The big news from Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest men is Carlos Slim overtaking Bill Gates for the top spot.  The magazine has a mini profile for everyone on the list.

Of the top 100, there are 85 men and 10 women for whom I could make out family information.  The men average 3.1 children each and the women 2.8.  Many of the males certainly aren’t finished yet and will crtainly bring this year’s average up by the end of their lives.  

When you’re rich enough for to be on the Forbes list keeping up with the Joneses isn’t a consideration and one can have as many children as one desires.  

Still, we shouldn’t get too excited.  Though billionaires are doing pretty well, they’re still way behind Africa.

At The Occidental Observer I review Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.  It’s quite a depressing read but helps explain how whites gave America up without a fight.  It may have been inevitable that the media would become the shaper of minds and it would be controlled by the group with the highest verbal IQ.  And if people weren’t going to honestly understand the nature of blacks, they would set themselves up for a nonstop process of blackmail.  Expecting whites to eventually wake up and say, “Sorry, you’re not actually equal after all” isn’t realistic.

ABC News pairs up the following video together with the article below.

I love the girl who says the black doll talks back and doesn’t follow directions.  

The author of the story is Alice Gomstyn, which I first read as Alice Goyim Stein.  

Walmart is raising eyebrows after cutting the price of a black Barbie doll to nearly half of that of the doll’s white counterpart at one store and possibly others.

A photo first posted to the humor Web site FunnyJunk.com and later to the Latino Web site Guanabee.com shows packages of Mattel’s Ballerina Barbie and Ballerina Theresa dolls hanging side by side at an unidentified store. The Theresa dolls, which feature brown skin and dark hair, are marked as being on sale at $3.00. The Barbies to the right of the Theresa dolls, meanwhile, retain their original price of $5.93. The dolls look identical aside from their color.

Editors at Guanabee.com said the person responsible for the photo told the Web site that it was taken at a Louisiana Walmart store. The person did not return e-mails from ABCNews.com.

A Walmart spokeswoman, who could not verify the exact store shown in the photo, said that the price change on the Theresa doll was part of the chain’s efforts to clear shelf space for its new spring inventory…

But critics say Walmart should have been more sensitive in its pricing choice.

“The implication of the lowering of the price is that’s devaluing the black doll,” said Thelma Dye, the executive director of the Northside Center for Child Development, a Harlem, N.Y. organization founded by pioneering psychologists and segregation researchers Kenneth B. Clark and Marnie Phipps Clark.

“While it’s clear that’s not what was intended, sometimes these things have collateral damage,” Dye said.

Other experts agree. Walmart could have decided “that it’s really important that we as a company don’t send a message that we value blackness less than whiteness,” said Lisa Wade, an assistant sociology professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the founder of the blog Sociological Images.

Decades after segregation and the civil rights movement, studies show Americans — both black and white — continue to internalize the heirarchical notion that lighter skin tone is considered “better than” darker, Wade said…

“Black children develop perceptions about their race very early. They are not oblivious to this. There’s still that residue. There’s still the problem, the overcoming years, decades of racial and economic subordination,” Harvard University professor William Julius Wilson told “Good Morning America.”

Wade said that Walmart could have chosen to keep the dolls at equal prices in an effort not to “reproduce whatever ugly inequalities are out there.”

While in public we talk about things like the school achievement gap, I’m sure that in the hearts of black women the beauty gap is much more ubiquitous and painful.  Societies with an appreciation of hierarchy do a good job of stopping envy from turning into hatred.  Ours isn’t one of them.

My heart is broken. Let there be no more doubt that the American right is no better than the left. They’re useful standing against big government and taking down the occasional Maoist in the Obama administration but they share the same anti-European and European American prejudices as everybody else.

My biggest nightmare: Europe awakens and then the US attacks in order to “save freedom” again. The idiots wave their flags, pat themselves on the back and ensure the Islamization of Europe. They smear anybody who dissents as an anti-American liberal.

A tribe of black Jews has been discovered.

A Jewish actress has discovered that she loves black men.

My page on why black people are so loud has moved up to second on Google.  

Russia proves once again that it’s culturally different than the West.  

Time reports on the German homeschooling family granted asylum in the US.

Auster names his litmus test for those on the right.  You’ll never guess what it is.  

