The Next Liberal Fad

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Precious and The Blind Side point to what Steve Sailer cynically calls the next liberal fad:

This weekend saw the national rollout of two crowd-pleaser movies about impoverished 350-pound black teens: Precious and The Blind Side. (What an amazing country we have, where a pair of poor children can tip the scales at 700 pounds!)

Together, the two films reflect an emerging, if seldom fully articulated, consensus among all right-thinking people in this Bush-Obama era about what to do with underclass black children.

Precious is the story of an illiterate 16-year-old girl who was made pregnant and HIV-positive by her rapist father, but her real problem is her abusive welfare mother with whom she shares a Section 8 apartment. Still, with the help of tireless teachers and social workers, she moves into a halfway house and begins to turn her life around.

The Blind Side is an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s 2006 nonfiction bestseller about Michael Oher. A homeless 16-year-old with a drug addict mother and a father who was thrown off a bridge, Oher was adopted by a rich white family. He’s now a rookie starting offensive tackle for the Baltimore Ravens of the NFL, with a five-year $13,795,000 contract.

The Blind Side’s writer-director John Lee Hancock told Michael Granberry of the Dallas News:

“He loves what he calls its nature vs. nurture story line. “It’s like a test case for nurture, and nurture wins in a big way. You’ve got a kid who’s cast on the junk heap of life, socially and from an educational standpoint. And it’s amazing what a roof, a bed, meals and an emphasis on schools can do, when everybody had written him off.” [The Texan behind 'The Blind Side', November 15, 2009]

The Blind Side is the rare movie in which white Southern Republican born-again Christians are portrayed favorably. One liberal commenter on IMDB.com raged, “I feel insulted (in the same way I felt insulted when McCain chose Palin for his running-mate) …”

Of course, this positive Hollywood treatment of a white Republican family comes only in the context of their writing a humongous black youth into their wills.

These two films help us understand the common denominator of the demands increasingly heard in the media for mandatory preschool, longer school days, shorter summer vacations, and universal post-high school education. They flow from the inevitable logic of the following syllogism:

  • Since 45 years of Great Society programs subsidizing black families have failed to close the black-white gap in school achievement;

  • And since only evil people suspect that nature as well as nurture plays a role in the black-white gap;

  • Therefore, poor black children are victims of their family environments, and thus should be, as much as possible, kept away from their families and raised by whites or middle-class blacks.

The New York Times Magazine has devoted countless articles in this decade to this general theme, such as The Inner-City Prep School Experience by Maggie Jones [September 25, 2009], about a public boarding school in Southeast Washington. The story is largely devoted to worrying that the school’s annual per student expenditure of $35,000 of the taxpayers’ money isn’t enough to keep the kids locked up in an enriching environment 24×7. When they go home on Fridays, they are re-exposed to black slum culture. Presumably, their test scores decline over the weekend.

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MS is not an autoimmune condition, but a vascular disease

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

When Paolo Zamboni, a professor of medicine at the University of Ferrara in Italy, found out his wife was coming down with multiple sclerosis, he did his own research and concluded that MS is not an autoimmune condition, but a vascular disease:

Fighting for his wife’s health, Dr. Zamboni looked for answers in the medical literature. He found repeated references, dating back a century, to excess iron as a possible cause of MS. The heavy metal can cause inflammation and cell death, hallmarks of the disease. The vascular surgeon was intrigued — coincidentally, he had been researching how iron buildup damages blood vessels in the legs, and wondered if there could be a similar problem in the blood vessels of the brain.

Using ultrasound to examine the vessels leading in and out of the brain, Dr. Zamboni made a startling find: In more than 90 per cent of people with multiple sclerosis, including his spouse, the veins draining blood from the brain were malformed or blocked. In people without MS, they were not.

He hypothesized that iron was damaging the blood vessels and allowing the heavy metal, along with other unwelcome cells, to cross the crucial brain-blood barrier. (The barrier keeps blood and cerebrospinal fluid separate. In MS, immune cells cross the blood-brain barrier, where they destroy myelin, a crucial sheathing on nerves.)

