Under discussion: Honor: A History by James Bowman (Encounter Books, 2007)

What happened to honor in the West? And without honor -- or at least an honest understanding of it -- are we capable of facing the challenges of the 21^st Century?

In Honor: A History, Bowman places these questions in a political context, as a clash between the old honor culture of the Islamic world and the anti-honor culture of the modern West. In this sense, his question is similar to the one Mark Steyn asks in America Alone. If Islam has all the attributes of what Osama Bin Laden famously called "a strong horse," will the pampered and polite social democracies of the West be able to survive its galloping onslaught?

This horse race bookends a rare and worthwhile exploration of the concept of honor itself, which is a confusing topic in the contemporary West where honorable ideals have been discredited as anti-modern, and the word "honor" has been reduced to a mere synonym for neutered, universal, non-hierarchical values like "goodness" or "honesty" or "integrity." The bumper sticker banality "honor diversity" renders the word honor a substitute for the verbs "value" or "esteem." While you can certainly follow the dilution of honor's meaning here, this is a world apart from a word once closely connected to glory won in battle.

As Americans observe the chaos in Greece, most assume that the strength of our currency, the credit worthiness of our government, and the vast expanse of two oceans, will prevent a similar scene from playing out in our streets. I believe these protections to be illusory.

Once again the vast majority fails to see a crisis in the making, even as it stares at them from close range. Just as market observers in 2007 told us that the credit crisis would be confined to the subprime mortgage market, current analysts tell us that sovereign debt problems are confined to Greece, Spain, Portugal, and perhaps Italy. They were wrong then, and I believe that they're wrong now.

During the housing boom, subprime and prime borrowers made many of the same mistakes. Both groups overpaid for their homes, bought with low or no down payments, financed using ARMs instead of fixed rate mortgages, and repeatedly cashed out appreciated home equity through re-financings. The market largely overlooked the glaring similarities, and instead merely focused on FICO scores. Yes, prime borrowers had better credit, but their losses on underwater properties were no less devastating. As the magnitude of home price declines intensified, prime borrowers defaulted in levels that were almost as high as the subprime crowd.

The latest trailer for Machete (2010) has been released, "with a special message for Arizona."
Even the Catholic Church gets in on the act.

From The Politico

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) thinks he’s found a work-around on the whole Miranda rights debate for U.S. citizens accused of terrorism: Strip their citizenship and ship them to Guantanamo.

Lieberman plans to introduce a bill that would amend a decades-old law aimed at yanking citizenship from U.S. citizens who fight for a foreign military.

“I’m now putting together legislation to amend that to [specify that] any individual American citizen who is found to be involved in a foreign terrorist organization, as defined by the Department of State, would be deprived of their citizenship rights,” Lieberman said Tuesday.

Such a law would potentially cover terror suspect Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-born American citizen charged in connection with the attempted car bombing in New York City’s Times Square. He was apprehended Monday night at the city’s John F. Kennedy airport after he boarded a flight to Dubai.

“If you have joined an enemy of the United States in attacking the United States and trying to kill Americans, I think you sacrifice your rights of citizenship,” Lieberman said.

There is one exception to the existing law: Americans are allowed to serve in the Israel Defense Forces without losing their citizenship.

Let me get this straight.  They actually wrote a law saying that anybody who served in a foreign army loses his American citizenship.  But then they inserted an exception just for Israel?  With what justification?  It would be one thing if they listed a few democratic countries like Canada and Britain and Israel were included.  But it looks like the Israel lobby doesn't even need to provide a plausible explanation for what it does.

There's something disturbing about Joe Lieberman sitting there and trying to think of ways to be able to legally torture people.  "He's a citizen, you say?  I've got it!"

While "joining a foreign military" is easy to define, being "involved in a foreign terrorist organization" isn't.   Does that mean looking at a website?  Registering for a message board?  How would Lieberman prove your guilt?  “My feeling is that if they [High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group] make a judgment that this was a terrorist act, the person should be turned over to the military." And what exactly is the "High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group"?  According to the Washington Post, it's "elite team of interrogators [created] to question key terrorism suspects"  In other words, bureaucrats whose power and jobs depend on there being enough "high-value detainees" would be able to decide that you're an enemy combatant, revoke your citizenship and then detain you as a POW until the "war on terror" is over, which will be whenever these same bureaucrats decide that the odds of a Muslim putting a firecracker in his underwear have fallen to zero and the government no longer needs their services.  

Any conservative who thinks that any such law would only be applied to foreigners, i.e. brown Muslims, is a coward and a fool.  You, my friend, are tomorrow's high-value detainee.  

Jim Cramer and Bubble Vision are trying to convince everyone that today's mini-crash didn't happen -- move along, move along, nothing to see here. When the crisis hit, Jim Cramer said on air that the new prices simply weren't real.

Afterwards the network claimed that the whole thing was set off by a silly error made by a trader, who reportedly typed a "b" (as in billion) instead of a "m" (as in million) in a Proctor and Gamble sell order. 

