Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

The Pacific

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

Jennifer Senior writes a New York Times book review on Simon Winchester’s latest — Pacific:

But what I learned most unexpectedly, to my depressed amazement, is how much the United States of today has in common with Australia … of the 1970s. Back then, a member of the Australian Senate threatened to shut down the government. (Under very different circumstances, admittedly, than House Republican have done here. But still.) Australia also suffered from xenophobia, because the government finally ended restrictions on immigration, and the country’s ambivalence about embracing the polyglot future persists today, which Mr. Winchester fears may keep it “pinioned and fettered firmly in its past.”

Steve Sailer writes Oct. 17, 2005:

The Cochran-Harpending theory is not good for the Jews, according to the cover story in New York magazine: “Are Jews smarter? Why the controversial new study of Jewish intelligence has everybody plotzing,”. For over a year, I kept telling Gregory Cochran that he was going to get roasted alive.
At first, though, most of the publicity was favorable. After all, it’s hard to be publicly against a scientific breakthrough that might someday help ease the suffering of victims of hereditary Ashkenazi diseases. But, Jennifer Senior has pulled off that feat. This article should remind us of just how brave NY Times genetics reporter Nicholas Wade really is.
For a decade, I’ve assumed that the Bell Curve controversy wasn’t really about blacks having lower than average IQs, but about Jews having higher than average IQs. After all, history shows it’s much more dangerous to be thought of as smarter than to be thought of as dimmer. So, if all mention of IQ could be banned as insulting to blacks, the thinking went, then nobody would notice how smart Jews are.

On the same day, Steve Sailer writes:

Making Jennifer Senior of New York magazine look like an IQ expert appears to be the goal of the new article in Slate, “Moral Courage: Is defending The Bell Curve an example of intellectual honesty?” by Stephen Metcalfe, whose qualifications are, apparently, that he is “a Slate critic and lives in Brooklyn.”
Metcalfe’s denunciation of Charles Murray’s recent Commentary magazine article “The Inequality Taboo” is full of howlers such as:
“Before I casually took up the cause of the race realists and assumed that only an overprogrammed PC hysteria had kept their work from gaining widespread legitimacy, I’d want to know a couple of things. I’d want to know why “the data” are always so selective and incomplete, if not hidden or misrepresented, and I’d want to know a whole lot more about the movement’s two leading lights, J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen. Rushton and Jensen came to my attention when Murray fingered them, along with Lawrence Summers, as the impetus for his new Commentary article.”
Slate is paying Metcalfe to write about the validity of IQ research, and yet Metcalfe admits that he had never heard of Arthur Jensen until a few weeks ago! Jensen, who has published 435 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, became a national figure in 1969 with the publication of his long meta-analysis “How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?” in the Harvard Educational Review. President Nixon even assigned his top domestic policy advisor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to keep him updated on Jensen’s research.
You really have to read this article to believe the quality of screeds that can get published these days.

From the comments:

* Yeah, Metcalf isn’t really equipped to deal with this stuff. Allow me to elaborate on Sailer’s critique of Metcalf’s self-congratulatory smear job:

“… the same daunting statistical hoodoo that left laypeople unable to evaluate the merits of The Bell Curve 11 years ago.” Hoodoo? Meaning, statistics is magic or statistics doesn’t really work? Actually, I really admired the statistical primer Herrnstein & Murray included in The Bell Curve. It was fairly lucid and brought back memories of my best stats professor. It is one of the many things they wrote to shield themselves from criticism, but of course that only shields them from criticism by people who have actually read the book (and who expect their critiques to be evaluated by others who have).

“Unless Sullivan has a degree in cognitive psychology we don’t know about, he’s as unqualified as the rest of us to determine whether Murray’s arguments are sound science….” No specialist background in cognitive science is required, just a basic ability to understand statistics, read for detail, and follow the reasoning. Psychometrics is its own field anyway, peopled mainly by those who agree with Herrnstein & Murray.

“In his own book on human intelligence, The Mismeasure of Man, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould….” In his own book on how human intelligence can’t really be measured, non-psychometrician Gould made up claims that Jews had substandard IQs in the 1920s, in order to demolish those claims. Gould is an anti-intellectual, a socialist, and a Lysenkoist, which is pretty glassy house to be living in if you’re going to be throwing stones about anti-semitism, particularly if you go around making up Jew-bashing legends. Metcalf’s implication that mid-Century Germany was less racist than the United States is probably the most telling part of his piece.

“… the motives of people who spend their entire professional lives trying to prove black people are dumber than white people escape all scrutiny.” Difficult to address this claim, since I can’t think of anyone who has spent their entire professional life trying to prove any one thing. What he’s trying to make the reader think is that Herrnstein, Lynn, and Jensen never came up against any serious criticism, which is more evidence that he’s simply out of his league with the ten minutes of Google that would be required to learn the facts.

