Steve Sailor discusses White Guilt.

Personally, I don’t think we need particularly sophisticated psychological theories about “white guilt.” I haven’t noticed many people particularly wracked by personal guilt over race. Instead, it’s more an effective tool for people to get what they want from other people, money, power, admiration, or to reassure themselves that they are better than other people. For lots of people, the mentality of white guilt is simply the substance in which they swim, and they are no more inclined to stop and think about it than a fish thinks about water.

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In the 1990s, Paul Romer revolutionized economics. In the aughts, he became rich as a software entrepreneur. Now he’s trying to help the poorest countries grow rich—by convincing them to establish foreign-run “charter cities” within their borders. Romer’s idea is unconventional, even neo-colonial—the best analogy is Britain’s historic lease of Hong Kong. And against all odds, he just might make it happen.

As Reagan so famously said, there are simple answers to these problems, just not easy ones. These simple answer typically boil down to: Keep government bureaucrats away from the economy (taxes and regulations), and people will amaze you with what they can do.

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The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say.) For all the hue and cry about becoming an “always on” society, we’re actually moving away from the demand that everyone be available immediately.

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Atom bombs
Can come true
It could happen to you
If you piss us off….

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Obviously, the main reason “black Americans were prone to disappointment when they visited Africa” is not because Africa isn’t “authentic.” That’s just laughable. Granted, it’s too much to expect Obama to admit that the main reason African American tourists like him are prone to disappointment with Africa is because it is disappointing. They go hoping to see what the black man has accomplished without the white man holding him down, and, well … (For an honest discussion, see the 1998 book Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa by Keith B. Richburg, who was the Washington Post’s Nairobi-based chief African correspondent from 1991-1994.)

Yet, why did Obama feel compelled to bring this question up and feature Rukia’s nonsensical answer so prominently as the Climactic Insight of His Life? Because her answer, ridiculous as it is, at least validates the central concern of Obama’s existence: to prove he’s black enough. If even Africans in Africa aren’t authentic, as this learned African scholar says, then his being half-white and brought up in a wholly non-black environment doesn’t disqualify him from being a black leader.

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No field of human endeavor is so pointless or obscure that somebody somewhere won’t spend time and money on it.

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One of the best takedowns of modern American culture I’ve ever encountered.

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In theory a ‘political futures market’ ought to be as accurate as it’s possible to be, but I’ve not seen any in-depth analysis of such markets nor any tracking of their prediction histories. They only show up, as here, when an election looms and the market predicts good news for one side or the other.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

All four comparisons point in the same direction, and lead them to the same conclusion, which I’ve put here on your handout. I’ll just read it. “Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies.”  The acronym there being WEIRD. “Our findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Overall, these empirical patterns suggest that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature, on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin and rather unusual slice of humanity.”

An awful lot of theories in evolutionary psychology, for instance, are tested by giving questionnaires to UC Santa Barbara students.

Read it. And watch the video.

The idea is to make use of the space between regular-size cars and bridges, thus saving construction costs as well as minimizing congestion impact by allowing cars to drive underneath these jumbo buses.

Freeberg nails it once again. ‘Christian In Name Only’ is a beautiful term for a very ugly thing.

And he nails Anne Rice in passing:

One, she’s a revolving-door-slammer. And I think you know perfectly well what I mean by that. “I’m out” means a cessation of interest, and I would expect so accomplished a writer to string together some words more in keeping with her true sentiment. She’s not out. She seeks to use shame to shape and mold something into her way of thinking.

The other thing I don’t like is that it reminds me of Meghan McCain. Yes, I’m comparing a literary giant to a bubble head. Because it fits. Anne Rice is doing to Christianity precisely what McCain has been doing to the Republican party.

It is a destructive thing to say “I love this thing over here and want to be part of it…I think it’s just adorable…and so it disappoints me when it doesn’t tolerate everything like I think it should.” To require an object to tolerate everything, even things that are injurious to it, is destructive to that object. It really doesn’t matter if the destruction is intended or not. Everything cannot tolerate everything. That’s just the way the universe works.

