The German government is downright stupid.
Whatever you think about Scientology, you have to wonder about the Church's treatment by the German state.
In December, Germany's interior ministers said they considered the religion to be "not compatible with the constitution." Yesterday, an AP story reported that the German Scientologists have dropped a legal battle to keep the country's intelligence services from monitoring its activities. What is Germany so afraid of?
German officials have categorized Scientology as a business, not a religion, and tax accordingly. Scientology has responded by complaining about "religious discrimination."
The German government has a much easier time opposing Scientology that Islam because Germany has orders of magnitude more Muslims than Scientologists inside its borders and the Scientologists do not control governments of trading partners. But if the German government wanted to look out for the interests of the German people it would focus much more on reducing the Muslim presence and put less effort into the much smaller threat from Scientology.
Bolivia's wealthier white Spaniards vote to separate themselves from the darker Amerinds.
SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia, May 4 -- Bolivia's wealthiest region voted Sunday to distance itself from the central government, directly defying President Evo Morales with a measure that aims to give local authorities more power over resources.
Morales had urged his supporters to ignore the referendum, but turnout was unofficially reported at 61 percent. Multiple exit polls suggested Sunday about 85 percent of Santa Cruz voters voted in favor of the proposal, but final results were not expected before Monday.
The measure directs Santa Cruz authorities -- mainly business leaders who detest Morales's socialist initiatives -- to take more control of locally produced tax revenue, police forces and property ownership administration.
The Santa Cruz voters would be better off if Bolivia split into two pieces.
On the second page of the article the Washington Post reporter mentions the racial split that is at the heart of this political conflict.
Like Morales, many of those protesters were born in the country's western highlands and claim Aymara or Quechua Indian ancestry. Many autonomy leaders, however, are of European descent.
The more economically productive Euroes do not want to get shafted by the Amerinds. Bummer for the Euro Bolivians. Being members of a more successful group can set you up for persecution unless you are the overwhelming majority.
But 62% of Bolivia's population are Amerinds and the whites are best understood as a market dominant minority ala whites may eventually become a market dominant minority ala Amy Chua's World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.
Surely a model for America's Latin American demographic future, walls and gated communities bring peace and prosperity to Iraq.
Baghdad - There is big excitement on al-Marifah Street. City workers are installing a new transformer to bring power to a part of the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Saidiyah that hasn't been on the city's electrical grid for more than a year.
"A year ago, dead bodies lay on this street for days; no one dared to pick them up. But now we are getting lights and shops have opened back up," says Mahdi Jabbar Falah, a 40-year resident who has just moved himself and his family of nine back to their house. They fled last year after Mr. Jabbar received a bullet in an envelope, a sure sign he was on someone's hit list.
"Last year, this was a ghost town," he says, "but now I feel we are alive again."
If you are young do not choose a low paying occupation. Don't spend years trying to earn a Ph.D. to then work as a post doc and then an assistant professor. You need to think in terms of the walled gated community once America's lower classes swell up and come to define the national culture. The walls make for a much better lifestyle as the Iraqis can surely attest. Learn lessons from this war.
Saidiyah is one of the many neighborhoods and towns in and around Baghdad that residents abandoned during the worst of the sectarian violence. Officials there estimate that more than half the area's 60,000 people moved out. Now, many are moving back and the trucks overflowing with household goods coming through al-Marifah Street attest to that.
But there has been a price to pay: Saidiyah is now surrounded by a 12-foot-tall concrete wall, a barrier that the US military completed four months ago. Long lines of cars await inspection by the Iraqi Army at the town's one public entrance, while pedestrians submit to a pat-down.
One guy in the article claims the walls do not bother him since he can't see them from his house. Well there, I hadn't thought of it that way. If you can see in advance where the walls will go up around your community the good real estate play is to buy at a location that won't be in eyesight of the walls. You heard it here first.
Even those with medical insurance are feeling pinched by rising medical costs (unless you just don't get sick).
Since the recession of 2001, the employee’s average cost of an annual health care premium for family coverage has nearly doubled — to $3,300, up from $1,800 — while incomes have come nowhere close to keeping up. Factor in other out-of-pocket medical costs, and the portion of the average American household’s income that goes toward health care has risen about 12 percent, according to the consulting and accounting firm Deloitte, and is now approaching one-fifth of the average household’s spending.
In a recent survey by Deloitte’s health research center, only 7 percent of people said they felt financially prepared for their future health care needs.
My own take on it is that you have to get rich in order to be able to handle a severe future health problem. The more you can save up the better.
An interesting graph of consumer spending on food, housing, medical care, and clothing from 1929 till today shows that medical care now surpasses each of those other 3 categories in percentage of consumer income spent on it. Clothing and shoes have declined from over 10% to 3.6%. Food has declined from 30% in the 1950s to 13.1%. Housing is now at 14.4%. But medical care has risen from a few percent to 16.6%, surpassing the other 3 categories.
Part of this change is due to more treatments becoming available. The article relays the anecdote of a guy spending $400 per month on drugs for congestive heart failure. Well, those drugs didn't exist 40-50-60 years ago. You just got various maladies, suffered without treatment, and died.
Another change: declining costs for food and clothing freed up money to spend on other things even as incomes rose. People spend more on medical care because they have the money to spend.
The desire on the part of everyone to get the best health care possible is probably the strongest force pushing for a bigger welfare state today. Demographic trends in the US seem likely to intensify that push as a growing lower class of lower IQ people can't earn enough to pay for the time of much higher IQ medical services providers. Taxes end up as the tool by which the lower IQ folks get the buying power to get time from higher IQ people.
One of the reasons I expect US economic growth to slow stems from a growing use of taxes to shift more higher IQ people into service provider jobs for lower IQ people. People who provide services are not available to do research, product design, factory design, product development, and other work that creates new sources of wealth. This is probably one of the reasons why Smart Fraction Theory (and its refinement) seems to work.
We need to automate the provision of medical services so that higher IQ people spend less time delivering services and more time developing new products and services.
Update: The amount American consumers spend on energy is now about half what they spend on food. Consumers are going to have to trade off. Eat meat or drive a big car and go on long trips?
In the past three months, average consumer spending on energy came to $663 billion, or 6.5 percent of total consumer spending, according to Moody's Economy.com. A year ago, it represented 5.8 percent and in 2002, it was 4.1 percent of their spending. "If gasoline breaks through $4 a gallon by Memorial Day, that would mean spending on gasoline would have risen by $100 billion since the beginning of the year, or roughly the size of the tax rebate checks going out," says Mr. Zandi. "The rebate checks are going to pay for filling up our tank."
How will people weigh medical spending versus gasoline? Gasoline seems easier to cut back on. Get a smaller car. Take fewer optional driving trips
As bad as medical costs have gotten my guess is that energy costs will grow more rapidly.
With the price shock of 2007-08, spending on energy as a share of wage income has shot up above 6%, topping the 1974-75 and 1990-91 shocks to be the worst since the 1980-81 runup. Comparing the additional cost of energy to income growth (especially sluggish in recent years), the current shock is far worse than any of the three prior ones, Mr. Carson says.
With US attention focused on insurgencies in Iraq Yemen has let go all the people involved in the attack on the USS Cole.
ADEN, Yemen -- Almost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials.
Jamal al-Badawi, a Yemeni who helped organize the plot to bomb the Cole as it refueled in this Yemeni port on Oct. 12, 2000, has broken out of prison twice. He was recaptured both times, but then secretly released by the government last fall. Yemeni authorities jailed him again after receiving complaints from Washington. But U.S. officials have so little faith that he's still in his cell that they have demanded the right to perform random inspections.
I bet the US government issues visas to Yemenis who want to visit or go to school in the US and that we even get some Yemeni immigrants.
Part of the blame probably belongs on the Bush Administration for not maintaining pressure on our enemy the government of Yemen.
"During the first part of the Bush administration, no one was willing to take ownership of this," said Roger W. Cressey, a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations who helped oversee the White House's response to the Cole attack. "It didn't happen on their watch. It was the forgotten attack."
The Bush Administration couldn't even maintain enough forces to hunt down Al Qaeda stragglers in Afghanistan. Iraq beckoned after all.
We should keep Muslims out of the West. We should also very aggressively go after terrorist groups that attack us.
Update: In the comments Brent Lane points to a US government web page which shows 70 Yemenis won US visas through our mind bogglingly foolish diversity lottery. So did 4392 Egyptians. Wonder if any of Mohammed Atta's relatives or friends were among the lucky winners. More Yemenis than Finns came up winners. Can someone explain how this isn't just an incredibly stupid idea for a policy?
Christians and secularists are minorities in French prisons. Imagine their fate should they become minorities in France as a whole.
This prison is majority Muslim -- as is virtually every house of incarceration in France. About 60 to 70 percent of all inmates in the country's prison system are Muslim, according to Muslim leaders, sociologists and researchers, though Muslims make up only about 12 percent of the country's population.
On a continent where immigrants and the children of immigrants are disproportionately represented in almost every prison system, the French figures are the most marked, according to researchers, criminologists and Muslim leaders.
Sociologists predictably blame whitey for racism. I blame whitey too, but for a different reason: the French were foolish enough to let in all those Muslims in the first place.
Muslims commit disproportionate amounts of crime throughout Europe.
In Britain, 11 percent of prisoners are Muslim in contrast to about 3 percent of all inhabitants, according to the Justice Ministry. Research by the Open Society Institute, an advocacy organization, shows that in the Netherlands 20 percent of adult prisoners and 26 percent of all juvenile offenders are Muslim; the country is about 5.5 percent Muslim. In Belgium, Muslims from Morocco and Turkey make up at least 16 percent of the prison population, compared with 2 percent of the general populace, the research found.
Here is how Washington Post writer Molly Moore came across this story. This might be news to the Washington Post. The French government tries to hide it and provides no official figures. But see my July 2005 post Muslims Said To Make Up 70% Of Prisoners In France and my December 2004 post Most Prisoners In France Are Muslim.
Muslims see themselves as believing a religion that gives them the right and duty to rule the world. At the same time, the Muslims find themselves living in societies where non-Muslims are far more successful. So they have resentment and jealousy. The achievement gap can't be closed. The IQ differences between European and Muslim countries and the accumulated body of IQ research on genetic contributions to IQ make these differences in achievement likely to last for generations until genetic engineering can boost IQ of lower IQ populations.
But there is a solution: Send the Muslims back to societies where they can feel more equal. This will make France much safer for the French and for the rest of us when we visit France. Shouldn't the French government's top priority be the safety and well-being of the French people? Isn't the French government failing to carry out its responsibilities toward the French people?
Update: A reader argues in email that boosting the IQs of Muslims might not make them less Muslim and more liberal. Smart people of an opposing point of view would pose a bigger threat than dumb ones who disagree with you.
I think it fair to say we do not know what offspring genetic engineering is going to do to change political leanings. More than IQ is involved in determining genetic predispositions to believe various viewpoints. As I've argued elsewhere, some religiously devout people could even choose genetic variations for their offspring that make them more likely to unquestioningly accept the beliefs they are taught. Also, other genetic variations might make a person more likely to hold strong moral beliefs or to be more easily morally outraged.
The safe and prudent thing to do when faced with immigrants who are hostile to your way of life is to keep them out. Do not engage in triumphalist wishful thinking about the power of your culture to transform them to your political, moral, or religious persuasion.
Between 1964 and 2001 (when the economy was sluggish), 35 per cent of the nation's most promising graduates moved abroad, according to research conducted by the Delhi-based organisation, Evalueserve, but from 2002 onwards (the period when India's GDP began to soar) only 16 per cent chose to leave. Now, the research suggests, the West no longer seems synonymous with wealth and opportunity. Asked to predict which country would 'hold the most promise for success' in 10 years' time, 72 per cent of the 677 IIT graduates surveyed named India, with only 17 per cent citing the US, 5 per cent Europe, and just 2 per cent China. The number who feel the US offers a better standard of living than India has fallen since 2001 from 13 per cent to almost zero. The study is a clear sign that the lamented flight of India's best students, which has troubled the government for decades, may be reversing, in tandem with the turnaround in economic prospects.
Another recent analysis argues the United States isn't getting the best and brightest among skilled H-1B visa workers. Well, that's not why employers use H-1B workers. The advantage of H-1B is that the workers are cheaper than natives at the same skill level. If the average skill level from abroad is lower that doesn't matter as long as some tasks do not require the highest skills. The main goal in using foreign workers is to cut labor costs.
If more skilled workers will find the United States increasingly less appealing then the mix of immigrants will shift even more heavily toward those with little or no skills. We need an immigration policy that keeps out the less able.
