It's interesting to do searches on Google News to see what the zeitgeist allows. For example:
It's interesting how almost the first word that comes to mind when I think of Haiti appears to be the last word to come to mind for all other journalists.
Haitiversus
Results 1 – 20 of about 240,610 for haiti. (0.21 seconds)
Haiti Malthusian
Results 1 – 1 of about 1 for haiti malthusian. (0.04 seconds)
It's interesting how almost the first word that comes to mind when I think of Haiti appears to be the last word to come to mind for all other journalists.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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52 comments:
Journalists quite properly invoke the spectre of Malthus - diminishing returns = when it comes to ecology. But they ignore it when it comes to the equally germane area of anthropology.
Asymmetrical delusionism.
How many journalists ever use the word "Malthusian"? (Clever way to link to yourself, though.)
I Googled "Haiti, dysfunctional" and got 902,000 hits.
Another Mencken quote: “Most of the ills that continue to beset American journalism today, in truth, are not due to the rascality of owners nor even to the Kiwanian bombast of business managers, but simply and solely to the stupidity, cowardice and Philistinism of working newspaper men...There are reporters by the thousand who could not pass the entrance examination for Harvard or Tuskegee, or even Yale. It is this vast and militant ignorance, this widespread and fathomless prejudice against intelligence, that makes American journalism so pathetically feeble and vulgar, and so generally disreputable.”
And those were the Good Old Days!
Now comes all the fake "orphans" into the USA. Since hundreds of thousands of Haitian children are just given away each year by their biological families to whomever, it would seem hard to ascertain their actual status. I smell a lot of bogusness in this traffic in "orphans". Haiti is now the boutique for status adoptions.
On a mainstream Republican site that had a story about Haiti a few days ago, I tried to post the sentence "Man proposes, Malthus disposes," but it never appeared.
Ummm Steve,
I got:
Haiti: 152,000,000 in .11 sec
Haiti Malthusian: 84,100 in .22 sec
Try "Google News" not "Google Web."
Touche,
Excellent post then.
You are a commentator not a journalist. Until you travel to Haiti yourself you are not doing original reporting.
Google News results vs. some objective metric could be an interesting blog. E.g. results for Calum Davenport in January, 2010; his trial date did get pushed back to mid-January right? But zero on my google.
In other news, I'm waiting for the Google by syllable function.
Maybe Google is censoring the search, the way they apparently censor the suggestions when you type "Islam is".
Lots of suggestions come up when you type "Christianity is" or "Judaism is".
Since finding this out I don't trust Google so much.
When I think I of the word "Haiti" I think of yet another charity cost that we, the USA, are in no position to afford. By the way, I am talking about the massive government expenditure in Haiti going on right now. Private donations are a separate matter.
Congress is about to vote on raising the debt ceiling by nearly 2 trillion! This story is bigger than the Scott Brown story. Could we please all come out our national funny money trance now? VISUALIZE TWO STACKS OF CASH TOTALING A TRILLION DOLLARS EACH!!!
Don't feed Haitians or leave food for them to find. Haitians fed by Americans come to regard Americans as a food source and will become pests by stealing our food. Feeding can lead to unnaturally high population growth in areas where it occurs often. People's hearts go out to them when their cupboards are bare, and nobody wants to see them starve, but Haitians should still be able to survive on their own. The number of Haitians that can live in an area is dictated by the amount of food that's available. We change that equation and we change the dynamics of a whole bunch of things, and usually it's to the Haitians detriment.
There already talking about a "Marshall plan" for Haiti. Who do you think is going to pay for it? Mexico?
You have it wrong, Steve. It's the U.S. government that wrecked Haiti's economy. In 1990 President George H.W. Bush imposed sanctions. Then in 1994 President Clinton invaded and put the commie Aristide in power. Before that, America intervened for most of the 20th Century.
The solution: Turn Haiti into a tax haven, like the Cayman Islands, with no income tax and no capital gains tax.