Preach it, brother.

In order to be a Christian:

1. It’s not enough to call yourself a Christian, any more than calling yourself a Navy SEAL or a Congressman makes you one.

2. It’s not enough to talk like you think a Christian ought to talk, if you’re not saying the same things that real Christians are saying (and have said for two thousand years).

3. It’s not enough to believe what you think Christ wants you to believe if that’s not what the people who were taught by Christ  believe.

4. It’s not enough to dress up like a Christian, as the Episcopal Church is demonstrating in painful detail.

5. It’s not enough to ‘be a Christian in your own way’ if your way is not His Way.

6. It’s not enough to pick and choose your beliefs from what you happen to like among the variety of tasty offerings, like ingredients at a salad bar.

Just like creating a simulacrum of an airfield with a mock control tower and fake hangers won’t bring you any cargo, so creating a crude parody of Christianity that kinda sorta looks like Christianity if you close your eyes and wish real hard won’t bring you any salvation.

Read the New Testament. It was written by people who either knew Christ in the flesh or were taught by those who knew Christ in the flesh. Accept that they know about being Christian than you possibly ever could. If what you believe is inconsistent with what was taught by people who knew Christ or were taught by those who knew Christ, then you aren’t a Christian, and you’re not fooling anybody but yourself.

Read it.

Megan McArdle likes to dive deep into a topic that may seem eccentric.

We seem to be in a situation where we are systematically depriving employers of any potential information about employees.  This is both bad for businesss, which end up with unnecessary turnover, and bad for employees, because it results in the use of less accurate proxies that aren’t banned.  As Alex Tabarrok pointed out, banning inquiries about criminal history is likely to result in (illegal, but harder to detect) racial discrimination.  Imposing liability for truthful bad references results in the use of things like FICO scores.  And banning FICO scores–well, it may not be a good proxy, but what are bosses likely to use instead?

Ladies!

If you should have a large piece of furniture, and if that large piece of furniture should have doors with hinges, and if for some good and sufficient reason you should decide to remove those doors, and if the removal of said doors leaves you with a number of loose screws that might be wanted again some day, then the thing to do is to put them in a ziplock bag and store them with the doors, preferably by fastening them to the inside of one of the doors with rigger’s tape, so that some gentleman friend in the future when called upon to re-attach said doors will have the relevant screws near to hand and will not be required to poke around in the four hundred little drawers containing various fasteners that you have cunningly placed in your garage. This will make life easier for all concerned.

Just sayin’.

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One argument against is that black men are more likely to have criminal backgrounds and thus these criminal background checks discriminate against black men.  Let’s put aside the normative issues. What’s surprising is that under plausible circumstances criminal background checks can lead to an increase in the employment of black men. The reason is that without the background check employers face a risk that their employees are ex-cons. If employers are very averse to hiring ex-cons then they will seek to reduce this risk and one way of doing so is by not hiring any black men. As a result, a background check allows non ex-cons to distinguish themselves from the pack and to be hired. Furthermore, when background checks exist, non ex-cons know that they will not face statistical discrimination and thus have an increased incentive to invest in skills.

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It is considered something of a rude question, nevertheless I think it fair to ask why 90% of all economists missed the coming of the current disaster. One doesn’t wish to judge too harshly. After all, everyone makes mistakes, even scientists. And if economic science missed this one, it wouldn’t be fair to use such a mistake to call into question the whole science. None of us would wish to be judged by one mistake. Should we not extend the same courtesy to economic scientists?

The problem, however, is that the same 90% of all economists also missed the last crises, and the one before that as well, and before that, and so on. In fact, their record of being able to diagnose and treat economic problems is about zero. And their prescriptions always seem to be counterproductive: the recommendations to limit government always make it grow, their advice on limiting taxation always makes it more, their prescriptions on growing the economy only leads to the illusory growth of bubbles, etc. Put it this way: If your doctor had this same track record of diagnosing and treating disease, you’d be dead by now.

