The end of the Jewish century

I suspect that this lawsuit, if successful, will spell the beginning of the end of the Jewish century in America:

A group that is suing Harvard University is demanding that it publicly release admissions data on hundreds of thousands of applicants, saying the records show a pattern of discrimination against Asian-Americans going back decades.

The group was able to view the documents through its lawsuit, which was filed in 2014 and challenges Harvard’s admissions policies. The plaintiffs said in a letter to the court last week that the documents were so compelling that there was no need for a trial, and that they would ask the judge to rule summarily in their favor based on the documents alone.

The plaintiffs also say that the public — which provides more than half a billion dollars a year in federal funding to Harvard — has a right to see the evidence that the judge will consider in her decision.

Harvard counters that the documents are tantamount to trade secrets, and that even in the unlikely event that the judge agrees to decide the case without a trial, she is likely to use only a fraction of the evidence in her decision. Only that portion, the university says, should be released.

“This is an important and closely watched civil rights case,” William S. Consovoy, the lawyer for the group, Students for Fair Admissions, said in his letter to the court. “The public has a right to know exactly what is going on at Harvard. Even if this were a commercial issue — as Harvard would like to portray it — the public would have a right to know if the product is defective or if a fraud is being perpetrated.”

At stake in the dispute is the secrecy of the university admissions process, especially at elite institutions like Harvard that are competing for a small pool of highly qualified students, and whether and how race and ethnicity play a role.

Students for Fair Admissions includes more than a dozen Asian-American students who applied to Harvard and were rejected. They contend in their lawsuit that Harvard systematically and unconstitutionally discriminates against Asian-American applicants by penalizing their high achievement as a group, while giving preferences to other racial and ethnic minorities. They say that Harvard’s admission process amounts to an illegal quota system.

U.S. Jews have perpetrated four self-serving myths that have contributed to their control of the intellectual high ground in the United States. One, Judeo-Christianity. Two, the historically nonsensical “nation of immigrants” narrative. Three, that they are unusually intelligent. And four, that their statistically improbable success in Hollywood, the media, and the financial sector is primarily a consequence of that superior intelligence.

Those myths have been severely eroded, but not exploded entirely yet. The primary reason that Harvard is so desperate to conceal the extent to which it has engaged in racial, ethnic, and religious favoritism is that it will a) reveal how far superior the Asian intellectual elite is to the Jewish intellectual elite, and, b) expose the extent to which Jewish admissions officers have compromised Ivy League admissions on behalf of their co-ethnics for the last five or six decades.

At a certain point, even those who are not particularly bright will eventually grasp the significance of the fact that the supposedly brilliant guys whose whip-smart intelligence is supposed to be the basis of their success reliably turn out to be the Sam Harrises and Ben Shapiros of the world, intellectual charlatans with elite degrees who are observably third-rate intellects at best.

A not-entirely-unrelated thought struck me when I was reading E.O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence the other day. Although Wilson cites the way in which kinship selection has been disproven, it did strike me as a potentially useful basis for a model that mathematically quantifies the extent to which nepotism influences group outperformance, one which, in this particular application, would demonstrate the essential silliness of the myth that has snared even the likes of the eminent Jordan Peterson.

How China can win

Although the US cannot lose a trade war with China due to the fact that it is already $600 billion in the annual red thanks to the trade deficit, that does not mean that China does not have an ace or two up its sleeve:

Chinese President Xi Jinping is now exchanging threats of tit-for-tat tariffs with President Trump, who announced Thursday he’s considering raising the stakes another $100 billion. China vowed to defend itself “at any cost.”

Compared to the scale of the U.S. economy, the numbers are still relatively trivial and mostly theoretical. But if things do spiral into all-out trade war, it’s worth noting China has a nuclear option.

I’m referring to rare earth metals.

These are elements like dysprosium, neodymium, gadolinium, and ytterbium. They aren’t actually rare, but they do play crucial roles in everything from smart phones to electric car motors, hard drives, wind turbines, military radar, smart bombs, laser guidance, and more. They’re also quite difficult to mine and process.

