I’m not sure of Richard’s beef with you guys. I first visited your site today after his post that linked to you, and searched in vain for anything that smacked of racism. I don’t think it’s racist to posit that there are differences between the races; I think it’s racist to take generalized information about a race (e.g., African-Americans score lower on IQ tests) and turn that into all African-Americans are dumb and inferior and deserve to be treated differently and in a less dignified manner.

Also, Bennett is not a left-winger. He may think you’re raving lunatic racists, and he may overuse ad hominem attacks, but he’s probably not that far from Bork, Derbyshire, or K Lo.

You must understand that Russia is undergoing economic and democratic transition. Poverty is rife and having children is perceived to be a financial burden.
You have to compare this with the fertility rate in communist Russia aka Soviet Union where perhaps, wealth and food wass more widely distributed and family units were more stable.

Andrew

You wonder if a vast Lebanese Diaspora is a good thing? Both Selma Hayek and Shakira are half-lebanese, half Mexican/Columbian, respectively. Q.E.D.

{It does amuse me when plastic paddies make out that the Ulster proestests are invaders of some kind, when their ancestors have been in Ulster a lot longer than any European-Americans have been in North America. If the natives have the right to overrule everyome else’s wishes in Ireland then why not in the US too?}
A good point, but I was under the impression that the Plantation of Ulster occurred under James I – the same era in which Virginia and Massachussetts were founded.

During medieval europe at least the standard preferred drinks were all alcoholic mainly because the water was unsafe, especially in larger settlements. Remember that these places very rarely had any sort of organised sewerage/waste disposal systems at all, the extent usually being to dump everything in the local river.
That made drinking out of the same river a rather bad idea. Beer is an especially good solution as the water in it is boiled and the end product has the dual benefits of keeping for a reasonably long time in storage and tasting nice. 🙂

It seems to be a beautiful result of unintended consequences.

The LDS leadership chose to cave on polygamy in 1890, fearing the feds would run them off to Mexico or worse. The LDS announced their capitulation as an amazing new revelation straight from God.

It looks like they already had tons of rhetoric and in many ways spirit of community/brotherly love to support the polygamy (maybe that’s a main way the pyramid leaders got away with pyramiding within their own communities…).

Maybe the Mormons also still felt very threatened by outsiders for a long long while after the capitulation…giving a strong Us/Them dynamic to reduce internal strife.

Also, they were pioneers! Self-reliance, achievement orientations. I imagine their communities honored independent success (further reducing moral hazard of their safety nets — even beyond just everyone being personally known)…also Heinleinian! (I love the Heinlein’s State U comparison. And, the malt shop evokes Pleasantville.)

Equilibrium.

The tendency of stable equilibria to stay that way…

We’re most interested in how events “shake out,” in how they will equilibrate when there’s real uncertainty.

Yeah, there should be more words for all this!

Great concepts!

Marvin Harris (awhile back) noted relationships between Vitamin A & D and sunlight and dairy for northern peoples like Scandinavians. To achieve the lighter skin and lactase processing ability for adults, neotenous tendencies (blue eyes, blonde hair, light skin, lactate processing) prolonged infant features into adulthood.

Along for the ride possibly came increases in left handedness and cooperative, egalitarian tendencies.

That's the theory, anyway.

Indeed, it’s often been said that “we’ve never had a president whose name ended in a vowel” (except for a silent “e” such as Coolidge, and with the exception of Kennedy)
What about James Monroe?

“It seems likely that within the next 10 years the United States will take the plunge and accept that a substantial portion of the pubic purse will be devoted to the health care of all Americans (Medicaid and Medicare mean that the system is already partly socialized)”
That’s an awfully hairy purse.
(I’m assuming you meant “public.”)

GDP already over 9000

AK responds: Can you please make your comment a bit more substantive.
EDIT: Oh you probably mean the Dow which has broken 9000. That was a poorly worded prediction – damn. Temporary recoveries will happen but I expect it to stay below that figure for most of this period.

Should you risk delays by postponing important meetings that would otherwise be scheduled for the third Monday in January? Or do you go ahead and make crucial decisions with few of your black staff in the room?

I love that this got published!!

Restricting to only the 2002 responses gives a quite different picture; the overall number favouring such a law drops to <10%, and the political party correlation changes substantially. However the regional differences are still very much present, with east south central still >30% and the south atlantic and west south central regions at 14%.
Given the very pronounced trend in this variable over time (from ~38% in the 70’s down to <10% now) it seems misleading to treat the whole dataset as a single unit.

8 posts in one day! Slow down Steve! Spread it out a little…

Indeed, the short generation time of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies) seems to have required a unique method of body axis determination and segmentation (simultaneous specification of segments rather than sequential) that is evolutionarily speaking a rather recent development unique to Dipterans (flies), not present in other arthropods. So even though the discovery of this body axis specification mechanism was a huge discovery for developmental biology, it is in some ways an artifact of having chosen a model organism for its 10-day generation time!

Second Anonymous: Yes, I'm saying that really attractive women tend to have bad personalities. I'm not positing inverse correlation across the board though. Truly ugly women have bad personalities as well because they don't have the confidence to get out and socialize. Most of the great personality women are in the middle — think of any female comedian. Really hot women — and I do mean really hot, not just pretty good looking — are almost always boring and childish because they never had to learn to suppress all that stuff to get others to hang out with them.

There's no correlation with men because looks just aren't that important to where men stand in the social spectrum. For men, it's the really great athletes who tend to have terrible personalities, because they were going to be popular no matter what. Guys who were clearly going to be rich tend toward the same. Of course, there aren't that many men who grow up knowing they'll inherit huge money (or who can really throw money around in school).

Riches can also make a man's personality get worse, particularly when they come early, when personality isn't all that set. I've never met a likable guy who made more than $10 million in his 20s in anything but sales. All of their whims start getting indulged and that is not good for personality.

Well, I voted for it. I’d actually arrived at essentially the same solution after you started posting about the problem, so having you post it was nice. Still, the response here will probably be skewed for you, while outside this website, it will be strongly against you (in the US and Europe, at least; probably not in Africa or Asia, but the most important demographic for this is in the Western world).

I wasn’t implying that China is on the brink of collapse. I was simply pointing out that as it comprises the richest, most technologically advanced and powerful nations (and largest polluters/energy-users), any international attempt at this problem would fail without the West. And despite the people on this website being for it, you’d have a very hard time selling this idea to them. Any movement to implement this theoretical dictatorship would almost certainly be undemocratic.

The reason I could never really like the NYT, even if I shared its political orientation, is its utter lack of humor. Even in this story, which is flat out comedy, many graphs treat it like real news. Perhaps the paper is just taking the joke one step further by treating it seriously — but I doubt it.

Clearly you have not done your research. The question posed is a valid one but the answers are far from straight forward and have puzzled researchers for a long time.

If 40% of the Hawaiian participants don't use suncreen it means 60% DID. This could significantly skew the results so they are lower than they would be for the other 40%.

Nebraska is above 40 degree latitude. Many studies have shown that anything above a 31 degree latitude will result in no vit D production for most of the day during winter and only marginal production in summer.

It gets even more complicated when one considers how vit D production actually takes place. Levels will continue to rise for up to 24 hours after exposure. Sunbathers may think they rank high in production but many will likely go for a swim afterward or take a shower a bit later. Tests have shown that even normal water will wash away significant amounts of vit D from the skin.

As if this is not complicated enough, after about 20-30 minutes of sun exposure it will start to destroy it again until as much is destroyed as is created. You may think you are getting a whole days super dose but in reality you are only increasing your sun exposure and tan with no real benefit. The best exposure is about 20 minutes at a time over a large area every day and to not wash it off directly afterwards. Ironically the best times are at midday, exactly the times we have been told to avoid the sun.

Lifeguards regularly test with levels at 100 ng/ml with no ill effects so there must be some correlation between the sun and high levels. Signs of adverse effects have only been shown to appear at ~150 ng/ml and toxicity only between 200-300 ng/ml. Overdosing is not so easy at standard doses and to date I have yet to see one such verified case.

It is not necessarily true that mega doses are required. Even 2,000 IU/day will eventually get most people to the optimum level. The exception is people with malabsorption issues. There is also a difference between vit D2 and D3. D2 is up to 5 times less effective than the natural D3 our bodies make and is also much more prone to show signs of toxicity even though blood levels may remain normal.

One researcher has put it like this, we take a bunch of people who are apparently "healthy" from a population that's vitamin D deficient and use them to derive at an "optimal" level. It's really a crazy way to do things and no other blood test uses this method.

Many studies have shown that levels above the standard optimum levels correlate with decreased incidence of the serious common cancers, even deadly melanoma skin cancer. The situation is the same with cardiovascular diseases. Mild supplementation have been shown to reduce osteoporosis including falls and fractures.

There are many studies worth looking at as a whole instead of picking one or two that are often shown to be flawed or set up for failure. The health benefits of high levels are real. The question we should now ask is what changes we have made in the last couple of centuries that has caused us to have these low levels.

