it's not their fault

If we had our druthers, of course, we'd all choose to be brilliant and beautiful. But we're not. Some of us are in fact very far indeed from being either brilliant or beautiful. There are two things to keep in mind about this:

1. It's not their fault.

2. Nonetheless, we should try to discourage people from reproducing if they really can't figure out how to put one foot in front of the other in a society like this. At the very least, people shouldn't have children they can't support.

literature

For some time now, I've had the sneaking suspicion that literature-- fiction, poetry, drama-- is what people who are no good at math do with their brains.

BB > BP

Having a big brain is more important than having a big penis. More specifically, having a high level of mathematical/logical ability is more important than sexual prowess. First-world societies-- those that understand science and technology-- can only be created by people with this kind of intelligence. Societies that lack a critical mass of such people will never become 'developed' nations. People with this kind of intelligence need only be sexy enough to survive and reproduce, in good Darwinian fashion.

academic standards are more important than diversity

Academic standards are more important than diversity.

npc

Twitter tried to ban these so-called 'NPC' memes, but they still seem to be all over the place:

why the disconnect?

This blog is about how to make sure the US remains a first-world country. Two aspects of this come to mind:

1. The primacy of science. We're the country that put a man on the Moon, after all. Any first-world country has to have a culture steeped in science and a population conversant with basic scientific method. Right?

2. We need an educated, skilled workforce. To get this, we need an immigration system based on merit, rather than family ties or just the ability to make it across the Rio Grande. Right?

So why is it that the two major parties don't support both of these things? The Democrats are all for science, acknowledging the reality of climate change, etc., but they seem to want to let anybody into the country who wants to come here and can make it across the border, legally or not. The Republicans, on the other hand-- or at least the Trump contingent among them-- want a meritocratic immigration system but remain willfully ignorant of climate change-- and probably evolution, for that matter.

I want both. Why isn't there a party for people like me?

'developing' nations

Ever since the end of World War II, third-world countries have been euphemistically referred to as 'developing nations.' Well, some of them-- China, India, South Korea, some others-- are 'developing' or have already 'developed.' That is, to say, they have created prosperous, first-world standards of living for their people by becoming part of the modern scientific-technological global economy and culture.

But what of the others? Are these countries really 'developing'? Are they ever really going to be 'developed'? Do you really think Haiti is ever going to become a 'developed' nation? I don't. And the reason is clear: They simply don't have enough people with the intellectual capacity to understand, let alone create, this kind of modern economy and society.

Take Puerto Rico-- please.  Puerto Rico and Guam are the last spoils we've kept from the Spanish-American War of 1898 (another war we should never have fought). We gave Cuba its independence almost immediately-- 1903. We held on to the Philippines until after World War II, but they've been independent for over 70 years now. We'll probably keep Guam forever, or at least as long as we retain pretensions to being a Pacific power.

But what about Puerto Rico? Why have we kept it all this time? Does it really have some overriding military significance that requires us to keep it? And why have we given it this peculiar 'Commonwealth' status, with talk every so often of making it a state?

I think the answer is that we wanted to make Puerto Rico a shining example, not just to the nations of the Caribbean, but to Latin America as a whole, of what good old American freemarket democracy could produce. In that effort, we've thrown billions of tax dollars and tax breaks at that island, but it really hasn't worked. Why not?

To me, the answer seems clear. There simply aren't enough people on Puerto Rico who have the intellectual capacity to manage a first-world economy. In fact, I've read (although don't quote me on this) that 40% of the Puerto Rican population is on welfare! IMHO, we should not only never grant Puerto Rico statehood, we should grant it its independence-- whether it wants it or not! And I'm sure an overwhelming majority of Americans feel the same way.

Let's face it, a lot of these third-world nations are never going to 'develop.' They will just remain indigenous societies with relatively low standards of living. And that's fine, as long as they don't over-reproduce and try to export their surplus population to the developed nations. This planet is big enough to contain a number of different types of human societies, and in some ways these indigenous cultures are preferable to ours. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that ultimately everybody is going to become part of the First World.

first-world gop?

