October 13, 2015 NR: What the Conservative Grassroots Get Right on Immigration — and What the GOP Establishment Gets Wrong Luke Ford No sacred cows.

NR: What the Conservative Grassroots Get Right on Immigration — and What the GOP Establishment Gets Wrong

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Luke Ford

From National Review: David Brooks has just written a stinging denunciation of the Republican party. Though he reserves his harshest criticism for self-described Republican radicals, his larger argument is that the party as a whole has “abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism.” To give Brooks his due, many aspects of his critique ring true. His frustrations are my frustrations. In one passage, for example, Brooks observes that even as Republicans denounce government in the most strident terms, they make ever more outlandish promises about what they can accomplish once elected. When the accomplishments themselves inevitably fail to materialize, members of the outrage caucus find some shadowy villain to blame. This cycle of overpromising and recrimination engenders a great deal of cynicism among rank-and-file conservatives, which in turn further strengthens the hand of the radicals who want to burn the GOP establishment to the ground. Unlike Brooks, however, I have some sympathy for the Republican radicals. That is because in at least one respect, it is the GOP establishment that has embraced radicalism while the Republican Right stands against it. House Republicans are divided on many policy questions, but the most important of them by far is the question of immigration reform. Though Brooks never mentions this divide over immigration, I would argue that it is playing a central role in the ongoing Republican civil war.

Broadly speaking, establishment Republicans favor an approach to immigration reform that would, among other things, grant legal status to unauthorized immigrants and increase legal immigration, including that of less-skilled workers. Anti-establishment Republicans oppose this approach. If the rise of Donald Trump proves anything, it is that immigration matters a great deal to Republican voters. Indeed, one recent survey found that a large (67 percent) majority of Republicans favors decreasing immigration levels. Almost half (49 percent) of independents feel the same way, as does a significant (33 percent) minority of Democrats. Is it surprising that many conservatives object to a House GOP leadership dominated by proponents of increased immigration levels when only 7 percent of Republicans favor such an increase?

…For a variety of reasons, the United States has a large population of people who are not just poor, but who are the children and grandchildren of poor people, and who are isolated from our society’s economic and cultural mainstream. One of the great dangers we face is that while less-skilled immigrants are upwardly mobile, in that they generally lead better lives in the U.S. than in their native countries, their children and grandchildren are in many cases experiencing “downward assimilation.” That is, they find themselves stuck on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, suffering from many of the same problems that plague other very poor Americans — they are being raised in unstable families, they are victimized by criminals at high rates, and they have far less faith in American institutions than their immigrant forebears did. This is not because these men and women are any less admirable than more affluent, more established Americans. It just so happens that there is only so much that government can do to ensure that the children of parents with low levels of literacy and numeracy will flourish in a society that prizes skills and social capital. Congress can increase transfers, certainly. But it can’t repair frayed social bonds.

Posted in Immigration, Republicans | Comments Off

WP: The secret surveillance of ‘suspicious’ blacks in one of the nation’s poshest neighborhoods

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Luke Ford

Washington Post:

These are questions being asked across the country as people experiment with services that bill themselves as a way to prevent crime, but also expose latent biases. The application “SketchFactor,” which invited users to report “sketchy” people, faced allegations of racism in both the District and New York. Another social network roiled Oakland, Calif., when white residents used Nextdoor.com to cite “suspicious activity” about black neighbors. Taking it even further was GhettoTracker.com, which asked users to rate neighborhoods based on whether they thought they were “safe” or a “ghetto.”
Now “Operation GroupMe” is stirring controversy in Georgetown. In February of last year, the Georgetown Business Improvement District partnered with District police to launch the effort, which they call a “real-time mobile-based group-messaging app that connects Georgetown businesses, police officers and community members.” Since then, the app has attracted nearly 380 users who surreptitiously report on — and photograph — shoppers in an attempt to deter crime.
The correspondence has provided an unvarnished glimpse into Georgetown retailers’ latest effort to stop their oldest scourge: shoplifting. But while the goal is admirable, the result, critics say, has been less so, laying bare the racial fault lines that still define this cobblestoned enclave of tony boutiques and historic rowhouses that is home to many of Washington’s elite.

Comments to the WP:

* Why don’t you tell us the statistics of who is committing crimes in these businesses? That would help us assess whether any group is being unfairly profiled. I imagine that DC police has those statistics readily available for use by journalists and anyone else with a legitimate interest.

* I’m not sure the point of this article. What are the shop owners supposed to do when there is a fight going on in their alley? Not report it because it is black people fighting?

* Go to MPD’s Second District police station. Ask to see the offense reports for shoplifting and theft from the Georgetown area/Wisconsin Ave./M Street. Look at the suspect descriptions for those crimes. Care to take a wild guess what color 95% of them are? The other 5% are hispanic. The police cant be everywhere and these roaming groups of black thugs are stealing those stores blind. So yes, the shop owners need to do something.

* As others have pointed out, what are the facts as to who commits the crimes?

Blacks would help improve their group image if many of them volunteered to help catch and punish their wayward brothers.

* Most shoplifting, otherwise known as larceny, is committed by blacks. If the writer had bothered to do any research, he would have learned this fact. You can weep and wail and complain about racial profiling but those are the facts. Blacks commit crimes of all kinds at a higher rate than any other group. A sad fact, but a fact nonetheless.

* Go to the second district police station. Ask to see the reports involving theft or shoplifting from the Georgetown area-Wisconsin Ave/M Street. Look at the suspect descriptions: 95% black, 5% Hispanic.

