Banker #36, the Belgian

Zerohedge reports that the body of yet another banker has been found:

52-year-old Belgian Geert Tack – a private banker for ING who managed portfolios for wealthy individuals – was described as ‘impeccable’, ‘sporty’, ‘cared-for’, and ‘successful’ and so as Vermist reports, after disappearing a month ago, the appearance of his body off the coast of Ostend is surrounded by riddles. and was found dead this weekend off the coast of Ostend.

No report of nailgun, but there is some strangeness concerning his use of automobiles in the time leading up to his disappearance. And there is a possible # 37 in London:

A banker has died after becoming impaled on railings after falling 60ft from the window of a luxury penthouse in central London, which is next door to John Lennon’s former home. Police were called to the exclusive block of flats in Montagu Square in Marylebone at about 5.20pm yesterday, but were unable to save the man who was in his early fifties.

Firefighters had to help police cut through the five foot high metal railings with an angle grinder, as part of attempts to free the man. Metropolitan Police said the man’s death was not being treated as suspicious but confirmed enquiries were being carried out into the circumstances surrounding his death.

The media turns on the Dunham Horror

All right, granted, it’s Volokh and not some scion of the Post’s left-wing elite, but it’s still remarkable to see an institution of the liberal Left finally turn on the self-admitted child molester, Lena Dunham, due to her publisher belatedly admitting that her parts of her “memoir” are fictitious:

Appalling. The book wasn’t a novel; it was a memoir, offered to readers as such. The copyright page, which I suspect few people read, does say that “Some names and identifying details have been changed,” but it certainly doesn’t tell people which ones.

Indeed, early in the book, when she mentions a boyfriend of hers and labels him Jonah, she adds a footnote: “Name changed to protect the truly innocent.” Reasonable readers, it seems to me, reading the rest of the memoir, would assume that “Barry” — whose name wasn’t accompanied with any such footnote — was actually named Barry. Even if not all readers would so conclude, many would, and quite understandably so.

How could Dunham and Random House do this? How could an author and a publisher — again, of a self-described memoir, not a work of fiction — describe a supposed rape by a person, give a (relatively rare) first name and enough identifying details that readers could easily track the person down, and not even mention that “Barry” wasn’t this person’s real name?

Say even that Dunham had forgotten that there really was a prominent Oberlin conservative named Barry back then. Surely it was obviously possible that, if one makes up a first name, someone real, who matches the other easily Google-findable characteristics, might have that name. Given the gravity of the charge, how can one possibly rely on a statement on the copyright page as the only hint that this particular item in the memoir is inaccurate?

The most amusing part is the addendum: “Folks, I think Lena Dunham acted badly here — but some commenters’ view
that she’s ugly or too fat or what have you seems to me to have little
to do with the merits of the matter.”

Actually, it has almost everything to do with them. Let’s face it, if the Dunham Horror wasn’t a creature being aggressively pushed on America by the media because she is fat, ugly, Jewish, and of the ideological Left, no one would have paid any attention to her rape fantasies in the first place. She is what a small, but influential group within the media wanted Americans to take for “the voice of her generation”.

And America collectively said: “yeah, not so much.”

Sie sind das Volk

I’m fairly certain the Germans want to preserve Germany’s Western Christian culture, not any nonexistent “Judeo-Christian Culture”. But in this timely piece, notice the interesting use of the term “migrant” rather than “immigrant”.

A new type of anti-immigration protest is sweeping across Germany, as
thousands take to the streets against what they say is the growing
“Islamisation” of the country.

The new protests, which began in the city of Dresden in the former East
Germany, feature no neo-Nazi slogans and have nothing to do with the
traditional far right. Instead the demonstrators have adopted the old rallying call of the protests
against the East German communist regime that brought down the Berlin Wall
25 years ago, “Wir sind das Volk”, or “We are the people”. They say they
want to preserve Germany’s Judeo-Christian Western culture.

The protests come as Bavaria’s ruling Christian Social Union (CSU) is seeking
to distance itself from a draft proposal for its party conference which said
that immigrants should speak German not only in public, but at home as well. Germany is now the second most popular destination in the world for migrants,
after the US, and the country is struggling to cope with an unprecedented
influx of asylum-seekers.

You know, it strikes me that if you don’t want to see a revival of National Socialism around the world in general, and in Germany in particular, encouraging the invasion of various European and European-descended countries by non-Europeans is probably an astonishingly bad idea.

As always, diversity first breeds discomfort, then anger, then hatred, and finally, bloodshed. Most Germans had no opinion at all about Islam 30 years ago. In another 30 years, they’ll be dispassionately and efficiently slaughtering large quantities of Turks and Arabs, and the world will be wringing its hands and wondering how this could ever happen again.