[The sixth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

A common leftist claim is that established social and moral principles serve the interests of the ruling classes. The claim isn't applied to principles of which the left approves. In particular, it's not applied to inclusiveness. That's unfortunate, because it's obvious that inclusiveness serves governing elites by eliminating competitors and justifying an elaborate system of irresponsible control by those at the top.

In particular, inclusiveness makes money, bureaucracy, certified expertise, and therapy the sole permissible principles of social order, while treating other more traditional and natural principles as ignorant, irrational, and hateful. The rhetoric is familiar. Religious authority is bigoted and oppressive. Family authority is narrow, sexist, agist, heterosexist, ethnocentric, and intertwined with patriarchal religion. And authority based on history and tradition is exclusionary and racist.

American educrats in one Bay Area town have banned the stars and stripes on Cinqo de Mayo.

The May/July issue of Foreign Affairs has a long article on "The Global Glass Ceiling," written by women's rights activist Isobel Coleman. The author calls on international corporations to join the fight for female empowerment in the developing world. Coleman hopes to convince those trying to turn a profit in emerging markets that their future gains depend in great part on making sure women are being educated and joining the workforce.  

The article proceeds to provide evidence that this is already happening. Goldman Sachs, for example, has put forward $100 million towards educating women entrepreneurs in Third World countries. The CEO of the company declares that programs like this are a good way of "manufacturing global GNP."  Walmart is taking it upon itself to increase female literacy in countries in which it operates. If they can be convinced to rely on women-owned businesses for one percent of their supply of goods, Coleman tells us, billions would go into women's empowerment, far more than what international agencies are able to provide towards the same ends. 

One of the most proactive of the Western corporations in trying to further the goals of Third World feminism is Nike, which set up the Nike Foundation in 2004 to address gender gaps in developing counties. Thus far, the organization has spent $100 million on education, health and "leadership" programs for poor young girls. The famous shoe and apparel company has also made use of its marketing skills, creating in 2008 a video called "The Girl Effect," which, we are informed, has "gone viral."

What else is new? some paleoconservatives may ask. Years ago Samuel Francis denounced the triumph of Economic Man in a piece on the controversy over the Confederate flag in Georgia in the early 2000s. He lamented the fact that blacks were able to put monetary pressure on the state by threatening boycotts if Georgia decided that a design based on the symbol of Old Dixie belonged on the current state flag. Francis wrote elsewhere that he disagreed with neoconservatives and rightist libertarians in that he saw capitalism as a destructive enemy of tradition.

At first glance, there seems to be something to this view. After all, corporations and businessmen in general would benefit if there was a way to double their available labor supply. Under a purely free-market system, a traditionalist may argue, the interests of capitalists and feminists converge. It's little wonder that Nike, Goldman and others have become supporters of progressive causes.  

Oh ye of little faith in human nature! Such an argument underestimates the natural differences between men and women. It is based on the assumption that putting money towards educating women is bound to pay off. If one looks at the top 10 college majors that women choose, at least six are absolutely worthless when it comes to creating wealth while the most lucrative undergraduate programs are known for being disproportionately male. Because the state to a large extent funds higher education through grants and subsidized loans, the disincentives to spending four years in school not developing any marketable skills are mitigated.  

Corporations hoping to educate girls in their own self-interest will be disappointed when they find that few are suited for leadership or high-paying positions. They would then give up paying for the training of those least likely to benefit from it, assuming that the culture they're operating in is neutral towards feminism. That's not to say corporations always rationally act in their own self-interest in the way understood in classical economics. Those companies mentioned in Coleman's articles are simply hoping to receive some good publicity and/or buy into egalitarian myths themselves. Whatever the case may be, the problem is the myths themselves rather than the economic system.

As science shows that women are more suited for lower-earning fields and tend to value money less than men when they decide on a career, it may make good business sense, ignoring PR considerations, to try to train large amounts of women to be retail clerks and secretaries but not engineers and investment bankers. One of the main problems with feminism is that it pushes for government policies in the hopes that women will eventually earn more relative to men, making the sexes less attractive to one another. The free market doesn't tend to lead to such results, especially when it's not operating in a sea of poisonous ideas, which, we must admit, would still be there under a more statist system.  

Francis failed to consider that blacks are not the majority in Georgia or the United States. Nor do they have much purchasing power relative to their numbers. If this smaller and poorer population is able to flex its economic muscles and push around whites, it's certainly not capitalism's fault! Southern whites, and whites in general, are willing to vote to maintain their heritage, but seem unable to organize to use economic levers to get their way. There's no economic reason why this has to be the case.  

Traditionalists unhappy with the world tend to blame any force that has power for what has gone wrong: the education system, the media, the state or the market.  While without question all have had some negative societal effects, the last is the only one that naturally moves towards fulfilling human desires and there is no way to fulfill human desires without a consideration for human nature. The reason Bill Gates is an anti-white multiculturalist isn't because he's a capitalist; it's because he's an educated Westerner at the start of 21st century. Bad ideas are bound to be pushed upon the rest of society as long as they're held by the vast majority of our civilization's brightest individuals and thus accepted by any potential elite. Finding ourselves in such circumstances, the biggest enemy is the coercive and unaccountable force of government.  

