Legislation with No Chance

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/23/AR2010122304421.html This legislation would be a terrible, almost inconceivable blow to the socialist parasitocracy. A fed bailout is the jackpot for these people: the sooner their states and localities succumb, the sooner the great tide of federal money comes to their rescue.

Compassion for the Superrich

This gives an idea of the reality of the estate tax: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/your-money/taxes/18wealth.html And remember, people at this level of wealth generally do not pay much tax while alive: the capital gains rate is only 15%. Given that a certain amount of taxation is necessary for even the basic functions of government, I favor a higher estate tax and a broader one. Why should the children of the wealthy pay less tax on their inheritance, money they did nothing to earn, than professionals pay on income received for productive work? This is unjust on its face. Additionally, while one could make a pragmatic case for low income/capital gains taxes on self-made financial successes, based on the assumption that they will use their money to generate high returns on capital and thereby accelerate economic growth--one cannot make a similar case for their progeny. Any estate over a million ought to be taxed at 40% for each dollar over a million and at 50% for each marginal dollar over 10 million and at 70% for any amount over 100 million. And loopholes ought to be closed. Ultimately, this may enable reduced taxes on economically productive activity. In any case, the decent billionaires give it away before or when they die, like Carnegie, Gates, Buffet, and a number of other, mostly American, serious power players.

The European Spirit and the Jews

The hatred Hitler inflicted upon Europe and which it has ever since redounded upon his dreams, the nanny-state weakness engendered by post-war prosperity, the psychological damage of the most terrible wars known to man, the fear of Jewish superiority and otherness, the complacency toward a Muslim population implicitly presumed to be inferior, the outgrowth of political correctness as a self-lacerating ideology created in response to prior evil ideologies (esp. Nazism), the nature of all ideologies and ideologues to privilege loyalty in thought and speech over truth, the failure to understand that Islam is a far more powerful and implacable ideology than "political correctness" can hope to be--in fact, the most powerful ideology Europe has ever experienced, more powerful even than Christianity ever was----All of these factors play a role in current European developments.

Europeans feared the Jews as aliens from the time of their arrival and applied to them special restrictions and, after the first few generations of occasional mixing, Christians and Jews lived as separate populations. Due to the nature of the specialized roles (esp. trade and finance) which the Jews came to monopolize, shrewdness was a characteristic more useful to Jews than to Gentiles. Also, more than the Christians, the Jews in their long exile valued book learning and rewarded the best scholars. The high value their circumstances and culture placed on shrewdness and on learning probably caused a virtuous circle in which the most successful, in terms of these characteristics, obtained more wealth and produced more children. This is called eugenics, here in the form of breeding for high intelligence. Not only are the Jews vastly overrepresented in their intellectual achievements vis-à-vis the Muslims, they have, in proportion to population, at least a 10-1 advantage over Gentiles in terms of the academic Nobels and the Fields Medals, and the more cognitively challenging the field the greater their relative advantage. Here’s a recent  paper laying out the possibility of eugenic evolutionary pressures for Ashkenazi Jews:
http://harpending.humanevo.utah.edu/Documents/ashkiq.webpub.pdf


It is natural to fear the alien. But, when that alien is superior to you genetically and culturally--tolerance of such circumstances among the general populace is unlikely to last. Europe chose the worst solution to the social tension that arose as Jews rose to the top in the socioeconomic competition—which happened in proportion to their escape from the traditional restrictions on their activities, beginning in the eighteenth century. The best solution, perhaps, among those within the realm of human possibility, was one suggested by Nietzsche in the 1880s: the aristocratic and officer classes of the nations of Europe (and presumably other elite elements of Gentile society) should strategically intermarry with the Jews to engender the “good Europeans” who would lead a united Europe. The risk would have been the demise of Jewry as a race and culture distinct from any other. In any case, the Europeans did not have the courage for this grand vision of the future. They succumbed to petty, mindless nationalism and narrow, often brutal ideological dungeons for generations, then, post-Hitler, turned to a suicidal pacifism as an ineffectual and equally stupid repentance for the past. Nor did they consider calling a halt to their mad fantasy quest to undo the past after renouncing the potentially noble endeavor of colonialism (the end of which produced quite catastrophic results, perhaps as bad, in terms of human suffering, as the world wars which were the proximate cause of the pullback), instead they pressed on, and, entangled in their delusions, they begged, in action and not only in words, for the opportunity to submit to a reverse colonialism. They place a higher priority on attempting to atone for the past and on massaging their consciences than on actually enacting the good in life. And Hitler’s ghost laughs at these weak fools who still cower in his shadow and thereby prepare the way for a worthy successor, another visionary of the  Götterdämmerung or a conquering caliph.

How could this happen? By what perverse logic are these people guided? For centuries Europe's will to power in both the spiritual and material realms has slowly subsided in face of the combined assaults of philosophical skepticism (at least, among the elite) and increasing sensitivity to pain and to fear (characteristic of the people at large, who became, as a united conforming mass, politically significant as democracy spread). Having no intellectual elite outside of the close-minded priestly class, Islam does not suffer the first philosophical weakness, and its economic primitivism and "eye for an eye" moral-religious code keep it relatively safe from oversensitivity. Result: the Muslim will to power sees Europe as ripe for submission. It seems that the human psychological equation dictates that more stupidity and more brutality produce more will to power.

Thus, having destroyed their great chance to be led by the Jews, an authentically superior people, or by a superior mixed race, like Nietzsche’s good Europeans, the bad Europeans come instead to power and proceed to prostrate themselves before an inferior people.

Yet, just as the world wars and the Holocaust revolutionized European psychology into the submissive form we find today, there remains the possibility of another revolution. Perhaps an excess of Muslim brutality will revive Europe, sharpening its intelligence (perhaps from an exodus of Israeli Jews to newly welcoming parts of Europe), strengthening it by exposure to inescapable brutality, and replacing the weak-born and birthing quality of sensitivity with the strength-engendered and engendering quality of generosity.

IQ and Infectious Disease

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/06/29/rspb.2010.0973.full
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/07/reader-writes-in-reference-to-new-paper.html
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/07/guardian-lower-iqs-found-in-disease.html
http://www.economist.com/node/16479286

Science as the Evasion of Science by Means of Political Correctness
The first link is to a recent paper on the link between infectious disease rates in different nations and their IQ levels. They found a correlation of r = -.82 (the closer to -1, the stronger the negative correlation). They then mention, in passing, this curious inconvenience: 

Lynn (1991) and Rushton (1995, 2000) proposed that temperature and climate provide important Darwinian selective pressures for intelligence, with cold climates selecting for higher intelligence, because low temperatures provide more fitness-related problems for humans that must be solved through cognitively demanding means, and through more complex social organization. Templer & Arikawa (2006) tested and supported predictions of this proposal in a cross-national study and found that average IQ correlated significantly with winter high temperature (r = −0.76), winter low temperature (r = −0.66)...Templer & Arikawa (2006) also found that average IQ correlated significantly with average skin darkness (r = −0.92). The authors offered little explanation of why this trend exists, except that they believed skin colour was related to exposure to certain climates over evolutionary time.

