Homicide rates by genetic versus stepfathers and by age of child for Canada, reprinted from Daly and Wilson (1996):
Homicide Rates by Genetic versus Stepfathers
Sunday, April 6th, 2014Mike Judge on Silicon Valley
Saturday, April 5th, 2014Mike Judge graduated from UCSD with a degree in physics and then moved to East Palo Alto in 1987 to work at a company that made interfaces for high-resolution screens, so he has some experience with Silicon Valley:
Everybody uses all this technology every day but very few people know what it’s like to be a programmer and coding this stuff. I haven’t seen engineer-programmer types portrayed the way I’ve known them to be. The only exceptions I’ve seen were “The Social Network,” which was great, and a little movie called “Primer.” The guy made it in Dallas for like $5,000. It looks incredible and the engineers seem like engineers.
[...]
Back then you looked for a job in the newspaper and I remember seeing a giant ad for Sun Microsystems that said “PUSH” in giant letters, and then underneath it said, “yourself harder than you ever dreamed possible, past all existing goals, up to the level of Sun Microsystems.” It just kind of scared me.
[...]
You look at the houses that a lot of billionaires live in, and they’re not flashy the way Hollywood is. I was talking to a very wealthy guy up there who said the last thing you’d ever do is drive around in a Maserati or something. But because nobody wants to show off any wealth, the whole place ends up looking kind of drab. I guess it started from hippie culture, and these are also introverted people, so there’s this code of behavior where you don’t show wealth. You wear a Patagonia vest and jeans and that’s that.
4GW is Alive and Well
Saturday, April 5th, 2014Is fourth-generation warfare (4GW) dead?, Chet Richards asked. No, it’s alive and well, Bill Lind argues:
Internally, in the U.S. military and the larger defense and foreign policy establishment, 4GW is dead, as is maneuver warfare and increasingly any connection to the external world. The foreign policy types can only perceive a world of states, in which their job is to promote the Wilsonian née Jacobin, follies of “democracy” and “universal human rights.” They are in fact, 4GW’s allies, in that their demand for “democracy” undermines states, opening the door for more 4GW.
In most of the world, democracy is not an option. The only real options are tyranny or anarchy, and when you work against tyranny, you are working for anarchy. The ghost of bin Laden sends his heartfelt thanks.
Third Generation doctrine has been abandoned, de facto, if not de jure, by the one service that embraced it, the U.S. Marine Corps. The others never gave it a glance. The U.S. military remains and will remain second generation until it disappears from sheer irrelevance coupled with high cost. That is coming much sooner than any of them think.
In the external world, meanwhile, fourth generation war is triumphing on almost all fronts. Somalia appears at the moment to be a setback. But elsewhere, the forces of stateless disorder (and there are many, not just AQ) have much to celebrate. The bottom line that defines victory or defeat for both states and non-states forces is one question: Is there a real state? A quick tour d’horizon shows spreading state failure. Libya is now effectively stateless, thanks to the “democracy” crowd in Europe and Washington. Fourth generation war is spreading from Libya into west Africa, where states are already largely fictions, Syria is now stateless. The Iraq created by the American invasion was always a Potemkin state, and 4GW there is growing fast, in part fueled from Syria. Fourth generation war is again kicking NATO’s and the U.S.’s butt in Afghanistan, and entirely predictable outcome of invading the Graveyard of Empires. Far more dangerously, 4GW elements grow ever stronger in Pakistan, where the state is failing. Even in Egypt, which has been at least a proto-state for 5,000 years, the state is shaky.
In many of these cases, including Egypt and Pakistan, the only element strong enough to hold the state together is the army. But the “democracy” crowd in Washington immediately threatens aid cut-offs, sanctions, etc., if the army acts. Again, the children now running America’s foreign policy are 4GW’s best allies.
