Who’s The Leading Black Classical Music Composer?

Posted on January 6, 2018 by Luke Ford

Richard Lynn writes in his book Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis:

* The low musical abilities of Africans, except for their strong sense of rhythm, are consistent with their generally poor achievements in classical music. There are no African composers, conductors, or instrumentalists of the first rank, and it is rare to see African players in the leading symphony orchestras.

[Chaim Amalek: To be fair, if you were a musically talented Negro, why would you want to spend your talents mastering the works of long dead European composers when there is vastly more money, respect, and sex to be had by focusing on musical idioms native to the Negro in America? You would be a fool to focus on Mozart when the potential rewards are so much greater in hip-hop.]

* The problem of the genetic and environmental contributions to the low IQ of Africans has been debated since the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly in regard to the problem of the low IQs obtained by African Americans in the United States. Three positions have been taken on this question. The IQ difference between Blacks and Whites is wholly environmentally determined or at least there is no compelling evidence for any genetic contribution to the low Black IQ. This position has been taken by Flynn (1980), Mackintosh (1998), Nisbett (1998), Fish (2002), Brody (2003), and many others. The IQ difference is determined by some mix of genetic and environmental factors. This position has been taken by Loehlin, Lindzey and Spuhler (1975), Vernon (1979), and Waldman, Weinberg, and Scarr (1994, p. 31), who conducted one of the most important studies of this question involving the IQs of Black children adopted by White couples. The IQ difference is largely genetically determined. This position has been taken by Henry Garrett (1945, 1961); Frank McGurk (1953a, 1953b), who showed that when Blacks and Whites were matched for socioeconomic status, Blacks scored 7.5 IQ points below Whites; Kuttner (1962), who argued that Black-White differences in intelligence were reflected in the differences in the building of early civilizations; Shuey (1966), who made the first compilation of Black-White IQ differences, from 1916 up to 1965; Robert Osborne and McGurk (1982), who made an updated compilation of Shuey’s work covering the years 1966–1980; and Jensen (1969, 1974, 1980, 1998), who made numerous contributions to this issue and concluded that about two thirds of the American Black-White IQ difference is attributable to genetic factors. Others who have taken the largely genetic position are Shockley (1969), Eysenck (1971), Baker (1974), Levin (1997), Rushton (2003), and the writer (Lynn, 1994c, 2001).

There are seven major arguments for the presence of some genetic determination of the intelligence difference between sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans. First, the two races have evolved independently in different environments over a period of approximately 100,000 years (Mellars and Stringer, 1989; Cavalli-Sforza, 2000). When two populations evolve largely in isolation from each other for this period of time, genetic differences between them inevitably evolve for all characteristics for which there is genetic variability. These differences evolve as a result of genetic drift, mutations, founder effects, and most important, adaptation to different environments. The extreme environmentalist position that there is no genetic difference between the two races for intelligence defies this general principle of evolutionary biology and should be ruled out as impossible.

Second, the consistency with which Africans obtain low IQs in so many different locations can only be explained by the operation of a strong genetic factor. If only environmental factors were responsible for the different IQs of different populations, we should expect to find some countries where Africans had higher IQs than Europeans. The failure to find a single country where this is the case points to the presence of a strong genetic factor. Third, the high heritability of intelligence found in twin studies of Blacks and Whites in the United States, in Europe, Japan, and India shows that intelligence is powerfully affected by genetic factors and makes it improbable that the differences between Africans and Europeans, or between any other pairs of races, can be solely environmentally determined. Fourth, the brain size difference between Blacks and Whites points to a genetic difference, considering the high heritability of about 0.9 of brain size and the correlation of approximately 0.4 between brain size and intelligence.

Fifth, several egalitarians have proposed that White racism may be responsible for impairing the IQs of the Blacks. Thus, Weinberg, Scarr, and Waldman write that their result that Black children adopted by Whites have low IQs “could indicate the results of environmental influences such as the pervasive effect of racism in American life” (1992, p. 41) and “the IQ results are consistent with racially based environmental effects in the order of group means” (p. 40). Mackintosh (1998, p. 152) also falls back on White racism in a final attempt to argue that the low IQ of the Black adoptees can be explained environmentally and suggests that perhaps “it is precisely the experience of being Black in a society permeated by White racism that is responsible for lowering Black children’s IQ scores.” These egalitarians do not explain how hypothetical White racism could impair the IQs of Black children reared by middle class White parents. There is no known or plausible mechanism by which supposed White racism could impair the IQs of Blacks. Nor do they attempt to explain how it is that Africans throughout sub-Saharan Africa, who are not exposed to White racism, except in South Africa, have IQs of approximately 71. Furthermore, if racism lowers intelligence, it is remarkable that Jews in the United States and Britain should have IQs of around 110 (Lynn, 2011b), since Jews have been exposed to racism for many centuries. The high IQ of American Jews has been well known since the 1930s and has been extensively documented by Storfer (1990), MacDonald (1994), and Herrnstein and Murray (1994), yet it goes curiously unmentioned by environmentalists like Flynn (1980), Brody (1992, 2003), Neisser (1996), Mackintosh (1998), Jencks and Phillips (1998), Nisbett (1998), Montagu (1999), and Fish (2002).

Sixth, Black infant precocity is impossible to explain in environmental terms and can only be attributed to a genetically based maturation difference. Seventh, the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study carried out by Waldman, Scarr, and Weinberg (1994) was designed to show that when Black infants are adopted by White parents they would have the same IQs as Whites. The authors of this study examined groups of Black, White, and interracial babies all adopted by White middle-class couples. It turned out that at the age of 17, the IQs were 89 for the Blacks, 98 for the interracial individuals, and 106 for the Whites. Thus, a 17 IQ point difference between Blacks and Whites remains even when they are reared in the same conditions.

Being raised by White adoptive parents had no beneficial effects on the intelligence of the Black children because their IQ of 89 is the same as that of Blacks in the north-central states from which the infants came. The interracial group with its IQ of 98 falls midway between the Black and the White, as would be predicted from the genetic cause of the difference. A full analysis and discussion of this study has been given by Levin (1994) and Lynn (1994c), together with an unconvincing reply by Waldman, Weinberg, and Scarr (1994, p. 43), in which they assert “we feel that the balance of the evidence, although not conclusive, favors a predominantly environmental etiology underlying racial differences in intelligence and that the burden of proof is on researchers who argue for the predominance of genetic racial differences.” Notice that their use of the phrase “predominantly environmental etiology” concedes that they accept that genetic factors are also present.

While the results of this study show that differences in family environment cannot explain the low Black IQ, it remains possible that Blacks provide an inferior prenatal environment as a result of poorer nutrition of pregnant Black women or possibly of the greater use of cigarettes that might impair the growth of the fetal brain. These possibilities are rendered improbable by studies showing that the nutrition of American Blacks throughout the twentieth century was not inferior to that of Whites (see Chapter 13, Section 7).

Another possibility is that Black babies might suffer greater impairment of the brain because pregnant Black women might smoke cigarettes more, since there is some evidence that smoking retards fetal growth, but this is rendered improbable by numerous studies showing that Blacks smoke cigarettes less than Whites.

Despite their commitment to the egalitarian position, it is interesting to note that Waldman, Scarr, and Weinberg (1994) concluded that their evidence shows that both genetic and environmental differences contribute to the Black-White IQ difference: “We think it is exceedingly implausible that these differences are either entirely genetically based or entirely environmentally based” (p. 31). Thus, while there is nothing in their data that can justify this conclusion, because they provide no evidence for any environmental contribution to the low Black IQ, their final position is not greatly different from that advanced by Jensen (1969), that both genetic and environmental factors are responsible for the low Black IQ; but where Jensen proposed that the relative contributions are about two thirds genetic and one third environmental, Waldman, Scarr, and Weinberg have concluded that both factors are involved, although they do not suggest a quantification of the magnitude of the respective contributions.

