Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to point to things at which some would rather not have people pointing.

For a couple of years, I’ve been pointing out that because African-American culture has become so narrow and inward-looking, it’s now having a harder time producing high achievers outside of Officially Black fields such as basketball, football, and some forms of entertainment. Thus, the black race is increasingly represented at the top of many categories by half-black individuals (typically raised by white mothers or white maternal grandparents). Barack Obama is only the most obvious example of the rise of this New Mulatto Elite. (In contrast, the Old Mulatto Elite, such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, generally had white ancestors in the paternal line.)

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More evidence that Wal-Mart isn’t Auschwitz after all.

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Want a daughter with blond hair, green eyes and pale skin?

A Los Angeles clinic says it will soon help couples select both gender and physical traits in a baby when they undergo a form of fertility treatment. The clinic, Fertility Institutes, says it has received “half a dozen” requests for the service, which is based on a procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD.

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The decision was made last week after California Rep. Barbara Lee, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Hispanic groups complained to the White House that Judd Gregg, the Republican senator from New Hampshire slated to head Commerce, couldn’t be trusted to conduct a complete Census. The National Association of Latino Officials said it had “serious questions about his willingness to ensure that the 2010 Census produces the most accurate possible count.”

Mr. Chapman worries about a revival of the effort led by minority groups after the 2000 Census to adjust the totals for states and cities using statistical sampling and computer models. In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Department of Commerce v. U.S. House that sampling could not be used to reapportion congressional seats. But it left open the possibility that sampling could be used to redraw political boundaries within the states.

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TANF has been a remarkable success. Welfare caseloads nationally fell from 12.6 million in 1997 to fewer than five million in 2007. And yet despite this achievement, House Democrats are seeking to undo Mr. Clinton’s reforms under the cover of the stimulus bill.

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Wells saw no difference between communism and fascism and Goldberg puts a compelling case that neither should we. Mussolini began as a socialist agitator. The Nazis were a national socialist party which despised bourgeois democracy and offered a comprehensive welfare state.

And this appears in the most left-wing major newspaper in Britain. Go figure.

Steve Sailer has some fun with a Great Metropolitan Newspaper that believes a fellow whose father is Jewish and mother is Korean is a “white supremacist”.

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In S.M. Stirling’s Draka books, the Citizen class don’t bear their own children, but rather have serf host-mothers do it, and the host-mother is retained as the child’s nanny until it goes off to school. Serfs are, of course, typically non-white. Perhaps we’re gradually backing into this system.

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Google says that Latitude is a new way to keep in touch with people, but it’s not as if there is a gap in the market for this. If I want to keep in touch with people, I could email them or find them on Facebook or follow their tweets on Twitter or – and here’s something for the good people at Google to get their clever heads around – I could call them up and ask them where they are. Indeed, if somebody created some sort of technology that allowed me to keep out of touch with people, I might kiss their face.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading. This is especially sharp.

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Tradition is there for a reason….

The Hog isn’t doing politics any more. Nope. Wouldn’t think of it.

The bailouts will prolong our economic problems, because they will keep inept people in control of major businesses, and they will also permit overpaid workers to continue charging too much for their work. They’ll also hurt good businesses by preventing them from taking the places of their failed competitors. In a healthy economy, bad companies fail, and good companies take their places, and everyone is better off. In the Bush-Obama socialist utopia, we keep bad companies alive and prevent good companies from replacing them. It’s like having the opposite of an immune system. We are generating antibodies to success and attacking it without mercy.

Just tools, food, and religion. No politics here.

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Or just your poopsie-woopsie, depending on how the numbers come out.

Darwin award.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

David Friedman discusses the strategic implications of picking the right name.

A well chosen name wins an argument by assuming its conclusion. Label cash subsidies to foreign government as “foreign aid” and who can be so hard hearted as to oppose them. Call subsidies to the public schools “aid to education” and you neatly skip over the question of whether additional spending in the public school system results in more education. Label something “pollution” and is no longer necessary to offer evidence that it is bad, since everyone knows pollution is bad—even thermal pollution, otherwise described as warm water. Occasionally we even get dueling names. Both “right to life” and “pro-choice” are obviously good things; how could anyone be against either?

Of course, only stupid people are deceived by this practice; but, since that’s at least half the population, it’s important.

Jerry Pournelle tells an inconvenient truth.

I believe that the worst threat to the future of the United States is a continuing trend: we are not properly educating the brightest 25% of our young people, and that will being about disaster; while our failure to teach relevant skills to the below average children contributes to the coming disaster. A nation of uneducated bright people coupled with a large part of the population who haven’t been taught to do anything and thus are not only pretty well useless but know it can lead to a number of scenarios, few of them pleasant. And that, I put it to you, is where we are now, and those who continue to promote the idea that every child deserves a world class university prep education is an enemy of the Republic.

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Robert Matthews, who retired as Chief Assayer of the Royal Mint in 2002, said: “If the public starts losing confidence in coins and notes, you get people refusing to take them.

