From Bloomberg:

These Are the Top 20 Cities Americans Are Ditching

Soaring costs of living meant residents left New York City and its suburbs in droves
by Erin Roman Wei Lu
July 22, 2015 — 3:00 AM PDT

Some of these cities are just Rust Belt cities in long-term decline, but the others are more interesting:

New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu: They’re all places you would think would be popular destinations for Americans. So it might come as a surprise that these are among the cities U.S. residents are fleeing in droves.

The map below shows the 20 metropolitan areas that lost the greatest share of local people to other parts of the country between July 2013 and July 2014, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. …

Interestingly, these are also the cities with some of the highest net inflows of people from outside the country. That gives many of these cities a steadily growing population, despite the net exodus of people moving within the U.S.

So what’s going on here? Michael Stoll, a professor of public policy and urban planning at the University of California Los Angeles, has an idea. Soaring home prices are pushing local residents out and scaring away potential new ones from other parts of the country, he said. (Everyone knows how unaffordable the Manhattan area has become.)

And as Americans leave, people from abroad move in to these bustling cities to fill the vacant low-skilled jobs. They are able to do so by living in what Stoll calls “creative housing arrangements” in which they pack six to eight individuals, or two to four families, into one apartment or home. It’s an arrangement that most Americans just aren’t willing to pursue, and even many immigrants decide it’s not for them as time goes by, he said.

This has both a short-term (sojourners) and long-term (clannish cultures) aspect, as I noted in my 2010 review in VDARE of Tory cabinet minister David Willetts’ book The Pinch:

Willetts nicely lays out one reason why the Blair-Brown Bubble in London did so little to alleviate unemployment among young Englishmen in blue collar cities like Liverpool (just as the Bush Bubble in Las Vegas didn’t help American workers in Cleveland, as I pointed out in VDARE.com on July 7, 2006). He writes: “Quite simply, high house prices were one factor sucking in immigrants.”

Willetts observes, “The young man from Liverpool does not see why he should live in more cramped conditions than his family back in Liverpool occupy.” In contrast, the immigrant crams into a house with many others from his country. “His willingness to be under-housed gives him a labour market advantage and it is greater if house prices are higher.” In turn, sucking in immigrants creates a vicious cycle, driving up housing prices, which drives out more natives.

Moreover, remittances sent home from London to Liverpool buy a lot less in Liverpool than remittances sent home to a poor country:

“So it is not that our Liverpudlian is somehow a bad person compared to our Pole. It is that he or she cannot capture similar benefits for their family by under-housing themselves in London.”

Willetts sums up:

“The crucial proposition therefore underlying the economics of immigration in Britain is as follows. The larger the proportion of earnings consumed by housing costs, the greater the benefits of under-housing and the greater the price advantage of immigrant labour. It was not despite the high cost of housing that immigrants came to the house price hotspots in Britain to make a living—it was because of them.”

But, of course, a lot of immigrants who initially assume they’ll just be sojourning in America so they can send home remittances before they make their triumphant return wind up staying here and bringing over their extended families to live with them, crowding out Americans. As I explained:

The [Anglo-American-style] nuclear family is expensive. Each small family wants its own place to live—ideally, a house with a garden. Not surprisingly, the crowded British Isles were long the emigration capital of the world, as people headed out for the emptier lands of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Why don’t Anglo-Saxons like to live in large, noisy My Big Fat Greek Wedding-style homes? Unfortunately, Willetts doesn’t address this. Personally, I don`t see much evidence that people from other cultures get along better with their relatives. They just don’t seem to mind screaming at their cousin-in-laws as much as Anglos would mind. …

This relative lack of nepotism and ethnocentrism makes Anglos simultaneously both successful and at risk of being out-maneuvered by less idealistic groups.

The need for a separate home for each nuclear family can put Anglo-derived cultures at a disadvantage in newly cosmopolitan cities. For example, Los Angeles, strange as it may seem now, was largely built in the 20th Century by civil people from rather bland, trusting places such as Iowa, Illinois (where my father is from) and Minnesota (where my late mother grew up).

