So much for the reinvention of the position

Steve Sailer observes that despite the NFL’s being openly desirous of the success of black quarterbacks, they’re simply not very successful in the league anymore despite the growing number of them coming out of the NCAA:

Back in 2003 Rush Limbaugh got fired from being a color commentator on Monday Night Football for pointing out that the media had been pushing hard for more black quarterbacks for decades. So Rush got fired because everybody knows that the only reasons don’t make up 75% of NFL starting quarterbacks is discrimination and the burdens of history.

So I like to check in on how black quarterbacks are doing. This QBR rating counts their running contributions, so it’s the best measure yet.

Here are black QBs (treating Colin Kaepernick as black) who ranked in the top 20 for each year as far back as QBR has been calculated. I counted the top 20 in a 32 team league since it’s pretty safe to assume that if you rank in the top 20 you deserve to start, whereas if you are, say, 29th, then there’s probably a benchwarmer another team that deserves your job.

2014: 2 (Russell Wilson 14, Colin Kaepernick 16)

2013: 3 (Colin Kaepernick 6, Russell Wilson 12, Cam Newton 13)

2012: 4 (Robert Griffin 5, Russell Wilson 6, Cam Newton 14, Josh Freeman 15)

2011: 2 (Michael Vick 7, Cam Newton 15)

2010: 3 (Michael Vick 5, Josh Freeman 6, David Garrard 13)

2009: 3 (Vince Young 7, Donovan McNabb 13, David Garrard 19)

2008: 3 (David Garrard 16, Jason Campbell 17, Donovan McNabb 18)

2007: 4 (David Garrard 3, Jason Campbell 15, Donovan McNabb 16, Tarvaris Jackson 19)

2006: 4 (Steve McNair 6, Donovan McNabb 7, Vince Young 11, Michael Vick 15)

It’s fairly obvious to me why blacks are increasingly unable to successfully play quarterback in the NFL. The new passing rules tend to benefit the mentally faster quarterbacks, nearly all of whom are white. Michael Vick’s much-ballyhooed “reinvention of the quarterback position” has failed for the very reason that detractors of running quarterbacks predicted: sooner or later a running quarterback is going to take a hit that slows him down.

Look at the difference between Robert Griffin and Andrew Luck. In 2012, you could seriously argue that Griffin was the better quarterback. One injury later, Griffin has lost his superhuman quickness, and having proved himself to be almost embarrassingly incompetent as a pocket passer, has just been benched for the second and possibly final time as a Redskin. He simply can’t see the field and process it quickly enough; the image shows a play in which he had no less than FIVE receivers open and somehow ended up throwing it away while also managing to take a shot from a defensive lineman.

It’s almost always the same. A running quarterback simply isn’t going to a) start many games in a row, or b) maintain his peak level of play very long. As a long-suffering Vikings fan, I very well know the difference between a scrambler who moves around to buy time – Tarkenton, Cunningham – and a runner who takes off in a panic as soon as his scripted first option fails to come open: Gannon, Culpepper, Ponder, although hopefully NOT Bridgewater.

NFL quarterback is arguably the single most difficult thing for a human being to do. It requires a bizarre blend of physical ability and mental agility that is incredibly rare, and today’s physically gifted runners are the modern version of yesterday’s rocket-armed blockheads. I find it very puzzling that NFL teams still haven’t learned that you simply can’t teach seeing the field and reacting to it. It’s interesting to see that Tarvaris Jackson cracked the top 20 in QBR at one point. He may have been the most perfectly coached quarterback I’ve ever seen play. He was a team player, he worked very hard, he always did his absolute best, he listened to his coaches as if their words were coming from on high, and his movements were so perfectly rehearsed that he looked like a well-oiled robot. I wasn’t at all surprised to see him go on to have a very successful career as a backup quarterback. But he just processed everything too slowly. Drop back, check one, check two… sack!

Anyhow, I won’t be surprised if in another year or two, we start seeing the football media start to complain that the new passing rules are racist. Because they observably place a premium on a particular skill that no current black quarterbacks – yes, zero, which you’ll know if you’ve seen Wilson or Kaepernick play this year – appear to possess.