Slate culture writer Troy Patterson dislikes Jay Leno for taking Conan’s job. The market has spoken.  Is Leno supposed to disappoint millions of viewers for the feelings of the talk show host who failed in his place and a few Swipples?  In an older blog post at Slate some feminist writes

Now [Leno is] an edgeless, middling host who plays to an imaginary concept of polite, family humor, when the truth is that even polite, family humor has gotten sharper and edgier over the years. Again, I point to my Midwestern grandmother, a lover of all Apatow movies—you know, the ones in which words and phrases like “dick,” “pussy,” and “Prepare to suck the cock of karma!” are thrown around more than “amen” in a Southern Baptist church. Our tastes have changed. The concept of polite humor is dying. And we’re pissed off that network TV won’t relinquish the old guard and please us, the American audience.

The American audience has spoken and they want Leno.  This reminds me of those socialists who talk about companies pushing their products on us when people really demand X, which they don’t actually buy.

I was inspired to check out FrumForum by recent events.  On the front page I found a call

 to teach global warming in schools and a link to an article demanding a purge of the anti-war right.  Apparently, it’s important that America be on guard against cutting its number of nukes. FF seems to have its own litmus test for conservatives too.   Update: FrumForum’s latest conservative issue: women in combat.

An old story: North Korea will feed its population by breeding giant rabbits.  Among Swipples, rabbit is gaining popularity.

Here’s a video from Time on the Tea Party.  I can’t figure out whether it’s supposed to be friendly or mocking, until the end when you see people cheering for Sarah Palin.  Ending with that is supposed to scare the viewer.  Not a single non-white there.  What will it take to make this an explicitly white movement?  Perhaps a few years of open hatred for the elites and getting comfortable being an all white crowd rallying against the establishment.  

A judge in Texas arbitrarily rules that the death penalty is unconstitutional.  I bet the good people of that state won’t stand for it.

Blacks walk over a dying man to order chicken.  

David Brooks talks about the similarities between the Tea Party and the New Left.

There are many differences between the New Left and the Tea Partiers. One was on the left, the other is on the right. One was bohemian, the other is bourgeois. One was motivated by war, and the other is motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart.

But the similarities are more striking than the differences. To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left…

But the core commonality is this: Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it…

But the Tea Partiers are closer to the New Left. They don’t seek to form a counter-establishment because they don’t believe in establishments or in authority structures. They believe in the spontaneous uprising of participatory democracy. They believe in mass action and the politics of barricades, not in structure and organization. As one activist put it recently on a Tea Party blog: “We reject the idea that the Tea Party Movement is ‘led’ by anyone other than the millions of average citizens who make it up.”

For this reason, both the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.

That idea was rejected in the 1960s by people who put their faith in unrestrained passion and zealotry. The New Left then, like the Tea Partiers now, had a legitimate point about the failure of the ruling class. But they ruined it through their own imprudence, self-righteousness and naïve radicalism. The Tea Partiers will not take over the G.O.P., but it seems as though the ’60s political style will always be with us — first on the left, now the right.

What Brooks leaves out is that the New Left succeeded.  They didn’t need a political party because their views on race and sexuality became embedded in the culture.  If the same thing happens with the Tea Party, we can consider ourselves very lucky.

At Alternative Right I review Russell Kirk’s The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft. 

Despite being a hero to many on the Alternative Right, Taft thought that the four issues mentioned above, currency regulation, health care, education and housing, were too important to be left to the market. But he never explained why capitalism was the best system for the distribution of steel or televisions but not education or medical care. Much of the Old Right seems to have gotten it backwards. They were fine with the market on most issues, but the more vital to a society’s health or well-being something was the more they were willing to tolerate or actively encourage government intervention.

This of course gets it backwards.  If we believe in the free market, the more important one thinks an issue is the less tolerance one should have for government meddling.

Even Republicans who supposedly believe in freedom seem to think it’s important to have choice when it comes to what kind of deodorant or DVD player to buy but that it’s too dangerous to let people make their own decisions on health care or retirement savings.  

Take education.  Whenever a country can afford to it tries to make it universal and paid for by the state.  And while the government does manage to educate doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. nobody knows what the opportunity cost was.  At least 50% of the population in any society is unable to benefit from much beyond learning how to read and some basic arithmetic.  Placing these children with the overpaid babysitters we call teachers for thirty five hours a week is a colossal waste.  Many of these slower children are not only not capable of benefiting from school, but take away from the educational experience of others.  

A friend applying to law school told me about LSAT prep.  These are classes that people take to try to improve their scores before the test.  Before you begin the course, you take a practice LSAT under testing conditions.  The students are then divided up by their scores.  This is the way it has to be.  Can you imagine a program that put people trying to go from the 95th to the 99th percentile, those trying to go from the 50th to the 60th, and those trying to go from the 30th to the 40th in the same class?  Nobody would pay for such a “service” and the LSAT prep business would go under.  But the government puts people with IQs of 130 and 80 in the same class rooms and teaches them from the same textbooks and at the same pace.  It’s torture for anybody too far above or too far below the mean.  

