On isolationism and the drawdown in Iraq

The following comes from part of a facebook discussion (an appropriate venue for such polemics, I know!) that resulted from one of my status updates (FB's response to tweets). For better or worse, I'm heavily indebted to Pat Buchanan for the tack I take in my approach to US history. Comments and corrections in my understanding will be much appreciated.

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Status: Fewer than 50,000 military personnel left in Iraq, something I'm proud of my President for. Now just 100,000 in Afghanistan, 66,000 in Germany, 54,000 in Japan, 30,000 in Kuwait, and 30,000 in South Korea to go. A republic, not an empire.

[Keenan wrote: Would we risk further instability in the world by returning to an isolationist foreign policy?]

Keenan,

Prior to our entry into WWI, Jefferson doubled the size of the US by buying up over 800,000 square miles of land from the French (who, had we have been more meddlesome in European affairs, would've been more hostile towards us than they were following the naval Quasi-War we'd had with them from 1798-1800) at less than $20 a square mile. Jefferson also oversaw the creation of the US Navy in response to the plundering of merchant ships by Barbary corsairs in the Atlantic and Mediterranean that had been going on for centuries.

James Madison took much of contemporary Florida from the hands of the Spanish empire and attempted to invade and conquer Canada.

The war hero and future President Andrew Jackson invaded what was left of Florida and kicked the Spanish governor across the water into Cuba. The result was complete US control of what became the sunshine state.

James Monroe, who sent Jackson to take Florida, declared during his Presidency the Monroe Doctrine, essentially telling the rest of the world to butt out of US affairs in the Western Hemisphere.

John Tyler annexed Texas. Instead of implicitly ceding the American Southwest to the Mexicans as we are apt to do today, he explicitly took its greatest part from them.

James Polk followed that up by chopping off the northern half of what was then Mexico (the California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico of today) at a bargain-basement price in the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Commodore Perry is probably more famous in the annals of Japanese history than in US history for forcing open trade between that formerly cloistered country and the West. He didn't remain stationed in Okinawa for six decades, though--he was back home in the US a year later.

In 1853, President Franklin bought up the remainder of Mexican-controlled territory (including modern-day Tucson) that would eventually become part of the US.

The US, under Andrew Johnson, supported Mexico's struggle for self-rule in opposing the French suzerainty that had been installed there by Napolean's nephew.

William Seward bought Alaska. He was less successful in acquiring Hawaii, British Columbia, Greenland, and the Virgin Islands. But he tried for those, too.

During Rutherford Hayes' administration, we almost went to war with Germany over questions over the status of the Samoan Islands.

William McKinley went to war with Spain, invaded Cuba, gave the US control of Puerto Rico, maintained US influence in the Philippines, used American troops to put down the Boxer Rebellion, and forced open trade between China and the rest of the West as Millard Fillmore had done in Japan half a century before.

Teddy Roosevelt made sure the Panama Canal was completed and mediated the treaty following Japan's surprising victory over Russia in 1904.

All that during the so-called period of US isolationism. We didn't isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Instead, we acted on the world stage when it was in our best interests, not on behalf of some entangling alliance or in defence of some universal proposition about the equality and civil rights of all man(and woman!)kind

My amateurish understanding of history freely admitted, I am not of the opinion that what the US has done since then--exported messianic liberal democracy on the barrel of a gun--has done us much good. World War I is widely regarded as a pointless bloodletting (Western Civilization's first Civil War, really). The Korean War? Vietnam? The Balkans? The war in Iraq? A decade in Afghanistan?

More controversial is criticism of our entry into WWII, but by starving the Japanese of energy while they were at war with China was a primary reason for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Hitler honored his alliance with Japan and declared war on us a couple days later, but had we not sent American troops into Europe, it's questionable as to how and where any military confrontations between the US and Germany would've commenced. Instead, at great cost in blood and treasure, we knocked out the Nazis before they'd done all they could've done to the Soviets. As a result, we got Stalin, who murdered millions more people than Hitler did, and a Cold War that lasted over four decades and ensconced in our economic fabric the military-industrial-congressional complex that underlies the countless "defense" boondoggles taxpayer dollars have been squandered on ever since.

