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Profiles in intellectual courage

The NRO crew provides some striking profiles in intellectual courage:

“Does @NRO want to be associated with someone who publishes racist trash like this? I know I don’t”
– Ramesh Ponnuru

“For the record, I find my colleague John Derbyshire’s piece fundamentally indefensible and offensive. I wish he hadn’t written it.”
– Jonah Goldberg

“Needless to say, no one at National Review shares Derb’s appalling view of what parents supposedly should tell their kids about blacks in this instantly notorious piece here.”
– Rich Lowry

“Why National Review must fire John Derbyshire“
– Josh Barro

Apparently these various National Review writers want Americans to remain trapped in the same clueless, post-racial, Orwellian delusion they have inhabited for the last fifty years. And yet, John Derbyshire’s article that has inspired such rabid ritual denunciation is little more than a calm and perfectly reasonable collection of observable realities of race in America:

(6) As you go through life, however, you will experience an ever larger number of encounters with black Americans. Assuming your encounters are random—for example, not restricted only to black convicted murderers or to black investment bankers—the Law of Large Numbers will inevitably kick in. You will observe that the means—the averages—of many traits are very different for black and white Americans, as has been confirmed by methodical inquiries in the human sciences.

(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been pleased that I write for WND and not NRO. Now, in the past, I have been urged by some to abandon what they errantly consider to be my “support for segregation”. What they fail to understand is that I don’t support segregation per se. I don’t actually have a position on it, any more than I have a position on gravity or oxygen. There is nothing to support, there is only an observation to be made: Humanity is intrinsically and naturally self-segregating. It is desegregation that is unnatural, that requires the imposition of force to maintain for even brief periods, and which is both inherently unstable and antithetical to the collective will of every people on the planet.

My own perspective should be perfectly clear, but I shall elucidate it anyhow. Due to past desegregation imposed by force of one kind or another, be it private action or government policy, rapid large scale segregation is going to take place because the vast majority of people on every possible side find it to be desirable. That future segregation is going to be either voluntary or involuntary, and will be either violent or non-violent. Therefore, government policies should, to the greatest extent possible, be strongly biased towards voluntary, non-violent, and gradual segregation in order to reduce the risk of rapidly destabilizing multi-ethnic and multi-racial societies.

Multiculturalism is dead. Desegregation is dead. MLK’s dream is dead, and more importantly, it was never more than wishful thinking anyhow. Racial equality is the same failed myth as every other aspect of human equality, none of which have ever been shown to exist in any tangible form. And all that dropping weak-kneed to one’s fainting couch or clinging to the oft-disproven canards of the racial equalitarians will achieve is to increase the level of violence and amount of involuntary cooperation that will eventually be required to recreate the historic balances that were originally brought about by the natural processes of group behavior. The American black/white situation is only one, and one of the smaller and less problematic, of the resegregations that should probably be anticipated in the medium term.

Ponnuru, Goldberg, Lowry, and Barro have humiliated themselves with their craven responses. John Derbyshire is not merely right, but it is not even remotely reasonable to pretend that he is incorrect in any significant detail. The truth is what it is, and it will usually come out in the end no matter how desperately the children try to cling to their fairy tales. Pointing and shrieking “RACISS” is the modern equivalent of crying “WITCH” at the height of the Salem witch trials… and is not going to change the probable course of future events in the least.

Mailvox: the divine metric

G asks a question that is much easier than many who ask it suppose it to be:

I was brought up in a Presbyterian church and settled in Church of God (national headquarters to boot). I have been a staunch believer and keeper of the faith for well over 30 years. I have begun to question why the Bible is the Truth. I’ve spoken with members of more than a few faiths (and others without faith) & as we know they all KNOW their God is the true & powerful force in the universe, all galaxies, clusters, solar systems, planets, but most significantly our lil inhabitable asteroid. I was raised a Christian and the only way to get to the promise land is through Christ. Allah and others have a different plan for the ultimate prize. Folks are dieing and have killed for gods that their parents told them was real and true. Why am I blessed to have parents that taught me the “right” religion. My Jewish pal & atheist pals are more than pleased with what they have been taught.

