Tag: Vibrancy is our strength

A nonexistent nation

A commenter at Pharyngula doesn’t understand that there are more than two sides in America these days. Considerably more:

nich, 12 August 2014 at 9:15 pm
In fact, speaking of the fucking Bundy brigade, where the fuck are all the freedom fighters using their precious 2nd amendment rights to protect the citizenry from tyranny? They’ll show up armed to the teeth to protect some fucking cows and keep the darkies on their side of the border, but the government actually rolls up in armored vehicles to squash a legitimate protest and it’s fucking crickets from these clowns.

Of course it’s “fucking crickets”. The legitimate protest is not being conducted by their people. “American citizen” is now as meaningless a term as “citizen of the world” or “member of the human race”. The “darkies” in Ferguson who are, quite rightly in my opinion, protesting the latest murder of one of their own by the badge gang, have absolutely nothing in common with the armed, civilized freedom fighters who successfully withstood the federal forces at the Bundy ranch.

It’s not even an “enemy of my enemy” situation, because the Missouri police are not the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management.

There is no nation in America any longer. The Left shattered whatever post-Civil War remnants of it remained in 1965, and it is gradually discovering that its fictitious “melting pot”, its romantic mythology of an “idea nation”, will not long survive the reality of differing peoples harboring radically different ideas inside the same borders. The armed white Christians in America will fight to defend themselves when finally forced to do so, but they’re no more likely to fight for African-Americans in Missouri than they are for African-Africans in Rwanda or the Congo. Or than any of those Africans were willing to show up to fight for a European-American rancher in Nevada.

I very much doubt that many, if any, of the Bundy Brigade support the Missouri police. But why should they risk their lives or shed any blood in the interest of defending those who are not their kind? After all, the police and the federal agents are American citizens too.

I’ve been reading Max Hasting’s book on World War I. It’s interesting, even though I disagree with his core perspective on who kicked it all off. The USA is, in some respects, in a position similar to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1900. The analogy is far from perfect, but the key similarity is that of a fundamentally divided multi-ethnic empire with incompetent, overly centralized leadership carelessly throwing its weight around while failing to realize how the empire’s internal divisions make it dangerous for it to do so. Barack Hussein seriously weighing military intervention in Iraq while ignoring the flag of ISIS flying in New Jersey is as insane as anything Franz Joseph ever did.

When cynical leaders engage in wars, thinking to unite the people behind them, they tend to forget that this works when the people are, in fact, a people. A single people, a nation. Otherwise, the stresses of war tend to fracture countries on their ethnic and ideological divides. Once an identifiable Anglo-Saxon Christian nation possessed of a unique transnational ideology, the USA is no longer a nation in any meaningful sense of the word except for lines on a political map.

Many sincerely believed that the ideological aspect trumped the Anglo-Saxon and Christian aspects. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that, despite the survival of its trappings, the former has not survived the loss of the latter two elements. One should be no more surprised that the Bundy Brigade declined to come to the assistance of the blacks of Ferguson than one is that the Roman citizens of Gaul failed to come to the assistance of the Jews during the Great Revolt of 66 AD in Judea.

An erroneous conclusion re crime

Ron Unz is a smart guy and he does a lot of good work. But I strongly suspect he made a fundamental error in his examination of race and crime rates:

This contentious history of racially-charged social analysis was certainly in the back of my mind when I began my quantitative research into Hispanic crime rates in late 2009. One traditional difficulty in producing such estimates had been the problematical nature of the data. Although the FBI Uniform Crime Reports readily show the annual totals of black and Asian criminal perpetrators, Hispanics are generally grouped together with whites and no separate figures are provided, thereby allowing all sorts of extreme speculation by those so inclined.

In order to distinguish reality from vivid imagination, a major section of my analysis focused on the data from America’s larger cities, exploring the correlations between their FBI-reported crime rates and their Census-reported ethnic proportions. If urban crime rates had little relation to the relative size of the local Hispanic population, this would indicate that Hispanics did not have unusually high rates of criminality. Furthermore, densely populated urban centers have almost always had far more crime than rural areas or suburbs, so restricting the analysis to cities would reduce the impact of that extraneous variable, which might otherwise artificially inflate the national crime statistics for a heavily urbanized population group such as Hispanics.