In fact, the results of the Minnesota Interracial Adoption Study show that both conclusions are incorrect. The conclusion to be drawn from this study is that rearing Black children in a White middle-class environment has no effect at all on their IQs at age 17.

Posted in Blacks, IQ | Comments Off on Who’s The Leading Black Classical Music Composer?

Neshama Carlebach: My sisters, I hear you

Posted on January 5, 2018 by Luke Ford

Neshama Carlebach writes:

Sometime in the late 70s, my father was involved in an intervention staged by women who were hurt by him. He came, even knowing the content of the conversation that was to happen. And when they told him that his actions and behavior had hurt them, he cried and said, “Oy this needs such a fixing.” I do believe that the actions, advocacy work and the way he raised his daughters in the last years of his life showed remarkable listening and personal accountability.

I accept the fullness of who my father was, flaws and all. I am angry with him. And I refuse to see his faults as the totality of who he was.

When I talk about my shifting perspective, I believe it must be said that I do not recognize the version of my father that some people describe. To me, he was the kindest, most respectful, most loving person to my friends and me. I myself witnessed him as a deeply passionate supporter of the role of women as leaders. The year my father passed away, he was taken to Jewish court (beit din) by his own synagogue, furious that he had dared to allow me to sing beside him. Before I even knew that it was important, my father was shouting to the world that women must have the place to share their voices and be heard. He was one the first to support Anat Hoffman and the Women of the Wall. He trained and ordained women as rabbis far ahead of any of the recent advances for women we’ve witnessed during the past decade within Modern Orthodoxy. I don’t believe he understood how his voice would change the fabric of women’s prayer, but I believe that he hoped and prayed that the tides would shift.

That he did not live to see all that would come from these acts of radical love brings me great sadness. What might he have witnessed during these past 23 years since his death that could have pushed him to translate his public commitments to women’s equality into choices he made as a person? Who knows the apologies he might have made, if he might have been granted the chance to offer the public acknowledgements so many only called for upon his passing, if only he had been able to give more years to repair the world around him as a man brave enough to ask for forgiveness. I wish he had had that chance, and that he could have been part of the healing he necessitated, a healing he would have been particularly equipped to offer. I would have had the chance to ask my own questions, and perhaps to hear what he would have said in response…

When I was 9 years old, a trusted friend of my father’s, also a rabbi, a fixture in my home, came into my bedroom and molested me. For the child in my heart, who has walked through life in fear since that moment, I thank you all for shifting the tide. Our daughters, our sons, our children, must have a better world. And that, friends, must be our true focus. We must not stop our work, pouring out the music of our souls to rid our children’s worlds of pain, fear, and hunger of body and soul.

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Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

Posted on January 5, 2018 by Luke Ford

Highlights from the new book:

* Lewandowski and Hope Hicks, the PR aide put on the campaign by Ivanka Trump, had an affair that ended in a public fight on the street…

* Shortly after Lewandowski, with whom Hicks had an on-and-off romantic relationship, was fired in June 2016 for clashing with Trump family members, Hicks sat in Trump Tower with Trump and his sons, worrying about Lewandowski’s treatment in the press and wondering aloud how she might help him. Trump, who otherwise seemed to treat Hicks in a protective and even paternal way, looked up and said, “Why? You’ve already done enough for him. You’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have,” sending Hicks running from the room.

