Tag: politics

Neocon-occupied territory

You don’t have to take my word for it. Or Pat Buchanan’s, for that matter. That’s Bill Kristol’s position concerning the Republican Party and he’s proud of it:

“The big story in the Republican Party over the last 30 years, and I’m very happy about this,” said Kristol, is the “eclipsing” of the George H.W. Bush-James Baker-Brent Scowcroft realists, “an Arabist old-fashioned Republican Party … very concerned about relations with Arab states that were not friendly with Israel … .”

That Bush crowd is yesterday, said Kristol. And not only had the “Arabists” like President Bush been shoved aside by the neocons, the “Pat Buchanan/Ron Paul type” of Republican has been purged. “At B’nai Jeshurun,” writes Weiss, “Kristol admitted to playing a role in expelling members of the Republican Party he does not agree with.” These are Republicans you had to “repudiate,” said Kristol, people “of whom I disapprove so much that I won’t appear with them.”

“I’ve encouraged that they be expelled or not welcomed into the Republican Party. I’d be happy if Ron Paul left. I was very happy when Pat Buchanan was allowed—really encouraged … by George Bush … to go off and run as a third-party candidate.”

Kristol’s point: Refuse to toe the neo-con line on Israel, and you have no future in the Republican Party.

Since I’m not a Republican, I’m not terribly concerned that it happens to be under the influence of big government neocons instead of big government pseudo-conservatives. It’s probably all for the better, in fact, as monomaniacal lunatics like Kristol will always overreach themselves and sow the seeds of their own destruction. It’s fairly apparent that the Republican Party has essentially become the Democratic Party of thirty years ago. But I think there are a lot of grass roots Republicans who would be surprised at the idea that both Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan should be purged from the Republican Party in the name of an Israel Über Alles foreign policy.

Kristol’s crowing is a little ironic these days, as Jewish congressmen are beginning to learn that the third world immigrants they have championed in their effort to strengthen America through diversity and vibrancy tend to be unimpressed by boasts about how much money they have helped funnel to Israel. Given the demographic patterns, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the Israel lobby lose control of the Democrats even as they exercise greater influence over Republicans. Christians of European descent can be convinced to support Israel through Christian Zionism or Holocaust guilt, but it’s a little tougher to play those cards with atheists, Muslims, Africans, Hispanics, and Asians.

I wonder what Kristol’s reaction would be if the Republicans decided to expel him and other neocons like him instead?

The ritual begins again

But this time, the Republicans are going to fight even harder before surrendering and raising the debt limit just one more time!

John Boehner, the leader of the House Republicans, has promised yet another fight with the White House over the debt ceiling — the limit Congress has placed on the amount the federal government can borrow.

What I like about this is that it saves me from having to write a column about once every two years or so. Change a few dates and numbers from the last one and we’re good to go again.

The anti-abortion trend

One of the informative things about those who draw conclusions from purely linear poll-based trends is that they do so on a very selective basis. For some inexplicable reason, we’re supposed to believe that legal gay “marriage” is inevitable because more people – though still less than half based on most polls – support it than before, and yet an abortion ban is impossible even though the anti-abortion trend is not only every bit as clear, but is also supported by demographic logic.

About four in 10 Americans said they support abortion rights in a new Gallup poll — the lowest figure recorded by the organization since it began asking the question in 1995. Fully half of Americans, meanwhile, told Gallup they were against abortion rights.

Of course, the more stories like this one of murdered little girls being literally thrown to the dogs leak out into the press, and the more third-worlders enter the country and begin to exercise their feminist “right to choose” by aborting baby girls, the stronger the anti-abortion movement will grow.

Obama’s IQ is still ~116

It will be interesting to see the disbelievers in pattern recognition attempt to explain this one away. You may recall that back in 2008, I noted that Obama’s IQ had an absolute sub-Mensa ceiling of 129 and that there was good reason to believe it is around 116. So, it was interesting to read this article discussing the relatively low quality of the 1981 class of students transferring to Columbia, which included one Barack Obama:

Breitbart News has learned that the transfer class that entered Columbia College in the fall of 1981 with Obama was one of the worst in recent memory, according to Columbia officials at the time. A Nov. 18, 1981 article in the Columbia Spectator, “Tight Housing Discourages Transfer Applications to CC,” written by student Jeremy Feldman and quoting admissions officials, reported: “On paper at least, the quality of the students accepted [as transfers] has declined along with the number of applicants, the officials say.”

