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Topics - Religious Dick

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61
3DHS / Multiculturalism: When Will the Sleeper Wake?
« on: March 29, 2012, 02:21:15 PM »
Multiculturalism: When Will the Sleeper Wake?
by John Derbyshire

London Mayor Boris Johnson spoke the other day about the riots that devastated London and other English cities last summer:

The biggest shock for me from the riots was the sheer sense of nihilism?perhaps I should not have been shocked, but in my view literacy and numeracy are the best places to start. In seven particular boroughs in London one in four children are leaving functionally illiterate. In a few schools it is nearer 50%. We have to intervene at an earlier stage, and I think the mayor can help.

Here is a thing that The New York Times said on Tuesday, March 20. The subject is the shootings at a school in Toulouse, France, the previous day. The victims were Jewish, but the gunman?s identity was unknown, so the Times defaulted to basic liberal assumptions:

The political debate around the shootings, and whether the deaths of an instructor and three young children were somehow inspired by anti-immigrant political talk, is likely to continue.?In the middle of a long and heated presidential campaign, with President Nicolas Sarkozy trying to win back disaffected supporters who have drifted to the far-right National Front party, the shootings at Toulouse have raised new questions about the tone and tenor of the debate here about what it is to be French.

Here is a thing that General Wesley Clark, then the supreme commander of the NATO alliance, said back in 1999. The subject was the NATO bombing of Serbia:

?Cultural diversity within a nation causes nothing but trouble?what could be more obvious??
There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That?s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.

The common thread there is multiculturalism, the notion that entire populations of different cultures can coexist in reasonable harmony together under a common sovereignty.

In Europe and the Anglosphere, this is the Age of Multiculturalism?an age when the doctrine is so much taken for granted, at least by elite types such as the Mayor of London, editorial writers at The New York Times, and American generals, that it has seeped into the tissues and bones to the degree that contrary notions cannot be thought.

My three quotes all illustrate that. The Mayor of London cannot think the following thought: Last summer?s riots were initially and essentially race riots, with what is left of England?s native underclass only joining in later as scavengers.

As for ?functionally illiterate,? well:

Across the 14 boroughs that make up Inner London, there are 98,000 schoolchildren whose first language is not English, compared to just 79,000 native English speakers.

So the dismal educational outcomes the mayor cites were not the cause of the riots. Rather, both London?s mass functional illiteracy and the riots are effects of a common cause: fifty years of insane immigration policies turning the capital into a Tower of Babel (while simultaneously gifting it with beauties like these). Multiculturalism?s horrible consequences can, this fool mayor tells us, be cured with a little extra algebra.

The thought that New York Times editorialists cannot think about anti-Semitic murders in Europe is that Jew-killing has nothing to do with ?anti-immigrant political talk? or the ?far right.? It is instead an activity favored, encouraged, and committed pretty exclusively by radical Muslims who have been admitted to Europe in ululating multitudes by the same lunatic multiculturalist immigration policies that gave London its riots.

Here?s the thought that General Clark could not think: Far from being a discredited 19th-century relic, the ethno-state has been the very foundation of Europe?s long post-WW II peace. The multiculturalist assault on ethno-nationalism will return Europe to strife, conflict, and national instability.

In the year 2099, a hundred years on from General Clark?s pronouncement, all three of those quotations will sound chimerical. Reading them, our great-grandchildren will shake their heads in wonder. ?Couldn?t they see?? Cultural diversity within a nation causes nothing but trouble?what could be more obvious?

In that future world, nations that had the sense to remain ethnically intact and which had ?Arctic? distributions of intelligence, behavior, and personality?China, Japan, Korea (presumably united by then), Finland maybe, Israel if she survives, just possibly Russia, some outlier oddities such as, perhaps, Hungary?will have steamed ahead of those who inflicted the multi-culti blight upon themselves.

The rest of us will either be dragging ourselves along wearily, towing behind us the millstones of unproductive, unassimilable, low-human-capital subpopulations left over from the Age of Multiculturalism, along with the associated frictions and rancors; or else we shall have broken up in complete ethnic disaggregation, casting off those subpopulations to fend for themselves in mini-states of their own while we join?rejoin, really?the ethno-nationalist march of mankind.

Historians of the future will amuse themselves by coming up with theories to explain why European civilization, at the height of its powers, rich with unparalleled achievements in science, music, art, literature, mathematics, and technology, gave up its lands and its treasures to people for whom those achievements were mere hated tokens of oppression or the impious and superfluous productions of infidels.

For those of us living through the Age of Multiculturalism, the interesting question is: When will the sleeper wake? When will the obvious become undeniable, even to those as sheltered and blinkered as Boris Johnson and New York Times staffers?

Given the well-nigh unlimited human capacity for self-deception and wishful thinking, together with the power of unanimous elites to enforce their version of reality on a distracted populace, my guess is that we have a decade or two to go. Multiculturalism is barely half a century old; Soviet communism lasted seventy-four years.

http://takimag.com/article/multiculturalism_when_will_the_sleeper_wake_john_derbyshire#ixzz1qWktsemz

62
3DHS / Overshot in Florida
« on: March 29, 2012, 02:18:15 PM »
Overshot in Florida
The no-go area of no-go areas
By Colin Liddell

Here in Japan we have had a no-go area since the great earthquake of last year. Such areas are something of a rarity in these parts. This one is rather large stretching across a radius of 20 km. It is centred on the Fukushima nuclear reactor, which was badly damaged by the tsunami caused by the quake, and is meant to protect people from radioactive contamination. In the usual, slightly nannying way common in these parts, it has been marked with all the paraphernalia that one would associate with no-go areas: manned roadblocks, no-entry signs, flashing lights, occasional automated announcements, and a range of gentle fines.

But while no-go zones are extremely uncommon in Japan, where walking about at night is perfectly safe, this is certainly not the case in America, where the trial for the murder of two British tourists shot in the Florida resort town of Sarasota has just ended in the conviction of Shawn Tyson, a Black 17-year-old youth.

No doubt if Obama had a son, he would also look like Tyson.
While Japan makes great efforts to mark its no-go zones, the same cannot be said for America. There it is regarded as something of a social faux pas to put up appropriate signage.

Regarding the case, it seems that the murder victims, James Cooper and James Kouzaris, after an evening spent at a couple of downtown bars, the last of which closed at 2 am, decided to walk to a well-known 24-hour diner, located about one-and-half miles away, for an early hours breakfast. After failing to take the right turning, they continued on their way to what newspapers in their coded way described as a "ghetto," "run-down estate," and "public housing project." The pictures of the murder site, however, showed a pleasant enough row of tree-shaded bungalows, each with its own spacious yard, and a car, SUV, or pickup truck in every driveway.

Certainly this is not the kind of obvious no-go area that innocent, liquored-up tourists could be expected to recognize, but no-go area it certainly was as quotes from the local police captain Paul Sutton to the press made clear. He admitted that detectives had ignored "lifestyle differences" between Britons and Americans and assumed the tourists would never have dreamed of trying to get around on foot. Sutton also talked about the men "losing their bearings" and "overshooting" the "correct turning." In other words, there are certain places it isn't safe to walk and no signs to let people know they have taken the wrong turning or wandered too far.

Sutton wanted to make it sound as if what happened to the two men was some kind of accident; as if they had haphazardly walked off a cliff or gone scuba diving without the correct equipment. In a sense this is true. There is an almost impersonal quality and predictability about Whites wandering into America?s no-go zones at night without the requisite number of guns, mace, bullet-proof vests, and police back up.

Cooper and Kouzaris were clearly targeted because they were White. One of the witnesses at the trial Jermaine Bane said he had a phone call from Tyson in which he heard him say: "Who are those crackers walking past the park?" When Tyson found out they had no money he decided to kill them for pleasure. The court heard that Tyson had boasted to a female friend, Latrece Washington, that one of the men had begged for his life but he shot him anyway.

In the press that followed the killings, it was routinely referred to a "botched robbery." Remember that term for future reference, as it occurs every time Blacks rob Whites and then shoot the victims for a racial buzz. Other notions floated during the initial period of the investigation included the suggestion that Cooper and Kouzaris were trying to buy drugs, were the victims of a "honey-trap" operation, or were even "ghetto tourists."

The cumulative effect of all this speculation was to make the victims seem like they were the problem, not the killer. In the days that followed their murder, with Sarasota baking in the media spotlight, Cooper and Kouzaris were effectively presented as bar-crawling drunks with poor orienting skills. They were also depicted as womanizing dope fiends with a thrill-seeking death wish. The clear message was: "Don't worry, tourists, you have to be a really sick fuck to get blown away in Sarasota." Just the reassuring message the local holiday trade needed!

While most American Whites, especially White Liberals, have mastered enough doublethink to successfully avoid America's honky-shooting no-go areas without being too overtly conscious of the racial dimension, it is unfair to expect this sort of advanced Orwellian thinking from foreign tourists whose picture of America has been shaped by a Hollywood where Morgan Freeman is God, Dennis Haysbert President, and all the crooks Whites (often with Southern, German, or English accents).

On its website, Sarasota looks like a lovely place. Back at the time of the killing its beaches were advertised with the disturbingly elitist slogan "All beaches are not created equal." This has now been changed to "So many beaches so little time." Echoing these slogans we could also say that not all the neighbourhoods of Sarasota have been created equally safe?for obvious reasons?and that wandering into some of them will give you a lot less time on this planet.

Given that Sarasota is a holiday destination that attracts na?ve foreigners and then tries to get them drunk and high, it might be a good idea to fence off certain parts of the town with barbed wire and put up warning signs exactly as you would if there were dangerous cliffs or a stretch of water with a deadly undertow or sharks. As some of the tourists may not be fluent in English, these should also be very visual, with appropriate images of trigger-happy racist Black thugs.

In Japan they try not to have any no-go areas, but when they do they at least make strenuous efforts to clearly delineate them. America by contrast is riddled with dangerous no-go areas, but instead of this being openly admitted and measures taken to keep out potential victims, any mention is suppressed. In America it seems that the most obvious no-go area is the subject of no-go areas itself.

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/hbd-human-biodiversity/overshot-in-florida/

63
3DHS / Open Society or Survival
« on: March 24, 2012, 02:35:14 AM »
Open Society or Survival
By Mark Hackard

Of all the idols of our age, none has demanded so much blood sacrifice and the dissipation of resources as that of democracy. From the Hindu Kush to our television screens, the liberal order betrays its totalitarian nature. We send armies and airborne robots into Asia?s wastelands to kill for the universal rights of man. Mass democracy can never be recognized for the deviant political philosophy it is, nor can it be restricted to the West alone; equality must reign everywhere unchallenged. Modern man is infallible, and in his militant faith he pursues no less than the entirety of the world subjugated to his will. How else may a New Jerusalem of pleasure and profit be realized, if not through the monumental force of a united humanity?

Eurasia remains the key to fulfilling this mad dream. Even as the United States continues its grinding and bloody counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and across Dar al-Islam, Washington has found the cash to promote ?civil society? and ?the rule of law? in Russia. The Obama Administration is looking to apply $50 million to NGOs and similar initiatives in Moscow and other regions throughout the country. Thus stated Ambassador Michael McFaul:

We have proposed to the US Congress to create a new civil society fund for Russia. We proposed that 50 million dollars in a neutral way, by the way, in terms of new money. That?s what I hear in Moscow that when you talk to real human rights organizations and what they really need, they need that kind of support.