Yes, skin pigmentation is a stronger predictor of international IQ differences than any other factor yet discovered. The second best predictor is infectious disease rates, third average winter temperatures--both of these two factors, however, may be considered good proxies for skin pigmentation since infectious diseases are more prevalent in the environment (and not only in the populace) in equatorial regions and higher latitude strongly correlates with the lighter skin pigment of peoples who evolved at those latitudes. This means that when skin color is used as a predictor of national IQ, it is highly accurate in its predictions and essentially eliminates the supposed predictive powers of infectious disease rates. To be fair, it is also true that when this process is inverted and infectious disease rates are first used as predictors of IQ, skin color has reduced predictive power beyond that gained by looking at infectious disease levels. These two characteristics almost cancel each other out--though, again, skin color has a bit more power. This makes the problem of distinguishing the causal factors from the merely correlative factors much more difficult. In dealing with various other potential influences on IQ expression, they used statistical analysis to clarify degree of overlap in the correlations compared. This way the proportion of causation to be assigned to each factor may be estimated more accurately. But, in the case of the most powerful correlation (and presumptively the most important), skin color, here's how the study's authors approached their challenge:

Although Templer & Arikawa (2006) found a positive relationship between IQ and skin darkness, we will not use skin darkness in our analyses for three reasons: (i) although evidence suggests that skin darkness is a measure of historical infectious disease intensity over evolutionary time, it is unclear exactly what kind of infectious diseases it is indicative of (see discussion); (ii) Templer & Arikawa (2006) argued that the relationship between skin darkness and IQ is not causal; and (iii) Templer & Arikawa (2006) did not sufficiently explain why the association between intelligence and skin darkness exists. Without a reasonable theoretical framework for this association, we did not feel it was appropriate to compare it with other variables for which there is a better theoretical rationale.

What's this? Inconvenient data? Will the reviewers let us toss it? Yes? And they agree with us that political correctness must here prevail over science and reason? Yes? Then let it be tossed!

Truly, it must be a bit discouraging for scientists to have to write such weak stuff. But, if you want to be published in "mainstream" journals, the proper political mask must be donned--howsoever ridiculous it may be. After all, in our time, this does not count as stupidity among one's peers. It's only convention, habit, a matter of rote--and barely distracts the conscious mind for a moment. Enough.

My rebuttal to their "reasons" for not analysing the skin color factor:

It scarcely matters what specific infectious diseases skin color may be a marker of--darker skin is known to be associated with enhanced protection from infectious disease in general. This leads to the inference that the pressures exerted by Darwinian selection in equatorial regions favored those with stronger immune systems, the added strength of which may have diverted resources from the highly resource intensive human brain. Those who allocate their energetic resources optimally for their environment survive and reproduce most successfully, enacting natural selection. Dark skin is genetically determined. The same forces which caused the evolution of dark skin may very well, by this logic, have caused a genetically determined reduced allocation of resources to the brain development of dark skinned people. It looks as though some IQ is given up at the genotypic level and, for those still exposed to equatorial disease rates, still more IQ is given up at the phenotypic level when children must fight off diseases. The different degree of exposure to infectious disease in childhood may provide part of the explanation for the IQ differences between Africans raised in developed nations and those still living in Africa. African-Americans (and African-Dutch and African-English) run at about 83-86 on IQ tests, indigenous Africans manifest, for various reasons, a large range of 64-82. In contrast to the evolutionary pressures faced by the dark skinned equatorial dwellers, those who left Africa 60,000 years ago and migrated north confronted a harsher environment which may have constrained them to evolve more intelligence than their tropical ancestors had required. Reduced UV exposure coterminously caused evolution of lighter skin. I think this constitutes a "reasonable theoretical framework." It's called The Theory of Evolution.

Another sign that their chosen leading predictor of IQ may be second best is the major group of outliers that can be seen in Figure 1 of the paper. These countries have IQs about 15-25 points lower than their disease rates would predict. They happen to be a group of African-populated Caribbean countries with relatively low disease rates, yet IQs consistent with those found in disease-ridden Africa. The authors' "explanation":  "Because these outliers are in the same geographical location, it is possible that local parasites that are not included in the DALY owing to infectious disease variable are causing these outliers." That's it. No notice that these countries are not outliers when skin color and IQ are graphed. I might add that the authors are quite lucky that American blacks never founded their own nation in N America. If you add American, Dutch, English blacks to their graph these groups would also constitute a group of major outliers about 15 IQ points below their disease-predicted levels. By comparison, East Asian nations end up 11 IQ points above their disease-predicted levels (there does appear to be a latitudinal or racial gradient for IQ in East Asia, which, when accounted for, leaves little if any predictive power to disease). Europeans are close to their predicted levels. Another point is that, in comparing Sub-Saharan African nations, no IQ-disease relationship visible in the data. Given the skin color similarity, this is perhaps unsurprising. The virtual absence of an IQ-disease relationship once nations are grouped according to skin color is rather striking. This absence is true in groups comprising Sub-Saharan Africa, N Europe, S Asia, NE Asia, and SE Asia.  The lack of relationship in S America (inclusive of the Caribbean) is so obvious that the authors admit to it themselves. There seems to be some disease-IQ relationship in S Europe (which would make them an anomaly, the exception that proves my proposed rule that the authors thesis lacks a sound basis in the data presented).

What do we have left of the original thesis? This: infectious disease rates may be considered a proxy for skin color in most places. Those cases where they are not a proxy (eg, blacks in rich northern countries or healthy caribbean ones) may reveal the racial component in genetic IQ determination. Since both infectious disease rates and skin color are latitudinally determined in most cases, the clearest way to reveal the relative causal power of these two factors would be to find instances where either disease or skin color are not in line with what is typical of a given latitude. In Singapore, we have a case of equatorial latitude, but low disease prevalence (2.7) and light skin (most being of Chinese extraction). Result (with both factors in its favor): average IQ 108, the highest in the world and 17 points higher than disease levels predict--as much as a 17 point racial bonus, though some of this is certainly non-racially determined. Surrounding Singapore, Malaysia is almost half lighter-skinned Chinese, the rest darker indigenous Malays, with a disease level (3.2) somewhat higher. IQ is 92, 6 points higher than disease-predicted. Another Chinese-based racial bonus?

Nations in the following graph (I made it based on the paper's data) are all of the 18 non-African nations with the highest disease burden (3.5-4.4, compared to the 4.2-4.8 range in black Africa), the closest disease-based comparison to sub-Saharan Africa.

High Disease Non-African Nations:
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S290610_-A9

First, and once again, there is little disease-predicted IQ relationship to be seen here. Second, on average these unhealthy nations have IQs 5.5 points higher that predicted by the disease-IQ correlation. By comparison, black Africa is 4.5 points lower than predicted. In other words, these unhealthy non-African nations had IQs measuring 85, the black African nations measured 68--a 17 point difference--whereas according to the disease-IQ theory the numbers should have been 79.5 and 72.5, which would be a 7 point disease-created difference. Could it be that black Africans have a more serious case of melanin over-determination? Amusingly, the only two non-African nations actually within the black African disease range (4.2-4.8) are Cambodia (4.2, IQ 91) and Afghanistan (4.4, IQ 84). These are the two most direct comparisons with black Africa and they clock in at 16 and 23 points higher than black African average IQ. It's difficult to think of any IQ relevant advantages those two have over Africa. Except skin color, of course.

So, when we compare black African IQs to the 18 globally scattered nations with similar disease burdens, African IQs fall well short of the expected level, insofar as disease is at all determinative. And when we compare blacks in various rich countries with low disease burdens to other races in such places we find that blacks fall 10-15 points short. The consistency of this shortfall in every study and every environment of which I am aware is quite impressive.

