One thing missing from the conversation is that this focus on building poorer quality institutions is actually embedding the power of white people. In Latin America white people basically win in every area because the bar is set so low that even lazy white people can’t help but come out on top.

Steve hints at this from time to time but it is never really fleshed out.

I was not discussing immigration regarding Steve’s business stance. Since you bring it up though it is not possible to compete in many industries if you hire only legal labor. It is delusional to think you can run a successful labor based business in LA county with legal labor for example. Not only from the labor cost perspective but the skills just don’t exist in the native born population for most labor jobs.

It’s not that Americans wont do the jobs they can’t do the jobs.

Hi Buzz you seem like a reasonable person. I own a business in CA (as well as other states) and I also interact with CA politicians for work reasons. Sadly getting what you want politically is actually remarkably easy. Very cheap too.

Personally I see caring as caring enough to act.

Emasculation comes in many forms. The writer of this blog frequently writes things that show a bias against business. This suspicion of business only comes from an emasculated society.

There is a reason that the continuing winners are the ones that promote endless immigration: Americans don’t care. Political power is not hard to get. People that wont fight deserve to lose.

Just think about the number of plane tickets the government could give away in lieu of spending the money on HSR.

Banking has never been about lending out savings at a higher rate than what is paid to depositors and your definition of usury is comically wrong.
Banks lend with very little regard to the amount of deposits they have. They lend first and get the regulatory capital later. If they happen to have the required capital on hand well and good but it is by no means a pre-condition to doing a loan.

It appears very few of you have had the opportunity to smoke Gold Flake.

Good stuff.

Cost of attendance at Colorado College for next year: $63,600.

Well that’s the posted rate anyway. I wonder what Rebecca’s parents think of the value they’ve received?

Skimming through these mug shots is like looking at the last 40 guys who’ve changed the oil in my car. If Jiffy Lube had its own army, it could be a pretty credible fighting force.

Let’s face it: most Americans are not worth $500k over the course of their entire life. Stolen money or no, these immigrants are at least a net financial gain to the US.
I enjoy reading this blog as a thought exercise but the author is always “once upon a time I did jury duty and a foreign guy went home with money he earned and didn’t give it to the state of CA to pay welfare”. I’m sorry white America: man up or go away.
Feeling superior to people who are kicking your ass by working harder just looks pathetic.

Germany has tried and failed to take over the world repeatedly. The English have exerted almost unbelievable control over most of the world’s surface for long periods.
In terms of which white tribe has “won” historically it is not even a close call.

The LA Times wrote about this today. This is a quote regarding why blacks have left San Francisco: “Civil rights leaders here attribute the exodus not just to the high cost of living, but to policies that have favored independent retailers over chains, urban renewal that tore down the housing where many African Americans lived, redlining by banks and high crime concentrated in neighborhoods where blacks lived.”

The last point has to be one of the more unintentionally hilarious things ever written in a major newspaper.

http://www.latimes.com/local/crime/la-me-sf-police-20150509-story.html

It’s weird to me that the more obvious “wife did it” possibility hasn’t been raised. Bruce Beresford-Redman took his wife to Mexico to kill her.

No need to do it yourself either local talent could do the job. Almost impossible to get caught in that country if you have money.

Yeah, the SWJ types I know are among the most conservative people I know when it comes to personal lifestyle.

The problem goes back to decolonization. That lead to instability, conflict and decline in living standards.

“Many people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, ravaged by war, hunger and disease, articulated the same sentiment. Ted Koppel, an American television journalist, visited eastern Congo in 2001 and produced a documentary showing women who had been raped, beaten and starved by the rebels, pleading for help. It was a poignant report. They made it clear, abundantly clear, in that documentary that it was only white people who could save them from misery and suffering. Once you see and hear that, then you may begin to understand why some Congolese felt it would have been better if the Belgians came back to rule them again and maintian law and order.”

http://africanstudies.tripod.com

Chris McCandless starved to death. He didn’t accidentally poison himself.

People who want to have one idea and get rich without work? Sounds like almost every American (of any culture) that I have ever met

I agree with Pinker that the sort of tech that Singularity folks talk about is hard.

But the future won’t be defined by the advanced tech we can’t figure out how to make work, but rather the stuff we can. Of which I suspect there’ll be no shortage.

The examples sound remarkably like the routine stupidity I encounter in my day to day life.

When I was in the Marines, I was up all night manning a post in a war gaming exercise. (Camp Roberts was the site, for those of you in the know.) I was the flunky lieutenant doing the work, but I had the privilege of being supervised by an LC that was one of the Marine helicopter pilots on Operation Eagle Claw.

What a comedy of errors.

He told me that when it was all said and done, the only thing he got out of the operation was a letter from the Justice Department telling him they would not prosecute him for any crimes he may have committed.

Yeah really. I’m a ‘Yankee’ and frankly am sick of hearing about slavery and harbor no particular animosity towards white people of the South.

Tonight, while you are sitting around the Easter dinner table with your family and friends, if the topic of minorities and housing comes up (God help you if it does) remember that the low income minorities that Steve is writing about were not hurt financially when the housing bubble burst.