While $50 million would be negligible in sustaining the Pax Americana?s military operations, it makes for a tidy sum when directed toward political subversion. (Among other projects, expect a new stream of nauseating parades and Pussy Riot church provocations.) Vladimir Putin?s third presidential term will begin this spring, but U.S. policy planners have been emboldened by a recent surge in opposition activism in Russia. Along with continuing pressure on Moscow?s peripheries, their strategy is still centered on creating the infrastructure for revolution, the most cost-effective way that an embattled Third Rome could fall to American power. After all, the United States seeks to destabilize Russia with an ultimate view to her dismemberment and exploitation by the lords of international usury.
The Freedom Agenda grants Washington carte blanche to undermine sovereign nations on whim in the name of ?human rights? and a long-term mandate for global governance. Exporting to the world its model of social chaos, the United States aims for the establishment of a unified, market-driven Open Society across the earth. Should some insolent tribe refuse the imperial model, it must prepare for the inevitable assault- if not by bombardment or sanctions, then at the very least through intelligence operations and psychological warfare.

Peoples who would defy postmodern Mammonism must have a clear ideological framework for resistance. In the case of Russia, such a basis for thought and action is conspicuously absent among ruling elites. Popular legitimacy can only derive from the quantitative ?will of the people?; the Kremlin carries out elections in imitation of Western stage-management and assiduously tracks approval ratings from the middle class. Putin and his assorted clans will have nothing to counteract a deadening reductive-materialist worldview if they share it with their geopolitical adversaries.

Russia spent a century enacting the social experiments of the modern West; she can afford neither lives nor time for yet another ruinous undertaking. Babel and its missionaries must be repudiated. War for the national soul begins at the visceral level of shared faith and kinship; these values form the traditional organic state, guardian of sacred heritage and culture. And there is no greater weapon in this struggle than the loyal heart.

Rendering judgment on democracy, the White ?migr? leader Ivan Ilyin gave us a principled and articulate rejection of the liberal dispensation and its incipient totalitarianism. It is no accident that today?s Free World is on the fast track to tyranny. The bloodless abstractions of liberty and equality bequeathed to us by Locke, Rousseau and their disciples have birthed mechanisms of control undreamt of by ancient despots. ?Government by the people? has in fact served to corrupt and dissolve whole peoples according to the design of an antitheist and anti-human Money Power. Is escape from the democratic Panopticon even possible? Yes, though it demands of us a fateful choice: languishing toward oblivion in the Open Society, or our arrival at the harsh conclusions necessary to chart a future.

 

***

On Formal Democracy

Essay by Ivan A. Ilyin. Taken from the collection ?Nashi Zadachi? and translated by Mark Hackard.

There are two different understandings of the state and politics: the mechanistic and the organic. The mechanistic asserts instinctive man and his private interests; it measures life quantitatively and formalistically. The organic derives from the human spirit and ascends to national unity and its common interests; it is qualitative, searching out spiritual roots and solutions.

We shall first examine the mechanistic view.

It sees in man first and foremost the instinctive individual with its ?desires? and ?needs?: every person wishes to work less, enjoy himself more and relax; procreate and accumulate; maintain his irresponsible opinions and express them without hindrance; to find the like-minded and associate with them wherever they may be; to depend upon no-one and wield as much power and influence as possible. After all, men are born ?equal?, and hence each of them must be provided equal rights for the assertion of their desires and needs: these are the inalienable rights of liberty which cannot abide restriction. Therefore every person should have an equal voice in affairs of state. For so many people there will be so many equal voices. Whatever a man may fancy is to be affirmed, and let there be no interference in this. Allow like-minded men of all nations to unite freely; let the votes be counted; the majority will decide?

As to the quality of the desires, plans and enterprises of all these men of one mind, and especially the motives and intentions of voters, no-one may concern himself. All of this is protected by inviolable ?freedom?, equality and the secret vote. Every citizen as such is considered already reasonable, enlightened, well-intentioned and loyal, incorruptible and honorable; each man is given the opportunity to discover his ?valor? and veil all his designs and schemes with words about ?the common good?.

Until he is caught, this man is not a thief; until taken red-handed, he demands complete respect. He who has not been implicated at the scene of a crime (for example, treason, foreign espionage, conspiracy, bribes, waste, fraud, call-girl rings, counterfeiting) ? is considered a political ?gentleman? independent of his profession and a full citizen. Most important are liberty, equality and vote-counting. The state is a mechanical equilibrium of private (personal and group) agendas; the state is built as a compromise of centrifugal forces, played out in the performances of political actors. And politics should move according to the results of mutual distrust and competing intrigues.

Unfortunately this view (as much as I know) is nowhere expressed in such a frank and precise form. It is not a doctrine; it is simply an unspoken political dogma, rooted in the world and taken as the self-evident essence of democracy. All men are formally free; all men are formally equal and contend with each other for power, for the sake of their own interests, yet under the pretense of a common benefit.

Such a formal and quantitative conception of the state renders its fate dependent on whom, how and what shall fill a vacuum of content, as well as that indifferent-drifting quality people afford themselves through formal ?liberty?. State and government are but a mirror or arithmetic sum of what is made in the soul of the human mass and its sense of justice. Something stews within this at once opaque and unassailable cauldron: any interference is forbidden as ?pressure?, and any constraint or action is denounced as ?an infringement upon freedom?. Every citizen is secured the right to crooked and deceptive political paths, to disloyal and treasonous designs, to the sale of his vote, to base motives for voting, to underground plots, unseen treachery and secret dual citizenship- to all those crudities which are so profitable to men and so often tempt them.

The citizen is given the unlimited right to temptation and the corruption of others, as well as the subtle transactions of self-prostitution. He is guaranteed the freedom of disingenuous, lying, and underhanded speech, and the ambiguous, calculated omission of truth; he is granted the liberty to believe liars and scoundrels or at least pretend to believe them (in self-interest simulating one political mood or its complete opposite). And for the free expression of all these spiritual seductions he is handed the ballot. Motivations for voting must be free; the formation of parties tolerates no constraint; to limit political propaganda is to exercise coercion.

To judge and condemn for ?political views? is not permitted: this would signify an assault upon another?s ?conscience? and persecution of his beliefs (in German, Gessinungsjustiz). Freedom of opinions should be total; government officials will not dare infringe upon this or attempt its curtailment. And the most stupid, most harmful, ruinous and foul ?opinion? is sacrosanct, already by virtue of the fact that there is a destructive fool or traitor who has proclaimed it, all the while hiding behind its inviolability. Is it possible to make him only passively hold his beliefs? How are we to keep him from putting these thoughts into action, through whispers, conspiracy, secret organizations, and the covert accumulation of arms?

It is understood that all of this immediately disarms the state before enemies and subversives; at the same time it guarantees these enemies and subversives total liberty and impunity. The government is obliged to secure the people the freedom to be seduced, while revolutionaries and traitors are assured the freedom to seduce. It is natural that another election?s results will show the success of this guaranteed seduction. And so the regime will continue until the seduction undermines the very idea of voting and readiness to submit to the majority (for according to the recently stated revolutionary formula of the Belgian Spaak: ?The minority is not required to submit to the majority?). Then voting is replaced by rebellion, and the organized totalitarian minority seizes power.

This means that the formalistic-quantitative concept of the state opens the doors wide open to every political adventure, coup and revolution, as we observe from year to year in South America, for example. And in truth, the scoundrels of the world would have to be complete fools if they did not notice and exploit this excellent opportunity for the seizure of power. Admittedly, American gangsters did not reach this point and kept their atrocities out of politics, and the Sicilian Mafiosi have also been satisfied with private income. But to arrive at such a conclusion is not at all difficult. Nature abhors a vacuum; as noble motives (religious, moral, patriotic, and spiritual) weakened and withered in human souls, into the empty space of formal liberty would inevitably surge ridiculous, evil, perverse and avaricious plans advanced by totalitarian demagogues of the Left and Right.

Formal liberty includes the freedom of secret treason and overt destruction. From the very beginning the mechanistic and arithmetical competition of private desires prepared within people?s hearts the possibility of blind escalation and civil war. As long as centrifugal forces agreed to moderate their demands and find a compromise, the state could maintain balance over the chasm; but the prophets of class struggle rebelled and brought upon us the moment of civil war. How can the formal-mechanistic conception of the state oppose them? By the urging of great persuaders? Cries over our perishing freedom? Or ideas of sentimental humanitarianism, forgotten conscience and trampled honor? But this would mean ?interference?, thereby denouncing formal liberty and the mechanistic conception of politics! This would entail a loss of faith in political arithmetic and a fall into pure democratic heresy!

For formal democracy does not allow any doubt as to the good intentions of the free citizen. Jean-Jacques Rousseau once taught that man by his nature is rational and good, and the one thing he lacks is freedom. We need only to not hinder him in drawing from his good-natured heart the guiding ?general will?, wise, unerring and salvific?Just don?t bother him, and he shall draw it forth!

People came to believe this two centuries ago. The French Encyclopedists and revolutionaries believed, and after them anarchists, liberals and proponents of formal democracy around the world. They believed to such a degree that they even forgot about their faith and its dangers: it was decided that this system is the truth most undoubted, and that in politics it demands veneration before liberty, a respectful formalism and an honest count of the votes. And now two centuries of this practice have set contemporary politicians before the greatest political earthquake in world history?

What can they do? Curtail formal liberty? Reject the mechanism of private desire? Abolish the arithmetic of voting? But this would mean to doubt the sacred dogmata of modern democracy! Who shall risk such a feat? Who will disavow himself? And how will he oppose totalitarians from both the Left and the Right?

If this is a dead end, then what next? Assent to the deformations and atrocities of a totalitarian regime?! Impossible!

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/exit-strategies/open-society-or-survival/

64
3DHS / How to piss off a frog
« on: March 18, 2012, 04:07:35 PM »

65
3DHS / Behave
« on: March 02, 2012, 09:46:52 AM »
Behave
Feb 26th, 2012 by Brett Stevens.
When a society collapses, the ideas on the periphery are the first to be subverted. They transmit the infection to the fundamentals, such that after some time ?common sense? is lost.

In the modern West we are at the stage where we cannot assume much in common with others. They do not share the same culture, religion, values or way of life, or at least enough of them do not that an assumption is no longer convenient. The result is that the lowest common denominator rules in every area.

One aspect of this is that people no longer know how to behave. In healthy societies of the future, we will discover (again) that common standards include behavior, so people know how to act in such a way that they do not trample on others unnecessarily.

A healthy society knows how lines work and how those who cut in line should be pushed aside. But now our people come in different stripes, including different views on lines. Some wait in orderly queues, while others mill around and then try to push ahead.

The result is the type of behavior lines were designed in order to avoid. Each person must be constantly vigilant against others trying to cheat, and the disorder means that each person waits longer. Resources like the time of whoever is helping the line gets wasted.

