…would have gone back to TV or radio, or waitressing or slaughtering moose….

Yada, yada, yada….

Camille Paglia has a different take on the subject:

“One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is ‘dumb.’ Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can’t see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism–the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.”

That, from an Obama supporter … if not a “truth”-er who (literally, and laughably) puts the big G in “Governmental.”

But that’s how they taught you to do it at Affirmative Action University, eh, “truth”?

Oh, this ain’t gonna make Too Small Cajones … I mean Too Tall Jones … happy at all. A “Black/NAM Friday” indeed. Ah well, “the ‘truth’ will out.”

Obama will be President.

God SAVE America.

Fixed that for you, KO.

Don’t like, like anyone esle,,,no?

BTW, first a new photo, now an updated wikipedia entry. Are you looking for a new job or just trying to boost your profile?

* manuscript of new book finished in time for election … check

* ten hours of sleep after pulling all-nighters to finish said mss, on the cusp of fiftieth birthday … check

* author photos updated for PR materials … check

* Wikipedia entry updated … aw, let someone else do it

Honestly, Steve, I’ve never seen anyone move the heaven and earth that’s required in finishing a book against a hard deadline, and be so quiet about it. Do you think Steven Pinker doesn’t advertise his forthcoming publications to the people who care the most about them? Damned right he does! And so should you!

…whatever large sum the DNC paid so Barack Obama could have marble-looking Greek columns for his convention acceptance speech?

Yes, that princely sum would be 5.3 million. Palin will be donating her clothes to charity after the election. Obama’s Greek temple, not so much.

Was he supposed to supply his own marble columns?

Well, what would that other legendary “community organizer” (Jesus) do? If JC could supply his own loaves and fishes for a community lunch, why can’t Obama manifest a column or two, out of ill-gotten “petty cash” if need be….

@”truth”: This is why you continually focus on the intellect of a candidate’s WIFE, while blatantly disregarding what would appear to be the the most meagerly endowed (in terms of brainpower) ticket in the history of modern American politics…and on a website that claims to believe that IQ is destiny.

Well, here’s something for you to chew on, Gomer:

Sarah Palin’s a Brainiac

She’s smarter than you could ever hope to be. Seriously.

Stuff white people like #368: Blatant hypocricy! [sic]

Another thing white people (and probably Thomas Sowell and Ward Connerly, too) like: Spelling words correctly.

As always with you, “truth,” it’s “affirmative in action.”

Here’s a helpful hint: If you view these pages in Firefox, the red line under a word in the comment box before you submit means you’ve just made another innovative, Ebonic contribution to the English language. That other great wordsmith, William Shakespeare, salutes you!

As for myself, I’m not a Muslim but it[‘]s earning my respect more and more.

Before you step too much farther into that steaming pile, you should check out Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch, and his Blogging the Qur’an.

If you’re up for being scared out of your wits (so soon after Halloween, itself a verboten celebration) about what that religion is doing to Europe–and what they’d love to do to North America–I would direct you to the Gates of Vienna blog.

Or, if you only have time to read one short blog entry, please read this: Give a Muslim an Inch.

Of all the religious fairy tales in the world that deserve no “respect” at all, those involving the violently anti-Semitic, pedophilic adventures of Mo, and the contemporary cartoon-riots and fatwas spawned by his insane teachings, top the list.

An interesting thing about Watson is that he claims that his IQ is only 125 (as written in Avoid Boring People), which is of course smart but relatively low for a scientist…

True, but Richard Feynman‘s IQ was only 123. Didn’t stop him from crunching a few numbers, equations and diagrams himself. Eminently.

So we need new cars, washing machines, toasters, computers etc. even though the old stuff is mostly still intact and we could end up using it for decades.

Yeah, I know that the only reason I’m not still using my old 386SX from ninety-whatnot is ’cause of conspicuous consumption….

And the new toaster really impresses the babes….

Kruschev sensed the JFK weakness and pulled crap he never would’ve attempted against Eisenhower.

Ironically, exactly that comparison came up yesterday on LGF, regarding Iran’s response to Obama’s recent “show of weakness,” i.e., his attempted outreach to them.

I don’t think Ada Lovelace has much in common with modern programmers…

Indeed she does not … but then, she wasn’t really much of a programmer, anyway. From
Repurposing Ada:

“All of the programs cited in her notes,” [Allan Bromley] writes, “had been prepared by Babbage from three to seven years earlier”….

“She didn’t write any programs,” says Martin Campbell-Kelly, Aspray’s co-author…. Campbell-Kelly honors Ada as a pioneer, if not a programmer as the term is understood today….

“She happened to write the first ever documentation on what it meant to be computer programmer.”

So, she wasn’t a programmer at all; she was at best a technical writer. Huge difference.

(Funny how an attempted slap at un-spongeworthy dorks/geeks/nerds turns into an exposé of the feminist rewriting of history, isn’t it?)

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment 1 1/16 is born.

Not only that, but more recently:

“We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe/That’s a good estimate with well-defined error bars/Scientists say it’s true, but acknowledge that it may be refined/And with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you.” (Katie Melua)

I don’t think that Steve or any of the vDare folks really care whether educated immigrants come to the US.

Norm Matloff (who has contributed to vDare) has a detailed piece on the effects of immigration (even of educated, H-1B Asians and East Indians) on the I.T. industry in North America:

Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage.

I just started a two-month I.T. contract for a Canadian provincial government. Of the two dozen people they hired (via a multiple-choice test, no interview), around five are whites/Jews who were born here. The rest are imported Russians, Chinese, and a few Arabs.

No blacks made the (purely meritocratic) cut. No women, either.

Gates seems to have the worst of both worlds in his company: slightly lower IQ than competitors at Apple, Sun, IBM, Oracle, and of course the Linux/Open Source guys (mostly in Europe).

For anyone who’s interested in the (proxy-for-IQ) test which Microsoft gives to potential new employees, you can see examples here.

While it’s only a sample size of one, I’ve worked with a world-class cracker (i.e., malicious hacker) who wrote at least one of the drivers for the Red Hat distribution of Linux (and was part of a group that hacked EverQuest). He was smart, but hardly stratospherically so–i.e., when he’d get stuck on a programming problem he’d come to me, not vice versa.

…or Sun, or other technology companies focused on putting out technically superior products through enabling small teams of really smart guys to do things….

Like creating The Java Problem, you mean? Heh.

I take issue with Steve’s characterization of Gates as wanting smart people around. Mostly, that has not been the case at Microsoft.

“The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.”–Joel Spolsky, project manager for MS Excel, 1991-94

“The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10X or 100X or even 1000X but by 10,000X.”–Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft

Those are not the attitudes of a company and corporate culture that believes in hiring less than “really smart guys.”

During it’s [sic] initial growth period, up to say 1997 or so, Microsoft relied on a constantly rising stock price to hire on the cheap, lots of smart but not the smartest technical guys, who worked in a huge team on a very small piece of a giant project. Microsoft was based on the model of mobilizing vast teams of programmers on the cheap, through stock options, as the main deferred compensation, to beat the other model which was small teams of the smartest guys, well paid.

And Gates’ approach has produced 12,000 millionaires. Not a bad deal for those who were hired “on the cheap,” eh?

And as far as the notion of “huge” teams of programmers goes, Steve McConnell has this to say, in his Rapid Development (p. 207):

“Word for Windows [first released in 1989], aka ‘WinWord,’ spent 5 years in development, consumed 660 man-months [i.e., 55 man-years] of developer effort, and produced a system of 249,000 lines of code.”

Fifty-five man-years worked over five real years means an average team of eleven people (including the project manager). Is that what you mean by “huge”? (Forty-five percent of software projects are done by teams of eleven or more people; only 15% of programmers work in teams of ten or fewer people. Source: McConnell, Code Complete, p. 651.)

And by the way, how huge do you think the team of developers working on Linux (8000+ man-years since 1991; 30 million lines of code) might be? Hint: 8000/18 = ~450, and multiply that by, say, 2 or 3, to account for the fact that nearly all of the people involved with that project have only worked part-time on it … for far less than stock options … while undermining the jobs and wages in their own industry on top of all that. (Linux alone is the equivalent of a billion-dollar project.) “Smart,” indeed.

When you’re working on projects of that size–even Win NT had 11 million lines of code–you’re inherently working “in a huge team on a very small piece of a giant project.” That has nothing to do with your creative reading of Microsoft’s corporate philosophy.

Essentially, Microsoft is a bunch of near feudal little ethnic nepotistic kingdoms, Indians only or Chinese only and the White engineers on the outs…

For my own part, I get approached every couple of months by a “preferred recruiter” for Microsoft, for software-development positions there (esp. in data warehousing). It’s obvious from my real name that I’m white as the Canadian snow … just as it’s obvious from the company’s and recruiter’s personal names that they’re ethnically East Indian.

So if they’re really trying to remove all traces of whitey from Microsoft, they’ve got an interesting way of going about it, eh? (I realize full-well that Gates has been a primary agitator for letting more H-1Bs into the USA, on the false pretense of there being a “skills shortage” in the I.T. industry. That, again, is a different issue.)

Still, “good try and all that,” ’99.

We were also told that black kids were the most self-confident.

