Tag: Fred Reed

Guest Post by Fred Reed

We Had a Good Run

June 23, 2014

I’m being a pain in the ass again. My chilodhood makes me do it. When I was eleven, we boy kids in Alabama liked to shoot a wasp’s nest with BB guns and run like hell. I guess it stuck.

In this column I will explain why the Caucasian race will shortly be extinct, and why it is a good idea. This conclusion flows ineluctably from evolutionary considerations and studies of racial IQ. It is simple biology.

 

The Evolutionary-IQ Perspective

As Race Realists have argued at length, IQ is a reliable measure of intelligence, and is primarily genetic. Twin studies, in which identical twins have been raised apart in differing environments, show that 80% of IQ is of genetic provenance. So far as I know, these studies seem to be correct.

Thke Realists frequently publish curves of IQ distributions indicating that American blacks have mean IQs of 85, Mexicans of 87, and white Americans of 98. (IQs tend to wander according to the argument one is making. For national averages I mostly use the figures in the table of IQ and the Wealth of Nations, regarded as canonical by Race Realists.) The authors who have discovered the superiority of whites, curiously enough, are white. As a rule, Realists attribute almost every instance of intelligence to to genetics and, usually, to white blood.

The accuracy is doubtful. In particular, they omit distributions of groups superior to plain vanilla whites (PVWs). For example, the slant-eyed Asians—Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. Their IQ, 105 to 108, is greatly superior to that of PVWs. Note that these Asian smake up the first five countries by IQ in IQ and the Wealth.(China, mysteriously, is put at 100 but, since Singapore, genetically identical, is given as 108, this would seem the best figure for developed Chinese societies. There are well over a billion of such Asians.

This is no statistical fluke. They are so overwhelmingly dominant in high-end universities (CalTech, 40%) that Ivy schools have quietly imposed quotas to protect PVWs—i.e., affirmative action for the non-competitive. In high-end laboratories and universities, they are way overrepresented. They have larger brains, which probably explains their superior intelligence.

In short, these Asians are genetically superior. (And they know it. An acquaintance with access to the Asian community of California quoted them as describing whites as “lazy and stupid.”) By inevitable natural selection, they are beginning to replace PVWs in evolutionary niches requiring intelligence, as Cro-Magnons replaced Neanderthals.

Think I’m kidding? United States Math Olympiad winners. The near-monopoly of Chinese names strogly suggests that the true Chinese IQ is well ahead of that of PVWs. Asians are something like 6% of the US population. Uncle Darwin is calling bed time.

Another group even more genetically superior to plain vanilla whites consists of the Ashkenazi Jews, mean IQ 111, 13 points ahed of PVWs. That is, the gap between the Ashkenazim and PVWs (which means, for most readers, us) is greater than the eleven-point difference between PVWs and Mexicans. Because of the workings of a normal distribution, the consequences of those 13 points are great. For example, Nicolas Wade, a genetic determinist, points out in A Troublesome Inheritance Genes, Race and Human History that proportionally these Jews produce about six times as many people above IQ 140 than do PVWs. The ratios grow at higher IQs.

This is huge. If you look at intellectual achievement, Ashjews are way, way ahead of PVWs—Nobel prizes, chess champions, hugely major scientists. By comparison, plain vanilla whites are just, well…how to put it? Not very bright. Careful examination shows that an imposing part of what we think of as white European achievement is actually Jewish achievement.

Into the Darwinian night. We whites had a good run. The reality of IQ shows that the world is moving on.

 

Other Asians outperform whites. Thirteen of the last seventeen winnrs of the Scripps National Spelling Bee have been Indian, who are a tiny fraction of the US. Indians, says IQ and the Wealth, have a mean IQ of 81. Sure, and I’m Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst. A common response of Realists is that only very bright Indians come to the US. Yes, but all the very bright American kids are already here, no?

A Non-IQist Perspective

There is no biological reason to believe that one genetic group cannot be more intelligent than another. There is a great deal of reason to wonder whether IQ is a good measure of intelligence between disparate groups, and whether IQ—the answer on the test—is genetic.

Many people are quite sure of the answers, but often have little grasp of the material.  I spent years on Steve Sailer’s human-biodiversity list, a conclave of very powerful and equally inelastic minds concerned with IQ and evolution, and was astonished at their capacity to ignore unwanted evidence, abandon logic, and find pat genetic explanations for everything, probably to include sun spots.  Contradictions abound like picnic ants on a half-eaten sandwici, as for example the many large differences in IQs of genetically identical groups. (Readers wanting a detailed analysis should read this, by Ron Unz.)

In 1972, a massive test of the Irish put them at IQ 87. Recently they have scored at about 100 (which is exactly what you would expect of a population of Eurowhite PVWs). The only way this difference could be accomplished genetically would be by killing off most of Ireland, an event which one would expect to have made the newspapers. But maybe they were distracted by the World cup or whatever Paris Hilton was doing at the time.

Now, if twin studies prove conclusively that 80% of IQ is genetic, and the Irish example proves conclusively that it isn’t, only one explanation is possible: IQ tests are not measuring what we think they are measuring. QED. I would expect this to cause cognitive dissonance in IQists, but they seem not to be cognitive enough to notice the dissonance.

Again, when a thirteen-point gap vanishes in  a very few generations, the change isn’t genetic. Further, note that all of the gap disappeared, showing that none of it was genetic.

Now we come to Mexico which, by chance, is alleged to have exactly the 87 IQ of the Irish, apparently based on one study (see the table) in 1961 of 520 Mexicans. what could be more convincing? But before proceeding, a minor zoological excustion.

 

Confidently Vacuous Experts

When I mention Mexico, I invariably get mail instructing me on the nature of the county and its inhabitants. Everybody seems to know more about Mexico than those of us who live here. I am not talking about the high-wattage Race Realists, such as Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, and Jared Taylor, who are very intelligent and thoughtful. Rather, I advert to the nitwit pack of howlers and Me-Tarzan-you-Jane chest-beaters who post thunderous comments.

I imagine the following conversation with these Confidently Vacuous Experts:

Me: “You have, I don’t doubt, lived in Mexico?” Confidently Vacuous Expert: “Uh, well, uh….” “But certainly you have traveled extensively, business trips to Mexico City, visits with Mexican friends?” “Uh, well, uh….” ”You do speak Spanish?”  “Uh, well, uh….” “A man of your cultivation cannot have failed to read Latin-American authors—Borges, Juan Rulfo, Vargas LLosa, Benedetti, Neruda, Perez-Reverte, Octavio Paz, Carolos Fuentes, Carlos Monsivais?”  “Uh, well, uh….” “You can tell me whether Guanajuato is the capital of Toluca, an ethnic dish made with nopales, the language of the Marimacha Indians of Sinaloa, or the name of Peña Nieto’s dog?” “Uh, well, uh….” “Yes, I see. Quite. Your mastery commands my astonishment. Now do tell me about Mexico.”

This is not is not the only question I might raise with these geographic virgins if I were rude, which I decidedly am not. I might ask, “Among IQ tests, can you cite the three major methodological differences between Raven’s Progressive Matrices and Rockwell’s Libertarian Matrices?” Or “You are familiar with the concept of standard deviation? You can calculate one? Take the mean, the differences from the mean, square them, and so on?”

Just wondering.
Durango-class patrol craft, designed and built in Mexico. Engineers in Mexico count on their figners and toes. It’s a digital age, after all.

I do so enjoy posting things about Mexico becausse it gets Confidently Vacuous Experts into an uproar. I confess to being a troublemaker.

Headline, Wall Street Journal: Hispanics Gain at California CollegesUniversity System Admits More Latinos Than Whites for First Time

Isn’t this fun?

