Everyone is conservative about what he knows best

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Luke Ford

LINK: Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:

  1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
  2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
  3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

John Derbyshire adds this:

Of the Second Law, Conquest gave the Church of England and Amnesty International as examples. Of the Third, he noted that a bureaucracy sometimes actually is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies — e.g. the postwar British secret service.

John Moore thinks the third law is almost right; it should read “assume that it is controlled by a cabal of the enemies of the stated purpose of that bureaucracy.”

Francis W. Porretto notes that Cyril Northcote Parkinson studied the same phenomenon of bureaucratic behavior:

Parkinson promulgated a number of laws of bureaucracy that serve to explain a huge percentage of its characteristics. They’ve exhibited remarkable predictive power within their domain. The first of these is the best known:

Parkinson’s First Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson inferred this effect from two central principles governing the behavior of bureaucrats:

  1. Officials want to multiply subordinates, not rivals.
  2. Officials make work for one another.

Like most generalizations, these are not always true…but the incentives that apply specifically to tax-funded government bureaucracies make them true much more often than not. They make a striking contrast with the almost exactly opposite behavior observable in private enterprise.
[…]
That young bureaucrat will profit from deliberate ineffectiveness to the extent that he can get himself viewed as an asset by his superiors and a non-threat by his peers. His superiors want him to produce justifications for the enlargement of their domains. His peers simply ask that he not tread on their provinces.

Miltion Friedman noted that bureaucratic resource allocation involves spending other people’s money on other people, so there are no compelling reasons to control either cost or quality — but a bureaucrat will learn, given time, how to “spend on others” in such a fashion that the primary benefit flows to himself.

To do this, bureaucrats must manage perceptions, so that their work seems both necessary and successful:

Von Clausewitz and others have termed war “a continuation of politics by other means,” but when viewed from the perspective of the State Department official, war is the declaration that his organization has failed of its purpose. He sees it as bad public relations for his entire function. Thus, even when the nation’s interests would be overwhelmingly better served by war than by the continuation of diplomacy, the State Department man will prefer diplomacy. It’s in his demesne, and enhances his prestige by enhancing the prestige of his trade.

It’s not too much to say that averting war regardless of its desirability or justifiability is near the top of every State Department functionary’s list of priorities. In this pursuit, the State Department will often find itself opposing even peacetime operations of the military designed to improve its effectiveness, such as the acquisition of new weapons or the enlargement of its ranks.

Posted in Conservatives, John Derbyshire | Comments Off on Everyone is conservative about what he knows best

NYT: Baltimore Struggles To Heal

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Luke Ford

I lived in Baltimore during the summer of 1980. Almost every day, I spent hours in the local public library. A naive Seventh-Day Adventist, I asked to join in various black basketball games in the playground outside and was told to get lost.

Once, I opened the door for a black teen and he cursed me out. I was shocked. I asked him why he cursed me. He said, “Because I hate what your people did to my people.”

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* I was recently in Baltimore – and the Fell’s Point neighborhood – and spent some time with a friend who is a resident. He said that while his upper middle class neighborhood was not having to deal with murders, the amount of property crimes and break-ins were way up since the riots. He also confirmed – though discussions with a police officer who is an in-law – that the police are extremely concerned about liability/criminal charges in regard to their everyday duties. He basically said that it’s a big mess there & his comments echo those of the Fell’s Point proprietors in the NYT article.

* Struggles to Heal

I don’t think a “police encounter” — “deadly” or not — is the reason Baltimore might be ‘struggling to heal’. And yes, I can just see those hardcore underclass ghetto Blacks in Baltimore using their Obamaphones to comfort each other in their ‘struggle to heal’. The NYT is so infantile.

* “One woman complained about “blatantly open drug deals and prostitution” in her neighborhood, saying she no longer felt safe, “even during the day.” A man said that when he walks outside “at 10:30 at night, and I don’t see a single police person, it freaks me out.” …”

Hilarious. In my neck of the woods you can watch the citizen/cop review meetings on channel 8. Resident’s in these meetings complain when 3 cop cars come to their area to address a situation.

