Mangan's

Cannabis vs. Alcohol: Social Sanctions

2009-11-24T10:23:00.000-08:00

The Vanity Fair piece about a murder in Perugia, Italy, in which a young American woman is a suspect, tells us that everyone involved or suspected seems to have been using large amounts of marijuana daily. While I rather doubt that marijuana use was a factor in the murder, though it may have been, this brought to mind a question I've wondered about, and that is the social permission or sanction of alcohol versus cannabis.

Cannabis use has been known to the Western world at least since the time of Herodotus, who described Scythians getting high on it. Yet, so far as I know, its use has been rare in the West until this century. Why is that? Marijuana would seem to be even easier to obtain than alcohol; the former requires merely growing a plant and drying it, the latter growing, processing, fermenting, storage of a bulky product that can spoil, and so on. From an economic point of view, cannabis would seem to have the edge.

Has there been a general social proscription on its use in the West for the past thousand years, and if so, why? The dangers of alcohol with regard to drunken violence and skid row alcoholism have been common knowledge for a long time, yet aside from various subcultures like Mormons or Adventists, its use has been generally sanctioned.

Maybe it's the case that not many people enjoyed a cannabis high, and therefore it was not in demand. Yet many peoples outside the West have used it with gusto apparently throughout history, and it's even been suggested that the use of cannabis and opium inspired the invention of agriculture, the oldest agricultural remains discovered being opium and hemp seeds from circa 40,000 B.C. (From Richard Rudgley's The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age - an excellent book.) Therefore, unless Western people have some peculiar psychological traits that make them generally dislike cannabis, one would have to reject that hypothesis.

More tantalizing is the idea that social traditions against the use of cannabis, assuming that they exist (other than in the American 20th century), embody some sort of wisdom against its use, wisdom engendered by episodes such as the murder discussed in the Vanity Fair article. Maybe our ancestors have had social experience with it that led to its use being relegated to dark corners of society, and only now, with the ascension of liberalism and its figurative defenestration of all social wisdom, has cannabis use become widespread.

Against the notion that social wisdom embodies knowledge of marijuana's dangers is a more scientific view, such as Estimating Drug Harms (pdf), by David Nutt (aptronym alert), who asserts that both alcohol and tobacco use are more harmful than cannabis. For that, he was recently sacked from a government advisory position in the UK. (Thanks to Bruce Charlton for the link.) So society doesn't want to hear that, which of course doesn't mean it is correct in doing so.

Sex, Marriage, Alienation

2009-11-23T10:30:00.000-08:00

A couple of comments to a recent post by Lawrence Auster read:

Ferg writes:

I came of age in pre pill America. Sexual frustration was the norm for young people of that period. Despite that, they did not go on mass killing sprees (even though you could mail order guns delivered to your home). In fact I never heard of a mass killing spree by anyone in the U.S. prior to the sexual revolution of the mid to late sixties, (and prior to the gun control act of 1968 which forbid the mail order delivery of firearms to your home). It was in the 1970s that killing sprees began to make the news. So, where is the connection?

LA replies:

My first answer: you're speaking common sense! Common sense is not allowed.

My second answer: When sex was liberated, it wasn't just liberated, it was divinized. And if sexual fulfillment is God and the greatest good, then lack of sexual fulfillment is the devil and the greatest evil. This is a dominant theme, even the signature theme, of our culture. How many movies have been centered on the idea that repression of sex (Fifties) keeps people in a non-human state, and liberation of sex (Sixties) makes them human, creative, even holy? The HBD'ers over at Mangan's don't realize it, but they are products of a liberal, Adorno-esque cultural programming which equates lack of sex with narrow-mindedness, racism, bigotry, and, as the culmination of all those liberal sins, mass murder.

The age of first marriage in 1960 was 22.8 for men, and 20.3 for women. The fraction of the unmarried, for both men and women, reached an all-time low in 1960. Therefore, since age of marriage was lower, and more people had the opportunity to get and remain married, I'm going to say that the statement that "sexual frustration was the norm" in that time is false. And if Roissy is correct that a smaller fraction of men now participate in a greater fraction of all sex acts - a sort of sexual Pareto Principle - then aside from the fact that fewer men are able to get married, fewer men are having sex outside of marriage, at least than they were 20 years ago. So to the extent that "sexual frustration" may be a factor in murder, it is not at all clear that sex was less available to a majority of men in 1960 than now. Whether or not my analysis is correct, analyzing a little beyond one's prejudices doesn't suit Auster when he has a point to make.

Besides that, the expression "sexual frustration was the norm" in the context of then vs. now refers to casual sex outside of marriage, of which there's undoubtedly more now. However, the prospects of marriage are lower, and when dealing with a propensity to violence, that would appear to be far more important than whether a man has access to casual sex. When a man's prospects for marriage are low, he has a greater propensity to be alienated from society.

Auster replies that the "HBD'ers over at Mangan's don't realize it, but they are products of a liberal, Adorno-esque cultural programming which equates lack of sex with narrow-mindedness, racism, bigotry, and, as the culmination of all those liberal sins, mass murder." No, speaking only for this HBD'er at Mangan's, we are products of a culture that tries to look at all of the evidence, and the evidence says that more men are shut out of marriage now than before; women no longer need the beta provider, women also initiate 3/4 of divorces, and women are less likely to remarry after divorce. The marital/sexual situation for many men may very well be far worse than it was in 1960.

In Muslim countries, the situation is likely worse because of polygyny.

But none of this fits into Auster's narrative, so he denounces anyone who takes a cold, hard look at reality. I suppose looking at human beings as sexual creatures, and therefore as being part of the animal world, is the cause of his reaction.

By the way, I liked his invocation of Adorno, but where did that come from? Has he been reading MacDonald?

Gold Rockets Higher

2009-11-22T20:43:00.000-08:00

Don't look now, but the price of one ounce of gold just hit ~~$1160~~ $1164. So what does that mean? Whatever the meaning is, it is not good. Distrust of fiat currencies creeps in like a fog, and those with money are deciding that a better bet than holding the green stuff is to jettison it for the yellow.