Among accepted transfer students, the average combined math and verbal score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test is a 1,100 and their grade-point average at their former schools is about 3.0, Boatti said.

There were 67 transfer students with an average SAT score of 1,100. Guess what that equals on the SAT to IQ conversion chart? It’s between 115.51 and 116.55, depending upon whether one uses an SD of 15 or 16. Now, this isn’t absolute and conclusive proof that Obama’s IQ is 116, as it could well be a little bit higher or a little bit lower. But probably not much higher, because if he scored even 100 points more on the SAT, he wouldn’t have had to go to Occidental in the first place.

This is because the range from which that average SAT score was calculated was the 67 selected from the 450 who applied. That average was also 100 SAT points lower than the average Columbia freshman score of 1200. So, I would assume that the absolute low end SAT that Columbia accepted for transfers was probably half that gap, or 1050, which equates to a 111 IQ. So, we can reasonably conclude that Obama’s IQ is probably somewhere between 111 and 118, which is not very far from my original estimate of 116.

Nor am I the only one to have concluded that Obama possesses moderate intelligence rather than the exceptional intelligence in which the more credulous still believe despite the accumulating evidence of his presidential term. At the end of his 2011 post on the subject of Obama’s intelligence, which focuses on the Harvard Law Review and Harvard’s graduating honors, Ace of Spades said this:

Hah! This guy guesstimates that based on tangible proxy evidence, which is right in the middle of where I figured it would be. Now, this guy is not just completely making things up. He knows, because there are records of it, that Obama was not a National Merit Scholar, or National Merit Finalist, or the lowest subcategory, “Outstanding Participant.” (This seems to be an honor conferred by the College Board (the SAT people) primarily if not exclusively based on SAT scores.)

Since Obama did not make the list for any of those automatically-conferred SAT-based recognitions, we know his SATs must be below those thresholds, setting a hard upper cap on his possible SAT scores. We can then figure his highest, likeliest IQ score, because the SAT is just a modified version of the old Army IQ test. Current IQ tests and the SATs are both derived straight from the old Army IQ test, testing pretty much the same things and in pretty much the same ways. Different scoring system, but same ultimate term of comparison — how you rank compared to the general population, expressed as percentile.

Not dumb, but I never thought he was dumb — just not a genius. 116’s a perfectly respectable score, but no one goes bragging on it and claims to be a genius at 116. No on ever says, “I’m a mere 30 points away from qualifying for Mensa,” for example.

Good catch on that National Merit thing.

Well, its absence on Obama’s record appears fairly glaring when you’re a National Merit whatever yourself. Hilary Clinton, for example, was National Merit. I don’t remember if I was a finalist or a semi-finalist, though. I know they gave me some sort of certificate at a school assembly, but I can’t recall which one it was. I would assume semi-finalist, though, since in addition to having the SAT scores confirm the PSAT, being a finalist requires “having an outstanding academic record, and being endorsed and recommended by a high school official” My academic record would be better described as “unique” than “outstanding”, since I was the first National Merit student to graduate without honors in the school’s history. Intelligence is a poor substitute for hard work.

Furthermore, it should be noted that a 116 IQ is a full standard deviation above the norm. It’s not calling someone stupid to estimate that they are smarter than the majority of the American people. In fact, based on the 30-point communication gap, there is reason to believe that a 116-IQ president is more likely to be successful than a Mensa-qualified 132-IQ president. There is far more to success than raw intelligence, particularly in a field such as politics that requires lots of people to like you.

Police for the police state

Actually, it’s rather hard to blame them:

ATHENS, MAY 11 – More than half of all police officers in Greece voted for pro-Nazi party Chrysi Avgi’ (Golden Dawn) in the elections of May 6. This is the disconcerting result of an analysis carried out by the authoritative newspaper To Vima (TheTribune) in several constituencies in Athens, where 5,000 police officers in service in the Greek capital also cast their ballot. At some polling stations Chrysi Avgi’ obtained 19 to 24% of votes.

The tragic thing isn’t that the police are supporting Golden Dawn. The tragic thing is that the Golden Dawn is, despite the very legitimate concerns about its ideology, probably the most sensible political option in Greece. In a choice between Greek Neo-Nazis and the real thing in Berlin and Brussels, you really would have to prefer the former.

