed prominent Democrats for office and is in Tampa showing support for her brother, had some reassuring words Wednesday for women concerned about the Republican Party’s hard line on abortion.

Mitt Romney would never make abortions illegal as president, Jane Romney said when National Journal asked her about the subject after a “Women for Mitt” event. "He’s not going to be touching any of that,” she said. “It’s not his focus.”

Democratic warnings that abortion rights are under threat are an ungrounded fear tactic, Jane Romney said. “That’s what women are afraid of, but that’s conjured,” she said. “Personally, I don’t think abortion should be used as a football in the political arena.”

I’ve always suspected that’s what Mitt Romney really thinks about abortion. It’s strange that this startling piece of news has not had more prominent coverage.

Probably, liberals don’t want to mention this because they think that Mitt would get more votes from moderates if it were known that he would “never make abortions illegal.” But ironically, conservatives also don’t want to mention this because they think that Romney needs to be anti-abortion to bring out the base.

Who are libertarians?

Gucci Little Piggy asks why so few libertarians are women (GLP is a blogger who often has something interesting to say), but the high male-to-female ratio of libertarians is part of a more general observation that libertarians tend to be smart losers.

The most typical libertarian is a computer programmer (or “software engineer” if you want to give them a fancier name). This is a group of people that gets paid a decent above-average middle-class salary, but they are hardly rich. Very few rich and successful people are libertarians. Way back in 2006, the libertarian blog Samizdata noted that there are very few rich libertarians.

Libertarians tend to be smart, and they also tend to have bought into the idea that the free market rewards smart people, and they are libertarian because they optimistically believe that they are going to become rich in the future on account of their smartness and they don’t want no government taking their future wealth from them.

But the way the world really works is that people don’t become rich though self-directed value creation, they get rich from value transference, which usually involves schmoozing people. People who are good at schmoozing don’t espouse unpopular political philosophies like libertarianism. The best way to get ahead is to present the impression to others that you share their beliefs, and of course this is most easy to do if you actually do in reality share their beliefs.

Thus there’s the anomaly that the richest people, the people who according to theory have the most to benefit from libertarianism, are not very likely to be libertarian.

And why aren’t there very many female libertarians? The answer is that women are more conformist in their thinking and are less likely to be associated with fringe groups. Similarly, atheist groups are mostly ugly men. Good-looking people benefit more from the status quo, so they too are less likely to belong to fringe groups.

* * *

And in a strange coincidence, a reader presented me an article from today’s Washington Post, explaining that kids who are popular in high school earn more money in the long run. Although it needs to be pointed out that the study found a pretty small earnings boost, only 2%.

An HBD analysis of a NY Times essay about test scores

There’s an essay in the New York Times written by a mother whose identical twin daughters both saw their E.L.A scores sink by “approximately 40 points” between the fourth and sixth grades.

The essay, unfortunately, is completely devoid of any information to tell you what in god’s name she’s talking about. What does 40 points mean? 40 points on a test graded on a scale from 1 to 50 means something extremely different than 40 points on a test graded on a scale from 1 to 10,000.

Only after doing a lot of Googling did I finally figure out that in 2005, the NY English Language Arts scores for the eighth grade had a mean of 698.2 and a standard deviation of 32.41. So a drop of 40 points would exceed a standard deviation, and that’s a pretty large drop indeed.

Probably, everything happening here can be explained by HBD principles. First of all, because identical twins have identical genetic potential, when they are raised in the same environment they will get very similar test scores. In fact, even identical twins reared apart get very similar test scores.

The second thing going on is that tests given to younger children are much more susceptible to coaching because they cover a much narrower range of cognitive abilities. We see this with the Head Start program, which increases test scores for the young children who are in the program, but their scores eventually sink back to their genetic potential as they get older and the tests cover a broader range of cognitive abilities. Head Start only coached them to do well on the tests, it didn't make them smarter.

The evidence from the article is that her daughters were encouraged to read a heck of a lot, and that boosted their fourth-grade scores far above their genetic potential, but probably the sixth-grade test placed a much greater emphasis on reading comprehension and analysis and was more highly g-loaded, so the author’s daughter’s test scores regressed toward their genetic g.

Jews from Brooklyn who support Romney

I enjoyed this video in which an Orthodox Jew walks around Crown Heights, Brooklyn asking people (both Jews and blacks) if they are going to vote for Romney or Obama. Interestingly, the very last person interviewed appears to be a black Jew who supports Romney (yes, there really are black Orthodox Jews).