I clicked through the link, hoping for a better explanation of why the book's author seems to feel so sure that life in England is some sort of zero-sum-game between the classes. I have never seen any evidence that there is a some limited number of good jobs that people must fight for. Instead, most of the evidence I see suggests there are a limited number of productive people, who all earn something roughly akin to what they produce, less money for their employers and the government and the portion of the population that leaches off productive people.

Yes, if you double the number of good engineers in a two year period, the wages for engineers will plummet, but the market adapts in the long run as investors put more money into buying capital for all these new engineers and some of them move to other professions. In the long run, there is no limit to the number of people who can be prosperous. Everyone in Western Society today is incredibly prosperous by the standards of 18th century England. The only cap seems to be the incredible struggle of getting ever larger percentages of the population to adopt bourgeoisie lifestyles. (As for limits in talent, which is obviously a major theme of this blog, they certainly exist, but most of today's most self destructive poor have the mental wherewithal to do just fine, if they had self discipline.

Sherlock Holmes, call your office, we have a mystery here.

Oh wait, he had troubles with his mortgage- the housing crisis strikes again!

I went to UMASS Amherst, then to Duke and Swarthmore. The first is a regular state university, and the other two are top-notch private schools.

My observation was that the biggest difference between UMASS and the others was the level of motivation of the students. All three had good classes, equipment and professors, but whereas at UMASS only a handful of kids in a given class would really be interested, at the private schools, especially Swarthmore, the kids were there to learn.

One result of this was that a good professor, who could really capture the interest of his class, could have a far bigger impact at the lower-tier school. All the kids who would normally be goofing off would prick up their ears and start paying attention. Thus, vastly increased test scores.

On the other hand, at the elite schools, the students are operating at or near their potential all the time (they have to, just to be admitted), and the level of change between their before-course and after-course test scores will be relatively lower.

Google "recursion" and read the question Google asks you.

Nice!

I guess whites and NAM's are about equally interested in "steve sailer," so it doesn't show up in either list!

Meanwhile, consider the Chinese. They set up business operations in foreign countries which actually return something tangible on the investment – copper, oil, minerals. (They may also provide cover for intelligence operatives, I don’t know). What a concept.

I can speak to the situation in Ontario, as someone who graduated from high school in 1995.

Back then, there was a common application for all Ontario universities where you picked 3 faculties at different, or the same, universities. We competed pretty much solely based on high school graduating averages, since we don't have anything like the SAT in Ontario. I think you can pick 5 faculties and schools now.

That was around the time the Maclean's magazine university rankings started, which caused something of a sensation by ranking universities. There's a definite hierarchy of universities, but the gap isn't necessarily that large, and it's perfectly conceivable that someone would go to a lesser ranked university because it's closer to home or they got a scholarship or something like that.

It is more competitive to get into the top programs, which are mostly at the graduate level, but some of which are at the undergrad level (e.g. comp sci or engineering at Waterloo, pharmacy at Toronto, business at Western).

Also note that it is a lot more competitive to get into professional programs such as medicine or law, because all universities are essentially public and the government limits the number of law schools and medical schools. The positive is that we don't have the same kind of glut in lawyers that exists in the USA.

The tuition fees for university are a lot more reasonable than the USA, so most people don't graduate with a debt of more than the low tens of thousands. American tuition fees seem insane to us.

Finally, we call them universities, not colleges. Colleges here are the equivalent of junior colleges in the USA.

One more thing: Canadians really don't care that much about collegiate sports. We have university football teams, but attendance will be in the hundreds, maybe a few thousand in some cases. We don't have full athletic scholarships for the most part, although there is now some wiggle room on that.

hi-lite.org Bookmarking like website that allows you to share with peers. Its pretty sweet, you can hi-lite parts of the page you like and tag it on your account to keep for personal use or to show other people what you found. You help their searches and they help yours!

You have to keep in mind that people taking the GRE with the intended graduate school major of philosophy are a self-selecting group of future professors and/or academics, whereas someone going to graduate school for engineering, business, social work, public administration or accounting is almost certainly going to look for a job outside of academia. Non-philosophy majors therefore probably need a more well-rounded skill set including specialized technical skills, presentation/business skills, or emotional/social intelligence, while philosophy majors can focus their time and attention on reading and writing or doing mathematical logic, which correlates well with the GRE.
As a “right-brained” computer science major who has always performed in the 90 percentile ranges on verbal sections, but only slightly above average on quantitative, I’m a good example of the limitations of the correlative power of verbal/quant and major.

I don't understand this. Where are all the black computer geniuses you see in the movies?

“The interpretation is the thing that matters most, from a medical perspective, and when a doctor provides an interpretation, it is based on years of training and clinical knowledge . . .”

No offense, but this sounds pretty archaic, especially when dealing with the technologically advanced subject at hand. Why rely on MD’s to correctly memorize what is needed for “interpretation” when computers are so good at memorizing, correlating and providing output. Is the answer more memorization by sub-specialists or is it just having access to a good computer program? Human-computer chess matches, for example, showed the best computer systems overtaking human chess champions in the late 1990s and computer power has progressed from there.

I think the reason is more human. He would not have wished to be seen as a violent man. Carrying a gun would undermine his greatest pretense.

LOL, Whiskey is such a dummy. Steve, didn't you used to moderate comments more carefully? or has the quality of your commenters just declined? You raise some typical outside-the-box Sailer points here,with perhaps a few mistakes that an on-point comment thread could clear up. But not with all these idiots spouting disinformation and non-information and their stupid prejudices masked as fact. For starters, a commenter who makes a strong assertion should be required to mention a source or two if not an actual link.

This article http://www.slate.com/id/2293544/ suggests that people are more likely to buy a product with a well-written negative review than one with a poorly written positive review.

This author posts his one-star reviews at his blog http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/04/we_get_reviews.html

The higher profits are from targeted marketing of identical products in different packaging to different market sectors.

Used to be there was just milk. Now there is skim, 1%, 2%, and whole, with barely any price difference for the lost cream in jugs averaging $4 per gallon, and the cream skimmed from the skim and reduced fat milks sold for $4+ per pint. Then there are "convenience" size half-pints of milks sold for around $1.50, while a pint of milk might be sold for $1.60.

Apply that sort of thinking across industries where ever more elaborate targeted marketing of products like shampoos, toothpastes, paints, jeans, beer, etc. is done at a variety of price points using base ingredients that are essentially identical.

Management compensation itself should be thought of as a fee to stockholders for the production of profits on their enterprise. Thus if you take a company's sales revenue minus material/energy input costs, the money that is left over can be divided between labor (wages of all non-officer employees of the company – i.e. everyone who does not serve at the pleasure of the board of directors) and capital (retained profits, dividends, income taxes, interst payments, executive/officer/board of directors compensation).

If labor wages are not growing with productivity of the company so that their share of revenues stays relatively constant, it means that an increasing amount of sales revenue is being paid to capital, especially in the current popular forms of high officer pay, stock buy-backs, and debt interest payments.

Jurors should be paid by the court system for their time at their normal hourly salary rate. Loser pays costs for civil torts.

Then you would see the pace of trials and quality of jurors pick up and the quantity of cases drop.

Has anyone on this page actually clicked on an online ad because of what it says?

I haven't in 16 years of internet use.

I recall speaking with a professor about this topic in the early-to-mid 1990's. He said he had checked back on his grades given out over the past 20 years and didn't discern any noticable pattern of inflation.

If you section off the graph at the points he was looking at – around 1994 to 1972, there is some minor fluctuation, but everything seems pretty stable – 30% A's, 40% B's, 20% C's, 5% D's, 5% F's.

The big change was from about 1964 to 1972, and from 1994 to present when a pre-existing trend from the late-1980's broke out of the fixed range.

Another way of looking at this is to see what GPA is required to get various honors at colleges. When my dad was in school from 62 to 6, he needed a 3.3 gpa to get into various honor societies. By the time I was there 30 years later, you needed a 3.7 gpa to attain the same honor society invitations.

They are guilty of the crime I am guilty of – Breeding While White.

More seriously, when you account for the fact that about 1/6 Americans are sterile thanks to the spread of various social diseases, that at least 10% of women never marry before age 40, and that over 20% of couples who do marry remain purposefully childless or have only one child, its pretty clear that the break-even point for society for anyone having more than one child is around four.

The Canadians could just outlaw birth control and they would probably have 100 million people in 50 years.

PLUS they would be actual Canadians.

There is a lot of nonsense being spouted here about corporations not paying taxes, only people pay taxes, double taxation of dividends, blah, blah, blah.

First, most corporate income is retained by the corporations for the use and abuse of the corporation and its officers, not distributed as dividends. If more dividends were being paid, the stock market would drive prices much higher relative to revenue and earnings to compensate for the yields.

Second, corporations most certainly do bear the burden of taxes, because the market sets the price of goods, and taxes are simply one of many costs of earning a desired return. Example: the FAA authorization expired on Friday, meaning the FedGov is no longer collecting the 10% ticket tax. Guess what happened? The airlines raised ticket prices to retain the tax share of income as their own profit, leaving the total ticket price with tax roughly the same.

