Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

After Many Generations, Mexicans Still Not Prospering in SoCal

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Luke Ford

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

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

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.”

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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.

* 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.

* 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

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”.

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Massacring Natives Is Usually Necessary To Take Over A Land And Develop Your Own Civilization

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

In the Torah, God commanded the Israelites to wipe out the original inhabitants of Canaan so they could take it over and develop their own civilization.

Whites had to do the same thing in America and Australia.

There’s rarely an alternative.

Israel won’t be safe until it has destroyed its enemies. Most Israelis wish that all Palestinians disappear.

In nature, you don’t find two subspecies in the same place. One always wipes out the others.

The races are subspecies.

Cal Flyn writes in Australia: The massacre at Warrigal Creek was one of the bloodiest episodes on the very bloody Australian frontier. In all, somewhere between 80 and 200 Gunai people were slaughtered that day in July 1843, wiping out in a single assault a substantial portion of the southern Bratowooloong clan. The leader of the Highland Brigade, Angus McMillan, was a Scot who had fled the horror of the Highland Clearances, during which thousands of his countrymen were forced from their land to make way for sheep, only to re-enact brutal clearances of his own upon this new land: Gippsland, the south-eastern corner of Australia. McMillan was a tough, pious and lonely man. A man who had struggled through miles of unknown territory, built new homes with bare hands, met tribes who had never seen or even known of white skin. He was a man who cut tracks, felled trees, shot strangers dead.

He was the “Butcher of Gippsland”. He was my great-great-great uncle.

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Trump Vs Hillary

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* I agree that Trump’s victory is part of a wave of nationalist and immigration-skeptical politics gaining strength in many democracies this year, for good reasons. One thing though that explains Trump, but also probably obscured him as an outcome, is the differences between the US and most foreign political systems. America’s two mainstream political parties effectively serve as semi-permanent versions of what would be coalitions of smaller political parties in other countries. The various “wings” or “blocs” of the Democrats and Republicans are the equivalent of what are smaller political parties in parliamentary coalition systems, but much less well-organized or defined.

Coalition systems allow for adjustment and bringing in or kicking out coalition members, which is one trick, for example, Western European political systems have done to keep anti-immigration/anti-globalist parties out of power. Party discipline is an actual real thing within political parties in many countries too, with parties having the power to decide on and expel members. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can do that. American political candidates are essentially self-declared and self-sustaining political entrepreneurs, at least by comparison, and any attempt to ostracize a political candidate is only informal, i.e., whether they get cut out of party outreach or fundraising apparatuses, endorsements, or convention rules (the amorphous “party establishments”). Another feature of the American system is the relative power and prominence of the President, which is not only the head of state and government but also leads a co-equal branch of government, the entirety of the federal government’s Executive Branch, and who is elected independently of the legislature.

All of this may mean that the American system is more subject to “wave”-type events: a system with an amorphous, loose, and largely undisciplined configuration of political alliances and no real way to control or check sudden reconfigurations in relative power within those alliances can thrust a surprise candidate into the paramount position very quickly, by comparison to other countries. (Would anyone have predicted in 2004 that Barack Obama would be elected in 2008?) No equivalent movement in Western Europe (UKIP, AfD, FN, etc.) has managed to get this close to power this quickly.

* When policies result in off-shoring jobs for the cheaper foreign wages, and importing unskilled third-world immigrants for cheaper domestic wages, the result is the destruction of millions of lives and families because–effectively–you’ve imposed a lowered standard of living through fewer jobs and lower wages on the domestic population.

Free trade: In theory, it should work in practice; in practice, it doesn’t work in theory.

* Black people often leave out verbs when they talk.

“he a fool”

“she nasty”

“he a jiveass turkey”

so maybe ‘matter’ in Black Lives Matter is meant as a noun.

maybe it means ‘black lives be matter’

so, maybe, we should call blacks ‘matters’.

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Nate Silver 2015: Donald Trump’s Six Stages Of Doom

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

Nate Silver writes in August of 2015: The lesson, rather, is that Trump’s campaign will fail by one means or another. Like Cain, Bachmann and Gingrich, Buchanan, Huckabee and Forbes came nowhere close to winning the Republican nomination.