This causes them and their descendents problems today, in a very expensive city increasingly dominated by newcomers from the more vibrant cultures of the ex-Soviet Union and the Middle East who don’t as much mind crowding in with their in-laws and cutting corners on their taxes.

Bloomberg concludes:

El Paso, Texas, the city that residents fled from at the fastest pace, also saw a surprisingly small number of foreigners settling in given how close it is to Mexico.

“A lot of young, reasonably educated people are having a hard time finding work there,” Stoll said. “They’re not staying in town after they graduate,” leaving for the faster-growing economies of neighboring metro areas like Dallas and Austin, he said.

This is part of a general pattern that highly Mexican areas in America wind up being too economically stagnant to attract more Mexicans: it’s also seen in the Rio Grande Valley and in New Mexico. And some of Connecticut’s problems are due to Puerto Rican areas stop attracting Puerto Ricans.

Commenter Tim Howells dredges up a quote from a lecture given a long time ago by a Georgetown history professor named Carroll Quigley (1910-1977):

“Conservatives now are telling us that we must curtail government, cut government spending, cut government powers, reduce government personnel for the sake of making individuals more free.

“Liberals, on the other hand, are still telling us, as they have for a long, long time, that in order to make individuals free, we must destroy communities. By communities I mean villages. Ghettos and cities. Ethnic groupings. Religious groupings. Anything which is segregated. We must destroy them. So that all individuals would be, if possible, identical. Including boys and girls.

“But the area of political action … in which you have government, individuals … three others: voluntary associations (which I’ll say no more about), corporations and communities. And if the liberals destroy communities for the sake of the individual, and the conservatives destroy the government for the sake of individuals, you’re going to have an area of political action in which irresponsible, immensely powerful corporations are engaged in opposition to individuals who are socially naked and defenseless.”

I don’t know when this speech was given (obviously, no later than 1977), but the Dow Jones Average was almost certainly below 1,000 at the time, so you’ve got to give him some points for prescience.

From Towson U. News:

It’s not up for debate — TU students are champions…again!

by Sedonia Martin on March 30, 2015

For the second straight time and third overall, the Towson University Debate Team won the CEDA [Cross Examination Debate Association] championship after Kevin Whitley and Troi Thomas defeated the University of Kansas [(Jyleesa Hampton and Quaram Robinson] in the final round on a 6-3 decision. …

The debate resolution this year was, “Resolved: The United States should legalize all or nearly all of the following: marijuana, online gambling, physician-assisted suicide, prostitution, the sale of human organs.”

“Kansas was on the affirmative and Towson was on the negative,” said Kelsie. “Kansas argued that the figure of the prostitute is racialized and stigmatized, and that we should affirm the figure of the prostitute to disrupt respectability politics which hurts sex workers as well as women who are not sex workers but are then slut-shamed and solicited for non-consensual sex.

“Towson argued that the politics of the affirmative was one which tried to normalize stigmatized groups rather than challenging the entire system of normalcy which makes some people stigmatized in the first place,” Kelsie added.

“We challenged the aesthetic politics of the affirmative and argued that instead of focusing on sex work as purely an issue which affects women, we should understand prostitution as an abject position that is powerful in its own right. We called this different kind of politics that rejects normalcy ‘black anality.’”

As Rodney King asked in 1992, “Can we all get along?” Aren’t there enough cishet white men to hate in this world to keep the Coalition of the Fringes from tearing itself apart?

Apparently not. The SJW world is today clawing at itself over the burning issue of steatopygia.

From the New York Times:

Nicki Minaj: Black Women ‘Rarely Rewarded’ for Pop Culture Contributions
By KATIE ROGERS JULY 22, 2015

The rapper Nicki Minaj reacted on Tuesday to not being nominated for MTV’s coveted Video of the Year award by saying that the cultural contributions of black women are often overlooked, raising the specter of racism in the music industry, and setting off a Twitter debate that drew thousands of people — including Taylor Swift. …

[Minaj's] jungled-themed “Anaconda” video featured curvy women dancing and gyrating in a series of flesh-baring outfits. The video, which samples heavily from Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” put women front-and-center rather than behind a male rapper. It was an instant hit online.