Cops are great to blame. Rule of thumb – if you live in an area where cops are not needed – you good. You live in an area where half your community hates cops for the simple reason that they are doing their job – move. Blame gentrification if you need to keep your lib cred up.

* I can’t really say I feel bad for anyone in Baltimore. All the gentrifiers only moved in because of the heavy police presence. If your city needs heavy-handed cops to be constantly patrolling and busting heads for you to feel safe, you picked the wrong city to live in. Truly nice places to live don’t need cops for much. Gentrified Baltimore was an artificially nice place to live, hence why it became a not-nice place to live so quickly once the cops realized the elites don’t want them to do their jobs.

* Feminists sometimes complain that society responds to male violence with a “boys will be boys attitude”, that it gives men a free pass. Sometimes this is tied in to what they call “rape culture”.

Feminists are delusional, of course, but Ta-Nehisi Coates seems to advocate an extreme version of “boys will be boys”, although he would never phrase it as such. His idea seems to be that society shouldn’t take black male violence seriously, since that means putting lots of black men in prison, which in turn destroys black society. Men who go to prison can’t get decent jobs, they can’t support families, women don’t want to marry them. This means more illegitimacy, more boys growing up without fathers, which perpetuates the cycle.

Coates seems to be saying, let young black men run amok during their youth, but don’t leave them stuck with criminal records. Eventually they will age out of crime and get jobs and raise families. In the long run black society will be better off that way. Some people will get mugged, some women will get raped, but in the long run that is less important than having as many men as possible become functioning members of society.

From a reactionary point of view, there’s actually something to be said for this. Law and order is vital to society, but arguably there is one thing even more important, and that is men. Men who will work, who will marry their women and raise their children. Family is more fundamental than law or justice.

This is the wisdom implicit in “boys will by boys”: that society depends upon men, that imposing excessive rules upon them in their youth only serves to stigmatize them, and they will age out of it and ultimately carry society on their back. (Feminists hate every part of this, and they actively want to stigmatize men.)

The problem is that when crime gets to the level it is in Baltimore, it destroys the economy. What businessman wants to start a small business in Baltimore nowadays? So even when black men age out of crime, there will be no good jobs for them. Who wants to hire men who have never been expected to follow any rules at all?

Still, I find it interesting that the core of Coates worldview can be interpreted in this ultra-reactionary and anti-feminist way.

* Wake up. It’s still a few decades too early to “gentrify” Baltimore, Memphis, St Louis etc. The cycle is not complete in these locations and gentrifiers will continue to take big losses.

They have been attempting to gentrify Baltimore for thirty years starting with the downtown core. Talk about a House of Pain.

You need a genuine mega trend to turn the tide in these hellholes. SanFran embraced tech and put the city on a new trajectory.

In lieu of an external mega trend there is the internal destructive trend. But it takes generations. In Detroit the cycle is almost complete. It’s probably only 10 years away from total implosion and rebirth as a largely non-black successful community.

* Why are no journalists getting interviews with “Black Lives Matter” leader George Soros?

Normally, when a large group of people shut down the Hollywood freeway, or shut down a community leadership group headed by the Mayor of the City of Los Angeles, a local journalist would seek an interview with the leader of this group, to get a better understanding of his intentions. Yet, as far as I can tell, George Soros is nowhere to be found. He’s invested over $9 million dollars to fly these activists around the country to demonstrate. You’d think he’d want a share of the credit of what his demonstrations have wrought?

He’s one of the most effective leader of black politics since Al Sharpton. I couldn’t see Al Sharpton avoiding the press. Why is Mr. Soros so shy? Why is the LA and NY Times so shy about getting an interview with him to find out where he’s taking his black constituency next?