That rebuttal to the derogatory "isolationist" charge aside, US military personnel constitute almost 70% of all foreign deployments worldwide. We have nearly 400,000 boots on the ground outside of the US. The rest of the world combined, by contrast, has a total of about 175,000 spread across the entire globe. If our soldiers come home from their extended vacations in Germany, the US embassy in Berlin will not be closed down. The Germans will still export BMWs to us. We will still export jets to them.

Instead of establishing permanent military bases throughout Europe and Asia, why not maintain a foreign policy stating that if you attack us or facilitate those who do, we're going to strike back an order of magnitude more ferociously (and then some), reducing your domestic military installations to rubble, killing your leaders, and aiming our nuclear arsenal at you just in case that response isn't enough to set you straight--then we're going to get out and leave the cleanup to you and your despondent citizenry?

As Landon rightly points out, China is establishing soft influence all over the place--in the Middle East, Africa, South America, the rest of Asia--without any overseas military bases or deployed soldiers to speak of. I don't even think they have an outpost in North Korea (although I could be off on that).

[Evan wrote: I'm sure South Korea wouldn't appreciate our departure.]

Evan,

Polls show that most South Koreans--by about a 55%-45% margin--want the US to extirpate itself militarily from their country (there is a generational divide on the issue, with older Koreans being more amenable to our presence than younger Koreans are). South Korea's economy is 20-30 times the size of the North's. Its military expenditures are four times the North's, and its population is more than twice that of its northern neighbor. Why are we footing the bill and putting our guys at risk on behalf of an ungrateful nation that can (and should!) defend itself?

NFL seasons have become less predictable over time

With the NFL regular season a couple of weeks from commencement, predictions for 2010 are about to (dis)prove their worth. The prevailing mindset seems to be that a few surprises are inevitably in store, as has more-or-less been the case since the Colts clinched a first-round bye in the playoffs during the 1999 season, a year after finishing 3-13. Last year, of course, the Saints won it all after a decade of mediocrity.

How relevant does the idea of parity in the NFL remain relative to decades past? When the term "dynasty" is used, how far back in time must one go to apply it meaningfully? The Patriots of the early 2000s? The Cowboys of the early and mid-nineties? The 49ers of the eighties? Or all the way back to the Steelers of '74-'79, who won four Superbowls in six years? It's a question sports buffs could argue over indefinitely.

As I don't have a compelling qualitative case to make, I'll defer to the numbers and take the quantitative approach. The following graph shows the season-to-season wins correlation over time. That is, the r-value for the 2008-2009 seasons is computed by taking each team's number of regular season wins in 2008 and correlating them with the number of regular season wins each time had in 2009. The individual data points are provided in a table at the end of this post.


There are some expected year-to-year random fluctuations, but three broad periods emerge, each one successively defined less by steady performance season after season than the period before it. In the seventies, teams' regular season records consistently correlated at higher than .50. If you were a Steelers fan in 1974, you had strong reason to believe that the black and gold would have a very real shot at hoisting up the Lombardi trophy again next year. That's in contrast to the state of the game today--who is seriously predicting a repeat performance by the Saints in Arlington next February? (The odds-makers show them tied with the Cowboys as the second most likely team to win, behind the Colts; I'm highly skeptical).

After a couple of topsy-turvy years ahead of the players' association strike that severely disrupted the 1982 season, the 49ers helped bring a brief return to seventies-era consistency. By the late-eighties, the capriciousness of the Bengals (who had only won 4 games a year before Boomer Esiason came up a little short against Joe Montana in Superbowl XXIII) became relatively commonplace.

Year-to-year performance would hover around .40 from that period through the end of the nineties. Then, in 1999, pandemonium ensued! After leading the 49ers to a 3-1 start, Steve Young's career would come to an end at the hands, er, shoulders of Aeneas Williams, one of the greatest defensive backs in NFL history (I realize that assertion is controversial, but Young never played again, so it effectively did so). San Francisco would go on to lose all but one of their remaining 12 games, ending 4-12 a year after they had gone 12-4. The Colts, meanwhile, did the opposite, as Peyton Manning, in the manner of Troy Aikman a decade before (and then some), exploded onto the scene in his second year as a pro, leading the Colts to a 13-3 regular season after his disappointing 3-13 rookie year.