Wouldn't it be nice if the GOP actually started acknowledging climate change? Well, will wonders never cease?. A Republican carbon tax. I know, it's hard to believe, but here it is, put forward by the Climate Leadership Council headed by Reagan-era luminaries George Shultz and James Baker, backed by Larry Summers, Christine Todd Whitman, and Janet Yellen. They don't call it a tax, of course, but a 'fee' or something. That's what it is, though.

https://www.clcouncil.org/

overpaid entertainers

Why is it that top-level entertainers and athletes-- which is to say, entertainers-- are so vastly overpaid? The top scientists and engineers should make significantly more than mere entertainers. Somebody should do an economic analysis of why this is so. Is it just that the entertainment industry is run by a bunch of insane greedheads?

diversity vs. academic standards

Diversity is overrated. Academic standards are much more important. In fact, bringing in less qualified minority students in order to achieve 'diversity' probably means that academic standards will be lowered to accommodate them. That ain't right.

I see where the Justice Department is joining some Asian group in suing Harvard, saying that the university discriminated against more qualified Asian applicants in order to meet affirmative action quotas. Actually, I think a private university should be able to admit whoever it wants to for whatever reasons it wants to. The provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that forbid this should be rescinded. At the same time, it would behoove Harvard to be transparent about this and make known the disparity in grades and test scores between their regular admittees and affirmative-action admittees.

charming

Fifteen-year-old boy hacked to death with machetes in New York City, in a case of 'mistaken identity.' These are the kind of third-world savages we should never allow into this country.

https://nypost.com/2018/06/29/bodega-owner-breaks-silence-on-teens-gruesome-murder/

'Make American Great Again'

We are the country that put a man on the moon. Let’s get back to being that country.

GOTCHA!

Is it just me? Why do I get the feeling that this brouhaha over child separation at the border is just another ‘Gotcha!’ attempt by the Democrat-media complex to derail, first, the Trump candidacy and now the Trump presidency. The thing is, it’s just such a naked attempt to manipulate people’s emotions. ‘Trump Hates the Chilluns!’ Omigod. I think most people are smart enough to realize that this is a secondary issue. The important question is: Do you want this massive influx of illegal aliens across our southern border to continue? To that question, the overwhelming majority of Americans respond with a resounding ‘No.’

So if the Dem/media types think this issue is going to take them through the midterm elections, I think they’ve got their heads up their rear ends. In the first place, Trump has already taken most of the wind out of their sails with this executive order, although they’ll no doubt find some related aspects of this to keep bitching about. What they really want, of course, is for these families to be released into the general American population—in effect, an open-borders policy for these people. Make it across the Rio Grande, and you’re home free. They’d never have the guts to admit this, of course, because they realize most people totally disagree with them. But that’s what they really want.

And then there’s the sneaking suspicion that these people care more about illegal aliens than they do about Americans. After all, there are over a million American children separated from their parents who are in jail or prison. Have you heard a peep of concern about them? Of course not.

So my feeling is that this will fade as we move along toward November, that this will recede just like the Access Hollywood tape and Stormy Daniels and all the rest of them. ‘Gotcha!’ . . . not.

two simple questions

Q: If an American citizen is charged with a crime, is she separated from her children?
A: Yes. She is put in jail awaiting trial, and the children are brought under the wing of a child protective agency and usually put in some kind of institutional setting.

Q: Should illegal aliens be treated more leniently than American citizens?
A: No.

geopolitics

Immigration is the one issue I agree with Trump on. We need to control who's coming into this country; we need to be bringing in people with education and skills that will benefit us as well as them. Anybody who thinks it's a good idea for us to allow in millions of illiterate peasants from Mexico and Central America just because they can make it across the Rio Grande ought to have his head examined.

That said, it seems to me that we ought to be paying a lot more attention to these countries-- our neighbors, after all-- than we do. We should pay a lot less attention to the Middle East-- where, IMHO, we're basically on the side of the Bad Guys. What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan after 17 bleepin' years? And Iraq? A war we should never have instigated in the first place. Instead, we should be concentrating our efforts on trying to help our neighbors become prosperous, orderly societies-- first-world countries-- whose people would be perfectly content to stay where they are.

monogamy

I think there should be clubs in colleges, high schools, maybe even middle schools called, simply, 'Monogamy.' I think monogamy is really what most kids want, especially if their parents seem to have successful marriages. These clubs would be totally voluntary, not affiliated with any religion, but the kids who join them would basically be saying, 'I want to find a life partner and have children and a family. I'm not interested in promiscuous sex.'

The popular culture of today is this 'hookup' culture, which tells kids that they should try to be as promiscuous as possible with as many people as possible. If it results in pregnancy, that's a mistake. On the other hand, you might not want to 'take precautions' if that will interfere with your sexual pleasure. This is the culture that Hollywood tries to foist on us, particularly on our children.