Fourth generation war includes far more than just Islamic “terrorism,” and we see it gaining strength in areas far from the Middle East. Gangs have grown so powerful in Mexico, right on our border, that I predict the state will soon have to make deals with them, as the PRI has done in the past. Invasion by immigrants who do not acculturate is a powerful form of 4GW, more powerful than any terrorism, and that is occurring on a north-south basis (except Australia) literally around the world. Remember, most of the barbarians did not invade the Roman Empire to destroy it. They just wanted to move in. In fact, most were invited in. Sound familiar?
What should concern us most is precisely the disconnect between the internal and external worlds. Externally, 4GW is flourishing, while internally, in the US government and military, it does not exist. This is the kind of chasm into which empires can disappear.
The Birth of the Lightsaber
Friday, April 4th, 2014Star Wars creator George Lucas, actor Mark Hamill, and sound designer Ben Burtt discuss the concept and creation of the lightsaber:
George Lucas recalls that Star Wars was influenced by pirate and swashbuckling films of the ’40s, which showcased the romantic side of fighting, illustrated in characters like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood. With Jedi, who were heroes in this tradition, the director needed a weapon that would match their ideals. In a clip from Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, the lightsaber is introduced by Obi-Wan Kenobi, who says it’s “not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.” Thus, the lightsaber also became a symbol for more peaceful, honorable times, representing what the galaxy was like before the Empire. Originally, Lucas says, Jedi were meant to fight with just swords. But to give the weapon a technological edge, they became “laser swords,” able to deflect incoming fire — which made sense, character-wise, as Jedi were not meant to be warlike, aggressive fighters.
The choreography and duels started simple, but became more emotional and complex as the series went on. Mark Hamill states that Lucas originally envisioned lightsaber hilts as being very, very heavy, always requiring two hands. But with a desire to make the sword fighting faster and more intense, they slowly moved away from the two-handed form. The technology used to create the glowing blade of lightsabers also changed as the series progressed.
In rare behind-the-scenes footage from Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker battles Darth Vader, and Hamill explains that metal poles were required so that the actors could have a realistic battle. Otherwise, one wouldn’t know where to stop their hands and finish a strike.
Ben Burtt says that the lightsaber was the first sound he created for the film. Upon hearing the hum of an old film projector idling, he felt it was the perfect, saying it was “musical, in a way. ‘That’s probably what a lightsaber would sound like.’” Burtt wanted another element — the iconic whooshing sound — which he accidentally created through electronic feedback.
In discussing the intensity of the lightsaber duels, Lucas says it changed with each film, often times reflecting the emotions of Luke and the ongoing story. Still Luke was not trained as a Jedi in the classic sense. It wasn’t until Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace that audiences would see Jedi battling in their prime; the duels were more aggressive and acrobatic than anything seen in the original trilogy, and only grew in scale and intensity as the series continued.
The sound effects really are almost as important as the visual effects.
Simpsonized Twin Peaks
Friday, April 4th, 2014Adrien Noterdaem has Simpsonized the cast Of Twin Peaks:
A Third World Country with First World Infrastructure
Friday, April 4th, 2014Fred Reed’s Mexican wife, Violeta, describes the United States as a Third World country with a First World infrastructure:
Someone famously said that democracy lasts until the unworthy learn that they can vote themselves the treasury. Yes. More generally, until they learn that they can vote themselves everything. Here is the backbone of American domestic policy, if that is the right word for floundering narcissism. The inadequate and barely lettered, by weight of numbers, can simply declare themselves the equals of their betters (or should I say “there betters”?). They don’t have to accomplish anything. They simply assert that they have done it, or that doing it is elitist and therefore reprehensible. I have in mind things like reading, scoring at the level of sentience on the SAT, or lifting mortar rounds.
The reduction of American universities to the academic level of the comic book (or, as we now say, “graphic novel”) was of course preceded and made necessary by the mob’s desire for the trappings of education. The substance they find merely annoying. They have the votes, though, and pay the tuition. Thus they get what they want, a diploma, without having to subject their tiny minds to the oppressions of thought.
[...]
And in our fourth-stage democracy, everyone has to nod and agree. Is high-school calculus too hard for minorities? Why, get rid of it. Future engineers can count on their fingers just like Chinese engineers. If women can’t lift 175mm rounds, declare ammunition obsolete, or say that it weighs less. In wars today, you just push buttons anyway.
