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November 1-15, 2004 Archive

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#schoch

The Jewish Century -- Here's a fascinating interview in the UC Berkeley alumni magazine with Berkeley history professor Yuri Slezkine about his important new book The Jewish Century. It was only about five years ago that I realized that I couldn't understand the central events of the 20th Century by continuing to conceive of Jews as merely passive victims of history. Instead, Jews played a variety of active roles in making history happen. The Moscow-born Slezkine, who is half-Jewish, puts the crucial Jewish role in 20th Century history into perspective in this interview. Dynamite stuff. Here's the opening:

 

Russell Schoch: In your book, you say that Jews experienced three Paradises and one Hell in the 20th century. Hell of course refers to the Holocaust. What are the Paradises?

Yuri Slezkine: These are the destinations of the three great migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are the two we all know about--from Eastern Europe, mostly the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, to America and to Palestine. Then there is the one I am particularly interested in: from the Pale of Settlement to the Soviet cities. Most of the Jews who stayed in Russia moved to Kiev, Kharkov, Leningrad, and Moscow, and they moved up the Soviet social ladder when they got there. This third, invisible or less visible, migration was much bigger than the one to Palestine and much more ideologically charged than the one to America. And, for the first 20 years or so of the Soviet state, it was also seen by most people involved as the most successful. But, by the end of the 20th century, it was seen by most people involved--the children and grandchildren of the original migrants--as either a tragic mistake or a non-event.

All three migrations were, in a sense, pilgrimages, and all three represented different ways of being Jewish, and of being modern, in the modern world: non-ethnic liberal statehood in the United States; secular ethnic nationalism in Israel; and communism--a world without capitalism or nationalism--in the Soviet Union. That, plus the Holocaust, of course, which stands for the dangers of not going on one of those three pilgrimages, represents much of the 20th century, I think.  [More...]

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#ahmed

Powell is gone -- For the second term, it would be most efficient for Bush to streamline his foreign policy operation by cutting out the middle men. Just appoint Ahmed Chalabi as Secretary of State and be done with it. Hey, Chalabi has plenty of experience running American foreign policy already, more than Condi Rice whose main job during the first term was reassuring Bush that he wasn't too lazy and ignorant to be President, keeping Bush from exclaiming, "I had this terrible nightmare. It was like I was back in school during Finals Week, except I was President of the U.S. but I hadn't studied anything at all!"

 

Come to think of it, with the way things are going with Bush so far, that might be the only way to keep us out of a war with Iran -- put an Iranian agent in charge.

 

A reader writes:

 

What a disaster this is shaping up to be. With Gonzalez at AG, Rice as SoS and the housecleaning at CIA, one can only conclude that the president really does think he can do no wrong, and that his cabinet's only function is to agree with him and implement his policies. It's going to be a long four years.

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#rbreq

Request: What's your Red-Blue theory? I've got a commission to write a big article this week on the underlying cause of the regional differences in the vote for Bush and Kerry. I've got my pet theory, but I'd like to hear yours.

 

Also, does anybody out there know how to find out from General Social Survey data the average number of children for white Republicans and white Democrats?

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#IQ417

IQ Hypocrisy, Chapter 417 -- Among the most heavily advertised products on the Web are online IQ tests. Evidently, there is a huge market out there for IQ testing. (In case you are wondering, I have no opinion on the quality of online IQ tests. I recall an email discussion where John Derbyshire asked Charles Murray to help him interpret the score he'd gotten on a free IQ quiz. Murray replied waspishly, "You took a heavily advertised, free, seven-minute IQ test and you want me to tell you what that says about your intelligence? Haven't you answered your own question already?")

 

Yet, despite this vast interest in IQ (see various IQ hoaxes for more evidence of America's IQ obsession), the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Bell Curve has passed with almost no mention by either the mainstream media or those oh-so-courageous bloggers. So far, I have only been able to find a single 10th anniversary comment anywhere on Google that isn't by a friend of mine.

 

It is irresponsible of the press to provide almost zero informed commentary on a topic of pervasive interest, thus leaving the field wide-open to the ignorant crackpottery evident in the various hoaxes about high IQ Democrats and low IQ Republicans.

 

Here's a new interview with Murray by my pal Philippe Gouillou, the French science writer (page down to read it in English.) An excerpt:

 

PG : After TBC, you have published the impressive "Human accomplishment". What will be the topic of your next book ?