If you want absurd specificity, I recently estimated Trump’s chance of becoming the GOP nominee at 2 percent.

COMMENTS:

* Is there any doubt that if Trump made it through Step 5 but then got nixed by insider maneuvering designed to block him that he would feel he had been treated “unfairly” by the party…and would then launch an independent bid for the Presidency? That would significantly hurt the chances of whoever the official GOP nominee was, particularly because primary voters who voted for Trump and felt he was robbed might stick with him.

So the GOP insiders would be faced with a choice: let the Trump nomination stand and lose the election OR block the Trump nomination, lose the election, make a portion of the base furious, and be blamed for the loss. Faced with that choice, it’s easy to imagine the insiders blinking and letting the nomination proceed.

* Trump for a greater America.
Revolution is the only solution.
Deport all the illegals along with their anchor babies back to Mexico.
Yea right, I know that some illegals didn’t come here from that cesspool called Mexico, but since they don’t really protect us from the flow we should return the favor.
President Trump in 2016.

* This is the same thing conservatives said when Nate predicted that Romney was going to lose. What you still don’t seem to get is that Nate, unlike you, doesn’t base what he writes on liking or disliking anyone. It’s called math. Which is why he’s always right.

* Trump supporters are hiliarious because they think hes some new phenomenon. But hes not. Hes Buchanon or Paul or Herman Cain. Hes riling up the base in a way that wont be sustained.

* I think the odds are VERY high that Trump drops out well before the convention. I think he has no desire to actually be President, he just enjoys the attention at this phase in the campaign.

* I think nobody in Trump’s position would do this unless he not only genuinely wanted to be President, he was further highly motivated to fix the country. Not only is it costing him money and aggravation and a lot of ill feeling from powerful interests, but it takes personal courage. If you look at the history of third party challengers, which he isn’t yet but might be indicative, the last two that were actually impacting the race were Wallace and Perot, and Wallace took a bullet and Perot stated he was intimidated out of the race (later to come back, but the stutter step cost him big in the polls.) Trump’s already been threatened by a Mexican gangster. He wouldn’t be going through all this aggravation if he weren’t seriously motivated.

* Nate,

This is a great article outlining the reasons that Trump will most certainly not be the nominee… But I think an honest assessment will indeed give greater weight to some of these obsticles than others.

1-2. Time. I would say that this is his second biggest vulnerability: He’s saying incredibly stupid things almost every time he opens his mouth… and every time he opens his mouth he becomes more embarrassing. You never know what stupid thing he might say might cause a supporter to drop him, or a non-supporter to declare “I would support Hillary over Trump”… but you know that it’s happening on a daily basis. However, I also must point out that all of this depends on how much money he throws at the problem. If he floods the airwaves and has paid doorknockers and ralliers and whatnot, he can easily recover from any major flub, and still look like the least idiotic douchebag in the GOP field.

3. Iowa and New Hampshire. Here I think your predictions are off. I think it extremely likely that Trump will claim one of the 3 tickets out of Iowa… and I think he’ll win NH in a landslide. Iowa is a caucus state. So there will only be a few tens of thousands of people participating at large, and they’ll be participating in a multi-hour ordeal where you have to stand firm in your support while you bully others to switch support. The tea-party is a fact-and-logic-immune cult that is long practiced at bullying… and Trump seems to be their messianic figure… so the caucus will be highly slanted towards Trump supporters, and he will absolutely do well. From there it will be a quick trip to where the democrats will be allowed to vote for Trump (making a big difference), or vote for Hillary (who will be nominated no matter what). I think Trump is going to get ~20% of the democratic vote here… just democrats wrecking havoc.

4. The winnowing. Here is where I feel Trump has no chance. As the field drops, he’s likely going to be the 2nd choice of less than 5% of the support for any given candidate. So in a field of 17, he might have 20% of the GOP vote, but in a field of 3, he probably won’t have more than ~24% of the GOP vote. His opponents will start beating him after New Hampshire, and they’ll beat him by very large margins in states with locked voting. From that point on, he’ll have to determine how much money he wants to flush over a lost cause.

