Developing but safe/stable countries are really the way to go for vacations, except for single women. Other than airfare everything is 50-90% cheaper than Florida, Italy, Greece, etc.

On the other hand a vacation in Turkey is getting dangerously close to SWPL territory. The horrors! I just hope SS is not letting his beard grow out and lugging a backpack.

"the political establishment's program of importing Third World helots who could be bribed to vote for Democrats."

That's really rich. Immigrants can't vote, and even their citizen children, two decades later, rarely do so. Even if they did, no politician thinks that far ahead.

You can thank big business interests, especially the hyper-Republican agribusiness and construction industries, for mass third world immigration.

Now which President was it that did the big amnesty in 1986? Who wanted to do a second big one a few years ago? Was it Carter? Clinton? I can't seem to remember.

And last year Tancredo totally crushed McCain in the GOP primaries.

Orange People are well represented among the powerful. Besides Mozilo, there is John Boenher and Charlie Crist.

Oh there are plenty of GOP gay sex scandels waiting to unfold. Just in South Carolina there are three high level closeted gay Republicans:

Sen. Lindsey Graham
State Senate president Glenn McConnell
Lt. Gov. André Bauer

Though Graham has such an extreme "gay voice" that calling him closeted might be an overstatement.

http://www.q-notes.com/2710/former-candidate-linda-ketner-outs-sc-republicans/

This should be no suprise, as gays seem to be disproportiately high in the skills modern politicians need: High verbal intelligence, charm, and social/networking skills, and keeping one's appearance presentable for TV.

Likewise lesbians have the qualities the public rewards in female politicians: toughness and a willingness to put work ahead of family.

Interesting scenerio: Right now there are 40 GOP Senators, and that will probably fall to 36 after the next election. Four GOP senators are female, leaving 32 male GOP Seantors. If Larry Craig had not gotten caught, and Charlie Crist as expected wins next years, that would leave the male GOP Senate Caucus 3/32 gay, or 9.4%. Make that 12.5% if the semi-credible rumors about Mitch McConnell are true.

That's way above the 2.5%-4% of the general male population.

As sex scandels go this is pretty mild and forgivable.

He said he only met her _three times_ over a one year period, she's not a hooker, 19-year-old bimbo, or on his payroll. He admitted the affair to his wife even shortly after it started, and soon after they planned an amicable seperation.

The average handsome high-status man does far worse.

Vern: The sample contains all known members of the population (male GOP senate republicans), so literally speaking what you said makes no sense.

If you mean Republican politicians in general with the 32 Senators as a random sample, then this is a plenty big sample for most purposes. Or more precisely, counting the McConnell rumors as true we can say the percentage of male GOP politicians who'd be gay in the next Senate if Craig had not resigned, with 90% confidence level, is 12.5% +- 1.8%.

Speaking of Mitch McConnell, I did some Google-ing and found his ex-wife is now a women's history librarian at Smith College, aka Lesbian World HQ.

Her facebook page is pure lesbiana. She lists herself as a "fan" of EMILY's list, Rachel Maddow, Gloria Steinem, and the main gay rights organization in her home state of Kentucky.

I also think Ricci will win 5-4, and I disagree that it will be narrow.

Kennedy is the only swing vote, and he is to the right of O'Connor on these issues.

2nd prediction: Sotomayor easily confirmed.

Business groups have decided they will be better off trying to live with her than launch a kamikaze assult, and the socons and have 20-30 votes in the Senate and no money.

Gotta agree with Daniel, with all due respect, Mr. Giraldi.

This was a man, as aberrant as they come, who provided us mere plebs with some much appreciated diversion. Moreover, he never attempted to control, bomb, and murder any of us — just entertain us, his bizarre and sick personal life, notwithstanding.

He was no prophet, holy man, savior, or guru, just another nutty pop icon (John Lennon and Elvis weren’t exactly healthy moral beings either). But there was lift in his craft, he never tore down. Not Bach, but not Madonna either.

At times there is nothing wrong with telling (in a manner) our sick political functionaries and leaders (most of whom are positively wicked when compared to Jackson) to buzz off for a few days. If this means we take our eyes off of the news of two evil wars and the antics of sociopath leaders of other countries, tough luck.

We deserve the occasional break from paying attention to our own political and economic rape. When one is daily being betrayed by those who are theoretically supposed to be looking out for you, resorting to silly pop diversions like Michale Jackson is a better choice than answering fools according to their folly, which all we’re ever allowed in this sinking nation.

You know, when you’re daily being politically and economically screwed by wicked men and women whose roles, theoretically, are to be looking out for us, some diversion into silly pop music is nothing to be ashamed of. Yes, Michael Jackons was a degenerate, but so what? He never tried to bomb us, control us, or kill us, his sick personal life notwithstanding.

Yeah, he was no Bach, but he was also no Madonna, George Bush, or Barack Obama. There’s something to be said for that.

Sorry for the repeat — it looked as if my first bit hadn’t posted.

The spirit of posts like this and most of the comments is why immigration restrictionists in the U.S. are almost powerless politically and badly underfunded.

I noted in a comment earlier here that gays have traits that make them effective modern politicians. They also will open their wallets if they feel under threat. You advocate for both immigration restriction and take potshots against them, you drive them and their educated family/friends into political coalitions with NAMs.

This is basically what happened in Colorado when the Republicans went on an anti-gay kick, spurring a two gay tech multi-millionaires to spend $12 million and raise much more and turn what was a solidly Republican state into a solidly Democratic one. They are worth a combined half billion and are ready to spend more.

I would point out over in Europe the mere two times in major countries very strong restrictionists came to power it was:

1 – gay Pim Fortyn, whose created a restrictionist party he named after himself, which became the 2nd largest party in parliamont out of many and part of the governing alliance in the Netherlands, though he was assinated shortly before the election

2 – bisexual Jorg Haider in Austria was a region's governor and united the new right parties in Austria, getting them to 27% of the vote and part of the governing coalition with the older and more centrist right-wing party.

I could say much the same thing about jews.

Of course now with MJ gone, it’s just Walmart that has little boy’s pants half off!
I guess the little boys will just have priests now to take care of their needs.
[email protected]

I think he wants you to put up half the prize money with the winner getting all of it.