CM : The working title is "Decadence." It extends some of the themes of Human Accomplishment through its stopping point at 1950 through the rest of the century. 

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#oskwat

Oscar Watch -- The Academy Awards face a big problem this year. In a lousy year for films, the three best movies so far, in my unhumble opinion, are The Passion of the Christ, Hero, and The Incredibles, all of which did well at the box office but none of which is likely to get a Best Picture nomination. No doubt, some good movies will be released over the next six weeks (God I hope so), but this year's Oscar ceremony is likely to be most interesting for who is not there. Similarly, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, while hardly in a class with the Big 3 aesthetically, was at least lively and highly profitable. If it misses out on a Best Oscar nod, that will add to the sense that all the most interesting movies are excluded.

***

 

"The 2004 IQ Wars: So much for the candidates, what about the voters?" My new VDARE article is up. I publish, for perhaps the first time anywhere, a table of average IQs by states from a study of Vietnam Vets. It won't tell you anything about who deserved to win the election, but it is interesting.

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#julian5

Were the "hobbits" of Flores Island modern humans instead of Homo Erecti? In the NYT, Nicholas Wade ponders some of the puzzles. Australian blogger Julian O'Dea may have been the first to raise this theory. 

 

By the way, another posting of Julian's is quite interesting. He quotes British biologist Anthony Barnett's description of an experiment Barnett carried out in his refrigerator:

 

" Evolution by natural selection is about adaptive change, adjustment to circumstances, especially changed circumstances. My experiments concerned adaptation to cold. I kept house mice for many generations in refrigerators. They were 'selected' simply by being left to breed. And, after only ten generations, the 'Eskimo' mice were heavier and hairier, they produced larger litters, the females secreted more, and more concentrated milk, and they looked after their young better. The males were very parental too."

 

Among humans, ten generations would be about 250 years, so when people tell you that humans haven't been around long enough to evolve different behavioral tendencies in different regions, just act snooty and say, "Apparently, you've never heard of Barnett's mice."

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#hispads

What issues appealed to Hispanics? A reader writes:

 

Enjoyed your statistical analysis, but you did not discuss a possibly more important aspect of the Hispanic vote- ... the reasons Hispanics supported Bush. See the New York Times story a week after the election which analyzed not the vote itself, but the actual Bush and Kerry advertising appeals to Hispanics. Other analyses support the reporters' evaluation. It seems that in their ads aimed at Hispanics, the Bush-Cheney campaign used the moral issues of gay marriage and abortion and the empowerment themes of education and small business development. Surprise: No mention of immigration. The Kerry campaign on the other hand did use immigration as an issue. The actual size of the Hispanic vote for Bush is less important than WHY they voted for him, and they did so NOT in response to promises of immigration reform. This is consistent with both common sense and real-politik: Left to their own devices and charged with the task of increasing Hispanic votes for Bush, campaign managers selected issues and themes they knew would work. Conclusion: The Bush reelection may owe something to Hispanic voters, but it owes nothing to the immigration lobby.

 

Right, Hispanic voters tend to have sensibly ambivalent feelings about illegal immigration. In contrast, Hispanic political consultants and politicians are all for it because it means more money in their pockets.

***

 

Bush's Brain -- My American Conservative article on the Bush-Kerry IQ whoop-tee-do is now online:

 

For a moment, I thought Sen. John F. Kerry was the exception to the rule that all liberals are secretly obsessed—even though they tell each other they don’t believe in it—with IQ...

 

When Kerry insouciantly replied to Brokaw as if he didn't care what he scored on a 90-minute exam 38 years ago, as if he believed that all that he had accomplished since then was the proper measure of the man, I was impressed.

But then, Kerry broke the spell by quibbling about my research, "I don't know how they've done it, because my record is not public. So I don't know where you're getting that from." Evidently, IQ mattered to Kerry, too.

A few days later, Brokaw went on Don Imus' radio show and revealed just how much it bugged Kerry that I had said Bush probably had a slightly higher IQ. After the cameras had stopped rolling, Kerry had rationalized to Brokaw, "I must have been drinking the night before I took that military aptitude test."   [More...]

