Negative Correlation between Looks and Talent

Here is a good point about correlations:

The paper claims "Across the highest adult performance levels, peak performance is negatively correlated with early performance." This is a classic example of Berkson's paradox.

Here is a simplified example to understand this: Assume that to be a successful actor you have to be either extremely good looking or extremely talented. Assume also that talent and looks are independent in the population. However, among sucessful actors you will observe a negative correlation between looks and talent. This doesn't meant anything beyond the selection process and should not be extrapolated.

My favorite example-joke of this is that basketball points scored is negatively associated with height among NBA players. (because to be an NBA player you have to be very tall OR be very good at scoring).

It refers to this AAAS Science paper, mirrored here. More discussion here.

The paper concerns comparing elite adult performance to elite youth performance. The top performing adults come from the top performing youths. But if you look at the correlation the wrong way, as in this paper, you might wrongly conclude the opposite.

Update: David Epstein brags about this paper as confirming his books on the subject. He makes the same statistical error.

Thank the Christian Dark Ages for Modernity

I found this on Twitter.

This view is widespread, but I have criticized it many times. It is anti-Christian propaganda. Most of what created the modern world was invented during the period labeled the Christian Dark Ages on this chart. Christian Europe advanced centuries ahead of the rest of the world.

The chart gives the impression that Europe would have done better without Christianity, or that Europe was falling behind the rest of the world. Not true. The opposite is more accurate.

It is true that when the Roman Empire moved east, some areas got left behind. But Christians were playing the long game, and making changes that would take centuries to pay off.

Everyone agrees that scientific advancement skyrocketed in Christendom after about 1500, while the rest of the world lagged far behind. That built on earlier advances, such as those described in Renaissance of the 12th century.

I get the impression that a lot of educated people think that Christianity somehow held back scientific progress, and that we might have advanced farther without it. That is completely crazy, as all Christian countries did much better than all non-Christian countries. The difference is so dramatic that it is hard to imagine Christendom doing better than it did.

Ancient Roman Road Map

Source

A new study identified over 68,000 more miles of ancient Roman roads than were previously known.

Year 150 AD. This is amazing.

Decline of the American Dream

This chart is being copied widely.

There are many causes for this. Notable ones include anti-marriage policies, and importing foreigner greatly in excess of available housing, driving up prices.

Why Are Black Crime Rates So High?

Ben Shapiro has a podcast on facts, and here is a recent episode:

29,322 views Apr 17, 2025 #BenShapiro #DailyWire #TheBenShapiroShow

In America, conversations about race and crime often follow a familiar script: white perpetrators, black victims, and a justice system accused of systemic bias. But what does the data actually say?

In this episode, Ben breaks down the numbers, traces the media’s influence and examines the role of fatherhood, policing, and culture in shaping crime patterns across racial groups.

so why is this 5:28 happening? why disproportionate crime in 5:30 the black community?

the single most 5:32 obvious factor correlating with violent 5:33 crime is lack of fathers in the home. 5:36 according to the Institute for Family 5:38 Studies only 37% of black children are 5:40 living in a home headed by their 5:42 biological parents. 72% of black fathers 5:44 have had a child out of wedlock. studies 5:46 show the number of fathers in a 5:47 neighborhood can actually help alleviate 5:49 the problem of lack of fathers directly 5:51 in the home.

Yes, that is an obvious correlation. Even among Whites, fatherlessness is correlated with violent crime.

This is a typical conservative response. They want it to be true, because then society can be improved by encouraging marriage and stable families. Those things are also good for other reasons.

The most obvious factor is the possibility that Blacks have genes for violent crime. There is not much research on this, as people are afraid of the results.

Ben would probably say that there is a lot of research showing that fatherlessness is correlated with violent crime, and that is true across all races, so why even look at race?

It is possible that fatherlessness does not cause crime at all. Maybe the crime is caused by genes, and those genes are inherited from the mom and dad. And maybe the moms and dads with those genes have all sorts of traits that lead to divorce and unstable relationships. So the genes could be causing the fatherlessness and the crime.