Jodi Kantor writes about Obama's white liberal guilt

In a strange coincidence, shortly after my post yesterday about why blacks vote for Obama, the New York Times runs a story by Jodi Kantor about Obama’s relationship with blacks.

Reading between the lines, I think her story confirms what I wrote three and a half years ago, that Obama is actually the whitest president rather than a black president.

Here’s the key quote:

The accusation that Mr. Obama does not care about black suffering appears to carry little weight with the African-American public, and yet it tears at the president, say aides, friends and supporters.

As I wrote yesterday, blacks support Obama because he’s black, yet allegedly Obama feels something which sounds suspiciously like white liberal guilt about not doing enough to help the blacks. Real black people don’t feel guilt about anything. If blacks were running Israel instead of Jews, and they had to deal with a Palestinian problem, decades ago they would have kicked out all of the Palestinians and Arabs to the other side of the Jordan River—problem solved, no more Palestinians—without feeling the least bit guilty about it.

Why blacks vote for Obama

There were some comments which suggest that people still don’t get this.

Back in 2010, I explained that blacks have race consciousness. When a black beats a white, at anything, it’s seen as a victory for all blacks.

The vast majority of blacks will always vote for a black candidate over a white candidate, as long as the black candidate isn’t seen as a race-traitor. Clarence Thomas probably wouldn’t get many black votes if he ran for some office because of the race traitor issue, but blacks will enthusiastically support black candidates who are total losers such as Alvin Greene or Marion Barry. Sticking it to whitey is more important than electing good government.

Obama’s only challenge in getting blacks to vote for him was to convince them that he’s one of them, something which was actually sort of difficult due to the fact that as a guy who grew up in Indonesia and in Hawaii where he attended an elite private school, he has practically nothing in common with the average black besides his skin color. But as he successfully overcame that hurdle through his authentically black activities in Chicago (and Steve Sailer explained this part of Obama’s life pretty well), he is now assured of nearly unanimous black support.

It’s as simple as that, folks. Whether his policies are any better for blacks than those of some random white politician is completely irrelevant.

Imogen

Randomly surfing the web, I found this collection of Imogen photos.

Imogen is a 20-year-old music student from Kent England. She claims to have had a crush on Sean Connery, "a beautiful beautiful man," when she was younger. She’s hauntingly beautiful, but it’s hard to describe why. Is it the large eyes? The pale skin? Her voluptuousness (at least slightly more so than the typical commercial model or Hollywood starlet)?

I couldn’t find out much about the photographer, Mark Wilkinson, other than the little he wrote about himself in his self-published photo book. Based on the fact that he received an Olympus Trip camera for his 12th birthday, that places him between the ages of 40 and 57, but more likely closer to 57 than 40 because although the Trip was manufactured until 1984, it was an obsolete camera by then. Mark is not related to Imogen and he’s not a professional photographer. For equipment, he mostly uses a Canon Rebel and the 50mm f/1.8 lens which sells for under $100. I don’t think that lens produces especially attractive bokeh, but I guess you don’t need good bokeh when you have a beautiful model. Mark probably doesn't have a very high-paying job, otherwise he'd most likely indulge his hobby with a more expensive lens purchase.

Romney pulling away

Yesterday's Gallup tracking poll shows Romney pulling to a 52% for 45% lead among likely voters.

As I predicted on Tuesday, Romney's momentum would not be stopped by the debate, because Romney only had to be as good as Obama and not soundly beat him, because Romney already had the momentum.

The key to Romney's win on Tuesday was his strong likeability among female voters, which I observed by watching the bars at the bottom of the screen on CNN. Romney's worst answer was the Middle East and Libya question, but foreign policy is a guy topic. Romney's best answer was when he was asked about the wage gap. Women LOVED his answer to that question. This is ironic, because Candy Crone probably figured that question skewed against Romney, but in fact Romney really rocked that answer with his explanation about how he hired more women to work for him and how he gave them flexible hours.

We are lucky that the abortion issue didn't come up during the debate, because no issue hurts Romney more than the abortion issue which is toxic to undecided voters. The final debate is about foreign policy, so that means that Romney should be able to escape the debates without having to talk about abortion.

My advice to Romney is to work on the soft sell during the final debate. Romney is at his best when he's not putting down Obama, but when he's describing his vision which sounds so much kindler and gentler than the Hitler-like figure that the MSM told everyone was the "real" Romney.

Celebrity sperm donor service

This is a great idea. Most celebrities have above-average IQ, so it makes sense to encourage the propagation of their genes. Better than a woman getting knocked up by some random unemployed gangbanger.

Unfortunately, the story is a hoax.