Indeed; but on what basis are they so confident? From Bernard Ortiz De Montellano’s Multiculturalism, Cult Archaeology, and Pseudoscience:

“Stevenson, Chen, and Uttal … compared black, Hispanic, and white children in Chicago and found that the self-evaluation of African American children exceeded their actual achievement scores. Stevenson’s group felt that this was due to blacks not getting, or not incorporating, reliable and accurate feedback on their performance. ‘Teachers praise the children for modestly good performance instead of pushing them to do better’…. Stevenson points out that praising work that is substandard, often on the pretext of protecting the self-esteem of the child, does not do the child any favor, because one of the most important sources of children’s self-esteem is realizing that they have mastered a challenging task….”

So, Mexico doesn’t make the top 15 source countries for new Canadian immigrants?

No, but it’s probably in Canadians’ top 15 tourism destinations … over the winter, at least.

No, the reason is that everyone *is* racist. That includes Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Comes from evolutionary roots. Revealed in those implicit association tests. Extends to any outgroup, such as Protestant/Catholic or Christian/Jew.

Yes, that’s exactly right. This is skeptic Michael Shermer:

“Consciously and publicly, Michael Richards is probably not a racist. [Plus, Richards explicitly claimed, in his televised apology, that he was actually “trying to be funny” in his infamous tirade against blacks.] Unconsciously and privately, however, he is. So am I. So are you….”

“We are by nature sorters. Evolutionists theorize that we evolved in small bands of hunter-gatherers where there was a selection for within-group amity and between-group enmity. With our fellow in-group members, we are cooperative and altruistic. Unfortunately, the down side to this pro-social bonding is that we are also quite tribal and xenophobic to out-group members.”

“This natural tendency to sort people into Within-Group/Good and Between-Group/Bad is shaped by culture….”

Likewise, from Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained (p. 290):

“Sidanius and Pratto marshal an impressive amount of evidence to suggest that there is more to dominance [hierarchies] than stereotyping, and that the latter is a consequence rather than a cause. In fact, they demonstrate that many dominant group behaviors not only represent a desire to stay with one’s group, to favor one’s clan, but also to favor one’s group in an insidious way that maintains the other group’s lower status. Racial stereotypes are among the representations that people create to interpret their own intuition that members of other groups represent a real danger and threaten their own coalitional advantages. Obviously, one possible reason for this blindness to coalitional structures is that they often conflict with our moral standards. This may well explain why many people prefer to consider racism a consequence of sadly misguided concepts rather than a consequence of highly efficient economic [i.e., implicit/evolutionary cost-benefit analysis of group membership] strategies.”

The classic study demonstrating that in-groups inherently devalue and view with suspicion their corresponding out-groups was, of course, Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment. The very readable text of that study is available online, here: Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation. From that excellent book:

“Our findings indicate that the limiting condition determining friendly or hostile attitudes between groups is the nature of functional relations between them, as defined by analysis of their goals. When the groups competed for goals which could be attained by only one group, to the dismay and disappointment of the other, hostile deeds and unflattering labels developed in relation to one another. In time, derogatory stereotypes and negative attitudes toward the out-group were crystallized…. Sociometric indices pointed to the overwhelming preponderance of friendship choices for in-group members. Experimental assessment of intergroup attitudes showed unmistakable attribution of derogatory stereotypes to the villainous out-group and of favorable qualities to the in-group. Laboratory-type judgments of performance showed the tendency to overestimate the performance attributed to fellow group members and to minimize the performance of members of the out-group.”

Racism is just in-groups and out-groups based on skin color, rather than on age, fashion, “Eagles” vs. “Rattlers” (in Sherif’s study), or any of a million other potential ways of grouping people. It’s also the most obvious-even-from-a-distance way of drawing those boundaries.

(David Berreby’s Us and Them is also very good for insight on this topic, though written from a Pinker-trashing “cultural” perspective rather than a genetics/evolution-oriented one.)

And what do multiculturalism and its proponents do, if not demand that we focus on “celebrating” each of those splintered in-groups–each of them inherently conflicted with their out-groups–rather than on finding common ground in our shared nationality, etc.? Even in that demand alone, it inherently creates conflict rather than unity, which no mere “goodwill contact” will resolve:

“Most of these contact situations involved activities which were satisfying in themselves, such as eating good food in the same room, attending a movie together, or engaging in an exciting activity like shooting fireworks. But none of them created a state of interdependence between the groups. Such contact situations did not prove effective in reducing friction. Instead contact situations not conducive to interdependence were used by our groups for overt acts of hostility and further exchanges of unflattering invectives.”

“The ineffectiveness of contacts during which hostile groups engaged, while in close physical contiguity, in activities which were themselves satisfying to each individual has obvious implications for psychological theorizing.”

The “contact/integration hypothesis,” debunked fifty years ago.

One of the other flip sides of all that is that the people who most identify with their own race or sex are necessarily also the ones who draw the sharpest boundaries between the “good”/superior in-groups to which they fortunately belong, vs. the “bad”/inferior out-groups. And that, of course, is precisely why black activists (for whom skin color is everything) are consistently the worst racists in the world, and dyed-in-the-wool feminists the worst and most unapologetically discriminatory sexists. It’s also a big part of the reason why such people find it so easy to blame all of their problems (even blatantly self-inflicted ones) on the Evil out-group to which they fortunately do not belong. Observe:

“In an early morning swim … the Eagles had discovered their flag in the water, burned the previous evening by the Rattlers. Upon making this discovery, they denounced the Rattlers as “dirty bums,” and accused them of having put ice in the water (because it appeared to one of them as colder than usual), and of throwing rocks in their creek (because one of them stubbed his toes a number of times during the swim).”

Regarding the Implicit Association Test, note this:

“About 80% of white Americans show a preference for whites. What that means in terms of the test is that it is easier for them to pair words like ‘love,’ ‘peace’ and ‘joy’ with white faces and words like ‘terrible,’ ‘evil’ and ‘failure’ with black faces than it is for them to do the opposite. The test times you, so it knows….”

“And so whites who have helped blacks their whole lives, whites who no one thinks of as racist, can still show a strong unthinking preference for whites. In their everyday thoughts they may not be racist, but deep down in their subconscious, below the level of thought, they still see white as good and black as bad.”

“Not surprising for anyone who grows up in America. As it turns out, even 42% of black Americans have a preference for whites! They too, in the back of their minds, tend to see white as good and black as bad!”

Given that, the idea that such tests measure “racism” is a bit of a stretch. More reasonably:

“The IAT … has been interpreted as assessing familiarity, perceptual salience asymmetries, or mere cultural knowledge regardless of personal endorsement of that knowledge. A more recent critique argued that there is a lack of empirical research justifying the diagnostic statements that are given to the lay public. Proponents of the IAT have responded to these charges, but the debate continues. According to The New York Times, ‘there isn’t even that much consistency in the same person’s scores if the test is taken again.’”

Plus, the hypothesis on which the tests are based is probably not falsifiable:

“[T]he whole point of IAT is that it can detect preferences subjects themselves are not aware of. So how do you know how accurate your test is? By definition the subjects can’t tell you if your test’s results are right or wrong, you have no actual data to check against.”

Very “Freudian” and junk-sciency, that.

Regardless, one of the interesting points made about how to counteract biases (subconscious and otherwise) is this:

“According to Banaji, a brief talk about working for women suffices to reduce gender bias. City University of New York psychologist Curtis Hardin showed that having black experimenters administer a test produced lower bias scores among white subjects.”

“In one of the few attempts to measure bias change and brain activity, Princeton University psychologist Susan Fiske simultaneously presented test subjects with pictures of black people and vegetables. When asked what the person in the picture liked to eat, activity in the amygdala–a brain region that modulates fear–subsided.”

“Amygdala activation goes away as soon as you start to think of people as individuals,” said Fiske.

That, of course, is exactly what Sherif would have told you: Thinking of people as individuals is precisely what breaks down the in-group/out-group barriers, and the associated negative stereotypes held toward the members of the out-group.

Establishment pols often like to cite this [voter ignorance and apathy] “problem”. But it’s a problem which has been created by themselves. The[y] dumbed down the voters deliberately in order to peddle any kind of shit past the citizen. Now they complain the voter is ignorant.

No, it’s more than that. From The Fourth R:

“Only one-third of adults can reason formally. That means that two-thirds of the citizens in a democracy cannot understand the more complex issues facing them both in life and in elections.”

The problem is not so much a contemporary ignorance which didn’t exist in some imagined past Golden Age of Politics. It’s rather that two out of every three adults in the civilized world lack the cognitive development to understand the issues they’re voting on, even in principle. That’s ignorance for sure, but it’s not a product of any deliberate “dumbing down” from above, and it’s also not a number that could have been higher in the past.

There exist a number of teachers who strongly desire to teach in the very school system that produced them.

“Welcome back, to the same old place that you laughed about….”

“Ooh, Mr. Kot-ter! Mr. Kot-ter!”

I think the word you were looking for was dipshits not Nimrods.