* Most of us profile or make some type of judgment about others based on our life experiences in general, and whether the person is a stranger, or someone we know marginally or well. Plus everyone gives off some kind of vibe and you are foolish to ignore it.

A lot of this is common sense and survival. And all of us make judgments about who we want to spend Friday night with.

* I have worked in retail in a similar situation here in Atlanta at an upscale shopping center. Every robbery, car break in’s, assaults were perpetrated by young Black men. This is not rumor – it has been confirmed with videos, eye witnesses and arrest.

Yes, when we see young Black men that fit similar description of the perpetrators of earlier crimes, yes, security is notified immediately and it has probably prevented even a greater number of crimes.

Sorry, but not willing to risk my life in order to be politically correct.

* Let’s be honest here. Whenever you see one of those videos of kids over running a store and stealing items, what color are they? I have yet to see one of white kids doing that stuff.

* It would have been nice for the reporter to take a look at all the shoplifting convictions in Gtown for say the last 5 years, and give us a breakdown of the races committing the crimes. I’m guessing those numbers would not have fit his narrative though. I wouldn’t profile by race. I would profile by the class of the person entering my store. If you have a person with facial tattoos, poorly groomed, dressed poorly, no teeth, and can’t speak English properly then I’ll assume you have no class and are more likely to commit a crime because you probably come from a poorer background. I don’t care if you’re Asian, black, or white.

Posted in Blacks, Crime | Comments Off

Top Twenty NFL Quarterbacks

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* The one thing that most impresses me in a quarterback is his ability to avoid doing something stupid when the game is on the line. It doesn’t even matter so much whether he actually manages to win the game, because that’s often not in his power. But I simply detest quarterbacks who just do something stupid to screw up the game — throwing an interception when there is no need to throw the ball at all, or calling a pass play when a run is obviously called for, or running out of time when a little bit of brains would make it obvious how to avoid doing so, etc. I can live with a quarterback who just misses his receivers sometimes, or lacks a certain amount of athleticism, but I really just can’t deal with quarterbacks who do stupid things. As a fan, it just drives me crazy.

And one thing I’ll say about Tom Brady: he doesn’t do a lot of stupid things, not when it’s important.

There aren’t many other quarterbacks about whom I can say that. For what it’s worth, these kinds of problems seem to be pretty common with black quarterbacks, including Russell Wilson. They make one great play after another, and then they commit some infamous boner. It would drive me out of my gourd if I was rooting for their team.

* It is in the NFL’s interest to keep the majority of quarterbacks white, even if blacks were more suited to the position (they aren’t.) Quarterback is the most high profile position on the team, and arguably the most singularly important. If QB demographics were to suddenly match the rest of the league, it would shatter the illusion that it is an “integrated” sport, and consequently lose a lot of white middle class fans. It would become another basketball or boxing. MMA is overtaking boxing because it is representatively white, and more suited to white abilities. Whether they say it out loud or even admit it to themselves, whites don’t like to watch sports that are completely dominated by nonwhites.

I guarantee NFL executives have had a more coded version of the above conversation on multiple occasions.

* Jason Whitlock, the black sportswriter who likes to say un-black sportswriter things, has pointed out that if the NFL switches to a “black” quarterback system—i.e. a lot more rushing, juking, diving, less emphasis on field general/throwing in complicated systems/drop back and pass—then the quarterback position will diminish.

And , Whitlock isn’t blaming “racism.”

Instead, Whitlock pointed out that the quarterback-as-running-back makes them much easier targets to injure and also, inevitably, will wear out their legs a lot faster than a drop-back-and passer while, simultaneously, making their legs even more important. A drop back passer can have crappy knees, but thanks to his pass protection and rules protecting him in the pocket, a dropback quarterback with poor but manageable knees can get along to his mid-30s or beyond, but a running quarterback will be worn out just from wear and tear.

So Whilock envisions that teams will have 2-3 quarterbacks that they will just rotate into plays—in other words, the same system as the other running backs on the field. So if one gets injured, there’s a couple replacements jumping right in on the next play without any significant drop off. And the other running backs tend to be done by their late 20s.

Whitlock is basically telling blacks that if they clamor for the NFL to change the game to suit them as quarterbacks they will actually diminish their own value. “Shut up and learn the position!”

Of course, what goes unsaid is that blacks largely won’t put the effort in to learn the nuances of the position if they can’t merely physically dominate it. Once in the NFL Michael Vick couldn’t just physically push over his opponents like he did in college, and his “Madden” and ESPN-friendly highlights were belied by his stats. Steve Young had great wheels, but at least learned a system and didn’t abuse them; Tim Tebow, who himself has great wheels, is stubborn like Vick about improving himself (but at least he doesn’t abuse dogs and is nice to the public).

* More glaring than the lack of black persons is the lack of funny black names. I just checked a few rosters going back to 2006. Not a single typical underclass name among a starter. The closest thing was Jameis and Tyrod, but those could be Mormon or Palin names.

By contrast, here are some names from a list of 40 defensive players:

D’Qwell
NaVorro
Reshad
Lavonte
Karlos
Donte
Deone
Ha’Sean Treshon (“Ha Ha”)

* Right now the NFL ideal qb is a tall guy with a missile launcher arm (“He can make all the throws”), and a positronic brain to make all those reads and go through checkdowns in a hurry.

If you run a “spread” offense the throws get a lot easier. Spread is kind of an ambiguous term to me, because it includes things like both Oregon’s offense and Mike Leach’s Air Raid.

But for the part about easier throws, the key is the qb is a threat to run. To me the biggest component of the pro defenses we’ve seen for about 50 years is the ability to double cover. Which is possible because the defense is playing 11 on ten, because the qb is no threat to run.

Remove this restriction and it opens up a lot of things. Obviously the defense can still double cover, but if it does, you leave a gaping weakness in another part of the field.

You really haven’t seen this done in the NFL yet, aside from parts of that one miracle season Tebow had in Denver. San Francisco, Seattle, they’ve used parts of the college playbook, but they haven’t gone full blown with it.

It is pretty standard to say it won’t work in the NFL. I tend to disagree. For a long time I’ve had a scheme like Whitlock’s in mind. Carry a number of qb’s and play all of them.

And trust me, I’d run qb power 40 times in a game until Ray Lewis (or whoever) is a bloody mess.

All these black/white things aside, to me it seems to be the natural evolution of the game at this point. For a number of reasons pro set/I formation teams are really the new “gimmick” teams in college football.

* Black dual-threat quarterbacks have led their teams to the last 3 Superbowls (that’s 400% over-representation). They won one Super Bowl by blowout and were one play away from winning the other two. And when was the last time the college championship did not feature a black quarterback?

* When I started to listen to jazz pianist Art Tatum (in my fifties), I finally figured out why I spent more time playing basketball with black guys when I was in college. Art Tatum was a self-taught genius; his amazing ability was in spontaneous creativity, not rote repetition. His best work was as a soloist; he didn’t work out as well in small groups (Clarinetist Buddy DeFranco said that playing with Tatum was “like chasing a train”). I enjoyed the style of black basketball players; in my own modest way, I was also creative and spontaneous, not to mention self-taught. I hated the rote repetition of playing on basketball teams that tried to run the same plays over and over.

This style of spontaneous creativity works in basketball; it wins games. More importantly to basketball as a spectator sport, it’s way more exciting to watch. One of the reasons that women’s basketball never catches on is that women basically can’t do it (there aren’t any women jazz pianists who do spontaneous performance, as opposed to classical pianists who do rote repetition). When I watched women’s basketball, I thought to myself that they looked like well-coached men’s intramural teams. They look like that because they run plays over and over. It’s inherently boring to watch.

This spontaneous creativity doesn’t work as well in football, because running plays that coordinate the effort of the linemen with the backs with the receivers with the quarterback is the only way to win. There can be individual creativity, but it is subordinated to running organized plays. One obvious place where creativity is treasured by fans is in the (useless) activity of victory dancing, which now takes place after every play. Other areas include hair styling (especially when it protrudes from the helmet), trash talking and tattoos. Of course none of these creative efforts advance the game.

* Maybe fans just didn’t care enough about interceptions back in Namath’s day?

To some extent that was rational since teams weren’t that good at moving downfield reliably, so a turnover on a deep pass wasn’t too much worse than punting.

I can remember around 1969 Roman Gabriel being cited for seldom being intercepted, but it was presented as minor positive side effect to the problem that he threw the ball so hard and with so much spin that his receivers couldn’t hold onto it.

My vague recollection is that the touchdown-interception ratio wasn’t a big deal to football fans in the 1960s-70s. Today, it seems like a really simple, obvious stat, but for some reason I don’t have a lot of old TD-interception ratios stored away in my head.

It seems to me that sheer passing yardage was the glamor stat way back then. Namath’s 4007 in a 14 game season was a big deal, like OJ’s 2003 yards rushing. Namath’s 4000 yard 1967 was an important breakthrough in that it showed you could pass all the time and do pretty well. Nobody broke that mark until Dan Fouts in 1979.

Or maybe the New York Jets had a strategy that once they got close to the end zone they’d always run it in?

In Bill Simmons’ book on the NBA, he found a lot of answers to statistical puzzles like this by reading old Sports Illustrated articles and player autobiographies and watching some old games on Youtube.

* Vick has little short range to middle range accuracy left & doesn’t have the wheels to make the highlight moves he had 10 years ago…but he still is in the top 20% of NFL qb mobility, imo. What he does have is a fucking cannon, and he can sling it (see the Wheaton TD in the 4th quarter).

The problem is 1/ Haley has designed an offense that is short to medium throws that gets the ball to the Steelers myriad of offensive weapons 2/ Big Ben is out until November-ish 3/ Bruce Gradkowski, the original back-up, is out for the year 4/ Landry Jones, the young draft pick from 2014 is not ready. So it became Vick by default in the preseason.

After another failed 3 and out in the middle of the third quarter, both Gruden and Tirico were openly wondering how bad Landry Jones must be to not get in for an inept Vick. But Vick made up for it w/ the bomb to Wheaton (his strength) and a last minute drive where he made a huge 25 yd run up the middle.

He’s a band-aid, and the Steelers were fortunate to get the win against a Chargers team that has 3 replacement level players playing O-Line.

* The key for the running QBs is getting to the point where the brain (I’m supposed to complete a pass!) overrides the instinct (Pressure…Take off!). Wilson has mostly gotten there. Taylor seems to be further along than most expected. Bridgewater averaged less than a yard per carry in college, so he was never a real runner.

Now they’re ready for the second step: the check-down list, an infinitely more difficult process. Some never master it. Some only look for the primary and then take off, leaving them to take the coaching staff’s abuse in the film session about missing those guys waving their hands downfield.

The key to it all is to find the guy who fits what you’re trying to do. Bradshaw’s job was to hand the ball to Franco Harris or Rocky Bleier, while occasionally using his cannon of an arm to throw it to the moon where Lynn Swann or John Stallworth would jump to said moon to pull it in. The offense didn’t run through Bradshaw.

Contrast that to the current wearer of 4 rings, Tom Brady. The entire offense runs through him. He’s had an ever-changing cast of characters lining up at running back not because they have 1,000 yard potential, but because they fit what Belichick is doing, Dion Lewis being the latest example. He’s had a steady supply of slow but precise white guys to throw to, and he’s seems to be able to get at least one of them 100 catches every year. As Steve has pointed out, too, the Patriots are pretty white, and they’re all smart enough to buy into what Belichick is selling.

* The Mel Blount Rule, introduced in 1978, where CB’s could no longer bump and manhandled WRs past five yards clearly helped Bradshaw’s overall passing numbers and helped get him into the HOF. Before ’78 he never had thrown 20TDs in a single season whereas he did for the next four. Its true that for first part of his career Terry was almost an afterthought since pgh had one of the all time greatest defenses in NFL history. All he had to do during that time was manage the game and not blow it.

But he definitely was the difference maker for Super Bowl XIII, the one where Jackie Smith dropped an easily catchable pass in end zone and he was wide open; on one within ten yards of him, so that’s on Smith for not catching an easily thrown pass to tie the game.

But in that game, Bradshaw threw 4 TD passes and had only 1 interception. It was a closely played game all the way til the Smith dropped pass in end zone. Even then he got it done in the end by passing to Swann in end zone for winning score.

Super Bowl XIII provided a glimpse into the future: A predominantly passing league, with higher scoring, with occasional big plays being made on defense.

* Tebow is interesting in that, more than perhaps any other quarterback, his career is a victim of the media age. He’s a lightning rod in the culture wars. Look up the second and third string QBs on active rosters, and even the most skeptical of his ability must admit that he’s a superior option to at least 10 or 15 of them. A sample: Bryce Petty, Kellen Moore, E.J. Manuel, David Fales, Blaine Gabbert, and Checkdown Charlie Whitehurst.

Unfortunately, he’s so popular that as soon as an offense struggles for a couple of games, fans will clamor for “Tebow Time”, and no GM or head coach wants to deal with the hassle. Imagine Tebow backing up Kaepernick right now.

* I recall in 1977 when black QB James Harris was traded to the Chargers from the Rams, San Diego columnist Jarry Magee remarked, “Harris is prone to the big error.”

That was his pattern on the Rams as well.

* Super Bowl XIII. “There’s no telling how the game would have gone if Smith had made the catch. The one thing I’m sure of is, if Pittsburgh had been up by 14 instead of 17 in the middle of the 4th quarter, their defense would have been a little more dialed in for the rest of the game.

Maybe Dallas lost focus after the drop? But if so, that’s on them, not on Jackie Smith.”

The two best defenses of the era (two SB titles for each before the game), two great offensive lines, outstanding QBs, receivers and runners, this was the real, greatest game ever played. Yes, who knows how it progresses if Smith makes the catch and it is 21-21. However, some shit luck came the Cowboys’ way after that drop, and not all of it made by Pittsburgh. A questionable PI penalty, a 3rd down sack of Bradshaw nullified by a questionable delay of game by the Steelers. Top the drive off with Franco’s TD run on which Charlie Waters was screened out by the Umpire, 28-17. Then on the kickoff Roy Gerela slips and squibs the kick right at Randy White, who with his broken hand in a cast, loses the ball and may have recovered the ball, but the refs allow a scrum and a late to the pile Steeler ends up with the ball 20 yards from the end zone. Next play, 35-17. So, yes, it could be argued that the Smith drop set in motion a bunch of bad luck for the Cowboys. I do agree that Bradshaw was outstanding in XIII and even more lights out in SB XIV.

Posted in Blacks, Football | Comments Off

The Big Short

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to the Steve Sailer blog:

* I saw the trailer for the upcoming film of Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short.” It looks like the movie will attribute the surge in demand to blond strippers who own 6 houses.

* Immigrants always have an out that Americans don’t have. And that’s to skedaddle back home to the third world nation they came from:

a) so they can pile up the real estate debt
b) use their homes like ATMs
c) skim from all cash businesses
d) evade most taxes (their mentality is paying taxes is for suckers meaning Americans)
e) employ illegal aliens (from their homeland) at slave wages
f) get SBA loans at preferential rates
…….. THEN when the law is coming down on them, go back home where they have been depositing profits all these years.

How can a native born American compete with this business model?

* That fact that two people called Zhenguo Lin and Yingchun Liu are both teaching at Cal State, Fullerton, is itself a massive indictment of our immigration policies. Is “college professor” now a job Americans won’t do?

Second, there are some good nuggets around Chinese mortgage and tax behavior in this recent New Yorker article on a Chinatown bank. The New Yorker occasionally lets true-facts slip into its reporting, thought it never quite gets to where those facts lead. One tidbit:

“However, unspoken in many discussions about the Chinatown economy is the issue of tax evasion. The under-reporting of income means that the gap between a prospective home buyer’s official income and his or her actual resources can be enormous.”

* Nobody noticed that all of the profs doing the study are Chinese who didn’t even bother to anglicize their names.

Posted in Economics, Immigration | Comments Off

David Brooks: “House Republican Caucus Is Close to Ungovernable”

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: With awareness of Paul Ryan’s Wisconsinan naivete about immigration policy * suddenly threatening his ascent to Speaker of the House, David Brooks complains in the NYT:

The House Republican caucus is close to ungovernable these days.

Personally, I was under the vague impression that in a Constitutional republic, we elect members of the House of Representatives to govern, not to be governed.

Of course, a text search does not find the string “immigra” in Brooks’ column.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* The Roman nobility thought the same way as those arrogant Texans of yours did when they imported the barbarians only to realize later the barbarians owned them. If they’re lucky the Mexicans will keep some of the snobby Texans around as clowns the same way the elite Romans provided entertainment to their barbarian overlords.

Demographics is destiny.

* Why should the blacks work. They are getting more in entitlements than the Mexican laborers are getting in pay.

Just listen to Lucy…

Lucy: “Well, I only pay $50 a month for rent. It’s supposed to be $600 something, so there’s $550 right there. I get $425 a month for food stamps. I get $150 month to pay my electric bill. I get a cell phone and then I get $100 a month paid towards for water.”
Host: “Do you have any kids, Lucy?”
Lucy: “I have three kids.”
Host: “Does your husband work?”
Lucy: “He’ll work every now and then. Part time. But he doesn’t work very much. He doesn’t feel the need for it.”
Host: “Does he get benefits as well?”
Lucy: “Yeah. Those are family benefits.”

Lucy: “I just want to say while workers out there are people like you that are preaching morality at people like me living on welfare, can you really blame us? I mean, I get to sit home, I get to go visit my friends all day, I even get to smoke weed.”

Lucy: “But you know, if somebody offered you a million dollars, no strings attached, would you walk away from it?”

Look at the deal these Cubans (who never even worked or lived in the US ) are getting in Florida.

Posted in Immigration, Republicans | Comments Off

Rabbi Steve Gutow: 4 Things the Jewish Community Needs To Be Called Out On

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Luke Ford

Forward.com: “Rabbi Steve Gutow is outgoing president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. This op-ed is excerpted from his keynote address October 11 to the JCPA Jewish Community Town Hall.”

Our ethics and our texts and our experiences require us to worry about the poor; to demand that Darfuris, Yazidis and Royhingas not be killed and raped and moved from their homes; to insist that immigrants coming to this country as “the other” not be left to die in their oppressive homelands but have a chance here; and to ensure that the environment God gave us not be destroyed.

What about the rights of Europeans to maintain their own cultures? What about gentile rights? Don’t they have a right to determine their own destiny free of interference by outsiders? Don’t they deserve the same ethno-state as Israel? Why should the English and the French and the Australians and the Americans absorb African and Muslim refugees?

Posted in Immigration | Comments Off

Is Race Biological?

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

I love the links that the Editors give for the “repeatedly “”disproven” idea that race exists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/22/science/do-races-differ-not-really-genes-show.html?pagewanted=all

This is a cutting edge article from 2000 in that famous scientific publication, the NY Times.

But, we are given a link to a much more up to date article from that other great scientific journal, Newsweek (are they still in business?)

http://www.newsweek.com/there-no-such-thing-race-283123

In this article, the author begs the question by conflating the notion of “race” with “subspecies” and declaring that since there are no human subspecies, so “race” does not exist.

We know that all dogs, from the chihuahua to the Great Dane, are all just a type of wolf with “minor” genetic differences between breeds (and that all of this variation arose in just the last 40,000 years), and yet we see that these minor genetic differences are enough to create vast differences in appearance, size, behavior, intelligence, etc. As long as we are willing to accept that a Yorkshire Terrier and a St. Bernard are exactly the same thing, then race in humans doesn’t exist either. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

So it’s all a clever semantic game – you define “race” to mean exactly what you want it to mean and then you can define it into non-existence.

* Interestingly, the author of this story is Emma Maier (she uses a pseudonym for her first name in the article), identifies as being on the autistic spectrum, and is not backing down (yet):

“I absolutely do not agree with the decision to remove and/or apologize for the articles, for they were not racist or eugenicist in any way,” she said. “The only violation they executed was to be a dissenting opinion away from Brown’s radical and politically left-wing student groups.”

…

“I do not think I need to apologize, either for myself or the Herald, nor will I,” she said. “I committed no transgression, as an opinion writer, and the Herald committed no transgression in deciding my articles were appropriate to print.”

* If biological race doesn’t exist, that’s news to doctors. We even have different units of measurement for kidney health/filtration rate based on whether the patient is Black or not.

http://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-communication-programs/nkdep/lab-evaluation/gfr/estimating/Pages/estimating.aspx

The following is the IDMS-traceable MDRD Study equation (for creatinine methods calibrated to an IDMS reference method):

GFR (mL/min/1.73 m2) = 175 × (Scr)-1.154 × (Age)-0.203 × (0.742 if female) × (1.212 if African American)

Lest anyone accuse me of cherry picking, this is one of many, many such points in medicine where race/ethnicity enters into medical diagnostics.

* What does the Brown Biology Department think of this?

In particular, this guy, “David M. Rand Stephen T. Olney Professor of Natural History, Chair of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology”

https://vivo.brown.edu/display/drand

Most of his work has been with animals, but here is a paper he coauthored which shows he knows about human genomics:

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/14448794_Rand_D._M.__Kann_L._M._Excess_amino_acid_polymorphism_in_mitochondrial_DNA_contrasts_among_genes_from_Drosophila_mice_and_humans._Mol._Biol._Evol._13_735-748

Also, this guy “Thomas Roberts Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Vice Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology”

https://vivo.brown.edu/display/troberts

studies the biomechanics of human running and might have an opinion on the demographics of Olympic medalists….

And this guy “Daniel M. Weinreich Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Co-Director of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Graduate Program”

https://vivo.brown.edu/display/dweinrei

wrote this paper which looks like an important theoretical buttress for Cochran and Harpending’s work:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16050095

However the rising star in that department, who specializes in human population genetics, is this lady: “Sohini Ramachandran Assistant Professor of Biology”

https://vivo.brown.edu/display/sr33

This year she published this paper, “A comparison of worldwide phonemic and genetic variation in human populations”

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/5/1265.full.pdf_1

which is a densely detailed and very solid article (as is typical for PNAS papers) that she was the principal investigator for (her vitae entry for the paper says “SR is the PI of this project, conceived of the study with MR and MWF, designed the research with NC and MWF, prepared and analyzed the linguistic data with NC, and wrote the paper with input from all authors.”).

I hope she has tenure already! Here is her vitae:

https://vivo.brown.edu/docs/s/sr33_cv.pdf?dt=074710073

any iSteve readers at Brown ought to look her up and ask her what she thinks of this controversy and the idea that race has no basis in biology. As an (Asian) Indian woman, she’s immunized against automatic dismissals of her as racist, so she ought to speak up.

(By the way, the cited paper says “phonemic” and it’s not a typo for “phenomic” which would have been even more interesting….)

* In addition to the Saudis behaving badly in Beverly Hills, five Arabs (perhaps all Saudi?) have been arrested in just the past week on sexual assault charges.

Four Johnson & Wales University students charged in sexual assault

Gypsy cab driver sexually assaults woman in Austin

But lets take in a million Syrians! If we get a North African/Middle Eastern demographic on the census form, crime statistic demographic categorization ought to follow suit.

* Here’s a link to a map that Razib Khan reposted a couple of weeks back. It shows the astonishing correspondence between the genetics of Europeans and the physical geography of Europe. Of course, similar patterns can be seen on a global scale, looking at the genomes of the major human races.

Meanwhile, “The Herald said ‘The white privilege of cows,’ published Oct. 5, relied on the incorrect notion that biological differences exist between races.”

Are our lyin’ eyes being misled by the faulty Principal Components Analysis? Perhaps the isolated DNA contains the corruption. Maybe the test tubes themselves are the source of this sinfulness.

Because the people from whom the blood was taken are identically the same. To each other, and to every other human that has ever lived, or ever will.

* As all the commenters attest, it really does seem absurd. But is that because we’re witnessing the collapse of an ideology? Steve had a post last week titled, “Gradually, then Suddenly,” about how consequential changes seem to hover in a steady state for a while, then become overwhelming. Today, that contemptible “editorial note” certainly appears as nothing less than the expression of a totalitarian instinct; but will it reveal itself down the road as the final grasping at straws of a once regnant, but now dying, ideology?

I wonder what the the lifespan is for ideas that have run aground on the hostile shore of reality. (Soviet Communism had a run of 70 years.) Certainly, a lot of bad ideas have persisted for long periods in history; if they’re mostly inconsequential to living (like theories of the afterlife or the origins of the universe), they can persist for a very long time. And of course in isolated environments faulty ideas can go on indefinitely. It’s ironic that the university has shown itself to be just such a cloister where outmoded orthodoxies are nourished and can thrive–like the Easter Island of our culture.

* The reality is that the “peoples of Europe” (however one wants to define them), expanded, enriched themselves, and expanded all over the globe. They brought various negatives with them, but they also brought all of the benefits of applied European technology, including the very medium we are communicating in, but also: printing, mechanical power via steam, combustion, and nuclear, electricity, public health, decisive conquest of the problems of disease, famine, and reproduction, a doubling or tripling of longevity, and many other benefits, not the least of which was a moral earnestness towards self-correction that would have seemed completely bizarre to the non-Europeans that were conquered.

That is the reality. So then the question is why. Various explanations were offered, but the one offered in the article(s), namely, environmental happenstance, is surely the mildest conceivable. The only possible alternative is to claim that the Colonial Project (let’s call it that) was a “Bad Thing”, which is absurd. One can say, and she does, and so does everyone else, that this particular rose had a thorn, or two, or more, but I don’t see how anyone could argue that the present status of the human beings in the Americas is not far better by any possible metric than what it was before the Europeans arrived.

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What can we do as Orthodox Jews to drive massage parlors out of our neighborhood?

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Luke Ford

My FFB friend says: “Flood them with so many dirty Jews, they will be repulsed, and leave forever! Let the rabbis lead the way…”

Luke: “Does it hurt your davening that there’s a whorehouse next door?”

Friend: “It gives me something to pray for.”

Luke: “Should we be praying for sex workers that they find a life of dignity?”

Friend: “Of course, what else would a frum married man be thinking? I don’t even know other women exist. If you only knew how perfect it is to be married!”

Luke: “Are these Asians massage girls doing jobs that Americans won’t do or are they taking our jobs and threatening marriages?”

“When a man can get a good Asian handjob for $80, does that reduce his dependence on his wife?”

Friend: “I think it reduces the frustration, and makes a better and happier world.”