* The silver lining of the ignominy Melania Trump had to endure after the Billy Bush tape was that now there was no way her husband could become president. Donald Trump’s marriage was perplexing to almost everybody around him—or it was, anyway, for those without private jets and many homes. He and Melania spent relatively little time together. They could go days at a time without contact, even when they were both in Trump Tower. Often she did not know where he was, or take much notice of that fact. Her husband moved between between residences as he would move between rooms. Along with knowing little about his whereabouts, she knew little about his business, and took at best modest interest in it. An absentee father for his first four children, Trump was even more absent for his fifth, Barron, his son with Melania. Now on his third marriage, he told friends he thought he had finally perfected the art: live and let live—“Do your own thing.” He was a notorious womanizer, and during the campaign became possibly the world’s most famous masher. While nobody would ever say Trump was sensitive when it came to women, he had many views about how to get along with them, including a theory he discussed with friends about how the more years between an older man and a younger woman, the less the younger woman took an older man’s cheating personally. Still, the notion that this was a marriage in name only was far from true. He spoke of Melania frequently when she wasn’t there. He admired her looks—often, awkwardly for her, in the presence of others. She was, he told people proudly and without irony, a “trophy wife.” And while he may not have quite shared his life with her, he gladly shared the spoils of it. “A happy wife is a happy life,” he said, echoing a popular rich-man truism. He also sought Melania’s approval. (He sought the approval of all the women around him, who were wise to give it.) In 2014, when he first seriously began to consider running for president, Melania was one of the few who thought it was possible he could win.

It was a punchline for his daughter, Ivanka, who had carefully distanced herself from the campaign. With a never-too-hidden distaste for her stepmother, Ivanka would say to friends: All you have to know about Melania is that she thinks if he runs he’ll certainly win.

* Throughout his life, Trump had few close friends of any kind, but when he began his campaign for president he had almost no friends in politics. The only two actual politicians with whom Trump was close were Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, and both men were in their own way peculiar and isolated. And to say that he knew nothing—nothing at all—about the basic intellectual foundations of the job was a comic understatement. Early in the campaign, in a Producers-worthy scene, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate: “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

* For quite obvious reasons, no president before Trump and few politicians ever have come out of the real estate business: a lightly regulated market, based on substantial debt with exposure to frequent market fluctuations, it often depends on government favor, and is a preferred exchange currency for problem cash—money laundering. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Jared’s father Charlie, Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric, and his daughter Ivanka, as well as Trump himself, all supported their business enterprises to a greater or lesser extent working in the dubious limbo of international free cash flow and gray money. Charlie Kushner, to whose real estate business interests Trump’s son-in-law and most important aide was wholly tied, had already spent time in a federal prison for tax evasion, witness tampering, and making illegal campaign donations. Modern politicians and their staffs perform their most consequential piece of opposition research on themselves. If the Trump team had vetted their candidate, they would have reasonably concluded that heightened ethical scrutiny could easily put them in jeopardy. But Trump pointedly performed no such effort.

* Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends’ wives into bed.

* Ten days before Donald Trump’s inauguration as the forty-fifth president, a group of young Trump staffers—the men in regulation Trump suits and ties, the women in the Trump-favored look of high boots, short skirts, and shoulder-length hair—were watching President Barack Obama give his farewell speech as it streamed on a laptop in the transition offices.

[Who is Trump boffing these days?]

Posted in America, Donald Trump | Comments Off on Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

Trump V Bannon

Posted on January 4, 2018 by Luke Ford

I don’t think there is any significance to this feud. I think Bannon will run Trump’s 2020 campaign. This is drama like George Steinbrenner firing and hiring Billy Martin repeatedly.

I’ve yet to see anything in the George Mueller investigation that will hurt Trump.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Funny to read all excited commentators trying to read complicated ideological disputes into typical personnel dramas that most of us have seen working in any other organizations.

This looks like a standard personnel drama, that happens when you have a few people with difficult personalities.

Bannon is such personality, as is Trump. When Bannon felt there wasn’t enough attention paid to him, or that people had slighted him – he started to create some kind of mischief.

Probably if job roles were reversed (not that Trump could even to contemplate working underneath somebody else), a similar story would have unfolded.

* Bannon didn’t win Trump the election, but he helped focus the campaign’s message into one that could resonate with all the right voters. For that he deserves recognition. Trump doesn’t seem to realize that it was his message that won the election, not him. Polls consistently showed that large numbers of his voters disliked him as a person and didn’t really trust him but voted for him anyway. Now he’s at 60% disapproval in Iowa and 52% approval in Mississippi. Not really a good place to be.