No, “nimrods” will work fine. From urbandictionary.com:

“Dictionary.com attests definition 2 [“A slow-witted person”] to have derived from a Looney Toons episode, wherein Bugs Bunny mocks his adversary, the hunter Elmer Fudd, calling him a “poor little Nimrod.” Warner Brothers’ Looney Toons cartoons were not written for children, but for literate adults, and often contained literary references children would not understand. Younger generations, mostly illiterate, and having little or no Bible knowledge not gleaned from their moronic parents and half-wit talk radio hosts, probably misunderstood the comment as being a general insult describing the slow-witted Fudd.”

Also Turkheimer finds:

“found a massive dependence of the broad-sense heritability on IQ on status, running from nearly zero at low status to about 0.8 at high status.”

Steve actually did address that particular study back in July of 2006:

“Turkheimer’s paper isn’t terribly persuasive because it seems disingenuous. It’s particularly frustrating to read because, as far as I can tell, it refuses to tell us what were the average IQs of the children tested, or most of the other most interesting basic facts about the data.”

“A few years ago I emailed Turkheimer asking him to reveal these numbers, but he never responded. Later, I got an email from a friend of Turkheimer’s chiding me for criticizing his paper. When I explained that I needed to know these basic facts about the study, he agreed, and offered to ask Turkheimer for the numbers, but then I never heard anything more.”

“This is important because psychometrician John Ray has put forward a plausible-sounding alternative suggestion:”

“Full publication of the study has not been done as yet but from what we know so far it seems that what they found was in fact much simpler than that. They found that if you separated out low income respondents (mostly black) and studied them alone, the role of heredity was less important in explaining IQ differences. That does sound like a real finding but it is in fact what statisticians would call a ‘restriction of range effect.’ In other words, if you take ANY group and select out a subset that is relatively homogeneous with regard to some variable, differences in that variable will tend to have less importance in explaining other differences. Since socioeconomic status and race are substantially correlated with heritable IQ, that is precisely what these researchers have done: Selected a group that is relatively homogeneous in genetic inheritance for IQ and then said: ‘Hey! Differences in genetic inheritance are not so important here!’ Statisticians would call the finding an ‘artifact’–i.e. something created by the research procedure rather than a genuine finding about the world.”

Further to Ivy’s admittedly off-topic post, this is the sort of thing which casts doubt on Richard Lynn’s scientific integrity, and thus on his widely quoted IQ-by-country numbers:

Sex and IQ.

van halen, perhaps the most creative guitar player ever, had a dutch father.

To the extent to which that credit for creativity is based on Eddie’s famed use of the “tapping” technique in his playing:

“[Steve] Hackett has often claimed Van Halen told him he learned the technique after attending a Genesis concert in the early 1970s.”

“One of the first rock guitarists to record using the tapping technique was Steve Hackett from Genesis. Two examples of Hackett’s complex tapping can be heard on the song ‘Dancing with the Moonlit Knight,’ from 1973, and ‘The Return of the Giant Hogweed,’ from 1971. Harvey Mandel, well-known for his psychedelic guitar playing, also employed 2-handed fretboard tapping in the 1960s. Mandel was one of the first rock guitarists to utilize this technique, years before Eddie Van Halen and Stanley Jordan first appeared.”

“Tapping was also used by Ace Frehley as early as 1975, for his live solo at the end of the song ‘She’ during Kiss’s performance on the Midnight Special. The technique would remain a part of Frehley’s solos from 1977 through the Kiss reunion during ‘Shock Me.’ Various other guitarists such as Frank Zappa, Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top, Brian May from Queen, Duane Allman from the The Allman Brothers Band and Leslie West from Mountain were using the tapping technique in the early 1970s as well. Ace Frehley and Frank Zappa used a guitar pick for their style of tapping.”

“Eddie Van Halen helped popularise the tapping technique for the modern audience and influenced many guitarists in his wake.”

Regarding Joseph Needham and the invention of gunpowder:

“There was once a great deal of confusion and controversy surrounding the invention of firearms, but it is now generally accepted that firearms originated in China. Although there is no solid evidence for firearms in Europe before the 1300s, archeologists have discovered a gun in Manchuria dating from the 1200s, and an historian has identified a sculpture in Sichuan dating fro the 1100s that appears to represent a figure with a firearm. Since all the other evidence also points to Chinese origins, it is safe to conclude that this was in fact the case.”

“The earliest known formula for gunpowder can be found in a Chinese work dating probably from the 800s. The Chinese wasted little time in applying it to warfare, and they produced a variety of gunpowder weapons, including flamethrowers, rockets, bombs, and mines, before inventing firearms. ‘Firearms’ (or ‘guns’) for purposes of this book means gunpowder weapons that use the explosive force of the gunpowder to propel a projectile from a tube: cannons, muskets, and pistols are typical examples.”

Similarly:

“A book dating from around A.D. 850 called ‘Classified Essentials of the Mysterious Tao of the True Origin of Things’ debunks thirty-five elixirs. Of one it warns, ‘Some have heated together sulfur, realgar and saltpeter [i.e., potassium nitrate] with honey; smoke and flames result, so that their hands and faces have been burnt, and even the whole house where they were working burned down.’”

He was sitting all alone changing planes for the 100th time in Chicago. He looked as depressed as he made me feel.

And you didn’t go over and say hi?

The near-mythological Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot used to take the bus and subway to his local gym in Toronto (after environmentalist David Suzuki made him feel guilty about driving). He once mentioned in an interview that “Nobody bothered me (on the TTC [subway]) but sometimes I got so lonely I wished they would.”

There are major stars who are also really nice people; Lightfoot’s one of them–several musician friends of mine have bumped into him at the hospital where they work, and had extended chats with him–and I’d guess that Emo is another. (I saw him twice in Winnipeg years ago–he actually remembered me and my sister the second time around.)

“I was in the bar the other day, hopping from stool to stool, hoping to get lucky … but there wasn’t gum under any of them.”

If there weren’t a handy pool of hispanics in Florida and California to lend to, they sure as hell would have found some other group.

And yet, on the same day, the US News and World Report has other ideas, with regard to East Bridgewater Savings in Boston:

“the FDIC has turned up the heat on Petrucelli’s bank, giving it an apparently rare ‘needs to improve rating,’ for not making more risky loans under the Community Reinvestment Act”….

“How many East Bridgewaters are out there that knuckled under to the pressure and started handing out mortgages to whomever?”

Darn those predatory lenders, eh?

You may be right about blues (who cares? liberals do) but those other forms are forms that sprang up among mixed-race people in cosmopolitan towns.

Regarding rap/hip-hop in particular, the first song with rapped vocals was recorded in 1973 by Mickey Hart, drummer for the Grateful Dead, and a lifelong devotee of world rhythms.

It proves, rather definitively (download), that just as white men can’t jump, they (we) can’t rap either.

Andy Fyfe:

“It wasn’t until record companies found a way of selling hip hop to a white audience … that the phenomenon took off. When producer Rick Rubin found a way of keeping both the original power of the drumming and its swing, he made the Beastie Boys famous. In 1986 the opening track of their album Licensed to Ill, "Rhymin' & Stealin'," did just that, beginning with the unmistakable opening drums [recorded in a stairwell] from [Zeppelin’s] ‘When the Levee Breaks.’ The song, and the album, turned hip hop on its head, finally opening up the genre to a massive white audience and creating the bedrock for all subsequent acts that followed in the Beastie Boys’ footsteps. The simple fact is that without [Zeppelin drummer John] Bonham and ‘When the Levee Breaks,’ there would be no hip hop as we know it. Since then Bonham’s drum track has become one of the two most sampled in history, along with ‘Funky Drummer’ by James Brown.”

“Asked in Q magazine what Led Zeppelin thought of the beat being so widely used, Plant was philosophical: ‘We were flabbergasted and impressed when people started using ‘When the Levee Breaks.’ When Jimmy and I talked about it, we figured nothing was sacred, as we’d been nicking old blues stuff since the beginning of time. It got a bit preposterous when Michael Jackson did ‘Bad’–which is the riff to ‘Heartbreaker’ [from Led Zeppelin II] with one note changed and as far as we’re concerned is a nick.”

Eminem? A mere latecomer, compared with the hippies, whites and Jews who have defined the genre at each of its critical points.

From Looking for elves in Iceland:

“Belief in the unseen runs so high in Iceland that the Public Roads Administration sometimes delays or reroutes road construction to avoid what locals believe are elf habitations or cursed spots.”

So be thankful, Steve, that elves and leprechauns aren’t (yet) protected species in California. ‘Cause if that infrastructure project near your house happened to hit one of their homes … those sewer and water lines might end up being rerouted right through your front yard.

Who else besides Steve is worth reading and has comments?

The classical liberal Protein Wisdom site is also very good, esp. Jeff G’s postings. (There’s also a couple of Catholics [Darleen, Dan] posting regularly there, who get predictably mixed up on stem-cell/embryo issues and the like, and who aren’t in Jeff’s league anyway, even on topics where their religion doesn’t irrevocably skew their worldview.)

Jeff and Steve actually had a bit of a dialog going, a number of years ago:

How the right hijacked the magic words…?

The Race Race

Race Race, Redux

BTW, speaking of Catholics, stem cells and embryos, if you haven’t seen Carl Sagan’s thoughts on the abortion issue, they’re very worth checking out:

Abortion: Is it Possible to be both “Pro-life” and “Pro-Choice”?