More striking still was that, when Dr. Zamboni performed a simple operation to unclog veins and get blood flowing normally again, many of the symptoms of MS disappeared. The procedure is similar to angioplasty, in which a catheter is threaded into the groin and up into the arteries, where a balloon is inflated to clear the blockages. His wife, who had the surgery three years ago, has not had an attack since.

The researcher’s theory is simple: that the underlying cause of MS is a condition he has dubbed “chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency.” If you tackle CCSVI by repairing the drainage problems from the brain, you can successfully treat, or better still prevent, the disease.

“If this is proven correct, it will be a very, very big discovery because we’ll completely change the way we think about MS, and how we’ll treat it,” said Bianca Weinstock-Guttman, an associate professor of neurology at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

The initial studies done in Italy were small but the outcomes were dramatic. In a group of 65 patients with relapsing-remitting MS (the most common form) who underwent surgery, the number of active lesions in the brain fell sharply, to 12 per cent from 50 per cent; in the two years after surgery, 73 per cent of patients had no symptoms.

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The White House suffers from Kael syndrome

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

The late New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael famously said after Nixon’s landslide reelection, “How can he have won? Nobody I know voted for him.”

Charles Murray’s proposition is that the White House suffers from Kael syndrome:

The General Social Survey, a mother lode of information for social scientists that has been collected annually or biannually since 1972, has asked people in every survey to say whether they are extremely conservative, conservative, slightly conservative, moderate, slightly liberal, liberal, or extremely liberal. A really simple question.

The graph represents the percentage of people who answered “extremely liberal” or “liberal” minus the percentage of people who answered “extremely conservative” or “conservative” in any given survey.

If you want to see a visual representation of the development of the bubble that Barack Obama has been living in since he left Hawaii, that graph is it. Judging from the GSS data, every white socioeconomic class in America has become more conservative in the last four decades, with the Traditional Middles moving the most decisively rightward. But the Intellectual Uppers have not just moved slightly in the other direction, they have careened in the other direction.

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Spontaneous deprogramming

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

Our modern political structure receives its guidance from the Cathedral of modern academia and respected media outlets like the New York Times, Mencius Moldbug says, but he expects to see more spontaneous deprogramming in the coming years:

Here is the problem: the Modern Structure is complete. The ancien régime is no more. Therefore, it is simply impossible for the progressive movement to generate anything like the energy it generated in the ’60s. The whole Obama experience, in particular, is a major downer. But this apathy would be growing anyway. It is just increasingly obvious that the ’60s will never be repeated. The logs it burned are ash.

What this means in practice: in practice, for a young person, it is very hard to squeeze any power or status out of the Left. All the institutions of the Left are bureaucratically stable. If you join them, you join them as an intern. If you want to achieve any status through them, you have to suck your way up a very long, greasy pole. It is just not exciting to be a mainstream left-wing activist. The lifestyle is grim and boring. You can be an extreme left-wing activist, like an Earth Firster, which is a little more exciting; but still exudes an ugly flavor of desire and futility.

Young people seek power and status. This is natural. It will always be the case. However, they are young; so they seek not the things that will bring them power now, but the things that will bring them power when they are of age to rule. Not, of course, that this is a conscious strategy; it is more a matter of evolutionary biology. But it still works. The number of former ’60s radicals in positions of power today is remarkable.

Thus, it is better to say that young people seek potential power and status. If an elite is open to new talent, they will seek it in that elite. If an elite is not open to new talent, or if the process of entering it excludes much of that talent…

In this case, we see a prerevolutionary condition. The classic case is late 19th-century Russia. Young elites, instead of being attracted to careers in the administrative or clerical arms of the Czarist state, were attracted to revolutionary activism — plotting to replace that regime. They seek a different path to power — not an existing path, but a potential and hypothetical path.

