Half Sigma

The NY Times reports

Nearly one in five public schools in New Jersey has almost no poor students, the highest percentage of any state, according to a new report.

This is the reason why people move from Manhattan to New Jersey after they get married and have kids; so they can send their kids to one of these schools with no poor students.

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How much do you want to bet that Winnie Hu, the journalist who wrote the article, is either (1) child free; (2) married with children and lives in a school district that has hardly any poor kids; or (3) married to a rich husband with children and sends her kids to an expensive private school?

I never heard of it until today, but a commenter pointed out that there’s a Wikipedia article about it (which may be deleted if you read the “talk page”). Producerism has a lot of similarities to my theories of post-Marxism and value transference.

Bummer. I thought I was being original. But what the Wikipedia article chiefly lacks is an explanation of how HBD relates to the topic.

Nor am I the first person to identify the Tea Party movement as being related to this idea, as a few liberal writers have mentioned the link between the Tea Party movement and producerism, usually simultaneously accusing the movement of racism.

From the Boston Globe:

In March, 2002, Bishop walked into an International House of Pancakes in Peabody with her family, asked for a booster seat for one of her children, and learned the last seat had gone to another mother.

Bishop, according to a police report, strode over to the other woman, demanded the seat and launched into a profanity-laced rant.

When the woman would not give the seat up, Bishop punched her in the head, all the while yelling "I am Dr. Amy Bishop."

Bishop received probation and prosecutors recommended that she be sent to anger management classes, though it is unclear from court documents whether a judge ever sent her there.

Not normal behavior from a woman with a Harvard PhD.

Because mainstream political analysts are unable to the view the world through any lens other than the left-right Democrat-Republican liberal-conservative dichotomy, they cannot understand what the Tea Party movement is really about.

As you recall, Marx identified two primary classes: the capitalists and the proletariat. He didn’t use the words “value transference,” but it’s what he described. The proletariat created value through their work in the factories, and the capitalists who owned the factories unjustly transferred value from the workers to themselves.

In my famous blog post on post-Marxism, I identified the four classes of modern times. At the top and bottom of the class structure are the value transference classes. The upper class I call the value transference class, because they are rich based not on the value created by their labor, but rather by their ability to transfer value created by the value creation classes to themselves.

At the very bottom, we have the parasite class which is similar to Marx’s lumpenproletariat. The parasite class is also a value transference class, because they receive more money from the government, and do more harm to society through their negative externalities, than the value they create from their labor.

Just as in the old days of Marx, the value creation classes are angry that the value of their labor is being transferred to other classes which don’t create any value themselves. The difference, today, is that their value is being transferred not only to the upper classes, but also to the lower classes.

People who feel that the current system of government is screwing them over are the ones who support a revolution. But there would be no point to a leftist revolution, because it’s leftist policies which are transferring value from the value creators. It’s notable that Obama was elected by the value transference classes. In addition to winning the vote of the poor, Obama also carried the majority of the upper value transference class. This is why the Tea Party movement is moving in the direction of supporting a libertarian revolution rather than a communist revolution. The communists are currently in power, and the upper value transference class voted for them.

Somewhere along the way, the Tea Party movement needs to figure out that the government they really want is not a pure libertarian government, but one in which the government prevents the rich from transferring value from the value creators while also not allowing the value to be transferred to the poor.

Reads like a scene from a cheesy movie:

Ms. Bishop stepped away from her grasp. While still on the floor, Ms. Moriarity managed to crawl partially out into the hallway. Ms. Bishop, who continued shooting the entire time, then turned her attention to Ms. Moriarity, placing two hands on the gun and pointing it at her. Ms. Bishop's expression was angry—"intense eyes, a set jaw," Ms. Moriarity recalled.

With Ms. Moriarity looking up at her, Ms. Bishop pulled the trigger twice. The gun clicked, apparently out of bullets.

Ms. Moriarity scrambled back to the room. Meanwhile, Ms. Bishop, now barely in the hallway, appeared to be rummaging in her bag, perhaps attempting to reload. Ms. Moriarity took advantage of Ms. Bishop's fumbling and closed the door. Others in the room then helped her push the table against the door, fearing that Ms. Bishop would continue her rampage.

Except for the part where they cowardly barricade the door instead of physically subduing a nerdy middle aged woman whose gun no longer has any ammo in it.

According to the Boston Herald:

Bishop, now a University of Alabama professor, and her husband James Anderson met and fell in love in a Dungeons & Dragons club while biology students at Northeastern University in the early 1980s, and were heavily into the fantasy role-playing board game, a source told the Herald.

Stupid journalist doesn't realize that D&D isn't a board game.

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Not many men meet their spouses by playing D&D. Anderson was obviously the alpha-male stud of the D&D crowd.

More details about Amy Bishop’s attempt to steal a car:

After killing her brother in 1986, alleged University of Alabama shooter Amy Bishop stormed a Massachusetts car dealership with a shotgun and demanded a getaway car. That’s the story of Tom Pettigrew, who was one of the employees. “I’m thinking it’s a BB gun,” he tells the Boston Herald. But no. “I open the door and she’s right there and we basically bumped into each other and I got a shotgun right in my chest!”