In the journal Intelligence Gerhard Meisenberg contributes another analysis showing that IQ and fertility are negatively correlated.  Here's the abstract:

Although a negative relationship between fertility and education has been described consistently in most countries of the world, less is known about the relationship between intelligence and reproductive outcomes. Also the paths through which intelligence influences reproductive outcomes are uncertain. The present study uses the NLSY79 to analyze the relationship of intelligence measured in 1980 with the number of children reported in 2004, when the respondents were between 39 and 47 years old. Intelligence is negatively related to the number of children, with partial correlations (age controlled) of −.156, −.069, −.235 and −.028 for White females, White males, Black females and Black males, respectively. This effect is related mainly to the g-factor. It is mediated in part by education and income, and to a lesser extent by the more “liberal” gender attitudes of more intelligent people. In the absence of migration and with constant environment, genetic selection would reduce the average IQ of the US population by about .8 points per generation.

All these patterns have been found before, including the more negative correlation among black females.  Here are the results in graph form.  

As you can see, for white women the most fertile range is 70-80, well below the black average of 85.  The second best place to be, from the perspective of a white woman's genes, is legally retarded!  

The smartest black females suffer from there being so few good bruthas out there.  While intelligent black males can either dip into the general population of the community or go white to find a partner, these options tend not to be available for black females who are not attractive to educated whites and don't usually want typical black men.  

0.8 points doesn't seem like a lot, but it means 11.7% fewer people with IQs higher than 130.  In a century there will be a drop of 2.9 points and 37.7% fewer gifted individuals.  Considering that whites and Asians have been genetically separated for tens of thousands of years and only differ by about five points, a change of three within a hundred years should horrify us.  Just imagine, if the "natural" IQ difference between whites and Hispanics is five points, our grandchildren could live to see one of the current gene-based racial gaps all but disappear within their lifetimes (assuming Hispanics don't also suffer dysgenics, etc).  No Child Left Behind will finally be a success! 

And don't count on the Flynn Effect to bail us out, as it's all but ended in the developed world.  Improved environment has done what it could for us and all future genetic deterioration will be noticeable.  Also, as Meisenberg explains, the 0.8 point drop is assuming that the nurture component stays the same, which it won't because a genetically lower IQ population will create a less stimulating environment.  

...if the cognitive returns on environmental improvements are indeed diminishing in the most advanced societies, small genetically caused declines can entail far larger declines of phenotypic intelligence than predicted by genetic selection alone. This is because a less intelligent population is less able to maintain near-optimal environments, thereby reducing its intelligence even more. For example, small reductions in the average intelligence of educational administrators will result in an increased probability that educational reforms will reduce rather than enhance students' intelligence, and thereby lead to even lower intelligence in the next generation of educational administrators and even greater deterioration of the educational system.

On the other hand, a lower societal IQ may cause Americans to reject socialism, thereby making the economy better than it otherwise would've been and increasing resources. Early twentieth century Russia could've certainly done better with fewer high IQ Jews and Georgians.

An interesting observation is that when you look at fertility of whites with IQs of >100 the rules don't apply. The Caucasian birthrate is almost exactly the same whether one is at 100 or 130.  Perhaps 100 is the bare minimum required to use contraception consistently and effectively.  

So what is to be done?  Those who have taken to the sport of burning strawmen say "Leave things as they are or Nazism.  Nothing in between!"   Obviously there are other options.  What would happen, for example, if colleges drilled the educated on the heritability and importance of IQ to one tenth the degree they preached feminism and environmentalism?  Even if childbearing and rearing made women less happy on a daily basis than working 9-5, and I truly doubt it, intelligent people tend to look for higher reasons to live.  That's why they endure physical discomfort to go to Africa with the peace corps or volunteer to teach in an inner-city neighborhood.  Some actual literacy in the human sciences would teach those with high IQs and a sense of social consciousness that the most important thing they could leave behind is their genetic makeup.  If this was widely understood, large families (made up of one's own biological children!) for women who have already demonstrated intellectual ability by say graduating from a top university would become a status symbol the way adopting a black baby is today.  There's some evidence that societies which revere families and traditional values have more eugenic fertility than those where acceptance of a sterile egalitarian humanism is a main marker of status.  In early twentieth century China the wealthier and literate tended to have more children and Richard Lynn has found Muslim Indonesia to have the most eugenic fertility of any contemporary nation studied.  

As for the other end of the spectrum, there doesn't seem to be a way to deal with low IQ breeding that doesn't include coercion.  Perhaps charities could be formed which paid those in the 70-85 range to be sterilized, but what to do with those below 70 who legally can't even give consent and have a higher birthrate than the general population? In the same way we lock up criminals and the mentally ill in the interests of society at large, one could argue that we could on the exact same principle sterilize those who are bound to harm future generations through giving birth.  If we say we don't want government making these decisions, then we have to ask why we allow government to institutionalize crazy people who haven't been convicted of a crime, a power that is just as open to abuse.