I’ve always noted that american blacks have been thirsty for leadership since the death of Dr. Martin Luthur King, and now we have this new leader for the black civil rights movement, who doesn’t seem to want any of the limelight. Can’t the LA or NY Times at least find out why he’s so shy? Just seems strange in this internet age that reporters are so reticent to take the chance of possibly violating Mr. Soros’ privacy. I know they mean well, but they can at least keep the reader abreast of when he might decide to take the stage.

I, for one, am interested in what Mr. Soros has to say!

* For time out of mind I have been imploring Steve to watch and maybe binge on The Wire. Plenty of important things revolve around what’s good or bad for the departments “clearance rate.” Plus, the guy who keeps the clearance rate ever in mind is the most likable fatso in the history of TV. BTW, I remember a while back some commenter belittling the show for depicting drug dealing thugs as micro-economists keen to gauge which way the market is going. Well that was the comment that made me decide to watch the series, and as it turns out, that was quite bogus to impute to a show which does not make the black gangsters out to be any smarter than they generally are, and rather does a top-notch job depicting how simple-minded men are occasionally effective.

* Any place that has a sizable black population always has a cloud of uncertainty hanging over it. All it takes is one unexpected police encounter with some black youth that goes south and the entire place can get Fergusoned. Even when the police can keep an invisible cordon around the white areas it’s the still white areas that have to pay the taxes for the damage the miscreants inflict on each other. When the proactive policing ends then there goes the balancing act. One can never predict if or when such an incident will occur and there goes whatever one has put into their home. It’s actually a very simple formula: blacks=trouble; the further away one lives from trouble the better off they are.

* It is all part of code speak. Take for instance this:

“…it has also been a reminder that black leadership, exemplified by Ms. Rawlings-Blake, is not a guarantee that government can manage toxic collisions of race and policing any better than white leadership has in places like Ferguson, Mo.”

What an utterly clever way to say that blacks always have trouble with the law and still manage to sound like you are on the side of the Black Lives Matter narrative.

* Nobody chooses to raise daughters in places which basically trivialises rape. Look at the flight out of the cities in the sixties.

* You’re assuming stable, two parent families as traditionally formed by whites are also the natural condition for blacks. They’re not. It’s the difference between r and K reproduction modes. Blacks have higher fertility, but shorter and more violent lives. Fathers staying with one woman and helping raise fewer children with higher investment in each child is not part of black nature.

* “Red Light District” is not what was created in “The Wire.” “Red Light District” means legalized prostitution and sex-related activities. What was created in “The Wire” was a special neighborhood where legalized, open-air drug dealing was permitted in order to take such activities away from other areas, which then benefited by the subsequent reduction in street-corner drug dealing and associated violence. BTW the white mayor of Baltimore who goes on to become governor was clearly patterned after Martin O’Malley, even though the fictional one on “The Wire” was Italian-American, rather than Irish-American. Great series. Great writing (established crime fiction writers such as Richard Price, George Pellacanos, Dennis Lehane) and great acting. My favorite TV series (better than “The Sopranos” imo).

* 270 murders in a developed-world city of 620,000 is absolutely dumbfounding. By way of comparison, that’s only about 10,000 more residents than Vancouver, BC (a city with significant crime/homelessness issues of its own).

Vancouver has 13 murders so far this year, which is higher than normal.

But 270? That’s apocalyptic. I really don’t think Americans are sufficiently shocked when they see numbers like those, or have the context into which those numbers should be placed. Because if they did, they’d be fairly disgusted.

* That’s a murder rate of over 40 per 100,000 for Baltimore. That’s a South African level of murder rate.

* Baltimore’s population is much different than Vancouver’s. The vast majority of those 270 are blacks killed by other blacks. Of course the anticop agitators and rioters knew this. Blacks really don’t like or care about other blacks.