Average bookstore in Guadalajara, though smaller than most. I don’t know whicdyh one, as I did a Google search rather than drive forty-five minutes to photograph the half-dozen I know. Typically they have sections on systems analysis, electrical engineering, cardiology, and such, though with far less schlock on self-help and the Wisdom of Oprah.

 

European woman, probably Danish, consoling typical Mexican for his sins and defects. Here we see the physiological basis of Mexican inferiority: A combination of microcephaly and jaundice. However they have broad shoulders and can do simple work if supervised by their betters.

Hey, I’m having fun. Sort of a last fling, before going extinct.

Guest Post by Fred Reed

 

Gray Matter in a Brown Package

June 16, 2014

I spent three decades covering the military and have never seen a more insightful piece than this, in the New York Times of all places, by Bradley Manning, on how the Pentagon controls the press. Well worth a read.

Latinos are now seventeen percent of the population, and the president is doing everything he can to increase that proportion. Will they assimilate successfully? There are many reasons for suspecting that they will not, and others for suspecting that they will. A crucial sub-question is whether they are as intelligent as whites. Many quietly think not. Asking about racial intelligence is forbidden, which raises the quite reasonable thought, “Uh-huh, and we know why it is forbidden, don’t we?” You only forbid a question if you think you won’t like the answer.

What is the evidence?

Those who suspect (or in many cases, hope) that Latinos are irremediably stupid point usually to two data sets. The first is the scores of Latinos on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP. These show Latinos to be ahead of blacks in reading and arithmetic, but below whites and, more damningly, that the gap does not decrease in the second and third generation. The second data set is the assertion that Mexicans have a mean IQ of 87, barely two points above blacks and close to the figure, 85, that was once regarded as indicating borderline retardation.

These are legitimate data, in the sense that they were derived by intelligent people trying to determine the facts. The thoughtful will not dismiss them. On the other hand, if data contradict each other, or are inconsistent with observation, one may wonder about them. Are they wonderable?

Before going further, a word on the question of IQ. On one hand, you have the politically correct, who simply repeat unendingly that intelligence doesn’t exist, and any way can’t be measured, and can’t be defined, and is biased, and anyway is a social construct, and so on. This is argument by unanimous unrelenting assertion. On the other hand, you have the vociferous Race Realists, as they call themselves. These began as (and still are) people with the intellectual honesty to look at racial issues—crime, education, illegitimacy, intelligence—that one must never talk about. Unfortunately, their position under the pressure of ideological warfare hardened and they ceased to be able to see the many inconsistencies and contradictions in their beliefs. That is another column. My point here is that their position is not nearly a clear as they make it seem.

My best take on the question: I live in central Mexico, just below Guadalajara. I cannot see that people here are any less intelligent that white Americans. But this raises the question: How great must a gap be to be noticeable? Is the alleged thirteen-point deficit too small to be visible? I tend to doubt it, but I don’t know.

Another tack: I reasoned that while I couldn’t judge the country as a whole, half of which is of the middle class (much of it, Americans would say, lower middle-class) and the other a peasantry, I could compare people in professions with which I am familiar: journalism, medicine, general administration (bank clerks, realtors, and such), dentistry, pilots, and computer techs.

I can’t see a difference. Newspaper columnists write in grammatical, complex, insightful Spanish, equal to writing in, say, the Washington Post. The radio station of the Universidad de Guadalajara is at least as sophisticated culturally as that of American University, which I listened to for years. Professionals in general seem no less bright than American.

IQists will reply that these are the few smart Mexicans in a country of 115 million. Well, maybe. Note, though, that America has a very effective system for finding the bright (SATs, etc.) in all social strata of the country. Mexico does not. If you have an IQ of 150 in a remote village, that is where you will keep on having it.

Well, I thought next, how many bright Mexicans do I know? For purposes of this column, let us assume that an IQ of 130 or better, which qualifies you for Mensa, is bright. This is the upper two percent of the general white population. I have known a lot of Mensans and their equivalents, and have a pretty good eye for the qualified.

Now, the IQist response to any examples I may give predictably will be threefold. First, “Well, Fred, you are reasonably bright, and bright people hang out with other bright people. So your sample is highly skewed.” True. On the other hand, VI and I are not sociable, and have encountered such brights as we know among a small sample.

Second, “But Fred, you are obviously hanging out with successful professionals who have been genetically selected for intelligence.” None of those shown below have college-educated parents. We do not know any Mexicans with money.

Three, “Fred, all the bright people are of the ten percent of whites in the population.” See below and do your own photometry.

Jasmín, 17, daughter of Rolfe, behind her, and Marisól, Mexicana. Clearly a Norwegian. When not in high school, she writes for a local newspaper and sometimes tends bar at Cheers, a bar/restaurant recently founded by her parents. I put her at Mensa level. (“Mensa” in Spanish means “fool.” I refer to the social club.) Photo: FOE staff.

 

Natalia, stepdaughter, currently in university. This kid is way bright, even by my snotty and elitist standards. At 22, she could certainly hold her own on any of the sites that publish FOE, though in Spanish. At age twelve she would run through three adult books on a slow weekend. Note low albedo. Photo: FOE Staff

 

Tona, ghastly cellplhone photo. Another white European. Decidedly not from a wealthy family. They don’t have a computer so their kids come to our house to do online homework. Vi noticed that he was something of a flash and since, like all sensible small boys, he is interested in octopuses and squids, we bought him a rougly sixth-grade book on marine biology and, on a why-not basis, a 900-page biology text. He would grow into it, we figured. Tona didn’t figure this. He simply began reading it. Slowly, we presume without evidence, but reading it. Tona is 9.

Violeta, grad in lit of the University of Guadalajara. She teaches Spanish to gringos, most of whom are woefully unprepared to learn a language, having no grasp of the grammar of their own language. Typically they regard her as an unlettered campesiana, which is to say that they have invented the art of condescending upward. This puts them in a category with the Wright brothers. She multitasks, as I write being in the middle of Robert Graves’ two-volume thing on mythology, the Old Testament as grist for Graves, Proust on her cell phone, just finished Justine, tying them all in with the Greeks, Eur, Aris, Soph, and Aesch, which she has liked since doing Lysistrata in university theater. ‘Bout what the average gringa reads, I reckon.

Violeta’s bookshelves. Illiterate by definition, she can’t read them, but is attracted to shiny covers and bright colors. You know, like beads. Lit, linguistics,, philosophy.

What does the foregoing prove? Nothing. It could be coincidence. Most assuredly, the examples are exceptions (but so would they be in the US). So are the several kids I know who have learned good English in central Mexico. How many American kids do you kow who have learned any language at all, anywhere?

Proves nothing. Certinly anecdotal. Might lead one to suspect, though.

Guest Post by Fred Reed

The Confessions of St. Fred

Acknowledges Vertebrate Privilege

April 24, 2004

I am done for, and damned. Yes, a poor sinner who has strayed from the path of righteousness, and now sits brooding over a bottle of Padre Kino, Mexican rust-remover marauding as red wine, for I have done the unpardonable: I have said–I cringe with shame–that some cultures are superior to others.

It gnaws my soul.

Please don’t misjudge me. I am in most respects a good American. I have nothing against brainless, passive-aggressive, narcissistic sanctimony, nor preening academic mediocrity, nor intellectual vacuity. No. I tell you, I love all of these things. I am devoted to our traditions. I believe to the roots of my teeth that bovine complacency is the bedrock of democracy. Indeed, the only criticism I can make of our national intellectual life is that it would embarrass a microcephalic box-turtle.

Oh god. Wait. I didn’t mean to imply that microcephalic box-turtles are in any way inferior. They are just otherly abled. I apologize, and acknowledge my Vertebrate Privilege.

