When smarty pants feel a little tight....

People perceived as the most likely to succeed might also be the most likely to crumble under pressure.

A new study finds that individuals with high working-memory capacity, which normally allows them to excel, crack under pressure and do worse on simple exams than when allowed to work with no constraints. ...

"The pressure causes verbal worries, like ‘Oh no, I can’t screw up,’" said Sian Beilock, assistant professor of psychology at Miami University of Ohio. "These thoughts reside in the working memory." And that takes up space that would otherwise be pondering the task at hand.
"When they begin to worry, then they’re in trouble," Beilock told LiveScience. "People with lower working-memory capacities are not using that capacity to begin with, so they’re not affected by pressure."

The findings are detailed this week’s issue of Psychological Science.

(Smart People Choke Under Pressure
By Bjorn Carey, LiveScience)

A most fabulous trick...

A kitesurfer going by when I was windsurfing:











More windsurfing pictures are back in the archives.

A few notes on the American oligarchy...

"One single object...[will merit] the endless gratitude of the society:
that of restraining the judges from usurping legislation." --Thomas
Jefferson (The Federalist)

Same issue discussed in an African American Newspaper, The 19th Century:

On this subject of the power of the Supreme Court, numbers of Mr. Jefferson's letters might be quoted, to the same purport as the above. I have only time to present brief extracts. In a letter to Judge Roane, date Poplar Forest, September 6, 1819, he says, referring to the Supreme Court:

In denying the right they usurp, of exclusively explaining the Constitution, I go further than you do, if I understand rightly your quotation from the Federalist of an opinion that 'the Judiciary is the last resort in relation to the other departments of the Government, but not in relation to the rights of the parties to the compact under which the Judiciary is derived.' If this opinion be sound, then indeed is our Constitution a complete felo de se. For intending to establish three departments, coordinate and independent, that they might check and balance one another, it has given, according to this opinion, to one of them alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others, and to that one, too which is unelected by, and independent of, the nation.

* * *

The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax, in the hands of the Judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please. It should be remembered as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any Government is independent, is absolute also; in theory only at first, while the spirit of the people is up, but in practice as fast as that relaxes. Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.

To Thomas Ritchie, whose name as the editor of the Richmond Enquirer, is familiar to us all, Mr. Jefferson wrote, under date of December 25, 1820, as follows:

The Judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners, constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our Constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special Government, to a general and supreme one alone.

I should weary you if I were to quote a tithe of what Mr. Jefferson has left us on this subject. What I have presented will suffice to show you that he entertained a deep-seated jealousy of Federal encroachments upon the rights of the States, and that he utterly repudiated the modern doctrine of the party which claims to be Democratic, that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of constitutional questions.

(THE NATIONAL ERA
April 21, 1859
Washington, D.C., Vol. XIII No. 642 P. 61)

Despite the fact that the law is based on text the federal judiciary is largely made up of textual degenerates. The Founders argued that the surest foundation of our government is its written Constitution. Those who would make all of the people's discriminations for them argue that it emits "penumbras" that only they can see. If the people are increasingly illiterate then they are textual degenerates of another sort who will tend to rely on someone else making all their discriminations for them. So they will be blind to tyranny until it has an obvious impact on them personally and by then it is too late.

(This issue is discussed from the angle of the issue of abortion over at Hyscience.)

Asians stuck in feudalism work as serfs....inside computer games

"Sack" is the only name I'm given for the person I'm supposed to contact. He lives in the Fujian province of China, but his place of business is online—he plays Lineage II. He's paid about 56 cents an hour to work in a videogame "sweatshop."

If the term sounds familiar, it's because of Lee Caldwell. The notorious MMORPG scripter got busted four years ago for admitting that his company, BlackSnow, hired workers in Tijuana to earn gold by "farming" in Ultima Online. Caldwell sold that in-game tender online for a handsome real-world profit while only paying his employees pennies on the dollar. Since 1998, the second-party market for MMORPG loot has steadily grown. Last year alone, this newfound industry grossed roughly $500 million, according to Bob Kiblinger of UOTreasures. CGW decided it was high time to go underground and find some of the key players who are going after a piece of the action.

(1up.com)
(From sweatshops to stateside corporations,
some people are profiting off of MMO gold.
by James Lee)

MMO = Massively Multiplayer Online, or something like that. They're big virtual worlds. Funny, the virtual world is like the real world for parts of the world stuck back in feudalism.

It should be noted:

For all the so-called virtual sweatshops discovered, a lot of these young men and boys don't mind their jobs, and they aren't exactly working in sweatshop conditions. There's a world of difference between making sneakers and watching bots fight all day. However, they are underpaid, or as Smooth Criminal puts it, "They get paid dirt. But dirt is good where they live."

