After Many Generations, Mexicans Still Not Prospering in SoCal

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

We are supposed to imagine that the vast immigration from Mexico to America is an investment in our future. But in Greater Los Angeles, where the future already has happened, the median Mexican family has set aside $0.00 in liquid assets and $5,000 in nonliquid assets.

A publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco about the Los Angeles Metropolitan Statistical Area (population 13 million, or pretty much everybody within a 90 minute drive of downtown LA) shows that Mexicans aren’t really working out.

The Color of Wealth in Los Angeles

Melany De La Cruz-Viesca
Zhenxiang Chen
Paul M. Ong
Darrick Hamilton
William A. Darity Jr.

A Joint Publication of Duke University, The New School, the University of California, Los Angeles and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development

… White households in Los Angeles have a median net worth of $355,000. In comparison, Mexicans and U.S. blacks have a median wealth of $3,500 and $4,000, respectively. Among nonwhite groups, Japanese ($592,000), Asian Indian ($460,000), and Chinese ($408,200) households had higher median wealth than whites. All other racial and ethnic groups had much lower median net worth than white households—African blacks ($72,000), other Latinos ($42,500), Koreans ($23,400), Vietnamese ($61,500), and Filipinos ($243,000).

 Racial and ethnic differences in net worth show the extreme financial vulnerability faced by some nonwhite households. U.S. black and Mexican households have 1 percent of the wealth of whites in Los Angeles—or one cent for every dollar of wealth held by the average white household in the metro area. Koreans hold 7 percent, other Latinos have 12 percent, and Vietnamese possess 17 percent of the wealth of white households.

 The median value of liquid assets for Mexicans and other Latinos is striking, zero dollars and only $7, respectively, whereas, the median value of liquid assets for white households was $110,000. This not only implies possible financial hardship in the long term, but it also makes short-term financial disruption much more likely.

 Japanese households had by far the highest median total value of assets at $595,000. Asian Indians ($460,000), Chinese ($408,500), and white households ($355,000) were also among those with high median values of total assets. Filipino and African black households fall in the middle of the distribution—$243,000 and $152,000 respectively. Median total asset values for all other racial and ethnic groups were significantly lower—U.S. black ($30,000), Mexican ($5,000), other Latino ($43,000), Korean ($28,400), and Vietnamese ($40,000) households. The data reveal an astounding racial wealth divide in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

 Mexicans were the least likely to be banked and most likely to lack financial savings. In the NASCC sample, Mexicans (47.1 percent), other Latinos (54.6 percent), U.S. blacks (68.1 percent), and Vietnamese (54.8 percent) are far less likely to own checking accounts than white (90.1 percent) and Japanese (93.3 percent) households. Mexicans, other Latinos, and Vietnamese also owned savings accounts at a lower rate than white households—39.8 percent of Mexicans, 44 percent of other Latinos, and 37.4 percent of Vietnamese owned a savings account compared with 71.9 percent of whites. Fifty-six percent of U.S. black and 57.8 percent of Korean households held a savings account.

 Wealth differentials across racial groups in the Los Angeles NASCC survey are far more pronounced than income differentials. White households (40.7 percent) were far more likely to hold assets in stocks, mutual funds, and investment trusts. Only 18 percent of African black, 21.5 percent of U.S. blacks, 7.6 percent of Mexicans, 7.3 percent of other Latinos, 23.6 percent of Korean, and 9.9 percent of Vietnamese owned stocks, mutual funds, or other investments or trusts. The percentage of Chinese, Japanese and Asian Indian that have these types of financial assets was much higher when compared with whites—48.8 percent, 60.8 percent, and 58.6 percent, respectively.

The racial and ethnic disparity is large across all asset types and even larger across private retirement assets. Sixty-four percent of white households have an IRA or private annuity compared with 8.2 percent of other Latino, 15 percent of Mexican, and 17.7 percent of Vietnamese households. Japanese, Filipino, African black, and Chinese households were also likely to own an IRA although at lower rates than whites—62.3 percent, 55.6 percent, 48.5 percent, and 48.3 percent, respectively. The nonwhite groups less likely to own an IRA included Koreans (27 percent), U.S. black households (37.9 percent), and Asian Indians (38.6 percent). The results suggest that many households, especially black, Latino, and some Asian ones, would have virtually no financial assets of their own at retirement if not for federal insurance provided by the Social Security program.

Emphasis mine.

COMMENTS:

* Even George Lopez can tell you Mexicans are not prospering in Southern California. He said even though he is wealthy, he still gets mistaken for a lower class blue collar guy because not many affluent white collar Los Angelenos racially look like him. He used an example of when he was taking a walk in his upper class neighborhood and one of his White Gringo neighbors who just recently moved into the area, approached him and asked him if he paints houses and how much does he charge.

* He should have felt honored that someone took him for an honest worker.

An honest worker sells his skill for a reasonable market rate. This implies both self respect and knowing about one’s worth in the more general scheme of things i.e. being worldly.

Mastering a skill demonstrates that an individual has placed themselves in a subordinate position with respect to tradition and the Laws of Nature; has overcome their childish self-centeredness and allowed themselves to be influenced and guided by the way the world is and the way more experienced people have learned to do the world.

To have been regarded as such is to have been respected at the most fundamental level.

* Texas cultural nationalism is a (so far) successful response to diversity.

* I live in The Bay Area which has a large Filipino population. You will be surprised at how many Filipinos have high paying government jobs.