Let me recount my fall from grace as a warning to those that will hear. Long ago, a callow youth, I was reading the Huffington Post (this column has no respect for chronology), which informed me that no culture is superior to any other: They are just different. To think otherwise, it huffed, was to concede oneself to be among the Fallen, and perhaps a Republican.

I read this and the scales fell from my eyes (though I had no interest in going to Damascus, where they were using nerve gas). I thought, Yes! It’s true! Hosanna! All cultures are equal! Jewish culture is not superior to Nazi, just different. Why hadn’t I seen it before? The culture of Switzerland is not better than that of North Korea, and the South of Bull Conner was in no way inferior to the most dappled, liquid-eyed liberalism of Massachusetts!

For years I believed this, enraptured, and prattled like a jaybird. I was among the Saved. Then…Woe! Woe!…Padre Kino got the best of me. Oh, Demon Rum! Drink has ever been my downfall (and uplift, and maybe side-straddle. After a couple of bottles, it’s hard to tell.)

Anyway, I was in my cups and, prompted by the Devil, thought: All cultures equal? Exactly how is a pack of nekkid savages in the rain forests of Papua-New Guinea, who eat weird pasty white grubs and each other, who speak a language consisting of seven word none of which means anything, who have never even heard of Carlos Santana—how could they possibly be the equals of Europeans who brush their teeth and wrote Hamlet’s soliloquy? Equal how? In the eyes of God, maybe. If so, I figured the Old Boy must need glasses.

So low had I sunk.

Floating in the vile effluvium of the corrupting grape, I engendered worse thoughts. Regarding Islam, for example. How equal was this medieval horror? Here is a faith that will not let its girl children learn to read, and indeed holds them down screaming and mutilates their genitals with a razor blade and no anesthetic. Equal? To what? If to anything at all, I decided to avoid both. I have daughters. I don’t care how dry a Moslem’s head may be, if he came near my kids, he would eat a baseball bat.

You see. Wine. Booze. The Great Purple Father was making me lose all devotion to equality. Shun strong liquor, I implore you, lest you start to favor the death penalty for such victims of intolerance as Ted Bundy, who was misunderstood by society.

But back to Islam. Before, alight with the equality of all cultures, I had thought clitoridectomy to be a minor surgery, not much different from sending girls to Wellesley. Actually, Wellesley had seemed worse, as on campus girls underwent forced exposure to oppressive dead white men like Plato, while Moslem girls faced nothing worse than gangrene.  But suddenly I wasn’t sure. My Huffington-flavored faith wavered.

I even reflected at one point that European culture had invented everything that kept many of the rest from living in the animal shelter. Where they would probably eat the animals.

It is what drink does.

The seeds of heresy, once planted, grow like welfare budgets. Curious: Cultures that really were in a league with European—Japanese, Chinese, Korean—were too busy making Toyotas, smart phones, and money to worry about it. Cultures that obviously weren’t equal, that couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the sole, were making noise about Privilege This and Privilege That. In this they were joined by delicate white sociologists, splashing pridefully in the cultural birdbaths of the universities.

Why was it, I wondered, that all cultures were equal, but that all cultures were superior to white European culture? This seemed illogical. In my earlier state of virtue, I had understood such considerations to be the result of Male Linear Thinking, which had earlier been called “thinking” until it was noticed who was best at it.

I reached bottom, moral Quisling that I am, when I found myselfreflecting: If those who chatter about oppressive European culture had ever contributed anything to it, of to much of anything, instead of holding out their begging bowls, and expecting Euro-Americans to be their freaking mother—we would live in a better world. Or at least a quieter one.

My maternal instinct was reaching its limits.

The thing about Padre Kino is that it grows on you, first removing tartar from your teeth and then most of the fillings. Having decided that some cultures were superior to others, I fell deeper into error, and wondered whether maybe being smart was better than being stupid. Before, I had understood from the Washington Post that being illiterate and borderline retarded was a sign of Authenticity. Well, I certainly wanted to be Authentic, though I thought I would pass on eating the pasty white gurbs. (Authentic what was never mentioned, but it didn’t seem to matter. If Salon was for it, it must be good.)

I began dressing like the contents of a dumpster, with butt-hanger pants and a baseball cap on sideways so as to look like an idiot. I petitioned the Educational Testing Service to have my SATs lowered, and began Vocabulary Limitation Therapy. I considered lobotomy. Such was my desire for Authenticity.

It did not work. No. No amount of abasement, no embrace of degradation can overcome Vertebrate Privilege. But, like a sociologist, I could revel in being an earnest aspirant to degeneracy. Small compensation, but better than nothing.

But alas! Alack! I am ruined. Having lost one’s faith in the transparently absurd, one may never go back. I will never again believe the Iroquois the equals of the Finns. I am lost.

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Ponderous Ruminations, Maybe Tedious

The world is too much with us, late and son. Before long, it can begin to seem reasonable. I have my doubts. The usual always seems reasonable.

For example, existence seems reasonable. We wake up every morning and there it is. Actually it isn’t reasonable. It’s just customary. We avoid thinking about this so as not to become anxious. Or so, anyway, think I.

The sun, we are told—and I have no reason to doubt it—is a roaring ball of hydrogen fire in apparently infinite darkness, an inexplicable void endlessly  lonely, frigid, meaningless,  speckled with outposts of violent nuclear fusion. That’s reasonable? We hear of this on droning nature shows and say, “Yes, interesting, but what is on the movie channel?”

As we watch Lucy reruns we ride around the central conflagration on a small ball of mud and rock, which we call a planet, and see nothing curious in this. It is very curious.

Believing that the recurrent is reasonable probably keeps us from going mad. It is the principle underlying particle physics, as otherwise it would be impossible to believe that a thing can be a wave and a particle at the same time. If we thought too much about such matters, we would need massive amounts of Xanax to quell the anxiety. Alice in Wonderland is more plausible than this odd world in which, somehow, we find ourselves. So we check the movie channel.

Humanity has invented various ways to give itself a sense of understanding what it does not understand, thus maintaining inner tranquility. Today we favor the sciences to do this. Astronomers tell us of the speed of light and the red shift and remote galaxies at millions of light years of distance and, confusing description for understanding, we feel that the mystery of things has been abated. Why, it’s just physics. That’s all it is. Of course we won’t know the current state of a galaxy at a million light years for another million years, by which time it will no longer be the current state. For all we know, those stars may have turned into giant tube roses or ice cream cones. We have no way of knowing.

The sciences are fascinating, but they have a pedestrianizing and soporific effect. They make weirdness piled on improbability poured over the incomprehensible seem as ordinary as breakfast. How did the stars get there? Well, there was the Big Bang. We know because the 4K background radiation. But…why the Big Bang? Well, you see, the question has no meaning within physics, so let’s talk about the state of the universe 10^-45 seconds after the Bang, and then about the formation of electrons. All right, but why electrons? Why not cream cheese? Well, you see, it’s just the nature of Big Bangs.

It all works, or seems to, provided that you focus on the how and not the why. Given diffuse clouds of hydrogen, it can be shown mathematically (I do not know the mathematics of this, but will take it on faith) that gravitation will lead to coagulation and compression and rising temperatures and ignition and away we go. But why gravitation instead of repulsion? Why does this seem to make sense? Because we are used to it.

The philosophical principle of the sciences is that It Just Is. One planet does not attract another for a reason. It just does. There is nothing mysterious about T. Rex and those walking horrors of the Cretaceous. They just were, the inevitable result of physics and chemistry. What else could you expect? It’s a simple matter of starting conditions.

In fact there is nothing mysterious about anything. Everything Just Happens. That’s all.

Gaping holes exist in the scientific understanding of existence, which the sciences answer chiefly be ignoring them. They do not mention purpose (there is none), the possibility of an afterlife (there is none), free will or determinism (we have freely determined that there is no free will), or Good and Evil (evolutionary traits evolved to further cohesion within the pack). Minor omissions, these.

