And in the end those individuals who are most culpable, who led these institutions, both public and private--will walk. They seem to have performed the trick of achieving power without bearing accountability. Under such a system the capacity to deter a repetition of these events does not exist.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Bad Repetitions
I do not view the financial collapse as a partisan issue--at least, not in its origins (its results are a different matter because the Democrats are likely to use it as an excuse for a binge of socialization programs). The basic problem is that no one in a position of power seemed to consider what might happen if the largest bubble in world history did what all other bubbles have done in the past: collapse. The Fed, the Treasury, the White House, the major banks should have recognized that a collapse on this unexampled scale could cause systemic risk. The first responsibility of the government in its regulation of financial markets and banks is to prevent systemic risk. Instead, the government, in many different ways, each reinforcing the other, virtually invited the risk. To compound the disaster financial institutions that were too big to be allowed to fail underwrote risks that could lead to their failure, unless the government bailed them out.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
The Rock and the Hard Place
I count this a clear and ugly summary of our prospects in Afghanistan, and some implications for the region. I especially like the anecdote about the illiterate retards we're trying to train up to fight the insurgents. How long do you think we can continue to fight against an enemy which renders itself unbeatable by taking shelter behind the border of one of our supposed allies and for a narco-state that has neither the resources nor the moral conviction to defend itself? The Muslims of the world have the most to lose from a failure in the struggle to contain terrorism. After all, the most cost effective way to do this, from the perspective of rest of the world is to contain all the Muslims of the world within a certain prescribed geographical range--and then ensure that they are deprived of the technological capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction. At that point all their terroristic impulses would merely be implosive, and the rest of us could shed the nihilistic drag we currently bear. |
Warmed Up Buffoonery
Chapter XXVII: Wherein the Faithful Don Quixote de la Craken Once More Mounted His Magnificent Steed and Sallied Forth to Battle the Wild Phantoms of Other Men's Imaginations
This is not a very coherent piece of work. It's rather hackish, actually. One finds not only deliberately misleading quotes, bad grammar, no sign of proofing--but also, poor organization, no clear thesis, no paraphrasable conclusion. Thus, from the outset, given these formal deficits, it does not appear that the authors expect a serious reception. They certainly do not deserve one.
Unfortunately, due to the irreducible complexity of this issue, both those who essentially agree with the IPCC reports and those who propose alternative interpretations of the scientific data have descended into oversimplified rhetoric when discussing climate change in the popular press. Oversimplification is also, to various degrees, falsification. An issue of this complexity is not susceptible to soundbites, nor to live debates, nor to superficial newspaper articles and editorials. All of these conduits transform the underlying information into mere rhetorical displays and political peacocking--yet, what pitiful percentage of the population could even attempt to understand the gross and scope of the climate system (including its feedback mechanisms), the scientific process, the national and international political machinations, the economic calculations, the technological realities and potentialities, the environmental risks, the response of pathogens, the social and psychological adaptations to the realities of all these things and to the images of all these things that actually settles in the mind of the common man?
But, now I must set off on my next adventure, before Sancho's island kingdom is deluged by the swollen oceans. Therefore, I commend you to the capable Senor Romm, who provides a more thorough and particularized response at this blog: http://climateprogress.org/2008/12/11/inhofe-morano-recycles-long-debunked-denier-talking-points-will-the-media-be-fooled-again/#more-4413
The author has the scientific and experiential qualifications necessary for analysis.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
By Indirections
find directions out--
Herein lies a feminist rant, which achieved the opposite of its goal, at least in my case:
She wished to persuade us of the worthiness of women workers, of the contribution they might make to Obama's job program, and of the necessary justice of a tilt in its balance. However, she only succeeded in reminding me how little the female side of the ledger really adds to the economic numbers. For example, men invent virtually everything--and do almost all the difficult and dangerous work. The vast majority of women, whatever their formal titles may be, function as (mostly overpaid) babysitters, nurses, and secretaries. Now, which sex do you think clawed its way out of the Stone Age--and which one continues to propel the economy, and not only the economy, forward? All science, mathematics, technology was created and produced by men; also, all philosophies and religions and cultures, these great civilizing influences in history, were imposed upon the world by men. Women do not evidence the necessary levels of curiosity, ambition, passion, commitment, or talent to generate the major contributions in these areas. Is it possible then that they deserve equal compensation? But, wouldn't equal compensation, under such conditions, mean unequal treatment? "One law for the lion and the ox is not justice."