(Ib.)

There is always some Marxist around who thinks that the solution to exploitation is to make everyone unemployed through some totalitarian system. Ironically, Marx himself argued that capitalism is a necessary step between feudalism and communism.

In related news: New Chinese clinic aims to combat online gaming addiction (GameIndustryBiz)

I rather like some cold toads.

A Book Review

I read a book over the weekend that happened to be in my parent's vacation house. It was State of Fear by Michael Crichton, the first novel I have read in a few years. Ironically, although it is fiction it deals with a form of scientism in our times, i.e. "global warming." It's like one can't escape it these days. I found the way the author paints verbal pictures of the mommy Earth type of New Man amusing. I suspect that some scientific cold toads will be hopping mad about it. Anyway, onward....an example of the New Man:

“Listen,” he said. “I have to go see Nick for a bit.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll come back,” he said, “as soon as I can.”

“I’ll be fine,” she repeated. He stood, and she stood, too. On a sudden impulse he gave her a hug. She was so tall they were almost shoulder to shoulder. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”

She returned the hug, but when he released her, she said, “Don’t ever do that again, Peter. I’m not hysterical. I’ll see you when you get back.”

He left hastily, feeling foolish. At the door, she said, “By the way, Peter: Do you have a gun?” “No,” he said. “Do you?”

“Just a 9-millimeter Beretra, but it’s better than nothing.”

“Oh, okay.” As he went out the front door, he thought, so much for manly reassurances for the modern woman.

(page 152-153) It seems that the New Man has a hard time separating from the feminine sometimes. He also feels that he comes up short and resents her for it. By page 323 things are still pretty much the same:

...Sarah looked at Peter. He was good-looking, and he had the strong physique of an athlete. But sometimes he behaved like such a wimp.

“You ever do any sports?” she said.
“Sure.”
“What?”
“Squash. A little soccer.”
“Oh.”
“Hey,” he said. “Just because I don’t shoot guns. . . I’m a lawyer, for Christ’s sake.”

She was disappointed with him and not even sure why. Probably, she thought, because she was nervous and wanted somebody competent to be with her. She liked being around Kenner. He was so knowledgeable, so skilled. He knew what was going on. He was quick to respond to any situation. Whereas Peter was a nice guy, but...

The New Man is a nice guy. That's pretty much undeniable. By the way, I should note that Real Men don't write about what New Men or Real Men do or don't do. Yet that does not stop me!

It wasn't all so bad for the New Man in this section:
"...but...She watched his hands on the wheel. He drove well. And that was important today." (Ib.)

Well, there's the good hands and at least some sort of spatial reasoning. Maybe the New Man can be a Real Man? Maybe...but he'll probably have to quit being so prissy, die fighting evil and then be born again. Where do such scripts come from? By page 358 it was done:

He realized then that his experience in the crevasse had changed him—and changed him permanently. Someone had tried to kill him. .... [H]e could not have predicted the way that he felt changed by it now. He felt as if he had been physically moved—as if someone had picked him up and shifted him ten feet to one side. He was no longer standing in the same place. But he had also been changed internally. He felt a kind of solid impassivity he had not known before. There were unpleasant realities in the world, and previously he had averted his eyes from them, or changed the subject, or made excuses for what had occurred. He had imagined that this was an acceptable strategy in life—in fact, that it was a more humane strategy. He no longer believed that. .... The world was not how you wanted it to be. The world was how it was.

The "crevasse" was quite a wordly womb and the New Man had to be pulled on out of there to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Otherwise he'll always skirt the issue of Good and Evil by hiding behind Mother Nature's skirts or crawling back into her womb. Look carefully, he sometimes looks out from her skirts with fearful eyes! Fortunately, some New Men are born again:

She noticed that Evan's voice had lost its boyish hesitancy. He was no longer protesting everything Kenner said. He sounded older somehow, more mature, more solid.

So by page 359 he's coming along nicely! How nice. Well, you get the idea, I liked the book as a fast read and found it amusing. Also, he has apendices in the back of the book which deal more seriously with his research and so on. (No book that deals with scientism would be complete without mentioning the eugenics movement and the Nazis.)



Spoiler: There is a spot where a Hollywood half-wit type Leftist gets eaten alive by their supposed noble savages. Yes, believe it or not there are evil people living in Third World nations. It has to do with how they come to be Third World nations in the first place. Yet as much as I agree with doing away with stupid and ignorant ideas, having someone get eaten alive may have been a bit heavy handed. At any rate it is true, Rousseau's noble savage is not so noble while the New Man's typical refusal to deal with Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, is often dangerous to himself.