Three Laws of FISAgate Evidence

In following the FISAgate scandal, I've sometimes wondered, when great rhetorical battles have raged over whether certain documents should be released to the public, why doesn't the DOJ just destroy all the incriminating evidence? Destruction of evidence is a lighter crime than the crime being concealed - seditious conspiracy - and it's not like anyone of importance is ever punished for it. So why not?

That mindset betrays an unhealthy lack of cynicism. I've found that, as grizzled as I am about things, I tend to miss more from a lack of cynicism rather than an excess. Regulars here may wonder if I missed it when I predicted that the fake bombs sent to Democrat politicians was the work of another liberal. (I haven't gotten around to addressing that yet.) I remain unconvinced of the storyline, given not just the cartoonish pro-Trump walking billboard that was the (recently converted) culprit, but more with how quickly the media dropped that gold mine of a story, before all political benefit had been wrong out. Still, that sticks out as an example where I may have been too cynical and got it wrong. Contrary to that, I could name several instances where I erred from a lack of cynicism and there is no uncertainty.

The correct mindset is not to ask why they aren't destroying evidence, but to assume they are. Consider the trends. Evidence disappears all the time. Hillary emails and phones. IRS hard drives. Wasserman-Schultz and Anthony Weiner laptops. No one is ever punished. And when evidence does make it out, it is heavily skewed by the media. The mainstream audience doesn't realize that Capitol Hill Democrats were heavily infiltrated by Chinese and Pakistani spies on their own paid staff, but everyone knows Trump paid off a hooker. (Which is only because the FBI raided his lawyer's office, because Russia.)

When it comes to FISAgate, there are three laws of evidence.

1. All evidence known to be withheld or destroyed is damaging to the deep state.
2. All evidence that harms Trump is leaked.
3. All evidence further substantiates our hypothesis or, at least, doesn't substantiate the mainstream narrative.

The first law is provably true, because it could be easily disproven by counterexample of it was false. I am aware of no example of evidence destroyed or withheld that would have been beneficial to the deep state. Meanwhile, virtually all the evidence damaging to the deep state makes it out under great outrage after protracted battles of subpoenas and lawsuits. Consider the tremendous effort it took to have the original FISA warrant published, under heavy redaction. Consider also that the New York Times held an unredacted copy the whole time thanks to a staff prostitute, which they presumably still hold. (And yet, liberals will argue that the corporate media is the "free press" and not a core component of the deep state, and disregarding old-guard progressive heroes like Noam Chomsky to do so.) The New York Times could have spoken up when Democrats were accusing Devin Nunez of misrepresenting the contents of the warrant application, but they remained silent.

The second law can't be proved, as it would amount to proving a negative, but a solid case can be made that the deep state is so eager to air Trump's dirty laundry that it is inconceivable they would withhold anything. They have twice - twice! - released damning evidence against Trump that supposedly solidified their case against Trump and which then turned out to be "evidence" against a completely unrelated Michael Cohen. Or consider that the FBI raided the Cohen office and then almost immediately dirt on Trump - having nothing to do with Russia - started leaking. This goes back to the lack of cynicism thing, because even I - having been following their dastardly deeds and predicting this kind of behavior for some time - did not expect them to be so brazen. You'd think they'd at least give it a few weeks, perhaps take effort to launder the intel. No, they're so eager that they don't even care much about optics or building layers of plausible deniability. So the second law must be true.

And the third law must be true because it could easily be proven by counterexample. There is still no evidence that substantiates the claim of treason against Trump, or that the DOJ had any such evidence when it spied-on & investigated him. Evidence that comes out always confirms our convictions of a deep-state coup against the elected president.

So recent revelations of missing evidence, as always, fit the 3 laws. On Friday, the special counsel failed to respond to a federal judge's subpoena for the original Flynn 302s, instead turning over 302s dated 6 moths later of an interview done on Peter Strzok, who lead the interview on Flynn. (Which, as the 302 that were released indicate, Flynn had been led to believe that he was participating in an informal conversation, rather than a formal interview. Counter that to Strzok's interview of Hillary Clinton, who had numerous lawyers present including at least one who would have been a co-conspirator!) It has been alleged by many on our side for over a year and a half now that the Flynn 302s were fraudulent. Mueller probably can't go so far as to deliberately disobey a subpoena, at risk of giving Trump political cover to end his witch hunt, which means that the 302s must no longer exist. They've been "lost".