***

 

AEI conference on race and medicine on CSPAN: A reader writes:

 

I've enjoyed reading the articles on your website and at VDare.  I was first introduced to your works from an Amazon.com review you submitted.  I don't know if you're aware or not, but a conference about race, anthropology, and population genetics is currently on C-Span 2 (as of 8:20 pm CST Friday evening).  It is surprisingly fascinating, and borderline politically incorrect!  In fact, a few moments ago, Professor Vincent Sarich of Berkeley mentioned you by name as a friend.  Hopefully this presentation will be replayed in full on the network.  Perhaps you could spread the word to other loyal readers.

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#lovihoax

The funny thing about the Lovenstein Institute Presidential IQ hoax that The Guardian and Doonesbury fell for is that the email announcing it ended:

 

About the authors : Cristina L. Borenstein and Lana Taamar are both recently off the campaign trail where they served as receptionists for the Pennsylvania chapter of Gore For President, Inc., and have co-written the eBook Gore Got Gored. Together they publish the The Pennsylvania Court Observer which has a circulation of 5.

Dr. Lovenstein lives in a mobile home in Scranton, Pennsylvania with his long time companion Patricia F. Dilliams. When the two are not publishing reports for their Lovenstein Institute, they run an internet business www.collegedegreesforsale.com.

 

And they still didn't get it.

***

 

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#bridget2

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason -- Because the sequel to the 2001 hit is exactly the same as the original, only more so, here's an excerpt from my review of the original movie in 2001:

Probably the only people who will be disappointed by the film will be those who loved the howlingly funny book. The moviemakers have turned what was a tart satire on feminism into a pure romantic fantasy. In the book, the ditzy, incompetent, and adorable Bridget slowly comes to realize that by letting her stridently feminist friend Sharon bully her into believing that her (dismal) career was more important than marriage, she has reached the verge of wasting her life.

The novel's subversive perspective elicited howls of protest from feminists in the press. Just this Sunday, an author of a book of feminist film criticism named Molly Haskell wrote in the New York Times that the novel is "grotesquely reactionary." She went on to plaintively ask, "[H]aven't we all evolved" past Bridget's emotional states?

Considering that a couple of million more women have bought "Bridget Jones's Diary" than have bought Ms. Haskell's theorizing, the answer seems clear. As Darwin pointed out, humans don't evolve very fast. Modern women feel the same emotions as their cavewomen ancestors.

Novelist Helen Fielding modeled Bridget's misleading mentor Sharon on her own friend, the documentary filmmaker Sharon Maguire. Perhaps in repayment for fictionalizing her as a hypocritical harpy, Fielding promised to let Maguire direct the movie version. Not surprisingly, Maguire's movie fails to lampoon her own ideology.

Instead, Maguire has made a fantasy about an ugly duckling with pudgy jowls and lank hair who somehow entrances both Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. That other British sex symbol plays Mark Darcy (who is modeled upon Mr. Darcy in Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"). Firth's character is the unfashionable but rich and reliable human rights lawyer who slowly comes to worship Bridget from afar.

Much of the hype surrounding the movie claims that by putting on about 20 pounds to play Bridget, Zellweger has undermined Hollywood's obsession with actresses who, as Bridget would say, "look like stick insects." Unfortunately, Zellweger's portrayal will only reinforce Hollywood's infatuation with near-anorexia because the extra weight makers her look awful. Many of the new pounds went to her face and arms. Since Zellweger has the scrunched up features of someone suffering an allergy attack, the only time her face appears even moderately attractive is when she's concentration-camp thin.

Now, Zellweger's an excellent actress, so it may seem harsh to dwell on her physical shortcomings. But it's necessary because the fact that Zellweger puts her pounds on in unappealing places made it hopeless for the movie to even try to get across the book's satirical point about Bridget's neurotic obsession with her weight. The character in the novel, whose weight fluctuates between 119 and 133, isn't fat by any rational standard. She's just overweight by the unnatural norms that women in her fashionable social strata apply to each other.

If Jennifer Aniston of "Friends" had played Bridget, she could have helped make the movie a terrific satire on the media business' diet frenzies. Plump Aniston up and most of the added weight would have gone to her hips and breasts. In any normal human culture that values child-bearing capacity in women, a voluptuous Aniston would have been viewed as a goddess.