The Expert
Thursday, April 3rd, 2014What it’s like to be the sole technical expert in a client meeting:
The Charter School Performance Breakout
Thursday, April 3rd, 2014Do charter schools get results?
Initial assessments were mixed. In the early days, charter authorizing was very loose, nobody knew what worked best, and lots of weak schools were launched. The system has since tightened. In Washington, D.C., for instance, seven out of nine requests to open new charters are now turned down, and 41 charters have been closed for failing to produce good results.
Nationwide, 561 new charter schools opened last year, while 206 laggards were closed. Unlike conventional public schools, the charter system allows poorly performing schools to be squeezed out.
As charter operators have figured out how to succeed with children, they are doubling down on the best models. Successful charter schools have many distinctive features: longer school days and longer years, more flexibility and accountability for teachers and principals, higher expectations for students, more discipline and structure, more curricular innovation, more rigorous testing. Most charter growth today is coming from replication of the best schools. The rate of enrollment increase at high-performing networks is now 10 times what it is at single-campus “mom and pop” academies.
The combination of weak charters closing and strong charters replicating is having powerful effects. The first major assessment of charter schools by Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes found their results to be extremely variable, and overall no better than conventional schools as of 2009. Its follow-up study several years later found that steady closures and their replacement by proven models had pushed charters ahead of conventional schools. In New York City, the average charter-school student now absorbs five months of extra learning a year in math, and one extra month in reading, compared with counterparts in conventional schools.
Other reviews show similar results, and performance advantages will accelerate in the near future. Charter schools tend to start small and then add one additional grade each year. Thus many charters in New York and elsewhere are just getting started with many children. As the schools mature, and weak performers continue to be replaced, charters will become even more effective.
But the results top charter schools are achieving are already striking. At KIPP, the largest chain of charters, 86% of all students are low-income, and 95% are African-American or Latino, yet 83% go to college. In New York City, one of the academies Mr. de Blasio has denied additional space to is Harlem’s highest-performing middle school, with its 97% minority fifth-graders ranking No. 1 in the state in math achievement. It and the 21 other schools in its charter network have passing rates on state math and reading tests more than twice the citywide average.
Judged by how far they move students from where they start, New York charter schools like Success Academies, Uncommon Schools, Democracy Prep and Achievement First—and others like them across the country—are now the highest-achieving schools in America. The oft-heard claim that charters perform no better than conventional schools on the whole is out of date and inaccurate.
Twin Studies
Thursday, April 3rd, 2014In lieu of kidnapping twins, Dalton Conley explains, the way that researchers typically calculated how much a given trait — be that extraversion or earnings — was due to genetics was by comparing how alike identical twins were with respect to how alike (same sex) fraternal twins were:
The logic is that the fraternal twins share half their genes on average and the identical twins share all of them, so the degree to which identical twins are more alike than their fraternal counterpart pairs reflects the genetic contribution to that trait.
If two-thirds of our kids’ chances in life were due to their family background, the field of behavioral genetics would have us believe that the vast lion’s share of that predictive power of family of origin was due to genetics. According to these studies, about half of the variation in incomes or job situations was due to our genetic makeup. And only about a sixth resulted from the household environment on which parents could exert some conscious influence. The remaining one-third was a product of random events outside a family’s control: an inspiring teacher, a traumatic accident, or a lucky break at work.
I initially went into the field of genetics to prove these researchers wrong. Genes couldn’t matter that much, I figured. It just didn’t jive with what I saw around me: Siblings seemed so different from each other; I knew plenty of poor kids growing up that I could have imagined achieving great heights had they been reared in better circumstances; and, likewise, in my adulthood I had gotten to know plenty of folks who seemed to be of mediocre talent despite their huge paychecks. Social environment had to count for more. So I decided to go right after the geneticists’ core assumption.
