Michelle Malkin writes that, "After Wurzelbacher told Katie Couric that Obama's rhetorical tap dance was 'almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr.,' the inevitable cries of 'bigotry' followed. (There are now tens of thousands of hits on the Internet for 'Joe the Plumber racist.')"

This is why this former liberal can't stand liberals.

What happened in my office the other day: I am in the habit of telling my students that, on average, women are more prosocial than men. Look at any list of crime stats broken out by gender. Even prostitution arrests are 40% male, and how often do they arrest the Johns?

But maybe I'll stop telling them this after an incident the other day. Two students were in my office. One was a really nice guy with cerebal palsy. The other was a very attractive young woman who is recently divorced with young children. The three of us were swapping stories, and I learned that this woman gets no child support from her ex, but she loves to go out and get drunk--she appears to be making up for a youth lost to motherhood. She has no money, so she always insists that her friends pay.

You can probably see where this is headed. This girl starts flirting with the guy. He's eating it up and telling stories about what a tough guy he is--you know he hasn't been with a woman in years--and before you know it, she has given him her number, and they plan to go out with her friends the following night. Who do you suppose is going to pay for drinks?

Now I could couple this story with my recent observation that women love Obama--a man who sits in his peaceful way looking on the million babies aborted each year--or I could, of course, mention the Caylee Anthony case, but I'll just end by saying that I won't feel like praising women much in class next time.

Dumb people are sometimes right

In my view, the gut instinct which dumb people are more likely to rely on is sometimes right, while the analytical approach that smart folks have a habit of taking at times leads to mistakes. For example, the General Social Survey asked 901 Americans, "One of the bad effects of science is that it breaks down people's ideas of right and wrong."

The graph above shows that the percent agreeing with this statement tends to decline with increasing IQ, but I would argue that the statement is correct. Now, in terms of logic, science does not undermine morality: facts do not imply values. But the question is asking about cause and effect, not logic, and I think it is clear that science often works like an acid on established value systems.

The values of traditional religion, for example, do not have the status among the Western elites that they used to have, and this is due in part to the advance of science. I don't like to include cultural anthropology and sociology as sciences, but they share the epistemology of the hard sciences, and anyone who has taken even an introductory course in one of these subjects learns that values and norms are arbitrary. They are nothing more than social convention, and could easily be something else. These ideas come from the observed fact that cultures vary a lot.

Now, of course, you can argue that there is more to values than mere convention, but science will never argue that they are God-given, or that they have some transcendent, Platonic status. Science reduces values to a human level.

It looks like unintelligent people intuit this, while that understanding is drowned out in smarter folks as they deliberate over the question. Perhaps many smart people fail to appreciate the irrational nature of humans. Science doesn't corrode traditional ideas of right and wrong through logic: it does so through a psychological, irrational process.

For example, let's assume for a moment that heterosexual monogamy is right. Science has taught us that polygyny has been common among humans and is found among closely related species like gorillas. This knowledge might convince a person that monogamy is not right--it is just one way to organize human sexuality.

Logically, this makes no sense since the observed fact of polygyny does not imply that monogamy is either right, wrong, or neutral. Science doesn't deal in right or wrong, but it has an impact on our definitions of morality nevertheless. Smart people might not see this because they have these models of rational humans which are incorrect.

(It would be nice to see answers for people smarter than those shown in the graph. The people who are disagreeing with the statement in large numbers really aren't that smart, so it could be that they, by their answer, are simply saying that science is good because that's the respectable thing to say. And yeah, I might have just thrown out my earlier ideas. Get used to it: I do that all the time. I still like the idea of smart people using an incorrect model of rational humans, though.)

Female voters: Did anyone see tonight's debate on CNN that tracked the immediate reactions of men and women as the debate proceeded? It gave me a lot of insight into the minds of female voters. It is clear that they like positive plans and promises and happy talk in general. Numbers went way down when candidates went negative.

Without a doubt women prefer Obama, but why? I got the impression that women love coolness--a man who will absolutely not be ruffled. When it comes to a man, women like a rock. The Marlboro Man. That combined with a resonant baritone voice signals masculinity and leadership. McCain's emotionality, along with a nasal voice, is less attractive. The various arguments seemed much less important than these qualities. I'm not sure about this, but it seems like women, compared to men, base their votes more on one's likeability and the niceness of one's positions.

