James Brody's Blog (54)

There is a fifty year old debate about IQ. As Jonah Goldberg (2012, 94) observed: “One of the most fascinating counter-intuitive facts of life is that the introduction of dumb people can make a group of smart people collectively smarter.”

An acquaintance, Phil Rushton, spent ten years refuting popular opinions about his demonstrations of the importance of IQ in courtship, marital choice, occupational choice, and friends. The Jews (IQ approx. 110) will never have an easy…

“It is the man, not the gun, that is capable of committing acts of evil.

“That was the message Glenn Beck conveyed throughout his highly anticipated keynote speech at the 2013 NRA Convention on Saturday. He made that case using storied antique firearms as he taught America’s captivating history through guns. Make no mistake, the history behind some of the guns Beck handled on stage will blow you away.

“One story about a particular shotgun, wielded by a ‘naked hippie’ shooting…

Lawyers can do anything, including the practice of psychology without a license.

Once or twice or three times again . . .

Predictors – witchdoctors, cops, electrical contractors, or political consultants – can explain a plague, a criminal, a fire, or Mitt’s defeat. None of those events is predictable. In every case you have to lock-up thousands (literally!) in order to prevent one bad actor, one suicide, or one dead teacher.

Explanations are easy.…

Convenience sometimes drives confusion; it also builds superstitions, particularly when convenience lines up with our instincts.

Docs for example, are linked to each other, to computerized diagnostic systems, and to networks of insurance companies. They are an obvious lens from the government into your gun closet. The problem arises when you ask a doc to predict your lethality. He/she can’t do it because half of them tend to be a little paranoid and others of them are too autistic to…

Newtown, CT, was the stage for 28 murders and a lock-down at nearby Danbury Hospital. Newtown was also home for a state hospital from 1933-1995.

It was 1970, I was a staff psychologist at the state mental hospital on Newtown’s edge, an “adorable little town” where 20 first-graders and seven adults were killed in school last Friday. The shooter was 20 years old and said to be brilliant but socially deficient, an Asperger’s kid and possibly one with obsessive-compulsive…

An elementary school in Newtown, CT, was the stage on Friday for 27 murders and a lock-down at nearby Danbury Hospital. Irony: Newtown was also home for a state mental hospital, Fairfield Hills, from 1933-1995.

Predicting the future is an old addiction for genes and humans. Wild creatures migrate, others grow fat, and still others move to caves. A mother bear, feeding her cubs, is a soothsayer just as was true for Nordic hags who read not tea leaves but shells and bones.

People…

Lincoln finessed a war with southerners when he learned of New York City’s threats not to send tariffs to the federal treasury.  And after the War, the Union League helped force Southerners to hand over their property to blacks and carpetbaggers.

We’re doing it all again.

Even though corn gave way to ethanol, wheat to wind farms, and oil fields to solar arrays but slavery stays although in modern costumes. Federal rules and spending do now to millions what cannons once did to…

Agenda 21,The UN initiative, is based on the assumption that humans outbreed the life forms in our ecosystem. Malthus was right!

Actually, every demographic group except the Muslims reproduce at below replacement rates. As Steyn remarked in America Alone, “Funiculi, funicular, funic yourself because there is no one else! Such is true for the Italians, Greeks, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, and the Russians. It’s also true for the American population. Surprise!…

Barack Obama first looked at an old photo of Trayvon Martin and remarked that it could have been of himself at a comparable age. Behavior geneticists find, however, that the contribution from the worlds that you make for yourself – the books, friends, partners, rewards, and activities that you pick – account for eighty-five percent of your long term outcomes. This effect is greatest when you are sixty and begins when you are about eight years old … heritability increases as you age! Thus,…

Robert Spencer, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins. Wilmington, ISI Books, 254 pages, about $17 from Barnes or Amazon on line. Now on the shelf at Barnes…

Mark Steyn has remarked about the reluctance of publishers to handle controversial material - complaints in Amsterdam halt the presses in New York. And authors disappear as well as their manuscripts. A friend in New York, for example, speculated that Muhammad had…

The statistical physics people draw circles, connect them with lines, and count the connections in order to describe rules for network organizations. Some sociologists (e.g., Mark Granovetter or Duncan Watts) do a similar thing.  The key finding:  The players in those networks are attached to each other by “strong links” and “weak links.”

Strong links describe organizations in which every player knows every one of the other players. “Weak links” apply to organizations in which…

A recent TIME cover … a three year old boy stares at the camera while he anchors his lips to the meager breast of his twenty-six-year-old mother. “Attachment Parenting” was the article’s theme and at least one counselor on Fox News informed us that the child was traumatized by this environmental exposure.

Nonsense.

First, environment is limited in its influence because each of us makes our own environment. Such is true for worms, coral, crickets, and spiders. It is also true…

Michael Savage, 2012, Trickle Down Tyranny: Crushing Obama’s Dream of the Socialist States of America. NY: Harper Collins, 323 pp., about $20 on discount at most, but not all, Barnes & Noble.

“Genopolitics” has its page in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genopolitics) and credibility now adheres to the notion that political persuasions have a basis in heritability … lefties expect to lecture you just as your mother did and are stunned that you won’t agree with them or that you lie to get rid of them. Your engaging in discussion signals your willingness to change your mind…

“Can we talk? Starbucks…

“Take Germany as a city cut off from the outside world by a fire or flood advancing from every direction. The mayor proclaims martial law, suspending council debate. He mobilizes the populace, assigning each section its tasks. Half the citizens are at once engaged directly in the public business. Every private act – a telephone call, the use of an electric light, the service of a physician – become a public act. Every private right – to take a walk, to attend a meeting, to operate a printing…

I have a collectivist president who enrages me. As Charles Murray predicted, Obama erodes my deep satisfactions that once came because I had fulfilled my “responsibility for just about the most important things that human beings do.” Obama steals from my grandchildren while he also lies and cheats and buys votes with mortgages, government-financed vehicles, tuition subsidies, food stamps, free cell phones, “clean” energy, legal services, voter fraud, health care, day care, public school,…

From Rushbo…

 “George Stephanopoulos kept hounding Romney on contraception. It had not come up, nobody had said anything about it, and we were all confused, as was Romney, what the deal was. Well, it is Dick Morris' theorem that that was a setup that led to what happened last week…”

“…They want to create the impression that the Republicans will ban…

Murray, Charles (2012) Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. NY: Random House.

“… it seems to me far more important to stress that the organisms find, invent and reorganize their environments in the course of their search for a better world.” (Popper, 1989/1994, p. viii)

“…the Washington of the permanent political class…” Sarah Palin, CPAC, 2012

Murray describes two Americas – “Belmont” and “Fishtown” –…

There's work to do....

By Carrie Severino

January 31, 2012 8:12 P.M.

"Tennessee’s constitution states that “the Judges of the Supreme Court shall be elected by the qualified voters of the State.” Despite that clear text, since 1971, judges of the Tennessee Supreme Court…