toward a first-world world

The following was written on the morning of September 13, 2016:

toward a first-world world

A first-world world would be based on math, science, and technology.

All children should learn their multiplication tables from 1 to 10 before they leave elementary school. Geometric form is also important, the basic geometric shapes.

IQ is also important.

Science and technology have to do with outer space, ecology (E. O. Wilson, ½ Earth), and neuroscience.

Literature—fiction, poetry, drama—isn’t very important.

Population must be controlled:  2-child max for a couple, 1-child max for a single woman. Whether an area is overpopulated should be determined anecdotally at the local level

There should be a carbon tax.

There should be a first-world country on every continent.

trump, hillary, immigration

I have no intention of voting for Donald Trump, but on immigration my views are certainly closer to his than to Hillary Clinton's.

Our immigration policy should be based on enhancing our national interest. There are hundreds of millions of people on this planet who would love to live in this country. We can afford to be very choosy about who we let into this country, and we should be. We need a high-skills, high-education citizenry if we're to remain globally competitive and preserve a functioning democracy, rule of law, and all those other things we like. Anybody who would suggest that bringing in 12-15 million illiterate peasants from Mexico and Central America would somehow enhance our national interest would be looked at as if he had a hole in his head.

In a way, I'm less concerned about the illegals themselves than their children.  Hispanics have the highest dropout rate of any group in the population, and even those who do stay in school don't do particularly well. The last thing we need in this country is a second underclass. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If we had 12-15 million illegal Chinese immigrants in this country, but their kids were getting straight A's and winning science scholarships, nobody would care.

Hillary, on the other hand, at least in her public remarks, seems to make no distinction whatever between legal and illegal immigrants.  She just refers to them all as 'immigrants.' What are we to make of this? Of  course, no journalist ever asks her that rude question. Does this mean that as President she would have no intention of enforcing our immigration laws at all? Just take on all comers? Our crack media investigators really need to pin her down on this. But don't hold your breath.

affirmative action

This morning on the NPR 'Marketplace Tech' show, one of the guests was a woman who was head of the Iowa Black Business Coalition. She was bemoaning the fact that 'only' 9% of Apple's employees were African-American. Actually, this is a much higher percentage than at Facebook or Google and is the result of Apple's new affirmative action program.

Affirmative action is a form of handout, and it's even more pernicious than other handouts in that it's a zero-sum game. For every less-qualified black or Hispanic who's hired, a more-qualified white or Asian is shut out. That's wrong, and of course it will redound to the detriment of the company in fairly short order. You keep hiring less-qualified people over more-qualified people, and pretty soon you end up with an uncompetitive company. And we know what happens to them.

dem convention

Although at this point I have no intention of voting for Donald Trump, I'm also beginning to get an uneasy feeling about the Democrats.  In a nutshell, it's this: I'm beginning to think that the Democrats wouldn't really mind if the US became a third-world country-- which is, of course, precisely what this blog is trying to prevent. There's a  failure to take problems seriously, an unwillingness to criticize when criticism is called for. The Democrats' response to the abysmal failure of urban public schools, for example, is simply to throw more taxpayer money at them. Make class sizes smaller, provide universal pre-K, things which haven't shown they actually work but are, conveniently, jobs programs for the teachers' unions.

As for Trump, I just wish he'd get the memo on climate change. He's even more dismissive of climate change than other Republicans, many of whom privately acknowledge its reality but are unwilling to say so publicly. Why is that? The only reason I can think of is the reason the Democrats give-- that they're in the pocket of the fossil fuel companies. What else would explain it?

There was a time, back in the 1990s-early 2000s when the GOP did acknowledge climate change. Newt Gingrich actually made a PSA about it with Nancy Pelosi. When asked about it now, Gingrich simply says, 'I don't know what I was thinking.' Really? And what does he know now that he didn't know then? People forget that the idea for a cap-and-trade system to manage greenhouse emissions was actually a market-based solution that came out of-- are you ready for this?-- the American Enterprise Institute!

