Category Archives: Politics

Why The West Is Losing

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This column is interesting. First off, Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics. Why was he commissioned by the New York Times to ruminate on foreign policy? That’s not his area of expertise, even if we want to pretend that economics is an area of expertise. His credentials don’t add authority to his analysis and they don’t suggest his analysis is based in anything ore than his own ruminations. If he was a professor of game theory, then it would maybe make some sense.

Now, Cowen is a smart guy, who has many interesting things to say, so maybe he gets some leeway. Still, it used to be that no one would ask an economist to discuss anything outside of economics and even that was a very narrow topic. Today, the local economist feels free to poke his nose into everything. They are the court magicians and the local soothsayer. Serious men consult them to divine the will of the gods. Maybe they should be required to dress like Gandalf.

In another era, religious leaders routinely commented on the morality of public policy, including foreign policy. Today that role is filled by members of the local economics faculty. The reason is the morality of Christianity has been replaced by a new materialist morality among the ruling classes. It is why passing a Byzantine health care bill was treated as a moral triumph. An economist somewhere said it would add wealth to the nation and there can be no higher good than increasing the GDP.

The flaw in this is that the benefits of public policy often lie well over the horizon, while the costs are often right now. Of course, the reverse is often true. The benefits of debt creation, for example, are immediate, while the long term costs are passed onto future generations. The result is a form of short term thinking about public policy that veers into the myopic. In America, the “live for the moment” morality has produced a nation of amnesiacs incapable of remembering yesterday or contemplating tomorrow.

In foreign policy, this new morality is at the heart of our troubles with Russia. The Russian elite reject the materialism of the West. They look at the Crimea as a part of their cultural history and a part of their patrimony. It is a part of what they hope will be their shadow, in which future generations will stand. That changes their cost-benefit analysis. Putin is willing to sacrifice now, for what he assumes will be a legacy passed onto his people. The West cannot understand such reasoning.

The other thing is just how deeply our elites are marinated in cultural nihilism. Top to bottom they think culture is witchcraft from a bygone era. Their extreme egalitarianism leads them to assume all people are the same. Everyone wants what we want, loves what we love and hates what we hate. In domestic policy we see this all the time. Education starts with the assumption that everyone can be above average, as Bush hilariously claimed. Diversity demands that no one notice the diversity of man.

In the competition with Putin, the West’s inability to see his motives through his eyes is leading to one error after another. John Kerry throws a temper tantrum thinking it will have the same effect it has when he does not get seated on time at the club. Instead Putin sees a weak, feckless man who is no threat to him. In Obama, he probably sees a guileless provincial surrounded by equally inept courtiers. The fact that Obama and his people cannot imagine that being the case means we have informational disequilibrium.

Consider this from the Cowen post:

A more reassuring kind of deterrence has to do with the response of Russian markets to the crisis. Russia is a far more globalized economy than it was during the Soviet era. On the first market day after the Crimean takeover, the reaction was a plunging ruble, and a decline in the Russian stock market of more than 10 percent. Russia’s central bank raised interest rates to 7 percent from 5.5 percent to protect the ruble’s value. Such market reactions penalize Russian decision makers, who also know that a broader conflict would endanger Russia’s oil and gas revenue, which makes up about 70 percent of its export income.

In this case, market forces provide a relatively safe form of deterrence. Unlike governmental sanctions, market-led penalties limit the risk of direct political retaliation, making it harder for the Russian government to turn falling market prices into a story of victimization by outside powers.

The underlying assumption is that Putin wants what we want. He and his people love what we love, hate what we hate and see themselves as citizens of the world, just like Tyler Cowen! Maybe the folks running Russia put a high price on having swank Miami condos and houses in Switzerland. It is just as likely they love their country, their forebears and their own place in the Russian time-line more than those trinkets. The elites int he west are no longer able to understand such thinking.

Why Democracy Fails

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Sheila Jackson Lee is not retarded or missing a chromosome. She is just not terribly bright. The reason she is in Congress, however, is the voters of her district are mostly to the left of her on the bell curve. According to Wikipedia, her district is 40% black, 35% Hispanic and 20% white. According to this site, her district is one of the youngest. It ranks 18th in number of children under 5 and 30th in residents under 30. It seems odd that it would have so many babies, yet a declining population of adults. Hmmmm….

The answer is it is home to the Third Ward, a section of downtown Houston. The Third Ward is known as one of the most dangerous neighborhoods on the planet. According to this, you have a 1-in-13 chance of being a crime victim there. Getting a decent murder rate for the area is tough, but news reports claim a murder rate three times the rest of the city, which is 12 so that means over 30. It is hard to know for sure, but we know enough to say it is a hyper-violent place.

The general picture to keep in mind is of a poor urban ghetto filled with violent drug dealers and their underclass partners. You’re not getting a lot of high IQ strivers coming from that district. The median IQ of her district is below 85. It is the old line about the one eyed man being king of the blind. Jackson Lee is a moron by normal standards, but in her district, she’s the smart fraction. In Detroit, a smart fraction with IQ’s in the 90’s resulted in the Haiti-fication of what was once America’s richest city.

 

It is easy to pick on Lee and the people of her district, but it is the central defect of democracy. No matter how much you spend on education, half of the population is going to be below average. More than half, much more than half in fact, is average or below average in intelligence. The magical thinking of democracy is that one dumb person cannot be trusted to make decisions. A million dumb people will collectively act like a single smart person. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

The people of Lee’s district should not be voting on anything of significance. They are simply too dumb to be trusted. Some could be trusted with the vote. Certainly some own property, run a business and conduct themselves as responsible citizens. Most struggle to keep up with the basics of living. A fair number are unable to understand much more than a child. Why would anyone think it wise to let such people vote? Yet, this is the logic of democracy. It is an appeal to the lowest common denominator.

The Coming Collapse

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On the excitement scale, pension reform is down there with Swedish land reform and women’s basketball. Even for accountants, it is considered dull. It is the small boring things that tend to bring down society. The best example is the Yersinia pestis, which was carried by the fleas on mice. Christendom was nearly wiped out by a tiny pest carrying an even tinier pest. Anyway, this post about pension reform is an example of the small boring stuff that will turn out to be quite important.

The regular session of the Louisiana Legislature is right around the corner and one of the most depressing aspects of it is what won’t be discussed. Pension reform isn’t going to be a prominent topic.

In fact, what could happen is lawmakers will make things worse. That’s because bills to give retired state workers a 1.5 percent cost of living raise have not only been filed but, according to the early handicapping, are likely to pass.

It’s been eight years since the last raise, which is a long time in any context other than one in which the private sector is enduring stagnant wages and chronically high unemployment for years. That is to say, like now.

Under the bookkeeping formulas kept by the state, the money is there for the COLA boost. Now. It may be better to give than to receive, but a pension increase, like a raise, is a gift that keeps on giving for the recipients. This is no bonus forun a job well done, it’s something that stays on the books and has to be met going forward even if balances cause that accounting formula to change.

When economists talk about public debt, they seldom mention the mountain of promises to government employees. If I promise you a job and regular raises for the next 30 years, that’s a debt I owe you. It is no different than borrowing the money and handing it to you. Those promises by state and local government to pay people long into the future cannot be discharged in court in most states, either due to the state constitution or the fact states cannot declare bankruptcy.

Furthermore, it’s no secret that state and municipal governments face few if any looming financial crises greater than pensions. Some governments have taken piecemeal steps to address this, largely copying moves made by the private sector.

More specifically, defined contributions plans like 401ks are now recognized as far more sensible than the rich defined benefits schemes that were once the norm.

Nevertheless, whether the fiscal bombshells created by defined benefit plans — which guarantee a certain payment for life — can be defused remains an open question. By no means is this all the workers’ fault. Lawmakers in states across this great land have frequently underfunded pensions, and states have stuck to a very respectable and probably outdated “anticipated” rate of return of 8.5 percent.

I can provide the answer here. They cannot be defused. They will explode when the cash runs out in the next decade. No one should shed any tears for the workers. They knew, or at least they should have known, that these lavish benefit packages were out of line. They live in the same world as the rest of us. They also knew the money for those lavish pay and benefit plans comes out of their neighbors paycheck. To put it bluntly, they have been screwing the rest of us for decades so too bad for them..