As he phrased it you'll lose. What you've argued, correctly, is that a large part of the problem was loans to NAMs.

The reason you won't win, however, is the CRA had nothing to do with the massive number of loans to minorities during the boom, but the rapid decline in underwriting standards.

The CRA had nothing to do with this, rather the problem was the dumb money willing to loan someone $700,000 on a house in LA ghettos. No law forced banks or mortgage investors to do this.

Without this dumb money we would have had no 0-down loans, no Angelo Mozillo, no boom, no bust.

To continue my previous point about the political dangers of immigration restrictionists being associated with homophobia, Roduck offers an alternative explanation of why Colorado flipped from solid GOP to solid Dem:

–Maybe Colorado changed over the years because of immigrationn from Mexico and the inmigration of liberals from California.–

This fails to explain things for two reasons. First, immigrants don't vote in large numbers, nor do their children. That's why there are many LA suburbs that are more than 70% hispanic but don't have a single hispanic on the city counsel.

Second, the whites leaving CA for Colorado are hardly liberals. Even as the CA coast becomes more liberal, the whites who have fled not to Colorado but to Cal desert areas like Riverside, Kern, and Fresno counties have caused these areas to become more Republican. Fresno went from a swing area to solid GOP in the past 25 years, for example, even as the hispanic population soared. The reason was whites moving in from the Cal coast were more conservative than the native whites.

Moreover, California whites still vote GOP in large numbers, and the ones who "flee" because of crime, immigration, affordable housing, etc are if anything more conservative than average.

Google "gang of four" and Colorado. Many articles confirm the importance of the money these two gay millionaries donated and raised. It wasn't just their cash, they were very good self-made multi-millionaries who made sure the money was spent well.

Finally notice the other state that rapidly flipped from solid GOP to solid Dem in the same 2004-2006 period: New Hamphire. The thing NH and CO have in common is a very educated population.

Driving a group with strong verbal skills and plenty of time and money into the hands of NAMs is a bad idea. Best to leave the gays and the jews alone if you want to actually get things done in politics.

Paleocons like Steve, just like libertarians, don't seem to really care about winning, so they'll ignore my advice and continue to lose. They'd rather take their potshots at the jews, queers, union members, public school teachers, SWPLers even if it helps lead to the Mexification of the USA. There's no concept of trying to expand the anti-immigration coalition to include those who aren't married christian social conservatives, who will never be enough for a governing majority.

White people generally however are a huge majority, but as Steve notes himself multiple times, white people care about getting ahead of other whites while ignoring the NAM demographic threat.

I note my prediction on an earlier thread was right. It was a 5-4 decision, and not a narrow one confined to the facts.

The Court said you can't have a policy of "screw whitey because if we don't we have a chance at getting sued for desparate impact" is not an excuse for screwing whitey.

Instead, the burden is now on those who want to discriminate against whites to provide "a strong basis in evidence that the remedial actions were necessary."

This opens the door to many other lawsuits by white government employees. The burden is now on those who want to discriminate to provide "strong evidence" that it is needed.

Or to put in another way, the Court closed a claimed loophole to its strict rule from Gratz that affirmative action by the government must pass the very difficult "strict scrutiny test" by claiming that AA is needed to avoid lawsuits.

Josey Wales is wrong that this is narrow decision because it did not decide a constitutional law issue.

Courts never make a constitutional law decision if there are other grounds to decide a case, this is the principle of constitutional avoidence. Only Scalia touched on the issue, not even Thomas or Alito would join him.

Anon:

-The same type of leftist lies that apply to NAMs are used for the benefit of homosexuals.-

Like what? What is the big lie about gays that is being told that's the equivalent of Mexicans are as smart and law-abiding as whites? The worst I've heard is "straights are at a high risk of HIV so always use a condom."

-NAMs, homosexuals, Jews and most SWPLers are permanently welded to the Democratic party for many other reasons than immigration.-

Yes, but my point is that the GOP needs to prioritize. "Keeping down the queers" seems to be near the top of the list. There is a huge cost to gay-baiting, but I guess I've missed the benefit.

Rudy managed to get elected in NYC by getting almost the entire white vote. What's wrong with this model? Was he a bad mayor? Pete Wilson combined social liberalism with a hard line on immigration and economic conservatism. What happened to this type of Republican in California?

–It's not restrictionists like Steve who are the subject of his ire, but rather almost solely the religious right.–

I agree, but immigration restriction becomes the collateral damage when the GOP runs with social issues that play poorly with whites outside of their base.

–You also make it sound like Steve's bucking for a job as editor of Newsweek or an RNC post, when he is operating on the fringes of mainstream journalism b/c he tells it like it is.–

He has mainstream media readers. Instead of, say, attacking gays, maybe he could point out that immigration isn't good for them financially or culturally? Highlight the homophobia of the average NAM immigrant as an example of their prole social values long enough and maybe this meme gets picked up by the larger press.

The Prop-8 "Gays v. NAMS" articles that came out was an opening that nobody on the right bothered to run with.

–So at this point diagnosing the fundamental issues at hand (see point #1) is the first priority.–

Excuses excuses. Kaus manages to do a real part on the immigration issue without focusing on the important "fundamental issue" of the perfidy of gays.

Supreme Court justices do have staff other than their four law clerks.

Also the terms of the clerks are two years. Signing bonuses paid by private law firms for former clerks are in the $100,000 to $150,000 range, plus the work is counted as seniority within the firm.

"credentialed but clueless poohbahs writing in to say how much they agree with the NYT's soporific editorials, but they were disappointed that the editorial didn't include some additional argument"

That is a perfect description!

How about that you're both right?

1. You are correct that NAM defaults are much higher than white and asian rates. The mortgage crisis, which is only a subset of the much larger debt crisis, would be much less severe if NAMs repaid their loans at the white rate.

This is an important point that does not get acknowledged explicitly.

2. He is right that this was not the result of the CRA or other public coercion, but the willingness of mortgage bankers to make these loans and investors to buy them as long as Moody's and S&P put their AAA rating on them.

