Chris Buckley:

Over 6 Billion man hours will be spent this year complying with the tax code. That’s the equivalent of 3 million full time workers . For perspective, the entire Federal government civilian workforce is about 2 million. So for every government worker, the government needs 1.5 workers just to collect the money they spend. That’s efficiency.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The Toast offers clues.

Some examples:

You have a pretty taste for paradox.

You speak English, but will lapse into Italian in order to create rhymes at the drop of a hat. …

You live in a country other than England, but the only way to tell this is from your dress and your occasional use of another language, as you are otherwise entirely indistinguishable from an English person.

You are an orphan.

You are not an orphan, but have just said that you are to a man who is altogether too interested in this fact.

You think you are an orphan, and are rather surprised to discover that you have either very rich or very disreputable relations.

Your mother is younger than you, or at least appears to be so? …

Your society’s legal system is fundamentally corrupt and everyone knows it, but no one has a problem with it.

David Yeagley, 1951-2014

Vanishing American, in the course of discussing the eagerness of so-many today to utilize the moral jiu-jitsu of victimhood to gain status and power, offers up a very interesting counter-example, whom I intend to learn more about.

The late Comanche patriot David Yeagley, who was an ethnopatriot towards his Comanche tribe, also acknowledged that their White foes won honorably. The two sides fought, and Whites prevailed. He was an exception, probably one of a kind, to take this attitude. It’s so much more profitable to whine about how one’s ancestors were wronged and oppressed by evil Whitey than to acknowledge that they simply were outmatched. It saves ‘face’, I suppose, to claim that the other side ‘cheated’ or ‘stole’ or ‘oppressed’ than to say that one’s side lost in a fair fight. There is always a winner and a loser. But the left has subverted this; it has almost made winning a mark of disgrace and infamy.

This is where the ‘narrative’ becomes unhealthy: this exaltation of weakness and ‘victimhood.’ It encourages people to don the ‘victim’ mantle to manipulate and gain power by insidious and dishonest means. It promotes deception and dishonesty. It is not a healthy thing.

Michael Ferguson offers a plausible explanation for the intellectual mediocrity and conformism of our establishment elite: the establishment selects against overly high intelligence (!).

The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession such as Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive, etc. increases with IQ to about 133. It then falls about 1/3 by 140. By 150 IQ the probability has fallen by 97%! In other words, a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions. This benefits neither the excluded group nor society in general. For society, it is a horrendous waste of a very valuable resource. For the high IQ person it is a personal tragedy commonly resulting in unrealized social, educational and productive potential. …

Over an extensive range of studies and with remarkable consistency, from Physicians to Professors to CEOs, the mean IQ of intellectually elite professions is about 125 and the standard deviationn is about 6.5. For example, Gibson and Light found that 148 members of the Cambridge University faculty had a mean IQ of 126 with a standard deviation of 6.3. The highest score was 139. J.D. Matarazzo and S.G. Goldstein found that the mean IQ of 80 medical students was 125 with a standard deviation of about 6.7. There was one outlier at 149, but the next highest score was 138. This means that 95% of people in intellectually elite professions have IQs between 112 and 138 99.98% have IQs between 99 and 151.

By dividing the distribution function of the elite professions’ IQ by that of the general population, we can calculate the relative probability that a person of any given IQ will enter and remain in an intellectually elite profession. We find that the probability increases to about 133 and then begins to fall. By 140 it has fallen by about 1/3 and by 150 it has fallen by about 97%. In other words, for some reason, the 140s are really tough on one’s prospects for joining an intellectually elite profession. It seems that people with IQs over 140 are being systematically, and likely inappropriately, excluded. With the conservative assumption that, absent the exclusionary processes, IQs above 133 neither help nor hinder the achievement of elite profession membership, the excluded population is distributed as shown above. If we assume that the positive correlation seen below 133 IQ continues above 133, the excluded population would be larger and the exclusion more complete.

This is a theory which explains so very much.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Telegraph story

I don’t think there are any Zylinski families possessing a princely title, and I’m very skeptical of the successful-cavalry-charge-that-saved-6000-Jews story, but I do like his attitude.

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CORRECTION AND RETRACTION:

I should have looked it up before posting. There is indeed a Polish Princely Żyliński family, descended from Rurik, taking their name from a locality in the palatinate of Smolensk. That cavalry charge story sounds much more believable to me now.

Buddha told a parable in a sutra:

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw on the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

Pakistani photographer Atif Saeed got this excellent close-up of a lion at a safari park near Lahore. The photographer then barely managed to get into his car before Simba nailed him. io9