More collateral than damage

Like it or not, the US is clearly guilty of large-scale terrorism:

The drones came for Ayman Zawahiri on 13 January 2006, hovering over a village in Pakistan called Damadola. Ten months later, they came again for the man who would become al-Qaida’s leader, this time in Bajaur.

Eight years later, Zawahiri is still alive. Seventy-six children and 29 adults, according to reports after the two strikes, are not.

However many Americans know who Zawahiri is, far fewer are familiar with Qari Hussain. Hussain was a deputy commander of the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group aligned with al-Qaida that trained the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, before his unsuccessful 2010 attack. The drones first came for Hussain years before, on 29 January 2008. Then they came on 23 June 2009, 15 January 2010, 2 October 2010 and 7 October 2010.

Finally, on 15 October 2010, Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator or Reaper drone killed Hussain, the Pakistani Taliban later confirmed. For the death of a man whom practically no American can name, the US killed 128 people, 13 of them children, none of whom it meant to harm.

A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals – the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls “targeted killing” – they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November.

I’m not entirely sure such indifference to collateral damage is correctly described as not meaning to harm anyone except the targeted individual. Regardless, it’s become abundantly clear there is no such thing as “targeted killing” that doesn’t involve soldiers on the ground pulling the trigger. And I suspect in less than ten years, cheap DIY drone technology will drive US politicians almost entirely underground as they become the targets of those they have so ineffectively targeted.

Unless, of course, cheap, but powerful ground-to-air laser technology renders drone technology completely useless.

Ferguson Night 2

This is an open thread for the Ilk to keep everyone posted on what’s going on around the country on the off-chance that there turns out to be a reason that 2,200 troops needed to be stationed around Ferguson.

I tend to doubt anything too crazy will happen; the rioters obviously know that the police and the National Guard are going to crack down hard and fast if they get too far out of hand. They’re just looking to act up, posture for the cameras, and loot a little bit, they’re not actually looking for a fight.

Fashion is the new science

The AAS releases a formal statement concerning men’s fashion:

The following statement was issued on 19 November 2014 by the Executive Committee of the American Astronomical Society on behalf of the AAS Council:

The past few days have seen extensive international discussion of an incident (known online as #shirtstorm or #shirtgate) in which a participant in a European Space Agency media conference wore a shirt with sexualized images of gun-toting women and made an unfortunate remark comparing the featured spacecraft to a woman. Viewers responded critically to these inappropriate statements, especially jarring in such a highly visible setting (one in which very few women appeared), and the scientist apologized sincerely. But in the meantime, unacceptable abuse has been directed toward the critics, from criticism of “over-active feminism” to personal insults and more dire threats.

We wish to express our support for members of the community who rightly brought this issue to the fore, and we condemn the unreasonable attacks they experienced as a result, which caused deep distress in our community. We do appreciate the scientist’s sincere and unqualified apology.

The AAS has a clear anti-harassment policy, which prohibits “verbal comments or physical actions of a sexual nature” and “a display of sexually suggestive objects or pictures.” Had the offending images appeared and comments been made under the auspices of the AAS, they would be in clear violation of our policy.

If I were a scientist, I would immediately resign from any organization that was releasing statements on fashion, much less had a formal policy on what I could and could not wear.

I’m sure it will surprise no one to know that the president of the AAS is a female SJW. The sad thing about this isn’t that most women care more about clothes and politics than science; we already knew that. What is both tragic and observable is that even women who are professional scientists care more about clothes and politics than science. They aren’t merely an embarrassment to their sex, they are the epitome of a humiliating shame to it.

It can’t possibly be true that “unacceptable abuse has been directed toward the critics”. Whatever abuse they received not only was well-merited, but didn’t go nearly far enough because they deserve shameless mocking for the rest of their pathetic lives.

And this is why you don’t let SJWs into any organization to which you belong. Because this is what they do.