I am sure it is not that simple, and crime has many causes. I am all in favor of improving fatherlessness, but it may not help the crime rate much.

Currently we have many laws and policies that favor fatherlessness. I agree with fixing them.

The London Guardian reports on a hot controversy:

Migrant charities and MPs have accused Yvette Cooper of pandering to racism and stoking the possibility of riots after the Home Office said it would publish the nationalities of foreign criminals in the UK for the first time.

The home secretary has ordered officials to publish the data, including the crimes that have been committed, by the end of the year. It is expected to lead to “league tables” of foreign nationals showing which nationalities are more associated with particular crimes.

Many people do not want to face reality. Britain is being repopulated with foreigners, and some are much more criminal than others.

Apparently education is not the cause:

Indeed, some studies show that Black women are the most educated demographic in America. ...

Despite stereotypes about African Americans, Black Americans in the United States are among those most likely to earn a postsecondary degree. For example, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that from the academic years 2000–2001 to 2015–2016, the number of bachelor's degrees awarded to Black students increased by 75% and the number of associate degrees earned by Black students increased by 110%.2 Black students are making headway in graduate education as well, with, for example, the number of Black students enrolled in master's degree programs nearly doubling between 1996 and 2016.

Covid Lockdowns Did Not Work

When the covid lockdowns started in early 2020, everyone attacked Sweden for not going along with the program. Hundreds of articles said that it was not following the science and medicine, and killing its citizen.

Now we have some data on what worked, and Sweden has the lowest excess mortality.

The same blog has an unrelated story of an Indiana mom went to family court asking for a child custody change to sole custody because she wanted to eliminate the possibility of the dad talking to her daughter about religion! Sure enough, the judge ordered the dad not to discuss religion!

Fortunately, the appeals court reversed. Most child custody decisions are not appealable.

Current Data on Crime and SAT Scores

Crime and IQ data are getting scarce, as they look bad for some groups.

In the FBI’s (less than perfect) homicide statistics for 2021, the ratio of black known homicide offenders to known nonblack homicide offenders is about an order of magnitude, depending upon how you define black from the 2020 Census....

If you use Black and Another Race, you get a racial ratio of about 9 to 1 for known homicide offender rate for black vs. all nonblacks. If you use Black Alone, you get a racial ratio of 11 to 1. So, roughly an order of magnitude, which is a huge ratio by almost all social science standards.

In contrast, women were one-eighth of the known homicide offenders in 2021, so the male to female ratio is more around 7.2 to 1.

It’s crazy that black to nonblack ratio is worse than the male to female ratio.

Steve Hsu reports:

The state of Michigan required all public HS seniors to take the SAT last year (~91k out of ~107k total seniors in the state). This generated an unusually representative score sample. Full report.  ...

To the uninformed, the results are shocking in a number of ways. Look specifically at the top band with scores in the 1400-1600 range. These are kids who have a chance at elite university admission, based on academic merit.

The SAT is less of an IQ test than it used to be, and colleges are dropping SAT requirements, even though it is still the best predictor of college performance. The problem is the ethnic breakdown. Just look at the chart.

Girls are now doing better than boys in school grades and college admissions, but the Michigan SAT data do not show that. They show boys outscoring girls at the high and low end, with girls doing better in the middle.

Asians score very high, and Blacks score low. Nobody argues that the tests are culturally biased anymore, as they are not written to let Asians score well.

New Studies on the Transgenderism Fad

There has been a huge increase in child transgenderism in the past few years. Is it a big fad? Is it because a previously unrecognized illness is being treated? Is it a contagious disease?

NBC News reports:

The “social contagion” theory can be traced back to a 2018 paper published in the journal PLOS One. Dr. Lisa Littman, who at the time was a professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University, coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” which she described as adolescents experiencing a conflict between their birth sex and gender identity “suddenly during or after puberty.” These adolescents, she wrote, “would not have met the criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood” and are experiencing dysphoria due to social influence.  