My problem with your many posts on this topic is that you ignore where he is right (#2), even while he and others does the same with #1.

As a result of you ignoring the culpability of investment banks, rating agencies, etc, and your extreme focus on only subprime lending, you oversell your perfectly valid point about the very high minority default rates, and the unwarranted assumption that they will default only at the white level.

Gardeners lying about their income has absolutely nothing to do with the current wave of commercial real estate defaults, and the impending wave of leveraged loans that will be defaulting and that were used to fund the LBO binge of 2004-2007.

He likewise has a point that your most recent points on this have been very light on statistics. Your first few posts showing default rates by race were excellent.

And again, you have not and will not be able to make the case that the CRA had much to do with the crisis. Besides being wrong as a matter of fact, it has the air of an excuse for the grossly irresponsible behavior of our evil Wall Street overlords and the dumb people who entrusted Wall Street with their money.

Steve wrote:

When did I ever say that Mr. Ritholtz's criticisms of the Usual Suspects were wrong?

Reply:

When you use phrases like "the diversity recession" and spend so much time on the CRA, you provide an alternative explanation that at least partially absolves the actions of bankers.

They're not greedy reckless immoral scum, they were just forced by Barney Frank and ACORN to make the loans!

Another point: Fannie and Freddie didn't do much wrong either.

During the boom they barely budged from their old somewhat strict standards, and as a result their market share dropped substantially. By law they never bought mortgages from brokers larger than the conforming limit of around $470,000 or garbage like 85/15 zero-down mortgages.

What the Diversity movement did was cut back regulatory restraints on the Yes Men and punish and demonize the Scrooges.
—

No, the scrooges were out-competed because they weren't producing the raw material for the garbage loans that were so profitable to repackage and sell.

I suppose you could make a more subtle point that the left's traditional pro-regulation/anti-usury position was de-fanged by the realization that this attitude prevented poor NAMs from getting loans, and further was co-opted by Wall Street money that flowed to deregulation politicians regardless of their positions on other issues.

However the economic left was out of power from 1981-2008 when most of banking deregulation occurred, and the right never a justification to deregulate banks. Deregulation of finance is an end in itself for Phil Gramm/Alan Greenspan types.

Joking about mass-murder of people because he doesn't like their taste in pop music?

What a deranged asshole!

Another reason is that in municipal jobs in cities that are 50%+ NAM there is a huge political pressure for AA on a vast scale.

By contrast in the private sector a token 5% of NAMs is really all you need, and this doesn't have that big an impact on career advancement unless you happen to be the rare white guy with his heart set on being director of human resources.

"Elite whites of that background compete with Asians, Jews, and skilled immigrants. That competition visibly reduces the availability of positions for whites, and they do seem to be nervous about it."

I'm white and from a protestant family and I have no worries because I am not in a zero-sum industry. Other smart people might sometimes be in direct competition with me for an opportunity, but overall the presence of these groups makes the USA a wealthier place.

It's their tax dollars, after all, that pay for all my bum relatives cheating the disability system. You don't see this too often in Jewish or Chinese families. Their property taxes as well pay for public schools even though they tend to have very few kids and then send them to private schools if they have to.

Swift's satirical proposal to eat Irish babies was not an attack on Irish babies, but rather a protest of the treatment of them, as well as the Irish in general.

This guy hates Michael Jackson fans, so he writes that it would be cool if a whole bunch of them got killed in a gruesome manner. Hilarity!

This is the guy who married a famous actress and model's 19-year-old daughter????

http://www.rawprint.com/media/2007/0711/cc_colbert_nov01_2007_walter_kirn.jpg

I need to get out more.

BR is right not to take up a fight he can't win, but in another sense he has a good point.

Whatever his methods, he seems to have made money for himself and his clients shorting real estate stocks.

That's all the standard of truth such people care about.

Testing99: cool your jets. Obama wants to be reelected, more immigration during a depression is not the way to do so.

The big threat right now is not mass-amnesty like Bush proposed, but the DREAM bill, which is nowhere near as bad, but still very bad.

I think the best thing to do in the intervening time is get more laws imposing fines on those who do business with illegals passed on the state and local level.

"white suburban kids who try to emulate black street culture"

The victims of the degradation of American culture by gangsta rap are of every race.

I have witnessed the negative effects of young people adopting a culture that thinks crack dealers and pimps are cool and adopting their speech and dress among blacks, whites, and asians.

And of course America exports its cultural garbage to the rest of the world.

Capitalism and "a free market of ideas" is corrosive to Western culture.

The 20-year-old was part of the Bahai religious minority in Iran, which is one of the wealthy ones.

Don't be too quick to dismiss valid complaints by bourgeois blacks about police mistreatment.

There are a lot of poor whites who resent wealthier blacks and enjoy the opportunity to hassle them.

The white caucus in CA politics is called the Republican Party.

While whites are now a permanent minority in CA, they did several things before this happened to hold onto power.

First, Prop 13 is essentially an annual tax cut on property owners by limiting increases to below the rate of inflation. White homeowners pay much lower property taxes than their younger neighbors.

Next, strong environmental and zoning laws prevent development around wealthy neighborhoods.

Next, the rule that tax increases require a 2/3 majority makes it nearly impossible to raise taxes.

Next, the initiative process allows the GOP to place ballot measures to a vote during random low-turnout elections where voters are much more white.

I wish the Gates story would just die.

It's bread and circuses in the middle of our civilization's demographic, economic and cultural collapse.

Jordan let Rodgers score because the rest of the guys were white, and he's black.

If Republicans actually want to win in 2012 Bloomberg would be an excellent choice. As Steve has noted many times, the way Republicans win is to crank up their share of the white vote.

Given NYC's heavy minority population, Bloomberg must have gotten 80%+ of the white vote to win.

He'd also be good at the job!

Here is a long interview of him at Google, his intelligence and good nature is obvious:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsRpYXJMGIg

I have a very high degree of respect for cops who I think are generally overworked, but firemen, as I pointed out here before, we have far too many of and as a result they get paid a lot of money for doing less and less.

