Category Archives: Intelligence

UPDATED: Orgy Of Sentimentality Finally OVER!

Democrats, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Propaganda, Reason

“Faking It” was a gem of a book published in 1999, if I am not mistaken. Its thesis was that ours is a society whose every facet is permeated with phony sentimentality, and with the elevation in every sphere of “feeling, image and spontaneity,” over “reason, reality and restraint.” The fraud and the poseur have the run of our institutions and cultural products!

And, as was evident from the 2012 Democratic National Convention that has finally ended, things have only gotten worse.

Granted, the Republicans might be “the drag queens of politics,” and should not be trusted until they repent, in earnest and in action.

It goes without saying, moreover, that the men and women who took to the podium at the RNC did not talk Austrian economics. They did, however, mix it up with economist Milton Friedman, so to speak.

In other words, Republican representatives—irrespective of their invariable and inevitable political treachery—do still evince some intellectual familiarity with the natural principles of the economic order, something that was utterly absent from the sensibilities expressed by the repulsive Democrats, decamping from Charlotte tonight.

In the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” Friedman put his finger on the backdrop to the growth of collectivism: “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”

Of course the NPR-cited Fact Checker found no errors of fact in Michelle Obama’s endless emoting. How can emotions be graded for factual content? There were no facts that mattered in the First Lady’s remarks!

In well-functioning people, the intellect is not separated from the affect (i.e. the emotional). They are integrated. When people are rational, they observe reality as it is, and are more likely to be concerned with justice and avoid misplacing compassion.

What we witnessed at the 2012 DNC was a mud-slide of sentimentality, unmoored from reason or reality, and backed by the might of voracious electoral majorities.

UPDATE: Apologies to readers on Facebook who said I got too wordy. My fault. I had to “medicate” to watch BHO and the other offal. I will get back to my solitary glass of wine a day now that the orgy is over.

The Road To Ruin

Barack Obama, Economy, Government, Intelligence, The State

“This Thursday night I’ll offer you what I believe is a better path forward,” Obama said today in Urbandale, Iowa, where the president began his “Road to Charlotte” tour. “A path that grows this economy, creates more good jobs, strengthens the middle class, and the good news is you get to choose which path we take.”

CNN failed to provide the full quote, which I watched. BHO went on to tout all the government workers he was responsible for hiring, thereby conflating the growth of government with job creation.

Au contraire.

This is yet more evidence that the man is as thick as a brick.

In a paper entitled “The Scope of Government and The Wealth of Nations,” economists James Gwartney, Randall Holcombe, and Robert Lawson demonstrate that “government growth as a share of GDP coincides with a decline in GDP growth. Governments in high-income developed economies have now been steadily accreting for decades. The decline in prosperity or in real growth rates in these nations has been concomitant: As government share of the GDP rises, so has GDP in the OECD nations been declining.”

“A 10 percent increase in government expenditure as a share of GDP results in a 1 percent point reduction in GDP growth.”

An increase in the number of jobs for federal employees invariably comes at the cost of real, sustainable, consumer-driven jobs in the private economy.

Obama’s trick is that the private jobs never created cannot be counted.

This US president is seriously dumb.

UPDATED: Hit The Road, Schmo* (Some Ferguson Facts)

Barack Obama, Economy, Elections, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Media, Neoconservatism

“A member of this global, glamorous elite; people who are at home in London and New York” is how Byron York wryly (and aptly) described economist Niall Ferguson (6 minutes into this clip). Ferguson has penned a Newsweek article, “Hit The Road, Barack: Why We Need a New President,“ which has infuriated the Obama-Head media. The Washington Examiner’s York set the scene for Ferguson’s defiance: “It is very fashionable among [this global elite] to support President Obama.”

From the perspective of the libertarian, Professor Ferguson’s piece is unremarkable (although, as I have said before in covering him, Ferguson’s knowledge is formidable).

On foreign policy, Ferguson accuses Obama of not being enough of a statist, which this neoconservative equates with statesmanship.

However, for a member of establishment intelligentsia to openly admit that Barack Obama doesn’t understand the issues about which he is supposed to decide; to intimate that he is the affirmative action appointee: Now, that is remarkable.

“You can’t just march in and make that argument and then have him make a decision,” Summers told Orszag, “because he doesn’t know what he’s deciding.” (I have heard similar things said off the record by key participants in the president’s interminable “seminar” on Afghanistan policy.)

Except, I have to wonder who’s the real Schmo? The man who was led to believe that he was up to the task throughout his “career” trajectory, or the enablers and sycophants who enforced Barack Obama’s self-delusions.

I recall that when, in April 15, 2011, I wrote ‘You Can’t Fix Stupid,’ readers patiently explained to me that BHO was not stupid, only evil. (Even IQ ace Steve Sailer might have been gulled.) No. I’ve always maintained that Obama was cunning, but not clever.

But there is much more to the article. Read it.

(*Schmo: From Yiddish, dull, stupid, fool.)

UPDATE: Non-writers, or armchair scribblers, will be cavalier about the comprehensiveness of the Ferguson piece. I am not, for obvious reasons. I disagree with Ferguson on many issues—for example, he cites “official” unemployment figures, rather than real joblessness, which not even the U6 statistic covers.