He needs to stop this shit. Focus on trade and immigration this year and forget about pointless tweet fights that the people hate and Paul Ryan’s retarded plan to cut Medicaid. Because otherwise you’re looking at a bloodbath in November and frankly I’m finding less and less reason to defend him as this garbage continues with no end in sight.

* I agree with Ann Coulter, Kris Kobach and others: Immigration is the number one issue. Lose on that, and all is lost. That’s why I supported Trump, despite the defects of his personality. (OK, I’ll admit I find the way he upsets Leftist race-baiters kinda funny–in fact the whole world of 4chan memes and stuff amused me in ways I never would have believed of myself a few years ago.) And this is why I hope and pray the Mueller investigation doesn’t uncover some nitpicky Russian connection or business deal of the sort no other politician would ever be indicted on. So on similar grounds, I’m not happy that Bannon seems to be undercutting the only hope we seem to have on at least stopping the bleeding on immigration. (I feel the clock is ticking so fast, that we can’t just wait another 4, 8 or 12 years for the “perfect” populist-Right candidate to come along.)

But I do agree with others that Bannon is probably way more of a thinker than Trump or most of his inner circle. In an absolute sense, I’m tempted to think that Bannon is more of a genuine right-wing populist, but the fact is he is not president and so only has the power of Breitbart–which is meaningless power without politicians to enact policy.

Also, to walk back a bit my first comment on Bannon messing things up: it’s not like he’s a lawyer. His opinion of it being treasonous doesn’t make it so. Putting him under oath to say he was upset with Don Jr. won’t make Don Jr’s actions suddenly illegal. Yes, Trump’s own kids and many in the WH staff seem to be neocons/neoliberals, and perhaps Bannon is genuinely upset at this. I’m not sure how this shakes out in any positive way, though. I think going after Trump’s family is a sure way to fall out of grace with Trump permanently (unless this is indeed an orchestrated PR effort.)

* Don Jr. retweeted Kevin MacDonald during the campaign, but he doesn’t seem like someone that would actually read the books. He and Eric have a typical jock mindset and don’t seem to be self-reflective at all.

Think of it this way, who would be better at running Breitbart, Bannon or Ron Unz? It could be worse, Ben Shapiro could be brought back.

Bannon is a good example of “appearance is ideology”. You can’t be serious when you are a thrice-divorced overweight slob. I don’t have much regard for Richard Spencer, but you can’t call the man unkempt.

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Vanity Fair: “OH MY GOD, THIS IS SO F—ED UP”: INSIDE SILICON VALLEY’S SECRETIVE, ORGIASTIC DARK SIDE

Posted on January 3, 2018 by Luke Ford

I wish there was an ethnic angle to this.

Vanity Fair:

Some of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley are regulars at exclusive, drug-fueled, sex-laced parties—gatherings they describe not as scandalous, or even secret, but as a bold, unconventional lifestyle choice. Yet, while the guys get laid, the women get screwed. In an adaptation from her new book, Brotopia, Emily Chang exposes the tired and toxic dynamic at play.

Who knew that goyim could be so predatory?

About once a month, on a Friday or Saturday night, the Silicon Valley Technorati gather for a drug-heavy, sex-heavy party. Sometimes the venue is an epic mansion in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights; sometimes it’s a lavish home in the foothills of Atherton or Hillsborough. On special occasions, the guests will travel north to someone’s château in Napa Valley or to a private beachfront property in Malibu or to a boat off the coast of Ibiza, and the bacchanal will last an entire weekend. The places change, but many of the players and the purpose remain the same.

Is this article a candid description of the Inner Party at work?

The freewheeling sex lives pursued by men in tech—from the elite down to the rank and file—have consequences for how business gets done in Silicon Valley.

Everything we do affects other people. The more power and money a guy accummullates, the more people he can screw.

I believe there is a critical story to tell about how the women who participate in these events are often marginalized, even if they attend of their own volition.

Why would only women have a story to tell? Anyway, dumb people are routinely marginalized because they are not smart enough to keep up, and on average, women are five IQ points behind men.