“… in front of the likes of David Duke, he argues that white women’s birth canals are larger than black women’s, allowing white women to give birth to larger-brained babies.” It’s certainly a shocking claim, but I wonder why no one bothers to even try to disprove it. Could it be because leftists would rather herd people with shocks than try to inform?

“As superintendent of something called the Eugenics Record Office, Laughlin’s testimony before Congress helped pass the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. (“The Jew is doubtless here to stay,” Laughlin confided to his associate Madison Grant, “and the Nordic’s job is to prevent more of them from coming.”)” Funny, then, that he supported a law which did not put any special limitations on Jews, or even recognize them as a category. Then again, people who haven’t read the law probably don’t know that the country with the most generous quota was Germany.

“These are people who openly admired the people who committed the worst crime in human history.” I wonder if Metcalf read visited the Pioneer Fund website. “They never disavowed that admiration or denounced that crime.” Oh yeah, I’ll bet my bottom dollar that Metcalf did some intensive quote-mining to see if anyone in Pioneer Fund ever said anything against mass murder.

“If maybe, just maybe, the inability to utter one word of acknowledgment or apology or remorse…” Just one word of “acknowledgement”? Like, Rushton’s name in the bibliography? In fact H&M do express regret over the disproportionate importance people place on intelligence, but it’s difficult to defend a book to people who are forbidden to read it.

“Have I ceased to be a liberal “in the classical sense”?” Yes.

* A reader writes:

Saw Pinker’s lecture [on the Cochran-Harpending theory of the evolution of Ashkenazi Jewish high intelligence] last night, it was great. I didn’t feel like taking frantic notes like I was back in school so I quickly came to terms with the inevitability that I’d forget most of it. But I enjoyed it while it was happening. Though not even Pinker could prevent the most technical aspects from blurring beyond my comprehension, the talk overall was very much in his clear, amusing, engagingly constructed writing style.

Noah Feldman was the moderator and he asked if potentially “dangerous” ideas shouldn’t be airtight before they can be published.

Funny how nobody asked that question before whooping up Steven D. Levitt’s now-discredited abortion-cut-crime theory for the last six years… “A lie goes halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on.”

As I recall, Pinker basically said “Maybe, good question, but no.” I didn’t quite understand how the theories are going to be sufficiently tested if they aren’t allowed into the open until they no longer require testing. Maybe Feldman meant “in popular venues like New York magazine” as opposed to “obscure scientific venues where people are comparatively safe from politics.”

Funny how the best overall critique of Levitt’s theory appeared in Slate.com within days of his theory first surfacing in the media. In contrast, professional economists were largely missing in action for years.

But it wasn’t clear and Pinker seemed to be saying No either way. (Feldman was asking the question in a fairly nonpartisan manner, by the way; he didn’t seem at all to be arguing in favor of the withholding.)

Since it was the segment that I think inspired the most questions, I would say one of the main sources of interest to the audience were the anecdotes Pinker told which went counter the idea that Jews are intellectually accomplished because their culture/parents put so much emphasis on academic achievement (amusingly, Pinker introduced this question as “Jewish Genes or Jewish Mothers?”).

Funny how Jennifer Senior in New York denounced attributing Jewish IQ to “Jewish genes” as a “stereotype,” when her preferred explanation was “Jewish mothers.” Nothing stereotypical about that concept!

One was a quote from Noam Chomsky’s mother describing her reaction to her son’s decision to study linguistics: “I go up and down the street all the time and I never see a sign that says: ‘Help Wanted: Linguist.’”

Pinker seemed to be saying that an emphasis on education to the extent that education helps one succeed in life is not the same as a love of intellectualism for its own sake. So if the latter is a characteristic of Jews it’s not the result of parents concerned about financial viability it’s the result of raw intelligence desiring a sufficiently stimulating outlet. The audience seemed to be rebelling against this idea somewhat.

I’d sympathize with the audience. Jews definitely have a tradition of unprofitable scholarship. Marx, for instance, was always dunning his capitalist relatives for financial support in angry letters that assumed that they had a duty to support a genius like himself.

It reminded me of John McWhorter responding in the paperback of Losing the Race to the critiques that, contra his argument that blacks don’t take enough interest in academics, blacks care very much about education because they realize it’s a means of economic success. McWhorter emphasized that he didn’t mean that they didn’t get the practical value of a degree but rather that intellectualism for its own sake is what makes one do well in school.

My impression is that the intellectual orientation of blacks isn’t bad, when you adjust for IQ. I’d guess that African-Americans are significantly more intellectually oriented than Mexican-Americans, who have a higher average IQ. Even adjusting for their high IQs, I’d guess that Ashkenazi Jews were the most intellectually oriented group on Earth, with the French in second place.