In addition, his notion of GDP is in all likelihood off too; official GDP numbers are a gambit.

And, as far as the Killer Drone’s actions abroad go, Ferguson objects not so much to the stealth killing of innocents, but to the loss of “crucial intelligence” assets caused by BHO’s “assassination program.”

As for Ferguson’s China fear mongering; that was addressed in an earlier critique: “Chinese mercantilism is not free trade, but is it not better than American militarism?” You bet it is.

On and on.

I understand that all Ferguson’s condemners believe they could have bested the Prof. Still, Ferguson has done a serious service in so far as he has offered the first damning case against BHO from the perspective of mainstream.

Interesting excerpts:

…the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak. Meanwhile, since 2008, a staggering 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program. This is one of many ways unemployment is being concealed.
…In his fiscal year 2010 budget—the first he presented—the president envisaged growth of 3.2 percent in 2010, 4.0 percent in 2011, 4.6 percent in 2012. The actual numbers were 2.4 percent in 2010 and 1.8 percent in 2011; few forecasters now expect it to be much above 2.3 percent this year. Nearly 110 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011, mostly Medicaid or food stamps.
…Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.
…By the end of this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), [government debt] will reach 70 percent of GDP. These figures significantly understate the debt problem, however. The ratio that matters is debt to revenue. That number has leapt upward from 165 percent in 2008 to 262 percent this year, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund. Among developed economies, only Ireland and Spain have seen a bigger deterioration. Under this president’s policies, the debt is on course to approach 200 percent of GDP in 2037—a mountain of debt that is bound to reduce growth even further.
…Yet the public mistakes his administration’s astonishingly uninhibited use of political assassination for a coherent strategy. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, the civilian proportion of drone casualties was 16 percent last year. Ask yourself how the liberal media would have behaved if George W. Bush had used drones this way. Yet somehow it is only ever Republican secretaries of state who are accused of committing “war crimes.”

What’s Next? Lobotomy for Asian Overachievers?

Affirmative Action, BAB's A List, Education, Intelligence, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

What’s Next? Lobotomy for Asian Overachievers?
By Myron Pauli

Fairfax County, Va., is one of the wealthiest counties in America – naturally, right outside Washington DC (as Ilana would say, home of the “Oink Sector”). Nevertheless, a shocking article exposed rampant racism even in such an elite location! It turns out that a group of conspirators known as “Asians” are taking over the local magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology.

The racist youths are engaging in such underhanded techniques as: (1) studying, (2) working hard, (3) getting good grades, (4) learning, and (5) competing. In fact, Thomas Jefferson High School’s mean SAT scores are 65 percent above the Yale University freshman class! The Asian conspirators now take up 64 percent of Jefferson’s freshman class! As a result, blacks are not being admitted to the school which US NEWS called # 1 in the country!

Naturally, the mentality is to view achievement as some zero-sum game, where the more the Asian kids study, the worse off the black kids become! Presumably, giving every Asian kid a lobotomy would make blacks and Hispanics all smarter! As they say, in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is King!

Meanwhile, as I write this, there is a nearby school that is 99.6 percent black – Ballou High School – the nearest high school to the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL):

NRL even has an outreach program with Ballou. In spite of that, no Ballou student has EVER passed an Advanced Placement test. Apparently the Ballou students are suffering because Ballou is “not a good school.” [Don’t you love those circular arguments, Myron?—IM] I guess Jefferson has better teachers, windows, chairs, bathrooms, etc. (actually, it is a very old school building). So I would suggest transferring the Asian racists to Ballou, and the local DC black children to Jefferson and see how those kids do one year later – after all, it is the “school” that is important and not the child (or his culture or home environment).

My speculation is that the result would be shootings at Jefferson, and that Ballou would become the best public school in the Metropolitan DC area (even if the teachers stink, the kids will just look up information online and study on their own).

The NAACP, of course, which is suing, is permanently locked into a mindset that we are still living in the 1920’s when lynching and Jim Crow were rampant. Perhaps the education of the appropriate minorities (as Orwell would put it, all minorities are equal but some minorities are more equal than others) can be improved by Congress – clearly the Civil Rights Acts have not been enough but we could bring back the Chinese Exclusion Act.

There is, naturally, a severe penalty for schools that prefer scholarship over “diversity”. Take Caltech, which admits vast numbers of Asians.

According to the New York Times, “Its baseball team has lost 227 games in a row and its women’s volleyball team has lost all 168 of its conference games. In 2011, the men’s water polo team snapped a seven-year winless drought, and the men’s basketball team ended a 310-game conference losing streak.”

Ironically, the NAACP, while living in the mindset of the 1920’s might have a hard time proving discrimination. In 1924, Virginia passed the “Racial Integrity Act” which, by law, established only two races, white and “colored.”

It turns out that all those Nehrus, Tanakas, Moons, Nguyens, and Wongs are really “coloreds,” and therefore the actual distribution at Thomas Jefferson High School comes out as 74 percent colored and 26 percent white, even though the white school-aged population is nearly 50%. Clearly the school system is discriminating against whites!

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism.