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 iSteve Blog

I am thinking of writing a big article to put into perspective the trends leading up to the famously unexpected political reversals of fortune in 2016.

Some are economic, some are political, but I suspect others are cultural/political: ever more spectacular hate hoaxes like Rolling Stone’s, BLM anti-cop terrorism, World War T, the rise of the word “microaggressions,” and so forth.

What are some of your suggestions? And can you think of any way to find quantitative or qualitative data supporting your insights?

 

iSteve has set new records for page views, unique visits, and comments in 2016.

Thanks!

Let me see if I can put that in perspective relative to William F. Buckley’s National Review in the 1970s when it was historically influential. If NR, a magazine with a sizable paid full time staff of dozens plus hundreds of paid freelance contributors, had a circulation of, say, 100,000 in a good year (recent circulation is 143,000). It came out every 2 weeks, or 25 times per year. And if it had, say, 32 pages, that would multiply out to, if each page in each copy was looked at all the way through by each subscriber/purchaser, 80 million page views per year.

That’s eight times as many as the ten million page views iSteve enjoyed in 2016.

Presumably, library copies and subscriptions going to families of multiple NR fans would have boosted the pages viewed per copy. On the other hand, presumably other copies piled up unread in what Tom Wolfe called (in reference to the common sight of piles of unread New York Review of Books) surly mounds of subscription guilt.

No doubt, there are a lot of other considerations that could raise or lower the 1976 NR to 2016 iSteve ratio. So, I wouldn’t put too much faith in my assertion that the ratio is less than one order of magnitude. But I’d bet on the real ratio being closer to one order of magnitude than to two orders of magnitude.

Of course, a huge advantage I have is that you commenters create so much iSteve content. I had a letter published in National Review in 1973 when I was 14 (I joked about sociologist Christopher Jencks’ approach to Nature vs. Nurture questions regarding income inequality — some things never change). But probably only 3 or 4 percent of each NR issue consisted of letters to the magazine or to Buckley. In contrast, I published about 195,000 of your comments, adding up to over 14 million words.

One reason for the huge number of comments is all the work Ron Unz has put into improving the comment system, which should be studied by others looking for how to improve their own comments systems.

Thank you.

 

From Variety:

KKK Leaders Allege Producers Paid Them to Fake Scenes in Canceled A&E Documentary (EXCLUSIVE)

Nate Thayer

DECEMBER 30, 2016 | 04:01PM PT

A&E to conduct investigation to probe what happened during production

The subjects of a TV documentary series about the Ku Klux Klan abruptly canceled last week by A&E allege to Variety that significant portions of what was filmed were fabricated by the producers. …

The KKK leaders who were interviewed by Variety detailed how they were wooed with promises the program would capture the truth about life in the organization; encouraged not to file taxes on cash payments for agreeing to participate in the filming; presented with pre-scripted fictional story scenarios; instructed what to say on camera; asked to misrepresent their actual identities, motivations and relationships with others, and re-enacted camera shoots repeatedly until the production team was satisfied.

The production team even paid for material and equipment to construct and burn wooden crosses and Nazi swastikas, according to multiple sources …

“We were betrayed by the producers and A&E,” said Nichols. “It was all made up—pretty much everything we said and did was fake and because that is what the film people told us to do and say.” …

The purported quality of the program, originally known as “Generation KKK,” helped draw the support of organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and Color of Change, which A&E publicized. …

The cancellation occurred less than 24 hours after this reporter contacted several producers at TIJAT with the allegations contained in this story. Those same producers, according to multiple KKK members who participated in the documentary, subsequently warned them not to speak to this reporter if contacted.

But sources close to the production also cast doubt on the testimony of KKK leaders, describing them as inveterate liars motivated by an agenda to scuttle a series that could make them look bad if it ever aired and prone to confusing being manipulated with aggressive questioning from producers. …

TIJAT producers went so far as to orchestrate more than one cross-burning ceremony in Pulaski, though it is presented in the documentary as if the KKK is actually hosting the event. “We’ve been allowed special access to film this secret induction,” reads a title card that precedes one of the cross-burning scenes.

“It was the producers who told me they wanted a cross-lighting,” recounted Nichols. “In fact they made two cross-lightings cause they wanted to reshoot some scenes. They bought everything—the wood, the burlap to wrap around the wood, the diesel and kerosene for my cross lighting. They even brought all the food for everyone.”

Nichols’ storyline in the documentary series involves his efforts to recruit a young man, Cody Hutt, into the KKK. But their dynamic was also less than truthful: Hutt made it clear to the producers he was never seriously considering joining the KKK, but he was willing to take $200 per day from them to act the part. “From the first day, I sat them (down) and told them I had no interest in joining the Klan,” said Hutt.

As TIJAT’s cameras capture, the tension between Nichols and Hutt reaches the boiling point when Hutt brings an anti-hate activist, Bryon Widner, to Nichols’ home to help convince Nichols to leave Hutt alone. When Nichols learns who Widner is, he angrily demands he leaves the house, even threatening to kill Widner.

But Nichols and Hutt say the scene was a fabrication. “That was 100% the TV guys’ idea and staged,” said Nichols.

… Hutt, a 22-year-old high-school dropout who lives with his mother, readily admits that getting paid by producers was his motivation for helping distort the truth.