US Corporations derive many benefits from being incorporated and operating under the protection of US law and US power and with full access to the US market. Things like subsidized infrastructure, open and relatively cheap courts of law, military muscle, and government contracts all provide a lot of earnings to US companies. That is why foreigners are so eager to invest money in the US. Corporations should pay for these rights and privileges.

What is wrong with what MSFT is able to do is that everyone knows they derive most of their income from sales into the American market, not from burning CD's in Puerto Rico. Whatever MSFT and other corporations do not pay in the taxes needed to run our country must be paid for by other taxpayers who are not able to similarly twist the law to their advantage, or must be borrowed.

Perhaps it would make more sense to tax corporations on their gross receipts rather than profits, just like the IRS taxes individuals on their gross income, not their net after paying living expenses. I.e. you make a sale in the US to a US citizen or entity, you pay a tax. Profit margins are only about 5-10%, so the tax rate needn't be high – maybe 3%.

Hunsdon:

"Deliver us from the fury of the Norsemen"

Most of the Norsemen who attacked and conquered England and France and Sicily and Russia were Danes and Geats – people from Denmark, Schleswig, and southern Sweden.

The Norwegians mostly focused on the essentially uninhabited northern fringe of Scotland and Ireland, the Hebrides, Orkneys, Faroe Islands, Shetlands, Iceland, Svalbard, and Greenland.

In later history, Norwegians turned into the bitches of first the Danes and then the Swedes and did not gain independence until 100 years ago. They were basically the pussies of Scandanavia.

“Dull” is not an euphemism for “stupid.” “Dull” actually means “stupid,” while “boring” is a connotation that the word “dull” picked up over the years, just like the word “dumb” (meaning ‘unable to speak’) picked up the connotation of ‘stupid’ as well.

well, I agree with lots of comments. But one thing is not in favour of china is that it is a communist country, and more often than not whatever reports facts and studies we get is govt oriented. Also , when there is no freedom of expression, people view points r suppressed. China is facing huge corruption and divide between rich and poor is increasing there.
India lacks a political will power because of so much diversity.and Bristish oriented constitution…
China is rising for sure but I am not sure how much people r rising.
In the long run I see, US, China and Russia emerging as super global powers , but whoever will get the support of India , would fill more powerful….

Leonard Cohen is very popular in Poland. I recall seeing huge, side by side billboards in Warsaw, one for an Alicia Keys concert, one for Leonard Cohen. That would never happen here in Canada.

I think it started in the 80s during the Communist era and has just continued:

http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/warsaw85.html

Here's Leonard Cohen with Lech Walesa:

http://1heckofaguy.com/2010/10/11/leonard-cohen-in-poland-visits-with-lech-walesa-backstage-and-grants-video-interview/

Love it!

Everything I read about this case everywhere has everything all backwards.

When the trial comes, Trayvon Martin won't be the defendant, George Zimmerman will. The evidence against him the prosecution will present is Zimmerman patroling his neighborhood armed with a deadly weapon, the 911 calls showing he stalked Martin after being told not to, his gun with his finger prints on it, and a bullet wound that killed Martin from a bullet from Zimmerman's gun, as well as the location of the various events. Plus his inconsistent statements (hard to keep things straight when you aren't being fully truthful). That is plenty to get Manslaughter and probably Murder 2.

For Zimmerman to defend himself, he has to take the stand to explain why he was justified in shooting Martin. No one else is going to do that, and since he killed Martin, Martin certainly won't be testifying about any agressive actions. Most of his testimony as a witness is going to come off as self-serving and will need to be carefully coached due to his conflicting stories and the physical evidence.

This isn't one of those cases where a prosecutor has to work hard to build a case and where there is "reasonable doubt". Its very clear Zimmerman killed Martin. Instead, Zimmerman has to prove his innocence by proving that Martin put him in fear for his life, thus justifying the killing. To do this, he will have to convince people that a grown man such as himself with 70+ lb weight advantage was afraid of some unarmed scrawny beanpole of a kid killing him. I was once a 6'-1" 17 year old who weighed 150 lbs too. I could barely benchpress 70 lbs. at that weight. In other words, Zimmerman has to pass himself off as a pussy who couldn't handle a 17 year old weakling.

Most people commenting on the story seem to assume Martin will be the one being prosecuted, instead of Zimmerman. Once you disabuse yourself of that confusion, his situation becomes much clearer, and it has nothing to do with race.

Legal Scholar:

You seem confused. The prosecution case is simple. There is a dead guy with a bullet in him from Mr. Zimmerman's gun, and Mr. Zimmerman's fingerprints are all over the gun. Oh, and he confessed to shooting him.

The prosecution doesn't need to delve into who picked a fight or who was winning the fight or Mr. Zimmerman's mental state to prove their case that Goerge Zimmerman left his house armed and ended up shooting someone after following them. All that stuff about fighting and fear needs to be brought up by Mr. Zimmerman to defend himself from the simplest conclusion from the physical evidence – that he shot and killed a teenager. And the only way it can be brought up is for Mr. Zimmerman to take the stand in his own defense.

Asking for a dismissal after the prosecution presents its case will undoubtedly be done by Zimmerman's lawyers. I don't see how a judge rules for self-defense when the one person who can testify about the need for that will not yet have taken the stand.

Are you retarded? Can't think of an explanation why one would want to shoot when being beaten viciously, probably to death?

Why in the world would the prosecution want to bring out George Zimmerman's version of events as part of their case? They can let George Zimmerman do that if he feels it needs to be in the record.

This is part of the mental confusion on the web about who is being prosecuted, and who needs to defend themselves in court. Hint, its not Trayvon Martin. Since he is dead, he can't even be brought onto the stand to play the blame the victim game like is done in rape cases.

Legal Scholar

Again, you seem confused. The State does not have to undertake Zimmerman's defense. They don't need to prove he was not defending himself. They need to show he killed someone. He needs to prove that his actions were justified by showing self defense.

When you shoot an unarmed person in a public place, the assumption is not that you were defending yourself. The law, including Stand Your Ground, does not give you benefit of the doubt, it excuses you from retreating if your life is threatened. The shooting must be unavoidable to preserve your life. That is what is so important about the police statements that this entire incident was completely avoidable. All Zimmerman had to do was avoid starting a confrontation. He didn't.

I can see from the irrational support for Zimmerman across the right side of the web that we have another OJ case in the making. In which case, it should be fun cleaning up on betting on the results of the trial again.

All:

You can tell from the comments on this case by various Zimmerman supporters that most of you have (1) never been in a fist fight, (2) never been in a typical Florida gated community or walked the path behind houses trying to find where you should be going, (3) never had your nose broken, (4) never had a confrontation with a strange adult as a teenager, (5) never had a criminal altercation with black teenagers, (6) never faced the barrel of a gun, (7) never been a witness to a crime, (8) never wrestled with someone significantly larger than you.

If you had a little more real world experience relevant to the case, you'd see why Zimmerman's self-serving self-defense story spread by him and his surrogates is not believable and why he is going to trial and will be convicted of manslaughter or worse.

And, no I am not a liberal troll. I do find it funny to see Steve's readers going all out to support a Latino against a black. Personally, I don't have a dog in the hunt.

Anonymous at 8:46

Exactly. Why I don't live in a neighborhood with people like Martin or Zimmerman. I fail to see the importantance of defending Zimmerman to the cause of civilization. In fact the opposite – I prefer a society with fewer cop wannabes like Zimmerman running around packing heat and calling in kids walking on a sidewalk to 911 as suspicious, and also a society with fewer Trayvons. The bright side of this story is that it looks like both these guys managed to remove themselves from society either permanently or for at least some duration in jail.

One other thing. I don't know why or how you reason Zimmerman was "significantly larger" then Martin.

I thought I stated this upfront. When I was 17, I was 6'-1" and 150 lbs. and so as slim as Trayvon and thus about as strong. I don't recall thinking this size made me want to take on adults in a fight. Zimmerman has been variously related to have been around 5'-9" and 185 lbs or more at the time of the shooting. My dad was 5'-9" and 150 lbs and he would have been able to kick the crap out of me at that age. Give an adult his size another 40 lbs of weight to use and there is obviously no comparison in terms of strength to a beanpole kid. I will admit to being confused about Zimmerman's weight. I only found information about it from the night of the shooting yesterday.

Especially consider that just being taller sucks up weight from muscle or belly and legs into torso and leg length – on average 5-6 lbs per inch. This menas that 20 lbs of Trayvon's lesser weight wasn't even useful weight for him in a fight because it was nothing more than his gangly body, not extra muscle.