The purest form of this approach is atheism. To me the most tedious thing about atheists is how proud they are of themselves, but I have never understood just what it is that they believe or don’t.  They reject Yahweh, Allah, Shiva, and Zeus, which is not unreasonable, but do they not wonder about death? Nothing comes after, they say. How do they know?

Which brings us to that other classic mechanism for the avoidance of anxiety, religion. While the sciences avoid questions of death, morality, human destiny and the afterlife if any by ignoring them, the religions focus on them, allowing the questions but mistaking assertions for answers. Of course if you want to be convinced earnestly enough, you can believe anything.

Religion consists more in fervent hope than observation. There is in most religions the idea that Good is rewarded and Evil punished, that if we are kind and compassionate and just, then God (or gods, according to taste) will reward us. There is no evidence for this. In fact cancer strikes the good as often as the bad and the intelligently amoral, not the virtuous, prosper. It does not seem likely that babies born with horrible birth directs are being punished for sins committed in utero.  In most places and most times, people have lived in misery and died in agony. Why they have deserved this is not clear as divine justice.

Nor is there support for the Christian notion of a loving God in the natural world. When a young giraffe is attacked by hyenas, disemboweled and bled until it collapses and the hyenas begin eating it while it is still alive, I for one cannot see much loving kindness in it. Just a giraffe, you say. It probably seems otherwise to giraffes, agreeable creatures who eat leaves.

But then, what choice do the hyenas have?

Yes, the universe has its appeal. I have never lived in a place more eerily beautiful and complexly implausible. Perhaps we really are just pond scum on a minor planet in the middle of everywhere. Or maybe something is going on that is way above our pay grade. But between the sciences that describe much and explain nothing, and religious faiths that seem exercises in wish fulfillment…What’s on the movie channel?

Guest Post by Fred Reed

I can’t understand what Fred is talking about. 🙂

 

The Chinese Won’t, Though

March 28, 2014

From the Looming Cloud department: In Taki’s Magazine John Derbyshire quotes Tim Wise, a white guy of positively asphyxiating virtue, to the effect that, what with high birth rates  among American non-whites, the country will soon, much to Tim’s satisfaction, be chiefly non-white, at which point the knives will come out.  The threat is clear:

Wise: “In the pantheon of American history, conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame….It’s OK. Because in about forty years, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it.…We just have to be patient. And wait for you to pass into that good night, first politically, and then, well.…”

He makes clear, though unconvincingly—he is worth reading—that the whites whose political demise he wishes are only those ol’ racist, conservative, etc. Not good whites, like Tim. See, once a dark majority is in place, all right-thinking whites, such as Tim, will live in harmony with the new rulers, who will be without racial hostility toward the pale minority. He is crazy as a bedbug in a moonshine jar. Races with little in common do not hold hands and sing Kum Bah Yah, however much we may wish it.

Now, the racial threat to whites is perhaps not quite so dire as Tim hopes. In particular, an alliance of Latinos and blacks against whites is very far from certain. I live in Mexico, and know Mexicans as friendly and courteous folk who run a functioning upper-Third World country with airlines, internet, telecommunications and all the trinkets of modernity. Switzerland it isn’t, but neither is it Detroit. My eleven years here have been 99.9% free of racial hostility. There is today little love between blacks and browns in America and, to the extent that Latinos rise economically, they will very likely align themselves with the other successful groups.

But a broader question, if I may. The well-being of everyone in the United States depends on economic competitiveness, which depends on high levels of trained intelligence. Who has it?

Here a little knowledge is needed to recognize how dependent the country is on the brains of…whites. If you grow up, with minimal education, among cars and television sets, you can come unconsciously to think that, like air, they just exist. Actually they are products of brains. Whose brains? Mr. Wise might reflect on this.

In a perfect world, we would all be brilliant. Yet the world does not seem to be perfect. In practice we all depend on the intelligence of those able to discover, invent, and manage. And that intelligence almost invariably belongs to whites, Indians, and North Asians. I wish it were not so, but it is. I believe in giving to all young the oportunity and encouragement to shine intellectually. But if it doesn’t work? Are we wise to yearn for the dominance of the resentful who can’t, or at any rate haven’t, over those who can and do?

I do not mean to be cruel, but it is worth asking: How many of any age in Detroit can recognize this, from eighth-grade algebra. You know, what pubescent white kids do.

It would be wonderful if black kids flourished mathematically, as it would obviate many problems, but they haven’t and show no signs of ever doing so. I believe that Latin kids can, but they mostly haven’t. That leaves….

How about elementary college material, Tim? When I was a white student in college we could explain s-p hybrid bonding orbitals—freshman chemistry forty years ago for us ofays.  How about “The entropy of a closed system tends to remain the same or to increase”? What is that? An excellent exposition is found in Kittel’s Thermal Physics. How many in Newark have read it, or could?

We need people who understand these matters.  Are source-drain-gate parts of a kitchen sink or a transistor? What do they do? What is a tracking thermistor? Q = inductive reactance over resistance, X_L/R. What are those? Anger at evil white people is good fun, yes, but somebody has to make stuff work.

Pretty much everything that keeps us from squatting in grass huts and crushing lice was invented by, yes, white males. In this I am not being racially arrogant: I am quite aware that the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indians and so on can play this game quite as well as white men. They have begun, and begun most impressively. But these do not spend their time complaining about trials caused by their own incapacities.

Those who can, do. The rest bitch.

But back to my point, that the unlettered do not realize the extent to which they depend on things they have never heard of, that they did not invent and probably couldn’t understand. How many of those whose coming rule you celebrate,Tim, know the purpose of a partial derivative of a function of two variables? Second semester, freshman calculus.

I am just a dumb-ass white gringo in Mexico, but I can grasp elementary math.  I do not overrate myself:   I know what a partial is, but do not have the talent to be even a fifth-rate mathematician. (I wish I were being charmingly modest, but I’m not.) Yet I have sufficient self-respect to acknowledge my debt to men, uncounted thousands of them, who by being smarter than I am have made life tolerable for me and mine. What do you think of them apples, Tim?

Your angry “people of color” owe everything that lets them complain in comfort to such white men as Shockley (the transistor), Claude Shannon (information theory), Carl Friedrich Gauss (pretty much everything), Boole (Boolean algebra), Newton and Leibniz (calculus, classical mechanics)…and countless other white men they have never heard of either.

We’ve been at ti for a while, Tim. It started with the Greeks, as for example with Euclid’s Postulates. I note that those ancient white men were smart enough to recognize the problem with the Fifth Postulate, opening the door much later to hyperbolic geometry and other neat stuff–you know, Riemann, Lobachevski, Bolyai, guys like that. You do know, right?

You have in all likelihood a high life expectancy, Tim. Why is this, do you suppose? Maybe you believe that when you come down with pneumonia, and it’s cured in a couple of days, your survival is something built into the nature of things. Not really. Much of our life span springs from medical science founded on chemistry and cellular biology discovered by…white men. Many of their recent advances spring from techniques that few have heard of and thus don’t appreciate. Think of RFLP (that’s Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism, Tim, as I’ m sure you know but most don’t) and PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) and magnetic-resonance imaging and…well, you know the kind of thing. From white men.

White men discovered elementary biology. How many in Newark have even heard of, say, endoplasmic reticula, ribosomes, deoxyribonucleic acid, transfer RNA? Degeneracy of the codon alphabet?  How many nuclear bases in a codon? In RNA, what pyrimidine in DNA does uracyl replace?

This is just freshman biology, Tim. Real students, which I am not, go on to infinitely more difficult biochem in grad school. They are overwhelmingly white, though disproportionately Asian or Indian. You might think about that.

