Study: Whites suffer higher rates of mental illness than blacks

This new study used data on more than 11,000 Americans to test the "Black-White Mental Health Paradox": researchers have found that blacks suffer lower rates of psychiatric illness than whites. 

The researchers looked at 12 disorders for the past year and also over one's whole lifetime:

Results showed overwhelming evidence of the paradox across lifetime and past-year disorders for women and men. In addition, Blacks’ mental health advantage over Whites widened after adjusting for socioeconomic factors.

So the data is clear that rates are higher for whites, and the gap is even wider if you compare high-income blacks and whites, or if you compare low-income blacks and whites.

Researchers call this a paradox, but it's only a paradox if you subscribe to the theory that America is a racist society, and so the trauma of oppression should cause rampant mental illness among blacks.

The greater mental health of blacks is evidence that there are big biological differences between the two races. Whites are biologically more vulnerable to psychiatric disorders.

In this context, liberals have told me that blacks are just really strong people. Who else could survive slavery and Jim Crow? Although they won't admit it -- they tend to be lazy, biased, dishonest thinkers -- they are really saying that blacks have a biological mental health advantage.

As the genetic evidence of racial differences becomes more and more indisputable, I imagine lefties will concede the importance of biology where blacks have an advantage in order to look scientific, but will continue to flip out over biological differences where blacks come up short.

Does a parent's love really improve a child's behavior?

This new study examined 227 pairs of twins:

They found that the twin who experienced stricter or harsher treatment and less emotional warmth from parents had a greater chance of showing aggression and a lack of empathy and moral compass—a set of characteristics known as callous-unemotional traits.

The researchers conclude that the study provides compelling evidence that parenting matters.

They might be right, but the scientific literature indicates parenting has little long-term effect on behavior. Overall the long haul, genes simply dominate. 

The scientists fail to mention that, in their discipline style, parents might be reacting to differences in the twins' behavior. Identical twins turn out different because of accidental events that happen during development. For example, one twin could get fall and get a brain injury which worsens his behavior, and parents might react more harshly and coldly to such behavior. One might ask why would a parent systematically treat one twin different than the other? The obvious answer is that the twins diverge first, and then parents treat them differently second. Parents typically delay punishment until the child seems old enough to understand it.  

One the other hand, if it is true that there are short-term benefits to more parental warmth and more moderate discipline, that is not without value.  I have 6 children and spend a lot of time managing them. If there are techniques that get my kids under better control, that is awesome even if it doesn't change their long-term character.

Shutting down Gab.com? Our elites are dumb

From this article:

Gab, the social network scrutinized following the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue that left 11 dead, went offline as service providers suspended accounts and threatened to shut the website down. 

A message on Gab.com said the website would not be accessible for a period of time as the site shifts to a new hosting provider.  In a statement, hosting provider GoDaddy confirmed it has given Gab 24 hours to switch providers after claiming the website violated its terms of service.   

'GoDaddy investigated and discovered numerous instances of content on the site that both promotes and encourages violence against people,' read a statement from GoDaddy.  Medium, an online publishing tool, suspended Gab's account, which was used to release statements including one right after the synagogue attack on Saturday... 

The accused Pittsburgh shooter, Robert Bowers, appeared to have an account on Gab where he posted multiple anti-Semitic messages. 'I can't sit by an watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I'm going in,' read a post on the account right before the shooting. 

I'm a bit reluctant to help American elites, but instead of shutting down Gab, why don't you exploit it?  A wide open forum attracts all types, including lots of crazies. Give them a comfortable platform so they blab about their plans, and then intervene before they commit crimes. You really want to shut these people up so you know less about them? Our elites seem to be stupid about everything.

Red, White and Blue McDonald's latest ad campaign

McDonald's is running an ad campaign with pairs of photos of customers to show us how much we have in common and how kind we can be to each other.  Honestly, I am getting a lot of warmth from the couple (I'm in Mickey D's all the time but have never seen guys like this there -- they wouldn't be caught dead in such a place, too much taste) but I gotta be frank: the young woman is not melting my heart. What's the deal? After Michelle Obama we're supposed to think that cold, hateful black women are the greatest thing since sliced bread?

Americans cannot handle much truth about race

I ran across this piece by Jared Taylor which argues that President Nixon believed in biological racial gaps among the races, but felt he must keep them secret. Taylor claims that Nixon believed in the use of "Noble Lies": telling lies that are good for society. Taylor thinks it's always destructive to tell lies, and telling blacks they are as capable as any group of rising to the top actually hurts society by making blacks resentful when they don't rise.

I would make one point: It is clear from the quotes that Nixon believed that social programs will be limited in how much they actually help blacks, so in this sense he did not think lying was good for society.

If I were Nixon, I would have talked about racial truths only to the extent that I could remain politically successful. Honest losers don't help anyone. I can't emphasize this enough. Race realists have a strong streak of social autism. You have to meet the American public where they are at. And in my view, at the moment -- even decades after Nixon -- they cannot handle much truth. Talk candidly, and you will be marginalized, and you will lose. Trump has shown about how far a very talented man can take the truth and still win. And he hasn't said much at all.

You don't lie for the good of society. You lie as much as you need to in order to win.

Readers might ask why a Christian would be okay with lying. I am with Machiavelli here.  He contended that Christian ethics should operate on a personal level, but when it comes to politics, saints ALWAYS LOSE. Politics is vicious. It's simply unavoidable.