For worthwhile blogs with comments, there’s also:

David Thompson: Culture, Ideas and Comic Books

Butterflies & Wheels (left-leaning classical liberal, whose overt Palin-hatred has probably receded into the background since November)

As for the Mensa requirment, the poster mistates the 95th percentile as a score of 167. It is actually 166. From the data above, however, I think an LSAT of 166 may actually equate to an IQ greater than 130.

Uh, Mensa cutoff is 98th percentile. Or is the above just poorly stated?

Regarding the effects of diet: Famous vegetarian rockers include Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Don “American Pie” McLean, Tom Scholz–the 4.8 GPA M.I.T. Engineering graduate, mastermind guitarist/songwriter behind the group Boston–“guitar god” Jeff Beck, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo.

Whenever you’re tempted to impugn the virility of vegetarians–and I know that many of the “real men” posting here aren’t shy about doing that sort of thing–think about the above list.

Most skip-rope and smoke dopers from the ’70’s look like Tom Petty.

Another vegetarian.

heavy metal and country are rather masculine

Sample size of one, but Ozzy Osbourne is vegetarian.

…a fat sweaty guy hyperventilating on stage can be a real buzz kill…

Oh, that reminds me: Meat Loaf is a vegetarian too.

Do you have any idea how much the whole long-haired musical profession skews not merely toward the political left but also toward the low-fat diets which are a natural outcome of a respect for animals and the environment (you know, “goofy stuff like PETA”).

Rock musicians, however, had to deal with all sorts of image issues, not just the hedonistic lifestyle that was mandatory, but appealing to women (must be thin) and heavy, heavy drug use of drugs that keep you thin (cocaine, heroin) by suppressing the appetite rather than fat by encouraging it (Marijuana).

Now that’s funny–a classic “T99” observation.

Have you ever hung out with rock musicians at all, ’99? Even in your Roissy-esque wet dreams??!

Yeah, no “last dance with mary jane” going on there at all. LOL! (Full disclosure: The last time I personally “partook” was precisely while jamming with a half dozen electric guitarists in their rehearsal space.)

Skinny guys don’t like sports so much because even if they are athletically gifted they tend to get knocked around a lot, and that’s really humiliating in high school.

There are plenty of non-contact sports out there, from baseball to badminton and tennis. If you don’t like the contact in hockey, play goalie (that’s what scrawny-little-me did in junior-high; MVP of the team, too.)

Also, the Juno ceremonies (Canadian equivalent of the Grammys) were just held over this past weekend. Every year, prior to the award-giving evening, a team of NHL old-timers plays a “Juno Cup” hockey game against a team of Canadian music stars, captained by Jim Cuddy (Blue Rodeo). Other players: Barenaked Ladies drummer Tyler Stewart, Great Big Sea frontman Alan Doyle, country singer Aaron Pritchett, and country singer George Canyon.

“John Dinsmore, who plays bass for [Kathleen ‘Hockey Skates‘] Edwards and will suit up in the game on Friday, [said:]”

“‘Probably all of us played hockey before we played music, certainly I did,’ he said. “Then when you realized you weren’t going to make the NHL, and (music) was a better way to meet girls, then it’s just with you.”

You don’t learn to skate and play hockey as an adult if you weren’t doing it as a kid. And unless you were in net, you were getting hit.

Obviously there are no musicians among those determining whether or not musical ability can be determined by body type.

Precisely. Yet “experts” on it all, nonetheless.

Maybe skinny bodies mean skinny fingers, which means easier more precise picking and fretting. Kind of hard to get big meaty sausages placed just so…and with speed a-finger, no less.

You need to check out Wendell Ferguson‘s “sausage fingers.”

Seven-time Canadian Country Music Assocation guitarist of the year, and a virtuoso in any style you want to name, from Atkins to Clapton.

Jerry Garcia was missing a finger on his picking hand, from a childhood wood-chopping accident. Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi lost the tips of two of his fretting-hand fingers in an industrial accident.

So sure, thinner fingers make it easier; but you can do it at a world-class level even without all your fingers, if you just have the drive to succeed, and are willing to put in the thousands of hours of practice per year (i.e., 6+ per day) that it takes to get good at the art.

You can do it like Eddie Van Halen, sitting on the edge of your bed with a six-pack from 7 pm to 3 am while your brother was out getting laid; or you can do it like Zakk Wylde, practicing all night and then sleeping through your classes in the daytime. But there’s no other way to get to a professional level than to put in those extreme hours of practice … for from three to ten years.

Nickelback doesn’t count as metal.

No shit! Good Lord, are there people anywhere who imagine that they do count?!

In the words of Paul Simon (like Mama Cass Elliot, a 160 IQ): “The music suffers, baby/The music business thrives.”

[Iron John:] Rock music is a great channel for all the bitter, malnourished hatred of the skinny guys…. Notice how the skinnies feel obliged to make comments against fatties, verging on moral preaching.

“Methinks the fatty doth protest too much.”

The solution is to pay American workers a good wage for physical work.

Work, that is, which could and should be done more efficiently by machines.

And when any high-school dropout can make “a good wage” for doing gruntwork, what incentive is there to complete a Ph.D. with mountains of debt, hmm?

Absolutely brilliant idea there, “Steely John.”

Neeners, are you familiar with Gloria Steinem’s “refutation” of sociobiology, from a decade and a half ago? If not, you can find it
here and here, with commentary.

What you are doing in your attempted critique of HBD–or at least your intro understanding of its ideas–is embarrassingly similar to Steinem’s comparably limping work.

There are women who bring real insight to these comment threads–Victoria, for one, is absolutely fantastic. But as Steinem demonstrated years ago, these are not topics which anyone can bumble into after spending a few afternoons glancing at them (particularly with a worldview hobbled by feminist ideology), and have anything to say that’s worth hearing.

Still, nice ass and cans, FWIW. Thanks to the “patriarchy,” that’s all you’ll ever really need in life! Even to the point of getting a hearing for your ideas on subjects where you are in completely over your head, and provocatively so.

Gloria would be proud.

From your blog:

Geneticists don’t discuss the issue.

James Watson did; are you aware of where that got him? If not, why should your opinion on what geneticists supposedly discuss even be given a hearing?

Oh, right: The T & A.

A small percentage of evolutionary psychologists discuss this issue, and evolutionary psychology can never be called a well supported hard science. Can’t do controlled experiments on cro-magnon to see why we ended up the way we are.

The evaluation of hypotheses in science isn’t based merely on being able to do controlled experiments, it’s also about making testable predictions. Evolutionary psychology certainly does the latter–Barkow’s Darwin, Sex, and Status alone made around thirty of them, two decades ago.

[T]he racist patriarchy is everything that tells me I am beautiful. [Oh, but surely the girls you’ve dated do, too; have they simply been brainwashed by the same “racist patriarchy”?] It looks at me and ranks me an 8. Whatever I have to say has little impact on my value to the establishment.

Hmm, how would you rank Leda Cosmides, on a scale of one to ten? And have her ideas had any impact on the “establishment” … or is she, too, “just a pretty face,” who could only be good for one thing in the eyes of the “racist patriarchy”?

If Cosmides has made a real difference in the world (and she has), while your notions haven’t, what do you think the difference might be between herself, and you? Aside, I mean, from her having a whole lot more courage in doing science and facing reality than any card-carrying feminist could ever have while still remaining a proud member of that wonky in-group?

From your blog, Neeners: [E]volutionary psychology can never be called a well supported hard science. Can’t do controlled experiments on cro-magnon to see why we ended up the way we are.

Here’s another thing we can’t do controlled experiments on: The first seconds of the universe after the big bang. No way to re-run that, is there?

And yet cosmological physics is still a “well-supported hard science,” isn’t it?

We can infer the early moments of the universe from the controlled experiments we’re able to run on particles today? Yep. And you can do exactly the same inferential thing with the data from the Human Genome Project, and test those hypotheses with genetic engineering (on mice, and on designer babies).

So don’t be too confident that evolutionary psychology, combined with genetic science, won’t ultimately provide well-supported, rigorous evidence to confirm exactly what you don’t want to believe. Chances are that it will, both in terms of racial differences and in terms of differences between the sexes.

…or a thoughtful, judicious cross between Pericles and King Solomon like Sen. McCain…

If they can’t decide what country and culture they want to be a part of, cut the immigrants in half, I say….

California man pleads no contest in selling of daughter for $16,000:

“A California man accused of selling his 14-year-old daughter into marriage for $16,000, beer and meat has pleaded no contest to felony child endangerment.”

“Marcelino de Jesus Martinez had pleaded not guilty in February to procuring a child for lewd acts, aiding and abetting statutory rape and child endangerment.”

What Would King Solomon Do?

The Cherokee are the largest tribe in the US. Historically they were an advanced, highly civilized tribe that covered major portions of the South.

Yes, a highly civilized tribe which kept negro slaves:

“American Indian tribes such as the Cherokee engaged in extensive enslavement of negroes. The Cherokee Indians owned large plantations on which they worked their negro slaves in gangs.”