This is about the time "parity" became cliche (although it more accurately described perceived randomness rather than equality in teams' performance on 'any given Sunday'). No season before or after has ever outdone 1999 in jumbling things up from the previous year, but excepting 2008-2009, which was unusually consistent, the year-to-year correlation has floated around .25 ever since, repeatedly failing to constitute a statistically significant result at even 90% confidence.

Years	r-value
08-09	.56
07-08	.21
06-07	.26
05-06	.29
04-05	.26
03-04	.24
02-03	.20
01-02	.38
00-01	.19
99-00	.36
98-99	.01
97-98	.50
96-97	.35
95-96	.44
94-95	.42
93-94	.26
92-93	.49
91-92	.32
90-91	.40
89-90	.43
88-89	.44
87-88	.33
86-87	.30
85-86	.69
84-85	.68
83-84	.51
82-83	.47
81-82	.28
80-81	.05
79-80	.33
78-79	.68
77-78	.56
76-77	.79
75-76	.56
74-75	.64
73-74	.61
72-73	.58
71-72	.50
70-71	.63
69-70	.39

Sound barriers would make a sound barrier

++Addition++I'd forgotton that five years ago Randall Parker had made a similar observation, in addition to doing some relevant quantitative digging:

The Federal Highway Administration says most highway sound barriers are constructed of concrete or masonry block, range from 3-5 meters [9-16 feet] in height, and cost between $175 and $200 a square meter.

According to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, there are "more than 2,630 linear miles of sound barriers" along U.S. highways, constructed at a cost of some $1.4 billion.

By comparison, the Pentagon is spending about $3.9 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, not counting rebuilding costs, the Associated Press has reported.

There is little shame in running half a decade behind parapundit, I suppose.

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I was in Minneapolis last week and was treated to miles and miles of aesthetically-pleasing highway sound barriers along I-35 and I-90. Over the last few years, I've noticed them in several cities I've travelled to. They began going up along the I-435 loop of my native stomping grounds four or five years ago. If you're unfamiliar with them, take a look at these google images.

Municipalities are putting up hundreds of miles of these walls all across the country--and justifying the costs that accompany it--just to keep noise out. These structures could just as well be used to keep people out. A couple hundred miles here, a couple hundred miles there, and before long we're talking about real mileage--say, around 2,000. Anyone who claims that building a wall along the entire US-Mexico border is an impossible undertaking is telling a lie.

It doesn't take money to put together a competitive deck, but attaining top-tier status does

The following post contains a discussion relating to the competitive M:TG standard format. For the vast majority of readers it will consequently be of no interest, so if you are among them, please don't waste your time.

I was at a Magic tournament the other day, scouting the remaining matches after I'd finished mine, when I noticed a guy I've worked with next to me. He was waiting on a pizza order to feed the family when he'd seen me standing inside. He'd played before he had his two little ones, but the game seems like too much of a time and money investment for him to get back into now.

The standard format is undoubtedly a cash cow for Wizards of the Coast--other trading cards (sports or otherwise) simply cannot compare. Jace, the Mind Sculptor--which just debuted in Worldwake in February of this year--will now set you back $80 per (as a longtime control player, I saw this coming and consequently bought two playsets when he was going for $30). For every Jace, though, there are several junk cards like Near-Death Experience. With sets rotating in every few months, and core sets now being released annually instead of every two years, the need for players to keep their libraries up to snuff is a perpetual one.

Rapid increases in price like that experienced with Jace do more to directly benefit the shops selling the cards than they do to benefit Wizards' itself. Of course, the resulting increase in Worldwake pack sales does translate into more money in Wizards' coffers, but presumably at the expense of other sets, since the competitive environment is a zero-sum game (the utility of a card is relative to others in the format, not in an absolute sense).