Its been mentioned Trayvon was an athlete and so would be expected to be relatively strong. I question this assertion based on my having been the same size and also having been an athlete (soccer, baseball, running, biking). When you are tall and thin and have an enormous teenage metabolism, it is difficult to gain weight and muscle even by working out because your body consumes everything you are eating in height growth and metabolism instead of mass building. Its not like he was an NFL or even College Division 1 linebacker – he played high school football like millions of other not that big boys who do not go any further with the game, and it looks like he was not even an active player in the last years of his life – probably because of his weight vs. height making him unable to stand the pounding. I know I couldn't, which is why I didn't play in high school when I was his size. And just being taller than a larger adult does not make you think you can win a fight with a shorter stockier person. It made me think the opposite because I felt thinner and more fragile.

All:

One more thought. Zimmerman's injuries to me seem far more consistent with his having slipped in the grass or on a wet sidewalk while walkng/running after Martin and trying to make a turn instead of from a fight. I've seen people give themselves a fractured nose from tripping on the sidewalk and broke my own by running into a forehead of another player playing mud football. Breaking someone's nose with your fist without damaging your hand is extremely difficult given the hardness of bone and the fragility of the hand. Hollywood movie fights are not reality.

However, if his head really was being repeatedly bashed into the concrete sidewalk as he claimed, he would have far worse injuries than a couple of cuts to the scalp. You would expect massive trauma to the skin of the scalp (especially on a shaven head) and probable fracture of the skull. The two small abrasions are more like what happens when you take a tumble and your skin nicks the ground.

If Zimmerman fell while chasing Martin, and then Martin turned around to confront him while he was prone, it would explain a lot of the eyewitness testimony and evidence a lot more simply. As Martin came over to confront a prone Zimmerman and continued advancing as words were exchanged, an injured Zimmerman probably felt threatend, and got up and shoved Martin away, causing Martin's bluetooth to fall out and end his call with his girlfriend. A tussle would have then ensued because of the chase and physical contact, someone cried out for help for at least a minute during the confrontation and Zimmerman then shot Martin at close range. This would then explain why Martin's body was lying the way it was face down on the ground after having been shot from the front, but why Zimmerman was not drenched in Martin's blood from a chest shot at close range with Martin astride him and beating him while he was prone. If that had happened, you would have expected Martin's body to collapse on Zimmerman and bleed all over him while Zimmerman struggled to get out from underneath his dead weight, leaving a trail of blood from Zimmermans chest at least to his legs.

Zimmerman's claims that Martin was shouting at him things like "You're going to die tonight" while fighting sound totally preposterous, which is why it is porbable Zimmerman's whole story is made up and self-serving. When you are fighting a fist fight, you typically clench your mouth to protect your tongue, teeth and jaw from blows and as a natural tensing mechanism of the whole body to give more strength to each blow you are trying to land. You are not wasting energy threatening the other person with your mouth and leaving opportunities for it to be injured. You do your talking with your fists, feet, and fingernails. If you have any experience in fights, you know to go right for the eyeballs with the fingernails to try to blind the other person and distract them from being able to punch and react. The purpose of fighting is to quickly overwhelm the other person with pain and make them want to stop. Fist fits are not boxing matches, and they don't look like moviefights. Zimmerman's accounts and those of his surrogates sound like a movie fight, not a real fight, probably because itis made up and embellished with each retelling to avoid admitting the truth.

On the person yelling for help.

What is more likely? Someone crying repeatedly for help for over a minute while fighting someone, or someone yelling for help for over a minute because they are being forcibly restrained against their will by a stranger?

If someone was being forcibly restrained, wouldn't it most likely have been Martin, who was trying to run away?

If Zimmerman was being forcibly restrained for over a minute by a smaller teenager why did it take him so long to draw his gun to free himself by superior force?

If Martin was being forcibly restrained for over a minute, isn't it likely he got shot either because he managed to lash out or free himself at least in part while being restrained or was shot simply for having the temerity to struggle against the restraint?

Zimmerman's story is that Martin somehow got him on the ground and was on top of him restraining him, that he cried for help for over a minute while having his head smashed into the sidewalk, and that in the midst of all of this, he finally found his wits and his gun and shot the guy on top of him in such a way that he didn't collapse on him but fell face first into the grass beside him.

Really, what sounds more likely based on this starting with Martin running away and Zimmerman purusing him?

That last line is so perfect.

Also the rest of it but the last line is awesome.

I'm 1/32nd "Seminole", whatever that means. The bigoted side of the family insists it means American Indian Princess, whichiswhat she attempted to pass for in late 1800's Jacksonville. The open minded side of the family claims it means Runaway Slave. The Census records record the woman in question as "black". Actual photographs of her show a tan skinned lady with straight dark hair. If you looked at my grandma, mom, brother and I you'd never know – tall, fair skinned, blonde-red, blue eyes. My aunt on the other hand, medium build, dark tan skin, straight black hair, brown eyes, barely looked white.

When I was living in Lexington, MA in the late 1990's the VP at our all white firm claimed Native American status. Diversity in Contracting, dontcha know. I think he was 1/32nd Mohawk or something. We used to laugh at the stupidity of it all, but it was perfectly legal and valid. There were cases discussed in the press in the 1990's of contractors in Oklahoma and Colorado who were blond and blue eyed claiming American Indian ancestry of 1/16th to 1/64th being permitted to use that ancestry for AA purposes and winning contracts because of it. It may seem ridiculous now, butit was perfectly legal then.

Why not just stop admitting Chinese students?

The Universities could shrink to a more manageable size and refocus resources on Americans,, and with the reduction in grad students, more professors could focus on American undergraduates.

Have any of you been to a Catholic Church recently?

Count the number of families with five or more children. There are five families like that at my 1000 family parish. That is the people NOT using birth control. The rest of the people in the Curch could give a rats ass about a doctrine they hardly follow themselves.

The idea that Obama is going to lose Catholic voters over the birth control mandate is preposterous.

You are literally talking about less than 1% of the Church that actually cares about this issue.

beowulf:

The economy is growing, at best, 2% a year, unless it speeds up to 3% (annualized) this summer– which it won't– Romney is a lock in WI and nationally.

The economy has been stuck at 2% growth since 2000.

I suppose at some point people will wake up and realize this, just like it will eventually be realized that we have not had a rapid employment recovery from a recession since 1983.

Fundemental changes have obviously taken place in how our economy works over the past 20 years due to demographics and energy per capita, and the total financialization of American economic activity.

Beowulf:

GDP growth from 4th quarter 1999 to 4th quarter 2011 was 1.67% per year average. from 4th quarter 1999 to 4th quarter 2007 just before the great recession was 2.42%. From 4th quarter 1999 to 2nd quarter 2008 just before the bank meltdown was 2.26%. From 2nd quarter 2009 to 4th quarter 2011 was 2.45%.

The fact that you need to grasp at straws is because there have only been two years of growth 4th quarter to 4th quarter over 3% since 1999 – 2003 and 2010. By contrast, there were 24 years of growth over 4% in the 41 years from 1959 to 1999, and the average growth rate was 3.53%.

To find a similar stretch of economic weakness, you need to go back to the period 1952 to 1960, when growth averaged just 2.45% for 8 years, and only two years were above 3%.

Chicago's natural dominant business is transportation/logistics.

But no railroads and just United are headquartered there, even though Boeing and GE transportation have recently moved in.

Overweight goes with malnourished.

Looking good & fit goes with great nutrition.

Being overweight is a sign of missing important nutrients. All too ordinary here in mass-production civilization, but we shouldn't see it as normal or okay.

This is not political. I'm one of the a biggest (…not fattest) reactionaries around here.

Engineers are encouraged to take on a Master's program because the 10 extra engineering classes taken during the program can double the number of non-intro level engineering classes you get as an undergraduate. That is because a lot of time as undergraduates is spent taking higher math and science so you can understand the engineering.

CMU required Calculus, Calculus II, Calc in 3D, Differential Equations, Physics, Physics II, Chemistry, Materials Science, Computer Science, Statistics for Engineers. I also took Economics, 3 course of German, English Composition, Philosophy, Accounting, and Technical Writing to fulfill humanities requirements. That was 18 clsses of non-engineering!

This didn't leave much time for actual engineering courses, which have to be taken in sequence to
be intelligible anyway. No point learning Structural Mechanics without Statics and Solid Mechanics, and you can't do Concrete design without Engineering Materials and Structural Mechanics.

Its certainly the same story in Accounting and other STEM type majors.

Funny that on an HBD site, people are not familiar with actual genetic studies of England.

The "Saxons" were already in England in Roman times and are undoubtedly the native stock of non-Celtic Britain. The south of England was called the Saxon Coast, and the military leader of the area was the Count of the Saxon Shore. This area was said by Caesar to have been inhabited by Belgae who were the same people as lived the low countries. This is the most reasonable explanation for the distribution of Celtic languages only in the west – they speak Celtic there because that is where the Celts always were, as opposed to some of the fantasies held by Celtic nationalists. The Frisians (who speak the only language directly related to English) and German Saxons lived in what is now the low countries immediately across the Channel and are now called Dutch and Flemings and along the North Sea in the area behind the Frisians. The Dutch and Flemings were Germans until after the rebellion against Spain and the 30 Years War whenthey gained a new nationality. The low countries were the source of many German settlers in the East due to their constant overpopulation – Mecklenburg, Pommerania, Transylvania Saxons, Baltic Germans, etc. The north fringe of Germany along those areas and the North Sea was also Saxon and Frisan even as it is today, but not the deep interior, and certainly not the land now called Saxony in East Germany.

The Angles, Jutes, and Norse were mainly from Denmark/Schleswig, with some from southern Norway – especially those who went to Scotland, Orkneys, Isle of Man, and Ireland, as well as to Normandy and Brittainy. The Germans who came to Britain after Roman times were most certainly a minority of the population at all times and places as is decisively shown by modern genetics. There was not then and never has been a decisive total replacement of any population in any place until modern times with modern weaponry of mass slaughter, and Stalinistic logisitics of total evacuation and exile of populations which would be impossible without modern technology. That the English are who they are today is not from replacement popultion of fantasy invaders, but because England was settled in sub-Ice Age times by the same people who settled Norway and Denmark in the northeast, Belgae/Saxons in the south, and Celts from Iberia in the western littoral, just as observed by Roman and Greek era historians of the populations already existing in Britain in their day.

Interesting topic.

My maternal grandfather was a direct line descendant of Tancred, one of Rollo the Magnificent's retainers during the invasion of Normandy. Our family took up residence and Tancarville on the Seine, the better to extract booty … err … taxes from the traffic heading to Le Havre.

When William decided it was a good day to conquer England, my ancestor Urse d'Abitot went along and received glory on the battlefield, resulting in His being granted the rule of the county of Worcestershire as sheriff. Urse then went about converting as much of the property in that county and the neighborng ones as he could grasp. In the ensuing centuries, the vast fortune thus acquired was gradually dissipated, so that by the 1200's we only had two measly shires to our name, and eventually a time came in the 1600's when one of the younger sons decided now was a great time to set out of Long Island rather than move to London like previous generatiins younger brother's did. Still, this was quite a better position to be in to start life in America than an evicted sheepherder from Scotland or a destitute mechanic from Yorkshire.

Our family eventually settled in upstate NY to live out a number of uneventful generations of being upper middle class gentleman farmers with a side life of being businessmen or lawyers. The family has always been Episcopalian/Anglican since the time of Elizabeth. We have avoided subdividing the estate in upstate NY by disinheriting younger sons as per English tradition. We are well away of the phoniness of the WASP elite in NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia and their very humble origins in England. My uncle recently had a genetic test done, and it confirmed a I haplotype Y chromosome, which is typically a Scandanavian marker, and fits with the known facts of the family origin ultimately from the Danish islands off Jutland between the North Sea and Baltic Sea.

One commenter asked about the name Spencer. Spencer comes from Robert Despenser, William the Conqueror's Treasurer, but as he left no heirs,the actual Spencer family comes from far more humble origins of a family of sheepherders who were aristocratic upstarts.

Others have commented on red hair. Red hair is most prevalent in Scotland, not Ireland, and is extremely common in Edinburgh. It is common enough throughout England as well, with a greater frequency found in the border counties. Blonde hair is most prevelant around the Baltic Sea on all coasts and trails off the further one goes. The Germans outside of the Baltic and North sea littorals are mostly brown haired, generally lighter colored than the French, but certainly darker than the English. Its easy enough to posit that blondes originated around the Baltic, and redheads around the North and Irish seas. It surprises me as a redhead that we have never been posited as our own seperate race, as we certainly have enough genetic characteristics to look quite different from others – red hair, freckles, pale skin, different pain sensitivities. Its certainly as distinctive looking to most run of the mill whites as being black is.

The Nationl Debt is money. People who want less debt by identity want less money. When they also say they want the same level of standard of living, this means they also want deflation. Deflation favors creditors and burdens debtors. In a capitalist economy built on debt finanace, this is a recipe for disaster. Its why the 1800's was not really a time of price stability, but a time of relentless deflation punctuated by inflationary periods of war and massive precious metal finds, with the times of war being the times of prosperity, and the deflation being periods of depression like the Long Depression of 1872 and the panics of 1835, 1857, 1893, etc.

Wealth increases by the government providing the money needed for investment and employment. In the 1800's we attempted to do this by free coinge of any precious metal brought to the Treasury. The results of this are obvious enough to any student of economic history, and were harmful enough to be set aside during the Civil War and other periods. In the modern economy, money is created by deficit spending by the government. When the government runs a surplus, it takes money away from the private sector, forcing it either into private debt or bankruptcy from more taxes being demanded from the economy than are returned as spending. The last three bouts of "surplus spending" resulted in the Great Depression, the economic malaise of the 1953-1960 period that began the economic disloction of the rust belt, and the financial wrecks of 2000-2008. When the debt was paid off in 1835, it resulted in an almost immediate panic and depression. One can track back other periods of surplus with similar economic results. Its amazing people can still getaway with proposing these economics as beneficial to anyone besides creditors.

it should always keep in mind that National Debt can be exchanged for money at any time and in any quantity without causing inflation because the debt is already a form of money. The formal legal means of this presently in the US is for the Fed to purchase debt securities with keystroke entries.

I noticed stray dogs everywhere while traveling in Chile. Sometimes they follow people around, but I was told that they rarely bite. Once I lay down on the beach and suddenly noticed a huge black dog looming over me, just waiting.

Actually there was an article yesterday about Canadians getting cranky at the Olympics. The women's soccer team in particular let loose after being cheated by a shoddy female referee against the USA:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/faster-higher-angrier-canadian-athletes-speak-out-at-london-2012/article4470725/

The other point is that Canada got some heat at the Vancouver Winter Olympics over the aggressive "Own the Podium" campaign. The Canadian government put a lot of money into ensuring a good performance on home turf, and a lot of it was in goofy events like skeleton and short track speed skating. In that Olympics more than half our medals were gold, so presumably we weren't good sports then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Winter_Olympics_medal_table

The simple fact is that the Summer Olympics are a lower priority for Canada. It makes more sense for a country like Canada or Norway to invest its money in the Winter Olympics, as opposed to Summer Olympics which are much more competitive.

In university I attended a talk by Mordecai Richler, who told the story of what happened when a gentile applied to join a Jewish country club in Montreal. They were having a meeting to discuss the application when a man in the audience shouted, "If you let one in, they'll all want to join!"

Agreed. It looks like the government is out to get this Coptic fellow, but they already have him by the you-know-whats because he's on parole.

I can think of two methods the American government could use against criticism of Islam: 1) Prosecute these individuals for provoking violence on the "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" theory. 2) Encourage the relatives of the victims of this violence to sue the filmmakers or even Youtube.

Number 2) actually seems pretty likely to me.

Of course we're already here in Canada: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Human_Rights_Commission_free_speech_controversy

What a hilarious lack of introspection in the previous 163 comments!

Senator Rand Paul pinpointed the reason the Republicans are currently doomed to lose. Although they are the "white" party, they fail to be competitive in the New England states (32 electoral votes), Pennsylvania and Michigan (36 electoral votes), Wisconsiin and Minnesota (20 electoral votes), and Washington and Oregon (19 electoral votes), even though these states are all over 75% white. They haven't won these states since 1988, and nothing they are doing presently is going to change that fact. In general, 5% of northern blacks, 15% of non-white hispanics (many of whom are Dominican and Puert Rican), and 35% of Asians in these states vote Republican, which is enough to amount to about 3% in the vote. That they are losing these states, and many by significant margns, means that just 50% of whites in these states are regularly voting Republican. These are hardly all government workers and welfare recipients voting this way.

The Republican Party needs to face the fact that the Southern Strategy is dead, because continuing to pursue it despite having lost the north no longer can produce a majority. The Southern Strategy worked great from 1968 to 1988, producing a conservative landslide in 5 of 6 elections (counting Wallace and Nixon together in 1968). Sometime around 1991, the strategy stopped working, and a critical mass of around 10%-20% of northern whites departed from the modern Republican party, never to return. Since that time, Republicans have lost 4 of 5 elections (winning in 2000 only by technicality), and are about to lose a 5th, all the while watching states like Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, and North Carolina bleed away, soon to be joined by Montana and Arizona and maybe also Indiana and Texas.

A coalition of southern whites, the Great Plains states, and Mormonland (Utah and Idaho) is a worthless ticket to permanent minority status.

The Republicans don't need to appeal to the same 10%-20% of northern whites they lost in 1992. They just need to find a message and candidates that appeals to any given additional slice of the northern white population in that size. It shouldn't be hard – winning at least 5/8 of whites should be the standard result of running Just Another White Guy as a Republican, and should produce a large victory. Republicans don't need to look to win blacks and Mexicans either.

If you look at election results in detail at the precinct level, its clear what white populations don't vote Republican by 5 to 3 margins – apartment dwellers, young singles especially women, the Irish, Jews, union workers, divorced women, and people in university towns.

Traditional Republican policies currently cast aside which would appeal to these constituencies – radically reduced non-white immigration, high wages for workers, protectionism/industrialization at home, environmental conservation, fair dealing in racial issues towards minorities while supporting private segregation in housing (and thus schools), peace and isolationism.