The number of paid firemen in urban and suburban areas just goes up and up because no politician is ever willing to say no to their budgets, but steadily improving building technology and rapidly falling smoking rates means the actual number of fires keeps going down.

While firefighting is of course more dangerous than an office job, it isn't that dangerous compared to many others.

Here are some statistics:

http://www.laurelvfd.org/Firefighting_paper.htm

So it's slightly more dangerous than police work, but half as dangerous as roofing, farming, or truck driving, less than a fifth as dangerous as being a airline pilot, a third as dangerous as construction, and less than an eighth as dangerous as logging or fishing which are the most dangerous jobs.

Beowulf:

The senior citizen volunteer police I see all over California are adorable, good for them helping their community rather than sitting on their asses watching TV all day like most retirees.

Here are some pics of senior police volunteers from two California towns:

http://www.ci.sausalito.ca.us/Modules/ShowImage.aspx?imageid=461&wid=540

http://www.cityofselma.com/police/images/Scan%20001.jpg

You use the phrase "Latino Elite."

I don't think the USA really has one. High socio-economic status latinos seem to intermarry with non-hispanic whites at a rate well above 50%, and even when they marry other latinos they are usually mostly to entirely white and fully assimilated.

If there are high-status mostly black/indian latinos I can't say I've ever met one. Because so many high-status hispanics assimilate into anglo white society, all that's left to form a "latino elite" is a few professors, politicians and NGO people who make a point of trying not to assimilate.

About half of these positions in LA seem to be filled by Cesar Chavez's large extended family.

Appealing only to married church-going whites isn't working too well.

As you've pointed out, growing share of minority votes isn't an effective strategy.

So what's left is to increase its share of the white vote. The swing white voters appear to be (1) educated high-income secular whites (2) union members. Both groups are large, but #1 is growing and #2 is shrinking.

Endless cheap shots at "swipples" doesn't strike me as much of a start.

It's not clear to me that the people who run the GOP, namely executives at big corporations, actually want to win the presidency or control of congress.

Right now the corporate elite have an effective veto over all major decisions because they can filibuster proposals they don't like.

Nominating someone like Huckabee who could win the presidency puts this control at risk. So they will probably just anoint a safe sure-thing loser like Romney.

The whole "activist" and right-wing media infrastructure prospers when it is in the opposition, so they have no real desire to win anything either.

Belated congratulations on your gig on Taki's excellent site. It's scary to think where paleos intellectuals would be without his philanthropic and entrepreneurial energy.

I agree with the above poster that the Burns style is horribly slow and boring to the point of being unwatchable.

National Parks, Baseball, Jazz, and the Civil War are among the dullest topics imaginable. Perhaps the next 15-hour documentary will be called "Ken Burns' Farm Equipment."

Right, we need either radically cheaper energy or radically improved automation. Fusion is the only radically cheap energy on the horizon, but I won’t hold my breath. And current trends, as well as policy choices of Obama (ie carbon taxes, renewable energy push, etc) will likely lead to higher energy prices. So that’s not good.
At some point robotics gets good enough and the construction industry will take a quantum leap up in efficiency. The speed of building roads, houses, and the like will radically accelerate. Advanced robotics could enable revolutions in large-scale engineering. Shipbuilding is a good example of something that’s been fairly resistant to automation so far.
Biotech might increase our health and productivity, but the vast majority are healthy now throughout their working lives. The toll of obesity, diabetes, etc doesn’t seem to drastically reduce productivity. There’d likely be some improvement. Probably be more productivity boost from a better version of caffeine.
The IT revolution now seems to mainly invent better and better ways for people to kill time – video games and porn for men, facebook and blogs for women, pirated movies for everybody –it’s fun, but it’s not especially productive.

The CIA was not happy Obama choose the outsider California liberal Leon Panetta to run it.

"In Jew in ya?" is a really stupid question.

And in any case Jews intermarried/converted with the local european population enough almost all whites have Jewish ancestors.

Exceptions might be people on the edges of europe that never had much jewish population like Norway and Ireland.

A typical example from the 1800's is upper class gentile family with too many sons and not enough property marries the daughter of well-off Jewish merchant.

Anon, it wouldn't take much mixing back when the population of europe was less than 10% of its current size 20 generations ago to come to the result we all have a little Jew in us.

There were large Jewish populations at some time in not just Germany and eastern Europe, but also Spain, Italy, Greece, France, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium and Holland.

And gentiles and Jews have been mixing in North America for upwards of 300 years as well. Even during periods of persecution you have lots of well-off conversos keen on marrying gentiles.

It's pretty depressing to be reminded that Rupert Murdoch spent about $200 million subsidizing Fox News, the Weekly Standard, and a few think tanks and got 5000 of my countrymen killed, and more than made back his investment in ratings.

Or that this happened before, when yellow journalism led to the Spanish American war, which led to current our Puerto Rican problem, as well America's pointless and genocidal war against the Philippines, during which the population of the islands decreased by more than 10%.

An argument for a heavy estate tax on heirs of large fortunes?

Murdoch certainly grew his father's fortune well, but he started out quite rich nonetheless. The other big bankroller of warmongering intellectuals is Martin Peretz, who spent much of his wife's inherited fortune on the New Republic.

"Kill everyone in Afghanistan? Not politically possible."

Fess up nutcase, you clearly wish this were otherwise, don't you?

Babylon:

Conrad Black is wrong.

In 2007 only 53.6% of births in the USA were to white non-hispanic mothers (so says the CDC). Some of these new white mothers mated with non-whites.

Add in the fact that most immigrants are non-white, and all white countries have low birth rates, I don't see how the US can stay majority white for much longer.

You say your family avoided the housing bubble.

Are you sure? I remember you saying you live in a nicer part of the valley. That means, if your house was average, your net worth probably went up about $600,000 between 2000 and 2006, and since then about $400,000 of that has evaporated.

Even if you never touched all that new equity, I think it would be hard for such a windfall not to affect you psychologically.

I agree with Bill above about the 3-4% historical illegitimacy rate not being correct.

The 50's and early 60's look good in comparison to now, but it is easy to forget they also look better than prior decades. For example, crime was lower that decade than any other in the 20th century.