The ironic thing about this post is that I've followed the data in a direction that surprises me. As an a priori matter, I expected infectious disease to be a major factor in creating IQ deficits. But, once race is accounted for, it looks as though the impact is limited. With uncontrolled studies like this (ones without good control groups), one can only estimate the degree of causation behind disparate IQ levels. And different causes will have more influence in some nations than others. In America, infectious disease levels are low and therefore cannot explain much of any deficit that may exist. For the black American deficit vis-a-vis white Americans other causal factors must be sought. Besides, as the authors commendably note, there are multiple other factors, known and unknown, that influence the phenotypic expression of the genetically-determined IQ potential.  Nutrition, education, wealth, pollution exposures, stress levels (like growing up in a war zone), mental stimulus in the environment, familiarity with testing--it's likely that all of these elements (and probably others) play a role in achieving one's genetically-determined potential IQ. Disentangling the relative causal power of each factor will only ever be an exercise in estimations. All of these factors have improved in those places (all rich countries) where the Flynn effect (IQ scores rising 2-3 points per decade over the last 100 years) has been observed.

Various studies have come up with an IQ heritability number of about 80% for adults (even the red-tainted NY Times assents to this established figure). The main qualification of this number is that it presumes a similarly favorable environment for the parents and children. The Flynn effect makes for a secondary qualification, though the IQ increases seen in the developed world are diminishing. These stable, favorable conditions are found in the rich world, not in the third world. If you have black African parents with typical 68 IQs, roughly 30% of IQ variation would be genetic. Black Americans with typical 84 IQ parents might have 80% of their IQ genetically determined--though this percentage might be lower for the extremely poor. Basically, the worse your environment, the less influential genes are in finalizing your IQ and the more influential is the environment.

On the whole, analyzed critically, this paper is useful in diagnosing some of the problems causing low IQ. It would have been rather better had it presented a proper statistical analysis of the race-IQ correlation compared to the disease-IQ correlation. This would have provided a clearer view of the proportion of IQ lost to disease. Nevertheless, disease certainly takes its toll on a phenotypic level. And, whether the worst effected lose 3 points or 15 points (I suspect it's about 6-8 points in the worst areas, though the paper implicitly claims something like 12-15 points), it's worth funding corrective measures. Bill Gates has explained that this is part of the rationale for his multi-billion dollar effort to cure the major diseases of black Africa. On a return on investment (ROI) basis, even if African lives are valued at relatively low dollar amounts, this area has been hugely underfunded for decades. Gates knows this too. Unfortunately, most NGOs are mismanaged by mediocrities and timeservers ducking the challenges of private sector competition. The non-profit sector of the economy is flabby and incompetent precisely because they are not forced into fitness by the competitive forces of capitalism--the only thing (some of them) compete for is handouts--and this is the only thing most are good at, coincidentally--as Gates also knows and even, delightfully, says. Not only is the money for poor countries' assistance misspent, but too little is allocated to begin with. The other source of funds, rich country governments, also have the very same competency problems common to all non-competitive enterprises and have historically done little good (though there be exceptions, esp work on eradicating small pox and polio). If black Africa were at the IQ levels of black Americans (84), they would then be at the same level as these countries: Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco. All are in better shape than black Africa--Brazil and Mexico have progressed so far as to escape into the second world. There are also a couple of failed or failing states at that IQ level (Afghanistan and Pakistan), nor is IQ anywhere near the sole determinant of national success (or any other success). My contention: a reasonable national IQ is necessary, but not sufficient.

A few graphs I created from the paper's data, broken down into world regions (and skin color), showing, except in S Europe, limited IQ-disease correlation once region/race are accounted for:
Sub-Saharan Africa and Black Caribbean nations:
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S290505LvL5
NE Asia:
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S290517b9r1
SE Asia:
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S290519Fue6
S Europe:
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S290611C5lb
N Europe:
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S290612tTHr

Obama Logic

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/09/barack-obama-on-bell-curve.php This is one of the very few things Obama has actually put his name to. It makes for totally unoriginal propaganda along the main line of political correctness. How surprising. Obama says (circa 1994): 1. IQ tests are illegitimate 2. cancelling affirmative action and welfare is racist 3. blacks need to take responsibility for their lives 4. blacks have never had equal opportunity in reality 5. equal opportunity would require heavy (or heavier) government spending/intervention in the lives of the poor I agree with #3. #1 is a harmful form of denial. #2 presumes that America owes reparations to blacks, which it does not. I might add that calling others racist without clear cause and justification is itself racist. #4 blacks have received more than they've given since 1965 in financial, professional, and educational terms--and it is a pregnant symbol of the self-defeating attitude of the black community that by the second generation, every non-black group of immigrants (having started with less) has surpassed American blacks in all measurable socioeconomic statistics. #5 government intervention has been so pervasive and is so incompetent and psychologically damaging that it has been, is, and will be counterproductive.

Priorities

It's interesting to note the options not presented in this game: Medicaid, food stamps, section 8 housing come to mind. And the real problem remains overall health costs, not the budget deficit--which is just a symptom of health costs. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?choices=h7u6c816

Dunceries

For those who still consider Beck, Limbaugh and company anything more than cartoon figures: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/opinion/17friedman.html?src=me&ref=general

Those who submit to leaders who lie to them for fun--
Well, demagoguery is still a going business.

Secession, Part II

http://www.economist.com/node/17467202

The harping on the 1964 Civil Rights Act seems disingenuous to me. I doubt more than 10-20% left the party for that reason: look at the graph. What really turned white southerners against the Democrats over the long term was the explosion of the welfare state and the advent of federally mandated anti-white racism. And these monstrous outgrowths of political correctness were all the more damaging in the South, since blacks are so heavily represented there. It is only surprising that the Democratic decline has taken so long--but, most people hold to their political beliefs unto death, seized by the mania for consistency, that "hobgoblin of little minds." I think the die-off dividend has been collected at this point, which means the Democrats are roughly at their nadir there--and our immigration policies promise a bright future to the socialists and their darkling dependents.

