ShrinkWrapped

The FDA Will Kill Us All

This is an absolutely perfect example of the FDA using the precautionary principle to cause paralysis.  Obesity is one of the greatest public health issues facing the American people.  There are almost no good treatment options for most people, short of invasive, potentially life threatening and life altering surgery.  A new drug (actually a combination of two already approved drugs) approaches the FDA for approval:

F.D.A. Rejects Qnexa, a Third Weight-Loss Drug

The Food and Drug Administration rejected another new diet pill on Thursday, the latest setback in the quest to develop treatments for overweight Americans amid the nation’s obesity epidemic.

The rejected drug, called Qnexa, is the third weight loss medicine to run into trouble this month because of concerns about safety. Last week, the F.D.A. declined to approve another new drug, lorcaserin, because it caused tumors in rats. And earlier in the month it forced the withdrawal of Meridia from the market after 13 years, citing the risk of heart attacks and strokes for certain patients.

Instead of allowing patients, in conjunction with their Doctors, to determine what level of risk they are willing to take in order to combat a problem that they know increases their risk for everything from heart disease to cancer, the FDA doesnt allow any treatment to be approved because there will be side effects; the reasoning distills the essence of bureaucratic paralysis:

Morgan Downey, an advocate for obese people who also consults for pharmaceutical companies, said the F.D.A. appeared to believe that a very effective drug would be used so much that unanticipated side effects would show up, while less effective drugs were not worth any risk. [Emphasis mine-SW]

“The F.D.A. has gotten itself into a real knot,” said Mr. Downey, who describes himself as obese and edits the Downey Obesity Report Web site. “They can’t approve a very effective drug and they can’t approve a modest drug.”

Perfect.

Candidates for the Great Filter

A civilization, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.            -- (with apologies to) Woody Allen

Rather than ponder the fate of our Nation, which will start to shift direction on Tuesday and is a rather minor issue in the grand scheme of things, I thought it would be useful to zoom out and take a longer view,  According to the LA Times, there may be billions of earth sized planets located in the habitable zone (where liquid water can exist) orbiting their suns: [HT: Steve Sailer]

Many Earth-like planets orbit sun-like stars

At least one in every four stars like the sun has planets about the size of Earth circling in very close orbits, according to the first direct measurement of the incidence of such planets, researchers said Thursday.

That means that our galaxy alone, with its roughly 200 billion sun-like stars, has at least 46 billion Earth-size planets orbiting close to the stars, and perhaps billions more circling farther out in what scientists call the habitable zone, said astronomer Andrew Howard of UC Berkeley, a coauthor of a paper on the subject published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

So, as Enrico Fermi asked, where is everybody? 

One fashionable answer is the existence of a Great Filter:

The Great Filter, in the context of the Fermi paradox, is whatever prevents "dead matter" from giving rise, in time, to "expanding lasting life".^[1] The concept originates in Robin Hanson's argument that the failure to find any extraterrestrial civilizations in the observable universe implies the possibility something is wrong with one or more of the arguments from various scientific disciplines that the appearance of advanced intelligent life is probable; this observation is conceptualized in terms of a "Great Filter" which acts to reduce the great number of sites where intelligent extraterrestrial life might arise to the tiny number of intelligent species actually observed (currently just one: human).^[2] This probability threshold, which could lie behind us or in front of us, might work as a barrier to the evolution of intelligent life, or as a high probability of self-destruction.^[1][3] The main counter-intuitive conclusion of this observation is that the easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are.

Since the human mind naturally enjoys Apocalyptic fantasies (which is why our news media know that if they want to stay in business they had better stick to their simple rubric--"If it bleeds, it leads")  the tendency has been to think of the Great Filter as some self imposed calamity, a nuclear war or biological warfare that gets out of control, or some other man caused disaster.  This approach suggests that life, even intelligent and technological life, may well be ubiquitous but at some point in any civilization's development events occur which destroy the civilization.  There is a kind of perverse comfort in the belief that we are powerful enough to destroy our planet and ourselves; the current iteration of this belief is embodied in the Global Warming alarmists, but in every generation there is an equivalent belief in an impending end times.

Recently, another candidate has emerged, a theory which suggests that the step from uni-cellular life to multi-cellular life is so complex and so difficult that it may well have happened only a very limited number of times; perhaps we are truly a one-off event:

Why complex life probably evolved only once

The universe may be teeming with simple cells like bacteria, but more complex life – including intelligent life – is probably very rare. That is the conclusion of a radical rethink of what it took for complex life to evolve here on Earth.

It suggests that complex alien life-forms could only evolve if an event that happened just once in Earth's history was repeated somewhere else.

All animals, plants and fungi evolved from one ancestor, the first ever complex, or "eukaryotic", cell. This common ancestor had itself evolved from simple bacteria, but it has long been a mystery why this seems to have happened only once: bacteria, after all, have been around for billions of years.

The answer, say Nick Lane of University College London and Bill Martin of the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, is that whenever simple cells start to become more complex, they run into problems generating enough energy.

In order to gather as much energy from the environment to meet the demands of complex multi-cellular organisms, an extremely unlikely event had to take place, one simple cell had to engulf another, the unicellular organism that persists as our mitochondria, the energy factories of our cells.

Once freed from energy restraints, genomes could expand dramatically and cells capable of complex functions – such as communicating with each other and having specialised jobs – could evolve. Complex life was born.