It is also being reported that the Mueller Team destroyed over 19,000 texts between Strzok and Lisa Page, after deciding there was nothing of significance. Of course, if the texts were truly innocuous they would have been released. In fact, Mueller has a vested interest in releasing large batches of innocent texts between Strzok and Page because the ones released were so damaging to the credibility of his venture.

Let me make a couple more cynical predictions. No one will be punished for this missing evidence, or for any missing, destroyed, or otherwise mishandled evidence in this whole debacle (unless maybe someone happened to bungle some evidence against Trump.) I am confident of that, and even more certain that no one of significance will face significant punishment.

There Will be Paradigm Shifts

The fundamental fallacy, according to Brett Stevens, is to assume that we can change how we do things and achieve the the same results; that we monkey with cause and not screw up effect. Conservatives inherently realize this, and believe social change should be careful, measured, and incremental so that missteps can be rolled back. Liberals, like Barrack Obama, vow to "fundamentally transform the United States of America." They believe their radical agenda will eliminate real & imagined injustices which they use to leverage themselves into power, while not affecting the good aspects of American society, like economic success and peaceful transfers of power. They believe they can radically transform the cause and merely tweak result.

A second fundamental fallacy, if I might propose one, is the belief that things will not change. And, in particular, that our understanding of things will not change. Conservatives can fall prey to this, when they long for a past that isn't coming back. But liberals do too, in assuming that progress is linear and constant. Reactionaries differ from both in that they are more familiar with the cyclic nature of societies. They're somewhat more "big picture" kind of people. As society progresses, the constant linearity fallacy becomes more entrenched. Our society looks back at the ignorant rubes who came before major paradigm shifts of the past, all while assuming non lay before us.

The problem permeates our society. I will not struggle here in providing examples, but more in limiting myself in listing them. The worst can be found with the usual suspects: corporate media, government, and academia. Probably no better example can be found than the Fukuyama vs Huntington debate in the social sciences. Fukuyama fielded his End of History hypothesis, that liberal democracy was the culmination of human societal progress, and the rest of human existence would consist of clean up and consolidation. Huntington proposed the Clash of Civilizations, that conflicts would continue indefinitely at the world's civilizational fractures. By the turn of the century, when I was entering college, the radical progressives in the social science departments (where all students are forced to take electives) were quite pleased that Huntington was considered to have won over Fukuyama. My best guess as to why they aligned that way is that Fukuyama is a neoconservative, and back then liberals were as confused as we were that neoconservatives were a form of conservatism, rather than liberal imperialists. I don't know what they're teaching today, but the ironic thing is that liberals are actually fully in line with Fukuyama, believing that if they spread magical democracy and liberal values then the world will oscillate in perfect harmony. Even when gloating about it ("ha ha bigots, the neocon guy lost") they still haven't actually processed the paradigm shift that the Huntington thesis represents.

Another is the sciences. Do you think I was too harsh the other day? Here's an account from a researcher from particle physics, the field I credited with actually having some relative success. The analysis is grim. Tens of thousands of failures. Little theoretical work of merit. Which stands opposite a couple experimental successes regarding theories a half century and a full century in age. The problem with particle physics, she says, is stagnation. That should be expected. Like society, scientific progress is not linear. It is better described by punctuated equilibria, like evolution. Given that we've had so many major paradigm shifts in the last couple centuries, it is understandable why people might assume technological advancement is a linear game. Particle physics is stagnating because it has nearly wrung out the benefits of the previous paradigm shifts of quantum mechanics and the discovery of subatomic particles. It's likely that the big breakthroughs will coincide with a new paradigm shift. Academic researchers box themselves in by desiring great breakthroughs that will make them famous, yet also assuming that the current paradigm is the final answer. As long as the current orthodoxy holds, their progress will largely consist of confirmation exercises, which is really all that the CERN and LIGO results are, at best. (Personally, I have strong faith in the CERN results....less so for the LIGO. I don't think the evidence for general relativity is as strong as its purported to be.)