But then Haiti wouldn't be the pet of all those busybody international agencies and charities that can't mind their own business. And Obama and the UN don't want any more tax havens from their tax obsessions.
Haiti doesn't need Malthus, but Mises.
Unfortunately, we are going to have to swallow a whole lotta ... garbage regarding Haiti.
Does anyone honestly think that the US Coast Guard under THIS PRESIDENT and THIS ATTORNEY GENERAL will sink the flotilla of soon-to-be Haitian refugees floating towards the US?
Haiti is farther away than Cuba, but it is still a journey that has been made and can be made.
No, under THIS PRESIDENT, we will take whoever comes across from Haiti. In fact, Obama wants as many refugees as possible, so he can reshape Florida's politics (make it Blacker).
THIS CONGRESS (with massive Dem majorities, looking shaky post-Brown, and wanting instant new voters, are not going to stop Obama who as executive can do whatever he wants with respect to admitting refugees anyway).
So practically, to limit the amount of Haitians ending up on the Welfare rolls and prisons (inevitably), we will HAVE to intervene in Haiti.
Elections have consequences. President Obama wants as many Haitians in the US as possible. Period. The only way to limit that is US aid/reconstruction/bribes etc. as a massive sink-hole. Unless you want all nine million Haitians moving here.
Yeah, maybe long term Obama and Dems will pay a price for Haiti-izing Florida and turning Miami into a warzone battleground between mostly assimilated, better educated Cuban exiles and Haitians, dirt poor, voodoo prone, and illiterate. But that's a problem both will gladly take later.
Life isn't a choice between kittens and puppies, but between suck and suck more.
You have it wrong, Steve. It's the U.S. government that wrecked Haiti's economy. In 1990 President George H.W. Bush imposed sanctions. Then in 1994 President Clinton invaded and put the commie Aristide in power. Before that, America intervened for most of the 20th Century.
I've always found these kinds of libertarian commentary somewhere between laughable and deplorable. There is virtually no Black country on the planet earth making significant economic progress (maybe Ghana at least has a decent society) and the libertarians want to blame the problems of Haiti on US economic intervention, though such intervention obviously did not hurt Japan, South Korea and Germany after WW2. I love the libertarian universe.
There are 51 results for Haiti "basket case" in Google News.
There is a potentially explosive story developing about the many american citizens still missing in Haiti - including some good looking young college girls that are getting coverage from our tabloid media. The students were there on a mission of *hope* when the quake hit.
It's odd when you consider that the respectable, non-racist, Jared Diamond used a Malthusian analysis on Haiti in his respectable, non-racist bestseller "Collapse." You'd think a lot of chatterati would have read that one.
To narrow a search. Try http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&um=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=haiti+malthus
5 hits; including some back-and-forth at the _Globe and Mail_ about how Malthus is 'long-discredited'. (Apparently understanding a simple conditional is beyond the power of this Garth Stevenson.)
Journos just have a limited vocabulary:
http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=haiti+every+man+for+himself
"There are reporters by the thousand who could not pass the entrance examination for Harvard or Tuskegee, or even Yale."
College degrees have not improved the tribe of journalists in the slightest. Sheepskins merely create learned ignoramuses.
"You are a commentator not a journalist. Until you travel to Haiti yourself you are not doing original reporting."
Few journalists actually do original reporting. They collate press releases and do live shots.
The other part of this is: If Haiti as been in such bad shape (I'm thinking of *before* the earthquake), how is it that the population is so big? They may have been poor, but they weren't starving. And in term of Darwinian success, they're doing a lot better than, say, Belgium.
>solution: Turn Haiti into a tax haven, like the Cayman Islands, with no income tax and no capital gains tax. But then Haiti wouldn't be the pet of all those busybody international agencies and charities<
Also there would be fewer HHH, Haitian-heritage Haitians. That half of the island would merely become another playground for international bankers.
Btw, isn't it ironic that the big movie hit of the day is Avatar, while at the very same time, the US is landing troops ashore in Haiti? But of course our troops are there to help, while the movie troops were evil.
Maybe Google is censoring the search, the way they apparently censor the suggestions when you type "Islam is".
Lots of suggestions come up when you type "Christianity is" or "Judaism is".
Since finding this out I don't trust Google so much.
Google and Youtube will not give search suggestions for "Pat Buchanan" or "Patrick Buchanan." Once you get to "Pat Buc" or "Patrick Buch" there are no query suggestions. This started happening around early to mid 2009.
You have it wrong, Steve. It's the U.S. government that wrecked Haiti's economy. In 1990 President George H.W. Bush imposed sanctions. Then in 1994 President Clinton invaded and put the commie Aristide in power. Before that, America intervened for most of the 20th Century.
The solution: Turn Haiti into a tax haven, like the Cayman Islands, with no income tax and no capital gains tax.
....
Haiti doesn't need Malthus, but Mises.
God, the Cargo Cult is less ridiculous than this.
Anonymous:
"VISUALIZE TWO STACKS OF CASH TOTALING A TRILLION DOLLARS EACH!!!"
Why? That would be incredibly stupid and pointless. It would tell you nothing about the size of the debt relative to the size of the country's economy.
John Seiler:
"It's the U.S. government that wrecked Haiti's economy. In 1990 President George H.W. Bush imposed sanctions..."
At that point in first reading your comment, I thought you were being facetious. Then you brought up the tax haven nonsense. As if all it took to attract prosperity was a lack of taxes. Have you noticed some things the Caymans and other tax havens have in common that Haiti doesn't have?
Steve, you are clearly in a league of your own. Because you are brilliant, and because you tell the truth. You are a national treasure...
Ronduck, was that a joke? Maybe if we all donate to Vdare they'll set up a Haiti bureau so we can watch Sailer walk around the rubble with a microphone in his hand like Anderson Cooper!
The odd phrase "Malthusian Strain Relief" is the phrase that popped into my head (I'm a part time electrician) when I heard about the quake. The second thing that popped into my head was "Here come the refugees!"
What I'd like to see are actuarial tables predicting various crimes by an admitted population based on local crime statistics in their country of origin. This is a fairly potent weapon against immigration: if you know there will likely be X Americans maimed, raped, or murdered by cretinous foreigners and their children, you develop a healthy fear of these people. Kind of alters your perception of a potential orphan deluge since as we all know "the shorty is baby daddy to the G." It also tempers your sympathy when you look at the disaster photos. You wonder what these people were up to pre-disaster.
Haiti is listed 30th on the world population density chart in Wikipedia behind The Netherlands, Singapore, S. Korea as well as some genuinely poor nations. It ain't what ya got it's how you use it!
Haiti is now the boutique for status adoptions.
Yes, can't you just hear these white snits in a couple of years, introducing their little brown toys: "I got them from Haiti." Black women dream of making white babies, while white women busy themselves adopting black ones. It gets weirder and weirder.
"Maybe if we all donate to Vdare they'll set up a Haiti bureau so we can watch Sailer walk around the rubble with a microphone in his hand like Anderson Cooper!"
Nah, send me to Barbados to see what they're doing right. But, hurry, winter won't last forever.
"Now comes all the fake "orphans" into the USA. Since hundreds of thousands of Haitian children are just given away each year by their biological families to whomever, it would seem hard to ascertain their actual status. I smell a lot of bogusness in this traffic in "orphans". Haiti is now the boutique for status adoptions."
Ugh, isteve posters sometimes make my stomach sick.
If Americans want to adopt Haitian orphans, then what is your problem?
It is not like they are forcing YOU to adopt them.
I personally commend Americans that adopt Haitian orphans.
I hope all the children that are now orphans in Haiti will find an American who will adopt them.
Malthus and Erlich lost their popularity when Erlich started losing bets to Julian Simon...
As several commenters have pointed out, there are many international Haitian adoptions going on... See Steve! From a genetic standpoint they now have a chance to hit the lottery! A much better chance than if they sat home in Haiti having a *responsible* birth rate (and couldn't afford to lose anyone), but with 0 chance of becoming a competitive, higher I.Q. group.
From their point of view, its better to be materially a little worse off but have some of your descendants have at least *some* chance of marrying into a much more superior group.
If they cannot adapt, and they have too far to go to catch up with Whites and Asians to do this without outsider genetic input, they will be sitting ducks. Sooner rather than later, a smarter group will decide to exploit and/or annihilate them; sometimes, it's not even on purpose.
>If Americans want to adopt Haitian orphans, then what is your problem?<
Why have immigration restrictions? Let anyone of any level of intelligence, education, income, skills, and criminal record in. Why have borders at all?
Look at this video ("Immigration Gumballs").
A strong nation has strong borders and a well-defined and enforced sense of who belongs in it and who does not belong in it. Serial adopters and Christian groups bringing in whomever by the boatload should be audited with a view toward imprisonment and disbanding.
"Nah, send me to Barbados to see what they're doing right. But, hurry, winter won't last forever."
Steve, they are doing a lot of things right in Maui!
We have already had Haitians in Miami for quite some time, here is a nice look at how they have behaved here in America:
In Miami, Dade County has a special maintenance squad that cleans up dead chickens, goats, lizards, voodoo powder, and other "hex" items found each morning on the grounds of the county courthouse. These items are ritually deposited there by adherents of the Voodoo, Santeria, and similar religions whose members are appearing before the court on various charges. Almost all are immigrants from the Caribbean islands.
page 115
Google and Youtube will not give search suggestions for "Pat Buchanan" or "Patrick Buchanan." Once you get to "Pat Buc" or "Patrick Buch" there are no query suggestions.
What do you mean by this? I just got 6,680,000 Google hits for Patrick Buchanan, offering what looks like individual sites, not only for all of Pat's affiliate organizations, but for each individual book, and lots more.
What are "query suggestions?"
Can't all these Haitians be sent to Senegal, where the president made a very generous offer to take them in? It would be much more humane to send them there than have them try to fit into a modern country. We already have a surplus of future Nobel Prize winners here in the USA.
>If Americans want to adopt Haitian orphans, then what is your problem?
It is not like they are forcing YOU to adopt them.<
Given the dismal realities of human biodiversity, every time an American couple adopts a Hatian orphan, that more than likely represents a socio-economic drag on US society--in effect, we all end up taking that kid home with us. And that means that there is that much less to go around for those of our own citizens who are truly in need.
Jack Strocchi:
I'd like to understand what you wrote but just cannot seem to make head or tail of it.
What have Malthus or his ideas got to do with "diminishing returns" (and what've "diminishing returns" got to do with either ecology or anthropology)?
Adoption is probably the most benign possible kind of immigration. The kids get a middle class US upbringing, speak the language perfectly, are likely brought up Christian. The numbers are self limiting, because the demand for adopted kids is from parents wanting to raise them, not employers wanting cheaper labor.
One obvious concern about our intervention in Haiti is HIV exposure. Thousands of soldiers and rescuers, mostly youngish and male, are flooding into a place with frightfully high HIV rates. Nature is going to take its course, here--many of the rescuers will get the traditional reward, young men and women thrown together in harsh conditions will do what they've always done, and a singularly nasty virus will also behave according to its nature.