But I don't think this is what most young people actually want. This hookup culture tries to pressure girls, in particular, into having casual sex when they may not want that at all. 'Monogamy' would be a cultural alternative that would allow these young people to avoid that pressure.

two sides of the same coin

Welfare dependency and criminality are two sides of the same coin: parasitism, the unproductive people living off the productive people.

the question

The question is, What do the productive, intelligent people owe to the unproductive, unintelligent people? The answer, generally speaking, is, something but not everything. We can't let people starve or freeze to death, but I don't think we should just let them reproduce at will-- just because reproducing is one of the few things they're any good at. If we did, they'd just reproduce us into being a third-world country.

to hell with ability

New York Mayor Bill De Blasio has come up with a truly awful plan to impose virtual racial quotas on the city's top examination schools. It seems there aren't enough blacks and latinos at these schools, because not enough of them do well on the rigorous entrance exams. (Unspoken, of course, is that there are too many Asians at these schools, where they typically make up well over half of the student population.)

We need to be making sure that the brightest kids get the education they need. Affirmative action quotas for these schools create only the illusion of ability, and the result will be that the good students at these schools will inevitably be slowed down while the quota students try to keep up. A terrible, self-destructive idea that will produce predictably horrible results.

https://nypost.com/2018/06/05/de-blasios-latest-bad-idea-will-hurt-citys-elite-schools/

why does the left like to talk dirty?

So the latest is Samantha Bee of  TBS's 'Full Frontal,' who came up with the dirtiest thing you can call a woman to describe Ivanka Trump.

It seems characteristic of people on the left that they use profanity more than people on the right. Certainly rightists feel just as strongly about things as leftists, yet it's overwhelmingly people on the left who use profanity publicly in asserting their views. Why is this?

I think there are a couple reasons for this:

1. One is that that don't know any better. I think this is true of Bill Maher, for example. His use of profanity is just so casual, so unthinking, that I just think that's the way he grew up. Everybody in his family talked that way, all his friends and neighbors talked that way, so to him it was just the way 'everybody' talked. I think this was-- perhaps is-- characteristic of ethnic working-class people and blacks. Somewhere along the line Maher must have learned that most people don't think you should talk this way in public, but by that time he had learned the second reason why people on the left talk dirty:

2. They do it for effect. They think it makes them seem clever. This is particularly true of show-business leftists like Steven Colbert and now Samantha Bee. At one time they may have been right. I think that time has now passed.

3. Democrat party chair Tom Perez uses profanity at public meetings. With somebody like him, I think the reason for this is the one that's customarily ascribed to it: that he lacks the intelligence to articulate specifically what it is that's bothering him, so he resorts to profanity because it's the only, but inarticulate, way for him to express his frustration.

arithmetic

Even something as simple as arithmetic is related to our remaining a first-world country. Don't you think so? Wouldn't it be a good idea if all the schoolkids had to memorize their multiplication tables from 1 to 10 before they graduated from elementary school? Don't you think they could do it? After all, it's basically rote memorization, right? Only later might it sink in what these relationships actually are. And it would give kids a certain basic confidence around numbers that might lead on to further mathematical understanding. It's that kind of understanding-- that logical-mathematical intelligence-- that will keep us in the ranks of the first-world nations.

the best-kept secret in the world

The best-kept secret in the world is the overwhelming centrality of mathematical-logical ability in the modern world. This kind of ability is absolutely crucial in coding, for example. If you don't have it, you can't do it. The countries with more people with a higher degree of this ability are the countries that will be successful; those with few such people, and even those of relatively low ability, will not be successful. It's that simple.

perverse logic

The Urban League's 'State of Black America 2018' report complains thusly about the lack of diversity in the high-tech workforce:

'Black Americans are frequent users of technology, and have helped build social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram into the giants they are today. But they aren’t reaping the same economic benefits of the tech boom as white Americans, and low rates of black employment in the tech industry are a large part of the reason why.'

So blacks deserve a greater chunk of high-tech employment because they constitute a high percentage of users of these products. Really? By that logic, 80% of the players in the NFL should be white. What's wrong with that picture?

It doesn't seem to occur to these race-baiters that you need a certain kind of ability to work in this industry, and in Silicon Valley in particular you need a high level of that ability. Same as in the NFL. Skin-color quotas just aren't gonna cut it in this industry, regardless of how many blacks use Twitter and Instagram.