5-6. I think Trump is more than capable of hiring people that can calculate electoral delegate strategies, and the people in the part are not likely to rip the part apart by overruling the people’s choice if he manages to scrape the delegates together.

Instead of each stage having a 50/50 chance of Trump surviving, I would rate it as follows:
Stage 1: 80%
Stage 2: 70%
Stage 3: 90%
Stage 4: 5%
Stage 5: 80%
Stage 6: 75%

All told, I give him about the same chance… I just think some of these threats are pretty navigable for him, and some of them are almost insurmountable.

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Idiocracy In Brooklyn

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Applicant’s criminal record or financial record is discriminatory.

* Drudge had a link up to a report stating that medical error is now the third leading cause of death. And I’ve seen a number of other news reports of prisoners mistakenly released (especially those with detainers) despite the certain fact that government isn’t eager to have such mistakes reported.

With high school diplomas today utterly meaningless and even college degrees no sure proof of literacy, this sort of thing will be on the rise. Maybe President Trump will find a Cabinet level job for Mike Judge where his uncanny vision of our future can be put to advantage for the nation.

* http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trumps-six-stages-of-doom/

If you haven’t done so yet, scroll down to the bottom and read the facebook comments from last summer. They are beyond hilarious. Swarmy SJW nerds make post after post about how nate is never wrong bc he uses math, and math is just too complex for the idiot trump supporters to understand. They bring up romney and 2012 over and over, not realizing this was their version of it.

This comes from the long winded 538 prediction of trump only having a 2% chance to win the nomination.

* When I first saw Idiocracy years ago, I described it to fellow travelers who hadn’t seen it as, “A documentary of the future.” Well, if anyone had any lingering doubts, let it be known: that future has most definitely arrived.

* Washington Post Headline: “NTSB: Metro has had a ‘severe learning disability’ when it comes to safety”

No discussion of the racial profile of Metro workers in any of dozens of articles on this subject. Surely there are no tests with disparate impact used to select employees.

* Do you think if we have a President Trump, he will declare Taco Tuesdays?

* A few years ago, the Kentucky Correctional & Psychiatric Center released an inmate after receiving a grammatically incorrect fax from the local grocery store demanding the man’s release.

* I like goji berries as much as any sandal-wearer, but you don’t have to go all vegan-fanatic on us. A taco salad once a year isn’t going to cause a heart attack any more than a granola bar once a year will cause a fatal intestinal blockage.

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Hillary’s Plan to Lose the Deer Hunter States

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: …the Washington Post ran a trial balloon claiming that Hillary intended to run in the fall on immigration expansion and gun control.

Looking at the 2012 electoral college map, that looks even more suicidal than it originally sounded. The Democrats prospered in 2012 by carrying almost all of the heavily wooded Rust Belt Great Lakes states where deer hunting is a big part of the culture, like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.

* My wife and I once had an employee who lived in a heavily black area some distance away (he’s black). His house was invaded by two black male criminals. He happened to be a gun owner (and former military), so he fired shots at them. He nicked at least one of them and they fled (they were later arrested at a hospital). The cop who took the employee’s statement at the end said to him, “I wish you hadn’t missed. Now we have to deal with ‘em through the justice system.”

That’s usually a common sentiment with a lot of rank-and-file cops; they sort-of secretly high-five each other when they find that a courageous citizen had defended himself or herself and dispatched the perps to their makers. And, of course, notwithstanding all this talk about racist cops gunning down (black) criminals, interviews with criminals demonstrate time and again that they are far more fearful of armed citizens than they are of police officers, from whom they expect restraint. Convicts who are interviewed about the subject are invariably for gun control.

* “Within broad rounding errors, what percentage of U.S. voters hunt? Six percent maybe? Probably less. I doubt the 2016 election is going to be decided by hunters.”