Current Republican policies which do not help – low wage policies, opposition to legal abortion which helps keep down minority birth rates, worrying about gays destroying the universe when 40% of southern whites are divorced and many remarried and innumerable republican politicans keep turning out to be secret gays, opposition to infrastructure spending, warmongering, opposition to basic environmental protections, tax cuts for the rich, free trade with slave labor countries like China, obvious race baiting.

The problem of missing white voters is not too hard to figure out.  Look at which large states have a lot less votes than in 2008 that are primarily white.  This points to about 500,000 fewer whites voting in each of the following states – New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Illinois, 250,000 fewer whites in Missouri and Indiana.  That is 3 million.  A number of smaller states seem to have about 100,000 fewer votes each, like Maryland and Oklahoma, which may account for another 1 million.  The rest of the missing voters are probably in California, which looks like it will be a few million votes short of its 2008 turnout when it is done tallying votes.  The only state the missing voters could have made any difference in was Pennsylvania.  The voters are probably missing because these states were not contested, and also because of effects from Hurrican Sandy in the northeast.

The whole problem is overblown and is not why Romney lost.

The exit polls provide a snapshot of state's ideological divides.  Romney only won states where the Conservative vs. Liberal population share in ideology was 18% or more, because Romney lost the moderate middle.  The following states have between 4 and 18% more conservatives than liberals, and a share of liberals that is 21 to 27% vs. a share of conservatives of 31 to 37% while moderates are 38 to 45%.  In order from most conservative to least they are Iowa, New Mexico, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Colorda, Virginia, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Pennsylvania.  To win, you just need conservatives and between 33% and 48% of moderates.

The moderate middle he could have won, but did not, can be defined as middle class casually or non-religious whites, plus a marginal amount of white Catholics and midwestern mainline Protestants (mainly Luthern and Methodist) and as a grouping, predominantly white, and skewed female.  Many of them are trade union workers, public school teachers, and local government workers.  Romney's vote share among religious whites was 55% and up to about 65% minimum for most protestants.  Among the non-religious, it was 20-30%.  Non-religious whites were 10% of voters, so the drop from 65% to 25% is 4% of the electorate, and Catholics in these areas were around 20% of the electorate and he got 55% of them vs. 65% of Protestants.  That is another 3% given up.  These voters were enough to move every swing state, and thus the election, to Romney.  Their economic concerns were unemployment, high prices, and health care.  It should be patently obvious why a man belonging to a bizzare religious cult who had made his living as a financial plutocrat and running on platform of more tax cuts for the wealthy and reducing the scale of government employment was not going to get their vote.

Steve:

I am glad you posted this, and the conversation provoked is interesting and confirms what you are saying. Hopefully people will sit back and listen to what you are saying.

Republicans and the Republican base have been anti-numbers for a long time. I can still recall the screachy defensiveness when it was pointed out that Bush lost the popular vote in 2000. It manifested itself this year in the Unskewed Polls BS. Post election we are hearing the usual anti-numeric shrill cries of "voter fraud" (its not fraud for blacks to vote Democrat – its what they do), and "lost white votes" (the boards of election are still counting votes and have not yet canvassed the total so people are crying about unofficial tallies which will grow).

At the end of the day, its clear the smart-guy corporate CEO got out hustled and out strategized and out organized by the black community organizer. Perhaps this has to do with financiers aversion to building organizations and their proclivity to financially exploit them instead.

During the campaign you could see it in the improbable strategy Romney chose to pursue, where he accepted Obama laying out the battleground upon which the election would be fought instead of from the start challenging Obama in vulnerable Democratic states with a conservative ideological lean and largely white electorates (Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Minnesota, Michigan, Oregon, and Washington). Romney always had to pretty much run the table in the states he contested, and never had a better than 12% chance of victory, since he only had around 60 paths to victory out of 512 possible combinations of outcomes in the battlegrounds.

Continuing the alienation of Asians, who are rapidly intermarrying with whites, as mentioned by one commenter was a big mistake. They are 3% of the electorate in Florida, Colorado, Oregon, and Virginia, 5% in Nevada, and 6% in Washington. In the states where they are 3% of the electorate, losing them 75-25 instead of winning 60-40 is a 2% swing in the outcome of an election decided by 3%. Romney also lost the non-religious white vote by 70-30. As they made up 10-15% of swing state electorates, this was a very heavy blow.

A lot of this was probably not avoidable by running a candidate like Romney. Although Romney is highly articulate and intelligent, he scores very low on sympathy and likability, and this is compounded by his being an active member of the Mormon cult. Being a northeastern moderate from Massachusetts doesn't get any style points either among the electorate that needed to be swung (asians, SW Mexicans, white Catholics ion the midwest, non-religious whites in the north and west), and probably accounts for Obama winning around 20% of voters self-identifying as conservatives.

The type of candidate Republicans need to run to win is probably someone like Governor John Engler or Terry Branstad – a white, quietly religious Catholic or Lutheran from a marginal northern swing state (Michigan for Engler, but a similar figure from Wisconsin, Iowa, or Minnesota would also work) who won't scare or embarass non-religious whites.

Its amusing to watch people discover realities the party has known on the ground for years.

Apartment dwellers vote Democrat? No kidding, the Republican party has been drawing apartments out of Republican legislative and congressional districts for the past two decades.

We need relatively more white children? Why do you suppose the Republican party supported the child tax credit, something only of particular benefit to realtively well off people with income against which it can be credited? Why do you suppose the party has never seriously tried to overturn abortion nationwide, which would bring about a catastrophic increase in the black and hispanic birthrates?

You make this so complicated when it isn't.

States have a partisan lean from their ideological lean. These leans are stable unless something transformative happens in the electorate.

As it so happens, the American electorate has been very stable since 1996. The only changes were West Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri became solidly Republican while Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia became slightly Democratic.

The targets here have the following Democratic leans:
PA&IA +1
MN&WI +2
MI +3

A few other states have similar Democratic leans:
NH&CO +1
NV + 2
NM +3

VA is even with no partisan lean
OH is Republican +1
FL is Republican +2
NC is Republican +3

Three other states lean slightly Democrat:
OR +4
WA&ME +5

Romney lost not because of anything about Hispanics or Asians or single women, but because he was not popular and failed nationwide to win the middle of the electorate.

The ideological breakdown of the exit polls explain these states. Romney won states where the conservative part of the electorate exceeds the liberal part by 18% or more. In swing states, the conservative lean is as follows:

IA +16
NM, OH & FL +13
WI & NV +11
CO & VA +7
NH, MN, PA, and WA +4

OR has a 1% liberal lean and ME has a 2% liberal lean, but these states are relatively competitive because the Democratic party has only 36% and 32% of the electorate.

Who the middle of the electorate is in these states is no mystery – whites who are mainline Protestant, irregular church-going Catholic, and non-religious, young single white men, male union members, divorced white women with kids, lower middle class whites, urban whites. Some smaller groups also pop up here and there – Arab Christians, married non-Muslim Asians, and married Hispanics self-identifying as white (especially native Hispanos in New Mexico but also white immigrants from Mexico, Brazil, Venezeula, Columbia, etc.).

When you look at the red-blue maps at a precinct level, its the people who live in the light blue neighborhoods in large cities, inner suburbs, and small towns. If you can make those places a light reddish-pink, the Republicans will win. That is what Bush did in 2000 and 2004, and its what Republicans did in 2010 too.

The other option is to find a specific subset electorate in these states and push it permanently Republican as in Appalachia and the Ozarks in 2000 by so that the states tip. The Republicans have been at this in Western and Northeastern PA and rural MN, especially in the Iron Range. This requires lots of local legwork and money, and usually only succeeds after the utter failure of the previous regime. In Pittsburgh, Richard Mellon Scaife is a guiding force behind the electoral movement to move the area Republican.

The key to 2016 or 2020 is finding a candidate who can appeal to people in these states in this middle group. That person is not an elitist snob from MA, not a Cuban from Florida, or a good ole boy like Mike Huckabee. Nor anyone who has lost an election, like Rick Santorum. The ideal person would come from the most difficult of the states to win and is thus proven in the fire – Michigan. I.e., someone like John Engler or Rick Snyder. A weaker alternative might be Terry Branstad or Tim Pawlenty or John Kasich. This route is the direct appeal to the midwest, and does not attempt to reverse the bleeding out west.

The alternative path is a western Americanized Mexican Governor – like Brian Sandoval or Susanna Martinez..

If the Republicans wanted to win Asian-American votes, how about banning both affirmative-action and legacy admissions? For Asians, hitting them over college admissions is hitting them where it hurts.

Banning legacy admissions would help solve two problems for the Republicans: the "let's not appear racist" problem, and the too many Bushes problem.

I wholeheartedly agree with rasing the minimum wage and the authors intentions, but honestly, I think the chances that the House would pass a minimum wage (even a dollar increase, let alone $3 to $5) are about as likely as the House agreeing to another stimulus. When the stars align and minimum wage reform is possible, we should set a floor (like the hourly equivalent of twice the poverty level).