In states with no personal recourse on mortgages borrowers with no down payment, low and unverified income, and little to no other assets, didn’t really purchase the house. They rented the house with an option to purchase.

They might have spent a couple hundred dollars at U-Haul for a truck rental for one extra move. That’s the extent of their financial damage.

If Steve’s assertion is propaganda, I guess you don’t think his assertion of lowered mortgage underwriting standards as a contributing cause to the housing bubble is correct. What do you believe is a stronger or non-propagandist cause?

You are not allowed to use the word “greed” in your answer.

Your lack of knowledge is showing. You are implying that you save up and buy your vehicles where dealers buy their cars. Car auctions in LA are dealer only. OPG auctions are open to the public but legal dealers are very unlikely to buy a car there.

People also do not have the ability or desire to save and pay cash for cars. Odds are very strong that this includes you.

Your assertion that picking up cars is a feature of these businesses is about twenty years out of date. Nowadays people with bad credit can walk into shiny dealerships with $500 and a paystub (fake or real) and walk out with a very nice car. Why are they going to put thousands of dollars – which they don’t have – down on a beater?

Why comparing Jewish women’s apparent respect for their virtue to the world’s greatest soccer player’s respect for competition rather than for fakery is supposed to be anti-Semitic is unexplained.

That made me laugh…

Much funnier than Noah’s tweet.

You were dividing by 150,000. However:

“But only 12,748 of the 150,000 apartments were earmarked for low- and moderate-income tenants…”

You should have been dividing by 12,748. The result is $83,15o per unit.

I love how not one person has challenged your your completely made up (and wildly wrong) 7,000% number.
Most payday lenders are struggling middle class and couldn’t be further from Wall Street if they tried. They lend to people who no one trusts – family and friends included – and the default rates are off the charts.
Even the concept of APR being applied to a two week loan is somewhat stupid. If you asked a friend to spot you $300.00 no one would think it weird if the friend gave you an extra $50.00 as a “thank you”. When a business does it all of a sudden we decide to stretch out the loan as if it lasts for an entire year and get shocked that the APR is higher than a credit card. In CA it costs $8.00 to borrow $50.00 from a payday lender. So what?!
The cycle of debt thing is a joke. That $8.00 is trapping you forever?!

The car dealer thing also falls into a made up scandal territory. Several people have written here that the evil dealers resell cars they repo. What are they supposed to do?

I think I am the only pro business voice that ever comments here. Instead of yearning for a white utopia why don’t some of you get off your butt and try to run a business. Since everyone on here is an expert in payday lending my suggestion would be to start there. Get back to me when you’ve burned through all the money you’ve managed to scrape together.

As usual the government is looking in the wrong place. If you want to find discrimination, you can’t look at the loan terms, you must look at portfolio performance/profitability. If my ROI on my “black” loan pool is higher than that of my “white” pool, I may in fact be discriminating. I think competition really drives racial disparity to zero.

Like Lot, I’m concerned about anyone that is going to be taken advantage of by someone with my skills and background. I think a lot of bad regulation has allowed the current situation to come into being. Back when I was a banker in the early ’90’s we wouldn’t finance payday lenders, we were very choosy about used car dealers and only financed a couple of pawn shops. Financing tote the note lots put another layer of security/repayment between us and the less than credit worthy consumer. Pawn shop loans are non-recourse so they, while having very high interest rates, are not really evil. Really shady guys could not get bank financing. All their stuff had to be done out of personal capital.

Now we have publicly traded companies with bank financing making the payday loan racket possible on the scale we see today. Just another example of gaming the regulations. In the old days we had guys that were concerned about their reputation in the banking industry. Today, with their ability to hide behind regulation… Not so much.

Pro tip to the iSteve community: if you see an old guy like me sitting across the table from you with an HP-12c, run. If I’m allowed to sell you a product with no clear market price, and also finance that sale, I can rip you off in one dimension or another.

The Bushes?

I know I’m wearing out my welcome tonight, but…

I’m sitting here having a whiskey or two… And I’m very interested in this story.

OU has one of the most generous National Merit Finalist scholarships in the entire country. It is a five year deal and is what is known as “full ride plus.”

I can assure President Boren that he’s lost one particular National Merit Finalist for the Fall of 2015.

And I’m happy about it, even though it will cost me money.

I know I can’t fix the football/education problem at our state flagship universities on my own, but I can move one student in the right direction. Give me a little individual justice to be on the side of and I’ll feel even better about the money I’m going to have to spend.

(There is no Social Justice. There can be justice for individuals. We all need to be in favor of justice for individuals.)

You know Steve, I don’t know about that particular charge.

But, he was a U.S. Senator…

So I know which way I would bet.

My son is a student at Jesuit. This is what I meant by hitting too close to home.

The SJW’s were protesting at the Rice family home this week. WTF?!

Also, for another peach on the football team at OU, google up Dorial Green-Beckham.