Trends in the Jewish population

The declining religiosity of Americans is discussed a lot, but less attention is given to the shrinking and shifting of non-Christian groups. This graph shows that into the 1980s, Jews were just about the only non-Christian game into town. Jews as a share of non-Christians began to drop precipitously in the 90s, and is now under 50% (General Social Survey data):

Of course, some of this is due to the immigration of non-Jews, or Jews dropping out of the religion, but the number of offspring for those ages 40-64 has been dropping since the 70s (with an interesting reversal in this decade):

Orthodox Jews have helped fertility from falling further by having more kids than other Jews, especially in the last couple of decades:

On the other hand, Orthodox Jews are a fairly small minority within the Jewish community, and those who are some "other type" of Jew are growing, and they tend have few children.

Data: The family size split between the religious and secularists has grown

A recent study of the Canadian General Social Survey shows an increasing split in the fertility of religious vs. non-religious women.  From the paper:

For more than 100 years, women who attend church weekly have had more children than never-attenders. But the split accelerated from the 1950s to recent times. (More recent cohorts aren't finished yet.)

One standard explanation is that religious women use less birth control, but many religions, even conservative ones like Mormons, are fine with birth control, just not abortion. I imagine religious women are less likely to abort an unwanted pregnancy because of beliefs against it.  Religion also tends to stress the importance of motherhood. Mary, the feminine ideal, was first and foremost a mother.

In addition, research suggests that religious people tend to score higher on the trait of agreeableness and to a lesser extent, conscientiousness and emotional stability. Agreeableness, which includes trust, compliance, and tender-mindedness, predicts investment in church and family life.

This is one reason I'm a religious person (in addition to being pro-science). I feel at home with people who are pro-life in the broad sense. Secularism seems to me the road to death.

My kids and I go to our first Trump rally

Some of my kids and I were able to attend our first Trump rally. It was a blast -- the President is obviously a talented man -- but I pretty much know his routine, so my main focus was on the crowd. 

Frankly, I love these people. They are my father multiplied by 10,000. Ordinary Americans. People who fix things. The backbone of the country. I didn't see very many business-looking types. I didn't see many intellectual types. 

They were polite and friendly but tough. We were packed in like sardines. Animal behaviorists would have predicted several fights, but I didn't hear an unkind word. I was worried that my kids would hear a lot of bad language, but there was very little. 

Some really responded to the opening Christian prayer; others didn't seem religious at all but were respectful. Respect again and obvious pride when the Pledge of Allegiance was said and the National Anthem was sung. 

If journalists see fascism in these people, they are liars. These are the descendants of pioneers. Love of freedom is in their blood. They are wary of government and despise tyranny. They are not Fascists, they are Americans.

UPDATE: Two points on race: 1) Crowd applause rose and fell. I was one of the only people in my area who said "Yay!" when Trump said Hispanic unemployment was at an all-time low. Working-class whites seem pretty focused on their own situations. Don't expect them to show up in droves to vote for you if your main message is that other groups are benefitting from your policies. 2) I did not see a single white nationalist. I know folks might blend in and look like everyone else, but as for proud, visible WN's, none. 

One key difference between people like me and white nationalists

If people didn't know better, they might think from my last post on too much population growth in Africa that I am a white nationalist (WN). I am not. There are crucial differences between them and me.

While members of a movement do not agree on everything, I assume most WNs believe that the white race has an ultimate value, I suppose the ultimate value, at least for whites. My attitude is basically the same as it was 20 years ago. I place a high value on my family, my country, and humanity (and God, if we want to go beyond the natural world). The welfare of these groups tends to be enhanced by white people. Thriving is correlated with whites. They are a means to the desired ends of human success, achievement, and virtuosity. I'm not saying whites are only valuable because they benefit others. I'm saying they have the same value as all humans, but they contribute more. They are needed more.

Since my family and I are white, our fate is tied up with that of whites, but the fate of America and of other races depend on how whites are doing as well. The main difference between me and the run-of-the-mill conservative is that I recognize the overwhelming power of genes. Group differences simply cannot be wished away. The market cannot solve all our problems. We have to deal with these realities. And while I disagree with WNs (I focus on only one difference here), their intelligent representatives are much more in touch with social reality than the Loony Left is.

CDC: American fertility is now as pathetic as Europe's

The figure below is taken from an October 2018 CDC report. It shows large drops in US fertility over the past decade. Whites from counties of all sizes are now well below replacement. White women in large metro areas average about 1.6 kids each. These are pathetic European levels. People in the developed world want their trips to Aspen, not the hassle of raising kids. And don't give me the excuse that people can't afford kids. My grandfather had eight children on a maintenance man's wage. They lived simply, that's all.  I have six kids, and our household income is average.

And if you're celebrating because this is a sign of progress toward a sustainable global population, think again. Current trends just mean a shift away from whites and Asians and toward blacks, God bless them. We need thriving scientific populations, not exploding, perennially poor ones.

By the way, it's ironic, but Michelle Obama might save the day. She is pushing for much more female education in Africa. What works in one population doesn't necessarily work in another, but if history is any guide, nothing dries up a woman's uterus better than staying in school.

You don't see me kissing up to my 100% German boss by telling her stories of my single German ancestor from 19th century Pennsylvania

Carl Zimmer and Razib Khan have made a big deal on Twitter about the inaccuracy of the claim that Elizabeth Warren is no more Indian than the average White American. Razib, a geneticist, says that when the data are interpreted accurately, Warren would probably have 10 times the Indian ancestry of the average White American.