In the end, feminists have succeeded in reinventing misogyny--first, they deprive the female of half her charms, then they aggressively expose her to unfavorable comparisons with the opposite sex in an environment natural to him but not to her, and, finally, having diminished her strengths and emphasized her weaknesses, these deluded ideologues then want to claim for her a privilege she never possessed even in the past, before her power was foolishly squandered--equality? What? Do they think themselves illusionists to try to foist upon us ideas that betray both sense and reason?
And to think that the Republican party should have such weak and weak-witted enemies as these--and then suffer inglorious defeat to them--
Only the decadence of the age can explain such folly.
|
Friday, December 5, 2008
Affirmative Action Numbers
Here's some hard evidence on the huge qualifications gap between white and black law school applicants--which gap leads ineluctably to the bar passage gap discussed in the last post:
"In the 1996-1997 admissions cycle, some 2,646 white applicants placed in the top 7.7 percent of LSAT-takers and had college GPAs of 3.5 or better. These credentials are very good, obviously, but not phenomenal; the average student who was admitted to Boalt Hall this year had an LSAT in the 97.7 percentile and a GPA of 3.74. And yet a mere 16 African Americans in the United States and 45 Hispanics had records that strong! In this elite group of applicants, whites outnumbered blacks 165 to one. If we relax the standard substantially and look at students in the top sixth (83.5 percentile or better) on the LSATs and a GPA of only 3.25, 7,715 whites and just 103 blacks qualify. In this broader elite, there were 75 whites for every African American." (See Diversity and Meritocracy in Legal education: A Critical Evaluation of Linda F. Wightmans's "The Threat to Diversity in Legal Education."; Response to Linda F. Wightman, New York University Law Review, vol.72, p. 1, 1997 Constitutional Commentary March 22, 1998).
The differences are even more astounding when you consider that many self-identified blacks and hispanics are actually mixed race (like Obama). Adjusted for the difference in the sizes of the white and black populations in America that 165 to 1 still comes to 30 to 1. If there were as many blacks in America as whites, there would still be 30 times as many highly qualified whites as blacks. This is obviously not a convenient fact socially. Inequality creates tensions and affirmative action is imposed by the elites to keep the people pacified. They will use this strategy for so long as it produces pacification. Of course, if it ever ceases to work, instead of treating the symptoms of pathology (racial inequalities in achievement levels), they might then adopt measures to treat the pathology itself (lower black IQ).
I've drawn up a rough statistical comparison of LSAT scores by ethnicity extrapolated from numbers from this report: Law School Admission Council, LSAT Technical Report 98-04, March 1998. The most recent scores are virtually identical to those in this report. The left hand column is LSAT scores, the numbers in the next 4 columns represent the percentage of each ethnicity who equalled or exceeded the matching score.
Only half of LSAT test takers actually go to law school and these attendees tend to be in the top half of each ethnicity's scoring distribution. This means that a 163 will place a white in the top 10 percent of test takers, but only about the top 18-20 percent of law students. Given that 152 is the median white score, it's fair to assume that few whites with sub-152 scores attend law school. So 152 is effectively the minimum expected from white applicants as far as admissions officers are concerned. If this minimum were imposed on blacks, just 10% would make the cut at any law school. About 15% of law students attend top 20 schools, which are those with nationwide reputations and prestige. This corresponds to a minimum LSAT of 165 for whites and asians. Only 0.6% of black law students score that high. On merit, they would represent less than 0.1% of the student populations at top 20 schools--in reality they are closer to 7%. A 70 to 1 ratio of charity cases to merit cases is impressive. This is a religion forbidding doubts. The black minimum score, then, is 156 at these schools--a full standard deviation below the white minimum. Of course, this makes sense insofar as the median black score on the LSAT is a standard deviation lower than the white median. Coincidentally, the black-white IQ gap has stood at a standard deviation for generations. The education system in this way achieves a superficial unity at the expense of fundamental inequality, de facto and de jure.