Littman also hypothesized that adolescents assigned female at birth are more likely to be affected by social contagion and, as a result, are overrepresented in groups of adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria when compared to those who were assigned male at birth.

After intense debate and criticism, PLOS One conducted a post-publication reassessment of the article, and issued a correction that included changing the headline to clarify that Littman did not survey transgender or gender-diverse youth themselves, but actually surveyed their parents. The correction also noted that, “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is not a formal mental health diagnosis at this time.”

Now a new study, by some prominent transgenderism advocates, claims to refute this.

The deleterious effect of unfounded hypotheses stigmatizing TGD [transgender and gender diverse] youth, particularly the ROGD hypothesis, cannot be overstated, especially in current and longstanding public policy debates. Indeed, the notion of ROGD [rapid-onset gender dysphoria] has been used by legislators to prohibit TGD youth from accessing gender-affirming medical care, despite the considerable methodological limitations underlying the generation of this hypothesis, as well as the unequivocal support for gender-affirming medical care by multiple major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, and the American Psychiatric Association.8

Cannot be overstated? The bias shows. The study shows no such deleterious effect.

Their main argument is that females would be more subject to social contagion, but his study found more males.

They also say that the transgender kids reported bullying, while that would not be expected if the kids were doing what is popular.

This is not a refutation of anything. Maybe boys and girls have different reasons for being transgender. Maybe transgenderism is popular with some but not others.

It says other studies found bullying, but I do not see that the data prove anything. Suppose you discovered that kids with tattoos report more bullying. Would that prove that there is no social pressure to get tattoos? Certainly not.

This whole subject is politicized. A good paper is forcibly corrected. Stupid papers get published if they promote transgenderism. The major medical associations are on board with it.

Here is a criticism of an earlier paper by the same authors.

You know they have biases when you use phrases like "those assigned male sex at birth (AMAB)". They have male sex from the moment of conception until they die. They are male. The sex is noticed at birth, but also before birth and after birth.

There is no solid science backing up any of the transgender affirming treatments.

White Population Declines

The London Daily Mail reports:

For the first time in U.S history, the number of white people in the nation is expected to show a decline when racial breakdowns of the 2020 Census are reported this week.

The data, set to be released on August 12, will reveal just how much the ethnic and racial make up of the nation has shifted over the past decade, according to preliminary data seen by The Washington Post.

'Twenty years ago if you told people this was going to be the case, they wouldn't have believed you,' said William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. 'The country is changing dramatically.'

They would not believe it, because Wikipedia and the mainstream media call it a conspiracy theory.

Whites are already a minority in California.

Here is the latest language nonsense:

Terms such as "mother," "breast," "breast milk," and "breastfeeding" are no longer acceptable.

Last week, the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine announced that it is replacing these terms with "lactation-related language" to achieve "desexed or gender-inclusive language."

Though it contains "breastfeeding" in its name, the ABM will now use "mammary gland" to refer to "breast" and "human milk feeding" instead of "breastfeeding."

This is so silly that it is baffling as to what they think they will accomplish. The official statement has some peculiar language theories:

Language, interpretation, and translation are constant considerations for ABM. We affirm that lan- guage has power. This is demonstrated in linguistic rela- tivity and determinism, both theories explaining how the structure of a language impacts thought and behavior.

Wow, linguistic determinists are somewhat like genetic determinists, in that I thought that they offend leftists.

That is, a linguistic deterministic might say that you have to speak English to be an intelligence person today, and that arguments in other languages are unworthy of consideration. But these woke academics say that language determines how you think. Weird.

Update: Jennifer Rubin is the Wash. Post token conservative columnist. Actually she is Jewish, not conservative. She says the White decline is "fabulous news", because we (Jews) need to prevent White rule.

The Census says that a majority of the under-18 population is likely to be already non-white.

Update: Rubin was caught spreading false info about sick kids.

Update: Tucker Carlson said:

What happened to those white people now missing from the census? It turns out many of them perished in the opioid epidemic…100s of thousands of Americans, leaving aside their color, have died of opioid ODs and the only one anyone in Washington notices is George Floyd.

