Pew induces puking

A little with this report, anyway. Pew Research is an admirable organization that has given me buckets of food for thought and more than my share of blogging material to make use of, all without asking anything of me in return. Countless hours of entertainment for free. What could the organization possibly owe me? If anything, I owe it. Still, while this report might not be...

TSB 2013, Cowboys/Patriots

Hopefully you're doing something more productive than this over the holiday season. The extra time I've found myself with, however, is being squandered on silliness of the sort below. Don't throw away your playful beginnings, I gue...

Indonesia's Islamic spirit of tolerance

Writing at Secular Right, Andrew Stuttaford quotes Barack Obama on Indonesia:Those things that I learned to love about Indonesia — that spirit of tolerance that is written into your constitution, symbolized in your mosques and churches and temples standing alongside each other; that spirit that is embodied in your people — that still lives on.When evaluating flattering fluff like this, my instinct is to try and quantifiably evaluate how much truth,...

The gun gap

Writes Jack Hunter:In the cause of preventing future tragedies, it would make FAR more sense to ban the media from ever mentioning the names of these evil murderers than to further restrict guns. Think they'll give up their 1st Amendment rights? For public safety?Ever the proverbial fool, after seeing that pithy rhetorical ploy I knew I had to say something. The Herostratus...

Fatherhood is more than sperm donation

From a man contemplating whether or not it's possible to be both an alpha male and a genetic dead end comes a hypothetical thought experiment designed to show that procreation per se isn't the end all, be all of male fulfillment:The two choices are guaranteed to fill the gene pool with five cherubic apples of your eye.The choice which leaves you more satisfied, more personally fulfilled and brimming with positive feelings of high self-worth, isa....

The Office fogies

I'm into the fifth season of The Office. As a cog in the machine, its lampooning of the corporate world hits home and the hot-cold mix of blatant-subtle presentation really does it for me. My onomastic obsession has been activated since the beginning, though. The show is set in contemporary Scranton, PA but if one considers the characters' names in a vacuum, he'd be excused...

Where to be born vs. where people are being born

The Economist's "sister" company has made an earnest, contemporary attempt to determine which countries are the most and least propitious ones to be born into. Check out the list and notes on the methodology there. The first thing that jumps out at me is that the best places to be born are doing the least birthing, while the worst places are doing more than their fair share...

Infield annihilation of PUAs?

Speaking of me, I have an idea to serve as a sort of dark complement to videos of PUAs in action. It came to me the other night at a Christmas party. My girlfriend showed me a text her ex-boyfriend sent her, the fourth or fifth she's showed me over the last month or so. Without going into too much detail, he's a good looking guy with an interest in and pretty natural grasp of game, but I know she's thoroughly committed, not least because of...

The Good Life

With apologies to Aristotle specifically and my readership more generally, a quick glimpse into my world. If I haven't found it, it feels like I must be pretty close. I wake up at 8am to my girlfriend's gentle kisses. We make love out of my morning wood and then she makes me this while I do P90X yoga:She leaves for work and I have the day to seek out wisdom through a flat...

Holocaust? Beaver never heard of it

Writes Steve in a recent Taki's column:A more general discovery was the wide usefulness of Israel’s strategy in 1967: Go on the offensive. This military triumph infused American Jews with new confidence. Before the Six-Day War, the Holocaust was only occasionally mentioned. It was depressing and alarming to admit that your people had recently been the victims of the worst...

The left's anti-natalism

Commenter "Dan" wrote the following in a couple of places:Here are 10 areas off the top of my head where ‘liberal’ theology is anti-natalist: 1 – Pro-Life versus pro Choice (duh) 2 – Worshiping the Cathedral (specifically higher education); the more time you are in higher ed, the less time you have to have children 3 – Feminist careerism – can’t be in the kitchen cooking dinner for your kids if you are in the corporate boardroom,...

Early voting key to Obama's reelection?

Jack Cashill, who is always putting forward interesting and controversial (in an accurate sense of the word) ideas, is one of my favorite writers, not least of all because he plugged me into the local political scene. His recent contention that early voting was a key to Obama's reelection victory is hardly an exception to that rule. He writes:In the week before the election,...

Providing procreation predictors, pronto

++Addition++See Jason Malloy's work in the comments.---"Have kids" wasn't exactly the right answer to the question of how one finds his way to happy happy village, though "don't have kids" doesn't get the peregrinator any closer, either. But happiness doesn't echo through time, it expires along with its bearer. A question of greater consequence is how we get people to have more (or fewer) children. Okay, it's obvious in a technical sense. But what...

STEM beliefs

In the comments of a post showing sex ratios of various supernatural beliefs, someone suggested that the heavy male skew among atheists and agnostics might have to do with the fact that men are more likely to be in STEM fields than women are. The chicken-and-egg question aside, how do STEM majors compare with the general population when it comes to belief? Conventional wisdom...

Occupations by social class

Half Sigma's post describing teaching as the quintessential middle class occupation naturally made me wonder what, precisely, the most middling profession is. HS writes:Teaching is not the highest class of profession, but I don’t really characterize it as blue-collar. I have always considered teaching to be the quintessential middle-class occupation. “Top” college graduates aspire to upper-middle-class occupations, so that’s why they aren’t interested...

Conservatism is white men

For the sages of the 'conservative' Establishment (I'm looking at you, Sean Hannity), a revisiting of recent history that illustrates why a coloring in of the country isn't just bad for Republicans' electoral prospects, it bodes terribly for a whole host of social, cultural, and economic positions that define the contemporary American right. The lesson at hand today is Michigan's 2006 Proposition 2 banning affirmative action programs in education...

Time to abort opposition to abortion?

Reflecting on the 2012 presidential election, Half Sigma writes:Republicans are on the losing side of the abortion issue. It doesn’t matter that Romney, personally, didn’t make abortion a big issue. Everyone knows that Republicans are against abortion, and he selected a staunchly anti-abortion Vice Presidential nominee in Paul Ryan. That the Republican Party has morons like Richard Mourdock who think that the demon-spawn of rapists are a “gift from...

Not confirming a minority woman? Probably not!

There's been a palpable shift among those in the Establishment towards openly, without the air of furtiveness, subjugating the concerns and well being of heterosexual white men to those and that of all our assorted 'minorities'* since Obama's reelection earlier this month. The "new normal" was prominently on display today on NPR's Morning Edition, in a conversation between Linda Wertheimer and Cokie Roberts on Obama's trip to Asia (audio is...

The Silent Xenophobes

Alerted by Steve Sailer of the ability to cross tab exit polling data for free via Reuters, I thought it'd be a fun challenge to try and paint an electoral map red--entirely--to contrast with the easy-to-create blue one. Perhaps married white men earning at least six figures annually (though in honor of Jokah Macpherson, I suspect that demographic trends slightly progressive in Vermont)? Unfortunately, the sample sizes aren't large enough to look...

2012 electoral maps by sex, race, and income

Upon realizing that for cost-cutting reasons there were insufficiently sized exit polling operations carried out in 19 safe states and the District of Columbia, I'd resigned myself to the actualization that it wouldn't be possible to create hypothetical electoral maps based on select demographic characteristics for the 2012 Presidential election. Damn.But the media consortium...