Freeberg says it best.

More and more, it looks to me like this: Shirley Sherrod spent 43 minutes lying about her motives and what she’s been learning on the job, and Brietbart unfairly played a few bits out of context, the ones where she told the truth about herself.

I’m tired of the duplicity. I’m tired of being told Sarah Palin is malicious because some stalking pervert moved in next door to her. I’m tired of being told just because someone can be called a victim of something and she happens to have dark skin, and a chestless jackal for a former boss, that her motives must be pure.

In fact, there are other crackpots and nutjobs in the mix as well. I’ve had it to here with the “because”-es. I’m fed up with being told Elena Kagan will be a great Associate Justice because she’s funny. Rush Limbaugh is evil because he’s rich. Dick Cheney deserves to die because he ran Halliburton. The Gulf oil spill is in good hands because Stephen Chu has a Nobel prize.

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Indians have a bit more focus on this problem than Americans do.

Joe Wickert looks at a very interesting question.

I’m buying ebooks almost exclusively now.  In fact, I can’t even recall the last print book I bought for myself.  Although I ditched my Kindle on day one with my iPad, I do most of my book reading in the Kindle app on the iPad.  Although Amazon has a major selection advantage of the iBookstore, Apple will catch up at some point.  Then there’s B&N and Borders.  Both of them have iPad apps and ebook stores.  And don’t forget about Google and their upcoming Editions program as well a host of other up-and-coming e-tailers.

What products and services can an e-tailer offer to earn your repeat business?  Or, with all these stores just a click away, are we less likely to remain loyal to only one or two of them?

Freeberg nails it.

Yeah, that there is pretty much my textbook definition of a bad idea.

Concur. But wait, there’s more.

It’s an abandonment of history. And that brings many perils. It’s a manifestation of a younger generation that is disinterested in what came before — they want all the things that will consume their attention, to be positioned for that consumption behind a narrow selection of avenues. They want comfort as they supposedly broaden their horizons; more comfort than can be realized while one is truly broadening one’s horizons.

Read it. And read it again. You may even need to read it a third or fourth time. Don’t be shy.

American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce interesting atheists in America. The god most American say they believe in just is not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty, and happiness.

Putting it as directly as I can, I believe we may be living at a time when we are watching Protestantism, at least the kind of Protestantism we have in America, come to an end. It is dying of its own success. Protestantism became identified with the republican presumption in liberty as an end reinforced by belief in the common sense of the individual. As a result Protestant churches in America lost the ability to maintain the disciplines necessary to sustain a people capable of being an alternative to the world. Ironically the feverish fervency of the religious right in America to sustain faith as a necessary condition for supporting democracy cannot help but be a strategy that ensures the faith that is sustained is not the Christian faith.

I try to help Americans see that the story that they should have no story except the story they choose when they had no story is their story by asking them this question — “Do they think they ought to be held accountable for decisions they made when they did not know what they were doing?” They do not think they should be held accountable for decisions they made when they did not know what they were doing. They do not believe they should be held accountable because it is assumed that you should only be held accountable when you acted freely, and that means you had to know what you were doing.

Of course the problem with the story that you should have no story except the story you choose when you had no story is that story is a story that you have not chosen. But Americans do not have the ability to acknowledge that they have not chosen the story that they should have no story except the story they choose when they had no story. As a result they must learn to live with decisions they made when they thought they knew what they were doing but later realized they did not know what they were doing. Of course they have a remedy when it comes to marriage. It is called divorce. They also have a remedy for children. It is called abortion.

Read it.

1. It is the nature of things that man does not have a legal problem with God. That is to say, the nature of our problem is not forensic. The universe is not a law-court.

