Breathtaking stats from a recent NY Times piece by David Brooks:

Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.

Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition…is…the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

Add Adam Smith to the list of people neocons use as a reason to be selfish, and who are actually a thousand times more balanced towards the left than they realize.

Sometime within the last couple months I’ve realized that CNN and Fox (and most cable news channels) have become news entertainment.

The reason for this is the increasing lack of education, and general sophistication, of the American TV-viewing population. Most Americans don’t want to think or be challenged; they want to be dazzled. And this translates to ratings being higher for content that provides that.

So when a cable news show has a story about Britney’s boobs, and the ratings go crazy, the people at the cable network take notice. Perhaps there’s a slight sting among the real journalists who work there as they make the move to more soft-core porn and other sensationalist content, but it’s the business people that make the decisions.

Common Components

I see a theme here, and it’s the same with the sub-prime mortgage crisis, or the lottery, or with exorbitant credit card fees for those with poor credit. There are two primary ingredients for all of these things:

1. Greed
2. Stupidity

As a society if you fail in both of these areas you quickly move toward becoming a third-world country. If you have greed but no stupidity the greedy will be called out, ostracized, and will die off. If you have stupidity with no greed, you get a paternal hand to guide you back on your feed.

But when you have both the greed feeds off the stupidity. The more stupidity you have, the more the greedy at the top take advantage of it for profit. There are few things with more money-making potential than a mass of millions of people who’ll believe anything you tell them.

And that’s why Fox news anchor women look like porn stars. We as a nation are too stupid to reject the lack of content being presented by news today, and we consume the garbage that’s being fed to us. So we’ll still see “politics” in the headers of cable news, but the stories will have headlines like:

Sex Secrets of a Congressman’s Mistress!

…and people will watch.

Real News

Real news won’t go away, it’ll just be hidden on the Internet and away from TV viewers who would just get confused by it–and probably a bit threatened. I say “hidden” on the Internet, but what I really mean is hidden from the mainstream–kind of like books in the library. ::

Links

[ Fox News Porn | foxnewsporn.com ]

Few things get me as excited as data visualization. I seriously love the stuff, and this project by the New York Times is excellent. It shows homicide data for the NYC area over the past several years, broken down by age, sex of perpetrator, sex of victim, race of perpetrator, race of victim, weapon used, borough, time of day, etc.

Really cool stuff.

At the bottom it says, “Do you see any patterns that should be explored further?” My first inclination is:

Um, how about the fact that 90% of both the perpetrators and the victims are non-white and non-asian?

I mean, seriously. 90%? I find it amazing that the NYT can publish such staggering stats and then put out op-ed columns about how the NYPD unfairly targets black and hispanic people.

This is a textbook example of the moralistic fallacy, which is the most common intellectual offense committed by liberals. This fallacy puts forth the idea that things are, in reality, the way they should be. In other words, that the police should scrutinize a young asian kid in a suspicious situation the same way as a young black kid–because there shouldn’t be any reason to evaluate one more than the other.

But reality clearly says otherwise, and I applaud any effort to shed light on the truth–regardless of how unpleasant it may be. It’s much harder to argue with data when you see it displayed in this way.

Now if we can just get some gun control vs. concealed carry data. I really want to make some progress on my opinion on that matter. ::

Links

[ NYC Homicide Visualizations | nytimes.com ]

Given a divorce rate in America hovering at around 50%, I think I will always call my fiance my “girl” rather than my “wife”.

When an 19-year-old says:

I went to the coffee shop with my girl today; it was fun.

…it implies that there were many girls he could have gone to the coffee shop with, but that this is the one he is totally into, so he went with her.

But if a 43-year-old says:

I went to the coffee shop with my wife today: it was fun.

…this is most likely to mean they were just both there at the same time. Perhaps I’m jaded from seeing so many shallow and unhappy relationships.

/shrugs

Anyway, when I refer to my woman I want it to always be with the context of active choice to be with her, and not some responsibility like kids or the unpleasantness of divorce that prevents me from being with someone else. ::

In short? Bad.

