Here come the Saxons

While there may be a mainstream publication that is more zealously in favor of open borders than the WSJ is, I'm unaware of its existence. So it's a relief to see a letters to the editor section that looks like this in response to Ellis island paeans by a renowned beltway insider like Michael Barone:Hostility across the board, with the exception of the ethnic activist writing...

Cartels vs. Insider Trading

Steve Sailer writes:I'm interested in the topic of cartels and price-fixing, in large part because nobody else seems to be interested in them, which reflects a massive change from as recently as the 1970s.As an early millennial, I remember hearing a bit about the topics in a college macroeconomics class, but that was about it. I do recall a seemingly inordinate amount of focus...

White New England Protestants, a liberal lot they are not

As a myopic provincial, the figure I conceptualize in my mind as politically representative of New Englanders is a theistically ambivalent liberal white Protestant. A SWPL, basically. N/A, proprietor of R/H/E Notes, who has set me straight on misconceptions in the past, may have done so again by showing that Romney enjoyed a comfortable edge among white Protestants in New...

Denominational doubt and devotion

Agnostic's insights into hair color and heaven (lots of blondes in half-hearted denominations like Episcopalianism, relatively fewer among the more committed, like Baptists) got me wondering about certainty of belief among members of major religious institutions in the contemporary US. And it's not like I need even that flimsy a segue to report as much, because the results fit the blog's tagline quite well. The following table shows the percentages...

Expendables are more interesting

Genetically, men are more expendable than women are. Historically for our species around 40% of men and 80% of women reproduced. Alphas ruled the past. But the biological world isn't static and significant evolutionary changes can occur in the geological blink of an eye. Today in the US the gap has narrowed substantially. The GSS shows that 81% of men and 86% of women who've made it through their reproductive careers have procreated. Genetic continuance...

Uptalk valve

The ultimate in uptalk..."I know, right?"Seemingly ubiquitous and horribly conspicuous among people under thirty, its putative purpose is to show affirmation and agreement with an observation or statement made by another person. Yet at the same time, it is also a request that the other person validate said affirmation and agreement.Not only does it evince an inability to make an assertion of one's own, it even shows an alarming level of uncertainty...

Certainty of God's existence is now a minority position among young whites

In an intriguing post (when are his anything but?) criticizing the New Atheists' evangelism, Jayman remarks:This indicates that religious belief – or lack there of – is largely intractable. It is a futile effort to get people to give up religion en masse (or, for that matter, to get non-believers to believe). You may have some individual “successes”, largely because of changing...

Per capita debt + unfunded pension liabilities by state

Randall Parker points to a CNBC article focused on unfunded pension liabilities at the state level that is packed with quite a bit of data on the financial condition of the fifty. I've been after something like this for several years.There are multiple ways to view the numbers, but probably the most broadly informative involves adding together current state debt and unfunded...

NAEP scores and demographics galore

Previously, this provincial took a look at the relationship between scholastic performance and student body racial composition for the two most populous counties on the Kansas side of the KCMO metro area. Let's do the same but this time at the national level, replacing individual schools with states and using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).The...