“And she’s like, ‘Hands up!’” Pettigrew continues. “And I’m like, ‘Yes ma’am.’” He recalls that she demanded a car because she said, “I got into a fight with my husband.” Pettigrew says police swarmed the dealership and arrested Bishop before she could make her getaway. She was later released for reasons that now appear dubious, and the city is looking into “deficits in its past record-keeping process.” Pettigrew is surprised he’s back in the spotlight. “For the last 23 years, it was just a cool story I could tell my friends.”

Sounds like armed robbery to me. Even if killing her younger brother was really an accident, she gets away with armed robbery.

Another photo from February, 13. No evidence of global warming.

According to the Boston Herald:

A family source said Bishop, a mother of four children - the youngest a third-grade boy - was a far-left political extremist who was “obsessed” with President Obama to the point of being off-putting.

In addition to “accidentally” killing her brother, she was a suspect in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard professor.

Rosenberg was opening mail, which had been set aside by a cat-sitter, when he returned from a Caribbean vacation on Dec. 19, 1993, according to Globe reports at the time.

Opening a long, thin package addressed to "Mr. Paul Rosenberg M.D.," he saw wires and a cylinder inside. He and his wife ran from the house and called police.

The package contained two 6-inch pipe bombs connected to two nine-volt batteries.

In March 1994, the Globe reported that federal investigators had identified a prime suspect in the case. But the article did not name the suspect.

A law enforcement official said today that the investigation by the US Postal Service and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms focused on Bishop, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow who was working in the human biochemistry lab at Children's Hospital at the time, and her husband, Anderson.

Bishop surfaced as a suspect because she was allegedly concerned that she was going to receive a negative evaluation from Rosenberg on her doctorate work, the official said. The official said investigators believed she had a motive to target Rosenberg and were concerned that she had a history of violence, given that she had shot her brother to death in 1986.

No one was ever caught.

Another photo taken February 13, 2010. No evidence of global warming here.

From an article in the Boston Globe:

The town’s current chief, Paul H. Frazier, said police were prepared to arrest and charge Amy Bishop immediately after the shooting but were ordered to release her by the chief at the time, who called the death accidental. The file containing the report from officers at the scene disappeared from the station not long after.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘coverup,’ ’’ Frazier said at a press conference yesterday afternoon. “I don’t know what the thought process was of the police chief at the time.’’

. . .

Frazier, who was a Braintree officer in 1986, said Bishop fired three shots: one that hit a wall, one that killed her brother, and a third into the ceiling as she fled their Hollis Avenue home on foot. Bishop also pointed the pump-action gun at a passing vehicle in an apparent attempt to get the driver to stop before she was captured by police behind a business on nearby Washington Street, according to Frazier, who said his account came from one of the officers who responded.

Bishop was being booked when the lieutenant handling the booking received a call from Polio, “or possibly a captain on Chief Polio’s behalf,’’ ordering her release, Frazier said.

He said that Bishop’s mother was a town official at the time, possibly on the personnel board.

“This would not happen in this day and age, I can tell you that,’’ said Frazier. “The members of the department were not happy with the turn of events that occurred’’ in the Bishop case.

Frazier said that the Bishop case file was missing from the records yesterday and that he was told by an officer that it had been missing since at least 1988.

Reading the rest of the story, the shooting doesn't sound very accidental to me.

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Some interesting comments at RateMyProfessors.com :

“This class was great. Bishop makes the class interesting by talking about her research and her friends research. That speaker she had for class was hard to understand but smart. She expects alot and you need to come to every class and study. She is hot but she tries to hide it.And she is a socalist but she only talks about it after class.”

“I am in her lab and her class. She is smart, talks about more stuff than just the book. She lets me sit in her office and study. She always dresses nice. She should stop trying to straighten her hair and go natural!”

“This prof is absolutely the bomb! Knows her stuff cold, and quick witted too. Never met anyone who knows more random knowledge. Sci-fi to quantum mechanics with a little art history thrown in the mix. Who knew? Definitely take one of her courses!”

“I don't know what you people are talking about! She is not "easy" unless you are her favorite. She gets off on random**** all the time and is sooo completely scatter brained! I was there everyday, studied HARD, and still barely passed. I don't like her and don't recomend her.”

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It should be pointed out that despite her Harvard PhD, she was teaching biology to nursing students at a bottom tier state school (the University of Alabama Huntsville is the least prestigious of the Alabama campuses, and one could make the case that even the flagship University of Alabama isn't really all that prestigious), and she couldn't even get tenure there.

The National Weather Service map from the previous blog post doesn’t lie. There really is snow cover in Central Park.

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In 2005, Time Magazine soberly reported that Global Warming caused Hurricane Katrina. So given such precedent, why can't I write that the cold and snowy winter is caused by lack of global warming?

Source: National Weather Service

Snow cover in all 48 contiguous states and DC.

In addition to being snowy in the United States, it has also been one of the snowiest winters in recent memory in England .

A few years ago, global warmists predicted exactly the opposite:

In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.

Boy was he wrong.