Translated, that means not enough money has been poured into the pension systems and investment returns will have to be forever rosy.

But the relationship between unions – whose power is increasingly concentrated in the public sector – and lawmakers means handsome deals have been struck between decidedly non-adversarial parties. Besides, it all involves other people’s money, and the unions have always provided handsome returns to friendly politicians’ campaign war chests.

Taxpayers are now looking at the monstrous bill produced by such cozy extravagance.

Louisiana, fortunately, doesn’t have as gigantic a burden as states like Connecticut face. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a huge problem in the Pelican State – to the tune of somewhere between $20 billion or nearly $75 billion, depending on which alarming report you consider more accurate.

Louisiana hasn’t adopted sensible reforms like raising the retirement age and moving to defined contribution plans. Louisiana taxpayers are still stuck with an antiquated and expensive arrangement where the defined benefit plan rules supreme.

In 2012 the Legislature did pass a law requiring future state hires to enroll in defined contribution plans, but led by the teachers’ unions and other interested parties – staffers, boards, lobbyists, investment salespeople, accountants, lawyers and the rest who ride like remoras on this bloated whale – the law was repealed.

Of course. Letting public employees unionize was never about the state employees. It was about the democrat politicians hoovering off billions in tax dollars through the unions. The hacks running the unions funnel money to the politicians, who play ball with the unions. The union leaders also keep a nice share for themselves.

It’s hard to predict how deeply we must dip the gourd into the magic fountain of other people’s money to make good on the state’s current obligations. What is clear is regardless of whether one goes with the rosy estimates floated by those in the pension business or the much scarier numbers arguably more objective analysts reach, it would take tens of thousands out of Louisiana wallets just to plug the existing gap.

In other words, what Louisiana and practically every other state across this great land faces is a system that is — all together now — unsustainable.

It is beyond belief everyone doesn’t see this, which means everyone does. The state workers drawing these handsome pensions want them. They fight like cornered tigers over having to contribute another dollar to what they regard not as some extraordinarily generous entitlement paid for by folks who have no such protected eggs themselves, but as some kind of right, confined to them, as sacred as free speech.

There is no magic solution. Detroit is the example states may follow. Over the next decades services will be reduced and budgets cut in areas like public recreation and road maintenance. As the crisis grinds on, bond holders will be hit with demand from states to forgive some debt to avoid defaults. Eventually they will come back to pension plans and force cuts on them. The unions will sue, like they are in Illinois, but you can’t get blood from a stone. When the money runs out, the party is over.

The Spread of Stupid

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Part of getting older is losing patience for stupid people. That means losing interest in mass media, particularly the commentariat. These are people who spend all of their time opining about things, but never take the time to fact check themselves. They have the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips, yet they can never be bothered to look up basic facts about their topics. Instead they just repeat the same nonsense the other chattering skulls have been saying.

Here’s a good example from John Fund over on National Review. How hard would it be to call someone who knows something about natural gas? They could quickly tell him that it is really hard to ship overseas. They would also tell him we lack the facilities to do it in any sort of volume. It will take decades for us to built out those systems. We have not built a refinery in thirty years. The environmental lobbies will never go along with a large scale LNG facilities near a major port. It’s probably easier to start a nuclear plant than to build a new natural gas facility.

Let’s look at the building of alternative pipelines into Europe. What do you think Russia is doing in Syria and Iran?  They want to build a pipeline through Iran, over northern Iraq into Syria. Tartus would be a very convenient place to build LNG facilities as it already has port facilities capable of handling big sea-going vessels. The GCC and Saudi Arabia would like to build one too, except their pipeline would run through Saudi Arabia into Jordan to the Suez Canal. Neither of these plans will be done anytime soon. Given the problems in the region, both projects are on permanent hold.

Again, all of this stuff can be looked up on-line. Five minutes of time and you quickly see we are not going to be able to do anything about Gazprom. Even if he is unable to work the internet, he works for the Wall Street Journal. he can call people who know about these things. instead, he repeats nonsense. Most likely, the nonsense comes from the neocons who obsess of Russia. They feed these lunkheads in the medial their talking points, knowing that people like Fund will never fact check them.

