Barrel Strength

Madame Justice Sotomayor in a speech in 2001:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

The New York Times reviews this here.

Frank James in NPR’s news blog has this to say about it.

I quote from James’ article, which refers to Stuart Taylor’s attack on this line of thinking:

“Her statement has prompted charges that she traffics in identity politics. How could it not? Stuart Taylor of the National Journal wrote a widely read criticism of her speech. An excerpt:

“Indeed, unless Sotomayor believes that Latina women also make better judges than Latino men, and also better than African-American men and women, her basic proposition seems to be that white males (with some exceptions, she noted) are inferior to all other groups in the qualities that make for a good jurist.
Any prominent white male would be instantly and properly banished from polite society as a racist and a sexist for making an analogous claim of ethnic and gender superiority or inferiority.

“Imagine the reaction if someone had unearthed in 2005 a speech in which then-Judge Samuel Alito had asserted, for example: “I would hope that a white male with the richness of his traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life” — and had proceeded to speak of “inherent physiological or cultural differences.”

“I have been hoping that despite our deep divisions, President Obama would coax his party, and the country, to think of Americans more as united by allegiance to democratic ideals and the rule of law and less as competing ethnic and racial groups driven by grievances that are rooted more in our troubled history than in today’s reality.”

Lurking in the background is a case where Sotomayor dismissed an appeal from New Haven firefighters whose successful test results were dismissed by the New Haven fire department. The reason? The successful applicants for the supervisor jobs were disproportionately white. The City of New Haven, apparently fearing lawsuits from blacks over the “disparate impact” of objective testing, dismissed the tests. This is known as the Ricci case after Frank Ricci, the dyslexic firefighter who quit his seocnd job, obtained tutoring, and passed the supervisor test.

The case is now going before the US Supreme Court. Stuart Taylor explains the origins of the disparate impact issue:
“The Court’s response was to rule that any test with a “disparate impact” on blacks — meaning that disproportionate numbers had low scores — was presumed to be invalid unless required by “business necessity.” Lack of intent to discriminate was no defense to such a disparate-impact suit. This remains the law today, although the Court and Congress (in 1991) have tinkered with the detailed rules.

“Over the decades since 1971, fewer and fewer employers have engaged in intentional racial discrimination against blacks or Hispanics. Likewise, the objective tests used by employers — including the New Haven fire department’s written and oral promotional exams — have been more and more carefully designed to be valid measures of job-related skills.

“Two things have remained constant, however. First, blacks and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics, score markedly lower on average than whites and Asians on objective tests of job-related skills — whether for firefighter, police officer, manufacturing worker, or other blue-collar jobs.

“This is what one might expect in a nation still plagued by vastly unequal educational opportunities and academic performance. Studies show, for example, that on average, the math and reading levels of black 17-year-olds are no higher than those of whites and Asians in the eighth grade. And the gap is not closing.”

Stuart Taylor’s article is essential reading for understanding what I expect will be a growing resistance by white people (of all races and colours) against the racial spoils system so dear to the Democrats.

  Read the rest…

An economic pioneer from Chicago? Yes.

Milton Friedman? Not quite…

Click video to play

I have been reading a truly interesting book, 1491, by Charles Mann. It deals with the catastrophic impact of European diseases on the Indians of the Americas. It deals with the epidemioligical facts of life and death, covering some of the same ground as Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel, Hans Zinsser’s Rats Lice and History, and William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples.

1491 recounts the growing consensus that the population of the Americas was reduced by 95% in the centuries after contacts with whites by smallpox, measles, influenza, and other diseases to which Europeans, Africans, and Asians had developed greater resistance. A “virgin” population was destroyed several times over before whites even arrived on the scene.

The same was said by Francis Parkman in the 19th century. He said that European settlement advanced into the de-populated regions of North America, which he thought, mistakenly, consisted of a band about several hundred miles in advance of white settlements, where white desieases had ravaged the aboriginal population. His error, apparently, was in considering that anyplace in the Americas at all had escaped these catastrophic ravages. Bernal Diaz, a junior officer in Cortes’ invasion force, recounts how the Aztecs were dying like flies in the siege of Tenochtitlan, the great capital of the Aztec Empire, in 1521. Other Spanish accounts confirm the dreadful effects of disease and plague on the Amerindian population.