* I had a friend in Baltimore whose home was broken into three times, with no serious investigation by the police. Once, his wife walked in on the intruders, who, thanks be to God, ran out instead of raping and killing her. Among the things stolen were products with GPS that could be tracked. We located the home in which they were being used. The police refused to act. My friend moved his family to a small town across the country shortly thereafter.

* This is as good of a place as any to float a theory I came up with a few days ago.

To set it up, you’ll have to read VDH’s latest:

Before I get to my theory, I’ll note that Victor Davis Hanson strikes me as someone who is stuck in a political no man’s land, somewhere between straight cuckservatism and soft nationalism. This is why his writings about his native and home state are such a maddening mix of hints of truth and utter bullshit.

Now to my theory.

No, California is not going to become Detroit. This is what happens when people misdiagnose problems. Detroit isn’t Detroity because of one party political rule and liberalism. Detroit became Detroit because it’s a bell curve city, full of blacks and run by blacks. If anything, the black population of California is declining in both terms of percentage and raw numbers, and the few that remain are quickly being shipped out of their heretofore ghettos in Oakland, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Both are crucial factors, because if you’re going to have blacks, if you can keep them detached and spread out, this severely hurts their race-based political power. Because they are not tightly ghettoized and geographically compartmentalized, their networks of churches and preachers cannot materialize. And, as we all know, black preachers are the big chiefs in black political life. This may be one of the reasons why the Democrat Party wants to do AFFH, to spread out blacks in order to weaken real black political power, so that one day, the Democrat Party won’t need to be the black party, and can leave behind all the political problems that they currently face from being the black party. Sure, wherever blacks are scattered, they’ll still vote Democrat almost 100%, but that will be the extent of their contribution to the party. No black preachers to hang around Democrat functions.

Posted in Baltimore, Blacks, George Soros | Comments Off on NYT: Baltimore Struggles To Heal

12-Step Wisdom

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Luke Ford

* Many of my visions turned out to be hallucinations.

* Going from invisible to invincible.

* You can’t save your ass and your face at the same time.

* Suit up, show up and speak up.

* Wherever you go, you take your reality with you. (Neil Strauss)

Posted in Addiction | Comments Off on 12-Step Wisdom

Who Cares About The World?

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Luke Ford

Growing up as a Seventh-Day Adventist on Seventh-Day Adventist college campuses in Australia and California, I often encountered the attitude, “Who cares about the world?” The more traditional the Adventist, the more likely he was to have this attitude.

Traditional Adventists saw themselves as God’s Chosen People, the true Israel, the remnant saints, and they saw the wider world as the enemy that wanted to persecute them, was fated to persecute them, until the Messiah arrives.

I found this attitude narrow because I cared about the world and I wanted to make a difference in the world.

I discovered Dennis Prager on the radio in 1988, when I was 22, and I fell in love with his presentation of Judaism as a step-by-step system for making this world better.

When I began my RCC conversion to Orthodox Judaism in 2001, I had a meeting with its Beit Din (Jewish law court) chaired by Rabbi Avrohom Union. When I explained to the rabbis why I grew disenchanted with Adventism, Rabbi Union said I had much of my father in me, and that many of the things I disliked about Adventism were very much present in Judaism.

He was right. The more traditional you go in Judaism, the more you get the attitude, “Who cares about the world?”

Traditional Jews see themselves as God’s Chosen People, and they see the wider world as the enemy that wanted to persecute them, is fated to persecute them, until the Messiah arrives.

Now I realize that the stronger your in-group identity, the less concern you have for out-groups, and the more likely you are to see them as the enemy.

Posted in Adventist, Judaism, Personal | Comments Off on Who Cares About The World?

Education Professor: ‘Forced busing’ didn’t fail. Desegregation is the best way to improve our schools.

Posted on October 24, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments at Washington Post:

* Can we start with your kids, professor?

* Shorter Version:

Society wasn’t failed by liberal policies, liberal policies were failed by an unworthy society!