The Left Versus The CIA

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This is a curious story about the security state and the political class. Following World War II, a permanent professional spy agency was created with the National Security Act of 1947. After some fits and starts, it has been a permanent feature in Washington for five decades. Presidents come and go, senators come and go, but the CIA is always there. That’s not a small thing. These semi-independent agencies that sort of report to the executive tend to take on a life of their own.

Congressional aides involved in preparing the Senate Intelligence Committee’s unreleased study of the CIA’s secret interrogation and detention program walked out of the spy agency’s fortress-like headquarters with classified documents that the CIA contended they weren’t authorized to have, McClatchy has learned.

After the CIA confronted the panel in January about the removal of the material last fall, panel staff concluded that the agency had monitored computers they’d been given to use in a high-security research room at the CIA campus in Langley, Va., a McClatchy investigation found.

It remained unclear Wednesday if the monitoring, the unauthorized removal of classified material or another matter were the subject of a recent CIA request to the Justice Department for an investigation into alleged malfeasance in connection with the committee’s top-secret study.

The documents removed from the agency included a draft of an internal CIA review that at least one lawmaker has publicly said showed that agency leaders misled the Intelligence Committee in disputing some of the committee report’s findings, according to a knowledgeable person who requested anonymity because of the matter’s extraordinary sensitivity.

In a combative statement issued Wednesday evening, CIA Director John Brennan chastised unidentified senators for making “spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.”

“I am very confident that the appropriate authorities reviewing this matter will determine where wrongdoing, if any, occurred in either the executive branch or legislative branch,” he said in an apparent reference to the request for a Justice Department investigation. “Until then, I would encourage others to refrain from outbursts that do a disservice to the important relationship that needs to be maintained between intelligence officials and congressional overseers.”

The removal of the documents is the focus of an intense legal dispute between the CIA and its congressional overseers, said several people who also cited the matter’s sensitivity in asking to remain anonymous.

Some committee members regard the monitoring as a possible violation of the law and contend that their oversight powers give them the right to the documents that were removed. On the other hand, the CIA considers the removal as a massive security breach because the agency doesn’t believe that the committee had a right to those particular materials.

Most people probably think Congress can get whatever they want from any government agency, but that’s not true. In fact, some agencies routinely ignore Congress. People also think the CIA would not be spying on Congress, but that they do.

“Even if the agency is technically correct on the legalities, it’s a real asinine thing to pick a fight with your oversight committee like this,” said a U.S. official who was among those who spoke to McClatchy. “You’ve got to be asking yourself why the agency would be willing to take such a risk. The documents must be so damned loaded.”

White House officials have held at least one closed-door meeting with committee members about the monitoring and the removal of the documents, said the first knowledgeable person.

White House officials were trying to determine how the materials that were taken from CIA headquarters found their way into a database into which millions of pages of top-secret reports, emails and other documents were made available to panel staff after being vetted by CIA officials and contractors, said the knowledgeable person.

The extraordinary battle has created an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the spy agency and its congressional overseers and raises significant implications for the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches of the government. It also has fueled uncertainty over how much of the committee’s report will ever be made public.

“The CIA has gone to just about any lengths you can imagine to make sure that the detention and interrogation report won’t be released,” said Sen. Mark Heinrich, D-N.M., a Senate Intelligence Committee member who has pushed hard for the release of the report.

“As furious as I am about these allegations, I want to keep focused on getting that report out to the people so that they can read the truth and make up their own minds as to who made those decisions and why,” he said.

One of the fascinating aspects of the Left is they never forget a slight – ever. Here we are years after the Bush people were chasing jihadis around the desert and liberals are still pressing claims about alleged abuses. It was only after most of the principles were dead that the Left forgot about Nixon. Even death is not enough sometimes. Obama’s Russia policy was largely a rebuke of Reagan’s policies. The whole “reset” nonsense  and the decision to kill missile defense was the long delayed answer to Reaganism.

Buckley’s Folly

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I still subscribe to National Review and I still visit the site daily. It is more habit than interest these days. The magazine goes unread until they pile up and I thumb through them in one sitting. Charles Cooke is interesting from time to time. Andrew Stuttaford is often good when he writes about Europe. Kevin Williamson is the best writer they have left, which speaks to how bad it is now. They have run off most anyone with talent and something interesting to say.