And you might think about this: The almost infinite number of disciplines that keep most of us fat, dumb, and happy—a condition that is about all most of us can hope for in this life—are products of the intelligence of white men. If others want to play this game, and have the brains, well and good. But in today’s political clime in America, we actually enshrine incapacity as authentic or democratic or of the people or whatever. We dumb down everything for the emotional benefit of the incapable. The whole thrust in America seems to be to lower standards and punish competence and intelligence. And anyone who notices who has them.

As a white male (though of limited talent) I am happy that my species benefits others. But when the country is, as you so ardently hope, in the hands of people who have produced almost nothing, will we really be better off? Any of us? Think Uganda.

This, in the long run, probably in the short run, isn’t going to work.  Boom boxes don’t grow on trees, Tim. And they only look simple.

Think about it.

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Grant Me the Wisdom to Know the Difference

March 6, 2014

 “Race realists,” as they call themselves, very much want to think that Latin Americans are inherently stupid. The idea appeals to me. As a curmudgeon, I like to believe in the corruption, venality, concupiscence, and stupidity of our sorry race. Certainly it is the way to bet. Further, I admit, indeed espouse, the biological possibility that one genetic strain may be brighter than another.

While I want to regard all of humanity as inferior, with regard to particular groups vile ripples of unwanted evidence occasionally raise their ugly heads (if ripples have heads). Consider Latinos..After living for eleven years in Mexico, I cannot see that Mexicans are any stupider than anyone else. (This, of course, leaves ample leeway for being stupid.) The assertion among fans of IQ is that because of their admixture of Indian blood, Mexicans, and for that matter all mestizos of Latin America, are stupid. I don’t see it.

But personal observation carries no water with race realists. Fair enough. Let us consider brown people in Peru, a small, heavily mestizo Andean nation of some thirty million. Let us also consider the International Math Olympiad, an annual contest of high-end mathematical talent around the planet. In 2012, Peru finished 16th. Results from the Olympiad vary considerably by year, in 2013 Peru finishing 26, Australia 15 and 27 in those two years (and Mexico 17th in 2013). Yet it is hard for me to see how an inherently stupid people could make it to16th. This is especially puzzling because Peru does not have the highly-developed mechanisms for discovering talent that America has.

I consequently suggest that race realists, at least with respect to South America, have become more racial than realistic, and may suffer from a rectocranial inversion. I hope that Fred on Evrything can serve them as salutary forceps.

To believe a group stupid because of the evidence is one thing; to believe it in spite of the evidence is another. Which I think they are doing. In support of this blasphemy I adduce, first, the Peruvian kid Raul Arturo Chávez Sarmiento, who became the second youngest participant to win a medal in the Olympiad and went on to win both silver and gold medals.

Now, the usual explanation in IQist circles for Latino successes is that only the white ruling classes accomplish anything. Well and good, if it works. The truth is the truth. However:

Arturo Chavez

His two siblings are a physicist and mathematician, so there hasn’t been much regression to the mean in his family.

One data point does not a distribution make. At the end of this column are links to bios of the Peruvian math team. Click on a few and see whether you can find a white kid.

Also interesting is Jorge Ciri. Says the Wikipedia, “Jorge Cori (born July 30, 1995 in Peru) is a Peruvian chess prodigy. He is ranked No. 1 among Under-18 player in the Americas, No. 3 in Peru and No. 8 among all Under-18 players in the world.”

Jorge Ciri. If he is white, I’m Jean Harlow. (There is little evidence that I am Jean Harlow.) 

Then there is Jorge’s sister, DeysiCori, women’s grandmaster. Wikipedia: “Cori is ranked 42nd in the world among women players and 3rd on the junior girls list.She is currently the only player in the junior girls Top 20 who resides in the Western Hemisphere.”

Deysi Cori. Norwegian, I guess. No trace of Indian blood. You teach her chess. I don’t do human-sacrifice. Not if I am the human, anyway.

Now, the existence of exceedingly smart Peruvian kids proves nothing conclusively. A Gaussian distribution being asymptotic, there is a calculable chance that a population with a mean IQ of 20 will produce, well, Gauss. It is a very small likelihood. Yet the Math Olympiad is not for the intellectually emaciated. Further, you do not get a high world ranking in chess by being merely very smart, or very, very smart. The probability that a small country still developing, of low average intelligence, much of its population in small villages in the mountains, would by freak mathematical accident produce these kids—anyone but a race realist stop and think.

If I am wrong, show me. As a curmudgeon, I believe that everybody is wrong about everything, including me. This produces a certain logical opacity, which encourages alertness.

So why do we have this Andean flowering now, and not earlier?

We can guess. As a correspondent of mine says, “This surge of young talent has all appeared within the last decade or so, which has coincided with economic growth and the appearance of a mestizo middle class.”

Here we have the old question of whether IQ produces prosperity, or prosperity produces IQ. (Or, perhaps, unleashes it).The IQist bible is IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhane. The book purports to show that a nation’s economic rank depends of the mean IQ of its population. The test scores the book uses tend to be a gobbledygook amalgam of different tests offered to different test groups at different times and would make a statistician’s hair curl. Still, if you accept these numbers as vaguely approximating reality, there is indeed a correlation between IQ and prosperity.

A problem is that prosperity can change almost overnight, at least with some populations, which leaves you, to the extent the IQ is genetic, with one IQ correlating with two very different prosperities. Oops.

Consider Taiwan in 1970 and now, China in 1850 when the British thought its people hopelessly inferior, and, er, now. Or Korea in 1950 and now, or Koreas north and south, same genetics but wildly different prosperities.

As for Peru, I have walked the streets of Lima extensively—it is a modern and functional city—without having the slightest feeling of moving among dolts.

Now: If a genetic group has never produced evidence of intellectual capacity, one might reasonably suspect that it doesn’t have any. You might be wrong, but you might be right. Once the said group has produced too much talent at too high a frequency to be attributed to long-shot, fourth-standard-deviation chance, genetic explanations for former lack of national prosperity cease to work.

I am not sure that we are not about to be surprised by a lot of Latin America. I note that the third (or fourth, depending on where you put Bombardier) manufacturer of aircraft in the world is Embraer, of Brazil. When I fly United from Mexico to the States, it is aboard an Embraer 145. The IQist explanation is that Embraer’s engineers are all of the white elite, or, so help me that “only the smartest Brazilians work for Embraer.” This latter suggests that Airbus and Boeing use ordinary citizens, perhaps recruited from a bus station.

Ridiculous Latin-American craft, of clay and wattles made, probably in the rainforest, doubtless with an abacus. Note logo on tail.

Are Embraer’s engineers white? Maybe. I don’t have mug shots. Nor do I know just how the rapid economic progress in Brazil is affecting the make-up of the professions. Yet I wonder whether there is not such a thing as getting too comfortable. Those airliners are not toys. US airlines buy them.

Maybe race realists need to be more realistic about race. How many exceptions make a norm? It takes very few Deysi Cori’s to wreck a perfectly good theory.

For some reason I don’t think Fred and Kunstler would hit it off.

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Notes of a Fed-Up Southerner

March 3, 2014

Coming up as I did a Southern boy, usually barefoot, lots of times with a cane pole and a string of bream I caught in Machodoc Creek, and other signs of higher civilization, I believe I could get tired of Northerners huffing and puffing about how moral they are. Ain’t nothing like a damn Yankee for smarmy hypocrisy. They can spit it out in chunks like saw logs. A Yankee can’t open his mouth without preaching about how everybody else ought to do something he won’t do himself.

It’s always the same thing, about how the South keeps blacks in poverty and has lynch mobs. (Actually, it’s been at least three weeks since I was in a lynch mob.) To listen to these pious frauds, you’d think Northerners just loved black people and spent most of their time with them at the country club, talking the stock market. Why, how else could it be?

I couldn’t lie so much if you gave me a bird dog and a buzz saw. It ain’t in me. The worst schools in the country are in Mississippi, which doesn’t have any money, and the second worst in Washington, DC, which has all our money. Yes, Washington, so virtuous it makes your teeth curl. How many white kids are in those schools? Uh-huh. It’s you and him integrate, not us.

You’ve heard about white flight. In nearly about every city in the North white people streak for the suburbs so’s not to be near black people, and then they talk about how bad Southerners are for doing the same thing. I guess talking moral is more fun than being it.

Fact is, you can see more social, comfortable integration in a catfish house in Louisiana than you can in probably all of Washington.

Now, sometimes I have to yield to the truth. I don’t like to, but it’s forced on me. Blacks do live miserable in Southern cities.It can’t be denied. There’s a shameful list of awful cities and it hurts me to write it: Newark, Trenton, Camden, Detroit, Flint, Chicago, and Gary. Pretty much the entire South.

Facts is, the South itself was always poor, dirt poor, pea-turkey poor, especially after 1861, and a lot of what it was and how it felt came out of that. Songs like Ode to Billy Joe to Yankees are funny, the kind of thing you’d expect from those hicks down there. But they tell how it was for a lot of folk. Red dirt hills where nothing much wanted to grow, and there was nothing much to do and sometimes nothing much to eat. It was ugly, Tobacco Road, and the North laughs it. Even in the mid-Fifties you saw—I saw—kids from the countryside of Alabama with their teeth black from decay, and in some regions school vacations came at cotton-picking and cotton-chopping time. You could easy find people living in fall-down shacks, white people too. Thank you, Mr. Lincoln.

Piety quiz: Everybody take out a sheet of paper. Who said the following: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people….” (1) Mahatma Ghandi (2) Mother Theresa (3) Tinker Belle or (4) Abraham Lincoln. Hint: It wasn’t any of the first three.

Let me remind us that the South has generally had to bring to the North the benefits of culture. It figures. Industrial society is so full of stench and soot and misery and crowding that people can’t even do a good job of being unhappy. That’s why the great blues men like Mississippi John Hurt and Lightnin’ Hopkins came out of Dixie. So did jazz, and country music, and Dixieland jazz, which is different, and bluegrass, and rock’n’roll thanks to Big Boy Crudup and Elvis. Yankees can play long-hair music pretty good, but they stole it from Europe.

The South, though. It was a different place, mostly kind of sad I guess if you looked close, but it could grow on you. Those hot, quiet cotton fields in the Delta, where time passed sweet and slow like sorghum syrup dripping on busted china, and it was so peaceful and the air so soft you figured maybe there was a God after all. There wasn’t, though. At the time you could stand there and think that it would go on forever, that there was something comfortable and familiar that wouldn’t turn into something else you didn’t want. But it did. Nothing lovely can last when next door you have an infernal industrial smoke pit.

There was a wildness to the South, a sense that anything could happen. It didn’t feel controlled. Maybe it wasn’t obvious. People talked soft and slow like the Good Lord intended, instead of honking through their noses the way they do in Brooklyn, and they were polite and friendly. You didn’t want to lean on them, though. That wasn’t a good idea.

If you knew the place, it wasn’t surprising the moonshine runners came from there, and later turned into NASCAR. Hopped-up flathead mill, tank of bust-head corn in the trunk, flying through the Tennesse night with the dam federals after them. Back then, like now, Washington didn’t want people to drink what they wanted or smoke what they wanted. They was always sticking their long possum noses where they didn’t belong. And not just in the South. They’d invade anybody they’d ever heard of. Mexico in 1846 and 1916, Spain in 1898, Europe in 1917, on through Iraq and Yemen, wherever that is, and Afghanistan and I don’t know where all. Anything but mind their own business.

And now we got another Yankee president from Chicago messing with the whole country, turning America into Russia. That sort of thing never did set too well below Mason and Dixon’s Line.

Piety quiz: Which of the following in the decades surrounding the Civil War said over and over that he wanted to send all the black folks to Africa? (1) Susan Anthony (2) Pallas Athena (3) Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst (4) Abraham Lincoln. Hint….

But enough about Washington, the world’s central deposit of oleaginous purity. Let’s talk about cars. Dixie was a car culture from when it first got the chance. It still is. I remember when, come summer, at umpty-dozen tracks the night howled and yowled and roared as muscle cars raced, taching high and sometimes blowing rods but things don’t always turn out perfect. In the stands they drank beer out of paper cups and hollered for Jimmy Jack or Joe Bob to take the lead. It was their place in the world and they were doing what they liked with people they liked and there were no dam feds telling them they had to put catalytic converters on the race cars. Yet.

That was something the South always liked. Being left the hell alone.

On the weekends of races at Road Atlanta, from all over the South, from little towns like Farmville, Virginia, trailers and motor homes towing race cars streamed in. They’d set up and bring out the tool boxes and start prepping for the races the next day. Wives and girlfriends would help and everyone hollered greetings at new arrivals.

The wives and girlfriends were real women, and seemed to think being a woman was a good thing. Men thought it was a good thing, that’s for sure. It was like there were two kinds of people, men and women, instead of just one. It’s a novel concept, I reckon. But we liked it. And they were just nice. You could easy tell a Southern gal from a menopausing crocodile. Up North, you’d need a DNA test.

Anyway, half the crowd already knew each other and the others didn’t have to because it was a coomon culture and if you had a race car, you were in.

Greasy-purity quiz: “I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” (1) George Wallace (2) David Duke (3) Nathan Bedford Forrest (4) Abraham Lincoln

Uh-huh. The Great Emancipator. Himself. How I do love goodness.

Guest Post by Fred Reed

 

Things Don’t Work Like They Spoza

February 25, 2014

A cause of this dysfunction is the notion that criminals can “pay their debt to society,” and then be all better, as if crimes were purchases made on a credit card. Say that a marginal human wielding a bolo knife crawls through a window, burglarizes the house, and gets caught and sentenced to five years. He gets out some time later having “paid his debt”—actually the citizenry have paid $20K a year to keep him fed and comfortable. He is now thought to have been cleansed and ready to make a fresh start.

Not a chance.

As any cop can tell you, career criminals commit almost all crime. When Willy Bill gets caught carrying a television out from someone’s window,, you will find, with the absolute certainty one associates with bankruptcy in a Democratic administration, that he has a rap sheet going back to puberty. Two years after getting out for one offense, he will be arrested for another. Normal, civilized people don’t suddenly think, “Gosh, slow day. I guess I’ll do a little burglary.”  Either you don’t do it at all, or it’s all you do.

Whenever I covered a guy who stabbed a woman thirty-seven times while robbing her at an ATM, I knew he would prove to be be out on parole for something similar. He always was. Which is why three-strikes-and-you’re-out makes considerable sense, at least for serious crimes: e.g., forcible rape, armed robbery, and ADW, though not for felony shoplifting or peddling grass.  You can cage a rattlesnake after it bites someone, but when you letit out, it is still a rattlesnake.

Which brings up to parole and the phoniness of sentencing.

Suppose that a judge gives Willy Bill fifteen years for a bloody robbery. This looks good to the public: Grr, woof, bow-wow. Sernness. But Willy gets time off for good behavior, and a parole-eligibility date in seven years or next Wednesday, whichever come first.  The sentence he gets isn’t the sentence he serves.  It has to do with crowding in prisons and, I strongly suspect, a desire to make it appear to the public that criminals are being punished when they aren’t much.

Then you have Willy Bill and his parole hearing. Parole boards often consist of gullible citizens with no experience of criminal behavior. Further, Willy is a good con man. He does great repentance-speak. He is All Fixed Now. Nobody produces better sincerity than a psychopath who wants out. It’s forty-weight. You could lube a diesel with it. The parole board bites. Three months later he kills a woman.

Jesus is responsible for much of this mayhem. Prisons churn out conversions to Christ like Hershey’s does chocolate kisses. I once spent a week of work days in the Cook County Jail in Chicago when a friend was head of IAD there. He arranged for me to interview prisoners. I heard a common song: “I done wrong. I know I did. But I found Jesus. He my man now. All I want is serve my savior.”

Sure. Any day now. But it convinces parole boards, some of them anyway. When he gets out, whatever he did, he’ll do again. Within weeks, most likely. He’s doesn´t know how to do anything else. The system rests on the idea that criminals can get better. Mostly they don’t. They can’t.

(Incidentally, if you want a marvelous (I thought, anyway) book about how scams work in the slam, try Games Criminals Play. It’s a hoot.)

Then comes plea-bargaining, a labor-saving device for prosecutors and judges. America is supposed to have trial by jury. It says so in the Constitution we used to have. Actually, something over 90% of cases are pleaded. If ten percent of criminals had a jury trial, the system would stop like a two-dollar watch.  Our legal system supposes we are a civilized people, and that such peoples don’t  commit a lot of crime. Try that in Detroit, Newark, Camden, Chicago.

Suppose that an urban hairball slingin’ rock on the corner fires seven times at a competitor with a stolen Glock, missing because he has no idea how to shoot. He is arrested for attempting murder, which is exactly what he was attempting. The public defender pleads him down to aggravated assault or malicious jaywalking, or maybe Inappropriate Thought, which is what we pay PDs to do: keep violent felons on the street (which, by the way, they know perfectly well they are doing.). What with time off and a probably stupid parole board that additionally has been told to let people go because the slams are full to bursting, a few years later he’s out and, sure enough, kills….

Then there is drug rehab, a profitable scam that doesn’t work. It is profitable in part because it doesn’t work: a city will pay several times for the rehab of the same addict. Dopers amount to a reusable resource for the rehab racket.

A judge doesn’t want to send an endless stream of crack-heads, scag monkeys, and pill freaks to the slam. There isn’t enough room. Sending them to rehab sounds humanitarian, progressive, and improving. Actually, with very few exceptions, it is useless, as all involved know.  I have sat in a police car outside a rehab house in Washington and watched an inmate come out, score, and go back in. The cop I was with did nothing. There was no point in doing anything.

Jury trials are in large part a scam. I don’t have a better idea, but that doesn’t keep them from being scams. To begin with, you are supposed to face an impartial jury. The Foundering Fathers stuck this in so that ordinary citizens wouldn’t be railroaded by kangaroo juries packed with the equivalent of the King’s littermates. It was a perfectly good idea. However, in the racially divided America of today, jurors of another race are unlikely to be impartial. Space aliens would come closer. Think of the passions ignited nationally in the cases of Rodney King, OJ Simpson, and George Zimmerman. The same emotions poison lesser trials that few hear about. Not good.

Another problem is that s, except in high-dollar cases with alpha-shysters, juries are sometimes composed of people who weren’t smart enough to avoid jury duty. They can resemble the waiting room in a bus station. People with a Macy’s-Basement IQ simply can’t understand the what is g oing on. A woman I know was a juror in a civil trial in Washington in which both sides stipulated that sexual harassment was not involved. Despite this, the jury wanted to give the complainant an award for having been sexually harassed.

Finally, trials are not about truth, justice, and beauty, but about winning. Period. Neither lawyer wants a jury of people who think objectively, as for example twelve physicists. In a rape case, the defense will try to seek a censorious Aunt Polly spinster who will think, “Well, if she went into that awful biker bar in a three-inch miniskirt, she deserves what she got, the trash.” The prosecutor will want a hard-nosed law-and-order type who will think, “If we can’t keep our women safe from this kind of animal, what the hell kind of country are we?”

If that ain’t impartial, I can’t imagine what might be.

Guest post by Fred Reed

Dismal Wisdom for Dismal Times

February 3, 2014

Ah, the guttering candle of civilization! How I love it. The dwindling flames warm the cockles of a curmudgeon’s heart (whatever precisely a cockle may be): the galloping rot, the stampede to enstupidation, the gathering night of the Fifth Century.

For a while I lost confidence in democracy, which was producing a depressingly literate and responsible public. A curmudgeon does not like to see prosperity and content growing from intelligent policy. It offends his sense of rightness. Now, thank Hera, the country rushes toward its appointed endpoint in the abyss.

The signs are as clear as pigeon droppings on a martial statue. This, from UCLA, a daycare center in California which was formerly a university:

“Racial tensions are inflamed at the University of California at Los Angeles following several incidents — most notably, one where a professor corrected the grammar, punctuation and capitalization in minority students’ assignments. The act of correcting a black student was “micro-aggression,” according to the members of the student group “Call 2 Action: Graduate Students of Color,” which launched a sit-in during a subsequent meeting of the class.”

Wonderfu! This is heady stuff. Graduate students “of color” (which never seems to include Chinese or Koreans, who can spell) can’t be expected to distinguish “its” from “it’s.” Fourth-grade English is just too hard for them, and they must be sheltered from the burden. Apparently they attend university to avoid being expected to learn anything.

This is balm to a curmudgeon’s cockles. You see, we of our ashen-souled and lonely trade, laboring in the shadows, take no pleasure in the honest mistakes that befall us all. No. If your grandmother falls and breaks her hip, we feel no joy. We feast only on thorough-going damned foolishness, on lunacy, on luminous hypocrisy and suicidal moral preening. These are good times for us. We gorge.

Back to UCLA. Protecting minorities (which category never seems to include Jews, men, Mensans, or Anglo-Saxons) from the travails of learning would seem more racist than requiring it of them, but never mind. Keep’em dumb, keep’em mad. Especially, keep their tuition. Onward into the gloaming. Let the show go on.

The inevitable inevitably happens, and it is. (You saw it here first.) Someone famously said that democracy lasts until the unworthy learn that they can vote themselves the treasury. Yes. More generally, until they learn that they can vote themselves everything. Here is the backbone of American domestic policy, if that is the right word for floundering narcissism. The inadequate and barely lettered,  by weight of numbers, can simply declare themselves the equals of their betters (or should I say “there betters”?). They don’t have to accomplish anything. They simply assert that they have done it, or that doing it is elitist and therefore reprehensible. I have in mind things like reading, scoring at the level of sentience on the SAT, or lifting mortar rounds.

The reduction of American universities to the academic level of the comic book (or, as we now say, “graphic novel”) was of course preceded and made necessary by the mob’s desire for the trappings of education. The substance they find merely annoying. They have the votes, though, and pay the tuition. Thus they get what they want, a diploma, without having to subject their tiny mindsto the oppressionst of thought.

This unionism of the shiftless shapes society at all levels.  Thus No Child Left Behind when clearly many children can’t possibly get ahead. Thus the drive to have all students in high school  “college-ready” when a screaming maximum of twenty percent are smart enough for what used to be college work. Thus the feral grunting of rap.

But here is another jewel of degradation gleaming in the wan light of witlessness: A school (should I sy “school”?) in Brooklyn, two-thirds of whose students are black or Hispanic, has abolished its (I mean “it’s”) advanced courses for the intelligent. Why this salubrious excision? Why, because too many of the students therein are white. That is, classes for the intelligent contain the intelligent. My god. This cancer must be corrected lest it spread.

“Citing a lack of diversity, PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald informed parents in a letter that the Students of Academic Rigor and two other in-house programs would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners.

“Our Kindergarten classes will be heterogeneously grouped to reflect the diversity of our student body and the community we live in,” she announced in an ooze of perfectly normal priss-enhanced  boilerplate bird-brainery. The dull crabs don’t want the smart crabs to escape from the pot.