Crossing the Line

This is not the sort of review one expects to find in a leftist magazine like The New Republic: http://www.tnr.com/book/review/what-hope Nevertheless, even if enlightenment is achieved by the socialist component of our polity--I think a change of policy likely to lag very far behind, for political, psychological, and cognitive reasons. This is a key insight: Wax [author of the book under review] is well aware that past discrimination created black-white disparities in education, wealth, and employment. Still, she argues that discrimination today is no longer the “brick wall” obstacle it once was, and that the main problems for poor and working-class blacks today are cultural ones that they alone can fix. Not that they alone should fix—Wax is making no moral argument—but that they alone can fix.          The Johnsonian "Great Society" interventions in black America are as flagrant a public policy failure as the Nixonian "War on Drugs" that followed. In each case, the government stepped in, all money and arrogance, spent profligately to ensure black men no longer faced any financial responsibilities, ruined millions of American lives by process of moral hazard, and made the original problems much worse. The black family was ruthlessly destroyed as an institution, and black culture went with it. Further, as I've mentioned at other times, the black-white IQ gap is not irrelevant to the problem. It has persisted at the same level for the 100 years that IQ testing has been administered. But, to reiterate a basic consequence of this fact, if the top third of whites pull bachelors degrees, their average IQ would be about 114 and the minimum would be 106. Only 8% of blacks meet this minimum and 2.5% meet the average--a fourfold difference between college-capable whites and blacks. With ever more sophisticated demands faced by professionals, the fact that only 8% of blacks can hope to meet those demands constitutes a serious problem requiring such redress as we can muster. Wax does mention this, but only in a single paragraph that fails to grapple with its implications. I do credit her, however, with the courage to admit that the possibility of genetic differences in IQ between races yet remains, "the science on this question is inconclusive." (69) In the next quote, I disagree with the reviewer, who hasn't learned the limits of governmental competence. Throwing more handouts at black America will exacerbate the problem, which stems in the first instance from a lack of self-reliance reinforced over decades by the nanny state. Wax stipulates that the government should do all that it can to ensure equal opportunity, which includes providing decent education and enforcing civil rights laws. I [the reviewer] would say that there is somewhat more that the government can do, given the historical circumstances. Programs to ease ex-cons back into society could do infinitely more for black inner-cities than suing car companies over small differences in loan deals. The welfare state imposes a system of incentives on blacks that encourages irresponsibility. Black men who walk on their families are at the center of the problem. But, why do they walk? They did not do this in 1960. What has fundamentally changed except the vast and comprehensive governmental provision of all necessities to black mothers and children? And the less involved the father is, the greater the government's largesse. The incentives are clearly perverse, and they have achieved the effect one might have expected. Incentives work. I do not mean to claim that this monstrous bureaucratic affliction impacts only blacks--attenuated versions may be seen among other groups as well. The welfare state has entirely remade lower and working class American society. It has not only robbed these orders of all dignity, but even of the sense that human dignity has value. So have the economic incentives crafted by our left-wing experts corrupted the character of much of America. The author, seeing the psychological results without fully understanding the causes which lie embedded in the system, then moves on to her summation: Wax usefully asks: “Is it possible to pursue an arduous program of self-improvement while simultaneously thinking of oneself as a victim of grievous mistreatment and of one’s shortcomings as a product of external forces?” To the extent that our ideology on race is more about studied radicalism than about a healthy brand of what Wax calls an internal locus of control, her book provokes, at least in this reader, a certain hopelessness. If she is right, then the bulk of today’s discussion of black America is performance art. Tragically, and for the most part, she is right. This is dead on. The whole of our handling of black America since Johnson has been a cynical game of elites (especially gentile and Jewish elites) engaged in social status competition. The most "generous" on the face of it, at the superficial level, won the competition, as demonstrated by the ever leftward tendency of our politics. Assuming that the poor are angels who will not humanly respond to incentives in the way that the contemptible "bourgeois" would counted as a sound basis for policy design. It turns out the poor are human, and the incentives came into play, and the poor were ruined--just as the middle classes would have suffered ruination had the incentives been generous enough to tempt them. This is what comes of officially sanctioned lies. To adapt Henry James, these are the black and merciless things that are behind the great socializations.

Magical Sharks

A couple of entertainments: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/science/02angier.html?ref=science http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/

The second is impressive and delightfully deflates the arrogance of doctors. They're not as clever as they think and generally understand little of either math or science--which is unfortunate, since optimal medical care is based mainly on math and science. They oftentimes forget this because their gradual accumulation of anecdotal experience eventually comes to overwhelm in their minds their theoretical knowledge. In other words, within a few years of leaving medical school, they can no longer see the forest for the trees (or is it that they can't see the patients for the dollar signs? or that they can't see reality for their god-complex?). I think a few mathematicians and physicists are needful at the commanding heights of medical research and administration--to herd these MDs in the right direction.

Union Blackmail and Corruption

I especially like the last line of the article. Public sector unions are holding the country hostage. They ought to be outlawed. They represent an intolerable encroachment upon the integrity of a democratic system of government.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/10/unions_america

The Non-Debate

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/how-the-other-half-thinks/

Krugman is perhaps too kind in this post: the other half by and large does not think. Republicans have been consistently stupid or dishonest on the economic issues we face. Their policy solutions are an invitation to a prolonged slump a la Japan over the last 20 years. On macroeconomics, the democrats have a better approach right now--except insofar as they intend to expand entitlements. But, apparently, the story Krugman has clearly explained on multiple occasions is too counterintuitive for most to grasp.

There may also be some deeper motives at play--deliberately extending the recession to discredit Obama, for example. Or, squeezing government revenues so hard as to force a reconsideration of the whether we can afford an ever-expanding welfare state. Or, waiting for increasing unemployment to lead to an anti-immigration political consensus that will evolve at least far enough to end illegal immigration, preferably all non-strategic immigration. All worthy motives to my mind. But, are they worth the price? Also, can they be this way achieved? The second and third seem unlikely to happen, and they are more important in the long run than Obama's political fortunes. The welfare state strategy may even backfire. FDR invented the welfare state during the Depression.

Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Krugman

That is, Dr. Krugman on economics instead of  his Hydeian political madness. Here are two concise perspectives on how to escape the current economic recession (we are only technically out of recession, not in any meaningful sense). The first explains, with reference to one of the most appropriate historical analogies, why temporarily increased government spending should not result in a long-term rise in the government's debt burden. Essentially, this is because expansionary fiscal policy increases economic growth and increases inflation--both of which erode the real burden of any incurred debt. The key is to ensure that new entitlement programs are not a part of expanded government spending. The second explains the other likely way out--continued high levels of bankruptcy and default. This path will take longer and result in less economic growth in the long run. It is the path we opted for in the 30's and the one Japan has opted for since its financial collapse 20 years ago. In both cases economic growth was minimal at best. So far, it is the path we are on--supported mindlessly by the repubs and cravenly by the dems. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/paradoxes-of-deleveraging-and-releveraging/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/25/default-is-in-our-stars/

Afghanistan and American Responsibilities

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/opinion/31topping.html?_r=1

I consider this a rather dubious line of reasoning, culminating in the fantastical assumption in the last line. Depend upon it, none of our allies in any war we have ever fought volunteered to fight "in our interests." Were the French royals fighting in our interests in the Revolutionary War? Were Stalin's soldiers fighting in our interests? Absolutely not. They are motivated by their own distinct set of interests. The fact that there is sufficient overlap in their interests and ours to constitute them allies is a very different matter from having the same interests. This guy is arguing that whenever we go to war we have to accept the responsibility either to fight indefinitely until victory or to be prepared to relocate whole peoples and nations to the U.S. There are cases in which neither option is acceptable or reasonable, either from our perspective or from that of our allies. I might add that if this were adopted explicitly as U.S. policy it could lead to a major increase in isolationist tendencies. It effectively punishes us for trying to create decent regimes in other countries. This is like insisting that a man who saved several children from a fire, at risk to his own life, must now adopt those children since he failed to save their parents. It punishes good intentions and encourages a dangerous isolationism--which is far more pernicious, morally, than the occasional failure of well-intentioned international intervention. 

 

From a moral perspective there is no more reason to relocate Afghan allies to the U.S. than to relocate Congolans caught in the middle of that nation's civil war. Neither group was promised this privilege. Both groups face the prospect of being murdered by their countrymen and may, to that degree, be considered equally innocent and worthy of rescue. And there is no proof that our intervention in Afghanistan caused or will cause an excess of deaths above what would have occurred had we left that land to continue its endless civil wars and theocratic gambits. Perhaps we are more culpable for the millions of deaths in Congo since these might have been greatly reduced had we intervened. Another moralistic perspective might be this: it became clear within the first few years that the Afghan war was unwinnable (since the Taliban are based in Pakistan and Pakistan is neither our ally nor readily conquerable). This means the lives lost and monies squandered in the last 2-4 years were wasted in a futile exercise. And, remember, money at this scale, properly spent, could actually save lives instead of facilitating finishings.  