Why? I imagine that, to work and rise in the late Czarist bureaucracy, one had to both swallow and regurgitate some rather stale bagels of the mind. Certainly the literature of the period gives one that impression. Also, Jews were disliked. Rather actively disliked, as a matter of fact. Some of my ancestors left Imperial Russia on account of this nonsense.

The alternative? Communism. Out of the fire, into the frying pan. Or rather — out of the sauna, into the crematorium. Nonetheless, a prerevolutionary condition is a prerevolutionary condition.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | No Comments »

A Tale of Planetary Woe

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Planetary scientists believe that waterfalls may have once cascaded down these steep cliffs at Echus Chasma on Mars. Mars has many desiccated landscapes like this one, thought to have been sculpted by abundant water in the distant past.Patrick Barry may be no Leigh Brackett, but he nonetheless tells a tale of planetary woe:

Once upon a time — roughly four billion years ago — Mars was warm and wet, much like Earth. Liquid water flowed on the Martian surface in long rivers that emptied into shallow seas. A thick atmosphere blanketed the planet and kept it warm. Living microbes might have even arisen, some scientists believe, starting Mars down the path toward becoming a second life-filled planet next door to our own.

But that’s not how things turned out.

Mars today is bitter cold and bone dry. The rivers and seas are long gone. Its atmosphere is thin and wispy, and if Martian microbes still exist, they’re probably eking out a meager existence somewhere beneath the dusty Martian soil.

The loss of martian atmosphere could be caused by a complex set of mechanisms working simultaneously. MAVEN is equipped with eight different sensors designed to sort out the confusion.Somehow Mars lost its CO2-rich atmosphere, and NASA is sending its MAVEN mission there to examine the flow of CO2 and other molecules from Mars into space:

Conventional wisdom holds that Mars’s atmosphere is vulnerable because the planet lacks a global magnetic field. Earth’s magnetic field stretches far out into space and envelopes the whole planet in a protective bubble that deflects the solar wind. Mars has only regional, patchy magnetic fields that cover relatively small areas of the planet, mostly in the southern hemisphere. The rest of the atmosphere is fully exposed to the solar wind. So the loss could be caused by the slow erosion of the atmosphere in these exposed areas.

David Brain of UC Berkeley has proposed another, seemingly contrary possibility. These small magnetic fields might actually hasten the loss of Mars’s atmosphere, Brain suggests.

The solar wind might buffet those magnetic field lines, occasionally pinching off a “bubble” of field lines that then drifts off into space — carrying a large chunk of the atmosphere with it. If so, having a partial magnetic field might be worse than having none at all.

(Hat tip to Nyrath.)

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The last thing a democratic party wants to do

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

The rule in conventional democratic politics — followed rigorously for centuries — is to be as broad and vague about your ideals and desires as possible, so as to attract the largest possible base:

Consider the tea parties. What were they about? Their namesake — a thoroughly left-wing phenomenon, a mob of vandals who masked their faces like Hamas to ransack a private business whose only crime was obeying the law? A mood, a feeling, a thought? Maybe an agenda, if a negative agenda counts? No to healthcare reform? But not just no to healthcare reform…

It was, and is, nowhere near clear. No surprise. The more people you get, the more powerful you feel. Unfortunately, if those people are milling about randomly in a “big tent” the size of Nebraska, you have accomplished very little in terms of coordinating support. You have not coordinated anything. All you have is a feeling. If you could get a million people behind some defined objective, you might be able to get that objective to happen.