On merit, blacks would run to 0.25% of students at the top 50 law schools (which combined graduate a third of law students). And the study quoted at the top of the post estimated that, depending on the predictive model used, between 2% and 3.4% of all law students would be black if admissions were color-blind. Her methodology is quite generous to blacks. To estimate race-blind admissions rates she looked only at LSAT scores and undergraduate GPA. The thing is, white students at any given college have higher IQs than their black peers (due to undergrad affirmative action). I guarantee that people with higher IQs are more likely to take difficult classes than lower IQ people. Result: white and black GPAs are not comparable. An "A" in precalculus hardly carries the same signification as an "A" in multivariable calculus. She certainly overestimates the black representation that would be expected from a more thorough merit-based admissions process. But, even if you accept an average of her numbers, 2.7% is much lower than the 13% of the American population blacks represent. It's a 5 to 1 shortfall. This exactly matches my statistical estimates in the table above: if blacks had to meet the white minimum of 152 to get into any law school, only 10% would make it, compared to 50% of whites. This is slightly misleading, though, since only 10% of test takers are black and my table is based on test takers, not population numbers. By my numbers, 10% of the 10% of test takers who are black would make it--which means they would compose 2% of law students, a 6.5 to 1 shortfall.
The analysis I've done here showing the effect of affirmative action on law school admissions applies in similar fashion to undergrad admissions and admissions to any competitive graduate or professional programs. They are all based, to a significant degree, on pure (eg, SAT, LSAT) and applied (GPA, courseload) cognitive ability. The IQ differences between groups predicts to a high degree of accuracy, as shown above, the academic qualifications that characterize each ethnic group. I do not think most Americans have any notion of the magnitude of the assistance given to affirmative action cases. Even supporters of this racial strategy might be privately grieved by it. My purpose here was to pull out a variety of numbers to give some perspective on the issue.
"In the 1996-1997 admissions cycle, some 2,646 white applicants placed in the top 7.7 percent of LSAT-takers and had college GPAs of 3.5 or better. These credentials are very good, obviously, but not phenomenal; the average student who was admitted to Boalt Hall this year had an LSAT in the 97.7 percentile and a GPA of 3.74. And yet a mere 16 African Americans in the United States and 45 Hispanics had records that strong! In this elite group of applicants, whites outnumbered blacks 165 to one. If we relax the standard substantially and look at students in the top sixth (83.5 percentile or better) on the LSATs and a GPA of only 3.25, 7,715 whites and just 103 blacks qualify. In this broader elite, there were 75 whites for every African American." (See Diversity and Meritocracy in Legal education: A Critical Evaluation of Linda F. Wightmans's "The Threat to Diversity in Legal Education."; Response to Linda F. Wightman, New York University Law Review, vol.72, p. 1, 1997 Constitutional Commentary March 22, 1998).
The differences are even more astounding when you consider that many self-identified blacks and hispanics are actually mixed race (like Obama). Adjusted for the difference in the sizes of the white and black populations in America that 165 to 1 still comes to 30 to 1. If there were as many blacks in America as whites, there would still be 30 times as many highly qualified whites as blacks. This is obviously not a convenient fact socially. Inequality creates tensions and affirmative action is imposed by the elites to keep the people pacified. They will use this strategy for so long as it produces pacification. Of course, if it ever ceases to work, instead of treating the symptoms of pathology (racial inequalities in achievement levels), they might then adopt measures to treat the pathology itself (lower black IQ).
I've drawn up a rough statistical comparison of LSAT scores by ethnicity extrapolated from numbers from this report: Law School Admission Council, LSAT Technical Report 98-04, March 1998. The most recent scores are virtually identical to those in this report. The left hand column is LSAT scores, the numbers in the next 4 columns represent the percentage of each ethnicity who equalled or exceeded the matching score.