So if Lane and Martin are right, the textbook idea that complex cells evolved first and only later gained mitochondria is completely wrong: cells could not become complex until they acquired mitochondria.

Simple cells hardly ever engulf other cells, however – and therein lies the catch. Acquiring mitochondria, it seems, was a one-off event. This leads Lane and Martin to their most striking conclusion: simple cells on other planets might thrive for aeons without complex life ever arising. Or, as Lane puts it: "The underlying principles are universal. Even aliens need mitochondria."

Of course there is no reason the initial Great Filter precludes the existence of other filters that come into play at later points in the process of evolution of life from single celled creatures to technological civilizations.

I would add another possible candidate for a Great Filter.  A civilization is indeed like Woody Allen's shark.  We have already reached the point where a failure of technological progress would be likely to doom us to another Dark Age, where life devolves into a zero-sum, Hobbesian existence.  This would represent a massive failure of imagination and courage as the most frightened and regressive elements on the planet gain primacy.  In the name of saving the world from Anthropogenic Global Warming, or in thrall to a blood thirsty Allah, and with the failure of the Last, Best Hope of Man, we will surrender the future for an imagined, Utopian past.   Perhaps the last Great Filter will simply be the bureaucracy that uses its rules to make innovation so difficult that progress grinds to a halt.  We would be left with the poet's epitaph:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Settlements and Peace

According to the Obama administration, and echoed by many well meaning and not so well meaning interested observers, there can be no Peace between Israel and the Palestinians until the Israelis stop provoking the Palestinians through their policy of building settlements.  The only problem with this theory is that it is wrong.  It is true that the Arabs find Israeli settlements to be an unacceptable humiliation; however, the Arab definition of "settlements" might well surprise you:

PA TV deligitimizes Tel Aviv residents as "settlers"

In a PA TV program about the history of Jaffa (southern Tel Aviv), pictures of a Muslim cemetery in Jaffa included the caption: "Jaffa's holy sites are in the hands of the settlers."

The Arabs consider all of Israel to be occupied land:

Abbas displays map of "Palestine" that erases Israel

PA cartoon: "Palestine" replacing Israel comes before education

The Israeli request that the Palestinians accept Israel as a Jewish state would seem to be the minimal expectation of their "partners in Peace" in the Palestinian Authority yet the Arab League has just officially enjoined the Palestinians from rejoining the Peace talks because of Israeli "intransigence." 

It is worth wondering why the West has so much trouble understanding that the Arabs mean what they say, that it is the existence of a Jewish state in what they consider part of their territory that is the unacceptable provocation.  It is not a matter of drawing acceptable boundaries between states but an existential matter; any Jewish state, within any borders, is unacceptable. 

Richard Landes tries to educate Tom Friedman, the "go to" expert on the Middle East in the liberal media, on how the Middle East works:

Tom Friedman and the Deep Superficiality of Western thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict

Tom Friedman’s latest effort to offer advice on the “peace negotiations” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority offers some in-depth insight into how superficial much of current Western thinking is on the matter. In it, he expresses some exasperation with Israel’s behavior – like a spoiled child – in refusing Obama’s request for an extension of the settlement freeze. In the process of laying out his case, Friedman reveals a curious tunnel vision which, I think, is symptomatic of many Westerners.

It’s not that Friedman’s approach, what I call the PCP1 (Politically Correct Paradigm) is necessarily wrong (which I think it is, at least right now). It’s that Friedman clearly doesn’t even consider that the other approach, the JHSP (Jihad Honor-Shame Paradigm) might be more accurate for analyzing the situation and devising successful strategies to deal with it (which I think it is, at least right now). And it’s not that these paradigms are “scientific” in the sense that one’s right and the other’s wrong. They’re about people and cultures, and therefore much less pre-determined.

But since, if the JHSP is the appropriate one for this case at this time, and you apply strategies based on the PCP, the consequences are far more than simple failure. When post-modern masochism (it’s our fault) comes together with pre-modern sadism (it’s your fault), the marriage is not a very pretty sight.

As a prelude to fisking Friedman, let’s just for a moment, review how differently PCP and JHSP analyze the key issue he treats in this op-ed piece – Israeli settlements on the West Bank. For the Politically-Correct Paradigm (PCP) – which Friedman and the overwhelming majority of the Mainstream News Media (MSNM) channel, as illustrated by Jim Clancy of CNN – they are the obstacle to peace. Settlements beyond the the “Green Line” (’67 border) compromise the “land for peace” formula; they eat away at the land that Palestinians want to create their state side by side with Israel.

They are, from the PCP, illegal (or should be if they’re not); they create enormous friction with the local population; they’re troubling evidence of Israel’s expansive tendencies; they ruined the Oslo Peace Process; and it’s entirely understandable that Palestinians are deeply angered by them and demand their cessation. In order for the Peace negotiations to advance, it’s a minimal demand. Settlements have the power to drive “peace” advocates to call for  murdering “every last man, woman and child“, to drive Wikipedia to its least impartial entry. Obama reflected this thinking when he announced his intention to “solve this problem in a year or two” at the beginning of his presidency by pressuring Israel to call a freeze.