When it comes to yearly average household income, Filipinos in The U.S punch well above their weight when you factor in that they tend to be a low IQ ethnic group.

* The one thing that does ring plausible is blacks having no money for their retirements. I have seen the way they blow their paychecks and the garbage they spend it on. That is a feature of poor impulse controls and no ability for delayed gratification.

* Regarding the Vietnamese, they don’t trust banks. Knew a woman that owned a Nail shop and had a little over a million distributed within her extended family. They also tended to buy land back home. Keyword being home.

They also have an attitude of why not game the gibsmedat system like the inferior ethnicities. If it’s not going to be them some black or Latin will happily take it.

Welcome to tribal America.

* Mexicans having no money for their retirement is plausible as well. Mexicans don’t exactly have the cheap frugal spending habits of Jews and the Scottish.

That is why you can have 20 Mexicans living under one roof all with jobs, dividing the rent among them and they are still living paycheck to paycheck.

* These statistics show the rather impressive degree that Southern California has expelled its low-end black population.

50% of black households in Southern California have more than $200 in their bank account and $30,000 in assets. 37.9% of black SoCal households even have IRAs! I can assure you that is not the case in most of the rest of the USA. Importantly, IRAs are not set up by employers, they are something people with strong future time orientation and sufficient intelligence to set them up and fund them do on their own.

A majority of Mexican households here do not have a single member with a bank account.

They still largely work, pay rent, etc so have to store at home and sometimes carry around lots of cash. This means they are much better robbery and burglary targets than whites and asians, who do not carry around much cash since they have credit and debit cards. And of course they are physically smaller and less likely to own a gun and less likely to call the police, both because of immigration issues and because many have outstanding warrants, most often for petty offenses.

* Here in San Francisco Hispanics make up only 15 percent of the population, but they make up 95 percent of San Franciscans who cash their checks at cash checking stores instead of banks, lol.

Seriously go to any cash checking store here and you will overwhelmingly see Latin American looking phenotypes and overwhelmingly hear Spanish being spoken.

“They still largely work, pay rent, etc so have to store at home and sometimes carry around lots of cash. This means they are much better robbery and burglary targets than whites and asians,”

Here in The Bay Area it is a lot more common for Blacks to rob Asians at gunpoint rather than Hispanics.

A lot of Hispanic men in The Bay Area are bad ass alpha males, especially the ones with lots of tattoos because of the gang culture here. They are the ones who riot when The Giants win the World Series.

Asians in The Bay Area are easier targets for robbery, especially since a lot of Han Chinese here are older than The 10 Commandments. The Bay Area attracts a lot dirt old as hell Han Chinamen.

Dindu Nuffins here love committing arm robbery against old Chinos.

* Of course, for any society, capital formation/savings/fixed investment etc, and the very closely related phenomenon of per capita income are the fundamental distinguishes between whether the state is lovely chocolate box whiteopia such as Switzerland – or a the world’s biggest outdoor cess-pit such as Bangladesh. The difference between chicken salad and chicken shit, as one Californian wag put it.

These appalling statistics – contra to the crap that The Economist peddles – seem to indicate that third world populations still act as third world populations once given first world opportunities.
What this presages for the future is obvious.

* There are some factors to keep in mind when looking at this set of data:

1. Population sizes are wildly different. For example, Mexicans are a whopping 32% of the L.A. MSA. Koreans are only 1%. I have not looked at the data in detail, but I suspect sampling accuracy is probably highly variable depending on population size.

2. Immigration (self-) selectivity also varies significantly. For example, immigrants from India tend to be highly selected for professional qualifications. Immigrants from Mexico are not. Korean immigrants of the past were more like Indian immigrants – mostly professionals and entrepreneurs. Today, South Korea is a first world country with one of the best “Human Development” indices (consistently top 20) in the world. Aside from academic immigrants, the bulk of the declining number of Korean immigrants are probably not the “best of the lot.” Highly qualified Koreans tend to stay put – there is little if any benefit for them to move to the United States.

3. The data are for the L.A. MSA only. With small populations such as Koreans, their stats will very wildly depending on geographic locations. My suspicion is that the L.A. probably contains a disproportionately high percentage of economically underperforming Korean population (e.g. seniors, “fresh off the boat,” etc.). I would bet that an economically more dynamic area, say, north of Dallas (Plano-Frisco) or Northern Virginia (Fairfax) has a much greater concentration of successful Koreans.

4. The national economic numbers of the various ethnic groups are probably very different. For example, the Manhattan Institute has been studying major immigrants groups and their assimilation rates for many years now. Its assimilation index has three components: economic, cultural, and civic. The economic portion is described by the study as follows:

Economic assimilation describes the extent to which immigrants, or groups of immigrants, make productive contributions to society indistinguishable in aggregate from the contributions of the native-born. Economic assimilation is low when immigrants cluster at certain points on the economic ladder—most notably, the low-skilled rungs—and high when their distribution on the economic ladder matches that of native-born Americans.

According to its 2013 report, the economic assimilation indices for some of the immigrant groups under discussion are as follow for the year 2011 (100 = perfect assimilation)

Chinese: 90
Filipinos: 100
Indians: 97
Japanese: 100
Koreans: 100
Mexicans: 65

Mexicans not only perform extremely poorly compared to Asian immigrants, but they also lag at or near the bottom among Hispanic immigrants. And given their very low upward mobility through the generations (they have extremely high dropout rates from colleges, for example), it’s not a surprise that their generational wealth transfer is likely extremely low.