Today's scientists are endlessly amused when they look back at ancient paradigms like an Earth-centered cosmos, or a universal ether to provide a medium for electromagnetic propagation. And yet, dark matter is, if anything, more absurd than ether, and neutron stars are more fanciful than an Earth-centric cosmos, which at least had a working - if complicated - mathematical model. These are the kind of people that gawk at car wrecks and end up read-ending the people in front of them.

Today's absurdities will one day be seen not in isolation, but as amusing anecdotes from a forgone paradigm. I hope my grandchildren's textbooks warn about backwards nations that thought it would be a good idea to have open borders coupled with a welfare state while encouraging their own children to castrate themselves. Or a monetary system where states borrow their currency from semi-private central banks, which then route the profits back to the Treasury. A lender giving the profit back to the burrower? It's often those little things that no one thinks about, and no one really questions, that seem so obvious in hindsight.

[Here's another one, from physics. (Sorry, I've been on that kick lately.) Gravitational models of many-bodied systems are inherently unstable. How do they explain our nice, orderly, well-behaved solar system? They just say we must be in a stable period. "Why don't observations match the models? Oh, they don't now, but they will soon, believe me. Probably not until after I retire though...." Under general relativity, even two-bodied systems become unstable. It means that the Earth orbits the point the Sun was at 8 minutes ago, and the Sun orbits the point the galactic center was at 26,000 years ago. Another reason to be suspicious of that explanation, even if there aren't yet better alternatives.]

It's probably more appropriate to imagine our civilization as a dark ages than an enlightened era. There's a lot of hand waving going on. A lot of "don't look at the man behind the curtain." A lot of "how absolutely dare you zyr for questioning settled science." If the numbers don't add up, something is wrong. And if you take measure of what the absurdities are, you'll have a good feel for what the genuine paradigm shifts are when they occur. Become an early adopter and you might make a fortune. Or even make yourself into a sort of benevolent dictator for life. We're about due for one of those, you know.

United by Money

Pragmatically Distributed predicted that the election of Macron would result in a civil war in France within five years. What we're seeing now is civil unrest, not civil war, although we're not yet even two years into his tenure. Even if Macron is forced to step down it won't constitute a civil war. A war, a real literal war, requires armed groups of people trying to kill each other.

It has long been my opinion that money is the only thing that holds us together as a nation. After that, we share a language - which is certainly important - and then pop culture. So once the money goes away, we quickly will find ourself scraping at the bottom of the barrel of common interest. America is not a tribe. That much should be clear. That ended in 1965 when Congress decided we should prioritize immigration from those not of western European heritage. They might as well have renamed the United States of America to the Multicultural States of America while they were at it. MSA! MSA! I guess it just didn't have the same ring to it.

A nation divided cannot stand. That much has been known for some time. But our superiors insisted we could still be nation, a proposition nation, where the proposition was that I won't infringe your rights if you don't infringe mine. It all sounds good, but the obvious question arises: what happens if the proposition dies? If there's anything we've learned in the past few years, it's that the proposition of America is a mere fiction. Not all get the same rights. Elections can be nullified. It's just a power struggle. Lee Kuan Yew warned that multicultural democracies collapse into competing ethnic & religious voting blocs. In America, we have a bitter struggle between the party that gets 2/3 of white votes and the party that gets 3/4 of non-white votes. Put America into the category of evidence that supports the Yew hypothesis.

We still have money, so we still have unity. I predict that once the economy collapses, the rest will go too. The French have a lot of reasons to be angry, but they seem to be protesting about money. French GDP growth per capita has been around or slightly above 1% for the past few years. It is outpaced by both inflation of the Euro and increases in government spending, each at about 2% a year. The typical French worker is losing income each year, yet being tasked to fund a perpetually growing government. It's why the prediction was made that Macron's election would cause civil war - although I suspect he overestimates how much reform would really happen under the nationalist socialist versus the globalist socialist. [For reference, what has really been reformed under two years of Trump?] In fact, the riots were in response to Macron's attempts to reign in social welfare spending, and a gas tax increase. Does anyone suspect they wouldn't riot against Le Pen for doing the same? Many from the right joined in the festivities - and are probably venting decades-long disdain for their government - but still nothing happened until the financial squeeze was on.