1491 gets into trouble from the opponents of political correctness, who think that the idea that North and South America were densely populated before the advent of white men is so much PC nonsense, and from another school which likes to think the Indians went “light on the ground”, interfering with nature as little as possible, living in harmonious balance with Gaia.

Neither view is true, according to the latest research. This consensus may be no more valid than the consensus on anthropogenc global warming. For several reasons, 1491 can be read with pleasure by a broad readership, in confidence that they are not being seriously misled. First, billions of government funding for research are not at stake. Second, because all historians and all contemporary observers of the European Conquest of the Americas are at one in remarking upon the immediate effects of smallpox and other diseases on the Indians; only the size of the original population is at issue. Third, because, as the book itself relates, the Indians have left massive evidence of their systematic working of the earth in many places in both Americas.

An entertaining and informative book such as this deserves a wide readership. You will learn a lot, painlessly.

I asked my friend the Dark Lord about the difference between the British National Party (BNP) and the UK Independence Party. He replied as follows:
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The UKIP is a one-issue party, anti-EU to be sure, but probably founded by Establishment insiders as a means to allow the Great Unwashed to blow off steam harmlessly. Then, when all the fuss dies down, it’s back to business as normal.

“Appeals to the educated”… Arf, arf.

That’s the presumptuous piffle of the eternally soft. Oh! If only we could talk in university coffee club language, with occasional references to thinkers we might have read in our studies, and have the masses swing behind us, wouldn’t it be wonderful?

Yes, it would, but it isn’t going to happen. The real issues in Britain are not the level of state economy or free enterprise, much as we would like them to be, but the collapse of the education system, the settlement of the nation by hordes from the Dark Ages, the corruption of the police force, the destruction of the legal system, and the denigration of all national traditions. And all this aside from the corruption in government that even the BNP could not have dreamed up.

The British National Party is talking to ordinary people. It is ordinary people. They are now John and Jane Normal. That’s why the Establishment is worried.

Every thing else is light beer.

And the UKIP is light beer–a waste of effort.

A recent article in Gates of Vienna makes the point that the vast increase of German social spending under Hitler was based on the expropriation, and subsequent enslavement of Germany’s Jews.

The same point is made in Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler. The German state was running a huge deficit that could only be made up by pillaging its Jewish citizens. Robbery on a massive scale was an essential part of the national-socialist program.

“There was nothing irrational about the Holocaust. It was the only way Hitler could finance his social security. And that very same social security was the reason that the Germans got carried away with him, despite the hardships of war. They gained: the companies and houses of Jews were available for “nothing”. Jewish household goods and clothing went to those who lost their homes in the bombings. Money, jewels, and gold went to the state.”

It is no surprise to those who are politically literate that national-socialism is a leftist phenomenon, but it needs repeating.

I experienced tremendous emotional resistance, when arguing these facts, from those who believe that fascism is a right-wing phenomenon. It is not. Read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.

_____________

Pensee d’escalier: Mr. Jonah Goldberg points out that the entire anti-semitic project of Hitler was madly irrational. I grant  this freely. But rationality, when considered instrumentally, is the coherence of methods in relation to one’s ends. So from that weaselly point of view, robbery of those whom you wish to destroy is “rational”. In the same way that heart sacrificies are “rational” if the Sun God will fail to shine unless fed with the hearts of enemies.

My hero Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out the relentless campaign of British authorities to reduce the capacity of people to defend themselves.

I am not talking about firearms.  Lack of access to legal firearms reduces your ability to defend yourself, true.

But their real aim is to destroy any assurance that society will back you up if you aggressively defend yourself.

Two recent cases in Canada are disturbing. Brian Knight, an Alberta rancher was charged with excessive force for chasing the thief who stole his all-terrain vehicle and driving him into a ditch.