Since the main driver of the price of gold is distrust of governments and the money that they create from nothing, an act of debasement that affects everyone, one way of valuing gold would be to compare the amount held by a government with the amount of fiat currency it circulates. For example, the U.S. government and the dollar:

To value gold it helps to understand that paper money was traditionally based on the stock of gold (and silver). Depositors of bullion would receive a receipt proving their holdings and it soon became easier to use those receipts for commerce than it did the physical gold. So while the use of paper money had become commonplace by the 18th century, that paper was always redeemable into gold or silver. The money supply was always gold-backed. [...]

So one way to value gold, therefore, is to ask at what gold price the value of outstanding central bank paper would be completely backed by gold. The US owns nearly 263m troy ounces of gold (the world's biggest holder) while the Fed's monetary base is $1.7 trillion. So the price of gold at which the US dollars would be fully gold-backed is currently around $6,300.

Gold to hit $1200 within 24 hours?

If there is to be a crash, a civilizational crash, gold will be a leading indicator.

Got gold, or got paper?

Global Warming Exposed as the Greatest Scandal in Modern Science

2009-11-22T11:00:00.000-08:00

By now you are no doubt au courant with the global warming scam being exposed for what it is. A leading climate "research" organization had its servers hacked and 60 MB of emails and other data have been posted on the internet. (See Mish, Karl Denninger, Lubos Motl, Andrew Bolt, NY Times, Wikipedia.) The takeaway point from the exposed emails is that the scientists in question had an agenda that they promoted, that is they were and are not doing disinterested science. Their actions border on fraud, and may amount to the greatest scandal in modern science.

James Delingpole: Climategate: how the MSM reported the greatest scandal in modern science shows how the media have become advocates for the promotion of the global warming agenda.

One especially interesting email from Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann details efforts to suppress research not to the liking of AGW promoters.

As with anything, follow the money. The Global Warming Industry receives billions of dollars in grants, Al Gore and others have turned it into a lucrative crusade, and governments see it as a tempting source of tax revenue - not to mention a source of new power.

Nations to seek billions in 'climate debt':

CENTRAL American nations will demand $US105 billion ($114.2 billion) from industrialised countries for damages caused by global warming, the region's representatives say.
Central American environment ministers gathered in Guatemala overnight to discuss the so-called "ecological debt" owed to them and to set out a common position ahead of climate talks in Copenhagen next month.

Guatemalan environment minister Luis Ferrate said the $US105 billion ($114.2 billion) price tag was "an estimate" of the damage done by climate change across 16 sectors in Belize, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama.

Ferrate minister said the region "had never faced" so much drought, aridity, flooding, and precarious food security.

A formal proposal will be presented in Denmark, officials said.

His Nicaraguan counterpart Juana Arguenal said that Central America would press industrialised countries to reach concrete decisions to reduce "greenhouse" gases at Copenhagen.

"We hope for a deal that is ethical and moral," she said.

This article demonstrates AGW for what it is: a scheme to rob ordinary people of their money and freedoms.

There Is Only One Explanation, and Auster Is Its Prophet

2009-11-21T09:02:00.000-08:00

Today Lawrence Auster once again features a criticism of me for asserting that Hasan's celibate status may have been relevant to an explanation of his terrorism. Since this seems to require a response, here's his post:

Why Darwinian materialism is useless when it comes waking up the West to the Islam threat

In my commentary on Raymond Ibrahim’s important article demonstrating how Nidal Hasan at every stage of his conduct was following the Islamic doctrine on Muslim relations with non-Muslims, I noted the existence of various theories purporting to explain Hasan’s act through causes other than Islam, among which were:

According to the Human Biodiversity blogger Dennis Mangan, Hasan carried out the attack because, being unable to find a Muslim wife, he was sexually frustrated.
I’ve now added to that entry the exchange at Mangan’s Miscellany where a commenter articulates the sexual frustration theory, and Mangan agrees with him. Also, when we consider Mangan’s position in light of the depressing opinion poll (posted in the next entry) showing that 49 percent of Americans believe the massacre was a killing spree by an unhinged individual and only 44 percent believe it was an act of terrorism, we see that Mangan is on the side of those seeking to persuade the public that it was a killing spree. It’s interesting that the liberal view and the Darwinian/Human Biodiversity view of Islamic jihad are the same. Both liberalism and Darwinism reduce the jihad attack at Fort Hood to a meaningless, random event.

He elaborates in another post, the relevant parts of which are these:

Just to document my remark about Dennis Mangan's theory that Hasan's mass murder of U.S. soldiers was driven by sexual frustration rather than jihad, here is the relevant exchange at Mangan's site. [...]

Does Dennis Mangan express any skepticism about the notion that the self-described jihadist Nidal Hasan's act of mass murder, the possibility of which he had darkly hinted to the Army for months (remember his warning in his PowerPoint presentation about the "adverse consequences" of requiring U.S. Muslim soldiers to fight against Muslims?), was caused by sexual frustration, indeed, that it was really a "crime of passion" during which Hasan may have sexually climaxed? Nope, Mangan doesn't question it at all. To the contrary, he agrees with it.

Just about everything Auster wrote here either stretches the meaning of what I wrote and imputes to me ideas that I don't hold, or ignores the things I wrote that don't fit into his narrative.

There's no doubt in my mind that Islam is the paramount explanation for Hasan's act of terrorism, and I said so loud and clear, here (ironically, in the very post that contains the comment which Auster thinks so damning - but I guess he didn't read it), here, and here. I also elaborated, in A Sexual Theory of Terrorism, on what I saw as the dynamic behind much Muslim terrorism, and clearly Islam is by definition behind Muslim terrorism. So, in essence, Auster sets up a straw man when he says that my explanation for Hasan's deeds has something to do with (lack of) sex; but Auster doesn't possess much subtlety. As a commenter said, "Heaven forbid, Dennis, that you should argue for more than a single variable in human behavior!"