I have a question: Who would care? It’s not as if the coins (or notes) have any intrinsic value. If people can’t tell the difference between the “real” ones and the “fake” ones, the only people to whom it could possibly matter are government bureaucrats.

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I suspect that the Illuminati are somehow involved.

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… is getting very little attention — which is a pity, because it’s the best alternative.

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Gee, I wonder which religion will be the first to hit the publishers with death threats?

I just wonder.

Megan McArdle has some interesting thoughts on the Porkout.

It is very obvious, now that we have the stimulus plans, that the Democrats are using stimulus as an excuse to spend money on things they want to spend money on.  Their demand for things like alternative energy programs is inelastic; it’s just that it happens, right now, to be convenient to bill them as stimulus.

Steve Sailer nails it yet again.

Portland, Oregon is, of course, near the top of any list of Stuff White People Like. It has it all: environmental restrictions on suburban development, trams, liberal social attitudes, bicycle trails, awareness, an upscale population, microbreweries, sterility, and so much more. Not surprisingly, white people like Portland. In fact, it was the only city in the country where reporter Jonathan Tilove found, while researching his book The View from Martin Luther King Drive, that white gentrifiers were driving blacks away from the local MLK Drive. Similarly, it’s one of the few cities in the country with a growing population of Reform/Conservative Jews.

Nonwhites, eh … not so much.

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Apparently the Obama Nation may include a bunch of freeloading relatives. Africans are apparently a lot like Arabs that way.

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A German scholar of ancient languages takes a new look at the sacred book of Islam. He maintains that it was created by Syro-Aramaic speaking Christians, in order to evangelize the Arabs. And he translates it in a new way.

Like Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, I find fascinating the stories about how various sacred books aren’t what they seem.

On the other hand, bear in mind that St John Damascene, who worked as a bureaucrat for the Caliph in the 8th century, discussed Islam as if it were a Christian heresy; and presumably he knew more about it than we do.

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When I got to my office this morning here on Capitol Hill, I picked up the Washington Post and started looking for its story on the annual March for Life, which usually brings somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 people to the city to mark the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. There are times when the advance story makes the Metro front, but most of the time you look for something short inside the paper somewhere.

I’m still looking. Did I miss something?

Well, it serves as a useful reminder that the Washington Post isn’t really a newspaper but rather a spin machine for the Chattering Classes.

But beyond that, this incident serves to illustrate my earlier point that the Establishment Media no longer function as effective gatekeepers to the public brain; they no longer control what news is available and what slant that news will take. A good thing, I’m thinking.

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A significant distinction that many overlook.

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The whole system of handling returns in the publishing business is insane. One of the silver linings of the current economic panic is that the system may be fixed.

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Read it twice. This contains some highly significant ideas.

I argue that we should abolish the Freedom of Information Act and instead make transparency the default for government’s business, which should occur digitally and in the open, so citizens may search, link, comment on, and analyze it. Rather than our asking the government to release our information, the government should ask our permission not to.

Well, that ain’t gonna happen, and anybody who thinks that it might is smoking and not sharing.

The most interesting point is the one that the author entirely misses: The internet allows public officials, especially public officials who are trying to move beyond the comfort zone of the Nomenklatura, direct access to the public.

Reagan used radio and television to speak directly to the American people when he couldn’t get his programs past Congress and the bureaucracy. Then the dinosaur media caught on — and when Bush had some twitches in that direction, they went all passive-aggressive gatekeeper on him. But the Internet seriously degrades the establishment’s gatekeeper power, whether broadcast or print. And the various government-sponsored web sites are the key to that revolution.

IF OBAMA IS AS SMART AS HIS WORSHIPPERS ALL KEEP SAYING HE IS, the White House web site will have links to his position on every single scrap of legislation and every single controversial issue that pops up its ugly head — and he will have a position on every such issue. If you want to know what the administration’s position is on any subject, you won’t have to depend on the Spin Cycle media; just go right to the source and ask the horse. The danger here is the White House internal bureaucracy. As in any bureaucracy, control of information is power, and bureaucrats like sharing information/power about as much as they like spending their own money.

Let’s see if he (a) understands the opportunity and (b) has the balls to use it.

These will be interesting times.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

And quite often he’s dead on, too.

The Hog doesn’t do political commentary any more. Nope. Wouldn’t think of it. Just tools and food, and some religion here and there. That’s all. Nothing else.

I can’t help feeling some excitement over the inauguration of a black President. I just wish it were someone else.

Hear, hear. Thomas Sowell, perhaps. Or Walter Williams.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

As I reported last September, even though the four Sand States (which have 21% of the country’s population) accounted for about half the foreclosures, they must have accounted for an even higher proportion of the defaulted dollars, which is the key variable in setting off the world financial crisis. That’s because median home prices in California were almost triple that in the rest of the country at the peak of the bubble.

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We can tell that the “culture wars” are not over because Democrats and liberals are still fighting them. We know culture warriors won’t disappear from national politics because one of them just won the presidential election. And if Beinart means that conservatives are losing the culture wars, that’s far from a certain bet, and one the Democrats would be ill-advised to take.