Posted in Blacks, California, Latino, Los Angeles, Mexicans | Comments Off on After Many Generations, Mexicans Still Not Prospering in SoCal

Steve Sailer: Washington Subway Falling Apart Due to Anti-white Discrimination

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Luke Ford

How would you like an affirmative action doctor? Seven out of eight black doctors got affirmative action to get into medical school. They averaged lower scores than whites who were rejected from medical school.

Steve Sailer: From the Washington Post today:

Metro threatened with shutdown unless ‘urgent action’ is taken

Citing a botched response to a fire on Thursday, the Federal Transit Administration issued a series of emergency directives and threatened to shut down all or parts of the nation’s second-busiest subway.

By Robert McCartney 2 hours ago

From the Washington Times in March 2012:

Metro derailed by culture of complacence, incompetence, lack of diversity
‘Inept get promoted, … capable get buried’

By Luke Rosiak – The Washington Times – Monday, March 26, 2012
First of three parts

Ninety-seven percent of the bus and train operators at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority are black, with only six white women out of more than 3,000 drivers, according to Metro documents — a lack of diversity at one of the region’s largest employers that has led to an acknowledgment of failure in affirmative-action documents and spawned a series of lawsuits.

The homogeneity, interviews with dozens of current and former Metro workers indicated, is a proxy to a clubby culture of favoritism in which merit has little to do with promotions, and accountability, such as noting safety violations, is a career death knell. In typical examples, court and Metro records show, a black man who spent eight years in prison for dealing PCP was promoted to a high-level management position soon after his release, and whites in the same positions as blacks with far less seniority are inexplicably paid less.

With Metro’s budget chronically strained and reports of mismanagement coming more regularly than trains, interviews and internal records depict a likely root: an environment in which hardworking employees are actively excluded and those who rise are those willing to do the bare minimum — never causing a stir by flagging rampant safety violations, reporting malfeasance or proposing improvements.

“When the accident happened in 2009, I called a supervisor and said, ‘Is this the one we all dreaded?’ The way workers do their jobs, we all knew it was a matter of time. … The inept get promoted, and the capable get buried. Smart people were put in the corner, ostracized and given nothing to do,” said Christine Townsend, who sued Metro for discrimination and won.

It is a culture in which a white male engineer near completion of a Ph.D. was passed over for a management position in favor of a black man who was barely literate, multiple staffers said.

“The average rider wouldn’t believe the things that go on. There are so many easy things we could do to make the system better,” a station manager said. “But they’d never put me in charge because they know I’d make sure others actually did their jobs. They don’t want change. It’s go along to get along.”

Metro is a quasi-public agency that receives funding from the federal government, Maryland, Virginia and local jurisdictions to operate a regional bus and rail transportation system in the national capital area, but is not beholden to rules that apply to fully governmental entities. With a $2.5 billion operating and capital budget for fiscal 2012, Metrorail serves 86 stations and has 106 miles of track, while Metrobus serves the nation’s capital with 1,500 buses.

Metro’s affirmative-action plan notes that the 1.4 percent of its bus and train operators who are Hispanic and the 25 percent who are female of any race are “less than reasonably expected.” It does not make note of the 1.5 percent who are white.

COMMENTS:

* The DC Metro has always been terrible. Like most government planned and built things, it was poorly planned and built from its inception, with the stations in bad locations that don’t correspond to market demand, badly designed for accommodating passenger traffic, etc. The fares are also very expensive, despite it being a government/quasi-government concern with federal and state funding. And like most government programs, it became a quasi jobs program for blacks and incompetents. It wasn’t so bad since it wasn’t used that much until The War on Terror and the Obama years increased government spending and employment and ridership, as well as the Dems trying to get more people to use public transit.

* Who runs Riker’s Island, the NYC jail that’s a disgrace?

* This is increasingly the reality in all the big western cities as the native blue collar population are erased – the new people hire their relatives and the average competence goes down and everything starts to slowly crumble.

* Haiti now has only 2% forest cover, and has lost virtually all of its topsoil, making it impossible to grow food, and causing widespread drought. As such, a staple of Haitian culture has become its dependence on imports for 93% of its food, and Haiti’s resultant poverty.

Meanwhile, it’s neighbor, the dominican republic, enjoys lush vegetation, and a functioning agricultural model. This is why dominicans purge blacks from their country from time to time, as well as resist any meaningful immigration by blacks into their country.

The Bell Curve of African intelligence generally precludes them from being functional amongst themselves in a modern society. Although there are successful Africans in America, they most often occupy the right side of the Bell Curve, or are assisted by others to be functional. Africans on the right side of the curve will always be undermined by the majority low IQ of their race in the middle and left side of the curve. Any social plans that don’t recognize this is doomed to fail each and every time.

Collectively, Blacks must generally work at menial jobs, or become angry, frustrated parasites on advanced nations. They don’t have the ability to make a choice.

This is why either allowing blacks to try to run a complicated subway system, or Obama importing blacks by the score, is madness. We should severely limit black immigration, and qualify those we allow in, and just work with what we have for the next few generations. Offering government grants for having submitting to sterilization would be a great start, as well as giving tax breaks to interracial couples.

Black bodies continue to pile up. Blacks who still have a breath in them are too often leading pointless lives, and are very unhappy. The grand experiment has failed. It’s time to clean up the horrible mess.

* Anything that is 97% black is going to be dysfunctional.