But, as Pinker seemed to be saying, that’s the reverse of the real cause and effect—being into intellectualism for its own sake is the result of having a highly intelligent mind, and a highly intelligent mind is the most important thing for doing well in school, more so than “Jewish Mothers.”

Posted in Australia, IQ, Jews, Nationalism | Comments Off

Blacks On Juries

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

I served on a jury in Inglewood circa 2003 for a black man who blew blood alcohol tests way above the legal limit. He was clearly guilty but the three blacks on the jury said that enough young black men were in jail and they weren’t going to convict a brother. So the jury was hung.

In general, blacks and Muslims seem to exhibit a strong sense of group identity and group solidarity and that makes them a poor choice for juries and other objective roles.

What about Jews? Some Jews have such an attachment to their group that they won’t vote to convict a fellow Jew. I suspect most Jews in America are not that Jewishly committed, but I suspect Jews on juries will be less likely to vote to convict a Jew than would non-Jews.

This issues touches on the problems of a multicultural society containing groups that have more loyalty to their group than to the nation state. It seems to me that any group that has such loyalty to their own group that they won’t act in the interests of their country, is a danger.

What are good measures of citizenship? It seems to me that WASPs create the least corrupt countries. WASP countries tend to be high trust countries until they overrun by non-WASPs.

NYT Editorial Board: Excluding Blacks From Juries
In requiring prosecutors to give a “race-neutral” reason for excluding black jurors, the court wrote that racial discrimination in jury selection “harms not only the accused whose life or liberty they are summoned to try,” but undermines “public confidence in the fairness of our system of justice.”
Mr. Foster was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death. For nearly three decades since, state prosecutors have denied that race was a factor in their decision to strike all the black jurors from his trial. They have also steadfastly refused to turn over their jury-selection notes to defense lawyers.
Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case, Foster v. Chatman, to decide whether the prosecutors are telling the truth. The Georgia courts have all ruled in the state’s favor. But now those jury-selection notes are at the center of the case. Almost 20 years after Mr. Foster’s conviction, his lawyers finally got hold of them through the state’s open-records law.
The notes show that, contrary to prosecutors’ claims, race was indeed central to their decision to exclude certain jurors. Each black potential juror’s name is highlighted in green and marked with a “B”. The first four names on a handwritten list of “Definite NOs” are those of the black jurors who were struck. In a separate list, those jurors are ranked against one another, “in case it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors.”

More wisdom is to be found in the NYT comments section:

* As anyone who has ever sat on a jury can tell you, juries are very unrepresentative. Most working people don’t want to sit on juries. To miss 6-8 days of work for an auto accident is just too much for most hard working Americans. You are left with young, unemployed people and retirees.

* I guess the prosecution of OJ Simpson was not guilty of stacking the jury pool. With a nearly all black jury, white Americans were shocked when known murderer Orenthal Simpson was acquitted of his gruesome crimes and millions of African Americans cheered. The OJ trial revealed that bias in the courtroom is a two-way street. Later of course, OJ all but admitted to murdering Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman. How tragic that black bias prevented the families of OJ’s victims from receiving justice for their loves one. How biased and unjust.

* Google for a November 4, 1994 NYT article on the use of peremptory challenges to ensure a mostly black jury in the OJ Simpson case – there was only one white.

And how they cheered when he was acquitted!

Yes, the abuse works both ways.

* Now. Let’s ask the question “why?”. Why would potential jurors who are black be rejected?

* This is a two-way street. Given the concept of jury nullification, most notably demonstrated in the OJ Simpson trial, perhaps the prosecution is on to something. Johnny Cochran played the jury like a violin and used the subtle inference of “us vs. them” to let a murderer walk free.

* This article references a complex multifaceted area of the law/government in passing as its author conducts a racism shaming exercise based on biased and false assertions, it does us readers and our intelligence a disservice. This is not a scholarly article about peremptory challenges, it is paying lip service to it while using it as a vehicle to judge and condemn an entire legal system/branch of the government as racist. You could find a law review article that tells you more about the challenges and their history left out of this article that contradicts the author’s conclusion, and any trial lawyer will tell you there are many situations where whites are excluded from juries based on their race. This article is just embarrassing, starts nowhere, goes nowhere, gives you 1% of the information, makes grandiose claims about race without coming close to supporting it.

* So… a jury that INCLUDES African-Americans simply because they’re black will be a better judge of the innocence or guilt of the defendent than one that EXCLUDES African-Americans simply because they’re black? Or only when the defendent was black? How about when the defendent was white? Was poor? Was a repeat offender?…At some point, do we care about just getting a jury that just does a BETTER JOB?