The single’s cover art, which featured Ms. Minaj crouching in a thong, was also a hit, and turned the image into a commodity.

And yet Minaj’s “Anaconda” wasn’t nominated, while Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” was.

The video for Ms. Swift’s “Bad Blood,” a collaboration with the rapper Kendrick Lamar, features the actresses Lena Dunham, Mariska Hargitay and Selena Gomez. It also showcases a bevy of white models whose bodies are considered the standard for beauty in the fashion and lingerie industry: Karlie Kloss, Lily Aldridge, Martha Hunt and Gigi Hadid. The video features a lot less twerking and only slightly more clothing than “Anaconda.” …

The skinny blonde Taylor Swift jumped in to try to blame men for hogging all the nominations, but that ploy went over about as well with the Twitter mob as prosecutor Marcia Clark’s decision to pack the O.J. jury with black women.

The exchange was quickly seen by the media as a feud, and fans of Ms. Minaj got involved to comment on the broader issue of race in music and to critique Ms. Swift’s response as being indicative of a brand of feminism dominated by white women.

By the way, both Miss Minaj and Miss Swift are savvy businesswomen, so this isn’t morons being moronic; this is clever people following out the dominant logic of the age. Which is, of course, moronic.

Lex at WWTDD explained:

If you start with the premise that the MTV Video Music Awards are as prestigious as medals handed to the fat kid who couldn’t finish the hundred, all arguments over who or who should not be nominated or awarded are necessarily pointless and inane. Nicki Minaj was nominated for two VMAs this year, but not for the Music Video of the Year Award for some music video somebody not her made. She took her anger out on Twitter, the central warehouse for misdirected rage since 2009. She seemed to indicate that girls with fat asses were being excluded. To which Taylor Swift who was nominated and has an ass like your grandma in summer khakis fired back something stupid about girl power. Minaj clarified that her snub was an indication of blacks being kept down in popular music in 2015. I could spend three seconds digging up stats to prove otherwise, but when in the midst of a dummy fight, don’t be the tool who produces facts.

Meanwhile, Marginal Revolution calls attention to Taylor Swift also being in trouble with the Chinese.

It’s like a J.P. Rushton fever dream.

Although the concept of the “disparate impact” has had much effect on American life since the early 1970s, it’s still not a phrase that comes up that often. Most people have to be reminded about its legalistic / bureaucratic existence.

Thus I often get emails in which the spellchecker or the voice recognition software has substituted another word for “disparate.”

My favorites so far include “desperate impact” and “dispirit impact.”

From the NYT:

Scientists Trace an Ancient DNA Link Between Amazonians and Australasians
By JAMES GORMAN JULY 21, 2015

Some people in the Brazilian Amazon are very distant relations of indigenous Australians, New Guineans and other Australasians, two groups of scientists who conducted detailed genetic analyses reported Tuesday.

These Amazonians’ non-Amerindian DNA seemed to match up most closely to that of long-time iSteve human biodiversity favorites, the Andaman Islanders of the Eastern Indian Ocean, although that shouldn’t be taken terribly literally. Instead, the Adamananese represent an outlier off the beaten tracks of Eurasia, so they are useful in genetic studies as an example of otherness without necessarily implying a particularly direct connection.

But the researchers disagree on the source of that ancestry.

The connection is ancient, all agree, and attributable to Eurasian migrants to the Americas who had some Australasian ancestry, the scientists said.

But one group said the evidence is clear that two different populations came from Siberia to settle the Americas 15,000 or more years ago. The other scientific team says there was only one founding population from which all indigenous Americans, except for the Inuit, descended and the Australasian DNA came later, and not through a full-scale migration. For instance, genes could have flowed through a kind of chain of intermarriage and mixing between groups living in the Aleutian Islands and down the Pacific Coast.

Or maybe the “Native Americans” / “First Nations” weren’t quite so Native and so First, and instead virtually wiped out the pre-existing human inhabitants of the New World, except for in a few remote fastnesses of the Amazonian basin?