On the surface of course this makes for a more interesting society. Don?t do it the same old way each time ? we?ll invent new, fresh, interesting ways of waiting in line! Then the reality sets in after a few weeks: other than surface adornments, there are no new ways. Only choosing dysfunction or function.

The same applies to driving. The rules and conventions build up over generations for the safety of all are forgotten. The result is constant competition on the roads, for mere feet of space, while defending against the random and reckless behavior of others.

Unlike the small subset of problems for which government is adapted, these problems cannot be solved by laws. They are cultural in origin and in solution, if culture is the intersection of shared values and customs for a group. Laws require nit-picking rules and nit-picky enforcers. Culture does not.

Even simple things as not running your cart into other people in the grocery store, not leaving trash on the ground, or even the basic principle of being efficient or orderly. We can create government agencies to force people to behave in these ways, but unless it comes from within, such behavior is soon forgotten.

Our zeal for pluralism has destroyed what may have been our greatest strength, which was our ability to cooperate toward a goal. Any tyrant can make laws and selectively punish violators in public show trials. But only a culture can unite us, and make us behave in a way that makes a society we can all enjoy.

http://www.amerika.org/social-reality/behave/

66
Radical theory of first Americans places Stone Age Europeans in Delmarva 20,000 years ago

By Brian Vastag, Published: February 29

When the crew of the Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: a dark, tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp.

Forty years later, this rediscovered prehistoric slasher has reopened debate on a radical theory about who the first Americans were and when they got here.

Archaeologists have long held that North America remained unpopulated until about 15,000 years ago, when Siberian people walked or boated into Alaska and then moved down the West Coast.

But the mastodon relic found near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay turned out to be 22,000 years old, suggesting that the blade was just as ancient.

Whoever fashioned that blade was not supposed to be here.

Its makers probably paddled from Europe and arrived in America thousands of years ahead of the western migration, making them the first Americans, argues Smithsonian Institution anthropologist Dennis Stanford.

?I think it?s feasible,? said Tom Dillehay, a prominent archaeologist at Vanderbilt University. ?The evidence is building up, and it certainly warrants discussion.?

At the height of the last ice age, Stanford says, mysterious Stone Age European people known as the Solutreans paddled along an ice cap jutting into the North Atlantic. They lived like Inuits, harvesting seals and seabirds.

The Solutreans eventually spread across North America, Stanford says, hauling their distinctive blades with them and giving birth to the later Clovis culture, which emerged some 13,000 years ago.

When Stanford proposed this ?Solutrean hypothesis? in 1999, colleagues roundly rejected it. One prominent archaeologist suggested that Stanford was throwing his career away.

But now, 13 years later, Stanford and Bruce Bradley, an archaeologist at England?s University of Exeter, lay out a detailed case ? bolstered by the curious blade and other stone tools recently found in the mid-Atlantic ? in a new book, ?Across Atlantic Ice.?

?I drank the Solutrean Kool-Aid,? said Steve Black, an archaeologist at Texas State University in San Marcos. ?I had been very dubious. It?s something a lot of [archaeologists] have dismissed out of hand. But I came away from the book feeling like it?s an extremely credible idea that needs to be taken seriously.?

Other experts remain unconvinced. ?Anyone advancing a radically different hypothesis must be willing to take his licks from skeptics,? said Gary Haynes, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada-Reno.

At the core of Stanford?s case are stone tools recovered from five mid-Atlantic sites. Two sites lie on Chesapeake Bay islands, suggesting that the Solutreans settled Delmarva early on. Smithsonian research associate Darrin Lowery found blades, anvils and other tools found stuck in soil at least 20,000 years old.

Displaying the tools in his office at the National Museum of Natural History, Stanford handles a milky chert blade and says, ?This stuff is beginning to give us a real nice picture of occupation of the Eastern Shore around 20,000 years ago.?

Further, the Eastern Shore blades strongly resemble those found at dozens of Solutrean sites from the Stone Age in Spain and France, Stanford says. ?We can match each one of 18 styles up to the sites in Europe.?

In 2007, Lowery, who also teaches at the University of Delaware, was hired by a landowner to survey property on Tilghman Island, Md., at a place called Miles Point. Almost immediately, Lowery saw a chunk of quarzite jutting out of a shore bank. It was an anvil, heavily marked from repeated beatings, a clear sign that it was used to make stone tools. Lowery dated the soil layer holding the anvil and other stone tools with two methods, radiocarbon dating and a newer technique, optical stimulated luminescence. Both returned an age of at least 21,000 years.

?We were like, geez . . . what the hell is going on here?? Lowery said.

Another site, 10 miles south, Oyster Cove, yielded more Stone Age artifacts. Those too, came out of soil more than 21,000 years old.

Lowery published the finds in 2010 in Quaternary Science Reviews, but the report made nary a ripple in the conservative world of archaeology, where new ideas tend to progress at a glacial pace. ?People are going to think we?ve clearly gone off our rocker here,? Lowery remembers musing.

One problem: The ancient dates came from the soil, not the artifacts themselves.

?It?s an indirect date,? Dillehay said. ?You need a feature like a hearth or something that?s clearly human. But it?s still suggestive.?

In 2008, Lowery toured a tiny museum on Gwynn?s Island, Va., at the southern end of the Chesapeake. He asked the curator if the museum had any stone tools. They did: The eight-inch blade, displayed next to a bit of mastodon tusk and a molar, recovered by the Cinmar.

Lowery immediately called Stanford. ?He got real excited,? Lowery said.

Lowery also contacted the Cinmar?s captain, Thurston Shawn. The tusk and blade were so unusual that Shawn had made a point of marking the spot on his charts. It was 60 miles east of the Virginia cape, in 240 feet of water. At the end of the last ice age, when the oceans were low, that spot was land, on the coast.

Stanford carbon-dated the mastodon to 22,760 years old. He and Bradley ? two of the world?s foremost stone tool experts ? also scrutinized the blade. It had not been smoothed by wave action or tumbling. They concluded the blade had not been pushed out to sea but had been buried where the Cinmar found it.

?My guess is the blade was used to butcher the mastodon,? Stanford said. ?I?m almost positive.?

But some question the meaning of the find.

?I?m not going to hang a completely novel interpretation of the peopling of the Americas from something dredged off the sea bottom 40 years ago and not properly documented,? said David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University.

Stone tools recovered from two other mid-Atlantic sites ? Cactus Hills, Va., 45 miles south of Richmond, and Meadowcroft Rockshelter, in southern Pennsylvania ? date to at least 16,000 years ago. Those tools, too, strongly resemble blades found in Europe.

Little is known about the Solutrean people. They lived in Spain, Portugal and southern France beginning about 25,000 years ago. No skeletons have been found, so no DNA is available to study.

But the Solutreans did leave behind rock art, which showed a diamond-shaped flat fish in delicate black etchings. It looks like a halibut. A seal also appears, an arrow-headed line stabbing through it.

Stanford contends that the art proves that the Salutreans built boats ? halibut are deep-sea fish ? and knew how to survive at the edge of an ice cap that drooped deep into Europe.

?The reason people don?t like the Solutrean idea is the ocean,? he said. No Solutrean boats have been found. But given that people arrived in Australia some 60,000 years ago ? and they didn?t walk there ? wood-frame and seal-skin boats were clearly possible, Stanford argues.

His idea faces another challenge: At the end of the last ice age, the polar ice cap may not have extended all the way across the Atlantic, leaving iceberg-strewn gaps of open water for the Solutreans to navigate as they headed West for unknown reasons.

Meltzer is among those still skeptical of the Solutrean hypothesis, citing the scant evidence. ?If Solutrean boat people washed up on our shores, they suffered cultural amnesia, genetic amnesia, dental amnesia, linguistic amnesia and skeletal amnesia. Basically, all of the signals are pointing to Asia? as the origin of the first Americans.

Since the 1930s, archaeologists have favored a single migration from Siberia to Alaska as the epic event that peopled the Americas about 13,000 years ago. Stone tools found at Clovis, N.M., and elsewhere, suggested that a single culture spread across much of the continent. This ?Clovis first? idea became entrenched.

But starting in the 1990s, archaeologists dated sites in Texas, Chile and the mid-Atlantic region to pre-Clovis times. Few archaeologists accepted those dates at first, said Michael Collins, an archaeologist at Texas State.

?People learned it in college and built careers on ?Clovis first,? ? Collins said. ?They?re unwilling to turn it loose.?

But now they might have to adopt Stanford?s Europe-first slogan: ?Iberia, not Siberia.?

However, Stanford acknowledges that his evidence is scant. He calls the Solutrean hypothesis ?a skeletal idea.? And he worries that a rising sea might have washed away compelling evidence.

Later this spring, Stanford plans to take a boat to the Cinmar site, where he will dredge for more clues to an ice-age journey that just might have been the first voyage to America.



? The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/radical-theory-of-first-americans-places-stone-age-europeans-in-delmarva-20000-years-ago/2012/02/28/gIQA4mriiR_print.html

67
3DHS / Something?s Rotten in the Republic
« on: February 27, 2012, 09:44:14 AM »
Something?s Rotten in the Republic


If you hang out at dissident-right websites you surely know the Berthold Brecht quote: ?Would it not be easier?for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?? This is offered on those websites?I mean to say, on those shameful digital cesspools that no decent-minded person would even think of visiting?in the context of Britain and America?s ongoing demographic revolutions. As the story line goes, a secretive cabal of elites, insufficiently stimulated by our nations? inadequate diversity, or irritated by their demands for better wages, or shocked by their insistence that their interests trump those of foreigners, has decided to replace them with as much stealth as such a project can muster.

I wish I could believe it. Being allergic to conspiracy theories, I can?t. Being also at an age when I can regard the future beyond the next few summers with calm indifference, I think if the root stocks of Britain and America?nations blessed with representative government?were so stupid as to let wily elites drive them to minority status in their ancestral lands, the fools deserve the race war that?s probably coming to them. I do feel some mild regret on behalf of my kids, who I suppose will spend some of their adult years in a continent-sized version of 1970s Lebanon or 1990s Yugoslavia or 1960s/70s/80s/90s/00s Congo/Sudan/Somalia/Ethiopia/Zimbabwe, but at least I?ve taught the little Derbs (him and her) how to use firearms.

So I?m not normally an easy sell for the evil-elites story line. I believe that rank, unorganized human stupidity and selfishness explain well-nigh all deplorable social phenomena. But there are times when I wonder whether the conspiracy theorists might be onto something. There are times.?

Item: I was sitting in the man cave Sunday evening with a slice of my wife?s incomparable pecan pie and a glass of supermarket plonk, watching 60 Minutes.

One of the segments was titled ?Trapped in Unemployment.? It was about some middle-aged, middle-class people in Connecticut who?d been laid off in the 2008-09 recession and have been unemployed ever since.

Never in the last 60 years has the length of joblessness been this long. Four million people, a full third of the unemployed, have been out of work more than a year.

There?s a stonyhearted cadre of commentators who respond with: ?This is capitalism. We don?t do jobs for life, certainly not middling-ability paper-shuffling jobs with benefits.? I kind of see their point, but having spent much of my own working life among the modern business office?s cubes-?n?-tubes people, I?m sympathetic on tribal grounds. These are my people.

