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Sailer in Taki's: Lisa Cook's Half-Cooked History
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From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

Half-Cooked Data

Steve Sailer, February 16, 2022

Besides being a black woman at a time when the Biden administration is publicly committed to appointing a disproportionate number of them, economist Lisa D. Cook’s prime qualification for her nomination to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve is a celebrated paper on black inventors. Her work raises one of the more troubling issues in political philosophy.

While most economists are agreed that the capitalist system generates more wealth than any other, what if capitalism can never generate what is now called “equity”: equal outcomes by race and sex?

What if—no matter how thoroughly any and all discrimination, abuse, and unfairness is rooted out of the capitalist system—blacks and women will on average be less likely to strike it rich or even just to perform up to par in demanding jobs than whites and men?

… on university campuses in the current year, these are not questions with which all professors of economics are happy to publicly wrestle. A safer approach is to blame any shortcomings in the performance of the good people like Lisa Cook on the bad people: i.e., white men.

Hence, the acclaim for Professor Cook’s 2014 paper “Violence and Economic Activity: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870 to 1940.”

Here’s Cook’s celebrated graph of patents earned by whites (blue line) and patents earned by blacks (red line).

Not surprisingly, many of her readers, such as Cook’s interviewer on NPR, see this graph as proving blacks achieved equality with whites in inventiveness by 1899 (before the apparent nosedive in 1900 from which Cook attempts to draw large lessons). But Cook graphed white patents per million whites on the left axis (from 150 to 550) and black patents per million blacks on the right axis (from 0.0 to 1.o), a big no-no in academic data graphics precisely because it often misleads readers.

But … besides overstating black inventiveness by using a shifty graph design, she also understated the number of patents earned per million blacks by about 85% here due to an arithmetic error she made.

So, here’s my version of her graph, correcting both of her mistakes:

Read the whole column there.

 
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  1. And they want to put this innumerate moron in a position where numeracy is a primary component of the job.

    Seriously, the Deep State keeps making it obvious with every Deep State appointee that they are pulling the puppet strings and are just going for the most colorful array of puppets.

    • Replies: @El Dato
    @R.G. Camara

    She has EXACTLY the quals needed for a job at the FED.

    , @Alrenous
    @R.G. Camara

    It's okay, she was never expected to do any work.

    No three-letter-agency head decides agency policy, and this agency is no different.

    See also: just about any random scene in Yes, Minister.

    , @SFG
    @R.G. Camara

    Isn’t one of Steve’s big arguments that the Inner Party now believes their own BS and this is one of the problems we’re seeing?

    Replies: @ic1000, @Barnard

    , @Tiny Duck
    @R.G. Camara

    Uh you do know that most people in acadmeia and bank heads and finiancail gurus support her?

    In other words the most intelligent people want her.

    That tells you smoething right there.

    According to most economists and such Lisa Cook is for sure among the 100 most qualified people to serve on the Fed board.

    Dr. Lisa Cook has decades of experience as an economist and has fought to promote balance and innovation in order to strengthen our economy.

    Paul Krugman supports

    MAny banks have written letters suppirting here

    All demicrats support
    ALl People fo Color suport here.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Unladen Swallow, @R.G. Camara

    , @Citizen of a Silly Country
    @R.G. Camara

    She's black and better than most black candidates. That's her qualifications. What's more, in a multiracial society, thats all qualifications she needs.

    Steve remains stubbornly stuck in his colorblind meritocracy fantasy. That country is parrot dead. Time to move on.

    The country (if you want to call it that) is now tribal. Each group gets its slice of the pie or it pushes back. Only gentile whites haven't gotten the memo.

    , @AndrewR
    @R.G. Camara

    No puppet can top Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Or maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps in 2024 they will install some mentally retarded black trans woman as president. It doesn't matter anyway. Marg bar Amrika

    , @SaneClownPosse
    @R.G. Camara

    The Federal Reserve dollar is nearing its inevitable demise.

    Placing a black, supposedly non-Semitic, woman in place to be the fall guy, instead of another person from the Tribe, who have always been in charge.

    It will look more Zimbabwe than Wiemar.

    , @Cato
    @R.G. Camara


    The Deep State keeps making it obvious with every Deep State appointee that they are pulling the puppet strings and are just going for the most colorful array of puppets
     
    The biggest problem is that the puppet-masters are not people you would want as a mid-level manager, let alone exercising control over an entire country.
  2. Not Hidden Figures, but Wrong Figures.

    • LOL: Bardon Kaldian
    • Replies: @Dennis Dale
    @Change that Matters

    Fibbin' Figures

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

    , @fish
    @Change that Matters

    No....it was a case of "Hidden Figures" If I hadn't glanced at the blue/red details at the legend to the left I would have thought we were discussing the prominent blue data instead of the red crawling along the X axis.

    , @pyrrhus
    @Change that Matters

    A fool and her faked statistics are soon promoted...

  3. So Paul Romer , Nobel Laureate, fell for basic graph illiteracy? Sad.

    • Replies: @Almost Missouri
    @kaganovitch

    Probably Romer lent Cook one of his research assistants to do her thesis work her, so he felt obligated to praise the outcome irrespective of quality. He was just hoping/expecting that everyone else would see that it is a work of modern ¡B!lack "scholarship" and just obligatorily wave it through and cheer it on like he did.

    Unfortunately, he didn't reckon on the rise of the internet autists who will actually read and analyze stuff.

    ...And Cook's "work" melted away like fairy gold in the harsh light of day.

    Replies: @Alrenous

    , @Bardon Kaldian
    @kaganovitch

    Economics Nobel has a few serious people having won it.

    Romer is not among them.

    , @Brutusale
    @kaganovitch

    White knights supporting women of dubious accomplishment has become a thing.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-board-of-directors-2015-10?op=1

    , @guest007
    @kaganovitch

    There is a line in the movie "The Big Short" when one character ask if the person selling credit default swaps (CDS) is right about the housing market (that the market will collapse and the investment banks are the cause) and the other character says "you want him to be right."

    Many outlanding claims, papers, ideas are successful because a lot of people want those claims to be right. Sometimes the claims are right but most of the time the claims are wrong. Steve would like people to work harder analysing such claims instead of taking them at face value without question.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbiDrzTd8fE at the 07:30 mark.

  4. Competence is overrated.

    • Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
    @Redneck farmer

    "If you just act like you know what you're doing,

    Everybody thinks that you do."

    -- Joe Walsh, "Lucky That Way"

  5. I can imagine the bitterness of real economists for her promotion.

    • Replies: @Whitey Whiteman III
    @J

    First, assume a violin.

  6. @kaganovitch
    So Paul Romer , Nobel Laureate, fell for basic graph illiteracy? Sad.

    Replies: @Almost Missouri, @Bardon Kaldian, @Brutusale, @guest007

    Probably Romer lent Cook one of his research assistants to do her thesis work her, so he felt obligated to praise the outcome irrespective of quality. He was just hoping/expecting that everyone else would see that it is a work of modern ¡B!lack “scholarship” and just obligatorily wave it through and cheer it on like he did.

    Unfortunately, he didn’t reckon on the rise of the internet autists who will actually read and analyze stuff.

    …And Cook’s “work” melted away like fairy gold in the harsh light of day.

  7. Perhaps a logarithmic scale would be more appropriate as the data spans several ordinate decades.

    • Replies: @res
    @Anonymous

    That's what I would try. Though you would have to deal with the (apparent) zero values then.

    Also, log scales are not intuitive to most people.

  8. Cook’s style of thinking shows up in lots of places. Let’s grant that the only reason group x did not achieve at the level of white men. The fact that they were discriminated against means they did not achieve as much. Despite this near-tautology, activists want group x put on the same plane as white men in high school and college courses.

    When I was at Reed, there was a constant feminist grumble that we did not cover Greek and Roman women’s achievements. Maybe they did a lot, but there ate no records! Should we spend half of the broad humanities class on Sappho?

    Now Reed’s Humanities 1xx (think it’s 110) covers the Greeks, Romans, Tenochtitlan, and the Harlem Renaissance. If there’s anything that willconvince you of white superiority it’s “the Greeks invented philosophy, geometry, and science. The Romans developed conquest and government to it’s highest level before the modern era. They created a state that lasted longer than any modern government. Far away, the Aztecs had a hugely productive food source (corn is has C4 metabolism. Much more efficient than wheat, which is C3) and built a stone city and a government based on terror. As soon as an alternative presented itself, the Aztec’s lost all their satrapies. Much later, some blacks wrote poetry and made music with instruments they could never invent.”

    [MORE]

    Really, when you stack white achievements against non-whites, it makes you realize whites have a special sauce to the extent that no lefty CRT-inspired course ever presents them on an even footing. The best they can do seems to be Egypt. Ok, the Egyptians were building pyramids when wooly mammoth roamed Europe. That’s pretty cool. But besides pyramids to gawk at, what did Egyptians do that anyone thought was worth copying? With the first civilization, why did civilization never spread to the rest of Africa. Ok, malaria. But one might go a step further out and ask, “without civilizations, were Africans under the same sort of selective pressures that turned Europeans into world-conquering, science-creating, disease vanquishing behemoths? I will grant that East Aians (formerly Orientals) have caught up in many areas. Interesting science comes out of Japan. A huge chunk of modern “American” science is the doings of Chinamen. (but most of it does not replicate)

    Personally, i love Cook’s graph. It shows the cargo-cult nature of so much social “science.” It says, “if we just pretend, then reality will conform.” Remember when scientists wanted to understand reality? Today, when reality screams at them, they cover their ears and make sill graphs. That graph is a visual representation of the unwillingness of moderns to look honestly at the past and what different peoples have produced. One can be sure that Cook chose both scales so that a cursory glance would make blacks seem equally inventive for a short time, until BadWhites made them dumb again. I’ve heard seemingly smart people say that the decline of whites in. Ametica is fine for whites in America. Blacks and hispanics will do all the R&D, bespoke manufacturing, then ramping up production in the future. That future is coming in around eight years.How is that coming along so far?

    Magic 8 Ball says, “wtf were you thinking? Blacks can’t invent not shooting each other over Facebook feuds.” The different ways people chose to use technology is astounding. Blacks carry on their petty crabs-in-a-bucket lives with connectivity such as the world has never seen. Granted, average whites use tech to create misinformation bubbles to live in. But the magic that drives economic growth does not come from average people. It comes from +2-3σ folk. The number of blacks and mestizos with 145 IQ is a rounding error. The great and good are so delusional that they’ve decided that putting blacks front and center in institutions will save America! Hopefully, it’s just “representation.” In 2nd grade, I remember telling my dad that scientists were black. All the scientists in videos that they showed in school were black, you see. Dad smiled and said that videos often did not reflect reality. Showing “successful” blacks to inspire other blacks to behave better and make whites less reality-based, and therefore less “racist” goes back to the eighties. Forty years. That’s more than a generation.

    Kids have grown up with nothing but “blaques Rnt dum” from popular culture. The gentry, to use a Moldbugism. Moldbug and Unz have a lot in common. They both write essays no one has read in their entirety. Moldbug’s schtick is to blame Puritans for Jewish cognitive quirks. Unz’s is to gather all the dissidents in one place for easier monitoring and make patriots comfortable with the endless Hispanic invasion. Remember “The Marching Morons” by Kornbluth? It was inspired by the idea that if Chinese were in a x person wide line walking through a gate at 3 miles an hour, they would never all get through. There are so many Chinese that babies would be born, grow old, and die walking in that line. The line grows faster than they can cross through the gate. That’s pretty much what Hispanic immigration is. They reproduce faster than they immigrate, so there will always be poor Hispanics who could have higher standards of living in America. For practical matters, there is an infinite supply of illegals at 1-3 million/year. How are Biden’s illegals numbers shaping up? The media always crowed about how more aliens were streaming in under Trump than ever before, they stopped talking about that, so one can only assume that the problem stopped, right? Thank God for actual reporters, telling us about the federal government flying aliens from the border to your red state.

    I feel a Galileo thing is a mixed metaphor, because the culturist, now discriminationist, explanation for racial disparities is much closer to being a flat earther or young Earth creationist than buying a geocentric model of the universe. But we’ve had fifty five years of mass immigration. The country has become more crowded, polluted, and divided. When does immigration making America better start?

    Political division has grown to the extent that progs are fantasizing about civil war. Though that might just be because they want to use the post-9/11 police state on their domestic opponents. I guess they think the military will obey whatever disabled black transsexual they make into a general? Surely it scared them when they had to politically vet thousands of national guard soldiers to secure the capital for Biden’s installation? They did it fast, which implies to me that they already have a preliminary dossier on everyone in uniform. What’s a surveillance state for, if not that? Back to people thinking all populations are identical. At least geocentrism made some sense. It described facts about the world. The sun and moon appear to orbit the earth. The earth doesn’t feel like it’s moving, does it? Meanwhile cognitive creationism explains zero facts about the world.

    “Let’s make some graphs that show that the races are equally inventive and the earth stands still!”
    E pur si muove.

    • Thanks: Redneck farmer, TWS, ic1000
    • Replies: @martin_2
    @Rob


    At least geocentrism made some sense. It described facts about the world. The sun and moon appear to orbit the earth. The earth doesn’t feel like it’s moving, does it? Meanwhile cognitive creationism explains zero facts about the world.
     
    Absolutely true.


    Regarding the Egyptians and their Pyramids...

    They had stone. Europeans had wood. Wood decays, so maybe we don't know what Europeans really built thousands of years ago.

    As for the Aztecs, etcetera...

    How do we know about these ancient non-white civilisations? Who were the people who explored the remote and inhospitable regions of Africa and South America to do the painstaking and dangerous archeological work? It was white men from Europe and the USA. No-one would know anything about these histories were it not for them.

    Replies: @Anonymous

    , @Stonewall Jackson
    @Rob

    Unz's schtick is to gather all the dissidents together for easier monitoring and to pave the way for an endless hispanic invasion...

    Lots of Ronnie fans here will attack you for that one... but I have thought the same thing about this website. He has the anti holocaust stuff... I guess which will land him in the future jailling that is coming for hate crimes... maybe... But the jews tend not to punish their own.

    The part of his endless hispanic invasion support though. While you point out that no one reads his long winded and pointless essays.. he gets to the point on that one. Read the failure of white nationalism.

    The rest of your essay is top notch too. Thank you.

    , @Recently Based
    @Rob

    Apparently I haven't commented enough recently to hit the "Agree" button, so you get slightly more fulsome praise.

    This was an outstanding comment, and has the feel of something that could be expanded into a worthwhile essay.

  9. Lets get real. Cook is dumb and has been promoted beyond all competences. A female Colin Powell. Who needs them? This whole plaques for blacks thing is getting out of hand. Her plaque might be from the Fed Reserve

    Yikes + WTF —– University of California, Berkeley (PhD)

    • Agree: Patrick in SC
  10. Anonymous[387] • Disclaimer says:

    Just as an aside to your essay, I wonder if patent numbers really reflect true inventiveness. The reason I say this is that my father was friendly with a guy, Joe Bolger, who was a classic Yankee inventor, coming up with all sorts of clever solutions to everyday problems and needs. He used to patent his inventions, each patent costing him about \$5,000 in various fees and expenses (this would have been 40 or 50 years ago).
    But he quickly discovered that having a patent on his inventions did not protect him, because big companies would just steal his inventions. The Japanese were the worst offenders.
    When he found out a company had stolen one of his inventions and he told them he held the patent they would just say so sue us. He couldn’t afford to do that.
    He gave up on patenting his inventions, things like the ball-end on a motorcycle hand lever so your hand won’t slip off, folding footpegs, monoshock rear suspensions etc., and all sorts of tools. We still use a device that instantly frees frozen screws and nuts or bolts, no matter how badly they are corroded or jammed, that he gave to my father decades ago. It applies both downward pressure and torque simultaneously. At least that’s the best I can do to explain how it works.
    He never patented it and just sold it to friends or at flea markets, trade shows, etc., and through catalog sales, making an item when someone ordered it. We still have an old AJS 7R, originally a road racer that my grandfather competed with, that Bolger helped my father convert to a motocrosser, using lots of his unique components.
    I wonder how many other inventors like him there are out there who never patent anything.

    • Replies: @Cool Daddy Jimbo
    @Anonymous

    Love the story, but the ball end is so you don't stab yourself when you crash.

    Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease

    , @YetAnotherAnon
    @Anonymous

    "We still use a device that instantly frees frozen screws and nuts or bolts, no matter how badly they are corroded or jammed, that he gave to my father decades ago. "

    Are they available to buy?

    Replies: @Technite78, @Billy Ash, @Anonymous

    , @Calvin Hobbes
    @Anonymous


    Just as an aside to your essay, I wonder if patent numbers really reflect true inventiveness. The reason I say this is that my father was friendly with a guy, Joe Bolger, who was a classic Yankee inventor, coming up with all sorts of clever solutions to everyday problems and needs. He used to patent his inventions, each patent costing him about $5,000 in various fees and expenses (this would have been 40 or 50 years ago).
    But he quickly discovered that having a patent on his inventions did not protect him, because big companies would just steal his inventions. The Japanese were the worst offenders.
     
    Thanks. I was wondering about how much trouble it is to apply for a patent. And if most of the good ones get stolen anyway, getting a patent was kind of like buying a very expensive lottery ticket.
    , @rebel yell
    @Anonymous

    Great story, thanks. Mr.Bolger should have found an ambulance-chasing out of work lawyer willing to work on commission to sue all those patent violators for him. Remember that Bill Gates made more money getting copy rights than he ever did inventing or creating anything. Hats off to Bolger the inventor. If he had also been Bolger the Litigator he might have made millions.
    At Oregon State University one of the Engineering buildings is named after an alum who invented a better assembly production line for making batteries. He didn't invent a better battery - just a more efficient way to produce standard batteries. He made millions, donated the money for the Engineering building at OSU and was a civic leader in Corvallis. A fine career.

    , @Lurker
    @Anonymous

    The flip side is people applying for patents for stuff which never got made or was not really practical or merely replicated existing inventions. Is measuring the number of patents really a good proxy for measuring inventiveness?

    Replies: @Jack D

  11. Most black “intellectuals” stick to producing “scholarly work” that relies on their “lived experience” and just aggregates quotes from other pseudo-intellectual wokesters who do the same. As an alleged “economist,” Cook’s fatal flaw was attempting to work with numbers.

    This demonstrates why black pseudo-intellectuals are well-advised to stick to vague, verbal opinions which are non-falsifiable. Math is racist. It will not be kind to black fakers.

    • Replies: @Kylie
    @Hypnotoad666

    "Math is racist. It will not be kind to black fakers."

    True. But there are plenty of white enablers who will be.

    Actually, I don't think these black "intellectuals" are fakers. I think they truly believe they're the talented scholars, researchers, etc. that their white enablers tell them they are. Their inflated sense of self-worth and under-developed self-awareness combine to make them extraordinarily susceptible (by white standards) to flattery. Give them offices with their names on the doors and they're executives. Give them lab coats and name tags and they're researchers. They really, truly believe they're all that.

  12. yall be laughing on the other side of your face when pro-fessor Cook spits out the next Fed report in rhyme.

  13. So, here’s my version of her graph, correcting both of her mistakes

    Racist! EOS.

    In related news, NYC mayor says he’ll copy Chicago mayor and stop taking questions from white journalists. Until and unless they stop asking insolent and disrespectful questions about crime and stuff like that.


    This is right where we’re headed, and I do admit that I like the umbrella.

  14. Okay, she’s on the Board now. How does she participate in Board meetings? Do the others dumb-down the complexity and the pace, to indulge her? Not likely; I am guessing they ignore her. She just nods. This isn’t like classes at Harvard, where affirmative-action students are taking different classes, and don’t need to keep pace with the physics lecture.

    • Agree: Alrenous
  15. Meanwhile, a fatherless feral negro bungled his assassination attempt towards a Jewish mayoral candidate, thanks to God, and “Sailer’s Law” which isteve readers know as regarding to the American negro’s statistically reliable poor marksmanship:

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/louisville-council-candidate-accused-in-shooting-attack-on-jewish-mayoral-hopeful/

    • Replies: @Alden
    @Anonymous

    The wanna be assassin shot at the candidate from about 12 feet away. Very very hard to miss. But he did. I’m sure ADL AJC SPLC will pour more money into both BLM and the candidate’s campaign. And somehow mange to blame the local red neck Kku Kkuxxers

    , @Jim Don Bob
    @Anonymous

    BLM bailed him out with a cashier's check for $100k.

    The Las Vegas Sun today published an editorial decrying “increasingly violent rhetoric coming from extremist Republicans” in connection with the attempted assassination of Louisville, KY mayoral candidate Democrat Craig Greenberg.

    2 + 2 does equal 5.

  16. @R.G. Camara
    And they want to put this innumerate moron in a position where numeracy is a primary component of the job.

    Seriously, the Deep State keeps making it obvious with every Deep State appointee that they are pulling the puppet strings and are just going for the most colorful array of puppets.

    Replies: @El Dato, @Alrenous, @SFG, @Tiny Duck, @Citizen of a Silly Country, @AndrewR, @SaneClownPosse, @Cato

    She has EXACTLY the quals needed for a job at the FED.

  17. Anonymous[295] • Disclaimer says:

    Inventiveness, at least in the golden age of inventiveness in the 18th and 19th centuries, was mainly the product of obsessive compulsive hobbyists, men usually of modest financial means, but with a compulsion to tinker with things, beavering away in a myriad of backyard sheds and the like.
    This was the age of the artisan, the village blacksmith, carpenter, clockmaker etc, where the workman was never too far away from the source of his implements, and the means of tinkering with them. As industrialisation and literacy proceeded, magazines and publications etc popularized line diagrams and news of other hobbyists inventions. In the pre video entertainment age, this only fuelled the obsessiveness of the shed people – the various hobbyist carpentry magazines still on the market, and of course ‘Popular Mechanics’ magazine still embody this spirit, which basal to many males of the species, and likely goes back to neolithic times – hence that typical male past time of tool collecting, even if the said tools are never actually used.

    • Replies: @Luke Lea
    @Anonymous

    Speaking of homo faber, man the tool maker, you might like this little puzzle on the subject:

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ccu91wcovedefH6WbdWaEz6F_uzvy8tab7GHoZBv1BQ/edit?usp=sharing

  18. Nike data scientist Michael Wiebe…

    Huh? Well, I guess in the old journals a paper or two would list the author’s affiliation as a corporation rather than a university.

    Wiebe’s work suggests as a quick fix multiplying her figures for patents per million blacks by 6.66.

    The fraction of the Beast.

    Republican politicians tended to be vaguely sympathetic toward black progress.

    This has been true of them from the days of Frémont to the days of Trump. However, moderation is racist.

    BTW, why doesn’t Fremont, California have its namesake’s accent? It can’t be state policy:

  19. Well, yeah, most of us figured that out even before they gave us the Nobel…

    cool & fun

    Does that mean Cook deliberately mislead her readers. Probably not. She’s not that clever.

    Maybe a bit on the snarky side. She does not want to mislead anybody. She just sticked to the facts, as she found them, that’s all. – She was matter of factly in her own personal way! Honest. Proud too. But not deceptive. No, not that; that not at all…

    PS

    That graph comparing the numbers of wihte and black patents. This is tough stuff. Why not rather make it illegal to publicly compare such divisive social data? – I mean, like really people, this dark stuff has to go away. It is as simple as that = the solution fot this problem is simple. All it might take is a lightbulb and a little bit of courage, – c’mon man! – – rule this stuff out, make it illegal!

  20. @Change that Matters
    Not Hidden Figures, but Wrong Figures.

    Replies: @Dennis Dale, @fish, @pyrrhus

    Fibbin’ Figures

    • Replies: @Reg Cæsar
    @Dennis Dale

    https://jethroinvadesvienna.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/windpassing-austria.jpg?w=650

  21. OT PJ O’Rourke is dead.
    https://news.yahoo.com/amphtml/pj-o-rourke-death-celebrated-081524134.html
    (They’re not saying his death is celebrated, they’re calling him a celebrated satirist.)

    • Replies: @Gordo
    @J.Ross

    He wrote some god stuff in his time.

  22. When I look at the dual Y axis in Cook’s original graph, it seems to me that she used the default results of Microsoft Excel’s automatic axis scaling. When you give it two data sets with the same X-axis (i.e. time), and then choose to have independent Y axes, it scales the range of the axes and sets their origin so that the highest and lowest data points fall in the top half and bottom half of the chart respectively… in other words, it’s trying to stretch and center the data points on the graph so that they are readable, without respect to whether it makes for a logical comparison between the two data sets.

    I’ve done a fair amount of data analysis using spreadsheets and graphs, and the default Y ranges chosen automatically by Excel frequently have to be manually adjusted so that the data sets can be properly compared. I’m guessing that wasn’t done here… and it’s entirely possible that the poor choice of Y ranges was due to laziness/incompetence rather than an intent to deceive.

    • Thanks: Alden
    • Replies: @James Speaks
    @Technite78


    and it’s entirely possible that the poor choice of Y ranges was due to laziness/incompetence rather than an intent to deceive.
     
    …and it’s entirely possible that the poor choice of Y ranges was due to laziness/incompetence coupled with an intent to deceive.

    FIFY
    , @Muggles
    @Technite78


    and it’s entirely possible that the poor choice of Y ranges was due to laziness/incompetence rather than an intent to deceive.
     
    Yeah. We need to save that charitable excuse for when it is needed during her Fed Board term.

    She will be an Affirmative Action hire after all.
    , @mc23
    @Technite78


    it’s entirely possible that the poor choice of Y ranges was due to laziness/incompetence rather than an intent to deceive.
     
    Well, that makes me feel much better about the leadership of the Federal Reserve.
  23. @Dennis Dale
    @Change that Matters

    Fibbin' Figures

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

  24. This whole Lisa Cook saga has Human Biodiversity written large, and written small. Every component of the story has powerful HBD aspects.