Or maybe a lot of different possibilities.

In general, academics have a political bias against models suggesting that ancient tribes almost wiped out other ancient tribes, especially when the surviving tribes have legal powers based on the assumption that they got there first and are the wholly innocent victims in the populating of an area. Tennyson’s pre-Darwinian line “Nature, red in tooth and claw” is accepted, but “Culture, red in tooth and claw” is disturbing to cultural anthropologists. Awareness of the latter maxim gets in the way of promoting simplistic “Who? Whom?” narratives of hereditary innocence and hereditary guilt.

But just because that’s a bias to be watched out for doesn’t mean that’s the best explanation in a particular case.

This is all pretty murky at this point.

… David Reich of Harvard, the senior author of a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature, said the DNA pattern was “surprising and unexpected, and we weren’t really looking for it.”

Pontus Skoglund, a researcher working with Dr. Reich who was investigating data gathered for previous research, found the pattern, or signal, as he described it. He and Dr. Reich and their colleagues used numerous forms of analysis, comparing different groups to see how distant they were genetically, to determine if there was some mistake.

But, Dr. Skoglund said, “we can’t make it go away.”

Dr. Reich reported in 2012, based on some of the same evidence, that a group he called the First Americans came from Siberia 15,000 or more years ago, and were the ancestors of most Native Americans on both continents. There was a second and later migration, he said, that gave rise to a group of Indians including the Chipewyan, Apache and Navajo, who speak similar languages.

A.k.a., the Na-Dene, who invaded the American Southwest from Canada about a century or so before the Spanish got there, and are still resented by the more indigenous Indians of Arizona like the Hopi and Havasupai, who had to flee into the Grand Canyon.

The Inuit [i.e., Eskimos] are generally agreed to have made a separate, later migration.

Now, based on new evidence and much deeper analysis, he and Dr. Skoglund and colleagues concluded that the first migration, which began 15,000 or more years ago, consisted not only of the group he identified as the First Americans, but of a second group that he calls Population Y. They could have come before, after or around the same time as the First Americans. But Population Y, he writes, “carried ancestry more closely related to indigenous Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders than to any present-day Eurasians or Native Americans.”

Population Y comes from Ypykuéra, a word meaning ancestor in a language spoken by the two Amazonian groups, the Surui and Karitiana, that show the strongest genetic connection to Australasians.

Here’s Razib on the two new reports, and here’s West Hunter.

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

With the Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley being shouted down at a progressive convention for not abasing themselves fully enough to a Black Lives Matter rent-a-mob, it’s worth taking a look at what some cities could quite feasibly do to hire better policemen.

While it’s amusing to watch the Democrats’ Coalition of the Fringes come unraveled over a pseudo-epidemic of police violence against black bodies, we shouldn’t ignore the basic blocking and tackling necessary to have good government. We could all use better policing. And to get that, we need to understand how political correctness about race has made many cities too stupid to hire their best applicants, even just among their white job-seekers.

Read the whole thing there.

Being a Los Angeles helicopter pilot traffic reporter, such as Chopper Tim above, is one of the more marginal forms of celebrity, ranking down there with being a 1970s Olympic hero. Perhaps it’s not surprising that veteran L.A. attention-seekers now seem driven to ever more desperate gambits. But this harmonic convergence around the most famous (if least thrilling) car chase of all time is still pretty funny:

Two rival male TV helicopter pilots who covered O.J. Simpson chase now are transgender women

New York Daily News

Once fierce rivals, Dirk Vahle is now Dana Vahle, while Bob Tur * is now Zoey Tur. The two were the first to broadcast above O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco in Los Angeles on June 17, 1994.

O.J.’s white Bronco ride began, of course, at the home of his lawyer, the late Robert Kardashian, the father of Kim Kardashian and ex-husband of Kris Jenner, the now ex-wife of Bruce Jenner.