I assumed that women don't read this blog because they are less interested in politics and numbers, but they must be at least as turned off by its harshness.

The American animal: Have you ever noticed how the United States looks like an animal? Johnny Depp did say that America is like a big puppy. New England is the head, with Boston being the brains. Between all the media and politicians, New York City and DC are the two ends of a big mouth.

All those solid folks in the northern states form the straight backbone, and Midwestern region is where the nation's heart is found. The West Coast is the nation's buttocks with Las Vegas as the colon and Hollywood and San Pornando Valley the anus out of which the waste comes.

Florida and South Texas are the fore- and hind legs, and New Orleans is the sex organs.

A fine lookin' animal, if you ask me.

More on those nutty religious conservatives: Now that I have a few more free minutes, I can compare the risk of mental health among very religious, extremely conservative people and extreme liberals who never attend church. The mean days of mental illness reported per month for the former group is .47. For the latter group, it's 7.05.

That means that the rate is 15 times higher for irreligious liberals. Put differently, a typical godless liberal is mentally ill one week out of each month!

"The irreligious are all lunatics!" A reader by the pseudonym of Jewish Atheist claimed in a comment in the last post that the only people supporting McCain these days are racists and religious nuts. Let's set aside the fact that JA just impugned the motives of about 100 million people--boringly typical among lefties--and see if there is any empirical basis to his fact-free assertion about the craziness of really religious people.

The General Social Survey asked 5,273 Americans about their church attendance as well as how many days of mental illness have they have experienced in the past 30 days. Here are the means:


Mean days of mental health problems last month

Never attends church 4.66
Less than once a year 4.22
Several times per year 3.66
Once a month 3.70
Two to three times a month 3.51
Nearly every week 3.10
Every week 2.69
More than once a week 3.53

People like JA have 1.7 times the mean number of mental illness days per month compared to a weekly churchgoers like myself. So, let me mirror JA's type of language with the one exception of actually basing it on data: "The irreligious are all lunatics!"

I expect a response back from JA saying something to the effect of, well, maybe religious people are healthier, but their POLICIES are sick!

(If JA wants to claim it's only conservative religious people who are nuts, I'd be happy to look at that as well.)

Brooks has "Whiterpeople disease": David Brooks, in his piece on Palin and the decline of Republicans, shows that he is a card-carrying member of the American Whiterpeople Association. His basic argument is that Republicans are becoming too populist and thus are losing the educated class.

Any successful party needs to attract the masses in order to win a majority of votes and a substantial number of wealthy and smart people to properly arm the party. A successful party has no choice but to have two faces.

Brooks is one of the first pundits I've read who is arguing that Republicanism does not appeal to elites. Wealthy people don't like the doctrine that lower taxes is good for society? And for those who feel they must justify their votes with something other than self- or class interest, since when is it a dumb argument that high taxes on small businesses in a recession will make things worse? Palin pushes this idea on a daily basis at rallies. Since when is it brilliant and not demogoguery to argue that fat cats need to be taxed more heavily, as Obama argues on a daily basis?

Brooks is not turned off these days by Republicans because they are now espousing dumb ideas, or because they are against being smart. He is a whiterperson who wants his vote to be associated with politicians who seem like they read Proust in their spare time. He shows that his status concerns are overwhelming his intelligence. Democrats are smarter. They have the two necessary faces: one that appeals to the Georgetown cocktail set, and one that appeals to ordinary people, especially poor, nonwhite ones.

You might counter that these two Democratic faces are more compatible with each other. After all, whiterpeople gain status by professing concern for the underprivileged. But the two faces that fit together for Republicans are based on no-nonsense smarts. Appealing to the middle class is not at all incomptable with appealing to talented people who have no patience for intellectually fashionable BS.

Democrats are smart to demonize cigar-smoking fat cats, and Republicans are smart to demonize cultural snobs.

Let me share my nightmare vision: The catastrophic diversity recession puts Obama in the White House, and it gets 60 Democrat Senators elected to Congress. A long list of liberal legislation is quickly passed. A cyclical recovery and a cheerleading media give Obama a second term. But before second term scandals tarnish his image, his charisma gets him assassinated. His reputation eventually surpasses that of Roosevelt, JFK, and MLK. Liberalism is so beloved, alternative ideas, like human biodiversity, are never more than marginal, and the U.S. goes down the shitter just like every country that is not in touch with reality.