Perhaps this culture is just one of the many offshoots of the sexually progressive Bay Area, which gave rise to the desert festival of free expression Burning Man, now frequented by the tech elite.

The more you free up sexuality, the more predatory it gets.

“Anyone else who is on the outside would be looking at this and saying, Oh my God, this is so fucked up,” one female entrepreneur told me. “But the people in it have a very different perception about what’s going on.”

Different groups have different norms. The Inner Party, for example, has different norms from the Outer Party.

Alcohol lubricates the conversation until, after the final course, the drugs roll out. Some form of MDMA, a.k.a. Ecstasy or Molly, known for transforming relative strangers into extremely affectionate friends, is de rigueur, including Molly tablets that have been molded into the logos of some of the hottest tech companies. Some refer to these parties as “E-parties.”

Many women in particular are looking to escape responsibility for their choices, they love to blame bad decisions on drugs and alcohol and the predations of other people. Few women are willing to take responsibility for their choices. For most of human history, were the property of a father, husband or brother or other relation, so they didn’t have to take responsibility. We need to regulate women as a natural resource because most of them don’t want the responsibility that comes with agency.

Do you know why WASPs won’t go to orgies? Too many thank you notes to write.

These sex parties happen so often among the premier V.C. and founder crowd that this isn’t a scandal or even really a secret, I’ve been told; it’s a lifestyle choice.

People with high IQs are less vulnerable to the consequences of a libertine life while the working class, for example, was devastated by the sexual revolution.

While some parties may be devoted primarily to drugs and sexual activity, others may boast just pockets of it, and some guests can be caught unawares.

People who don’t want to take responsibility for their choices are likely to be shocked and offended that sex goes on at parties. Orthodox Judaism segregates the sexes because it assumes that debauchery is likely to occur when you give people an opportunity.

They don’t necessarily see themselves as predatory. When they look in the mirror, they see individuals setting a new paradigm of behavior by pushing the boundaries of social mores and values.

Hmm, this sounds like a transgressive elite at war with the wider culture.

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The ADD Con

Posted on January 3, 2018 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Even more ridiculous is how they allow players to work around these problems when their personal doctor attests that they have ADD or a testosterone deficiency, so need prescription drugs to remedy it. A-Rod was allowed to do so, but still abused it. MLB keeps the list secret because of HIPAA and all. Sure. Gymnast Simone Biles “has” ADD. How many other American athletes take drugs while claiming that the Russians and everyone else are cheats? A growing number of cops and corrections officers I know get treated for their supposed lack of testosterone by cop-friendly doctors too.

* The good news is that Biles isn’t cheating by being prescribed performance enhancing drugs which would otherwise be illegal for an athlete to take.

No, she’s a brave American “taking a stand against ADHD stigma”.

ESPN:

“Biles isn’t the only high achiever with the condition; a host of other highly decorated Olympians, including swimmer Michael Phelps, hockey player Cammi Granato and Michelle Carter, an American who won gold in the women’s shot put in Rio, also have ADHD.

The leaked medical records revealed that Biles takes Ritalin, a stimulant commonly used to treat ADHD. The hackers accused her of using an “illicit psycho-stimulant” while competing, but USA Gymnastics confirmed that Biles had been approved for a therapeutic-use exemption.”

The incentive for athletes to be diagnosed with ADHD (then being able legally to take banned stimulants) is enormous.

Posted in Health | Comments Off on The ADD Con

Jews vs Goys

Posted on January 3, 2018 by Luke Ford

Kevin MacDonald writes: The rancour between Bannon and “Javanka” – Kushner & Ivanka Trump – is a recurring theme of the book. Kushner and Ivanka are Jewish. Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, is quoted as saying: “It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.”

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Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President

Posted on January 3, 2018 by Luke Ford

From Michael Wolff’s new book:

On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans.

Conway, the campaign’s manager, was in a remarkably buoyant mood, considering she was about to experience a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election — of this she was sure — but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under six points. That was a substantial victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: It was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers.

She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and blaming Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors whom she had been carefully courting since joining the Trump campaign — and with whom she had been actively interviewing in the last few weeks, hoping to land a permanent on-air job after the election.