Truth is, 10 times the tiniest fraction is still tiny. Zimmer said the vast majority of white Americans have ZERO Indian ancestry. So you can have a absolutely trivial amount of indigenous blood and still have much more than most of us.

Assuming the Stanford geneticist is correct, Warren had an Indian ancestor 6 to 10 generations back. My parents have carefully documented our ancestry going back many generations. Most of my ancestors are English with a little Welsh, Irish, Scottish, and Danish mixed in.

But I do have one grandmother exactly six generations back who was born in Germany but ended up in Pennsylvania in the 19th century. Have any of my relatives ever dreamed they were German, or even part German? A huge tree of ancestors, and one damn German? It's absurd. I would be a liar if I told people I was German. My boss is 100% German, but you don't see me kissing up by telling stories about my German grandmother.

UPDATE: Hmmm. I wonder if it would work...

Data: White Americans seem fairly homogeneous (so far)

I recently showed that white Americans whose families are from east of the Hajnal line tend to be more clannish than those from west of the line.

In addition to the issue of clannishness, hbdchick also presented evidence that Western Europeans have a number of positive traits at higher levels than Eastern Europeans. Do these differences hold up in the US?

So far I've seen little evidence that they do. Their mean IQs are not different, nor are their chances of an arrest, nor their frequency of donating blood. The one difference I've detected so far is that W. Europeans are slightly less approving of cheating on their taxes--not even 1/5 of a standard deviation difference.

At least so far, American whites seem fairly homogeneous. European differences seem to have faded.

Meta-analysis: Mass immigration is unrelated to crime (and it leads to more crime long-term)

In this new meta-analysis of 51 studies, liberal researchers found a whopping correlation of -.03 between immigrants and crime. In other words, even when liberals try REALLY hard, they cannot say that more immigration results in less crime.

And further, even they have to admit that the children and grandchildren of immigrants have MUCH higher crime rates.

Notice, too, how all of their studies conflate legal with illegal immigration. What they have attempted to do is show everyone that conservatives are wrong in saying illegals are more criminal than native-borns by showing the effect of overall immigration on crime. Dishonest.

They also confuse the issue by mixing groups, for example, Mexican and Chinese immigrants--two VERY different groups in terms of street crime (the Chinese, of course, have very low rates).

Anyway, they have talked very loudly about lower crime rates among immigrants, but this meta-analysis shows that this is false, and they fail to acknowledge that their own data and methods indicate that LONG-TERM our crime problem gets much worse with mass overall immigration.

As for illegal immigration, they have a lot more research to do. And I don't trust them.

What kind of person thinks cheating on taxes is okay?

What's the profile of someone who thinks cheating on one's taxes is okay?

Using a General Social Survey question, this is what I found:

Thinking cheating on taxes is okay (sample size = 2,348, standardized coefficients)

Age  -.05*
Male  .07***
Non-white  .08***
City size   .05*
Immigrant  -.04
Education  -.08*** 
Church attendance   -.12***
Liberalism   .10***

So people who think cheating on taxes is not wrong are likely to be (from strongest to weakest): not religious, liberal, non-white, less educated, male, young, and living in a big city. Pretty close to a profile of a street criminal.

UPDATE: Amusing, isn't it, that liberals want to force you to turn over so much of your money to the government, but think it's fine to avoid paying their own taxes.

The clannishness of white Americans (or the lack of it) mirrors that of Europe

I recently presented evidence that non-whites tend to be clannish because they are non-white, not because they are outnumbered. But I also mentioned that there is variation among whites. This is consistent with bloggers hbd chick  and JayMan who stress that not all Europeans are the same, and that the Hajnal line divides them.

Using the General Social survey question ("When you think about yourself, how important is your ethnic group membership to your sense of who you are?" 1 = not at all, 2 = slightly, 3 = moderately, 4 = very) I calculated the mean score for various white groups:

Mean clannishness score (N = 2,173)

Orthodox Jew  3.50

Conservative Jew  3.43

White Mexican  3.38

Greek  3.20

White Puerto Rican  3.15

Reform Jew  3.09

White Spanish  3.08

Czech  2.89

Austrian  2.70

Italian  2.61

Russian  2.59

Swedish  2.56

Irish  2.55

All whites  2.54

Norwegian  2.51

Hungarian  2.50

Polish  2.48

Dutch  2.48

Scottish  2.47

Jew--no affiliation  2.46

German  2.44

English/Welsh  2.39

Danish  2.38

Finnish  2.29

French   2.23

French Canadian  2.19

To get a sense of the variation, the difference between Orthodox Jews and French Canadians is over one standard deviation--a very large difference. 

Following hbd chick, I categorized white Americans as Western Europe (=3, 53.1%), Mixed (=2, 22.5%), or Eastern Europe (=1, 24.4%). Next, I conducted OLS regression to see if this measure, along with several others, predicts clannishness:

Clannishness (standardized coefficients)

Age  .13***

Male  .01

Education  -.03

Conservatism  .09*  

Church attendance  .04

Westernness  -.07*

So whites are more ethnocentric if they are: older, politically conservative, and if their families came from outside these lines: 

 

 It's pretty amazing that Americans whose families left Europe a long time ago still show some of the clannishness found in the Old Country.