You don’t seem to understand how politics works. First of all, a majority of eligible voters don’t vote. Then there is a sizable majority among voters who consistently vote for one party or the other no matter what. When you do some math-by-dissection of the electorate, the “swing voters” are actually quite few, only a small single digit percentage.

Hunters are actually a diverse lot, in political terms – everyone from a wealthy Republican businessman who like to shoot exotic game to Joe Six-Pack union card holder who hunts deer on public land.

The hunter/shooter lobby may comprise only a small segment of the electorate, but when it is mobilized it punches far above its weight. Guns and hunting are a VERY emotional, cultural issue for such people – they go almost “rabid” politically when their beloved tradition is threatened. I know – I am one of them.

* ctual risk, are mass shootings by men with scary rifles. More on point to politics, another symbolic cultural issue to bash core America is something that won’t soon get old for the Democrats. (Look for arguments that we’ll need to take away guns from all those “racist Trump supporters who might revolt if he loses.”) I will concede that a live question exists as to whether this issue will hype up the Democrat base more than it will piss off white males in states the Democrats need to win, and I will also concede that the history of gun control makes for a great example of the difference between intensity of interest versus breadth of interest in an issue (gun control has been a loser for the Democrats since the 1990s in part because gun rights supporters who are invested in the issue enough to vote over it have outnumbered gun control supporters who are).

The real issue over guns right now is the future makeup of the Supreme Court. DC v. Heller (the 2008 Supreme Court case that found that the Second Amendment was an individual right) was a 5-4 decision penned by Scalia, who was the Justice most intellectually and personally invested in the issue. He’s gone now, and the Democrats have been signaling ever since the decision that they regard it as a rogue decision overturning “70 years of precedent” (which is false, but nonetheless), and it’s near to a certainty that any Clinton nominee to the Court would not vote to expand or further apply Heller’s individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, and would vote to overturn Heller if given the chance to do so. This may or may not matter depending on where you live, but in some places (e.g., California, whose legislature may very well ban all semi-auto rifles this year), a future Constitutional challenge would be the only thing standing in the way of expansive gun control.

* Beginning in the 1960s, liberals began to attack the criminal justice system because they felt it disparately punished minorities. Before that time, criminal cases that had been tried in state courts very rarely were appealed to Federal courts. Then, all of a sudden, they started to be, and very often. Capital cases, in particular, began to go regularly all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. This litigation resulted in procedural changes such as the constant application of the exclusionary rule (the policeman makes a mistake, so the criminal goes free), the advent of the Miranda warning, and the restriction of the death penalty to cases of aggravated murder (Furman v. Georgia, 432 U.S. 238, consolidated with Jackson v. Georgia and Branch v. Texas). Recall that before this period, even the state of New York, for example, had a mandatory death penalty for first-degree murder, including “felony murder” (homicide committed during the course of another felony, e.g., an armed robbery). Many states provided the death penalty for rape, arson, train-wrecking, and a few even for burglary. Liberal judges swept all this away.

These developments coincided with a rising rate of violent crime, and also with race riots and general urban decay. The movie Death Wish (1974) was a product of this era. There was a widespread perception that liberals were “soft on crime.”

The Left’s infatuation with gun control was, first, an effort to respond to that charge, enabling urban Democrats to claim that this was how they were going to be “tough on crime,” without, however, suggesting that they were going to punish actual criminals. That would be self-defeating, since it would involve locking up or executing members of their constituencies, particularly blacks.

The gun control push quickly aroused the NRA, and later led to repeated defeats for liberal politicians outside of a handful of urban constituencies. I believe that the left has since then pressed for gun control less out of a desire to take handguns away from urban blacks than from the desire to hurt the suburban and rural white males that have handed them so many defeats over the gun issue.

You’ll note that Hillary promises she’ll “take on the NRA” – there’s no mention of urban violence at all. These days, it’s all about political revenge against those “bitter clingers.” Statistical rarities like the Colorado theatre shooting are trotted out, and blamed on the “gun lobby” instead of on the near-impossibility of committing the dangerously insane to the loony bin, where they belong. The black-on-black slaughter in places like Chicago is never mentioned – and I’m sure that politicians like Hillary Clinton or Chuck Schumer have no realistic expectation that their anti-gun measures will make a particle of difference to it.