In any case, I'm perfectly willing to change my mind on this, I have no ideological axe to grind here. Of course, Auster thinks that I do, hence his reference to me as "the Human Biodiversity blogger Dennis Mangan". So, question for Auster: why are most of the Muslim terrorists (whom I'm aware of) unmarried? It may well be that most murders are committed by unmarried men, and furthermore that most soldiers who engage in killing the enemy during war - or civilians during internal strife - are unmarried, so much so that to point out the marital status of a killer is meaningless. It looks as if either unmarried men are less reticent to take human life, or that society places unmarried men in positions in which they have no choice, but if the former, which is cause and which effect?

More serious is this passage from Auster's post:

...we see that Mangan is on the side of those seeking to persuade the public that it was a killing spree. It’s interesting that the liberal view and the Darwinian/Human Biodiversity view of Islamic jihad are the same. Both liberalism and Darwinism reduce the jihad attack at Fort Hood to a meaningless, random event.

In other words, according to Auster, I'm trying to convince people that Islam had nothing to do with Hasan's mass murder. What is the expression for this, willful misreading? False characterization? Slander?

Auster writes that "both Darwinism and liberalism reduce the jihad attack at Fort Hood to a meaningless, random event". I'm not aware of a Darwinian party line on Fort Hood, but suppose for a minute that there was one, and that it consisted of ascribing Hasan's deed to a sexual motivation. Would that be meaningless? No, but since it would not fit Auster's preferred explanation - which is, there is only one explanation, and Auster is its prophet - he characterizes it as meaningless.

A possible Darwinian exploration of the facts behind Fort Hood might go something like this: young men are far more likely than women or older men to commit murder. (Hasan is male but 39, so he's somewhere in between.) Religions and states have historically been allies in ruling societies, and the men (not women) whom states have sent out to fight, conquer, and die, have been disproportionately (by far) young. Religions and states both increase the fitness of a group. Islam is the political religion par excellence, hence it is more likely than other religions to be allied with the state and/or to send men off to die to advance its cause. None of this can explain why this particular man did what he did, but we're dealing with correlations and statistical generalizations, as in all social science, something Auster obviously does not understand.

Finally, to the most interesting point: why does Auster get so bent out of shape over this? One reason, perhaps, can be seen in his response to the matter of "game" and the idea that the sexual landscape in the modern West has dramatically changed. Depending on what day it was, he either refused to believe that sex relations have deteriorated, derided game as a totalizing philosophy that couldn't possibly deliver what it promised, denounced gamers and Roissyites as libertines, denounced game as Darwinian and hence degrading to human beings, and/or told men that they must stay the traditionalist course, even if they have to remain celibate to do so. Whatever the exact response, Auster is obviously hostile to any idea that posits the sex drive as explanatory for social structure. Therefore he's hostile to any idea that Hasan's celibate status is relevant to his terrorism. (By the way, Hasan often went to a strip club - wouldn't have anything to do with his marital/sexual status, would it?)

Aside from that, Auster is hostile to the idea that anything but Islam could explain Hasan's acts. In this, he's practicing a sort of traditionalist PC, and PC is anti-knowledge. Since most Muslims, whether here or abroad, do not and never will kill people in the name of their religion, it would be helpful to understand why it is that some of them do, and to identify them. (That doesn't mean that we should be complacent about Muslim immigration.) But Auster's anti-knowledge PC would forbid conservatives (at least) from asking such questions.

PC Is Anti-Knowledge, and the Human Resources Rule of PC

2009-11-20T09:09:00.000-08:00

In the course of his entertaining and brutal evisceration of Malcolm Gladwell, Steve Sailer wrote:

As a commenter pointed out, this debate over NFL quarterbacks is really a stalking horse for the debate over IQ and race, which, in turn, influences practically every other concept about how the world works. (See Gladwell's 2008 bestseller Outliers for examples.) Political correctness is essentially anti-knowledge. [My emphasis.]

That's a great and pithy expression that gets to the core of PC. Being politically correct means that one must ignore information that leads to conclusions that cast "minorities" in a less than favorable light. Consequently, however, ignoring the facts means that what's wrong in society cannot be corrected. So long as the science of intelligence testing and the other findings of psychometrics ignored, AA, mass immigration, and scapegoating of whites won't end.

One reason PC endures is the hold it has in the workplace. Ben Tillman pointed out that coworkers of Nidal Hasan failed to report him to his and their superiors not because they held politically-correct beliefs (though they might have actually believed them), but because anyone in the workplace is well aware of the consequences of noticing bad qualities in a "minority". We might call this the Human Resources Rule of PC: notice a hatefact, lose your job. Take a look at Begging for Lawsuits: 7 Stupid Things Supervisors Say from HR Daily Advisor: companies can be sued when supervisors say innocuous things or make commonplace observations; it's no wonder that HR directors are so cognizant of the zeitgeist.

A Nation in Fear

2009-11-18T09:46:00.000-08:00

Writing in The Independent (Ireland), Ruth Dudley Edwards says that the U.S. is "a nation in fear of being seen as anti-Muslim":

THERE'S a climate of fear in the US among the military, law-enforcers, policy-makers, the media, opinion-formers and many ordinary citizens. A major cause is the intimidating Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which is dedicated to Muslim empowerment, receives substantial funding from Arab governments and has been accused by federal prosecutors of funnelling money to Hamas.

So effective and ruthless is CAIR that anyone in authority worries before doing anything that can be misrepresented as anti-Muslim and lead to lawsuits citing religious or racial discrimination.

There were plenty of people who might have prevented the psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan from murdering 12 soldiers and a policeman, but were too scared to do so. FBI operatives, for instance, knew he was exchanging chummy emails with the al Qaeda supporter Anwar al Awlaki, who had been an imam at a Virginia mosque which Hasan attended and who fled to the Yemen after 9/11 because the FBI were investigating his close links with two of the hijackers.

She says that it's CAIR that is mainly responsible for this fear.

A good example of how CAIR has put the fear of Allah into American society is the case of the flying imams. Three years ago, at Minneapolis airport, some passengers and crew on US Airways Flight 300 were alarmed by six imams whose suspicious behaviour included praying loudly, changing seats and two of them demanding seatbelt extensions which they did not use; an Arabic-speaker on the flight heard two of them mention Osama bin Laden and condemn America for "killing Saddam". They were removed from the flight by airport police, detained, questioned and released.