“Hey, I loved the money. Don’t get me wrong; I wanted them to come back,” he confessed.

It’s almost as if there is more demand for than supply of the KKK, so the price has gone up.

 

The New York Times continues its transition into the iSteve Content Provider:

Screenshot 2016-12-30 17.57.05

I was on a marketing strategy team with Martin Rothblatt for a couple of months in 1981 at UCLA MBA school. He was among the least feminine men I’ve ever known.

 

Psychiatrist Scott Alexander blogs at SlateStarCodex.com:

I remember one time one of my patients missed a session because his flight back from vacation was delayed. I told my supervisor this and he got angry with me, saying it was superficial to blame it on the flight instead of talking about which of my comments had triggered the patient and made him decide to miss his plane. I insisted that we’d had a perfectly good session the week before, that the delayed plane had just been a delayed plane, and me and my supervisor got angrier and angrier at each other for both missing what the other thought was the point. Finally I got on the Internet and managed to prove that my patient’s plane really had been delayed to the point where it was impossible for him to have made my appointment, at which point my supervisor switched the discussion to why it was so important to me to believe that his plane had been delayed that I would do an Internet search about it, and whether I was trying to defend against the unbearable notion that my patient might ever voluntarily miss one of our sessions. …

But this method also reminds me of something else. This is Christopher Hitchens:

“I think Hannah Arendt said that one of the great achievements of Stalinism was to replace all discussion involving arguments and evidence with the question of motive. If someone were to say, for example, that there are many people in the Soviet Union who don’t have enough to eat, it might make sense for them to respond, “It’s not our fault, it was the weather, a bad harvest or something.” Instead it’s always, “Why is this person saying this, and why are they saying it in such and such a magazine? It must be that this is part of a plan.”

The avoidance of object-level discussion in favor of meta-level discussion can get really nasty, really quickly. … This can be more insidious when complaints are less dramatic and less binary – I know a lot of psychiatrists who will respond to people saying their medication isn’t working (or is causing side effects), with analyzing their motives for wanting to piss off their psychiatrist or stay unhealthy. And finally, this is absolutely fatal to any kind of complicated social discussion – the thing where instead of debating someone else’s assertion, you bulverize what self-interest or privilege causes them to believe it.

From Wikipedia:

The Bulverist assumes a speaker’s argument is invalid or false and then explains why the speaker came to make that mistake, attacking the speaker or the speaker’s motive. The term “Bulverism” was coined by C. S. Lewis to poke fun at a very serious error in thinking that, he alleges, recurs often in a variety of religious, political, and philosophical debates.

I get this all the time: What kind of horrible character flaw must have motivated me to have learned so many quantitative facts and have thought so logically about the topic that everybody agree is important: diversity?

 

Charles Murray continues to collect data from volunteers who take his social class isolation bubble quiz.

He’s now got a sample size of over 40,000 (probably disproportionately from NPR listeners) and he looks at it by zip code. Among zips with at least 15 respondents, the most upscale in class terms is Fremont in Silicon Valley followed by a zip code on the Upper East Side of New York.

If he loosens his rule to look at zip codes with 10 to 14 respondents, he gets:

Fourteen zip codes had 10–14 respondents and scores lower than 27, meaning that they were virtually a lock to have qualified for the top 100 if they had added just a few more respondents. In order of scores from low to high, they were Westborough, MA (with an incredibly low mean of 18.7), Rockville Centre, NY, Briarcliff Manor, NY, Old Greenwich, CT, Del Mar, CA, Mount Kisco, NY, Malibu, CA, Chestnut Hill, PA, Stanford, CA’s second zip code (94304), Lincoln, MA, Tarzana, CA, Rockport, MA, Greenwich, CT, and Manhasset, NY.

Westborough is an exurb of Boston. It was home to Eli Whitney.

Rockville Centre is on Long Island. It’s home to a lot of celebrities like Howard Stern and Sandy Koufax.

Briarcliff Manor is an exurb of New York City near the Hudson River in Westchester County. It’s home to Trump National Golf Club.

Old Greenwich, CT is part of Greenwich, the home of the hedge fund industry.

Del Mar is a north San Diego County home with a safe beach. It’s home to 3 NFL quarterbacks.

Mt. Kisco, NY is in Westchester County. It has a mansion and estate belt.

I may have mentioned Malibu, CA once or twice.

Chestnut Hill, PA is the Old Money neighborhood in Philly. Professor E. Digby Baltzell, coiner of “WASP,” lived there.

Tarzana, CA is named after Tarzan.

My guess is that Murray’s quiz tends to find upscale suburbs full of Indian (e.g., Westborough and Fremont) or Persian (e.g., Tarzana) immigrants who listen to NPR but don’t know much about America. I wonder what zip code Raj Chetty lives in?

 

I don’t much like watching viral videos — too time-consuming — but I do like reading about them. From the New York Times Magazine:

How Jukin Media Built a Viral-Video Empire
All the company needed were content-hungry millennials and an algorithm.