"Europe's dead cross may bud and blossom there"

All my emprises have been fill’d with Thee,
My speculations, plans, begun and carried on in thoughts of Thee,
Sailing the deep, or journeying the land for Thee;
Intentions, purports, aspirations mine—leaving results to Thee.
O I am sure they really come from Thee!
The urge, the ardor, the unconquerable will,
The potent, felt, interior command, stronger than words,
A message from the Heavens, whispering to me even in sleep,
These sped me on.
By me, and these, the work so far accomplish’d (for what has been, has been;)
By me Earth’s elder, cloy’d and stifled lands, uncloy’d, unloos’d;
By me the hemispheres rounded and tied—the unknown to the known.
The end I know not—it is all in Thee;
Or small, or great, I know not—haply, what broad fields, what lands;
Haply, the brutish, measureless human undergrowth I know,
Transplanted there, may rise to stature, knowledge worthy Thee;
Haply the swords I know may there indeed be turn’d to reaping-tools;
Haply the lifeless cross I know—Europe’s dead cross—may bud and blossom there.

                                                       --from "Prayer of Columbus,"  Walt Whitman, 1871
                                                     

Non-whites are clannish because they are non-whites, not because they are outnumbered

Using General Social Survey day, I've shown before that non-white Americans are much more ethnocentric or clannish than whites.

Now this could be due to whites, especially those with ancestors from northwestern Europe, being more universalistic than other groups, or it could be due to the self-consciousness that comes from being in a very small group. You feel surrounded, so you stick together. This would mean that tiny whites groups would be clannish, too. Are Greek Americans, for example, somewhat clannish because they are a tiny slice of America, or because they are naturally ethnocentric?

I looked at this by creating a variable for ethnic group size. The group was scored 1, 2, or 3 depending on whether it was small, medium, or large.  English, Italians, and Finns, respectively, serve as examples.

Next, I regressed how important your ethnic group is to you on to variables I thought might be related to clannishness.  Here I show the standardized OLS coefficients (sample size = 1,959):

Importance of ethnic group to you

Age   .10***
Male   .00
Non-white  .32***
Immigrant   .06*
City size  .02   
Education   -.03
Ethnic group size  .03

The variables that significantly predict clannishness from strongest to weakest are: non-white, being older, and being an immigrant. The other variables, including ethnic group size, don't matter.

(For age, perhaps people tend to "come home" as they get older, similar to what you see with religious involvement.)

So non-whites are not clannish because they're small and thus feel they need to stick together; rather, they are ethnocentric because that's who they are. Whites tend to be universalistic because that's who they are.

This has implications for assimilation. Evidently, non-whites will remain clannish even after being here for generations, as blacks and Native Americans have done. (I should mention that there is variation: according to GSS data, Japanese Americans are not ethnocentric, while Orthodox Jews are.)

If you want immigrants to become true blue Americans with no other loyalties, invite whites to move here.

Our elites are sick

Our elites are sick.

I made the mistake of watching a CBS News story of how Gala apples are now passing Red Delicious as America's number 1 apple. I was pleased because Gala's are great, and I've always hated Red Delicious -- mealy and too sweet.

Then like an OCD patient who has to wash his hands 100 times a day, the journalist had to turn this amusing story into a moral message: Red Delicious represents 1950s White America where only one uniform color was valued. Galas represent 2018 America where a variety of colors -- read: fewer whites -- makes a superior apple.

Our elites need Zoloft, and I need some Pepto-Bismol.

Aristotle and Darwin tell you how to live

Few things have frustrated me more than the modern philosophical view that there is a gulf between facts and values. While hypotheses can be tested against the empirical world and rejected if not supported, there is no similar way to test claims about right and wrong. Morality only exists in our imaginations, we're told. I don't know about you, but that is completely unsatisfactory.

Only one man has offered a way out of this mess: Aristotle. According to him, your design dictates your morality. A knife is a good knife if it does well what it is intended to do -- cut stuff.

Aristotle used this approach to develop an ethics for man, which was further refined by Thomas Aquinas centuries later. But neither man, of course, knew the works of another genius, Charles Darwin, who figured out natural selection centuries later.

What is man's design, according to Darwin? Simple -- to propagate. To turn the world into copies of yourself.

It just so happens that this is roughly what Aristotle and Aquinas argued.

Three geniuses from three very different eras agree more or less about what you are.  So what is right for you?  To go forth and propagate.

What Frederick Douglass said when asked what must be done for former slaves

When former slave Frederick Douglass was asked what must be done for former slaves, his answer was, "Do nothing for us... Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall."

Study: Large numbers of immigrants cause working-class citizens to have fewer children

This new study looks to see if the flood of Cuban nationals into Miami in 1980 had a negative impact on the fertility of non-Cuban Miami women.

The researchers found that it reduced, at least in the short-term, the number of births to women who rent because rental costs went way up.

By contrast, women who owned homes were unaffected. As expected, it looks like working-class Americans are hurt the most by mass immigration.

Data: "Free love" causes more rape, and more sex partners do NOT make you happier

Liberals are so insensitive to reality, they don't realize that their advocacy of sexual freedom generates more rape. How? Despite the stereotype of getting jumped like Ford claims about Judge Kavanaugh, most rape is date rape. It's casual intimacy gone wrong. At some point in the seduction, the girl wants to stop, but the guy keeps going. The sequence is typically persuasion, pressure, then force.

So the more casual sexual interactions, the greater the odds of interactions that go south.

Sex liberationists would deny the connection -- again, these kinds of people are immune to reality --but if an honest one came along, perhaps he might argue it's worth it because free "love" generates so much overall happiness. Is that true?