* Yes, the NYC subway is more crowded and dirtier. But that’s because it’s a very good and practical and economical public transit system. It’s the best and most practical way to get around NYC. Part of the reason the DC subway functions relatively smoothly and is clean is that it’s not as practical or effective for getting around DC and the DC area as the NYC subway is for getting around NYC, and it’s expensive.

* Worked for 6 months in DC @ George Washington Hospital as contract nurse in the ER. Lived 2 stops on the metro from work did not bring a car with me from TX. If the trains had running on time and the passengers not been so rude and disruptive this would have been great. I came to the conclusion after one month of using the metro theft it was a Jobs Program for Retarded Criminal African Americans and I was right.

* Operating a train on a grade-separated metro system like the one in Washington is the definition of a cushy job. The computers basically drive the trains on their own, and the operator is really only there as a backup.

It’s pretty corrupt to direct all those jobs to blacks, but ultimately doesn’t have much an effect on the operation of the system.

Does anyone have numbers on the percentage of the mechanics and maintenance crew that are black? If the difficult work of maintaining the railcars, the tracks, the signaling and electrical equipment has been turned into a black patronage machine, then it’s surprising the system runs at all.

* Nothing works in DC, including the Metro, because it is essentially a Black-run city. For those old enough to remember him, Marion Barry exemplifies the model for competence, leadership, and management in DC … a welfare culture that is corrupt to the core. As the Washington Post once stated, “To understand the District of Columbia, one must understand Marion Barry.”

The Metro is just one more tick mark on the long list of public-funded programs in DC run into the ground (three other examples are the educational system, public works programs, and summer jobs program for youth). I can’t see a meaningful recovery scenario for the Metro or anything else in DC. Throwing money at the problem doesn’t work due to the culture. It is throwing money down a rathole.

* This is the type of expose the Washington Post would normally be all over but I’ve never seen even a hint that affirmative action or culture have anything to do with it.

I know people that work in Metro’s finance department & it’s also black run. Consequently it’s a mess. I know of a white colleague that applied for a job there. He didn’t get an interview He doesn’t however know the reason he didn’t get it is because the Caribbean manager was racist. When he received his resume from a mutual ex-colleague the manager asked if he was black or white. When informed he said he didn’t want a white guy thinking they knew everything to tell him his job. So resume was trashed.

* The Singapore subway is a model of efficiency and cleanliness. I live in Chicago and take the red line and the conparison is stark. In Signapore the trains are always on time and there are no homeless people melting into the seats. Every aspect of the train cars is cleaner and the system moves you from one place to another much more quickly – even during rush hour.

* I left the DC area in 2002 and rode the Metro routinely for years. With some usual problems – delays in trains, overcrowding at rush hour, etc – I found it serviceable. I have been following its demise through friends still in the area for years.

I have to say though that this sounds very much like a vicious circle. I suspect that long before the 97% was reached, white people stopped applying for such jobs and many that were not near retirement left the system. Why stay in a system where promotions and pay are stacked against you and where your likely co-workers and especially your boss were incompetent and hostile? So what happens? More incompetent blacks get hired and more whites leave or don’t apply in the first place. 97% is just around the corner, just a matter of time.

Two quick parallels:

The DC school system where it entails the highest per capita cost and the lowest returns. I read somewhere that 40% was the tipping point for school systems. After that white flight took over.

Neighborhoods and apartment complexes, about which Steve has written over the years.

Before I left the DC suburbs in 2002, I lived in a great apt complex in Alexandria. Sometime in the 90’s there was a gradual population shift, which became a major shift as time went by. We began seeing often non-family groups of 3-4 people or families w/several children – mainly from El Salvador and Ethiopia – where singles or couples had lived before.

As living conditions declined as a result of overcrowding, litter, garbage-overflow, and crime, more of the long-timers left, to be replaced by MORE 3-4 groups or families. The new groups living there simply brought in more unvetted renters to share the rent and the conditions reflected the changes. Turnover increased, as you’d expect. Fewer singles and couples wanted to live there so the newest renters were more of the same that drove the old renters out. When I left, I was 1 of 2 whites living in a 14 unit bldg.

The owners, realizing that they had lost control of the complex, decided to gentrify. The complex was emptied and the units up-scaled, including rent, to where the old renters couldn’t afford to live there. The result was that close to 250 affordable units were removed from the market.

* In Tokyo there are several competing private rail companies – they all try to give the best service at the lowest cost in order to lure riders away from their competitors. Unbelievably, this works better than having the government run one big efficient rail system that has no wasteful duplication. Who could imagine that would happen? We should learn from the DC Metro and get rid of wasteful duplication in the airline and auto industries to start with so they too can reap the benefits of socialism.

* I think, though it’s not been widely acknowledged much, there’s been a cultural devolution gaining momentum in the former black working class and below that’s been slowly occurring since blacks left the republican party, that black elites, and especially white democrats willfully ignore, and the “black lives matter” constituency are too feeble-minded to be aware of.

Black Republicans:

Black Democrats:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=75b_1462666930

The most important lesson black folks must learn is, when American white culture devolves, American black culture devolve even lower.

Trying to lower white people’s status is an exercise in cultural self-annihilation.

* Blacks must generally work at menial jobs and become angry, frustrated parasites on advanced nations. They don’t have the ability to make a choice.

* The Miami-Dade County Transit system has been a hideout for overpaid blacks for decades – over 90% black workers and managers, while the county is only 19% black. I was familiar with one reasonably competent black female that got a job there as an entry level secretary right out of high school twenty years ago. She’s now a senior-level secretary (which the agency titles as “Administrative Officer”) making $80K year plus plenty of “overtime.”