* It’s common knowledge among defense attorneys with any significant experience that most prosecutors will strike as many black jurors as they can in cases involving black defendants. The responses of prosecutors listed in this article are typical of the lame responses I encountered in making Batson challenges. As long as the response is “race neutral”, the strike is allowed by the courts. Even boneheaded prosecutors can come up with race neutral excuses until the cows come home. The response doesn’t have to make any sense. It only has to be race neutral. I would assume that Batson was intended as an attempt to provide black defendants with a jury of their peers. If so, it is an abject failure, a toothless tiger.

* Both sides exclude jurors in any trial. The prosecution wants someone hard on crime. The defense wants someone leinent.

The fact is that the vast majority of blacks are sympathetic to other blacks. There is nothing wrong with that. Over 90% of blacks voted for Obama twice. It was their right. If 90% of whites voted white, Obama would never have been elected!

Over half of all blacks believe that the police are prejudiced against blacks. Why would a prosecutor ever want a person with that belief on their jury regardless of race?

If you were the prosecutor and had lost cases because a black refused to find another black guilty, what would you do? if you were a lawyer repesenting a black, would you favor a black over a white prospective juror? The fact is that they both do so most of the time.

You want to stop it. Don’t let either side see the prospective juror during questioning. Of course, both sides can often tell the race by the voice and answers to some questions.

* As a former prosecutor, I can tell you exactly why it is done. I’ve seen multiple examples of extremely guilty black defendants go free because a black(s) on the jury simply would not vote to convict one of their own. The game becomes being able to articulate a non race based reason to exercise a peremptory challenge against a black whom a prosecutor knows good and well based on experience will not convict a fellow black if left on the jury.

* Having personally experienced two cases in which a black juror was the only “no” vote to convict an obviously guilty black defendant, (“I just don’t think he’s guilty”) and found the same situation encountered by several friends, I certainly understand the angst of having black jurors excluded based on race.
Just don’t complain about crime in your neighborhood or try to move into mine.

Posted in Blacks | Comments Off

Conversion, Attachment & Addiction

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

In my experience, most converts to Orthodox Judaism are unconsciously trying to fill a hole in their soul, fill up a deep sense of emptiness stemming from a lack of attachment (aka an unhappy childhood) and that without deep inner work, the conversion is not going to be successful (i.e., they won’t create the happy loving home they crave).

I wonder what percentage of converts to Orthodox Judaism could be called a success?

If I were doing conversions to Orthodox Judaism, I would demand that would-be converts enter a 12-step program of their choice and only come back to me once they’ve worked all twelve steps.

Addiction and connection are opposites.

Posted in Addiction, Conversion | Comments Off

Steve Sailer: NYT Catches On, Finally … Sort of: “A Mass Migration Crisis, and It May Yet Get Worse”

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Polish soccer fans stand in defiance of “refugee” invasion and unveil huge banner. Pretty intimidating.

* It may get worse? But I thought making White countries more “diverse” (that is less White) was always good?

* But, Steve, surely the point is that ‘open borders’ is the prevailing political orthodoxy of our times – hammered in by the real opinion formers, movers and shakers behind the politicians – and all we are seeing now is the prelude to the actual opera.

Yes, the NYT might express faux alarm now, to garner a few controversial headlines and salacious stories, but don’t you think that the softening up process, the ‘shock therapy’ to a *real* regime of open borders – which means exactly what the label describes – has only just begun, and so far is working to plan?

I mean the whole idea is to habituate white Europeans, either by a process of ramping up gradualism, or by punctuated equilibrium of shocks, that somehow massive immigration to the point of displacement and extinction, is ‘normal’ and ‘inevitable’.

* When ISIS was headlines on cable news everyday, Sean Hannity was joined via satellite by a today Christian Crusader who looked like captain America, a straight T.E. Lawrence, he was wearing this garment that looked like a cool rug. He was locked and loaded and fightin on side one of the good guys over there. Frankly the thing screamed V for Vendetta set-up media. I don’t think that’s quite legal yet what he was doing as a US citizen, and the mien was too remarkable to feel real. But I strongly support the matter whether truth or vapid propaganda. Muslims got more heroes than we do right now, and I sense the jig is up in a sense, America is not going to walk into the middle of muslim civil war when it spent a damn decade trying to leave one, because the sand wars are not conducive for uncle sam heroes, basically, but Christian heroes…. Yeah I think the jig is up and coming. One of them politico type sites splashed a small truth from time out of mind and the timing was well enough on time I guess. When good people do the right thing nations really do heal. I’m serious. Because unhappy the land in need of heroes. “Unhappy the land in Need of Heroes.”