“White slaves were actually owned by negroes and Indians in the South to such an extent that the Virginia Assembly passed the following law in 1670: ‘It is enacted that noe negro or Indian though baptized and enjoyned their owne freedome shall be capable of any such purchase of christians….’”
–Michael Hoffman, They Were White and They Were Slaves, p. 39-40.

Interesting how to work out the “reparations” for that, no?

OT: I, robot — and gardener: MIT droids tend plants:

“A class of undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created a set of robots that can water, harvest and pollinate cherry tomato plants….”

“Even though robots have made few inroads into agriculture, these robots’ creators hope their technology eventually could be used by farmers to reduce the natural resources and the difficult labor needed to tend crops.”

You know, for the jobs which “Americans won’t do” … and which can, should, and will, be done by machines in the foreseeable future. Machines, that is, which will be designed by skilled engineers, and maintained by community-college educated technicians.

Where will that leave the Luddites, ditch-diggers, and other “real men” who need to do physical work in order to feel fulfilled, and who would gladly return our tech-driven society, and growth-through-increased-productivity based economy, to a manual-laboring one in pursuit of that goal?

“Let them eat tomatoes.”

I have found Natal Astrology to be the most highly effective method for discerning an individual’s personality I have ever seen, and have been using it for over twenty years.OMFG, you can’t be serious.

You owe it to the people you may be inadvertently misleading to read through Robert Carroll’s Skeptic’s Dictionary from beginning to end. Pay particular attention to the entries on astrology and the Forer effect, as they cover all of the “effectiveness” you misattribute to astrology.

Then read Skeptical Inquirer at csicop.org. Read Skeptic magazine (archives). Read James Randi. Check out Susan Blackmore‘s transition from a paranormal-believing “sheep” into a skeptical “goat.”

Because, you see, there is far less in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your superstitious “philosophy.”

My favorite minor character was always Professor Frink….Ha, misread that as “minority character,” and then started to wonder:

Are geeks finally a recognized “oppressed minority” too?

Don’t know what it is but there is something strange about corn that holds back IQ development when eaten generation after generation as principle food….Odd how Cochran, et al., missed that, eh?….

I remember Diamond’s book being full of excuses. That New World animal is too aggressive for domestication, this one is not social enough, etc, etc…. [M]ost of Diamond’s excuses about non-domesticability of individual species are BS….Indeed, but it’s actually worse than that. First, Sailer:

“Not all sub-Saharan Africans lack domestic animals. For instance, the Fulanis are mostly lactose tolerant precisely because they evolved an ability to drink cow’s milk as adults because they herd cattle on a massive scale.”

“It’s true that Africans never domesticated the ostrich, but a Mr. Hardy pulled off the trick in the 19th Century. In the late nineteenth century, South African farmers raised almost a million of these 300-pound birds to supply the fancy hat industry with feathers.”

“Most strikingly, Diamond failed to recall that elephant-mounted African warriors did swarm north to decimate horse-mounted Romans and almost create an empire that spanned Africa and Europe in perhaps the most famous feat of ancient warfare: Hannibal crossing the Alps. (Although a biopic with Denzel Washington as Hannibal has long been under development in Hollywood, the North African Carthaginians were actually the Semitic descendents of the Levantine Phoenicians.)”

Then skeptic Steven Dutch:

“Jared Diamond admires the hunter-gatherers he knows from New Guinea, noting that whenever they travel to a new area, they note new plants and sometimes dig them up to transplant at home. But what they are doing is simply a variation on a theme they already know well. He doesn’t cite any cases of anyone wondering why certain plants grow in some places but not others, or wondering how a seed develops into a plant.”

“In his chapter ‘Necessity’s Mother,’ Diamond argues that most inventions arose from initially useless discoveries produced by constant tinkering. (This chapter is the weakest in his whole book. It’s full of nagging minor errors, omissions, and misconceptions that made me wonder how many similar faults are lurking elsewhere that I didn’t catch because the chapters are outside my expertise. For example, he cites early internal combustion engines as being unsuitable for automobiles, apparently unaware that the first internal combustion engines were intended as stationary power sources running off piped gas.)”

Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall:

“Academics with an idée fixe say strange things. Take Professor Jared Diamond for example. Desperately anxious to explain why Australian Aborigines kept no domestic animals other than dogs, and fearful we will think the worse of them for this, he announced in Guns, Germs, and Steel that Australia ‘had no domesticable native mammals’ before the arrival of Europeans.”

“That sounded odd. Should we assume he mistook the wombat sitting next to him on the couch for a cushion? I would have thought that potentially domesticable animals were quite common in Australia. If raised from infancy in human company wallabys and kangaroos will hang around hoping to be fed, even though no special effort has been made to tame them….”

“Yet Jared Diamond tells us that Australia had no suitable domesticable animals that might have been raised for meat. If for some reason he imagines that the wild boars of late Ice Age Eurasia, or the fiercely horned bulls of the Minoans, would actually have been easier to domesticate than emus or wallabys … well, what can one say?….”

And critic J. M. Blaut:

“[I]t is noteworthy that Diamond does not always acknowledge the achievements of other scholars who have made arguments similar to his, while offering valuable insights of their own. In this regard, the work of Marvin Harris (1979), especially his development of the theory and method of cultural materialism, is glaringly absent. Harris was one of the main exponents of a materialist and environmentally focused tradition in anthropology despite, and often in the face of, the above noted resistance to biophysical explanations characteristic of 20th century social science. Similarly, Diamond ignores Alfred W. Crosby’s (1972, 1986) work, which focused on the fundamental roles biological and ecological factors played in human history, particularly in their connection with European imperialism.”

Diamond isn’t even a minimally reliable source of information, much less a competent and insightful scholar. On the contrary, he’s just another one who’s “both good and original” … but where the parts that are good aren’t original, and the parts that are original aren’t good.

On the bright side, he did do an infamous and rather un-PC study on “Ethnic Differences: Variation in Human Testis Size” (page 1, page 2). You know, with larger genital size arising from greater sperm competition, which in turn is a product of sexual promiscuity.

Well then copyright it!In the U.S., anything you write is automatically copyrighted at its moment of creation.

You also can’t copyright titles; but maybe if Steve wrote and published a book with only those two words in it, and anyone else tried to use them, he could try to claim copyright infringement (of the entire text).

I’m just sayin’….

(I don’t think you could trademark the phrase either, unless you started using it in a business/product context. Then again, I’m not a lawyer….)

Give me Islam over Liberalism, any day.Jihad Watch.

Maybe get a clue about what that death-cult religion does to every country foolish enough to let its practitioners in.

Have you even learned anything from the way they treated Salman Rushdie, or from the Danish cartoon riots? Or did you sleep soundly through all that?

Anyway, you’re free to convert and go live in any of those Arab “paradises”.Precisely. Don’t plan on changing your mind later, though: The penalty for apostasy is death.

It would be too funny if they turned out to be the same person.Indeed. Plus, the “African-American Scots-Irish” blend is something you can’t get at … well, Starbucks.

Can you?

[M]y mom and dad are very religous Christian people, and are extremely pro-Israel for reasons of Biblical Prophecy. They listen to preachers tell them as often as the day is long that whoever blesses Israel will be blessed by God…. They believe we are in “the latter days” right before “the rapture”….True enough … and yet oddly (no sarc intended), my own fundamentalist Christian (Mennonite) relatives and ancestors have taken exactly the opposite practical approach to Israel, even though starting from exactly the same eschatology:

“If its enthusiasm for hosting Ahmadinejad is any guide, the Mennonite Church has learned little from this dark chapter [of early support for Hitler] in its past. On the contrary, the church’s alliance with the Iranian leader is an extension of its hard-line anti-Israel politics, which find expression in its funding of books advocating the so-called ‘right-of-return’ for Palestinian Arabs–a policy that, if implemented, would mean the destruction of Israel.”

Takes all kinds, I guess.

Please ask Cochran or Ewald about this swine/human/bird flu and see if it is much ado about nothing.“This flu” being the following: Mexico fights swine flu with ‘pandemic potential’.

Sorry, but now I can’t stop thinking of the Muppet Show episode where Kermit mentions “swine flu” … and then Miss Piggy lets him have it, right in the chops!

Ah, life was so much simpler, “back in the day”….

“hiii-ya!!”

Antartica is NOT melting:That is correct; but more accurately, from an article by the libertarian-conservative scientist Steven Dutch, Why Doesn’t Anyone Mention the Record Growth of Sea Ice Around Antarctica?:

“The Arctic [ice] decrease is statistically significant, and the Antarctic increase is not. This is Stats 101…. Not all trends are equally statistically significant….”

“To be sure, climate modelers are perplexed by the differing responses of the Arctic and the Antarctic. In general, the Arctic is responding faster than the climate models predicted and the Antarctic is responding more sluggishly.”

As far as the Arctic, gee, impossible to think seafloor volcanism might have something to do with it, huh?And that the heat from that activity could be so widespread as to produce the rising surface-temperature trends, in a 3000-km radius around the South Pole, shown in the heat map that Dutch provides (via NASA) at the bottom of the same (linked) page? Or in the adjacent map of regions of snow melt in Antarctica by year of first occurrence?