    There are a smattering of smart, ambitious, hard-working American white male economists stuck in low-rank jobs at second-tier universities (but mostly those jobs are held by recent immigrants recruited from abroad). Will some of these ambitious and overlooked economists open their minds to the reality of human biodiversity and its widespread impact, on them personally and on society more generally? Being unfairly passed over focusses the mind sharply.

    Second best outcome, after her getting turned down in a wave of bad publicity, is her getting accepted to the Feb board and performing attrociously and attracting widespread criticism.

    Maybe a slowly accumulating drip-drip-drip of the reality of HBD is the best that science and society can reasonably manage.

    • Replies: @AnotherDad
    @Peter Johnson


    This whole Lisa Cook saga has Human Biodiversity written large, and written small. Every component of the story has powerful HBD aspects.
     
    Agree on this. Though mostly what's revealed is the sorry state of rigor and the academic racial/political taboos in 21st century America.


    Second best outcome, after her getting turned down in a wave of bad publicity, is her getting accepted to the Feb board and performing attrociously and attracting widespread criticism.
     
    But this has basically zero chance of happening.

    The truth is she doesn't have to actually do much of anything. The Fed's staff economists will gather all the Fed and government data on money supply and velocity and employment and purchasing and inflation. Powell will have his desired policy--which is some sort of vague desire to ease off the gas ("qualitative easing", i.e. money printing) just a bit. (Real tightening--actually, selling down the Fed's giant book is probably not in the cards. And not required.)

    All Lisa Cook needs to do is nod and go along. If at some point Biden thinks Powell is easing off the gas too much--say wants the Fed's foot on the gas during his re-election campaign and the other Democrat appointees are willing to go along and rebel, Cook just votes along with them. (Count me as skeptical that Biden actually runs again. But the man has a ginormous--Trump sized--ego (with even less justification for it) so who knows.)

    Anyway, the bottom line is Cook could become a private joke among the Fed staff. (Like "Madeline NotBright"). But she really doesn't have to do much and the chance of her performance becoming some sort of public joke is close to zero. For all the obvious reasons.
  25. @Anonymous
    Just as an aside to your essay, I wonder if patent numbers really reflect true inventiveness. The reason I say this is that my father was friendly with a guy, Joe Bolger, who was a classic Yankee inventor, coming up with all sorts of clever solutions to everyday problems and needs. He used to patent his inventions, each patent costing him about $5,000 in various fees and expenses (this would have been 40 or 50 years ago).
    But he quickly discovered that having a patent on his inventions did not protect him, because big companies would just steal his inventions. The Japanese were the worst offenders.
    When he found out a company had stolen one of his inventions and he told them he held the patent they would just say so sue us. He couldn't afford to do that.
    He gave up on patenting his inventions, things like the ball-end on a motorcycle hand lever so your hand won't slip off, folding footpegs, monoshock rear suspensions etc., and all sorts of tools. We still use a device that instantly frees frozen screws and nuts or bolts, no matter how badly they are corroded or jammed, that he gave to my father decades ago. It applies both downward pressure and torque simultaneously. At least that's the best I can do to explain how it works.
    He never patented it and just sold it to friends or at flea markets, trade shows, etc., and through catalog sales, making an item when someone ordered it. We still have an old AJS 7R, originally a road racer that my grandfather competed with, that Bolger helped my father convert to a motocrosser, using lots of his unique components.
    I wonder how many other inventors like him there are out there who never patent anything.

    Replies: @Cool Daddy Jimbo, @YetAnotherAnon, @Calvin Hobbes, @rebel yell, @Lurker

    Love the story, but the ball end is so you don’t stab yourself when you crash.

    • Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease
    @Cool Daddy Jimbo

    "Love the story, but the ball end is so you don’t stab yourself when you crash."

    Says something about bikes that you didn't say "if you crash," but "when".

    Replies: @Anonymous

  26. Anonymous[102] • Disclaimer says:

    What if—no matter how thoroughly any and all discrimination, abuse, and unfairness is rooted out of the capitalist system—blacks and women will on average be less likely to strike it rich than whites and men?

    This is the right formulation, insofar as it articulates a “prohibited” scientific hypothesis, thereby signifying a violation of the scientific method. The prohibition has grown so strict, in fact, that even the pre-hypothesis steps of the scientific method (eg potentially supportive observations) are under a kind of academic police supervision. As a matter of principle, any such prohibited hypothesis should be regarded as having the highest likelihood of being true (or, at any rate, being closer to the truth than those hypotheses that are permitted to be discussed and ultimately tested). In turn, the legal and social forces suppressing that provisional truth have immense semiotic value, by, among other things, revealing the power hierarchy of a society, with rank revealed by the costs incurred and imposed to shape and enforce the prohibition.

  27. The Fed have been Cooking the books for years … this is just doing it with Soul.

  28. Still microwaving this racebait? OK, then I repeat:

    Speaking of monetary policy, try Noticing things before/since 1913. Pretty graphic!

    Dr. Cook’s appointment is of no importance to the typical reader here, other than to Distract, Divide & Conquer.

  29. Don’t forget to click on to the Taki essay’s link to scholar Jonathan Rothwell’s Twitter thread concerning the Lisa Cook imbroglio. His first tweet is:

    To my shock & chagrin, my work on Black inventors has been used to discredit an economist whom I have long admired, Lisa Cook, after her nomination to serve on the Federal Reserve. My view is that nothing about my work suggests flaws in her qualifications. The opposite is true.

    Keep reading to get to the 48-hours-ahead frontlash to Steve’s very article:

    The criticisms are petty political attacks by people who do not know her, have not read her CV, have not interviewed her or her collaborators, or former employers, but assume, with no evidence, that she has some far-left agenda for . . . monetary policy!

    “Frontlash” is a great concept, Steve — did you patent it?

    [MORE]

    That was a joke… one cannot patent an idea.

    • Replies: @res
    @ic1000

    Thanks. That thread is epic. Especially after Steve's tweet (have to love Rothwell's stream of ad hominems, scientific scholarship at its best). Though I think this might be the best of the thread.


    In making this argument, I drew upon Lisa Cook's excellent & groundbreaking work that makes essentially the same point (innovation & growth are harmed by oppression) after painstakingly creating her own database. In subsequent publications, we continued to cite Lisa's work.
     
    What a Current Year we live in!

    BTW, has nobody else managed to look at the 2008 spreadsheet I discussed in this comment?
    https://www.unz.com/isteve/did-bidens-fed-nominee-lisa-cook-mess-up-her-most-famous-paper/#comment-5163290

    https://web.archive.org/web/20160403083636/http://ptrca.org/files/handouts/stliblkin-10-09-2008-1C-with%20headings.xls

    Google existed when Cook wrote her paper, right?

    , @Jack D
    @ic1000


    scholar Jonathan Rothwell
     
    Rothwell is not a scholar, he's an ideologue who praises his fellow ideologue Cook.

    The title of Rothwell's book tells you all that you need to know:

    A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society

    Leftists have been dreaming about this just and equal society since the days of Karl Marx and every time they try to achieve this utopia it always ends in tears, But they never learn from this and just keep trying, generation after generation. Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

    Replies: @Uncle Dan

  30. @kaganovitch
    So Paul Romer , Nobel Laureate, fell for basic graph illiteracy? Sad.

    Replies: @Almost Missouri, @Bardon Kaldian, @Brutusale, @guest007

    Economics Nobel has a few serious people having won it.

    Romer is not among them.

  31. @R.G. Camara
    And they want to put this innumerate moron in a position where numeracy is a primary component of the job.

    Seriously, the Deep State keeps making it obvious with every Deep State appointee that they are pulling the puppet strings and are just going for the most colorful array of puppets.

    Replies: @El Dato, @Alrenous, @SFG, @Tiny Duck, @Citizen of a Silly Country, @AndrewR, @SaneClownPosse, @Cato

    It’s okay, she was never expected to do any work.

    No three-letter-agency head decides agency policy, and this agency is no different.

    See also: just about any random scene in Yes, Minister.

  32. Will one of Sailer’s regular foils crow that this diabolically evil rraacciisstt essayist was forced to fulsomely praise the achievements and character of African-American scholar Henry E. Baker (who was black)?

    Probably not. They might not even notice.

    In the Current Year, nothing proclaims allegiance to intellectual conformity more loudly than ignoring whatever Sailer might choose to write about.

    Rebutting implies awareness, with the exception of the Frontlash Exemption.

    • Replies: @Greta Handel
    @ic1000


    Will one of Sailer’s regular foils crow […]
     
    Yes. At whim.

    In the Current Year, nothing proclaims allegiance to intellectual conformity more loudly than ignoring whatever Sailer might choose to write about.
     
    You’re hooked on white copium.
  33. @Almost Missouri
    @kaganovitch

    Probably Romer lent Cook one of his research assistants to do her thesis work her, so he felt obligated to praise the outcome irrespective of quality. He was just hoping/expecting that everyone else would see that it is a work of modern ¡B!lack "scholarship" and just obligatorily wave it through and cheer it on like he did.

    Unfortunately, he didn't reckon on the rise of the internet autists who will actually read and analyze stuff.

    ...And Cook's "work" melted away like fairy gold in the harsh light of day.

    Replies: @Alrenous

  34. That wouldn’t be her primary qualification, as it’s irrelevant to the work of the Federal Reserve and might not be her most cited paper, either. One would hope it’s not her most meticulously composed paper.

    Aside from the fact that central banking, finance in general, monetary economics, and macroeconomics are subjects about which she’s not well-versed above and beyond what would pass to teach the introductory macro course, her attitude toward public discussion marks her as a person not fit for any position wherein she has authority over others. That includes teaching.

    NB, the best metaphor for the conduct of the Democratic Party the last couple of years has been the smash-and-grab robbery.

    • Agree: ic1000
  35. anon[122] • Disclaimer says:

    Off Topic

    NPR covered the Pre-K study that showed negative results for minorities. Steve knocked it out a few days ago. https://www.npr.org/2022/02/10/1079406041/researcher-says-rethink-prek-preschool-prekindergarten

    Curious. But around here, everyone just nodded because more education mostly never closes achievement gaps and mostly does nothing.

    But NPR acted all surprised, and mostly discussed how they could spend more money next time. They never, for an instant, considered that it was valid and this stuff never works.

    They are so anchored on the idea that it has to work (in theory), that any failure simply has to involve the details in its implementation.

    Including:

    She’s talking about drilling kids on basic skills. Worksheets for tracing letters and numbers. A teacher giving 10-minute lectures to a whole class of 25 kids who are expected to sit on their hands and listen, only five of whom may be paying any attention.

    “Higher-income families are not choosing this kind of preparation,” she explains. “And why would we assume that we need to train children of lower-income families earlier?”

    Maybe because they always have problems with basic skills?

    • Thanks: Dieter Kief
    • Replies: @stillCARealist
    @anon

    Wait, what little kid doesn't do worksheets for tracing numbers and letters? How else would you learn how to form them?

    A 10 minute lecture for 4 year olds is just fine if you're holding up pictures or puppets, getting them asking questions, and generally entertaining them.

    , @Nicholas Stix
    @anon

    "They are so anchored on the idea that it has to work (in theory), that any failure simply has to involve the details in its implementation."

    They are anchored on the practice of pauperizing White taxpayers. They know their educational nostrums are worthless. As someone else here pointed out, such worthless programs also exist to let the educationists get their hands on your kids, earlier and earlier, in order to ruin their minds.

  36. @ic1000
    Will one of Sailer's regular foils crow that this diabolically evil rraacciisstt essayist was forced to fulsomely praise the achievements and character of African-American scholar Henry E. Baker (who was black)?

    Probably not. They might not even notice.

    In the Current Year, nothing proclaims allegiance to intellectual conformity more loudly than ignoring whatever Sailer might choose to write about.

    Rebutting implies awareness, with the exception of the Frontlash Exemption.

    Replies: @Greta Handel

    Will one of Sailer’s regular foils crow […]

    Yes. At whim.

    In the Current Year, nothing proclaims allegiance to intellectual conformity more loudly than ignoring whatever Sailer might choose to write about.

    You’re hooked on white copium.

    • LOL: ic1000
  37. @R.G. Camara
    And they want to put this innumerate moron in a position where numeracy is a primary component of the job.

    Seriously, the Deep State keeps making it obvious with every Deep State appointee that they are pulling the puppet strings and are just going for the most colorful array of puppets.

    Replies: @El Dato, @Alrenous, @SFG, @Tiny Duck, @Citizen of a Silly Country, @AndrewR, @SaneClownPosse, @Cato

    Isn’t one of Steve’s big arguments that the Inner Party now believes their own BS and this is one of the problems we’re seeing?

    • Agree: Unladen Swallow
    • Replies: @ic1000
    @SFG

    Off-topic (but along the lines of a self-deluding Party's unforced errors), here is Tom Piatek's short essay urging resistance against the eager enthusiasm of the Sect'y Blinken/Anchorman Holt/Columnist Rubin cabal, as they push the U.S. towards a showdown in Ukraine.

    Replies: @SFG

    , @Barnard
    @SFG

    Yes, one of the tells here is her argument that lynching led to a decrease in black patent holders. Ask her how many blacks were lynched between 1890-1900 and I doubt she would guess fewer than 20,000. The accepted historical total is 1,217. True believers like Cook also think these lynchings were a result of things like showing up whites, instead of being charged with serious, violent crimes in most cases. Virtually no one out of those lynched ever would have received a patent.

  38. @SFG
    @R.G. Camara

    Isn’t one of Steve’s big arguments that the Inner Party now believes their own BS and this is one of the problems we’re seeing?

    Replies: @ic1000, @Barnard

    Off-topic (but along the lines of a self-deluding Party’s unforced errors), here is Tom Piatek’s short essay urging resistance against the eager enthusiasm of the Sect’y Blinken/Anchorman Holt/Columnist Rubin cabal, as they push the U.S. towards a showdown in Ukraine.

    • Thanks: bomag
    • Replies: @SFG
    @ic1000

    Agreed.

    I kind of think this could be one of the few things the dissident right and the remains of the old left could agree on.

  39. I guess everyone knows that over the past 30 years or so there has evolved among many academic historians this fantasy world in which America would not have its racial problems today if the North had simply maintained Reconstruction in the South for as long as necessary. There are PhDs who really believe this, walking around the halls of universities, free of adult supervision, well paid and influential on the whole academic community.

    • Replies: @SFG
    @Henry Canaday

    Read Kendi’s “How to be Antiracist”. He basically says either the discrepancy has to be due to inferiority or discrimination, and is counting on your conditioning to make you pick option B.

    He’s trying to close off the ‘culture’ argument used by the mainstream right and until recently much of the left. But he’ll probably wind up redpilling a few people.

    (Ironically I actually think culture plays a fairly big role, though not 100 percent or I wouldn’t be here.)

    , @Hypnotoad666
    @Henry Canaday


    this fantasy world in which America would not have its racial problems today if the North had simply maintained Reconstruction in the South for as long as necessary
     
    I think that's partly an example of a larger historical fallacy that should have a name -- maybe the "one fateful event fallacy." For example, "if only the U.S. hadn't overthrown potentially better than average third world leader X, that country would have avoided it's subsequent history of failure." (Rather than merely having a slightly different succession of dictators and national failures).

    Every event (or non-event) isn't a cross-road. Sometimes it's just another step in the slog of a history determined by lots of inevitable facts.

    Replies: @Jack D

    , @Nicholas Stix
    @Henry Canaday

    "There are PhDs who really believe this, walking around the halls of universities, free of adult supervision, well paid and influential on the whole academic community."

    I have a hard time believing that. My hunch is that they fanatically repeat their talking points, and are completely focused on destroying whomever they have put on their enemies list, which may include relatives.

    About four months ago, a "progressive" relative of mine, who also lives in NYC, told me, "The subways are safe."

    At the time, this person was not traveling around on the subways at any time.

    The same relative told me that not only were blacks not rioting in NYC in 2020/2021, but that during marches, Whites would try to incite the blacks to riot, but the blacks would physically restrain the Whites.

  40. @Rob
    Cook’s style of thinking shows up in lots of places. Let’s grant that the only reason group x did not achieve at the level of white men. The fact that they were discriminated against means they did not achieve as much. Despite this near-tautology, activists want group x put on the same plane as white men in high school and college courses.

    When I was at Reed, there was a constant feminist grumble that we did not cover Greek and Roman women’s achievements. Maybe they did a lot, but there ate no records! Should we spend half of the broad humanities class on Sappho?

    Now Reed’s Humanities 1xx (think it's 110) covers the Greeks, Romans, Tenochtitlan, and the Harlem Renaissance. If there’s anything that willconvince you of white superiority it’s “the Greeks invented philosophy, geometry, and science. The Romans developed conquest and government to it’s highest level before the modern era. They created a state that lasted longer than any modern government. Far away, the Aztecs had a hugely productive food source (corn is has C4 metabolism. Much more efficient than wheat, which is C3) and built a stone city and a government based on terror. As soon as an alternative presented itself, the Aztec’s lost all their satrapies. Much later, some blacks wrote poetry and made music with instruments they could never invent.”

    Really, when you stack white achievements against non-whites, it makes you realize whites have a special sauce to the extent that no lefty CRT-inspired course ever presents them on an even footing. The best they can do seems to be Egypt. Ok, the Egyptians were building pyramids when wooly mammoth roamed Europe. That’s pretty cool. But besides pyramids to gawk at, what did Egyptians do that anyone thought was worth copying? With the first civilization, why did civilization never spread to the rest of Africa. Ok, malaria. But one might go a step further out and ask, “without civilizations, were Africans under the same sort of selective pressures that turned Europeans into world-conquering, science-creating, disease vanquishing behemoths? I will grant that East Aians (formerly Orientals) have caught up in many areas. Interesting science comes out of Japan. A huge chunk of modern “American” science is the doings of Chinamen. (but most of it does not replicate)

    Personally, i love Cook’s graph. It shows the cargo-cult nature of so much social “science.” It says, “if we just pretend, then reality will conform.” Remember when scientists wanted to understand reality? Today, when reality screams at them, they cover their ears and make sill graphs. That graph is a visual representation of the unwillingness of moderns to look honestly at the past and what different peoples have produced. One can be sure that Cook chose both scales so that a cursory glance would make blacks seem equally inventive for a short time, until BadWhites made them dumb again. I’ve heard seemingly smart people say that the decline of whites in. Ametica is fine for whites in America. Blacks and hispanics will do all the R&D, bespoke manufacturing, then ramping up production in the future. That future is coming in around eight years.How is that coming along so far?

    Magic 8 Ball says, “wtf were you thinking? Blacks can’t invent not shooting each other over Facebook feuds.” The different ways people chose to use technology is astounding. Blacks carry on their petty crabs-in-a-bucket lives with connectivity such as the world has never seen. Granted, average whites use tech to create misinformation bubbles to live in. But the magic that drives economic growth does not come from average people. It comes from +2-3σ folk. The number of blacks and mestizos with 145 IQ is a rounding error. The great and good are so delusional that they’ve decided that putting blacks front and center in institutions will save America! Hopefully, it’s just “representation.” In 2nd grade, I remember telling my dad that scientists were black. All the scientists in videos that they showed in school were black, you see. Dad smiled and said that videos often did not reflect reality. Showing “successful” blacks to inspire other blacks to behave better and make whites less reality-based, and therefore less “racist” goes back to the eighties. Forty years. That’s more than a generation.

    Kids have grown up with nothing but “blaques Rnt dum” from popular culture. The gentry, to use a Moldbugism. Moldbug and Unz have a lot in common. They both write essays no one has read in their entirety. Moldbug’s schtick is to blame Puritans for Jewish cognitive quirks. Unz’s is to gather all the dissidents in one place for easier monitoring and make patriots comfortable with the endless Hispanic invasion. Remember “The Marching Morons” by Kornbluth? It was inspired by the idea that if Chinese were in a x person wide line walking through a gate at 3 miles an hour, they would never all get through. There are so many Chinese that babies would be born, grow old, and die walking in that line. The line grows faster than they can cross through the gate. That’s pretty much what Hispanic immigration is. They reproduce faster than they immigrate, so there will always be poor Hispanics who could have higher standards of living in America. For practical matters, there is an infinite supply of illegals at 1-3 million/year. How are Biden’s illegals numbers shaping up? The media always crowed about how more aliens were streaming in under Trump than ever before, they stopped talking about that, so one can only assume that the problem stopped, right? Thank God for actual reporters, telling us about the federal government flying aliens from the border to your red state.

    I feel a Galileo thing is a mixed metaphor, because the culturist, now discriminationist, explanation for racial disparities is much closer to being a flat earther or young Earth creationist than buying a geocentric model of the universe. But we’ve had fifty five years of mass immigration. The country has become more crowded, polluted, and divided. When does immigration making America better start?

    Political division has grown to the extent that progs are fantasizing about civil war. Though that might just be because they want to use the post-9/11 police state on their domestic opponents. I guess they think the military will obey whatever disabled black transsexual they make into a general? Surely it scared them when they had to politically vet thousands of national guard soldiers to secure the capital for Biden’s installation? They did it fast, which implies to me that they already have a preliminary dossier on everyone in uniform. What’s a surveillance state for, if not that? Back to people thinking all populations are identical. At least geocentrism made some sense. It described facts about the world. The sun and moon appear to orbit the earth. The earth doesn’t feel like it’s moving, does it? Meanwhile cognitive creationism explains zero facts about the world.

    “Let’s make some graphs that show that the races are equally inventive and the earth stands still!”
    E pur si muove.

    Replies: @martin_2, @Stonewall Jackson, @Recently Based

    At least geocentrism made some sense. It described facts about the world. The sun and moon appear to orbit the earth. The earth doesn’t feel like it’s moving, does it? Meanwhile cognitive creationism explains zero facts about the world.

    Absolutely true.

    Regarding the Egyptians and their Pyramids…

    They had stone. Europeans had wood. Wood decays, so maybe we don’t know what Europeans really built thousands of years ago.

    As for the Aztecs, etcetera…

    How do we know about these ancient non-white civilisations? Who were the people who explored the remote and inhospitable regions of Africa and South America to do the painstaking and dangerous archeological work? It was white men from Europe and the USA. No-one would know anything about these histories were it not for them.

    • Replies: @Anonymous
    @martin_2

    Arkaim - deep in central Asia, but built by European Corded Ware folk was pretty impressive, as are the reconstructions of the timber built towns of the Globular Amphora Culture of central Europe.

  41. What if—no matter how thoroughly any and all discrimination, abuse, and unfairness is rooted out of the capitalist system—blacks and women will on average be less likely to strike it rich than whites and men?

    The answer to this is plain to see, and it has been going on for quite some time, in many’s ways: Discrimination against white men.

  42. @Henry Canaday
    I guess everyone knows that over the past 30 years or so there has evolved among many academic historians this fantasy world in which America would not have its racial problems today if the North had simply maintained Reconstruction in the South for as long as necessary. There are PhDs who really believe this, walking around the halls of universities, free of adult supervision, well paid and influential on the whole academic community.

    Replies: @SFG, @Hypnotoad666, @Nicholas Stix

    Read Kendi’s “How to be Antiracist”. He basically says either the discrepancy has to be due to inferiority or discrimination, and is counting on your conditioning to make you pick option B.

    He’s trying to close off the ‘culture’ argument used by the mainstream right and until recently much of the left. But he’ll probably wind up redpilling a few people.

    (Ironically I actually think culture plays a fairly big role, though not 100 percent or I wouldn’t be here.)

  43. Folks might be being too harsh here. A dissertation (usually) isn’t a researchers best work or the most cleverly done. It’s the first independent work. I certainly look back on my early papers and cringe, and see methodological glitches I really should have caught.

    Having separate x-axes isn’t the worst thing. If the goal is to highlight relative changes in white vs black inventiveness it’s not a bad option. I’m decent with math, but often have a hard time putting log scales in qualitative terms and find them misleading. So for her choice about the y-axis? Shrug. If she’s making statements that the rate of black and white inventiveness was equal in 1900, then there’s a big problem. But it doesn’t seem like she’s asserting that.

    Missing the whopping big artifact in the data that one of her sources only collects data to 1900? That’s a problem. She should certainly issue a correction or clarification that the graph probably doesn’t show what it appears to.

    • Replies: @res
    @JosephD

    The 2014 patent paper is not her dissertation. She got her PhD in 1997 (17 years earlier, for those who are counting) with a dissertation focusing on the underdevelopment of the banking system in czarist and post-Soviet Russia.[

    The patents paper was published AFTER she had already served as a Senior Economist in the Obama Administration's Council of Economic Advisers from August 2011 to August 2012.

    The thoughtful apologia schtick works better when it is not obviously wrong.

    The separate y-axes issue is complicated. If you are going to do what she did then you need to make very clear what was done so people don't make mistakes like the NPR idiot did.

    At least we agree on your final paragraph. Hopefully you can see by now that isn't going to happen.

    Replies: @Peter Johnson, @JosephD

  44. Steve,
    Excellent work digging into the problems with the analysis. My question is why some of this wasn’t obvious to the journal referees? The divisor error was pretty subtle, but the differing axes is a red flag.
    Also notice that the white ratio axis doesn’t start at zero. Another red flag. If either of those came in a paper I refereed, I would demand to see the axis corrected graph.

    I tried to read the paper, but it made my eyes gloss over. I wanted to see how the analysis was done and what the numbers looked like. Fortunately, someone with a more focused attention did the hard work.

    • Replies: @peterike
    @Dr. DoomNGloom

    My question is why some of this wasn’t obvious to the journal referees?

    Do you really have that question? It probably was totally obvious, but we're talking about black math here, so, you know, we can overlook certain discrepancies.

    Fortunately, someone with a more focused attention did the hard work.