2. It is the nature of things that Christ did not come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live. This is to say that the nature of our problem is not moral but existential or ontological. We have a problem that is rooted in the very nature of our existence, not in our behavior. We behave badly because of a prior problem. Good behavior will not correct the problem.

3. It is the nature of things that human beings were created to live through communion with God. We were not created to live as self-sufficient individuals marked largely by our capacity for choice and decision. To restate this: we are creatures of communion, not creatures of consumption.

The nature of things is that people die – and not only do they die – but death, already at work in them from the moment of their birth, is the primary issue. The failure of humanity is not to be found or understood in a purely moral context. We are not creatures of choice and decision. How and why we choose is a very complex process that we ourselves do not understand. We can make a “decision” for Jesus only to discover that little has changed. It is also possible to find ourselves caught in a chain of decisions that bring us to the brink of despair without knowing quite how we got there. Though there are clearly problems with our choosing and deciding, the problem is far deeper.

The importance of these distinctions (moral versus existential) is in how we treat our present predicament. If the problem is primarily moral then it makes sense to live life in the hortatory mode, constantly urging others to be good, to “take the pledge,” or make good choices. If, on the other hand, our problem is rooted in the very nature of our existence then it is that existence that has to be addressed.

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Granted that Australia’s demographics don’t map all that well to America’s, nevertheless certain trends that are working out Down Under may sketch what America’s future looks like, as we slowly catch up. I can certainly see a day when the red/blue divide will not be territorial but sociological, based on urbanization — deep blue city cores composed of Underclass tenements, ‘gritty’ hipster enclaves, gentrified yuppie zones, and near-burb Richistan areas, with layers growing increasingly redder as one moves out into Nascar Country. The Coasts will always be more blue, and the Heartland more red, and how national elections come out will depend on the balance between the Crust and their client proletariat versus the Countryside.

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As I arrived for a visit, my 90 year old father was perusing ads from his favorite big box store for chicken parts. Seizing the moment that all children savor, I sought to impress him with my declaration: “I buy my chicken parts – albeit at higher prices – at the natural foods store; you know daddy, where the chickens ate naturally off the barn yard floor like they did when you were a boy”? Not missing a beat and dashing my hope for an “at a boy,” he retorted: “I saw what those chickens ate off the barnyard floor and I’ll buy my chickens at Walmart(s)!”

Those who know what the Good Old Days were really like prefer Now, thank you.

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Perhaps they know something that we don’t.

Seth Godin is one of those business-buzzword gurus who is famous chiefly for uttering trendy oracular aphorisms and selling books to fashionable corporate executives (and those who would be etc.). But even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.

It’s paper that makes the economics of the newspaper industry work (or not work). It’s paper that creates cost and slows things down and generates scarcity. And scarcity is what they sell.

It’s paper that makes the book industry what it is. As soon as you remove paper from the equation, the costs change, the timing changes, the barriers to entry change, the risk changes. And defenders of the status quo don’t like change.

Is there not enough paper in your life? Why are we wringing our hands about the demise of paper as the economic gating factor for ideas? In fact, some of the trees I know are delighted that we’ve found a better, faster, cheaper way to spread ideas.

If the demise of paper means that good people doing good work in important industries will have to find faster and better ways to do their jobs, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

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The ceremony, which featured Pakistan Rangers and Indian Border Security Force troops in full dress uniform marching up to their rivals on the border line in exaggerated goose-steps while shouting loudly. These scenes, cheered on by jingoistic crowds on either side chanting pro-Pakistan and India slogans, were shown on Michael Palin’s celebrated BBC documentary series Himalaya.

They have to wear those hats and they decide to complain about the goose step?

The whole damned thing looks extremely silly. What’s the Hindi for “Yo mama!”?

Gates of Vienna is one of the web sites doing the heavy lifting in the effort to keep us all from being assimilated by the Borg of Islam.

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‘For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn. And, The laborer is worthy of his hire.’ How much more then do we owe those who never cease in their efforts to rouse the somnolent when the wolf is, almost literally, at the door?

