Land of the free

Another appalling outlier statistic: the US has over 1% of its adult population incarcerated, more than any other country in both raw and per-capita numbers. Damn. China, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia all manage to get by with far fewer people thrown in jail than that beacon of freedom, the United States.

My first thought was that this could mostly be chalked up to high numbers for blacks, but while the rates for them are truly astonishingly high, it is still the case that 1 out of every 106 adult white males is locked up.

I'm going to have to try to find some positive statistics in which the US is an outlier. I'm sure there must be some.

White nationalists for Obama; Jews for white nationalism

OK, this is just weird:

"It depends on what Barack Obama does," [odious racist Jared] Taylor replied. "I mean his blackness in and of itself would not necessarily be a handicap. I'd vote for Thomas Sowell (a conservative economist at Stanford's Hoover Institution, who is black) over just about any white candidate likely to come up."

Obama, he said, "is smart enough to try to have a kind of aracial presidency. ..."I think he's got the right touch, absolutely the right touch."He continued: "People are so eager to have a man who can really unite America as he promises to do that I think they will forgive him those things, and I'm not sure I wouldn't be prepared to forgive him those things too. He's an intelligent and serious man and he realizes that he cannot be a 'black' president."

Apparently the Obama magic extends even to the ability to charm neo-Nazi shitheads. That is kind of scary.

Non-Obama related, but also weirding me out in the linked article:

The last gathering ended with long-simmering hostilities between neo-Nazis and Jewish white nationalists spilling into the open.

Jewish white nationalists! I guess there is some number Jews who really, really hate the schvartzers; to the point where they are ready to make common cause with Nazis. More on this curious phenomenon.

America the weird

The US is just a fucking weird place. I seem to be constantly stumbling over graphic reminders of this. Here's yet another scatterplot, this time of religiosity vs. per-capita GDP. Here's the source, an article by Alan Wolfe in the Atlantic that claims we shouldn't worry about religious conflict, because Jihad is going to merge with McWorld and give us Americanized McReligions in the model of Rick "Purpose-driven" Warren, that are more interested in self-improvement than holy war. I suppose that's a positive vision.

Libertarians for Obama

Given my habit of mocking and baiting libertarians, it seems only fair when their overly-simplistic principles end putting them on the right side of an issue. So if Lew Rockwell's site is suggesting that libertarians should support Obama, because war is the most pro-big-government thing there can be, and Obama is the most anti-war of the viable candidates...well, my hat is off. That Lew Rockwell is often a nexus of racism and xenophobia just heightens by admiration. I've long thought that libertarians would be truer to their principles if they allied themselves with the Democrats than Republicans (both parties of "big government", but in different ways) and it seems like they are coming around.