Likewise the Victorian era was an especially moral one, but even then not as good as the 1950's.

I'd say one reason why the post-war era was so moral is that for the lower classes, hard work paid well while crime and sloth didn't. That isn't the case now.

Sadly, the private sector unionization rate has fallen from nearly 40% in the 1950's to under 6% now.

Going back to your main point, I think you make a mistake is treating "liberals" as some organized intentional group that ran the whole USA in the 1960's.

What did liberalism have to do with the invention of the pill or the advancement of technology that made unskilled male labor less valuable?

Or, for that matter, with right-wing free trade ideology that further smashed traditional male industrial work?

@Tony Jeremia has a point. What the lsat tests is the ability to read and understand a narrative and to do logic problems. Or at least that’s what I remember when I took it 15 years ago. A lot like the GRE too.
I’m actually surprised that physics majors score so highly since there was no math at all on the LSAT. Perhaps it has to do with training in physics thought experiments or something.
When I took the LSAT there were long reading sections with questions about what did and did not follow logically from the passage, nuances of what had been written, etc. This is why I’m surprised English majors do so poorly. OK, 11th isn’t horrible, but considering they majored in half the test, they should do better. Perhaps the reason Philosophy majors do so well is that they get all of the reading and interpretation background that English majors have plus the logic background. The lack of a background in logic would also explain the performance of English majors.
The other main section of the test was basically a series of puzzles. 13 people eat dinner at a round table. Jeff sits on Ann’s left, Fred orders the fish, Paul has a red tie. What did James have for an entree? Assume Paul had pie for dessert, who sits on Ann’s right? Those sorts of puzzles. They are very easy to do. You just draw the matrix of choices and start eliminating possibilities as the come up. Then go through the hypothetical situation of each question and find the answer.
Most people don’t finish the LSAT either. You have to both read and think very quickly(like you have to do in court) to finish. And people really get ticked at you if you finish ten minutes early and start looking bored. 🙂
For those interested in anecdotes, not data, I took both the GRE and the LSAT. BA in English(early English lit, linguistics, classics in translation, and folklore were my interests). I scored +95 percentile in all sections. MA in English, thesis on Twelfth Night and fairy tale analogs. I scored above the 95 percentile in the LSAT as it was given at the time. I think both the LSAT and the GRE have changed formats since the early ’90’s, but I haven’t compared the modern versions to my memories.

I think you are wrong that the oil companies were not 100% behind the Iraq invasion. Obviously they CEO of Exxon is not going to be calling in to Rush Limbaugh and calling for blood, however:

Every time bombs get dropped on middle east countries oil prices rise and they make more money.

The oil cos are the biggest funders along with defense contractors of the big pro-war think tanks like AEI/Heritage/CEI.

Iraq was a problem for them because in the Clinton years Iraqi production was slowly rising. Not only was that holding down prices, but they didn't have their fingers in the production.

Finally, who was behind the Iraq war more than anyone? And what was the previous job title of the former VP? Oil Company CEO.

Notice the right-wing media is always advocating for an invasion or bombing of Venezuela and Iran. This too would goose oil company profits.

So much of the financial industry exists and has been carefully refined to rip off rich non-finance people.

Year after year more than 80% of mutual funds do worse than S&P 500 index funds, and charge big fees to do it, yet the number of mutual funds keeps growing.

Pro sports people are such obvious targets.

Here is a quick summary of how Lenny Dykstra lost all his money, plus a lot of other people's money.

http://deadspin.com/5224796/the-myth-of-lenny-dykstra-completely-unravels

From there, links to more detailed and revealing articles.

Notice that Jim Cramer was swindling and scamming each step of the way here.

The schools that don't give merit aid use the money for other forms of financial aid.

Since their admission pool is already mostly wealthy, the few that aren't are given very generous financial aid.

Harvard's policy is to give full tuition scholarships to anyone from a family with income below $60,000, which is a majority of US households. Partial financial aid is often award to those above $200,000.

What do you propose instead? That Harvard offer scholarships to the absolute top of their pool, many of whom are the children of the very wealthy? Do you think the very talented children of the very wealthy are unfairly put upon by having to pay full price at Harvard, which for some is still less than the tuition their parents paid for at their private high schools?

"all bureaucracy is inherently dysfunctional"

Wrong wrong wrong.

The British Imperial bureaucracy ruled India, Pakistan, and Bangladash with under 4000 civil servents and 10,000 soldiers.

Among some peoples liberalism as well as several alternatives work well.

Among others, nothing works too well.

Congratulations!

BTW I think I've been a SS reader since I was around 15 and read your "why lesbians aren't gay" article in the print national review.

"Austrian" economists are a bunch of cranks. You waste your time taking them seriously.

A few eccentric rich folks fund them, and like other forms of libertarians they are very vocal on the web and have wrong but easy to understand theories.

Interesting that Krugman shares your view of Stephen Jay Gould, and analogizes him to the various cranks who write about economics. In this particular case Krugman attacks left-wing economics cranks, but I'm sure he'd say the same about the "Austrians" and other marginal kooks of the sort you find at the CATO Institute:

"Some members of this faction have held university appointments. But most of them lack academic credentials and, more important, they are basically hostile to the kind of economics on which such credentials are based. …

Academic economics, the stuff that is in the textbooks, is largely based on mathematical reasoning. I hope you think that I am an acceptable writer, but when it comes to economics I speak English as a second language: I think in equations and diagrams, then translate. The opponents of mainstream economics dislike people like me not so much for our conclusions as for our style: They want economics to be what it once was, a field that was comfortable for the basically literary intellectual.

…

A similar situation exists in other fields. Consider, for example, evolutionary biology. Like most American intellectuals, I first learned about this subject from the writings of Stephen Jay Gould. But I eventually came to realize that working biologists regard Gould much the same way that economists regard Robert Reich: talented writer, too bad he never gets anything right."

Hoste:

Economics does not exist to answer questions like that.

It can tell you the effects of fiat money or the gold standard, but not if it is right or wrong.

We tried the gold standard for a while, and it didn't work. Among other problems, it enriched NY bankers (your favorite people!) and caused horrible dislocations among farmers, who were then a very large share of our population.