That is, their nifty little calculation relies on one hugely problematic assumption known as the “equal environments assumption.” Put in English, these researchers had to take as a given the notion that identical twins are not treated any more similarly to each other than fraternal twins are (and that identical twins don’t interact with each other more than fraternal twins do in ways that might affect the outcomes in question — i.e. that their mutual, reciprocal influence is no different than that of same gender fraternal twins). Since in my own experience I often couldn’t even tell who was who in an identical twin set, it seemed obvious to me that identical twins were experiencing much more similar environments than fraternal twins were in ways that were not generalizable to us non-twins in the population, and thus the behavioral geneticists were inflating the effects of genes and correspondingly underestimating the impact of family environment.[2]
Determined to prove them wrong and save the day for social scientists, I thought of a trick that would have been unimaginable before the days of 23andme and the like: I would take the fraction of twins who thought they were identical when they were really fraternal (and vice versa) and run the same analysis on them. If they thought they were fraternal twins their whole lives but the laboratory genetic test revealed they were actually identical, we could be sure that they weren’t raised with more similar environments because they had been (mistakenly) socialized as fraternal twins. And ditto in reverse. But when I ran these folks through the statistical models, the results didn’t refute the behavioral geneticists at all. In fact, my models confirmed the high genetic heritability for everything from height to high school GPA to ADHD.
The Weapons in the Leland Yee Scandal
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2014Not many FBI documents read like crime thrillers, but the FBI’s case against California State Senator Leland Yee and the Chee Kung Tong does:
The FBI accuses 54-year-old Kwok Sheung Chow of leading the Chee Kung Tong (CKT) criminal group. (The bureau tapped the ceremony swearing him in as the Dragonhead of the group.) The criminal complaint paints him as a leader who wants his organization to be seen as legit, but who keeps a direct hand in some of the felonious operations that ensnared other CKT-affiliated players, including State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), a gun control advocate caught on FBI recordings brokering arms deals and accepting money to pass legislation. Chow is the person who introduced Keith Jackson, the senator’s political operative, to the undercover FBI agents.
In July 2010, when the investigation was new, UCE 4599 had dinner with Chow, who used the venue to discuss his days as a street gangster. “Chow described how he like to carry two 9mm and a .45 caliber [pistols],” the affidavit reads. “Chow described that a .22 caliber is an assassin’s gun, but he liked carrying something that had real power and would stop someone if you had to use it on the street.”
In March 2012, the undercover agent was “inducted” into the Chee Kung Tong as a “consultant.” After that, the investigation into California crime and corruption really took off.
On March 11, 2014, Yee met with political consultant Keith Jackson (more on him soon) and Wilson Lim, who claimed to have a relative in the Philippines military who could steal weapons and was supposedly selling the military gear to Islamic rebels in Mindanao. An FBI undercover employee (UCE 4599) also in attendance asked Lim what kinds of weapons he could get. “Lim told UCE 4599 the Israeli-made Tavor assault rifle was very common in the Philippines,” the affidavit says. “Lim described the Tavor as being the equivalent of the M16 assault rifle.”
[...]
The idea at this meeting was to buy rifles from the Philippines and ship them to the United States through New Jersey (where the undercover agent claimed to have Mafia connections at the Port of Newark) before sending them to final customers in North Africa. “Senator Yee told UCE 4599 there are approximately 100 rifles currently available,” the court document says, and that Yee said “he thought Africa was largely an untapped market for trade” of weapons. The profits would be broken into smaller pieces and funneled into his election campaign. If he had lost that election, he would “move into the private sector and exploit all the relationships he had in Asia for various kinds of activities,” according to the criminal complaint.
[...]
Of all the strange people in the FBI document, the Jackson family may be the strangest. Keith Jackson operates a political consultancy that raised campaign funds for Yee. He also is implicated in scores of money laundering deals, high-volume drug transactions, bribes, cigarette and booze smuggling, international arms deals, and local weapons sales. Plus, he has been linked to murder-for-hire schemes; he told undercover agents that he and his son, accused drug smuggler Brandon, could hire thugs to kill people.