Then in Toronto the Good, David Chen, a Chinese grocer was arrested and charged with forcible confinement for chasing down a thief, beating him and throwing him into the van to bring him back to the scene of the crime.Police also charged Mr. Chen and his employees with assault, kidnapping and carrying a concealed weapon.

The report from the National Post said the following:
“The suspect ran down the alley, throwing his bike behind him. Mr. Chen leapt over the bike in pursuit.

“After they caught up to the suspect and put him in the van, they drove the van to the side of the road because it had been left in the middle of the street, he said.

“Mr. Chen said he then called police, but a citizen had already alerted officers who stopped the van.

“Mr. Chen and his employees were handcuffed and taken to the police station. He was carrying a box cutter in the cellphone case clipped to his belt, which accounts for the weapons charge.

“He said he had recently complained to an officer about his store being plagued by shoplifters. His employees caught two suspected thieves on Friday. Employees guarded one suspect inside the store for almost six hours until officers arrived, he said.”

Mr. Chen was charged with unlawful confinement because the police took six hours to show up! His concealed weapon was a box cutter, which is a tool legitimately used to open boxes – he is in the grocery business.

Today the following details emerge from a Globe and Mail report:

“After catching him, Mr. Chen said he and his employees tied the man up and put him in a delivery truck, intending to hold him until police arrived. But someone else called 911 first.

“The first thing we told police this guy he stole a thing from my store there,” Mr. Chen said. “But the police [officer] didn’t hear anything. He just pulled me down on the ground, put me in a car and sent me to the station.”

“Mr. Chen said he spent 24 hours in a holding cell at 52 Division, paid $7,500 bail, and that the suspected shoplifter – also charged – got out of custody before he did.

“He and his two employees, Jie Chen, 21, and Qing Li, 40, were each charged with carrying a concealed weapon, which the shopkeeper said were grocer’s box-cutters, like the one hanging from his belt loop.”

This is the advice we receive from our cops:

“Superintendant Ferguson said that according to the law, people trying to make a citizen’s arrest have the right to use physical force to detain someone only if they have witnessed a crime. Unlike a police officer, they are not allowed to arrest someone if they merely suspect the person of committing a crime previously.

General police advice, he said, is that citizens should not confront or try to catch criminals on their own.”

Leave to us professionsals, who show up six hours late.

 What is the point of these noisy front-page arrests? To intimidate people into not taking action to protect themselves. Why would police and authorities want to do this? What is their interest? My speculation is that they have lost their moral compass; they fear an aroused citizenry. They envy the directness of citizen action. They wish they could do the same themselves. They cannot. And if they can’t, no one can. Only specialists such as themselves are capable of maintaining order. If people took it into their heads to maintain order, the general uselessness of the police would be more effectively demonstrated. It is the same in education. No one can learn except by being taught by a unionized public school teacher.

It reminds me of Adam Smith’s talk of merchants never getting together but to conspire against the public interest. Only in this case it is the public authorities who seek to enforce their legal monopolies.

The following is an imagined future talk between a teacher and student in about 2025.

- You mean they had less than a billion addresses on the Internet?”

- They had no Internet. They only had about 85 endpoints, and they were called channels then.

-  Channels?

- The information only flowed one way.

- You have to be kidding. You’re kidding me, aren’t you sir?

- No, I am not. When broadcasting technology started, there were only three or four channels of television.

- What’s television?

- A pre-computer analog distribution system which employed vast amounts of spectrum to convey signals one-way. It was highly inefficient, but it was better at conveying pictures than what went before, which was only the printed word.

- How did they talk back?

- They didn’t.

- You mean they just sat there and watched stuff?

- Yes.

- Ah sir!  That’s just too weird!

- Nevertheless, for a few decades after radio communication was invented, but before computers re-organized how it was done, there was a period there when signals went out but the back-channel was missing.

- It must have been a period of extreme conformity, I mean, everybody watching the same stuff must have meant they all thought alike.

-  Good insight. It was. The 20^th century was the century of the mass-man and the collective state, even in the parliamentary democracies. There were even people who tried to maintain that system. They called the expansion of choices ‘fragmentation of the audience’, as if we were all supposed to be watching the same thing.