I’ve asked it before and I’m sure I’ll have to ask it again: Where the HELL do you think all those ethnically homogenous nations came from in the first place?

Israel for the Jews. Germany for the Germans. France for the French. England for the English. Nationalism and respect for national borders is the world’s only hope for a reasonable facsimile of peace. If segregation is not accomplished peacefully, it will be accomplished violently. If the entire written record of human history is any guide, it will be accomplished one way or another.

The perils of philosophy

John Wright challenges the concept of IQ:

Since I am apparently one of those self deceived idiots, allow me to say that the predictive ability of people who do well on one kind of intellectual test to do well on another kind of intellectual test is not science. It is not the empirical measurement of an observable reality.

I could with even greater accuracy predict that the winners of beauty pageants will be shapely women who are in favor of world peace.

I can also predict she will wear a crown and carry a bouquet.

No matter how accurate such a prediction, it is not science. Beauty is not a thing that can be measured and neither is the degree of craving for world peace.

It is (at best) confirming a correlation. This is not the same as Newton determining the laws of gravity from which accurate descriptions of falling apples and orbiting planets can be deduced mathematically. 

Such are the perils of a philosopher wading out into the perilous waters of science. What is not observable about an intellectual test? What is less empirical about a percentage of correct answers than a quantity of inches or a measure of weight? And, of course, the science of intelligence goes far beyond people taking two or more intellectual tests. It is no less scientific than any other branch of genetic science, in which the birth of a baby with blue eyes can be predicted or the disease of a child yet unconceived can be anticipated on the basis of his parents’ genetics.

Science does not require precisely defined measurements to be science. It need only be observable, testable, and repeatable. The fact that it is harder to agree upon a measure for intelligence than one for height does not mean that intelligence is not observable or that the predictive model is unreliable. John appears to be erroneously targeting the fuzzy metric presently used to quantify intelligence and thinking this is sufficient to call the entire science into question.

Would he also claim that weight does not exist or is unscientific? After all, it is even harder to predict the adult weight of a baby than his IQ on the basis of his parents. As other commenters have pointed out, we have a pretty good idea of the heritability of g, so how can it be reasonably asserted that there is no use of the scientific process being utilized? We have seen and observed a considerable number of relevant hypotheses being tested, both formally and informally, after all.

And beauty, at least in some of its forms, can be measured, as the picture below demonstrates.

The banality of US evil

ESR rightly identifies a problem much worse than racism:

Eric Garner was black. The policeman who choked him to death was white.

Some people want to make this horror about race. I find myself wishing they were right – that just once, the racial grievance peddlers weren’t basically making up inflammatory crap that canonizes thug trash like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Because as bad as violent racism is, I’m afraid that what actually killed Eric Garner was something far worse.

The truly terrifying thing about Eric Garner’s death is that I don’t think the cops in that video hated anybody. They were just doing their job. And their job included strangling a man to death for having sold “loosies” – untaxed cigarettes. Something he wasn’t doing when he was killed; he had just broken up a fight that the police came to investigate.

Garner had just broken up a fight. The police hassled him, based on his record as a (gasp!) vendor of untaxed cigarettes, and when he protested the force of law came down on him and snuffed him.

In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a book called Democracy In America that has been justly celebrated for its perception about the young American republic ever since. In it, he warned of the dangers of what he called “soft despotism” – that “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules”, all justified in soothing ways to achieve worthy objectives. Such as discouraging people from smoking by heavily taxing cigarettes.

Eric Garner died in a New York minute because “soft despotism” turned hard enough to kill him in cold blood. There was no anger there, no hate; the police simply failed to grasp the moral disproportion between the “crimes” he wasn’t even committing at the time and their use of force. And an investigating grand jury did no better.

Violent racists, as evil as they are, generally understand on some level that they’re doing wrong. That understanding is written all over the excuses they make. These cops didn’t need an excuse. They were doing their job. They were enforcing the law. The casual, dispassionate, machinelike brutality with which Garner was strangled reveals a moral vacuum more frightening than mere racism could ever be.

Americans find themselves living in a country where people can be freely killed, without hesitation or consequences, by the police for the “crime” of simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. To call it “the Land of the Free” is darkly morbid sarcasm indeed.

The anger expressed in the Ferguson riots was misplaced, but not entirely illegitimate. There is a serious cancer in the United States and it has fully metastasized in the police forces across the country. It is yet another sign that all is not right on Main Street USA these days.