As far as the Bible,(noted that I did not do the research myself) tis my understanding that several books were left out or added to the original work? That a group of men decided which books would be in the teachings that the world would learn and preach as the truth. Some say they were guided by a divine hand (no free will?). Also, I know it is a tired argument but I have not ever received a answer that quite satisfies me- the talking serpents, forbidden fruit, adam and eve- who recorded they info,a rib, much of Jesus’ time written about was well after his death (accuracy?). Some things are to be taken litteraly & some are fables – which ones – who decides – each church and divisions within have different interpretations. I seem to get the “He works in mysterious ways & some things we’ll never know”. That is a whole cart load of bison dung. I don’t know- guess im rambling now with errant thoughts but I’m beginning to question my faith as measured by others faiths & those with a lack of a belief in a god or gods. Using Occams Razor, it is pretty well deduced that I well have been wasting my time. I non-trivially pray that I’m wrong and will once again see the light.

First, G reveals that his “research”, such as it is, doesn’t even rise to the level of reading Wikipedia about the major world religions. He hasn’t actually spoken to “members of more than a few faiths”; we know this because only a very small number of religions are even monotheistic and therefore make the sort of claim of God that G erroneously declares they do. Of the five religions with a globally significant number of faithful, precisely two of them believe in a ruling divinity, Christianity and Islam.

And it is a tremendous misapplication of Occam’s Razor to think that it favors atheism in any way. The correct divine metric is to compare the truth claims of a religion or anti-religion with observable reality. Is it true, for example, that the poor will always be with us or was Marx correct and the elimination of poverty is merely a matter of first establishing the worker’s paradise? Does Man have free will, as the Bible teaches, or are two of the leading New Atheists right to declare, like the Muslims, that he does not? Is Sam Harris correct in insisting that religion is the greatest current threat to human existence, and if so, how has it failed to destroy the planet for the previous 8,000 years of recorded human history?

The Bible says “seek and ye shall find”. But, of course, it is necessary to do so in a genuine spirit of honest inquiry. If it is patently obvious to me that G’s “search” has hitherto been superficial and unserious, I tend to doubt it is capable of fooling God. Furthermore, before attempting to wrestle with the queen of all sciences, I strongly suggest G cut his teeth on some easier ones. The fact that he appears to believe that he presently dwells upon an “inhabitable asteroid” suggests that his ability to correctly distinguish between fact and fiction is rather limited.

Contortions and the Crucifixion

After the most recent Team Calvin exercise, The Responsible Puppet felt that he had caught me committing a Calvinist-style X=Not X contortion:

I looked at his Chain of Events and saw these two statements:

(A) The Father draws everyone.

(B) Some . . . do not permit themselves to be drawn.

Later he agreed to the statement “Some who God draws are not drawn.”

This, I maintain, is a contortion at least as bad as what he claims the Calvinists make.

Setting aside the obvious lack of conflict due to the intrinsic difference between subject and object, Jamsco assumes my statement must be a contortion because he cannot conceive of a difference between a successful draw and an unsuccessful one. To him, the very act of drawing is enough to ensure the success of the action. But he is wrong. For, when we consider what Jesus Christ himself said of the event that we celebrate today, Good Friday, it is abundantly clear that my interpretation of the concept “draw” as a resistible call rather than an irresistible pull is the correct one.

“Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.” – John 12:31-33

When he was lifted up to his death on the cross, Jesus Christ drew everyone to himself. His sacrifice was offered on behalf of everyone, not merely John Calvin’s “elect”. And yet, Jesus was perfectly clear that not everyone would be saved despite of his sacrificial atonement for Man’s sin. Therefore, it is not possible to escape the conclusion that even though both Jesus and God the Father have drawn everyone, salvation is not solely accomplished by the will of the Father or the Son. Salvation requires the will of the repentant sinner as well.

There is no need to go off onto tangents concerning the theoretical limits of divine capability and various metaphors of mortality when Jesus Christ’s own words make it clear that the sinner must act of his own free will, repent, and accept the sacrifice offered on his behalf, if he is to be saved.

God did His part by sending His Son. Jesus did his part by accepting his death. And the protestations of Team Calvin notwithstanding, the question that you must ask yourself is if you are willing to do your part and accept the gift of life that was offered on this day some twenty centuries ago.