| median | 152 | 151 | 146 | 142 |
| SD | 9 | 10 | 9 | 8 |
| LSAT Scores | White | Asian | Hispanic | Black |
| 142 | 86 | 84 | 70 | 50 |
| 143 | 84 | 82 | 65 | 45 |
| 144 | 82 | 79 | 60 | 40 |
| 145 | 79 | 76 | 55 | 35 |
| 146 | 76 | 73 | 50 | 30 |
| 147 | 73 | 69 | 45 | 26 |
| 148 | 69 | 65 | 40 | 22 |
| 149 | 65 | 60 | 35 | 19 |
| 150 | 60 | 55 | 31 | 16 |
| 151 | 55 | 50 | 28 | 13 |
| 152 | 50 | 46 | 25 | 10 |
| 153 | 45 | 42 | 22 | 8 |
| 154 | 40 | 38 | 19 | 6 |
| 155 | 35 | 34 | 16 | 5 |
| 156 | 31 | 31 | 13 | 4 |
| 157 | 28 | 28 | 10 | 3 |
| 158 | 25 | 25 | 8 | 2 |
| 159 | 22 | 22 | 7 | 1.7 |
| 160 | 19 | 19 | 6 | 1.4 |
| 161 | 16 | 16 | 5 | 1.1 |
| 162 | 13 | 13 | 4 | 0.9 |
| 163 | 10 | 11 | 3 | 0.7 |
| 164 | 8 | 9 | 2 | 0.5 |
| 165 | 7 | 8 | 1.7 | 0.3 |
| 166 | 6 | 7 | 1.4 | 0.2 |
| 167 | 5 | 6 | 1.1 | 0.1 |
| 168 | 4 | 5 | 0.9 | |
| 169 | 3 | 4 | 0.7 | |
| 170 | 2 | 3 | 0.5 | |
| 171 | 1.7 | 2 | 0.3 | |
| 172 | 1.4 | 1.7 | 0.2 | |
| 173 | 1.1 | 1.4 | 0.1 | |
| 174 | 0.9 | 1.1 | ||
| 175 | 0.7 | 0.9 | ||
| 176 | 0.5 | 0.7 | ||
| 177 | 0.3 | 0.5 | ||
| 178 | 0.2 | 0.4 | ||
| 179 | 0.1 | 0.3 | ||
| 180 | 0.2 |
Only half of LSAT test takers actually go to law school and these attendees tend to be in the top half of each ethnicity's scoring distribution. This means that a 163 will place a white in the top 10 percent of test takers, but only about the top 18-20 percent of law students. Given that 152 is the median white score, it's fair to assume that few whites with sub-152 scores attend law school. So 152 is effectively the minimum expected from white applicants as far as admissions officers are concerned. If this minimum were imposed on blacks, just 10% would make the cut at any law school. About 15% of law students attend top 20 schools, which are those with nationwide reputations and prestige. This corresponds to a minimum LSAT of 165 for whites and asians. Only 0.6% of black law students score that high. On merit, they would represent less than 0.1% of the student populations at top 20 schools--in reality they are closer to 7%. A 70 to 1 ratio of charity cases to merit cases is impressive. This is a religion forbidding doubts. The black minimum score, then, is 156 at these schools--a full standard deviation below the white minimum. Of course, this makes sense insofar as the median black score on the LSAT is a standard deviation lower than the white median. Coincidentally, the black-white IQ gap has stood at a standard deviation for generations. The education system in this way achieves a superficial unity at the expense of fundamental inequality, de facto and de jure.
On merit, blacks would run to 0.25% of students at the top 50 law schools (which combined graduate a third of law students). And the study quoted at the top of the post estimated that, depending on the predictive model used, between 2% and 3.4% of all law students would be black if admissions were color-blind. Her methodology is quite generous to blacks. To estimate race-blind admissions rates she looked only at LSAT scores and undergraduate GPA. The thing is, white students at any given college have higher IQs than their black peers (due to undergrad affirmative action). I guarantee that people with higher IQs are more likely to take difficult classes than lower IQ people. Result: white and black GPAs are not comparable. An "A" in precalculus hardly carries the same signification as an "A" in multivariable calculus. She certainly overestimates the black representation that would be expected from a more thorough merit-based admissions process. But, even if you accept an average of her numbers, 2.7% is much lower than the 13% of the American population blacks represent. It's a 5 to 1 shortfall. This exactly matches my statistical estimates in the table above: if blacks had to meet the white minimum of 152 to get into any law school, only 10% would make it, compared to 50% of whites. This is slightly misleading, though, since only 10% of test takers are black and my table is based on test takers, not population numbers. By my numbers, 10% of the 10% of test takers who are black would make it--which means they would compose 2% of law students, a 6.5 to 1 shortfall.