CAIR backed the imams' claim that they had suffered from religious discrimination and underwrote their lawsuits against the airline, the law-enforcers and unnamed passengers who had reported them to the crew. Congress banned the suing of airline passengers who report on suspicious activity, but after a bizarre judicial ruling that no competent law enforcer could have thought their treatment reasonable, the airline and the law-enforcers settled out of court last month. The consequences for airline security are terrifying.

The thing is, CAIR can only function in a society that has lost all sense of self-preservation. That CAIR was successful in their lawsuit is only due to a judge - thoroughly leftist probably - who decided that the treatment of the "flying imams" was unacceptable. A decent society would have the judge cashiered.

But I imagine that most people aren't afraid of CAIR, never having heard of it. CAIR didn't stop all those who noticed Hasan's jihadist tendencies from reporting him; they were stopped by their own sense that tolerance is the highest virtue, and noticing vicious or violent qualities in a protected minority is bigotry.

The Curse of Future Time Orientation

2009-11-17T09:17:00.000-08:00

In an email exchange the other day, a friend and I were discussing our mutual possibilities of retirement: each of us in our mid-50s, probably financially able to make the leap, and working too hard, we still keep grinding away. My friend referred to this as "the curse of future time orientation". Our genetic inheritance and cultural conditioning together have made us into modern wage slaves, in thrall to our masters and fearful of crossing the river.

Like most things, future time orientation (time preference for you economists out there) is a double-edged sword. But in the Age of Obama, the edge that cuts oneself has become more prominent. The government penalizes those of us who have worked and saved and invested, and rewards those who have been idle and spendthrift.

If you still drive your old car (like I do), the government subsidizes new SUVs with Cash for Clunkers.

You have good credit: the government subsidizes those who don't with FHA and Fannie Mae.

You saved your money: the government debases the dollar and creates inflation.

The list could go on, to include our massive government debt - which has no possibility of being repaid - lowering wages through legal and illegal immigration, promoting the undeserving over our heads, handing the contents of the treasury to Wall Street, and so on.

The benefits to a high future time orientation have declined precipitously, all through the actions of our elected representatives and leaders. (Is it any wonder some of us don't feel so loyal any more? The government now represents people like our commenter Advocatus Diaboli more than it does us.) So, one has to decide the risks and returns to one's time preference, just as one must for any investment. If the returns are lower and risks higher, then invest elsewhere, in things like leisure, retirement, and a good bottle of whisky.

Vitamin D Dosage

2009-11-17T09:10:00.000-08:00

The NY Times features Vitamin D Shows Heart Benefits in Study. The study showed that those in the lowest tertile of vitamin D levels "were 77 percent more likely to die during the follow-up, 78 percent more likely to have a stroke and 45 percent more likely to develop coronary artery disease than those with normal levels. They were twice as likely to develop heart failure as those with normal levels."

But at the end of the article we find the same tired assertions for a low-dose vitamin D regimen, out of fears of toxicity. An amount of 1000 IU daily is called a "much higher dose". The fact is that the vast majority of people will never reach sufficiency on that dose. Five thousand would be more like it. Toxicity has never been seen with doses up to 10,000 IU daily, and in fact, 20 minutes in the midsummer sun will give you 20,000 IU.

If you follow official government recommendations for vitamin D dosage, you'll be more likely to end up in the group with heart disease and stroke.

What Is Diversity?

2009-11-16T08:58:00.000-08:00

According to Rick Darby,

Diversity is population replacement. Diversity is race replacement.

I wonder if we can refine that a bit. Stalin used population replacement and transferred entire ethnic groups, but we wouldn't call that "diversity". On the other hand, the policy of the USSR which promoted the moving of ethnic Russians into lands not theirs, e.g. the Baltics, resulted in a mixed population in those countries, and one might well imagine an official campaign by the government to convince, say the Lithuanians, that "diversity is strength". So maybe "diversity" is race replacement along with the conviction on the part of the replaced people, or a campaign mounted by the replacers, that their replacement is right, good, and necessary.

In his latest column, Steve Sailer has this from John Derbyshire's recent book, We Are Doomed:

He notes, for example, that Washington State University in Pullman, a small town on the Idaho border, has a Chief Diversity Officer who oversees a full-time staff of no less than 55. Derb even worries about the career prospects of the diversicrats:

“What will happen to all these smiley-face yuppies employed in the Diversity industry when Diversity has done its work, when … the last Diversiphobe has been hustled off to a reeducation camp? … Will not all the Diversity consultants, Diversity trainers, Diversity assessors, Diversity lawyers, writers of diverse school textbooks, distributors of grants for Diversity workshops …—will they not be unemployed?”

We now have a diversity industry such that even a small state college employs a large staff to ensure that diversity takes place - or else. Their careers are riding on it. So to add to my modification of Rick Darby's definition of "diversity", we might further modify it to "race replacement, the replaced being convinced that their replacement is right and good, with a number of the the replaced actively working and highly compensated to abet those orchestrating the replacement, as well as those people doing the replacing".

The concept of diversity, as we know it, was invented out of whole cloth, something to be "celebrated", and in this the diversicrats scored a coup. Since our betters use "diversity" as the sole criterion for race-based jobs and promotions and university slots, that hardly anyone bothers to ask about the real meaning of diversity works very much in favor of those whom it benefits by blinding people to the nature of what is occurring.

The Ivy Portfolio

2009-11-14T09:39:00.000-08:00

With the stock market meltdown over the past couple of years, one thing that became glaringly obvious was how few investors and pundits had any clue that the market was going to tank. To the sorry list of television and internet market gurus, we can add well known names in value investing, including people such as Warren Buffett, Ken Heebner, David Dreman, and many more. Some of the lesser known but highly regarded investors - Mohnish Pabrai comes to mind - saw their portfolios utterly tank, with losses greater than 50%. Investors like John Paulson, who was up over 500% in 2007 by virtue of shorting subprime mortgages, were a rarity.

