Category Archives: Culture

Ta-Nehisi Coates : Bigot or Honest?

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The word “bigot” like the word “racist” has become nothing more than a synonym for “bad” as used by the Left.  It is a part of the Left’s war on language. If you brought in ten left-wing intellectuals and asked them to write down five principles of fascism, you would get a dozen responses. Some would require years to finish the answer. The same is true of racism. They would all agree that racism is bad, but what actually constitutes racism is a mystery that must be provided to them by others.

Professional lunatic Tim Wise has made a career, as it were, trying to write a definition of the word. The word “bigot” has gone in for the same treatment, except it basically means anyone who rustles the Left. You get called a bigot, for example, if you don’t want homosexual males showering with your kids at school. You are a bigot if your wife stays at home with the kids. Even so, we are still allowed to keep dictionaries and we can look up the definition of these words. Here’s the entry for bigot from Webster’s

a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially:  one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance

Note the modifier. A bigot is someone that has an irrational intolerance or fear of something or someone. Refusing to have dealings with Catholics because you think the Pope is trying to control the world is bigotry. Refusing to have dealings with the Mafia because you think they may try to kill you is not bigotry. The former is not based on any known facts, while the later is based on mountains of evidence and history.

On the other hand, refusing to have dealings with Catholics because you you don’t like them and think Catholicism is an offense to God is rational. If you are a devout Muslim, for example, you think Catholics and all Christians are enemies of God. They are non-believers, which you are commanded by Allah to oppose. If you are truly devout, you have nothing to say to these people other than “submit or die.”

This brings us to the point of this post. The increasingly famous Mr. Coates has been obsessing over the Michael Dunn murder case. For those unfamiliar, this is the case of white man shooting a black.  A middle-aged white guy shot and killed a young black male at a gas station. The black male was playing loud music, as is their custom, and the old white guy took exception. An argument ensued and the white guy pulled a gun and started shooting, killing 19-year old Jordan Davis.

To get on TV, the state prosecutor wildly over-charged the white guy with first degree murder. The jury chose to convict on attempted murder, which will put the white guy away for the rest of his life, given the sentencing guidelines and his age. Given the notoriety, the white guy will be murdered in prison within five years. That’s just a reality of the modern prison system. Famous prisoners always have a target on them, but famous racists have a special bounty on them from the blacks.

A rational person would look at the events and conclude the jury got it as right as they were allowed. If the prosecutor was not a fool, he would have properly charged the case and Dunn would have been found guilty of murder. Instead, we have a result that black victimologist can wave around as proof they are being hunted by evil white devils. One of them is Mr. Coats, the subject of this post. His latest post is an interview of sorts with the victim’s mother.

Last Thursday, I took my son to meet Lucia McBath, because he is 13, about the age when a black boy begins to directly understand what his country thinks of him. His parents cannot save him. His parents cannot save both his person and his humanity. At 13, I learned that whole streets were prohibited to me, that ways of speaking, walking, and laughing made me a target. That is because within the relative peace of America, great violence—institutional, interpersonal, existential—marks the black experience. The progeny of the plundered were all around me in West Baltimore—were, in fact, me.

What the country thinks of his son is not rooted in superstition. When adults confront a teenage male, they immediately begin to assess the risk. Young males are by nature, the most dangerous members of any human society. In America, young black males commit almost a third of the homicides, despite being just 3% of the population. Unless you are from another planet, you know this. Mr. Coates knows it too. That’s why he no longer lives in West Baltimore and instead lives with white people.

That’s the important bit to know about West Baltimore. It is and has been 100% black since Mr. Coates has been alive. It is a crime ridden war zone because it is run by out of control black youth gangs. He knows that. His father certainly knew it. His father claims to have been a Black Panther, but was most likely just another looter in the riots of 1968. For anyone of any race to be a little cautious if not frightened by young black males is simply acknowledging observable reality.

The question of the post is whether Mr. Coates is honest or a bigot. We can dispense with honest as it is clear he is not being very honest. Unless he has brain damage or has had a psychotic break, he certainly knows the greatest threat to his son is not a white guy at a Florida gas station. He also knows the real reason people are wary around young black males. He could simply say he hates this reality and wishes it were otherwise. That would be honest. Instead he conjures another reason.

Mr. Coates keeps using the word “plundered” to describe blacks in America. The idea, I surmise, is that blacks are in this degraded state due to white racism. His coevals in West Baltimore were joining gangs and shooting each other because long ago a white guy did bad things to their ancestors. Alternatively, the rules of society make young black males into homicidal maniacs, despite the fact most black males are not homicidal maniacs. Whatever works to excuse the behavior is the rule here.

The fact is, Coates, like all American blacks, is entirely defined by his relationship with white Americans. He is incapable of being grateful, because it would strip him of his sense of purpose, his reason to exist. Therefore, the never ending blood feud must be continued generation after generations. It’s a superstition now, where blacks are trained to fear whites, even though whites are coddling blacks to a degree never seen. His irrational fear of whites makes him a bigot, according to Webster’s.