For those here who are interested in approaching AGW with anything resembling scientific literacy, please consider reading Dutch’s The Science and Pseudoscience of Global Warming.

As he puts it, and as the confidently presented anti-AGW data quoted here demonstrates:

“There are lots of legitimate and serious questions about climate change that all researchers in the field readily admit. What convinces me of the reality of climate change, despite the uncertainties, is that the comments put out by climate change denialists are absolute, unmitigated garbage. We find distortion and misuse of credentials, publication of counterfeit papers, and scientific illiteracy of all sorts. This junk is on a par with the creationism of Michael Behe and Darwin’s Black Box.”

Can all of you see why left wingers love outsourcing and H1B visas to economically damage, and hopefully damage the birthrates of fly-over America….Fine, but church-going conservatives want high levels of immigration (incl. H-1B [not “H1B”] visas) to drive wages down and break unions, just as much as godless liberals want immigrants for votes. That’s been true up here in Canada for the past quarter-century; it’s the same for you guys south of the 49th.

Politics is WAR BY OTHER MAEANS folks, and SWPLS hate conservatives above all things.The problem is not that SWPLs are at war with conservatives; it’s that both sides have the same disastrous solution (i.e., high levels of unskilled immigration) to their different, high-priority problems. It doesn’t even matter who wins that “war”: we’re sunk regardless. Outsourcing and H-1Bs are just “good business” and a better return for your shareholders; and it ain’t just “the left” that’s figured that out, eh?

This is nothing more than a laundry list of idolatries for nihilists who are desperately hoping to discover & cling to the tiniest sliver of meaning in their lives.As opposed to what–believing in Mesopotamian death-and-resurrection fertility myths, and an Imaginary Friend in the Sky?

Thanks, but I’ll take the “pagan religion” of atheism instead. It’s called having the courage to face reality, rather than clinging to childish fairy tales which have absolutely zero chance of being true, even if they do have a lot of cultural survival value.

Why is this not a breach of copyright? The book will not be released for sale until next week.Uh, maybe because copyright violation has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a book is in print. Copyright is established in North America at the time of creation of a work; whether or not it ever gets into print is irrelevant to the principle of copyright infringement.

The most Steve’s quoting could be would be a violation of “fair use,” if it was judged to be too long of an extract. More likely, though, the author and publisher would recognize that Steve is giving them some damn good PR and buzz here, to a very targeted audience.

Plus, since the book isn’t for sale yet, how do you think Steve got ahold of a copy of it? ‘Cause right now, only the author, the publisher, and reviewers they’ve specifically chosen to send copies to, should have access to it, eh? That is, Sailer couldn’t have just walked into a bookstore and bought it off the shelves, any more than you or I could.

So where do you think he got his advance copy from?

Affirmative action means more blacks and hispanics get to try, but not that they get a free pass when trying to get the final degree, or when taking bar exams, becoming board certified, etc. That’s all stuff that the average white person simply couldn’t manage.And because university admissions are a zero-sum game, AA means that there are above-average whites who could complete those programs of study, but who are not even allowed to try. So instead of a competent non-minority graduate, you have a failed NAM instead. Or worse, a minority grad doctor/lawyer who’s less competent than the non-minority who would have graduated in his place. In the medical profession, for one, that differential in competence is costing lives.

That’s a much better point than the one that you were trying to make, NOTA.

King Obama: Are you a racist, Steve? For instance, are you against interracial relationships? Do you have any black friends?

Sailer: Some of my best friends are black.

King Obama: That’s what racists always say. Do you really think that just because you have black friends (including Ward Connerly), and aren’t opposed to racial intermarriage, it means you’re not a racist?

Even though you’re an anti-semite.Do you have any Jewish friends, Steve? Do you think that just because Steven Pinker is/was a regular reader of yours, that means you’re not an anti-semite?

More importantly, and most potentially damning: Do you have any SWPL friends? And if your son were to start dating an SWPL girl, could you accept her (and their HBD-SWPL hybrid children) as a full and equal member of your family?

As King Obama has noticed, your true colors are starting to show, Steve. And I must say, it’s not pretty.

I did read the rest of the comment. It still stinks. And I’ve seen that done many times before, here and elsewhere, and it always comes across as snarky and stupid – but I’ll just chalk that up to puerility on your part.I too have seen the FTFY idiom used many times, and have never felt offended by it on behalf of the person being “corrected.”

It is not clever. It is stupid, juvenile, and annoying. Write your own damned thoughts and stop monkeying with those of others.We will, just as soon as we finish eating these bananas and throwing our feces at the gawkers on the other side of that fence.

Now where did I put my organ grinder?

Remember, these “numbers” are being brought to you by the same crowd who thinks that the earth is “warming”, and that there is “scientific” evidence to “prove” that the earth is “warming”….From an article by the competent skeptic and conservative-libertarian Steven Dutch, on The Science and Pseudoscience of Global Warming:

“The debate over whether climate is getting warmer is mostly over…. The debate now is over whether the connection between warming and human emission of carbon dioxide is real, or whether there are other causes of climate change at work.”

This is the “warming,” supposedly unsupported by “scientific evidence,” to which you derisively refer, correct?

Steve, why do you allow Lucius Vorenus to post his tripe on basketball and “rulebooks” and not give others the allowance to rebut him in the type of language he understands?I blame the nihilists.

No one in Canada uses cheques any more–most stores don’t take them now. I haven’t written a cheque in years.For montly rent, cheques are still used very commonly. And if you bounce one, there will just be a $25 to $50 NSF charge.

Plus, small businesses (and their owners) do still write out cheques for payment to vendors, and to employees. The last full-time job I worked (for a software company that was too small to set up EFT) was paid in cheques; and I currently have one in my back pocket, for a website I put up last month.

It’s true that no one uses them in stores anymore, but there’s a whole world outside of retail transactions, you know?

And yes, we spell it “cheques,” not “checks,” for anyone who’s wondering.

I’ve heard that people who quit on a degree don’t have such dreams.I’ve quit on several degrees, but still can’t find the engineering classroom I’m supposed to be in, and often find that I haven’t studied for tests … back in high school.

It’s as if the whole immigration policy was designed to benefit American business, to keep American emplyees wages down….As if on cue, here’s an otherwise-astute East Coast businessman who wants to import 100 million Mexicans, ’cause “Hispanics for the most part integrate quite nicely into the American Culture”:

Getting Rid of Immigrants Caused our Financial Crises.

We haven’t imported even 10 million Chinese into Canada, but we already have enclaves in Vancouver where their children aren’t learning English. The only thing that could blind an otherwise-intelligent person to such obvious effects from wholesale immigration, even among groups that “integrate quite nicely,” is dollar-signs-in-the-eyes, at the thought of more customers and cheaper labor.

Global warming is such a crock. Seriously, who gets worked up about it? Here’s my list:….

-scientists looking for more funding

Also, competent professional scientists who aren’t looking for more funding for related research but who simply care about reality, such as Steven Dutch:

The Science and Pseudoscience of Global Warming.

If I had to hazard a guess, headache, I’d wager that your own sources for your opinion on the subject include Anthony Watts and Christopher Monckton. They don’t come any more quack-y and scientifically illiterate than that.

@LV: speaking of the nonsense which passes as dogma in the pagan religion of “Science” these days….

Shouldn’t you be busy chaining your wife to the stove to ensure that she reproduces at replacement rate? Come on, 2.1!

Better to live in chains than to die for freedom, right, LV? If you ever found a province/state/country, that should be your motto!

-church leaders who cannot stomach the real gospel

Right, you mean the apocalyptic “real gospel” so obviously based from beginning to end on pagan religions! Here’s David Thompson, summarizing where your One True Fairy-Tale, Rape-The-Earth-‘Cause-God-Will-Fix-It, Externalized-Costs-Be-Damned Religion actually came from:

“The Biblical accounts of Jesus are clearly an amalgam of much older, pre-Christian myths and stories, and often strikingly so. A number of pre-Christian deities, such as Attis and the Persian Sun god Mithras, were also thought to have been born during winter, often of virgin mothers; these deities died and were allegedly reborn or resurrected. Mithras, known also as ‘the light of the world,’ was supposedly born with shepherds in attendance. Attis was known as ‘the lamb of God’ and his crucifixion and resurrection were celebrated annually with communions of bread and wine. Predating Attis is the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, whose other names included the word ‘easter.’ Even Christianity’s iconic trademark, the cross, was a symbol of Ishtar’s consort Tammuz (and numerous other deities) centuries before it became associated with Jesus.”

“Another pre-Christian deity in human form, Dionysus, was also reported to be born of a virgin mother–and in a stable, no less. Dionysus allegedly travelled with an entourage, performing various miracles–among them, turning water into wine. Accused of blasphemy by the religious authorities, Dionysus was tried and executed, before allegedly rising from the grave three days later. All of which predates Jesus’ passion story by centuries.”

“The ‘Madonna and child’–an icon usually thought of as uniquely Christian–can be traced back to the Egyptian cult of Isis and Horus, which, again, predates Christianity by over 1000 years. Likewise, the story of Noah and the flood echoes the fictional flood depicted in the Sumerian novel, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which predates Christianity by some 2000 years. (In Gilgamesh, the gods destroy the ancient Mesopotamian city of Shuruppah in a great flood. But Utnapishtim survives the flood, along with his family and a sampling of animals, by building a great ship. In recognition of his ingenuity, the repentant gods bestow Utnapishtim with immortality.) In terms of its key stories, Christianity is clearly part of a continuum of cults and ‘mystery faiths’–an embellished composite retelling of much earlier myths and traditions.”