Of course, the evidence systematically contradicts the PCP belief that the solution is through settlement dismantling and “land for peace.” Since Israel has already twice agreed to dismantle settlements in the territory it cedes to the Palestinians (Barak 2000, Olmert 2007), construction in 95-97% of the West Bank (i.e., beyond the Maale Adumim, Gush Etzion and Ariel blocks adjacent to the Green line), far from being an obstacle to peace, just means that the Palestinians will get to enjoy the fruit of Israeli labor. As for work in areas that even the PA has (in principle) agreed will stay in Israel, they’re not an issue. So why do the Palestinians make such a fuss over them?

Please go to Richard's site to read the whole thing.  He has spent a great deal of time trying to understand the cultural impediments to Peace and can enlighten the interested reader on the very different, alien, worldview of the Arabs viz a viz Israel and Peace.  His post is long but will reward your time. 

For what its worth, in answer to the question of why the West has so much trouble understanding the Middle East, I would suggest, as with any problem involving human beings, the answer is multi-factorial.  It combines European (and American European-lite)  guilt and hatred, as well as weakness and fear; it also brings to mind the old joke about the drunk looking for his car keys under a street light although he dropped them down the block.  When asked why he was looking under the light instead of where he lost them, he responds, "because the light is better here."  Pressuring the Arabs for Peace is a losing proposition for the Europeans.  The Arabs find Israel's existence to be intolerable and are not amenable to reason.  (If Arab leaders and the Arab street don't care about the well being of their own people, why should they care about making the world a better place for other people?)  For the West to press the Arab world would ensure more terrorism, threats of oil shocks, and boundless rage.  (It is slowly dawning on the Europeans, though not yet on the Obama administration, that our current tack of appeasement is evoking the very things they fear most anyway, but don't expect any changes anytime soon; they are far too wedded to their weltanschauung.)  It is easier to pressure Israel because the Jews will not attack you or act irrationally and maybe a miracle will happen, Israel will be destroyed, and the Europeans will finally be rid of those troublesome people, this time without the guilt of actually committing genocide themselves.

A Teachable Moment for Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan thinks he has caught Juan Williams being racist.  He notes that Juan Williams offers distinctly different explanations for his comments to Bill O'Reilly about Muslims and past comments he made about people with dark skin. 

Juan Williams: Busted

Notice that Williams uses facts and evidence to make these judgments [about his reaction to dark skinned people.] Yet the facts and evidence in the case he was discussing on Fox News prove that there is no statistical reason whatever to get nervous around those in Muslim garb on airplanes - since no terror attacks in America have been conducted by people in that attire. Yet that factor - and that alone - is what he invokes to justify his fear. This is anti-religious bigotry in its purest, clearest form.

In stark contrast, in the case of generalizing about nervousness and suspicion of thievery toward African-American men, Williams is far more circumspect. He takes statistical evidence into account; he looks for aspects in a human being that, independent of their race, might make one suspicious. He rules out judgment based on their clothing or their "acting nervously". But when it comes to Muslims in traditional garb, he feels nervous because of that fact alone, and associates them immediately with a terror suspect involving Islam in general - not radical Jihadism - as at war with the West.

So generalized nervousness around people wearing Muslim garb (who statistically have committed zero acts of terrorism in the US) is not bigotry; but generalized nervousness and suspicion around young black men (who statistically were much more likely to commit the crimes in question in the thought experiment in the colloquium) is racism.

By all means, read the whole thing and while you do, keep in mind that Andrew Sullivan, whose entire political orientation revolved around a single, highly emotionally charged issue, completely fails to either furnish the exculpatory remarks that Juan Williams added and the distinction that Juan made between an emotional reaction and one's cognitive evaluation of that reaction.  Allow me to elucidate further.

Our brains are the most finely tuned pattern recognition systems ever devised (by Nature or a Creator, take your pick.)  We begin making differentiations and distinctions, starting with the difference between Self and Other, from the earliest moments of life.  Our sense of Self emerges from an undifferentiated state of union with the Mother, progresses to a clear and stable differentiation between Self and Mother versus all Others and gradually expands the category of Self/Like-Self versus Other/Like-Other.  Eight month old infants, when picked up by unfamiliar people, tend to  cry ; this reaction is so ubiquitous as to have gained a well known appellation, "Stranger Anxiety." 

Since our brains are designed to heighten and highlight differences, people will have an almost reflex reaction to the sight of a recognizably "Other" person.  Dark skin, easily differentiated, has traditionally been a marker for Other and has a historical negative valence, even among blacks.   It is no coincidence that in South America there is an inverse relationship between dark skin and status/economic success.  For reasons that are poorly understood, a great many people will have a visceral, ie pre-rational, emotional, negative reaction to very dark skin, just as people tend to have a more positive, near instantaneous, ie pre-conscious and pre-rational, response to white skin.  It is what people do with such reactions that determines whether or not they are racist.

Some people use their rational minds to reinforce their subliminal response; they find reasons to hate the Other.  There are still (mostly white but also Arab, Chinese, Indian, Black, et al) troglodytes who express racist sentiments, just as there are people who demonize white people for nothing more than the shade of their skin.  Most people, however, use their reason to combat their initial "racial" responses.

Where does this leave the discussion of Andrew Sullivan's condemnation of Juan Williams imagined racism?  An important point is that Muslims have not always been associated with negative stereotypes in the West.  I suspect that if one were to have done the requisite neurological testing of Americans after the first Indiana Jones movie, most of the responses would have been positive or neutral.  However, for the last 30 years, Muslims have allowed themselves to be represented by those who are the most racist, anti-Semitic, hate filled members of their religion.  Countless atrocities have been committed in the name of Islam.  Over time the association of Muslim and terrorist has been strengthened by each incident as well as by every official PC attempt to hide the association.  As a result, images of Muslims is no longer going to elicit a neutral or positive pre-conscious reaction from those in the West who have been targeted. 