Even though the numbers in a few key states had appeared to be changing to Trump’s advantage, neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law, Jared ­Kushner — the effective head of the campaign — ­wavered in their certainty: Their unexpected adventure would soon be over. Not only would Trump not be president, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.

As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. His ultimate goal, after all, had never been to win. “I can be the most famous man in the world,” he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future. He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities.

“This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes a week before the election. “I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.”

From the start, the leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was, and how everybody involved in it was a loser. In August, when he was trailing Hillary Clinton by more than 12 points, he couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory. He was baffled when the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer whom Trump barely knew, offered Trump’s campaign an infusion of $5 million. Trump didn’t turn down the help—he just expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. “This thing,” he told Mercer, “is so fucked up.”

Steve Bannon, who became chief executive of Trump’s team in mid-August, called it “the broke-dick campaign.” Almost immediately, he saw that it was hampered by an even deeper structural flaw: The candidate who billed himself as a billionaire — ten times over — refused to invest his own money in it. Bannon told Kushner that, after the first debate in September, they would need another $50 million to cover them until Election Day.

“No way we’ll get 50 million unless we can guarantee him victory,” said a clear-eyed Kushner.

“Twenty-five million?” prodded Bannon.

“If we can say victory is more than likely.”

In the end, the best Trump would do is to loan the campaign
$10 million, provided he got it back as soon as they could raise other money. Steve Mnuchin, the campaign’s finance chairman, came to collect the loan with the wire instructions ready to go so Trump couldn’t conveniently forget to send the money.

Most presidential candidates spend their entire careers, if not their lives from adolescence, preparing for the role. They rise up the ladder of elected offices, perfect a public face, and prepare themselves to win and to govern. The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their worldview one whit. Almost everybody on the Trump team, in fact, came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president once he was in office. Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as Trump’s opening act at campaign rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” ­Flynn assured them.

Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.

Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears—and not of joy.

There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: Suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the United States.

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VOX: Why American doctors keep doing expensive procedures that don’t work – The proportion of medical procedures unsupported by evidence may be nearly half

Posted on January 2, 2018 by Luke Ford

Your health is too important to be left to your doctors.

For example, almost all chiropractors and physical therapists treating on a lien basis are useless, according to the 2016 book CROOKED: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting On the Road to Recovery.

From VOX:

The recent news that stents inserted in patients with heart disease to keep arteries open work no better than a placebo ought to be shocking. Each year, hundreds of thousands of American patients receive stents for the relief of chest pain, and the cost of the procedure ranges from $11,000 to $41,000 in US hospitals.

But in fact, American doctors routinely prescribe medical treatments that are not based on sound science.

The stent controversy serves as a reminder that the United States struggles when it comes to winnowing evidence-based treatments from the ineffective chaff. As surgeon and health care researcher Atul Gawande observes, “Millions of people are receiving drugs that aren’t helping them, operations that aren’t going to make them better, and scans and tests that do nothing beneficial for them, and often cause harm.”

Of course, many Americans receive too little medicine, not too much. But the delivery of useless or low-value services should concern anyone who cares about improving the quality, safety and cost-effectiveness of medical care. Estimates vary about what fraction of the treatments provided to patients is supported by adequate evidence, but some reviews place the figure at under half.

Naturally that carries a heavy cost: One study found that overtreatment — one type of wasteful spending — added between $158 billion and $226 billion to US health care spending in 2011.

The stunning news about stents came in a landmark study published in November, in The Lancet. It found that patients who got stents to treat nonemergency chest pain improved no more in their treadmill stress tests (which measure how long exercise can be tolerated) than did patients who received a “sham” procedure that mimicked the real operation but actually involved no insertion of a stent.

There were also no clinically important differences between the two groups in other outcomes, such as chest pain. (Before being randomized to receive the operation or the sham, all patients received six weeks of optimal medical therapy for angina, like beta blockers). Cardiologists are still debating the study’s implications, and more research needs to be done, but it appears that patients are benefitting from the placebo effect rather than from the procedure itself.