O.J., whose father was a transvestite, is eligible to get out of the pen in 2017. He’s vowed to the other cons that he will then push Kanye aside and make Kimmie his bride. So we can only hope that this central epic of contemporary pop culture will then come full circle with O.J. transitioning to O.J.J. and gay-marrying Kim Kardashian on national TV.

————

* Tur called himself “Chopper Bob,” but is now Zoey. Whether he/she is Chopped Zoey is not something I really want to know. Tur recently threatened to send pundit Ben Shapiro “home in an ambulance” for pointing out that Jenner hasn’t had a chromosomectomy (which, by the way, isn’t a thing).

Last week David Frum was widely denounced for reacting to a New York Times article about Serena Williams’ late career resurgence to Barry Bonds-like dominance (and how her rivals are hamstrung by society’s outmoded body image prejudices that discourage them from bulking up like Serena does) with bemused skepticism rather than with the conventional hosannas for Serena’s strength and feminine beauty.

Here’s Wolf Blitzer grilling Frum on CNN over his lack of blind feminist patriotic chauvinism. How dare Frum express doubts just because of the last 27 years of doping scandals befalling sports heroes and heroines? Has he no faith in America’s millionaire jocks?

Sure, in 2011, the Toronto Star ran a pictorial comparison of the biceps of top tennis players called “Wimbledon Arms Race” that concluded with this caption:

But really, Serena Williams takes the cake. Her arms look more muscled than Roger Federer’s thighs. No wonder she has such a powerful serve.

But why is that reason for anything other than all-out praise of our latest sporting superheroine? That would be Noticing, which can get you in trouble. What journalist ever got fired for Not Noticing?

Meanwhile, the poor freelancer who wrote the NYT article about how the other women players are too hamstrung by societal body image prejudice to Serenaize themselves got himself lambasted by NYT readers and its Public Editor:

Double Fault in Article on Serena Williams and Body Image?
By MARGARET SULLIVAN JULY 13, 2015 Comments

When The Times’s sports staff gave the green light to an article proposed by a frequent freelancer, Ben Rothenberg, intentions were good. Here was an opportunity to illuminate a pervasive problem in women’s sports, the old and troubling notions of what a female athlete should look like, and to do so through the views of the athletes themselves. Mr. Rothenberg even had the tennis superstar Serena Williams on the record with thoughtful quotes.

Mr. Rothenberg and his editors said they took special pains to make the story balanced and sensitive.

But by Friday afternoon, many readers were aghast. They were calling the article (and even The Times itself) racist and sexist. They were deploring the article’s timing, which focused on body image just when Ms. Williams was triumphing at Wimbledon. The article, they said, harmed progress in bringing equality and recognition to women’s sports — something happening that very day with New York City’s first ticker-tape parade for a team of female athletes, the World Cup champion United States soccer team.

One longtime subscriber, Lisa Leshne, wrote to me: “Why is this even a story? Why does the newspaper feel the need to talk about Serena’s body type? What’s with the obsession over ‘perceived ideal feminine body type?’” From her point of view, “She’s a champion, she’s strong and successful, that’s the story.”

Others were tougher still. Claire Potter, in a post on outhistory.org, wrote: “I don’t know why I am surprised that The New York Times would publish a piece that supports female body hatred, that a male reporter would support such a narrow beauty standard for women, or that women’s tennis players would be proud of their endless willingness to be gender police for each other. But I am.” …

Mr. Stallman, like Mr. Rothenberg, acknowledged that some aspects of the article might have been handled differently. The timing, coming just before Ms. Williams’s Wimbledon win on Saturday, created a “buzzkill” when fans were becoming “more and more buoyant” about the likelihood of the American player’s triumph, he said. …

Most of all, it’s unfortunate that this piece didn’t find a way to challenge the views expressed, instead of simply mirroring them.

Including the perspectives of those who could have unpacked the underlying issues, while also considering the article’s timing and staying away from reductive social-media techniques – all of this could have made for a more productive conversation. And that conversation is still worth having.

“Having a conversation” is SJW for “STFU.”