The great pandemic is mostly over

The US CDC released weekly COVID-19 mortality update. There is a lot of data there, but a couple of things stuck out to me. First, there have been no significant excess COVID-19 deaths in any age group for about 3 months. Yes, there are still people dying of the disease, but it is mostly people over age 70, and they are dying at the rate that they would be dying anyway. Second, it says:

For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.

The official US death toll is about 182,000, but that includes deaths with multiple causes. The CDC has data about excess deaths but it is tricky to interpret directly. It uses a model that says deaths should have been going down since Jan. 1, 2020. The current death rate, from all causes, is about the same as what was predicted for Jan. 1, 2020, so the CDC says that there are still excess deaths. It appears to me that the number of deaths that can be fairly attributed to COVID-19 is maybe half the official figure.

Corruption of Psychologists and Pediatricians

Christopher J. Ferguson writes in Quillette:

The bottom line is that professional guilds such as the APA [American Psychological Association] and AAP [American Academy of Pediatrics] have a demonstrable track record of unreliability when speaking on matters of science. This means that parents, the general public, and policy makers may base decisions on erroneous pseudo-scientific claims that can’t be backed by good data. Perhaps the most egregious issue is when such bodies simply pretend no controversy exists in fields that are, in fact, highly controversial. ...

Social science is being poorly represented by groups like the APA and AAP. I recommend that, for the time being, parents, policy makers, and the public should, at best, treat resolution statements with a grain of salt and perhaps ignore them altogether.

I have posted many criticisms of the recommendations of these organizations. These are politicized organizations who do not follow the science. The above article has examples to prove it.

Black men do poorly, even if born rich

The NY Times reports:

Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds, according to a sweeping new study that traced the lives of millions of children.

White boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way. Black boys raised at the top, however, are more likely to become poor than to stay wealthy in their own adult households.

Even when children grow up next to each other with parents who earn similar incomes, black boys fare worse than white boys in 99 percent of America. And the gaps only worsen in the kind of neighborhoods that promise low poverty and good schools.
According to the study, led by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and the Census Bureau, income inequality between blacks and whites is driven entirely by ...

The study says that they could not find any quantitative evidence for an explanatory cause for black men doing worse than white men, except for the possibility of "differences in innate ability." But if so, it said that the racial differences must be greater for men than for women.

That is, maybe black men are stupid, oversexed, impulsive, violent, and lazy compared to white men, and thus are less successful in the job market. But the same is apparently not true about black women compared to white women. White women seem to have problems similar to black women. Sad,

The disparities that remain also can’t be explained by differences in cognitive ability, an argument made by people who cite racial gaps in test scores that appear for both black boys and girls. If such inherent differences existed by race, “you’ve got to explain to me why these putative ability differences aren’t handicapping women,” said David Grusky, a Stanford sociologist who has reviewed the research.

Not hard to explain. Men are smarter than women. Men are more aggressive than women. Men are more criminal than women. Blacks are more matriarchal than whites. A decent academic study would have considered these hypotheses, as well as a few others.

The authors, including the Stanford economist Raj Chetty and two census researchers, Maggie R. Jones and Sonya R. Porter, tried to identify neighborhoods where poor black boys do well, and as well as whites.

“The problem,” Mr. Chetty said, “is that there are essentially no such neighborhoods in America.”

Then integrating neighborhoods does not work.

All these studies show the same thing -- that race and sex differences are real. All attempts to find external explanations have failed.

The lead author of the study is Raj Chetty, a politically correct economist who once won a genius prize. He and the Jews who run the NY Times are so eager to argue that white (non-Jewish) American men are no better than black men. Even when the data overwhelmingly lead to that conclusion, they cook up ridiculous reasons for denying it.

Libertarians give data vendors a pass

Reason reports a libertarian view:

In America, tech giants know a lot about us. John Stossel says that's fine with him. He knows what information he's handing over and he does it voluntarily. But he says we should worry about becoming like China, where the government is starting to use online data to create 1984 in the real world.