    No they didn't. Just like blacks almost never pay to get on the New York City subway, they never have to "pay" for much else either. And the higher up the ladder you go, the less is expected of them.

    , @Gordo
    @Dr. DoomNGloom


    My question is why some of this wasn’t obvious to the journal referees?
     
    I'd imagine it was.
  45. @ic1000
    @SFG

    Off-topic (but along the lines of a self-deluding Party's unforced errors), here is Tom Piatek's short essay urging resistance against the eager enthusiasm of the Sect'y Blinken/Anchorman Holt/Columnist Rubin cabal, as they push the U.S. towards a showdown in Ukraine.

    Replies: @SFG

    Agreed.

    I kind of think this could be one of the few things the dissident right and the remains of the old left could agree on.

  46. @Redneck farmer
    Competence is overrated.

    Replies: @Buzz Mohawk

    “If you just act like you know what you’re doing,

    Everybody thinks that you do.”

    — Joe Walsh, “Lucky That Way”

  47. @R.G. Camara
    And they want to put this innumerate moron in a position where numeracy is a primary component of the job.

    Seriously, the Deep State keeps making it obvious with every Deep State appointee that they are pulling the puppet strings and are just going for the most colorful array of puppets.

    Replies: @El Dato, @Alrenous, @SFG, @Tiny Duck, @Citizen of a Silly Country, @AndrewR, @SaneClownPosse, @Cato

    Uh you do know that most people in acadmeia and bank heads and finiancail gurus support her?

    In other words the most intelligent people want her.

    That tells you smoething right there.

    According to most economists and such Lisa Cook is for sure among the 100 most qualified people to serve on the Fed board.

    Dr. Lisa Cook has decades of experience as an economist and has fought to promote balance and innovation in order to strengthen our economy.

    Paul Krugman supports

    MAny banks have written letters suppirting here

    All demicrats support
    ALl People fo Color suport here.

    • Thanks: R.G. Camara
    • LOL: William Badwhite
    • Replies: @Reg Cæsar
    @Tiny Duck


    finian•cail gurus
     
    I believe those are called "monks".


    cáil in Irish Gaelic


    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Clonard_Statue_St_Finian_2007_08_26.jpg


    https://live.staticflickr.com/2830/33423533514_889e9a21b3_b.jpg


    cáil ar "Cúinne" Mountjot de bharr na corraíle i rith na rástaí gluasteán glach bliain.

    (The sign translates corraíle as "thrills", but Google says it means "unrest". Perhaps the Irish don't differentiate.)

    Replies: @Coemgen

    , @Unladen Swallow
    @Tiny Duck

    Not that I would have expected it, but hey td, how about debating the substance of Steve's critique? Oh, that's right, you don't even understand it.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

    , @R.G. Camara
    @Tiny Duck

    I've missed you, baby. Please don't leave me again.

    You...complete....me.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sze0JlKaTyE

  48. @kaganovitch
    So Paul Romer , Nobel Laureate, fell for basic graph illiteracy? Sad.

    Replies: @Almost Missouri, @Bardon Kaldian, @Brutusale, @guest007

    White knights supporting women of dubious accomplishment has become a thing.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-board-of-directors-2015-10?op=1

  49. As I said on Steve’s earlier post on this woman, the kind of errors he highlights are too obvious to be from stupidity – they are on purpose and safe in the knowledge that no one will ever call it out because in our current age we are to expect the worst of whites and the best of blacks in terms of achievement and integrity.

    Also, although I am not an exalted academic, it seems awfully dubious to look at a single phenomena like the output of patents and assert it’s evidence of the negative impact of other social conditions without, you know, actually providing supporting evidence that they are related.

    Several of the accounts on the bird app I follow simply highlight interesting archaeological finds. It’s impossible to miss the fact certain civilizations had a level of skill and innovation thousands of years ago that others never reached at any point, much less before the dreaded era of colonization or slavery supposedly prevented these cultures from reaching the heights they were destined to achieve.

    Anyway, the crack up over race basically comes down to the fact that despite the vast sums of treasure expended, the scores of policy innovations, and the adoption of plainly unconstitutional practices that were intended to elevate blacks, it’s obvious to all that it just hasn’t worked. This reality is unbearable for the people that hold the commanding heights of our society, so a new religion has been invented to free us from inconvenient facts.

    • Agree: Dr. DoomNGloom
    • Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
    @Arclight


    Anyway, the crack up over race basically comes down to the fact that despite the vast sums of treasure expended, the scores of policy innovations, and the adoption of plainly unconstitutional practices that were intended to elevate blacks, it’s obvious to all that it just hasn’t worked. This reality is unbearable for the people that hold the commanding heights of our society, so a new religion has been invented to free us from inconvenient facts.
     
    On the question of the inconvenient facts, though, it is necessary to remember that these facts would have very little significance were it not for the inhuman scale and soft totalitarianism of modern societies.

    This is why debating HBD, Nature/Nurture, and other suchlike theories so often amounts to barking up the wrong tree. In a more distributed political system, the question even of whether races differed from one another, let alone why they differed, would be of no practical importance to most people. We would just avoid people we didn't want to be around and stick with those we did want to be around. Our own history, experience, and ability for risk assessment would provide us with a sufficient toolkit for navigating through the world and achieving a meaningful life. The race-question would be an affair for scientists and philosophers, not a matter of politics.

    But when the empire constrains us all to live in a common economy and a common welfare state, the strains between different classes of people become evident, and this opens up the whole field of "problem politics" that is so characteristic of imperial ages. The empire wants only money, power, and obedience. It wants to channelize all human activity into a single current of tax revenue and economic force that it can drink from at will. Due to its own nature, it cannot help but see any sort of individual difference as a direct affront to its own authority. The idea that people might have different beliefs, ideas, priorities, and tendencies is interpreted as a rebellious notion; as a result, "equality" becomes a watchword of official propaganda and prescribed belief. The empire rightly discerns the political effect that any admission of difference would have, viz. that it must relax its stranglehold upon the lives and dignities of ordinary people. This the empire will not tolerate, so it relentlessly pushes its equality line and thinks little of spending vast sums of money in fruitless efforts to paper over real distinctions which, in spite of all, continue to exist.

    The rise of the Civil-Rights-era legislation and the welfare state coincides with the crystallization of the West into an imperium and the replacement of hard currency by imperial fiat. Ordinarily, the laws of economics, which are simple derivatives of the natural law, would not permit such things. These are not goods that are produced but conceits that are indulged. Delivering arguments to the empire, about why its conceits are wrong and irrational, works about as well as it does with any other man whose paycheck depends on him not understanding certain things.

    It is written that you cannot serve both God and mammon. By "mammon" is not meant wealth (which is a good thing in and of itself), but the kingdom of lies and sins held together by the power of money. The empire is an evil billionaire who has bought up everyone's mortgage and now threatens them with arbitrary economic ruin if they don't perform his required rites---this alone accounts for the willingness of people to submit to and applaud the racial chicanery. The only way out of this is the arduous task of regaining personal autonomy, which starts by regaining financial independence. Getting out of debt is the first step. Fiat money is the lifeblood of the imperium, and retiring debt extinguishes it. This will involve great pain for many people, but in this case the magnitude of the sacrifice is the direct measure of the deviation from the mean which we must correct.

    Replies: @Art Deco

  50. Finally, real Voodoo Economics after it was promised so long ago.

    • LOL: fish
  51. @J
    I can imagine the bitterness of real economists for her promotion.

    Replies: @Whitey Whiteman III

    First, assume a violin.

    • LOL: Nicholas Stix
  52. @Anonymous
    Just as an aside to your essay, I wonder if patent numbers really reflect true inventiveness. The reason I say this is that my father was friendly with a guy, Joe Bolger, who was a classic Yankee inventor, coming up with all sorts of clever solutions to everyday problems and needs. He used to patent his inventions, each patent costing him about $5,000 in various fees and expenses (this would have been 40 or 50 years ago).
    But he quickly discovered that having a patent on his inventions did not protect him, because big companies would just steal his inventions. The Japanese were the worst offenders.
    When he found out a company had stolen one of his inventions and he told them he held the patent they would just say so sue us. He couldn't afford to do that.
    He gave up on patenting his inventions, things like the ball-end on a motorcycle hand lever so your hand won't slip off, folding footpegs, monoshock rear suspensions etc., and all sorts of tools. We still use a device that instantly frees frozen screws and nuts or bolts, no matter how badly they are corroded or jammed, that he gave to my father decades ago. It applies both downward pressure and torque simultaneously. At least that's the best I can do to explain how it works.
    He never patented it and just sold it to friends or at flea markets, trade shows, etc., and through catalog sales, making an item when someone ordered it. We still have an old AJS 7R, originally a road racer that my grandfather competed with, that Bolger helped my father convert to a motocrosser, using lots of his unique components.
    I wonder how many other inventors like him there are out there who never patent anything.

    Replies: @Cool Daddy Jimbo, @YetAnotherAnon, @Calvin Hobbes, @rebel yell, @Lurker

    “We still use a device that instantly frees frozen screws and nuts or bolts, no matter how badly they are corroded or jammed, that he gave to my father decades ago. “

    Are they available to buy?

    • Replies: @Technite78
    @YetAnotherAnon


    “We still use a device that instantly frees frozen screws and nuts or bolts, no matter how badly they are corroded or jammed, that he gave to my father decades ago. It applies both downward pressure and torque simultaneously.“

    Are they available to buy?
     

    I'm pretty sure he's describing an impact driver. If you do any serious mechanical repair work, especially on old equipment, you should have one. And yes, they are available.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_driver

    , @Billy Ash
    @YetAnotherAnon

    Its called an impact driver. You load the proper bit and place the tool on the screw head and hit it with a hammer. It applies counterclockwise torque and downward force. Worked well on my stuck screws.

    , @Anonymous
    @YetAnotherAnon

    Hi, Yet,

    I asked my dad about the gizmo and he dug it out of the attic. It hasn't been used in years. Below is a photo of it. To use it, after fitting the appropriate bit, you pull the T handle out all the way, then push it in. You don't have to use any force, just enough to get it going. The cylinder spins as it goes down and when it contacts the crossbar it rotates the center shaft and the screw or bolt pops free.
    Dad says he doesn't remember when Bolger gave it to him, but it was probably when he was working part time as a stunt man with Solar Productions. He most likely met him through Bud Ekins or Steve McQueen when they all competed in the old Barstow-to-Vegas desert race, so it would have been mid-to-late 1960s when he was in college, so the tool is pretty old. It looks obviously home workshop-made to me. I don't know if it was ever sold commercially.

    https://i.imgur.com/Wju6Grz.jpg

    Replies: @Jack D

  53. @R.G. Camara
    And they want to put this innumerate moron in a position where numeracy is a primary component of the job.

    Seriously, the Deep State keeps making it obvious with every Deep State appointee that they are pulling the puppet strings and are just going for the most colorful array of puppets.

    Replies: @El Dato, @Alrenous, @SFG, @Tiny Duck, @Citizen of a Silly Country, @AndrewR, @SaneClownPosse, @Cato

    She’s black and better than most black candidates. That’s her qualifications. What’s more, in a multiracial society, thats all qualifications she needs.

    Steve remains stubbornly stuck in his colorblind meritocracy fantasy. That country is parrot dead. Time to move on.

    The country (if you want to call it that) is now tribal. Each group gets its slice of the pie or it pushes back. Only gentile whites haven’t gotten the memo.

    • Agree: Gordo, Alden
  54. The amazing thing is that no one immediately called out the plummet in the black graph at 1900 as an obvious methodological artifact (problem) instead of any reflection of real-world phenomena. The number of Jews in Berlin in 1943 did not free-fall as much!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenstrasse_protest

    • Replies: @Jack D
    @Abe

    "Extremism in defense of [equity] is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

    Once you adopt that mentality, then stretching the truth a little bit is A-OK, as long as it is for a good cause. As you can tell from the above quote, this can be true regardless of whether your goals lie to the left or the right of the center.

  55. @Anonymous
    Just as an aside to your essay, I wonder if patent numbers really reflect true inventiveness. The reason I say this is that my father was friendly with a guy, Joe Bolger, who was a classic Yankee inventor, coming up with all sorts of clever solutions to everyday problems and needs. He used to patent his inventions, each patent costing him about $5,000 in various fees and expenses (this would have been 40 or 50 years ago).
    But he quickly discovered that having a patent on his inventions did not protect him, because big companies would just steal his inventions. The Japanese were the worst offenders.
    When he found out a company had stolen one of his inventions and he told them he held the patent they would just say so sue us. He couldn't afford to do that.
    He gave up on patenting his inventions, things like the ball-end on a motorcycle hand lever so your hand won't slip off, folding footpegs, monoshock rear suspensions etc., and all sorts of tools. We still use a device that instantly frees frozen screws and nuts or bolts, no matter how badly they are corroded or jammed, that he gave to my father decades ago. It applies both downward pressure and torque simultaneously. At least that's the best I can do to explain how it works.
    He never patented it and just sold it to friends or at flea markets, trade shows, etc., and through catalog sales, making an item when someone ordered it. We still have an old AJS 7R, originally a road racer that my grandfather competed with, that Bolger helped my father convert to a motocrosser, using lots of his unique components.
    I wonder how many other inventors like him there are out there who never patent anything.

    Replies: @Cool Daddy Jimbo, @YetAnotherAnon, @Calvin Hobbes, @rebel yell, @Lurker

    Just as an aside to your essay, I wonder if patent numbers really reflect true inventiveness. The reason I say this is that my father was friendly with a guy, Joe Bolger, who was a classic Yankee inventor, coming up with all sorts of clever solutions to everyday problems and needs. He used to patent his inventions, each patent costing him about \$5,000 in various fees and expenses (this would have been 40 or 50 years ago).
    But he quickly discovered that having a patent on his inventions did not protect him, because big companies would just steal his inventions. The Japanese were the worst offenders.

    Thanks. I was wondering about how much trouble it is to apply for a patent. And if most of the good ones get stolen anyway, getting a patent was kind of like buying a very expensive lottery ticket.

  56. @kaganovitch
    So Paul Romer , Nobel Laureate, fell for basic graph illiteracy? Sad.

    Replies: @Almost Missouri, @Bardon Kaldian, @Brutusale, @guest007

    There is a line in the movie “The Big Short” when one character ask if the person selling credit default swaps (CDS) is right about the housing market (that the market will collapse and the investment banks are the cause) and the other character says “you want him to be right.”

    Many outlanding claims, papers, ideas are successful because a lot of people want those claims to be right. Sometimes the claims are right but most of the time the claims are wrong. Steve would like people to work harder analysing such claims instead of taking them at face value without question.

    at the 07:30 mark.

  57. Also, although I am not an exalted academic, it seems awfully dubious to look at a single phenomena like the output of patents and assert it’s evidence of the negative impact of other social conditions without, you know, actually providing supporting evidence that they are related.

    Much of the paper, to the extent I could follow it, was smokescreen of cognitive fog. It left enough pegs to distract the highly educated and on which hang their biases (provided you don’t look too closely).

    Maybe if one is not familiar with the dubious causal inference techniques, it just looks just as you describe. Or perhaps you just notice. It’s a cautionary tale in how politics has corrupted the academic press.

    I’ve seen surprisingly garbage papers from Ivy League economists, but mostly from marketing. There is a lot of serious literature in causal inference, but this paper does not contribute.

  58. The dominant pattern–the drop in the year 1900–creates a situation where any variable that varies significantly pre and post-1900 would statistically explain the result. The number of potential variables is practically infinite (eg, number of automobiles per capita).

    Her paper documents the many esteemed researchers and institutions that aided and abetted this work. It’s not trivial to be invited to Standford, Yale, the NBER to give presentations, and then to have a Who’s Who of economists reading your paper and giving advice. With such support, the obvious criticism that this is simply an exercise in obtuse pedantry explaining a nothingburger, is not something you would say or write in public because it would generate the wrong enemies.

    Interestingly, she documents a significant state-by-state effect of lynchings and race riots on Black patents per million. Like the famous Levitt abortion study, this is the kind of thing that economists love because it is hard to dispute if you don’t have the data (eg, it could be true regardless of the simple time series data). However, if a researcher was truly interested in finding the truth, they would segregate the data into two groups, say states w/ above and below average riot rates, and then show the difference over time. A real pattern should show up in a simple graph, suitably pre-sorted.

    Another interesting point is that lynching peaks in the 1890s, yet is found to have a strongly negative effect on Black patent rates. In her chart, the time series shows a strong positive correlation between patent rates and lynching. I’m not sure how she teased out the negative correlation in her multivariate analysis, but such is the power of econometrics to find whatever you want.

    See paper here
    https://lisadcook.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/pats_paper17_1013_final_web.pdf

  59. A nice piece.

    The corrected chart made me smile.

    We really do live in an Empire of Lies.

  60. Consider the possibility that she really believes her graph proves her point rather than an attempt to fool people.

    Also, who was that black guy in the late 19th century that caused that spike upwards in black patents? Was it the black Thomas Edison?

    • Replies: @Jack D
    @Yancey Ward

    Whether she was sincere or not is beside the point because it's bad either way - either she was dumb enough to make these obvious methodological errors or she did so intentionally because she was seeking to promote her ideology. Or maybe you don't have to pick between stupid and evil 'cause she's a bit of both?

    The real question is why the adults in the room (her thesis advisor and thesis committee) didn't call her on her BS? Again, either they had double standards and were giving her a break (the soft bigotry of low expectations) because she was black or else they supported her ideologically and so were willing to allow her to do ideologically tainted "science" , or again, a bit of both.

    And you can't just blame them. There is tremendous pressure in the academy to promote DIE. The faculty's own hiring and advancement in many universities is judged in (large) part by their efforts to "promote diversity". It's hard enough to find black women who are even remotely plausible candidates for a PhD in economics. This is the kind of field that is just not appealing to them to begin with and even for the ones it appeals to, very few actually have the intellectual and mathematical chops to do the work. So here they have a real live black female PhD candidate - they are going to do everything they can to get her through. Do you want to be the "racist" who flunked out this black woman?

    Replies: @Emil Nikola Richard, @Goddard, @Jack D, @International Jew

  61. @Abe
    The amazing thing is that no one immediately called out the plummet in the black graph at 1900 as an obvious methodological artifact (problem) instead of any reflection of real-world phenomena. The number of Jews in Berlin in 1943 did not free-fall as much!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenstrasse_protest

    Replies: @Jack D

    “Extremism in defense of [equity] is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

    Once you adopt that mentality, then stretching the truth a little bit is A-OK, as long as it is for a good cause. As you can tell from the above quote, this can be true regardless of whether your goals lie to the left or the right of the center.

  62. @SFG
    @R.G. Camara

    Isn’t one of Steve’s big arguments that the Inner Party now believes their own BS and this is one of the problems we’re seeing?

    Replies: @ic1000, @Barnard

    Yes, one of the tells here is her argument that lynching led to a decrease in black patent holders. Ask her how many blacks were lynched between 1890-1900 and I doubt she would guess fewer than 20,000. The accepted historical total is 1,217. True believers like Cook also think these lynchings were a result of things like showing up whites, instead of being charged with serious, violent crimes in most cases. Virtually no one out of those lynched ever would have received a patent.

  63. @Dr. DoomNGloom
    Steve,
    Excellent work digging into the problems with the analysis. My question is why some of this wasn't obvious to the journal referees? The divisor error was pretty subtle, but the differing axes is a red flag.
    Also notice that the white ratio axis doesn't start at zero. Another red flag. If either of those came in a paper I refereed, I would demand to see the axis corrected graph.

    I tried to read the paper, but it made my eyes gloss over. I wanted to see how the analysis was done and what the numbers looked like. Fortunately, someone with a more focused attention did the hard work.

    Replies: @peterike, @Gordo

    My question is why some of this wasn’t obvious to the journal referees?

    Do you really have that question? It probably was totally obvious, but we’re talking about black math here, so, you know, we can overlook certain discrepancies.

    Fortunately, someone with a more focused attention did the hard work.

    No they didn’t. Just like blacks almost never pay to get on the New York City subway, they never have to “pay” for much else either. And the higher up the ladder you go, the less is expected of them.

  64. OT But maybe not, maybe this is relevant. Below more tag because maybe it’s not.

    [MORE]

    Lefties have just enough cleverness to grift, and then after that they’re either remarkably stupid (and relying on cult conformity or a fake pity appeal), or they’re acting that way to avoid trouble. Just now on Hugh Hewitt a Lawrence Tribe-level stupid person, with a wierd babytalk affect (willing to believe he has pedoface, unwilling to look it up), illustrated the weakness of Hewitt’s faith in the outdated way of doing things.
    Hewitt’s an establishmentarian who subtly hates Trump voters and mentions once a day that January 6th protesters deserve permanent jailing with only a promised trial, brain damage, the complete loss of their property, detached retinas, and whatever else they get; also that there can be no doubt that Biden is the most popular candidate in the history of election going back to Cain. He gave air time to the unsellable loser Chris Christie, who proceeded to defame Trump so clumsily that he had to walk it back within the day. So much for “Republicans.”
    Enter Simple Jack, columnist for the Boston Node, constitution-hating communist, believer of NPR, and guy who managed to catch one out of context audio clip of two haters of Trump voters who daily call for the punishment of January 6th “rioters.” Simple Jack, who is not a regular Hewitt listener, and who, due to his tragic mental limitations, is incapable of perusing the recent transcripts on Hewitt’s web site, decided that he was listening to two January 6th terrorists, crowing about how they got away with it, because after all nobody cares.
    Hewitt attempts to educate Simple Jack. Jack, who you’ll remember thinks he is talking to a murderous and Russian pro-election Trumptrooper, frontlashes about the importance of teaching people about that bloody holocaust which was one broken window, one stolen laptop, and one traumatized policeman who was forced to murder an unarmed terrorwoman (we must never forget).
    Hugh stupidly attempts to agree with Simple Jack. Simple Jack’s not about to have that. Hugh attempts to move on. Simple Jack is as unmovable as Chris Christie in a Dairy Queen line.
    Suddenly Hugh, a professor of Constitutional law, asks Simple Jack an innocent question which made me smile, because I immediately saw where he was going — and I also knew he wasn’t getting there any time soon.
    (Interlude: the Kill All Republicans Kangaroo Klaven could have attempted to give itself some shadow of legitimacy by not violating ancient precedent and custom. But Pelosi was drunk that day, as she is all day every day, and allowing Republicans to choose their own guys — as is how it is actually done — doesn’t fit with the name of the Kill All Republicans Kangaroo Klaven. Thus the Klaven does not represent representative democracy or the opinion of the minority or the traditions of the Congress. Thus Hugh calls it illegitimate.)
    Simple Jack did what every legally illiterate knob does in trying to argue with a law talker: attempt to force a conflation which, in actual law school, would get him chewed out like he’d been caught sleeping. He calls the Klaven at least as legitimate as the Ben Ghazi hearing, which every NPR believer thinks was something that at this point made no difference, because it’s not like anybody died at Ben Ghazi. He thinks he has scored a point, because leftism isn’t about knowing context or making sense, it’s about getting a punch in and scoring a point. Hugh counters with a poisonous comparison, asking Simple Jack if he knows what the difference is between the Klaven and the BGH, and readying himself to explain.
    Stupid law school graduate.
    Of course Simple Jack easily defeats all this, by being too dense to digest or allow it. And he’s supposed to sit still! For an explanation of, of all things, how he is wrong! It’s almost like Hugh doesn’t have a lot of experience talking to communists. He might not. Most of his experience is probably talking with a Tip O’Neil type Democrat.
    Hugh suggests just the slightest restrained irritation when he asks Simple Jack, “Have you ever been sued?”
    The interview goes into the pay-per-view “naughty hour,” which is closed but to subscribers to Hugh’s personal media empire, so I don’t know if Simple Jack ever got it. But I know how I’d bet.

  65. @YetAnotherAnon
    @Anonymous

    "We still use a device that instantly frees frozen screws and nuts or bolts, no matter how badly they are corroded or jammed, that he gave to my father decades ago. "

    Are they available to buy?

    Replies: @Technite78, @Billy Ash, @Anonymous

    “We still use a device that instantly frees frozen screws and nuts or bolts, no matter how badly they are corroded or jammed, that he gave to my father decades ago. It applies both downward pressure and torque simultaneously.“

    Are they available to buy?

    I’m pretty sure he’s describing an impact driver. If you do any serious mechanical repair work, especially on old equipment, you should have one. And yes, they are available.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_driver

  66. Most people don’t have the brains, drive, talent, and luck to give their fellow Americans great enough value to become rich. I’ll never be as rich as Gates or Jobs but so what. If people have the freedom to buy iphones and stuff money into Jobs pocket that was the result of capitalism.

    Instead of trying to make every group produce the same number of millionaires why not try to make life better for the middle class and upper lower class? Most people will be in the middle class or upper lower class. Safe neighborhoods would be a nice start for a public policy goal. Good schools whether by reform or vouchers would be another worthy policy goal. A measure of freedom to live your life as you see fit would be a good policy goal. No one seems to be working on those goals.

  67. • Replies: @Bill Jones
    @CCZ

    But note she does not claim they invented English Grammar.

  68. OT: iSteve content generator Jeh Johnson has once again said the quiet part loud. That the current warmongering and backing into a corner of a country that still has vast ICBM stocks is ‘payback for 2016’. Now, personally I think it’s more ‘payback for 2015’ when Russia began it’s intervention against the US neocon and Israeli regime change attempt in Syria but disturbingly perhaps a lot of non-neocons are now gunning for Vladimir Hitler Putin now too. Where is the opposition to stop these things getting out of hand?

    In politics you don’t succeed by being elected, you succeed by making your opponents adopt the same policies as you, meaning the policy becomes embedded no matter how an election goes. It looks like the Trump-Putin hysteria was very potent propaganda from the neocons and they have converted many to their cause of unending pressure and hostility to Russia.