These are political consultants with access to a slew of firearms. In one transaction alone, on June 24, 2013, the father-and-son team sold UCE 4599 five weapons for $5300. One of them was a Cobray Machine Pistol, a compact fully automatic 9mm weapon with a 50-round magazine. The other guns: a Mossberg shotgun, a Smith & Wesson Model 59 handgun, A Colt MKIV 80 handgun, a .22 Ruger carbine, and a 7.62mm Clayco Sports Rifle. Also, intriguingly, they sold the undercover agent two ballistic vests. When UCE 4599 checked, he found the protective vest was stolen from the FBI.
Jackson Consultancy appears to be always campaigning for the candidate’s war chest. During the June 24 weapons buy, “Keith Jackson told UCE 4599 that he was hoping UCE 4599 could raise more money for Senator Yee.”
The Overprotected Kid
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2014It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation, Hanna Rosin says:
Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s — walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap — are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting. One very thorough study of “children’s independent mobility,” conducted in urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods in the U.K., shows that in 1971, 80 percent of third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had dropped to 9 percent, and now it’s even lower. When you ask parents why they are more protective than their parents were, they might answer that the world is more dangerous than it was when they were growing up. But this isn’t true, or at least not in the way that we think. For example, parents now routinely tell their children never to talk to strangers, even though all available evidence suggests that children have about the same (very slim) chance of being abducted by a stranger as they did a generation ago. Maybe the real question is, how did these fears come to have such a hold over us? And what have our children lost — and gained — as we’ve succumbed to them?
The irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have:
According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital visits, the frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans. The number of deaths hasn’t changed much either. From 2001 through 2008, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 100 deaths associated with playground equipment — an average of 13 a year, or 10 fewer than were reported in 1980. Head injuries, runaway motorcycles, a fatal fall onto a rock — most of the horrors Sweeney and Frost described all those years ago turn out to be freakishly rare, unexpected tragedies that no amount of safety-proofing can prevent.
Even rubber surfacing doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference in the real world. David Ball, a professor of risk management at Middlesex University, analyzed U.K. injury statistics and found that as in the U.S., there was no clear trend over time. “The advent of all these special surfaces for playgrounds has contributed very little, if anything at all, to the safety of children,” he told me. Ball has found some evidence that long-bone injuries, which are far more common than head injuries, are actually increasing. The best theory for that is “risk compensation” — kids don’t worry as much about falling on rubber, so they’re not as careful, and end up hurting themselves more often. The problem, says Ball, is that “we have come to think of accidents as preventable and not a natural part of life.”
There’s much, much more.
Staying Married for the Kids or Getting Divorced
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2014Which is the lesser of two evils: staying married for the kids or getting divorced?
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of studies showing that kids from divorced families do worse on scores of outcomes. The problem with all of those research papers is that we can never know the counterfactual: What if those particular parents who divorced had actually stayed together? This would be an entirely different sample of folks from the parents who did in fact stay together — harkening back to Tolstoy’s famous dictum. No, we must confine our inquiry to the ones who did divorce in our sliver of the quantum universe. Would their kids really be better off if they had stayed together in some other quantum state — fighting and yelling and tiptoeing around?
The best study I know of that deals with this apples/oranges issue was by the cool hand of Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who examined changing divorce laws across the United States. He found that when states made divorce easier by instituting no-fault, just as New York did in the midst of my own marital split, divorce rates did in fact increase. More importantly, he showed that these kids — whose parents would have stayed together if divorce had still been more difficult — were worse off forty years later in terms of their educational attainment, their earnings, and the fate of their own marriages. Since he estimated these effects based on changes at the state level that had nothing to do with the characteristics of particular happy or unhappy couples, his study was the next best thing to a double-blind medical study that randomly dispensed divorce pills and placebos.