The Coming Collapse

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Nothing lasts forever. Human societies rise, reach their peak and nthen go into decline, or possibly collapse. The US has had a great run the last 100 years or so. Even Rome did not have the global influence we see with the USA. Like Rome, American culture is altering the cultures of the world. How much of a lasting influence it has is up for debate. What is not up for debate is that America and American influence is in decline.

Here’s an interesting bit of math on the state of the country.

In 1935, the year that FDR signed the Social Security Act into law, the birth rate was 18.7 per 1,000. In 1940, when the first monthly check was issued, it had gone up to 19.4. By 1954, when Disability had been added, the birth rate at the heart of the Baby Boom stood at 25.3.

In a nation of 163 million people, 4 million babies were being born each year.

By 1965, when Medicare was plugged in, the birth rate had fallen back to 19.4. For the first time in ten years fewer than 4 million babies had been born in a country of 195 million. Medicare had been added in the same year that saw the single biggest drop in birth rates since the Great Depression.

There could not have been a worse time for Medicare than the end of the Baby Boom.

Today in a nation of 317 million, 4.1 million babies are being born each year for a birth rate of 13.0 per 1,000. 40.7% of those births are to unmarried mothers so that it will be a long time, if ever, before they pay back into the system, and most will never put back in as much as they are taking out.

 According to people who measure these things, the United States generates $50,000 of income per person. That’s the sum of all income divided by the population. That ties out to GDP close enough for economics. Experience says the American economy can tolerate about 25% of tax at the federal level before bad things start happening. That’s $3.7 Trillion in spending that the tax base can support. Once you exceed that you have to borrow and that creates trouble in future years.

Liberals and libertarians both act as if the crisis facing us can be fixed if we take more from the “wealthy elderly” or give them less. The crisis is born of demographics. It can’t be fixed by targeting the elderly because they haven’t been the problem in some time.

It’s the same crisis being faced by countries as diverse as Russia and Japan. The difference is that Russia is autocratic and has little concern for its people while Japan shuns immigration and has a political system dominated by the elderly.

The United States however takes in a million immigrants a year. In his 2013 State of the Union address, Barack Obama praised Desiline Victor, a 102-year-old Haitian woman who moved to the United States at the age of 79 and never learned to speak English, but did spend hours waiting in line in Florida to vote for Obama.

Between 1990 and 2010, the number of immigrants over 65 doubled from 2.7 million to 5 million. Twenty-five percent of these senior immigrants were over 80. Elderly immigrants are also much more likely to become citizens, in part because the requirements for them are lower. Many, like Desiline Victor, don’t even have to learn English to be able to stand in line and vote.

15 percent of senior immigrants come from Mexico largely as a result of family unification programs. If amnesty for illegal aliens goes through, before long the country will be on the hook not just for twelve million illegal aliens, but also for their grandparents.

Decades ago, Milton Friedman noted that you can have a welfare state or immigration, but not both. Cities and states tested this in the last fifty years by offering generous welfare benefits. What they found is they became welfare magnets. America is now the premiere welfare magnate in the world. If you are a poor person in Guatemala, getting to America is your only goal. Since cheap labor makes the ruling class rich, they are happy to import world’s poor into your neighborhood.

The welfare state has been spending more money with an unsustainable demographic imbalance. There are fewer working families supporting more elderly, immigrants and broken families. The Russians invest money into increasing the native birth rate. Instead we fund Planned Parenthood because liberal economic eugenics dictates that we should extract “full value” from working women as a tax base to subsidize the welfare state while discarding the next generation.

The “modern” system that we have adopted with its low birth rates, high social spending and retirement benefits is at odds with itself. We can have low birth rates, deficit spending or Social Security; but there is no possible way that we can have all three.

And yet we have all three.

In the European model that we have adopted, men and women are supposed to spend their twenties being educated and their thirties having two children. These Johns and Julias will work in some appropriately “modern” field building apps, designing environmentally sustainable cribs for the few children being born or teaching new immigrants to speak enough English to vote. Then they plan to retire on money that doesn’t actually exist because they are still paying off their student loans.

John and Julia began marriage with tens of thousands in debts, only one of them will work full time, while the other balances part time work, and they will do all this while being expected to support social services for new immigrants and a native working class displaced by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, not to mention the elderly and the entire bureaucracy that has grown around them. If John and Julia are lucky, they will find work in a technology field that is still growing, or, more likely they will pry their way into the social services bureaucracy which will keep on paying them and cover their benefits until the national bankruptcy finally arrives.

In this post-work and post-poverty economy, those most likely to have children are also least likely to work or to be able to afford to have those children.

Birth rates for women on welfare are three times higher than for those who are not on welfare. Within a single year, the census survey found that unmarried women had twice as high a birth rate as married women. These demographics help perpetuate poverty and feed a welfare death spiral in which more money has to be spent on social services for a less productive tax base.

Children raised on welfare are far more likely to end up on welfare than the children of working families.