But the upper reaches of Anglo-American society have become deeply suspicious of women who show evidence of an ample supply of womanly hormones. A thoroughly modern man worries that a woman who grows her own breasts, rather than buying them from a plastic surgeon, might want to use them someday. If he married her, she might quit her job and stay home to breastfeed her babies. And then how could he afford the trendy life?

(The rest of my movie reviews are here.)

A few notes about the new film. The book it's based on is even funnier than the original, but they don't keep much of it. Most of the new inventions aren't as good as the unfilmed material in the book -- especially the film's groaningly stupid lesbian plot twist starring the world's least likely lesbian. And they eliminate the climax of the novel when Bridget is finally freed from a month in a Bangkok prison on a rice and water diet, rushes to a scale, and records in her diary:

114 lbs. (Yess! Yess! Triumphant culmination of 18-year diet, though perhaps at unwarranted cost.)

Women moviegoers love the moment when the ugly duckling turns into a swan, and this would have been a great parody, but the movie completely passes it up. They could have filmed Zellwegger's release at a 114 pounds first, then checked her into a hotel in, say, Bologna for two weeks of intensive fattening up while they filmed the mandatory Hugh Grant - Colin Firth fistfight over her, then filmed the rest of the movie. It would have been easy, but they didn't do it.

One reason they couldn't stick to the book is that Zellwegger is 42 months older and looks even worse than in the first movie, while the second book's plot is predicated on Bridget actually being a definite hot number by anybody's standard except for that of the dating market she competes in, which consists of the top 2% of the U.K.'s eligible bachelors and bachelorettes.

On the other hand, the filmmakers do pump up the role of the cad Daniel Cleaver, and since he's played by Hugh Grant, who is the best cad in the business right now, that's a more than welcome change. 

As Bridget's two-timing boss, Grant (who played cute but fluttery leads in the similar British romantic comedies "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Notting Hill") had women in the preview audience audibly gasping at his leering sexiness. Like Pierce Brosnan before him, the 40-year-old Grant has finally matured out of his pretty boy youth. More importantly, he has also brought under control his always-remarkable ability to cycle rapidly through facial expressions.

In the past, Grant has tended to come across as a twitchy, dithering cross between Ally McBeal and William F. Buckley Jr. Here, though, he uses his face's ability to send multiple messages in a fraction of a second to show off dominance rather than diffidence. When flirting with Bridget, his lustful looks tell Bridget that not only does he want her, but that he knows she knows he wants her, leaving her feeling arousingly checkmated by his masterful control of the situation.

Interestingly, Zellweger appears to have responded to the challenge of playing against Grant's famously mobile features by raising her own game. She's always been a fine actress, but now you can watch one emotion after another flit momentarily across her face. 

 

UPDATE: A reader writes: 

 

Zellweger's "scrunched up features" are from a Swiss father and Norweigian Lapp\Saami mother, which explains her Oriental facial features.

 

Cool! The invaluable IMDB.com reports:

 

Her Norwegian mother, Kjellfrid Irene Andreassen, is of sami origin (a minority originating mainly from the northern parts of the Scandinavian peninsula often referred to as Lapland). Zellweger herself has many typical sami features, such as the strong cheekbones and the squinty eyes.

 

(Zellweger's dad was born in St. Gallen canton in Switzerland where the Sailers are from, but that's of only local interest.)

 

Now, can anybody fill me in on why Icelandic singer Bjork looks the way she does? Is she part Lapp too, or is she part Eskimo? Were her ancestors the last Vikings to make it out of Greenland alive back around 1400?

***

 

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#guardianz

British Journalism's Fact-Checking Standards Are Abysmal: You'll recall that the most important mainstream publication to fall for the state IQ hoax last May was The Economist, and that the main purveyor of the Lovenstein Institute hoax claiming Bill Clinton's IQ was 182 and George W. Bush's was 91 was The Guardian. Now, the Guardian is back with a long think piece about the state IQ hoax:

 

Mr [Chris] Evans was careful to cite the Economist magazine as his source - he did not vouch for the table that so many had rushed to consult. The Economist (May 15 2004) had cited as its source the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen (2002).

 

The article then goes on to give four paragraphs detailing the fictitious IQ data. It never mentions that The Economist issued a retraction on May 20, 2004:

 

Clueless in St James's

Last week we published a list that purported to show the IQs of states voting for George Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Alas, we were the victim of a hoax: no such data exists. By way of apology, here are two very crude ratings of states' intelligence—and how they voted. 

 

Eventually, The Guardian gets around to admitting:

 

More tellingly, the Evans-Economist table is, as bloggers such as the (ultra-conservative) Steve Sailer [hmmhmmh, I prefer "level-headed, truth-telling realist Steve Sailer," if you please] have protested, probably something of a hoax: a concoction of Democratic wishful thinking and statistical manipulation. It does not, in fact, come from the book cited, although, as other corrective bloggers pointed out, for example) there are correlations that generally agree with the Lynn and Vanhanen thesis as regards (a) levels of income and levels of intelligence, and (b) levels of income and recent American voting patterns. But the issue is a whole lot fuzzier than everything above IQ 100 Blue: everything below IQ 100 Red.

 

No, it's not "something of a hoax," it is a hoax, 100% a hoax.

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#marquardt

More on IQ and Voting: Here's the education levels of voters in the 2002 Midterm elections broken out by race. This comes from the long-lost exit poll data that I bought and personally number-crunched. GOP candidates for the House of Representatives did exceptionally well with the well educated in 2002, especially compared to Bush's rather downscale re-election campaign in 2004.

 

As you can see, with each race, the GOP did the worst with high school dropouts. With whites and Hispanics it did the best with college grads, and among blacks, Republican candidates greatest appeal was to those who had done postgrad studies (not necessarily a postgrad degree -- and all this is self-reported so there is likely some exaggeration of credentials, although voters do tend to be better educated than nonvoters.)

 

So, overall, there was a positive correlation between educational level and Republicanism. Still, the fact that for whites, there was a drop-off between college grad and postgrad in support for the GOP indicates

 

2002 House Elections
Education Level % of total GOP Share
White
No HS 3% 53%
HS Grad 22% 56%
Some College 30% 61%
College Grad 26% 63%
Some Postgrad 20% 54%
Black
No HS 7% 2%
HS Grad 25% 4%
Some College 38% 10%
College Grad 22% 16%
Some Postgrad 8% 19%
Hispanic
No HS 14% 27%
HS Grad 22% 31%
Some College 35% 35%
College Grad 18% 55%
Some Postgrad 11% 40%

 

For comparison, here are the GOP candidates for the House's share of whites in 2002 versus Bush's share of whites in 2004. The 2004 numbers come from a post-election phone poll of 1800 respondents conducted by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg's Democracy Corps (see p. 34 of this big PDF):

 

GOP House 2002 Bush 2004
No HS 53% NA
HS Grad 56% 62%
Some College 61% 61%
College Grad 63% 58%
Some Postgrad 54% 48%

 

Republican House candidates in 2002 got 59% of the white and Bush in 2004 got 58%, so it's a clean comparison. Clearly, Bush's re-election campaign appealed to people farther down the educational ladder than the 2002 House candidates, although the difference is not huge.

*

 

Scott Marquardt graphs IQ, income, and voting by state. IQ comes out a wash but Kerry states tend to be richest, followed by very heavily Bush states, with moderately Bush states the poorest.

 

On an individual level, Bush did somewhat better with high income people, but something that jumps out from the county maps showing the vast, empty red counties and the small, crowded blue counties is that while liberals may not be particularly rich themselves, liberals like to live near rich people.

 

I'm actually quite serious about this. One of the big things going on in the country is that people with bigger families are moving to the emptier Red states where it's easier to afford a bigger family. People with no or few kids are moving to the more crowded Blue states, where cultural amenities are denser.

***

 

"From the Folks who Brought You President Kerry ..." My new VDARE column showing that the exit poll's claim that 44% of Hispanics voted for Bush is not just unrealistic, but it's internally inconsistent, assuming that Hispanic voters in small states cast over 100% of their voters for Bush.

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#gonzo

Bush thanks religious conservatives for their votes by dumping their hero John Ashcroft and replacing him with Alberto Gonzales, who gutted Ted Olson's objections to racial quotas at the U. of Michigan, which is the main reason the Supreme Court validated affirmative action last year. Randall Parker has the ugly details on what Gonzales' nomination means for immigration (Prop. 200 voters -- you've been warned) and quotas.

 

I just found out today that Gonzales was a year ahead of me at Rice U. Funny, Rice has only 2600 undergrads, but I can't recall ever hearing of him while I was there.