OU was angry with the NCAA that Green-Beckham had to sit out the season.

“The judicial outcome and the video speak for themselves,” Oklahoma President David L. Boren said. “The University is an educational institution, which always sets high standards that we hope will be upheld by our students. We hope that our students will all learn from those standards, but at the same time, we believe in second chances so that our students can learn and grow from life’s experiences.”

That was President Boren recently when Joe Mixon was reinstated to the football team. Go read that whole post linked in that quote.

This one hit a little too close to home for me.

Like the UVa rape scandal, the local media (with help from the big league) will protect the reputation of Madison. The lefties have to go to UW-Madison. There isn’t a tuition reciprocity agreement with Iowa.

Iowa City is pretty cool, but it’s not Madison. And if the reputation of Madison falls to the level of Ferguson, do you really expect the students to go to Minneapolis (where there is tuition reciprocity)?

There is no need to fear Madison eclipsing Ferguson as The Most Important Place on Earth. The Badgers, especially those that want their children to attend UW-Madison, will make certain that doesn’t happen.

Matt Kenny should be afraid of what may happen to him. Much more afraid than Darren Wilson ever needed to be.

Lot, I thought that line was funny without looking for his image. Now that I’ve gone off to see the resemblance, the line is even funnier.

Steve, thanks for the pointer, that was a great read.

OT, but Dr Frost & other commentators may wish to comment on this appalling straw man piece by Dr Rutherford, who I thought would have higher standards.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/01/racism-science-human-genomes-darwin#comment-48268761

OT, but Steve or other commentators may wish to comment on this straw man article at the Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/01/racism-science-human-genomes-darwin#comment-48268761

Dave, you’re absolutely right about the lack of White Protestants on the U.S. Supreme Court but you have answered your own question, and I quote, “White Protestants, who are primarily of British stock, are the most individualistic people in the world, according to everybody who tracks this stuff.”

That’s the reason! White Protestants are INDIVIDUALISTIC. They are not “company men. ” Catholics ARE company men/women. Catholics are taught to “do as they’re told.” (I’m Catholic myself so no slights are intended; that’s what the Baltimore Catechism is all about –“do as you’re told.”) For example: The last two White Protestants on the U.S. Supreme Court were both appointed by Republicans: David Souter and John Paul Stevens. Both turned out to be the EXACT OPPOSITE of what their Republican Presidents wanted. They were TOO individualistic and became extremely liberal. They were NOT ” company men.” George H. W. Bush (41st President) put Souter on the Court. In the infamous case of Bush v. Gore regarding the 2000 Presidential election, Souter took the Gore side! Even though Souter owed his job to a Bush, he individualistically went out of his way to vote against the Bush family’s interest. Likewise, President Gerald Ford put Stevens on the Court only to find out Stevens was more liberal than anyone else on the Court. In Bush v. Gore, Stevens ALSO took the Gore/ Democratic side, not the side of the Republican candidate.

MAKE NO MISTAKE: I’m not being partisan. I’m pretty liberal myself. It goes both ways: Republican or Democrat. But if I’m a President , I want a “company man” or “company woman” who is gonna toe the line for my beliefs. If I’m George H.W. Bush (41st President) the last guy I want is a Souter who votes against my son (George W. Bush, 43rd President) in Bush v. Gore. Catholics are taught to toe the line. They obey hierarchy. They kneel, and say “mea culpa, mea ultima culpa”. I’m a Catholic myself, and I don’t recall the Catholic Church ever telling me to “think for yourself.” You’re to obey. Same goes with Democratic Presidents: Pick a Catholic and they’re used to toeing the line and being company men/women. Pick a Protestant and who have an individualistic loose cannon who’ll “think for himself/herself” and WON’T do what you want.

As far as I can tell, you’re making a valid point that gene function depends on context, a valid point that balanced polymorphisms exist, and a valid point that mutations are an important factor in long-term adaptation.

But then you go for what seems to me to be two ridiculous conclusions, that (1) any genetic engineering whatsoever is necessarily doomed to failure, because any optimization we can possibly think of involves unforseeable tradeoffs, *even if it’s just fixing a genome’s most obvious Loss-of-Function mutations*, and (2) that it’s always problematic to call any given mutation “negative”, because who knows, it could do something good in some context.

This misunderstanding seems rather fundamental, and resting on very different understandings of these ‘typos’ I suggest fixing: it feels like you’re arguing off of your definition of genetic variation, and I’m arguing off population genetics’ definition of genetic load, and ne’er shall the twain meet. Which is fine, but I think we may be getting into diminishing returns from discussion. If you want to see genetic load more as population genetics does, I can recommend the following fairly accessible sources:

– Armand Leroi on ‘mutants’ (written before we had much genetic data on load and mutation rate, but still a reasonable abstract overview):
http://edge.org/conversation/the-nature-of-normal-human-variety

– Greg Cochran on genetic load (all worthwhile reading):
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/?s=genetic+load

– Kevin Mitchell on the basic ‘sand in the gears’ hypothesis of genetic load decreasing intelligence: http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2012/07/genetics-of-stupidity.html