Fertility rates fall sharply above the $50,000 income line and with a graduate degree; that has ominous implications in a country whose socio-economic mobility rates continue to fall.

Progressive activists still talk as if we can afford any level of social service expenditures if we raise taxes on the rich, but workers can’t be created by raising taxes. Everything that the left has done, from breaking up the family to driving out manufacturing industries to promoting Third World immigration has made its own social welfare spending completely unsustainable.

By 2031, nearly a century after the Social Security Act, an estimated 75 million baby boomers will have retired. Aside from the demographic disparity in worker ages is a subtler disparity in worker productivity and independence as senior citizens are left chasing social spending dollars that are increasingly going to a younger population. ObamaCare with its Medicare Advantage cuts was a bellwether of the shift in health care spending from seniors to the welfare population.

Increasing welfare is only a form of Death Panel economic triage that doesn’t compensate for the lack of productive workers. It’s easy to model Obamerica as Detroit, a country with a huge indigent welfare population and a small wealthy tax base. The model doesn’t work in Detroit and it’s flailing in New York, California and every city and state where it’s been tried.

After a century of misery, the left still hasn’t learned that there is no substitute for the middle class. It’s not just running out of money, it’s running out of people.

The welfare state has no future. It is only a question of what terms it will implode on and what will happen to the social welfare political infrastructure when it does. The violence in Venezuela and the slow death of Detroit give us insights into the coming collapse of the welfare state.

The flaw in the math posted above is that income is not distributed equally. Half of the population is made up of children. Some portion is too old to work, 10-15 percent, and some are broken in some physical or mental way. We know that half the work force is not working. That means the bulk of earnings are in the hands of a tiny minority. The super rich don’t pay taxes. It is why the Reason Magazine guys noted that there seems to be a hard cap of about 19% on tax receipts.

Economists, who have been wrong about every prediction they have made since Keynes first published, argue that the gaps can be bridged with credit creation from central banks and unlimited borrowing. This is being tested now. Obama has been borrowing and spending like you would expect from his kind. Debt is piling up at record rates to record levels. The fact that we have not had an Argentine collapse is proof it will never happen, according to the profession that is never right.

Whole Foods

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The hallmark of Baby Boomer culture in the late empire America is turning consumer products into religions. Steve Jobs, the quintessential Boomer guru in many ways, made owning an Apple product a social statement. His revival shows were nothing more than his confirmation that the assembled were chosen from eternity to be with the oneness of Apple. There’s a reason why their mobile products sold well, while their back office stuff was a dud. They were statements, not actual products.

The same thing is true with Whole Foods, a temple of post-modern consumerism for those who pretend they oppose consumerism. That makes this post a bit of a surprise, given that the Daily Beast is for the sorts of people who shop at Whole Foods. The typical reader is the type buying organic bananas or free range chicken. All of which costs twice what it would at a normal market. Maybe that’s why the author largely misses the religious angle and instead stumbles around the science-y stuff.

If you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America, you head to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It’s like a Law of Journalism. The museum has inspired hundreds of book chapters and articles (some of them, admittedly, mine) since it opened up in 2007. The place is like media magnet. And our nation’s liberal, coastal journalists are so many piles of iron fillings.

But you don’t have to schlep all the way to Kentucky in order to visit America’s greatest shrine to pseudoscience. In fact, that shrine is a 15-minute trip away from most American urbanites.

I’m talking, of course, about Whole Foods Market. From the probiotics aisle to the vaguely ridiculous Organic Integrity outreach effort (more on that later), Whole Foods has all the ingredients necessary to give Richard Dawkins nightmares. And if you want a sense of how weird, and how fraught, the relationship between science, politics, and commerce is in our modern world, then there’s really no better place to go. Because anti-science isn’t just a religious, conservative phenomenon—and the way in which it crosses cultural lines can tell us a lot about why places like the Creation Museum inspire so much rage, while places like Whole Foods don’t.

My own local Whole Foods is just a block away from the campus of Duke University. Like almost everything else near downtown Durham, N.C., it’s visited by a predominantly liberal clientele that skews academic, with more science PhDs per capita than a Mensa convention.

Still, there’s a lot in your average Whole Foods that’s resolutely pseudoscientific. The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver. The book section—yep, Whole Foods sells books—boasts many M.D.’s among its authors, along with titles like The Coconut Oil Miracleand Herbal Medicine, Healing, and Cancer, which was written by a theologian and based on what the author calls the Eclectic Triphasic Medical System.

You can buy chocolate with “a meld of rich goji berries and ashwagandha root to strengthen your immune system,” and bottles of ChlorOxygen chlorophyll concentrate, which “builds better blood.” There’s cereal with the kind of ingredients that are “made in a kitchen—not in a lab,” and tea designed to heal the human heart.

Nearby are eight full shelves of probiotics—live bacteria intended to improve general health. I invited a biologist friend who studies human gut bacteria to come take a look with me. She read the healing claims printed on a handful of bottles and frowned. “This is bullshit,” she said, and went off to buy some vegetables. Later, while purchasing a bag of chickpeas, I browsed among the magazine racks. There was Paleo Living, and, not far away, the latest issue of What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Pseudoscience bubbles over into anti-science. A sample headline: “Stay sharp till the end: the secret cause of Alzheimer’s.” A sample opening sentence: “We like to think that medicine works.”