President to leave First Lady

That’s the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from this belated announcement:

It was a long time coming: President Obama spoke out today in favor of marriage equality. “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,” he said in an interview with ABC News.

Considering what an absolute vote loser this issue is, proven by the fact that 30 states have passed anti-homogamy laws and amendments now, one can only wonder exactly how personally important it is to Obama. It’s rather remarkable, as Obama appears to be making a stronger effort to throw the election than John McCain did, and it’s only May. At this rate, he’ll be wearing women’s clothing, eating dogs, and openly calling for human sacrifice by September.

Get the race card ready

It’s hard to argue with the Reverend Jesse Lee:

“I think that one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote,” Peterson says. “We should’ve never turned this over to women. And these women are voting in the wrong people. They’re voting in people who are evil who agrees with them who’re gonna take us down this pathway of destruction. And this probably was the reason they didn’t allow women to vote when men were men. Because men in the good old days understood the nature of the woman,” he adds. “They were not afraid to deal with it. And they understood that, you let them take over, this is what would happen.”

I would just like to remind all of the women who are preparing to get their panties in a bunch over the outrageous notion that someone might hold their sex accountable for the way they have collectively voted for the last eighty years that it is objectively racist to claim that a black man is sexist.

Mailvox: evolutionary ideology

Anonymous Conservative writes of an amusing spin on the “science says conservatives are crazy” theme:

I’ve done a ton of research into the linkage between r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Ecology and political ideology. The short of it is
ideology looks like it’s just an intellectual expression of the underlying psychologies motivating r/K behaviors. Obviously, this likely speaks to the mechanism by which our ideologies evolved. That ideology and r/K behaviors are both related to the same DRD4 gene, and that the brain
structures which govern these behaviors is also the same also raises interesting questions about their evolutionary linkage.

This material is pure gold, if you’ve ever wondered why our species has this psychological divide within it. It even answers where exactly
Liberals came from, given their obvious reduced ability to function in what we often call “the state of nature” (ie a K-selected, competitive
state of nature – they would thrive in an r-selected stated of nature, where competitiveness is disfavored).

I’ve run this work by liberals, and it devastating to them, on a visceral level. They do not want to be the bunny-rabbit people, embodying a prey
species psychology within a highly K-selected, competitive species. I posted for a bit at TED, very benignly on this, just to test my
presentation in a hostile, more Liberal environment. I got the feedback and insight I needed (every liberal abandoned any thread this was posted
to), and then I left for six months. When I went back every one of my postings referencing this had been quietly deleted, despite the fact I
purposely was hyper-civil and cited everything I asserted. I don’t think they’ve ever done that to anyone else. Liberals are horrified by this
work, and the implications which naturally arise from it.

Now, I tend to regard all of this evo-psych as a ludicrous joke, especially since I am a confirmed evolutionary skeptic. Because there is so little scientific evidence in support of evolution by natural selection, I conclude it is unlikely to be the mechanism distinguishing the liberal Bunny People from the conservative Wolf People. And, of course, being a libertarian and rejecting both big government ideologies, I have neither a wolf nor a rabbit in that hunt. That being said, this is certainly a potentially useful rhetorical response to the faux-scientific rhetoric so often presented by liberals in a misguided attempt to somehow shame conservatives out of their psychologically inferior ideological perspective. (The very attempt betrays both the intrinsic intellectual flexibility of liberals as well as their inability to understand the other side.) And it certainly explains the way in which liberals are constantly looking to the government as a way to rein in their more successful competitors; because the Bunny People can’t do anything to control the Wolf People themselves, they need to appeal to the Hunter… never stopping to think that the Hunter is just as pleased to shoot bunnies as wolves… and may in fact prefer eating rabbit meat.

Anyhow, if you happen to find this sort of thing interesting, you can read a related paper on it.

The fictional memoir

Obama admits to writing fiction… how long will it be before he admits to NOT writing it?

One of the more mysterious characters from President Obama’s 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father is the so-called ‘New York girlfriend.’ Obama never referred to her by name, or even by psuedonym, but he describes her appearance, her voice, and her mannerisms in specific detail. But Obama has now told biographer David Maraniss that the ‘New York girlfriend’ was actually a composite character, based off of multiple girlfriends he had both in New York City and in Chicago.

The only real question here is if, by “multiple”, he meant “imaginary”, or if by “girlfriends”, he actually meant “boyfriends”.