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If God occasionally intervenes in the world to shoot down an atheist—to show who’s boss, or simply to vent—it makes sense for Him to target the esophagus.

No matter what Christopher Hitchens’ views or activities might be, the case for a Christian praying for him — as I do — is unimpeachable, starting with Matt. 5:4 and Luke 6:28 and progressing into the rarefied heights of scholastic theology.

Some believers, however, grapple with whether Hitchens’s vituperative contempt for all things religious places him outside the circle of those for whom believers should pray. Jeffrey Goldberg, on his Atlantic.com blog, consults a mutual friend of his and Hitch’s, Rabbi David Wolpe, who debated Hitchens on God’s existence.

“I asked David,” Goldberg writes, “what sort of intercessory praying a believer should do on behalf of a declared nonbeliever, or if one should pray at all, and he wrote back with some very wise words: ‘I would say it is appropriate and even mandatory to do what one can for another who is sick; and if you believe that praying helps, to pray. It is in any case an expression of one’s deep hopes. So yes, I will pray for him, but I will not insult him by asking or implying that he should be grateful for my prayers.”

Exactly correct. And if his chemotherapy turns out not to be effective, he shall (paraphrasing Thomas More) have our prayers to fall back on.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

Tyler Cowen does his economist thing.

Matt Yglesias suggests the notion is implausible, but I am surprised to read those words.  Keep in mind, we have had a recovery in output, but not in employment.  That means a smaller number of laborers are working, but we are producing as much as before.  As a simple first cut, how should we measure the marginal product of those now laid-off workers?  I would start with the number zero.  If a restored level of output wouldn’t count as evidence for the zero marginal product hypothesis, what would?  If I ran a business, fired ten people, and output didn’t go down, might I start by asking whether those people produced anything useful?

I’d like to know how many of them worked for the government. I have my suspicions.

This would actually seem to be a legitimate case of ‘right-sizing’. Firms are where they ought to be in terms of efficient use of human resources. And classical economic theory says that such is one of the benefits of economic downturns — business processes that were using resources inefficiently get that inefficiency wrung out, and sometimes that means that people get wrung out as well; the basic laws of economics really don’t care whether you as an individual had one of those misallocated jobs.

There is another striking fact about the recession, namely that unemployment is quite low for highly educated workers but about sixteen percent for the less educated workers with no high school degree.  (When it comes to income groups, the lowest decile has an unemployment rate of over thirty percent, while it is three percent for the highest decile; I’m not sure of the time horizon for that income measure.)  This is consistent with the zero marginal product hypothesis, and yeta few analysts ask whether their preferred explanation for unemployment addresses this pattern.axw

Eric Raymond is always worth reading.

One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap. In this essay, I will show that the kafkatrap is a form of argument that is so fallacious and manipulative that those subjected to it are entitled to reject it based entirely on the form of the argument, without reference to whatever particular sin or thoughtcrime is being alleged. I will also attempt to show that kafkatrapping is so self-destructive to the causes that employ it that change activists should root it out of their own speech and thoughts.

My reference, of course, is to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, in which the protagonist Josef K. is accused of crimes the nature of which are never actually specified, and enmeshed in a process designed to degrade, humiliate, and destroy him whether or not he has in fact committed any crime at all.

Much like traveling on a modern airline.

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When the New York Times was a pure newspaper, it was easy to appear agnostic about its editorial coverage, with no reason to play favorites with one business or another. But as the New York Times has branched out, making investments in external companies, it has acquired pecuniary [that means financial, by the way] incentives to favor those over rivals.

Still, the potential impact of the New York Times algorithm on the internet economy, not to mention the US economy, the US government and the world as a whole is such that it is worth exploring ways to ensure that the editorial policy guiding the New York Times is solely intended to improve the quality of journalism and not to help other businesses that the New York Times owns or the bottom line of its for-profit owners.