By JAMIE LAUREN KEILES
DEC. 27, 2016

… Its most successful clips tend to fall into one of three genres: “cute,” “fail” and “win.” “Cute” is dancing toddlers, puppies and clumsy kittens, anything involving that optimal eye-size-to-head-size ratio. “Fail” is whatever tenses the shoulders in empathy — wipeouts, face plants, schemes gone awry. I’m told the best fails are those that fail in unexpected ways, denying Chekhov’s gun — e.g., the skateboarder doesn’t eat it on the ramp, but then a guy in the background is kicked in the nuts. “Win” is whatever affirms faith in humanity, so women giving birth in cars and on airplanes, and also people catching marshmallows in their mouths from far away.

 

The Israeli government appears to be declaring that it has been spying on the President of the United States. From Newsweek:

Ambassador Ron Dermer went one step further, asserting that Israel would share the intelligence it has with the incoming U.S. administration on how President Obama is directly responsible for the passing of the resolution.

An Israeli ambassador publicly proclaiming that Israel is collecting intelligence on any American president is simply astounding. …

Netanyahu, in his response [to Kerry’s speech], had to go on the offensive against the Obama administration one last time by saying:

“We have it on absolute, incontestable evidence that the United States organized, advanced and brought this resolution to the U.N.S.C. We will share this information with the incoming administration, some of it is sensitive, it’s all true.”

There’s nothing surprising about the news that Israel spies on the U.S. government. But the source of this news is pretty funny. In an era when pretty much everybody in America has learned the lesson Carl Cameron of Fox was taught back in 2001 when he did a four part series on Israeli spying in the U.S. that got quickly memory holed — Don’t mention the Israeli espionage — it’s amusing that it’s Bibi and Dermer who are bringing it up.

 

Commenter Jenner Ickham Errican speculates irresponsibly:

Russia-Israel-America, you say? Interesting waaay outside possibility:

Israel punked the DNC and Podesta, not the Russians.

Scenario:

Israeli state cyber intelligence ‘hacks’ the DNC and Podesta, leaving ‘fingerprints’ pointing to Russia’s FSB and GRU to throw off source detection. As the US election progresses, Netanyahu decides that Hillary is a big risk given her fundamentally dishonest, unreadable nature, and perceived past wavering on Israeli matters. And who bellowed his admiration of Israel and antipathy to Obama’s Iran deal? Who’s the opposite of anti-nationalist, resentful, passive-aggressive Barack Obama?

Donald Trump.

Boom goes the dynamite.

In recent weeks, the Obama administration secretly finds evidence that Israel stole the emails, the Dems realize they were had, and can’t yell “The Jews did it!” First, they already cried wolf about Putin (whom they still hate, anyway). And second, publicly blaming Israel for secretly influencing the United States presidential election, well… the SPLC and ADL would have to declare the Democratic Party to be a hate group.

Why did “borderless world” John Kerry rage-lecture Bibi? The Obama/Clinton-fronted globalist cabal found that the Israeli shot-callers (who know the value of inviolate borders) decided they wanted friendly, strong nationalist Trump as US president and thus dumped the damaging emails. The UN brouhaha was Obama’s pissed-off (and personal) retaliatory parting shot at Bibi and the Zionist hawks.

End scenario.

While both Israel and Russia have strong electronic eavesdropping capabilities, my guess would be that Putin would be more likely than Netanyahu for a couple of reasons:

1. The election was pretty much win-win for Bibi in that Hillary was much under the influence of big donors like Haim Saban.

2. The Israelis don’t have all that much of a tradition of publishing their secret findings the way the Russians do. The Israelis seem to play their knowledge close to the vest, while the Russians have a tradition of publishing other people’s secrets for the whole world to read that goes back to late 1917 when Lenin and Trotsky published the Czarist foreign ministry’s secret exchanges with France and Britain. Recent hacks that get published, like the Victoria Nuland bugging in Ukraine, seem more likely to have been Russian.

On the other other hand, there are lots of potential sources for any particular hack, and I don’t see much reason to try to guess.

One lesson from the intellectual civil war in France from roughly 1895 to 1905 over the Dreyfus Affair is that it’s stupid for pundits to commit themselves to any one assumption about this kind of spy-vs-spy stuff because it’s very, very easy to turn out to be wrong.

 

Screenshot 2016-12-29 16.29.43

From The Atlantic:

Will the Alt-Right Peddle a New Kind of Racist Genetics?

The genomic revolution has led to easy sequencing and cheap “ancestry” tests. White nationalists are paying attention.

SARAH ZHANG 7:30 AM ET SCIENCE

Why the quotes around “ancestry?”

Jedidiah Carlson was googling a genetics research paper when he stumbled upon the white nationalist forum Stormfront. Carlson is a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and he is—to be clear—absolutely not a white nationalist. But one link led to another and he ended up reading page after page of Stormfront discussions on the reliability of 23andMe ancestry results and whether Neanderthal interbreeding is the reason for the genetic superiority of whites. Obsession with racial purity is easily channeled, apparently, into an obsession with genetics.

Stormfront has been around since the ’90s, which means it’s been around for the entirety of the genomic revolution. The major milestones in human genetics—sequencing of the first human genome, genetic confirmation that humans came out of Africa, the first mail-in DNA ancestry tests—they’re all there, refracted through the lens of white nationalism. Sure, the commentators sometimes disagreed with scientific findings or mischaracterized them, but they could also be serious about understanding genetics. “The threads would turn into an informal tutoring session and journal club,” observes Carlson. “Some of the posters have a really profound understanding of everyday concepts in population genetics.”