It turns out the United States is almost entirely dependent on foreign suppliers for rare earth metals. More importantly, it’s almost entirely dependent on China specifically for rare earth metals that have been processed into a final and usable form.

Basically, if China really wanted to mess with America, it could just clamp down on these exports. That would throw a massive wrench into America’s supply chain for high-tech consumer products, not to mention much of our military’s advanced weapons systems.

In fact, China isn’t just America’s major supplier of rare earth metals; it’s the rest of the globe’s major supplier as well. And in 2009, China began significantly clamping down on its rare metal exports. Once, China briefly cut Japan off entirely after an international incident involving a collision between two ships. This all eventually led to a 2014 World Trade Organization spat, with America, Japan, and other countries on one side, and China on the other.

That forced China to abandon its quotas. But it also shows China is willing to use its advantage in rare earth metals to play hardball if it’s pushed far enough.

However, this is not an argument for free trade. In fact, it is precisely the opposite, it is a devastating disproof of Ricardian Comparative Advantage theory, which posits that manufacturing can move seamlessly between industries. In fact, if one were to argue that the USA must engage in trade due to its fear of its inability to process rare earth metals, one would have have to reject the theory of comparative advantage, and therefore, free trade.

This is the danger of engaging in the Ricardian Vice. It becomes all too easy to accidentally refute your own position when attempting to respond to protectionist arguments.

Compare the narratives

Austin Bay considers the Seven Chinas grand narrative.

Nations have always used narratives to support their diplomatic operations. Not all of them are “weaponized,” but a powerful, moving story gives a diplomatic initiative additional energy. Often these narratives incorporate nation or ethnic historical and cultural themes. Since they support a diplomatic initiative, they are always political.

In February, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies published a short paper entitled “Seven Chinas: A Policy Framework.” The paper briefly examined “seven identities” that the Chinese government uses to “shape and justify policy.”

Each identity is a narrative.

China 1: Self-sufficient civilization (We generate our own values)

China 2: Most humiliated nation (Our senior civilization, conquered and despised)

China 3: Leader of the developing world (Late developing China leads developing nations)

China 4: Champion of plurality (We are ending Western/American hegemony)

China 5: Sovereign survivor (We survived the collapse of Communism because we are unique)

China 6: Last man standing (The West is declining while our wealth is increasing)

China 7: Herald of the high frontier (China and shares the global trade and communications commons)

In the South China Sea China’s narrative weapons have augmented its military and economic clout. It’s proved to be a powerful combination.

Compare these to the ever-shifting globalist and SJW narratives that have replaced the traditional Western narrative. It is eminently clear that in any matchup of these particular weaponized narratives, China is not merely winning, China is going to win.

An economic education

Sometimes these jokers openly admit what is readily obvious to even the casual observer: the basis for their professed knowledge is remarkably shallow. In this particular circumstance, one might even say callow.

Jeffrey Gundlach warns we may be repeating the mistakes that led to the Great Depression. The bond investor was asked for his view on the rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China.

“It’s not a positive. I mean it is really interesting when I was in elementary school and high school we talked about the Great Depression … [What] my teachers told me was that the Great Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve raising interest rates prematurely in a not so strong economy and also the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act,” he said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Halftime Report.”

Well, if the opinions of public school elementary teachers from four decades ago aren’t a sound basis for modern economic policy, I don’t know what could be. Sure, my elementary school teacher didn’t know the difference between a triceratops and an allosaur, but I’m confident her knowledge of economic history was considerably more sound.

What he said

An astute comment at Steve Sailer’s about the Kevin Williamson firing:

The NR staff currently wailing on twitter about the injustice of dumping a talented writer for being provocative on an independent website can show it’s not just crocodile tears by apologizing to Derbyshire.

Apologizing? They should offer to rehire him with a raise as well. Consider David French’s wailing about “the cowardly firing” with just a few changes to it.