My expectations proved entirely correct, and the correlations between Hispanic percentages and local crime rates were usually quite close to the same figures for whites, strongly supporting my hypothesis that the two groups had fairly similar rates of urban criminality despite their huge differences in socio-economic status. But that same simple calculation yielded a remarkably strong correlation between black numbers and crime, fully confirming the implications of the FBI racial data on perpetrators.

He’s correct about blacks committing crime at much higher rates than whites. But I think I can show that his conclusion that Hispanics commit rates at about the same rate as whites is wrong. The reason is that the metric he chose to try to pull out the information that the FBI is hiding is suboptimal.

I reached a very different conclusion when looking at race and homicide by firearm in 2012.

We will assume, for the sake of argument, that Hispanic victims are synonymous with Hispanic killers. The BJS supports this assumption, reporting that from 1976 to 2005, 86% of white victims were killed by whites and 94% of black victims were killed by black.  A CDC report states: “Homicide rates in 2010 among non-Hispanic, African-American males 10-24 years of age (51.5 per 100,000) exceeded those of Hispanic males (13.5 per 100,000) and non-Hispanic, White males in the same age group (2.9 per 100,000).”

We’re not concerned with the black homicide rate since we already know that.  What interests us is how the remaining 4,116 gun homicides are divided between whites and Hispanics.  The distribution indicated by the CDC report shows that 3,388 were Hispanic and only 728 were white.  This may be a little skewed by the focus on young males, but nevertheless provides a very credible estimate of 6.8 per 100k population, which would put the US-Latin firearms homicide rate in between Nicaragua at 5.9 and Paraguay at 7.4.  It would also indicate that the US-White homicide rate is 0.32 per 100k population, a per capita rate very close to The Netherlands at 0.33 although still higher than France, Germany, or the UK.

Now, it is theoretically possible that while young Hispanics commit a disproportionate amount of firearms homicide, Hispanics of all ages commit other crimes at the same rate as whites. This strikes me as a very unlikely conclusion, especially in light of what we know anecdotally from police and media reports.  Obviously more work needs to be done before the matter can be considered settled, but I think that this is sufficient to call Mr. Unz’s conclusion into question.

Fabled “Roots”

I’d heard that a fair amount of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer-prize winning “Roots” was fictitious, but I didn’t know that a considerable amount of the book was plagiarized, or that the entire thing is about as historically legitimate as “Star Wars”.

Unfortunately, the general public is largely unaware of how Haley’s monumental family autobiography, stretching back to 18th-century Africa, has been discredited. Indeed, a 1997 BBC documentary expose of Haley’s work has been banned by U.S. television networks – especially PBS, which would normally welcome such a program.

Coincidentally, the “Roots” anniversary comes amid the growing scandal over disclosures of historian Stephen Ambrose’s multiple incidents of plagiarism. Because as Haley himself was forced to acknowledge, a large section of his book – including the plot, main character and scores of whole passages – was lifted from “The African,” a 1967 novel by white author Hal Courlander.

But plagiarism is the least of the problems in “Roots.” And they would likely have remained largely unknown, had journalist Philip Nobile not undertaken a remarkable study of Haley’s private papers shortly before they were auctioned off.

The result was featured in a devastating 1993 cover piece in the Village Voice. It confirmed – from Haley’s own notes – earlier claims that the alleged history of the book was a near-total invention…. Historical experts who checked Haley’s genealogical research discovered that, as one put it, “Haley got everything wrong in his pre-Civil War lineage and none of his plantation ancestors existed; 182 pages have no basis in fact.”

Given this damning evidence, you’d think Haley’s halo would long ago have vanished. But – given this week’s TV tribute – he remains a literary icon. Publicly, at least. The judge who presided over Haley’s plagiarism case admitted that “I did not want to destroy him” and so allowed him to settle quietly – even though, he acknowledged, Haley had repeatedly perjured himself in court.

The Pulitzer Prize board has refused to reconsider Haley’s prize, awarded in 1977 – in what former Columbia President William McGill, then a board member, has acknowledged was an example of “inverse racism” by a bunch of white liberals “embarrassed by our makeup.”

To paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, the left-wing literary establishment is desirous of the perceived success of black authors. The science fiction community is literally decades behind in handing out affirmative action awards to inept and derivative authors of diversity.