* No sane mayor or city council, no matter how liberal, will ever again endorse busing. Middle and upper class residents of all colors will be gone in a heartbeat, taking zillions in taxes with them. A person’s home is usually his/her biggest investment by far, and aside from the four walls, the school district in which they are buying is usually the second most important consideration. Change that from a sure thing to a lottery and no one who can afford not to will choose to live within the city limits.
In fact there’s probably an argument to be made that the end of busing coincided (caused…?) the resurgence of American cities like NY and Chicago.

* “‘Forced busing’ didn’t fail. Desegregation is the best way to improve our schools.”

Whoa, that’s a pretty racist remark. To claim that the mere presence of white kids in a school makes the other kids perform better seems like a crazy racist remark. And I take offense to it.

These microagressions are forcing me to consider buying a safe space somewhere in Fiji.

* The studies you cite are not at all compelling as to your premise. There is no sense of either causation or isolation of variables to ensure that the critical points of the premise are driving the conclusions.

So many things left out, changes in curricula, drop outs, changes in communities, crime, economy, the list goes on.

* The beauty of America is that we can make our own chouces. If you want to put your child in a diverse setting do so. No one is stopping you.

* When I was in high school, some black kids were bused 25 blocks to a majority white school, even though there was a high school literally one block away from where I lived. However, few white kids were bused in that black school. White parents mostly will never be ok with busing their kids to black schools, mainly because they feel that black schools are inferior, not to mention the racial overtones. But like everything else in America, quality is cost-driven. I have been saying for years that if you look at the cost of operating one school bus (and a large school district has many buses), ie, purchasing the bus, hiring and training for the driver, maintenance, fuel, insurance, etc, our education dollars are being wasted. Why not invest those busing dollars into neighborhood schools in a way that insures that every school, be it in rich or poor neighborhoods, has the same quality books, equipment, programs, and staffing. Black parents should be just as opposed to busing as white parents, and demand quality from the schools in their communities. And psychologically, black kids shouldn’t feel that their neighborhood schools aren’t good enough. Scrapping those buses would create a windfall to make ALL schools better.

* Two observations/questions. Is the result of closing the achievement gap through desegregation actions worth the social disruption that we endured in the 70’s and 80’s? That, too, is a cost.
Second, one of my children went to a high school that was split about equally between black, hispanic and white students. The black students were generally the most disruptive, so if a white kid was put in a majority black class, he or she would either just skip the class for the semester since little learning actually occurred while the teacher tried (and failed) just to get control of the classroom, or try to get into a different class. The hispanic kids were mostly just passive observers–not disruptive but certainly not active class participants. That was OK with the white kids in the class though since it still allowed the teacher to teach.
The AP classes were almost all white because the minority students did not want to be in them.
The author’s contention notwithstanding, I’ve had 3 children go through public elementary, middle and high schools, and there is zero evidence that the minority students did better academically as a result of these mixed populations. Sorry, real world versus academic theory.

* Many years ago our school district was trying to figure out why there as such a big academic gap between white kids and black kids. They hired a consultant who “discovered” that if the child’s parent/s take an active interest in their kids education that child will likely reach their academic potential.
Bricks and mortar didn’t count. Parents counted.
You can bus kids hither and yon, but if the parents don’t care about their child’s education, nothing will change.
Want to help a struggling child? Help their parents become better parents.

* When low-income families are pushed into middle-class, upper middle class communities it becomes an unmitigated disaster. Prime example is the social engineering experiment conducted by Judge Sand on the City of Yonkers. Yonkers once had good schools. Now you wouldn’t even want to send your dog to a Yonker’s school. Perhaps this experiment would have never happened if the children of Pound Ridge where hypocrite Judge Sand lived had to also be bused to a community of color as part of the settlement of the NAACP lawsuit.