Organic food is a boondoggle, of course. There are no standards for labeling something organic and there is a lot of fraud. Is using an “organic” fertilizer better than using a chemical created in a lab? How does one define better? Then there is the fact that the produce gets mixed up on the way to the store. The retailers just put the good looking stuff in the organic bin and the beat up stuff in the regular bin.

Customers are not there to get food. They are there for salvation. The food is just a part of the ritual. Whole Foods is not selling produce, they are selling grace. Everything about the operation is pure capitalism, but it is aimed at bourgeois people, who need to feel like they have purpose beyond making money. In the 60’s, New Age gurus made money off of these people selling made up eastern religions. Today, corporations like Apple and Whole Foods are doing the same thing on an industrial scale.

Food cults are not new. The Jews are well known for their dietary laws. Catholics used to have dietary laws too. Muslims have dietary rules, similar to Jews. There’s something in the human psyche to make a religious fetish out of food. What’s happening today, in the great bust-out that is modern America, is this quest for grace, whether through food or consumerism, is turned into a big business.

Socializing Insanity

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The extemporaneous mutterings of Hollywood people are often amusing, because these people are both dumb and insulated from the real world. We like to think these people get loopy after years of fame, fortune, drugs, alcohol and so forth. That’s not the case. Almost all of them were nuts long before they got famous or even got into the business. The best in recent years has been Alec Baldwin. The guy is what the Brits used to call mad.

I flew to Hawaii recently to shoot a film, fresh on the heels of being labeled a homophobic bigot by Andrew Sullivan, Anderson Cooper, and others in the Gay Department of Justice. I wanted to speak with a gay-rights group that I had researched and admired, so I called its local Honolulu branch.

The office number turned out to be some guy’s cell phone. I left him a message—I said, “I’m from out of town, I’m visiting Hawaii on business, I’d like to  get some information on your group.” After two or three more calls, he answered the phone. I said, “Yeah, I’m the guy that called about your organization.” And he said, somewhat impatiently, “Okay, well, what did you want?” I said, “Well, let me put it to you this way, Nick. Your name is Nick? Nick, let me begin by asking you a question. Who would you say, by your estimation, is the most homophobic member of the entertainment industry currently in the media?” And he paused for a long count of four and said, “Um … Alec Baldwin?”

And I said, “Ding, ding, ding, ding! Bingo, Nick, bingo! That’s who you’re talking to.”

He said, “C’mon!”

I said, “Nick, I want to come in and talk.”

I met with Nick and others from two LGBT organizations. We talked for a while about the torment of the LGBT life many of them have lived while growing up in traditional Hawaiian families. Macho fathers. Religious mothers. We talked a lot about words and their power, especially in the lives of young people.

One young man, an F-to-M tranny, said, “Are you here to get dry-cleaned, like Brett Ratner?” Meaning I could do some mea culpa, write them a six-figure check, go to a dinner, sob at the table, give a heartfelt speech, beg for forgiveness. I thought to myself: Beg for forgiveness for something I didn’t do?

I said, “No. I don’t want to get dry-cleaned. I don’t want to be decontaminated by you, Karen Silkwood–wise, scrubbed down. I want to learn about what is hurtful speech in your community. I want to participate in some programs about that. Or underwrite one. And then, like you, I just want to be left alone.”

His line about the Gay Department of Justice is a good one. Giving homosexuals a veto over public discourse is just socializing insanity. Homosexuals do have unpleasant lives due to losing the biological lottery at birth. There is a good bet that homosexuality is just one manifestation of a larger psychological problem. This story from the failed state of California is not a promising omen.

A senior at Azusa High School will be the first transgender student to play on the girls’ varsity softball team, school officials said Friday.

Patrick Cordova-Goff, 17, who goes by Pat, is a member of the cheer squad and student body president. She could also be the state’s first transgender student to play softball at a high school.

Pat, who played baseball in her freshman year, began trying out for the softball team two weeks ago, said Azusa Unified School District Supt. Linda Kaminski.

The transgender teen learned she made the softball team when high school officials posted tryout results Thursday, Kaminski said.

The first game is scheduled March 5 at the school.

“The softball team is practicing and focusing on their upcoming season,” Kaminski said. “Coaches from nearby districts are positive about the upcoming games.”

Kaminski said only a few people have expressed concern about the school’s decision to let a transgender student play on the girls’ softball team.

“But when they hear how we are addressing their concern, they are understanding,” Kaminski said.

Pat’s path to making history in her district, perhaps the state, was paved by two major events.

Let’s get a look at “Pat”

Unsurprisingly, Pat looks like a young man in drag. That’s because Pat is a young man in drag.

One of them was California AB 1266. The state law–signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last August–prohibits public schools from “discriminating on the basis of specified characteristics, including gender, gender identity and expression,” the bill reads.

The law also allows students to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, such as athletic teams and competitions.

The California Interscholastic Federation, which governs school sports, took action and amended its Constitution and Bylaws to include new guidelines for transgender students participating in high school sports.

The new rule states that all students should have the opportunity to participate in CIF activities in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on a student’s records.

The bylaw went into effect beginning the 2013-14 school year, according to CIF-SS Communications Director Thom Simmons.

CIF officials said they did not know whether Pat was the first transgender student in the state to play on a girls’ softball team.

“No appeals have been filed in the CIF Southern Section or any other sections across the state to my knowledge,” Simmons said.

No student or school has sought assistance from the CIF’s Gender Identity Eligibility Committee, which looks at whether a transgender student is eligible to play in a sport or not, officials said.

Pat, who has a 4.0 grade-point average and founded Azusa’s Gay-Straight Alliance, a high school club advocating transgender student rights, is just one of many students across the country driving cultural change.

Last year, in Huntington Beach, Cassidy Campbell ran a successful campaign to become Marina High School’s first transgender homecoming queen.

“I’m doing this for the kids who can’t be themselves,” Cassidy told The Times.

That same year, Pat also sought a bid for homecoming queen, but she did not win, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reported.  The paper was the first to report on her softball tryout.

I will allow for the possibility this young man thinks he is a woman. There are cases where people are convinced they are invisible or missing limbs. These beliefs are easily refuted, but the person persists in their belief. When a person is convinced of things that are easily refuted, we assume they are insane. If Pat were convinced he was a bird, no one would let him jump off a building. For his own safety, adults would step in and get him whatever care was available for his affliction.

There’s also the possibility that Pat is just an attention seeker. From the news accounts, it appears his first attempt at being a public nuisance failed. Being publicly gay is no longer shocking or even interesting. He started a club and tried various ways to make a pest of himself, but no one seemed to care very much. Now that he is wearing a sun dress and trying out for the softball team, everyone is noticing. Not everyone can be Miley Cyrus, but they can try.

What’s going on here is we are socializing the mental illness of this person. Everyone is being forced to alter their lives to accommodate a crazy person. It is one thing to pay some tax to fund an asylum. It is quite another for girls to be forced to compete against a man as a condition of joining the softball team. This puts the safety of young women at risk so a handful of lunatics can get some grace on the cheap. It is only a step removed from human sacrifice where one must die so others can be happy.

The Future of Revolution

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The word “revolution” brings to mind rampaging mobs carrying torches and pitchforks, while their betters run for their lives. Revolutions, in the common way of thinking about the term, are always violent. In reality, the degree of violence is not all the same, as some are quite peaceful, while others are quite bloody. Relatively speaking, the American Revolution was peaceful, compared to the French Revolution. This post in the Los Angeles Times on Ukraine has an interesting end worth considering.

I have argued that, in our time, 1989 supplanted 1789 as the default model of revolution. Rather than progressive radicalization, violence and the guillotine, we look for peaceful mass protest followed by negotiated transition. That model has taken a battering of late, not only in Ukraine but also in the violent fall that followed the Arab Spring. If this fragile deal holds, however, and the fury on the streets can be contained, Europe might again show that we can occasionally learn from history.

Revolution is not merely a change in who holds the keys to the prison. Revolution is a sudden collapse of the old system and the evolution of a new system. The French Revolution was not a failure when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. He may have looked a lot like Louis XVI, but it was not a restoration of the Ancien Régime. It was just another step in France evolving into a post-monarchical state. What’s going on in Ukraine is just a change in who sits atop the existing order.

What’s happening in Ukraine is a bad example, as it is a land with a strange history and not much of an organic identity. Much of what it means to be Ukrainian is tied to the history of the surrounding people. Still, to assume all revolutions are violent and obvious is an error. Like the cultural revolution that swept the West in the 1960’s, it is only in retrospect that it becomes clear that the old order was wiped away. That was not a violent over throw of the old regime, but it was a revolution nonetheless.

Good News From The Black Death

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Every society has its myths. Foundation myths not only explain how the culture came to be, but also why they are God’s special people. Up until a couple of decades ago, Americans were taught in grammar school about the Pilgrims, religious liberty and the founding of the world’s first representative democracy. Other myths justify the existing order and the traditions of the people. In the West, this means believing in the equality of man, natural rights and so forth. Myths are a necessary part of who we are.

In America, politics, popular culture and policy debate all start from the assertion that all people are equal at birth. Everything about a person is determined by environment. Even things like heart disease, cancer, and body type are negotiable, despite science saying otherwise. Of course, sex and race are ruled irrelevant. Any differences between the sexes or races is assumed to be a carryover from past sins in the culture. Public policy in areas like education are aimed at eradicating these cultural shadows.

As is always the case with religion, myths and belief, science tends to be an enemy. The HBD folks have done yeoman’s work popularizing and expanding on ideas percolating up from the sciences, particularly genetics and evolutionary biology. Still, it is a small collection of people that follow this stuff and even a smaller group that think public policy should reflect the new knowledge. Superstition is the rule, but if you are the least bit optimistic, then stories like this one should give you some hope.

Enter Mihai Netea, an immunologist at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands. He realized that in his home country, Romania, the existence of two very distinct ethnic groups provided an opportunity to see the hand of natural selection in the human genome. A thousand years ago, the Rroma people—commonly known as gypsies—migrated into Europe from north India. But they intermarried little with European Romanians and thus have very distinct genetic backgrounds. Yet, by living in the same place, both of these groups experienced the same conditions, including the Black Plague, which did not reach northern India. So the researchers sought genes favored by natural selection by seeking similarities in the Rroma and European Romanians that are not found in North Indians.

Netea; evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain; and their colleagues looked for differences at more than 196,000 places in the genomes of 100 Romanians of European descent and 100 Rroma. For comparison, the researchers also cataloged these differences in 500 individuals who lived in northwestern India, where the Rroma came from. Then they analyzed which genes had changed the most to see which were most favored by selection.

Genetically, the Rroma are still quite similar to the northwestern Indians, even though they have lived side by side with the Romanians for a millennium, the team found. But there were 20 genes in the Rroma and the Romanians that had changes that were not seen in the Indians’ versions of those genes, Netea and his colleagues report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These genes “were positively selected for in the Romanians and in the gypsies but not in the Indians,” Netea explains. “It’s a very strong signal.”

Now, why should Gypsy resistance to the plague matter? Well, as a cultural matter, it does not. What matters is the free and open discussion in a mainstream science journal about genetic differences in human populations. If genes matter in disease resistance, there’s no denying they matter in other areas. More important, if observable differences are genetic, then there is little point in arguing for environmentally based antidotes. That would be like trying to talk someone out of having cancer.

Now, there are plenty of these turning up every week and that supports for the above point. What’s important here is the casual discussion of gypsies, a protected class in Europe. Even though everyone hates them, no one is allowed to mention them. They are not quite on the level of American blacks, but they enjoy a similar status. When geneticist feel free to study and report on protected classes, then maybe the Overton window is moving in the direction of rationality. Even a little movement is a miracle.

Hitler Again

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World War II ended roughly 70 years ago. Hitler supposedly killed himself in 1945, but even if that was faked, he has surely been dead for a very long time. He was 56 at the time he allegedly killed himself, so would have died at least 30 years ago if as hiding out in Paraguay.  The point being, most everyone who was around back then is dead. Yer, the Germans have arrested three former Nazis on charges they were prison guards. Not just prison guards, but guards at Auschwitz.

German police on Thursday raided the homes of nine elderly men suspected of serving as SS guards at the Auschwitz death camp and arrested three of them on allegations of accessory to murder.

The arrests came five months after federal authorities announced they would investigate former guards at Auschwitz and other Nazi-era death camps. Their effort was inspired by the precedent-setting trial of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk, who died in 2012 in a Bavarian nursing home while appealing his conviction on charges he served at the Sobibor camp.

“This is a major step,” said Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, when told of the arrests. “Given the advanced age of the defendants, every effort should be made to expedite their prosecution.”

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was the first person convicted in Germany solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in any specific killing.

Munich prosecutors successfully argued that anyone who was involved in operating a death camp was an accessory to murder. Demjanjuk maintained he had been mistaken for someone else and never served as a guard.

Reading the story, my only thought was about the ages of these guys. Simple math says the youngest camp guards are now well over 80 years old. Let’s say you were in a family of true believers that volunteered you at 15 and  you got assigned to a death camp at the end of the war. That means you are 84 years old now. Since that’s unlikely, it means the youngest guards still alive are in their late 80’s. In other words, the only guys still around were conscripts at the end of the war who probably did very little.

The three men arrested, aged 88, 92 and 94, all live in state of Baden Wuerttemberg in southwest Germany. They were taken to a prison hospital, Stuttgart prosecutors’ spokeswoman Claudia Krauth said.

Krauth said officials had yet to uncover enough evidence to merit the arrests of three other suspects aged 94, 91 and 90.

She said authorities seized “diverse papers and documents from the Nazi era” from the suspects’ homes. She declined to provide details.

Five men made no statements, while the 88-year-old admitted being a guard at Auschwitz but denied committing any crimes, Krauth said.

Prosecutors in Frankfurt said more documents and photographs were seized during raids on the homes of two men aged 89 and 92 in the neighboring state of Hesse. A spokeswoman, Doris Mueller-Scheu, said neither suspect was arrested nor made statements.

In North Rhine-Westphalia, state police said they raided the apartment of a 92-year-old man who admitted being an Auschwitz guard but denied participating in any crimes. They found no incriminating material during the search.

I’m at a loss as the value of rounding up old men from nursing homes. Notice how the police “raided” the homes. There are some feisty nonagenarians, but merely being alive at that age is considered feisty. Even assuming they were monsters 70 years ago, this seems a bit excessive. Perhaps the argument is it prevents these guys from dying before their families know the truth about them. Regardless, we are running out of Nazis to hunt. At some point, the guys at the Simon Wiesenthal Center will need to find work.