You can run, white man

But you cannot escape the hordes that follow:

Another factor driving the diversification of the suburbs is the emergence of “black flight” from major cities with established black populations. Black population losses have been occurring in some cities since the 1970s, but the magnitude and pervasiveness of black losses in cities during the first decade of the 2000s were unprecedented. The central cities of the 100 largest metropolitan areas saw a total decline of 300,000 blacks, the first absolute population decrease among blacks for these cities as a group. The black presence, which has been the mainstay of many urban populations, is diminishing (in fact it is now Hispanics, not blacks, who constitute the largest minority group in cities).

Three of the cities with the largest black declines–Detroit, Chicago, and New York–were among the primary destinations for blacks during the Great Migration, but the losses were not confined to northern metropolises: Southern and western cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles were also among those losing blacks. Much of that population is shifting to the suburbs, moves that can be attributed in part to the black population’s economic progress in recent decades, especially among younger people aspiring to the suburban lifestyle that eluded their parents and grandparents. On the whole, 96 of the largest 100 metropolitan areas showed gains in their suburban black populations. Of those, more than three-quarters had larger increases in the past decade than in the 1990s. While delayed for decades, the full-scale suburbanization of blacks is finally under way.

I find it amusing that they attribute the black movement to the suburbs to “economic progress in recent decades”. The problem with that reasoning is that there hasn’t been any economic progress in recent decades, in fact, wage rates are still lower than 1973. This is little more than the more civilized blacks trying to escape their own race to live among whites, and whites attempting to get away from those more civilized blacks before their friends and family follow. As Joshua points out in the comments, this was only made possible by the Fed’s low interest rates and federal housing policy. So the 2000-2010 trend will not likely continue.

But that’s largely irrelevant anyhow. As the graph shows below, the real story is my La Raza cousins, who are in the process of ethnically cleansing both the cities and suburbs they have invaded. One thing white people, especially liberal white people, have never understood is that Hispanics dislike blacks considerably more than whites do, and furthermore, their open disdain is not affected by white guilt over slavery. The liberal fantasy of an anti-white multiracial minority alliance has always been just that, a fantasy, because real multiculturalism is the Hobbesian war of all against all.

The yellow art of pygmies

Sarah Hoyt explains both the short-term triumph of the SJW pygmies and their eventual return to insignificance, particularly in science fiction:

No elite that is as schizophrenic as they are can long stay in power. Their narrative being so anti-reality requires those seeking to join them to abase themselves to such a degree (like some gang members who have to commit a heinous murder to join) that the only the most craven will do so. These are also, for whatever reason, often not the most competent at whatever the field is.

They’re not often, like Chelsea Clinton, so guppy-stupid that even all the attempts to advance them and hand them “accomplishments” for existing fall flat (as did her career in TV.) But as generations go by and each generation picks the new luminaries based ONLY on loyalty to the party line, the quality of performance and competence keeps going down.

Take New Wave in our field. Its practitioners often held strange views of life, strange enough to repel the hoi polloi and those who bought the bulk of the books, but by and large, I challenge you to read them and not see the craftsmanship and the talent (with a few exceptions, of course.)

However those who came after them were a little less talented and trained. This was the period back in the nineties when I considered myself fortunate for finding writers who weren’t actively off-putting, and could only ever find one or two that I considered to rise above . And the current crop of establishment darlings, particularly the young ones (again with one or two exceptions) are cringingly bad or at the very best cringingly trite (which would be endurable without the encomiums to their Earth shattering originality.) Even the establishment can find no better reason to shower awards on them than the oft-repeated claims of vague discrimination and saying that women are overdue for recognition.

Like any elite that is incompetent at what its supposed to do, this means that they create a crisis that invites their replacement. In science fiction, where I’m concentrating because I know it better, (though arguably parallel processes are taking place in all other fields) they might have tottered on another generation or two, with each selling less, until the advances for first novels were zero and publication meant nothing except to the academics who need publication.

Fortunately Kindle intervened. Because indie publishing came into a vacuum and served underserved readers, it’s blooming against the wilting of traditional publishing.