Politicized Admissions

It's interesting to see them quantify the leftist prejudice against certain elements of society--apparently being in 4-H or high school ROTC programs is a black mark against applicants to elite schools. What these schools want to enroll is eager conformists and ass-kissers (as well as the lucrative legacy students, that is, the rich whites who stupidly finance this whole charade). I remember reading elsewhere that at a typical Ivy League school fully half of admissions are justified by affirmative action, legacies, or athletic scholarships--only half made it on merit. That's quite a heavy burden of corruption and quality dilution for any school to bear. http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html

America First Immigration Plan

We need an immigration system whose first goal is to benefit America. Until Islamic culture manages to join the civilized world, the presumption must be strongly against any Muslim applicants for entry. Until Mexicans prove that they are capable of something more than labor and high fecundity, they should face the same negative assumptions. What America should seek from its immigrants is simple: people capable of contributing and willing to assimilate. Too few Muslims and Mexicans (among many other inadequate groups we've let in, like Haitians and Jamaicans) have demonstrated either characteristic.

Thoughts on WWII Posters

These posters would no longer work in America. America was then a unified nation. It not only professed, but even ensured equality of opportunity for all except the blacks (whose subjection to Jim Crow would not long have lasted under any version of likely historical development). And the blacks were net contributors, instead of a net burden. Also, there was very little difference in religious and therefore moral assumptions. We have sacrificed strength and unity for "multiculturalism" and "political correctness."

 

The greatest lasting defeat we suffered in the sixties was political defeat at home: pervasive socialism that corrupted the character of the lower classes, affirmative action, racial and sexual quotas, radical feminism, uncontrolled immigration that benefits other countries but not America, undisciplined and unaccountable government spending, the massive unionization of all government workers, the regulation and legalization of every aspect of life. The sixties germinated or accelerated all of these misfortunes--and they are like incurable diseases.

Balkanising the Levant

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=179380 Israel is less and less sustainable, beset by internal and external enemies. I do not think this proposal will work. If it's lucky, Israel will predictably implode in a few decades. The other option is being overrun.

Possible Improvement

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/educated-women-opting-for-motherhood/ Of course, though not mentioned here, I think it's a fair bet that dumber women who have children have more of them--so the dysgenic influence remains largely in force.

Le Guin Unloosed

The Fantastical Canon: The Books and School of all Ages http://www.newstatesman.com/200612180040 Amongst more general edifications and pleasantries, a major clue to Le Guin's beautifully clean and clear English style reveals itself herein. I think she owes much in this regard to the best writers of "children's books." They have helped her to evade three serious temptations: excessive intellectualizing, vain verbal peacockery, and solipsistic obscurities. I, of course, am prey to all three. In some sense, though, her diction may constitute an availed luxury of her chosen genre, perhaps even a precondition of its success. Yet a clear river does not alone suffice. It must float one through the realms of gold, and in company of characters who do not beggar the imagination, but fulfill various of its finer latencies. Here, too, she finds mastery at her fingertips--in counterpoint to Tolkien, that arch-incompetent among fantasists. He keeps his river relatively clear, I concede. However, it slows to the degree that it seems sometimes a lake and the reader finds his company merely seems since Tolkien never persuades us that it could be. Mayhaps, though, in the end, we ought to be grateful to him for inspiring others to believe they could do his work, but better. After all, when an author achieves supreme transcendence in a given genre, he often manages thereby to kill it. Shakespeare's tragic plays (and not only his tragic plays) have so whelmed and pervaded the minds of his successors (especially those heir to his language) that they’ve scarcely so much as attempted to write such grand drama in the last 400 years. So too did Milton kill epic poetry with Paradise Lost, only excepting the exuberant eccentric Blake. Tolkien was a mere mapmaker, not a master. He reminded his successors of what might be found through new adventures and, unintentionally, fortified their self-confidence too.

The Lost Principle of Accountability

An excellent article, much after my own taste: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/opinion/24ricks.html   I especially liked the comparison of the private and the general. This is a pervasive and hugely destructive problem in our society at large. Leaders are simply not held to account for their failures. We see this in the Gulf oil spill, we saw it in the financial crisis, we see it perpetually among the management of unsuccesful publicly held companies. This is what America has lost in the last 50 years and what will ultimately destroy it if not recovered: the interlocking values of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and accountability.

Our Communist Bastion

This is an interesting article on the influence of the communists in Hollywood. It's telling that their greatest success in Hollywood appears to have been a matter of excluding anti-communist films from being made. They had virtually no success in popularizing pro-communist films. I attribute this partly to the visceral anti-communism in American popular consciousness and partly to the inherent difficulty of making any kind of political propaganda into entertainment or art. In the end, it's almost comical: communists have had an enormous presence in Hollywood since the 30s--but, their influence on the American people looks almost trifling given their control over the heart of American popular culture. They deserve failure. They have always been both intellectually and morally bankrupt.   http://reason.com/archives/2000/06/01/hollywoods-missing-movies/

BP Attacks America

There are two basic strategies to prevent these disasters caused by corporate or governmental incompetence:

1. Write and enforce effective regulations to minimize the risks and to adjust risks and rewards in a cost-effective fashion.

2. Impose accountability upon responsible parties, whether they are government officials, business executives, or any other decisionmakers.

Both ought to be followed. Natheless, as was the case with the financial meltdown, we have utterly failed to pursue either of these strategies.

Result: America is robbed blind by the Wall Street barons, leading to the election of Mr. Change--then, the oil barons destroy an ocean, with all the environmental, commercial, and cultural treasure that ocean once supported.

We've done nothing on financial meltdown risk-mitigation. How likely is it that anything will be done to ward off future oil spills?

Compared to Bush and Katrina, Obama has played the PR side more conscientiously--but, he has displayed even more incompetence than Bush. And, to me, this is a much more serious affair than Katrina was. BP looks absolutely abominable in their management of this crisis, with their endless stream of lies and continuous incompetence.

Affirmative Action in Action

check out the graph on the second page: http://iasp.brandeis.edu/pdfs/Racial-Wealth-Gap-Brief.pdf When you hand out undeserved high paid jobs to affirmative action beneficiaries, is it any surprise that they behave not according to their income, but according to their (mental) abilities? This goes back to the relationship between intelligence and time horizons--the higher the intelligence level, the longer the time horizon. In this context, this means white people invest for the future, blacks for the present. In other words, giving blacks high pay is a waste of money since they squander it instead of investing in the country's economic future.

A Couple of Pieces

A couple of laudably uncharacteristics articles from the NY Times.   Here is a demonstration of how the government can exceed its usual mandate of merely wasting obscene amounts of other people's money (the great commonality of Washington and Wall Street) and enter into a new business: wasting other people's lives. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/opinion/21fleming.html?src=me&ref=homepage   And here we have an odd political perspective: a Times article that is relatively objective about the teachers unions (objectivity paints an ugly picture) and shows by what sly maneuverings Obama has attempted to reform their priorities to achieve a some reasonable balance between their selfish unionist obsessions and educational quality. Personally, I think Obama will push the unions further than they've ever been pushed before--because he can and because, by doing so, he may be able to score a rare political victory. After all, who else can they turn to? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23Race-t.html?hpw

Jewish Measures

I just read yet another Jewish editorialist who provided a retread of the usual Zionist delusionalism. I will not link it. There is no thinking there--it's just a brief repetition of other people's ideas, without regard for whether they possess any justification--some do, some don't, but the putative author has no sense of where the sense may lie. This fellow stands manifestly unworthy of the great Jewish tradition.