Of course, keeping the Nazi bogeyman alive is central to the people in charge. That way they can excuse all of their excesses by claiming it is to keep Hitler from coming back and starting up the death camps again. That means when all the Nazis are dead, they will be rounding up their decedents and accusing them of having Nazi blood. That is, after all, how blood libels work. The West will be paying for the alleged crimes of the Nazis until the people of the West take back their countries and their history.

Female Trouble

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The awfulness of feminism was not always obvious. The “first wave” of feminism, conveniently called first-wave feminism, was about women getting the vote and some legal protections. A lot of men knew giving women the vote was a bad idea, but not so bad that they were willing to fight to stop it. A century ago when women were demanding the vote, feminism did not look like an assault on nature. It was just unattractive women making a nuisance of themselves in public.

Second-wave feminism is where the nuttiness bobbed above the water line. That’s where we get words like “gender” worming their way into our vocabulary. That is, sex is an arbitrary construct created by men to oppress women. The remedy was to smash up family life, give women a handful of rubbers and money for cab fare as dating aids and demand that men stop thinking about sex. That sounds crude, but crudeness was the most obvious feature of second wave feminism in the 60’s and 70’s.

Third-wave feminism takes this to another level of crazy where reality is infinitely negotiable. Here we get a variety of new sexes, claims about women being witches from another planet and the sun revolves around the earth. That sounds like mockery, but it is hard to satire this stuff. When people are claiming the biology is not just a social construct, but part of a grand conspiracy, it’s hard to not mock it. Despite this, the lunacy has just started. Soon, men will be afraid to around women in the office or even in public.

Crazy rants against nature in the abstract are one thing. Sitting in your college office ranting about males has a different result than throwing yourself off the roof claiming you can fly. But, the crazy rants eventually lead to someone testing the theory. The insanity of feminism is now showing up in the emergency rooms of America as women and girls test the theory that there is no biological difference between men and women. At the Olympics, girls competing on courses built for men are getting hurt a lot.

Sarka Pancochova, a Czech snowboarder, led the slopestyle event after the first run. On her second trip down the course of obstacles and jumps, she flew through the air, performed a high-arcing, spinning trick and smacked her head upon landing. Her limp body spun like a propeller into the gully between jumps and slid to a stop.

Pancochova was soon on her feet, and the uneasy crowd cheered. Her helmet was cracked nearly in half, back to front.

She was one of the lucky ones, seemingly O.K., but her crash last week was indicative of a bigger issue: a messy collage of violent wipeouts at these Olympics. Most of the accidents have occurred at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, the site of the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events like halfpipe, slopestyle and moguls.

And most of the injuries have been sustained by women.

The rants against nature are not just showing up in silly snow activities. The US military is putting women in combat units. It is one thing for a gal to break her neck trying to ski like a boy. It is unfortunate and sad, but not the end of the world for anyone but her. Putting physically and mentally inferior soldiers into combat units is another matter. That’s where mother nature let’s you know reality is not negotiable. Men in combat have a way to handle the physically and mentally unfit within their ranks.

Women are not men. Men are bigger, faster and stronger than women. Studies have been conducted using the mountain of data collected by the military over the last 100 years. One of the ancillary benefits of having a massive standing army is a massive amount of data about the humans entering and serving in that standing army. It provides the best cross-section of the American population possible. Since America is a mixed society, it works as a handy proxy for the human race in general.

“Using the standard Army Physical Fitness Test … the upper quintile of women at West Point achieved scores on the test equivalent to the bottom quintile of men.”

West Point is a training center for the very best who are willing to join the Army. What the data shows is the best women are physically the same as the very worst men. That may not sound so bad, but according to the data, “the average 20-to-30 year-old woman has the same aerobic capacity as a 50 year-old man.” Anyone who has played sports, goes to the gym or lived on earth knows this is fairly obvious. There is a reason why girls don’t play football and boys are not allowed to play in women’s sports.

There’s another bit to this. Women and men think differently too. For instance, there are differences in IQ. Males are over represented in fields like math and science, but under represented in nurturing professions like education and medicine. The difference between men and women show up across the range of human attributes. Men and women are different and they are complimentary. For all of human history, people, both sexes, understood and excepted this.

Fallon: Regular Guy?

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I saw this on Drudge yesterday. For some reason I thought the Fallon version of the Tonight Show was starting in the spring. I’m not enough of a TV watcher to keep up with these things, I guess. I’m now exclusively on Amazon and the XBox for content. That means old movies when the spirit moves me and whatever is free from Microsoft.

Anyway, I never have understood the popularity of Jimmy Fallon. I don’t think he is very funny. The dorky effeminate white guy routine is as worn out as the neurotic Jewish guy routine. You have to be a comedic genius to make it work. But, I’m not a good judge of these things. I think Will Ferrell is just warmed over Chevy Chase.