So keep all that in mind. A nation divided will stand until the money gets tight. Then it becomes a powder keg. A lifetime of resentments will come to a boil. I consider it quite possible that this country will dissolve, in some fashion, in my lifetime. Think about it, you'd be crazy not to carry fire insurance, right? I did the numbers some time ago, and found that the average time to inferno for a US home was something like five or six hundred years. Yet, you get the insurance in case it happens in the years that you own the home. Look at where we're at, do you really think this can go on for five or six hundred years? To believe that would be far crazier than winging it without insurance. From here on out, each economic downturn will come with a significant risk of social collapse.

The Science is Settled

There are many meanings to the term settled. Which is meant when people claim, "the science is settled"? In aquatic climes, detritus settles down to rot and be raked over by bottom-feeders. The resemblance to modern science is indeed profound. Perhaps they mean in the same sense as settling a bill. When the NSF check clears the bank, the science is settled. Or perhaps the allusion is akin to a stomach settling, in between bouts of diarrhea. Those are all appropriate metaphors, but they don't quite capture the intended meaning. There are probably two usages that best fit. One is what we might hear after a heated argument that doesn't end in a mutual agreement. The parent or teacher tells the child that the matter is settled and she doesn't want to hear another word about it. Another might a visual of dust settling after a battle. How do we decide which side won? Well that's never a problem. Whoever freely roams the battlefield, plundering the wares of the fallen, is clearly the winner. Which scientists won the debate? Whichever ones are free to roam the campus, cash the NSF checks, and publish in the most prestigious and politically-correct (same thing) journals.

Of course, we aren't inherently opposed to having decisions default to the authority figure, or nations deciding the only remaining option is longswords. Hierarchy has its costs. It depends on the particulars. Is the teacher an educator or a tyrant? Is she competent at her duties, or is she actually making her students dumber? Science, on the other hand, is supposed to progress towards truth in spite of - or ideally in absence of - authoritarianism. Science is an ideal. It's an institution of people, and depends on those people to be open, honest, and to have the integrity to put their noble pursuit of knowledge in front of personal and professional benefit. The scientific capacity of a nation is limited by the character of its people.

When they say the science is settled, they mean that the process of science has been faithfully executed to its fullest ideal, therefore there is no possibility that skepticism is valid. Because today's scientific environment is not ideal - in fact is riddled with outright fraud and absurdity - the implied message is more like: go away dirt people. The cloud people are insulted by your existence.

Now we all know that this is usually all in the context of climate change, the most politicized of academic disciplines. We've done that topic a number of times here, so no need to rehash it too much, but the major points are that the funding comes with a preference of outcome, that all the errors (and outright scandals) occur in favor of that outcome, and - more importantly than anything else - the settled science never actually predicts anything. We can't help but make the analogy to doomsday cults, who's members double down in their beliefs after the apocalypse (again) fails to materialize. The entirety of the settled science regarding climate change can be reduced to a single equation: doomsday = x + 15, where x is there current year.

We normally blame the outright fraud that is "climate science" - rule of thumb: no field of study with the word "science" in its name is really a science - on liberal politics. Unfortunately, other fare little better. The reproducibility crisis affects most disciplines, particularly the social sciences. Cancer research is an utter racket. Charities take huge overheads in the name of "raising awareness," as if there is anyone who still has not heard of cancer. The researchers are just as deceiving, always assuring the breakthrough is right around the corner. [cure = x + 15] One trick for funding is to boast to the funding committees that your new compound has been preliminarily shown to kill cancer in 100% of trials, without mentioning that it belongs to a family of compounds known to kill the host as well. (For a million dollars I can cure your cancer with a single 9mm round.) Once the funding is obtained, the other task is to loot it. One trick is to provide housing for your grad students in some dingy apartment in the campus area, and bill the grant funds at a highly inflated rate.

Most painfully, physics is not immune to the crisis. It's sad to see the field of astrophysics so compromised. The deep reaches of space are out of bounds from our petty, terrestrial political squabbles, and even so the academic community fails profoundly. As a discipline, they are constantly backpedaling. With each new probe sent to some new corner of the heliosphere, their predictions are refuted, oftentimes dramatically. Venus should not have been hot, Saturn's north pole very cold. A comet crashing into Jupiter was supposed be anti-climactic, not explode in an enormous fireball. In moments of clarity, they say they must reconsider their most basic assumptions, even rewrite the known laws of physics. Those things never actually happen. They patchwork ever more complexity onto their models, and request funding for the next experiment that will surely prove their claims.