The AtlanticNational Review has caved to the intolerant mob and fired Kevin WilliamsonJohn Derbyshire, and in so doing has contributed to a slanderous fiction — that KevinJohn is so beyond the pale that he has no place at one of the nation’s premiere mainstreamconservative publications. His millions of words, his countless interviews, and his personal character were reduced to nothing — inconsequential in the face of deleted tweets and a five-minute podcast dialoguea single column. Look, I know it’s easy for some to dismiss KevinJohn’s termination as mere inside-baseball media drama. But it’s more than that. It’s a declaration by one of America’s most powerful mediaconservative entities that it can’t even coexist with a man like KevinJohn. If he wants to write, he should run along to his conservativeAlt-Right home. His newlong-time colleagues simply couldn’t abide his presence.

These cuckservative Never Trumpians simply do not realize that their time is past. They have been exposed for hypocrites and fools. They do not lead opinions, they are led by the Left instead, following it slavishly from one societally destructive policy to the next. Give them a little more time and they’ll be dutifully laying out the conservative cases for cannibalism, child sacrifice, and Satan worship.

Hence the real reason for their wailing. They know they are losing the right-wing audience that is increasingly rejecting their soft leftism, and now they are beginning to realize that the hard Left has no use for them either.

The Littlest Chickenhawk has been crying about that on Twitter, in addition to issuing the conventional dire warnings of consequences never being the same. He thinks he is one of the “virtuous people” to decide who is acceptable and who is not, to decide who is chased down and disemployed and who is not, intstead of the overt Left.

This is, we are told, the “stone cold truth” and “the Left won’t like it”.

The Left continues to radically narrow the Overton Window – the spectrum of acceptable discourse. They separate discourse into two categories: the acceptable and the unacceptable. Then they shrink the acceptable down to the opinions located between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. This necessarily places Kevin Williamson and @bariweiss and @SamHarrisOrg and me and everyone else the Left finds unpalatable into the “excluded” category. But the unacceptable category is already populated by those who are actually unacceptable: alt-right trolls, for example. This means that the population of opinion in the unacceptable category – let’s call them Deplorables, since the Left does – come to be a majority by way of exclusion. Unless, that is, virtuous people who have been excluded by the Left draw distinctions among themselves. Which they should, of course – Kevin and @bariweiss and I and @SamHarrisOrg all get lumped in as Nazis by the Left, but we all fight the actual alt-right Nazis.

But counting on the virtue of people you’ve just deemed unacceptable not to band together against you is both stupid and unrealistic over time. Which means the Left is doing something unethical here, and deeply dishonest – and something that is likely to foster polarization that results in the mainstreaming of truly gross opinions. This is how you get a reactionary movement willing to countenance alt-right evil: you tell people they’re part of the alt-right when they’re not, and treat them as such no matter how much of a lie that is. What just happened to Kevin Williamson leads conservatives to side with anyone the Left casts out, good or bad, merely as a form of protection. That shouldn’t happen. But it does. And the Left causes it with this bulls***.

Demonstrating, once more, that Ben Shapiro is not of the Right at all, but of the soft Left. That’s why they are always trying to a) disassociate from the Right and b) fix the Left.

Glenn Reynolds and Kurt Schlichter have similar takes. From Instapundit:

What really happened is that women at The Atlantic complained that Kevin’s abortion views upset them. And since making women feel bad about their life choices is a mortal sin, he had to go.

The difference between progressives and conservatives is that progressives assert that making women or blacks or gays or Jews feel bad is sufficient reason to lose your job. Conservatives, on the other hand, argue that only making blacks or Jews feel bad is enough to justify disemployment.

Financial nuke or dud?

There are dire warnings about a financial nuclear option in the dawning US-China trade war:

It took China just 11 hours to retaliate against the United States for proposing tariffs on some 1,300 Chinese products, but Chinese officials are holding back on taking aim at their largest American import: government debt.