* In 1970 black illegitimacy was 38%. Today it is 72%. Black kids are in bad schools because it is incredibly difficult to stay in or move into the middle class as a single parent. Kids raised in such environments are also far more likely to create chaos in the classroom. That and the disappearance of high wage jobs from the inner cities explain the resurgence of “segregated” school districts, not some phantom resurgence of racism.
Busing will not fix either problem. Neither macro trend is my fault, and I am not going to sacrifice my kids’ education in an uphill (actually, futile) effort to reverse either one.

* Busing is a way to make kids do what adults will not do = live in mixed neighborhoods. Since the kids do not vote they get stuck with riding hours to and from school. And the “progressive liberals” in the northeast seem to be the worst.

* Forced busing disrupted my childhood, but also gave me some insight into the fundamental flaw with this opinion piece. The first problem is that the professor starts at proposition A (racially and socioeconomically integrated schools produce better academic results for black students), moves to proposition B (forced segregation produces integration) and ends up at conclusion C (therefore, we can help black students achieve by forcing integration). However, it utterly fails to appreciate a couple of truths about human nature. A) In a free society, 100% of engaged parents will take measures to ensure the best outcome for their own progeny, whether that is to move to the best school district they can afford or to pay private school tuition; and B) people react to changes in educational prospects like stocks move on the market – in the anticipation of what will happen next. They move in a herd because the rest of the herd is too. In Prince George’s County in the early 1970’s, white people anticipated that forced integration would result in unsafe schools, lower peer academic achievement, and general disruption of the school system, white people anticipated that their neighbors would also anticipate this consequence, white people therefore anticipated that all the white people would move rather than have their children go to unsafe academically underachieving schools, therefore, almost all the white people moved. Leaving, what is today, a school system with less than 15% white enrollment that is unsafe relative to neighboring jurisdictions and is academically one of the two worst jurisdictions in Maryland (the other being Baltimore City). The professor’s answer to this market behavior is to way a finger and call everyone that moved racists. Yet for most of them, including one neighbor who had adopted a mixed race child, it was about making sure that child got the best school environment possible ( and thus enrolled him at a private school the same year we moved).

* I taught for 14 years, not that that is a prerequisite for recognizing the foolishness in this article. “Schools” that are failing are almost exclusively in urban settings, AKA black neighborhoods. Show me a school’s free and reduced lunch percentages and I can with a large degree of certainty tell you whether I would want my kids to go there. Throw in huge percentages of kids who don’t speak English in some of those inner city schools, and yes, you have a recipe for low achievement. Single parent households, a lack of value placed on education, truancy, gang membership, teen pregnancy, etc. – busing does not cure these problems – they mask them. And the people who have said that the rich/white kids get dragged down when this happens are correct in my opinion – having experienced the busing in the late 70’s, early 80’s around Madison, WI. You’re punishing kids and parents who have worked hard to afford a school in a “good” district by introducing kids who are going to have a negative impact largely. Again, great policy for the kids who caused their former school to fail. But a really infuriating policy for the parents and kids who have made a school succeed.

* Another academic without a clue of what actually happens in the real world. Forced busing did not improve school. Crappy schools were still crappy and the good schools were dragged down by the influx of disruptive and unprepared bused-in students. No body should pay any attention to this sort of nonsense. Just like nobody should pay any attention to so call “social scientists”. They all have an agenda.

* Forced busing destroyed the lives of millions of children. It destroyed thousands of schools and neighborhoods. It did not improve education but destroyed it.

* How does desegregation improve math competence? Does “at least five music teachers, band, orchestra, choir, musical theater and dozens of other clubs and activities” help the children learn math? Of course, the presence of such facilities indicates a far greater allocation of resources to one school rather than to a different school without these programs. However, you do not need much equipment or resources to teach or learn math and what the mixing of skin colors has to do with math is not clear to me.

Posted in Blacks, Education | Comments Off on Education Professor: ‘Forced busing’ didn’t fail. Desegregation is the best way to improve our schools.