Anyway, I was trying to read this from Jonah Goldberg and I kept thinking about how dreary National Review is these days. Part of it is me. My views have changed as I have grown older. It is just a part of getting older. But, the world has changed too. In the 1980’s, Bill Buckley was a rock star, of sorts. The main reason is a new generation was ready to push back against the Baby Boomer liberals. To be a young right-winger in the 1980’s was a lot of fun, even if the ideology did not always make sense.

Today that brand of conservatism feels about as exciting as disco. Reading Jonah’s column, I was thinking about how many times I’ve heard the same argument from the Conventional Right. There’s nothing wrong with it, other than the fact it was a reasonable response to the Left in 1950. Given where we are as a culture, the value of gentling tapping the brakes on the Progressive drive to the abyss is lost on me. I mean, what’s the point?  The time for debating this stuff is long ago in a foreign country.

For some reason I was reminded of when John O. Sullivan was shown the door by Bill Buckley. I had vague recollections of it being another case where Buckley canned the guy most thought was set to take over for him. I went looking and this is the best I could find, which is a column with lots of quotes from the article I must be recalling. Buckley could never figure out how to close the show that was his life. Like all men, he struggled to turn control of his project over to someone competent.

Given the shabby state of the conservative movement Buckley built and the sorry state of his signature achievement, he was foolish to try and leave a legacy. It is ironic in a way as he saw what happened to Henry Luce and his magazine empire after his demise. He was friends with John M. Olin, who bankrolled a lot of early conservative enterprises. Buckley surely knew that the best course was to shut it all down and let the next man build his own thing, outside the shadow of Buckley and his project.

Maybe it will not matter much. There does seem to be a gathering storm of dissident writers and publications out there on the Internet. Taki Mag has become a must read among anti-liberals. Bloggers like Steve Sailer promote dissident ideas. Still, it would be better if there was not this hollowed out entity claiming to represent the opposition to the Progressive orthodoxy. In the end, Buckley’s vanity may end up causing more harm to the causes he championed than the good he did as a leader of the Right.

Not So Smart Fraction

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Raw intelligence is a poor predictor of political success. The HBD people tends to link IQ with everything, even politics, despite the rather obvious fact that many of our politicians are uncommonly stupid. Joe Biden is quite dull. Years of drinking and a few strokes have shaved a dozen points off his IQ. Odds are he would score in the low 20’s on the Wonderlic Test, maybe even high teens. His rather obvious lack of intelligence has not worked against him. He’s going to president one day.

Saying that politicians are dumb is a popular past time, but not all of them are dumb and even the dumb ones can say some smart things. Simply noticing things can be the smartest thing one can do and some of our politicians can notice things. Sarah Palin was hooted down by the Left for her alleged lack of smarts. They mocked here for claiming Russian had designs on parts of the Ukraine.  This story from Breitbart goes into it in light of recent events..

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin warned that if Senator Barack Obama were elected president, his “indecision” and “moral equivalence” may encourage Russia’s Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.

Palin said then:

After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.

For those comments, she was mocked by the high-brow Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico magazine.

In light of recent events in Ukraine and concerns that Russia is getting its troops ready to cross the border into the neighboring nation, nobody seems to be laughing at or dismissing those comments now.

Hounshell wrote then that Palin’s comments were “strange” and “this is an extremely far-fetched scenario.”

“And given how Russia has been able to unsettle Ukraine’s pro-Western government without firing a shot, I don’t see why violence would be necessary to bring Kiev to heel,” Hounshell dismissively wrote.

Palin made her remarks on the stump after Obama’s running mate Joe Biden warned Obama supporters to “gird  your loins” if Obama is elected because international leaders may test or try to take advantage of him.

That’s not to say Palin is very smart. It is a good bet that she is not working math puzzles in her free time. She’s not dumb like Joe Biden. Palin is school teacher smart, while Biden is fork lift driver smart. On the other hand, Biden is politician smart, while Palin is not. One can be left unsupervised while the other may run with scissors if you don’t watch him. You can trust Palin with your kids, while Biden, well, you know.