To give an overall flavor, here is a collection of data from a number of polls on American belief in evolution, correlated to a number of factors:

• The Majority of Republicans Doubt the Theory of Evolution | Gallup, 2007
• 40%-50% of the public accepts a biblical creationist account of the origins of life | Pew, 2005
• Only 26% of Americans believe in Natural Selection | Pew, 2005
• In the year 2009, 200 years after Darwin’s birth, only 39% believe in the theory of evolution, and 36% have no opinion either way | Gallup, 2009
• 79% of those with a high school education or less either don’t believe in evolution or have no opinion either way | Gallup, 2009
• 27% of those with postgraduate degrees in the United States either don’t believe in evolution or don’t have an opinion either way | Gallup, 2009
• Among those who seldom or never go to church, 45% either don’t believe in evolution or have no opinion either way | Gallup, 2009
• Of those who go nearly weekly or monthly, 70% either don’t believe in evolution or have no opinion either way | Gallup, 2009
• And finally, in the year 2009, in the United States of America, only 39% believe in evolution | Gallup, 2009

Here’s Gallup’s implications summary:

As Darwin is being lauded as one of the most important scientists in history on the 200th anniversary of his birth (on Feb. 12, 1809), it is perhaps dismaying to scientists who study and respect his work to see that well less than half of Americans today say they believe in the theory of evolution, and that just 55% can associate the man with his theory.

This makes me sad. ::

So, regarding support for Obama (and his plan):

• If they support him and he succeeds, they fail.
• If they oppose him and he succeeds, they fail.
• If they support him and he fails, they fail.
• But if they oppose him and he fails, they succeed.

Opposing him violently and hoping he fails is simply the only scenario where they can win, and lo and behold–that’s precisely what they’re doing. Maybe it’s coincidence, but I don’t think so. ::

This is why people should be allowed to carry their own protection. The government isn’t there to protect you at all times, and I think it’s pretty clear that America is based on individuals’ rights to protect themselves.

This needs to happen more often.

“Attacker dies because he was killed by his would-be victim.” That’s what we need. We need society to lash out at violence–to say it’s unacceptable–rather than sit back like sheep and wait for the government to swoop in and save us.

This brightened my day. Maybe it will make that area one iota safer. Probably not, but maybe. As long as violent crime works and the people are discouraged from protecting themselves, this will continue. Add to the insult the fact that this guy would have been out of jail in no time if he lived.

It’s sickening.

It’s highly eroding to a society for citizens to fear for their physical safety. We’re becoming a third-world country, and this guy who died was part of the problem. Good riddance.

And to the father who wants “someone” to pay for this? That’s you. ::

Evidently I’m not the only one who’s seeing what’s happening. I’ve been writing for years about how we’re approaching a volatile social situation due to the tension between those with and those without. My essay called “A Future Divided” loosely handles a number of scenarios along these lines, and a recent report from the U.N. just comes out and states it.

High levels of inequality can lead to negative social, economic and political consequences that have a destabilising effect on societies,” said the report. “[They] create social and political fractures that can develop into social unrest and insecurity.

The report goes on to talk about how race is a major factor in the inequality in U.S. cities, giving the example of New York as the 9th most unequal city in the world:

In western New York state nearly 40% of the black, Hispanic and mixed-race households earned less than $15,000 compared with 15% of white households. The life expectancy of African-Americans in the US is about the same as that of people living in China and some states of India, despite the fact that the US is far richer than the other two countries.

I find it very odd that the Upper West Side in NYC is full of some of the richest people in the world, and yet it’s surrounded by what equate to third world nations. Walking around in Queens you can feel it. The place is completely run down, people don’t trust each other, and it seems most are struggling just to survive. People are not happy, and the fact that the super-rich are a “stone’s throw” away is catastrophe with a lot of potential energy.

To continue to ignore this is completely asinine. The only solution is to lift everyone and eliminate the massive levels of inequality. We have to take all steps necessary to stop creating more pain in the world; it only magnifies at an exponential rate. In short, the strategy of the elite to isolate themselves from the poor is not a strategy–just ask the French. ::

Here are some graphs comparing the previous two stock market crashes with our current situation.

Up to this point the trend looks eerily close to our path-let’s just hope we take an ‘87 turn and not a ‘29 turn.

I’m kidding about the ammo thing, by the way. Well, sorta. ::