Faced with this, what is an investor to do? Biases in investing, such as loss aversion or anchoring, often haunt investors, making him his own worst enemy. Add to that the fact that virtually no one can predict where the market and economy are headed, and that individual investors are known to be poor stock pickers, and you have a recipe for taking large losses while transfixed like the proverbial deer in the headlights. The simple system outlined in Mebane Faber and Eric Richardson's The Ivy Portfolio: How to Invest Like the Top Endowments and Avoid Bear Markets can help the investor beat markets and preserve wealth through diversification and not losing.

Faber and Richardson divide their book into two dissimilar sections. In the first, the top-performing Yale and Harvard Endowment funds are examined, showing that diversifying does what it's supposed to do. Holding a well-diversified portfolio of major asset classes, including U.S. and foreign stocks, commodities, real estate, and bonds, would have generated market-beating returns with less volatility than any one asset class alone.

The second, to me more interesting section, outlines a simple system of market timing using a price moving average. If one had used this system going into the 2008 meltdown, one would have been entirely in cash or bonds before the crash happened. Over the past 35 years or so, the system would have beaten the S&P 500 while drastically reducing volatility and drawdowns.

Why does this system work, and will it continue to work? The short answers are behavioral biases in investing, and yes, because behavioral biases are not going away any time soon. Think of it as human biodiversity in investing: we're hardwired to make the same mistakes again and again.

Warren Buffett's top two rules for investing read, "1. Don't lose money. 2.Don't forget rule number one." The Ivy Portfolio can show you how to avoid bear markets, while participating in bull markets, and at least partially help you to conform to Buffett's rules.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who manages his own portfolio. However, almost all the information in the book can be found in reading Mebane Faber's paper, A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation, together with his blog.

PS: The system also works for houses and gold.

Quoted on Derb Radio

2009-11-14T08:53:00.000-08:00

John Derbyshire, in his weekly podcast at National Review Online, Radio Derb, approves of my take on the poor math skills of CUNY students. (Starts at the 31:00 mark - you can't advance the tape on the site, so you'll need to download to do that. But of course you'll want to listen to the whole thing.)

The Derb, after noting the CUNY math story, says, "Those of us who understand that the whole business of school performance scoring is a political racket, were much less surprised. About 1/10 as surprised, or 0.1. Blogger Dennis Mangan's comment on this story can't be improved upon." He then proceeds to quote my comments.

Apologies for talking my book, but you need to know just how significant this blog is. Thanks to reader AS for the notice.

Why were the warning signs missed?

2009-11-13T08:44:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal today asks that question in all seriousness: Hasan to Face Death Penalty
Military Court to Try Major in Fort Hood Massacre; Inquiry Into Missed Warning Signs

Let's see: Hasan gave a presentation during a conference arguing that unbelievers should have their heads cut off and boiling oil poured down their throats - though which one of these is supposed to come first, Hasan left unclear.

His superiors in the military medical service had grave doubts about his competence. Other doctors did not like to refer patients to him, and said that he was a "loner" and "given to anger".

And if all of that weren't enough, Hasan made contact with a radical Muslim cleric who lives in Yemen.

If these aren't warning signs, I don't know what would be, and they weren't "missed" - many people noticed them.

The answer is that Hasan was a diversity hire, that his colleagues were reticent to report him for fear of the repercussions to themselves, and that the American military, while seemingly pretty skilled at killing people and breaking things, reflects the general incompetence and obeisance to diversity of the federal government.

In the immortal words of Army Chief of Staff General Casey, "A diverse Army gives us strength."

Properly acknowledging what went wrong would mean acknowledging that our country's unofficial motto, "Diversity is Strength", is seriously mistaken, results in dead Americans, and is the equivalent of fighting with both hands tied behind your back.

CUNY's Math Problem

2009-11-12T18:09:00.000-08:00

Ninety percent of freshman can't do basic algebra:

More city kids are graduating from high school, but that doesn't mean they can do college math.

Basic algebra involving fractions and decimals stumped a group of City University of New York freshmen - suggesting city schools aren't preparing them, a CUNY report shows.

"These results are shocking," said City College Prof. Stanley Ocken, who co-wrote the report on CUNY kids' skills. "They show that a disturbing proportion of New York City high school graduates lack basic skills."

During their first math class at one of CUNY's four-year colleges, 90% of 200 students tested couldn't solve a simple algebra problem, the report by the CUNY Council of Math Chairs found. Only a third could convert a fraction into a decimal.

The most notable thing here is how unsurprising this is. Of the 90% who can't do basic algebra, probably 90% of them don't belong in college. However, the powers that be want college enrollment to increase - I mean, hey, we've got to be prepared for all those high tech jobs that barely exist anymore. - and if these kids can't do algebra, then we'll just have to increase the numbers of H-1B visas.

The Most-Read Paper in Social Science Over the Past Year

2009-11-11T17:04:00.000-08:00

Let's diverge from politics for a bit. The most downloaded paper on the Social Science Research Network over the past year is Mebane Faber's A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation, which details a simple system of market timing using five asset classes. (See here. It appears to be number 7 in the all-time ranking.) Why is this noteworthy? For one thing, Mebane is not an academic, and in fact his education is in biology. For another, he's a blogger.

And to see why this paper was downloaded so often, take a look at this chart:

This shows that if you had followed the system given in the paper, you would have all but avoided the market meltdown of the past year. That makes this paper definitely worth reading, and heeding. I recently ordered Mebane's book, The Ivy Portfolio: How to Invest Like the Top Endowments and Avoid Bear Markets , which has received rave reviews on Amazon.

By the way, gold just hit a record high.

Fighting While White

2009-11-10T09:46:00.000-08:00

Martin B commented:

General Casey's disgraceful comments are more proof, if indeed more proof were needed, that whites shouldn't join the armed forces. You may, out of deep patriotic feeling, desire to serve your nation, but that is not what you will be doing.

Instead, you will be a soldier in Xerxes army, fighting for an empire that despises you and your kin. Your own generals will be indifferent to you being murdered by your enemies, while on base on your own soil. They are more concerned with the delicate feelings of those who would kill you, than with your safety and morale. They will sacrifice you in order to win the diversity brownie points needed for their promotion.