The Sorrowful Ballad Of Fat White Chicks

Posted on October 24, 2015 by Luke Ford

Richard B. Spencer: #Adele sings the sorrowful ballad of fat White women everywhere who’ve taken in Black men and been abandoned.

Posted in Blacks, Fat | Comments Off on The Sorrowful Ballad Of Fat White Chicks

We Need A Populist News Channel

Posted on October 24, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comment: A paleo news channel probably wouldn’t work (too intellectual and probably a bit too reactionary on economic and social issues for majority tastes) but a populist news channel probably would.

I’m sure there are plenty of working and lower middle class people in the Anglosphere are keen to watch a channel questioning immigration, attacking banks and financiers, questioning neocon foreign policy, slack law and order (the proles are big on law and order) and pointing out blatant examples of media bias and political correctness. Such a channel would also be very useful for educating non-Americans about what actually goes in the US in regard to issues such as immigration and law and order.

The problem wouldn’t be getting viewers, but making sure it wasn’t blocked by its opponents.

* A casual perusal of FOX’s ads indicate who their viewership is: pharmaceuticals, life-alert systems, hurricanes, diabetes supplies, reverse mortgages. As Richard Spencer at Radix has pointed out: the median age of Bill O’Reilly’s audience is north of 70 – the FOX News demographic is dying out.

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on We Need A Populist News Channel

What Made DC Boom?

Posted on October 24, 2015 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: The DC metro area boomed between 1996-2000 and 2011-2012, in large part due to guys in the DC metro area failing to prevent 9/11. Thus, the War on Terror dumped huge amounts of money on the DC metro area.

When you are deciding where to raise your children, always try to anticipate long chains of events in the future like the World Trade Centers being blown up and the taxpayers shoveling hundreds of billions into the DC area in response.

* My guess would be that the long-term trend has been toward bigger cities winning, so Minnesota with one big urban area does better than Iowa with multiple smaller ones. I wouldn’t be surprised if it has to do with airports. Frequent fliers are crucial figures in the economy and their lives are typically easier living near a major airport with direct flights like Minneapolis rather than having to make connections like if they lived in Des Moines.

By the way, has anybody ever studied frequent fliers as a class? What are their demographics, how do they vote, etc? On the rare occasions when I fly anywhere, the passengers who look like they know what they are doing strike me as a fairly distinctive group, but the term “frequent flier” never seems to have caught on as a demographic shorthand the way “soccer mom” has.

Comments:

* Frequent fliers are mostly as you would expect – white, somewhat male, managers, professionals, sales people. Mostly in their 30s and up to retirement age. Well remunerated. Most would vote conservative I expect, to suit their demographics.

* Well, two novelists have taken on the subject, although one someone elliptically.

The Accidental Tourist could be taken as a first stab. Anne Tyler is a fine writer, by the way.

And then there’s Kirn’s Up In The Air. Book was better than the movie. A lot better.

Posted in America | Comments Off on What Made DC Boom?

What would you say are the principle Somali gifts to civilization?

Posted on October 24, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Years ago the State Department tried to resettle the initial wave of Somalis to Atlanta. The Somalis didn’t like ‘the brothers’ there and, being an intercontinental vagrant population, had scouts who reported that Maine, with its almost entirely white population offered more value per welfare dollar. The Atlanta Somalis decamped en masse to Lewiston, Maine. It was quite a story at the time as the poor folks in Maine suddenly had stone age people showing up in town.

* I’ve lived in St Cloud for about thirty years. Up until about twenty years ago we were about 99% white in a metropolitan area of 100,000 (excluding the inmates of the local prison). We were fairly called “White Cloud”.

In the 1990′s, developers with Section 8 vacancies imported blacks from the Chicago and Gary Ind. areas. Previously unknown violent crime followed.