The four designations of commonality factor into market pricing, of course. A booster runs 11 commons, 3 uncommons, and a rare, which, 12.5% of the time will turn out to be mythic. Cards are not valued exclusively on their in-game merits; they also double as collector items, and the rare stuff is more difficult to collect. But the list of dollar rares (as they're dismissively called) is long, while top uncommons fetch close to double-digit prices.

Using data from decklists entered in sanctioned tournaments from M11's release to August 13, 2010, I correlated mid-range card prices with their respective rankings among the top 100 most-used cards. The correlation is .27 (p=.01). It's statistically significant, but modest, which is what regular players would expect to be the case. The single most played card in standard at the moment is Lightning Bolt, a common which anyone who has ever played Magic at any point in time will recognize as the marquee red card, if not game's marquee card, period.

The reason people complain about the high cost of certain overly powerful rares like Jace is that he has too much general utility to be left out of anything that plays more than a splash of blue. To a lesser extent the same can be said for white with Baneslayer Angel and for green with both Vengevine and Primeval Titan (red is reliably the pauper's best option for being maximally competitive; black is also currently cheap because it sucks). If you're playing these colors but lack the respective cards, it's virtually impossible to compensate with something cheaper. Again, Jace epitomizes this--without him, blue collapses as a foundational color. So even though 90% of a competitive deck is easily acquired on the cheap, the few expensive rares propel top-tier decks into the $500 range.

Roissy's dating value test and Hot or Not score inflation

Last weekend I found Roissy's test designed to help men self-assess their dating value to women. I can't dispute that the guy knows his stuff, but by essentially giving each item an equal weighting, the scoring scale is less useful than it could potentially be. So on the basis of physical attractiveness, you're a 1, but the Hollister model standing next to you, who is a 10, tells the woman he's talking to that he has to use the restroom, while you just turn away from the one you're shooting it with in mid-conversation and go. According to the Roissy scale, all other things equal, the two of you are equally desirable in female eyes.

That is absurd, of course. Digressing, I can't believe simply walking away to use the restroom in mid-conversation is ever your best move--would it not be taken as a response to anxiety, the need for a private moment to regain your composure? I've actually been in that exact situation fairly recently. I told her to "wait here", and then went to relieve myself. When I came back, her mild curiosity and expectancy was met with an inconspicuous but relieved "whew" as I was a few paces away and then "okay, so you were telling me about your visit to Niagra Falls..." The response was good.

I've been a prickly skeptic of the game phenomenon not because I think it is fundamentally flawed, but because it is oversold. Confidence, assertiveness, wittiness, smooth operating, creating sexual tension both verbally and non-verbally, and everything else involved in game, ceteris paribus, raise a man's desirability. Roissy gives an estimate of 1-3 points worth. That sounds reasonable if a bit ambitious on the high-end, the gain depending on one's level of confidence to begin with.

To the extent that I disagree with him, it's in not seeing how he squares this with his ranking of game as being of greater importance than physical attractiveness. In addition to the restroom question, there are eight other scenario situations. Thus it appears that game is nearly an order of magnitude as important as physical attractiveness is for men. If you're doppleganger of Robert Pattinson, unless you are an extraordinarily agoraphobic mess, you're not going to have trouble running circles around witty, self-confident guys with crooked, crisco-infused faces and gorilla-hairy arms.

Tangentially, to gauge one's level of attractiveness, he suggests using the site HotOrNot.com. I created a profile there a few days ago and began rating people. I was immediately struck by how inflated the scores are. After giving someone a rating, you are shown that person's average score from all ratings she's received up to that point. After rendering judgment on 100 or so ladies, I was without exception always harsher than the stated average, but the mean score I dispensed was probably 6.0-6.5, which is presumably a bit overly generous (it's a scale of 1-10, after all).

It seems as though the site's scale as it actually exists is 5-10, not 1-10. I googled "hot or not score inflation" and the like to try to figure out if there are bots at work or the site intentionally filters out low scores but didn't turn anything insightful up, only a few people making similar observations. The picture I posted has now accumulated 52 ratings for an average of 9.9 and the caption "You are hotter than 99% of the men on this site!" It's a decent though candid shot taken by a friend, not dressed up by a professional photographer or anything, and I wasn't hit by the ugly stick as many times as I could've been in the womb, but I'm not model-caliber. Does anyone know why HotOrNot scores are so inflated? The women who spend time rating male photos surely tend to be on the lower end of the looks scale, but that alone is unlikely to be a full explanation.