In any event, low and stable inflation is one of the civilized world's top economic priorities and should only concern you if your method of saving is to bury paper currency in your back yard. Bonds, CDs, etc are all priced such that they implicitly account for expected inflation, or in the case of TIPS explicitly adjust up or down with inflation.

If you think these instruments don't fully take into account future inflation and don't trust the government on TIPs, nobody is stopping you from buying assets that whose nominal value increases with inflation, such as stocks, real estate, and of course gold. In fact it has never been easier to buy gold, if you have a brokerage account it takes 5 seconds.

Nice to see you not blindly bashing economists!

Here are some OT but interesting race statistics:

First, changes in population by race in congressional districts:

http://swingstateproject.com/diary/5692/racial-composition-change-by-congressional-district

Bottom lines is the whole country is getting more hispanic, inner cities on the coast are the rare places that are getting whiter (especially Harlem!), and exurban areas have rapid black and hispanic growth.

#2: Online dating interactions by race:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/

Main points are that white males are the most attractive males and middle eastern females are the most popular women.

Also surprising is that among okcupid users (largely young and liberal), 54% of white females and 40% of white males "strongly prefer" to date within their own race.

Among non-whites of both sexes, only 20% "strongly prefer" to date within their race.

Lots of other interest data on the blog.

The M to F economist is Deirdre McCloskey. She's sort a libertarian Milton Friedman protege, and that part of the profession is in current disgrace. Hopefully this will last.

Pic of here and some other MtF academics are here:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/TSgallery3.html

Ah, I went through a Piers Anthony phase as a young boy. Naked robot girls, topless centaur women, princesses with ripped blouses, space princesses with ripped blouses — his stuff had everything! 🙂
Seriously, though, Anthony pretty much did offer everything my 12 year old brain craved – robots, wizards, spaceships, magic, rayguns … and all topped with generous amounts of jiggling breasts. All I read were the Xanth, Blue Adept and Incarnations series. The sexy naked robot girls of the scifi-fantasy Adept series I found particularly enthralling.

The chart also shows that amazing mid 20th century spike. It appears the growth rate now is closer to the late 19th century rate.

Well, this particular paranoid fantasy seems a combination of cheesy 80s SF like “V” and “They Live”.
Clearly, we just need to sick Rowdy Roddy Piper on these lizard people, and make sure he’s out of bubble gum. In a pinch Nature Boy Ric Flair could substitute.
I expect we can look forward to paranoia based on Battlestar Galactica in 20 years, and some sort of Matrix-based doomsday cult should pop up any day now.

"Republican states, wealthy white voters are more likely to be Republicans than downscale white voters. That’s not true in Democratic states"

Again you glide by a key issue killing republicans. Why is it that coastal rich whites don't vote for the GOP anymore?

Maybe because, as a previous comment noted, the GOP has become the party of Sarah Palin and Toby Keith. Of nutjob fag-bashing megachurch preachers. Of the birthers.

It's actually worse than that for the GOP. The children of the rich, even in whitest middle America, are also alienated from the party and voted strongly for Obama.

A few years ago you made the excellent point that the GOP turns off secular whites with its anti-environmentalism. That was a really good start.

More recently however your analysis degraded into juvenile SWPLblogging. At the same time, the GOP, which was once competitive everywhere in the USA, has now basically vanished from the Northeast and Pacific Coast, and has gone from dominating the interior West to at best breaking even.

It is a lot easier to come up with a winning agenda for the GOP than it is to figure out how to get that person through a GOP primary.

Mitt Romney, running as a middle-of-the-road "adult" candidate beat a democrat for governor of Massachusetts. Rudy Guiliani won twice in NYC, which is about 5-1 Democrat. Pete Wilson and Arnold both won in California twice by large margins.

The winning formula for the GOP is clear: law and order is a top priority, and centrism on social and economic issues.

Is there really much doubt Romney/Giuliani wouldn't have beat Obama in 2008, in particular a Romney that didn't have to flip flop on a dozen issues to be viable in GOP primaries?

The reason this won't happen is the party is solidly in the hands of a few corporate interests, what Ike called the military-industrial complex, with as abused junior partners social conservative activists.

The people who run the party now are very keen on keeping control of it, even if it means losing most of the time. They have a lot of money, and I don't see any group capable of taking control of the party from them.

Again, your analysis here is very week. You accuse Asian democrats of "conformism" and high-income white Democrats of false-consciousness and say their heads are full of unrealistic ideas about race.

In fact, the Republican party is shocking and grotesque in both its platform and leaders. White Californians are well aware their interests do not coincide with NAMs. That's not the reason they vote for Democrats. It's that the Republican alternative is far far worse.

Where have you ever acknowledged that trashing the environment, trashing public institutions and finances, trashing the American tradition of public secularism and dragging the country into multiple bloody middle eastern wars is a far worse than, *God forbid it*, having a 15% minority set aside at elite colleges and road construction projects?

It'd be awesome if you could get an article about race broken down by football position into a sports magazine or high-traffic website. Seems like you have most of the necessary research and ideas already at hand.

A great way to get HBD science some additional exposure!

Andrea, you make the same mistake that Steve does.

Republicans nominate an blood-thirsty corporatist warmonger of little intelligence and an even duller and less articulate Pentecostal megachurch fundie who participated in exorcisms and doesn't read newspapers. A woman who was so blinded by religion she lacked the good sense to abort her downs syndrome fetus!

Democrats nominate a family man and Harvard Law School graduate who had the good sense to oppose the Iraq War and promise to end it.

Your (and Steve's conclusion): whites who voted for Obama because of guilt and racial egalitarianism! Also because Obama was "cool."

Whiskey, in addition to being a paranoid nut, you don't know the first thing about US military spending. You write:

"Military spending as a measure of GDP collapsed after Reagan from about 4-5% to about 2% now"

In fact, quoting from the well sourced wikipedia article "For FY 2009, Department of Defense spending amounts to 4.8% of GDP."

Including non DoD defense spending like DOE nuclear weapons programs and the present value of future VA obligations incurred this year, we are at well over 5%.