Again, it is what we do with such reactions that determines whether or not we are "Islamophobic".  Juan Williams unnecessarily noted, as have many others, that most Muslims are not terrorists.  There have been few terrorist attacks in the West (though many in the Muslim world)  by Muslims wearing traditional garb.  However, rationality cannot change unconscious reactions but can only temper them, dampen them, and channel them, or in many cases, completely deny them.

If Andrew Sullivan (and NOR) is now proposing to punish people for the contents of  their unconscious minds, they are truly setting the stage for totalitarianism.

We cannot be held responsible for the contents of our unconscious minds; we can only be held responsible for our actions.

Jay Adler, coming from the opposite end of the political spectrum, offers his take here, with the wonderfully titled The High Spark of the Low Heels, Boys (extra credit for anyone under the age of 40 who can identify the reference); once you get past his obligatory anti-Conservative snark, he has some  very worthwhile comments.

Radical Islam and Projection

Projection is one of the more powerful and intractable of our primitive defenses.  In projection we disavow our own unacceptable thoughts and impulses and attribute them to an external actor.  When Projection exists in the intrapsychic sphere, the individual is usually identifiable as paranoid, and often accuses others of behavior that he himself indulges. 

[Projection can also be seen in those who are not diagnosable.  It is a reflection of "normal" projection that both Left wing and Right wing activists typically accuse their opposing numbers of unacceptable behavior that they themselves frequently perform.  This post is concerned with more pathological varieties.]

When Projection, and its less pathological relative, Externalization (the tendency to attribute one's faults to others' agency, as in the youngster's tearful cry, "he made me do it") are privileged functions sanctioned by a large group, the danger escalates.

Soccer Dad calls our attention to a wonderful, home grown example:

Abdul Alim Musa declares "Muslims live under dictatorship in US" 

Abdul Alim Musa is a name worth knowing. According to Wikipedia:

In a video aired by Fox News, Musa stated, from behind a podium at the University of California at Irvine on Sept. 9, 2001, that "If you don't stay out of our way and leave us alone, we're going to burn America down."

We also learn, courtesy of Wikipedia, that Musa is reported to have said "Yahuds are the enemy of humanity." "Yahuds" are folks like your faithful Judeopundit who like a nice sip of single-malt scotch with their shmaltz-herring after davening on Saturday morning. Musa is apparently a great supporter of Khomeinism and he makes an appearance in the following IRIB item:

Muslims live under dictatorship in America, said an African-American Muslim activist, ahead of a review of the US human rights records by the UN Human Rights Council.

 In less than two weeks, the Human Rights Council will, for the first time ever, assess the human rights status of the United States in a Universal Periodic Review (UPR).

"We [Muslims] believe that it is our duty, it is our responsibility to stand up to what we call the US government's 'constitutional dictatorship'," activist and Imam of Masjid al-Islam Abdul Alim Musa said on Monday.

"When we say a constitutional dictatorship, we mean that they have a constitution, but with all of the new anti-terrorism bills, patriot acts, all of the homeland securities, all of the FBI memos... all of these new charges that they operate on allow them to go around all of the constitutional guarantees [for human rights,]" he added. [...]

If only America were more like Iran.

Mr. Musa, née Clarence Reams, has a long history of anti-social behavior, as documented by Steven Emerson and the Investigative Project on Terrorism:

Apologists or Extremists

Abdul Alim Musa, born as Clarence Reams, is the director of Masjid Al-Islam in Washington, DC and founder and director of the As-Sabiqun movement. Musa is also a member of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT), an organization established in 1998 to continue the work of the global Islamic Movement. [1]

The As-Sabiqun website provides an extensive biography for Musa. According to this biography, Musa was born in Arkansas, but grew up in Oakland, California. In the 1960s, Musa's involvement with the drug trade earned him unwanted attention from law enforcement. Around the same time, he became sympathetic to the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam. To avoid the consequences of his crimes, Musa traveled the world.[2]

As-Sabiqun's biography of Musa also claims that he became "leading cocaine-exporter in Colombia," met exiled Black Panther leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver and Pete O'Neal in Algeria.[3] After returning to the U.S. he supposedly surrendered to law enforcement authorities and served an unspecified time in prison. While incarcerated, Musa converted to Islam.[4]

The As-Sabiqun biography states that following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, Musa announced his support for the Islamic Republic and its leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Since the early 1980s, he made several visits to Iran as a representative of Muslims in the United States and a supporter of, as he puts it, "the Islamic revival."[5]

Anti-social characters tend to rely upon externalization and projection to maintain unrealistically high self-esteem.  None of their faults are ever due to their own behavior or limitations but always attributed to others, especially "society."  Those who have sociopathic tendencies and can be redeemed often find such change through their adoption of religion while in prison.  Christianity fosters a surrender to a benevolent, loving G-d who helps the sinner turn his life around; the modern incarnation of Islam, especially that promulgated in our prisons by Wahhabi trained and financed Imams, has a very different message.  For this version of Islam, society is the enemy; they  (we) oppress the innocents of Islam who merely want to bring Allah's word to the masses.  Any resistance to their blandishments are experienced as attacks and justify counter-attacks.  Islam is the Religion of Peace and is never inherently violent; Muslims are only violent when they needs to defend Islam.  This has been the way of Islam for a very long time and we are now getting to see the results in our own country.  