Fertilizer is not prevention

I very much enjoy reading VDH’s historical works, but I’ve never seen a better historian so completely unable to correctly apply the lessons of history to current events:

The ancient ingredients of war are all on the horizon. An old postwar order crumbles amid American indifference. Hopes for true democracy in post-Soviet Russia, newly capitalist China or ascendant Turkey long ago were dashed. Tribalism, fundamentalism and terrorism are the norms in the Middle East as the nation-state disappears.

Under such conditions, history’s wars usually start when some opportunistic — but often relatively weaker — power does something unwise on the gamble that the perceived benefits outweigh the risks. That belligerence is only prevented when more powerful countries collectively make it clear to the aggressor that it would be suicidal to start a war that would end in the aggressor’s sure defeat.

What is scary in these unstable times is that a powerful United States either thinks that it is weak or believes that its past oversight of the postwar order was either wrong or too costly — or that after Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, America is no longer a force for positive change.

A large war is looming, one that will be far more costly than the preventative vigilance that might have stopped it.

He’s correct that a large war is looming. Where exactly it will start, or which sides the various parties will take, is presently unknown. But VDH appears to have completely ignored the lessons of the Athenian adventure at Syracuse about which he wrote so informatively, and to have ignored that the collapse of the “nation-state” in the Levant was always inevitable due to the artificial and externally imposed nature of their creations; they were never nations in the first place.

That is why we can safely assume that the “nation-states” in Africa will continue to collapse as well. And, of course, that is why the “powerful” United States has been rendered increasingly impotent; it is no longer a homogenous white Christian nation committed to Anglo-Saxon ideals. Indeed, one cannot truly consider it a nation at all, it is best described as an imperial multi-national, multi-ethnic state akin to the Byzantine, Roman, and Austro-Hungarian empires.

The birthrates fall

The US birthrate falls further below replacement level. But it’s okay, because immigration!

The number of women in the United States who gave birth dropped last year, according to federal statistics released Thursday, extending the decline for a sixth year. The National Center for Health Statistics reported Thursday that there were 3.93 million births in the United States in 2013, down slightly from 3.95 million in 2012, but 9 percent below the high in 2007.

According to the report, the general fertility rate in the United States — the average number of babies women from 15 to 44 bear over their lifetime — dropped to a record low last year, to 1.86 babies, well below the 2.1 needed for a stable population. For every 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, there were 62.5 births in 2013, compared with 63 the previous year.

The decline is especially notable because the number of women in their prime childbearing years, 20 to 39, has been growing since 2007. Some demographers said the numbers were not cause for concern.

“Americans haven’t worried much about birthrates in the past, because we
have the faucet of immigration to turn on and off,” said Andrew J.
Cherlin, a family demographer at Johns Hopkins University.

Absolutely. After all, swapping an -1SD IQ Guatamalan immigrant who doesn’t speak English for the native child of +2 SD white parents isn’t dysgenic or dyscivic at all, right? Such an exchange is not going to have any problematic long-term consequences in a world that we’re told is going to be getting more competitive and require more cognitive capacity to be economically productive in the future, n’est-ce pas?

It looks rather like a vicious cycle has been established. The economy drives down birth rates, which results in less educable lower-IQ immigrants being substituted for higher educated, higher-IQ natives, which hurts the economy….

VPFL Week 13

108 Bane Cornshuckers (9-4-0)
52 Texas Chili Eaters (7-5-1)

90 Mounds View Meerkats (8-5-0)
55 Boot Hill Bogs (2-10-1)

95 Favre Dollar Footlongs (6-7-0)
74 Greenfield Grizzlies (9-4-0)

95 King (6-7-0)
62 Clerical Errs (2-11-0)

70 RR Redbeards (8-5-0)
59 Gilbert Gamma Rays (7-6-0)

After a 38-point explosion from the Chili Eaters, I can’t believe that I’m in danger of missing the playoffs while scoring the most points in the league. Again.

IQ is real and reliable

Jerry Pournelle talks about a past predictive program that was terminated because it worked:

I have a number of letters from people who try to account for differences in mean IQ among races – a phenomenon found and confirmed so often that it must be assumed to be true – by various factors, the most common of which is culture. A number of competent differential psychologists who would have wished to find that all those differences can be truly accounted for by cultural (and thus changeable) factors have devoted a great deal of effort to trying to prove that, and to eliminate all cultural factors from IQ tests, but they have not been able to do so….

There is no single item in any IQ test that identifies the race of
the person taking that test. Any such item, if there ever were any, has
long since been eliminated. You may look at IQ tests until you are blue
in the face and you won’t find the “racial code” items, because they are
not there. A lot of very smart people have worked hard to see to that. But IQ tests do predict academic success. And the University of
Washington developed a Grade Prediction Program that did much more. I
worked on it as a graduate student. The experiment was paid for by Navy
Research.