Another commenter objected to this, pointing out the patriotic policemen and firemen and those who joined the military in the wake of 9/11.

Well, that that was then, this is now. Why indeed would a young and patriotic white man think that going off to fight and possibly be killed or wounded in Afghanistan or Iraq be worth his while, or a service to his people? Why would anyone want to serve under General Casey, who is "more concerned about the delicate feelings of those who would kill you", and with preserving our nation's precious so-called "diversity"?

Young white men: the leaders of this nation hold you in contempt. They are intent on displacing you from the labor force with people who will work cheaper, on stealing what wealth you may be able to obtain to give to those who have no moral claim on it, and on sending you off to die or be mutilated in meaningless foreign wars that benefit very few of us, all the while allowing enemies to immigrate and holding "diversity" a higher value than your lives.

For those who will say that patriotism and racial identity are not synonymous, I say that history provides abundant evidence that multicultural empires eventually fail to command the loyalty of their subjects. When the inhabitants of the polyglot - and highly diverse - Austro-Hungarian Empire figured out that their leaders didn't have their subjects best interests at heart, and plunged them into wars that meant nothing but suffering to those who fought them, they withdrew their loyalty, and the country collapsed.

A Sexual Theory of Terrorism

2009-11-10T09:11:00.000-08:00

My offhand remark on Hasan - that he was a sexually frustrated loser and that that might be relevant to his murderous rampage - gets quoted over at Lawrence Auster's. Auster characterizes this as another in his series of "non-Islamic theories of Islamic extremism", and suggests that I am anti-Christian (sic) because I made this remark.

Well, I'm no student of Islamic extremism but, as the liberals like to point out, very few Muslims account for the majority of acts of terror. (That the majority of Muslims don't seem to have much of a problem with the extremists among them is another issue.) It's also my impression that most suicide bombers, whether in Iraq or elsewhere, are young, single men without major life prospects.

Now, it's been pointed out both here and elsewhere that the surplus of single men in India and China, most of whom are utterly without a realistic prospect of marriage, has at least until now not resulted in extraordinary social disruption or terrorism. So, perhaps what we have in the case of Hasan means: Islam + sexual frustration = mass murder.

Auster is to be applauded for his daily hammering on the Hasan case, exposing the hypocrisy of the establishment and the lies and bigotry of the media. But he sure has the ability to alienate potential allies. Perhaps any suggestion that sexual frustration or lack of marital prospects had anything to do with the Hasan case is repugnant to him. After all, even now most conservatives refuse to recognize the baleful outlook of young men in this country - but why that is, I'm not sure.

Army Jumps the Shark

2009-11-09T09:10:00.000-08:00

Yes, you've read this already on a hundred other blogs, but the Army's chief is concerned about Muslims.

General George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, said on Sunday that he was concerned that speculation about the religious beliefs of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 12 fellow soldiers and one civilian and wounding dozens of others in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, could “cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.”

“I’ve asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that,” General Casey said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union. “It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

He's asked his officers to be on the lookout for a "backlash"; meanwhile, it looks like he never asked anyone to be on the lookout for jihad. Casey says that he's afraid that "diversity became a casualty"; no matter how many people get murdered, diversity must remain. That an Army general is capable of muttering such Orwellian blather speaks volumes to how far we are gone.

“A diverse Army gives us strength,” General Casey, who visited Fort Hood Friday, said on “This Week.”

Priceless, beyond parody.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, chimed in:

“I mean does every soldier who shows discontent with the war and every soldier that has had a bad performance report — what are we going to do with those folks?” Sen. Graham said. “At the end of the day, maybe this is just about him. It’s certainly not about his religion, Islam.”

He added: “To those members of the United States military who are Muslims, thank you for protecting our nation, thank you for standing up against the people who are trying to hijack your religion.”

We're lost.

Excuses, Excuses

2009-11-07T09:24:00.000-08:00

From the NY Times, the article called Muslims at Fort Voice Outrage and Ask Questions doesn't live up to its name. What most of the Muslims offer in this article are excuses.

KILLEEN, Tex. — Leaders of the vibrant [sic! - ed.] Muslim community here expressed outrage on Friday at the shooting rampage being laid to one of their members, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who had become a regular attendee of prayers at the local mosque.

But some of the men who had befriended Major Hasan at the mosque said the military should examine the policies that might have caused him to snap.

Right, so there's, what, 1.5 million men in the American military, and it's a Muslim who "snaps" and commits a massacre. Like I said, excuses.

“Ultimately it was Brother Nidal’s doing, but the command should be held accountable,” Mr. Benjamin said. “G.I.’s are like any equipment in the Army. When it breaks, those who were in charge of keeping it fit should be held responsible for it.”

Still calling him "brother" after he's murdered thirteen people, then blaming the command. I agree with him in blaming the command, but for an entirely different reason.

“After 9/11, nothing happened here,” said Ajsaf Khan, who owns three convenience stores with his brother, Abdul Khan. “We are very cooperative.”

Spoken in the voice and accent of Apu.

“He said he should quit the Army,” Mr. Reasoner said. “In the Koran, you’re not supposed to have alliances with Jews or Christian or others, and if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell.”

Mr. Benjamin, who worked as a private contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan after leaving the Army in 2000, said the military should have let Major Hassan resign. “They should take more consideration of the human beings in the uniform,” he said, “rather than simply say, ‘We invested our money in you and need to get our money’s worth.’ ”

Still, Mr. Benjamin added, Major Hassan had overlooked an important, and peaceable, tenet of Islam. “We do have the right to retaliate,” he said, “but he who does not is twice blessed.”

So, Muslims believe that they have the "right to retaliate", and according to the speaker's words, he believes that Hasan, as a Mohammedan, had the right to commit mass murder for the alleged and likely wholly imaginary sins of his commanders. Leaving to one side the notion that murder is a suitable and proper response to some sort of harassment, every one of these followers of the Religion of Peace offers no evidence for any ill treatment. Because there is none.