People don’t care about politics

I had a similar revelation some years ago, when it occurred to me that the “cable news giant”, Bill O’Reilly, had a viewership that represented, at the time, about one percent of the voting electorate. It gets even more absurd when one considers that a “big blogger” has a readership that is less than one-tenth the size of these viewerships.

Jon Stewart pulled in a whopping 1.372 million viewers Monday, which only looks good when compared to Stephen Colbert, who pulled in less than a million. Here’s the list. As you can see, something called “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” and “Bad Girls Club” beat both of America’s satirists pretty handily. So did cartoons … and reruns of cartoons.

What I love about these posts that prove our clown-emperors are not only naked but media-created emperors, is that people get all angry over my reporting of this fact. I know, I know — I’m supposed to be so outraged by Bill Maher that I don’t focus on these two sacred cows, but I just can’t help myself.

Stewart can be funny at times while Colbert is simply stupid. But both of them are largely irrelevant. When one considers how little impact something as large and splashy as the Tea Party has had, one quickly realizes that the liberal clowns are almost totally devoid of significance despite their media hype.

Repent

The West’s political and banking elite are running out of time to repent and make amends for their crimes against their various nations.

“The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all hope for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not give me any way to react (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans to survive.

I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.”
– Dimitris Christoulas

Saints busted again

Now it’s more annoying than ever that the Vikings fumbled away the NFC championship to this gang of lying bozos:

Williams’ speech, delivered less than two months before the Saints’ bounty scandal became public, was revealed to Yahoo! Sports by Pamphilon, who had access to various team functions for much of the 2011 season.

Pamphilon, who directed the critically acclaimed “Run Ricky Run” documentary for ESPN, is working on a project featuring former Saints special teams ace Steve Gleason, who is suffering from ALS. Pamphilon has released an audio recording of the profanity-laced speech (also obtained and listened to by Yahoo! Sports) on his website and said he believes “there’s no doubt at all” that Williams put a bounty on Smith in the meeting.

Said Pamphilon: “At one point Williams says, ‘We hit [expletive] Smith right there’ – then he points under his chin [and continues] – ‘remember me.’ Then he rubs his thumb against his index and middle fingers – the cash sign – and says, ‘I got the first one. I got the first one. Go get it. Go lay that [expletive] out.’

It’s now clear that the Saints merit the harsh penalty they received from the NFL Commissioner. If Payton was wise, he’d withdraw his appeal at once. And the fact that the Saints organization is now attempting to feign outrage over the way in which Pamphilon exposed their continued lies is simply despicable.

Medieval Pre-Keynesianism

From The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin:

Following the example of the more advanced people they had conquered, the Tartars began issuing their own paper currency, and after 1260, when Kublai Khan completed his conquest of China, he made it the regular institution reported by Marco Polo. In Marco Polo’s day the notes were still passing at full face value, but in the last years of the Mongols’ Yüan dynasty (1260–1368), floods of paper money once again signaled inflation. When the first emperor of the new Ming dynasty (1368–1644) took over, he cut back the paper money in circulation, and finally succeeded in stabilizing the currency.

From its beginnings in China, printing bore this guilty association with unsound currency. For centuries printed paper money appeared to be the only form of printing known to European travelers. A paper-money debacle closer to the West added to the ill-repute of printing. In Tabriz, capital of Mongol-conquered Persia, both Venice and Genoa kept commercial agents during the early years of the fourteenth century. The extravagance of the Mongol ruler Gaikhatu Khan from 1291 to 1295 put pressure on his treasury, which he tried to relieve by issuing paper currency. Block-printed in 1294 in Chinese and Arabic, each of his notes bore the date of the Muslim era, a warning to forgers, and the cheerful prediction that now “poverty will vanish, provisions become cheap, and rich and poor be equal.” But the magic did not work. After only a few days of compulsory use of the paper, commerce was disrupted, markets closed, and the Khan’s financial officer was reported murdered.