Basically, for all incoming freshmen, we took measures of almost
anything you can think of that might affect academic grades, and
recorded the grades those students achieved in four years of instruction
at the University of Washington. We recorded high school class rank,
and grades in high school subject areas. We gave batteries of tests to
the incoming freshmen. We took ratings and estimates from counselors
(which were not easy to get because counselors are not accustomed to
making numerical estimates, and sure enough, they weren’t much use in
the final predictions). We even threw in height and weight. We did not
record race, religion, national origin, or socio-economic status.

All this stuff went into a huge matrix, one line of a couple of dozen
predictors for each student. Then over time we built another matrix,
one line of grade results for each person. This whole thing then went
into a huge program to find the correlation of each item in the
predictors with each item in the results. This would be a number from 0
to 0.99; actually I think the highest predictor item was about 0.8,
which was IQ. Many of the predictors were near enough to zero that it
could reasonably be concluded that they could be eliminated. There were
one or two predictors that correlated highly with some fields of study
and not at all with others; the formula was adjusted for that so these
predictors were only used in prediction of relevant academic areas.

And lo! After a few years of taking results and honing the prediction
equations, every incoming freshman was given a grade prediction for a
number of academic area. Be a math major and you will be an A student,
but you will flunk out of biology. Actually, of course, that would be a
rare result: people who were predicted to be A students in any area were
likely to have higher predictions for other areas. An A prediction in
engineering would very likely to be accompanied by an A prediction as an
education major. Of course an prediction of an A average in Education
was not necessarily accompanied by the prediction of an A in anything
else.

The program was successful, but it is no longer used, because the
average grades predicted for Black and Hispanic students was lower than
the average grades predicted for White students. There was no single
item in any test that identified the race of the student, but those who
set out to prove this thesis managed to find that out.

The beauty of science is that it eventually calls one’s assumptions and ideologies to account. At this point, one can only laugh at those who claim that human intelligence doesn’t exist, that IQ doesn’t measure anything, that neither IQ nor intelligence has no any link to race, and so forth. IQ is a very powerful predictive model of human intelligence, in fact, it is one of the more reliable predictive models that we have. It may not be fine-grained, it may not account for the full range of human accomplishment, and it may not be deterministic, but so what?

A metric’s failure to be absolutely perfect in every regard does not render it useless.  In fact, conservatives should take note that one of the most useful things about IQ is that it completely undermines the entire equalitarian program and renders it intellectually hors de combat.

If, in the interest of maintaining your belief in unicorns, leprechauns, and human equality, you are still trying to claim that whites are intellectually identical to Asians are intellectually the same as Africans, or asserting that it makes no difference whether someone scores +2SD or -2SD on an IQ test, you are worse than an idiot. You are being intentionally and willfully dishonest with yourself; you are deceiving yourself. And self-deceit is not a sound foundation from which to determine the truth about anything.

That’s a feature, not a bug

In what Ross Douthat laments, I see cause for celebration:

“The eulogy that needs to be written,” Klein argued, is actually for an entire kind of publication — the “ambitious policy magazine,” whether on the left or right, that once set the terms of Washington’s debates.

With the emergence of the Internet, those magazines lost their monopolies, and the debate “spilled online, beyond their pages, outside their borders,” with both new competitors and specific voices (Klein kindly cites my own) becoming more important than before.

As Klein correctly implies, this shift has produced a deeper policy conversation than print journalism ever sustained. Indeed, the oceans of space online, the easy availability of studies and reports, the ability to go endless rounds on topics — plus the willingness of many experts to blog and bicker for the sheer fun of it! — has made the Internet era a golden age for technocratic argument and data-driven debate.

But there is a price to be paid as well. That price, Klein suggests, is the loss of the older magazines’ ability to be idiosyncratic and nonpandering and just tell their readers what they should care about…. The New Republic as-it-was, the magazine I and others grew up reading, was emphatically not just a “policy magazine.” It was, instead, a publication that deliberately integrated its policy writing with often-extraordinary coverage of literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, fine art.

It wasn’t just a liberal magazine, in other words; it was a liberal-arts magazine.

In other words, a small group of people will no longer enjoy the stranglehold they once possessed over politics, literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, and fine art, to “set the terms of Washington’s debates” and tell readers “what they should care about”.

This is supposed to be a bad thing? Are you kidding me?

The New Republic is gone. It would be a good thing for the American Right if National Review followed suit.