For the Psychiatrist, Patients who depend upon Projection are the most troubling and the ones with the greatest potential for violence.  They do not respond well to appeasement, logic, or rational explanations; they do respond well to firm limit setting and the judicious appearance of overwhelming force.  In other words, most Paranoids will calm down when confronted with a calm voice and demeanor and several large hospital police.   For the paranoid, knowing you will not allow anyone to be harmed by his aggression (whether internally or externally located) is helpful rather than provocative.  Although Islam is constantly complaining of being provoked, in reality, a show of steadiness and force will cause the radicals to back down and go back into hiding.  We could use a little more Psychiatric common sense in our approach to radical Islam.

Our Disconnected Elites

Yesterday, Charles Murray penned an op-ed piece in the Washington Post attempting to explain the estrangement between the bi-coastal elites and the mass of Americans who constitute the Tea Party movement:

The tea party warns of a New Elite. They're right.

The tea party appears to be of one mind on at least one thing: America has been taken over by a New Elite.

"On one side, we have the elites," Fox News host Glenn Beck explained last month, "and the other side, we have the regular people." The elites are "no longer in touch with what the country is really thinking," Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle complained this summer. And when Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell recently began a campaign ad by saying, "I didn't go to Yale," she could be confident that her supporters would approve.

All this has made the New Elite distinctly touchy (see Maureen Dowd's "Making Ignorance Chic"), dismissive (see Jacob Weisberg's "Elitist Nonsense") and defensive (see Anne Applebaum's "The Rise of the 'Ordinary' Elite").

"Elite?" they seem to be saying. "Who? Us?"

Why are the members of the New Elite feeling so put upon? They didn't object back in 1991, when Robert Reich said we had a new class of symbolic analysts in his book "The Work of Nations." They didn't raise a fuss in 2000 when David Brooks took an anthropologist's eye to their exotic tribe and labeled them bourgeois bohemians in "Bobos in Paradise." And they were surely pleased when Richard Florida celebrated their wonderfulness in his 2002 work, "The Rise of the Creative Class."

That a New Elite has emerged over the past 30 years is not really controversial. That its members differ from former elites is not controversial. What sets the tea party apart from other observers of the New Elite is its hostility, rooted in the charge that elites are isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans.

Let me propose that those allegations have merit.

One of the easiest ways to make the point is to start with the principal gateway to membership in the New Elite, the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities. In the idealized view of the meritocrats, those schools were once the bastion of the Northeastern Establishment, favoring bluebloods and the wealthy, but now they are peopled by youth from all backgrounds who have gained admittance through talent, pluck and hard work.

That idealized view is only half-right. Over the past several decades, elite schools have indeed sought out academically talented students from all backgrounds. But the skyrocketing test scores of the freshman classes at Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other elite schools in the 1950s and 1960s were not accompanied by socioeconomic democratization.

...

The New Elite marry each other, combining their large incomes and genius genes, and then produce offspring who get the benefit of both.

We are watching the maturation of the cognitive stratification that Richard J. Herrnstein and I described in "The Bell Curve" back in 1994. When educational and professional opportunities first opened up, we saw social churning galore, as youngsters benefited from opportunities that their parents had been denied. But that phase lasted only a generation or two, slowed by this inescapable paradox:

The more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite -- the "cognitive elite" that Herrnstein and I described -- becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama's example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members. An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent ("Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations," as the adage has it). An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens.

...

We know, for one thing, that the New Elite clusters in a comparatively small number of cities and in selected neighborhoods in those cities. This concentration isn't limited to the elite neighborhoods of Washington, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and San Francisco. It extends to university cities with ancillary high-tech jobs, such as Austin and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle.

Read Murray's whole piece; there is a lot there that is important, but he actually misses the most important point that is implicit in his article and contradicts part of his thesis. 

First some back of the envelop numbers:

According to Ivy League Universities, a web site devoted to assisting High School students in their efforts to get accepted into an Ivy League college, the  number of students per year of the Ivies is as follows (with the percentage of students with Social Sciences as their major in parentheses.)

Harvard                                                              1875 (41%)

Yale                                                                      1325 (25%)

Columbia                                                            1425 (26%)

Princeton                                                           1225

Dartmouth                                                         1025 (32%)   

Cornell                                                                3425  

University of Pennsylvania                        2450 (16%)    

Brown                                                                  1475 (45%)

According to the US Census Bureau statistics from 2008, there were approximately 9,407,000  High School age students between the ages of 16-19 (out of a total number of young people in that age group of 17,110,000, which includes those who have graduated HS, those who are already in college, and those who have dropped out.)  This is the pool from which the Ivy Leagues choose their students.

Further, the percent who graduate with a Social Science major is significant.  In the modern academy, post-grade inflation, Social Science students do not have to graduate with a rigorous course of study which includes any understanding of how to evaluate policies or apply the scientific method and its derivatives.  Further, I would suggest that a Social Science major serves as a proxy statistic for those who believe in some form of social engineering.  After all, few of us question the expertise of Harvard engineers or biologists in their field of expertise, but many of us do question the prescriptions that seem to flow endlessly from the Social Science policy makers who still seem to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that they can make people better.