China's government has announced that they'll assign a mandatory government "social credit score" to everyone in the country by 2020. It will be based largely on what you do online. Say something that gets censored, you lose points. Same if you watch porn, or are late in returning a rented bike, or buy lots of alcohol.

China's government boasts that the social credit system will "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step."

No, the tech giants are grabbing out data, whether voluntary.

Facebook has recently gotten in hot water for turning over user data to political operatives, but the problem is much worse than that. Even if you never use Facebook, it buys info from data brokers on you, and has you better profiled than the Chinese govt has on its citizens.

Europe has laws regulating somewhat how tech giants collect user data. The USA has no such laws.

It is funny that libertarians are so adamantly against govt collecting data on its citizens, but give a free pass to these multinational tech giants who manage our data with little or no accountability. I would have thought that the interests of individual liberty would be for individuals to have some control over their own data.

This is one of many issues where I have become disillusioned with libertarians. Others are immigration, dope smoking, gambling, trade, and family law.

Year 2100 demographics

Those who worry about predictions for the year 2100 fall into two camps: concern over CO2 and population. The latter say this is “the world’s most important graph.”


American Renaissance,asks:

We asked our contributors to answer the following questions: “What should the white West do about this prediction, and what will we do about it?”

The chart show moderate increases for Europe and N. America, but these increases are likely to be entirely non-white.

I think that whites will do nothing about it, until it is clear that they are about to be enslaved. Then they will resist, and a world-wide racial and religious war will result. It will be ugly.

What should the white West do? Something to avoid war, of course, and also to avoid enslavement.

When Algorithms Discriminate

A NY Times article says:

But can computer programs be discriminatory?

There is a widespread belief that software and algorithms that rely on data are objective.

Another says:

“Algorithms aren’t subjective,” he said. “Bias comes from people.”

Somehow Google has been the big beneficiary of such thinking. People widely believe that Google searches are objective algorithms, and therefore not subject to human second-guessing.

Of course Google employs a couple thousand engineers who hand-tune search tables so that result will align with its business purposes.

Yes, algorithms discriminate. That is their purpose. Even if they are just trying to discriminate in favor of people willing to spend more money online, that will be correlated with all sorts of other discriminators.

More and more our lives are determined by algorithms, and they can be doing good or evil.

An artificial intelligence site argues:

These four claims form the core of the argument that artificial intelligence is important: there is such a thing as general reasoning ability; if we build general reasoners, they could be far smarter than humans; if they are far smarter than humans, they could have an immense impact; and that impact will not be beneficial by default.

The Less Wrong folks have similar concerns.

Their arguments are fairly convincing. And opinions will vary about what is beneficial. But I cannot endorse this open letter against autonomous weapons, signed by many famous experts and intellectuals. These weapons are coming, just like self-driving cars, and good engineering can make them useful.

FBI wants your crypto keys

FBI Director James Comey writes:

But my job is to try to keep people safe. In universal strong encryption, I see something that is with us already and growing every day that will inexorably affect my ability to do that job. It may be that, as a people, we decide the benefits here outweigh the costs and that there is no sensible, technically feasible way to optimize privacy and safety in this particular context, or that public safety folks will be able to do their job well enough in the world of universal strong encryption. Those are decisions Americans should make, but I think part of my job is make sure the debate is informed by a reasonable understanding of the costs.

See this SciAm article for background.

Some prominent cryptologists have written an essay on The Risks of Mandating Backdoors in Encryption Products. They say that the govt plan cannot work, and and the NY Times says that a previous Clinton administration plan was shown to not work either.

I am inclined to agree that giving the Obama administration everything they want would infringe our civil liberties, but the cryptologist argument is nonsense. The Clinton administration plan was defeated politically, not by technical weaknesses.

Every other country spies on its citizens, and does it without any statutory limitation or due process. Apple, Google, credit bureaus, Obamacare, and others collect vast amounts of privacy invading data on us, and we have very few protections. The main forces against encryption are businesses who profit from selling our private data.