    • Replies: @Jack D
    @Altai


    the current warmongering and backing into a corner of a country that still has vast ICBM stocks
     
    Someone should have told Putin this. He's the one doing the warmongering. And I know of a country that is not named Russia that has vast ICBM stocks. Why is he playing with fire?

    Replies: @James Speaks

    , @Johann Ricke
    @Altai


    That the current warmongering and backing into a corner of a country that still has vast ICBM stocks is ‘payback for 2016’.
     
    What corner? No one has invaded Russia or is even thinking of doing so. If you're suggesting that not surrendering to Russia will result in Putin unleashing all-out nuclear war, let me point out that this gambit would merely hand a depopulated Russia over to China. Putin wants a bigger Russia, not a bigger China bloated with Russia's freshly-killed carcass.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

    , @Nicholas Stix
    @Altai

    "Unconstrained by truth."

    This mook is implying that Biden's people are constrained by facts?!

  69. This is incredibly depressing. This is the best black female economist they could fine?

    Harrowing..

    • Replies: @Art Deco
    @Kaz

    I don't think being a capable researcher hurts, but I'd wager connections and the congruence of your research program with the preferences of the political types would be the main currents in the pipeline.

    Note, 55 years ago Andrew Brimmer was appointed to the Federal Reserve Board. He'd gone through the paces (University of Washington and Harvard) at a time when AA was unknown and he'd been on the staff of Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

    Right now, about 30% of the research degrees awarded in social sciences (anthropology, economics, geography, political science, and sociology) are awarded in economics. Currently, the award of research degrees in social sciences to blacks is running at about 180 per year, so you figure 50-odd doctorates are awarded in economics to black candidates in a typical year, which would account for about 4% of all the doctorates in economics awarded. There are about 30,000 working economists in the United States. If you have 1,200 black economists, you're going to find quite a number who do not make a hash of things in this way. The majority of economists, btw, work for corporations or public agencies.

    Note, they could certainly have found someone more suitable that the red haze shoplifter they nominated to be Comptroller of the Currency. Quality is not driving the appointments process in this administration.

  70. @Altai
    OT: iSteve content generator Jeh Johnson has once again said the quiet part loud. That the current warmongering and backing into a corner of a country that still has vast ICBM stocks is 'payback for 2016'. Now, personally I think it's more 'payback for 2015' when Russia began it's intervention against the US neocon and Israeli regime change attempt in Syria but disturbingly perhaps a lot of non-neocons are now gunning for Vladimir Hitler Putin now too. Where is the opposition to stop these things getting out of hand?

    In politics you don't succeed by being elected, you succeed by making your opponents adopt the same policies as you, meaning the policy becomes embedded no matter how an election goes. It looks like the Trump-Putin hysteria was very potent propaganda from the neocons and they have converted many to their cause of unending pressure and hostility to Russia.

    https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1492554515144396813

    Replies: @Jack D, @Johann Ricke, @Nicholas Stix

    the current warmongering and backing into a corner of a country that still has vast ICBM stocks

    Someone should have told Putin this. He’s the one doing the warmongering. And I know of a country that is not named Russia that has vast ICBM stocks. Why is he playing with fire?

    • Replies: @James Speaks
    @Jack D

    After forcing the AngloZioNazis to deliver his security guarantees, albeit under other labels, he and Assad are now going to retake the rest of Syria. Al-Tanf is next.

  71. @Technite78
    When I look at the dual Y axis in Cook's original graph, it seems to me that she used the default results of Microsoft Excel's automatic axis scaling. When you give it two data sets with the same X-axis (i.e. time), and then choose to have independent Y axes, it scales the range of the axes and sets their origin so that the highest and lowest data points fall in the top half and bottom half of the chart respectively... in other words, it's trying to stretch and center the data points on the graph so that they are readable, without respect to whether it makes for a logical comparison between the two data sets.

    I've done a fair amount of data analysis using spreadsheets and graphs, and the default Y ranges chosen automatically by Excel frequently have to be manually adjusted so that the data sets can be properly compared. I'm guessing that wasn't done here... and it's entirely possible that the poor choice of Y ranges was due to laziness/incompetence rather than an intent to deceive.

    Replies: @James Speaks, @Muggles, @mc23

    and it’s entirely possible that the poor choice of Y ranges was due to laziness/incompetence rather than an intent to deceive.

    …and it’s entirely possible that the poor choice of Y ranges was due to laziness/incompetence coupled with an intent to deceive.

    FIFY

    • Agree: Technite78
  72. @J.Ross
    OT PJ O'Rourke is dead.
    https://news.yahoo.com/amphtml/pj-o-rourke-death-celebrated-081524134.html
    (They're not saying his death is celebrated, they're calling him a celebrated satirist.)

    Replies: @Gordo

    He wrote some god stuff in his time.

  73. @Dr. DoomNGloom
    Steve,
    Excellent work digging into the problems with the analysis. My question is why some of this wasn't obvious to the journal referees? The divisor error was pretty subtle, but the differing axes is a red flag.
    Also notice that the white ratio axis doesn't start at zero. Another red flag. If either of those came in a paper I refereed, I would demand to see the axis corrected graph.

    I tried to read the paper, but it made my eyes gloss over. I wanted to see how the analysis was done and what the numbers looked like. Fortunately, someone with a more focused attention did the hard work.

    Replies: @peterike, @Gordo

    My question is why some of this wasn’t obvious to the journal referees?

    I’d imagine it was.

  74. @Jack D
    @Altai


    the current warmongering and backing into a corner of a country that still has vast ICBM stocks
     
    Someone should have told Putin this. He's the one doing the warmongering. And I know of a country that is not named Russia that has vast ICBM stocks. Why is he playing with fire?

    Replies: @James Speaks

    After forcing the AngloZioNazis to deliver his security guarantees, albeit under other labels, he and Assad are now going to retake the rest of Syria. Al-Tanf is next.

  75. @Yancey Ward
    Consider the possibility that she really believes her graph proves her point rather than an attempt to fool people.

    Also, who was that black guy in the late 19th century that caused that spike upwards in black patents? Was it the black Thomas Edison?

    Replies: @Jack D

    Whether she was sincere or not is beside the point because it’s bad either way – either she was dumb enough to make these obvious methodological errors or she did so intentionally because she was seeking to promote her ideology. Or maybe you don’t have to pick between stupid and evil ’cause she’s a bit of both?

    The real question is why the adults in the room (her thesis advisor and thesis committee) didn’t call her on her BS? Again, either they had double standards and were giving her a break (the soft bigotry of low expectations) because she was black or else they supported her ideologically and so were willing to allow her to do ideologically tainted “science” , or again, a bit of both.

    And you can’t just blame them. There is tremendous pressure in the academy to promote DIE. The faculty’s own hiring and advancement in many universities is judged in (large) part by their efforts to “promote diversity”. It’s hard enough to find black women who are even remotely plausible candidates for a PhD in economics. This is the kind of field that is just not appealing to them to begin with and even for the ones it appeals to, very few actually have the intellectual and mathematical chops to do the work. So here they have a real live black female PhD candidate – they are going to do everything they can to get her through. Do you want to be the “racist” who flunked out this black woman?

    • Replies: @Emil Nikola Richard
    @Jack D


    And you can’t just blame them.
     
    They had a job to do and they did not do it.

    Do you want to be the “racist” who flunked out this black woman?
     
    See above. Has anybody ever sued a thesis committee for malpractice?
    , @Goddard
    @Jack D


    Do you want to be the “racist” who flunked out this black woman?
     
    Put me in, Coach!
    , @Jack D
    @Jack D

    Correction - I see now that this was not her thesis but a paper submitted years later. For thesis committee substitute journal reviewers.

    The truth is that, especially in the social sciences (but in the hard sciences also - witness the # of results that cannot be replicated), the review system has failed. Journals are a business and you can get almost any sort of garbage published. The review system is not powerful enough to prevent the publication of worthless or flawed papers like this. Lots of flawed papers get published in any case, but as soon as the reviewers saw the subject matter and understood who the author was, the double standards would have kicked in bigtime and the standards would have fallen even lower than usual.

    Replies: @Johann Ricke

    , @International Jew
    @Jack D

    Don't assume that thesis advisors or the other committee members read every word in a thesis. I once got invited to the committee for a Korean grad student the department just wanted gone; I was invited on condition that I sign off without asking questions or making trouble.

  76. “economist Lisa D. Cook’s prime qualification for her nomination to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve is a celebrated paper on black inventors.”

    So in other words, the paper for which she is known for has nothing whatsoever to do with economics, which is relevant for being on the Board of Reserve. This kind of paper would be a high end level say, for Black Studies classes, or as a “scholarly” source for Kendi or Coates to consult for the upcoming tomes “hating on whitey”, but aside from those scenarios, her prime qualification is not a qualification for the job she’s being nominated for. So she’s basically not qualified to be on the Federal Board of Reserve. So in the name of DIE, the Administration is willing to sacrifice the economy. And if this is the best person they could find to fit the Affirmative Action bill, that’s not saying much.

  77. @Anonymous
    Perhaps a logarithmic scale would be more appropriate as the data spans several ordinate decades.

    Replies: @res

    That’s what I would try. Though you would have to deal with the (apparent) zero values then.

    Also, log scales are not intuitive to most people.

  78. @anon
    Off Topic

    NPR covered the Pre-K study that showed negative results for minorities. Steve knocked it out a few days ago. https://www.npr.org/2022/02/10/1079406041/researcher-says-rethink-prek-preschool-prekindergarten

    Curious. But around here, everyone just nodded because more education mostly never closes achievement gaps and mostly does nothing.

    But NPR acted all surprised, and mostly discussed how they could spend more money next time. They never, for an instant, considered that it was valid and this stuff never works.

    They are so anchored on the idea that it has to work (in theory), that any failure simply has to involve the details in its implementation.

    Including:

    She's talking about drilling kids on basic skills. Worksheets for tracing letters and numbers. A teacher giving 10-minute lectures to a whole class of 25 kids who are expected to sit on their hands and listen, only five of whom may be paying any attention.

    "Higher-income families are not choosing this kind of preparation," she explains. "And why would we assume that we need to train children of lower-income families earlier?"
     
    Maybe because they always have problems with basic skills?

    Replies: @stillCARealist, @Nicholas Stix

    Wait, what little kid doesn’t do worksheets for tracing numbers and letters? How else would you learn how to form them?

    A 10 minute lecture for 4 year olds is just fine if you’re holding up pictures or puppets, getting them asking questions, and generally entertaining them.

  79. @Altai
    OT: iSteve content generator Jeh Johnson has once again said the quiet part loud. That the current warmongering and backing into a corner of a country that still has vast ICBM stocks is 'payback for 2016'. Now, personally I think it's more 'payback for 2015' when Russia began it's intervention against the US neocon and Israeli regime change attempt in Syria but disturbingly perhaps a lot of non-neocons are now gunning for Vladimir Hitler Putin now too. Where is the opposition to stop these things getting out of hand?

    In politics you don't succeed by being elected, you succeed by making your opponents adopt the same policies as you, meaning the policy becomes embedded no matter how an election goes. It looks like the Trump-Putin hysteria was very potent propaganda from the neocons and they have converted many to their cause of unending pressure and hostility to Russia.

    https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1492554515144396813

    Replies: @Jack D, @Johann Ricke, @Nicholas Stix

    That the current warmongering and backing into a corner of a country that still has vast ICBM stocks is ‘payback for 2016’.

    What corner? No one has invaded Russia or is even thinking of doing so. If you’re suggesting that not surrendering to Russia will result in Putin unleashing all-out nuclear war, let me point out that this gambit would merely hand a depopulated Russia over to China. Putin wants a bigger Russia, not a bigger China bloated with Russia’s freshly-killed carcass.

    • Replies: @Reg Cæsar
    @Johann Ricke


    If you’re suggesting that not surrendering to Russia will result in Putin unleashing all-out nuclear war, let me point out that this gambit would merely hand a depopulated Russia over to China.
     
    Only one political party has been mad and amoral enough to wage nuclear war on civilians, and it was neither Putin's new party nor his old one.

    That party is still in power in its homeland.


    As Jackson and (the other) Buffett might say, it's nuclear 11:59 somewhere...

  80. @ic1000
    Don't forget to click on to the Taki essay's link to scholar Jonathan Rothwell's Twitter thread concerning the Lisa Cook imbroglio. His first tweet is:

    To my shock & chagrin, my work on Black inventors has been used to discredit an economist whom I have long admired, Lisa Cook, after her nomination to serve on the Federal Reserve. My view is that nothing about my work suggests flaws in her qualifications. The opposite is true.
     
    Keep reading to get to the 48-hours-ahead frontlash to Steve's very article:

    The criticisms are petty political attacks by people who do not know her, have not read her CV, have not interviewed her or her collaborators, or former employers, but assume, with no evidence, that she has some far-left agenda for . . . monetary policy!
     
    "Frontlash" is a great concept, Steve -- did you patent it?

    That was a joke... one cannot patent an idea.

    Replies: @res, @Jack D

    Thanks. That thread is epic. Especially after Steve’s tweet (have to love Rothwell’s stream of ad hominems, scientific scholarship at its best). Though I think this might be the best of the thread.

    In making this argument, I drew upon Lisa Cook’s excellent & groundbreaking work that makes essentially the same point (innovation & growth are harmed by oppression) after painstakingly creating her own database. In subsequent publications, we continued to cite Lisa’s work.

    What a Current Year we live in!

    BTW, has nobody else managed to look at the 2008 spreadsheet I discussed in this comment?
    https://www.unz.com/isteve/did-bidens-fed-nominee-lisa-cook-mess-up-her-most-famous-paper/#comment-5163290

    https://web.archive.org/web/20160403083636/http://ptrca.org/files/handouts/stliblkin-10-09-2008-1C-with%20headings.xls

    Google existed when Cook wrote her paper, right?

  81. @Technite78
    When I look at the dual Y axis in Cook's original graph, it seems to me that she used the default results of Microsoft Excel's automatic axis scaling. When you give it two data sets with the same X-axis (i.e. time), and then choose to have independent Y axes, it scales the range of the axes and sets their origin so that the highest and lowest data points fall in the top half and bottom half of the chart respectively... in other words, it's trying to stretch and center the data points on the graph so that they are readable, without respect to whether it makes for a logical comparison between the two data sets.

    I've done a fair amount of data analysis using spreadsheets and graphs, and the default Y ranges chosen automatically by Excel frequently have to be manually adjusted so that the data sets can be properly compared. I'm guessing that wasn't done here... and it's entirely possible that the poor choice of Y ranges was due to laziness/incompetence rather than an intent to deceive.

    Replies: @James Speaks, @Muggles, @mc23

    and it’s entirely possible that the poor choice of Y ranges was due to laziness/incompetence rather than an intent to deceive.

    Yeah. We need to save that charitable excuse for when it is needed during her Fed Board term.

    She will be an Affirmative Action hire after all.

    • Agree: Technite78
  82. @JosephD
    Folks might be being too harsh here. A dissertation (usually) isn't a researchers best work or the most cleverly done. It's the first independent work. I certainly look back on my early papers and cringe, and see methodological glitches I really should have caught.

    Having separate x-axes isn't the worst thing. If the goal is to highlight relative changes in white vs black inventiveness it's not a bad option. I'm decent with math, but often have a hard time putting log scales in qualitative terms and find them misleading. So for her choice about the y-axis? Shrug. If she's making statements that the rate of black and white inventiveness was equal in 1900, then there's a big problem. But it doesn't seem like she's asserting that.

    Missing the whopping big artifact in the data that one of her sources only collects data to 1900? That's a problem. She should certainly issue a correction or clarification that the graph probably doesn't show what it appears to.

    Replies: @res

    The 2014 patent paper is not her dissertation. She got her PhD in 1997 (17 years earlier, for those who are counting) with a dissertation focusing on the underdevelopment of the banking system in czarist and post-Soviet Russia.[

    The patents paper was published AFTER she had already served as a Senior Economist in the Obama Administration’s Council of Economic Advisers from August 2011 to August 2012.

    The thoughtful apologia schtick works better when it is not obviously wrong.

    The separate y-axes issue is complicated. If you are going to do what she did then you need to make very clear what was done so people don’t make mistakes like the NPR idiot did.

    At least we agree on your final paragraph. Hopefully you can see by now that isn’t going to happen.

    • Replies: @Peter Johnson
    @res

    Thanks for the informative comment.

    As you state, the separate y-axis scaling issue is complicated. Normally it is done to display two very different data series with wildly different scales which otherwise would not fit readably on a single graph. The unusual feature is that her two data series are closely linked, but one group has massively more per-capital patents than the other (backwards-causality due to Redlining). As long as she is 100% clear about this that is ok. I don't think she would want to focus on the need for two scales, since it hints at HBD.

    Replies: @res

    , @JosephD
    @res


    The 2014 patent paper is not her dissertation. She got her PhD in 1997 (17 years earlier, for those who are counting) with a dissertation focusing on the underdevelopment of the banking system in czarist and post-Soviet Russia.
     
    Doh! My bad. I saw the discussion of her dissertation and thought this work was from that time period. Given her role for when it was produced, yes, much of my sympathy vanishes.
  83. @Jack D
    @Yancey Ward

    Whether she was sincere or not is beside the point because it's bad either way - either she was dumb enough to make these obvious methodological errors or she did so intentionally because she was seeking to promote her ideology. Or maybe you don't have to pick between stupid and evil 'cause she's a bit of both?

    The real question is why the adults in the room (her thesis advisor and thesis committee) didn't call her on her BS? Again, either they had double standards and were giving her a break (the soft bigotry of low expectations) because she was black or else they supported her ideologically and so were willing to allow her to do ideologically tainted "science" , or again, a bit of both.

    And you can't just blame them. There is tremendous pressure in the academy to promote DIE. The faculty's own hiring and advancement in many universities is judged in (large) part by their efforts to "promote diversity". It's hard enough to find black women who are even remotely plausible candidates for a PhD in economics. This is the kind of field that is just not appealing to them to begin with and even for the ones it appeals to, very few actually have the intellectual and mathematical chops to do the work. So here they have a real live black female PhD candidate - they are going to do everything they can to get her through. Do you want to be the "racist" who flunked out this black woman?

    Replies: @Emil Nikola Richard, @Goddard, @Jack D, @International Jew

    And you can’t just blame them.

    They had a job to do and they did not do it.

    Do you want to be the “racist” who flunked out this black woman?

    See above. Has anybody ever sued a thesis committee for malpractice?

  84. Off topic (so far) but:

    Did Uncle Joe cancel the Ukrainian invasion?

    I was looking forward to seeing those big Russian tanks rolling down the streets of Kyiv.

    And seeing all of those big storefront banners:

    “Special invasion sale! We speak Russian! Military discounts! Rubles accepted!”

    Maybe Joe was watching those Canadian truckers roll into Ottawa and thought they were Russians invading Ukraine. There are a lot of Ukrainians in central Canada…

    • Replies: @Jack D
    @Muggles

    It's sick that you are making light of this. A war is no joke. Thousands would be dead on both sides. There would be hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of refugees.

    Idiots always start out thinking that a war will be a walk in the park. The grateful Iraqis will throw flowers at our feet. That's not how it goes. If the Russians think the way you do, they are deluding themselves. Once they start getting their legs blown off and their boys shipped home in boxes they will realize that it's not going to be that way at all. Maybe you can invade a country of 44 million with an army of 150,000, but how are you going to occupy it?

    Maybe there was a time when the majority of Russian speaking Ukrainians would have been glad to see Russian troops but feelings have hardened. Even Russian speakers don't want to be ruled from Moscow under Putin's corrupt dictatorship.

    Replies: @Art Deco, @Muggles

    , @Joe Stalin
    @Muggles

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s062H1xEvuw

  85. @Anonymous
    Just as an aside to your essay, I wonder if patent numbers really reflect true inventiveness. The reason I say this is that my father was friendly with a guy, Joe Bolger, who was a classic Yankee inventor, coming up with all sorts of clever solutions to everyday problems and needs. He used to patent his inventions, each patent costing him about $5,000 in various fees and expenses (this would have been 40 or 50 years ago).
    But he quickly discovered that having a patent on his inventions did not protect him, because big companies would just steal his inventions. The Japanese were the worst offenders.
    When he found out a company had stolen one of his inventions and he told them he held the patent they would just say so sue us. He couldn't afford to do that.
    He gave up on patenting his inventions, things like the ball-end on a motorcycle hand lever so your hand won't slip off, folding footpegs, monoshock rear suspensions etc., and all sorts of tools. We still use a device that instantly frees frozen screws and nuts or bolts, no matter how badly they are corroded or jammed, that he gave to my father decades ago. It applies both downward pressure and torque simultaneously. At least that's the best I can do to explain how it works.
    He never patented it and just sold it to friends or at flea markets, trade shows, etc., and through catalog sales, making an item when someone ordered it. We still have an old AJS 7R, originally a road racer that my grandfather competed with, that Bolger helped my father convert to a motocrosser, using lots of his unique components.
    I wonder how many other inventors like him there are out there who never patent anything.

    Replies: @Cool Daddy Jimbo, @YetAnotherAnon, @Calvin Hobbes, @rebel yell, @Lurker

    Great story, thanks. Mr.Bolger should have found an ambulance-chasing out of work lawyer willing to work on commission to sue all those patent violators for him. Remember that Bill Gates made more money getting copy rights than he ever did inventing or creating anything. Hats off to Bolger the inventor. If he had also been Bolger the Litigator he might have made millions.
    At Oregon State University one of the Engineering buildings is named after an alum who invented a better assembly production line for making batteries. He didn’t invent a better battery – just a more efficient way to produce standard batteries. He made millions, donated the money for the Engineering building at OSU and was a civic leader in Corvallis. A fine career.

  86. OT: P.J. O’Rourke died from complications of cancer. That’s a shame. I enjoyed a lot of his books back in the day. The booze and tobacco caught up with him.

    • Replies: @scrivener3
    @Anon

    He was 73? The expected lifespan for a male born in the 1950's is 69. It seems to me that nothing caught up with him other than time.

    It used to be cardiovascular events culled men in their sixties, now medicine has nearly cured that if you take some care. Still, if you are male you are probably going to die sometime between age 70 and 90 and you will die with something wrong, probably cancer.

    Unsolicited advice, when you turn 60 you need to get a colonoscopy every five years and a "digital prostate examination" every year. I already know one friend lost to colon cancer and one to prostate cancer. They skipped the exams so they may have got a few more years if they followed the recommendation.

  87. Hey iSteve, Chicago mayor Lightfoot has figured it out:

    Democratic alderman blasts Chicago Mayor Lightfoot for linking remote learning to carjackings: ‘Grasping at straws’

    https://news.yahoo.com/democratic-alderman-blasts-chicago-mayor-153604612.html

  88. @martin_2
    @Rob


    At least geocentrism made some sense. It described facts about the world. The sun and moon appear to orbit the earth. The earth doesn’t feel like it’s moving, does it? Meanwhile cognitive creationism explains zero facts about the world.
     
    Absolutely true.


    Regarding the Egyptians and their Pyramids...

    They had stone. Europeans had wood. Wood decays, so maybe we don't know what Europeans really built thousands of years ago.

    As for the Aztecs, etcetera...

    How do we know about these ancient non-white civilisations? Who were the people who explored the remote and inhospitable regions of Africa and South America to do the painstaking and dangerous archeological work? It was white men from Europe and the USA. No-one would know anything about these histories were it not for them.

    Replies: @Anonymous

    Arkaim – deep in central Asia, but built by European Corded Ware folk was pretty impressive, as are the reconstructions of the timber built towns of the Globular Amphora Culture of central Europe.

  89. @Muggles
    Off topic (so far) but:

    Did Uncle Joe cancel the Ukrainian invasion?

    I was looking forward to seeing those big Russian tanks rolling down the streets of Kyiv.

    And seeing all of those big storefront banners:

    "Special invasion sale! We speak Russian! Military discounts! Rubles accepted!"

    Maybe Joe was watching those Canadian truckers roll into Ottawa and thought they were Russians invading Ukraine. There are a lot of Ukrainians in central Canada...

    Replies: @Jack D, @Joe Stalin

    It’s sick that you are making light of this. A war is no joke. Thousands would be dead on both sides. There would be hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of refugees.

    Idiots always start out thinking that a war will be a walk in the park. The grateful Iraqis will throw flowers at our feet. That’s not how it goes. If the Russians think the way you do, they are deluding themselves. Once they start getting their legs blown off and their boys shipped home in boxes they will realize that it’s not going to be that way at all. Maybe you can invade a country of 44 million with an army of 150,000, but how are you going to occupy it?

    Maybe there was a time when the majority of Russian speaking Ukrainians would have been glad to see Russian troops but feelings have hardened. Even Russian speakers don’t want to be ruled from Moscow under Putin’s corrupt dictatorship.

    • Agree: Bardon Kaldian
    • Replies: @Art Deco
    @Jack D

    Putin actually runs a political machine which has a 20 year record of making satisfactory decisions. The country's had a remarkable turnaround in that time.

    However, people generally like to run their own show. There's pan-Russian sentiment in White Russia, but it's notably weaker than it was 25 years ago, down from about 1/2 the population to about 1/4. The pan-Roumanian parties have for a generation been a modest minority in Moldova, in spite of that country's small population and severe economic distress.

    The self-understanding of western and eastern Ukrainians is unlikely to be affected by Anatoly Karlin instructing them Ukrainian nationality is 'fake and gay' or by his votaries chuffering about Novorossiya or Malorussia.

    Replies: @Jack D

    , @Muggles
    @Jack D


    It’s sick that you are making light of this. A war is no joke. Thousands would be dead on both sides. There would be hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of refugees.
     
    I hate to quibble about a minor point, but why do you attack my comment about the War That Didn't Happen?

    I am not making "sick jokes" about war. Biden & media stooges are. So far as reasonably unbiased reports show, the local Ukrainian population is not preparing for war. Nor does anyone I've seen appear to be worried about the horrible consequences of that.

    Unless this "war fever" is something invented by Sleepy Joe & Comrades to distract us from inflation, COVID bullying, high crime, migrant invasions, et. al. this war talk is just Russia playing chess with a very dumb opponent.

    It is Biden who is playing a sick joke on us.

    Now I don't have a crystal ball. The Russians might stage an incursion, but I doubt it. Why would they? Nor do they seem to want to occupy Ukraine. They have what they want.

    This is all about pushing back NATO bullying and demonstrating to our senile Dear Leader that Putin isn't just some ClownWorld figure who can be vilified as a political stage prop.

    The entire Biden regime has been one fantastic lie after another. "Jan 6 Insurrection" and "Russian invasion happening tomorrow!" Not to mention Masking = Safety. etc.

    Within a few months or so, Biden insiders will be exiting the WH and working for CNN. Some will write memoirs telling us some of the dirty insider lies.

    Meanwhile Biden who promised "unity" in his first speech, is arming the DoJ to go after his political foes, past and (newly invented) present.

    I give the likelihood of Biden arresting dissident Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, populists and open protesters more probable than Russian tanks in Kyiv.

    I've been around too long to succumb to mere right-wing paranoia. But lately, with Biden's own hate and fear mongering leaking from every mumbled utterance, I am wondering which border crossing might be the safest. And closest. Canada now second choice.

    When cornered, the Hard Marxist Left always doubles down.

    Replies: @Jack D

  90. @Jack D
    @Yancey Ward

    Whether she was sincere or not is beside the point because it's bad either way - either she was dumb enough to make these obvious methodological errors or she did so intentionally because she was seeking to promote her ideology. Or maybe you don't have to pick between stupid and evil 'cause she's a bit of both?

    The real question is why the adults in the room (her thesis advisor and thesis committee) didn't call her on her BS? Again, either they had double standards and were giving her a break (the soft bigotry of low expectations) because she was black or else they supported her ideologically and so were willing to allow her to do ideologically tainted "science" , or again, a bit of both.

    And you can't just blame them. There is tremendous pressure in the academy to promote DIE. The faculty's own hiring and advancement in many universities is judged in (large) part by their efforts to "promote diversity". It's hard enough to find black women who are even remotely plausible candidates for a PhD in economics. This is the kind of field that is just not appealing to them to begin with and even for the ones it appeals to, very few actually have the intellectual and mathematical chops to do the work. So here they have a real live black female PhD candidate - they are going to do everything they can to get her through. Do you want to be the "racist" who flunked out this black woman?

    Replies: @Emil Nikola Richard, @Goddard, @Jack D, @International Jew

    Do you want to be the “racist” who flunked out this black woman?

    Put me in, Coach!

  91. @Change that Matters
    Not Hidden Figures, but Wrong Figures.

    Replies: @Dennis Dale, @fish, @pyrrhus

    No….it was a case of “Hidden Figures” If I hadn’t glanced at the blue/red details at the legend to the left I would have thought we were discussing the prominent blue data instead of the red crawling along the X axis.

  92. @Jack D
    @Yancey Ward

    Whether she was sincere or not is beside the point because it's bad either way - either she was dumb enough to make these obvious methodological errors or she did so intentionally because she was seeking to promote her ideology. Or maybe you don't have to pick between stupid and evil 'cause she's a bit of both?

    The real question is why the adults in the room (her thesis advisor and thesis committee) didn't call her on her BS? Again, either they had double standards and were giving her a break (the soft bigotry of low expectations) because she was black or else they supported her ideologically and so were willing to allow her to do ideologically tainted "science" , or again, a bit of both.

    And you can't just blame them. There is tremendous pressure in the academy to promote DIE. The faculty's own hiring and advancement in many universities is judged in (large) part by their efforts to "promote diversity". It's hard enough to find black women who are even remotely plausible candidates for a PhD in economics. This is the kind of field that is just not appealing to them to begin with and even for the ones it appeals to, very few actually have the intellectual and mathematical chops to do the work. So here they have a real live black female PhD candidate - they are going to do everything they can to get her through. Do you want to be the "racist" who flunked out this black woman?

    Replies: @Emil Nikola Richard, @Goddard, @Jack D, @International Jew

    Correction – I see now that this was not her thesis but a paper submitted years later. For thesis committee substitute journal reviewers.

    The truth is that, especially in the social sciences (but in the hard sciences also – witness the # of results that cannot be replicated), the review system has failed. Journals are a business and you can get almost any sort of garbage published. The review system is not powerful enough to prevent the publication of worthless or flawed papers like this. Lots of flawed papers get published in any case, but as soon as the reviewers saw the subject matter and understood who the author was, the double standards would have kicked in bigtime and the standards would have fallen even lower than usual.

    • Replies: @Johann Ricke
    @Jack D


    Correction – I see now that this was not her thesis but a paper submitted years later. For thesis committee substitute journal reviewers.
     
    As I pointed out earlier, these AA admits are presenting undergrad level work *and* getting plaudits for papers with serious conceptual and methodological flaws. The idea that AA Ivy grads can hack it is way past its sell-by date. Maybe in its first days, when the intake was a trickle, not the torrent it grew to be.
  93. @res
    @JosephD

    The 2014 patent paper is not her dissertation. She got her PhD in 1997 (17 years earlier, for those who are counting) with a dissertation focusing on the underdevelopment of the banking system in czarist and post-Soviet Russia.[

    The patents paper was published AFTER she had already served as a Senior Economist in the Obama Administration's Council of Economic Advisers from August 2011 to August 2012.

    The thoughtful apologia schtick works better when it is not obviously wrong.

    The separate y-axes issue is complicated. If you are going to do what she did then you need to make very clear what was done so people don't make mistakes like the NPR idiot did.

    At least we agree on your final paragraph. Hopefully you can see by now that isn't going to happen.

    Replies: @Peter Johnson, @JosephD

    Thanks for the informative comment.

    As you state, the separate y-axis scaling issue is complicated. Normally it is done to display two very different data series with wildly different scales which otherwise would not fit readably on a single graph. The unusual feature is that her two data series are closely linked, but one group has massively more per-capital patents than the other (backwards-causality due to Redlining). As long as she is 100% clear about this that is ok. I don’t think she would want to focus on the need for two scales, since it hints at HBD.

    • Replies: @res
    @Peter Johnson

    Thinking about the y-axis issue some more, what I might recommend is apply a round multiplier and clearly note what and why I did it. In this case I think 500x would be a good number. It would separate the curves a bit more (0.6 matches 300) helping to encourage the less than perception, though hopefully the size of 500 would make the point forcefully enough.

  94. It’s interesting to look through some of these early black patents. A fair number seem to be for boots (not a put down to the inventors: a better boot is a step forward for mankind).

    The most interesting one I saw was one from 1911 for a flying machine. The inventor’s name is Albert Crenshaw.

    https://patents.google.com/patent/US1031840A/en?oq=Us1031840a

  95. @Henry Canaday
    I guess everyone knows that over the past 30 years or so there has evolved among many academic historians this fantasy world in which America would not have its racial problems today if the North had simply maintained Reconstruction in the South for as long as necessary. There are PhDs who really believe this, walking around the halls of universities, free of adult supervision, well paid and influential on the whole academic community.

    Replies: @SFG, @Hypnotoad666, @Nicholas Stix

    this fantasy world in which America would not have its racial problems today if the North had simply maintained Reconstruction in the South for as long as necessary

    I think that’s partly an example of a larger historical fallacy that should have a name — maybe the “one fateful event fallacy.” For example, “if only the U.S. hadn’t overthrown potentially better than average third world leader X, that country would have avoided it’s subsequent history of failure.” (Rather than merely having a slightly different succession of dictators and national failures).

    Every event (or non-event) isn’t a cross-road. Sometimes it’s just another step in the slog of a history determined by lots of inevitable facts.

    • Thanks: V. K. Ovelund
    • Replies: @Jack D
    @Hypnotoad666

    Sometime one fateful event is not a fallacy. I think that if Corporal Hitler had died of his WWI wounds, then history would have been different.

    Replies: @Hypnotoad666, @Art Deco, @Dieter Kief, @Reg Cæsar

  96. @ic1000
    Don't forget to click on to the Taki essay's link to scholar Jonathan Rothwell's Twitter thread concerning the Lisa Cook imbroglio. His first tweet is:

    To my shock & chagrin, my work on Black inventors has been used to discredit an economist whom I have long admired, Lisa Cook, after her nomination to serve on the Federal Reserve. My view is that nothing about my work suggests flaws in her qualifications. The opposite is true.
     
    Keep reading to get to the 48-hours-ahead frontlash to Steve's very article:

    The criticisms are petty political attacks by people who do not know her, have not read her CV, have not interviewed her or her collaborators, or former employers, but assume, with no evidence, that she has some far-left agenda for . . . monetary policy!
     
    "Frontlash" is a great concept, Steve -- did you patent it?

    That was a joke... one cannot patent an idea.

    Replies: @res, @Jack D

    scholar Jonathan Rothwell

    Rothwell is not a scholar, he’s an ideologue who praises his fellow ideologue Cook.

    The title of Rothwell’s book tells you all that you need to know:

    A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society

    Leftists have been dreaming about this just and equal society since the days of Karl Marx and every time they try to achieve this utopia it always ends in tears, But they never learn from this and just keep trying, generation after generation. Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

    • Agree: fish
    • Replies: @Uncle Dan
    @Jack D


    Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
     
    They like repeating it. Their fondest wish is to be The Man At Finland Station, pointing out Historical Inevitably to the proletariat.

    Replies: @Nicholas Stix

  97. That corrected graph is absolutely savage.

    Well done iSteve!

    • Agree: Bill Jones
  98. Cook spent several years carefully coming up with a list of 726 patents granted to black inventors over the 71 years

    Very impressive.

    “Sir Walter Raleigh was a soldier, colonist, explorer, poet and scholar .. he was imprisoned in the Tower of London [1603- 1616] where he began composing The History of the World. Being well read, it is thought that Raleigh had a library of over 500 books with him during his imprisonment in the Tower, which provided the secondary material from which to compose his work. Published as five books in one volume, the story covers the period from Creation to the rise of the Roman Empire.”

    Not impressive.

    Abolish the Fed!

  99. Steve — I suggest you add a corrected version of the graph using a log scale, as you suggested in your Taki’s piece.

  100. @Hypnotoad666
    Most black "intellectuals" stick to producing "scholarly work" that relies on their "lived experience" and just aggregates quotes from other pseudo-intellectual wokesters who do the same. As an alleged "economist," Cook's fatal flaw was attempting to work with numbers.

    This demonstrates why black pseudo-intellectuals are well-advised to stick to vague, verbal opinions which are non-falsifiable. Math is racist. It will not be kind to black fakers.

    Replies: @Kylie

    “Math is racist. It will not be kind to black fakers.”

    True. But there are plenty of white enablers who will be.

    Actually, I don’t think these black “intellectuals” are fakers. I think they truly believe they’re the talented scholars, researchers, etc. that their white enablers tell them they are. Their inflated sense of self-worth and under-developed self-awareness combine to make them extraordinarily susceptible (by white standards) to flattery. Give them offices with their names on the doors and they’re executives. Give them lab coats and name tags and they’re researchers. They really, truly believe they’re all that.

  101. @Anonymous
    Meanwhile, a fatherless feral negro bungled his assassination attempt towards a Jewish mayoral candidate, thanks to God, and "Sailer's Law" which isteve readers know as regarding to the American negro's statistically reliable poor marksmanship:

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/louisville-council-candidate-accused-in-shooting-attack-on-jewish-mayoral-hopeful/

    Replies: @Alden, @Jim Don Bob

    The wanna be assassin shot at the candidate from about 12 feet away. Very very hard to miss. But he did. I’m sure ADL AJC SPLC will pour more money into both BLM and the candidate’s campaign. And somehow mange to blame the local red neck Kku Kkuxxers

  102. @Jack D
    @Jack D

    Correction - I see now that this was not her thesis but a paper submitted years later. For thesis committee substitute journal reviewers.

    The truth is that, especially in the social sciences (but in the hard sciences also - witness the # of results that cannot be replicated), the review system has failed. Journals are a business and you can get almost any sort of garbage published. The review system is not powerful enough to prevent the publication of worthless or flawed papers like this. Lots of flawed papers get published in any case, but as soon as the reviewers saw the subject matter and understood who the author was, the double standards would have kicked in bigtime and the standards would have fallen even lower than usual.

    Replies: @Johann Ricke

    Correction – I see now that this was not her thesis but a paper submitted years later. For thesis committee substitute journal reviewers.

    As I pointed out earlier, these AA admits are presenting undergrad level work *and* getting plaudits for papers with serious conceptual and methodological flaws. The idea that AA Ivy grads can hack it is way past its sell-by date. Maybe in its first days, when the intake was a trickle, not the torrent it grew to be.

  103. The true axis of evil

  104. @Anonymous
    Just as an aside to your essay, I wonder if patent numbers really reflect true inventiveness. The reason I say this is that my father was friendly with a guy, Joe Bolger, who was a classic Yankee inventor, coming up with all sorts of clever solutions to everyday problems and needs. He used to patent his inventions, each patent costing him about $5,000 in various fees and expenses (this would have been 40 or 50 years ago).
    But he quickly discovered that having a patent on his inventions did not protect him, because big companies would just steal his inventions. The Japanese were the worst offenders.
    When he found out a company had stolen one of his inventions and he told them he held the patent they would just say so sue us. He couldn't afford to do that.
    He gave up on patenting his inventions, things like the ball-end on a motorcycle hand lever so your hand won't slip off, folding footpegs, monoshock rear suspensions etc., and all sorts of tools. We still use a device that instantly frees frozen screws and nuts or bolts, no matter how badly they are corroded or jammed, that he gave to my father decades ago. It applies both downward pressure and torque simultaneously. At least that's the best I can do to explain how it works.
    He never patented it and just sold it to friends or at flea markets, trade shows, etc., and through catalog sales, making an item when someone ordered it. We still have an old AJS 7R, originally a road racer that my grandfather competed with, that Bolger helped my father convert to a motocrosser, using lots of his unique components.
    I wonder how many other inventors like him there are out there who never patent anything.

    Replies: @Cool Daddy Jimbo, @YetAnotherAnon, @Calvin Hobbes, @rebel yell, @Lurker

    The flip side is people applying for patents for stuff which never got made or was not really practical or merely replicated existing inventions. Is measuring the number of patents really a good proxy for measuring inventiveness?

    • Replies: @Jack D
    @Lurker

    It's probably as good as any. Economists are always looking for measurable yardsticks. There's no place where you can go to look up the level of inventiveness but you can look up the # of patents. It's probably a decent proxy.

    The factor that Anon mentions, that many worthwhile inventions are not patented means that the # of patents understates the true level of inventiveness. The factor that you mention, that many patents don't represent worthwhile inventions means that the # of patents OVERSTATES the true level of inventiveness. So maybe it all comes out in the wash. Even if it doesn't, if you assume that the underpatenting and overpatenting factors are relatively constant over the short run, then the # of patents issued becomes a proxy for, if not a 1:1 measure of, the level of inventiveness.

    The reality is that the patent system has always been used mainly by big business to thwart competition. Edison used the system that way, Bell used the system that way and it's still used that way.

    Patents are not self enforcing. The first thing that Bell did was to get financial backers so that not only could he get a patent but that he could fund a patent fight. Joe Bolger by himself has no chance. Joe Bolger with the right patent and the right backers could cash in bigtime.

    For example, Robert Kearns invented and patented the intermittent windshield wiper. When the Detroit makers started putting them on their cars, he asked them for royalties and they told him to go pound sand. He sued and eventually he received $30 million from Chrysler (plus more from other car makers). But in order to achieve this, he had to first spend $10 million on legal fees - Chrysler appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. Chrysler figured that it was cheaper to spend $10 million on legal fees than to pay $30 million in royalties. Anyway, paying would give guys like Bolger the idea that they could actually enforce their patents against big business. Better to run a scorched earth campaign and hope that the patent holder runs out of $ to pay legal fees. If you don't have $10 million to pursue a case, then you have to find people who do (and agree to give them half of your winnings). That's how it goes.

  105. That Wiebe fella works for Nike? The shoe company? And he corrected this Cook gal? Isn’t he worried about getting fired? I would be.

  106. @Muggles
    Off topic (so far) but:

    Did Uncle Joe cancel the Ukrainian invasion?

    I was looking forward to seeing those big Russian tanks rolling down the streets of Kyiv.

    And seeing all of those big storefront banners:

    "Special invasion sale! We speak Russian! Military discounts! Rubles accepted!"

    Maybe Joe was watching those Canadian truckers roll into Ottawa and thought they were Russians invading Ukraine. There are a lot of Ukrainians in central Canada...

    Replies: @Jack D, @Joe Stalin

  107. OT

    Steve, do you plan on addressing WHY Negroes are attacking/raping/murdering Asian females?

    https://www.amren.com/commentary/2022/02/who-murdered-all-the-asian-women-and-whos-covering-it-up/

    • Replies: @Danindc
    @Meretricious

    Isn’t it mainly opportunity bc they live amongst them?

    Replies: @Meretricious

  108. @YetAnotherAnon
    @Anonymous

    "We still use a device that instantly frees frozen screws and nuts or bolts, no matter how badly they are corroded or jammed, that he gave to my father decades ago. "

    Are they available to buy?

    Replies: @Technite78, @Billy Ash, @Anonymous

    Its called an impact driver. You load the proper bit and place the tool on the screw head and hit it with a hammer. It applies counterclockwise torque and downward force. Worked well on my stuck screws.

  109. Lisa D. Cook’s immediate recourse to the race card against all critics makes it impossible for me to grant her the benefit of the doubt, regarding incompetence or malice. She could be motivated both by incompetence and malice, but malice is definitely in the stew. (Were I a Midwesterner, I might opt for just incompetence, but I’m a New Yorker. Malice, first. (Terms of Endearment.)

    • Replies: @Unladen Swallow
    @Nicholas Stix

    Being a Midwesterner I of course opt for incompetence, Cook's paper I think could only be produced by a person sublimely unaware of their own lack of competence, combined with no one in authority having the guts to tell her so. That it passed muster for her dissertation is not surprising, but what is very surprising is that such an obviously poor piece of research got published in a peer reviewed journal. Economics has obviously started to become Politically Correct, just like other "social sciences" had a long time before.

  110. @Lurker
    @Anonymous

    The flip side is people applying for patents for stuff which never got made or was not really practical or merely replicated existing inventions. Is measuring the number of patents really a good proxy for measuring inventiveness?

    Replies: @Jack D

    It’s probably as good as any. Economists are always looking for measurable yardsticks. There’s no place where you can go to look up the level of inventiveness but you can look up the # of patents. It’s probably a decent proxy.

    The factor that Anon mentions, that many worthwhile inventions are not patented means that the # of patents understates the true level of inventiveness. The factor that you mention, that many patents don’t represent worthwhile inventions means that the # of patents OVERSTATES the true level of inventiveness. So maybe it all comes out in the wash. Even if it doesn’t, if you assume that the underpatenting and overpatenting factors are relatively constant over the short run, then the # of patents issued becomes a proxy for, if not a 1:1 measure of, the level of inventiveness.

    The reality is that the patent system has always been used mainly by big business to thwart competition. Edison used the system that way, Bell used the system that way and it’s still used that way.

    Patents are not self enforcing. The first thing that Bell did was to get financial backers so that not only could he get a patent but that he could fund a patent fight. Joe Bolger by himself has no chance. Joe Bolger with the right patent and the right backers could cash in bigtime.

    For example, Robert Kearns invented and patented the intermittent windshield wiper. When the Detroit makers started putting them on their cars, he asked them for royalties and they told him to go pound sand. He sued and eventually he received \$30 million from Chrysler (plus more from other car makers). But in order to achieve this, he had to first spend \$10 million on legal fees – Chrysler appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. Chrysler figured that it was cheaper to spend \$10 million on legal fees than to pay \$30 million in royalties. Anyway, paying would give guys like Bolger the idea that they could actually enforce their patents against big business. Better to run a scorched earth campaign and hope that the patent holder runs out of \$ to pay legal fees. If you don’t have \$10 million to pursue a case, then you have to find people who do (and agree to give them half of your winnings). That’s how it goes.

  111. @Hypnotoad666
    @Henry Canaday


    this fantasy world in which America would not have its racial problems today if the North had simply maintained Reconstruction in the South for as long as necessary
     
    I think that's partly an example of a larger historical fallacy that should have a name -- maybe the "one fateful event fallacy." For example, "if only the U.S. hadn't overthrown potentially better than average third world leader X, that country would have avoided it's subsequent history of failure." (Rather than merely having a slightly different succession of dictators and national failures).

    Every event (or non-event) isn't a cross-road. Sometimes it's just another step in the slog of a history determined by lots of inevitable facts.

    Replies: @Jack D

    Sometime one fateful event is not a fallacy. I think that if Corporal Hitler had died of his WWI wounds, then history would have been different.

    • Replies: @Hypnotoad666
    @Jack D


    Sometime one fateful event is not a fallacy. I think that if Corporal Hitler had died of his WWI wounds, then history would have been different.
     
    That's true. But would it have been all rainbows and puppy dogs and a steady march to international peace and prosperity without Hitler? Or would the Bolsheviks have taken over Germany and fought a nuclear war with Britain and France in, say, 1965? Who knows.

    I guess that's the problem with History. It's hard enough to figure out what actually happened. What it meant in the long-run is inspired speculation at best.

    Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @AnotherDad

    , @Art Deco
    @Jack D

    Possibly. He had some unusual talents. He was one odd piece of work.

    If the Bruning ministry had had the sense to devalue the currency, history might have been different. Had Karl Jarres been elected President of Germany in 1925 history might have been different as well.

    , @Dieter Kief
    @Jack D

    Adolf Hitler was an illegal immigrant. A left wing (Social Democrat) internationalist / immigrant-friendly Munich judge let him have his will and become a German citizen - against the law, especially because Hitler had broken the law quite often beforehand and been in jail too.

    , @Reg Cæsar
    @Jack D


    I think that if Corporal Hitler had died of his WWI wounds, then history would have been different.
     
    "[I]t was easier for [failed art student] Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas."

    --Steven Pressfield, honorary citizen of Sparta*, in The War of Art.


    *How the Spartans Would Fight COVID-19
  112. @Anonymous
    Inventiveness, at least in the golden age of inventiveness in the 18th and 19th centuries, was mainly the product of obsessive compulsive hobbyists, men usually of modest financial means, but with a compulsion to tinker with things, beavering away in a myriad of backyard sheds and the like.
    This was the age of the artisan, the village blacksmith, carpenter, clockmaker etc, where the workman was never too far away from the source of his implements, and the means of tinkering with them. As industrialisation and literacy proceeded, magazines and publications etc popularized line diagrams and news of other hobbyists inventions. In the pre video entertainment age, this only fuelled the obsessiveness of the shed people - the various hobbyist carpentry magazines still on the market, and of course 'Popular Mechanics' magazine still embody this spirit, which basal to many males of the species, and likely goes back to neolithic times - hence that typical male past time of tool collecting, even if the said tools are never actually used.

    Replies: @Luke Lea

    Speaking of homo faber, man the tool maker, you might like this little puzzle on the subject:

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ccu91wcovedefH6WbdWaEz6F_uzvy8tab7GHoZBv1BQ/edit?usp=sharing

  113. @Henry Canaday
    I guess everyone knows that over the past 30 years or so there has evolved among many academic historians this fantasy world in which America would not have its racial problems today if the North had simply maintained Reconstruction in the South for as long as necessary. There are PhDs who really believe this, walking around the halls of universities, free of adult supervision, well paid and influential on the whole academic community.

    Replies: @SFG, @Hypnotoad666, @Nicholas Stix

    “There are PhDs who really believe this, walking around the halls of universities, free of adult supervision, well paid and influential on the whole academic community.”

    I have a hard time believing that. My hunch is that they fanatically repeat their talking points, and are completely focused on destroying whomever they have put on their enemies list, which may include relatives.

    About four months ago, a “progressive” relative of mine, who also lives in NYC, told me, “The subways are safe.”

    At the time, this person was not traveling around on the subways at any time.

    The same relative told me that not only were blacks not rioting in NYC in 2020/2021, but that during marches, Whites would try to incite the blacks to riot, but the blacks would physically restrain the Whites.

  114. If you take Romer’s econometric research on it’s face value(no econometric research should be taken on it’s face value…start with Keynes critique of econometrics…move on to the specification problem that plagues econometrics to this day)…..well, the heart of his research is this:‘technological innovation…the driving force of economic growth….is driven by labor scarcities.

    The problem for blacks is that they 1)face labor market competition with post-1965 nonwhites….2)but they blame whitey for their labor market problems….3)‘they are in a highly racialized voting bloc coalition with post-1965 nonwhites….1+2+3+4=blame whitey….exterminate whitey…

    Steve

    You and your commenters really needed to expose the lies and exaggerations surrounding the very mediocre Katherine Johnson. The myth of Katherine Johnson is used as a battering ram to racially dispossess White Males at NASA…..You and readers only offered weak and timid bleats to this onslaught…

  115. @R.G. Camara
    And they want to put this innumerate moron in a position where numeracy is a primary component of the job.

    Seriously, the Deep State keeps making it obvious with every Deep State appointee that they are pulling the puppet strings and are just going for the most colorful array of puppets.

    Replies: @El Dato, @Alrenous, @SFG, @Tiny Duck, @Citizen of a Silly Country, @AndrewR, @SaneClownPosse, @Cato

    No puppet can top Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Or maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps in 2024 they will install some mentally retarded black trans woman as president. It doesn’t matter anyway. Marg bar Amrika

  116. What are Lisa Cook’s views on the H-1B…L-1 B visa program…are her views identical to the President of RPI upstate NY just outside Albany…in Schenectady NY…

  117. @Jack D
    @Muggles

    It's sick that you are making light of this. A war is no joke. Thousands would be dead on both sides. There would be hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of refugees.

    Idiots always start out thinking that a war will be a walk in the park. The grateful Iraqis will throw flowers at our feet. That's not how it goes. If the Russians think the way you do, they are deluding themselves. Once they start getting their legs blown off and their boys shipped home in boxes they will realize that it's not going to be that way at all. Maybe you can invade a country of 44 million with an army of 150,000, but how are you going to occupy it?

    Maybe there was a time when the majority of Russian speaking Ukrainians would have been glad to see Russian troops but feelings have hardened. Even Russian speakers don't want to be ruled from Moscow under Putin's corrupt dictatorship.

    Replies: @Art Deco, @Muggles

    Putin actually runs a political machine which has a 20 year record of making satisfactory decisions. The country’s had a remarkable turnaround in that time.

    However, people generally like to run their own show. There’s pan-Russian sentiment in White Russia, but it’s notably weaker than it was 25 years ago, down from about 1/2 the population to about 1/4. The pan-Roumanian parties have for a generation been a modest minority in Moldova, in spite of that country’s small population and severe economic distress.

    The self-understanding of western and eastern Ukrainians is unlikely to be affected by Anatoly Karlin instructing them Ukrainian nationality is ‘fake and gay’ or by his votaries chuffering about Novorossiya or Malorussia.

    • Replies: @Jack D
    @Art Deco


    has a 20 year record of making satisfactory decisions. The country’s had a remarkable turnaround in that time.
     
    Before the crooks were stealing 80% of Russian wealth and now they are only stealing 40% of Russian wealth so they are a much better bunch of crooks. That and higher oil prices explains the entire turnaround.

    Replies: @Art Deco

  118. @Jack D
    @Hypnotoad666

    Sometime one fateful event is not a fallacy. I think that if Corporal Hitler had died of his WWI wounds, then history would have been different.

    Replies: @Hypnotoad666, @Art Deco, @Dieter Kief, @Reg Cæsar

    Sometime one fateful event is not a fallacy. I think that if Corporal Hitler had died of his WWI wounds, then history would have been different.

    That’s true. But would it have been all rainbows and puppy dogs and a steady march to international peace and prosperity without Hitler? Or would the Bolsheviks have taken over Germany and fought a nuclear war with Britain and France in, say, 1965? Who knows.

    I guess that’s the problem with History. It’s hard enough to figure out what actually happened. What it meant in the long-run is inspired speculation at best.

    • Replies: @Bardon Kaldian
    @Hypnotoad666

    Would've, should've ....

    Lenin, Hitler, Stalin aside.... who could have predicted that Europeans would grab the world in the past 550 years? That some stubborn Portuguese prince would keep on trying & fighting; that the Portuguese will be followed by Spaniards, English, Dutch, French ... and that, despite their constant infighting, they, from some obscure corner of Eurasian continent - would prevail over much more populous, fabulously rich & militarily strong the rest of the globe?

    Go figure ...

    , @AnotherDad
    @Hypnotoad666


    Or would the Bolsheviks have taken over Germany and fought a nuclear war with Britain and France in, say, 1965? Who knows.

    I guess that’s the problem with History. It’s hard enough to figure out what actually happened. What it meant in the long-run is inspired speculation at best.
     
    I think your suggested history is pretty unlikely. The Bolshy ship had likely pretty much sailed with defeat of the Spartacus uprising. Though the Great Depression might have given them another go round.

    But agree with your "who knows".

    But Jack's Hitler point seems pretty darn true as well. Hitler really is one of those guys--a*holes in this case--who really "made history". If Alois had stopped for a beer that evening and say humped Klara a bit later that night, the world would actually be different--probably better (though lacking the ineffable quality of my existence).

    But then ... "who knows?"
  119. @anon
    Off Topic

    NPR covered the Pre-K study that showed negative results for minorities. Steve knocked it out a few days ago. https://www.npr.org/2022/02/10/1079406041/researcher-says-rethink-prek-preschool-prekindergarten

    Curious. But around here, everyone just nodded because more education mostly never closes achievement gaps and mostly does nothing.

    But NPR acted all surprised, and mostly discussed how they could spend more money next time. They never, for an instant, considered that it was valid and this stuff never works.

    They are so anchored on the idea that it has to work (in theory), that any failure simply has to involve the details in its implementation.

    Including:

    She's talking about drilling kids on basic skills. Worksheets for tracing letters and numbers. A teacher giving 10-minute lectures to a whole class of 25 kids who are expected to sit on their hands and listen, only five of whom may be paying any attention.

    "Higher-income families are not choosing this kind of preparation," she explains. "And why would we assume that we need to train children of lower-income families earlier?"
     
    Maybe because they always have problems with basic skills?

    Replies: @stillCARealist, @Nicholas Stix

    “They are so anchored on the idea that it has to work (in theory), that any failure simply has to involve the details in its implementation.”

    They are anchored on the practice of pauperizing White taxpayers. They know their educational nostrums are worthless. As someone else here pointed out, such worthless programs also exist to let the educationists get their hands on your kids, earlier and earlier, in order to ruin their minds.

  120. @Jack D
    @Hypnotoad666

    Sometime one fateful event is not a fallacy. I think that if Corporal Hitler had died of his WWI wounds, then history would have been different.

    Replies: @Hypnotoad666, @Art Deco, @Dieter Kief, @Reg Cæsar

    Possibly. He had some unusual talents. He was one odd piece of work.

    If the Bruning ministry had had the sense to devalue the currency, history might have been different. Had Karl Jarres been elected President of Germany in 1925 history might have been different as well.

  121. @R.G. Camara
    And they want to put this innumerate moron in a position where numeracy is a primary component of the job.

    Seriously, the Deep State keeps making it obvious with every Deep State appointee that they are pulling the puppet strings and are just going for the most colorful array of puppets.

    Replies: @El Dato, @Alrenous, @SFG, @Tiny Duck, @Citizen of a Silly Country, @AndrewR, @SaneClownPosse, @Cato

    The Federal Reserve dollar is nearing its inevitable demise.

    Placing a black, supposedly non-Semitic, woman in place to be the fall guy, instead of another person from the Tribe, who have always been in charge.

    It will look more Zimbabwe than Wiemar.

  122. @Hypnotoad666
    @Jack D


    Sometime one fateful event is not a fallacy. I think that if Corporal Hitler had died of his WWI wounds, then history would have been different.
     
    That's true. But would it have been all rainbows and puppy dogs and a steady march to international peace and prosperity without Hitler? Or would the Bolsheviks have taken over Germany and fought a nuclear war with Britain and France in, say, 1965? Who knows.

    I guess that's the problem with History. It's hard enough to figure out what actually happened. What it meant in the long-run is inspired speculation at best.

    Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @AnotherDad

    Would’ve, should’ve ….

    Lenin, Hitler, Stalin aside…. who could have predicted that Europeans would grab the world in the past 550 years? That some stubborn Portuguese prince would keep on trying & fighting; that the Portuguese will be followed by Spaniards, English, Dutch, French … and that, despite their constant infighting, they, from some obscure corner of Eurasian continent – would prevail over much more populous, fabulously rich & militarily strong the rest of the globe?

    Go figure …

  123. King Harald Uhlig is a Kraut of some sort and this Kraut Uhlig says that Lisa Cook shouldn’t be confirmed for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board. Uhlig says that Lisa Cook don’t approve of FREE SPEECH and Harald Uhlig says this Lisa Cook wants to censor every mug in sight.

    King Uhlig thinks that the Democrat Party wants to steer the Federal Reserve Bank towards some kind of “ideological agenda” or some other thing.

    I say the Federal Reserve Bank should be NATIONALIZED and the Fed should begin doling out mass quantities of loot like that Saturday Night Live comedy bit where the Coneheads consume mass quantities of beer and potato chips.

    Use the nationalized Fed as a tool to politically dislodge from power the JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire.

    The Fed is now electronically laundering conjured up currency through the FIRE sector — Finance, Insurance, Real Estate — and the Fed has created massive soon-to-pop asset bubbles in stocks and bonds and real estate.

    The Fed should be nationalized and the Fed funds rate raised to 6 percent and the Fed’s ballooned balance sheet must be liquidated and that will pop the asset bubbles in a split second and the Fed should be doling out the cash directly instead of laundering the loot through the banks and the FIRE sector and the debt-based fiat currency system needs restraining anyways.

    UBI or the Pewitt Conjured Loot Portion(PCLP) is about raw power and who has it. A UBI or PCLP will allow the historic American nation or the European Christian ancestral core the ability to dislodge from power the evil and treasonous JEW/WASP ruling class from power.

    The Pewitt Conjured Loot Portion(PCLP) will pay each American who has all blood ancestry born in colonial America or the USA before 1924 a cool ten thousand dollars a month. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank shall work together to conjure up the cash out of thin air, just like the ruling class is doing now.

    Sam Francis said it’s all about the ruling classes and Sam was right. A UBI or PCLP will create the conditions whereby tens of trillions of dollars and land and property and licenses and other assets can be severed from the ownership and control of the current corrupt and illegitimate JEW/WASP ruling class members of the American Empire and doled out to the patriotic and honorable old stocker members of the European Christian ancestral core.

    UBI or PCLP is about raw political power; it’s not about economics.

    The ability to control the central bank is the true power and it must be contested by the old stocker members of the historic American nation.

  124. @Jack D
    @Muggles

    It's sick that you are making light of this. A war is no joke. Thousands would be dead on both sides. There would be hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of refugees.

    Idiots always start out thinking that a war will be a walk in the park. The grateful Iraqis will throw flowers at our feet. That's not how it goes. If the Russians think the way you do, they are deluding themselves. Once they start getting their legs blown off and their boys shipped home in boxes they will realize that it's not going to be that way at all. Maybe you can invade a country of 44 million with an army of 150,000, but how are you going to occupy it?

    Maybe there was a time when the majority of Russian speaking Ukrainians would have been glad to see Russian troops but feelings have hardened. Even Russian speakers don't want to be ruled from Moscow under Putin's corrupt dictatorship.

    Replies: @Art Deco, @Muggles

    It’s sick that you are making light of this. A war is no joke. Thousands would be dead on both sides. There would be hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of refugees.

    I hate to quibble about a minor point, but why do you attack my comment about the War That Didn’t Happen?

    I am not making “sick jokes” about war. Biden & media stooges are. So far as reasonably unbiased reports show, the local Ukrainian population is not preparing for war. Nor does anyone I’ve seen appear to be worried about the horrible consequences of that.

    Unless this “war fever” is something invented by Sleepy Joe & Comrades to distract us from inflation, COVID bullying, high crime, migrant invasions, et. al. this war talk is just Russia playing chess with a very dumb opponent.

    It is Biden who is playing a sick joke on us.

    Now I don’t have a crystal ball. The Russians might stage an incursion, but I doubt it. Why would they? Nor do they seem to want to occupy Ukraine. They have what they want.

    This is all about pushing back NATO bullying and demonstrating to our senile Dear Leader that Putin isn’t just some ClownWorld figure who can be vilified as a political stage prop.

    The entire Biden regime has been one fantastic lie after another. “Jan 6 Insurrection” and “Russian invasion happening tomorrow!” Not to mention Masking = Safety. etc.

    Within a few months or so, Biden insiders will be exiting the WH and working for CNN. Some will write memoirs telling us some of the dirty insider lies.

    Meanwhile Biden who promised “unity” in his first speech, is arming the DoJ to go after his political foes, past and (newly invented) present.

    I give the likelihood of Biden arresting dissident Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, populists and open protesters more probable than Russian tanks in Kyiv.

    I’ve been around too long to succumb to mere right-wing paranoia. But lately, with Biden’s own hate and fear mongering leaking from every mumbled utterance, I am wondering which border crossing might be the safest. And closest. Canada now second choice.

    When cornered, the Hard Marxist Left always doubles down.

    • Agree: Nicholas Stix, Kylie
    • Replies: @Jack D
    @Muggles


    , but why do you attack my comment about the War That Didn’t Happen?
     
    It's the war that didn't happen YET. It's far from clear that there isn't going to be a war. I wish it was, but it ain't.
  125. @Jack D
    @Hypnotoad666

    Sometime one fateful event is not a fallacy. I think that if Corporal Hitler had died of his WWI wounds, then history would have been different.

    Replies: @Hypnotoad666, @Art Deco, @Dieter Kief, @Reg Cæsar

    Adolf Hitler was an illegal immigrant. A left wing (Social Democrat) internationalist / immigrant-friendly Munich judge let him have his will and become a German citizen – against the law, especially because Hitler had broken the law quite often beforehand and been in jail too.

  126. While most economists are agreed that the capitalist system generates more wealth than any other, what if capitalism can never generate what is now called “equity”: equal outcomes by race and sex?

    What if—no matter how thoroughly any and all discrimination, abuse, and unfairness is rooted out of the capitalist system—blacks and women will on average be less likely to strike it rich or even just to perform up to par in demanding jobs than whites and men?

    Wealthy white fear and loath working whites. That is what all this is about.

  127. @Tiny Duck
    @R.G. Camara

    Uh you do know that most people in acadmeia and bank heads and finiancail gurus support her?

    In other words the most intelligent people want her.

    That tells you smoething right there.

    According to most economists and such Lisa Cook is for sure among the 100 most qualified people to serve on the Fed board.

    Dr. Lisa Cook has decades of experience as an economist and has fought to promote balance and innovation in order to strengthen our economy.

    Paul Krugman supports

    MAny banks have written letters suppirting here

    All demicrats support
    ALl People fo Color suport here.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Unladen Swallow, @R.G. Camara

    finian•cail gurus

    I believe those are called “monks”.

    cáil in Irish Gaelic


    cáil ar “Cúinne” Mountjot de bharr na corraíle i rith na rástaí gluasteán glach bliain.

    (The sign translates corraíle as “thrills”, but Google says it means “unrest”. Perhaps the Irish don’t differentiate.)

    • Replies: @Coemgen
    @Reg Cæsar

    cáil - reputation

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

  128. @Change that Matters
    Not Hidden Figures, but Wrong Figures.

    Replies: @Dennis Dale, @fish, @pyrrhus

    A fool and her faked statistics are soon promoted…

  129. @Altai
    OT: iSteve content generator Jeh Johnson has once again said the quiet part loud. That the current warmongering and backing into a corner of a country that still has vast ICBM stocks is 'payback for 2016'. Now, personally I think it's more 'payback for 2015' when Russia began it's intervention against the US neocon and Israeli regime change attempt in Syria but disturbingly perhaps a lot of non-neocons are now gunning for Vladimir Hitler Putin now too. Where is the opposition to stop these things getting out of hand?

    In politics you don't succeed by being elected, you succeed by making your opponents adopt the same policies as you, meaning the policy becomes embedded no matter how an election goes. It looks like the Trump-Putin hysteria was very potent propaganda from the neocons and they have converted many to their cause of unending pressure and hostility to Russia.

    https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1492554515144396813

    Replies: @Jack D, @Johann Ricke, @Nicholas Stix

    “Unconstrained by truth.”

    This mook is implying that Biden’s people are constrained by facts?!

  130. @res
    @JosephD

    The 2014 patent paper is not her dissertation. She got her PhD in 1997 (17 years earlier, for those who are counting) with a dissertation focusing on the underdevelopment of the banking system in czarist and post-Soviet Russia.[

    The patents paper was published AFTER she had already served as a Senior Economist in the Obama Administration's Council of Economic Advisers from August 2011 to August 2012.

    The thoughtful apologia schtick works better when it is not obviously wrong.

    The separate y-axes issue is complicated. If you are going to do what she did then you need to make very clear what was done so people don't make mistakes like the NPR idiot did.

    At least we agree on your final paragraph. Hopefully you can see by now that isn't going to happen.

    Replies: @Peter Johnson, @JosephD

    The 2014 patent paper is not her dissertation. She got her PhD in 1997 (17 years earlier, for those who are counting) with a dissertation focusing on the underdevelopment of the banking system in czarist and post-Soviet Russia.

    Doh! My bad. I saw the discussion of her dissertation and thought this work was from that time period. Given her role for when it was produced, yes, much of my sympathy vanishes.

  131. @Jack D
    @Hypnotoad666

    Sometime one fateful event is not a fallacy. I think that if Corporal Hitler had died of his WWI wounds, then history would have been different.

    Replies: @Hypnotoad666, @Art Deco, @Dieter Kief, @Reg Cæsar

    I think that if Corporal Hitler had died of his WWI wounds, then history would have been different.

    “[I]t was easier for [failed art student] Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.”

    –Steven Pressfield, honorary citizen of Sparta*, in The War of Art.

    *How the Spartans Would Fight COVID-19

  132. @Johann Ricke
    @Altai


    That the current warmongering and backing into a corner of a country that still has vast ICBM stocks is ‘payback for 2016’.
     
    What corner? No one has invaded Russia or is even thinking of doing so. If you're suggesting that not surrendering to Russia will result in Putin unleashing all-out nuclear war, let me point out that this gambit would merely hand a depopulated Russia over to China. Putin wants a bigger Russia, not a bigger China bloated with Russia's freshly-killed carcass.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

    If you’re suggesting that not surrendering to Russia will result in Putin unleashing all-out nuclear war, let me point out that this gambit would merely hand a depopulated Russia over to China.

    Only one political party has been mad and amoral enough to wage nuclear war on civilians, and it was neither Putin’s new party nor his old one.

    That party is still in power in its homeland.

    As Jackson and (the other) Buffett might say, it’s nuclear 11:59 somewhere…

  133. @Jack D
    @Yancey Ward

    Whether she was sincere or not is beside the point because it's bad either way - either she was dumb enough to make these obvious methodological errors or she did so intentionally because she was seeking to promote her ideology. Or maybe you don't have to pick between stupid and evil 'cause she's a bit of both?

    The real question is why the adults in the room (her thesis advisor and thesis committee) didn't call her on her BS? Again, either they had double standards and were giving her a break (the soft bigotry of low expectations) because she was black or else they supported her ideologically and so were willing to allow her to do ideologically tainted "science" , or again, a bit of both.

    And you can't just blame them. There is tremendous pressure in the academy to promote DIE. The faculty's own hiring and advancement in many universities is judged in (large) part by their efforts to "promote diversity". It's hard enough to find black women who are even remotely plausible candidates for a PhD in economics. This is the kind of field that is just not appealing to them to begin with and even for the ones it appeals to, very few actually have the intellectual and mathematical chops to do the work. So here they have a real live black female PhD candidate - they are going to do everything they can to get her through. Do you want to be the "racist" who flunked out this black woman?

    Replies: @Emil Nikola Richard, @Goddard, @Jack D, @International Jew

    Don’t assume that thesis advisors or the other committee members read every word in a thesis. I once got invited to the committee for a Korean grad student the department just wanted gone; I was invited on condition that I sign off without asking questions or making trouble.

  134. @Reg Cæsar
    @Tiny Duck


    finian•cail gurus
     
    I believe those are called "monks".


    cáil in Irish Gaelic


    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Clonard_Statue_St_Finian_2007_08_26.jpg


    https://live.staticflickr.com/2830/33423533514_889e9a21b3_b.jpg


    cáil ar "Cúinne" Mountjot de bharr na corraíle i rith na rástaí gluasteán glach bliain.

    (The sign translates corraíle as "thrills", but Google says it means "unrest". Perhaps the Irish don't differentiate.)

    Replies: @Coemgen

    cáil – reputation

    • Replies: @Reg Cæsar
    @Coemgen

    FWIW, I can pronounce Coemgen.

  135. @Peter Johnson
    This whole Lisa Cook saga has Human Biodiversity written large, and written small. Every component of the story has powerful HBD aspects.

    There are a smattering of smart, ambitious, hard-working American white male economists stuck in low-rank jobs at second-tier universities (but mostly those jobs are held by recent immigrants recruited from abroad). Will some of these ambitious and overlooked economists open their minds to the reality of human biodiversity and its widespread impact, on them personally and on society more generally? Being unfairly passed over focusses the mind sharply.

    Second best outcome, after her getting turned down in a wave of bad publicity, is her getting accepted to the Feb board and performing attrociously and attracting widespread criticism.

    Maybe a slowly accumulating drip-drip-drip of the reality of HBD is the best that science and society can reasonably manage.

    Replies: @AnotherDad

    This whole Lisa Cook saga has Human Biodiversity written large, and written small. Every component of the story has powerful HBD aspects.

    Agree on this. Though mostly what’s revealed is the sorry state of rigor and the academic racial/political taboos in 21st century America.

    Second best outcome, after her getting turned down in a wave of bad publicity, is her getting accepted to the Feb board and performing attrociously and attracting widespread criticism.

    But this has basically zero chance of happening.

    The truth is she doesn’t have to actually do much of anything. The Fed’s staff economists will gather all the Fed and government data on money supply and velocity and employment and purchasing and inflation. Powell will have his desired policy–which is some sort of vague desire to ease off the gas (“qualitative easing”, i.e. money printing) just a bit. (Real tightening–actually, selling down the Fed’s giant book is probably not in the cards. And not required.)

    All Lisa Cook needs to do is nod and go along. If at some point Biden thinks Powell is easing off the gas too much–say wants the Fed’s foot on the gas during his re-election campaign and the other Democrat appointees are willing to go along and rebel, Cook just votes along with them. (Count me as skeptical that Biden actually runs again. But the man has a ginormous–Trump sized–ego (with even less justification for it) so who knows.)

    Anyway, the bottom line is Cook could become a private joke among the Fed staff. (Like “Madeline NotBright”). But she really doesn’t have to do much and the chance of her performance becoming some sort of public joke is close to zero. For all the obvious reasons.

  136. “But Cook graphed white patents per million whites on the left axis (from 150 to 550) and black patents per million blacks on the right axis (from 0.0 to 1.o), a big no-no in academic data graphics precisely because it often misleads readers.”

    This is the nicest way I’ve ever heard someone call another human a bold faced liar.

  137. @CCZ
    https://twitter.com/DeIudedShaniqwa/status/1493962703672647681

    Replies: @Bill Jones

    But note she does not claim they invented English Grammar.

  138. @Hypnotoad666
    @Jack D


    Sometime one fateful event is not a fallacy. I think that if Corporal Hitler had died of his WWI wounds, then history would have been different.
     
    That's true. But would it have been all rainbows and puppy dogs and a steady march to international peace and prosperity without Hitler? Or would the Bolsheviks have taken over Germany and fought a nuclear war with Britain and France in, say, 1965? Who knows.

    I guess that's the problem with History. It's hard enough to figure out what actually happened. What it meant in the long-run is inspired speculation at best.

    Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @AnotherDad

    Or would the Bolsheviks have taken over Germany and fought a nuclear war with Britain and France in, say, 1965? Who knows.

    I guess that’s the problem with History. It’s hard enough to figure out what actually happened. What it meant in the long-run is inspired speculation at best.

    I think your suggested history is pretty unlikely. The Bolshy ship had likely pretty much sailed with defeat of the Spartacus uprising. Though the Great Depression might have given them another go round.

    But agree with your “who knows”.

    But Jack’s Hitler point seems pretty darn true as well. Hitler really is one of those guys–a*holes in this case–who really “made history”. If Alois had stopped for a beer that evening and say humped Klara a bit later that night, the world would actually be different–probably better (though lacking the ineffable quality of my existence).

    But then … “who knows?”

  139. @Technite78
    When I look at the dual Y axis in Cook's original graph, it seems to me that she used the default results of Microsoft Excel's automatic axis scaling. When you give it two data sets with the same X-axis (i.e. time), and then choose to have independent Y axes, it scales the range of the axes and sets their origin so that the highest and lowest data points fall in the top half and bottom half of the chart respectively... in other words, it's trying to stretch and center the data points on the graph so that they are readable, without respect to whether it makes for a logical comparison between the two data sets.

    I've done a fair amount of data analysis using spreadsheets and graphs, and the default Y ranges chosen automatically by Excel frequently have to be manually adjusted so that the data sets can be properly compared. I'm guessing that wasn't done here... and it's entirely possible that the poor choice of Y ranges was due to laziness/incompetence rather than an intent to deceive.

    Replies: @James Speaks, @Muggles, @mc23

    it’s entirely possible that the poor choice of Y ranges was due to laziness/incompetence rather than an intent to deceive.

    Well, that makes me feel much better about the leadership of the Federal Reserve.

  140. economist Lisa D. Cook’s prime qualification for her nomination to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve is a celebrated paper on black inventors.

    A prime qualification for an economist to be on the Federal Reserve is a paper on black inventors? Really?

    A paper about black bookies and sports betting would at least have some relevence.

    • Replies: @Charles Pewitt
    @mc23

    A paper about black bookies and sports betting would at least have some relevence.

    I say:

    Never bet on the New York Jets or against Fordham basketball at home.

    This guy who has a Pee H Dee in economics and has a somewhat Irish sounding name -- Mohamed A El-Erian -- is a fan of the New York Jets and it might explain some melancholy moments of perceptive lucidity when he contemplates the monetary policy extremism machinations of the globalized central banks.

    Mohamed El-Erian also ran the Harvard Hedge Fund that benefited tremendously from the asset bubbles created by the globalized central banks, and that might give El-Erian some reason to pause and reflect upon the political damage caused by monetary policy extremism. On the other hand, El-Erian might go the Steve Miller route and say: 'Hoo-hoo-hoo, go on, take the money and run, oh lord.'

    Frank Booth: "Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!"

    Heineken guy sees some cost inflation:

    https://twitter.com/elerianm/status/1493870517912326144?s=20&t=8Ec-b8IczoWam6Ud_erOYA

    https://twitter.com/YahooFinance/status/1040072847065063424?s=20&t=8Ec-b8IczoWam6Ud_erOYA

  141. @Kaz
    This is incredibly depressing. This is the best black female economist they could fine?