No better example exists than dark matter. Astronomers noted that the rotational velocities of stars around galaxies do not slow with distance, as in planets do about our sun. (Mercury scoots along nearly tens times as fast as Neptune, and completes nearly 700 orbits to each of Neptune's.) This was in addition to other observations that galaxies and larger structures did not seem to hold enough mass to remain gravitationally composed. The models did not match the observations. The solution? Throw out the observations! Or, more accurately, augment them with some hypothetical observations. They invented the necessary mass to make the equations work; 5.7 times as much as the visible stuff, roughly. It sounds like looney tunes, but it is plausible. It's not been disproven, at least. But, it is surely an exotic hypothesis and should be considered as such. Scientists have only piled on, adding dark energy, dark inertia...whatever is needed. Like the other branches, a simple equation sums it all up: 5 + 5 = 2 + dark_numbers. I do suspect that, as our scientific probes and devices improve, those of us with 20-30 years left will see many of the currently unquestioned aspects of the current model thrown out. At the front of the line is dark matter & dark energy. They're just too ridiculous, too convenient, and too ugly (mathematically) to be likely.

Another candidate is neutron stars. Astrophysicists had to account for quickly flickering stars. Because only rotation can cause periodic motion in their worldview, they had to devise stars that were both extremely small (to rotate quickly) and extremely massive (to stay composed under extraordinary centrifugal force). They devised the neutron star, so dense that normal matter breaks down into a soup of subatomic particles. And they have to be neutrons, otherwise the star would be quickly destroyed. So the neutron soup spins rapidly with the equator at relativistic speeds, and the light emitted from near the poles is pulsated as consequence of a hypothesized extreme magnetic field in a process I can't pretend to understand. Also in the category of things I can't comprehend: how a spinning neutrally charged object creates a magnetic field orders of magnitude strong than any other object in the known universe. To my credit, they don't seem to even attempt an explanation. Pulsars, like dark matter, are a highly exotic theory. And, unlike dark matter, perhaps not even possible, as emitted energy exceeds theoretical limits for a radiating body of that size, and neutrons in isolation quickly decay into a proton-electron pair.

Alt science people proposes their own exotic theories. Some people are convinced the Earth is hollow. It sounds ridiculous. But realize, the neutron star is vastly more improbable than a hollow Earth. Frankly, neutron stars make a hollow Earth seem pedestrian, almost trivial. They are even more likely to be discredited than dark matter. Interestingly, they are one of the main examples given to substantiate Einstein's theory of general relativity. Discrediting neutron stars won't disprove general relativity, but will certainly reduce its body of evidence.

Many billions of dollars are spent testing the theories. Most experiments fail, and often result are contradictory to theory. There are a few standout successes that are used to tote the supremacy of modern physics. And yet, they sometimes seem something like red herrings to distract from the otherwise constant flow of disappointment. One was the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which was predicted as a result of the Big Bang. Although, if you read up you'll have to endure answers like this one, which boasts that the measured radiation perfectly matches predictions, or that the temperature variations fit theoretical predictions. Not so true, they fit post hoc. They were not, in fact, predicted, and the models had to be updated to make the proper "prediction."

Besides all that, they've had a couple big wins in the last few years. The Higgs boson was discovered at CERN, at a cost of some $15 billion (plus whatever was spent at other sites like FermiLab in Illinois) which provided solid support for the standard model of particle physics. A second one was the detection of gravity waves at LIGO, coincident with a gamma-ray event, reported as a black-hole merger, which confirmed Einstein's prediction that the speed of gravity equals the speed of light. While not proof of spacetime, it was confirmation of the final unconfirmed prediction of general relativity. It is the standing theory of gravity, and competing theories will face a strong threshold for credibility, notwithstanding some supporting evidence for general relativity collapses, such as the neutron star.

Particle physics seems to have faired better than astrophysics as of late. Yet, even with major advances underpinning the standard model and general relativity, who would ever say the science is settled in those domains? There is certainly room for a different explanation of gravity, at least, and it's not clear if the current theory would ever be proved beyond any doubt. Saying the "science is settled" should get one about the same reaction in academia as you'd get swearing loudly in Church. And in particular, when used to describe fields in which the dominating theories routinely fail. 