It would be possible to give the feds what they ask, and give citizens better protections than they have today. There are no technical barriers to this.

These cryptologists are saying something that is popular with civil libertarians, and with big data companies who would like to keep spying on us. But those big data companies are eager to give the false impression that all of your data can be trusted with them, and that the FBI is the real threat to your privacy.

Here is a bigger threat, from a Latina political appointment in the Obama administration:

Katherine Archuleta, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, resigned under pressure on Friday, one day after the government revealed that two sweeping cyberintrusions at the agency had resulted in the theft of the personal information of more than 22 million people, including those who had applied for sensitive security clearances.

I think that it is just a matter of time before massive files on everyone get put on the web, with Social Security numbers, addresses, and health info. Once that happens, people will see little point in making that info secret anymore.

Update: James Baker says that he convinced the NY Times to issue a correction about the supposed technical weaknesses of the Clinton administration plan.

While I was on the opposite side of Baker in the 1990s crypto wars, I agree with him that the press has fallen for lame arguments from cryptologists.

African population exploding

SciAm reports:

United Nations leaders have worried for decades about the pace of population growth. A few years ago leading calculations had global population peaking at nine billion by 2070 and then easing to 8.4 billion by 2100. Currently it stands at 7.2 billion. Recently the U.N. revised these numbers steeply upward: the population is now expected to rise to 9.6 billion by 2050 and continue to 10.9 billion by 2100 (black line, below). What caused this drastic revision? Almost all the increase comes from Africa (pink line). Earlier models “had anticipated that fertility rates in Africa would drop quickly, but they haven’t,” says Adrian Raftery, a statistician at the University of Washington, who assessed the revised estimates. How the world will feed a few billion more people is the question of the day.

I mentioned this before, but the chart makes it clearer.

For years, all the environmental experts have said that most of the world's problems are attributable to too many people, but the population experts have assured us that Third World populations will drop if raise their standard of living. Educated women do not want kids, they say, and with birth control options they will not.

This thinking is wrong, if the UN projections are accurate. It appears that aid to Africa may be catastrophic for the world.

You have to be careful what you say about Africa. The London Telegraph reports:

James Watson, the world-famous biologist who was shunned by the scientific community after linking intelligence to race, said he is selling his Nobel Prize because he is short of money after being made a pariah.

Mr Watson said he is auctioning the Nobel Prize medal he won in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA, because "no-one really wants to admit I exist".

Auctioneer Christie’s said the gold medal, the first Nobel Prize to be sold by a living recipient, could fetch as much as $3.5m (£2.23m) when it is auctioned in New York on Thursday. The reserve price is $2.5m.

Mr Watson told the Financial Times he had become an “unperson” after he “was outed as believing in IQ” in 2007 ...

Mr Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for uncovering the double helix structure of DNA, sparked an outcry in 2007 when he suggested that people of African descent were inherently less intelligent than white people. ...

Mr Watson said his income had plummeted following his controversial remarks in 2007, which forced him to retire from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. He still holds the position of chancellor emeritus there.

“Because I was an ‘unperson’ I was fired from the boards of companies, so I have no income, apart from my academic income,” he said. ...

Mr Watson – who insisted he was “not a racist in a conventional way” – said it had been “stupid” of him to not realise that his comments on the intelligence of African people would end up in an article.

“I apologise . . . [the journalist] somehow wrote that I worried about the people in Africa because of their low IQ – and you’re not supposed to say that.”

In 2007, the Sunday Times ran an interview with Dr Watson in which he said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”.

He told the newspaper people wanted to believe that everyone was born with equal intelligence but that those “who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

Mr Watson said he hoped the publicity surrounding the sale of the medal would provide an opportunity for him to “re-enter public life”. Since the furore in 2007 he has not delivered any public lectures.

He is unlikely to be forgiven. Nor will people try to prove him wrong. It is a strange situation for one of the most famous scientists in the world.

I have criticized Watson before, but he should not have to sell his medal to get attention. If he can be shunned like this, then most other scientists will be intimidated into not expressing themselves on certain subjects, and truth will be hard to find.

Adam Rutherford, a Nature magazine editor and BBC science host, writes:

He may have unravelled DNA, but James Watson deserves to be shunned ...

This sounds awful: an 86-year-old hero ostracised for his views, shooed from public life by the people who walk in his scientific shadow.

But it’s not awful. Watson has said that he is “not a racist in a conventional way”. But he told the Sunday Times in 2007 that while people may like to think that all races are born with equal intelligence, those “who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. Call me old-fashioned, but that sounds like bog-standard, run-of-the-mill racism to me.

Rutherford's statement is much more offensive than Watson's. Watson was giving an opinion, based on his knowledge and experience. Rutherford offers no rebuttal, and treats it as an unmentionable scientific fact.

George R.R. Martin wrote (in A Clash of Kings or Game of Thrones):

“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”

Goofy analogies for spying

Here is how Pres. Obama tried to justify NSA spying:

“If I tell Michelle that I did the dishes–now, granted, in the White House I don’t do the dishes that much, but back in the day–and she’s a little skeptical. well,I’d like her to trust me, but maybe I need to bring her back and show her the dishes and not just have to take my word for it.”

And here is his NSA director's explanation:

It’s like when you were younger—well, this is for boys—you know, when you’re younger you say, “I don’t want to take a bath.” You say, “No, I’ll never to take a bath.” Why would you want to take a bath, well, you have to take a bath, clean, da da, da. You say, “But isn’t there a better way?” So we had to take baths, right. Or showers.

Actually, my impression is that most people do not care much about the NSA spying. The spying from Facebook, Google, Apple, banks, phone companies, credit bureaus, etc. seems worse.

Sears Tower still tallest

I keep seeing silly claims that other skyscrapers are taller than the Sears Tower in Chicago, such as in Malaysia and elsewhere. Time reports:

The new World Trade Center tower was designed to be the tallest in the country, a symbolic 1776-foot marker of American resilience.

But the developer decided to nix the decorative mast that would have accounted for more than 400 feet, saying it would have been impossible to maintain. Instead, the nearly-completed building has a mostly-bare broadcast antenna that reaches the 1,776-foot goal—but may or may not be counted in the building’s official height.

A committee of architects met behind closed doors Friday to decide whether the design change will impact the official measure of the building’s height. Without the mast, the tower reaches 1,368 feet, the same height as the original World Trade Center towers but below Chicago’s 1,450-foot Willis Tower (not including its antenna), formerly known as the Sears Tower.

Since the Sears Towers, as it is still commonly called, skyscrapers have added radio antennas spires in order to be classified as being taller, but it is much more reasonable to measure to the roof or the top occupied floor.

My guess is that they will say that the new WTC tower is the tallest, because that is the patriotic thing to do.

There is a much taller building in Dubai, but I am not sure that it has indoor plumbing. Maybe we should measure to the highest floor with a toilet connected to a sewer system.

California whites declining

The Sacramenta Bee newspaper reports:

California's birthrate tumbled last year to its lowest point since the Great Depression, new state figures show, yet another indication that the difficult economy is reshaping everyday life.

California families are looking at their personal finances, their job security, their prospects for the future – and increasingly deciding now is not the time to have a baby.

That is just part of the story. Middle class families sometimes find that kids are too expensive, but poor family get welfare payments to have kids.

"We are not becoming the next Germany or Japan, where the number of deaths exceeds the number of births," Johnson said.

The white population of California is declining like Germany and Japan. California's growth is entirely from immigration, illegal aliens, and first-generation (births to immigrants).

According to the California report, 51% of all births today are to hispanics, and it is rising to 55%. Only 29% are to whites, and that will drop to 25% by the year 2020. Hispanic women are having 2.23 kids apiece, while whites are having 1.68 and Asians 1.59.

This is all the result of a set of policies that have discourage white reproduction, and encouraged non-whites. It is as if the govt decided a few years ago to replace the white population of California with a non-white population.