One measure of lots of causal sex is the number of partners one had in the past year. The General Social Survey asks this question, so I looked to see if this and control variables predict being happy. Here are the ordinary least squares (OLS) results for almost 15,000 cases.

Being happy (standardized OLS coefficients)

Age  -.01
Male  -.01
White  .09***
Size of city   .01
Native-born  -.02*
Education  .12***
Church attendance  .11***
Liberalism  -.05***
Number of sex partners  -.01

* p < .05,  ***p < .001, two-tail test

So what predicts being happy?  Being white, an immigrant, educated, religious, and conservative. Race, education, and religious involvement are most important.

Age, sex, and city size don't matter, and people get nothing out of many sex partners.

Now you're thinking, maybe lots of partners don't make women happy, but c'mon, it's a man's paradise.

I ran the numbers for men only: the coefficient is negative (-.02) but the p-value is .074. In other words, more partners makes no difference in a man's happiness. Same thing if I run the numbers for women only.

Like Greg Cochran says: Sociologists are useful because if you take the position that is the opposite of theirs, you're probably right.

UPDATE: By the way, if you suspect that I added a bunch of controls to wipe out a positive partners/happiness correlation, you're wrong: it's -.02 (and not significant).

DNA analysis: 15% of convicted rapists are falsely accused

This is an interesting study that relied on DNA evidence to determine if convicted rapists were falsely accused. According to the researchers, 15% of  subjects had been falsely accused.

UPDATE: This study suggests that the percent of all men falsely accused of rape is higher than 15%. The men included in this study were convicts, so these were cases in which the criminal justice system believed the accusers. An unknown number of men were accused but their cases were dismissed, or they were found not guilty because the accusers were judged to be lying.

Watch sociologists do back flips to avoid biological explanations of crime

Sociologists are such dumbasses. For almost a century, they have been predicting high crime rates in immigrant neighborhoods. Such a prediction comes from their view that strong institutions -- families, schools, churches, community organizations, etc. -- effectively control young people. If the institutions are weak, people are "free" to follow the shortcuts of crime.  Since immigrants are new to the country, they haven't had the time and stability to build high-functioning institutions.

But over the past couple of decades, anti-immigration sentiment motivated sociologists to find that immigration actually lowers crime, or at least doesn't affect crime levels.

But instead of admitting their views were wrong and accepting the idea that immigration (notice how they don't differentiate legal from illegal) often selects for types of individuals not especially prone to crime, and that institutions are not that important for behavior, we see studies like this new one that propose that immigrants -- people still wet from the Rio Grande -- are now instantly supposed to have stronger institutions than citizens who have been building up their American institutions for centuries.

They will do back flips on top of back flips to avoid biological or any kind of internal explanation of crime.

Honest Hollywood depiction of East Africans

I hadn't seen African Queen by the greater director John Huston since the 90's, so I starting watching it tonight (I'm a big fan of Humphrey Bogart) and was stunned at the opening scene. Watch it to see what I mean. A scene like this would be unthinkable today, but it seems like a comic scene honestly depicting ordinary East Africans. 

Social scientists are so helpful! They say somewhere between 1.5% to 90% of rape allegations are false!

This paper reviews studies that estimates the percent of rape allegations that turn out to be false. If I get time, I'll do a critical analysis of the individual studies, but for now let's say that the estimates range from 1.5% to 90%; in other words, I can guess with more precision than our social scientists.

It wouldn't be unreasonable, for starters, to focus on the median study which finds that 11% of allegations are false. If true, most women tell the truth, but there are enough liars to show that the maxim to "believe every woman" is simply evil. (Sorry about crooked columns!)

Table 1. A Selection of Findings on the Prevalence of False Rape Allegations

Source                                                       False Reporting Rate                     

                                                               Number                   %

Theilade and Thomsen (1986)             1 out of 56               1.5%

                                                             4 out of 39                10%

New York Rape Squad (1974)             N/A                            2% 

Hursch and Selkin (1974)                    10 out of 545              2% 

Kelly et al. (2005)                                67 out of 2,643           3%

                                                                                               22%

Geis (1978)                                          N/A                        3–31% 

Smith (1989)                                        17 out of 447           3.8 %

U.S. Department of Justice (1997)       N/A                             8% 

Clark and Lewis (1977)                       12 out of 116           10.3% 

Harris and Grace (1999)                       53 out of 483          10.9%

                                                            123 out of 483             25%

Lea et al. (2003)                                   42 out of 379             11% 

HMCPSI/HMIC (2002)                     164 out of 1,379       11.8% 

McCahill et al. (1979)                        218 out of 1,198       18.2% 

Philadelphia police study (1968)         74 out of 370              20% 

Chambers and Millar (1983)                44 out of 196          22.4% 

Grace et al. (1992)                                80 out of 335             24% 

Jordan (2004)                                        68 out of 164            41%

                                                              62 out of 164             38%

Kanin (1994)                                         45 out of 109            41% 

Gregory and Lees (1996)                      49 out of 109            45% 

Maclean (1979)                                     16 out of 34              47%

Stewart (1981)                                      16 out of 18               90%

Meta-analysis: Male-male anal sex and having HIV are major predictors of anal human papillomavirus infection

Anal human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, especially HPV16, is the main cause of anal cancer. Anal sex increases the infection, and it is worsened by HIV-related immunosuppression.