The segment dragged its weary length for over 12 minutes while I howled at the monitor: ?Mention immigration! Go on, at least mention it! Tell us about the H-1B scam!?

They never did. Not a peep. Nor did any of the dozens of comments on the comment thread mention it. I suppose CBS monitors those comments closely. Wouldn?t want anyone raising controversial topics on a major TV network?s website. Good heavens, no!

Item: At least one US government agency is willing to break the law to ensure that Somali goatherds, Iraqi daughter-killers, and Uzbek terrorists keep flowing into our towns. The agency is the Office of Refugee Resettlement, demon spawn of the US Department of Health and Human Services. The law is Title IV, Chapter 2, Section 413 of the Immigration and Nationalities Act, which requires that Congress shall receive ?report on activities under this chapter?not later than the January 31 following the end of each fiscal year.?

As Ann Corcoran notes, the administration is now running three years late with these reports. Gosh, you might almost think there?s something they don?t want you to know about refugee resettlement, mightn?t you? Such as, oh, that the whole shebang is fraud-addled and that genuine refugees are a tiny minority of those resettled. Or that refugees are dumped on the welfare system ASAP and mostly stay there while fat-cat executives of the ?nonprofit? agencies running the scam purchase gold-plated Jacuzzis with their high-six-figure salaries.

And where is Congress?s amour-propre? Aren?t any of the Congressreptiles miffed that Kathleen Sebelius?s pet beagle is eating reports they should, according to laws their eminent selves passed, be getting annually? You might almost think?you might almost think?the Congressroaches are in on the racket. Nah, can?t be.

Item: A February 19 Associated Press report carries the headline: ?Immigrants trickling back to Ala despite crackdown?:

Ana Jimenez and her husband were so terrified of being sent back to their native Mexico when Alabama?s tough crackdown on illegal immigrants took effect that they fled more than 2,000 miles to Los Angeles, cramming into a two-bedroom apartment with more than 20 other relatives.

Now they are among the families coming back to cities like Birmingham, as the mass deportations never materialized and courts blocked parts of the law.

(I added the Birmingham link. Lotsa luck there, Ana! The whole thing is written in this triumphalist tone: Righteous people who?d been wronged are heroically asserting their humanity in the face of cruel oppression. Sound the trumpets!)

These are illegal immigrants the Associated Press is writing about: trespassers, scofflaws, job thieves, and future (or present if they get sick) welfare-state clients. And they are deemed worthy to receive benefits from a common fund into which neither they nor any of their forebears paid a single red cent.

Some initially feared the law would mean that people would be rounded up?said Ferreti, an anthropologist from the University of Texas who is living in Tuscaloosa, about 60 miles southwest of Birmingham, for her studies. ?That has not happened.??

What a pity. What a damn pity.

Yes, I?m turning. CBS; the administration; Congress; the Associated Press; there?s something going on here.

http://takimag.com/article/somethings_rotten_in_the_republic_john_derbyshire#axzz1naaY096h

68
3DHS / A Conversation with Peter Thiel - The American Interest Magazine
« on: February 11, 2012, 07:08:27 PM »
A Conversation with Peter Thiel - The American Interest Magazine

Francis Fukuyama: I?d like to begin by asking you about a point you made about there being certain liberal and conservative blind spots about America. What did you mean by that?

Peter Thiel: On the surface, one of the debates we have is that people on the Left, especially the Occupy Wall Street movement, focus on income and wealth inequality issues?the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. It?s evident that both forms of inequality have escalated at a very high rate. Probably from 1973 to today, they have gone up faster than they did in the 19th century. The rapid rise in inequality has been an issue that the Right has not been willing to engage. It tends either to say it?s not true or that it doesn?t matter. That?s a very strange blind spot. Obviously if you extrapolate an exponential function it can go a lot further. We?re now at an extreme comparable to 1913 or 1928; on a worldwide basis we?ve probably surpassed the 1913 highs and are closer to 1789 levels.

In the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse. It?s a disturbing question which of these three is going to happen today, or if there?s a fourth way out. On the Right, the Tea Party argument has been about government corruption?not ethical violations necessarily, but inefficiency, that government can?t do anything right and wastes money. I believe that is true, and that this problem has gotten dramatically worse. There are ways that the government is working far less well than it used to. Just outside my office is the Golden Gate Bridge. It was built under FDR?s Administration in the 1930s in about three and a half years. They?re currently building an access highway on one of the tunnels that feeds into the bridge, and it will take at least six years to complete.

Francis Fukuyama: And it will require countless environmental permits, litigation, and so on.

Peter Thiel: Yes. There?s an overall sense that in many different domains the government is working incredibly inefficiently and poorly. On the foreign policy side you can flag the wars in the Middle East, which have cost a lot more than we thought they should have. You can point to quasi-governmental things like spending on health care and education, where costs are spinning out of control. There?s some degree to which government is doing the same for more, or doing less for the same. There?s a very big blind spot on the Left about government waste and inefficiency.

In some ways these two debates, though they seem very different, ought to be seen as two sides of the same coin. The question is, should rich people keep their money or should the government take it? The anti-rich argument is, ?Yes, because they already have too much.? The anti-government argument is, ?No, because the government would just waste it.?

I think if you widen the aperture a bit on the economic level, though I identify with the libertarian Right, I do think it is incumbent on us to rethink the history of the past forty years. In particular, the Reagan history of the 1980s needs to be rethought thoroughly. One perspective is that the libertarian, small-government view is not a timeless truth but was a contingent response to the increasing failure of government, which was manifesting itself in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The response was that resources should be kept in the private sector. Then economic theories, like Laffer?s supply-side economics, provided political support for that response, even if they weren?t entirely accurate. We can say that the economic theories didn?t work as advertised, but for Obama to try to undo Reagan-era policies, he would have to deal with the political realities those theories were confronting. We cannot simply say things went wrong with credit creation in the 1980s; we also have to deal with government malfunction in the 1970s.

So you have these two different blind spots on the Left and Right, but I?ve been more interested in their common blind spot, which we?re less likely to discuss as a society: technological deceleration and the question of whether we?re still living in a technologically advancing society at all. I believe that the late 1960s was not only a time when government stopped working well and various aspects of our social contract began to fray, but also when scientific and technological progress began to advance much more slowly. Of course, the computer age, with the internet and web 2.0 developments of the past 15 years, is an exception. Perhaps so is finance, which has seen a lot of innovation over the same period (too much innovation, some would argue).

There has been a tremendous slowdown everywhere else, however. Look at transportation, for example: Literally, we haven?t been moving any faster. The energy shock has broadened to a commodity crisis. In many other areas the present has not lived up to the lofty expectations we had. I think the advanced economies of the world fundamentally grow through technological progress, and as their rate of progress slows, they will have less growth. This creates incredible pressures on our political systems. I think the political system at its core works when it crafts compromises in which most people benefit most of the time. When there?s no growth, politics becomes a zero-sum game in which there?s a loser for every winner. Most of the losers will come to suspect that the winners are involved in some kind of racket. So I think there?s a close link between technological deceleration and increasing cynicism and pessimism about politics and economics.

I think, therefore, that our problems are completely misdiagnosed. The debates are all about macroeconomics, about how much money we should print. I think you can print more money and have inflation, or stop printing money and have deflation. Bad inflation involves commodity prices and inputs, and bad deflation involves people?s wages, salaries and house prices. But the middle-way Goldilocks version, where commodity prices and consumer goods go down and wages go up, seems very farfetched. I don?t see how that sort of outcome can be crafted in a world with no growth.

Francis Fukuyama: I understand you?re part of the inspiration behind Tyler Cowen?s book The Great Stagnation. Apart from being a former colleague of mine, he?s on the editorial board of The American Interest.

Peter Thiel: He did very graciously dedicate the book to me, and it?s an incredibly powerful articulation of this theme on many different levels. I think the question of technological dynamism isn?t often examined, but when you look into it you see many problems, from transportation failures to the space program and the Concorde decommissioning to how the energy failure allows oil price shocks to undo the price improvements of the previous century. Think of the famous 1980 Paul Ehrlich-Julian Simon wager about resource scarcity. Simon may have won the bet a decade later, but since 1993, on a rolling decade basis, Ehrlich has been winning famously. This is something that has not registered with the political class at all.

Francis Fukuyama: That?s an early sign that we may be moving into a zero-sum world.

You made your fortune initially in Silicon Valley. Your assertions may raise a lot of eyebrows, because skeptics would say, ?What about the whole boom of the 1980s?? There?s that famous Robert Solow quote from 1987, ?You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.?1 Econometricians finally began detecting that productivity jump in a more significant way in the 1990s. I would think that rather than arguing in general that there has been a technological slowdown, the more socially important argument is that the distributional impact of all the cutting-edge technological changes that have occurred over the past generation go overwhelmingly to the smart and well-educated. If you had great math skills during the agrarian economy of the 19th century, there weren?t many jobs where you could exploit that and get really rich. Now you can go to Wall Street or become a software programmer. So there?s something about the progress we?ve had that has overlain the increasing inequality you?ve pointed to.

Peter Thiel: I don?t entirely agree with that description. My claim is not that there has been no technological progress, just deceleration. If we look at technological progress during most of the 19th and 20th centuries, it brought significant disruption. If you built horse buggies for a living, you would be out of work when the Ford Motor Company came along. In effect, over time labor was freed up to do more productive things. And on the whole, people got to be better off. I think the larger trend is just that there has been stagnation. There are debates about how to precisely measure these statistics, but the ones I?ve looked at suggest that median wages since 1973 have been mostly flat. Mean wages have gone up maybe 20?25 percent, which is the greater inequality, an anemic 0.6?0.7 per year. And if you confiscated the wealth of all the billionaires in the United States, the amount would pay for the deficits for only six months. There has been this increase in inequality, but it?s a secondary truth. The primary truth is this truth of stagnation.

As for why inequality has gone up, you could point to the technology, as you just have. You could also point to financialization of the economy, but I would say globalization has played a much greater role because it has been the much greater trend. Even though there have been a lot of bumps in the road, your ?End of History? strikes me as very much true today. Globalization has been incredibly powerful, far more so than people could have realistically expected in 1970. The question is, what is there about globalization that creates a winner-take-all world? There certainly has been a labor arbitrage with China that has been bad for the middle class, as well as for white-collar workers, in the past decade or two.

Consider, too, that in 1960 we spoke of the First World and the Third World; today we speak of the developed world and the developing world, the part that is looking to copy the West. The developed world is where we expect nothing more to happen. The earlier dichotomy was fairly pro-technology and in some ways more agnostic on the prospects for globalization. The present dichotomy is extremely bullish on globalization and implicitly pessimistic about technology. Of course, we can point to the great fortunes that have been made in the tech industry, but of the great fortunes that have been made in the world over the past twenty or thirty years, most have not been made in technology. Look at the Russian oligarchs. Maybe one out of a hundred billionaires has a tech-related fortune. The others are a political thing linked somehow to globalization. So that?s why I think it?s important to quantify these things correctly. We tend to focus a lot on the optimistic tech narrative that notes a lot of progress, but I think the more important question is why it hasn?t been happening.