    Harrowing..

    Replies: @Art Deco

    I don’t think being a capable researcher hurts, but I’d wager connections and the congruence of your research program with the preferences of the political types would be the main currents in the pipeline.

    Note, 55 years ago Andrew Brimmer was appointed to the Federal Reserve Board. He’d gone through the paces (University of Washington and Harvard) at a time when AA was unknown and he’d been on the staff of Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

    Right now, about 30% of the research degrees awarded in social sciences (anthropology, economics, geography, political science, and sociology) are awarded in economics. Currently, the award of research degrees in social sciences to blacks is running at about 180 per year, so you figure 50-odd doctorates are awarded in economics to black candidates in a typical year, which would account for about 4% of all the doctorates in economics awarded. There are about 30,000 working economists in the United States. If you have 1,200 black economists, you’re going to find quite a number who do not make a hash of things in this way. The majority of economists, btw, work for corporations or public agencies.

    Note, they could certainly have found someone more suitable that the red haze shoplifter they nominated to be Comptroller of the Currency. Quality is not driving the appointments process in this administration.

  142. @Meretricious
    OT

    Steve, do you plan on addressing WHY Negroes are attacking/raping/murdering Asian females?

    https://www.amren.com/commentary/2022/02/who-murdered-all-the-asian-women-and-whos-covering-it-up/

    Replies: @Danindc

    Isn’t it mainly opportunity bc they live amongst them?

    • Replies: @Meretricious
    @Danindc

    I think Asian females are the weakest members of American society, and since Negroes are opportunistic predators ... I think the Negro is also sexually attracted to Asian women. What's most important is to stop funding the irresponsible breeding practices of low-IQ Negresses as they are the producers of the lion's share of all these murderers.

  143. What are the chances that the ‘black’ inventors in the 1880-1899 period were Octoroons or even whiter, given the one-drop rule in practice at the time?

    • Replies: @Steve Sailer
    @Thomm

    You can find photos of the ten or so most famous black inventors from around 1900. Just type into Google:

    American Inventors

  144. @mc23

    economist Lisa D. Cook’s prime qualification for her nomination to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve is a celebrated paper on black inventors.

     

    A prime qualification for an economist to be on the Federal Reserve is a paper on black inventors? Really?

    A paper about black bookies and sports betting would at least have some relevence.

    Replies: @Charles Pewitt

    A paper about black bookies and sports betting would at least have some relevence.

    I say:

    Never bet on the New York Jets or against Fordham basketball at home.

    This guy who has a Pee H Dee in economics and has a somewhat Irish sounding name — Mohamed A El-Erian — is a fan of the New York Jets and it might explain some melancholy moments of perceptive lucidity when he contemplates the monetary policy extremism machinations of the globalized central banks.

    Mohamed El-Erian also ran the Harvard Hedge Fund that benefited tremendously from the asset bubbles created by the globalized central banks, and that might give El-Erian some reason to pause and reflect upon the political damage caused by monetary policy extremism. On the other hand, El-Erian might go the Steve Miller route and say: ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo, go on, take the money and run, oh lord.’

    Frank Booth: “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

    Heineken guy sees some cost inflation:

  145. @Thomm
    What are the chances that the 'black' inventors in the 1880-1899 period were Octoroons or even whiter, given the one-drop rule in practice at the time?

    Replies: @Steve Sailer

    You can find photos of the ten or so most famous black inventors from around 1900. Just type into Google:

    American Inventors

  146. @Tiny Duck
    @R.G. Camara

    Uh you do know that most people in acadmeia and bank heads and finiancail gurus support her?

    In other words the most intelligent people want her.

    That tells you smoething right there.

    According to most economists and such Lisa Cook is for sure among the 100 most qualified people to serve on the Fed board.

    Dr. Lisa Cook has decades of experience as an economist and has fought to promote balance and innovation in order to strengthen our economy.

    Paul Krugman supports

    MAny banks have written letters suppirting here

    All demicrats support
    ALl People fo Color suport here.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Unladen Swallow, @R.G. Camara

    Not that I would have expected it, but hey td, how about debating the substance of Steve’s critique? Oh, that’s right, you don’t even understand it.

    • Replies: @Reg Cæsar
    @Unladen Swallow


    Not that I would have expected it, but hey td, how about debating the substance of Steve’s critique?
     
    Swallows might not swallow, but ducks always duck.

    https://media.makeameme.org/created/read-the-ducking.jpg

  147. So, here’s my version of her graph, correcting both of her mistakes:

    While you’re at it, pls also make one for male vs. female recipients, and extend that all the way to the present.

    That differential will be equally stark.

  148. @Danindc
    @Meretricious

    Isn’t it mainly opportunity bc they live amongst them?

    Replies: @Meretricious

    I think Asian females are the weakest members of American society, and since Negroes are opportunistic predators … I think the Negro is also sexually attracted to Asian women. What’s most important is to stop funding the irresponsible breeding practices of low-IQ Negresses as they are the producers of the lion’s share of all these murderers.

  149. @Muggles
    @Jack D


    It’s sick that you are making light of this. A war is no joke. Thousands would be dead on both sides. There would be hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of refugees.
     
    I hate to quibble about a minor point, but why do you attack my comment about the War That Didn't Happen?

    I am not making "sick jokes" about war. Biden & media stooges are. So far as reasonably unbiased reports show, the local Ukrainian population is not preparing for war. Nor does anyone I've seen appear to be worried about the horrible consequences of that.

    Unless this "war fever" is something invented by Sleepy Joe & Comrades to distract us from inflation, COVID bullying, high crime, migrant invasions, et. al. this war talk is just Russia playing chess with a very dumb opponent.

    It is Biden who is playing a sick joke on us.

    Now I don't have a crystal ball. The Russians might stage an incursion, but I doubt it. Why would they? Nor do they seem to want to occupy Ukraine. They have what they want.

    This is all about pushing back NATO bullying and demonstrating to our senile Dear Leader that Putin isn't just some ClownWorld figure who can be vilified as a political stage prop.

    The entire Biden regime has been one fantastic lie after another. "Jan 6 Insurrection" and "Russian invasion happening tomorrow!" Not to mention Masking = Safety. etc.

    Within a few months or so, Biden insiders will be exiting the WH and working for CNN. Some will write memoirs telling us some of the dirty insider lies.

    Meanwhile Biden who promised "unity" in his first speech, is arming the DoJ to go after his political foes, past and (newly invented) present.

    I give the likelihood of Biden arresting dissident Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, populists and open protesters more probable than Russian tanks in Kyiv.

    I've been around too long to succumb to mere right-wing paranoia. But lately, with Biden's own hate and fear mongering leaking from every mumbled utterance, I am wondering which border crossing might be the safest. And closest. Canada now second choice.

    When cornered, the Hard Marxist Left always doubles down.

    Replies: @Jack D

    , but why do you attack my comment about the War That Didn’t Happen?

    It’s the war that didn’t happen YET. It’s far from clear that there isn’t going to be a war. I wish it was, but it ain’t.

  150. @Art Deco
    @Jack D

    Putin actually runs a political machine which has a 20 year record of making satisfactory decisions. The country's had a remarkable turnaround in that time.

    However, people generally like to run their own show. There's pan-Russian sentiment in White Russia, but it's notably weaker than it was 25 years ago, down from about 1/2 the population to about 1/4. The pan-Roumanian parties have for a generation been a modest minority in Moldova, in spite of that country's small population and severe economic distress.

    The self-understanding of western and eastern Ukrainians is unlikely to be affected by Anatoly Karlin instructing them Ukrainian nationality is 'fake and gay' or by his votaries chuffering about Novorossiya or Malorussia.

    Replies: @Jack D

    has a 20 year record of making satisfactory decisions. The country’s had a remarkable turnaround in that time.

    Before the crooks were stealing 80% of Russian wealth and now they are only stealing 40% of Russian wealth so they are a much better bunch of crooks. That and higher oil prices explains the entire turnaround.

    • Replies: @Art Deco
    @Jack D

    That and higher oil prices explains the entire turnaround.

    No, they do not.

    Fuel and mineral exports account for about 15% of the country's nominal domestic product, a ratio which has declined by half in the last 20-odd years. Domestic product per capita in that time has trebled, life expectancy at birth increased by seven years, the total fertility rate has increased by 50%, and the homicide rate has declined by 2/3. Russia does well on a range of financial indicators: foreign debt loads, public sector debt loads, balance of payments on current account, public sector borrowing, &c. The employment-to-population ratio is at 0.60, about normal for an affluent country. Wage arrearages, a huge issue in 1998, are now a minor issue. Inflation's an issue right now, but no worse than it is here.

    There's a reason survey research finds his approval rating fluctuates between 65% and 90%. From 1789 to the present, you'd be hard put to find a Russian ruler whose policy decisions proved to be tonic to this degree. What you might hope he doesn't do is damage his legacy by pushing the sort of madcap irredentist claims that some Russian nationalists favor.

    Replies: @Jack D

  151. @Tiny Duck
    @R.G. Camara

    Uh you do know that most people in acadmeia and bank heads and finiancail gurus support her?

    In other words the most intelligent people want her.

    That tells you smoething right there.

    According to most economists and such Lisa Cook is for sure among the 100 most qualified people to serve on the Fed board.

    Dr. Lisa Cook has decades of experience as an economist and has fought to promote balance and innovation in order to strengthen our economy.

    Paul Krugman supports

    MAny banks have written letters suppirting here

    All demicrats support
    ALl People fo Color suport here.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Unladen Swallow, @R.G. Camara

    I’ve missed you, baby. Please don’t leave me again.

    You…complete….me.

  152. Anonymous[387] • Disclaimer says:
    @YetAnotherAnon
    @Anonymous

    "We still use a device that instantly frees frozen screws and nuts or bolts, no matter how badly they are corroded or jammed, that he gave to my father decades ago. "

    Are they available to buy?

    Replies: @Technite78, @Billy Ash, @Anonymous

    Hi, Yet,

    I asked my dad about the gizmo and he dug it out of the attic. It hasn’t been used in years. Below is a photo of it. To use it, after fitting the appropriate bit, you pull the T handle out all the way, then push it in. You don’t have to use any force, just enough to get it going. The cylinder spins as it goes down and when it contacts the crossbar it rotates the center shaft and the screw or bolt pops free.
    Dad says he doesn’t remember when Bolger gave it to him, but it was probably when he was working part time as a stunt man with Solar Productions. He most likely met him through Bud Ekins or Steve McQueen when they all competed in the old Barstow-to-Vegas desert race, so it would have been mid-to-late 1960s when he was in college, so the tool is pretty old. It looks obviously home workshop-made to me. I don’t know if it was ever sold commercially.

    • Replies: @Jack D
    @Anonymous

    It's very clever. It's in the nature of an impact driver. I think nowadays you would use an air driven or cordless electric impact gun for the same job. Inside the impact wrench is a rotating hammer that operates on the same principle but instead of just making impact one time it does it repeatedly for as long as the motor is spinning the shaft.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gSJa3L_7c

    Current manual impact drivers are nothing like this - in those the hammer is separate (just an ordinary hammer that you swing in your other hand) and provides only striking force which the tool converts to rotary motion.

  153. @Peter Johnson
    @res

    Thanks for the informative comment.

    As you state, the separate y-axis scaling issue is complicated. Normally it is done to display two very different data series with wildly different scales which otherwise would not fit readably on a single graph. The unusual feature is that her two data series are closely linked, but one group has massively more per-capital patents than the other (backwards-causality due to Redlining). As long as she is 100% clear about this that is ok. I don't think she would want to focus on the need for two scales, since it hints at HBD.

    Replies: @res

    Thinking about the y-axis issue some more, what I might recommend is apply a round multiplier and clearly note what and why I did it. In this case I think 500x would be a good number. It would separate the curves a bit more (0.6 matches 300) helping to encourage the less than perception, though hopefully the size of 500 would make the point forcefully enough.

  154. Anonymous[141] • Disclaimer says:

    1. Steve, you’ve done some of the best work on Cook. I see how it appeals to your MBA market researcher slant on things. Very McKinsey of you. I haven’t seen the Cook defenders doing any real analysis. Nor the EJR people or most of the commenters here. (I at least forced myself to read her paper and the competing paper, rather than just your posts).

    2. I think the two different axes crit is a little unfair. How the heck is she supposed to compare the two time series? And the figure caption and discussion is clear. Maybe showing your true scale variant first, followed by her figure?

    3. Her math error is unfortunate. And good on you all for finding it. But doesn’t really change the time dimension of what she is doing. (Might change the regression a little if white and black populations expended at different rates, and if she had the math error inside the regression also, not just the figure.)

    4. The Cook approach is called the “biography approach” (I would call it bottoms up) by the competing census based (what I call top down) approach. If you look at her appendix 2 and the info on the 40 papers, and books she looked at, it’s pretty obvious how limited it was (despite what was probably a real manual effort). I mean she’s not doing some Nexus search of all newspaper obituaries from 1870-1940 for instance.

    5. If the census approach is overcounting black patents and mixing in white patents very significantly, that might obscure the plunge in black patents, even if they occurred. I don’t think the Cook plunge is real, think it’s an artifact of the bottoms-up approach combined with timing of the Baker survey. But the point is the time evolution of the alternate approach could obscure a plunge if the mixing and false counting is large.

  155. @Coemgen
    @Reg Cæsar

    cáil - reputation

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

    FWIW, I can pronounce Coemgen.

    • LOL: Coemgen
  156. @Unladen Swallow
    @Tiny Duck

    Not that I would have expected it, but hey td, how about debating the substance of Steve's critique? Oh, that's right, you don't even understand it.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

    Not that I would have expected it, but hey td, how about debating the substance of Steve’s critique?

    Swallows might not swallow, but ducks always duck.

  157. @Nicholas Stix
    Lisa D. Cook's immediate recourse to the race card against all critics makes it impossible for me to grant her the benefit of the doubt, regarding incompetence or malice. She could be motivated both by incompetence and malice, but malice is definitely in the stew. (Were I a Midwesterner, I might opt for just incompetence, but I'm a New Yorker. Malice, first. (Terms of Endearment.)

    Replies: @Unladen Swallow

    Being a Midwesterner I of course opt for incompetence, Cook’s paper I think could only be produced by a person sublimely unaware of their own lack of competence, combined with no one in authority having the guts to tell her so. That it passed muster for her dissertation is not surprising, but what is very surprising is that such an obviously poor piece of research got published in a peer reviewed journal. Economics has obviously started to become Politically Correct, just like other “social sciences” had a long time before.

  158. @Jack D
    @ic1000


    scholar Jonathan Rothwell
     
    Rothwell is not a scholar, he's an ideologue who praises his fellow ideologue Cook.

    The title of Rothwell's book tells you all that you need to know:

    A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society

    Leftists have been dreaming about this just and equal society since the days of Karl Marx and every time they try to achieve this utopia it always ends in tears, But they never learn from this and just keep trying, generation after generation. Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

    Replies: @Uncle Dan

    Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

    They like repeating it. Their fondest wish is to be The Man At Finland Station, pointing out Historical Inevitably to the proletariat.

    • Replies: @Nicholas Stix
    @Uncle Dan

    "They like repeating it."

    And I am going to go around, repeating you.

    You took a common misunderstanding of Santayana, who was talking about one human life, and turned it into something brilliant.

  159. @Rob
    Cook’s style of thinking shows up in lots of places. Let’s grant that the only reason group x did not achieve at the level of white men. The fact that they were discriminated against means they did not achieve as much. Despite this near-tautology, activists want group x put on the same plane as white men in high school and college courses.

    When I was at Reed, there was a constant feminist grumble that we did not cover Greek and Roman women’s achievements. Maybe they did a lot, but there ate no records! Should we spend half of the broad humanities class on Sappho?

    Now Reed’s Humanities 1xx (think it's 110) covers the Greeks, Romans, Tenochtitlan, and the Harlem Renaissance. If there’s anything that willconvince you of white superiority it’s “the Greeks invented philosophy, geometry, and science. The Romans developed conquest and government to it’s highest level before the modern era. They created a state that lasted longer than any modern government. Far away, the Aztecs had a hugely productive food source (corn is has C4 metabolism. Much more efficient than wheat, which is C3) and built a stone city and a government based on terror. As soon as an alternative presented itself, the Aztec’s lost all their satrapies. Much later, some blacks wrote poetry and made music with instruments they could never invent.”

    Really, when you stack white achievements against non-whites, it makes you realize whites have a special sauce to the extent that no lefty CRT-inspired course ever presents them on an even footing. The best they can do seems to be Egypt. Ok, the Egyptians were building pyramids when wooly mammoth roamed Europe. That’s pretty cool. But besides pyramids to gawk at, what did Egyptians do that anyone thought was worth copying? With the first civilization, why did civilization never spread to the rest of Africa. Ok, malaria. But one might go a step further out and ask, “without civilizations, were Africans under the same sort of selective pressures that turned Europeans into world-conquering, science-creating, disease vanquishing behemoths? I will grant that East Aians (formerly Orientals) have caught up in many areas. Interesting science comes out of Japan. A huge chunk of modern “American” science is the doings of Chinamen. (but most of it does not replicate)

    Personally, i love Cook’s graph. It shows the cargo-cult nature of so much social “science.” It says, “if we just pretend, then reality will conform.” Remember when scientists wanted to understand reality? Today, when reality screams at them, they cover their ears and make sill graphs. That graph is a visual representation of the unwillingness of moderns to look honestly at the past and what different peoples have produced. One can be sure that Cook chose both scales so that a cursory glance would make blacks seem equally inventive for a short time, until BadWhites made them dumb again. I’ve heard seemingly smart people say that the decline of whites in. Ametica is fine for whites in America. Blacks and hispanics will do all the R&D, bespoke manufacturing, then ramping up production in the future. That future is coming in around eight years.How is that coming along so far?

    Magic 8 Ball says, “wtf were you thinking? Blacks can’t invent not shooting each other over Facebook feuds.” The different ways people chose to use technology is astounding. Blacks carry on their petty crabs-in-a-bucket lives with connectivity such as the world has never seen. Granted, average whites use tech to create misinformation bubbles to live in. But the magic that drives economic growth does not come from average people. It comes from +2-3σ folk. The number of blacks and mestizos with 145 IQ is a rounding error. The great and good are so delusional that they’ve decided that putting blacks front and center in institutions will save America! Hopefully, it’s just “representation.” In 2nd grade, I remember telling my dad that scientists were black. All the scientists in videos that they showed in school were black, you see. Dad smiled and said that videos often did not reflect reality. Showing “successful” blacks to inspire other blacks to behave better and make whites less reality-based, and therefore less “racist” goes back to the eighties. Forty years. That’s more than a generation.

    Kids have grown up with nothing but “blaques Rnt dum” from popular culture. The gentry, to use a Moldbugism. Moldbug and Unz have a lot in common. They both write essays no one has read in their entirety. Moldbug’s schtick is to blame Puritans for Jewish cognitive quirks. Unz’s is to gather all the dissidents in one place for easier monitoring and make patriots comfortable with the endless Hispanic invasion. Remember “The Marching Morons” by Kornbluth? It was inspired by the idea that if Chinese were in a x person wide line walking through a gate at 3 miles an hour, they would never all get through. There are so many Chinese that babies would be born, grow old, and die walking in that line. The line grows faster than they can cross through the gate. That’s pretty much what Hispanic immigration is. They reproduce faster than they immigrate, so there will always be poor Hispanics who could have higher standards of living in America. For practical matters, there is an infinite supply of illegals at 1-3 million/year. How are Biden’s illegals numbers shaping up? The media always crowed about how more aliens were streaming in under Trump than ever before, they stopped talking about that, so one can only assume that the problem stopped, right? Thank God for actual reporters, telling us about the federal government flying aliens from the border to your red state.

    I feel a Galileo thing is a mixed metaphor, because the culturist, now discriminationist, explanation for racial disparities is much closer to being a flat earther or young Earth creationist than buying a geocentric model of the universe. But we’ve had fifty five years of mass immigration. The country has become more crowded, polluted, and divided. When does immigration making America better start?

    Political division has grown to the extent that progs are fantasizing about civil war. Though that might just be because they want to use the post-9/11 police state on their domestic opponents. I guess they think the military will obey whatever disabled black transsexual they make into a general? Surely it scared them when they had to politically vet thousands of national guard soldiers to secure the capital for Biden’s installation? They did it fast, which implies to me that they already have a preliminary dossier on everyone in uniform. What’s a surveillance state for, if not that? Back to people thinking all populations are identical. At least geocentrism made some sense. It described facts about the world. The sun and moon appear to orbit the earth. The earth doesn’t feel like it’s moving, does it? Meanwhile cognitive creationism explains zero facts about the world.

    “Let’s make some graphs that show that the races are equally inventive and the earth stands still!”
    E pur si muove.

    Replies: @martin_2, @Stonewall Jackson, @Recently Based

    Unz’s schtick is to gather all the dissidents together for easier monitoring and to pave the way for an endless hispanic invasion…

    Lots of Ronnie fans here will attack you for that one… but I have thought the same thing about this website. He has the anti holocaust stuff… I guess which will land him in the future jailling that is coming for hate crimes… maybe… But the jews tend not to punish their own.

    The part of his endless hispanic invasion support though. While you point out that no one reads his long winded and pointless essays.. he gets to the point on that one. Read the failure of white nationalism.

    The rest of your essay is top notch too. Thank you.

  160. @Anonymous
    @YetAnotherAnon

    Hi, Yet,

    I asked my dad about the gizmo and he dug it out of the attic. It hasn't been used in years. Below is a photo of it. To use it, after fitting the appropriate bit, you pull the T handle out all the way, then push it in. You don't have to use any force, just enough to get it going. The cylinder spins as it goes down and when it contacts the crossbar it rotates the center shaft and the screw or bolt pops free.
    Dad says he doesn't remember when Bolger gave it to him, but it was probably when he was working part time as a stunt man with Solar Productions. He most likely met him through Bud Ekins or Steve McQueen when they all competed in the old Barstow-to-Vegas desert race, so it would have been mid-to-late 1960s when he was in college, so the tool is pretty old. It looks obviously home workshop-made to me. I don't know if it was ever sold commercially.

    https://i.imgur.com/Wju6Grz.jpg

    Replies: @Jack D

    It’s very clever. It’s in the nature of an impact driver. I think nowadays you would use an air driven or cordless electric impact gun for the same job. Inside the impact wrench is a rotating hammer that operates on the same principle but instead of just making impact one time it does it repeatedly for as long as the motor is spinning the shaft.

    Current manual impact drivers are nothing like this – in those the hammer is separate (just an ordinary hammer that you swing in your other hand) and provides only striking force which the tool converts to rotary motion.

  161. I could make hundreds of thousands of US dollars by pubishing a book with a title like Tie Black Teslas. Trouble is, there were none and it would be discarded once people fnund that I am not black.

    OTOH, American black inventors seem mainly to have been concerned with practical things, to their credit.

    Unlike Jewish ‘inventors’ who patent new ways to display advertising on food packaging and other such nonsense.

    I have had numerous patentable ideas, but right now, they fall into two categories.

    1. Made irrevelevant by a different approach or done later anyway.

    2. Extensions on ideas I learnt through work, to patent those would be unethical. Some were adopted, it doesn’t throw money at me, but a little satisfying.

    • Replies: @Jack D
    @Che Guava

    Here's a Jewish inventor whose work did not involve advertising:

    http://imageusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/uzi2.jpg

    He was born Gotthard Glas but changed his name to Uziel Gal when he moved to Palestine (Israelis have names like science fiction characters). But his friends called him "Uzi" for short.

    Replies: @Joe Stalin, @Che Guava

  162. @Anonymous
    Meanwhile, a fatherless feral negro bungled his assassination attempt towards a Jewish mayoral candidate, thanks to God, and "Sailer's Law" which isteve readers know as regarding to the American negro's statistically reliable poor marksmanship:

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/louisville-council-candidate-accused-in-shooting-attack-on-jewish-mayoral-hopeful/

    Replies: @Alden, @Jim Don Bob

    BLM bailed him out with a cashier’s check for \$100k.

    The Las Vegas Sun today published an editorial decrying “increasingly violent rhetoric coming from extremist Republicans” in connection with the attempted assassination of Louisville, KY mayoral candidate Democrat Craig Greenberg.

    2 + 2 does equal 5.

  163. @Jack D
    @Art Deco


    has a 20 year record of making satisfactory decisions. The country’s had a remarkable turnaround in that time.
     
    Before the crooks were stealing 80% of Russian wealth and now they are only stealing 40% of Russian wealth so they are a much better bunch of crooks. That and higher oil prices explains the entire turnaround.

    Replies: @Art Deco

    That and higher oil prices explains the entire turnaround.

    No, they do not.

    Fuel and mineral exports account for about 15% of the country’s nominal domestic product, a ratio which has declined by half in the last 20-odd years. Domestic product per capita in that time has trebled, life expectancy at birth increased by seven years, the total fertility rate has increased by 50%, and the homicide rate has declined by 2/3. Russia does well on a range of financial indicators: foreign debt loads, public sector debt loads, balance of payments on current account, public sector borrowing, &c. The employment-to-population ratio is at 0.60, about normal for an affluent country. Wage arrearages, a huge issue in 1998, are now a minor issue. Inflation’s an issue right now, but no worse than it is here.

    There’s a reason survey research finds his approval rating fluctuates between 65% and 90%. From 1789 to the present, you’d be hard put to find a Russian ruler whose policy decisions proved to be tonic to this degree. What you might hope he doesn’t do is damage his legacy by pushing the sort of madcap irredentist claims that some Russian nationalists favor.