Weak-minded children take such Christianized fairy tales literally.

And you wonder why militant atheists like the libertarian skeptics Penn and Teller are “mean”….

OT, but the soulful supermodel Iman has been sharing her opinions about the Other Supermodel:

“‘Mrs Obama is not a great beauty,’ the Somali-born model and wife of rocker David Bowie tells Parade magazine’s Sunday issue….”

“Iman, 53, also told Parade that her rise to catwalk superstardom did not free her from racism.

“You suddenly represent a whole race, and that race goes, ‘Well, that person does not represent our ideals of beauty.’ For lack of a better term, it becomes what it was like during slavery,’ she said.”

“‘One had the field [Bad Word not used on iSteve] and the house [Bad Word not used on iSteve]. There was this notion that I was chosen by white fashion editors to be better than the rest, which I am not. I did not like being thought of as the house [Bad Word not used on iSteve].’”

Of course, the only negative prejudice which Mrs. Bowie was being subjected to was coming, by her own admission, from her own people; but hey, that’s “racism” for ya….

Back on-topic:

@FeministX: New York Times, why are you so obsessed about this foreclosure issue and its disproportionate effect on non-Asian minorities?Fixed that for ya, Toots.

And: reality, like cause-and-effect, is never passé. At least, not for ex-feminists like myself–it may well be different among your circle of friends.

Steve, why are you so obsessed about this foreclosure issue?

Any psychologist could tell you, FeministX, that even if Steve was “obsessed” with the causes of the subprime crisis and its wider effects, the fact that you’re clearly bothered enough by that supposed “obsession” to post about it–and give him unsolicited, implicit advice to move on from that “passe” focus–says much more about you than it does about him.

I am not a psychologist, nor do I play one on TV. But, based on my years growing up as an eldest, responsibility-taking brother to an innocent-victim, radical feminist sister who was never to blame for anything, I’d wager your thinking goes something like this:

“Racial minorities in America are consistently discriminated against, and denied their fair share of the power and wealth. And women are denied the same things: We’re all part of the same oppressed group [i.e., in-group], through no fault of our own. Blacks, Hispanics, LGBTs, whenever one of us wins, we all win; when one loses, we all lose.” (That, of course, neglects how homophobic blacks vote disproportionately against gay marriage, etc.; but never mind that for now.)

“Steve keeps blaming minorities for the financial crisis. He can’t blame my oppressed in-group for that!”

“He needs to stop being so obsessed about the causes of the crisis: It’s not the fault of the minorities [of which I am one], it’s the fault of the greedy white male, heterosexual predatory lenders [which I am not]. Steve is blaming the victim–it’s so passé. But what do you expect from the racist patriarchy? It’s just business as usual.”

Or will you try to claim, FemX, that if Steve (or any other writer) was blaming patriarchal, racist males for the meltdown, that you’d find that to be an equal “obsession,” rather than lapping it up?

Planning to write a book about it [or] something?

I’m sure we’d all love to see Steve do exactly that, since he was first to figure out exactly how and why the subprime crisis happened.

But the creatures of [race-realist] evil
Have captured [Steve’s] heart
And that same old obsessionStill keeps us [i.e., whites, NAMs, and feminists] apart

–Gordon Lightfoot, “That Same Old Obsession“

🙂

I just put up a post on my blog about whether or not his hunch is right….I was just going to put up a link to that, here. It’s a damned fine post, including reference to my favorite social-psych study, Robbers Cave:

Why logos, and why are teenagers more brand-obsessed than adults?

the fact that most of the prehistorical evidence for sudden progress comes from Stone Age Europe is “socially unsavory”Yes, well, you see, if archeology wasn’t dominated by racist, patriarchal, white European males, they (led by Marija Gimbutas) would have already found large-breasted “Mother Goddess” figurines and bison-horn “girls’ toys” (figure c) in 35K BCE Africa too, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

Because if there’s one thing you can be sure of, it’s that prehistoric African girls needed to … you know … now and then, too.

Kagan for supreme court?Kagan-roo court?

This is also true of my favorite minor art form, golf course architecture….

Misread that as having to do with the architecture of miniature golf courses, and was genuinely surprised that anyone would want that “game-based art form” to reverberate into the surrounding society.

Sorry–off to see Spinal Tap’s “Unwigged and Unplugged” tour tonight, and seem to already be in the right frame of mind.

“Stonehenge! Where a man’s a man!”

And on a side note – no, dammit, she is not attractive.Precisely. Does this blog come with a free pair of beer goggles? ‘Cause if it does, I didn’t receive them, but it appears that a lot of other commenters here did.

I’ve often wondered if Hitler’s unhealthy vegetarianism (real heavy on the pastries) caused a vitamin B deficiency that contributed to his mania.

While you’re at it, you might also wonder whether Dave Scott‘s veganism contributed to his winning the iron-man triathlon. Six times in eight years. Can’t get much more vitamin-deficient than a vegan diet, right?

Vegetarian & Vegan Sports Personalities and Athletes.

For real contributions to Hitler’s mania, consider this:

“Adolf Hitler had a mystical awakening at Pasewalk Hospital in 1918, following the defeat of Germany; it led to his decision to enter politics.”–Len Oakes, Prophetic Charisma.

“Hitler by now was possessed by delusions of grandeur…. Convinced that he was Germany’s political messiah, his supporters unashamedly referred to Hitler as a prophet…. After reading Mein Kampf, Joseph Goebbels, later the Party’s propaganda chief, wrote ‘Who is this man? half plebian, half God! Truly Christ, or only St. John?’ For the growing number of ‘disciples’ gathering around Hitler at this time–referred to as the ‘charismatic community’–Hitler was more than just a politician offering political and economic solutions, he was a messianic leader embodying the salvation of Germany.”–D. Welch, Hitler: Profile of a DictatorThat’s a whole lotta religious mania that had nothing to do with pastries.

(If you want to question the nutritional status of Germans during the rise of Hitler, you should start with the fact that they were so poor that they were using fire ashes for “pepper.”)

That 8th grade question was culturally biased. I’m sure a lot of the students in America today would be overwhelmed by the concept of ’employees’.

You’re right. The question should have read: “There were 90 unionized staff members in a branch of the federal government last year. This year, with a black president in power for the first time in history, the number of staff members increased by 10 percent. How many staff members are in the government this year?”

Free at last!

When he gets back, he’s gonna have some splainin’ to do….

OT: Mixed-race patients struggle to find marrow donors:

“At a time when the number of multiracial Americans is rising, only a tiny fraction of donors on the national bone-marrow registry are of mixed race….”

“‘The truth is, when people of different backgrounds marry and produce offspring, it creates more types that are harder to match,’ said Michelle Setterholm, the program’s director of scientific services. ‘The probability just gets lower when you have people of mixed ancestral DNA.’”

“Populations in different parts of the world developed certain proteins, or markers, that are part of the body’s natural defenses. These markers help the immune system determine which cells are foreign and should be rejected.”

“A match between two people who share many markers will reduce the risk of the donor and recipient cells attacking each other. Because certain markers tend to cluster in particular ethnic groups, matches are most often found among people of shared backgrounds. Multiracial patients often have uncommon profiles and a much harder time finding a donor.”

Wow, good thing race is only a social construction, or that could be a real problem….

Religiosity is the virile manifestation of supernatural belief. Spirituality is its more effeminate version.

Religiousity is also the conformist and more inflexibly authoritarian, order-giving and -following side of that pair.

Women are more liberal than men on average, right? So you would expect the same psychology which makes them liberal, to also affect their religious/spiritual orientation. So just go down the list of "fundamental human needs for stability vs. change, order vs. complexity, familiarity vs. novelty, conformity vs. creativity, and loyalty vs. rebellion," and ask yourself which side matches up better with religion, and which with spirituality … and which side you'd expect creative men to find more appealing.

Even on familiarity vs. novelty, it's well-known among marketers that if you can get a man "hooked" on a brand, he'll stay with that brand for the rest of his life … while women will constantly be trying other brands even after they've found one they like.

VDare has changed the URL of your piece. It’s now here:

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/090531_sotomayor.htm

did you see this article in newsweek, "The Math Gender Gap Explained"….

Funny thing about that article, when combined with the link to La Griffe du Lion's debunking of Hyde's earlier work. From the former article by Sharon Begley:

"For anyone who still believes that innate factors explain the math gender gap, as I wrote last year, look at countries with a common gene pool…. Korea topped Japan by 6 to 0." (She doesn't say for what years, or whether the year[s] in question were representative.)

But, Korea actually has a slightly lower World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index (0.6157 vs. 0.6447) than does Japan. (Higher is better, in terms of female emancipation, etc.; Sweden, for example, is 0.81, while Yemen is 0.45.) So, the 6-to-0 ratio between countries with a "common gene pool" is exactly in the opposite direction of what it should be if the greater number of girls sent by Korea was the product of "social and other environmental forces" directed toward young females, and rather wildly so.