Wow, where to begin? I'll give some of my background to color my comments. I grew up partly in an upper middle class Jewish urban neighborhood – Mt. Airy, Philadelphia and part of the time in the midwest. I was a National Merit Scholar Finalist based on PSAT scores (a 1450 in 1990, which I followed up with a 1390 [690M/700V] SAT in 1992 with no test prep or study, and later a 750/740/710 GMAT in 1996). I attended Carnegie Mellon in engineering, and I still volunteer with the Admissions office to interview prospective students and participate in college admissions fairs, so I interact with a variety of guideance counselors and students.

First of all, the Jewish admissions preference is far more widespread than "just" the Ivies, even if it is most noticable there. However, at every top 25 private college, top 50 private university, and the top 25 public universities, Jews are generally 10-15% of the student body both by statistics shown at Hillel, and what you see "on the ground" at the schools. This means slots not just at the Ivies, Stanford, Northwestern, Duke, and MIT but also elite liberal arts colleges like the the Seven Sisters and Swarthmore, and all over flyover country, at places like UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Tulane, and Case-Western are excessively occupied by Jews at the expense of flyover country/Christian whites.

This is a far larger issue than just Jews dominating Harvard. That is also why dismissing it as a professional vs. STEM bias in career paths between Asians and Jews is incorrect. Aside from Harvard, which uniquely ignores STEM among the elite schools and focuses on feeding Wall St., Law, Medicine, Media, Religion, CEO/CFO's and the Senior Executive Service mainly because it can, the other Ivies have well known and well regarded science and engineering programs that compete with the likes of MIT, Cal Tech, and CMU to feed the elite managerial ranks in consulting engineering, research science, computer/software industry, and industrial management. There is no question, for example, that a Princeton, Yale, Cornell, or Penn engineering degree has incredible cachet in the industry just from its name, and places the degree holder on a level plane with a tech school or Stanford/Northwestern engineering graduate. So to say Asians are more STEM focused and thus excluded by that from the Ivies is wrong.

Asian underepresentation may be less real than shown statistically because the category comprises many disperate peoples. When people discuss high intelligence Asians, it usually refers to Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians, and generally exlcudes the 40% of Asian Americans who tend to the lower itelligence side of the population – Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thais, Hmong and Filippinos. Once you account for the realities of the SE Asian groups, the high intelligent end of East/South Asian groups are probably NOT underrepresented at elite universities.

To continue…

White underrepresentation is concentrated among elite disfavored white populations – urban Catholic ethnics like Italians, Poles, Ukranians, "Bohunks" and Irish, and back-country Scots-Irish/"American" ethnics from the Appalachian/Ozark/Southwest areas. True WASP's (Episcopalian/ Presbyterian/ Congregationalist English/Scots and French Huguenot ancestry) are not underrepresented given that they are less than 5% of the population. What I will call the "American Modal Haplotype" – the mid-atlantic/midwest/northwest Anglo-German-Scandanavian population is only underrepresented to the extent that it chooses to not overly focus on Ivies given its access to elite public universities like the Big 10/Big 12/Pac West and the lack of desire of many of these people to move back east to Ivy-land. The Ivies should be judged more harshly on access provided to elite disfavored groups back east between Maine and North Carolina, given how much of the white population of the Northeast, Mid Atlantic, and Mid South they form. Its easy to count Italian and Polish surnames at the Ivies and see that they are notably reduced vs. the local population.

Regarding identification of intelligent students in flyover country, let me give examples from my college admissions work. Guidance Counselors at every school may not be aware of exactly how to get their best students into the Ivies, and the students even less so, but they are obviously aware of which are the elite 100 colleges and universities, and they know who their smart students are. They steer highly intelligent students to those of us involved in elite school admissions outreach at college fairs and through the interview process. These two forms of outreach aided by the school counselors provide a good enough ability to find plenty of intelligent students for consideration. Overall, some part of the elite university/college system just needs to get in touch with the top 10-50 students at most high schools. With 100 top elite universities/colleges by definition, this is a relatively simple task for each school. It only needs to consider an average of two close to top of class students from 25% of American high schools to have an admissions pool of 10,000 very competitive students. Because of regional preferences in schooling, these samples will not match the US population closely.

And lastly ….

PSAT scores should be thought of as a reliable indication of elite intelligence status, and not dismissed with the thought that Jews are not focusing on dominating them.

Most SAT/ACT test takers will take the PSAT simply because it is a prep test for the one that counts, and it offers the opportunity for scholarships.

Additionally, the PSAT is generally taken prior to heavy involvement in biasing test prep study, the score does correlate with the range the student can expect to score on the SAT, and it is a widely taken test with a huge sample size among the upper half of the bell curve.

I would expect and suspect Ron Unz does also that the PSAT scores mostly represent natural ability and talent, as opposed to an SAT score which might be the third or fourth test try by a student, and which is subject to bias from test prep and gaming and cheating. Just because the results are not favorable to Jews does not make it untrue.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-phu-quoc-nguyen/asian-american-students_b_2173993.html I hope everyone can participate in gaining admittance and everyone can improve the system legally. Real repair is needed.

To be fair to Bush, in many cases he happened to come along at a time when various things were already happening and were going to happen anyway regardless of who was in power – kind of like Obama coming in in the midst of the recession. In many cases he backed policies intended to ameliorate what was happening. For example, with the hollowing out of American manufacturing, Bush countered with tarriffs and dumping cases that successfully saved the American steel industry from Chinese lead liquidation and transfer to Asia, His tax cuts, while undoubtedly slanted to the rich, were very pro-natalist and provided normal families a break of thousands of dollars just for being married or having a few kids, It was hard for them not to slant to the rich given where income distributions had gone during the 1980's and 1990's. NCLB allowed the creation of charter schools which give an out from NAM's for urban white parents from failing school districts and an alternative to the shrinking Catholic schools system whch have been in terminal collapse since around 1993 due to the second wave of urban demographic transformation (the first were the changes wrought by black rioting and from busing in 1966-1974).

As to illegal immigration, the real shock of this occurred in the mid to late 1990's, not under Bush. I still recall in the summer of 2000, visiting my family's small Indiana town of Bremen and finding it suddenly overrun by Mexicans when just 5 years earlier it was 100% white. When I asked what had happened, I was told the local owner of the major factory in town had died, and that his sons, who had moved away, had inherited it, fired most of the American workers, and brought in Mexicans to replace them just because they could make more money. Bush had nothing to do with that, and that is the story of illegal immigration all over the country in a nutshell. When Californians complain about Mexicans, it must be understood that there haven't been white people picking fruit and veggies since the 1930's. What happened in California politically and demographically in the early 1990's wasn't so much from illegal immigration as from white outflow caused by the collapse of the aero-space industry and the crisis in the computer chip industry (remember that?) and the ripple effect of that throughout the California economy. The recession of 1990-1992 was primarily a California recession, and the end result was an ongoing outflow of white Californians to other western states with more economic promise. These people were replaced as voters and residents not by a swarm of Mexicans, who in the main don't vote (and who in the main were accomodated by new construction in the inland empire, high desert, and central valley), but by a swarm of homosexuals and "creative" types who now completely dominate LA and San Francisco which provide the Democrats their atatewide margins. Look at San Francisco election returns as an example.

1976
Carter – 134K, Ford – 104K

1988
Dukakis – 202K, Bush – 73K

2000
Gore – 242K, Nader – 25K, Bush – 51K

2012
Obama – 302K, Romney – 47K

You won't fool me into thinking a transformation like that is because of Mexicans (who don't vote and don't live in San Francisco) or because of Bush in the 2000's (when the tranformation was complete by 1996).

To the commenter noting causes stretching back to 1959, it should also be noted that the dramatic economic collapse in 1957-1958, which permanently destroyed a huge number of businesses in New England and what became the rust belt, was eye-opening to many people regarding what their future would be. And the introduction in 1957 of something called the oral contraceptive pill.

So what their future was not going to be was living in a tight knit ethnic neighborhood up north, the husband working at the local mill, and having between 4-9 kids with a stay-at-home mom. It wasn't going to be that because suddenly many of those mills were gone and the girls were on the pill.

But who was protesting?

Look at my now flaming liberal (by voting) parents. But at the time … born in late December 1945, my father paid his way through college driving a forklift in a North Carolina factory and then went to Northwestern on grad scholarship where he met my born in 1949 mother, who was paying her way through by digging at Cahokia in the summers. Up to around 1967, my father was a Goldwaterite (and a pacifist comming from a Mennonite/Brethren background), and my mother was a docile and demure WASP from Miami. They met because my father rescued my mother from the attentions of the campus Episcopal Priest during a mixer, where he was plying her with drinks. In 1968, he was politically radicalized, most probably by what he saw in the new on the streets outside the Democratic convention and from the news out of Vietnam. My mother took on whatever political opinions he had, but in her heart and to this day has remained the perfect mixture of her parents: an unreconstructed southern racist and a liberal Rockefeller Republican. They were married in 1971 (when my mom was 22), and quickly settled down to a conventional and uneventful life having children and owning houses but also voting for the most radical liberal Democrats and occasional liberal Republican.