Approximately 35,000 HPV-related anal cancers are diagnosed annually worldwide, including 17,000 among males. Anal cancer rates are increasing in several high-income countries, which might be due to changes in sexual behavior.

In the U.S., most of the increase among young males is due to human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV) infection.

Researchers recently conducted a meta-analysis of 79 studies with a total of almost 24,000 patients.

Among people who did not have HIV, rates of HPV16 was higher among men who have sex with men (MSM) (14%) than among men who have sex with woman (MSW) (3%).  The same was true for HIV-positive men -- 30% for MSMs versus 11% for MSWs.

So same-sex preferences and being HIV-positive are both strong predictors having HPV16 infection. The authors conclude that to prevent anal cancer, focus should be placed on gay men with HIV.

Women are the New Holy Men

I think I agree with American philosopher Charles Peirce (I've been reading him a lot--an underappreciated American) that revealed truths "constitute by far the most uncertain class of truths there are." I won't get into his specific objections. Suffice it to say that there are several reasons to doubt one's testimony, even a saint's.

The Modern Mind certainly agrees with Peirce and goes beyond him to mock this kind of "believe me when I tell you." That is, of course, unless your talking about the testimony of a woman who has allegedly been sexually assaulted. Women are now the New Prophets. Truth with a capital T comes straight down from Heaven and proceeds in pure form out of the mouths of Babes. Their proclamations are Gospel Truth and to doubt them is to blaspheme. Blasphemers must be stoned.

It seems like we humans never change. We just swing.  

Our elites are freaking insane

You folks probably already know the story of how a study that attempts to explain greater variability among males versus females ended up being pulled from not one but two journals.

I wanted to see what was so horrible about the paper, so I read it word-for-word.  Holy crap, it's the most boring, technical paper you could ever read. The goal is to demonstrate mathematically why greater diversity among males makes sense in terms of evolutionary theory.

The paper does not even get into the idea that greater variability among guys causes a huge excess of men at the very high end of the distribution; that we should expect, for example, many more male than female geniuses. The paper doesn't even touch the topic. There is absolutely NO rational reason to pull this paper.

This story is just more proof that our elites are freaking insane. They are ruining this country. We have GOT to stop them.

Girls are better readers because boys think reading is for sissies? Give me a damn break

This new study of 3.9 million American children over 27 years finds that girls are better than boys and reading and writing, and that this gap emerges early.

The authors say that, following masculine norms, male peers might discourage reading and writing. Reading and writing is sissy stuff, but every he-man-womanhaters club knows that math is macho. How long will we have to endure such crap? Males and females are biologically different. What's the big deal? Why all the silly lies?

How do we explain the trends in teen suicide?

The rise in teen suicide since 2007 was recently documented at Chateau Heartiste (CH). The increase was attributed to the humiliations of social media and the alienation of a diversifying country.

CH wanted to see a longer trend broken out by race, so I used CDC data to calculate rates for white teens going back to 1968. Trends had to be broken into periods. Here's the first from 1968-1978:

The rate rose and peaked in 1977 at over 9 suicides per 100k white teens ages 15-19. The next graph covers 1979-1998:

White teen suicides continued to climb and peaked in 1988 at 12 per 100k, then returning to 9 thereafter.  From 1999-2016:

The rate fell below 9 and bottomed out at 7 in 2007. Since then it has risen to almost 12, which matches the 1988 peak.

I doubt there are only a couple factors to explain these trends. Your ideas are appreciated. Drug use among teens was on the increase in the 70s, and it peaked around 1978. But it fell in the 80s while suicide kept climbing. Then it became to climb again around '93 and has basically plateaued  since the late 90s. Alcohol use has declined from the 70s to the present day, so drugs and alcohol don't seem to explain it.

I was working in a psychiatric unit in the late 80s, and many of the teens were Goth types. All the "rapid onset" teen transgenders were hearing about reminds us how important social contagion is for adolescents.

Gun availability doesn't explain it: While the number of guns per gun-holding household has risen over the past few decades, you don't need 10 guns to kill yourself. You just need one. The percentage of homes with any guns has drifted down.

I don't know enough about trends in treatment and prescription drugs to know if they explain the trends.

Divorce was on the rise in the 70s, but I don't know why suicide would fall during the 90s if family is so important.  Friends are obviously important to teens, and social media certainly seems important over the last decade, but I don't know what what going on to drive trends from the 70s to the 90s. Ideas?

By the way, over the entire period black teen suicide rate was much lower than for whites. Half as much. Like whites, rates rise in the 70s and 80s and peak later in 1994, then they fall but have jumped again in the last couple years, perhaps due to social media.

UPDATE: If we ignore the ups and downs, the big picture is that the white teen suicide rate in the late 60s was around 5 and by the late 70s and since it has been very roughly twice that rate. So something has happened to kids' lives over the past 45 years. HC talks about diversity. The country is certainly more diverse. Families are definitely messier than they used to be. Changes in treatment seem to have made things worse, not better. Social media facilitates humiliation.

One interesting change is sex. More teens have sex now than in the 60s, and liberationists tell us more sex means happier people. It actually seems to be making teens more miserable.  

NEW STUDY: Immigration has hurt British wages

The details give me a headache, but this new study reports that, overall, 1999-2016 immigration in Great Britain has hurt native wages.

As an example of how this works in real life, college students should be thrilled with all these immigrant professors. You can't understand what the hell they're saying in class, and the low salaries drive native-born talent into other fields, but just think of all the additional multicultural services and administrators the cheap professors pay for!