The other thing that people who complain about this never acknowledge is the high level of Asian workers in this industry. That's because the disproportionate number of East Asian people of yellow color and South Asian people of brown color doesn't fit in with the victimology narrative about all those oppressed 'people of color.' These people are successful largely because they're well educated. Funny how those two things seem to go hand in hand.

schizophrenic google

It seems there are actually two separate Google companies. One is the successful high-tech company whose great service we all use. The other is a politically correct second company that has been piggy-backed onto the first and advocates for a 'multicultural, diverse' tech universe that doesn't quite seem to exist in reality. Here's an example of their output, bemoaning the attributes of a 'white/male dominant culture.' I doubt you can have it both ways.

don't bother

There really is no point in trying to 'educate' low-intelligence people beyond a certain point. I mean, there's only so much learning people with IQs of 85 and 90 can absorb, and to try to push them beyond that will only lead to frustration and resentment. Plus, it won't work anyway. Yes, we should try to bring everybody up to some basic level of literacy and numeracy so they can get through day-to-day life in a society like this, and maybe even hold down some kind of job. But don't expect miracles, and don't bet the farm on it.

I think this is one cause of increasing teacher burnout, this attempt to educate people who are basically ineducable beyond a certain point. The result is that what goes on in some of these schools is more an exercise in crowd control than anything else, just an attempt to keep a lid on the pandemonium created by kids who couldn't care less about education. In an environment like that, teachers can't teach, and those students capable of learning can't learn.

We need to make sure that the kids who have demonstrated-- who have demonstrated-- a high level of intellectual ability are challenged and get what they need. These are the people who can create a decent economy and society.

the importance of science

It amazes me to have to say this, but science is just real, real important, folks. It's incredible to me that the Trump administration thinks it can just finesse the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change-- but's that's exactly what they're trying to do. Science is the best tool we humans have developed for understanding the nature of physical reality. To think one can ignore its conclusions is the height of hubris.

'racial equity'

When I hear this phrase 'racial equity,' what I really hear is, 'More handouts and quotas, please!' This means taking more money from productive people and using it to subsidize unproductive people. It also means handing out jobs and university places on the basis of skin color or ethnicity rather than ability and competence. I'm against it.

in a nutshell

In a nutshell, these are the kind of people we don't want:

. above all, people who exhibit that peculiar combination of low intelligence and violence that is absolutely toxic to civilized life; and

.beyond that, those who cannot or will not avoid becoming welfare recipients and criminals. Such people share a common characteristic: They are parasites, living off the productive people. We don't need them.

And the kind of people we do want? Why, those who are civilized, educated, and responsible, of course.

the trouble with feminists

The trouble with feminists is, they don't reproduce. These are among the brightest, best-educated people in our society, but a lot of them don't have any children at all. It's almost a badge of honor with them. Oh, they might have one, a la Chelsea Clinton, but that's about it, that's enough of that oppressive, patriarchal child-bearing nonsense. Meanwhile, the welfare idiots are churning them out like rabbits. Idiocracy, here we come.

I think educated, intelligent women should feel obligated to have at least two children, three if they and their spouse want one and can afford it. In fact, I would almost say that women like this have a duty to reproduce.

democrats

My problem with the Democratic Party is quite simple. I think the Democratic establishment would be quite content to watch the United States become a third-world country as long as they got to maintain their power and privilege. That's why they feel much more comfortable with their Wall Street megadonors than with the useful idiots who constitute their minority voter base.

After all, this is pretty much the way they operate in big cities, which contain what are basically whole swaths of third-world areas now. Somebody like Rahm Emanuel, for example, (mayor of Chicago) doesn't really have to care too much about the state of the Chicago public schools; he sends his kids to private school. As did Jesse Jackson. As did Bill Clinton-- although he said during his campaign that Chelsea would attend a public school in Washington. In the event, she attended one of the most exclusive private schools in the city-- the same school that Barack Obama sent his two daughters to.

education

I'm really beginning to think we need a radical restructuring of public education in this country. In particular, I'm thinking we should stop trying to waste money 'educating'  very low-intelligence people (people with, say, IQs south of 90). Trying to educate people like this beyond a sixth- or eighth-grade level is just a waste of time, energy, and money. It's just not going to 'take,' anyway, because these kids just can't handle it.

What should they do instead? Maybe they could become agricultural laborers. They shouldn't be living in cities anyway; they just get into trouble there. Working on farms would at least give them something productive to do to fill up their time.