There certainly are a lot of areas of technology where, if it were progressing, we would expect a lot of jobs to be created. The classic example would be clean technology, alternate energy technology. If you were to retool the economy toward more efficient forms of energy, one would realistically expect that to create millions of jobs. The problem with that retooling is that the clean technology just doesn?t work?namely, it doesn?t do more for less. It costs much more, so it isn?t working?at least not yet.

Francis Fukuyama: Thinking again about inequality, the problem isn?t that people are lazy. It?s not that working-class people don?t have a work ethic. In a sense they?re victimized by the advances of technology and globalization and so forth. The classic response to that is to urge the state to protect them. Take Karl Polanyi?s view that these forces can?t be defeated or pushed back, but that there must be some form of guided social adjustment, because society on its own adjusts much less quickly than underlying technology and trade patterns change. But then, if you say we?re stuck because the government can?t do anything, there isn?t a solution. Or at least there isn?t the classic solution: more redistribution and active labor market policies like they have in Scandinavia, which arrange for worker retraining.

In terms of clean tech, I think the classic infant-industry argument might apply here. It?s true that it isn?t competitive with fossil fuel technology right now, but we?re walking very rapidly down a cost curve, especially in solar tech. Governments have provided a certain amount of help in commercializing technologies. Certainly the Chinese have been doing this big time, which is why they?ve undermined our alternative energy industries. Where do you stand on that kind of intervention?

Peter Thiel: We have different kinds of challenges on the government side. One is a little more philosophical in nature: We tend to think the future is indeterminate. But it used to be seen as a much more determinate thing and subject to rational planning. If it?s fundamentally unknowable, it doesn?t make sense to say anything about it. To put it in mathematical terms, we?ve had a shift from thinking of the world in terms of calculus to statistics. So, where we once tracked the motions of the heavenly bodies and could send Voyager to Jupiter over a multiyear trajectory, now we tend to think nature is fundamentally driven by the random movements of atoms or the Black-Scholes mathematical model of financial markets?the random walk down Wall Street. You can?t know where things are going; you only know they?re going to be random. I think some things are true about this statistical view of the future, but it?s extremely toxic for any kind of rational planning. It?s probably linked in part to the failure of state communist central planning, though I would argue that there is something to be said for some planning over no planning. We should debate whether it should be decentralized or centralized, but what the United States has today is an extremely big government, a quasi-socialist government, but without a five-year plan, with no plan whatsoever.

If you were to telescope this now down to a single issue like clean energy, the unplanned statistical view of the future is that we don?t know what energy technology will work, so we?ll experiment with different things and see what takes off. The planned view says that two are most likely to be dominant, and so the government has a role to play in coordinating resources and making sure they work. So if it?s nuclear power, it has to free up space at Yucca Mountain, deal with zoning rules and get plants built, and it?s a complicated project at the regulatory level. The same is true of solar or wind power. If government wants high-speed rail, it must overcome local zoning rules. My guess is that at best we can push on just a handful of these major things, but that sort of determinate push requires a view of the future that is very specific, and that?s not now the kind of view people have.

The Solyndra bankruptcy is a detailed example of this. It strikes me that the Obama Administration?s response should have been, ?Well, Solyndra failed, but here are two or three companies we awarded loan guarantees that are working great.? They didn?t give that response. There?s a bad explanation and a worse explanation for that. The bad explanation is that none of these companies are working. The worse explanation?the one I believe is true?is that no one at a senior level in the Administration even thinks about the question of technology. It?s assumed to be a statistical, probabilistic thing that?s best figured out by portfolio allocations of capital to different researchers, and not a worthwhile subject to think about. This is a radically different position than, say, that of John F. Kennedy, who could talk about the nuts and bolts of the Apollo space program and all the details of what was needed to make it happen. So it?s a much different way of thinking about the future.

If there is going to be a government role in getting innovation started, people have to believe philosophically that it?s possible to plan. That?s not the world we?re living in. A letter from Einstein to the White House would get lost in the mail room today. Nobody would think that any single person would have that kind of expertise.

Francis Fukuyama: Well, clearly, Silicon Valley was in many ways the product of a government industrial policy, DARPA. So much of the early technology, the creation of the internet itself, the early semiconductor industry, were really spinoffs from investments in military technology that were obviously pushed very strongly by the government.

Peter Thiel: My libertarian views are qualified because I do think things worked better in the 1950s and 60s, but it?s an interesting question as to what went wrong with DARPA. It?s not like it has been defunded, so why has DARPA been doing so much less for the economy than it did forty or fifty years ago? Parts of it have become politicized. You can?t just write checks to the thirty smartest scientists in the United States. Instead there are bureaucratic processes, and I think the politicization of science?where a lot of scientists have to write grant applications, be subject to peer review, and have to get all these people to buy in?all this has been toxic, because the skills that make a great scientist and the skills that make a great politician are radically different. There are very few people who are both great scientists and great politicians. So a conservative account of what happened with science in the 20th century is that we had a decentralized, non-governmental approach all the way through the 1930s and early 1940s. At that point, the government could accelerate and push things tremendously, but only at the price of politicizing it over a series of decades. Today we have a hundred times more scientists than we did in 1920, but their productivity per capita is less that it used to be.

Francis Fukuyama: You certainly can?t explain the survival of the shuttle program except in political terms.

Peter Thiel: It was an extraordinary program. It cost more and did less and was probably less safe than the original Apollo program. In 2011, when it finally ended, there was a sense of the space age being over. Not quite, but it?s very far off from what we had decades ago. You could argue that we had more or better-targeted funding in the 1950s and 1960s, but the other place where the regulatory situation is radically different is that technology is much more heavily regulated than it used to be. It?s much harder to get a new drug through the FDA process. It takes a billion dollars. I don?t even know if you could get the polio vaccine approved today.

One regulatory perspective is that environmentalism has played a much greater role than people think. It induced a deep skepticism about anything involving the manipulation of nature or material objects in the real world. The response to environmentalism was to prohibit scientists from experimenting with stuff and only allow them to do so with bits. So computer science and finance were legal, and what they have in common is that they involve the manipulation of bits rather than stuff. They both did well in those forty years, but all the other engineering disciplines were stymied. Electric engineering, civil engineering, aeronautical, nuclear, petroleum?these were all held back, and attracted fewer talented students at university as the years went on. When people wonder why all the rocket scientists went to work on Wall Street, well, they were no longer able to build rockets. It?s some combination of an ossified, Weberian bureaucracy and the increasingly hostile regulation of technology. That?s very different from the 1950s and 1960s. There?s a powerful libertarian argument that government used to be far less intrusive, but found targeted ways to advance science and technology.

Francis Fukuyama: Let?s talk about the social impact of these changes. Those stagnating median wages basically translate into a guy who had been working in the auto industry or the steel industry at $15 or $20 an hour but is now a very downwardly mobile checker at Walmart. So does the government have a role in protecting that kind of individual? If, as you say, we?re up to 1789 levels of inequality, this could be a socially explosive situation?perhaps not now, but down the road. The classic response of many capitalists is that you have to save capitalism from its own excesses by some form of redistribution or protecting the people hurt by it.

Peter Thiel: I think most government welfare spending does not actually go to poor people. I don?t have a problem with the amount of money going to poor people, and perhaps we could do somewhat more. There are some very out-of-the-box solutions we could explore, such as a more protectionist trade policy, which would effectively raise taxes through tariffs and protect a range of domestic jobs. Even though that?s an inefficient move from a certain economic perspective, perhaps it?s a better way to raise taxes than a variety of other means. The argument has been that hampering free trade distorts markets, but every tax distorts markets, so you need to make a relative argument, not an absolute one.

The reality is that most government entitlements are middle-class in nature: social security, Medicare, a lot of the education pieces. One type of reform would be to means-test all entitlement spending, but you then run into these difficult political problems. My larger view is that all these fixes are simply provisional. The overarching challenge is that all the questions about how much the government should insulate people from what?s going on depend on how far we are from equilibrium. Take, for instance, competition with Japan in the 1970s, when people were being paid half as much and it was disruptive to the car industry. Was there something we could have done? Perhaps, but China has four times as many people and wages at one-tenth of the U.S. level. The disequilibrium goes much further.

On the one hand, we should streamline the welfare state to help those who are actually poor, as opposed to the middle class. But at the same time we need to do more to make people aware of the need to compete globally. One area where government has really failed is that its use of resources have encouraged people not to even think about the worldwide stuff. The U.S. government in 1965 made the American people much more aware of global competition and global trade than they are today. The economy has shifted from manufacturing to non-tradeable services. If you?re a lawyer, yes, there?s some complicated way in which you?re subject to international pressure, but you?ve basically chosen a career path that doesn?t force you to compete globally. The same is true of a nurse, a yoga instructor, a professor or a chef. So this skewing toward non-tradable service-sector jobs has led to a political class that is weirdly immune to globalization and mostly oblivious to it.

Francis Fukuyama: I agree with you that we?ve bought this line from the economists for the past thirty that globalization is inevitably going to be good without thinking through these points you raise.

I?d like to shift now to the question of biotech and biology. I know you?ve been an investor in companies researching issues like longevity, a personal interest of yours. This is one of those areas, I think, where there?s conflict between an individual?s interest in living forever versus the social good of population turnover. Steve Jobs said this in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, that we should welcome death, because without it people wouldn?t see much change. It?s like Max Planck?s old saying, ?Science progresses one funeral at a time.? Pick your discipline, and I think that?s largely true. And actually, it seems like a lot of our fiscal woes are due to the fact that people live too long now. We used to have population pyramids; now they look more like Greek vases, with a big mass of older people resting on a decelerating rate of population growth. So isn?t the cumulative impact of advancing biomedical research into longevity going to be to worsen every single one of the social problems you point to?

Peter Thiel: I don?t agree with the Steve Jobs commencement speech. I?m deeply skeptical about any sort of rationalization of death. It?s tricky to make the ethics too consequentialist, because even if it were true that longevity is bankrupting the welfare state or the healthcare system, we can?t unlearn the things we?ve learned. The goal of longevity research is for people to live longer and healthier lives. If it succeeds, the key thing is just to raise the retirement age. Retirement in many cases at age 65 is absurd given present life expectancy, which has been going up two and a half years each decade. In 1840, 46 years was the maximum life expectancy (among Swedish women); today it?s 86 years (among Japanese women). And every day that you survive, your life expectancy goes up something like five or six hours. So the policy calibration should be to have an automatic increase of the retirement age by three months per year.

The secondary, more scientific question is whether the claims are correct that these technologies are producing longer, healthy lives; perhaps they?re producing longer, unhealthy lives. I think the truth involves some of both. The average seventy-year-old is healthier, but at the margins there are longer periods of suffering, such as with Alzheimer?s. About a third of people age 85 have either Alzheimer?s or some incipient dementia. If we can?t cure some of these late-stage ailments, there?s a prospect of a very long period of debility before death. I think the jury is still out.

To take a step back, the entire longevity research program is the culmination of the Western scientific project. It was part of Francis Bacon?s New Atlantis, and has been a recurrent thread through much of the past 400 years of science. I don?t think we can abandon it or carve it out without abandoning technological progress altogether. It?s too closely linked to it.