Since this is already dripping in self-indulgence, AE's responses and score on the Roissy test:

1. Age: 26-34 yo (+1)
2. Height: 6' to 6'4" (+1)
3. BMI: 24.1 to 27.0 (0)
4. Bench: 81% to 170% of body weight (+1)
5. Hairline: Full, under 35 yo (0)
6. Income: Over $70k, under 40 yo (+1)
7. Car: Have one, over 21 yo (0)
8. Looks: HotOrNot aside, I'm going to say 5-7, not 8-10 (0)
9. Sports: Played leading role (+1)
10. Occupation: Neutral status (0)
11. Friends: 20+ (+1)
12. Friends via internet: over 2 (a proud -1, thanks to those who comment regularly here!)
13. Last house party: Less than a year ago (0)
14. Funny: Nearly everyone who knows me (+1)
15: IQ: 130 to 145 (0)
16. At party: I approach first (+1)
17. Fight: Never been in one (0)
18: Arrested: No (0)

In the interest of space, just the scores for the scenario questions:

19. +1
20. 0
21. +1
22. 0
23. -1
24. +1
25. +1
26. 0
27. +1

+11, which means I don't even get a label. I've not spent much time in bars, so I'm not sure how accurate the description is.

Partisan self-identification by intelligence over time

Listening to an EconTalk podcast with David Brady of Stanford University, the phrase "all-important independents" was used on multiple occasions by host Russ Roberts' guest. I've heard both that American politics are becoming more partisan and that independents are coming to represent an increasing portion of the electorate (Brady emphasizes the latter, though President Obama's approval ratings by party provide evidence for the former--and he is continuing a trend that began as far back as the Johnson administration). Those two things would seem to be contradictory on their faces, though in Red State, Blue State, Andrew Gelman notes that while voters seem to be moving away from party labels and toward self-described political independence, the primary process helps ensure that politicians are generally to the right (if Republican) or the left (if Democrat) of their constituencies. Further, whether those in question represent a random sample of all adults, registered voters, or likely voters matters.

Despite opening with it, though, that's a digression from what I want to look at in this post. It sparked a tangentially related question of how partisan self-identification has changed over time among people grouped by varying levels of intelligence. The GSS wordsum distribution is ideal for this sort of categorization, as slicing score ranges into five groupings creates something akin to a normal distribution; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Really Dumbs (0-3, 12%). In the following graphs, the blue lines represent those who self-identify as Democrats, the purple lines independents, and the red lines Republicans.

Society's upper echelon has been pretty evenly split three ways for the last several decades, and as of 2008 the partisan distribution among them was almost identical to what it had been in 1974. This might seem to counter the concern among some on the right that Republicans are losing ground among the most intelligent, but for three of the other four IQ groups, Republican self-identification has increased modestly over time. Relative to the bulk of the population, high-IQ types seem less enticed to move toward the Republican label than others are.


Among this solidly middle class portion of the population, the story is similar to that of the Really Smarts, albeit a little better for the GOP. The spike in the late-eighties looks like randomness to me, but I could be missing something. If I had to designate one of the five groups to which President Reagan would have appealed most to, I'd choose this one.



It is among Normals and Pretty Dumbs where the Democrats have lost the most ground. I suspect this is in large part due to the shift among southern whites towards the GOP and away from the Democratic party in the eighties.

It has been noted previously that when the perennial narrative describing how independents will determine the outcome of whatever election is at hand is given, the spotlighted fence-sitters tend to be duller than their more decisive compatriots are. That is apparent here.

Also apparent are the underpinnings of the PC trap white conservatives are able to snare SWPLs with--in aggregate, Republicans are, on average, more intelligent than Democrats are. The primary reason for this is the overwhelming support NAMs (especially blacks) give to the Democratic party. SWPLs could conceivably respond that among whites (the only group they're really concerned about how they measure up to) this is not the case. But of course they refrain from doing so, because making such a point would be racist. Appearing to be less sharp than white conservatives, while surely frustrating, is not as awful as being racist. Indeed, nothing is.