– Optionally, the MacArthur paper on the methodology in, and results of, finding LoF variants (a longer, less accessible read, but good background if you’re interested):
https://macarthurlab.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/lof_final-manuscript-with-figures_120216.pdf

– Optionally, Hsu’s paper laying out his methodology and estimates for finding IQ-reducing variants (Hsu’s methodology may indeed involve some balanced polymorphisms, aka tradeoffs):
http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421

You can also just google ‘genetic load population genetics’ or ‘genetic load Haldane’ (co-founder of population genetics, who also coined the concept of genetic load) and you’ll find a lot to read. Some of the literature uses the term ‘mutational load’ interchangeably with ‘genetic load’, which can be confusing. But I assure you, this isn’t exactly an unstudied problem…

It seems to me you want to say something about mutation, adaptation, and ecological niches, but aren’t quite clear on how to phrase the statement.

Are you suggesting that no gene variant can ever be more across-the-board adaptive than any other gene variant? Or that if a random mutation happens, our probability estimate shouldn’t skew toward it likely having a negative effect? Or that there’s no such thing as a “loss-of-function” mutation, since function is contextual? Or that random mutation is the core engine behind adaptive evolution, so it has a net positive effect on our genomes? Or that accumulating mutations in not-so-important-or-inactivated-genes is useful as a pool of genetic variance, that can be drawn upon during times of increased selection pressures (basic ‘punctuated equilibrium’ theory)? Or that evolution, for all its blind chance, is probably smarter than humans would be if we tried to ‘fix’ our genomes, so we should leave well enough alone?

The above statements are all very different. A couple are reasonable, with some caveats, whereas others go against every foundational equation in the field of population genetics.

Mike- yes in theory, if we can edit the genome, we can replace ‘good’ genes with better ones.

But it’ll be really complicated to do this. Generally, if there’s a ‘good’ version of a gene, it won’t be easy to improve upon it in a way that doesn’t involve subtle (or obvious) tradeoffs. Eventually this sort of ‘from good to amazing’ enhancement will happen, I’m sure, but it’ll take deep knowledge of how genes contribute to our phenotype, and a lot of trial-and-error, and maybe there’s not a ton of room for improvement without completely remaking our genomes.

Meanwhile, we have a bunch of broken genes laying around, and we already know the ‘good’ versions work (since almost everybody carries the good variant of any given gene). We don’t have to know nearly as much about the nuts-and-bolts of how things work to fix these errors. The neat thing is the potential benefits from doing this are surprisingly large.

Melendwyr-

There’s natural genetic variation, and there are errors. This idea of ‘spellcheck’ leaves natural genetic variation (and most balanced polymorphisms) intact, while fixing the obvious, low-hanging-fruit errors.

It’s reasonable to say context is important, but it’s unreasonable to say “outside of specific contexts, there is no such thing as a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ gene”– many errors are simply bad. Negative. They break the gene, and this hurts us. Full stop.

Any hypothetical ‘spellcheck’ process wouldn’t have much impact on ongoing accumulation of de novo mutations, so evolution would still happen if it was a one-time thing. If it was an ongoing process, sure, evolution would slow down (but you still have a gazillion possible combinatorial arrangements of existing genes, so it’d by no means stop). But something tells me worrying about genetic engineering having the capacity to stop evolution is kind of missing the point: I guarantee genetic engineering will lead to a lot more genetic change, not less.

Yet instead of asking for proof (I have a deluge of numbers waiting) this is your response. Says it all.

If the natives were not lazy the absurd regulatory burden would not exist. Americans literally have no ownership in their own country. It takes an engaged citizenry to care about the rules that govern how things work. Instead everyone congregates here and cries into their beer. Sad.

Fantastic call on the camel overcoats. Could be like one of those features in celebrity magazines, Who Wore It Best?

It’s a tough call but Isaac but a hair.

The only thing that reliably unites everyone in the US anymore is their dislike of small business owners. Hating small business is a constant iSteve theme.
As an immigrant from a (more civilized) first world country, the US really deserves the third world social environment it is building. The complexities of running a smaller company here are ridiculous.
What Steve fails to understand (and doesn’t care to try) is that the tax burden here is irrational. For a business I once owned I did the math of the percentage of revenue it would take to be in compliance with all laws: city, state and federal. It came to 110%. No one believes me or cares when I tell them this but math has a funny way of being right.
Being hostile to small and medium business is profoundly stupid. Immigrants own almost all SME businesses here. Isn’t it something of a clue that if a people of a country are too lazy to run a business that their elites will walk all over them in all areas including immigration?

Gene Su-

I wasn’t aware Hulugu Khan did genocide in Old Baghdad. By all accounts it was a world class “rape,
pillage and plunder” ass kicking that the Arabs never really recovered from.

Those “exceptions” in popular entertainment prove there’s a huge market for conservative-friendly stories that the self-appointed guardians of popular culture want to suppress. If they can’t suppress them, they’ll do their best to ignore them.