In a tit-for-tat response to the Trump administration’s plan for 25 percent duties on $50 billion of Chinese imports, China hit back with its own list of similar duties on key American imports including soybeans, planes, cars, beef and chemicals. But officials signaled no interest for now in bringing their vast holdings of U.S. Treasuries to the fight.

China held around $1.17 trillion of Treasuries as of the end of January, making it the largest of America’s foreign creditors and the No. 2 overall owner of U.S. government bonds after the Federal Reserve. Any move by China to chop its Treasury portfolio could inflict significant harm on U.S. finances and global investors, driving bond yields higher and making it more costly to finance the federal government.

But a reader explains why the bond threat is toothless.

It’s hilarious reading Drudge headlines about how the Chinese owning US Treasuries is some kind of “nuclear option” for Beijing.

Presumably, China thinks it will somehow crash the value of its Treasury holdings by dumping it on the open market. This is somehow supposed to destroy the value of these bonds…or something. It’s almost as if no one understands how bonds actually work.

Bonds have an intrinsic value, the face value of the bonds which is the amount of money that is returned to bondholders when the bond matures.

This is the par value. If I sell a bond to you for $1,000, then I am obligated to return $1,000 to you plus interest when the bond matures. If I sell a $1,000 bond to you at an interest rate that is lower than the market rate, then I may only collect, say, $950 for the bond, but, at maturity, I am obligated to pay $1,000 back to you plus interest.

If you decide to sell the bond that I sold to you on the open market, then you may get a premium above the $1,000 or you may get a discount below $1,000, but the face value of the bond, the money owed, does not change. Upon maturity, $1,000 is owed to the bond holder.

The value of the bond may oscillate on the secondary market because of the risk of default or because interest rates have changed, but, absent the risk of default, the value of the bond is purely mathematical. Since US Treasuries have virtually zero risk of default, the value of the bond is simply the interest rate paid by the bond, vs. the interest rate of competing securities of similar risk vs. the duration. These can all be calculated in Excel using amortization tables.

There is nothing China can do to devalue US Treasuries by dumping their holdings. If they decide to sell for an artificially low price, then they are simply creating arbitrage opportunities for the buyers and frenzied trading will quickly bid back up the value of those bonds to their mathematically determined price.

See how important bonds and interest rates are in understanding the economy?

The financial trade media is heavily invested in arguing that there can be no winners in a trade war. But they are ignoring the fact that the trade war has been ongoing for decades and the USA has been continually surrendering.

They are also ignoring the uncomfortable fact that if comparative advantage were legitimate, the correct response to tariffs and other trade restrictions would be to do nothing. According to free trade theory, a country is economically better off if it enacts no trade restrictions regardless of what its trade partners do. The fact that various US trade partners are threatening retaliation for US tariffs is further evidence that, despite their free trade rhetoric, they do not genuinely believe in the concept. Nor should they, because it does not work as advertised.

A negative asset

What goes around comes around. The truth about the dysfunctional, downscale writer Kevin Williamson is that he deserves to die. Economically, he is a negative asset.

Conservative commentator Kevin Williamson was fired from The Atlantic, just weeks after being hired, the magazine told TheWrap.

“Kevin is a gifted writer, and he has been nothing but professional in all of our interactions. But I have come to the conclusion that The Atlantic is not the best fit for his talents, and so we are parting ways,” said editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in an email to staff on Thursday.

In his memo, obtained by TheWrap, Goldberg explained that Williamson was being terminated over his views on abortion, which have come to wide attention in recent days.

“Late yesterday afternoon, information came to our attention that has caused us to reconsider this relationship. Specifically, the subject of one of Kevin’s most controversial tweets was also a centerpiece of a podcast discussion in which Kevin explained his views on the subject of the death penalty and abortion,” wrote Goldberg.