Phyllis Schlafly reviews Dreams of My Father:

"With his new all-black identity, Obama stews about injustices that he never personally experienced and feeds his warped worldview by withdrawing into a 'smaller and smaller coil of rage.' He lives with a 'nightmare vision' of black powerlessness.

"Obama says that the hate doesn't go away. 'It formed a counter-narrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people -- some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.'

"Obama's worldview sees U.S. history as a consistent tale of oppressors and oppressed. He objects to the public schools because black kids are learning 'someone else's history. Someone else's culture.'

"He even criticizes his white grandparents, who worked hard to give him a privileged life. Their motives are a mystery to Obama because they came from the 'landlocked center' of the United States, which, he asserts, is full of 'suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty.'

"Obama grew up in Hawaii, the exemplar of a melting pot of races, yet he sees it as a place of 'aborted treaties and crippling diseases brought by the missionaries.' Although his mixed race was not a handicap in Hawaii, he whined that 'we were always playing on the white man's court ... by the white man's rules....'

"Obama immersed himself in the writings of radical blacks: Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. Obama's favorite became Malcolm X.

"Obama scarcely knew his father, yet he wrote: 'It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.'

"Obama described his happiness in going to Kenya: 'For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide.' He felt he 'belonged' and had come home. Apparently, the only other place he felt at home was in Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago.

"Obama rejects racial integration because it is 'a one-way street' with blacks being 'assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around.' Does he think America would be a better country if whites were assimilated into African culture?

"There is absolutely nothing in this book that expresses pride in or love of or appreciation of America. In 442 pages of introspection extending over his life as a teen, undergraduate and law student at prestigious institutions, community organizer and working adult, he doesn't say anything positive about American government, culture, society, freedom or opportunity.

"Obama's refusal to wear an American flag pin on his lapel sounded too trivial for a campaign issue. But since there is nothing in his book about respect for the flag, or the republic for which it stands, maybe the flag-pin flap does indicate his disdain for patriotism.

"In his autobiography, Obama accepts the view that 'black people have reason to hate.' His later book is called 'The Audacity of Hope,' but his autobiography, which he has never disavowed, should be titled 'The Audacity of Hate.'"


Obviously, I don't like Jeremiah Wright, but I do think he honestly communicates what he thinks. I believe him when he says that Barack is saying whatever he needs to say to get elected.

Age and race in the presidential race: Some folks don't think it's fair to focus on McCain's age--ageism they call they it. Even though I want Obama to lose, I think it's a reasonable concern. According to CDC stats, people in McCain's age group have death rates five times higher than those Obama's age.

But if it's legitimate to worry about troubling events correlated with age, why is it not legitimate to worry about risks associated with race? For example, the Uniform Crime Reports shows us that blacks are 3.4 times more likely than whites (with Hispanics added in) to commit the crime of embezzlement, even though they are under-represented among people in the position to be guilty of this crime. If it's okay to worry about a dead president, why isn't it okay to worry about a live, corrupt one?

Good point by Victor Davis Hanson:

"He [Obama] said they have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January 2005" (New York Times, 10/3)

"Why in the world was Barack Obama still communicating on the phone or via email with Bill Ayers up until 2005 — when in 2001 Ayers gave widely publicized interviews claiming he had no regrets about the bombing, indeed regretted that he had not done enough, and did not necessarily have any remorse either about his Weathermen career?

"Ponder that: the possible next President of the United States, well after 9/11 and in the climate of hourly worry over terrorism here at home, was still friendly and communicating with an associate that had to abandon his book tour due to popular outcry, and was widely quoted as absolutely unrepentant about his terrorism. That is a damning indictment of his judgement — among other things — and it is no "smear" to raise the issue.

"Indeed, there is a disturbing pattern here. Obama's once-close radical Chicago associates are never jettisoned out of principle, but only at the 11th-hour when they became impediments to Obama's political career."

Camille Paglia never fails to stimulate:

"One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is 'dumb.' Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism -- the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.

"As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English -- beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.

"Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant."