That’s the thing about politics in a social democracy. it’s not about smarts. Palin could have been the sharpest person in the room, but the Left would still call her dumb, because they need to call her dumb. They would get away with it because she is not good at politics in the way a lunkhead like Joe Biden is good at politics. That’s why democracy is a terrible system. It rewards Joe Biden and punishes Sarah Palin.

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.

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.

Immigration Observations

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The office building in which I work is having some renovations done. The renovations have been going on for so long I no longer remember when they started. The office towers are having the windows replaced. They do a space when it becomes vacant so it has been on-going for a long time. The tenants on our floor moved out so they have been doing the windows in those units. For some reason we agreed to let them do out office last week. As a result I am working at home.

The plan was to let them do their thing starting last Wednesday and they would be done by Monday. Of course, they were not done by Monday. My office looked like a bomb went off yesterday morning. Some Hispanic guys were milling around with tools, but that’s all they were doing. Another Hispanic guy, who was obviously of European stock, appeared to be in charge. The rest looked like extras from a National Geographic special on the Mayans. Lots of little brown oompa-loompas.

The guy in charge tried hard to avoid me, but I finally cornered him. He was evasive in that Latin way you know if you have ever been to South America. They appear to be saying yes, but they are so vague you really have no idea. On the one hand they are effusively agreeing with you. On the other they are never actually committing to do that which will resolve the confrontation. In my case, I wanted to know when the job would be done. The guy in charge said a few hours, but maybe a few days. Who knows?

Watching the scene, I got a good dose of the Latin Way. This is when a job requiring five people has ten people trying to do it. Because it is a five person job, the extra five people slow down the required five people. Another take on this is where they have three people working in such a way that they produce the work of one person. To white people, two working together can do the work of three. three working together produce the work of five. For Latin America, it never works out this way.

Yesterday morning, that meant some of the Mayans moving around with tools in their hand,  others taking turns moving a ladder around the room. Then some of the tool carriers would move a ladder or maybe move some tools around. Everyone once in a while they would say something in their language and one would leave for some reason and the return empty handed. They were working hard, but with no purpose. Instead of screwing off, they just looked busy, but the result is the same.

I fully understand why contractors, landscapers and so forth like Latin labor. They show up and try hard. With the right supervision, they can be excellent workers. That’s the problem. There’s no “smart fraction” coming over to supervise the Mayans. This old chart from the NY Times lays it out clearly. The Mexican immigrants coming to America are mostly dimwits. Add in the cultural issues and the odds of this group spawning a smart fraction capable of rising up in a modern technological society is rather slim.

This is the fundamental problem with the pro-immigration argument. The cheerleaders operate as if every human on the planet is capable of becoming the next Steve Jobs, which is so obviously not true it has to be a lie. Even when they acknowledge that some fraction are never going to be more than guys who carry things for a living, they claim that children of these people will magically flower into high IQ strivers. Biology says that is no more likely than some generation of cats producing litters of puppies.

At the other end the open borders crowd likes to extol, we have Indians. That’s sub-Himalayan Indians. I see car loads of them coming in to work at a programming or engineering shop. There are firms around here that specialize in bringing in these people on John McCain Temporary Work Visas. Those visas he thinks we need to create, despite having over twenty types of them now. These firms rent out apartments, set them up with bunk beds and pack them with Indian engineers and programmers.

What this is all about is avoiding the cost of locals. You can bring in an entry level programmer for about two-thirds the cost of training a college kid. Unlike the college kid, they have no outside distractions, don’t take days off and don’t require constant supervision. Their upside is very low, but they are temps so who cares. If anyone wants to know why kids are not going into STEM fields, just look at the numbers. Pay for engineers and programmers has been stagnant for two decades.

I think the dilemma for patriotic Americans is they sympathize with the contractors and landscapers. The Mayans seem nice. They work hard, even if they are not terribly bright. Everyone knows why the contractors prefer these people over the alternative. At the other end, the Indians also seem nice, when you see them. Unless you are in a stem field or very observant, you don’t notice the 100,000 or so temporary STEM workers brought into to cut the throats of Americans.