* The first five minutes of Al Jazeera’s “The Stream – Young and alone in Sweden” are amazing. Within minutes the host’s breadth is taken away as a Swedish official presents the current figures regarding the arrivals of “unaccompanied minors”. The already high figures just reported by Al Jazeera were outdated and way too low. Next, a person representing the “Swedish association for unaccompanied minors” who was said to have arrived to Sweden in 2012 is asked why he chose Sweden as his destination. He replies that he spent the whole summer of 2009 there – with his sister’s family – and that he liked the caring and good-hearted people…

* Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Croatia (plus Austria minus Vienna) are all saying NO! along with the former DDR and Bavaria.

We are seeing a belt of conservative nationalist regimes rejecting the dictates of Brussels and Merkel coalescing in the former Habsburg lands (plus former DDR/Bavaria).

* Leftists relentlessly pushes policies that must inevitably result in either the extinction of their own societies or a return of Hitlerism. Like the scorpion on the frog, it is their nature.

* Sweden should make immigrants a deal. Each migrant should be given a Swedish-Arabic dictionary and grammar book upon arrival. After one year, anyone who can speak fluent Swedish and has no criminal record should be allowed to stay an extra year. Those that are gainfully employed and still law-abiding should be given long-term residency. Everyone else should be deported with prejudice.

* None of these “refugees” want to go to Eastern European countries, everybody knows that they’re poor and extremely xenophobic, they want UK, Germany, Sweden, France, Norway…

* I guess you use “Ms. Merkel” in imitation of the style guide of the NYT, Steve. I’d prefer you use Dr. Merkel, to reflect that she has a doctorate in physical chemistry.

I think that fact goes a long way to explain her: elementary particles don’t recall what other particles have collided with them in the past and have to be considered fundamentally equal. Extend this philosophy to people and you get her response to 2015′s invasion.

* The jizya was a tax levied by Muslims on non-Muslim subjects. It’s now being levied in four of Britain’s biggest prisons.

Posted in Europe, Immigration, Sweden | Comments Off

George Soros Is Bad News For Israel

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

If you are on the left, you usually believe that racial, ethnic and religious differences are unimportant compared to social and economic differences. So leftists generally despise ethno-states such as Israel. If you identify more with the left than with the Jews, you will likely despise Israel.

REPORT: Billionaire George Soros’ philanthropy is bad news for Israel, according to an in-depth report from the NGO-Monitor watchdog group.

The report listed the many causes in Israel, or pertaining to Israel, that are funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

…

Another recipient of OSF funding is the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which, NGO-Monitor reports, is headed by staff who have accused Israel of war crimes and have termed Israel an “apartheid state.”

Among the Israeli recipients is Adalah, which promotes the so-called “right of return” to Israel, which would allow millions of descendants of Arabs who fled Israel during the War of Independence to claim Israel as their home

OSF also funds Al Haq, an Arab organization based in the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Ramallah, north of Jerusalem. NGO-Monitor’s researchers described Al-Haq director Shawan Jabarin as “a human rights campaigner by day and a terrorist by night,” who is among the senior members of the PFLP terrorist group.

The extreme-left Israeli group B’Tselem also receives OSF funds. B’Tselem is notorious for publishing one-sided reports, and for inflating Arab civilian casualty figures. For example, the group included hundreds of Hamas policemen in Gaza as “non-combatants,” and counted Sheikh Ahmed Yassin – then the leader of Hamas – as not a definite combatant.

…

The report listed several other controversial, far-left Israeli groups that receive direct or indirect OSF Funding, including Rabbis for Human Rights, Ir Amim, Yesh Din and the New Israel Fund.

…

Soros Fund Management, the family office of the billionaire investor George Soros, has sold its stake in SodaStream, the soda making appliance producer that profits from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and was made popular by actress Scarlett Johansson’s endorsement.

The decision comes as a number of big international investors, including the fund linked to the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, join in a burgeoning financial boycott of Israel amid a push by the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement and other groups seeking more rights for Palestinians.

SodaStream, headquartered in the Israeli city of Lod, has its main factory in the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.

…

From a 2007 article written by Soros himself:

… Israel, with the strong backing of the United States, refused to recognize the democratically elected Hamas government.

One explanation is to be found in the pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which strongly affects both the Democratic and the Republican parties. AIPAC’s mission is to ensure American support for Israel but in recent years it has overreached itself. It became closely allied with the neocons and was an enthusiastic supporter of the invasion of Iraq.

Whether the Democratic Party can liberate itself from AIPAC’s influence is highly doubtful. Any politician who dares to expose AIPAC’s influence would incur its wrath … Israel’s policies of occupation, control, and repression on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem and Gaza … AIPAC has been so successful in suppressing criticism …

Posted in George Soros, Israel | Comments Off

Crime Shoots Up In New York Following Black Lives Matter Movement

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* In the late 1980s early 1990s NYC was often above 2000 homicides and those numbers are now in the 500/600 range.

The number of murders per year in NYC fell from 2,262 in 1990 to 333 in 2014.