God you are just so damn stupid! Off by a factor of 150%!

Also, your figure under Reagan are wrong, they did not range between 4-5%, rather they ranged between 5 and 6%. So relative military spending is only slightly below the Reagan years. It did not "collapse."

Green River:

I agree Democrats are doing well in part because they co-opted the best GOP issues by moving right on guns, crime, and welfare. All racially charged issues.

The obvious solution for the GOP: Keep on moving right! Dems will probably follow them leading to positive social change, but if they choose instead to side with NAM criminals then GOP rides into office.

NAM street crime is way down from the peaks, but still could be lower.

Aside from street crime, how about a program to have random insurance checkpoints and immediately inpound the vehicles not properly insured. Or if we want to be nice give them 10 days to provide proof of insurance.

What a wedge issue! On one side are republicans PLUS the insurance companies PLUS environmentalists PLUS the those of us with nice new beamers tired of driving behind 1983 Ford Rangers full of old coaches and lawn mowers going 42 MPH PLUS all the liberals concerned about getting hit by the uninsured illegals. On the other side: La Raza and that's about it.

Also, more welfare cuts! The big scam right now is not welfare itself, but the same lazy bums that were kicked off welfare going onto disability for supposed "bad backs" or "mental illness." Go to any ghetto and half the population is on the dole for fake or minor disabilities. I see birthers on TV all the time, I don't think I have EVER seen a republican change the subject to cracking down on disability fraud.

Asians like this even better because they are the least likely to have criminal/welfare family members and most likely to be crime victims.

I briefly dated a girl who combined several interesting variants of crazy. She was early 20s and amazingly hot and pretty bright, but was a born-again virgin. (I learned later that she’d been a slutty pot-head in college and had recently gone straight when I met her. But she seemed sweet, if quirky, at first.)
The born-again virgin thing was odd, but I don’t rush these things anyway and was happy to date her awhile and see if she was worth the wait.
By the third date she casually said she thought the moon-landings were fake. The cool, if insane, part was she believed we had landed on the moon, but not until the 1980s and the early footage had all been faked. I never learned why she believed that.
The 4th, and last, date involved her trying to get me to confront her neighbor who she believed was trying to kill her dog in the middle of the night.
Now, my crazy-ometer had been going off from the beginning, but … well she was really, really hot and extremely … sensual. She was clearly not wired to be a born-again virgin. She was more like an alcoholic trying not to drink but who still likes hanging out at bars. She was also clearly not wired, unfortunately, to be especially sane. I bolted when her craziness went past quirky and into paranoia about real people.
Oh, she attended some weird super-charismatic church, perhaps not new-age, but definitely not a mainstream church. She wanted me to attend with her, but I bolted before that. Beautiful, but crazy.

I'm not bothered by athletes endorsing consumer crap, but I always find it highly depressing that every time I go to an airport I see really lame Tiger Woods posters advertising Accenture.

Here is an example:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3240/2368238228_85e68c2dbc.jpg

It is depressing because it upsets my mental image of the men who run large corporations as not be dumb enough to be swayed by paid celebrity endorsements. Hiring Accenture I think generally runs a company at least $250,000!

They even have a hokey jingle "We know what it takes to be a Tiger."

Blech. I think he got a multi-year deal worth $30 million from accenture. If their margin is 50% that means they in signing it think they will get an extra $60 million in business. Hopefully they're wrong.

"the left has for the last four decades been more anti-Semitic than the right."

Listen to any mainstream right-wing media source and you see endless attacks on: lawyers, hollywood, teacher unions, New York City, professors, etc.

It's not the mainstream right hates Jews per se, they just hate all the main Jew-heavy
demographics.

"there’s no sign that quotas will be imposed to keep Jewish representation in, say, Ivy League colleges down"

The very top schools have informal policies under the rubric of economic and geographic diversity that help white gentiles at the expense of jews.

If you are a white guy from a middle class family in Boise you are a lot more likely to get in with the same test score and GPA than the kid of a jewish banker in New York.

The problem is there just aren't all that many top scoring non-jewish whites from the sticks.

Let me put it this way: if the white mean is IQ 100 and Ashk. jewish mean is 115 and the standard deviations for both is 15, then a jew is 42.5 times more likely to have an IQ of 160.

If white gentiles are 65% of the U.S. population and Ashk jews 2% then the total white population with IQ > 160 is majority Jewish.

"Thus Jewish demonization of immigration reform patriots…"

Unfortunately "immigration reform patriots" are a group that overlaps with and does not completely disavow anti-semites.

Big Mistake.

In politics you have to pick your fights.

"Don't f– with the Jews is good advice." It really also applies to any group with high verbal IQ: gays, indians, etc.

If you can't find anything nice to say, and you actually care about your cause, then say nothing at all. I guess your excuse is you're a journalist first and a activist second.

Responding to a few points (easier to do if people would pick a fake name rather than anon!):

My math saying that an Ashkenazim is 42.5 more likely than a gentile to have a 160 IQ is correct, the question is whether the assumptions are. The AshJ mean of 115 I think is pretty solid, but being a less diverse group they probably have a lower SD. The general point still stands, however, that at the very far right of the IQ curve is very very Jewish.

Second, sorry if you don't believe me that Jews are slightly discriminated against compared to gentiles in ivy admissions, but it is simply the case.

White gentiles are more likely to add economic and geographic diversity, more likely to be #1 in their HS class, and more likely to get athletic and music bonuses.

Defending my point that paleos need to get their priorities straight and do a better job of choosing their enemies:

1. You don't need discuss Jews to oppose middle east wars. In fact doing so turns people off and weakens your argument. Funny Obama managed to vote against the war and run against it without attacking Jews. Funny the most effective anti-Wall Street congressman is the jew Alan Grayson.

2. To even consider wasting time and political capital on the meaningless issue of gay marriage when the country is hurtling towards demographic disaster is incredibly puerile and bigoted.

Looking over to Europe, the two most successful anti-immigration parties were actually led by a gay and a bisexual (Pim Fortuyn and Jorg Haider). In each case their parties were actually part of the ruling coalition and put into effect strong restrictions.