My point in recounting this is that this same sort of story, with minor changes in details, is the story of probably 99% of young people of the Baby Boom/Post-War generation. They weren't hippies, didn't experiment with drugs and orgies, didn't fight for Civil Rights, and weren't draft dodgers (other than simply going to college). They were not the radicals or the leaders of the radicals or the mob of protestors.

If you look at the birthdates of the actual leaders of the counterculture and various radical groups (think people like Abbie Hoffman, Bob Dylan, and Bill Ayers), they are actually members of the Silent Generation, generally born between 1936 and 1945 with the occasional older guide like David Dellinger. Their influences are not 1968 and Woodstock, but the Beat Generation and the early Civil Rights movement pre-Vietnam and pre-1964 Civil Rights Act. When a Baby Boomer is involved, they are on the very leading edge of the generation – think people like Bill and Hillary.

When looking to pin the blame on rebelling Baby Boomers, we should instead look at the Silent Generation as the guilty party. The people in power who conceded every point to the radicals and fostered their movement were not old men, but people like Yale President Kingman Brewster, then 49 and in the prime of his life, and who had himself been a student protestor in the late 1930's/early 1940's in the cause of staying out of WWII, and who was of the same generation as the real culture makers like Hugh Hefner and John Kennedy.

Until we reframe things to look at the correct people, we will be mislead in the diagnosis.

Republican House candidates aggregated statewide won the popular vote in Florida, Virginia, Ohio, and Colorado, and just narrowly lost Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Iowa.

This means the mushy moderate 5-7% middle of the electorate voted Obama for President – Democrat for Senate – Democrat for Statewide Row Offices – Republican for House – Republican for State Senate, Republican for State House.

The moderate middle is, as seen by election returns by precinct, a 2-4 percent subset of the suburban middle class whites, and 10-20% of suburban lower middle class ("working class" ) whites, along with 1-3% of urban blacks, whites, and Hispanics. Working against this is the 5% racist vote among urban whites against Obama.

Instead of agonizing over Hispanics, Republicans should be asking themselves how their House candidates outpolled Mitt Romney when Congress has a 11% approval rating.

Working against this is the 5% racist vote among urban whites against Obama.

???

Could you expound? Thanks.

About 5% of urban lower class white voters are inveterate racists. While they voted uniformly for all manner of liberal Democrats in every race, when it came to Obama, suddenly they voted against him. This is the opposite of the behavior of most other urban and suburban whites, who favored Obama, but then voted in higher numbers for various downticket Republicans.

The phenomena is uniquely found in some mostly white neighborhoods of some major cities. The only other place you see it is in the remaining appalachia/dixiecrat counties in West Virginia, Arkansas, etc.

Anon @3:56

"As much as it pains me to say this, it seems clear that this country was founded on false pretenses–the idea that the British Parliament had no right to tax their own colonies when clearly they did."

The revolution was not a rejection of the power of taxation, but concerned the rights of English Citizens to political representation in their own government instead of being treated as political chattel, a fundemental truth among the Teutons since the days of the Althing held in clearings in the woods. "No taxation without representation."

The initial proposition of the Colonists was either independent self-government under the King or representation in Parliament. When both were rejected, Independence was all that was left for any Englishman with a modicum of self-respect.

This is a fantastic article. Thank you Mr. Unz, you have given me much to think about.

PhD student here. I wish I knew MORE math(mainly stats). And I wish I knew more scripting!!

But Giovanni Peri said that an influx of low-skill immigrants with their "complementary skills" will lead to promotions for high school dropouts!

Good article, but you should have mentioned that apparently Tamerlan lazed about while his wife worked lengthy shifts to support him. How did he get an American girl to do that?

On the question of Tiananmen Square, I found this article last night, written a year after the massacre in The Nation. The writer seems credible, claims to be one of the last western journalists to leave the Square the night the army cleared it of students. He says that it is dangerous to claim that students were killed, because it allows the Chinese regime to cover up killings they did outside of the Square with the truth that they did not kill students.

http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dclarke/public/Munro_Who_Died_in_Beijing_and_Why.pdf

There was actually a mini-scandal in Canada when author Yann Martel called it the "greatest hotel on earth". You only have to stay on Canadian soil for 3 years out of 5 to get citizenship, and people literally count the days.

Part of the fun of being a hotel is you have a bunch of Canadian citizens living in Lebanon who pay no tax yet demanded free tickets out when it was being bombed by Israel. Also great that people can work in Hong Kong or Shanghai and then come back to Canada for the free health care when they're old and decrepit.

Old Gasbag at it again.

Jayman:

The issue of Germans is far more complicated than what you are looking at. First of all, Germans have long lived far beyond the borders of today’s Germany proper. Some ethnic/dialectical groups today who were German and were indistinguishable from other Germans in the middle ages pretend not to be today. Much of todays understanding of ethnic groups and nation states goes back only to the time of Napoleon, while Germany itself only became strictly defined in the time between Bismarck and Hitler.

When looking at who is German, or “Deutsch” when such people started coming to America in the 1600’s, this group would have included all of the Germanic people of Germany (including Silesia and Pommerania), Austria, Tyrol, Switzerland, Alsace, Lorraine, Luxembourg, Flanders, Holland, Prussia, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, and Transylvania.

In general, this larger group of Germans can be divided into a handful of large tribal groups dating back to before the time of Rome:
1) Franks (Germans living along the Rhine and Meuse Rivers – Holland, Flanders, Luxembourg, Rhineland, Franconia, Palatinate, Lorraine, and also eastward through Thurningia and Silesia and into Posen and Ukraine).
2) Allemanians (Germans living in Alsace, Baden, Switzerland, Vorarlberg)
3) Bavarians (Germans living in Bavaria, Bohemia, Tyrol, Moravia, Austria)
4) Swabians (Germans from Swabia [Wurrtemburg/Northern Bavaria], who also later settled the Danube Valley in Hungary and Serbia)
5) Frisians (Germans living on the North Sea Coast)
6) Saxons (Germans living behind the Franks along the Ems and Elbe River behind the North Sea and also in Holstein, Mecklenburg, and Pommerania and also down the Carpathians in Transylvania, who also later settled in Russia)
7) Prussians (Baltic Prussians mixed with Saxons and Germanized)

The densest part of Germany has always been the Rhine Valley and upper Danube Valley – i.e the Romanized parts of Germany from Holland and Flanders down through Swabia and into southern Bavaria. This part of Germany was continually producing a surplus of population compared to arable land who tended first to move east into the slavic countries of eastern Europe, and later after the discovery of America emigrated in very large numbers to the US, Canada, and Brazil. They were also the Germans who settled the lands in the lower Danube Valley, southern Ukraine, and Volga Russia Plain devasted by Turks and Tartar slave raiders.

The German pietists who emigrated from the Palatinate who settled in Pennsylvania were Allemanians from Switzerland and Alsace who had been driven from their homelands for their pacificsm and religious non-conformity and moved up the Rhine the in search of tolerance. This liberal group is the base German population of Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. To this group were added Lutheran dissidents driven out of Catholic Austria and Bavaria int he 1700’s.

Later German settlers tended to settle in climate/geographic belts reminiscent of their homelands. Middle and Southern Germans (Franks/Swabians/Bavarians) tended to settle the eastern midlands out to Iowa. Northern Germans (Saxons, northern Franks) tended to settle in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota along with their Scandanavian kissing kin. Eastern Germans, including large numbers of dissilusioned Russian German settlers from Russia and Ukraine settle on the great plains along with Poles and Czechs. You can in part tell the general origin of settlers by the names they gave to places they settled in America. A town named Bremen in Indiana (and a major city in northern Germany) is unlikely to have been settled by Bavarians. A neighborhood named “Over the Rhine” in Cincinatti is unlikely to have been settled by Saxons.

Germany in general is divided between a conservative and Catholic South and West and a liberal, individualistic, and Protestant North and interior. The different temperment of Germans from different regions along with the special temperments of small pioneer groups like the German Pietists or the Russian Germans account for quite a bit of the political variance in American German groups. It should not be surprising the the descendants of liberal dissident Germans in Pennsylvania vote more liberal, while conservative pioneers who had previously colonized Russia and later moved to South Dakota would remain conservative.

Due to the fact virtually all scholarships or grants involve candidates to publish a minimum of one essay or dissertation, it's very significant that this essay or dissertation you create talks to the grant judges. Besides should you meet up with his or her certain requirements, however, you must make sure you will find absolutely no transliteration or even grammatical blunders.survey data analysis

Nothing in the Quran supports what these hypocrites do and what they do is evil.

I spent two weeks in Russia a couple of years ago and thought Russians were noticeably soft-spoken. Actually, Poles find Russian pronunciation very soft-sounding compared to Polish.

For what it's worth, my background is 100% Polish and a female music teacher recently told me she was surprised I'm a tenor, considering that I'm 6 foot 3.