GSS variables used: WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10), YEAR, PARTYID(0-1)(2-4)(5-6)

Why are Asian women so flat, among other things?

++Addition++In the comments, n/a writes the following:

Many of the black and white search suggestions make more sense if you realize they are primarily giving insight into the minds of blacks (not a random sample of internet users). Black people think about blacks (and think about whites as "white") much more than white people do -- on top of which I suspect lower IQ people are more likely to type search queries in the form of questions.

It's not white men typing "why are white men intimidated by black women". The only people who think white men are intimidated by (or attracted to) black women are black women. It's a classic black female rationalization for why they don't get approached by white men.

Likewise it's black women who think white women are jealous of them, wonder why black men are "on the down low", and believe white women are attracted to black men (because the white women who catch their attention are disproportionately those with black men), etc.

It's probably Asian women who think white women are jealous of Asian women.

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Agnostic had a great post a couple of months back on Google search suggestions filling out what has been entered up to that point. He looked at variations of "why are guys/girls ..." Rather than rehash it here, give it a read if you haven't yet done so.

I'm shamelessly stealing his idea with the added elements of race and ethnicity thrown in. As those familiar with Google know, the returns are in order of interest, (presumably) based on aggregate totals of searches with what has been entered up to that point included. The following suggested phrases are consequently ordered in this way.

"Why are white men" attracted to black women, so ugly, serial killers, dating black women, not attracted to black women, attracted to Asian women, intimidated by black men, so racist, intimidated by black women.

Interracial marriage and cohabitation rates don't lend credence to the idea that white men tend to be attracted to black women. That the first and fifth suggestions are directly opposed to one another demonstrates that there obviously isn't uniformity in the stereotypes people hold about different groups.

The perceived attraction to Asian women is justified by the data, however.

I believe n/a of RHE Notes has remarked that white men spend a disproportionate amount of time worrying about and comparing themselves with blacks. White men are the only group for which intimidation by some other group comes up among the top nine returns.

Whenever the issue of black criminality is brought up, a SWPL can always be relied on to note that most serial killers are white men, as though that somehow proves there are no real differences in rates of criminal behavior by race. It is not surprising that most serial killers are indeed white men, since men perpetrate more than 90% of all violent crime and the majority of the US' population is white. As La Griffe has shown, however, black men are still about twice as likely to become serial killers as white men are. Parenthetically, blacks are similarly twice as likely to engage in hate crime as are whites.

And, of course, white men are racist, as are white women and Hispanics. Although there are several reasons to believe blacks are more racialist than whites are, returns for blacks, as shown below, do not include anything about racism.

"Why are white women" so beautiful, jealous of Asian women, so hot, so racist, so ugly, attracted to black men, so easy, jealous of black women, so skinny, so attractive.

Jealousness of Asian women and attraction to black men are both justified by the data (though it needs to be remembered that the spouses of some 97% of married whites are white as well). That there are different patterns depending on sex (ie, white men/Asian women, black men/white women, Asian men and black women left out in the cold) among the remaining 3% that people are quite interested in for one reason or another is a testament of how salient race is, despite tripe about it being a "social construction".

The idea of white women being jealous of black women seems to come out of left field to me.

"Why are black men" bigger, attracted to white women, so angry, better in bed, so violent, violent, so lazy, on the down low, so ugly, obsessed with white women.

When people think of racial stereotypes, black men are surely the most conspicuous group that comes to mind. Trojan makes a style of condom, Magnums, that are larger than the rest of its product line. They come in a black box and are, in my experience, almost exclusively [actually, it appears that 40% of Magnums are purchased by black men, so it's their condom of choice, but whites buy them as well... just not this humble blogger, who is comfortable enough in who he is to admit that!] used by black men. Hence "bigger". The rest of the returns, with the odd exception of "on the down low", come as little surprise--SWPLs would point to the above and say it shows how ugly racism still exists (violent, angry, lazy), while HBD realists would counter that relative to whites, these adjectives are, on average, accurate.