* One of the things that’s kept Boston functioning fairly well in comparison with a lot of US cities is the fact that the Euro ethnics have fought tooth and nail to retain their hold on the public unions.

* The operators were all black back in the ’80s, too*, but the system worked. The Metro was held in high esteem back then, or at least in as high esteem as any public transportation system ever is by the people who use it.

As you say, the problem is aged equipment and lack of maintenance. Last year, I had occasion to ride the Metro again – same ride I used to make, from Silver Spring to Dupont Circle on the Red Line. I was shocked to see the exact same cars, exact design as that used when the line first opened in 1976. The appearance of the cars is now so dated it’s like riding a “SeventiesWorld” ride at Disneyland.

It’s disgraceful that such a good system, truly a credit to the DC area and to the kind of big infrastructure projects we, sadly, seldom undertake anymore, was allowed to deteriorate. However incompetent Metro management may have been, this level of decay is only possible with the connivance of government leadership compounded by public unwillingness to pay for proper upkeep through fares or taxes.

*Almost all the bus drivers were black, too, and had been at least since the early 70s. In my young mind, bus driving, like trash collection, was one of those jobs white people never did. I had never seen a white garbageman until I moved to New Jersey in the late 80s; I was genuinely shocked. Washington was still very Southern in some ways when I grew up there.

* What I notice about Black Conservatives/Black Republicans is that most of them date & marry White people and that includes Black female Conservatives as well, most of them get romantically involved with White men.

* Same here, and I take it to be a move of desperation to escape the pathology of black culture, while still providing commentary for it from a safe distance.

Call it “black fatigue.” It’s the strategy of avoiding adding more heads to your dysfunctional black family by marrying white, asian, or even hispanic.

Anything to eliminate the adding of more Cousin Jabari’s calling you on from their Obama phone asking if they can sleep in your living room because they doesn’t know where their dad is, and their mom just got arrested for dealing prescription drugs, or having heirlooms lifted when the family gets together at your home for Easter.

If you think it’s hard being around a lot of black people when you’re white, try being black. At least white people can walk away from black folks. Black people have black relatives, around half are dysfunctional, just plain stupid, or both, and one of the only ways out is to marry white.

* Don’t give the drivers too much credit. One of the reasons the 6 car trains have to pull all the way to the front of the stations instead of stopping in the middle of the platform is because too many of the drivers couldn’t remember that they were driving 6 or 8 car trains. This was true even when they had post-it notes on their dashboards telling them how many cars their train had.

Another issue is that the drivers are told they have to stop and count to 5 at every station stop before opening the doors just so they have time to remember which side of the train the doors open on. This was because the drivers kept opening the doors on the wrong side of the tracks.

* There was a disturbing real-life example earlier this year. Gloria Short 54, her son, 17, and granddaughter, 10 were beaten and stabbed to death in her home. The bodies were found by Short’s husband after he came home from working the night shift.

One of the teens arrested for the crime is Jervarceay Tapley, 17. Jervarceay lived with his grandmother and her boyfriend. The boyfriend was Gloria Short’s 68 y.o. brother. The brother died of a heart attack when he heard of the murders.

Although the teens stole the Short family vehicles as get away cars, they mainly stole clothing and jewelry which were found in Jervarceay’s bedroom and tossed in the neighbor’s backyard.

* Worth pointing out that Metro has actually been spending plenty of money. Operating expenses for the year ending 6/30/15 were about $2.5 billion. This may be apples and oranges, but the budget for operating expenses for FY 2015 was $1.75 billion of which 58% was for Metrorail. If we scale everything up, that would imply we spent ~$1.45 billion operating Metrorail in FY 2015. That supported average daily ridership of about 712,000 across 91 stations.

Meanwhile, the Tokyo Metro — a private subway, and one of the two major subway networks in Tokyo (alongside the Toei subway) — had operating expenses of approximately 260 billion JPY (with SG&A, 302 billion JPY). Using 120 JPY/USD as the historical exchange rate, those operating expenses total approximately $2.16 billion. That supported average daily ridership of approximately 6.84 million, across 179 stations. In other words, they paid about 50% more than WMATA, to get 960% more service.

And better service. Some of the difference is just because the population of the greater Tokyo area is something like 10 times the population of DC. Even if the rail network could support it (which it can’t), DC’s population is so small that running subways every 3 minutes wouldn’t make sense. The fact that Tokyo Metro turns a nice profit and WMATA depends on subsidies is also mostly due to DC’s tiny population, rather than American sloth and incompetence. But other aspects — punctual service, helpful staff, clean stations, well-maintained track and trains — aren’t things that necessarily scale. We pay a lot! We just don’t get our money’s worth.

“We need more money” is the eternal complaint of our incompetent public services. That doesn’t make it true. And the classically American solution — throw more money at a problem until it goes away — isn’t necessarily the best.

* To run a complicated technological structure requires a workforce with an IQ of about 100, thus the present decline of Metro and it’s eventual demise is as foreseeable as that of Detroit or Selma or Haiti. Even more, a free functioning democratic society requires a population with an IQ of at least 100. If the average IQ is around 90, then it takes a village or a “big-boss” society. If the IQ is in the 80 range it requires the institutionalized rule of society. Institutions such as prison, the military, schools, churches, serfdom or other peculiar institutions. With an average IQ of 70, you are in the heart of darkness. It’s not hard to see.