In fact, the way that divorce tended to disadvantage offspring(s) in Gruber’s study jibed with my own more qualitative research: In a 2003 book The Pecking Order, I deployed the term “Cinderella Effect” to argue that divorce didn’t have a universally good, neutral, or bad effect on offspring, but rather, its impact depended on the unique circumstances of the child. Namely, I found that the eldest female child was the most disadvantaged kid in the aftermath of a divorce because of the added, adult roles she tended to take on. While having to care for younger siblings in light of an absent parent and serving as the substitute partner of sorts to the remaining parent may be a maturing experience, it more often resulted in a child becoming resentful about having to grow up too fast and sacrifice his or her childhood autonomy for the sake of younger siblings and the family in general. Often these kids tried to escape the burdens of their family quickly — the same way Cinderella did — through marriage to Prince Charming. Indeed, Gruber found that the effect of divorce on lowering offspring education and earning levels, and raising their divorce rates worked through those offsprings’ own marital history. They tended to marry earlier than they would have had their parents stayed together. Earlier marriages tend to pull individuals away from additional education they might have otherwise pursued. That, in turn, depresses earnings in the long run. What’s more, as we all know, marrying younger means a higher risk of divorce.
Leland Yee, Super Villain
Tuesday, April 1st, 2014Democrat state senator Leland Yee isn’t just corrupt, Larry Correia (Monster Hunter International) says:
If Yee had a machine that could control the weather he’d be a Batman villain.
He got busted in an FBI sting, taking millions of dollars in bribes, to smuggle RPGs and machine guns through brutal Chinese tong gangs, through the Ukraine, to rebel insurgents in the Philippines. No. I’m not making any of that up.
The part that makes this all so awesome and hilarious is that the only reason people like me know who Yee is, is because he’s the primary asshole behind disarming law abiding Californians. Yes. He is the anti-gun poster child. He has an A+ from the Brady Center morons. (Hmmm… Now that he’s been caught smuggling rocket launchers to Muslim rebels, but he’s still a democrat, they might downgrade him to a B).
So, regular Californians can’t own an AR-15, but Chinese drug lords, no problemo. Law abiding citizen protected by the 2nd Amendment, go to hell. Murderous scumbag criminals, good to hook. This plan seems to work for Eric Holder too.
The other part that makes this funny as hell is that he is also the anti violent video game guy… Yee is the crusading liberal who has been out there trying to get violent video games banned. Because won’t somebody think of the children!
Let that sink in for a delicious moment.
Grand Theft Auto? Hell, he doesn’t need to play it. Leland Yee LIVES Grand Theft Auto. If only he hadn’t been exposed to Call of Duty, then he wouldn’t have been so tempted to smuggle machineguns to MILF. And yes. The rebels were actually called MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) So when you hear that a Green Beret bagged a MILF, it really could go either way.
Of course you probably haven’t seen too much of this on the regular news, because Yee is a democrat, and thus his scandal is totally not newsworthy. I saw a thing where Yee’s bust had gotten a grand total of like 30 seconds of coverage on CNN, in between long reports of how Chris Christie may possibly have blocked traffic.
Think about that. Sure, I know that CNN is basically the marketing department of the DNC, but this story has everything. It is implausible. It is ridiculous. It is Breaking Bad only more absurd. His Chinese mafia contact was named Shrimp Boy Chow! How the hell can you not report on a respected elected official making millions of dollars from rebels MILFs and a mob boss actually named SHRIMP BOY CHOW!
Grenade Launchers
Tuesday, April 1st, 2014Larry Vickers looks at grenade launchers on his Tac TV show and finds them far less devastating — and certainly far less spectacular — than movies and video games might suggest:
Day Care vs. Home Care
Tuesday, April 1st, 2014Dalton Conley, NYU sociologist, father, and author of Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know about the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to Ask looks at the academic results of day care by professionals versus home care by moms:
My reading of the “mommy wars” literature is that the secret variable that resolves many of the contradictory studies is social class. Namely, rather than it being good or bad per se for a mother to stay home with her young children, the effect seemed to depend on the socioeconomic status of the mother herself. The more time that highly educated mothers were with their kids — as opposed to sending them to day care — the better those children did on cognitive tests. But for less educated mothers, kids did better when they went off to preschool and other structured activities. Hence the big effects of Head Start and other such programs prepping low-income toddlers for K–12 schooling. But also the negative effects in Canada, for example, when universal pre-school was instituted.