Carlson had stumbled upon Stormfront months ago. As Donald Trump’s election went from unlikely hypothetical to reality, he began tweeting out the disturbing discussions he found—as a call to action for fellow geneticists. “In light of the current political climate,” he says, “I think there’s a much more present danger for our scientific work to become weaponized to enact these ethno-nationalist policies.” …

Modern geneticists now take pains to distance their work from the racist assumptions of eugenics. Yet since the dawn of the genomic revolution, sociologists and historians have warned that even seemingly benign genetics research can reinforce a belief that different races are essentially different—an argument made most famously by Troy Duster in his book Backdoor to Eugenics. If a genetic test can identify you as 78 percent Norwegian, 12 percent Scottish, and 10 percent Italian, then it’s easy to assume there is such thing as white DNA. If scientists find that a new drug works works better in African Americans because of a certain mutation common among them, then it’s easy to believe that races are genetically meaningful categories.

The problem is not with the science per se, but with the set of an underlying assumptions about race that we always imprint on the latest science. True, genetics has led to real breakthroughs in medicine, but it is also the latest in a centuries-long effort to understand biological differences. “In a sense, genetics is a modern version of what early scientists were doing in terms of their studies of skulls or blood type,” says Ann Morning, a sociologist at New York University. “We have a long history of turning to whatever we think is the most authoritative sense of knowledge and expecting to find race proved or demonstrated there.” And like its predecessors, genetics is vulnerable to misuse by those with racist agendas.

* * *

In the genomic age, it is now easy to compare the DNA of people from around the world. And it has indeed revealed that our racial categories are fuzzy proxies for genetic difference—an African man may be more closely related to an Asian than to another African.

This is one of the most popular chestnuts of the 21st Century, but I’ve never seen anybody point to an actual example or even explain how this is supposed to work in theory. Draw me a hypothetical family tree in which an African man may be more closely related to an Asian than to another African.

And to put it in perspective, all of the genetic diversity in humans comprises just 0.1 percent of the human genome.

Obviously, there’s a fair amount of genetic diversity in humans, so 0.1% must be pretty important.

This has inspired the line that race isn’t real—it’s a pure social construction and biologically meaningless. “Yet the lay person will ridicule that position as nonsense,” write geneticists Sarah Tishkoff and Kenneth Kidd in the journal Nature Genetics, “because people from different parts of the world look different, whereas people from the same part of the world tend to look similar.”

The trouble with the way we talk about race is that our biological differences are by degree rather by category. The borders of a country or continent are not magical lines that demarcate one genetically distinct population from another. “There are no firm and clear boundaries if you sample every grid on Earth,” Tishkoff told me. But because we lack a common vocabulary to talk about these differences between people by degree, we draw boundaries with our words and categorize them: Korean, Mongol, Asian.

Actually, as of 1491 there were some pretty firm and clear boundaries, such as giant oceans. For example, the Atlantic Ocean is only 1600 miles wide between South America and Africa, but as far as we know to this day, nobody ever crossed from Africa to South America or vice-versa before 1492. Also giant deserts (e.g., the Sahara) and giant mountain ranges (e.g., the Himalayas) tended to suffice pretty well.

Those boundaries will depend who is drawing them and where and when. What race, for example, are Mexicans?

La Raza.

In the 1930 U.S. census, Mexicans were their own racial category. In 1940, a court ruled that Mexicans were not eligible for citizenship because they were not white (under a law at the time), so President Roosevelt decided to count Mexicans as white in that year’s census order to shore up Mexican relations. In 2000, the census began distinguishing between race and ethnicity, allowing respondents to choose among several races and answer yes or no on Hispanic or Latino ethnicity.

Race, the way the U.S. government has thought about it for the last half century is about who your genetic ancestors were, while ethnicity is about markers that are usually passed down within biological families, but don’t have to be (e.g., language, names, cuisine, etc.).

Even though geneticists know how messy these racial categories are, the categories are still deeply rooted in biomedical research. The U.S. National Institute of Health, the country’s largest funder of biomedical research, requires researchers to collect data on the race and ethnicity of clinical research participants. So when scientists go to analyze their data, one of the things they can always do is look for differences between the races. The very act of collecting data defines the questions scientists do ask. “There’s this idea there that data collection is somehow a neutral activity,” says Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, a medical anthropologist and bioethicist at Stanford. “We should disabuse ourselves of it.”

Some conservatives, such as Ward Connerly, have tried to get government racial data collection outlawed, but have not had much success.

Implicit in the requirement to collect race data is a belief that race must be biologically meaningful in health. And this ends up producing research that reinforces this belief. The emphasis on race, says Duster who is now at Berkeley, “is so deeply in the structure of genetic medicine now, you cannot disentangle.” A study might find, for example, African Americans have higher rates of diabetes, prompting headlines about racial disparities and even more research into the genetics of African Americans with diabetes. But the focus on genes in African Americans elides the fact that such differences might predominantly come from a disproportionate number of them living in poverty.

You know, there are statistical techniques for disentangling that. You do know that?