And this was while the city’s population rose from 7.3 to 8.5 million.

Besides the things you mentioned there was serious demographic change. The share of births to black mothers in NYC fell from 32% in 1986 to 20% in 2013. The number of births to Puerto Rican mothers fell by more than half. The NAM population fell AND changed character – US Blacks were partly replaced by Caribbean and African Blacks, PRs were mostly replaced by Dominicans and Mexicans. Middle class whites were partly replaced with SWPLs, which affected the crime rate indirectly, by raising real estate prices.

A positive feedback loop was created – the fall in crime attracted more upscale people, which raised real estate prices, which drove more downscale people out of the city, which lowered crime even further.

As the above link shows, so far in 2015 the murder rate is up by 5.9% compared to last year.

* The new scourge on the streets of New York this Summer was synthetic cannabinoids called K2 or Spice. The drug really exploded, especially among the homeless population. I experienced the zombie crowd this Summer around the 125th and Lexington Subway stop. Deeply disturbing. Straight out of The Walking Dead.

I haven’t seen any naked dudes on the streets, but I have seen people in this state.

K2 is usually sold legally though bodegas by Yemeni immigrants. The packs sell for a dollar or two a pop which is the ideal price point for destitute. The active cannabinoid agents are often manufactured in China and then combined with spices in the US and sold as an “incense” type product. It’s an especially dirty drug and the long term implications of its toxicity on users is unknown.

It is often used as a pot substitute by people on parole or who are subject to a drug test. Because it is so cheap, it has really hit the homeless in New York City. Some users become addicted and repeated use can lead to PCP like episodes. I have seen a few of these people on the street and it isn’t pretty. I assumed it was PCP (not that I have ever seen anyone on PCP), but the insane, manic, sweaty delusional nature of users is straight out of an after school special.

It is an interesting experiment for the drug legalization debate. K2 appears to be terrible for the long term physical and mental health of the users, but because of its low price point and that fact that it is legally sold out of bodegas meant that so far at least, there is little gang crime associated with the drug. There is no money to be made on the street level, although I am sure that Triad organized crime or some other organized crime is involved in some way on the bulk level. A few weeks ago, the New York City Council banned the drug, but enforcement is difficult because the “chefs” continually rework the formula.

While there has been an astronomical explosion in hospital emergency room visits, overall it has not had a material impact on the crime rate for now.

* The city has taken a major hit in terms of tourism since the riots. I wish we could insert links into comments, because the occasional story is being written about this. One is titled “Hotel bookings down since April unrest.” Another one that buries the issue is headlined “Why the Camden Pub owner is selling: ‘I don’t want this for my kids.”

A few decades ago, my family moved to a Maryland suburb and regularly took trips to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and went to restaurants in Little Italy. A few weeks ago I mentioned to my dad that he could get something he needed for his house at a Home Depot in Baltimore County (not the city, but the county) and he cut me off immediately saying “Are you kidding? I’m not going into Baltimore!”

That right there, I think, should tell you the effect all this has had.

* My theory would be that lower police response resulting in higher criminal confidence leads to more ‘committed’ shootings. Instead of “bang bang bang—run away,” it’s “bang bang bang, run down the wounded and anchor shot.” And similar reductions in low success drive-bys, replaced by higher success close contact shootings.

Posted in Blacks, Crime, New York | Comments Off

Jewish Boy Graduates College – At Age 11

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

REPORT: Moshe Kai Cavallin, 11, became the second youngest American to ever graduate college this week, after completing an Associate of Arts degree with full honors to boot. Moshe Kai Cavallin (also known by his Chinese name Kai Hasiao Hu or “obedient tiger”) began his studies at East Los Angeles College at the age of 8. When he was not turning heads at ELAC, he also took time to help his fellow students with their studies. One would be advised not to cross the pint-sized college graduate, as he has won gold medals in 26 martial arts events and is very handy with a broadsword.

According to his Web site, Moshe began studying martial arts at the age of 5 with his father, an ex-special operations commando.

Don’t expect to find the martial-artist and future astrophysicist playing video games this summer, which he avoids “because it’s not helping humanity in any way.”

The youngest American to ever graduate from college was Michael Kearney, who finished the University of South Alabama in 1995 at the age of 10.

As a younger child, Moshe Kai Cavallin was identified with “Attention Deficit Disorder,” but his parents refused to use “Ritalin,” the official drug for ADD.

He spoke his first words while he was just 4 months old. He told his pediatrician, “I have a left ear infection” when he was just 6 months old. At the age of just 10 months, he learned to read. Moshe accomplished a perfect score on the multiple-choice diagnostic tests for the Johns Hopkins precocious math program when he was just 4-years-old and his accomplishment came without studying.