Some early suggestions for how to accomplish this include having the New York Times explain with some specified level of detail the editorial policy that guides what it decides to covers, what it doesn’t decide to cover, why it chooses to write a particular headline with a particular angle, to show all versions of a newspaper story that is written from start to finish, to reveal what’s been edited out. Another would be to give some government commission the power to look at all these aspects, perhaps the power to reside within the newsroom and ensure fairness.

Read it.

If you’re reading this article in print, chances are you’ll only get through half of what I’ve written. And if you’re reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion.

Of course, a lot of the problem is that what we’re presented with to read is mostly crap. The editorials in the Guardian will serve as a case in point.

The bear necessities.

Eric Raymond is always worth reading.

I’ve been thinking for some time now that the smartphone has achieved a kind of singularity, becoming a black hole that sucks all portable electronics into itself. PDAs – absorbed. Music players – consumed. Handset GPSes – eaten. Travel-alarm clocks, not to mention ordinary watches – subsumed. E-readers under serious pressure, and surviving only because e-paper displays have lower battery drain and are a bit larger.

This raises an interesting question: what else is natural prey for the smartphones of the future?

Consider. My Nexus One includes a GPS, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a magnetometer. That is, sensors for location, magnetic field, gravitational fields, and acoustic energy. Hook a bit of visualization and spectral analysis to these sensors, and bugger me with a chainsaw if you don’t have a tricorder. A quad- or quintcorder, actually.

Be sure to read the comments as well.

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Why only half?

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Two things are clear regarding the post-flotilla twist in the internal Palestinian dispute: It is not just a media war, and neither side is about to give up.

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The automobile’s potential is its greatest secret—an open secret and yet, it often seems, a forgotten one. The big SUV in my garage may occasionally make a 10-mile trip to Walmart or 2-mile run to the volunteer fire station when the siren sounds. But it has the potential—the size, the power, the range—to take me, my friends, and our bicycles over the mountain to a distant bike trail, or 1,100 miles with a load of furniture and books to my son’s house in Florida.

This is why trains suck unless you haven’t got anything better, and underlies the Crustian fondness for mass transit: because it constrains the ability of the Lower Orders to move about freely.

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Which means that most of them haven’t been paying enough attention. ‘Progressives’ have over a century of track record, most of it abysmal. Let’s hope that it doesn’t take another hundred years for the lessons of the last hundred to sink in.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading. Always.

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

A modern child doesn’t want some dumb fire truck that could be improved in 25 different ways. He wants a fully focus-grouped Transformers Inferno fire truck / alien robot that is part of a cartoon show and blockbuster movie series and that comes with dozens of other toys in the series to buy. If professional toy designers, researchers, marketers, McDonald’s Happy Meal executives, screenwriters, advertising agents, and web people haven’t taken dozens of meetings over the fire truck and exchanged countless Notes on how to make the entire branding concept more awesome, he doesn’t want it.

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Henri Pirenne’s posthumously-published Mohammed et Charlemagne (1938) presented to the academic world the results of a lifetime of research and study. His conclusions were stunning. The accepted narrative of western civilization, he maintained, was erroneous in a fundamental way. Classical civilization, the literate and urban culture of Greece and Rome, did not die as a result of the “Barbarian” Invasions of the fifth century. On the contrary, the great cities of the west, of Gaul, of Italy, of Spain and of North Africa, continued to flourish as before, this time under Germanic kings. These monarchs enthusiastically adopted the Latin language as well as Christianity, and regarded themselves as functionaries of the Roman Emperor — who by now however sat in Constantinople. Literature, as well as the arts and sciences, Pirenne found, continued to flourish in the western provinces until the middle of the seventh century. At that point, however, everything fell apart. Now, quite suddenly, a darkness — complete and total — descends. Gold coinage disappears and the great cities go into terminal decline. Within a generation, Europe is in the middle of a Dark Age. The light of classical civilization is utterly and completely extinguished.