It is ridiculous that these stories keep getting written.

Your conservatism when it comes to race and your discomfort with capitalism is always a weird mix to watch. As an auto lender in your neighborhood I can affirm that Hispanics and particularly blacks tend to pay more for auto finance. The reason is their dismal credit on average and their history of getting repossessed.

And no, car dealers in reality NEVER lend to consumers. Car dealers do not have the the right personality to have a thousand dollars in their pocket and not spend it. They don’t even buy the cars they sell – they are all on credit from the auction house. Buying at auction has worse prices and very frequent major mechanical problems attached: you get better prices and know what you are getting with a Craigslist transaction.

The solution to the problem of your belief that blacks and Hispanics get discriminated against by lenders is simple: lend your own money at what you consider fair terms. Once you have lost all your money you might finally have a real world lesson that differences in race exist.

My mother’s high-school competed as the “Newell Irrigators”. Their rivals? The “Vale Beet-diggers”.

I’m not sure if these are pejorative or not…

It’s sadly obvious that most of the negative replies to Mr. Bonomo’s article, comes from complete tools.I can see that most, if not all of you tools have been thoroughly educated by sitting in front of your TV’s and burping and farting large amount of odorous gases from your beer infused bodies.A friendly bit of advice, remove your collective heads from your asses and get a real life.

Would you consider running for President? It has been far to long since I have heard anyone say something that was as simple and to the point as your statement. WELL SAID!!

Merry Christmas, Steve!

“obtained a huge database of its comments and user information.” How?

“Anderson Cooper of CNN should be near the top of the gullible list.”

Gullible? Come on the guy did an internship at the CIA when he was in college. Look it up. He’s just another news actor paid to produce propaganda. None of these people are gullible they know what they’re doing.

When you go to the original story URL the ‘A Note to Our Readers‘ admission by Will Dana that they maybe probably shouldn’t have published the story doesn’t appear anywhere:

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-20141119

Rolling Stone is a joke

Geez…

All this way and nobody got the difference between safety glass (a sheet of plastic sandwiched between two pieces of plain ol’ glass – your windshield), tempered glass (glass that has gone through a heat process to improve strength, this breaks into pebbles – your car door windows), and plain ol’ glass.

A young lady would not be comfortable on her back for three hours on pieces of any of the three types,
raped or not.

I believe the table was plain glass or tempered glass. Safety glass would be very unusual in a table top application. But, like someone way up thread said, falling through that top with some guy on top of her would have hurt like a mother when hitting the frame/legs/base. Broken rib or two? Another detail left out? Or maybe the whole thing was…

Funniest comment ever!

One thing that intrigues me about Sherman is that his March to the Sea and campaign through South Carolina seem to be seen by and large as successful morale-destroying campaigns. On the other hand, strategic bombing aimed at breaking the morale of civilian populations usually has been seen as counterproductive. There seems like a contradiction in there, but then again, maybe there’s a fair distinction between armies ravaging a land and bombers ravaging a land.

Regarding Jewish intelligence – there are only a few million of them (15 mil?), so there are far, FAR, more intelligent whites in the world so I don’t see what the big deal about Jewish intelligence is. In America the vast majority of highly intelligent people are white not Jewish. And of course, statistically, there are FAR more highly intelligent Asians than Jews.

Jewish intelligence is interesting only in statistical terms, not absolute terms, in that say 80% of Jews are doctors or whatever (lets say) while only 20% of whites or whatever. That’s a fun fact, sure – but the fact remains that Jews represent a tiny proportion of world intellect, and a small proportion of the American intellect.

IF you admire intellect, then why not simply admire intelligent people, whoever they are. Admiring intellect isn’t a reason for admiring Jews its a reason for admiring intelligent people.

The fact is, however, that Jews have been performing far above their intellect, because their traditional insecurity and social inferiority has given them a level of drive and ambition, and need to prove and validate themselves, far beyond top-dog whites, who have no need to prove anything, or millenia-old-civilization Asians. Asians recently began to feel the need to validate themselves, and Jews have recently shown a reduction in performance as documented by Ron Unz, so things may be changing. Whites have the kind of embarrassed indifference for extreme competitiveness typical of top-dogs, but as they become a minority and their power declines, we may see the return of driven, ambitious whites.

“Fact: When they work and pay taxes, they add money.” I wasn’t aware that adding the word “fact” in front of a statement that is untrue turned it into a fact.

Two points:

– I think you are vastly over rating how much anyone in LA would care if they ran someone over.