The New Wave writers were intentionally pissing on their forebears, but in the process they were creating yellow art in the snow. Their work was, of course, ephemeral, insignificant, and devoid of any meaningful commentary on the human condition or long-term value, but the pictures were pretty enough until the snow melted, at least if you ignored how they’d been created.

Their descendants only saw that their forebears were urinating, and quite wrongly concluded, “hey, I can do that!” They promptly did the literary equivalent of unzipping, cutting loose, and shouting “look at me, I can haz pee!” Or in the case of McRapey, “look at me, I can haz blow job! Because ground forces!”

The diversity crowd is even more pathetic. They can’t even manage the literary equivalent of unzipping first, instead they just wet their pants then give each other awards for their incontinence, crowing: “I is womyn! I is black! I is queer! I make water too!” And, as John C. Wright notes, they actually take pride and pleasure in taking their golden autoshowers:

If you are looking at a landscape covered with a thin gruel the hue of oatmeal, gray, tasteless, neither cold nor hot, dripping over telegraph wires, leafless trees, dusty lanes empty of traffic, collapsed houses, and the corpse of a small dog, and seeing a group of deformed pygmies and midgets decreeing immense victories and accomplishments in the fields of civic engineering and architecture, you would assume them to be an enemy of whoever once lived in the now ruined landscape. You would not assume they lived in that landscape and wanted it gray. And your assumption would be wrong.

There are few things that I find more amusing than looking at the Amazon rankings for the award-winning SF novels of the recent past and comparing them to the winners from 30 years before. Guess which novel was published in 2013 and is the most-awarded novel in science fiction history, and which one was published nearly 50 years ago.

  1. Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
    #14,910 Paid in Kindle Store
  2. Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
    #1,757 Paid in Kindle Store

Book 1 is Ancillary Justice, “a story about pronouns and modern feminist piety, utterly unimaginative and bland”. Book 2 is Dune, “a story about messianic politics, ecology, expanded consciousness, genetic destiny and the role of man in the universe.”

And just because I am a cruelty artist:

  1. Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
    #16,680 Paid in Kindle Store
  2. Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
    #19,115 Paid in Kindle Store

One is the recently published sequel to the landmark, award-winning novel, that was described by one enthusiast as “the most important book Orbit has published in ages.” The other is the recently published Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War.

Mrs. Hoyt is absolutely correct about the pygmies’ poor long-term prospects. No one outside their weird little cult wants to bathe in their stinking urine.

Presidential prosecutorial discretion

Obama leads the way in developing a useful tool. Republicans, take note:

President Obama completely fumbles when George Stephanopolous asks him how he’d respond if a future president takes the same action on taxes that Obama has taken on immigration. Incredibly, Obama responds as if he’d never heard or thought of this argument before, stumbling blindly along immigration talking points without answering the actual question.

Stephanopolous asked: “How do you respond to the argument, a future president comes in and wants lower taxes. Doesn’t happen. Congress won’t do it; so he says ‘I’m not going to prosecute those who don’t pay capital gains tax.’”

“The truth of the matter is George,” said the President, haltingly, “The reason that we, have to do.. uhm prosecutorial discretion in immigration, is that we know, that we – are not even close to being able to deal with the folks who have been here a long time…” Obama then pivoted to immigration talking points, without addressing the original question.

“The vast majority of folks understand that they need to pay taxes, and when we conduct an audit, for example, we are selecting those folks who are most likely to be cheating,” said Obama. “We’re not going after millions and millions of people who everybody knows are here and were taking advantage of low wages as they’re mowing lawns or cleaning out bedpans, and looking the other way.”

“So you don’t think it’d be legitimate for a future president to make that argument?” Stephanopoulos said.

Obama: “With respect to taxes? Absolutely not.”

Now that the President of the United States of America has declared prosecutorial discretion in immigration to be an executive power, it is obvious that any future president will possess similar prosecutorial discretion in taxation. This is a weapon that any small government party should be able to wield with a considerable degree of effectiveness.

If it is genuinely a small government party…. The Republicans certainly can’t pretend they don’t have the power to starve the beast anymore, not once they reclaim the White House.