But if the tea parties were promoting an actual manifesto, they would have had a much harder time recruiting. This would just have been weird. When you involve yourself in something like a tea party, you feel that you are contributing your thoughts, your ideas, your dreams, to a collective movement. This is the experience of conventional democratic politics. The last thing a democratic party wants to do is to crush those dreams, brutally, with its own.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | No Comments »

Too Many Elites

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Peasant uprisings have little chance of success when the governing élites are unified and the state is strong, Peter Turchin notes — but governing élites rarely stay unified, because everyone wants in:

The connection between population dynamics and instability is indirect, mediated by the long-term effects of population growth on social structures. One effect is the increasing number of aspirants for élite positions, resulting in rivalry and factionalism. Another consequence is persistent inflation, which causes a decline in real revenues and a developing fiscal crisis of the state. As these trends intensify, they result in state bankruptcy and a loss of military control; conflict among élite factions; and a combination of élite-mobilized and popular uprisings, leading to the breakdown of central authority.

The Law of Unintended Consequences is strong:

When the Assembly of Notables refused to approve a new land tax in 1787, they did not intend to start the French Revolution, in which many of them lost their heads. When Tony Blair was Britain’s prime minister, he set out to increase the proportion of youth getting higher education to 50%. He was presumably unaware that the overabundance of young people with advanced education preceded the political crises of the age of revolutions in Western Europe, in late Tokugawa Japan and in modern Iran and the Soviet Union.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | No Comments »

Italian police arrest 2 linked to Mumbai attacks

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Italian police arrest 2 linked to Mumbai attacks:

Italian police on Saturday arrested a Pakistani father and son accused of helping fund and providing logistical support for last year’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, authorities said.

The two were arrested in an early morning raid in Brescia, where they managed a money transfer agency, police in the northern Italian city said.
The day before the attacks began on Nov. 26 they allegedly sent money using a stolen identity to a U.S. company to activate Internet phone accounts used by the attackers and their handlers, said Stefano Fonsi, the head of anti-terror police in Brescia.

The transfer was just $229 but gave the attackers five lines over the Internet, which are difficult to trace and allowed militants to keep in touch even during the rampage, Fonsi said.

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Fantasy Art Has Arrived

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Fantasy art has arrived, John Baichtal declares, because Frank Frazetta’s cover painting for the Lancer paperback, Conan the Conqueror by Robert E. Howard, sold this week to a private collector for a reported $1,000,000:

The previous record price for a Frazetta painting was the $251,000 All Star Auctions fetched for the cover to Escape on Venus by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 2008.

There has always been something of a mystique surrounding Frazetta’s Conan covers; partly because they were the “first” successful Conan paperbacks and the first exposure to the character for the Baby Boomer generation of readers; partly because Frank got the assignment at the time when his painting skills had improved significantly and he felt he had something to prove; partly because the Frazettas had kept all of the Conan covers for the last 40-odd years (except for Conan of Aquilonia, which was stolen from Lancer’s office when the publisher went bankrupt).

The covers only rarely followed Howard’s descriptions or story situations and when asked if he had ever read the books Frank recently replied, “I didn’t read any of it. It was too opposite of what I do. I told them that. So, I drew him my way. It was really rugged. And it caught on. I didn’t care about what people thought. People who bought the books never complained about it. They probably didn’t read them.”

His cover for Escape on Venus conjures more thoughts of the Roman goddess than of the inhospitable planet.

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Ex-soldier faces jail for handing in gun

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Apparently the English have gone insane. Ex-soldier faces jail for handing in gun:

A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for “doing his duty”.

Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday — after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.

The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year’s imprisonment for handing in the weapon.

In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: “I didn’t think for one moment I would be arrested.

“I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get it off the streets.”

The court heard how Mr Clarke was on the balcony of his home in Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, when he spotted a black bin liner at the bottom of his garden.

In his statement, he said: “I took it indoors and inside found a shorn-off shotgun and two cartridges.

“I didn’t know what to do, so the next morning I rang the Chief Superintendent, Adrian Harper, and asked if I could pop in and see him.

“At the police station, I took the gun out of the bag and placed it on the table so it was pointing towards the wall.”

Mr Clarke was then arrested immediately for possession of a firearm at Reigate police station, and taken to the cells.

Defending, Lionel Blackman told the jury Mr Clarke’s garden backs onto a public green field, and his garden wall is significantly lower than his neighbours.