* The, err, ‘gun nuts’ will be highly motivated to vote this election. If you weren’t aware of it, there have been severe shortages in both ammo, and reloading components, due to the last two presidential elections. Some of these shortages are still not fully resolved.

* In the Tamir Rice case, I seem to remember it was heavily implied cops should have known better than to shoot a boy with a toy gun.

However, I learn today that nearly everyone from toddlers to adults can fail to accurately distinguish toy guns from real guns, loaded guns from unloaded ones, in the New York Times, no less:

One Week in April, Four Toddlers Shot and Killed Themselves.

Holston, Kiyan, Za’veon and Sha’Quille, RIP.

* Hillary is vulnerable on so many fronts.

Trump will destroy her in debates.

Words cannot describe how much I am looking forward to the debates.

* I did a marketing research project for the Z Channel in 1982 when I was at UCLA, modeling what kind of Nielsen ratings they’d get for different movies.

As for Italians and movie-making … the Romans were into theater and professional sports on a massive scale, and Ancient culture survived better in Italy than elsewhere. The Italians invented opera (around 1600) and other forms of entertainment (e.g., Shakespeare’s default was to set his plays in Italy because it was the most glamorous country in his day).

The Italians got into movie-making early and were possibly ahead of the Americans until “Birth of a Nation” in 1915.

My vague impression is that American GIs came back from fighting in Italy in 1943-45 liking Italian culture, which rich New England WASPs had been promoting since the late 19th Century.

Italian movies were a glamorous part of young adult American culture in the 1950s and 1960s. American movies got kind of stodgy in the 1960s, while Italian movies were cooler. I’ve been slowly watching Italian movies from that era on Netflix, and I can imagine my later father-in-law and mother-in-law in Chicago getting a sitter for the evening and going to a Sophia Loren movie.

I finally saw Bertolucci’s 1970 movie “The Conformist” and that just has style to burn. It probably had a huge confidence-building impact on young Italian-American guys in the movie business like Coppola, Scorsese, and Cimino.

The 1960s, with their northern European nature worship, weren’t really comfortable for Italian-Americans (who’d been feeling on top in the Sinatra Era of the 1950s), but they got their mojo back in the 1970s.

My guess is that the beginning of jet airliner service between New York and London at the end of 1958 tipped the 1960s toward Anglo-Irish ideas of cool (e.g., the Beatles). The Brits won the Big One, but then they were broke in the immediate postwar era. so their sons finally got a victory lap in the 1960s-1970 (e.g., the Who at Woodstock sound like the RAF over Dresden).

It took the Italians a while to recover from the weirdness of the 1960s, but then their ancient sense of style reasserted itself in the 1970s.

* There are very few hunters in California in part because there isn’t a lot of vegetation for deer to eat. But then the Republicans haven’t won California since 1988 and are unlikely to start again in 2016.

But there are a lot of deer hunters in the states that Democrats have been winning narrowly in recent elections.

My guess is that that Hillary will abandon insulting hunters when somebody points this out to her.

* My sister in law does the hiring for a doctors office in Maryland. She interviewed a black male for a job, liked him and wanted to hire him. She did the background check and it came back with a illegal gun possession charge and decided not offer. She mentioned this to a black male friend of hers. He said in Baltimore everyone carries a gun. You’d be crazy not to. They hired him, he seems to be working out.

* My take of the Left and guns is that it is one issue where the pubic is vastly more informed than the pols and their handlers. Depending upon who is doing the counting, half of American homes have a gun. About 90% of adults in America know someone who is a gun enthusiast. The result is the blather that comes from the Left is easily verified and disputed. Because the claims are so stupid most of the time, the Lefty pol talking guns ends up sounding like an idiot.