UPDATE: Keep in mind that even among economist researchers, the ratio of progressives to non-progressives is 5:1. All research disciplines are organized to generate liberal-friendly findings. The idea of objectivity is laughable. A rational person can dismiss liberal results as due to bias, and conservative results as a case of the data screaming too loudly to be silenced.

Another weak attempt to defend "Diversity is Our Strength"

Recently, I argued that Scott Adams' defense of the view that "diversity is our strength" is as weak as could be.  Now I see that neo-conservative Max Boot has tried the same thing. Both are responses to Tucker Carlson's diversity skepticism.

Since Boot's argument is written, in contrast to Adams' videorecording, it's more carefully done, but it's ends up just as dumb and dishonest.

Of course, Boot's first move is to claim that Tucker merely parrots neo-Nazi talking points. Boot is a classy thinker.

The way these people make "diversity is our strength" seem credible is to cherry-pick their examples and to equivocate: they use various meanings of diversity when it suits them. They use it to mean diversity of opinion when they give of examples of stifling uniformity. Boot relies on this meaning when he cites North Korea as an example.

Of course, Boot is cherry-picking here. These guys never focus on the typical situation. Yes, competition of different opinions can help a country arrive at better decisions, but normal countries have more than enough diversity to generate different perspectives. A typical country does not need to import millions of aliens to achieve sufficient diversity. Plus, more to the point, what you need for good decisions is smart people. A very diverse group of dummies is not going to cut it.

Boot conveniently ignores the general tendency: across countries, ethnic heterogeneity correlates with dysfunctional conflict. As a Jew, Boot should be aware of the fact that ethnic heterogeneity predicts genocide.  I don't need to cherry-pick to make my point: Everyone knows it's a general truth.

Next, Boot cites the examples of South Korea and Japan. They are aging and need young immigrants to help pay the bills. Here, "diversity" means cheap labor. He conveniently ignores the cost side of the ledger and the long-term consequences of importing huge, alien populations. Poor immigrants are very costly to welfare states, and, again, the consequences over the long haul are likely to be dysfunctional conflict and a society that ends up worse off.

Boot's next move is to sing the praises of America's genius immigrants. He goes all the way back to Levi Strauss to make his point. Again, equivocation. Diversity here means "geniuses."  He's cherry-picking. According to a study by Jason Richwine, the average IQ of US immigrants is somewhere between 91 and 94.  A person with IQ in the low 90s is suited to do a low-skill job--not to be the next Alexander Graham Bell.

Boot does manage to cite one study that found that public companies with more ethnic and gender diversity have higher profitability. I'll give him credit here -- he's debating in a serious way, for once -- but one study can find anything, and it might be the case that strong, profitable companies can afford the luxury of promoting more diverse leadership. The causal mechanism here seems unlikely: What is it about more minorities and women that would translate into more profit? The only answers that have any credibility are that these people understand minority/female customer desires better, or if "minorities" include large numbers of high IQ individuals (e.g., East Asians, South Asians).

Finally, he argues that diversity strengthens our national security. If the NYPD is made up of Arabic, Pashto, Farsi, and Urdu speakers, we will be safer. In other words, the grave security problems caused by diversity can be addressed a little better with diversity.  Lame.

UPDATE: Boot, like Adams, finishes with the point that diversity in the US is inevitable. This is practically an admission that diversity is a weakness -- a weakness we must live with. Like others, part of this "inevitability" is the tens of millions of legal and illegal immigrants who haven't come yet. To the PC-minded, even our future policy choices are inevitabilities. We're somehow paralyzed. There is no way we can change course with respect to mass immigration. So much dishonesty by these people. 

How the Right can keep winning

Steve Sailer writes on Twitter:

As I've been saying for going on 20 years now, if you want America to have a nonracialized political system like, say, New Hampshire's instead of a racialized one like Mississippi's, then cut down on immigration. But Democrats want to win by government electing a new people.

I'm not sure if Democrats are smart enough to have thought this through, but if they have, I suspect their reasoning goes like this: "We have so successfully demonized white solidarity [according to the World Values Survey, criminals are liked more than neo-Nazis in every country surveyed] most whites will accept subjugation over being labelled a Nazi."

And while Steve points to reduced immigration as a way to a nonracialized political system, mass immigration is likely to continue (I hope I'm wrong), so perhaps the most realistic course for whites is to pursue the "Mississippi Strategy." Advocate conservatism but pursue policies that happen to preserve white interests. Keep the whiteness implicit, incidental. Making it explicit will force many whites to choose subjugation over a Nazi label.  This is how Trump won, and it is the path to future success.

UPDATE: When I say "conservatism," I mean Pat Buchanan's populist, America First version, not the fake neo-con version.

My son's first stab at un-PC punditry

Indulge me in taking pride in my young boys for a second.

In the car tonight, the boys were telling some politically incorrect jokes, so I told them they were funny, but they need to be careful what they say around teachers and minority students. I told them minority kids can get very angry at that kind of kidding.

The older boy then said, "What's the big deal? I wouldn't care if they joked about me being white." So I asked him what the answer is. He thought for a second and said, "I wouldn't care because I don't see anything bad about being white. People get upset when you make fun of a weakness of theirs. Minority kids must think there is something bad about being a minority. Nobody likes to hear the truth."

Interesting answer.