Moshe graduated high school at the age of 6 years. He joined Santa Rosa Junior College when he was just 6-years and 7-months old. He finished his graduation from junior college with Associate of Science in Geology at the age of 8-years.

Moshe Kai Cavallin won $25,000 in the program “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” on Friday, April 25 2008 and April 28, 2008.

He graduated from East Los Angeles College with 4.0 GPA. He became the youngest student in U.S. History with an A.A. Degree, when he finished all the requirements for the degree in Jan, 2009 at the age of 10.

Posted in IQ | Comments Off

The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

From Amazon.com:

McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War
by Hamilton Gregory (Author)
In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara were desperate to find additional troops for the Vietnam War, but they feared that they would alienate middle-class voters if they drafted college boys or sent Reservists and National Guardsmen to Vietnam. So, on October 1, 1966, McNamara lowered mental standards and inducted thousands of low-IQ men.
Altogether, 354,000 of these men were taken into the Armed Forces and a large number of them were sent into combat. Many military men, including William Westmoreland, the commanding general in Vietnam, viewed McNamara’s program as a disaster. Because many of the substandard men were incompetent in combat, they endangered not only themselves but their comrades as well. Their death toll was appallingly high.
In addition to low-IQ men, tens of thousands of other substandard troops were inducted, including criminals, misfits, and men with disabilities.
This book tells the story of the men caught up in McNamara’s folly.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Low-IQ infantrymen as cannon fodder are not new today and weren’t new in the Vietnam war either.

In his superb classic book The Sharp End John Ellis presents a wealth of statistics showing that low-IQ enlistees and conscripts were relegated to the infantry whose units suffered something like 75% of all battle casualties.

Ellis also shows this for British forces as well. The British, much harder pressed for manpower than was the United States, consigned their lowest-IQ personnel to the Pioneer Corps whose members were menial laborers to dig ditches, roll airfields level, fill sandbags, erect fencing, clean latrines, &c. By late 1943 even the United States had run out of intellectually qualified conscripts and had begun to draft men not up to the lowest standards that had applied earlier in the war.

* Once I asked an army veteran of vietnam during the 1970′s if he thought platoon, full metal jacket, etc were very realistic. He said they weren’t, not at all, and neither was every other war movie he’d seen but with one eerily accurate exception. This movie is exactly what being in the army was like, he said. The movie is Stripes.

* Related to this, scholarly studies that look at life expectancy and IQ have found that people with low IQs are far more likely to die in accidents.

Now in an environment like the Vietnam War where you deal with guns and bombs everyday, that effect is magnified. Just think of the ways to accidentally die or kill: getting lost in the jungle, misunderstanding orders, accidentally shooting at fellow Americans, not taking proper precautions to prevent falling victim to friendly fire, mishandling explosives.

* Low IQ troops may not have helped in the Vietnam War but the rot was with the high IQ leaders. Read McMasters’ Dereliction of Duty.

BTW, the flawed U.S. Grand Strategy in Vietnam was essentially based on Maxwell Taylor’s highly influential book, amongst the Democrats, The Uncertain Trumpet. If I remember correctly, Taylor was near top of his class and proficient in several languages. It’s pretty certain that he had a high IQ.

McNamara and his “Whizz Kids” were also pretty bright, but not when it came to fighting a war.

Seriously, Steve, I think you’ve got to get around to reading Keith Stanovich. He is a legitimate cognitive researcher whose specialty is understanding why high IQ sometimes leads to stupid. The Scientific American ran an article by him which you might want to peruse.

“Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking that IQ Tests Miss.” Google it up.

* “How do the WW2 soldiers’ IQ compare to Vietnam era soldiers and how do the standards compare?”

They compare identically.

Early in both wars the military took in the best quality human material; later in the wars the military lowered the standards and inducted a lot of far from the best quality human material.

In the two wars the reasons for this shift differ: in WWII the nation(s) simply ran out of the best quality human material – the shortage was actual; while in the Vietnam War the best quality human material was exempted from induction – the shortage was artificial. In both instances the military was compelled to induct lower quality personnel.

The actual WWII & Vietnam War standards for IQ (or AFQT) don’t matter, as in both instances the bar was set high early and later lowered, and in both instances the military inducted from the then-available pool of manpower. The IQ ranges of those two wars’ manpower pools may not have been exactly the same (Flynn effect) but their graphs are parallel as are the graphs of the intelligence of the two wars’ inductees.

* Anecdotally, the stories I have heard from my friends who were officers in the Vietnam war certainly suggest that the troops they had were among the least prepared, least motivated, least trainable and most drug addicted that any US Army has gone to war with. One obvious factor is that in Vietnam inner city blacks made up a significant level of the troops. In WWII blacks generally weren’t allowed in combat units.