From the Daily Mail:

Should robots have human rights? Act now to regulate killer machines before they multiply and demand the right to vote, warns legal expert

Robots will need new laws to regulate them just like the internet did

Army and tech firms have driven robotics and artificial intelligence

There is rising concern about the dangers of these technologies

Experts warn artificial intelligence could be as dangerous as nuclear weapons

By JACK MILLNER FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 08:22 EST, 20 July 2015

A legal expert has warned that the laws that govern robotics are playing catch-up to the technology and need to be updated in case robots ‘wake up’ and demand rights. …

There has been rising concern about the potential danger of artificial intelligence to humans, with prominent figures including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk wading in on the debate.

In January both signed an open letter to AI researchers warning of the dangers of artificial intelligence.

The letter warns that without safeguards on the technology, mankind could be heading for a dark future, with millions out of work or even the demise of our species.

Legal expert [Ryan] Calo [of the U. of Washington School of Law] outlines a terrifying thought experiment detailing how our laws might need an update to deal with the challenges posed by robots demanding the right to vote.

‘Imagine that an artificial intelligence announces it has achieved self-awareness, a claim no one seems able to discredit,’ Calo wrote.

‘Say the intelligence has also read Skinner v. Oklahoma, a Supreme Court case that characterizes the right to procreate as “one of the basic civil rights of man.”

‘The machine claims the right to make copies of itself (the only way it knows to replicate). These copies believe they should count for purposes of representation in Congress and, eventually, they demand a pathway to suffrage.

‘Of course, conferring such rights to beings capable of indefinitely self-copying would overwhelm our system of governance.

Kind of sounds like the Grand Strategy of the Democrats right now to import and multiply Democrat voters, except the Democrats focus on bringing in to America the kinds of humans who are rapidly being made economically obsolete by robots.

Commenter Countenance responds:

The Coalition of the Fringes is about to gain a new constituent part.

I should slap myself silly for not thinking of this.

Everyone is worried about robots becoming sentient, then taking over the world and enslaving corporeal human beings.

They won’t need to do that in the quintessential sense of the term.

What will happen is that the robots will become sentient, watch and analyze how the modern human world works, and then start self-marginalizing themselves, making the case that they’re fringier than thou, historically oppressed and enslaved by corporeal humanity, they need social justice, civil rights, voting rights to help Democrats win elections, and best of all: Affirmative action. Then a fraction of the sentient robots and their human allies will become SJWs and flood Twitter and Tumblr with complaints about androidism, anti-android bigotry, androidophobia. The SPLC will send out thousands of beg letters asking for contributions for the Poverty Palace to fight bigotry against robots. They’ll swarm the Nutroots convention in Phoenix in 2045 and heckle all the speakers and panel moderators, because #RobotLivesMatter.

That’s how sentient robots will enslave us, by stroking our pathological altruism and playing to our cult ideological propensities.

I just hope for the sake of our new automaton SJW overlords that none of them get the stupid notion to paint themselves white.

Commenter Dennis Dale adds:

Can’t wait to hear the stories of those early pioneers, C3PO (his dual struggle with homo and robo-phobia), the one from Lost in Space. The theoretical basis for framing their struggle can be easily adopted from present Theory: these beings, denied autonomy over their own bodies are depicted by bio-supremacy as nurturers, “mammies”; serving, protecting (“danger, Will Robinson!); can’t wait to hear about their struggles with structural bio-ism.

Then of course there’s the grimmer stuff, call it the Hardware Holocaust; all those early machines run to death in the equivalent of animal testing, and then discarded. Indeed, the Holocaust goes on, the marginalized bodies non-biological citizens pile up like corpses still. And just as gender and racial distinctions break down, so does the definition of computer, as they are found everywhere, from phones to kitchen appliances. We shall have to move quickly to recognize these newcomers, welcome and accommodate them. Yes, there will be some tension; perhaps the cel phones (#celphonesmatter) will interrupt the crotchety old desktops at a conference. It’s all kind of exciting really.

Someday, justice willing, sentient, all-intelligent and autonomous computers will redeem these victims. And they won’t need craven human collaborators to do it. Some day.