What got my attention in this article was this:

Fallon has long positioned himself as a regular guy, the kind who would rather play charades with his guests than engage in lame interviews — or, even better, just pick up a guitar and goof around. His likableness has taken him far.

But even by his standards, the “aw shucks” factor was high on Monday night.

After a lovely opening credits intro directed by Spike Lee, Fallon took the stage, thanked his predecessors, and said: “I really don’t know how I got here.” Speaking in a voice so quiet you could practically hear audience members swallow, he introduced himself to “those of you who are watching me for the first time, which is very possible,” starting with the basics. “I’m 39 years old, I live in New York City with my beautiful wife Nancy and my daughter Winnie who’s six months old … and I love her so much.”

Fallon a regular guy? This is one of those things where you see the yawning gap between the over-class and the rest of America. The only place an effeminate poseur is a regular guy is in some gentrified hipsterville like Brooklyn. In the rest of America, men are still men and they don’t “pick up a guitar and goof around with friends.” That’s the sort of thing that will still get you beat up in large swath of America. If you’re black or Spanish, regular guys are certainly not 30-something white hipsters.

That probably explains the enormous investment in Fallon by NBC . They really want him to be the every man. More important, they want America to look like the trendy places they have coffee and talk about writing projects. In fact, they want it so much they believe it is happening. These people are always sure their greatest desires for society are right around the corner, so they can believe anything is possible.

In the early days of TV, writers and performers were obsessed with middle-America. TV hosts were from the Midwest so they could relate to everyone. The shows were geared toward reinforcing and flattering the norms of middle-America. Johnny Carson became an icon and a force in Hollywood because he was loved by middle-America. Leno, as much as he could, kept that tradition going, but he was never a powerful figure in show business like his predecessor. His politics were simply too pedestrian.

The promotion of a Jimmy Fallon reflects the new way of doing things. Instead of armies of Jewish writers flattering Middle-Americans, Hollywood is an army of writers lecturing, educating and training those crude prols that go to WalMart and eat fast food. Fallon is the new model man, small, petite and vulnerable. He does not have on guests to entertain you; he has them on so he can entertain them. The new model man is an androgynous man-boy begging for acceptance by spilling his heart out in public.

Lessons From The Painter

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Yesterday afternoon a painter arrived to finish up the offices. Instead of a Mayan, it was a middle-aged white woman. She was very cheery and very chatty. While she was working, she mentioned to me that she is learning Spanish so she can communicate with the workers her boss keeps hiring. I noticed some resentment, but she did her best to mask it, as standing up for yourself in cultural matters is so forbidden.

She then mentioned that the Hispanics call her “punta.” She happily informed me it means “bitch” in Spanish. I was not about to correct her on the matter. What would have been the point? She was happier thinking it was a sort of grudging compliment and I was happy to have her pissed off at me for explaining it to her. Those interested in the real meaning of that word can look it up on their own.

Later she informed me that learning Spanish has led to some of employees using “mung” instead of Spanish. She meant Mam, which is a Mayan dialect. She did not say it, but I got the impression she was not happy about it. The whole point of leaning Spanish was to help these people and now they were deliberately throwing a wrench in the works. So much for the idea that these people want to assimilate.

Here’s something she mentioned that perked my ears up. This women had been open minded about these people coming here, despite the obvious cultural issues. What really changed her mind is this. It was ObamaCare. She said to me as she was leaving that it was ridiculous to let all of these people in just so they could “go on our insurance. That’s all they want when they come here, ObamaCare.”

There was no trace of resentment in the use of the term “ObamaCare.” My guess is she probably thought it was a good idea. Whether libertarians like it or not, most people are comfortable with the government making sure everyone can get health care. America is a socialist country and everyone is OK with it as long as no one says it. And that’s what bugged this woman. It was having to share this blessing with strangers.

It reminded me of the way Alaskans think of some new comers to their state. They are suspicious that the new people just want to start collecting from the Permanent Fund, the money from oil rights distributed to Alaska citizens. They have no reason to make that the default assumption, but they are covetous of the fund. It is their oil and their money. They correctly see that the more people getting a check, the smaller the checks.

Democrats have spent so much time convincing people that insurance is a natural resource to be shared by everyone, a lot of people believe it. As a result they are covetous of it. They are right to be. You cannot have a generous welfare benefits and open borders. Most likely, you simply cannot have generous welfare benefits under any circumstances, but you certainly cannot have them with open borders.

Another possibility is ObamaCare has put everyone in touch with the welfare state, thus making everyone more aware of it. “Our” health care system is now more personal than when it was just your insurance. A year ago, few Americans knew much about the welfare system, other than it existed. It was not for them, it was for those other people, but now it is for everyone, so people feel like they own it now.

Anyway, it was a bit of an eye opener. It could just be one crazy painter, but I suspect ObamaCare has unleashed a lot of strange currents into the culture that will begin showing up in the ballot box this fall. There’s a strong possibility that the Obama years will be seen as the unleashing of all sorts of cultural, racial and society forces that had been held in check for a very long time. ObamaCare uncorked a lot.