    • Replies: @Jack D
    @Art Deco

    Putin took over at a low point so it wasn't hard for him to make an improvement over chaos. Russian per capital GDP is around $10,000, which is about even with the upper end 3rd worldish places like Turkey and Costa Rica but 1/4 of the GDP of Western countries such as Canada, Germany and Israel. For a sparsely populated country with abundant natural resources and an advanced educational system, this is not that great. Likewise the life expectancy of 73 is not so hot - comparable to N. Korea or Bangladesh whereas in Canada, Germany and Israel it's about 10 years longer.

    Russia is not doing terrible economically but it's far from great. On a PPP basis, your $10,000 goes a little bit farther in Russia. Rents and locally produced vegetables and such are cheaper than in Western Europe. But that doesn't help you if want to take a trip abroad or buy a car or an iPhone that is priced at world prices. If Russians are happy it's only because they are used to even worse.

    Replies: @Art Deco, @Art Deco

  164. @Art Deco
    @Jack D

    That and higher oil prices explains the entire turnaround.

    No, they do not.

    Fuel and mineral exports account for about 15% of the country's nominal domestic product, a ratio which has declined by half in the last 20-odd years. Domestic product per capita in that time has trebled, life expectancy at birth increased by seven years, the total fertility rate has increased by 50%, and the homicide rate has declined by 2/3. Russia does well on a range of financial indicators: foreign debt loads, public sector debt loads, balance of payments on current account, public sector borrowing, &c. The employment-to-population ratio is at 0.60, about normal for an affluent country. Wage arrearages, a huge issue in 1998, are now a minor issue. Inflation's an issue right now, but no worse than it is here.

    There's a reason survey research finds his approval rating fluctuates between 65% and 90%. From 1789 to the present, you'd be hard put to find a Russian ruler whose policy decisions proved to be tonic to this degree. What you might hope he doesn't do is damage his legacy by pushing the sort of madcap irredentist claims that some Russian nationalists favor.

    Replies: @Jack D

    Putin took over at a low point so it wasn’t hard for him to make an improvement over chaos. Russian per capital GDP is around \$10,000, which is about even with the upper end 3rd worldish places like Turkey and Costa Rica but 1/4 of the GDP of Western countries such as Canada, Germany and Israel. For a sparsely populated country with abundant natural resources and an advanced educational system, this is not that great. Likewise the life expectancy of 73 is not so hot – comparable to N. Korea or Bangladesh whereas in Canada, Germany and Israel it’s about 10 years longer.

    Russia is not doing terrible economically but it’s far from great. On a PPP basis, your \$10,000 goes a little bit farther in Russia. Rents and locally produced vegetables and such are cheaper than in Western Europe. But that doesn’t help you if want to take a trip abroad or buy a car or an iPhone that is priced at world prices. If Russians are happy it’s only because they are used to even worse.

    • Replies: @Art Deco
    @Jack D

    Russian per capital GDP is around $10,000,

    Assessment at purchasing-power-parity is preferred for comparing the standard of living. In assessments at purchasing-power-parity, the ratio of Russia's GDP per capita stood at 20% that of the United States in 1998 and stands at 45% of that of the United States today. Costa Rica's stands at about 26% that of the United States at this measure.


    Putin took over at a low point so it wasn’t hard for him to make an improvement over chaos.

    The logic of this remark is that no government which took office in 1999 could be deemed to have presided over any improvement of note.

    That aside, over a period of 20-odd years, Russia registered an improvement in real incomes which amounted to 4% per annum over and above the occidental norm. That's actually comparable to what was achieved by China. In re India, the additional increment in growth of per capita product was about 3%.

    The Maddison project has 59 years of data from which you can compute the ratio of Russia's per capita product to that of the United States. The period running from 2010 to 2018 is the most prosperous period, followed by 1975 / 76.

    , @Art Deco
    @Jack D

    If Russians are happy it’s only because they are used to even worse.

    Jack, it's a high middle income country more affluent than just about every part of the world bar North America, the Antipodes, parts of the Far Eastern periphery, Israel, and points west in Europe. It compares favorably to the situation in most of the west 50 years ago.

  165. @Jack D
    @Art Deco

    Putin took over at a low point so it wasn't hard for him to make an improvement over chaos. Russian per capital GDP is around $10,000, which is about even with the upper end 3rd worldish places like Turkey and Costa Rica but 1/4 of the GDP of Western countries such as Canada, Germany and Israel. For a sparsely populated country with abundant natural resources and an advanced educational system, this is not that great. Likewise the life expectancy of 73 is not so hot - comparable to N. Korea or Bangladesh whereas in Canada, Germany and Israel it's about 10 years longer.

    Russia is not doing terrible economically but it's far from great. On a PPP basis, your $10,000 goes a little bit farther in Russia. Rents and locally produced vegetables and such are cheaper than in Western Europe. But that doesn't help you if want to take a trip abroad or buy a car or an iPhone that is priced at world prices. If Russians are happy it's only because they are used to even worse.

    Replies: @Art Deco, @Art Deco

    Russian per capital GDP is around \$10,000,

    Assessment at purchasing-power-parity is preferred for comparing the standard of living. In assessments at purchasing-power-parity, the ratio of Russia’s GDP per capita stood at 20% that of the United States in 1998 and stands at 45% of that of the United States today. Costa Rica’s stands at about 26% that of the United States at this measure.

    Putin took over at a low point so it wasn’t hard for him to make an improvement over chaos.

    The logic of this remark is that no government which took office in 1999 could be deemed to have presided over any improvement of note.

    That aside, over a period of 20-odd years, Russia registered an improvement in real incomes which amounted to 4% per annum over and above the occidental norm. That’s actually comparable to what was achieved by China. In re India, the additional increment in growth of per capita product was about 3%.

    The Maddison project has 59 years of data from which you can compute the ratio of Russia’s per capita product to that of the United States. The period running from 2010 to 2018 is the most prosperous period, followed by 1975 / 76.

  166. @Jack D
    @Art Deco

    Putin took over at a low point so it wasn't hard for him to make an improvement over chaos. Russian per capital GDP is around $10,000, which is about even with the upper end 3rd worldish places like Turkey and Costa Rica but 1/4 of the GDP of Western countries such as Canada, Germany and Israel. For a sparsely populated country with abundant natural resources and an advanced educational system, this is not that great. Likewise the life expectancy of 73 is not so hot - comparable to N. Korea or Bangladesh whereas in Canada, Germany and Israel it's about 10 years longer.

    Russia is not doing terrible economically but it's far from great. On a PPP basis, your $10,000 goes a little bit farther in Russia. Rents and locally produced vegetables and such are cheaper than in Western Europe. But that doesn't help you if want to take a trip abroad or buy a car or an iPhone that is priced at world prices. If Russians are happy it's only because they are used to even worse.

    Replies: @Art Deco, @Art Deco

    If Russians are happy it’s only because they are used to even worse.

    Jack, it’s a high middle income country more affluent than just about every part of the world bar North America, the Antipodes, parts of the Far Eastern periphery, Israel, and points west in Europe. It compares favorably to the situation in most of the west 50 years ago.

  167. @Arclight
    As I said on Steve's earlier post on this woman, the kind of errors he highlights are too obvious to be from stupidity - they are on purpose and safe in the knowledge that no one will ever call it out because in our current age we are to expect the worst of whites and the best of blacks in terms of achievement and integrity.

    Also, although I am not an exalted academic, it seems awfully dubious to look at a single phenomena like the output of patents and assert it's evidence of the negative impact of other social conditions without, you know, actually providing supporting evidence that they are related.

    Several of the accounts on the bird app I follow simply highlight interesting archaeological finds. It's impossible to miss the fact certain civilizations had a level of skill and innovation thousands of years ago that others never reached at any point, much less before the dreaded era of colonization or slavery supposedly prevented these cultures from reaching the heights they were destined to achieve.

    Anyway, the crack up over race basically comes down to the fact that despite the vast sums of treasure expended, the scores of policy innovations, and the adoption of plainly unconstitutional practices that were intended to elevate blacks, it's obvious to all that it just hasn't worked. This reality is unbearable for the people that hold the commanding heights of our society, so a new religion has been invented to free us from inconvenient facts.

    Replies: @Intelligent Dasein

    Anyway, the crack up over race basically comes down to the fact that despite the vast sums of treasure expended, the scores of policy innovations, and the adoption of plainly unconstitutional practices that were intended to elevate blacks, it’s obvious to all that it just hasn’t worked. This reality is unbearable for the people that hold the commanding heights of our society, so a new religion has been invented to free us from inconvenient facts.

    On the question of the inconvenient facts, though, it is necessary to remember that these facts would have very little significance were it not for the inhuman scale and soft totalitarianism of modern societies.

    This is why debating HBD, Nature/Nurture, and other suchlike theories so often amounts to barking up the wrong tree. In a more distributed political system, the question even of whether races differed from one another, let alone why they differed, would be of no practical importance to most people. We would just avoid people we didn’t want to be around and stick with those we did want to be around. Our own history, experience, and ability for risk assessment would provide us with a sufficient toolkit for navigating through the world and achieving a meaningful life. The race-question would be an affair for scientists and philosophers, not a matter of politics.

    But when the empire constrains us all to live in a common economy and a common welfare state, the strains between different classes of people become evident, and this opens up the whole field of “problem politics” that is so characteristic of imperial ages. The empire wants only money, power, and obedience. It wants to channelize all human activity into a single current of tax revenue and economic force that it can drink from at will. Due to its own nature, it cannot help but see any sort of individual difference as a direct affront to its own authority. The idea that people might have different beliefs, ideas, priorities, and tendencies is interpreted as a rebellious notion; as a result, “equality” becomes a watchword of official propaganda and prescribed belief. The empire rightly discerns the political effect that any admission of difference would have, viz. that it must relax its stranglehold upon the lives and dignities of ordinary people. This the empire will not tolerate, so it relentlessly pushes its equality line and thinks little of spending vast sums of money in fruitless efforts to paper over real distinctions which, in spite of all, continue to exist.

    The rise of the Civil-Rights-era legislation and the welfare state coincides with the crystallization of the West into an imperium and the replacement of hard currency by imperial fiat. Ordinarily, the laws of economics, which are simple derivatives of the natural law, would not permit such things. These are not goods that are produced but conceits that are indulged. Delivering arguments to the empire, about why its conceits are wrong and irrational, works about as well as it does with any other man whose paycheck depends on him not understanding certain things.

    It is written that you cannot serve both God and mammon. By “mammon” is not meant wealth (which is a good thing in and of itself), but the kingdom of lies and sins held together by the power of money. The empire is an evil billionaire who has bought up everyone’s mortgage and now threatens them with arbitrary economic ruin if they don’t perform his required rites—this alone accounts for the willingness of people to submit to and applaud the racial chicanery. The only way out of this is the arduous task of regaining personal autonomy, which starts by regaining financial independence. Getting out of debt is the first step. Fiat money is the lifeblood of the imperium, and retiring debt extinguishes it. This will involve great pain for many people, but in this case the magnitude of the sacrifice is the direct measure of the deviation from the mean which we must correct.

    • Replies: @Art Deco
    @Intelligent Dasein

    There is no empire, the vast bulk of expenditure under the heading of 'the welfare state' is distributed to the elderly and disabled, and gold backed currency was abandoned because it has few benefits and many drawbacks.

    Replies: @Intelligent Dasein

  168. @Rob
    Cook’s style of thinking shows up in lots of places. Let’s grant that the only reason group x did not achieve at the level of white men. The fact that they were discriminated against means they did not achieve as much. Despite this near-tautology, activists want group x put on the same plane as white men in high school and college courses.

    When I was at Reed, there was a constant feminist grumble that we did not cover Greek and Roman women’s achievements. Maybe they did a lot, but there ate no records! Should we spend half of the broad humanities class on Sappho?

    Now Reed’s Humanities 1xx (think it's 110) covers the Greeks, Romans, Tenochtitlan, and the Harlem Renaissance. If there’s anything that willconvince you of white superiority it’s “the Greeks invented philosophy, geometry, and science. The Romans developed conquest and government to it’s highest level before the modern era. They created a state that lasted longer than any modern government. Far away, the Aztecs had a hugely productive food source (corn is has C4 metabolism. Much more efficient than wheat, which is C3) and built a stone city and a government based on terror. As soon as an alternative presented itself, the Aztec’s lost all their satrapies. Much later, some blacks wrote poetry and made music with instruments they could never invent.”

    Really, when you stack white achievements against non-whites, it makes you realize whites have a special sauce to the extent that no lefty CRT-inspired course ever presents them on an even footing. The best they can do seems to be Egypt. Ok, the Egyptians were building pyramids when wooly mammoth roamed Europe. That’s pretty cool. But besides pyramids to gawk at, what did Egyptians do that anyone thought was worth copying? With the first civilization, why did civilization never spread to the rest of Africa. Ok, malaria. But one might go a step further out and ask, “without civilizations, were Africans under the same sort of selective pressures that turned Europeans into world-conquering, science-creating, disease vanquishing behemoths? I will grant that East Aians (formerly Orientals) have caught up in many areas. Interesting science comes out of Japan. A huge chunk of modern “American” science is the doings of Chinamen. (but most of it does not replicate)

    Personally, i love Cook’s graph. It shows the cargo-cult nature of so much social “science.” It says, “if we just pretend, then reality will conform.” Remember when scientists wanted to understand reality? Today, when reality screams at them, they cover their ears and make sill graphs. That graph is a visual representation of the unwillingness of moderns to look honestly at the past and what different peoples have produced. One can be sure that Cook chose both scales so that a cursory glance would make blacks seem equally inventive for a short time, until BadWhites made them dumb again. I’ve heard seemingly smart people say that the decline of whites in. Ametica is fine for whites in America. Blacks and hispanics will do all the R&D, bespoke manufacturing, then ramping up production in the future. That future is coming in around eight years.How is that coming along so far?

    Magic 8 Ball says, “wtf were you thinking? Blacks can’t invent not shooting each other over Facebook feuds.” The different ways people chose to use technology is astounding. Blacks carry on their petty crabs-in-a-bucket lives with connectivity such as the world has never seen. Granted, average whites use tech to create misinformation bubbles to live in. But the magic that drives economic growth does not come from average people. It comes from +2-3σ folk. The number of blacks and mestizos with 145 IQ is a rounding error. The great and good are so delusional that they’ve decided that putting blacks front and center in institutions will save America! Hopefully, it’s just “representation.” In 2nd grade, I remember telling my dad that scientists were black. All the scientists in videos that they showed in school were black, you see. Dad smiled and said that videos often did not reflect reality. Showing “successful” blacks to inspire other blacks to behave better and make whites less reality-based, and therefore less “racist” goes back to the eighties. Forty years. That’s more than a generation.

    Kids have grown up with nothing but “blaques Rnt dum” from popular culture. The gentry, to use a Moldbugism. Moldbug and Unz have a lot in common. They both write essays no one has read in their entirety. Moldbug’s schtick is to blame Puritans for Jewish cognitive quirks. Unz’s is to gather all the dissidents in one place for easier monitoring and make patriots comfortable with the endless Hispanic invasion. Remember “The Marching Morons” by Kornbluth? It was inspired by the idea that if Chinese were in a x person wide line walking through a gate at 3 miles an hour, they would never all get through. There are so many Chinese that babies would be born, grow old, and die walking in that line. The line grows faster than they can cross through the gate. That’s pretty much what Hispanic immigration is. They reproduce faster than they immigrate, so there will always be poor Hispanics who could have higher standards of living in America. For practical matters, there is an infinite supply of illegals at 1-3 million/year. How are Biden’s illegals numbers shaping up? The media always crowed about how more aliens were streaming in under Trump than ever before, they stopped talking about that, so one can only assume that the problem stopped, right? Thank God for actual reporters, telling us about the federal government flying aliens from the border to your red state.

    I feel a Galileo thing is a mixed metaphor, because the culturist, now discriminationist, explanation for racial disparities is much closer to being a flat earther or young Earth creationist than buying a geocentric model of the universe. But we’ve had fifty five years of mass immigration. The country has become more crowded, polluted, and divided. When does immigration making America better start?

    Political division has grown to the extent that progs are fantasizing about civil war. Though that might just be because they want to use the post-9/11 police state on their domestic opponents. I guess they think the military will obey whatever disabled black transsexual they make into a general? Surely it scared them when they had to politically vet thousands of national guard soldiers to secure the capital for Biden’s installation? They did it fast, which implies to me that they already have a preliminary dossier on everyone in uniform. What’s a surveillance state for, if not that? Back to people thinking all populations are identical. At least geocentrism made some sense. It described facts about the world. The sun and moon appear to orbit the earth. The earth doesn’t feel like it’s moving, does it? Meanwhile cognitive creationism explains zero facts about the world.

    “Let’s make some graphs that show that the races are equally inventive and the earth stands still!”
    E pur si muove.

    Replies: @martin_2, @Stonewall Jackson, @Recently Based

    Apparently I haven’t commented enough recently to hit the “Agree” button, so you get slightly more fulsome praise.

    This was an outstanding comment, and has the feel of something that could be expanded into a worthwhile essay.

  169. @Che Guava
    I could make hundreds of thousands of US dollars by pubishing a book with a title like Tie Black Teslas. Trouble is, there were none and it would be discarded once people fnund that I am not black.

    OTOH, American black inventors seem mainly to have been concerned with practical things, to their credit.

    Unlike Jewish 'inventors' who patent new ways to display advertising on food packaging and other such nonsense.

    I have had numerous patentable ideas, but right now, they fall into two categories.

    1. Made irrevelevant by a different approach or done later anyway.

    2. Extensions on ideas I learnt through work, to patent those would be unethical. Some were adopted, it doesn't throw money at me, but a little satisfying.

    Replies: @Jack D

    Here’s a Jewish inventor whose work did not involve advertising:

    He was born Gotthard Glas but changed his name to Uziel Gal when he moved to Palestine (Israelis have names like science fiction characters). But his friends called him “Uzi” for short.

    • Thanks: Johann Ricke
    • Replies: @Joe Stalin
    @Jack D

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6ylvk5I61w
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81HVc-1nN8I

    , @Che Guava
    @Jack D

    I would just hit 'thanks', except that I don't think the Uzi series are the ultimate SMGs.

  170. @Intelligent Dasein
    @Arclight


    Anyway, the crack up over race basically comes down to the fact that despite the vast sums of treasure expended, the scores of policy innovations, and the adoption of plainly unconstitutional practices that were intended to elevate blacks, it’s obvious to all that it just hasn’t worked. This reality is unbearable for the people that hold the commanding heights of our society, so a new religion has been invented to free us from inconvenient facts.
     
    On the question of the inconvenient facts, though, it is necessary to remember that these facts would have very little significance were it not for the inhuman scale and soft totalitarianism of modern societies.

    This is why debating HBD, Nature/Nurture, and other suchlike theories so often amounts to barking up the wrong tree. In a more distributed political system, the question even of whether races differed from one another, let alone why they differed, would be of no practical importance to most people. We would just avoid people we didn't want to be around and stick with those we did want to be around. Our own history, experience, and ability for risk assessment would provide us with a sufficient toolkit for navigating through the world and achieving a meaningful life. The race-question would be an affair for scientists and philosophers, not a matter of politics.

    But when the empire constrains us all to live in a common economy and a common welfare state, the strains between different classes of people become evident, and this opens up the whole field of "problem politics" that is so characteristic of imperial ages. The empire wants only money, power, and obedience. It wants to channelize all human activity into a single current of tax revenue and economic force that it can drink from at will. Due to its own nature, it cannot help but see any sort of individual difference as a direct affront to its own authority. The idea that people might have different beliefs, ideas, priorities, and tendencies is interpreted as a rebellious notion; as a result, "equality" becomes a watchword of official propaganda and prescribed belief. The empire rightly discerns the political effect that any admission of difference would have, viz. that it must relax its stranglehold upon the lives and dignities of ordinary people. This the empire will not tolerate, so it relentlessly pushes its equality line and thinks little of spending vast sums of money in fruitless efforts to paper over real distinctions which, in spite of all, continue to exist.

    The rise of the Civil-Rights-era legislation and the welfare state coincides with the crystallization of the West into an imperium and the replacement of hard currency by imperial fiat. Ordinarily, the laws of economics, which are simple derivatives of the natural law, would not permit such things. These are not goods that are produced but conceits that are indulged. Delivering arguments to the empire, about why its conceits are wrong and irrational, works about as well as it does with any other man whose paycheck depends on him not understanding certain things.

    It is written that you cannot serve both God and mammon. By "mammon" is not meant wealth (which is a good thing in and of itself), but the kingdom of lies and sins held together by the power of money. The empire is an evil billionaire who has bought up everyone's mortgage and now threatens them with arbitrary economic ruin if they don't perform his required rites---this alone accounts for the willingness of people to submit to and applaud the racial chicanery. The only way out of this is the arduous task of regaining personal autonomy, which starts by regaining financial independence. Getting out of debt is the first step. Fiat money is the lifeblood of the imperium, and retiring debt extinguishes it. This will involve great pain for many people, but in this case the magnitude of the sacrifice is the direct measure of the deviation from the mean which we must correct.

    Replies: @Art Deco

    There is no empire, the vast bulk of expenditure under the heading of ‘the welfare state’ is distributed to the elderly and disabled, and gold backed currency was abandoned because it has few benefits and many drawbacks.

    • Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
    @Art Deco

    Taking the shortest way with the dissenters?

    Thanks for reading, I guess.

  171. @Anon
    OT: P.J. O'Rourke died from complications of cancer. That's a shame. I enjoyed a lot of his books back in the day. The booze and tobacco caught up with him.

    Replies: @scrivener3

    He was 73? The expected lifespan for a male born in the 1950’s is 69. It seems to me that nothing caught up with him other than time.

    It used to be cardiovascular events culled men in their sixties, now medicine has nearly cured that if you take some care. Still, if you are male you are probably going to die sometime between age 70 and 90 and you will die with something wrong, probably cancer.

    Unsolicited advice, when you turn 60 you need to get a colonoscopy every five years and a “digital prostate examination” every year. I already know one friend lost to colon cancer and one to prostate cancer. They skipped the exams so they may have got a few more years if they followed the recommendation.

  172. @Jack D
    @Che Guava

    Here's a Jewish inventor whose work did not involve advertising:

    http://imageusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/uzi2.jpg

    He was born Gotthard Glas but changed his name to Uziel Gal when he moved to Palestine (Israelis have names like science fiction characters). But his friends called him "Uzi" for short.

    Replies: @Joe Stalin, @Che Guava

  173. @Uncle Dan
    @Jack D


    Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
     
    They like repeating it. Their fondest wish is to be The Man At Finland Station, pointing out Historical Inevitably to the proletariat.

    Replies: @Nicholas Stix

    “They like repeating it.”

    And I am going to go around, repeating you.

    You took a common misunderstanding of Santayana, who was talking about one human life, and turned it into something brilliant.

  174. Holy crap. Absolutely devastating and hilarious.

    Lisa Cook & her eunuch-economist defenders look like the palookas Mike Tyson destroyed on his way to 37-0.

    iSteve is the Mike Tyson of economics reviewers.

  175. @Cool Daddy Jimbo
    @Anonymous

    Love the story, but the ball end is so you don't stab yourself when you crash.

    Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease

    “Love the story, but the ball end is so you don’t stab yourself when you crash.”

    Says something about bikes that you didn’t say “if you crash,” but “when”.

    • Replies: @Anonymous
    @The Germ Theory of Disease



    @Cool Daddy Jimbo

    “Love the story, but the ball end is so you don’t stab yourself when you crash.”

    Says something about bikes that you didn’t say “if you crash,” but “when”.
     
    No, it doesn't. It only says something about the commenter. Lots of spastic melvins, poindexters and dweeb dancers comment here. They're so much fun to read, "The Poindexters of UNZ™"!

    https://i.imgur.com/nC6FDyf.jpg
  176. @Art Deco
    @Intelligent Dasein

    There is no empire, the vast bulk of expenditure under the heading of 'the welfare state' is distributed to the elderly and disabled, and gold backed currency was abandoned because it has few benefits and many drawbacks.

    Replies: @Intelligent Dasein

    Taking the shortest way with the dissenters?

    Thanks for reading, I guess.

  177. Anonymous[387] • Disclaimer says:
    @The Germ Theory of Disease
    @Cool Daddy Jimbo

    "Love the story, but the ball end is so you don’t stab yourself when you crash."

    Says something about bikes that you didn't say "if you crash," but "when".

    Replies: @Anonymous

    “Love the story, but the ball end is so you don’t stab yourself when you crash.”

    Says something about bikes that you didn’t say “if you crash,” but “when”.

    No, it doesn’t. It only says something about the commenter. Lots of spastic melvins, poindexters and dweeb dancers comment here. They’re so much fun to read, “The Poindexters of UNZ™”!

  178. @R.G. Camara
    And they want to put this innumerate moron in a position where numeracy is a primary component of the job.

    Seriously, the Deep State keeps making it obvious with every Deep State appointee that they are pulling the puppet strings and are just going for the most colorful array of puppets.

    Replies: @El Dato, @Alrenous, @SFG, @Tiny Duck, @Citizen of a Silly Country, @AndrewR, @SaneClownPosse, @Cato

    The Deep State keeps making it obvious with every Deep State appointee that they are pulling the puppet strings and are just going for the most colorful array of puppets

    The biggest problem is that the puppet-masters are not people you would want as a mid-level manager, let alone exercising control over an entire country.

  179. @Jack D
    @Che Guava

    Here's a Jewish inventor whose work did not involve advertising:

    http://imageusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/uzi2.jpg

    He was born Gotthard Glas but changed his name to Uziel Gal when he moved to Palestine (Israelis have names like science fiction characters). But his friends called him "Uzi" for short.

    Replies: @Joe Stalin, @Che Guava

    I would just hit ‘thanks’, except that I don’t think the Uzi series are the ultimate SMGs.

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