- Why did they think we should all be watching the same thing?

- That’s a tough one. Your essay has to be on the social implications of “broadcasting”, and that’s an issue you should address in your paper.

There are several “accomplishments” a country must achieve before being designated a banana republic.  A poor credit is one of the requirements and US is taking the steps in that direction.  FT notes:

The US government has had a triple A credit rating since 1917, but it is unclear how long this will continue to be the case. In my view, either one of two developments could be enough to cause us to lose our top rating.

First, while comprehensive healthcare reform is needed, it must not further harm our nation’s financial condition. Doing so would send a signal that fiscal prudence is being ignored in the drive to meet societal wants, further mortgaging the country’s future.

Second, failure by the federal government to create a process that would enable tough spending, tax and budget control choices to be made after we turn the corner on the economy would send a signal that our political system is not up to the task of addressing the large, known and growing structural imbalances confronting us.

For too long, the US has delayed making the tough but necessary choices needed to reverse its deteriorating financial condition. One could even argue that our government does not deserve a triple A credit rating based on our current financial condition, structural fiscal imbalances and political stalemate. The credit rating agencies have been wildly wrong before, not least with mortgage-backed securities.

Another core requirement to earn the title of banana republic is to have an intelligence service that has an agenda that diverges from the government, elected or otherwise.  Pakistan is a good example where its intelligence service, ISI, “pursues its own agenda for its own reasons“.  Now it seems US is well on its way to meeting that requirement as well.

First the CIA went to war with the Bush administration, with wild cheering from the Left, and now it is taking on the Democrats.  Can we call that blowback or is that a term that can only be used by the Left to denigrate US foreign policy?  This is not a war that Democrats can win, because this war can only be fought defensively which negates its effectiveness.  Intelligence services, both domestic and foreign, are difficult to control if the culture of divergent agenda is adopted within them.  No administration succeeded in removing J. Edgar Hoover as the director of FBI for this reason and it is unlikely that CIA can be tamed now that the cat is out of the bag.

The Left loved the office of special prosecutor as long as it only dealt with Republicans like Nixon but when it took on a Democrat like Clinton the ardour disappeared.  They might find this to be a case of deja vu.

Lately there has been a great degree of schadenfreude in relation to the fact that the rich donated substantial amount of money to the Obama campaign and are now on the receiving end of class warfare.  TigerHawk captures the spirit well when he states the following:

When it comes to politics, the “rich” will sell you the votes to hang them by. Exhibit A: “Barack Obama’s rich supporters fear his tax plans show he’s a class warrior.” What was their first clue? It is not as though he is doing anything differently than he had promised (other than using the economic crisis as a reason to accelerate federal spending to escape velocity).

I have no problem with rich people who supported Barack Obama, but those who express surprise at his class warfare political chatter and passion for the regulation of business simply were not paying attention.

Your correspondent has some difficulty with this reasoning and posted earlier on this point.  That post noted the following.

One of the key factors that has transformed this class of “professionals” is the increasing government regulation, which has led to increase in requirements for lawyers, accountants and other assorted hanger-ons. They do not add value to any process, but serve as leeches and parasites, who take a tiny bite out of production. Lawyers in US are a solid Democratic constituency as they know where the money comes from. An increasing number of professionals are catching on to this, as government spreads its tentacles. This is merely an extension, in a roundabout way, of the majority taxing the rich minority or majority relying on government for their welfare.

The question is what percentage of the rich really rely on government, directly or indirectly, for their welfare?  We might have an answer to that question via this WSJ post which notes:

Hedge-fund managers are showing rare public outrage against the Obama administration, saying that it has wrongly rebuked investors necessary to salving the financial crisis…. They have been disappointed by the Obama administration, left detached from a leader to whose party they gave 70% of their overall campaign donations during the 2008 election.

Is it possible that 70% of the fund managers, the supremely rational thinkers that they are, were really looking after their own interests when rooting for Obama?  It is a surprise that liberals of the world are yelling for more and more?  They know where their bread comes from.