Francis Fukuyama: One of the concerns is with innovation. Part of what produces innovation is generational turnover. You see this in academia all the time. The people with the best ideas are younger professors. When you get to be my age, you more or less stopped thinking 25 years ago. If you live another 25 years, you?ll probably have the same dumb ideas you do today. In a sense, there?s a remorseless evolutionary logic to the fact that one generation has to grow up in different circumstances, adjust to that and see the world differently.

Peter Thiel: One of the critical areas of research today is neurobiology. The trickiest organ to deal with is the brain system. We can imagine replacing other organs as they wear out with artificial ones, but you wouldn?t want to have your brain replaced. So the longevity project must look at brain functioning and find ways to improve it over time. I think significant drug advances in neurobiology have happened over the past 15 years, and there?s good reason to believe we?ll see more progress in the next few decades.

Even if mathematicians peak in their twenties, as you suggest, a writer-philosopher has a long shelf-life, so you?ve picked a good career path for the age of longevity. I still think the correct answer is to figure out ways to acknowledge the fact, to address tenure and other systems that privilege the old over the young.

Francis Fukuyama: Look at California, for instance, where we spend much more on Medicare and pensions for the old than on K-12 education.

Peter Thiel: It?s a political problem, I agree, because old people vote and young people do not or cannot. On the other hand, if you look at the venture capital industry, it tends to allocate a lot of capital to younger people who start companies. The university is a strangely problematic case where it?s hard for young researchers to get funding. I think the public sector is more broken than the private sector.

Francis Fukuyama: As a last topic, let?s turn to your thoughts on education. You?ve made the case that many people overinvest in higher education. So you offered fellowships to allow people to drop out and start companies. Beyond that, what?s the agenda in terms of reforming the system? More privatization? There was a recent piece about people connected to the Obama Administration lobbying for less regulation of for-profit education. It seems like that?s become a pretty politicized area. What?s the next step in fixing this overinvestment problem?

Peter Thiel: Again, I look at this through my overarching view of forty years of technological stagnation, and an attendant unawareness of it because a series of bubbles have distracted us. There?s an education bubble, which is, like the others, psychosocial. There?s a wide public buy-in that leads to a product being overvalued because it?s linked to future expectations that are unrealistic. Education is similar to the tech bubble of the late 1990s, which assumed crazy growth in businesses that didn?t pan out. The education bubble is predicated on the idea that the education provided is incredibly valuable. In many cases that?s just not true. Here and elsewhere people have avoided facing the fact of stagnation by telling themselves stories about familiar things leading to progress. One fake vector of progress is credentialing?first the undergraduate degree, then more advanced degrees. Like the others, it?s an avoidance mechanism.

The bias I had five years ago was that my foundation should start a new university and just do everything better. I looked into it in great detail, examining all the new universities that have been started throughout the world in the past ten years, and found that very little has worked. It has been a huge misallocation of capital, and donor intent got lost on all sorts of levels. I started out wondering how you could allocate money for the improvement of education and concluded that there was no way to do it.

This relates to the problem I mentioned earlier with taking a statistical, unplanned approach to the future: A student doesn?t know what to do, so he learns stuff. When I taught at Stanford Law School last year, I asked students what they planned to do with their lives. Most were headed to big law firms but didn?t expect to become partners and didn?t know the next step after that. They didn?t have long-term plans about what they wanted to achieve in their lives. I think the educational system has become a major factor stopping people from thinking about the future. It?s far from equilibrium. There is something like $1 trillion in student debt. A cynical view is that that represents $1 trillion worth of lies told about the value of higher education. There are incredible incentives to exaggerate its value, and the counter-narrative has been shaky but is coming to the fore. Bubbles end when people stop believing the false narrative and start thinking for themselves. So many students are not getting the jobs they need to repay their debts, are moving back in with their parents, and the contract both parties signed up for is being revealed as false.

I don?t know exactly what will replace it. I suspect the for-profit schools are like the subprime brokers. I?m not in favor of them and wouldn?t even describe them as private-sector entities, since they?re so enmeshed in the system of state educational subsidies. If you had a strong government that worked, it would be fighting to break these bubbles. One of the reasons I?m a libertarian is that our government does not act in a counter-cyclical way. When bubbles are at their peak, it actually reinforces them?makes them worse. Today, the courageous thing for the government to do would be to aggressively tilt against the prevailing psychology, to encourage the pursuit of non-college vocational careers rather than adding fuel to the fire, as it has been doing.

Francis Fukuyama: One last question. The New Yorker profile of you mentioned that you?ve been reading Leo Strauss. Why?

Peter Thiel: I?ve been interested in Strauss for a long time. I think Strauss was a very important and profound thinker. His essay ?Persecution and the Art of Writing? shows how in all societies certain ideas are not allowed to be discussed. Properly understood, political correctness is our greatest political problem. We always have this question of how to build a society in which important problems can be thought through and tackled. It?s a mistake to simply fixate on the problem of political correctness in its narrow incarnation of campus speech codes; it?s a much more pervasive problem. For instance, part of what fuels the education bubble is that we?re not allowed to articulate certain truths about the inequality of abilities. Many of our destructive bubbles are linked to political correctness, and that?s why Strauss is so important today.

Francis Fukuyama: Excellent. Thank you very much.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1187

69
3DHS / The New American Divide
« on: February 07, 2012, 04:32:40 AM »
The New American Divide

By CHARLES MURRAY

America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world?for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day."

Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.


People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality.

When Americans used to brag about "the American way of life"?a phrase still in common use in 1960?they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.

To illustrate just how wide the gap has grown between the new upper class and the new lower class, let me start with the broader upper-middle and working classes from which they are drawn, using two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution).

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor's degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.

People who qualify for my Belmont constitute about 20% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. People who qualify for my Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49.

I specify white, meaning non-Latino white, as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the U.S. have become. Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity. I specify ages 30 to 49?what I call prime-age adults?to make it clear that these trends are not explained by changes in the ages of marriage or retirement.

In Belmont and Fishtown, here's what happened to America's common culture between 1960 and 2010.

Marriage: In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and Fishtown were married?94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10.

Single parenthood: Another aspect of marriage?the percentage of children born to unmarried women?showed just as great a divergence. Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families. This unwelcome reality persists even after controlling for the income and education of the parents.

In 1960, just 2% of all white births were nonmarital. When we first started recording the education level of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education?women, that is, with a Fishtown education?were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970.

Industriousness: The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men are supposed to work. In practice, though, that norm has eroded everywhere. In Fishtown, the change has been drastic. (To avoid conflating this phenomenon with the latest recession, I use data collected in March 2008 as the end point for the trends.)

The primary indicator of the erosion of industriousness in the working class is the increase of prime-age males with no more than a high school education who say they are not available for work?they are "out of the labor force." That percentage went from a low of 3% in 1968 to 12% in 2008. Twelve percent may not sound like much until you think about the men we're talking about: in the prime of their working lives, their 30s and 40s, when, according to hallowed American tradition, every American man is working or looking for work. Almost one out of eight now aren't. Meanwhile, not much has changed among males with college educations. Only 3% were out of the labor force in 2008.

There's also been a notable change in the rates of less-than-full-time work. Of the men in Fishtown who had jobs, 10% worked fewer than 40 hours a week in 1960, a figure that grew to 20% by 2008. In Belmont, the number rose from 9% in 1960 to 12% in 2008.

Crime: The surge in crime that began in the mid-1960s and continued through the 1980s left Belmont almost untouched and ravaged Fishtown. From 1960 to 1995, the violent crime rate in Fishtown more than sextupled while remaining nearly flat in Belmont. The reductions in crime since the mid-1990s that have benefited the nation as a whole have been smaller in Fishtown, leaving it today with a violent crime rate that is still 4.7 times the 1960 rate.

Religiosity: Whatever your personal religious views, you need to realize that about half of American philanthropy, volunteering and associational memberships is directly church-related, and that religious Americans also account for much more nonreligious social capital than their secular neighbors. In that context, it is worrisome for the culture that the U.S. as a whole has become markedly more secular since 1960, and especially worrisome that Fishtown has become much more secular than Belmont. It runs against the prevailing narrative of secular elites versus a working class still clinging to religion, but the evidence from the General Social Survey, the most widely used database on American attitudes and values, does not leave much room for argument.

For example, suppose we define "de facto secular" as someone who either professes no religion at all or who attends a worship service no more than once a year. For the early GSS surveys conducted from 1972 to 1976, 29% of Belmont and 38% of Fishtown fell into that category. Over the next three decades, secularization did indeed grow in Belmont, from 29% in the 1970s to 40% in the GSS surveys taken from 2006 to 2010. But it grew even more in Fishtown, from 38% to 59%.

***

It can be said without hyperbole that these divergences put Belmont and Fishtown into different cultures. But it's not just the working class that's moved; the upper middle class has pulled away in its own fashion, too.

If you were an executive living in Belmont in 1960, income inequality would have separated you from the construction worker in Fishtown, but remarkably little cultural inequality. You lived a more expensive life, but not a much different life. Your kitchen was bigger, but you didn't use it to prepare yogurt and muesli for breakfast. Your television screen was bigger, but you and the construction worker watched a lot of the same shows (you didn't have much choice). Your house might have had a den that the construction worker's lacked, but it had no StairMaster or lap pool, nor any gadget to monitor your percentage of body fat. You both drank Bud, Miller, Schlitz or Pabst, and the phrase "boutique beer" never crossed your lips. You probably both smoked. If you didn't, you did not glare contemptuously at people who did.

When you went on vacation, you both probably took the family to the seashore or on a fishing trip, and neither involved hotels with five stars. If you had ever vacationed outside the U.S. (and you probably hadn't), it was a one-time trip to Europe, where you saw eight cities in 14 days?not one of the two or three trips abroad you now take every year for business, conferences or eco-vacations in the cloud forests of Costa Rica.

You both lived in neighborhoods where the majority of people had only high-school diplomas?and that might well have included you. The people around you who did have college degrees had almost invariably gotten them at state universities or small religious colleges mostly peopled by students who were the first generation of their families to attend college. Except in academia, investment banking, a few foundations, the CIA and the State Department, you were unlikely to run into a graduate of Harvard, Princeton or Yale.

Even the income inequality that separated you from the construction worker was likely to be new to your adulthood. The odds are good that your parents had been in the working class or middle class, that their income had not been much different from the construction worker's, that they had lived in communities much like his, and that the texture of the construction worker's life was recognizable to you from your own childhood.

Taken separately, the differences in lifestyle that now separate Belmont from Fishtown are not sinister, but those quirks of the upper-middle class that I mentioned?the yogurt and muesli and the rest?are part of a mosaic of distinctive practices that have developed in Belmont. These have to do with the food Belmonters eat, their drinking habits, the ages at which they marry and have children, the books they read (and their number), the television shows and movies they watch (and the hours spent on them), the humor they enjoy, the way they take care of their bodies, the way they decorate their homes, their leisure activities, their work environments and their child-raising practices. Together, they have engendered cultural separation.