What, Pirenne mused, could have caused such a total and dramatic disintegration? The conclusion he reached was almost as dramatic as the civilizational collapse he described. It was, to use Pirenne’s own phrase, explainable in one word: Mohammed.

Steve Sailer is always willing to talk about things that other people avoid.

Everybody is in favor of in-depth analysis of educational statistics in theory, but when they actually finally look at them, the obvious leaps out: Holy cow, compared to everything else, race really matters. You can’t adjust it away (except by using cynical proxies for race the way Steven Levitt tried to do a few years ago: e.g., favorite soda flavor is Grape or the rough equivalent). And when it comes to physics and a few other subjects, sex matters.

Steve likes to say that a ‘race’ is actually an endogamous extended family, concerning which genetic differences are not only natural but inevitable.

The Other McCain doesn’t shrink from saying what we all know to be true.

This pattern illustrates a common-sense truth so basic that it seems a bit silly to state it directly: Criminals commit crime.

Contrary to media distortions, criminality is not evenly distributed throughout the population. A small and fairly distinct group of career criminals — recidivists, habitual violators, call them what you will — account for the majority of serious crime in America.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

That’s a big transaction cost. It’s much more efficient to be able to trust somebody you are doing business with when he tells you orally that the diamond is flawless. But how do you trust him? Because if he gets a reputation for cheating his relatives, his children will never find spouses.

In addition to being a fascinating story, it also serves to limn Sailer’s oft-propounded thesis that a ‘race’ is merely a large extended family that practices endogamy. This is an idea worth exploring, but which doesn’t get a lot of attention from the Crust. And there are implications:

But, I was struck while reading Michael Chabon’s 2007 alternative history bestseller, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, that the book is pretty dull until the villains in black hats are finally introduced. And the villains are literally in black hats: they’re ultra-Orthodox men who wear black hats. The book takes wing when Chabon — who is quite representative of mainstream modern American Jewish ethnocentric sentiments (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) — gets to indulge his fine, fierce hatred of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Sure, there are a few pages about how much his Yiddish policemen heroes despise American Republican goyim, but Chabon’s heroes really, really hate the black hats.

Chabon is a 21st Century Jew — all that 20th Century Jewish teamplay might be falling apart.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

But, men play the Great Game not because it makes sense but because they like to win. So, it’s unlikely that China and India will sit out the Great Game for the rest of the century. Let’s assume that China and India eventually decide to play for dominance of the world.

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There are small sidewalk-affixed plaques in many locations in Berlin, including on my street.  Here are some visual examples and here are many more.  They sit by the victim’s former home and list the victim’s name, the date he or she was taken away, and date and place he or she was murdered.  The word given is the more brutal “murdered” (ermordet), not “killed.”

A great idea. We could do the same in Washington, putting little plaques to memorialize where individual rights were murdered by the government.

Eric Raymond has some useful stuff to say.

No matter what you think you are and no matter what “reality” may be, the experience that you have to deal with (like every other human being) is of being thrown into a surrounding that does things independently of your thoughts. Shit happens, and you have to deal with it. The first step to dealing with it is to be able to predict it.

All truth claims can be unpacked as predictions. Sometimes they’re predictions about obvious, directly observable events in our immediate environment (”Rain will make your head wet.”). Sometimes they’re predictions about events we can’t observe directly but which have consequences we can observe (”Electricity is a flow of electrons,” or “Genetic information is carried by DNA.”) Sometimes they’re predictions about the distribution of outcomes in repeated tests (”A flipped coin will fall heads-up half the time and tails-up half the time.)

We can also say what “theory” is. A theory is just a machine for generating predictions. We judge the theory’s “truth” by whether those predictions are correct. And, remember, we make predictions because we need to cope with the shit that happens. A theory is a survival adaptation: we are theory-builders because we are prediction-needers because we are goal-seekers because we are survival machines.