Now take the next step:

Let us assume that the top two percent of students nationally are capable of mastering college courses at the Ivy League level*; that means there are approximately 188,140 High School students graduating each year who have the intellectual ability  for admission to the Ivy leagues.  (I am most interested in order of magnitude effects; I recognize not everyone in the top 2% has the drive, academic motivation, or other qualities necessary to amass the kind of High School record amenable to Ivy League acceptance, but in point of fact, there are at least close to 200,000 HS graduates each year who would, under the proper circumstances, be able to succeed at Harvard or Yale; further, the top 2% number might be too restrictive, which means there would be a significantly greater pool.  However, for the purposes of this discussion, lets stipulate we are looking at the top 2% as measured by testing specifically designed to elicit information about academic qualifications.  The most selective schools, Harvard and Yale, for example, accept 3200 students for their first year class.  (I understand that the elites recruit from more than just Harvard and Yale, but again, for the purposes of this post, the numbers would not move much.) 

*[It is generally recognized that those with an IQ 2 standard deviations above the mean have the requisite intellectual capacity to master college level material at elite universities; there is a tremendous quantity of literature supporting the use of IQ as a measure of potential for success in academia.  Approximately 2.3% of the population is above 2 SD's; I rounded down to restrict the pool further.]

What does all this have to do with Charles Murray's article?

It is unmistakable that many Ivy Leaguers pride themselves on their success in getting onto the elite conveyor belt; further, many seem to believe that it bestows upon them a special wisdom not shared by the less enlightened denizens of flyover country (which includes all those who did not grow up in the right neighborhoods and the right circumstances.)  The point that Charles Murray misses and that the self-satisfied elites also miss is that there is far more intelligence and expertise (even if we maintain the very restrictive standard of top 2%) outside of the elite neighborhoods, such as the Ivy Leagues, than within. 

Let us assume that approximately 20% of the most gifted High School graduates are accepted into an elite school; that means 80% are not going to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc.  Many of them are going into the US Military; many go into business; many go to State Schools and second tier colleges.  The upshot is that there are far more people who are the intellectual equals to those who matriculate at the elite schools than there are, in fact, in those schools.    Further, as noted by Murray, the limited experiences of the elites who are voluntarily estranged from the average American (how does one maintain one's status as a member in good standing in the elites if one goes to a NASCAR race or enjoys hunting or fishing?) means that they lack what is known among the non-illuminati as common sense.  If you haven't ever run a business it is not only supremely arrogant, but also fails the test of common sense, to imagine you can tell businessmen how to run their businesses; such humility is more easily learned outside of the Ivy Leagues.

Arrogance is never a becoming attitude; when those who are arrogant base it on successfully passing through a filter which has minimal relevance for the real world, retribution by the hoi polloi who resent their betters can only be a matter of time.  The original Tea Partiers of 1773 were not deterred by the knowledge that the Mother Country was the repository of elegance, charm, and manners that the rubes of the New World could never share.  In a world in which the ability to actually succeed at creating value is only partially related to the ability to amass the entrance requirements for Harvard, the loss of that necessary differentiation by our elites has caused them to sacrifice their authority and relevance.  We do not need Harvard Social Scientists to tell us how to live our lives; most of us know better what is good for us.

Flying While Muslim Cont.

Coincidence?  I don't think so:

Poor Juan Williams

... I am one of the most modest dressers in warm weather you will ever find. In particular, if I am going to have to be somewhat immobile in an air-conditioned space, you will find the M_O_M creature wearing head-to-toe loose layers. This is especially important when traveling, because there is nothing worse than charging through a 100 degree parking lot and then being trapped for several hours in an airline seat, immobile, with drafts blowing on your bare skin.

Although in my case this is not a religious practice, I am sometimes mistaken for a Muslim by Muslims because of it. Non-Muslims might think that the Koran requires the burka, but it doesn't. It does, however, dictate covering up and loose clothing. Therefore western Muslim women and I have a somewhat similar dress code, which is only likely to be perceived by Muslims as being typically Muslim.

It is possible that TSA training is better than most think it is, because I also find myself being yanked out for the body searches quite a bit at airports now.

A few years back, I was waiting for a plane to Jacksonville, FL, garbed in my normal layered look, and while I waited, I prayed the rosary. I often pray the rosary, but when I do it in public I tend to do it inconspicuously. I usually have the rosary in my lap or sort of in my pocket, and I do not speak the prayers aloud. I mouth them to myself.

I noticed that I was being stared at by a dark man while we were boarding the plane.

Read the whole thing.

Note to NPR: Reality testing is even exercised by American Muslims.

Flying While Muslim

There is an additional aspect worth noting to the comments Juan Williams made that caused NPR to catch the vapors and fire him in order to protect the fragile sensitivities of its staff and listeners.  Recall what he said to O'Reilly:

“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Mr. Williams also made reference to the Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty this month to trying to plant a car bomb in Times Square. “He said the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts,” Mr. Williams said.

It is rarely remarked upon but true nonetheless: young men, under the influence of their heightened Testosterone, gain status by their ability to be dominating.  We explicitly recognize the importance of Status and dominance in our primate relatives, but treat it as if it were somehow impolite to mention in mixed company.  Adolescence and young adulthood are prime periods for establishing one's relative place on the masculine hierarchy.  It is no coincidence that in High School the Quarterback of the football team has a higher status (with concomitant enhanced opportunities with the high status girls) than the nerdy computer geek.  The fact that the computer geek can look forward to a much higher status outcome in ten years than many of the High School stars who peak too young is small consolation for those who have minimal future orientation.  Adolescents do not, by and large, have an over developed future sense nor do they have a good grasp on cause and effect.  How does this come into play with Juan Williams's comments?

Perhaps a brief digression will help.  At one time young black men were held in relative thrall by a culture which circumscribed their opportunities and minimized their ability to gain high status.  Elite schools and social networks were unavailable.  Jews, another marginalized group, were able to set up parallel institutions and eventually break through the filters that traditionally kept them out of high status positions.  For various not well delineated reasons (racism, unconscious racism among both blacks and whites, constitutional endowment, culture, or perhaps some other factors) blacks were never able to create parallel institutions of equal status to the white institutions.  Further, when finally admitted to the elites, their ascension was accompanied by the subconscious meta-communication that they were allowed in as a favor, and were specifically not understood to be equal to their betters who practiced modern American noblesse oblige.  They could go to Harvard and Yale but could never really be seen as deserving.  This racism of low expectations continues to damage black Americans, including those who have "made it" (our First Lady is a prime example) and one response down the ranks was to opt out of education as a passageway to Status.  Instead, from the 1960's on, th easiest way for the average young black man to gain status was to instill fear in the white power structure.  Thus, ghetto and gangsta image became the fashion in black, especially inner city, communities.   If modern middle class pathways to status were unavailable, more traditional pathways to status, based on physical prowess, intimidation, and machismo, would be adopted instead.  The outcome was that while the majority of young black men were not criminal,  a large cohort, the majority in some communities, adopted first the dress, then the mores, and then the behavior of the ganstas.  This has been a disaster for black America and a major problem for the greater society.

Now consider the young Muslim who identifies with his co-religionists.  He recognizes, perhaps only subliminally, that much (most?) Muslim cultures are failing.  There are almost no successful Arab or Muslim role models.  There are minimal numbers of Nobel Prize winners, actors, or entrepreneurs (and those who are successful in business are primarily those who are born into a corrupt kleptocracy who made their great wealth as parasites off the extractive industries that are the major accomplishments of the Arab/Muslim world.  There are few Arab or Muslim nations that are powerful, none are democratic, yet the one area in which Arabs and Muslims have become accomplished is in terrorizing the infidels of the west whose example is a daily humiliation.  For a young Muslim who does not see another option open to him, scaring Westerners is a way to be recognized and accorded power and status. 

Just as the 1980's and 1990's featured boisterous young black men, dressed like gangstas (how many with their pants hanging off their thighs actually dressed like that to hide their gun and how many dressed like that as a fashion/status statement?)  gaining a feeling of power by scaring the whites, today young Muslim men (and women) can gain a feeling of power and status simply by dressing in traditional Muslim grab and speaking in Arabic (or Farsi or Urdu; they all sound the same to most Americans.) 

I have told this story before but it bears retelling.  Shortly after 9/11 my Oldest Son's close friend, a young Muslim man from Kuwait traveling on a Saudi passport, came to stay with us in New York for the two month Christmas break.  He flew from Richmond to New York and one of his first comments off the plane, barely 3 months post-9/11, was to the effect that he was frightened and horrified that so soon after 9/11, no one had even examined him closely for evidence of danger.  After all, as he pointed out, he was exactly who you should be suspicious of if you were concerned about a repeat of 9/11 yet he was not even requested to remove his shoes, while several others, including an elderly woman, were checked carefully and had to remove their footwear.  he thought this was crazy and, since he had no more desire to be blown up for others' concept of Jihad, was frightened to fly. 

A good case can be made that profiling Muslims in traditional garb solely on th basis of their raiment is foolhardy (since any Muslim with nefarious intent is likely to try to blend in without arousing suspicion)  it is indisputable that our current circumstances almost invite young Muslim men to attempt o gain status by scaring us.  They do not have to be terrorists or incipient terrorists to do so and one of the most difficult tasks for our TSA is to differentiate young Muslim thugs, thug-wanna-bes, and devout innocents from incipient or actual terrorists.  (And is there anyone who believes the TSA is capable of such distinctions?)

For the foreseeable future, the problem may be thought of as the following: A culture that finds status in death and its derivatives, as Islam is allowing itself to be characterized, is a culture that gains status in direct relation to how they scare the Other; we are the Other and every time we back down in the face of the extremists' demands (a terrorist veto) we further entrench the culture of death and destruction in the Muslim world.

Juan Williams Fired for Crimethink

crimethink - To even consider any thought not in line with the principles of Ingsoc. Doubting any of the principles of Ingsoc. All crimes begin with a thought. So, if you control thought, you can control crime. "Thoughtcrime is death. Thoughtcrime does not entail death, Thoughtcrime is death.... The essential crime that contains all others in itself."

Juan Williams is a well respected Liberal commentator at NPR, taxpayer supported National Public Radio.  He also is a Fox News contributor, placing himself in (intellectual) harm's way by sitting on panels with the likes of Charles Krauthammer, Bill Krystal, and Brit Hume.  He has gotten himself into trouble in the past with the PC thought police at NPR for comments at Fox which deviated from the party line, but has now stepped too far over the line and been fired.  According to the New York Times, his egregious transgression involved comments about Muslims:

NPR Fires Analyst Over Comments on Muslims

NPR has terminated its contract with Juan Williams, one of its senior news analysts, after he made comments about Muslims on the Fox News Channel.