So that ratio is either a statistical fluctuation, or it's one data-point of disproof for Begley's ideas; either way, it doesn't support her thesis, so she was dumb to quote it.

"mathgirl" posted a good comment on Begley's article:

"Results in science are not only about abilities. You can be very good at something, but just not that interested (and choose biology or medicine over math, for example). Scientific achievement at 40 is not perfectly correlated with grades at the graduate or undergraduate level at all. And the 'extremes of math ability' as manifested by the number of math professors is not 1% of population, it is much much less, so drawing conclusions on the basis of school results is similar to describing the properties of 10 karat blue diamonds by looking at large pool of standard 1-karat ones."

Further regarding the aforelinked Newsweek article on the male-female math gap, and greater male variability in math achievement, supposedly now disproved by a gaggle of feminists:

I've spent my whole day researching and summarizing that, after having paid for and downloaded the two studies by Hyde that Begley was referencing. For those who are interested, the results are here:

The (Math) Gap.

(There's way too much wrong with Hyde's study, and Sharon Begley's presentation of that, to post it all here.)

Is there anyone else here who hates taking formal vacations?

That would be me, although I've thankfully only had one year in my life when I had to abide by a normal 9-to-5:30 schedule, including taking weekends when everyone else does.

Yes, I'm in I.T. too–and being able to eat, sleep, and shop whenever you want is absolutely the way to go. (I got up at 6:30 pm yesterday, had a nap later, worked through the night, and am now trying to stay up until the post office opens at noon.)

Anyway, the hotel closes from October to May. I get the impression that this is fairly common. There's not enough business in the off-season to make it worth the trouble to winterize the place.

Much tourism in Canada is similarly seasonal, e.g., fishing resorts which are only open from May to September, or businesses in tourist towns which keep the same schedule. When I worked at a hotel in Lake Louise (Rocky Mountains), there was a tea house further up in the mountains which was likewise only open for the summer season. Only Christmas break and spring break were really worth keeping the hotel open for–for some reason people don't want to vacation in Canada over the winter. Go figure.

The Unibomber, for example, probably has an exceptionally high IQ.

Unabomber, and yes he does (167 IQ at age ten). The phrase "evil genius" exists for a reason.

Christianity, in other words, was the original leftism.

Yes, and in more ways than simply giving all you have to the poor, etc. From Elaine Pagels' book, The Origin of Satan:

"Celsus warns that the 'insanity' that impels Christians to 'refuse their religious obligations, and rush headlong to offend the emperor and governors,' actually may ruin the empire, eclipse the rule of law, and plunge the world into anarchy. Celsus demands that Christians do instead what all pious and patriotic citizens should, 'namely, help the emperor in his effort to provide for the common good, and cooperate with him in what is right, and fight for him, if it becomes necessary.'"

the totalitarian mindset of the Catholic Church….

You're actually onto something there, however inadvertently, because if you go down Robert Lifton's eight characteristics of any totalistic group, the Catholic Church meets at least seven of them:

* Milieu Control – The control of information and communication. ["Cardinals take an oath to the pope to safeguard the church from scandal–to prevent bad information from becoming public"]

* Mystical Manipulation – The manipulation of experiences that appear spontaneous but in fact were planned and orchestrated.

* Demand for Purity – The world is viewed as black and white and the members are constantly exhorted to conform to the ideology of the group and strive for perfection. ["Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect."]

* Confession – Sins, as defined by the group, are to be confessed either to a personal monitor or publicly to the group. [Masturbation is still technically a "mortal sin"–i.e., one for which the penalty is eternal damnation, if not confessed before death–as are homosexuality and the use of contraception]

* Sacred Science – The group's doctrine or ideology is considered to be the ultimate Truth, beyond all questioning or dispute. ["The French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was so reviled by the Holy Office for his vision of a spirituality in harmony with human evolution that his major works, which have reached millions of readers, were suppressed in his lifetime. Karl Rahner, who argued that theology should develop in the spirit of a time, and Yves Congar, who emphasized the role of laypeople in an evolving church, were marginalized in the 1950s by Pius XII, who had no use for their views." "The Anti-Modernist Oath, (enacted by Pope Pius X in 1910 and) sworn to this day in modified form by Catholic ordinands … required acceptance of all papal teaching, and acquiescence at all times to the meaning and sense of such teaching as dictated by the pope…. There was no possibility of any form of dissent, even interior. The conscience of the person taking the oath was forced to accept not only what Rome proposed, but even the sense in which Rome interpreted it. Not only was this contrary to the traditional Catholic understanding of the role of conscience, but it was a form of thought control that was unrivalled even under fascist and communist regimes."]

* Loading the Language – The group interprets or uses words and phrases [e.g., "Communion"] in new ways so that often the outside world does not understand.

* Doctrine over person – The member's personal experiences are subordinated to the sacred science and any contrary experiences must be denied or reinterpreted to fit the ideology of the group. [Consider exorcisms performed on people who simply need psychiatric help, or spiritual experiences which don't fit into the theology being regarded as "from the devil."]

* Dispensing of existence – The group has the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not. ["In 1997 (Pope John Paul II) excommunicated the Sri Lankan writer-priest Tissa Balasuriya for diluting Roman doctrinal orthodoxy: Balasuriya’s writing had cast doubts on the doctrines of original sin and the virginity of the Mother of God"]

For more details, see here.

Could the Church prevent movies it dislikes from being distributed or even financed?

Perhaps not today, but you only have to go back a few decades to find something very close to that happening with Monty Python's (privately financed) Life of Brian, against a loose coalition of Catholics, Jews, and miscellaneous (esp. Deep South/Fried) Christians:

"Protests against the film were organized based on its perceived blasphemy. On its initial [1979] release in the UK, the film was banned by several town councils–some of which had no cinemas within their boundaries, or had not even seen the film for themselves…. As recently as 2008, the mayor of the Welsh town of Aberystwyth (Sue Jones-Davies, who played Judith Iscariot in the film) was still trying to remove the local council's long ban of the film."

"In New York, screenings were picketed by both rabbis and nuns … while the film was banned outright in some American states. It was also banned for eight years in the Republic of Ireland and for a year in Norway."

Again, the Catholics were leading that charge–which is why the members of Python debated the Bishop of Southwark on the telly, and also specifically thanked the Vatican for all the free publicity they were getting from the Church.

Pilate did not have to succumb to the pressure of a rabid mob of zealots.

But, he did have to contend with the wishes of the Sanhedrin:

"Jesus was then put on trial by Jewish authorities to determine whether his guilt, in their eyes, justified handing him over to the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate with their request that the Roman Empire put Jesus to death on popular demand from the people."

And what grounds could Pilate possibly have had for refusing that request concerning a near-anonymous, itinerant, apocalyptic preacher? What could Pilate possibly have gained, politically, by sparing that life, against the wishes of the Jewish authorities?

Elaine Pagels:

"John … leaves no doubt that the chief priests want Jesus killed. John depicts the priests as evasive and self-righteous when Pilate inquires about the charge: 'If this man were not a malefactor, we would not have brought him to you' (18:30)."

That is, of course, assuming that there's any historical validity to the whole Crucifixion story, which is by no means certain. 🙂

Bravo Paul! Maybe Buzz Mohawk should stop drinking the Kool-aid, Paul’s right and you’re wrong simple as that. Turn off the history channel and grab a book…….. and a brain.

Duh, because after he was re-elected, the gloves came off and he became emboldened to act in concert with his ideological views without fear of political repercussions. With a GOP majority in both houses of Congress now, he has nothing to lose by letting his freak flag fly. Some “legacy”.

Breaking some kid’s balls about having a funny name when he’s stuck at your house is a mildly assholish thing to do. Nine out of ten small-town Americans would agree. Imagine it was a Polish name, if you find it hard to see the issue. Stuff like that doesn’t happen much any more and I’m glad it doesn’t. I agree it’s not worth dwelling on, though.

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed his desire to go to war with Iran”

Put the bastard on the front line so he can take one for the team. Then we’ll finally be rid of that filthy poisonous cockroach.

It’s a great article. But if in the greater scheme of things its comparatively a non-concern, how does one explain the extreme reaction of the Chinese themselves to it? Something just doesn’t ring true here.

Excellent article. I heard about this book getting released, but didn’t know anything about it. Sounds like I should pick it up.

“Where Did The Towers Go?” by Dr. Judy Wood

https://archive.org/details/where_did_the_towers_go

It’s amusing to hear Unz reading the final Anglin quotes in the article.

Two detailed articles on the origin of the Protocols; the 1st by Peter Myers and Kerry Bolton addresses the Parisian Masonic origin of the originally obtained copy, the second (a compilation of blog posts) by Karl Radl proposes a Ukrainian (Jewish) origin of writing:
https://mailstar.net/Bolton-Prot-Context-Ed.pdf
https://ia904609.us.archive.org/17/items/deanna-spingola-karl-radl-the-protocols-of-zion-the-facts-the-myths-and-the-lies-2012/The%20Protocols%20of%20Zion%2C%20the%20facts%20and%20myths%20-%2073pg.pdf