Forgive me if I’ve mentioned this before (when you write daily, you forget much of what you’ve said), but in the public grade school I went to I remember going over how to tell time on an analog clock at least three years in a row.  This must’ve made a really deep impression on me as it’s one of the few things I remember from my childhood.  Why were they doing this to us?  Were they just looking for an excuse, any excuse, to keep us in this building for hour after hour?  Now I realize that there may very well have been kids who didn’t get it.  The big hand points to three and it means “fifteen.”  The little hand points to three and it means “three.”  The red hand points to three and it also means “fifteen,” but in seconds.  Sure, I can almost convince myself that it’s sort of complicated and there are people out there who struggle with it.  But I didn’t need to spend seven hours a day with them and luckily never will again.  

I used to be divided on the Republican idea of school vouchers (parents who use private schools don’t have to pay for public schools too) because it always sounded to me like a way for NAMs to invade private schools.  Maybe it’s because of the way politicians have justified the programs.  “Those evil liberals, trying to keep blacks in the ghetto!” Then again, if vouchers ever became popular enough they could destroy the public school system.  The government would still be funding education but would have less control over content and practices, which would be a start.  And private schools would be able to expel the rowdy NAMs anyway.

Half Sigma thinks that the guy who tried to shoot up the Pentagon was a libertarian, even though the article he links to shows that Bedell supported liberal Democrat Mike Gravel for president. Gravel wanted to legalize pot, so it seems as if that was the shooter’s main issue.

We have once again seen how easy it is to get a gun and start shooting people, or even in the case of Joseph Stack get a plane and fly it into a building.  Why don’t Muslims, who we are told are suicidal and out to get us, pull anything like this off?  

Bedell was a “Truther,” and no matter the veracity of these conspiracy theories, they’re generally good if they get people to distrust the American government.  If you’re under an evil regime that seeks more power, there’s never a bad reason to distrust it or resist its expansion.  

Here’s a six year old article by Paul Craig Roberts on how Americans are no freer than nineteenth century slaves were.  Blacks could eventually purchase their freedom, while for us there’s no escape from the IRS.  

According to the Wikipedia page on Slavery in the United States

Fogel argues that the material conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers. They were not good by modern standards, but this fact emphasizes the hard lot of all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the 19th century. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90% of the income he produced.[51] In a survey, 58% of historians and 42% of economists disagreed with the proposition that the material condition of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers.[51]

Our material position is better because of technology but we’re no more free.

More people are waking up to the monster in Washington.  Let’s hope its days are numbered.

From the NYT

SAN FRANCISCO — Angered by increases in tuition and budget-related cuts in government financing, students and faculty members at California public schools and colleges planned protests across the state on Thursday, as leaders on both sides of the political divide in the state promised answers for its educational crisis.

Called a “strike and day of action to defend public education” by organizers, the demonstrations are expected to last all day at marquee institutions like the University of California, Berkeley, and U.C.L.A., which are part of the state’s 10-campus University of California system.

Organizers also hoped to hold rallies at colleges in New York City; Detroit; Austin, Tex.; and several other cities outside California.

California’s public universities were the sites of loud demonstrations last fall, when the state Board of Regents approved a 32 percent increase in undergraduate fees — essentially tuition. Students took over buildings on the Berkeley and Santa Cruz campuses in protest.

On Thursday morning, officials at U.C. Santa Cruz were turning cars away from the campus’s main entrance, according to the university’s Web site, and were telling employees not to come to work. Dozens of protesters had effectively closed a secondary entrance to the west of the main one. There were also reports of a broken windshield and of protesters surrounding cars that tried to enter the campus. In Berkeley, about 100 protesters blocked Sather Gate, a central pedestrian walkway on campus.

One of those was Rafael Velazquez, 23, a graduate student in the School of Education, who plans to be a public high school teacher.

“My whole family went to California public schools,” said Mr. Velazquez, who has a younger brother in fifth grade. “I plan to be a teacher, but it’s not my job prospects I’m worried about. It’s the whole system.”

The demonstrations were being backed by a variety of labor unions and by student groups and left-wing groups, with events also planned at elementary schools, high schools, community colleges and the 23-campus California state college system, which is separate from the state universities.