Luke: “Marriage is frustrating?”

Friend: “Not for me. But for many Jewish men, yes. Just imagine if everybody came to shul smiling.”

“I think we, like the police, should leave massage parlors alone. It’s better than people having affairs or harassing women. If it’s wrong, God will punish them. For the most part you can barely tell that they are there. Only when the clientele become unruly, loud or obnoxious should police step in. I’m sure there are a couple thousand massage parlors in LA county, and the police know all about them. Big deal.”

Luke: “How do we get a cut from every tug to support yeshivas?”

Friend: “That’s a genius fundraiser.”

From Vice magazine: As a result, federal and local law enforcement agencies still know very little about the way that Asian massage parlors operate, except that the networks are highly organized and adept at stashing their money. Officials quoted in the study described a nationwide network of massage-parlor operators who bring women into Flushing, Queens, or Los Angeles, and then rotate them through various AMPs in Atlanta, Seattle, Denver, and across the Midwest.

“We’ve seen cases where a woman is quite popular with the clientele; then they will transfer her to a different spa depending on what events are going on in that city,” one federal law enforcement agent in Atlanta said in the report. “[In] Dallas, they are home to the Dallas Cowboys, the big stadium there, and if they have some event there they’ll transfer their money earners to those clubs. Whereas Atlanta has the SEC championship going on, they’ll have more girls come here.”

Meanwhile, the money earned by the parlors is eventually wired overseas, making the networks difficult to trace. “The question…, and I don’t know the answer to this, is, How organized is the system across all of the cities?” said one Dallas law enforcement official. It’s a “very similar scheme you can see across all of the major cities around the country. Then the money goes back and we can pretty much get it to Hong Kong, but we’re not going to get it to China.”

And clearly, the business model is working. Without any real law enforcement action to crack down on erotic massage parlors, AMPs are continuing to multiply, expanding their tentacles into untapped markets of mongers. “Guys get horny and know they can roll into an AMP and get a known quantity,” Spanky explained. It’s “not rocket science. Where there is demand there are always enterprising people willing to provide a service.”

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Voting Republican For Israel

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Luke Ford

J.J. Goldberg writes: Today you’re invited to join me in a thought experiment. Assume for a moment that you’re the sort of American voter who puts Israel’s safety and welfare first when deciding how to vote. Let’s go further and assume that you don’t believe the American government should be dictating Israel’s policies, but should project American power to deter Israel’s and America’s shared enemies. (If you already feel that way you can still join the experiment with the rest of us.)
Got it? Now, let’s take a hard look at America’s two political parties. Consider the Republican Party, where forthright devotion to Israel is a prerequisite for mounting a presidential candidacy. Then consider the Democratic Party, whose last national convention in 2012 erupted in shouting on the floor when the leadership forced through a platform amendment endorsing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Those aren’t random examples. Surveys over the last decade have shown a steadily widening gap between the two parties in their levels of support for Israel. The Pew Research Center in July 2014 found self-described Republicans sympathizing with Israel over the Palestinians by 77% to 6%, while Democrats’ numbers were 44% and 18%. The two parties had been fairly similar until just after 2000, when Republican support began rising steadily while Democrats remained stable. The parties are similarly split on military spending , defending allies , supporting the United Nations and similar issues. Democrats are moderately in favor of projecting American power around the world, but Republicans are much more so.
So if you’re worried about protecting Israel, it’s a no-brainer, right?

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Women In Tech

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Women aren’t interested in tech the way guys are and are still slaves to fashion in professions where talent counts for everything. So of course men won’t take them seriously, really if they are concerned about dressing sexy, they aren’t focusing on the job but trying to catch a man(usually a management type – more prestige for the woman). Geeks know this. This is why geeks distrusts guys in suits. They know suits are tech stupid and treacherous.

Really if a woman wants to be taken seriously, stop obsessing over how to dress and focus on the work, not socializing.

As for dating all standard rules apply. Women are looking either for a senior management or engineer type as dating material. Problem they are generally taken. They will not date a equal so it forces them out and trying to meet guys from the humanities. The male humanity majors know you never date a woman scientist because 1) They are much smarter than you and will become contemptuous of her doltish boyfriend quite rapidly. 2) The guy will either be unemployed or making minimum wage. 3) STEM women aren’t exactly the sort of woman a man wants as well. Some are married to their job, others are ice princesses with all the femininity of a block of iron.

And they will not date a bluecollar even he makes a lot more than her because he’s at the bottom of the status totem pole society wise.

* There’s also a shift in types of IQ, with women having higher verbal IQ (is anyone surprised?) and men having higher mathematical and spatial IQ.

The female verbal IQ advantage results in better social skills, which are an advantage in most other areas in life. But that’s not good enough for them…as long as there’s one area men are ahead, there’s a problem.

* That’s only one factor. Another is that women, including the ones who score high on IQ tests, are much more interested in the human, interpersonal world, than in facts, figures or logic. Since this difference has been observed in all cultures and in all time periods that left records, it’s very likely that it’s a biological difference.

* I graduated in 1969 with a BA in physics and mathematics from a very prominent university (ranked among the top ten graduate math programa at the time). There were a fair number of young women in both the math and physics programs and those that could hack it did well and graduated. Many went on to graduate school and succesful careers in physics. The young women who had the capability were respected and treated as colleagues by faculty and their fellow students. Those that didn’t have the capability dropped out of physics and math sooner or later. The same wsas true of their male colleagues.