Quarantine the continent

Did the USA learn nothing from the AIDS epidemic? Why is a single flight from Africa being permitted to land anywhere in the USA or Europe? Do people not realize that were it not for the fact that he didn’t live long enough to board his flight to MSP, the eight hospital workers that Patrick Sawyer infected in Nigeria might well have been in St. Paul, Minnesota?

Ken Isaacs of Samaritan’s Purse told a Congressional Hearing that the WHO is underreporting the Ebola epidemic. “Ken Isaacs, a vice president with Samaritan’s Purse, a North Carolina-based Christian humanitarian organization, also said the number of Ebola cases and deaths reported by the World Health Organization are probably 25 percent to 50 percent below actual levels.”

Isaacs told of a prominent Liberian doctor who “openly mocked the existence of Ebola” by trying to enter a hospital isolation ward with no gloves or protective clothing. He and another man who accompanied him to the hospital both died within five days, Isaacs said. At one point, Isaacs even disputed the earlier testimony of a physician from the U.S. Agency for International Development, who said his agency had provided 35,000 protective suits for health care workers in West Africa. Isaacs told lawmakers he had received an email in the last 90 minutes from a hospital in Liberia “asking us for more personal protection gear. This a problem everywhere,” he said.

Equipment might not be a problem for much longer. Finding people to wear them will. Ebola is rapidly killing off the medical personnel and shutting down the hospitals. The dead are being left to die in the street, where with a last effort, some of them crawl out to expire.

How many millions are going to have to die in the name of multiculturalism and insanity before we end it as the madness that it has always been? Africa is hapless and hopeless and it is not America’s or Europe’s job to save it. And neither America nor Europe will even be able to help it if we import its cultural dysfunctionalities and turn all of our cities into Detroits.

Perhaps we’ll be fortunate this time and the Ebola epidemic will remain
in Africa despite the medical community’s apparent determination to
spread it around the world… this time. And why are these infected Western health workers being back to their home countries? Salute their efforts to save others elsewhere, by all means, but they have no right, none at all, to put their home nations at risk.

UPDATE: “On Saturday, Guinea announced that it had closed its borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia in a bid to halt the virus’s spread.”

So, if Guinea has done it, why don’t we? What can possibly be worth taking the chance of having it spread via air travel?

Will she write the story?

A female journalist gets a bigger story than she bargained for:

The woman was reporting on illegal immigration from France to Britain and police believe the attack was carried by some of the men she intended to write about in the northern France port.

Detectives described the attack as being of a “particularly brutal nature”….

The victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was described as “a London student who had travelled to France to highlight problems surrounding clandestine immigration.”

I have little sympathy for this woman, and none at all if she fails to honestly tell her fellow Brits about what happened to her at the hands of these poor immigrants who are just seeking a better life in Britain.  This is why: “this is believed to be the first time that a journalist trying
to highlight their plight has been attacked.” 

If the damned pro-immigration press would be more honest about the terrible cost of immigration to the native population, I tend to doubt she would have traveled there to “highlight their plight” in the first place.

Europe belongs to us

Statements don’t get much more powerful than that. This generation appears to already know it is going to have to fight the corrupt power of the anti-democratic EU, but they have a powerful message that is going to resonate across Europe, and hopefully, across the Atlantic as well.

It’s fascinating to see how strongly people react to the video. Does it fill you with pride and hope, or does it fill you with anger and fear? Your instinctive reaction, not your subsequent intellectual rationalizations, will tell you whether you are on the side of Western civilization or against it.

The awakening of the European nations is a prelude to the great battle of the 21st century, which will be the struggle for America.

Affirmative grading

Not content with making many young blacks feel retarded after being encouraged to attend universities beyond their intellectual capabilities, the academic left is now determined to ruin the academic reputation of those blacks who are capable of earning good grades on the Asian/White standard.

A remarkable article on the University of Wisconsin (Madison) appeared yesterday on the John William Pope Center site. In it, UW economics professor W. Lee Hansen writes about a comprehensive diversity plan prepared for the already diversity-obsessed campus. The report, thousands of words long,  is mostly eye-glazing diversity babble, filled with terms like “compositional diversity,” “critical mass,” “equity mindedness,” “deficit-mindedness,” “foundational differences,” “representational equity” and “excellence,” a previously normal noun that suffers the loss of all meaning when  printed within three words of any diversity term.