Once a treatment becomes popular, it’s hard to dislodge

Earlier cases in which researchers have called into question a common treatment suggest surgeons may push back against the stent findings. In 2002, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study demonstrating that a common knee operation, performed on millions of Americans who have osteoarthritis — an operation in which the surgeon removes damaged cartilage or bone (“arthroscopic debridement”) and then washes out any debris (“arthroscopic lavage”) — worked no better at relieving pain or improving function than a sham procedure. Those operations can go for $5,000 a shot.

Many orthopedic surgeons and medical societies disputed the study and pressed insurance companies to maintain coverage of the procedure. Subsequent research on a related procedure cast further doubt on the value of knee surgeries for many patients with arthritis or meniscal tears, yet the procedures remain in wide use.

Other operations that have continued to be performed despite negative research findings include spinal fusion (to ease pain caused by worn disks), and subacromial decompression, which in theory reduces shoulder pain.

Posted in Health | Comments Off on VOX: Why American doctors keep doing expensive procedures that don’t work – The proportion of medical procedures unsupported by evidence may be nearly half

Jewish Nationalist David Brooks Is Appalled By Tribalism

Posted on January 2, 2018 by Luke Ford

According to Wikipedia:

Brooks met his first wife, the former Jane Hughes, while both were students at the University of Chicago. She converted to Judaism[90] and changed her given name to Sarah.[91] In November 2013, David and Sarah Brooks divorced.[92][93] In 2017, Brooks married his former research assistant, writer Anne Snyder.[94]

According to The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, in a September 2014 interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Brooks said that his oldest son serves in the Israel Defense Forces.

So Jewish tribalism is great, but gentile tribalisms are bad? On the other hand, David’s latest bride is not Jewish, so he’s obviously not as committed to the Jewish tribe as he once was, and his heart seems to be leaning towards conversion to Christianity.

David Brooks writes in the NYT:

“A funny thing happens,” Haidt said, “when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side in each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose.”

The problem is that tribal common-enemy thinking tears a diverse nation apart.

This pattern is not just on campus. Look at the negative polarization that marks our politics. Parties, too, are no longer bound together by creeds but by enemies.

Furthermore, it won’t be easy to go back to the common-humanity form of politics. King was operating when there was high social trust. He could draw on a biblical metaphysic debated over 3,000 years. He could draw on an American civil religion that had been refined over 300 years.

Over the past two generations, however, excessive individualism and bad schooling have corroded both of those sources of cohesion.

In 1995, the French intellectual Pascal Bruckner published “The Temptation of Innocence,” in which he argued that excessive individualism paradoxically leads to in-group/out-group tribalism. Modern individualism releases each person from social obligation, but “being guided only by the lantern of his own understanding, the individual loses all assurance of a place, an order, a definition. He may have gained freedom, but he has lost security.”

In societies like ours, individuals are responsible for their own identity, happiness and success. “Everyone must sell himself as a person in order to be accepted,” Bruckner wrote. We all are constantly comparing ourselves to others and, of course, coming up short. The biggest anxiety is moral. We each have to write our own gospel that defines our own virtue.

The easiest way to do that is to tell a tribal oppressor/oppressed story and build your own innocence on your status as victim. Just about everybody can find a personal victim story. Once you’ve identified your herd’s oppressor — the neoliberal order, the media elite, white males, whatever — your goodness is secure. You have virtue without obligation. Nothing is your fault…

The crooked timber school of humanity says the line between good and evil runs through each person and we fight injustice on the basis of our common humanity. The oppressor/oppressed morality says the line runs between tribes. That makes it easy to feel good about yourself. But it makes you very hard to live with.

As Carl Schmitt noted, the friend/enemy distinction is the basis of politics.

All victimologies contain a nationalism and all nationalisms contain the capacity for genocide.

Posted in David Brooks, Nationalism | Comments Off on Jewish Nationalist David Brooks Is Appalled By Tribalism