I have a very strong suspicion that Pollack dropped out of her science major either because she couldn’t hack it or because she lost interest in the amount of intellectual effort that most need to succeed at these fields. Those who are drawn to a STEM major in college don’t usually like to admit that the field is beyond their capabilities unless forced to. I speak from observation and personal experience. I found that at least at the undergraduate level – say through advanced real analysis, complex analysis, abstract algebra through, e.g., Galois theory, and fundamental point set and algebraic topolgy — everything came pretty easily for those with some minimal talent in the field. I left math after a brief foray into graduate work where I found that a great deal more effort was required for success than I had theretofore experienced. But I did complete a Ph.D. in a math oriented field with a thesis that involved some moderately advanced mathematical analysis.

* No, Asians are neither vibrant nor diverse.

This has been another edition of easy answers to easy questions.

But anyways, the holy commandments of diversity have been handed down by the NRC and they are not to be questioned.

Kid of Argentine immigrants, Diverse
Kid Italian immigrant, not diverse
kid of japanese parents born and lived a few years in Brazil came to the U.S., diverse
japanese immigrant kid to the U.S., not diverse

Phillipino or Vietnamese immigrant kids, Not Diverse
Yemeni, not diverse.
Ethiopian immigrant’s kids, diverse.
Samoan immigrant kid, not diverse

Those who violate or question these commandments will be exiled from the cathedral.

* I never see any women garbage collectors.

I also never see any women demanding to be given jobs as garbage collectors.

* The federal government recognizes Asians as a protected class of diversity.

As a result, Asians receive some privileges of diversity, including:

1. Preferential US immigration, citizenship, and asylum policies for Asian people
2. 8a set-aside government contracts for Asian owned businesses
3. Affirmative Action for Asians especially in government jobs
4. Government anti-discrimination laws for Asians
4. Government hate speech prosecutions for Asians
5. Sanctuary cities for Asians, and other protected classes
6. Asian espionage directed at the US is very common
7. American policy allows mass importation of Asian products built with slave wage standards

Diversity theory rationalizes Asian privileges because it claims Asians are eternally oppressed by occidentals.

* There is no real problem with women in engineering (STEM careers) in Silicon Valley. It’s just that they are Indian and Chinese women. That’s because there is no diversity problem in silicon valley engineering. Eyeballing, it’s pretty much something like >80% Indian and Chinese. A lot of the remainder are Russians, Arabs, from the Balkans, stuff like that. So if “diversity” means “not heritage white”, SV has arrived.

I’d guess something like 20% to 40% of the Indians, for example, are female. As with non-Indian programmers/engineers, as soon as they have kids they do tend to target management or QA over programming. That’s mostly a matter of simple time management and ability to schedule, compared to development.

The ironic thing is many of these people are no longer from US universities. At one time it was typical that they would be. No more. No, the real problem now for Yale and Harvard is the big silicon valley tech firms are not hiring nearly as many US programmers from the big name US schools. They are getting a lot of their US programmers in SV direct from the IITs, little colleges in Mumbai and Pune, that sort of thing. The Yales, Harvards, and even to some extent MITs and Stanfords are being shut out, except at the highest level. At the ugrad level, the big companies are going for “good enough, as cheap as possible”.

I think women, white women in particular, when they are ugrads are sharp enough to catch on to what’s happening. Talking to their friends a few grades above them, that sort of thing. If the large companies that women used to look to for secure jobs are preferentially hiring Indians and Chinese, doesn’t it make sense for a white women at Harvard to do something else? Why fight the system?

People that don’t get around silicon valley much might not get this. If you haven’t seen what’s happened so fast in the engineering side of big multinationals it’s hard to believe.

* “a lower variance in IQ”

That’s why there are very, very few girls at the self-driving car team at Google and the network throughput switch design team at Twitter and the Artificial-Intelligence sentiment analysis team at Facebook and the Stanford Computer Science Department and the camera sensor processing optimization team at Apple.

But that level of technical work is a sliver of the profession. Most computer tech jobs require an IQ around 110 or 115 and women exist in equal numbers to men in that range.

But the website for your local insurance salesman and the accounting program at your local small-time law firm are run 90% by men. The guy who maintains the computer network at your doctor’s office is a guy. Those jobs can be done well by anyone smart enough to get a B+ average at community college.

So there’s a lot more to it than IQ variance.

* Undergraduate CS curriculums have become a lot more rigorous, cognitively demanding and theoretically oriented in the past 30 years. Some of this is a response to increased student demand for those departments, so the weed out factor has been upped, particularly in intro classes. CS programs now have 50% or higher dropout rates. Whereas 30 years ago the degree was more about learning simple programming, today knowing how to program is expected upon entry so the courses can focus on complex and mathematically intensive subjects.

Some of this is also driven by the changing nature of the field. There’s been a proliferation of languages, tools, libraries and frameworks. Most of these advances have comparatively favored the highly intelligent. They allow superstar developers to leverage highly abstract patterns to solve entire classes of problem in a single solution, through a highly reductionist non-intuitive and at sometime alien approaches.

Circa 1980 programming in COBOL on a large corporate mainframe system was closer to being an accountant. Yes, it required a definite above average intelligence. But more important was a high degree or organization, rigidly structured thinking, and the ability to meticulously follow rules and manuals. Nowadays programming a bleeding-edge distributed Scala system with a NoSQL backend and a machine learning inference engine is closer to the mental complexity of theoretical physics.

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