Giving Away Civilization

Last week a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck 6 miles from Anchorage. I happened to see the tsunami alert and texted my cousin who lives there - not really imagining I was telling her something she hadn't heard, but you never know. There were damages but no deaths, and a heavily damaged major highway has already been repaired. No tsunami occurred, but alerts were sent wide and far.

A couple months ago a 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck 48 miles from the city of Palu, Indonesia. Over 2000 died from the earthquake and resulting tsunami. An alert was issued but, by many reports, was ended before the tsunami had even arrived. A 7.5 is several times stronger than a 7.0, but it also struck several times farther from a major population center. In one scenario there are many deaths, but not the other. What's the difference?

Consider this: after the devastating tsunami of 2004, which killed around a quarter million people, the governments of the United States, Germany, and Malaysia donated a tsunami detection system consisting of 22 buoys, at a cost I haven't been able to determine. By 2016, all the buoys - every single one - was inoperable. The Indonesian government has other tools at its disposal, such as 170 earthquake sensors, but only a budget to maintain 70 of them. (No word on how many of the sensors were actually functioning.) Despite all this, an alert was issued, and yet there were no sirens or other notifications at the shoreline of a city at the end of a long bay. There was a crowd gathered at the beach for a festival, and reportedly the scene was gruesome.

I don't know the cost of the tsunami system we donated to Indonesia, but it was likely in the tens of millions. Why are western countries willing to donate the buoys but not maintain them? A couple reasons. For one, there is no glory in system maintenance, and the news cycles are short. After a disastrous tsunami politicians and NGOs can pledge infrastructure improvements to great fanfare from the public. Engaging in mundane maintenance many years later...not so much. (Although there will be renewed vigor in response to the latest tragedy, for a while.) The second reason is enough people will question if we should be operating another country's critical infrastructure. If the US needs to take over operation of their tsunami alerting system to save lives, we should probably take over their sewer systems, power grid, healthcare....Perhaps the most humanitarian thing would be to invade and install a benevolent dictator for their own good. (Which wouldn't really be fair to Iraq, who only got a liberal democracy out of the deal.)

A general rule holds: civilization can't be given; it can only be earned. Grandiose gestures, like tsunami buoys, don't help the Indonesians. Their system is improving at the rate feasible for them to do so, and to the extent that their society can manage. The modern western mindset of "we'll make the world better by making it more like us" is rife with hubris, to say the least. It's not clear to me what the difference is between US foreign policy and Evangelicalism, except they've stripped out the good parts and added lots of bombs.

Here's another story that hits closer to home. In Brooklyn 80% of bus riders don't pay fares. Drivers stopped trying after one was murdered demanding the fare, which followed a case where a driver defended himself using the assailant's own knife. (All involved were black.) In DC, there is a movement to stop charging fares entirely, since 90% of those arrested for dodging fares are black, so the system must be racist. “No one should be in jail because they can’t afford to access public transit,” say activists. No one should be in jail for stealing, it seems.

Heavily black neighborhoods are a bit like nonwestern enclaves in our major cities. Civilization is hoisted upon them, but they can't maintain it. Without funding from the higher strata, even the buses won't stay running. Still, the left can't seem to import enough people from the kinds of places that can barely keep the lights on. They insist on giving away civilization, and they won't stop until there's none left.

Effects of Race and Politics on US Domestic Migration

To follow up on yesterday's post, I found some state-to-state migration statistics from the US Census Department here. I used the 2017 statistics, in combination with the 2012 percentages of whites by states, and a quantification of the states' level of conservatism as reported by a Gallop poll.

First, a look at the raw changes by state. (Click image to enlarge.)

Big winners were Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington. Biggest losers were California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York, who dwarf the losses of the other states.

Here is a chart adjusted for population.

Per capita, the strongest states were Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, South Dakota, and Washington. Losing states were Alaska, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Wyoming.

The goal of analysis was to determine if there really is a domestic migration preference for white states. In looking at the data, I determined that political affiliation would likely have a greater effect. That is because there are great inconsistencies to the white=conservative relation. For instance, Texas is white minority but conservative, where as many northern states are very white but vote Democrat. (Vermont is both the whitest and most liberal state in the Union.)

