One Chicagoboy says this photo reminds him of a Johnny Cash song:

ONE PIECE AT A TIME
Recorded by Johnny Cash
Written by W. Kemp

[F] Well, I left Kentucky back in ’49
An’ [Bb] went to Detroit workin’ on a ‘sembly line
The C] first year they had me puttin’ wheels on cadil- [F] lacs
Every day I’d watch them beauties roll by
And [Bb] sometimes I’d hang my head and cry
‘Cause I [C] always wanted me one that was long and [F] black.

One day I devised myself a plan
That should be the envy of most any man
I’d sneak it out of there in a lunchbox in my hand
Now gettin’ caught meant gettin’ fired
But I figured I’d have it all by the time I retired
I’d have me a car worth at least a hundred grand.

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Black History Month

I really hate the idea of setting aside a month for one aspect of American history over the others, but let’s make the most of it. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James W. Johnson is a short piece of fiction that is still a little uncomfortable to read today, nearly a century later, but fascinating. The author later became the president of the NAACP.

Categories USA

Demography is Destiny — But What Drives the Demography?

“Spengler” offers a radical answer, which is plausible at least for the developed world.

“The personal is political,” said the feminists of the 1960s. They were on to something. Countries go to war because those who inhabit them cannot bear their individual lives. Entire cultures die out because the individuals who comprise them no longer wish to live, not because (as author Jared Diamond claims) they cut down too many trees. Bulgaria and Belarus have plenty of trees, yet we observe in such countries a demographic catastrophe unseen in Europe since the Thirty Years’ War.

Birth rates rise and fall with religious faith People do not have babies because religious doctrine instructs them to procreate, though, but because religion makes them happy. With the end of traditional society, religion becomes a personal, not a communal, matter, and the fate of nations is fought out at the level of individual souls. Communism suppressed religion in Eastern Europe, and the demographic data in consequence seem to bear out the cliche of the melancholy Slav. By mid-century most of the Eastern European countries will lose 20-40% of their people and be left with a geriatric remnant.

US Christians, by contrast, have one of the highest birth rates in the West. Conservative, mostly evangelical Christians have a plurality, soon to be a majority, in US politics. Their burgeoning power stems from a personal message that has made converts of tens of millions of liberal Protestants. Evangelicals are political only when circumstances force them into politics, for example proposals in several US states to legalize same-sex marriage. Their identification with Israel has drawn them into foreign policy … .

The Devil’s Sourdough and the Decline of Nations , by “Spengler”. (See also Why Europe Chooses Extinction, Death by Secularism: Some Statistical Evidence, Power and the Evangelical Womb and It’s the Culture, Stupid.)

Chris Masse on Prediction Markets

Chris’s RSS feed is easily readable here.

Chris is a one-man news and commentary agency on prediction markets topics. Now that he has coaxed me into using Google’s feed reader to check out his RSS feed I will be much better able to keep up with him.

Recommended.

Classified Stupid

It is not so much the major media’s biases that bother me as it is their sheer incompetence. The New York Times story, “U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review” by Scott Shane is laced with both.

The lead graph:

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

and later:

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department’s history series, “Foreign Relations of the United States.”The stuff they pulled should never have been removed,” he said. “Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous.”

Gosh, how weird, why reclassify stuff that is already publicly available? I’m sure our intrepid reported will soon tell us.

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