The smart fraction among American ethnic groups: La Griffe du Lion has shown that per capita GDP is a function of the smart fraction: the percent of a population with a verbal IQ of 106 or higher. The vocabulary test of the General Social Survey can serve as a good measure of verbal IQ, and I'm interested in estimating the smart fraction of each ethnic group in the United States, especially those groups with currently high levels of immigration. Here is what I found (immigrants are excluded since they can't be expected to have the vocabularies that natives have):


The smart fraction

Russian 66.3
Chinese 57.2
Japanese 55.5
English/Welsh 55.3
East Indian 49.9

All Native-born Americans 42.5

Filipino 28.5
Puerto Rican 27.4
Blacks 20.8
Mexican 20.6

Once again, Mexican Americans fall to the bottom of the list. I'm surprised that Filipinos don't do better since their educational levels are quite good. If we want to become a wealthier society, and to the extent that immigrants match their native-born counterparts, we want to encourage the immigration of those who increase our smart fraction and discourage those who shrink it.

Three very nice paragraphs by the great Thomas Sowell:

"The story of Obama's political career is not a pretty story. He won his first political victory by being the only candidate on the ballot-- after hiring someone skilled at disqualifying the signers of opposing candidates' petitions, on whatever technicality he could come up with.

"Despite his words today about 'change' and 'cleaning up the mess in Washington,' Obama was not on the side of reformers who were trying to change the status quo of corrupt, machine politics in Chicago and clean up the mess there. Obama came out in favor of the Daley machine and against reform candidates.

"Senator Obama is running on an image that is directly the opposite of what he has been doing for two decades. His escapes from his past have been as remarkable as the great escapes of Houdini."

Shut up with the attacks: I, for one, am fed up with all the personal attacks that we're now witnessing between McCain and Obama. The American people want to hear about the issues that matter to them. Like education. With all the insults, Obama has no chance to tell us that we shouldn't be devoting more money to improve kids' math and science skills. Obama's priorities while serving on the Woods Fund board were exactly right. Kids needs millions funneled into classrooms so they can spend their time learning how to overthrow the American goverment. Shut up with all the talk about what these men are like, and let's focus on their promises!

Help me with a quote: Some readers don't get my post on the "alpha male with a vagina" although it seems perfectly plain to me. I'll give a dollar to anyone who can give me the Churchill quote about how the critics on the sidelines are little pip squeaks--the great man is the one in the center of the battle. It won't help anyone understand any better, but I like it anyway.

UPDATE (Thanks to scrutineer): “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” -Teddy Roosevelt

Married conservatives are happier than married liberals

In my previous post, a reader named Jewish Atheist claims that conservatives have lower divorce rates than liberals due to the fact that conservatives stay in unhappy marriages because their religions say they shouldn't get a divorce. He asserts this with no evidence, so let me help him out.

The chart above shows how happy people are with their marriage by political orientation. If JA is right, unhappy marriages among conservatives should be more common than among liberals (who supposedly break up if they are dissatisfied). It turns out that just the opposite is true: conservaties have happier marriages. To be precise, 62.4% of liberals are very happily married, while 67.9% of conservatives are (shown in red).

Jewish Atheist, being the logically consistent commenter that he is, will retort that the religions of conservatives will insist they always tell the truth, which means the happiness gap with liberals is actually even larger since conservatives will not give the socially desirable answer of being happy when they really aren't like irreligious liberals will sometimes do. Uhm, oops, I guess that doesn't work out for him.

Actually do something to smack Obama and Reverend Wright: In condemning Republicans who run Jeremiah Wright ads, John McCain revealed that not being called a racist is more important to him than the election. Why the topic would be off-limits is absolutely beyond me.

After many months of opposing McCain's candidacy, I'm going eat some humble pie and urge readers to donate to Freedom's Defense Fund, a 527 which has been airing ads on Rezko, Ayers, and, most importantly, Wright. (If you know of a better 527 or better ads, please post a comment). For a 44 dollar donation, they send you a free copy of Obama Nation by Jerome Corsi.

What motivated my change was simple: reading USA Today, I was reminded that Justice John Paul Stevens will turn 89 in December, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 75. That has a way of bringing clarity to one's mind.

Another wacky idea from the Inductivist: Bill O'Reilly rants all the time about how NBC has lost all professionalism in its support for liberal ideology. That got me wondering if Saturday Night Live's plan to air fresh political parodies every Thursday night (the night with the largest TV audience) during prime-time slots until the election is motivated only by profit, or if NBC wants to influence the election by using Tina Fey to drive home the argument that Palin is not up to being the vice-president.