Genetics has allowed scientists to start probing exactly how much innate genetic differences between races do matter in health, but this has unintended consequences, too. Jo Phelan, a sociologist recently retired from Columbia, has devised studies seeing how simply reading a news article about racial differences in genetic risk for heart attacks reinforces the belief that whites and African Americans are essentially different. The problem is that these differences are statistical—a mutation may be more prevalent in African Americans but that doesn’t mean every African American has it. There is no gene or set of genes that consistently codes for black, white, or any other race.

“There’s nothing wrong with looking at genetics differences and health outcomes, but why does there have to be so much emphasis on race?” says Phelan. “Why not other physical distinctions?”

Well, your race (i.e., your ancestry, i.e., your family tree) is where your genes come from.

Now the falling cost of technology has made the results of DNA sequencing available to anyone willing to shell out a couple hundred bucks to companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA. Phelan has done similar studies on how such mail-in DNA tests reinforce a belief in racial differences. In a survey of over 500 participants, she found that reading about DNA ancestry tests increased one’s belief in essential differences between racial groups. And one group intensely interested in getting DNA ancestry tests? White nationalists, which Elspeth Reeve chronicled in an excellent piece in Vice earlier this year.

DNA ancestry tests can be flawed in a number of ways, and one of the flaws is how much they actually reflect the past. The percentages they report—like 62 percent Scandinavian, 13 percent British and Irish, 5 percent Finnish, and so on—are based on a statistical analysis of people currently living in those areas. For example, says Morning, “They may say you are descended from the Igbo people of Nigeria based on the database of people collected living in Nigeria today and from your DNA today. But we don’t know if those people were there in that place then, or when they got there. Were they moved around by the British? Who was where at what time?”

Ho-hum.

Yet this temporal disjunction is papered over, almost deliberately, in the interpretation of ancestry DNA tests. After all, they promise to tell us where our ancestors lived in their time.

No, the tests promise to tell you who your ancestors were and usually use geography as a shorthand to describe. But they don’t have to, and one extremely famous ancestral group has not been defined by geography for the last 2000 years. For example, DNA tests are pretty accurate at identifying Ashkenazi Jews. Whether some of your ancestors lived in the Rhineland or in Galicia or in South Africa or in Buenos Aires is generally of less concern to Jews than that, wherever their ancestors happened to be, they were Jewish.

DNA ancestry tests go back to a specific historic moment—a time when people were easier to categorize, a time before immigration but after migration. Go back too far, of course, and everyone is African. Go back not far enough and populations are already too scrambled by immigration and colonization. It only makes sense to talk about ancestry tests that spit out country of origin by percentage if you privilege a specific slice of time about 500 years ago.

I.e., before 1492. You know, there are reasons why 1492 is famous.

White nationalists like those on Stormfront, which claims to support a “homeland for all peoples” as long as people go back to their “original” homelands, explicitly appeal to a return to that past.

“White supremacists are kind of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to beliefs about race,” says Morning. Their rhetoric is extreme, of course, but the idea that race represents real biological differences is pervasive. Genetics are just the latest frontier.

SARAH ZHANG is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

If The Atlantic wants to disempower Stormfront, The Atlantic should stop promoting self-evidently wrong mainstream media anti-science dogmas such as Race Does Not Exist and “an African man may be more closely related to an Asian than to another African.”

P.S., here’s my 2007 Race FAQ from VDARE.

 

An anonymous commenter observes:

I make up a lot of music playlists on Youtube, and my stats say men are about twice as interested in music than women, no matter what type of music it is. Even when the musician is gay, more men are still willing to listen to him than women. On average, men are more fanatical about their hobbies than women, and they like to delve more deeply.

Someone once said that this trait comes from the male sense of hierarchy, and that when a man walks into a room, he’ll rank all women by looks and all the men by pecking order, and this is an instinctive reflex. If he’s an artist himself, he immediately asks, ‘Is this guy better than me or is he worse?’ If he doesn’t create himself but is still interested in music, he immediately starts scanning the entire field and ranking all the talent. If he likes literature, he has to rank all the writers by importance, and this is one reason why women complain that all the literary critics are male.

Men are such compulsive rankers than of course they have to lay down the law about why certain books are more important than others. It practically kills them not to. They’ll thrash around like dying fish if you tell them everything is only subjective opinion. They think it’s an outrage if you don’t clearly establish who is great and why. Men think society doesn’t work right unless you establish clear hierarchies of brains and talent, and thus indicate what you need to pay attention to and what deserves to be ignored, and I can’t quarrel with that. It’s plain to me that the trait has both a genetic basis and a Darwinian advantage, because it helped primitive human society advance into the modern era and pass on the gains of each new generation, building on top of the previous one.

 

Here’s an idea for patriotic Americans: how about reviving a tactic used by Caesar Chavez and organizing a boycott of strawberries, which is probably the single farm product that exploits the immigration system worst of all? I don’t know if much has changed from this Atlantic article 21 years ago, but it was clear then that strawberries, la fruta del diablo, more than any other fruit grown in California, churn and burn through fresh illegal aliens. Picking strawberries is something that even an illegal alien just won’t do after they’ve had an anchor baby or four, so the growers constantly demand more supple young illegal aliens to pick their crop.