I’ve sat at a meal dozens of time where a lefty will start yapping about guns, only to have someone politely eviscerate their claims and make them look like a fool. Since Progressivism is almost entirely about the pose now, a topic that makes the adherent look foolish is not a topic they want to discuss. Some of the true believers when in their coven will rattle on about guns, but in the wild it is just a disaster for them on theological grounds.

* Yesterday’s NYT article about the death toll from toddlers shooting themselves and others with their parent’s pistols can be viewed as battle space prep, as the NYT informally coordinates with the Hillary campaign.

It also indicates that the crafty Hillary won’t make the rifle mistake.

My guess would be a proposal for some kind of law that requires new pistols to be impossible to fire except by the owner. Unless you are wearing a magic ring or your fingerprints match or something, pulling the trigger won’t do anything. This way grabbing a cop’s pistol wouldn’t work either, a stolen pistol would be useless, etc. I’m sure that this would be completely impractical (it would reduce the reliability of guns while raising the cost) but it’s the kind of techie solution that would appeal to suburban whites, like pollution controls on cars. You have a fingerprint sensor on your iPhone so why not on guns?

With this proposal, Hillary could appease the “gun control” constituencies in her party, come off as pragmatic (“I’m not proposing something that will never get passed anyway”) and not alienate swing voters.

* If whites ever want to buy cheaper housing, or get their costs down by putting their kids back into decent public schools instead of expensive private schools, or get rid of their hour-long commutes to work, they’ll have to disarm blacks and/or kick them out of US cities. Yes, white liberals are very concerned about blacks with guns. They also know that every time one black kills another black with a gun, it makes their whole ‘only whites are evil’ narrative look phony. You can’t use blacks as a wedge issue against conservatives if blacks keep going against Saint Black story, and you can’t get blacks to back your politics if you tell them they’re just a bunch of sociopaths. Disarming blacks is the only way liberals have of taming blacks yet still keep black political support.

* First it was

He can’t lead the polls
He can’t win Iowa
He can’t win evangelicals
He can’t win the northeast
He can’t win the primary

Now it’s he can’t beat Hillary.

After Inauguration Day it’ll be

He can’t build the wall.
He can’t deport 20 million people
He cant bring back all the jobs
He can’t leave NAFTA
He can’t put colonies on the Moon

* While I agree that the gun control issue (as well as the immigration issue) certainly doesn’t seem to work in Hillary’s favor, the question is: what issue would work in her favor?

The sorts of issues that Democrats have always run against Republicans have almost all been taken off the table by Trump. She can’t pretend that she’s on the side of the workers economically when Trump defends entitlements and it is she who is in the pocket of the banks — there’s not going to be any hugely damaging 47% remark coming out of Trump. She can’t pretend that it is she who will avoid stupid wars when it is she who has supported them. Even the feminism/misogyny angle isn’t much of a win for her when it is an opportunity for Trump to bring up her own enabling of Bill’s predations.

So what’s left for her?

She really has to attack him personally as wild, unthinking, and reckless to make any real headway.

And of course there’s a real question as to whether Trump can in fact control himself enough to reduce the damage of such an attack.

* I think the answer is that Italian culture is very visual/pictoral. Compare the Italian Renaissance to just about any other geo-cultural event. The Italian Renaissance had Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and dozens of others whose names are less well remembered. It was a one-time assemblage of pictorial genius that never happened again. Even their cultural antecedents in classical Greece and Rome included sculptural and pictorial art that is still unparalleled.

The English had the Elizabethans, but they most wrote stuff: poetry and plays. The French and Germans had philosophers, mathematicians and scientists. The Russians had great literature but the pictoral art never really broke free of its religious iconographic roots. The low countries’ “Northern Renaissance” was great, but the calm landscapes and serene interiors just don’t make for action-packed moving pictures. When movies came along, it was natural that the Italians would be all over that.

Heck, even when Italians talk, you need to have a visual to get the full sense of it. With an Englishman, hearing the voice is enough, seeing the speaker doesn’t add much. With an Italian, everything is visible and everything is in motion.