– Serial killers are profiled as white males. This has been true for those caught. Advances in DNA testing and its widespread use are resulting in black males with multi decade killing sprees getting caught.
This has been puzzling me but I believe I have worked it out: white serial killers have a different internal moral architecture and WANT to get caught. Every serial killer of any fame has usually taunted the police with notes or killing in a way that vast attention is paid to the crime. What is different with the black killings starting to emerge is that they clearly have zero interest in getting caught. There is no inner voice saying “what you are doing is wrong”. Black serial killers seem to kill those who no one is surprised to see die violently.
White serial killers have a propensity for grand gestures – pentagrams daubed on the body etc – which is like a neon sign that the crime is out of the ordinary. They also frequently attack people who no one expects to die a violent death – the pretty young receptionist, the college student.
In the coming decades I think we are going to see (at least inside law enforcement) an understanding that black serial killing – like all other violent crimes – is a field dominated by black males. White serial killers are basically the hipsters of the serial killing world: “look at me, I made the ink for my pentagram from the ink of the rarest squid on earth! Lets see if the police can work it out!”.
While not evidence, places where black culture is the dominant force have murderers that commit serial killings without blinking an eye. Killing is routine in vast parts of Africa with little fear of law enforcement. Dominant people in communities kill people that displease them as a routine event. It is clear that the behavior and culture from Africa were imported here along with slaves and it seems incredible that this feature of society somehow managed not to be transmitted.

I laughed.

jjbees seems to have taken your comment seriously.

I am baffled that India is not included in this round of cheating scandals. Maybe it is because cheating is so ingrained in their society that no one even bothers to complain.

The fundamental attribution error might possibly cause us to see characters we identify with as hurt by external factors out of their control when things go bad, and when things go well for these characters we identify with, we see the cause as part of the characters’ inherent goodness.

On the other hand, the characters we don’t like, the baddies often, I guess, we will maybe see as inherently bad when they do bad things, and we’ll dismiss external causes. This all maybe fits into an ecological rationality framework in the sense it naturally puts opposing sides into a prosecutor-defense-like relationships where nature and nurture are both brought into the debate and given a full examination, I guess.

I have to admit that I liked Nairobi. My visit was really enjoyable. A white waiter would get more action than you could possible imagine.

Now I know what some of you are going to say…

I know it is late to the comment thread, but shameless self promotion anyway:

The Great Raccoon Battle at the White Rock Kitchens homestead.

In this EconTalk podcast, Roger Noll says that there are 70 to 80 kids with the skills, abilities, and academic chops to both get admitted to and play football at Stanford graduating from high school each year. Stanford has to recruit 25 of them.

I bet they keep track of likely suspects. They have to.

We’d be in a much better place all-around if Karl Popper’s view, that the worth of a statement is in its predictive power, was emphasized much more strongly in school.

As a resident of the area yourself I’m surprised you mention the Valley Girl accent without also mentioning that it no longer exists.

Edward Snowden is not given any credit for telling the truth in this article. And General James Clapper is not given credit for his lies. The liar stays in power – the truth teller is a fugitive.

Why are so many of these internal spymasters – generals? How much power do they have? Shouldn’t we really be worried about them spying on congress and the administration?

J Edgar Hoover spied on Washington and stayed in power – are the Clapper types doing the same? Is that the source of their power?

Hmm – It seems that the NSA and AIPAC have the same agenda?

The writer his simply betraying his age and that he hasn’t inherited his father’s skill in asking people what they think. Survey after survey now shows that a majority do not believe in the American dream and think they have little chance of moving up. If you actually ask people what they think of their opportunities almost everyone sees the deck stacked against them. This is a reasonable viewpoint at this point in history.

I have actually achieved the American Dream (penniless immigrant to significant income and decent wealth) but it is not a journey I would care to relive. If anyone tells me “oh that’s so cool, I want to start a business too!” I advise them against it. The US is designed to grind bootstrappers into dust. The country is a quicksand of red tape designed purely to keep out newcomers. The idea that this is some kind of capitalist paradise is a joke.

“We are in the cross-hairs.” What do you mean, “we”, Mr. Reed?
Judging by your recent columns, I thought you had become a Mexican.

“If courts simply honored contracts, we would quickly see pre-nups–no alimony, shared custody, no child support–that would end divorce rape, correct the balance and make marriage a safe and attractive option for men again. ”
Ain’t gonna happen.
The two constants that underlie the state laws dealing with kids and families generally (let’s just call it Family Law) are: (1) the state does not want to support the kid(s) if someone else is around to do it and (2) courts are supposed to make decisions about custody, support, etc., based what is best for the child (referred to as Best Interests of the Child, or BIC. The key to making almost any court decision involving kids is BIC). Not the parent.
That is why, e.g., when an unmarried woman with children applies for welfare, the government (in my neck of the woods, NY, it would be the County welfare dept.) will always try to get her to give up the names of the Baby Daddies. They will then pursue them and try to squeeze money out of them.

In a Family Law regime recognizing and honoring contracts, the state could not do this.

“A few times, prospective parents in the audience announced that they were going to avoid this expense and use just one woman, a surrogate who would both conceive and carry the child. The lawyers always warned them not to do that. ”
The “Baby M” case, a Long Island dispute some years ago, involved just this kind of arrangement , and Newsday, the local left-wing newspaper, always described the mother as a “surrogate”, which annoyed me.
In what way is a woman who conceives and bears a child a “surrogate”? A surrogate for what? She is just selling her rights to the child , pure and simple. The lawyer is correct, however, that the mother, as in Baby M case, will generally renage on the contract of sale. Whether is a result of new-found maternal feelings or just an attempt to squeeze more money out of the baby purchasers will vary case-to-case, I suppose.