At San Francisco State, part of the college system, protesters assembled at the business building, using a picket line and tables to block one entrance. Nancy K. Hayes, the dean of the College of Business, said administrators were concerned for student safety.

“Our students thought it was going to be a protest, not a blockage,” she said. “They’re undergrads and they’re young and they’re scared.”

The poor babies!  Scared they won’t be able to pay back their loans with their African-American Studies degrees!  It won’t be much longer that we’re a country where large swaths of the population can afford to go to four year brainwashing camps where they learn no marketable skills.  We’re going to be better for it.  

Lest you think I’m being unfair and that the kids with worthless degrees are a minority, here’s a list of the top ten most popular college majors.  Business management is first, “social sciences and history” is 2nd, education is 3rd, psychology is 4th, communications is 6th and English is 9th.  

A midday rally was also planned on the steps of the capitol in Sacramento, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican in his last year in office, met with education officials and students on Wednesday. At the meeting, Mr. Schwarzenegger said that the layoffs and increased class sizes at some state schools were “terrible.”

The bottom line, he said, was that “they need much more money.”

Where the money could come from is unclear. California faces a new $20 billion state deficit, and schools at almost every level have already begun cutting back spending in the expectation of cuts in state financing. San Francisco’s school district, for example, is facing a $113 million shortfall that threatens the jobs of some 900 teachers.

Alberto Torrico, the Democratic majority leader in the State Assembly, has proposed a new 12.5 percent tax on revenue from oil and gas production in California, a measure that he says could raise $2 billion for higher education. But with any new tax in the state requiring a two-thirds majority, its prospects seemed uncertain.

All new taxes in California require a two-thirds majority?  That’s wonderful.  They’ll need to import a lot more Mexicans to be able to get the votes in order to tax but if they get them it’ll not only chase out productive citizens but increase the amount of dependents, leading to a need for more taxes, which drive out more tax payers, ad infinitum!  

Big government and NAMs, who would’ve ever suspected that it wouldn’t work?  

Check out the front page of the Huffington Post

Real Winners

The distribution of the races is way too random for the picture not to have been purposely set up that way.

HP is trying to make this into some kind of national movement, but it seems to only be happening in California and to a much lesser extent Wisconsin.

At UC Irvine, approximately 50 members of the school’s Black Student Union gathered yesterday in front of the campus student center, wearing pieces of duct tape with “Do UC us” written on them over their mouths. The silent protest was held to show support for black students at UC San Diego, which has been rocked by racially charged incidents.

Clever!  We’re certainly not going anywhere if we don’t invest in these young minds.

Some readers ask why I keep writing about Palin.  Why do I write about anything?  Either I think a topic is important or I’m interested in it.  While breaking down every aspect of Palin’s personality and body language may not tell us a lot about this country (actually, I suspect it might), it is fun for me.  Anyone who finds this hobby annoying can skip this post.  

Watching Sarah Palin on the Tonight Show last night, I learned more about why I find her annoying.  Her victimization routine makes Cornel West sound like Ayn Rand.   And then there are two annoying gestures that I’ve discovered.  I will do an analysis of both issues.  

Watch Palin on Leno part one, part two.

She’s so insecure that every question Leno asks gets turned into “Woe is me, why are they out to get me?  It doesn’t bother me though!” 

The first question Leno asks her is whether she minds being controversial.  

Palin (none of these quotations are exact, but paraphrases): Well, it’s just because I have such strong views about where the country should go.  I’m not one to sit down and shut up!

Nobody asked her to sit down and shut up.  Although this paranoia is partly justified, in her head it’s amplified to a ridiculous degree.  Even on as laid back an environment as the Tonight Show she couldn’t help turning every answer into an explanation of what a victim she is and/or how she’s attacked for being strong.  

The rest of the first eleven exchanges of the interview went like this.  I broke Leno’s speaking pieces into questions, although sometimes he just makes statements for Palin to respond to.  

Question 2, Leno: Have you always been independent?

Palin: From my time as an athlete to a governor, I’ve never been one to not express myself.

Q3: Do you get this from your parents?

Palin: My family is busy and diverse.  We debate.

Q4: Do they still give you advice?

Palin: My dad teaches me about guns!  <applause> 

Q5: The media is critical of you.  But you’ve joined Fox.

Palin: I studied journalism.  The mainstream media is quite broken.  That’s why I joined Fox!  Americans deserve actual fairness.

Q6: I watch all sides.  MSNBC is liberal, Fox is conservative.  

Palin: That’s healthy.  As long as the opinion isn’t under the guise of hard news.  

Q7: Was it unfair that the media went after your family?