We like to flatter ourselves that we know so much more than our predecessors. And yet, the idea that printing more money will lead to economic growth as well as reductions in poverty and income inequality can be seen in almost every Paul Krugman column that mentions the money supply. The problem isn’t that his solutions are old, failed policies from the 1930s, but that they are old, failed policies from the 13th century.

The only difference between the treasury of Gaikhatu Khan and the Federal Reserve is that the latter has had the sense to slowly increase the money supply, thus delaying its eventual day of reckoning. But the cold, hard, mathematics means that day will eventually come.

The Barca machine

Grantland’s game diary for the second leg of the Milan-Barca quarterfinal:

Brian: Sometimes I watch a bit of play that just knocks me over the head with WHAT A WEIRD TEAM BARCELONA IS. They just won that penalty by bypassing a couple of completely plausible shots in order to stroke the ball around in the area like they were playing a very casual game of hot potato. They were literally trying NOT to pass the ball into the back of the net, and now it’s 1-0.

If you’re the heads-up display in the Barca-player visual-software interface, how do you decide when to light up for “shoot”? There are like nine floating circles that have to converge, at which point the software runs an algorithm that determines whether the resulting shot would be beautiful.

Three things struck me most about watching Barca effortlessly beat the Rossoneri. First, it’s like watching the Harlem Globetrotters. They don’t just make the pass instead of taking the shot, they make another pass, and sometimes a third, before taking the shot, and sometimes this all takes place inside the opposing box. I’ve never seen anything like it. They don’t so much waste opportunities as blatantly ignore them.

Second, they press frighteningly well. I would estimate that at least one-third, and possibly as much as one-half, of Milan’s attempts to clear the ball were intercepted or otherwise failed. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the Milan defense was playing back on its heels in full, catenaccio from the start, but no sooner did they take the ball away than they lost it, usually in their own half of the field.

Third, Barca stretches the field horizontally better than any team I’ve ever seen. There was always a winger on the far side of the ball, but instead of crossing the balls in the air, the wingers would push the ball inside, force the defender to commit, then a) try to beat him, b) pass off to Messi, or c) pass off to the central midfielder coming up in support. Their entire game is played on the ground, which makes sense given that their front six appear to average about 5’6″. They just keep passing and slashing and pressing until the defense cracks, then instead of shooting, pass three more times for good measure, before finally deigning to make an attempt on goal.

I would have been more annoyed by the two penalties awarded Barca were it not for the fact that the fouls were legitimate, and at least the first time, the ball should have already been in the net twice over by the time the foul occurred. The final score was 3-1, but it could just as easily have been 6-1. That’s not to say Barca is invulnerable, as neither their defense nor their keeper impressed me. A big, fast team with the benefit of a laissez faire referee could beat them, assuming they didn’t run out of steam chasing the little guys around.

The real problem

Some, like Michael Barone and John Leo, say the problem is too much diversity and too little science. Not me. I say the problem is quite clearly the rise of the undead!

The scary thing is that this is what the chairman of the University of California board of regents looks like when dollied up for a press conference. Can you even imagine what she looked like earlier that day, when she’d been freshly unearthed and the mortician hadn’t yet sewn the wig onto her scalp?

Mailvox: the benefits of immigration

In which a historical objection is raised:

I’ve read that the two migrations of Greeks into Italy (the first around Cato the Younger’s time IIRC, and the second after the fall of Constantinople) were beneficial for Italian society because of the Greek learning and culture they brought with them. Are these relevant to your thesis about the negative effect of immigration on receiving societies? As an immigrant to Italy, what is your opinion?

Cato the Younger lived from 95 to 46 BC. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. The Roman Republic is considered to have ended in 29 BC. I submit that this specific example is very relevant to my thesis, insofar as decades of civil war followed by a collapse into one-man dictatorship would generally be considered to be a societal negative.

As for the second wave of Greek immigration, those were Greeks in the Byzantine sense, not the Hellenic. Since Byzantium was still somewhat more civilized than thrice-sacked Rome or the oft-invaded Italian peninsula, this is rather like asking if immigration from the United States to some of the more war-torn African societies would be beneficial. And remember, the difference between Byzantium and the Italian peninsula would likely have been even starker were it not for the Venetian conquest and sack of Constantinople in 1204.