Exactly.

I remember sitting around in ’97 or ’98 trying to figure out payments on the internet. It was such an obvious need. If I was doing it, so were about 100,000 other guys, most of them smarter and harder working than me.

That at the end of the tournament we have a company, PayPal that dominates the market is not surprising.

That anybody thinks Thiel is something more than just another hard working smart guy is surprising.

Survivorship Bias. It affects both the winners and losers of these winner takes most tournaments.

I actually know the answer to this. It requires knowledge of how the financial system works that very few people have. Mathematically outstanding debt levels MUST increase by the amount of interest owed each year. People frequently don’t believe this but it is true and well understood at the very top of the system.
The result of this is that without new debt the financial structure will collapse. It is difficult to load endless debt onto the same group of people and it should be fairly obvious that existing US citizens are getting close to a point of maximum debt. Societies that are immigration averse – such as Japan – have already hit this wall and have entered into what can only be described as a post reality financial system.
While the massive baby boom population was winding its way through the system the opportunities for pushing more debt into the system was always available. The last baby boomer will this year hit the typical age when people start taking retirement seriously (50) so now we have our biggest debtors ALL retired, closed to retired or taking the thought of retirement seriously. The young already have striking debt levels with zero physical assets. Debts over $300k are routine for graduates at the doctoral level and job prospects are dim.
The result of this is that we MUST import a new population if we want to maintain our current financial system. Countries that fail to import at a rate higher than is necessary to maintain debt growth will collapse financially.
Of course, doing this will also result in any country that does it being a very unpleasant place to live. It also only delays the inevitable when the new point of maximum debt gets reached. But in the medium term (next decade at least) any country that gets new immigrants and lends to them will do better economically than places that don’t.
A little known secret of our system is that when anyone says the word “growth” what they are actually referring to is loan book growth of our system. Obviously people like business reporters have no clue as to what is meant. The popular meaning of the word is, of course, real growth in the sense that a small business doing $100k in revenue would be said to have grown by 5% if they grew their revenue to $105k. Our system is so debt dependent these days that this has long ceased to be true.
There is a way out of this but the claims have to be extinguished i.e lenders have to give up their loans. The only way this happens is war. One of the massive historical winners of this process is Germany. Germany has done well for a long time but their wealth underwent a radical change after they massacred millions of Ashkenazi Jews in WWII. Claims against Germans literally went up in smoke in Auschwitz.
Importing new debtors will remain a bi-partisan goal. You will likely see more aggressive efforts shortly because it is no secret that the Boomers are stopping their borrowing and spending habits and almost everyone has as much debt as they can pay interest on. You can lend to people who wont pay back but that does get shut down. You will notice that although there are new debt bubbles emerging it is impossible to get a house loan without documented income anymore.

The US State Department is AIPAC – NOTHING good is going to happen until that is changed.

All of the millions of words written, spoken, and propagated about US foreign affairs are half truths and lies. Never is making peach an option in the Jewish controlled Western media.

There is NO reason for America to attack Russia – we want to trade with Russia, not attack it – we do it only because it is in the interest of Israeli power.

Step back and think about it – the wrong being done to humanity is monumental – it is greater then anything that has ever happened before.

If “Jersey Shore” behavior is your idea of assimilation, then yes they have assimilated.

We have a flood of VERY subprime car loans being written right now and a lot of questionable credit cards being given out.

I’d often wondered if I am part Jewish. The evidence is I’m smart, I like Seinfeld and I’m careful with money. I was thinking of getting 23&me to do some tests but if they are doing them for free…

Mexicans are not smart and they don’t aspire to be smart. There are very few Hispanics that base their self worth on any kind of intelligence. Any variation of “Do your homework or you will shame the family” would be perplexing to both parent and child in the Mexican community.

Every Hispanic I know does believe that as a first generation immigrant they need to work hard but they also actively try to work any system that exists so their kids can live a life of leisure. The dream is that their kids will do nothing. Asian parents, with very few exceptions, have an almost pathological need to say “My child is a doctor”.

The cultures are different. Be a man and admit it.

Male homosexuals unquestionably have an innate (and strong) desire for men. It is a desire they are willing to die for in places that have death penalty laws for gay sex.
I have yet to meet a lesbian that doesn’t have issues with men and lesbians are famous for NOT having sex. It seems to be a choice so it is not surprising that it is malleable.

“• A black boy born today in the United States has a life expectancy five years shorter than that of a white boy.”

Curious that Kristof doesn’t compare white boys with white girls, or hispanic boys.

Don’t fire rockets at Israel – they wont fire rockets at you.

Israel elected not to get into an endless street battle in a neighborhood that had been built for years as an ambush trap.

Krugman also said that the internet would have the same economic impact as the fax machine. I saved the link but it would take a while to find it.

He is the reason I find it hard to take the Nobel seriously. He seems like he is a little dim witted. I don’t even mean that in a mean way. I feel sorry for the guy.