Considering raw data, I found that the correlation between white population and immigration numbers was .15, and between number of conservatives and immigration was .31. Those are positive correlations, but not strong. The rule of thumb is to take the square of the correlation to find the influence it wields. So if we take the square of .31, we find that the conservatism of a state accounts for about 10% of a person's decision to move there. Its enough to matter, but not really all that significant. Clearly other factors like economic performance and climate have a far greater impact. (I will attempt to tease some out in a future post.) A correlation of .15 between immigration and the percentage of white people means that only a few percent of the migration decision is determined by race. They only slightly skew to white states. Effectively, American migration patterns are not racist, although a racial breakdown of migration might paint a different picture.

When using the adjusted population numbers, I found a correlation of .32 with white population, and of .20 with conservatism. This is somewhat like taking the median instead of the average. It shows that, in most states, race has a bigger impact than political climate, but the big outliers, like lots of immigration to brown, conservative Texas and white, liberal Washington, skew the numbers. Which one are we interested in? Both, I'd say, but since we're in a head-count democracy, the raw, unadjusted numbers tell more about the downstream political consequences of the migrations.

Some other factoids.

• 54% of domestic migrants moved to more conservative state (than they were in).
• 52% moved to a state with higher percentage of whites.
• Between 1990 and 2012, the number of white people grew by 1.4%.
• In the same era, the white percentage of population dropped by 11.9%.
• The percentage of whites dropped in all 50 states. Only the imperial capital saw an increase in whites per capita.

The trends we talked about in the last post are there, but are only very slight. The most alarming statistic is the drop in white percentage of 12% in 22 years, nearly half a percent a year! If we assume that whites vote 60% conservative and non-whites 80% liberal, we can compute that liberals are gaining over 2% of the vote per decade from immigration alone. None of this counts the 20 million illegals here, who will likely gain amnesty with the next Democratic administration. Surely it's clear why the last thing they want is to enforce immigration laws. If you're conservative, or white, and want to live in a country that's conservative, or white, then please understand that, in a liberal democracy, the left primarily gains power through expansion of the electorate. The longer we play the game, the more we lose.

Randomly Generated Racism

The great state of Kansas has determined that its random string generating algorithm is inherently racist and most be regulated. Over 700 license plates have been recalled that contain the string JAP. The headline surprised me at first, because neither Kansans nor the Japanese seem like the kind of people to engage in quests to for Rorschach racism. Actually, the issue was brought up by a Japanese-descended Californian who observed one of the offensive plates in his own formerly great state. Outrage against random letters is not a Japanese kind of thing; it's a California liberal kind of thing. [For context, I lived in Japan for several years while in the military, and think very highly of them.] Ironically enough, outside of other Asians and WWII vets, most Americans who use JAP as an ethnic slur these days mean it as Jewish American Princess.

Around here will believe in universality, which means principles don't change depending on whom they are applied. Two foundational principles of this society are self-determination and freedom of association, however they now apply to everyone but whites. If you're white and generally want to live in white communities, your options are becoming limited. Originally, white flight was fleeing from northern city cores for suburbs as blacks migrated up for manufacturing work. Later, they fled inner suburbs for outer. Now they flee entire states. The migration trends today are that whites leave areas with low white percentage or those with strong control by Democrats - the anti-white party. For example, the state with the highest exodus rate is Illinois. You won't find any Illinois cities on lists of fastest growing US cities, or even fast-growing Midwest cities, but you'll find a disproportionate number of their cities on the lists of fastest-shrinking cities. Even in the downstate, which is every bit as flat and red as Kansas, cities are shrinking because the state is politically dominated by white-minority Chicago. [More context, I'm an Illinois native myself, now holed up in Missouri, with state politics being one of the major factors in staying put.] The fastest growing cities in the Midwest are places like Des Moines, Fargo, and Sioux Falls. That is, very white cities. Big losers are places like Chicago and Saint Louis (two of the three national leading losers, with Baltimore taking top spot). That is, very not-white cities. [My city, which is over 90% white, makes the cut in the top 25 growing midwest cities.]