I wonder if anyone in power has the stones to just issue condoms to all the soldiers and others, along with a reminder about the HIV rates. What else could be done here? I have a hard time imagining putting the soldiers on AZT for the duration of the mission, but maybe that wouldn't be so crazy.
with respect to one of steve's other themes about US news outlets not reporting much about what happens in mexico, despite it being the biggest nation close to america and having over 100 million citizens:
i've been watching this topic for a couple years now, after steve mentioned it a few times, and what i've noticed is that US news sources do report a good amount on mexico, but they elect not to make news from mexico into headline news in the US. so that when something that is kind of a big deal goes down in mexico, you get a blurb or a quick report, and then not much more.
major violent crime stories in mexico, involving either a kidnapping or the ongoing drug wars, do get a brief mention, but they're hardly discussed or analyzed. for most of the US news media they probably go into the "perpetrators were not white males, story is not interesting" category.
important political events in mexico also rate with a similar level of importance in the US news. worth a brief mention, but also warranting no analysis or days of discussion. even something that directly affects america in widespread ways, like the decision to let mexican truckers deliver to any location in america, got only moderate attention.
there's almost no coverage at all for other stuff like the oil situation in mexico, which is more important and has more ramifications that the drug trade.
Adoption is probably the most benign possible kind of immigration. The kids get a middle class US upbringing, speak the language perfectly, are likely brought up Christian. The numbers are self limiting, because the demand for adopted kids is from parents wanting to raise them, not employers wanting cheaper labor.
Lynn and Vanhanen estimate an average IQ for Haiti of 67.
So at the end of the day, these kids would become middle-class up-brought English-speaking Christians with IQs of 67.
You need an IQ of about 80 to have any hope of gainful employment as a janitor [and, even there, you'd be in competition with guys who had IQs of 85 and 90 and maybe even 95].
"One obvious concern about our intervention in Haiti is HIV exposure."
Agreed. Not so many McDonald's and Burger Kings in impoverished Haiti. No free government cheese, so many of the young women are quite slim and attractive, not beasts like Precious. And they will wanna get out of their cesspool of a country on a fiance visa or make a few green backs as a hooker.
>The numbers are self limiting, because the demand for adopted kids is from parents wanting to raise them, not employers wanting cheaper labor.<
Weak. Neither is self-limiting. "Want" is unlimited.
http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/HaireoftheDog/archives/2010/01/22/pat-buchanan-peers-into-the-souls-of-lily-white-souls-of-disgruntled-bay-state-voters
Go to the above link. When I googled Pat Buchanan (and I am no great fan), this came up. It almost makes me like Buchanan.
Somebody named Clair Haire wrote about Pat Buchanan looking into "lily-white souls", all white people who mistrust Obama (how and why could they!?) are "fat Archie Bunkers" who "got off their recliners" and have a problem because the president is a "black guy"-- this person is beyond parody, if he/she is white. Haire evokes every absurd, low-blow that one could think of. I could get angry but it was so ridiculous and almost hilarious, when I think about the rational reasons to distrust Obama, that I just laugh. Most of the country agrees with the voters of Massachusetts now anyway. I think that's what setting off the Obots to self-parody.
But here's a clue to why: Haire was just appointed editor to a major Honolulu newspaper. They know where they need to keep they Obots.
jody,
From what I've seen, US news sources pretty much ignore anything smaller than a Haiti-scale disaster happening south of the border. (Honestly, US news is pretty bad at all international reporting. But you'd think there was nothing south of Mexico if all your information came from TV news.)
If you speak or read Spanish, there are a lot of good news sources that cover the region really well. I don't really know of any English-language sources that do a good job. (But then, my interest has been more in polishing my Spanish and getting an outside-the-US view of the news, and less about learning about the latest Chavez power grab, or the most recent news of the really nasty war between the Mexican government and its drug cartels.)
"VISUALIZE TWO STACKS OF CASH TOTALING A TRILLION DOLLARS EACH!!!"
Why? That would be incredibly stupid and pointless. It would tell you nothing about the size of the debt relative to the size of the country's economy.
Right. As if there's any economy on Planet Earth in 2010 where a two trillion dollar debt increase could be construed as anything but curtains-on-fire economics.
Gotcha, Ben Bernanke!
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