So there's a mosque in Killeen, Texas, filled with people alienated from American society and who make excuses for a murderer. That's what this so-called nation has come to.

Defeatism

2009-11-06T06:53:00.000-08:00

One STDV wonders about a "defeatist attitude" among conservative bloggers, citing me among others.

Such a pessimistic, defeatist view ostensibly undermines the larger goals of conservatism and the specific goals of the Steveosphere. How can a group of iconoclasts succeed if they've accepted defeat prematurely? How can we save the West, or at least motivate a marked improvement, if the leaders of this "rebellion" view acquiescence as the only viable solution?

Is it defeatism or realism? Maybe the best reply to this is the comment of Thrasymachus in a previous post:

Note that the conservative faction is on its fourth uprising in the last 50 years to take back the Republican party, achieve electoral victory and turn back the march to socialism. It's never worked before and it's not going to work now.

If defeatism in this context means that one has given up on the U.S., then maybe the word fits. But my post was more about loyalties, about where one should place one's hopes and direct one's actions.

It is indeed my view that the U.S., as a political entity formed by and for white Americans, is just about irretrievable. The country has slipped from our grasp, and the huge demographic changes of the past 45 years - since the passage of the National Suicide Pact and the surge of illegal immigration from Mexico - look permanent. Demography is destiny. Most of these immigrants and their children have a vested interest in government preferences; conservatives have been trying to abolish affirmative action for decades now, unsuccessfully. Unless the populace suddenly embraces the political outlook of Milton Friedman, most of then will continue to clamor for government goodies, for race-based jobs and lawsuits, for family reunification, for amnesty.

I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do claim that we need to look at the situation realistically. Electing new politicians or even passing constitutional amendments are Band-Aids because, after all, we already have a Constitution, but it has been ripped to shreds by judges who were appointed by the politicians we elected.

While it is true that politics is a never-ending business, one that we cannot refuse to join, a politics that denies reality cannot succeed.

Loyalty and Indifference

2009-11-03T10:11:00.000-08:00

Ferdinand Bardamu writes:

I lost any loyalty I had to this society when it started conspiring to screw me over.

At his link, we read:

We all know that society is sick and civilization is waning, but how is an individual supposed to react to this? Once you’ve learned that following the rules is a sure way to get screwed over, you can’t go back to being Boobus Americanus (to borrow from Mencken). Western civilization, in its politically correct, feminized state, demands that you bend over and grab your ankles in order to be a good citizen, and breaking the rules will earn you the contempt of society at large – and yet, breaking the rules is the only way to survive. There’s no proper ethical code in existence that requires people to submit to tyrants who seek to bind them in chains.

The thought popped into my head the other day that I doubt that I would be willing to fight for my country. I've never served in the military, but I've always thought it an honorable institution, and still do. The problem is that I no longer think my country an honorable institution, but more importantly, it no longer feels like my country. As Ferdinand says, our country seems intent on screwing us over, at least those of us who are white, male, and native-born. The entire political and social apparatus is designed to elevate the untalented and undeserving, to steal money from taxpayers to give to Wall Street and its enablers in the federal government, to plunder and ruin men in divorce courts, to dilute our valued citizenship with the constant issuance of stock, and to fight foreign wars that provide no benefit for the people as a whole, and of which the allowance and even encouragement by the government of potential enemy aliens to settle here makes a mockery.

Passing politics, or deep structure? Until recently it looked like the former, but lately it appears that the U.S. has taken on at least some of these features permanently. What is one to do? While I haven't quite yet given up on the struggle to change the nation into something better, something a lot closer to what it used to be, it begins to appear a lost cause.

Is rebellion the only option? Another option is indifference and looking out for oneself, which, for now, seems to me the best option.

Addendum: I forgot, another thing the political apparatus does is constantly debase the currency, rewarding debtors and penalizing the prudent. "Our leaders dilute dollars for the sins of everyone."

Proximity to Canada Engenders Trust

2009-11-02T08:46:00.000-08:00

A recent Gallup Poll, Utah, South Dakota Best Places in U.S. to Lose Your Wallet, asked residents of different states whether they would expect a neighbor who found a wallet or purse that contained $200 to return it. California ranked third from the bottom on this poll, ahead only of Nevada and Mississippi. (Via The Inductivist.)

That ethnic homogeneity engenders trust, and that the secret of the success of the Anglo world lies in their superior quantity of social trust, have become fairly commonplace ideas.

The northern Midwest and the Northwest are filled with ethnic Germans and Scandinavians; the South, with blacks and Scotch-Irish; California, with Hispanics and Scotch-Irish. (The latter is an exaggerated attempt at humor, but quite a few Scotch-Irish did make it to California.)

Bottom Line

Seventy percent of Americans nationwide express trust in their neighbors, as measured by a question about whether a lost wallet (or purse) would be returned, but trust in one's neighbors varies greatly across regions. A number of Western and Midwestern states, along with other states with smaller populations, top the list of high-trust places, whereas Southern and highly populated states are more prevalent on the low-trust list. People living in high-trust states have higher overall well-being, possibly due to greater access to the resources and services needed to lead an optimal life.

More HIV Skepticism

2009-11-01T07:37:00.000-08:00

In the comments, in response to the statement that "[i]t seems well established that HIV progresses to AIDS", Ben Tillman wrote, "Indeed, in much the same way that it's established that human races are identical and humans should get 70% of their calories from carbos. Indoctrination."

There are many reasons to be skeptical of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, one of them being that so much of what our betters want us to believe simply isn't true. That races are essentially the same in all qualities that matter does not hold up to a moment's scrutiny, yet the NY Times, along with all the great and good, repeat this idiocy on a nearly daily basis. One can almost always find an article in the NY Times, decrying the state of education or crime while laying the blame on (white) society.

The reference to a dietary composition of 70% carbohydrates is perhaps even more apropos, because on this issue even the establishment is slowly but surely coming around. But this same establishment impeded the emergence of the truth at every step. Just like the AIDS establishment, they accused the dissenters of killing people.

In a "Bad Science" column, Medical Hypotheses fails the Aids test, Ben Goldacre accuses Peter Duesberg of misrepresentation.