 

Since the Jews do not suffer a proportionate burden of stupidity, I speculatively attribute these frequent excresences of tribalist prejudice and arbitrary historicizing to several conditions:

 

First, their Arab enemies are inbred and organically stupid people under sway of a comparatively childish conception of religion which reinforces their stupidity and breeds brutality--an enemy utterly lacking any living intellectual tradition--this reality has, through long interaction, helped to debase the moral and intellectual standards the Israeli Jews brought with them from Europe (having, ironically, invented many of these standards themselves in the first instance millenia past, introduced them to Europe, and furthered their development over centuries against much barbaric resistance). Brutality is contagious. Hitler infected the Jews, who brutally founded their Zionist state. Thus were their victims infected, who thereafter infected the remnant of the Arab world. But, the Arabs, with their inbred stupidity and martial religion, were primed for the infection to a degree that the Jews were not. In addition to the neurological difference, there is a difference in kind, culturally, between these two civilizations. The Arabs, as a civilization, did not develop. Their civilization still revolves around a medieval text whose quality can easily be discerned by reading the sections that provide a reinterpretation of the Judaic and Christian holy books. It simplifies to the point of being cartoonish. Not only was Mohammed unable to invent such stories himself, he could not even apprehend the meaning of the stories the great Jewish prophets and apostles had handed down. And yet this is the One Book of a billion Muslims! The Jews, fortunately, have not only their brilliant holy texts, which had the capacity to digest and reconceive virtually all preceding religious texts, as a powerful foundation for a contributive culture--but, also, vitally, the ability in the post-Prophetic age to create or assimilate all the other books of the world. The Jews not only invented monotheism, they play the game better than any of their successors. And to this creative power they added an enormous assimilative capacity. No useful source of intellectual power has escaped them. No useful source has ever found the Arabs. The Jews absorbed Plato, the greatest thinker of the ancient world, then merged him with various Jewish traditions to create Christianity. After their invention metamorphosed into unexpected barbarity (unexpected, most particularly, because Christianity, unlike Islam, or even Judaism itself, is a fundamentally idealistic religion), they carefully preserved their traditions and found ways to survive its hostility, even when domiciled in lands under its dominion. And, by way of encouraging the development of a Christian civilization with such means as they had available, their principle contribution was as savvy moneylenders who helped to supplant feudal relationships with economic (capitalist) relationships as the source of power (military, governmental, social) in the Western world. This transformation bred capitalism and was one of the seeds of the industrial revolution. Also, their preserved traditions, which included valuable non-Jewish ancient texts, provided material for the gentiles to work upon and build into the Renaissance. And the Renaissance led to the Protestant Reformation, which led to the Enlightenment, which further contributed to the gathering force of capitalism, a force which finally reached the threshold of necessary factors to produce the industrial revolution, whose success then permitted the social luxuries of democracy and individual liberty. Of course, direct participation in most of these successive, cumulative developments was prevented by the feudal and religious restrictions imposed upon them during this period. Only in the 18th and 19th centuries did gentiles begin to permit Jews full rights--and, concurrently, the Jews grew more secular and inclined to integration. The Muslim world, however, not only failed to contribute to any of these developments in the advancement of civilization, they also failed even to experience any of these things--to this day. Their reality is medieval, which is to say, barbaric.

Second, the Jews in the last 70 years have suffered an unending series of major traumas, which has caused them to adopt a posture toward the "unchosen" people defensive and paranoid (analogous to Stalin's Russia, which, having once been attacked by Hitler, decided thereafter that all other nations were enemies by definition, and treated them accordingly, and suffered accordingly). 

 

All of this by way of a meditation on the future of the Jews, who boast one of the most glorious histories, and one of the most tragic, of any people.

A Key to the Mystery

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/science/07neanderthal.html?src=me&ref=general I deem this study slightly dubious, but, if true, it would imply that African and non-African races could be considered separate sub-species--an implication oddly consonant with experience and observation. Also to remember: neanderthal brains were at least as large as human brains.   I wonder a little at the idiot presumption of the researchers that the gene flow would have to cut both ways. Have they failed to notice that a neanderthal male is far more likely to assault a woman, than a man is to assault a (butt-ugly) neanderthal female?

The Law against Owners

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Public-unions-make-a-private-sector-power-grab-92054474.html
I disagree with the op-ed. Corporate governance is currently dysfuntional in this country. This is because management has all the power under Delaware law--not the actual shareholder-owners of public corporations, but management. This is why executives receive huge pay packages that bear no relation to their performance--they pack the boards with their buddies. It's a mutual admiration society for millionaires. The owners, including pension funds, should have more power to control the companies THAT THEY OWN! This counts as yet another opportunity that the republicans have flagrantly missed to engage in useful reform that would have preempted democratic efforts. Republicans ought to keep well in mind that no matter how intensively you look backward and think backward--the world will keep moving forward.

The Rewards of Extremism

The lesson is: if you're crazy enough, people will take you seriously and SUBMIT. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/opinion/26douthat.html?ref=opinion

Degenerate Inbred Ingrates

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/middleeast/27qatar.html?hp
This is the face of "Islamic" decadence. The whole population is a rentier class with nothing in particular to do. Boredom is the great peril in their lives. With no access to psychotropic drugs or sexual promiscuity, eating is the only sensory pleasure everyone can readily indulge. And, apparently, their preferences have been reshaped to prefer processed foods--consumed in large amounts and frequently under social pressure. Hence their rapid run to the top of the obesity rankings.

Summary of a Paradigm Shift

This fellow wrote a book, "Good Calories, Bad Calories", a couple of years ago that demolished the received thinking about nutrition, the dogma promulgated by the USDA, the ADA, the AHA, etc. He summarizes his main findings in this lecture: http://videomedia2.swedish.org/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=cd8c7aa15bc94a0486f4ee9b66ef8f8f   I also recommend this talk, by another researcher with a similar point of view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Political Cycles

A couple of things occurred to me after reading a WSJ editorial about Obama's birth certificate issue, with a diatribe postulating Obama as a mere puppet of greater powers. The former issue is a joke on the two digit IQ redneck crowd, the latter an assertion with no more basis than could be presented for any other modern President. I find the WSJ editorial page a bit mysterious, though it's little worse than the NY Times editorial page. Who reads this stuff? Who buys it? Both papers offer such superficial propagandizing for the most part. Given the typical level of discourse in the "best" newspapers in this country, it sometimes surprises me that we have not experienced a still more pronounced collapse in the standards of governance than even Bush or Obama have managed to achieve.

Contra the WSJ's promotions, Obama is not a stupid man. His political and moral principles, however, are not traditional in America. He promotes socialism, in speech and action. Collectivism is not characteristic of America politically, socially, economically, psychologically. It represents an ever-advancing imposition of the elite upon the American people. And Obama has made himself a figurehead in one of the periodic revivals of the elitist tendency to promote socialism in America.

Compare and Contrast

I think the following quotes are a useful summary of the freedoms won and lost by the American people in the course of our history. From an article in Reason magazine by David Boaz, called Up From Slavery: "Brink Lindsey talks of an "implicit libertarian synthesis" in American politics today in his book The Age of Abundance. He argued in 2007: Nevertheless, the fact is that American society today is considerably more libertarian than it was a generation or two ago. Compare conditions now to how they were at the outset of the 1960s. Official governmental discrimination against blacks no longer exists. Censorship has beaten a wholesale retreat. The rights of the accused enjoy much better protection. Abortion, birth control, interracial marriage, and gay sex are legal. Divorce laws have been liberalized and rape laws strengthened. Pervasive price and entry controls in the transportation, energy, communications, and financial sectors are gone. Top income tax rates have been slashed. The pretensions of macroeconomic fine-tuning have been abandoned. Barriers to international trade are much lower. Unionization of the private sector work force has collapsed. Of course there are obvious counterexamples, but on the whole it seems clear that cultural expression, personal lifestyle choices, entrepreneurship, and the play of market forces all now enjoy much wider freedom of maneuver." Juxtapose the above to this perspective, which has, to my sense, considerable merit: "Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation writes about the decline of freedom in America: First of all, let’s talk about the economic system that existed in the United States from the inception of the nation to the latter part of the 19th century. The principles are simple to enumerate: No income taxation (except during the Civil War), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, economic regulations, licensure laws, drug laws, immigration controls, or coercive transfer programs, such as farm subsidies and education grants.There was no federal department of labor, agriculture, commerce, education, energy, health and human services, or homeland security."  It seems that we transitioned from positive governmental and societal discrimination against large segments of our society to constraining the freedoms of all by means of taxes and regulations--using as an excuse for these universal constraints the past injustices imposed upon the repressed groups. Of course, the disconnect in this line of implicit reasoning is that these modern constraints were not necessary to achieve the equality of opportunity previously lacking. They're just an excuse for socialism and elitist overreach.

Nutritional Perspectives

Over the course of the last few months I’ve received an education in the science of human nutrition from www.wholehealthsource.blogspot.com. It is written by Stephan Guyenet, a recently anointed Ph.D. in neurobiology and currently a researcher on neurodegenerative diseases. Since his blog has been the most important influence in transforming my view of nutrition and, after long consideration, my actual diet as well—I’ve decided to share an overview of it.

This guy runs one of the best nutrition sites out there. His philosophy is grounded in very simple historical and comparative observations of human health in different societies with different diets. To refine and supplement this anthropological/observational information, he independently analyzes contemporary scientific studies of human nutrition—with an emphasis on quality intervention studies (the only ones that count).

The human societies which consistently evince the best health outcomes are those which adhere to a hunter-gatherer (H-G) diet (called the “Paleo diet”). The archaeological record provides considerable evidence of this. There does not seem to be much dispute among the experts that human health declined, in a variety of ways, with the advent of agriculture. Additionally, in the last century, modern observation and testing of H-Gs who continued to follow traditional diets reinforced this historical evidence. The diseases of civilization, in particular cardiovascular disease and cancer (but also a number of less serious conditions), are much rarer among H-Gs than among westerners of the same age. This result holds regardless of the specific dietary composition of a given society, so long as they are hunter-gatherers. And the variation in diet between different H-G societies is extreme.

Remember, among all the groups I will mention in the ensuing examples, these diseases of civilization are virtually unheard of. Traditionally, Inuit relied upon animal food to provide 95% of their calories; and 70%+ came from animal fat. In contrast, the Kitavans, currently resident in the South Pacific, derive 70% of their calories from carbohydrates and 70% smoke cigarettes (but no heart attacks were found in the population). Traditional Masai, cow herders in southern Africa, lived on a diet of fermented whole raw milk, cow blood, meat and organs, and herbs—this amounts to 70% fat, 35% saturated fat, and, like the Inuit, 5% of calories from plant sources. The traditional Masai do not know what a heart attack is, do not recognize the symptoms, show no clinical signs of heart attacks. Fifty were autopsied recently, about a third of them over 50 years old, and, though those who were no longer following a strict traditional diet had atherosclerosis, not one had had a heart attack. Unlike the Kitavans the Tokelauans, another group in the south Pacific, consume a high fat diet: 50-60% fat, including 40-50% of all calories as saturated fat (from coconuts), the highest saturated fat consumption yet found in any traditional society. In 1982, all Tokelauan men aged 40-69 were given ECGs and none showed signs of prior heart attack—but 3.5% of Alabamans of the same age show signs of prior heart attack. I suppose it’s worth adding that the exercise levels in these groups vary greatly, from the Masai who do a lot of walking to the Kitavans, whose activity level is comparable to a modern European. In other words, there is good reason to believe that exercise is not the key factor. Diet is. A diet that has flown off the evolutionary rails causes diseases of civilization.

Stephan goes through the epidemiological studies from which the above data is derived. The point isn’t simply to advocate a high fat or a carnivorous diet, since groups like the Kitavans have relatively low fat and less carnivorous diets (though all known hunter-gatherer groups consume animal foods and the average intake among the 229 known groups analyzed by Loren Cordain is 50% of calories from animals and fish--although, it's well to note that most of these societies have veered away from a pure H-G lifestyle to some degree). The lesson to be drawn here, the element that all these healthy societies have in common, along with all known historical and current hunter-gatherers—is what they do not eat. Hunter-Gatherers do not eat grains, refined sugars, industrial vegetable oils, or food additives and chemicals. Instead, they eat, in greatly varying proportions, depending upon the availability in their environment: meat (always including organs), vegetables (esp. tubers and other root vegetables with high calorie counts), seafood, fruit, nuts, insects, herbs—on average, in that order from most to least calories.

The reason postulated for the apparent ill effects of the foods on the “do not eat” list is that humans have not evolved to eat them. Human evolution is a slow process of competitive adaptation to a constantly changing environment. Various forms of the hunter-gatherer diet have been followed by humans and our direct evolutionary ancestors for 2 million years--sufficient time to evolve optimal fitness for this diet. But, grains were only first domesticated 10,000 years ago. And the majority of humanity probably wasn’t eating them until 5,000 years ago. That is 5,000 years of evolutionary adaptation vs. 2 million years. Even the 10,000 Year Explosion of Cochran and Harpending does not nullify this argument, though it does somewhat attenuate it. Refined sugars are still more recent. As for industrial vegetable oils and food chemicals, they were the products of the 20th century—a circumstance that has permitted virtually no evolutionary adaptation. We are not adapted to these foods. In some cases this is obvious: for example, most of the world is lactose intolerant because they have not had sufficient time to adapt to cow milk. This example is also useful as an illustration that evolution, per Cochran and Harpending, does not stop: some humans evolved lactose tolerance in the last few thousand years. A further complication is that consuming pasteurized milk is different from fresh or fermented raw whole milk--also, consuming the latest breeds of wheat prepared by the food industry is different from consuming traditional einkorn wheat prepared in traditional ways. Those who consume foods developed in Neolithic times endanger their health to one degree or another. This is where Stephan starts; this is the first element of his nutritional philosophy, a clearly defined apprehension of what foods are presumptively safe and what foods are questionable.

From this epidemiological-evolutionary foundation, he then analyzes the scientific literature on nutrition. The simplest approach is to determine which of the hunter-gatherer dietary options might be healthiest and why. Also, this approach begs the question: why should we confine ourselves only to this set of options, the known range of H-G diets? This represents a shrewd humility in face of considerable scientific ignorance of human nutrition. Human physiology is an enormously complex system with a virtually infinite number of variables. Many of these variables are effectively unknown, as are their interactions. Scientists find it difficult to generate useful conclusions from such an irreducible chaos of information. Given the level of complexity and chaos, I would even venture that we will never develop a total understanding of human biology. We may instead, to achieve progress, eventually pursue simplification by means of transforming ourselves, piece by piece, into cyborgs. But, the point is, the most useful evidence we have to discover optimal nutrition is the signposts left by the evolutionary process. Evolution has done much of the work for us over thousands of generations of trial and error. Science, for now, remains a comparatively weak resource in this area and ought be seen, for practical purposes, as the handmaiden of evolutionary reasoning.

Another aspect he covers occasionally are the practical challenges of adopting a Paleo diet in 21st century America. It’s neither easy nor particularly cheap to do it right. Also, it can be difficult to decide which type of Paleo diet to pursue—though personal tastes, finances, convenience, digestive idiosyncrasies, and other factors tend to narrow it down quite a bit before arbitrary choices arise.

There are a great many blogs on the Paleo diet; and Stephan has many important predecessors (Weston Price being his acknowledged favorite) and competent contemporaries (Gary Taubes seems to be one of the most significant). I find the following blogs quite useful also (the first has an excellent twelve-step summary of how to follow a paleo diet--though many paleo advocates would argue that a higher intake of quality carbs is harmless): 

http://www.paleonu.com/,

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/cholesterol-blog.html

http://perfecthealthdiet.com/ 

 

 

Socialism in Action

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/nyregion/14hunger.html?hpw   "The South Bronx, Plagued by Obesity, Tops a Hunger Survey" You've got to love a headline like that! How did they determine these denizens are hungry? Well, they asked them whether they were short of food money at least once in the last year. In America, answering yes is sufficient to define you as hungry--at least, under socialist lights. Who believes this crap? It's not enough that we feed these morons with food stamps and free school lunch and breakfast--now they want us to subsidize the healthy items of their free food--since they cannot make intelligent decisions for themselves. They do not have healthy foods in these areas because businesses cannot make money selling what people do not want. It's no accident that this area is entirely overrun with blacks, puerto ricans, and dominicans--the third world imported to America and put on welfare because they cannot function in a first world society. The socialists know this--they will not say they know it, but their actions betray the knowledge. An eloquent British perspective on this issue, fortified with "knowledge by acquaintance": https://www.city-journal.org/html/starving-criminal-12383.html Excerpts: The existence of malnutrition in the midst of plenty has not entirely escaped either the intelligentsia or the government, which of course is proposing measures to combat it: but, as usual, neither pols nor pundits wish to look the problem in the face or make the obvious connections. For them, the real and most pressing question raised by any social problem is: “How do I appear concerned and compassionate to all my friends, colleagues, and peers?” Needless to say, the first imperative is to avoid any hint of blaming the victim by examining the bad choices that he makes. It is not even permissible to look at the reasons for those choices, since by definition victims are victims and therefore not responsible for their acts, unlike the relatively small class of human beings who are not victims....He feels the need to retreat into impersonal abstractions, into structures or alleged structures over which the victim has no control. And out of this need to avoid the rawness of reality he spins utopian schemes of social engineering. The British intelligentsia has thus come up with an abstraction that fits this particular bill perfectly—that is to say, the need to explain widespread malnutrition in the midst of plenty without resort to the conduct of the malnourished themselves: food deserts....The only homes in which there were ever any signs of genuine cookery and of eating as a social activity, where families discussed the topics of daily life and affirmed their bonds to one another, were those of the Indian immigrants. In white and black homes, cookery meant (at its best) re-heating in a microwave oven, and there was no table round which people could sit together to eat the re-heated food. Meals here were solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short....The Indian immigrants and their descendants inherited a far better and more elaborate cuisine than the native British, of course, but this is not a sufficient explanation of their willingness still to buy fresh food and to cook it: they continue to cook because they still live in families, and cookery is a socially motivated art. Even among Indian heroin addicts (principally Muslim), the kind of malnutrition I have described is rare, because they do not yet live in the solipsistic isolation of their white counterparts, who live alone, even when there are other people inhabiting the house or apartment in which they themselves live....If food deserts truly exist—and they cannot in these times of easy transport be very extensive—the explanation lies in demand, not in supply. And demand is a cultural phenomenon... The connections I have drawn are obvious, yet denied—or rather avoided altogether—in the typical modern British approach to social problems... The liberal intelligentsia has several reasons for failing to see or admit the cultural dimension of malnutrition in the midst of plenty—in failing to see its connection with an entire way of life—and in throwing the blame instead onto the supermarket chains. One reason is to avoid confronting the human consequences of the changes in morals, manners, and social policy that it has consistently advocated. The second is to avoid all appearance of blaming people whose lives are poor and unenviable. That this approach leads it to view those same people as helpless automata, in the grip of forces that they cannot influence, let alone control—and therefore as not full members of the human race—does not worry the intelligentsia in the least. On the contrary, it increases the importance of the elite’s own providential role in society. To blame the supermarket chains is implicitly to demand that the liberal and bureaucratic elite should have yet more control over society. This is how the British government’s current Food Poverty Eradication Bill should be interpreted. By attempting to tackle the sources of supply rather than those of demand, it will sidestep the question of an entire way of life—a problem that it would take genuine moral courage to tackle—and aim at an easy target instead. The government will increase bureaucracy and regulation without reducing malnutrition. This, in miniature, is the story of modern Britain.

Wind and Weather

At a sufficiently large scale, wind turbines may well impact the atmosphere in significant ways. I think the study here is preliminary to more accurate and detailed modeling in future.  Notice, though, that the study suggests the overall climate impact of extremely large scale wind farms approaches nil. This is because, according to this report, wind farms increase temperature in their immediate vicinity when situated on land, but decrease temperature when situated at sea. The long term trend is likely to involve ever more sea-based wind farms. Also, the study indicates that even such large scale wind harvesting does not slow atmospheric wind speeds so much as to make wind farms uneconomic. In other words, I consider the article's headline entirely misleading as to the actual findings of the study.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/mit-researchers-say-using-wind-turbines.html

The Legal Morass

http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_howard.html This guy does a great job of defining the problems afflicting our system; the solutions he proposes are more questionable. The risk he invites is transforming our system from one abused by litigious individuals and aggressive tort lawyers to one that may be abused by the authority figures to whom he would shift power. At this point, I suspect it is worth the risk; it seems time for the pendulum to swing back (and this would involve a retracing of our legal history to some extent). A vital point, lost on many people, is the pervasive impact of the mere threat of lawsuits in our time. Even where the courts hold the line on imposing the theoretical standard of "reasonable action under the circumstances," trigger-happy plaintiffs and attorneys circumscribe our freedoms ever more narrowly with each threat they make. In other words, the people behind these threats are engaged in de facto legislation for the rest of us--they superimpose a suffocating layer of unwritten laws on the endless millions of written ones. Another key point: the laws are far too extensive for anyone to understand--and many are also too complicated for anyone but professionals to understand. This is not necessary--in fact, it is an invitation to tyranny. If the people do not know the laws--and they do not--then the state can arbitrarily fine or imprison anyone it chooses. The definition of tyranny is unchecked executive power. And, be it noted, our hives of bureaucrats exercise far more executive power than the President.