As an Australian and a long time US resident I am in a very good position to answer the assertion that Australian and US police face a similar dynamic.

The idea is so wrong it is hard to know where to begin. I’ll keep it simple: In Australia there are VERY few areas where it is genuinely a bad idea for someone like me to go at night (six foot, athletic, male). In the US there are ENDLESS areas where it is very unwise of me to visit at nighttime.

I have direct family members in Australia who are police officers so I have heard all the drunken “secret” police conversations where they say what is actually on their mind. Australia is probably one of the most relaxed countries on earth to do the job in. Their exciting stories are not that interesting.

Most US police officers are very well trained. I have had several less than desirable encounters with the police but overall they do a good job. Your obesity comment is very divorced from the reality of most US officers – they tend towards hyper athleticism these days.

I would love to see your personal reaction to getting punched in the face by 6’3″, 300 pound “innocent young man” you are presumably referring to.

The crime rate in ferguson is about the national average. The first homocide of the year was committed by Darren Wilson. Is that a “wholesale orgy of death”?

Lol.

Re Mr. O’Keef’s comment:”but how the heck did they get to Newfoundland? Its an island.”

Suffolk County, Long Island now has had several coyote sightings (at least one confirmed by the state Department of Environmental Conservation). The latest theory is that they migrated from the mainland via a railroad bridge.
I certainly hope that the animals appearing on LI are true coyotes , rather than the wolf/dog/coyote mix…we have seen both types up here in the area west of Syracuse, NY (a near-twin to the wolf/coyote mix pictured at the top of Mr. Sailor’s article was in the woods in our backyard a year or so ago, in daylight, and quite fearless). The coyotes are much smaller than the wolf mix, and very shy. The wolf mix in our backyard was the size of a small shepard dog…I would guess at least 70 pounds.
Long Island has a huge problem with deer overpopulation, though. Maybe this will be the solution, at least until it becomes clear that coyotes are a danger to humans.

I think people’s perception of the black community depends on how much they interact with the community. If you do so frequently you know that black people will say or do almost anything when they feel it will advance their position. There is no rational link to anything. All of the black people I have seen interviewed say that the tape of him robbing the store is fake. In my real world experience I know this to be true. You can have someone on tape and they will say “that aint me!!” even if the incident occurred minutes ago.

One little known side effect of this is that black people have close to zero respect/trust for other blacks. This is well hidden because it places them at a disadvantage in getting what they personally want. Black people hate running businesses for the black community and rarely do it. They know full well what a thankless job it is.

As always there are exceptions to these generalizations but it is shocking how few.

No it doesn’t for reasons that should be obvious.

The 110 degrees in Phoenix does scare off CA trash. I asked a VERY ghetto Mexican on the CA/AZ border with a Uhaul which way he was moving. He told me in an amazingly snotty tone that he wasn’t moving anywhere but that he was helping his cousin move from Phoenix to LA. I asked him if he would ever live in Phoenix and he looked at me like I was insane and said “No” very emphatically. This was someone that lived in a very bad part of LA.

To foreigners (and many poor Americans) living anywhere in CA is having made it no matter how awful the circumstances. There are parts of SoCal that are almost incomprehensibly bad.

As a white businessman in LA I constantly get told that my success is because I am white. I am a genuine case study because I arrived with $800 in my pocket and I knew no one. People from my country DO NOT immigrate to the US (it being a first world country that is better to live in than than the US) so I have never had a community to hook into.

I have been told this from every spectrum: African Americans (constantly), Hispanics and most memorably a Jewish kid who grew up in Hancock Park. The latter person is so entrenched into the power structure of LA that I can’t give any details without making who it is obvious to many people from the city.

The hilarious thing is that in LA being white brings with it zero advantage. The only way to make it in LA without a community is to fight your way up (physically and metaphorically). I was pragmatic when I got here and have a self honesty bordering on the brutal – which again was a needed tool to make it. I have never had a situation where being white swung things my way. I can count endless occasions when it was a huge handicap.

Whites in LA are (apologies Steve) losers and there is zero benefit in carrying that skin color around. The biggest thing it did for me was to put a target on me as a mark because white people throw their hands up in surrender to everyone over everything.

Or alternatively you could not comment on something if you haven’t been following the story at all…

Every piece of this is factual. What fact do you object to?
– The overthrow of a Democratically elected government.
– The fact that it was done by (self described) Neo Nazis.
– Russia has had a naval base in Crimea before the US existed.

As the old saying goes: you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts. Your whiny implication that the writer is Russian is sad.

It is astonishing that any modern country would not use the metric system.

Razib Khan: Your article is informative. Indeed, IS leaves hell in it’s wake and effectively uses atrocity as a goal rather than a necessary means to moral ends. But the big questions remain how to stop them, how to eliminate IS, and why won’t Iran stand up? Your view, please.

“It’s a less wacky idea than it seems.”

It’s pretty wacky though. If planet-wide eugenics is OK, height isn’t what I’d start with.