This is a simple, flat, unambiguous misrepresentation of the Lancet paper to which they refer. Antiretroviral medications have repeatedly been shown to save lives in systematic reviews of large numbers of well-conducted randomised controlled trials. The Lancet paper they reference simply surveys the first decade of patients who received HAART – modern combinations of multiple antiretroviral medications – to see if things have improved, and they have not. Patients receiving HAART in 2003 did no better than patients receiving HAART in 1995. This doesn’t mean that HAART is no better than placebo. It means outcomes for people on HAART didn’t improve over an 8 year period of their use.

Yes, that Lancet paper they reference shows that HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy) is still killing people at the same rate as a decade ago. Furthermore, Goldacre says that "[a]ntiretroviral medications have repeatedly been shown to save lives in systematic reviews of large numbers of well-conducted randomised controlled trials." References, please. This is what I keep seeing, but have there in fact been randomized, controlled studies of HIV positive patients with no other lifestyle risk factors, such as IV drug abuse or multiple male sexual partners versus the same on HAART?

In short, there is a powerful AIDS establishment that receives billions of dollars from governments and employs thousands - probably tens of thousands - of highly-educated people, including scientists. They have every motive in the world to throw out clouds of obfuscation and silence their opponents, which is exactly what they are successfully doing right now. Is there any reason at all to trust them?

Darwinism Is Reactionary Dynamite

2009-10-29T17:37:00.000-07:00

Steve Burton writes on evolution and ideology, and asks whether conservatism and Darwinism are compatible. He says that radicals have long been at war with religion, and have seized any weapon at hand for their fight, notably the theory of evolution. Conservatives, many or most of whom are religious, therefore see Darwinism as antagonistic to traditional society and as an arm of radicalism. But in this case, they're mistaken.

'Cause evolutionary theory has it's own story to tell about things like the differences between men and women, and the differences between racial and ethnic groups - the general upshot of which is that, by guess and by golly, our ancestors pretty much got all that stuff right. And it had nothing to do with evil patriarchal oppression, or wicked white supremacism. It simply had to do with homo sapiens experiencing and adapting to reality...to the facts on the ground, as they say, these days.

E.g.: men and women, on average, really are different - in ways that are not only easily predictable, from a Darwinian point of view, but which your grandmother probably understood better than your grand-daughter will - brainwashed as she will have been by the revolutionary ideologists who control American education from start to finish. And human racial and ethnic groups differ in ways that are at least as deep, and even more interesting, than the ways in which the various breeds of cats and dogs and chickens and goats and every other animal under the sun differ from one another. And those differences reveal more about the way the world wags than all the multi-culti mythology that ever has been or ever will be written.

In short, much (most?) of evolutionary theory is reactionary dynamite.

Duesberg's Paper

2009-10-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

Here's the abstract to the paper by Peter Duesberg, Joshua Nicholson, David Rasnick, Christian Fiala, and Henry H. Bauer, published in Medical Hypotheses but withdrawn by the publisher under pressure from an AIDS advocacy group. Have a read and see if this is "pseudoscience" or such a huge threat that publishing it is a danger to humanity. Since those engaged in the campaign to deselect MH from Medline have said that Duesberg has the right to be heard, but not in a scientific publication, they won't mind if it's published on a blog.

A recent study by Chigwedere et al., “Estimating the Lost Benefits of Antiretroviral Drug Use in South Africa”, claims that during the period from 2000 to 2005 about 300,000 South African deaths from AIDS per year could have been prevented by available anti-HIV drugs. The study blamed those who question the hypothesis that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is the cause of AIDS, particularly former South African President Thabo Mbeki and one of us, for not preventing these deaths by anti-HIV treatments such as the DNA chain-terminator AZT and the HIV DNA inhibitor Nevirapine. Here we ask, (1) What evidence exists for the huge losses of South African lives from HIV claimed by the Chigwedere study? (2) What evidence exists that South Africans would have benefited from anti-HIV drugs? We found that vital statistics from South Africa reported only 1 “HIV-death” per 10,000 HIV-positives per year (or 12,000 per 12 million) between 2000-2005, whereas Chigwedere et al. estimated losses of around 300,000 lives per year. Moreover, the US Census Bureau and South Africa reported that the South African population had increased by 3 million during the period from 2000 to 2005 instead of suffering losses, growing from 44.5 to 47.5 million, even though 25-30% were positive for antibodies against HIV. A similar discrepancy was found between claims for a devastating AIDS epidemic in Uganda and a simultaneous massive growth of the Ugandan population. We conclude that the claims that HIV has caused huge losses of lives are unconfirmed and that HIV is not sufficient or even necessary to cause the previously known diseases, now called AIDS in the presence of antibody against HIV. Further we call into question the claim that HIV antibody- positives would benefit from anti-HIV drugs, because these drugs are inevitably toxic and because there is as yet no proof that HIV causes AIDS.

The argument seems reasonable, though I have not checked the paper's references nor do I have any expertise in virology or AIDS.

The abstract to the paper which Duesberg et al. are responding to can be found here: "Estimating the lost benefits of antiretroviral drug use in South Africa", by Chigwedere et al. I do not have access to the full paper, but the abstract states:

South Africa is one of the countries most severely affected by HIV/AIDS. At the peak of the epidemic, the government, going against consensus scientific opinion, argued that HIV was not the cause of AIDS and that antiretroviral (ARV) drugs were not useful for patients and declined to accept freely donated nevirapine and grants from the Global Fund. Using modeling, we compared the number of persons who received ARVs for treatment and prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission between 2000 and 2005 with an alternative of what was reasonably feasible in the country during that period. More than 330,000 lives or approximately 2.2 million person-years were lost because a feasible and timely ARV treatment program was not implemented in South Africa. Thirty-five thousand babies were born with HIV resulting in 1.6 million person-years lost by not implementing a mother-to-child transmission prophylaxis program using nevirapine. The total lost benefits of ARVs are at least 3.8 million person-years for the period 2000-2005.

Fair and balanced. I report, etc.