But Professor Hansen noticed one very important line in the report that the faculty senate must have missed when it approved this text: a call for “proportional participation of historically underrepresented racial-ethnic groups at all levels of an institution, including high-status special programs, high-demand majors, and in the distribution of grades.” So “representational equity” means quotas at all levels. And let’s put that last one in caps: GRADES WILL BE GIVEN OUT BY RACE AND ETHNICITY.

Oh, I doubt they missed it.  I very much doubt they missed it. On the other hand, there would probably be more than a few whites in math and engineering classes, and at places like UC Berkeley, who would find themselves thinking: “you know, grading by ethnicity doesn’t sound all that bad.”

You probably thought “separate but equal” was supposed to be the epitome of racism. But there is no one more deeply racist at heart than an “anti-racist”. That’s why they’re so vehement about stamping out any appearance of it. They’re like former alcoholics ranting about the unrestrained evil of drinking a glass of wine with dinner. And, as with ex-alcoholics, whenever they slip up it tends to be messy.

A classic left-wing “refutation”

How do you know that Nicholas Wade’s A TROUBLESOME INHERITANCE is worth reading? Because the New York Times has published a second hit-piecereview. And it is a classic of its type, utilizing techniques that you see repeatedly here and elsewhere when left-wingers are attempting to cast doubt on something they cannot reasonably rebut.

First, David Dobbs resorts to the popular “Disproof by Citation” tactic. One often sees this used in reference to scientific studies (in particular John Lott’s landmark study on gun crime), in which the left-wing critic will claim, almost always falsely, that some hitherto unknown figure has “demolished” or “destroyed” or “refuted” or “totally disproven” the “debunked” piece being cited.

In his 2007 book “A Farewell to Alms,” the economic historian Gregory Clark argued that the English came to rule the world largely because their rich outbred their poor, and thus embedded their superior genes and values throughout the nation. In her comprehensive takedown, the historian Deirdre N. McCloskey noted that Clark’s idea was a “bold hypothesis, and was bold when first articulated by social Darwinists such as Charles Davenport and Francis Galton in the century before last.” Indeed, over the past 150 years, various white Western scientists and writers have repeatedly offered biological explanations for Caucasian superiority. They have repeatedly failed because, as Mc­Closkey noted, none ever mounted a credible quantitative argument.

Note the phrase “comprehensive takedown”. That is the first red flag. And yet, even without reading McCloskey, without even reading Clark, we can safely assume that both she, and Dobbs, are not being honest because we know that a) Clark’s argument is not the same as those made by the social Darwinists, b) Clark’s argument only refers to the English and not other white nations, c) the only part of the “comprehensive takedown” actually cited simply called Clark’s idea a “bold hypothesis” before going off onto a tangent attacking other, unrelated parties. Furthermore, Clark does present a credible quantitative argument, one involving “the real day wages of English farm laborers from 1200 to 1800”, “homicide rates”, and other obviously quantitative factors. As Wade describes it:

“Clark has documented four behaviors that steadily changed in the English population between 1200 and 1800, as well as a plausible mechanism of change. The four behaviors are those of interpersonal violence, literacy, the propensity to save and the propensity to work.”

Now, how can you reconcile McCloskey’s claim that Clark did not mount a credible quantitative argument with the observable fact that this is exactly what Clark has done, complete with graphs and explanations of exactly how he is quantifying the four behaviors? By reading more carefully and realizing that McCloskey isn’t actually addressing Clark, but rather Davenport, Galton, and others from the pre-quantification era of social science. Dobbs knows that most people don’t read carefully, they only skim to see what they want to see. He’s not actually lying about anything except for the assertion – which is a subjective matter – of the “comprehensive takedown”, but he deceives the common reader into thinking that his assertion is supported. 

Second, Dobbs erects a strawman and burns it. Third, he resorts to outright lying.

And despite his protests to the contrary, Wade often sounds as if he sees the rise of the West as a sort of stable endpoint of human history and evolution — as if, having considered 5,000 years in which history has successively blessed the Middle East, the Far East and the Ottoman Empire, he observes the West’s current run of glory and thinks the pendulum has stilled.

If Wade could point to genes that give races distinctive social behaviors, we might overlook such shortcomings. But he cannot.