Williamson even appears to have been fired despite lacking the courage to stand by his previous convictions. There was no “errant tweet”, as the podcast footage subsequently demonstrated. So, who led Jeffrey Goldberg to believe that there was? Did he come up with that on his own, or was that an excuse that was given to him?

While Goldberg himself once trumpeted Williamson’s hire from the National Review, the writer immediately drew outrage — particularly over a tweet in which he argued that women who had had an abortion should face the death penalty. Williamson defenders — and Goldberg himself — had argued that his career should not be judged on an errant tweet.

Some on the Right still don’t get it. The Left is not fixable. The time for worrying about “the heckler’s veto” is long past. There is no public square anymore because there is no common ground. The Left is fighting a cultural war by any means necessary, and even if you’re not willing to do the same, it is reprehensibly foolish to expect them to do otherwise, much less mend their ways for fear of handwringing moderate right-wingers following through on ominously implied threats which they are manifestly unwilling to even articulate.

And we are supposed to imagine what happens to us in light of Williamson’s rapid ejection from The Atlantic? Where have you been for the last ten years? We don’t have to imagine anything. We’ve already experienced it.

Marvel’s vision of the future

So, Wolverine is a woman. The President of the United States is a woman. And a superhero. And a Muslim. It just keeps getting better… check out who is the President in the ALL-NEW WOLVERINE #33. Needless to say, the Comics-SJWs just love it.

As to what we’re doing to take advantage of this nonsense, I’m pleased to be able to say that the first TWO issues of Alt★Hero are now illustrated, the first issue is colored, and we are rapidly approaching the print layout stage. So, here’s the question: do we maximize the potential audience by using the smaller format and selling the single issues for $2.99 or do we go out with the larger format at $3.99?

If you’re an Alt★Hero backer or if you’re intending to buy the single issues, please share your opinion. I go back and forth on this one. Keep in mind that the graphic novels will be in the larger format regardless. And backers will receive the digital editions for free, of course.

We will have another print release on Monday. Possibly two, as a matter of fact.

Another Twitter “suspension”

The Z-man is the latest to be kicked off Twitter:

My twitter account was suspended for violation of their rules. The specific violations were that I was threatening to post personal information about someone and that I was contemplating suicide. Neither of those things are true, but that does not matter in these issues. What I think happened is some anti-Semites, who support the deranged loon Paul Nehlen, took issue with me saying Nehlen is a nut. Soon after, a lunatic started spamming me on Twitter and then my account was permanently suspended by the twitter police.

I’m not all that upset about it. I have been thinking about cutting out social media from my internet life. I was never into Facebook. I never saw the point of it. I’m not that interesting and neither are my friends. If I need to see cat videos, I have a cat at home. I never really liked twitter all that much, but I figured it was a good way to promote the site. It was mostly just a time waster. The increase in traffic from my activity was pretty much zero. My readers know where to find me, so twitter added nothing and just took away.

I’m still up on Gab, but I’m done posting there. Frankly, I’m tired of “white nationalist” types that have made Gab their home. I probably have muted two times the number of people I follow. It’s a free country and I think those people have a right to speak their mind on-line, but I just don’t want to hear it or see it. I’ve reached my limit on that stuff. It’s like being chained to a lunatic. No matter how hard you try to ignore it, you can’t help but notice the lunatic. The solution is to divorce myself from the whole scene. Goodbye lunatics…

Apparently tcjfs was kicked off too. As for the rest of it, the reality is that very few people are cut out for blogging long term. If it doesn’t come to you naturally, then you’re going to burn out sooner or later.

As for the usual “Alt-Right is over” theme, that’s a uniquely American perspective that confuses political philosophy with political movement, ideas with groups, and understanding with branding. When the White House is denouncing and firing globalists, European nationalists are winning elections, and Big Social is enduring everything from Congressional summons to attacks by SJW gunwomen, and self-styled conservative opinion leaders are increasingly irrelevant, the Alt-Right is the exact opposite of over.

Remember, winning is a process, not a conclusion. And as for me, I’m still not tired.