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.