The usual remedy for superior performance by superior students is to mandate the admission of unqualified students of color (“of culler” I meant so say, no elitist I (“Me” I meant)) (Damn the parenteses, full speed ahead.) who can’t keep up, so that the advanced courses have to be diluted. New Jersey, more direct, simply eliminates courses for the smart.  This is a faster road to universal inadequacy than imposing quotas.

Gutting courses for the intelligent also means that bright students of culler don’t got access to the advanced schooling that would let them rise in the world, know what I’m sayin’?

Wisdom from afar: My wife Violeta, a Mexican, describes the United States as a third-world country with a first-world infrastructure (Un pais tercermundista con infraestructura primermundista). Ummm…ah….

We see the same principle of inadequacy voting itself the cookie jar in…everything.  The Marines have opened the infantry to women. This is ridiculous, which is why I like the idea. Curmudgeons love the ridiculous, and find the results to vary between amusing and hilarious.

It is obvious that women are not physically up to ground combat, that they get pregnant more often than men, that training has to be enfeebled to maintain the pretense. But there are lots of them, and they vote. Reality is what the greater number say it is.

And in our fourth-stage democracy, everyone has to nod and agree. Is high-school calculus to hard for minorities? Why, get rid of it. Future engineers can count on their fingers just like Chinese engineers. If women can’t lift 175mm rounds, declare ammunition obsolete, or that it weighs less. In wars today, you just push buttons anyway.

Militarily, watching the evolution of Pentagonal policy is like  watching the fingers fall from a leper. You can bet on it. What falls next? The thumb? The little finger? Is there a point spread? As a curmudgeon, I applaud the step toward equality. As a former Marine, I am fascinated that General James Amos, Commandant of the Marine Corps, signed off on it. He knows better.(What would Chesty Puller think?) But it’s democracy, see, and there are more women than Marines. If the National Organization for Women wanted Amos to wear bra and panties, he would, with nothing to fill either. Let the ever-lovin’ show go on.

Best article from Fred in quite a while. He is 100% accurate in his assessment of our government. It cannot be fixed.

Guest post by Fred Reed

 

Infinite Arrogance, Infinite Incompetence

Miss Ammerica, Miss Universe, Miss Governnment

February 21, 2014

Oh lord. Oh lord. Can the government do anything right? There is no evidence for it. None. Everything it touches turns to grotesque failure. It hurts me to contemplate the federal reigning monstrosity in the Yankee Capital. I may have to send out for a bottle of Padre Kino red to get me through it. The Great Purple Father is the worst wine known to man, thirty-nine cents a trainload. Never mind. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Nothing works, government-wise. Ponder health care, if you can stand it. One approach to keeping people alive and healthy is national health care, which many countries, such as France, have and it works. It’s because grown-ups run it. Or you can have private health care, which the US had and, though it was way overpriced and unwieldy, strangled by paperwork and corruption, more or less worked, sort of.
So the gummint comes up with Obamacare, that doesn’t work at all. The feds can’t even write the freaking computer program. Yes, here in the world’s greatest technological power. We ought to contract the software to Guatemala, which couldn’t do it either but would cost less.

The War on Drugs, another disaster. A half century, billions of dollars, countless stupid laws, Mexico a war zone. Result? Every drug known to man, woman, or hermaphrodite is for sale at great prices in every high school in America. Another triumph of private enterprise over governmental regulartion. If Washington tried to provide free drugs, it couldn’t come close. No one would be able to get so much as an aspirin.

Race relations. Another charred ruin. Better than a half century into the Great Society, huge numbers of blacks live trapped in urban Bantustans, Newark, Detroit, Birmingham, Philadelphia, barely literate if at all, unemployed and unemployable, bastardy almost universal, utterly dependent on federal charity, without the slightest hope that any of this will change. If Washington had deliberately tried to make a greater mess, it couldn’t have.

Open borders. Another train wreck started, stage-managed, and supported by Washington. The merest glance at the outside world would show that mixing immiscible peoples regularly results in strife, division, decline and, often, civil war. Coming to a theater near you. Merry Christmas.

The military. A trillion withering green ones a year and we get forces that can’t beat a few pissed-off goat-herds with AKs. Which actually is a good thing since they shouldn’t be trying. A chronicle of unmitigated failure, and always for the same reason: trying to use shiny toys to whip whole countries that don’t want us there. Hey, if it doesn’t work, let’s do it again.

And now Washington wants wars with Iran and China, when it can’t beat Yemen. You have to concede a certain logic here: if you can’t defeat Afghanistan, a billion Han Chinese will be a cakewalk.

Economic policy. If any. Washington drives the country bankrupt, colludes with Wall Street, to the extent that there is a distinction between Washington and Wall Street, and brings on the sub-prime crash. The swine tell us that we are the greatest economic powerhouse known to creation, while unemployment is ghastly, college grads have to live with their parents, food stamps spread, and the middle class lives paycheck to paycheck. Oh thank you, thank you.

Constitutional government. Gone. Some of us remember it, as a trembling octogenarian remembers ardor in the back seat of his ’53 Chevy. The young will know it only as an exotic idea. Bush II began the serious bleeding. Obama, the first African-American president and much more African than American, opens the larger veins.

Unfettered surveillance of absolutely everything, militarized police, the military as private presidential army, searches without probable or indeed any cause, photo ID required to buy train tickets, on and on.

Perhaps worse, the endless regulation by Washington, either directly or by federal pressure, of everything anybody ever does. The country was founded on the idea that most things were none of the government’s damned business. Today, everything is the government’s business. There is virtually nothing that cannot be controlled by some level of government.

Why is the use of steroids by baseball players of concern to Washington? Are bulked-up hitters a threat to the commonweal?

Why should smoking in bars be the concern of government? People who don’t like smoke can find other bars, or bars which decide to have no-smoking areas. Personally I don’t like being around people who talk loudly. Should law require no talking above a whisper in public establishments? Enforce it with audiometers built into tables?

Why is it the government’s business to decide that insisting on academic standards in schools is racist or that mentioning Creationism violates an imaginary separation of church and state? Why are the schools in Oklahoma not the concern of Oklahoma?

Why is it Washington’s business to insist that hiring and promotion in fire departments be based on race and sex rather than competence?

When a central government has unlimited powers, as Washington for practical purposes now does, the effect is to disenfranchise the rest of the country. Today the doctrines of States’ Rights and the Tenth Amendment are often regarded as quaint, obsolete, retrograde, or even conservative. It is none of these, except conservative. People in Montana, Mississippi, Massachusetts, and Washington have very different ideas about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When Washington imposes its one-size-fits-all laws, it imposes an alien culture on most. Never mind the hypocrisy—liberal whites in Washington avoid blacks like leprosy—but they truly regard themselves as divinely authorized to dictate to the rest of us.

Having power over every aspect of everybody’s life centralized in Washington means that any lobby, meaning self-interested predatory wallets, can pay Congress, venal by disposition, to enact any law the lobby chooses. Worse, an anonymous federal bureaucracy can make a politically-correct regulation forcing you to do things that you regard as morally and otherwise repulsive. For example, you have to be genitally groped by TSA. You have no recourse, no voice. Did you vote for this? Do you have any idea who to blame? If you write your ongressman, you will get a form letter expressing his deep gratitude for etc, and nothing else. Constituents are regarded by Congress as a pain in the ass. Will you call TSA to protest? Try calling a brick wall instead. Brick walls are not manipulatively dismissive.

I can’t stand it. Yes, I know, I am weak and lack moral character. It is shameful. But as I reflect on the stupid, corrupt, lunatic, and evil mass of brainless, half-assed dirtballs that run us, my only thought is to call for an air-drop of Padre Kino and an intravenous line. Drugs will get you through times of no government better than government will get your through times of no drugs. That’s just common sense.