Palin: Yes, my kids are nice and well adjusted.  Please don’t go after them. Common courtesy is all I’m asking for.  <martyr nice lady look, applause>  

Q8: But they occasionally try to poke you and get a rise out of you.  Have you learned not to comment?

Palin: I would like more chances to follow up on what they say.

Q9: Can you give an example?

Palin: Like Family Guy.  I mean, that show is lame anyway.  A special needs family asked what I thought about the episode.  I commented.  

Notice how she doesn’t take responsibility for the fight that she picked.  A “special needs family” solicited her opinion.  I’m sure she gets asked all kinds of things in her Facebook comments. Anything she decides to talk about can be blamed on her fans.

Palin: It got out there in blogs and I couldn’t get what I meant out there.  Jay, you understand this.  It’s like that old saying “A lie can travel half way around the world before truth can even gets its pants on in the morning.”    

Q10: What about writing on your hand? 

Palin: The poor man’s version of the teleprompter.  Look at the three things I wrote.  Energy and security.  That’s how we’re going to be independent.  Tax cuts, that’s how small businesses are going to be able to create jobs.  And lift American spirits.  Our country needs those three things.  Nobody could argue the substance, only the format

Q11:  Did you do this as a kid?

Palin: Yeah, my dad taught me that.  He loves you by the way. <wink>  My dad used to write on his hand.  I’m going to keep doing it because it makes the left angry!

Out of her first eleven answers, three mention how tough and strong she and her family are and arguably eight take direct or indirect shots at the media.  

Now you may say that Leno kept asking her about the media and was drawing out these responses.  I would reply that Leno was taking the conversation in the direction of the topic his guest was most interested in.  He’s learned to do this automatically from decades as a talk show host.  If Palin had any other interests she could’ve steered the conversation towards something else.  “Jay, forget about all that and what people say about me.  I’m focusing on the future of the country.  My organization Sarah PAC is doing blah blah blah.” 

As for substance, in the entire interview she mentions the three things she wrote on her hand, endorses “common sense solutions” and praises the Tea Party as independent.  

Palin does this thing where she clenches her fists with the thumbs pointing towards the ceiling and shakes them.  She does it at the following points.

1. Part one, 4:45 (the timer on the videos count down rather than up) with one fist when she says “strong convictions.”
2. Part one, 1:45, once against to emphasize the word “strong,” this time talking about her “strong, independent” children. 
3. Part one, 0:12 when talking about truth putting its pants on.
4. Part two, 4:22  when she said “I stood by [McCain’s] side.”  
5. Part two, 2:21.  She does a short variation of the gesture while she’s coming out on stage.
6. Part two, 2:15 while she’s saying how happy she is to be on the Tonight Show.
7. Part two, 1:45 in trying to describe athlete Shaun White’s movements.  
8. Part two, 1:42, talking about the White House flip-flopping on health care.   
9. Part two, 1:11, mentioning “fighting on the ice.”

It appears that Palin does her fist shake 

1. When she’s trying to emphasize movement or conflict.
2. When she’s trying to emphasize the word “strong” or a related concept.
3. To emphasize loyalty.
4. To show she’s excited about something.

Reason four is interesting as the fist shake seems something that you would do to get a kindergarten class excited about gathering around the story rug.  A political figure making that gesture all the time is unsettling.  

Annoying gesture two is what I’ve discovered is called a Shaka sign.

1. Part two, 1:48 while talking about how cool Shaun White is.  
2. In this video at 2:07, giving a shout out to those of us who use the internet.   

Palin does this when she mentions something 0r someone she thinks is “cool” or “with it.”

Why does Palin make these gestures?  I suspect that they may be common amongst average and lower IQ women. Maybe high IQ people don’t need to use as many gestures as they have more verbal tools to make their points. Palin’s Shaka sign and fist shake could subconsciously signal to elites that she’s not of them and to the proles that they can trust her.  

Has there ever been research done to see if there is a negative correlation between IQ and what percentage of one’s communication is nonverbal?  Going anecdotally, Jerry Springer guests tend to swing their arms and point at each other a lot and politicians on Meet the Press tend to just sit there with their hands folded.  It may be that Springer guests just happen to be more extroverted members of the underclass.  

Back to Palin.  Elizabeth Wright points out that she’s not really politically incorrect at all.  I agree with that but think the author is being to hard on her when she faults the former governor for not having a consistent conservative ideology.  Wright is asking too much from someone with an average IQ.  Palin and her supporters’ resentment are based on feelings of inferiority more than down home anti-PC sentiments.