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Al’s the man.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Now, I’m not a doctor, but it’s my impression that rather than our “uncomfortable feelings about sexuality” that “have caused STDs to be stigmatizing,” it’s more the oozing sores.

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Steve Sailer is always worth reading. This was done back in November and I put it in my “ponder at leisure” stack; it’s still worth thinking about.

My basic theory is that Democrats do best in states with metropolitan areas where land for homes is scarce because they are hedged in by oceans or Great Lakes; while Republicans do best in inland areas where homebuyers can look around for homes in a 360 degree radius around job sites. I call this the Dirt Gap: Republicans are found more in areas with more dirt and less water.

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Mr Niemoeller used resin-soaked paper processed to form thin, light and strong panels. The material is also an excellent insulator, and is flexible, making it appropriate in earthquake-risk zones.

Not to mention incredibly flammable, and easy to get rid of when the government wants to clean an area up for tourists.

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Moral: Don’t surf.

But he said he does not blame the shark and has pledged to return to surfing.

Darwin Award waiting to happen. The System Works.

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The 52-year-old farmer is a conservative Democrat who bet on Republican John McCain and lost, a description that would apply to many in the white South. Now Loewer wonders about his place in Obama’s America.

And well he might.

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The question is — Is it our problem? Bush would have said “yes”; what will the Obamessiah say? (Something confusing and ambiguous, I suspect.)

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

The two most impressive companies I called upon in my corporate career were Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble. Wal-Mart had a fanatical policy about never letting anybody trying to sell anything to Wal-Mart spend a dime on a Wal-Mart employee. Wal-Mart felt that most retailers had been corrupted by vendors with NFL skyboxes and the like. So, you were not allowed to see Wal-Mart employees in restaurants (which is why the finest restaurant in Bentonville in 1991 was a Ponderosa steakhouse filled with world-class salesmen in $1500 suits and great haircuts, sitting alone, morosely chewing their $3.95 chicken-fried steaks). All negotiations were conducted in windowless interrogation cells. After a few hours of relentlessly being hammered by Wal-Mart employees, not only would you be willing to lower your price to Wal-Mart by 20 percent, but you’d leap at a chance to sign a confession that you were part of a Trotskyite wrecker cell attempting to assasinate Comrade Stalin if only they’d promised to make it all stop.

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“They pointed an stun gun at a waiter and demanded the cash from the till, but the staff grabbed kitchen knives and charged at the men,” he said.

A pack, not a herd. Note that the staff weren’t French.

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Our business model eliminates the catch. We’re giving away great textbooks and making them open because it solves real problems for students and instructors. In so doing, we are creating a large market for our product. We then turn around and sell things of value to that large market – more convenient ways to consume our free book (print, audio, PDF) and efficient ways to study (study aids). Sure, we’ll make less money per student than the big guys. But that’s okay. We’ll be selling to a lot more of them, and we’ll be doing it for a lot less money (thanks to technology like web-hosted services, XML, print-on-demand, and more). Like we said… just a smarter way to do business. For all of us.

In theory, this is a very smart strategy, based on the most modern thinking.

In practice … well, we’ll see.

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This is the difference between real history and antihistory: the difference between Mick Jagger and Cyndi Lauper.

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Looking at history, it’s almost certainly not the goverment. How many years have they been trying to computerize the air traffic control system? And the IRS? Unless the problem is with killing people and breaking things, the government is not the answer.

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Though you might consider finishing school or having a good job to be “accomplishments” many white people view them as burdens.  As such, they can only handle them for so long before they start talking about their need to “take a year off” to travel, volunteer, or work abroad.

The Brits call this a “gap year”, which is typically devoted to getting raped, robbed, or killed in some Third World hell-hole during the interval between their equivalent of high school and university. Never saw the attraction, myself.

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What the Chinese know that Barack Obama doesn’t.

t really does all boil down to the generation of power, primarily electricity. Without machines we cannot make things sufficiently cheaply in sufficient numbers to allow comforts to be available to all, and without power we cannot make machines, without power we cannot run machines, without power we cannot transport goods in bulk and so it goes on.

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Been waiting for this to happen.

An introduction to the most delightfully thought-provoking blog I know.

The basic premise of UR is that all the competing 20th-century systems of government, including the Western democracies which came out on top and which rule us to this day, are best classified as Orwellian. They maintain their legitimacy by shaping public opinion. They shape public opinion by sculpting the information presented to the public. As part of that public, you peruse the world through a lens poured by your government. Ie: you are pwned.

Except for a few unimportant institutions of non-mainstream religious affiliation, we simply do not see multiple, divergent, competing schools of thought within the American university system. The whole vast archipelago, though evenly speckled with a salting of contrarians, displays no factional structure whatsoever. It seems almost perfectly synchronized.

Whatever you make of the left-right axis, you have to admit that there exists some force which has been pulling the Anglo-American political system leftward for at least the last three centuries. Whatever this unfathomable stellar emanation may be, it has gotten us from the Stuarts to Barack Obama. Personally, I would like a refund. But that’s just me.