New study: Why women make false accusations of rape

Here is a new study which analyzes the motives for making false allegations of rape: 

The list of motives by Kanin (1994) is the most cited list of motives to file a false allegation of rape. Kanin posited that complainants file a false allegation out of revenge, to produce an alibi or to get sympathy. A new list of motives is proposed in which gain is the predominant factor. In the proposed list, complainants file a false allegation out of material gain, emotional gain, or a disturbed mental state. The list can be subdivided into eight different categories: material gain, alibi, revenge, sympathy, attention, a disturbed mental state, relabeling, or regret. To test the validity of the list, a sample of 57 proven false allegations were studied at and provided by the National Unit of the Dutch National Police (NU). The complete files were studied to ensure correct classification by the NU and to identify the motives of the complainants. The results support the overall validity of the list. Complainants were primarily motivated by emotional gain. Most false allegations were used to cover up other behavior such as adultery or skipping school. Some complainants, however, reported more than one motive. A large proportion, 20% of complainants, said that they did not know why they filed a false allegation. The results confirm the complexity of motivations for filing false allegations and the difficulties associated with archival studies. In conclusion, the list of Kanin is, based on the current results, valid but insufficient to explain all the different motives of complainants to file a false allegation.

Liberals think patriotism is not important for national unity

The General Social Survey asked 1,182 respondents, "How much do you agree of disagree that strong patriotic feelings in America are needed for America to remain united?"  I'm not sure how a country stays united if many of its people dislike it. 

What predicts the view that patriotism is not important for unity? I conducted ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to see which predictors matter after removing the influence of other factors.   

Patriotism unimportant for national unity

Age   -.10**

Female   .03 

Nonwhite   -.04

Immigrant   .07*

Education   .03

Church Attendance   -.08*

Liberalism   .23***

City Size   -.01

Thinking patriotism is not important for national unity is significantly predicted by: youth, being an immigrant, low church attendance, and being a liberal. The effects are standardized, so the larger the number, the stronger the effect. In other words, liberalism is the factor most strongly associated with devaluing patriotism. 

This question seems to tap clear thinking as much as attitudes toward patriotism. To put it starkly, would you expect a group to be unified if half the group adores the group and half hates the group? What binds them together if not identification with the group? 

Huge meta-analysis: Women are as happy as men

Feminists instruct us that men are organized to oppress women everywhere.  Women have incredible talents and ambitions, but these are crushed by male rule.

If this were true, we should see high levels of female dissatisfaction. Gifted individuals who are blocked from success surely cannot be happy about it.

A new meta-analysis of hundred of studies and more than one million people from many countries -- some of them with low levels of gender equality -- reports that there are no significant sex differences in being satisfied with life or one's job.

How can this be?  The truth is that women have it pretty good.  Surveys are not going to detect the handful of women who fantasize about Evil Males and push the lie on others, usually in a classroom somewhere.

BJS data: If you release a felon, he will go back to crime

This new report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics tells us a lot about criminal recidivism. Here's perhaps the best graph:

See how more than 80% of offenders released from prison are re-arrested within 9 years. Keep in mind that these are only criminals who were caught. I've read studies concluding that the typical serious criminal commits many crimes per arrest. A study found that incarcerated felons estimate that they would commit one felony per week if they were free.

The attitude of many Americans these days is that we need to lock up violent offenders, not property or drug criminals. A basic finding in criminology is that criminals are generalists: if their last crime was theft, their next crime is about as likely to be violence or drugs as another theft crime. Typically, there is no such thing as a "violent criminal." Offenders do all types of crime. A guy might be in prison for auto theft this time, but it is likely it will be rape or aggravated assault next time.

So the recidivism data tell us this: release an prison inmate, and he is going to back to crime. If you want him to stop, lock him up and keep him locked up. You have to weigh costs: the costs of prison versus to cost of crime. If you're like me -- on the side of victims and don't mind some taxes -- let's lock them up and throw away the key.

And no conjugal visits, and no voting.

UPDATE: The recidivism rates increase with the "hardcoreness" of the group. From mild to severe, the numbers look like this: women 77%, Asians 79%, whites and Hipsanics 81%, men 84%, American Indians 85%, blacks 87%, and those under age 25, 90%.

Is falling testosterone feminizing American men?

Based on 185 studies (43k men), this meta-analysis documents the 1972-2011 drop in total sperm count among men in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The decline was almost 60%.

The authors do not speculate about causes, but a GQ writer thinks it's due to an increase in plasticizers which are known to disrupt fetal testosterone (T). Perhaps it's due to increasing obesity which lowers T. The authors controlled for increasing age, so that doesn't appear to be the reason.

Anyway, I'm interested in the consequences. Assuming that a sperm count is a proxy for prenatal and adult T, young men strike me as being less masculine than in previous generations. They are certainly not shorter or smaller, but they seem more effeminate. And I'm not talking about dress or tastes. I mean in their faces and in their mannerisms.

According to the General Social Survey, the percent of men reporting they have sex exclusively with other men rose from 2.2% in the 1980s to 3.2% in this decade. This, of course, could be due to a greater willingness to admit the behavior, but there is a theory of homosexuality that claims it is due to inadequate prenatal T.

Subtracting out the 1984-94 gang wars and crack epidemic, the US homicide has declined since the late 1970s. Declining T? I'm just thinking out loud -- I might be crazy -- but it's an interesting idea.

UPDATE: By the way, the GQ author thinks the collapse in sperm count points to the end of the human race.