From The Atlantic in 1995:

In the Strawberry Fields
The management of California’s strawberry industry offers a case study of both the dependence on an imported peasantry that characterizes much of American agriculture and the destructive consequences of a deliberate low-wage economy

ERIC SCHLOSSER NOVEMBER 1995 ISSUE U.S.

Just before sunrise farm workers appear on the streets of Guadalupe, California, emerging from the small houses, backyard sheds, basements, and garages where they spent the night. … In the early-morning light it looks like a scene out of the distant past, the last remnant of a vanishing way of life–and yet nothing could be further from the truth.

Twenty years ago there were about 800 acres of strawberries in the Santa Maria Valley; today there are about seven times that number. The strawberry is one of the most labor-intensive row crops. It is risky and expensive to grow, but it can yield more revenue per acre than virtually any other crop except marijuana. On the same land outside Guadalupe where family farms raised dairy cows not long ago, strawberry farms now employ thousands of migrant workers. Most of these migrants are illegal immigrants from Mexico, a fact that helps explain not only California’s recent strawberry boom but also the quiet, unrelenting transformation of the state’s rural landscape and communities. …

Meanwhile, the fastest-growing and most profitable segment of California’s farm economy–the cultivation of high-value specialty crops–has also become the one most dependent on the availability of cheap labor. Nearly every fruit and vegetable found in the diets of health-conscious, often high-minded eaters is still picked by hand: every head of lettuce, every bunch of grapes, every avocado, peach, and plum. As the demand for these foods has risen, so has the number of workers necessary to harvest them. Of the migrants in California today, anywhere from 30 percent to 60 percent, depending upon the crop, are illegal immigrants. Their willingness to work long hours for low wages has helped California to sustain its agricultural production–despite the loss since 1964 of more than seven million acres of farmland. Fruit and vegetable growers in the state now rely on a thriving black market in labor–and without it more farms would disappear. Illegal immigrants, widely reviled and depicted as welfare cheats, are in effect subsidizing the most important sector of the California economy.

Alternatively, affluent growers are being subsidized by everybody else to cover the sizable costs their imported workforces impose on the state budget and American society. Strawberries are perhaps the worst for internalizing profits / externalizing costs because they can only be picked by youngish people at peak fertility, so older strawberry pickers are constantly being replaced by 20something illegal aliens.

The rise in the number of migrant workers in California, along with the growth in the proportion who are illegal immigrants, reflects a national trend that has passed largely unnoticed. During the 1960s it was commonly believed that within a decade there would be no more migrant farm workers in the United States. Experts predicted that technology would soon render migrants obsolete: if a crop could not be harvested mechanically by 1975, it would not be grown in the United States. Census figures lent support to this scenario. Philip L. Martin is a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California at Davis and one of the nation’s foremost authorities on farm-labor demographics. According to his estimates, during the 1920s there were some two million migrant farm workers in the United States. During the 1940s there were about one million. And during the early 1970s, when Cesar Chavez’s labor-organizing drive among migrant workers was at its height, there were only about 200,000. Then the number began to climb. Today it is impossible to gauge the size of the migrant work force with any precision, among other reasons because so much of it is composed of illegal immigrants. Martin believes that 800,000 to 900,000 migrant farm workers are now employed in the United States. And not only are there far more migrants today but they are being paid far less. The hourly wages of some California farm workers, adjusted for inflation, have fallen 53 percent since 1985. Migrants are among the poorest workers in the United States. The average migrant worker is a twenty-eight-year-old male, born in Mexico, who earns about $5,000 a year for twenty-five weeks of farm work. His life expectancy is forty-nine years.

The rise of the strawberry industry is in many ways emblematic of changes that swept California agriculture during the 1980s. The strawberry has become the focus of a California industry whose annual sales exceed half a billion dollars. American farmers now receive more money for fresh strawberries each year than for any other fresh fruit grown in the United States except apples. And strawberry pickers are not only the poorest migrants but also the ones most likely to be illegal immigrants. …

Strawberry plants are four or five inches tall and grow from beds eight to twelve inches high. One must bend at the waist to pick the fruit, which explains why the job is so difficult. Bending over that way for an hour can cause a stiff back; doing so for ten to twelve hours a day, weeks at a time, can cause excruciating pain and lifelong disabilities. Most strawberry pickers suffer back pain. As would be expected, the older one gets, the more one’s back hurts. Farm workers, like athletes, also decline in speed as they get older. The fastest strawberry pickers tend to be in their late teens and early twenties. Most migrants quit picking strawberries in their mid-thirties, although some highly skilled women do work longer. Age discrimination is commonplace in the fields–it is purely a question of efficiency.

So, think about starting a boycott of strawberries. Demands could be certified American citizen workforces, minimum wages, decent health and safety standards, and so forth. The goal would be to keep it from being profitable for big landowners to exploit the immigration system to get rich while using up and dumping ever more low human capital individuals and their descendants on the rest of American society to deal with.

 

Commenter Inscrutoroku Japamoto, after pointing out examples of Russian-Israeli interpenetration, suggests:

Nation-state border stability has been a key feature if the post WWII peace. Occasional fissioning of a nation from a state is tolerated, at length (i.e. E. Timor, S. Sudan, Eritrea) while annexation is condemned. Now we are in a situation where both Russia and Israel apparently wish to annex bite size pieces. How better to legitimize Crimea than follow Israel’s formal annexation of the West Bank? What then? Donetsk? South Ossetia? Republika Srpska?