It’s always fascinating to see how SJWs have absolutely no ability to grasp logical consequences. Which tends to demonstrate the fundamental illogic of their thinking. It reminds me of the gay “marriage” proponents who genuinely couldn’t figure out how redefining the legal nature of marriage once would likely lead to future legal redefinitions of marriage.

The least surprising leak ever

It is being reported that a leak in the prosecutor’s office indicates there will be no indictment of the police officer responsible for shooting Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

From a source inside the Prosecutor’s Office – NO INDICTMENT in the Michael Brown case.

Frankly, I’m a little puzzled that anyone ever thought there might be one. I’m about as dubious of the American police as anyone, and I never thought it appeared to be an even questionable shooting.

Anyhow, if the announcement does come tonight, this is an open thread to discuss it and any related events.

Casualty in the Cabinet

Obama fires his Secretary of Defense:

Chuck Hagel has been fired as defense secretary. We were critical of his appointment, and opposed his confirmation by the Senate. But let’s be clear: Hagel has done what he was asked and what was expected of him at the Pentagon. To the degree he has deviated from the Obama White House line, he’s been more right than wrong (e.g., on the threat the Islamic State poses).

So why has he been fired? Because the Obama White House needs a scapegoat. President George W, Bush fired Don Rumsfeld in connection with a change in strategy (the surge) and to bring in someone of independent stature. That’s not the case today. President Obama continues to want a Pentagon with weak leadership and little independence. There’s therefore no reason to expect the next two years of Obama foreign and defense policy to be any better than the past two.

He’s fired an awful lot of generals too, come to think of it. I don’t know if there have any bigger purges among the brass since pre-WWII Stalin.

Unrest across Europe

Mass migration and third world invasion is being violently protested by Europeans everywhere from the south:

On the gritty, long-neglected outskirts of Rome there was continuing tension outside a centre for refugees, which was repeatedly attacked by local residents during the week. A group of 36 teenage migrants had to be evacuated from the centre in Tor Sapienza, a working-class suburb, on Thursday night after the authorities said the area was no longer safe for them.

Locals had hurled stones, flares and other missiles at the migrant centre, smashing windows, setting fire to dumpster rubbish bins and fighting running battles with riot police during several nights of violence. They demanded that the facility be closed down and claimed that the refugees from Africa and Asia were dirty, anti-social and violent.

To the north of the continent:

The Swedish police recently released a map of 55 areas where they publicly admit to having surrendered control to the criminal gangs. These areas have long had problems with mailmen, fire trucks and ambulances being attacked when trying to enter, which has led to them routinely requesting police escort. Now it’s the police being attacked outright.

These no-go zones are primarily so-called “exclusion areas” which is the politically correct term for the 186 ghettos that have sprung up around Sweden in the past two decades. These areas are predominantly populated by immigrants from muslim countries with low education and even lower employment rates. The exception being the enthusiastic entrepreneurs in the fields of drug dealing, protection rackets and robberies…. This development would have been inconceivable only 20 years ago, and one would think this official surrender by the police would have made big headlines. This is not the case; the most attention it seems to have received in mainstream media is an opinion piece in national paper Svenska Dagbladet.

It can be speculated that this is due to the fact that any reporting on this could be seen as “support” for nationalist party SD that wants to restrict the vast inflow to these ghettos, which is an absolute no-no amongst the journalists and could cost them their jobs.

It’s not going to be long before the Swedish Democrats are the ruling party in Sweden. And it’s not going to be long before the Swedish military is going to be entering those ghettos with tanks and machine guns. That’s why the current left-wing Swedish government is trying to increase immigration even up to the end, this is the equivalent of the pre-WWI governments setting their mobilization plans in motion. The anti-Western European Left wants to fight a civil war by proxy, but as Anders Breivik demonstrated, the European Right knows perfectly well who its real enemies are.

I suspect that the younger generation of Native Europeans is going to make the Nazi-era Germans look moderate by comparison. Europe belongs to them. And they know they are going to have to fight for it if they don’t want to go the way of the Native American.