As Reg Caesar indicated previously, in the late ’90′s, Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities started settling Somalis in to St Cloud to the point now where there are about 5,000. Apparently we were starving for the benefits of diversity. Affirmative discrimination has progressed so far that this 95% white area has successively appointed a black police chief, a black transit director, and now a black school superintendent. They are punishing us for our whiteness.

Unlike the Somalis who settled in Minneapolis’s Cedar-Riverside area, the Somalis in St Cloud are not a source of excessive crime. We’d rather have them than the Chicago/Gary blacks we now have.

Generally, Somalis are quiet and keep to themselves. The older Somali men reflect a patriarchal society that rubs local white women the wrong way. The teen Somali girls who have been here many years seem to have acclimated better than the majority of Somalis whose allegiance doesn’t seem to have transplanted to America.

A few months ago, a facebook photo of a Somali girl in a wheelchair suggesting she was a terrorists resulted the Somalis disrupting their high school. CAIR jumped in to agitate the local Somalis. By the way, about one week after the incident, six Somalis from Minneapolis were indeed indicted for attempting to join a terrorist group.

When a local VFW invited a speaker from California to speak about the refugee program, the local SJWs blocked access to the venue. Weeks later, the speaker was able to give their talk in a private venue. No fireworks ensued.

Gov. Dayton came to St. Cloud and the local NAACP meeting as one-upsmanship to the locals who were trying to figure out any excessive benefits that refugees receive. Dayton’s visit was intended to keep the rubes in their place and empower the existing SJWs to continue to use affirmative discrimination.

When I first came to St Cloud from the Twin Cities thirty years ago, I was stunned by the friendliness and trusting nature of the locals. That is now changing thanks to the SJWs who know what is good for us.

* I agree, the real enemies are those whites that are purposely destroying white cities with these black buggers. From what I understand they get something like $10-20K per Somali that they settle.

And lets be clear about these “Christian charities” – they are leftwing political groups nowadays. If they were Christian they would be petitioning Obama to help the Assyrian Christians, etc. They aren’t. But instead importing hundreds of thousands of hostile Muslims they’ve shown their true colors – anti-white and anti-Christian.

We might as well consider them the logistical arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.

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Good For Donald Trump for taking on the Seventh-Day Adventist lobby!

Posted on October 24, 2015 by Luke Ford

From what I remember about Seventh-Day Adventists, they’re in heaven getting this much attention.

The best movie about Seventh-Day Adventists is The Nostradamus Kid and the best book is Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream.

Adventists tend to be apolitical and when they do get political, they are evenly split between left and right.

Washington Post: JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Donald Trump on Saturday contrasted his Presbyterian faith with that of Seventh-day Adventists, apparently attempting to draw attention to and raise doubts about Republican presidential rival Ben Carson’s religious beliefs.

Speaking at a campaign rally here, Trump was in the midst of discussing his standing in the polls, including recent Iowa surveys that showed him falling behind Carson in the GOP race. Then, he brought up religion.

“I love Iowa. And, look, I don’t have to say it, I’m Presbyterian,” said Trump. “Can you believe it? Nobody believes I’m Presbyterian. I’m Presbyterian. I’m Presbyterian. I’m Presbyterian. Boy, that’s down the middle of the road folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don’t know about. I just don’t know about.”

Politically, the matter could become an issue in the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses. As the Des Moines Register notes, “some conservatives have argued Seventh-day Adventists … aren’t Christians.”

Carson is a twice-baptized Seventh-day Adventist, which he describes in his book “Gifted Hands.” Seventh-day Adventists are Protestants who observe the Sabbath on Saturday, unlike most Christians, including Presbyterians, who observe it on Sunday. The church also takes a very literal view of the Bible.

“We believe that the biblical events recorded in Genesis 1-11, including the special creation of human beings, are historical and recent, that the seven days of creation were literal 24 hour days forming a literal week, and that the Flood was global in nature,” reads the church’s official Web site.

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