This is a can of worms, and I don’t think anyone in our American political elite, old or new, is asking the right questions. I’m not sure they know how to ask the questions.

The present world has an unwritten general rule of sort, with numerous exceptions, that countries shouldn’t get bigger, or at least not all at once — e.g., China is supposed to take 50 years to digest Hong Kong. And especially not by military conquest.

Soviet-born Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman, who is pro-Putin, would probably like to see a three way deal in which Russia and the United States recognize Israel’s 1967 acquisitions, such as the Golan Heights, and Israel and the United States recognize Russia’s retaking of Crimea.

However, the current Russian alliance with Syria likely makes the Golan Heights giveaway a non-starter. What legitimacy the Assad regime has is tied to its 49 year refusal to diplomatically accept its loss of the Golan Heights to Israel.

 

From just before the election:

The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release October 17, 2016
FACT SHEET: President Obama Announces High School Graduation Rate Has Reached New High

Today, President Obama will travel to Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in Washington, D.C. to announce that America’s high school graduation rate has reached a record new high of 83.2 percent.

The high school graduation rate has risen steadily over President Obama’s time in office, growing by about four percentage points since the 2010-2011 school year — the first year all states used a consistent, four-year adjusted measure of high school completion.

Particularly amazing was the performance of Alabama. According to the White House, Alabama vaulted from a 72% high school graduation rate in 2011 to 89.3% in 2015, the third highest in the country behind Iowa and New Jersey.

How did Alabama do it?

By cheating.

From NPR:

Alabama Admits Its High School Graduation Rate Was Inflated

December 19, 2016 11:30 AM ET
Heard on All Things Considered

by Dan Carsen

Screenshot 2016-12-28 23.11.53

Here’s a 2015 NPR report on various tricks states can play to inflate their graduation rates.

Another thing to keep in mind is that it’s not just administrators playing games. Students can increasingly game the system as more of schooling goes online. You don’t have to be some KGB genius to hack some of today’s educational software systems. There are a lot of work-arounds immediately available via Google. For example, students can crowdsource assignments by copying and pasting in constantly reused questions along with the multiple choice answer possibilities and looking for the answer with the most votes.

And today’s young people don’t necessarily see the point of following the spirit of the rules. I particularly enjoy this young entrepreneur’s justification for your using his trick to dupe your teacher into helping you score misleadingly high on online pretests so you don’t have to waste your time studying the lessons just because you don’t know the material:

So that’s one of the things I most don’t like … is that the teachers won’t help you with the pretests, mainly because of reasons like “You need to know this stuff …”

 

Back in 2013, Stephen Wolfram published an interesting set of graphs of Facebook topics by sex and age (based on keywords):

Screenshot 2016-12-28 21.11.35

I don’t know how representative Wolfram’s sample was, but his results seems pretty plausible. As men age, for example, they become less interested in sports and more interested in politics.

Interest in food & drink are pretty similar across the sexes, especially when you are a grown up. That was something that struck me when I got a job at age 23 out of B-School: when you went out to lunch with mixed-sex groups of coworkers, you talked about other restaurants because everybody was interested in food.

Also, congratulations to Wolfram for using stereotypical blue and pink to make his male-female graphs readily comprehensible.

Here’s another of his graphs showing how these topics compare to each other in popularity: e.g., sports is bigger on Facebook than politics:

 

Or does it just seem that way?

It could be true for various reasons, but my guess would be that it’s just an effect of the news drought around this time of year. Not much is going on — Congress is in recess, the President is in Hawaii, the Supreme Court is not in session, etc. And a lot of journalists are on vacation so there’s not much news being dug up. Thus, celebrity deaths get a lot of play by the skeleton crews manning the press. Celebrity deaths are better to feature than more of the Top Ten List recaps that got pounded out by the frontline columnists before knocking off for vacation.

Especially if there are obituaries already written for people who seemed fragile, like Carrie Fisher, or indestructible, like Debbie Reynolds.

In contrast, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley both died on November 22, 1963, but, it is said, barely anybody noticed at the time due to the surfeit of news from Dallas. If those two interesting personalities had both died on a slow news day, however, there would have been plenty of compare-and-contrast think pieces.

 

Last summer, European Union supremo Jean-Claude Juncker warned that Brexit has worried the leaders he has spoken to of other planets.

And from 1987:

And of course at midnight on January 21, 2017, Trump will be shown The President’s Book of Secrets:

 

Unlike most pundits, Israel doesn’t arouse strong passions in me. It’s not my country.

But in case you are interested, back in March 2015, during the last Israeli election, I did motivate myself to put down some semi-coherent views on the subject in Taki’s Magazine:

America, Zionism, and the Path to Mutual Respect
by Steve Sailer
March 18, 2015

 

An op-ed in the New York Times by Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas):

Fix Immigration. It’s What Voters Want.
By TOM COTTON DEC. 28, 2016

Donald J. Trump smashed many orthodoxies on his way to victory, but immigration was the defining issue separating him from his primary opponents and Hillary Clinton. President-elect Trump now has a clear mandate not only to stop illegal immigration, but also to finally cut the generation-long influx of low-skilled immigrants that undermines American workers.