My major objection to Hillary Clinton is that she's a rather weak person whose approach to dealing with problems is simply to provide more and bigger handouts to various constituency groups. The problem is that she hasn't really gotten to where she is under her own steam. Does anybody think that if Hillary Rodham hadn't married Bill Clinton that she'd be the Democratic nominee for President? Of course not. She hitched her wagon to that star and has stayed hitched through her husband's multiple, fairly public, and evidently ongoing infidelities-- and it has indeed gotten her to where she wanted to go. It would not have happened otherwise.

So Hillary Clinton is not really a leader, which is why she draws such small crowds and elicits no genuine enthusiasm. I think she would be a very ineffectual President as a result. Trump, on the other hand, is a leader, but exactly where he intends to lead us is anybody's guess. More later.

the gop and climate change

Reading this blog, one might get the impression that I'm very right-wing on just about everything, but a quick perusal of my other blogs will show that this simply isn't true. In fact, this blog is the exception. Although I am very right-wing on issues of crime and law and order, there is one issue-- the all-important issue, in my view-- on which I am way to the left:  climate change.

When it comes to climate change, the Republicans are simply out to lunch. How it has come to pass that a major American political party thinks it can ignore an overwhelming scientific consensus on this all-important subject is simply beyond me, but it can’t be allowed to stand. Of course, a majority of Republicans don’t even accept Darwinian evolution, so in that sense it’s hardly surprising. What’s unacceptable is not much the GOP’s ignorance of the science, but its arrogance in assuming such ignorance is acceptable.

iq is real, and important

IQ is real, and important:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2015/12/06/iq-matters-for-the-economy/#8c6d1c02045c

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/04/what_do_sat_and_iq_tests_measure_general_intelligence_predicts_school_and.html

meritocracy

I heard some guy on the radio this morning saying that tech companies need to have workforces that 'look like America.'  In other words, they need to institute skin-color quotas. I'm totally against this.  I want this country to be a meritocracy, in which people are given jobs on the basis of competence and nothing else.

I'm beginning to think that, in their heart of hearts, a lot of black 'leaders' believe that blacks will never be able to compete successfully against whites and Asians, which is why they need to be given everything, including jobs.

trump vs.hillary

Which of these two candidates would get us further toward First World America? I don't think it's the 'Make America Great Again' candidate.  We don't need a candidate who's as anti-science as Trump, at this late date still calling climate change a 'hoax' and a 'phony issue.' On the other hand, the thing that REALLY bothers me about Hillary is that she's so beholden to the black vote-- having piled up hundreds of delegates in southern primaries in states she doesn't have a prayer of winning in the fall-- that in office she would be nothing but a Quota Queen. More handouts and set-asides for black folks, which IMHO are the last things they need.  I think they need to start living in the real world with the rest of us for a change.

It's a dismal choice, but in the event I'll hold my nose and vote for Hillary.  Laws and executive orders can be repealed, but a ruined planet can't be.

the tradeoff

The basic tradeoff for those dependent on the productive people (taxpayers) is this:  We want to provide enough of a 'floor'-- food, clothing, shelter, medical care-- to give these people some basic opportunity to 'make it' in life.  But we don't want to provide such a cushion that they just decide to stay on it rather than try to become productive citizens.  Of course, some people simply don't have the wherewithal to become productive.  This may become even more true in the future, when the productive people will be those with rather specific abilities and skills.  The main thing is this:  Unproductive people-- those being supported by the taxpayers-- should not be reproducing.

default life

At a certain age, people should just be given a job, even if it's a make-work 'public works' job.  It's better -- and cheaper-- than letting them hang out on the streets and then warehousing them in our prisons.  This would be the 'default life' you'd be given if you couldn't decide on your own.

fewer, but brighter: population and iq

It seems to me that eugenics is going to make a comeback, for one specific reason:  the more we come to understand the human genome, the more we will be able to isolate those components of it that have to do with intelligence.  Very few experts in psychometrics or neuroscience doubt that there is a significant genetic component to intelligence.  To the extent that the human species can now control its own evolution, we will move in the direction of being an ever more intelligent species, particularly the kind of mathematical-logical intelligence that is the basis of science and technology.

This means that we will probably have a much smaller human population because it requires so many resources to raise and educate children and young people to a high level.  But it will be a uniformly more intelligent population.  And that's a good thing.