He also showed jurors a leaflet printed by Surrey Police explaining to citizens what they can do at a police station, which included “reporting found firearms”.

Quizzing officer Garnett, who arrested Mr Clarke, he asked: “Are you aware of any notice issued by Surrey Police, or any publicity given to, telling citizens that if they find a firearm the only thing they should do is not touch it, report it by telephone, and not take it into a police station?”

To which, Mr Garnett replied: “No, I don’t believe so.”

Prosecuting, Brian Stalk, explained to the jury that possession of a firearm was a “strict liability” charge — therefore Mr Clarke’s allegedly honest intent was irrelevant.

Just by having the gun in his possession he was guilty of the charge, and has no defence in law against it, he added.

(Hat tip to Curunir.)

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Terror in Mumbai

Friday, November 20th, 2009

HBO’s Terror in Mumbai is especially chilling because of a successful operation by Indian intelligence — they managed to pass along a number of SIM cards to Pakistani militants, and three of those cards were being used by the Mumbai attackers in their cell phones. So the documentary includes actual conversations between the young killers and their controller back in Pakistan:

The phone intercepts provide a grotesque running commentary as the controllers, watching events unfold on live TV, direct the gunmen, telling them where the security forces are, which of their hostages should be killed and how to do it. With the killers wounded and asking what to do next, the tapes reveal the controllers calmly urging them to fight to the death and not allow themselves to be taken alive.

Guests from the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels tell how the terrorists first staged mass executions, then worked their way through the corridors, killing whenever they managed to enter a room. An elderly couple recounts how they were spared by the terrorists when it was realized they were fellow Muslims, while all around them were mowed down in a hail of bullets. Perhaps the most unsettling testimony comes from Ajmal Amir Kasab, the sole surviving terrorist, who answers his captors’ questions with startling frankness from a gurney soon after being captured.

The documentary inadvertently makes the case for the importance of leadership and strong morale in combat, as the terrorists, with their controller exhorting them on the phone, maintain the initiative and keep advancing toward their objectives, and the Indian police freeze, unable to react, let along to seize the initiative.

Dave Grossman makes the case that it is difficult to get soldier to overcome their innate resistance to killing. This may be less true of rural Pakistani boys than of suburban American kids, but the terrorists clearly used the proper techniques for overcoming any such resistance:

Religious martyrs with a strong “brother” on the line can and will fight to the death — and if they don’t die, and they lose that reassuring voice, they break down like the poor lost boys they are.

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Washingtology

Friday, November 20th, 2009

The study of the US government deserves its own department — Washingtology:

Washingtology is an applied discipline, like archaeology. Its mission is simply to study the real Washington. This mission requires no engagement with any of USG‘s PR arms. Washingtology is not journalism. It is the study of what Washington is and does — never what it says. Unless that speech is in some sense an action.

One of the few systematic mendacities that I see across the entire spectrum of American punditry is the convention of writing as if political actors personally wrote, or believed, their lines. Of course, all these pundits know that the speeches are composed by teams of professional writers. Nonetheless, they invariably report these speeches as if they were actually personal productions. They never say: “Today in St. Louis, President Obama read a White House speech which called for…” They never say: “Today in St. Louis, the White House called for…” They say: “Today in St. Louis, President Obama called for…” This is a classic Orwellian abuse of English.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | No Comments »

Not Psychohistory, Cliodynamics

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Not everything in history is contingent and particular, Peter Turchin notes. Societies as different as medieval France, the Roman Empire and China under the Han dynasty share dynamics, when viewed in an appropriately coarse-grained way:

In fact, several patterns cut across periods and regions3. For example, agrarian, preindustrial states have seen recurrent waves of political instability — not interstate warfare, but lethal collective violence occurring within states, ranging from small-scale urban riots, in which just a few people are killed, to a full-blown civil war. This is just the sort of violence we need to understand: many more people are killed today in terrorist campaigns, civil wars and genocides than in wars between nations4.