Posted in Blacks, Steve Sailer, Whites | Comments Off on Steve Sailer: Washington Subway Falling Apart Due to Anti-white Discrimination

WP: Why the Ben Rhodes profile in the New York Times Magazine is just gross

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Luke Ford

Washington Post: Absurdity, self-regard, hypocrisy, chumminess between writer and subject — it’s all there.

I just don’t know anymore where David Samuels begins and Ben Rhodes ends.

Samuels’s massive New York Times magazine profile of Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, is already prompting debates over the administration’s truthfulness in promoting the Iran nuclear deal, as well as over the disdain with which Rhodes regards the Washington press corps, the U.S. foreign policy establishment — basically anyone who is not himself, President Obama, or fellow West Wing narrative pushers…

The grossness emerges on several levels and on multiple occasions.

It is the knowing chumminess of a journalist finishing sentences for a White House official who is mocking other prominent Washington journalists for getting so easily spun – and then quoting himself as he finishes the sentence, even letting us know that he did so with a chuckle. (It takes a special kind of journalist to quote his own chuckle.) It is the blindness of a writer who declares that Rhodes is “not an egotist” while offering countless examples of that subject’s gargantuan self-regard, and not bothering to note the contradiction. It is letting a speechwriter colleague praise Rhodes for giving “zero [expletive] about what most people in Washington think,” when the entire exercise in which the writer, subject and source are engaged – a lengthy and access-heavy profile portraying Rhodes as the “Boy Wonder” of the Obama White House and revealing Rhodes’s contempt for the Washington foreign-policy establishment – proclaims precisely the contrary.

The grossness is also evident in the profile’s literary pretentiousness. Don DeLillo is a frequent reference point, from the first paragraph of the story, in which the horror of 9/11 becomes a convenient inflection point in the arc of Rhodes’s professional aspirations (from wannabe fiction writer to guy who wants to “try to write about international affairs”), to the bizarre exchange later when Samuels and Rhodes wonder who would best write the novel of Rhodes’s experiences. “I don’t know how you feel about Don DeLillo,” Rhodes suggests. “I love Don DeLillo,” Samuels responds.

Also, we are told not once but twice that Ben Rhodes is something like Holden Caulfield of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” Once it is Samuels who thinks so (Rhodes is “an only slightly updated version of what Holden Caulfield might have been like if he grew up to work in the West Wing”), and next it is Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who “volunteers” the comparison, Samuels emphasizes. “He hates the idea of being phony,” she says to Samuels, “and he’s impetuous, and he has very strong views.” Never mind that Caulfield is one of the most overused literary references for every brooding, self-involved young man. It’s that the work of spin and manipulation that Rhodes performs every day – and that Samuels appears so enthralled by – takes phoniness to an art form.

It is one thing for a journalist to let his subject reveal himself, in his own words and terms, and let readers make up their minds. But there is plenty of room between that and an uncritical, almost credulous approach to a story. You don’t even have to fight over whether the communications strategy surrounding the negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal deserves pride of place over the, you know, actual diplomacy. Just look, for instance, at Rhodes’s critique of the press covering foreign policy. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” This from someone who has been writing speeches for Obama since he was in his late 20s, and surely understands that age and insight can have a nonlinear relationship. Yet, the only word that Samuels is able to summon to describe Rhodes’s own lack of the usual credentials for his lofty position? “Startling.”

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on WP: Why the Ben Rhodes profile in the New York Times Magazine is just gross

Emma Barton: I went looking for Trump supporters and I found white supremacists

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Luke Ford

Emma writes: Another bystander brings up Hitler. First, he dismisses the question as being historical and therefore irrelevant, he says he’s looking to the future instead. So, I ask, seven times before getting a straight answer, if he condemns the attempt of Adolf Hitler to create a purely “Aryan” country.

After saying “I think Hitler is misunderstood” and telling me he does condemn violence, he finally answers whether or not he condemns Hitler, saying, “No, I don’t. The idea that someone would want a country of their own, that someone would want a country that’s defined by their ancestors and their people, I do not condemn that.” He is so skillful at making white supremacy sound like a nice fairy tale that he can almost make Hitler sound like someone who just wanted a quaint little Germany with his extended family – almost.

On this note, and after a digression about the likelihood of Trump interning muslims, which Spencer does not think is likely, I ask him, what’s the end game? He gives me the “medium term” and the long term. First, he “want[s] European Americans to have a sense of themselves. I think at this point they, we, don’t. We have a sense of ourselves as individuals, we might even have a negative sense of ourselves.” The long term?

“I think we should have a new Roman empire. My ultimate dream, and this is probably not something that’s going to happen in my lifetime, it’s very similar to leftist dreaming of communism or Jews dreaming of Zionism, would be yes, a grand ethno-state for all Europeans to come together.”

COMMENTS:

* “I’ll be honest, when I went looking for Trump supporters, and they were all Trump supporters, I thought I would find buck toothed hill billies. I was wrong”

This sentence summarises the last few decades of politics in the US. The left, because of its cultural and political hegemony, has not had a serious opposition since the 60s. The alt-right represents the emergence of a serious opposition to the left. “Buck toothed hill billies” will not be the face of “racism” and “sexism” in the 21st century. The face of racism and sexism in the 21st century will be well educated white men who can with total seriousness and rigour defend the position that “there is nothing wrong with racism and sexism”. The time of dismissing such ideas as those of “buck toothed hill billies” is over. The future of “hate” in the US will be well-educated shit lords calmly and methodically quoting IQ studies, crime statistics, admixture studies and whatnot.

Basically you’re fucked. When you can download a PDF from the DOJ that plainly states black people committed 56% of fatal gun crimes from 1980 to 2008 — and then some NET turns it into a meme — the entire mainstream narrative collapses.

*
The author is completely oblivious to how her assumption that Trump supporters would be “bucktoothed hillbillies” underscores the need for what people like Spencer are doing. She’s unaware of the vicious and disastrous racial and class prejudice on which her whole worldview is built and the outrageous hypocrisy of it.

The narrative that comes out of her worldview doesn’t allow for the reality of a working class white population that is being destroyed socially, culturally, and economically while it is coerced into funding its own dispossession. That doesn’t compute for bourgeois white women on college campuses who think they’re oppressed. The “bucktoothed hillbillies” whose neighborhoods and culture are destroyed by “cultural enrichment” are supposed to be the oppressors somehow. Maybe one day the left can explain how, but they certainly haven’t been able to yet.

* What you regard as “racism” is really just the social trust that comes from a cohesive society where people have a relatively common experience, identity, and way of life. It’s the natural preference that people have for others with whom they can identify. Social trust is the mark of a healthy society, one in which people often understand their community as an extended family. This is something which will forever be denied to us while we destroy ourselves force fitting your lunatic multicultural utopia which will never exist anyway.

And if you doubt this, ask yourself why it hasn’t materialized already. Maybe someday, huh?

The sad truth of it is that “diverse” societies are not stronger for it, but far weaker. They are characterized by high crime and low trust, fractured societies that are easily divided and conquered by the capitalists or wealthy I’m sure you love to complain about. Diversity isn’t strength. Unity is. A multicultural society isn’t a society at all.

The future we’re heading into isn’t going to resemble the late 20th century affluent society of atomized, individual consumers. As the bottom drops out economically, people are going to have to revert to clans, tribes, extended families, and communities because they will need to rely on one another. We don’t confront our environment directly, but indirectly through a division of labor, through a culture and society on which we depend to survive. All of that requires cultural homogeneity and the social trust it makes possible. You’re simply operating on an article of faith if you think race isn’t connected to culture. But ok, I’m sure on some magical far-off day, whites will be able to establish that necessary social cohesion with blacks who are 12% of the population and committing over half the homicides.

You realize that ancient people weren’t stuck in one place. They migrated great distances, moved here and there, came into contact with each other repeatedly. And yet, after thousands of years of this, what we inherited were largely racially homogeneous societies. Is it possible there’s a reason for this?

You better hope there isn’t.

* The reporter asked a full grown man what gender he was? Does this make any sense?

* Look at the reality of your own state, Emma. 72% White to less than a plurality in 40 years, and the “Scottish” Hispanic kid wants to act like dispossession isn’t occurring? California has absolutely changed, and for Whites that means lower wages, crowded public schools, gangs, drug cartels, strain on public resources, etc. We’re not the boogeymen you’re cultural Marxist professors or media make us out to be. You wanted a legitimate source for biological studies on racial differences? A good introduction to genetics and race would “A Troublesome Inheritance” by Nicholas Wade. He’s a liberal like you — he even writes for the NYT — yet he’s also a geneticist, and an honest one at that. In his words, human evolution has been “recent, copious, and regional.”

The social science narrative of “race as a social construct” doesn’t actually pan out — its why genetic testing companies like 23andme can definitively map you or I’s DNA to specific regions, and races. All they need is a bit of spit and they can tell whether your European or East Asian or sub-Saharan African at a percentage level basis; and even chromosomally. That’s why D’migo laughed when the obviously brown, black haired Hispanic kid tried to say he was “Scottish” — most Hispanics are a mix of European and Amerindian and African blood. It’s why Mexico isn’t considered “Scottish” or European because biologically they’re not. Whereas in North America, whether in Canada or the US, our nations were settled by Northern Europeans who mixed with Amerindians as an exception. It’s why my families been here for 400 years and I’m still as Northern European as my Welsh and Scots-Irish ancestors. Advocating for our own interests isn’t “supremacy” Emma, and it’s because you’re brainwashed to think it is that you find it acceptable to begin this piece mocking poor Southern whites as “toothless” hillbillies. Disgusting. Wake the fuck up, La Raza doesn’t care that your a liberal or that you profess you’re not “racist”. Take a trip down to Mexico or better yet South Central that was ethnically cleansed by MS-13 of blacks. See how long you last around those “people of color”.

* What I can’t understand is if the mud people are so oppressed then why do they risk everything to get into a white country where they will apparently be lynched in the streets?

* How many times did she call him “alpha” in this article? She’s clearly infatuated.

* Chicks dig it. They just don’t wanna admit it.

original

* She’s so brave not voting for Trump. She’s like one of those Vietnamese monks that really did set themselves on fire.

* I watched the video too, “Last Tommy” and I noticed her furrowed brow valiantly going into convulsions in its attempt to prevent oxygen from getting to her brain in order to stop her thinking bad-thoughts. She’s nothing but a sick, anti-white traitor.

* Why can’t Europeans have what Jews have — an ethnically homogeneous state with a nice big wall around it? A member of the alt right is nothing more than a white who applies the principles of Zionism to whites.

* Look at what naturally happens in school cafeterias, prison, housing patterns, etc. People who are more alike tend to flock together, and work together better, and don’t have intra-ethnic conflicts. Look at the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918 (you can’t, you’re historically ignorant of actual examples rather than propaganda), it was as clear-cut an example of the problems of diversity as a person could find, just like the problems of diversity in the Balkans played a significant role in the outbreak of World War I.

Some people don’t think that artificially injecting low iq Somalis, from a country rife with corruption and crime, into lily-white Minnesota actually benefits Minnesotans. The gigantic jump on the welfare roster, increase of corruption and crime, just like back home, vindicates them. Simply believing that “diversity” is progress because some short-haired Jewish Marxist lesbian told you so doesn’t actually make it so, dummy, it only proves that you’re a lout who uncritically accepts subversion strategies.

get

* That “buck-toothed hillbillies” line says it all really. Nothing but conformity and status signalling and emoting against facts and statistics.

* Emma said she was majoring in cognitive science and beating lots of males grade wise, and doubts Richard’s assertion that men tend to be better at science than women. I can’t speak for Richard, but from what I’ve read, in terms of mathematical or spatial reasoning, women do as well as men, generally, but at the extreme right tail of the bell-curve, from which come the most gifted and highly accomplished scientists, there are more men than women.
There is also the matter of inclination and desire. Few women, including highly intelligent ones, have a strong determination to become scientists or engineers. Feminists claim this is because of the patriarchal culture, which somehow, even in 2016, is still keeping women out of STEM. I believe in the more obvious answer, that women don’t become scientists and engineers in greater numbers, because it’s not in their nature to do so; it’s more in their nature to become wives and mothers, or teachers or social workers or nurses or pediatricians…even in 2016, and even against the insane pressure they are put under by popular culture to do what does not come naturally.

* Practically every woman I have known in a long life have exhibited mechanical inaptitude, by male standards. The few that were like men, usually tomboys or lesbians, where just regular examples of what passes for mechanical aptitude amongst men. None of them were outstanding. Male and female brains are objectively different.

* It’s funny how she tries to emphasize the power dynamic at work; her, a poor widdle short woman surrounded by tall sinister white men! We all know she’d be safer among outright National Socialists than in the brown future she wants for this country, where whites have no societies of their own. Her and her dildo politics will be the first to go when hispanics gain cultural hegemony.

The point of feminism is to destroy white patriarchy. It has nothing to say about brown patriarchy. Which is why new forms of patriarchy come in and fill the void of white patriarchy left by feminism.

* Pretty good article. Not as hysterical as I would’ve expected coming out of the Cultural Marxist epicenter of Berkeley. Just to clarify though: “It sounds like it makes sense because it is said intelligently, that is, until you examine what he is really saying.” This actually spells out the disingenuous and, frankly, ridiculous rhetoric coming out of Leftist/Cultural Marxist post-modern drivel with all their -isms and mental gymnastics that tries to pass itself off at once as “proletariat” and “elite” at the same time. Until Leftist rhetoric figures this out, they are a doomed ideology. Applying postmodern mind games to real world situations is unsustainable and, frankly, elitist. But, that’s Cultural Marxism for you: appealing to the masses for ever greater state power over them, and using convoluted language to kowtow people into thinking they are “in the know”. It’s bogus.

* Every time the author refutes one of Richards arguments it’s done from an emotional standpoint. To be quite frank I’d be embarrassed to publish an article like this…even under my pen name.

Posted in Adolf Hitler, America, Nationalism | Comments Off on Emma Barton: I went looking for Trump supporters and I found white supremacists

Poland Abolishes Anti-Racism Watchdog

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

From Breitbart: Poland’s landslide-elected right-wing government has abolished the national Council Against Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.

The Law and Justice (PiS) party this week scrapped a public body designed to fight racism and investigate “hate crimes”, citing its inefficiency. Government spokesman Rafal Bochenek told reporters the council’s responsibilities will be taken over by “more efficient” state institutions.

The Council Against Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance was set up by the previous government led by the liberal Civic Platform party, who were voted out of office last October after they agreed with the European Union (EU) that the country would take several thousand non-European migrants.

The human rights Ombudsman, and parties opposed to PiS, have widely condemned the government’s abolition of the body as they say hate crimes are increasing in Poland. “It’s shameful. The council is absolutely necessary amid the increasing number of racially motivated attacks and rising xenophobia,” Ombudsman Adam Bodnar told AFP.

“The fears, spread by certain political parties about refugees are feeding into racist comments on the Internet, and this has not been firmly condemned,” he continued.

The Times of Israel reported that Polish prosecutors last launched 1,500 probes into cases of alleged discrimination and racially motivated hate crimes, up from the investigation of 60 such cases in 2009.

Polish politician Katarzyna Lubnauer, of the socially and economically liberal Modern party, said she was “outraged” at the liquidation of the state council. Given increasing reluctance in Poland towards accepting “people of another colour, another race, or who use a language other than Polish”, the MP stressed she believes the institution is ”very much needed”.

Comments below Polish television network TVN’s coverage of the story were broadly supportive of the move, with one person writing “‘Anti-racism council liquidated’ – rightly so, looking at what’s happening in Germany or France”, seemingly referring to the problems those European countries are facing as a result of having large numbers of non-European migrants.

Civic Platform politician Rafal Grupiński claimed that scrapping the anti-racism body, which was established in 2013 by then Prime Minister of Poland, current European Council President Donald Tusk, is “contrary to the rules of the European Union”.

Posted in Poland | Comments Off on Poland Abolishes Anti-Racism Watchdog