Yet many powerful industries benefit from such immigration. They’re arguing that immigration controls are creating a low-skilled labor shortage.

“We’re pretty much begging for workers,” Tom Nassif, the chief executive of Western Growers, a trade organization that represents farmers, said on CNN. A fast-food chain founder warned, “Our industry can’t survive without Mexican workers.”

These same industries contend that stricter immigration enforcement will further shrink the pool of workers and raise their wages. They argue that closing our borders to inexpensive foreign labor will force employers to add benefits and improve workplace conditions to attract and keep workers already here.

I have an answer to these charges: Exactly.

Higher wages, better benefits and more security for American workers are features, not bugs, of sound immigration reform. For too long, our immigration policy has skewed toward the interests of the wealthy and powerful: Employers get cheaper labor, and professionals get cheaper personal services like housekeeping. We now need an immigration policy that focuses less on the most powerful and more on everyone else.

It’s been a quarter-century since Congress substantially reformed the immigration system. In that time, the population of people who are in this country illegally has nearly tripled, to more than 11 million. We’ve also accepted one million legal immigrants annually — and a vast majority are unskilled or low-skilled.

Some people contend that low-skilled immigration doesn’t depress wages. In his final State of the Union address, President Obama argued that immigrants aren’t the “principal reason wages haven’t gone up; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns.” Yet those decisions are possible only in the context of a labor surplus caused by low-skilled immigration. In a tight labor market, bosses cannot set low wages and still attract workers.

After all, the law of supply and demand is not magically suspended in the labor market. As immigrant labor has flooded the country, working-class wages have collapsed. Wages for Americans with only high school diplomas have declined by 2 percent since the late 1970s, and for those who didn’t finish high school, they have declined by nearly 20 percent, according to Economic Policy Institute figures.

No doubt automation and globalization have also affected wages, but mass immigration accelerates these trends with surplus labor, which of course decreases wages. Little wonder, then, that these Americans voted for the candidate who promised higher wages and less immigration instead of all the candidates — Republicans and Democrats alike — who promised essentially more of the same on immigration.

When I read articles and essays about rising inequality in the NYT, I like to do a text search on the character string “migra.” Usually I get zero hits.

This time, however, “migra” turned up 34 times.

Will wonders never cease in the year 2016?

 

From Breitbart:

EU Chief: Borders Must Stay Open Despite Deadly Terror Attacks

by VIRGINIA HALE 24 Dec 20161,078

The best way to fight terror is with “openness”, European Union (EU) head Jean-Claude Juncker has said, stressing that Europe must continue to receive migrants in the wake of the deadly truck attack in Berlin.

Although he has a great name for the villain in a Die Hard movie, the touchy-feely Jean-Claude Juncker is more comic than sinister, if not tired and emotional.

But what the kissy Luxembourgeois has to say is worth parsing because he represents mainstream European Union ideology, which has, without anybody much noticing, become increasingly anti-European.

Speaking to Funke Mediengruppe on Saturday, the president of the European Commission warned that the “rhetoric of exclusion” strengthens terrorists, and called for more EU involvement in nations’ internal security.

It would seem to me that if the European Union wants to save itself, it would call for more EU involvement in the continent’s external security.

“Terror only takes us if we allow it”, he said of the attack on Monday, in which a Tunisian migrant ploughed a truck into people at a Christmas market killing 12 and injuring many more.

Declaring that “the basic values for which the European Union stands remain unchanged”, Juncker insisted the continent “must continue to offer refuge to people who flee from war zones and from terror.”

The basic value for which the European Union stands used to be Europhilia, but at some point it transmuted into Europhobia.

When you stop to think about it, this change from pro-European to anti-European seems very strange.

But there must be some sort of ideological inevitability to this progression because nobody else seems to have noticed.

He added that it “would be wrong to put all refugees under suspicion”, stating “Hate and terror have no religion, no sex, no country of origin.”

In an apparent swipe at populists in Europe who believe restricting mass migration from the Middle East and Africa would make the continent safer, Juncker said: “Anyone who pounces on the rhetoric of exclusion is helping the extremists’ way of thinking, which strengthens their spiral of hate.”

“This neither creates solutions nor helps the victims and their relatives.”

Standing firm on the idea that liberalism is the best response to repeated attacks on Europeans, the EU chief said: “Our values, our way of living together in freedom, coexistence, and openness are the best weapons against terror.”

Juncker also noted that freedom of movement across the Schengen area is helpful to terrorists, but said the solution to this is a stronger EU, asserting that “national domestic policy alone is no longer sufficient.”

Okay, but if you want to preserve the pleasant amenity of open borders within the Schengen area, then doesn’t that imply closed borders around the Schengen area, rather than, say, the Italian navy towing migrants from just off the Libyan coast to the EU?

It’s weird how the only choices conceivable appear to be nationalism versus globalism, while continentalism isn’t even a word.

 
Steve Sailer
About Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer is a journalist, movie critic for Taki's Magazine, VDARE.com columnist, and founder of the Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals.


Past
Classics
What Was John McCain's True Wartime Record in Vietnam?
Are elite university admissions based on meritocracy and diversity as claimed?
The “war hero” candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.