Recent comparative research shows that agrarian societies experience periods of instability about a century long every two or three centuries. These waves of instability follow periods of sustained population growth. For example, in Western Europe, rapid population growth during the thirteenth century was followed by the ‘late-medieval crisis’, comprising the Hundred Years War in France, the Hussite Wars in the German Empire, and the Wars of the Roses in England. Population increase in the sixteenth century was followed by the ‘crisis of the seventeenth century’ — the wars of religion and the Fronde in France, the Thirty Years War in Germany, and the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution. Similarly, population growth during the eighteenth century was followed by the ‘age of revolutions’, ranging from the French Revolution of 1789 to the pan-European revolutions of 1848–49 (ref. 5).

Such oscillations between population growth and instability have been termed ‘secular cycles’6. Given the limitations of historical data, we need an appropriately coarse-grained method to determine the statistical significance, and the generality, of the pattern. The basic idea is to demarcate population growth and decline phases, and to count the instability incidents (such as peasant uprisings and civil wars) that occur during each phase.

With my col leagues Sergey Nefedov and Andrey Korotayev, I have collected quantitative data on demographic, social and political variables for several historical societies. Applying the above approach to eight secular cycles in medieval and early modern England, France, the Roman Empire and Russia, we find that the number of instability events per decade is always several times higher when the population was declining than when it was increasing6. The probability of this happening by chance is vanishingly small. The same pattern holds for the eight dynasties that unified China, from the Western Han to the Qing7, and for Egypt from the Hellenistic to the Ottoman periods8.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Science, War | No Comments »

Apple’s Mistake

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Paul Graham examines Apple’s mistake:

Their fundamental problem is that they don’t understand software.

They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn’t work for software. It doesn’t work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words “software” and “publisher” fit together, the underlying concepts don’t. Software isn’t like music or books. It’s too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that’s what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced house style.

If software publishing didn’t work in 1980, it works even less now that software development has evolved from a small number of big releases to a constant stream of small ones. But Apple doesn’t understand that either. Their model of product development derives from hardware. They work on something till they think it’s finished, then they release it. You have to do that with hardware, but because software is so easy to change, its design can benefit from evolution. The standard way to develop applications now is to launch fast and iterate. Which means it’s a disaster to have long, random delays each time you release a new version.

Apparently Apple’s attitude is that developers should be more careful when they submit a new version to the App Store. They would say that. But powerful as they are, they’re not powerful enough to turn back the evolution of technology. Programmers don’t use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would.

How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn’t like?

Posted in Business, Paul Graham, Technology | No Comments »

The Crescent and the Continent

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Jacob Laksin reviews Christopher Caldwell’s diagnosis of Europe’s immigration woes, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:

In Caldwell’s account, mass immigration in Europe was predicated on several assumptions, nearly all of them false. Needing cheap labor to fuel their expiring postwar industrial economies, Europeans assumed that the immigrants they turned to would be temporary; that they would not qualify for welfare; and that those who remained would assimilate and shed the cultural mores and habits of their home countries. The Europeans were wrong on all counts. When its textile mills and factories closed in the sixties and seventies, Europe was left with a vast, imported underclass with one tenuous link to its adopted countries: the welfare payments on which it had come to rely.

The demographic transformation was profound. Europe has always had immigration, but the scale of its midcentury influx was without precedent. And one group led the way. In the middle of the twentieth century, there were practically no Muslims in Europe; today, it is estimated, there are about 20 million, including 5 million in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Britain. Equally dramatic was the change in immigrants’ economic fortunes. In the sixties and seventies, Germany’s Turkish migrant workers actually boasted higher labor-force participation than native Germans did. Today, unemployment in Germany’s Turkish community tops 40 percent—three times the national unemployment rate. Nor is Germany an outlier. Some 40 percent of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands are on welfare, Caldwell reports, as are two-thirds of French imams.

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