"Why are black women" single, so angry, so rude, so loud, beautiful, angry, so mean, so overweight, losing their hair, obese.

With an illegitimacy rate today of nearly 70% for black babies, coupled with the fact that, like Asian men, black women lose out in the interracial mating game (they actually have it worse than Asian men do, as one-third of black men spend some amount of time incarcerated and are thus unavailable to black women who would otherwise be seeking them out), there is no shortage of single black women. A quick glance at Craigslist* confirms that.

The rest is pretty unflattering. If memory serves, in absolute terms, black females' waists are, on average, larger than the waists of black men. According to the CDC, some 37% of black women are obese (BMI of 30+). While the BMI has it's shortcomings for men (namely that guys like this are deemed "obese"), it is generally a good indicator for women. Thus we get "so overweight" and "obese".

"Why are Hispanics" short, at greater risk for PTSD, discriminated against, considered white, overweight, so racist, more obese, Catholic, rude, fat.

Unfortunately, Google only returns a couple suggestions for "why are Hispanic men" and "why are Hispanic women". While the term "Hispanic" definitionally refers to someone who speaks Spanish or is of Spanish descent, it generally brings to mind Amerindians, usually from Mexico. It is not Vicente Fox of Felipe Calderon who earn Hispanics their reputation for being physically short, it is the Amerindians who work on roofs and ride lawnmowers who do it.

That Hispanics can be of any race is a perpetual source of confusion for people. One always has to be cognizant of whether or not Hispanics (that is, Amerindians or Mestizos from south of the US border) are included in statistics on whites. When people think of white, they tend to have in their minds what is better described as "non-Hispanic white" by the Census, but the government often includes the majority of Hispanics in the white category (with the remainder either being characterized as black, two or more races, or "other", the latter being almost exclusively chosen by Hispanics).

Like black women, Hispanic women are also more likely to be overweight or obese than white women are. My impression is that Hispanic women are especially bad at carrying that extra weight, as it seems to congregate extensively in the worst place (the gut) for a woman to have excessive fat.

The "so racist" probably stems from the common perception among middle class white men that blacks and Hispanics have it out for each other (and because Hispanics tend to be more servile and less and threatening than blacks, the sloppy idea that Hispanics will take care of blacks in the city slums emerges from this line of thinking).

Like hair loss among black women, an increased risk of post traumatic stress disorder is not among the first things that come to mind when I think about Hispanics as a group.

"Why are Asian men" so ugly, ugly, so small, so skinny, so feminine, attractive, so weak, attracted to white women, feminine.

Ouch. While from it may appear from the outside looking in that teenage boys today are effeminate softies, a couple minutes in a WoW chatroom or a Halo 3 multiplayer reveals that stripped of authority figures forcing political correctness onto them, pussies and fags are among the most contemptible forms of life in the universe. The warrior spirit is alive among adolescent boys today, even if it manifests itself primarily in the virtual world. Compared to their black and white counterparts, Asian guys are more likely to have characteristics of those disrespected lifeforms.

"Why are Asian women" so thin, attracted to white men, so attractive, so rude, thin, so ugly, such bad drivers, flat, so small, so beautiful.

There are a handful of writeups on male penis size by things like nationality or race, but I'm unaware of any attempts to systematically measure bust size by the same. From personal experience though, I'm confident that "flat" is in the correct category here.

"Why are Jews" hated, liberal, rich, so cheap, so rich, so successful, Democrats, cheap, so smart, persecuted.

Like Hispanics, Google returns only a couple of suggestions for Jewish men and Jewish women. Read it and weep--people know what Jews are all about (think of "cheap" as a prodigal goy's underhanded way of acknowledging prudence and parsimony)!

Finally, the best for last:

"Audacious" epigone [my emphasis!], definition, skins, plugins, p, inquiry, meaning, synonym, in a sentence, ubuntu.

* Looking through the female-seeking-male postings for the Kansas City metro area, about half are by black women. Glancing through nearly 100 of them, I found only a single instance of someone who is clearly above a 3. Most are hopelessly unattractive. How sad.