* The Iraq War turned out great in this sense: combat deaths were 10% of losses in Vietnam and 1% of losses in WWII. In some years, losses were less than in the peacetime years of the Cold War. A lot of this can be explained by the fact that we had a smaller, smarter army in Iraq.

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Academia’s Rejection of Diversity

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

If diversity is such a blessing, why does almost everyone flee it when given a choice? People prefer to live, work, play and worship with their own kind.

Diversity makes people uncomfortable, even afraid, and so they shrink within themselves.

By contrast, when I go back to Australia with its 90% white population, I’m in a land with one dominant culture and a tradition of mateship. High trust, high social capital.

Arthur C. Brooks writes: ONE of the great intellectual and moral epiphanies of our time is the realization that human diversity is a blessing. It has become conventional wisdom that being around those unlike ourselves makes us better people — and more productive to boot.

Scholarly studies have piled up showing that race and gender diversity in the workplace can increase creative thinking and improve performance. Meanwhile, excessive homogeneity can lead to stagnation and poor problem-solving.

Unfortunately, new research also shows that academia has itself stopped short in both the understanding and practice of true diversity — the diversity of ideas — and that the problem is taking a toll on the quality and accuracy of scholarly work. This year, a team of scholars from six universities studying ideological diversity in the behavioral sciences published a paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences that details a shocking level of political groupthink in academia. The authors show that for every politically conservative social psychologist in academia there are about 14 liberal social psychologists.

Why the imbalance? The researchers found evidence of discrimination and hostility within academia toward conservative researchers and their viewpoints. In one survey cited, 82 percent of social psychologists admitted they would be less likely to support hiring a conservative colleague than a liberal scholar with equivalent qualifications.

This has consequences well beyond fairness. It damages accuracy and quality. As the authors write, “Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking.”

One of the study’s authors, Philip E. Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania, put it to me more bluntly. Expecting trustworthy results on politically charged topics from an “ideologically incestuous community,” he explained, is “downright delusional.”

Are untrustworthy academic findings really a problem? In a few high-profile cases, most definitely. Take, for example, Prof. Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who in 2011 faked experiments to show, among other things, that eating meat made people selfish. (He later said that his work was “a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth”).

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Yes, liberal media bias is real, and here’s how it affected the CNBC debate

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Luke Ford

Timothy P. Carney writes: The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC — the largest media outlets with the exception of Fox News — all slant clearly left. So do a vast majority of other major newspapers and magazines. I’m not talking about their opinion pages, but about their news operations.

I don’t think it’s deliberate, or that any collusion, deception, or bad intentions are at play, except in the rarest circumstances. I also think very highly of many of the journalists whose personal views are significantly to the Left of the American political center. Many of them do an excellent job of reporting the news fairly and trying to understand political viewpoints all around the spectrum.

But the vast majority of journalists at these major outlets are generally liberal, and this ends up slanting their coverage. Cuomo is a perfect example.

Cuomo’s father was Democratic governor Mario Cuomo. His brother is Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is a daytime host and reporter, not an explicitly liberal host, such as Piers Morgan or MSNBC’s evening hosts.

This is the norm in the media: People with distinctively liberal or Democratic pedigrees and resumes are hired as straight news reporters (see Jake Tapper, Nick Confessore, Annie Lowrey, Alex Seitz-Wald, most of whom are excellent and fair journalists). In 2014, the Media Research center counted 30 former reporters as Obama officials. It’s far, far rarer to find the opposite.

While Tapper, Confessore, and Lowrey do a very good job of making sure their coverage is fair, the norm in the major media is slanted coverage — slanted to the Left. For instance, Linda Greenhouse was long the Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, and now she’s a liberal columnist about the Supreme Court whose factual errors consistently cut against the Right.

Reporters at the major outlets are almost entirely liberal on cultural issues. See the coverage of the gay marriage ruling, where the Supreme Court stretched the language of the Constitution to find that states couldn’t limit marriage to heterosexual couples. The country seems to be split evenly on gay marriage, but the major media are nearly unanimous. I don’t think this is really a matter of debate. In 2013, the Washington Post’s ombudsman basically admitted as much, with even more revealing comments by anonymous Post reporters placing Christian teaching on marriage on the same level as racism.

You see it with abortion, too, where journalists always ask difficult abortion questions of pro-life politicians, and nearly never ask difficult abortion questions of pro-choice politicians.

But it’s also true on questions of regulation, government spending and taxation. (I should add the media also has a very strong bias, which is neither liberal nor conservative, towards deficit reduction, which most journalists don’t realize is a bias.) I could give a thousand examples, but one good one was from the New York Times reporter, Jonathan Weisman, who spent the most time on the Export-Import Bank at the time, making it clear he was totally unaware about conservatives’ and libertarians’ economic arguments against export subsidies, while he was well versed in the talking points of industry and the liberals.

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