* Gun control is as good a proxy as there is for Hillary’s real adversary, white men. Being white herself, she will have a much harder time pulling the race card than Obama and ginning up the war on women meme only appeals one half of the electorate. Heeding Napoleon’s advice, it is much better not to divide her forces, especially now that she has go on the attack. Gun control is the demagogic message that she will use to unite her “diverse” coalition against the one thing they all hate the most but cannot openly say it.

What Trump needs to do is disrupt her message.

* Are you suggesting that avid supporters of gun control, ignoring a steadily increasing accumulation of evidence and research that gun control has no impact on crime or possibly even increases crime rates, are not engaged in VERY emotional thinking? And based on my observation of voters I know– particularly those who identify as some form of “progressive” or yellow dog dimocrat — I’d suggest that you are grotesquely over-estimating the proportion of voters in this country who ponder their ballot choices like Platonic philosopher kings.

* Just to tie together a couple points that come up in this thread, I think that what most characterizes Trump — and, on the other hand, a lot of Italians in cinema and elsewhere — is the motormouth phenomenon.

There are certain people — I’d guess particularly among Italians — who simply can’t stop talking. If they are also of well above average intelligence, they can be, and typically are, quite charming. Trump is obviously such a person. I’d say that among Italians in the cinema, Scorcese, Joe Pesci, and Roberto Benigni are emblematic of the type — outside the cinema, I’d say that Scalia and Giamatti at Yale had more than a touch of it.

Generally, motormouths, for all their charm, don’t make it far in politics, for obvious reasons. Every word is a potential bombshell in politics, and they generate words like mad.

No doubt Trump’s success to date as a politician owes in no small part to his having been able to come in from on top, and having avoided the usual process of politics beneath the Presidential level which grinds down or out anything that isn’t already meally.

The thing is, I don’t think motormouths can do much to control themselves, even when the stakes are high — it runs too much against their nature.

How this will play out for Trump I just don’t know.

One thing Trump has going in his favor is that his motormouth talent could actually serve to implement a standard technique in psychotherapy: flooding. So-called flooding is a method used to treat phobias. If you’re afraid of heights, say, it will involve you exposing yourself to ever increasingly “scary” situations with heights until you no longer experience the fear: it’s been flooded out by all the exposures.

Trump is effectively doing this for many of the issues that our culture considers taboo. The more Trump comes out and openly criticizes and mocks cultural taboos, the less the public feels the impact of an invocation of a taboo to shut him and others down. He could single-handedly create the new normal they keep bringing up.

It should be a fun ride. We do indeed live in interesting times.

* Democrats are all about disarming White men and allowing Black criminals to rob without risk. That’s the whole point of gun control. Removing the ability and right to self defense. ESPECIALLY to Black criminals. If Dems wanted to disarm Black criminals existing gun laws make that very easy — paroled felons have no right to them and checks can allow the feds when they want to imprison the ex felons found with guns. This happens very rarely in concentrated anti-gang sweeps.

Hillary figures anti-White male stuff is just the ticket to suburban soccer moms who really, really HATE HATE HATE White working class men and beta males alike. It is all identity politics, and is likely polling well enough for Hillary to use it — along with mass third world immigration.

Gun ownership ballooned up as Liberal soft-on-Black-Voter-crime policies aligned with mass Third World immigration into the US; prior to both say from 1920-1960 gun ownership was not an issue for either party and was routine even in cities save NYC which was a Teddy Rooosevelt pioneer in that respect — TR got gun restrictions passed in the late 19th Century. Every other place it was a non issue and gun ownership declined. Owning a gun is essentially a bet that the State will fail to protect yourself or family; a good bet with globalized labor movement and protected status for Black voters with relatives who commit disproportionate amount of crimes.

Most middle to upper class women figure “a real Alpha” would not “need a gun” to protect against that contingency and that NAMs are sainted figures anyway, so gun control is part of Hillary’s “Woman Card” politics. Indeed you could argue Democrats cater to female perceptions that only “real Alphas” those 5-10% of top men count, and the rest are disposable.

It is understandable why — consumer marketing has followed this line since the 1970s.

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