So, Wade specifically and repeatedly states he is not doing what Dobbs thinks he is doing, which Dobbs then uses as justification to reach a conclusion that manifestly and absurdly contradicts everything Wade is saying. Wade never claims that “the pendulum has stilled”, quite to the contrary, his ENTIRE ARGUMENT depends upon the idea that the pendulum never stops swinging. And Wade does point to genes, specific genes, including the MAO-A gene, the SLC24A5 gene, the ABCC11 gene, and the EDAR gene that give races distinctive features as well as, in the case of the MAO-A gene, observably affecting their social behaviors.

Fourth and finally, Dobbs resorts to Vox’s Second Law of Critical Dynamics. If I can imagine it, it must be assumed true. If you can’t conclusively prove it, it must be assumed false.

Learn to recognize these deplorable rhetorical tactics. And never, ever, take a left-winger’s word for anything. You’ll be surprised how often they blatantly lie in the hopes that you won’t bother doing the research necessary to call them out on it.

Chiraq: America’s war zone

Whatever could be the problem in Chicago? It’s probably poverty. Or hunger. Or income inequality. Or privilege. Or maybe global climate change.

For 10 minutes, it seemed like the shooting was everywhere in the South Chicago neighborhood. It started when someone shot and wounded a couple, then two people fired at the shooter, then there was a chase and shots exchanged and a man sitting on a porch was hit. Responding officers kept cutting each other off on their radios as they reported other gunfire in the area late Sunday night and early Monday morning.

Then the heavy equipment rolled in: A helicopter and SUVs packed with lockers of rifles. SWAT teams in green coveralls patrolled the streets with uniformed officers.

It was just one of dozens of shooting scenes across Chicago over the long Fourth of July weekend. In all, at least 82 people were shot, 14 of them fatally, since Thursday afternoon when two woman were shot as they sat outside a two-flat within a block of Garfield Park.

Five of the people were shot by police over 36 hours on Friday and Saturday, including two boys 14 and 16 who were killed when they allegedly refused to drop their guns.

Many of the long weekend’s shootings were on the South Side, clustered in the Englewood, Roseland, Gresham and West Pullman neighborhoods that rank among the most violent in the city.

The victims ranged from the 14-year-boy shot by police in the Old Irving Park neighborhood to a 66-year-old woman grazed in the head as she walked up the steps of her porch on the Far South Side.  Most victims were in their late teens and 20s.

Fortunately, there is an answer, and that is the MILITARY OCCUPATION of Chicago.

National Guard needed in city to stem shootings

It is time to call out the National Guard to patrol the streets of certain crime-infested neighborhoods in Chicago where the murder rate is high. It is apparent that the presence of the city’s police force alone is inadequate to deal with this violence.

I suggest that the National Guard be mobilized during every weekend for the rest of the summer.  I also suggest imposing a curfew of midnight on weekend nights during the summer on all teenagers in the city except for those with jobs that require them to be out after the curfew.

It is, of course, deplorably racist to express any wish to avoid living among people who cannot be described as being even a little bit savage and merely require a modest military occupation in order to reduce the amount of murderous violence in which they happen to engage for no particular reason at all. All right-thinking people would cheerfully welcome the chance to have their neighborhood occupied by the US military, as that is a very small price to pay for the myriad benefits of diversity.

Is race the most valuable resource?

The Chateau considers the question:

After Randall Parker gazed in the crystal ball and saw chaos and decay in America’s near future, commenter “Jim” contributed a sound bite worthy of the coveted CH Freelance COTW.

Places like Brazil and the Congo have enormous economic potential just based on geography, climate, and natural resources. A place like Japan is mountainous (only 3% of the land area is arable), few natural resources, not located near major trade routes, subject to frequent catastrophic earthquakes and tsunamis. But Japan has the Japanese people who are more valuable than all of Brazil’s natural wealth.

Doesn’t that get right to the beating heart of all our loud, violent, useless social discourse?

whatever happens, japan has got
the japanese, and you have not

Those who look at today’s birth rates and leap to erroneous conclusions are forgetting that the future does not proceed from the present in a linear manner. Nigeria may have far more Nigerians than in 1950, but it is less able to feed itself than it was in 1950. On the other hand, while there is a lower percentage of young Japanese than there were before, in quantitative terms, there are more young Japanese than there were in 1914.

The one thing we know for certain about the future is that it will not look like today.