The analysis I've done here showing the effect of affirmative action on law school admissions applies in similar fashion to undergrad admissions and admissions to any competitive graduate or professional programs. They are all based, to a significant degree, on pure (eg, SAT, LSAT) and applied (GPA, courseload) cognitive ability. The IQ differences between groups predicts to a high degree of accuracy, as shown above, the academic qualifications that characterize each ethnic group. I do not think most Americans have any notion of the magnitude of the assistance given to affirmative action cases. Even supporters of this racial strategy might be privately grieved by it. My purpose here was to pull out a variety of numbers to give some perspective on the issue.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
The Wages of Corruption
Our government mandated racism provokes blowback in all sorts of ways that the PC crowd could never (allow themselves to) imagine. For example:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/weekinreview/13liptak.html
A key figure from this is that 4% of white law school graduates never pass the bar. For black law grads, the number of those who never pass the bar is 22%. That is a shocking contrast and, for the many, many blacks who cannot pass, it is a tragic waste of time and money.
Here's the problem: black law applicants with the best credentials match places like Ohio State or American (ranked 30-50), but, because of affirmative action, instead go to Harvard or Yale (the top ranked programs). Those blacks who fall just short of this top group have qualifications like those at schools in the 50-80 range, but get accepted to schools in the 4-10 range. This continues down the line until you have the least competitive law schools accepting the best black students that higher ranked schools have not snapped up. These students fall short of the white students at their schools just as blacks at Harvard fall short of white Harvard students. Unfortunately, the whites at low ranked schools can barely pass the bar themselves--their less qualified black peers have even more trouble, and frequently cannot pass even with multiple attempts. So the problem starts at the top, though it is not obvious there since the black Harvardeers (being Emory level students) pass the bar at high rates.
The solution is to either end affirmative action, leaving the top 20 programs with virtually no black students and even the top 50 with about 1% blacks, or to somehow prevent the bottom third of law programs from admitting blacks whose qualifications demonstrate they are highly unlikely to pass the bar--which would leave the bottom third bereft of black students. This would theoretically be simple since there is a close correlation between LSAT scores and bar passage rates. Today these ill-fated blacks are not even informed of their odds. At a minimum, they ought to be provided information they can understand on this issue prior to committing to 3 years of law school. The socialists will no doubt reject all my proposed remedies. I'm a threat to their holier-than-thou hypocrisies, and the religion of PC has no mercy on apostates or heretics.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/weekinreview/13liptak.html
A key figure from this is that 4% of white law school graduates never pass the bar. For black law grads, the number of those who never pass the bar is 22%. That is a shocking contrast and, for the many, many blacks who cannot pass, it is a tragic waste of time and money.
Here's the problem: black law applicants with the best credentials match places like Ohio State or American (ranked 30-50), but, because of affirmative action, instead go to Harvard or Yale (the top ranked programs). Those blacks who fall just short of this top group have qualifications like those at schools in the 50-80 range, but get accepted to schools in the 4-10 range. This continues down the line until you have the least competitive law schools accepting the best black students that higher ranked schools have not snapped up. These students fall short of the white students at their schools just as blacks at Harvard fall short of white Harvard students. Unfortunately, the whites at low ranked schools can barely pass the bar themselves--their less qualified black peers have even more trouble, and frequently cannot pass even with multiple attempts. So the problem starts at the top, though it is not obvious there since the black Harvardeers (being Emory level students) pass the bar at high rates.
The solution is to either end affirmative action, leaving the top 20 programs with virtually no black students and even the top 50 with about 1% blacks, or to somehow prevent the bottom third of law programs from admitting blacks whose qualifications demonstrate they are highly unlikely to pass the bar--which would leave the bottom third bereft of black students. This would theoretically be simple since there is a close correlation between LSAT scores and bar passage rates. Today these ill-fated blacks are not even informed of their odds. At a minimum, they ought to be provided information they can understand on this issue prior to committing to 3 years of law school. The socialists will no doubt reject all my proposed remedies. I'm a threat to their holier-than-thou hypocrisies, and the religion of PC has no mercy on apostates or heretics.
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