I was pondering this issue, my complacency in the face of the Obama onslaught. There are many reasons to be seriously perturbed.

Here are the reasons why we should all be upset.

The economy is ratshit. The capitalist system is in disgrace. A lot of banking is revealed as a Ponzi scheme. More toxic debt will emerge from eastern Europe, in frightfully high ratios to total GDP. Americans have put in the Democrats for a term or two, free of filibustering by the Republicans. The terms of the bailouts of GM and Chrysler may affect the rights of bond holders and thus the ability to raise capital in the future, provided there is capital to be raised when the  inflation engendered by Obama will be wrecking the economy further .

So why am I complacent? Why do I have this feeling that my time is best spent not fretting about the interventionsist tide?

My theories are:

1) I have a job now and have become a sell-out since I have a few years’ worth of job security.

2) I have lived long enough to know that the onslaught will work itself out. That every offensive is met eventually with a counter-offensive.

3) Even if the United States is pulling permanently to the Left, even if Obama is a psycho- narcissist, there is nothing I can do about it.

I prefer theory 2.

Friends to the right of me are working themselves into a frenzy about Obama. Friends to the left of me are beginning to think the US will finally see universal medical care, while noting the  continuity of Obama and Bush in foreign policy.

Folks! The Republicans are in the penalty box, and will be there for a major game misconduct. They have messed with excessive de-regulation, they have served the rich altogether too well; their telecommunications policy is anti-Internet. In foreign policy I think Bush was right to invade Iraq and I think the casualty level was trivial for a nation of 330 million, though others  are still enraged by that war. In any case, the Republicans are out; they are leaderless and they have no ideas except lower taxes and more de-regulation. It is not going to sell.

Thus the Dems will advance into the middle of the electorate, assisting all their client groups, stifling innovation in education, favouring organized labour, messing at the edges with capitalism, working for Google against the carriers, until their scandals, crimes, attitudes and misdemeanors will bring them down. In four years or eight?

In the meantime, don’t forget to breathe.

In an earlier post your correspondent noted that a “lynch mob has been unleashed in US and institutional advisers have taken note”.  Those who chose to ignore this fact are now bearing the consequences.  Powerline blog in a post aptly titled “Banana Republic, Part II” states:

In connection with the Chrysler bankruptcy, Obama, ignoring laws that assign priority to secured creditors, has tried to bully lenders into abandoning their legal rights in favor of the United Auto Workers Union. To my knowledge, there is no precedent for this sort of arrogant lawlessness in American history.

It goes on to report a statement from a lawyer: “One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under the threat that the full force of the White House Press Corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.”

Welcome to a Mob style shakedown.  But did anybody really expect anything else from a Chicago politician?

Bernard-Henri Lévy in retracing the footsteps of another Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, made an interesting observation when conversing with muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, a city with a very high muslim population, which he wrote about in the book American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville.  He noted that whilst muslims in Europe, when using the word “we” mean Muslims, but when Muslims in US use that word they mean Americans and that it took him a while to understand that fact, because his initial assumption was that the American Muslims were using the word in a manner consistent with their European brethren.  That is one of the reasons US has been spared the plague of domestic terrorism.  The American Muslims identify themselves as Americans first and Muslims second unlike UK, where multiculturalism has led to a cesspool of festering terrorists.  Is that likely to remain the case in US?

The takeover of the auto industry by the Obama administration and UAW has assured the destruction of the auto industry in US.  Mark Steyn notes:

General Motors has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to over a million people. They can never sell enough cars to make that math add up. In fact, selling cars doesn’t help, as they lose money on each model. GM is a welfare project masquerading as economic activity.

The new boss at GM is unlikely to make any changes that will reverse this, thus assuring their destruction.  Both GM and Chrysler contribute significantly to the economy of the state of Michigan and problems related to the demise of the auto industry will no doubt cause economic hardship.  Are the muslims in Dearborn likely to remain docile in face of this economic calamity?  What will fill this vacum in their life?  Nature abhors vacum and in this case it is likely to be filled by Islam.