NPR said in a statement that it gave Mr. Williams notice of his termination on Wednesday night.

The move came after Mr. Williams, who is also a Fox News political analyst, appeared on the “The O’Reilly Factor” on Monday. On the show, the host, Bill O’Reilly, asked him to respond to the notion that the United States was facing a “Muslim dilemma.” Mr. O’Reilly said, “The cold truth is that in the world today jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.”

Mr. Williams said he concurred with Mr. O’Reilly.

He continued: “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Mr. Williams also made reference to the Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty this month to trying to plant a car bomb in Times Square. “He said the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts,” Mr. Williams said.

This is my favorite part, combining newspeak and superior moral affectation while accusing Juan Williams of crimethink:

NPR said in its statement that the remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”

This is an almost perfect expression of the kind of behavior that leads, paradoxically, to reinforcing the opposite belief from what the powerful intend.  Clearly, NPR is in thrall to the same belief that much of the liberal elite adheres to, that  is that Islam is a Religion of Peace and any expression of concern about Islam is therefore bigoted.  What this does is to reinforce the notion that Muslims are particularly hypersensitive and that the powers that be are so terrified of offending Islam that they have convinced themselves that all Muslims and Islam itself must be treated with kid gloves and special protective rules.

The episode most reminds me of Jesse Jackson's comment that if he were out at night and saw a group of young black men he would be more worried than if he saw a group of young white men.  

There are certain unfortunate bits of reality that are so obvious that everyone who has not been blinded by Political Correctness can not avoid noticing.  Young black men are more likely to commit violent crimes than young white men; Muslims, especially those who announce via their dress their connection to Sharia Islam, are more likely to try to blow up an airplane than white Grandmothers.  This is not rocket science.  However, the PC Thought Police have decreed that any recognition of unacceptable reality is a Thoughtcrime; Juan Williams must be made an example so that no other Reporters will ever notice the unmistakable connection between Islam and terrorism.

I listen to NPR everyday.  For many years I listened primarily because their news stories had more detail and more depth than the news reported on other stations.  As time went on my listening changed; now I listen to NPR for the same reason I read the New York Times everyday, to see what the day's liberal conventional wisdom is from the mouth of the Ministry of Truth itself (and, in answer to the unasked question, I believe this is not yet a completely accurate statement; it is meant as hyperbole.)

We do not yet have a Ministry of Truth but when NPR censors common sense statements in thrall to its "editorial standards and practices", we are approaching a dangerous point in which the elect cognoscenti live in and report on a fantasy universe that no longer has any intersection with the world that the rest of us live in; this cannot end well.

The old chestnut has it that when there are problems in a Democracy, the people choose new leaders, while when there are problems in a Communist State, the rulers choose new people.  NPR is a reflection of the affectations and weltanschauung of our liberal elites, among whom must be numbered our Confabulator in Chief.  They will not give up their status, position, and power easily.

There is much more from Ed Morrissey and Big Journalism, with lots of excellent links.

A Curious Coincidence: Addendum

In pour President's haste to leave Afghanistan/Pakistan/Iraq, are we setting the table for mass murder?

Al Qaeda on the rise

Just when you thought it was safe to leave Iraq, al Qaeda is back -- with a vengeance.

According to The New York Times, al Qaeda operatives are undoing the Anbar Awakening, which secured the American surge back in 2008. Under a hailstorm of brutal Islamicist violence, the Sunni sheiks living there are now abandoning their pro-American stance and going back to the terrorists.

Meanwhile, we learn that Osama bin Laden, far from cowering in a cave with goats as his only friends, is holding court in northwest Pakistan and even supervising operations from his base -- while other al Qaeda operatives stream back into Afghanistan for new attacks. That puts still more pressure on a government that's on the verge of tossing in the towel to al Qaeda's old ally, the Taliban.

In short, the work of almost a decade of US counterterrorist and counterinsurgency operations -- at a cost of thousands of US lives plus uncounted Pakistani, Afghan and Iraqi soldiers and civilians -- is coming unraveled. We're staring at the possibility of the entire region becoming a permanent al Qaeda base.

How ironic that this comes under President Obama -- who during the presidential campaign excoriated George W. Bush for neglecting al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq.

The reason is simple. This president has made it clear that his most urgent priority isn't victory or even regional stability, but getting every American out of there -- so that he'll be able to say at the 2012 Democratic Convention, "I brought our troops home."

In the process, he'll have left a disaster that will make post-Vietnam Southeast Asia -- boat people, "killing fields" genocide and all -- look like "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood," because Pakistan's nuclear weapons are at stake. [Emphasis mine-SW]

...

Meanwhile, winning is only going to get harder. Bin Laden, al Qaeda and their allies have studied America's success in Iraq and adjusted their strategies across the region accordingly. They're confident that, before long, Obama will hand over all three countries to them -- along with Pakistan's nukes.

Can anyone say, looking at this administration, that they're playing a long shot?

Apparently I am not the only one who worries that renewed American isolationism (sentiments more closely associated with the Progressives since the Vietnam War) will lead to a disaster.