California is another state with massive white exodus. That wasn't the case even a decade or so ago, when a lot of young people I grew up with moved west after high school. Almost all of them have returned. There are a lot of California refugees here in Southwest Missouri. I don't know of anyone recently who moved out there. Here is a synopsis of California migration, which is enlightening if you can read between the lines, as no specific references are made to race (and probably for good reason). California's domestic migration rate was negative 625,000, which means that 625,000 more Americans fled California than moved there between 2007 and 2014. The report shows that New York had an even greater net loss, at nearly a million, and other big losers were Illinois, Michigan, and Alaska. The latter would seem to contradict our perceived racial migration trends, but Alaska is somewhat of an exception in that it's population is so sensitive to economic trends, as people move there when the mines and oil fields are booming, and leave otherwise. I suspect that if we looked at numbers through 2018 Alaska would fall off the list of losers, as their real estate market is very hot right now.

Despite the net outflow of well over half a million Americans per year, there is enough foreign immigration that the state still grows. In racial terms, the trend is clear: white people flee the state, and are replaced with non-whites. Here's an interesting graph from their report.

Again, the only surprise here is Alaska. Also, perhaps, that Colorado isn't on the top list, but it surely is near the top.  Texas really dominates, it is an outlier even in the top five. I assume they are mostly moving to Dallas (a business boomtown which is barely holding on to white majority status) and Austin, which is much whiter than Dallas but also as liberal an anywhere in California.

 Let's do a quick racial analysis. I'm getting numbers from here, looking at the states' non-hispanic white population percentages in 2012.

California: 39.2

Texas: 44.3
Oregon: 77.6
Nevada: 52.7
Arizona: Arizona: 56.9
Washington:  71.4
Colorada (honorable mention): 69.4

Alaska: 63
New Jersey: 57.9
Michigan: 79.3%
Illinois: 62.9
New York: 57.4%

The numbers only weakly support our theory. Texas, far and away the destination of choice for fleeing Californians, is minority white, while 3rd & 4th place Arizona & Nevada aren't far off. Meanwhile, Michigan has a higher white percentage than any of the states under examination. Partly this can be explained through politics. Texas is surprisingly Republican given its demographics (although that's changing fast with California & Hispanic influxes) and Michigan is surprisingly Democratic given its demographics. Proximity is another piece. Oregon, Nevada, and Nevada are all direct neighbors. I highly suspect that, if we look at the data for all 50 states, we'd be able to create a nice correlation for race and migration patterns. (I've not yet been able to get the data used to generate these reports, but I do plan to dig into it some more.)

After Texas, Californians are fleeing to Oregon, primarily to Portland - the whitest city in America. Portland has undergone tremendous growth in the last decade or two, although that has been slowing down, likely in response to Portland becoming the most liberal city in American (more or less). In fact, so many have immigrated that there is now open xenophobia against Californian newcomers, which is amusing.

So what does this all have to do with Kansas license plates? Well, it signals the futility of state-level white flight. If you thought that you might avoid the rage of California liberals - who may discover a pattern of racism in the background noise - by simply leaving California, you'd be wrong. If you thought that moving 1200 miles across the mountains to the desolate plains would be far enough, it's not. To choose to live in a white community, or even just escape liberal cultural tyranny, we have reached the era where there is no safe haven. For the Kansas DMV to screen for a particular letter combination is no big deal, but then it's not a big deal to have them in circulation in the first place. The point remains that the state of Kansas felt compelled to act so that no one in any distant land might be offended. Once permitted, these demands always increase in scope and magnitude.

After the Supreme Court decided that gay marriage was a natural right, the town of Salem, Missouri flew its flag at half staff in protest. There was nationwide media outrage and the town was shamed into reversing its decision. The town of Salem has bigger problems than gay marriage, like drug abuse and disaffected youth, but still the message was clear. In no town is it permitted to take the same stance on marriage that Hillary Clinton held until just 5 years ago (the first time she gave a full-throated endorsement to gay marriage.) As it turns out, the mainstream Democrat opinion of last decade is so bigoted that it cannot be tolerated even in the most remote Ozarks highlands outposts. I noted in a video linked here that the referendum initiatives made 2018 a pretty good year for Missouri Democrats, despite the state being thoroughly dominated by Republicans.

Moving to conservative places and even winning statewide elections no longer gives cover. There isn't a "safe space" for us. If we don't have Kansas or Missouri, we don't have anything, yet those places are subjected to liberal cultural tyranny. There is no where to run. We either fight, or resign ourselves to the glorious future that has been chosen for us.