By contrast, over in the UK the anti-Semitic and anti-gay BNP is a joke that has never elected a single MP and gets 1 or 2% of the vote.

Young people are the most hurt by immigration but they are not going to vote for a party that focuses on cramming retrograde fuddy-duddy Christian morality down their throats.

RKU: I think it is fairly obvious that gay males have verbal iq's above the mean for their respective ethnic groups. Arther Hu makes the point on that large page full of stats he has. My guess is about a third of a SD.

SAT scores have some flaws to them if you want to rank ethnic groups this way.

An Ashkenazim with IQ of 95, for example, is probably more likely to take the test because of family expectations than a gentile, thereby depressing their scores.

One reason that Lutherans are so high is that they are concentrated in the ACT region of the country, so only the self-selected group of those who think it is worthwhile to go to college outside of the midwest will take the SAT.

This is a much better sample that SAT scores!

It also shows that the commenter who said the Ashkenazi average is only 110 is wrong, given this sample of Jew would include non-Ashkenazi Jews plus the product of mixed marriages who identify as Jewish, and still has an average of 111.3.

BTW Steve, I love these well-sourced ethnic data posts!

RKU: I was only speaking of Ashkenazi as having IQs of 115.

Anthony: I do think jews tend to marry gentiles with lower IQs (though not a whole SD lower), but even if they marry those with equal IQs, the product of their marriage will regress to a lower mean than a product of two Ashkenazi. The mean will be around 107.5 rather than 115.

I have a lot of respect for doctors, but as for adding value, the majority of medical spending the USA is from the government, and a lot of that goes to end-of-life spending on those who will never contribute to society again and/or never saved or paid taxes enough previously to pay for their subsidized care.

Also doctors in Japan and Western Europe get paid a lot less and seem to do a better job given those countries' average life expectancy.

Again the UK has the best system: completely free and very efficient basic care paid for the by government, and private care with no subsidies if you want more.

And before you say that this would require higher taxes, the British pay less in taxes to support their efficient socialist system than we pay for our inefficient semi-socialist system.

I watched a few episode of the first season but found it slow and boring.

Very pretty actors, clothes, and sets, but that gets old very fast with the dull and predictable plot.

Women like the manly main character in part because we are in a depression and this makes them value security over the prettier and friendlier types.

Likewise men in recessions go for physically larger older women with higher earning power.

Lithe and skinny for both sexes go out the window when the economy is bad.

Middletown Girl:

Mainstream conservatives circa 2009 are intellectually dead so of course they are not going to be able to perform the difficult intellectual task of creating -good- TV shows. At best there is the bland and formulaic puff put out by Disney and various Christian producers.

Back in the 1950's, however, and you had solid shows like Donna Reed and I Love Lucy that inculcated wholesome bourgeois values on the public and were huge successes.

Now the right has been completely bought off and corrupted by the military industrial complex is lacks the moral authority to do push conservative values on the public through art.

Can you imagine someone like Ann Coulter and her normal hooker outfits being able to make statements like Donna Reed used to with moral authority and without irony?

"Even walking to a movie with a young man shouldn’t be allowed before 16"

http://www.donnareedshow.com/articles/tvpiclife64.html

Here comes the hillbilly preening…..

RE: Food Taboos
You all seem to be forgetting what might be the biggest reason for food taboos: group cohesion. *We* don’t eat $animal, only those people-who-are-barely-people-because-they aren’t-us eat $animal. I would imagine a lot of religious and cultural customs are there simply as an artificial mechanism for group bonding. They let you identify other group members, make the other folks look bad and make your group look more pious for following those rules. Not drinking coffee lets Mormons feel all smug and superior to their non-Mormon colleagues.
I don’t drink alcohol, simply because my family did so so very rarely that it was not something I consider a normal activity. So I get to feel all superior to the drinkers. Sure, I can claim it’s because alcoholism is on both sides of my family. Or because I was such a nerd that I never hung out with the cool kids who got drunk on the weekends, but realistically it has become a way for me to be smug and morally superior. Same as other cultures or religions. 🙂
When it comes to cultural food types, it is mainly simply what you are used to. I wouldn’t eat honeyed locusts or horse because I didn’t grow up in a culture that did. Nor would I eat horse, cat, dog, lamb or guinea pig as I’ve had all of them as pets. In fact, one of the reasons my mother stopped raising chickens for food was because my brother and I started naming them. Killing, cleaning, and de-feathering also played a factor. Plucking a chicken is not a fun way to spend time and if you’ve ever missed a couple of feathers and smelled them burning in the oven it is not something you want to repeat. 😉
In America, the bias against eating things like squirrel, possum, raccoon, and other “varmints” is based on class/caste. Those animals are only eaten by “hillbillies”, “rednecks”, or whatever you want to call people on the lower end of the rural economic scale. See Beverly Hillbillies for examples of humor built on this.

I'm glad you recognize that these votes are all violations of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Thankfully our form of government is a Constitutional Republic, not a direct democracy. Basic rights are not subject to the vote.

Of course the big corporations who run both parties are glad the idiot white masses are more worried about teh buttseks rather than the country's very profitable demographic and industrial collapse.

If lack of DDT is causing deaths in the third world, you sure couldn't notice it based on their rapid population growth.

Why do environmentalists have to care about helping third world populations that are irresponsibly breeding like rabbits when hardly anyone else does?

Also much lulz at the paranoia about cap and trade.

A modest plan to make sure that huge CO2 emitters pay for their pollution is supposed is "fascism" and "nihilism"? Really?

It is even set up using a permit trading system that conservative economists have been pushing since the 1980's rather than a straight tax.

I highly agree with Anon that California should find ways to tax illegals more and high-earning citizens (like me!) less.

My favorite method is very strict enforcement of vehicle regulations. Immediate impound of the vehicles of unlicensed drivers or unregistered/uninsured vehicles! This is also good for the environment, good for traffic, and reduces insurance rates.

Higher property taxes are a good idea too if the money is used to lower income taxes. Property taxes are impossible for illegals to avoid and get passed on in higher rents, but they easily avoid income taxes.

Another good idea is to start applying the sales tax to food and to raise the rate overall.