It gets worse. A subset of Belmont consists of those who have risen to the top of American society. They run the country, meaning that they are responsible for the films and television shows you watch, the news you see and read, the fortunes of the nation's corporations and financial institutions, and the jurisprudence, legislation and regulations produced by government. They are the new upper class, even more detached from the lives of the great majority of Americans than the people of Belmont?not just socially but spatially as well. The members of this elite have increasingly sorted themselves into hyper-wealthy and hyper-elite ZIP Codes that I call the SuperZIPs.

In 1960, America already had the equivalent of SuperZIPs in the form of famously elite neighborhoods?places like the Upper East Side of New York, Philadelphia's Main Line, the North Shore of Chicago and Beverly Hills. But despite their prestige, the people in them weren't uniformly wealthy or even affluent. Across 14 of the most elite places to live in 1960, the median family income wasn't close to affluence. It was just $84,000 (in today's purchasing power). Only one in four adults in those elite communities had a college degree.

By 2000, that diversity had dwindled. Median family income had doubled, to $163,000 in the same elite ZIP Codes. The percentage of adults with B.A.s rose to 67% from 26%. And it's not just that elite neighborhoods became more homogeneously affluent and highly educated?they also formed larger and larger clusters.

If you are invited to a dinner party by one of Washington's power elite, the odds are high that you will be going to a home in Georgetown, the rest of Northwest D.C., Chevy Chase, Bethesda, Potomac or McLean, comprising 13 adjacent ZIP Codes in all. If you rank all the ZIP Codes in the country on an index of education and income and group them by percentiles, you will find that 11 of these 13 D.C.-area ZIP Codes are in the 99th percentile and the other two in the 98th. Ten of them are in the top half of the 99th percentile.

Similarly large clusters of SuperZIPs can be found around New York City, Los Angeles, the San Francisco-San Jose corridor, Boston and a few of the nation's other largest cities. Because running major institutions in this country usually means living near one of these cities, it works out that the nation's power elite does in fact live in a world that is far more culturally rarefied and isolated than the world of the power elite in 1960.

And the isolation is only going to get worse. Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into that world. Unlike the typical member of the elite in 1960, they have never known anything but the new upper-class culture. We are now seeing more and more third-generation members of the elite. Not even their grandparents have been able to give them a window into life in the rest of America.

***

Why have these new lower and upper classes emerged? For explaining the formation of the new lower class, the easy explanations from the left don't withstand scrutiny. It's not that white working class males can no longer make a "family wage" that enables them to marry. The average male employed in a working-class occupation earned as much in 2010 as he did in 1960. It's not that a bad job market led discouraged men to drop out of the labor force. Labor-force dropout increased just as fast during the boom years of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s as it did during bad years.

As I've argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.

But, for practical purposes, understanding why the new lower class got started isn't especially important. Once the deterioration was under way, a self-reinforcing loop took hold as traditionally powerful social norms broke down. Because the process has become self-reinforcing, repealing the reforms of the 1960s (something that's not going to happen) would change the trends slowly at best.

Meanwhile, the formation of the new upper class has been driven by forces that are nobody's fault and resist manipulation. The economic value of brains in the marketplace will continue to increase no matter what, and the most successful of each generation will tend to marry each other no matter what. As a result, the most successful Americans will continue to trend toward consolidation and isolation as a class. Changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy won't make a difference. Increasing scholarships for working-class children won't make a difference.

The only thing that can make a difference is the recognition among Americans of all classes that a problem of cultural inequality exists and that something has to be done about it. That "something" has nothing to do with new government programs or regulations. Public policy has certainly affected the culture, unfortunately, but unintended consequences have been as grimly inevitable for conservative social engineering as for liberal social engineering.

The "something" that I have in mind has to be defined in terms of individual American families acting in their own interests and the interests of their children. Doing that in Fishtown requires support from outside. There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need?not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending "nonjudgmentalism." Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

Changing life in the SuperZIPs requires that members of the new upper class rethink their priorities. Here are some propositions that might guide them: Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting. Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people. If you're not part of that America, you've stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special.

Such priorities can be expressed in any number of familiar decisions: the neighborhood where you buy your next home, the next school that you choose for your children, what you tell them about the value and virtues of physical labor and military service, whether you become an active member of a religious congregation (and what kind you choose) and whether you become involved in the life of your community at a more meaningful level than charity events.

Everyone in the new upper class has the monetary resources to make a wide variety of decisions that determine whether they engage themselves and their children in the rest of America or whether they isolate themselves from it. The only question is which they prefer to do.

That's it? But where's my five-point plan? We're supposed to trust that large numbers of parents will spontaneously, voluntarily make the right choice for the country by making the right choice for themselves and their children?

Yes, we are, but I don't think that's naive. I see too many signs that the trends I've described are already worrying a lot of people. If enough Americans look unblinkingly at the nature of the problem, they'll fix it. One family at a time. For their own sakes. That's the American way.

?Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960?2010" (Crown Forum) will be published on Jan. 31.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577170733817181646.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5

71
3DHS / I'm So Bored With MLK
« on: January 16, 2012, 07:35:03 AM »
I'm So Bored With MLK
by Jim Goad

January 16, 2012

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I had a dream I stood on the mountaintop and puked.

As we all gather around the Guilt Pole to commemorate Martin Luther King's approximate birthday, 94% of Americans agree that he was a mighty swell fella.

That's a tremendous shift from the last few years of MLK's life, when never more than a third of Americans seemed to approve of him. But ever since his 1968 murder, a carefully constructed religious aura has been fashioned around King like garland being wrapped tightly around a Christmas tree. His ongoing canonization is such that Jesus is now merely Martin's towel boy. Compared to MLK, Jesus is not very sacred at all in this culture. He's a much safer target to criticize.

The corpse of Jackie Onassis was recently exhumed and publicly flogged when it was revealed that she'd said some less-than-worshipful things about Doctor King. Most news reports failed to mention that Bobby Kennedy had allegedly told her that MLK arrived drunk to JFK's funeral and made jokes about the pallbearers almost dropping her newly dead husband's coffin. She may also have been tipped off to an FBI surveillance tape which reportedly reveals King watching TV footage of Jackie and her children leaning over JFK's casket, whereupon MLK said disgustedly, "Look at her. Sucking him off one last time."

I won't be able to verify whether MLK actually said that until the year 2027. That's because in 1977 his widow got a court order that sealed up King's voluminous FBI files for 50 years. So until then, we won't know for sure whether he actually made such insensitive comments about his predecessor in assassination, nor whether he actually once shouted, "I'm fucking for God!" while rutting a hooker in a hotel room.

But can we at least dial down the MLK-worship a little, America? Seriously! The recently unveiled monument to him in DC is 30 feet tall, which, to be honest, is 24.5 feet taller than he was in real life. If we've learned anything from his murder, it's how counterproductive it can be to martyr someone. All it does is make them grow.

I find it hard to be reverent about the Reverend. Whenever such a thick cloud of sanctimony enshrouds anyone or anything, my guts tell me to reach for the air freshener. Yes, I realize that there used to be segregated drinking fountains and that in some places, poor little black kids couldn't even buy ice-cream cones from white vendors. But I think it's time we all conceded that many places in Africa don't even have drinking water, much less a single flavor of ice cream.

Is it a deal? Can we, as the eager urban youth like to say, "get real" about all this?

I'm typing this from Stone Mountain, Georgia, immortalized in MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech in the part where he beseeches God?MLK was primarily a "man of God" lest any of you are alarmed at evangelicals who mix church and state?to "Let freedom ring from the Stone Mountain of Georgia." King stole that passage about Stone Mountain from a 1952 oratory delivered by another black preacher at the Republican National Convention. He also allegedly plagiarized parts of the first public sermon he ever delivered back in 1947. It's been established that huge chunks of the good Doctor's doctoral dissertation consisted of wholesale literary theft. The right Reverend clearly didn't mind helping himself to things that belonged to other people.

Oh, and those silly "commie" allegations? Well, if it makes you a Nazi merely to surround yourself with Nazis, then MLK was a communist purely by dint of cramming his entourage with communists. His longtime advisor and secretary Bayard Rustin was an organizer of the Young Communist League. His speechwriter, book editor, event organizer, PR handler, tax advisor, and fundraising kingpin Stanley David Levison was a Communist Party USA leader in the 1950s who reportedly received huge subsidies from the Soviets. King also openly decried the "capitalists of the West," things such as "profit motives and property rights," and encouraged his listeners to "question the capitalistic economy."

But we've all realized that witch-hunting communists is a violation of basic human rights. Therefore, it has been replaced with an endlessly well-financed campaign to conduct witch hunts against anyone remotely suspected of "racism," however the hunters choose to define it.

Perhaps the most insulting thing anyone can say about MLK is that he was the unwitting tool of a government that saw tremendous growth potential in the "racial justice" biz. What exactly is meant by "civil rights," anyway? Is that a nice way of saying, "The utter obliteration of the right to freely associate?" Define these indefinables, please. What is meant by "equality"?and how much will this cost me? What do you mean by "racial justice," "social justice," and just plain "justice," and have you done any price-shopping on it? What's the planned completion date for this ambitious public-works project? How long does my term of indenture last? When will the debt be paid? Do I have a basic human civil right not to pay?

Although his "I Have a Dream" speech gives lip service?no lip jokes, I swear?to "freedom," MLK spoke of "an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny" and "the interrelated structure of reality" and how "Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." That doesn't sound like "freedom" as I define it. Rather, it sounds like a giant Gordian knot of pain-in-the-ass codependency.

Any idea when we'll be "Free at last!" of MLK memorials? Now that would be freedom.

Although he established his rep on a nonviolent platform, the whole showing-up-in-huge-crowds-and-being-nonviolent thing strikes me at the very least as passive-aggressive. As with the Occupy movement, you have to be a wee bit of an asshole to insist on planting your behind where you're not wanted. Although in recent years the historical narrative has been sanitized to portray only white club-wielding police as the perpetrators of violence throughout King's numerous marches and mass demonstrations, there's also evidence that his own protesters were less than peaceful on numerous occasions. The return to Memphis that ended in his murder was aimed at marching once again on behalf of black sanitation workers whose protests had previously turned violent. Some have suggested that the more than 100 riots that erupted nationwide after his murder frightened mainstream white America into making an uneasy truce with American blacks?don't burn down our cities, and we'll give you our lunch money and promise to stop calling you bad names.

Although he said he dreamed of a day when people "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," the affirmative-action schemes he endorsed (he spoke in favor of "preferential treatment" and proposed that "If a city has a 30% Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30% of the jobs in any particular company") are explicitly racial and have zilch to do with character. And I'm not quite sure that someone who claimed "the problems in the world today?must be blamed on the whole doctrine of white supremacy" and that "if one black person is down, we are all down" cared all that much about getting beyond skin color. Are things any less racial these days than they were in the 1960s? Not so far as I can tell. The same media brain-slaves who lick the soles of King's feet continue to race-bait and race-bait, all in the name of anti-racism.

There's also his infamous philandering?he apparently philandered, re-philandered, and kept on with his phreely philanderous ways until there was nothing left to philander. We know that he was great at oratory, but until the FBI files are unsealed, we'll never know if he was any good at oral sex. He reputedly hosted multiple orgies while on the road. In private hotel rooms after the speeches, "We shall overcome" apparently switched to "We shall cum over and over." King even allegedly squandered SCLC funds to pay for booze and whores. Most notable is the allegation that he spent the night before he was murdered inside a Memphis motel room with three separate prostitutes and that it got a little rough with the third one. According to Michael Eric Dyson citing Ralph David Abernathy:

[King] shouted and knocked her across the bed. It was more of a shove than a real blow, but for a short man, Martin had a prodigious strength that always surprised me. She leapt up to fight, and for a moment they were engaged in a full-blown fight, with Martin clearly winning.

Hey, not that there's anything wrong with any of this! I'm not one to judge, but neither do I claim to be a saint. But isn't all this at least sufficient to publicly disrobe Martin Luther King, Jr. of sainthood's holy cloak?

After nearly 1,000 mostly dilapidated American streets named in his honor and a select number of cushy jobs awarded in media, athletics, education, and government, what has MLK achieved for American blacks in real terms? Have you seen Birmingham or Memphis lately? Do these latter-day urban creatures seem somehow nobler than the black men in porkpie hats and Buddy Holly glasses who marched for their amorphous "rights" in the 1960s? To my blue eyes, the new jacks seem a few rungs down from their forebears on the evolutionary ladder.

I've tried to think of what King achieved that I'd want to celebrate, but I'm drawing blanks. I've never wanted to sit next to someone of any color at a lunch counter, so that's a moot point. I know that American restaurants are now integrated, which means that all waiters and waitresses, regardless of their skin color, now realize that black people don't like to tip.

I resent the fact that I'm required to pay a guilt tax due to his presumed accomplishments. I think it's absurd that if I so much as question his sanctity, I'm automatically a sinner.

Beyond all that, the only thing Martin Luther King means to me is that on the third Monday of every January, I don't get my mail delivered.

http://takimag.com/article/im_so_bored_with_mlk#axzz1jW7wYhBF

73
3DHS / Microsoft Patents ?Avoid Ghetto? Feature For GPS Devices
« on: January 08, 2012, 02:03:38 AM »
Microsoft Patents ?Avoid Ghetto? Feature For GPS Devices

REDMOND, Wash. (CBS Seattle) ? Microsoft has been granted a patent for its ?avoid ghetto? feature for GPS devices.

A GPS device is used to find shortcuts and avoid traffic, but Microsoft?s patent states that a route can be plotted for pedestrians to avoid an ?unsafe neighborhood or being in an open area that is subject to harsh temperatures.?

Created for mobile phones, the technology uses the latest crime statistics and weather data and includes them when calculating a route.

The patent, written in a combination of tech-speak and legalese, was awarded to Microsoft earlier this week. It also described other uses for the new GPS technology.

One section of the patent mentioned that advertisers can use the technology to navigate a user through a newly set up ad campaign.

Microsoft declined to comment to CBS Seattle.

http://seattle.cbslocal.com/2012/01/06/microsoft-patents-avoid-ghetto-feature-for-gps-devices/

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3DHS / EEOC: High school diploma requirement might violate ADA
« on: January 01, 2012, 11:41:46 PM »
EEOC: High school diploma requirement might violate Americans with Disabilities Act


Employers are facing more uncertainty in the wake of a letter from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission warning them that requiring a high school diploma from a job applicant might violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The development also has some wondering whether the agency's advice will result in an educational backlash by creating less of an incentive for some high school students to graduate.

The "informal discussion letter" from the EEOC said an employer's requirement of a high school diploma, long a standard criterion for screening potential employees, must be "job-related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity." The letter was posted on the commission's website on Dec. 2.

Employers could run afoul of the ADA if their requirement of a high school diploma ? 'screens out' an individual who is unable to graduate because of a learning disability that meets the ADA's definition of 'disability,' " the EEOC explained.

The commission's advice, which does not carry the force of law, is raising alarms among employment-law professionals, who say it could carry far-reaching implications for businesses.

Maria Greco Danaher, a lawyer with the labor and employment law firm Ogletree Deakins, said the EEOC letter means that employers must determine whether job applicants whose learning disabilities kept them from obtaining diplomas can perform the essential job functions, with or without reasonable accommodation. She said the development is "worthy of notice" for employers.

"While an employer is not required to 'prefer' a learning-disabled applicant over other applicants with more extensive qualifications, it is clear that the EEOC is informing employers that disabled individuals cannot be excluded from consideration for employment based upon artificial barriers in the form of inflexible qualification standards," she wrote in a blog post.

Mary Theresa Metzler, a lawyer with Ballard Spahr in Philadelphia, said there may be an "unintended and unfortunate" repercussion of the EEOC's discussion: "There will be less incentive for the general public to obtain a high school diploma if many employers eliminate that requirement for job applicants in their workplace."

Officials at the EEOC said the letter in question addressed "a particular inquiry" and disputed that it would have repercussions in secondary education.

"No, we don't think the regulation would discourage people from obtaining high school diplomas," said Peggy Mastroianni, legal counsel for the EEOC. "People are aware that they need all the education they can get."

She said the letter does not offer a new interpretation of the ADA.

Jeanne Goldberg, a senior lawyer/adviser at the agency, said the issue would come up only when high school graduation standards are not related to a specific job.

"This would never arise when the high school diploma is in fact necessary to do a job," she said.

Ms. Metzler said the policy could lead the EEOC to bring claims against employers or encourage applicants who have failed to gain employment to raise the issue.

"The EEOC may be inclined to test its view on the high school diploma requirement and its impact on the disabled in a court case," said Ms. Metzler, who is advising clients to "review their job descriptions to determine if a high school degree is truly necessary, or would aid the employee in performing the essential functions of the particular job.

"While such a requirement is routinely included by many employers, a deeper analysis may demonstrate that a lesser educational requirement might suffice," she said.

Some worry that the EEOC's letter could place less emphasis on a diploma in the workplace, but the push in Congress has been in the opposite direction. House Republicans sought late last year to reform the federal unemployment-benefit system by requiring recipients of aid who do not have high school degrees to be "enrolled and making satisfactory progress in classes" toward a General Education Development certificate or equivalent.

That proposal was not part of the final deal that Congress approved to extend a payroll-tax holiday for two months, but Republicans say they intend to renew their call for the reform this year.

Some corporate counsels are advising clients to adjust the way they approach the hiring process.

"Employers are wise to evaluate whether a high school diploma really is necessary to perform the essential functions of any job for which it is being required," the Employer Law Report advised in a blog post by Lisa Whittaker, a lawyer with the Porter Wright firm, which has represented business clients for more than 150 years.

"Even in those situations where the high school diploma requirement can be justified, employers will still need to consider" whether a "reasonable accommodation" could be provided to allow a disabled person without a diploma to perform a given job.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/1/eeoc-high-school-diploma-might-violate-americans-w/

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3DHS / Forbidden Fruit
« on: December 31, 2011, 02:45:07 AM »
Forbidden Fruit
by Paul Gottfried

Even in this progressive age, religious uncertainties still abound as we approach Holy Season, which begins with St. Martin's Day on January 16 and extends throughout Black History Month. This was made dramatically clear last week at a college near where I live, a place that has demoted the ancient Christian holiday that falls on December 25 and the weeks leading up to it as "holiday season."

Meanwhile the institution is making every effort to commemorate MLK's trials and martyrdom. Considering his stature, the customary one-day celebration was deemed inadequate, so they are preparing for a weeklong celebration of their twentieth-century savior. The sacred week will be devoted to recounting America's racist past, what remains to be done to overcome that past, and most importantly, the question of whether King's pronouncements can help advance gay and transvestite agendas.

When asked to submit lecture proposals, only one faculty member bothered to respond, but since this wiseacre had the temerity to question King's spiritual purity, he was immediately turned down. Still, there's no reason to suspect that other faculty members were equally irreverent. One retired professor wrote to his colleagues that the proposed celebration did not dwell sufficiently on Southern wickedness. He also said the college was not doing enough to exalt King, given what this truly heroic figure had done to raise us out of our bigotry.

The college community was peacefully and reverentially preparing for January 16 until someone expressed an idea that befouled the worshipers as if a garbage truck's contents had been dumped on their heads. This disruption is equivalent to the controversy over Christ's divinity that wracked the early Christian world. The person who set it off belonged to the college's venerable Center for Global Citizenship and was helping to plan an international dinner to be served for foreign students on the academic liturgical calendar's holiest day. In his childlike simplicity he suggested including a large fleshy-centered fruit called "w----n."

Rather thoughtlessly, the committee was planning a festive menu without beseeching the approval of their religious superior-the black female Director of Diversity. Had they acted through the designated chain of authority, the ensuing controversy would not likely have arisen. The lower clergy would have known it was acting in a way that ran contrary to the teachings of the Church of Political Correctness, whose highest campus official is the diversity-directing minority lady. Similar grave oversights may have led to Christendom's split in the sixteenth century, if one may be allowed to compare the present moment of high sensitivity to outdated religious superstitions.

The Director of Diversity issued a pronouncement emphatically prohibiting her flock from serving w----n on the Feast of St. Martin. The prelate explained that w----n is a "symbol of oppression to all black people," thus it would be racist to serve at a college event. To their credit, those associated with Global Citizenship immediately withdrew their menu suggestion and have acted contritely ever since. But what sort of benighted being wouldn't recognize the gravity of this offense on their own? They had ignored repeated warnings that a prohibition would be coming. For months the Director had lamented the fact that the forbidden fruit was being served on campus. But others chose to ignore these cries of despair.

Still, it would be nice if the college's highest ecclesiastical official spoke conclusively about how far the prohibition extends. This lady has been all too taciturn in engaging a question of deep moral and ritual significance. A clergyman who is still vaguely associated with the now-vanquished Christian religion has appealed to the Office of Diversity for further clarification. Are we about to see a political scandal erupt if the fruit were to appear again on campus? The college's future may involve a local Watermelongate.

Will students still be permitted to eat w----n in the dining hall? What about their dorm rooms and while snacking between classes? Perhaps there will be differing degrees of prohibition, depending on whether or not one is pursuing the path to PC perfection. Students might be allowed to munch on the fruit in private, but for those seeking absolute sensitivity, it will be necessary to practice total abstinence.

I have picked a middle path. Since I am hopelessly addicted to the fruit of sin and buy it even during the winter when it has to be imported from Chile, I could not give up eating it. But I can show verbal restraint by not mentioning the word designating that green thing with the red juicy pulp in the middle. That's the least I can do to exhibit solidarity with those true believers.

There are other repercussions to be feared. Fights may soon be breaking out in the dining hall if the dreaded red stuff shows up in a fruit salad and students are unclear about how to address such a grave situation. Should they throw the pollutant into the garbage can, or are they supposed to burn the red, pulpy matter lest they contaminate themselves with a "racist" substance? What does a fastidious practitioner of PC do if some of the contaminant gets on his/her shoes while he/she's walking near a supermarket? Is he/she required to destroy the shoes lest they become polluted by contact with racism? What should I do if I accidentally blurt out the horrible word at a fruit counter? Is there some penance I'll have to peform, such as reciting the "I Have a Dream" speech fourteen times or attending the College Diversity Committee's monthly meeting? Those of us who are not fully sensitized beg for instruction.

http://takimag.com/article/forbidden_fruit#axzz1i2ahWYJh

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