 

So far, in the week since Bush's re-election, it looks like Invade-the-World-Invite-the-World is his highest priority for his second term.

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#arrrrgggh

Our Infallible Leader's pet obsession is back: From the Washington Times:

 

President Bush yesterday moved aggressively to resurrect his plan to relax rules against illegal immigration, a move bound to anger conservatives just days after they helped re-elect him. The president met privately in the Oval Office with Sen. John McCain to discuss jump-starting a stalled White House initiative that would grant legal status to millions of immigrants who broke the law to enter the United States...

"We are formulating plans for the legislative agenda for next year," said White House political strategist Karl Rove. "And immigration will be on that agenda." He added: "The president had a meeting this morning to discuss with a significant member of the Senate the prospect of immigration reform. And he's going to make it an important item."

While the president was huddling with Mr. McCain, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was pushing the plan during a visit to Mexico City. "The president remains committed to comprehensive immigration reform as a high priority in his second term," he told a meeting of the U.S.-Mexico Binational Commission. "We will work closely with our Congress to achieve this goal."

 

Bush should name his bill "The George P. Bush Dynastic Succession Enablement Act."

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#arrrrgggh

Our Infallible Leader's pet obsession is back: From the Washington Times:

 

President Bush yesterday moved aggressively to resurrect his plan to relax rules against illegal immigration, a move bound to anger conservatives just days after they helped re-elect him. The president met privately in the Oval Office with Sen. John McCain to discuss jump-starting a stalled White House initiative that would grant legal status to millions of immigrants who broke the law to enter the United States...

"We are formulating plans for the legislative agenda for next year," said White House political strategist Karl Rove. "And immigration will be on that agenda." He added: "The president had a meeting this morning to discuss with a significant member of the Senate the prospect of immigration reform. And he's going to make it an important item."

While the president was huddling with Mr. McCain, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was pushing the plan during a visit to Mexico City. "The president remains committed to comprehensive immigration reform as a high priority in his second term," he told a meeting of the U.S.-Mexico Binational Commission. "We will work closely with our Congress to achieve this goal."

 

Bush should name his bill "The George P. Bush Dynastic Succession Enablement Act."

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#aced

Education levels and voting: From my upcoming article in the Dec. 6th American Conservative:

 

A more direct comparison of the parties' voters can be found in the 2000 exit poll, where Bush voters reported an average educational level negligibly greater than Gore voters. Gore did best among high school dropouts and those who had undertaken post-graduate studies, with Bush leading among those in-between. (Many Democrats with advanced degrees, by the way, are public school teachers with credentials in the easy field of Education.)

In the 2002 midterm elections, voters supporting Republican House candidates were particularly well-educated. The GOP won 58% - 40% among college graduates and even captured a majority among postgrads for the first time in many years.

In 2004, Bush's majority was more downscale. If you assume that high school dropouts averaged 10 years of schooling, high school grads 12 years, those who attended college but didn't graduate 14 years, college grads 16, and postgrads 18, then Kerry voters claimed 14.64 years of education and Bush voters 14.48 years, or only about six weeks less schooling.

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#polarx

The Polar Express - From my upcoming review of Robert Zemeckis' $160 million G-rated Christmas pageant, starring Tom Hanks, in the Dec. 6th American Conservative:

 

Chris Van Allsburg, author of 1985's The Polar Express, writes and paints the kind of hardcover picture books that win the Caldecott Medal, bedtime books that, at $18.95 each, only grandparents can afford. This format tends toward bland multiculturalist fare of the Lo-Ming and N!xau Celebrate Cinco de Mayo ilk that libraries feel obligated to buy, but Van Allsburg creates mysterious, sometimes sinister tales that kids actually enjoy.

When Van Allsburg's Jumanji was made into a 1995 Robin Williams picture, the paucity of his plot required the screenwriters to tart up the movie with an elaborate backstory. His Polar Express is even sketchier, consisting, along with his lovely but oblique paintings, of no more than a few hundred words. On Christmas Eve, a boy who is not sure he believes in Santa Claus anymore finds a magic train in front of his house, which takes him to the North Pole where Santa gives him a bell from his sleigh.

Zemeckis add a few characters, some rollercoaster action, and two musical numbers, but, on the whole, he stoically resists injecting conflict, motivation, humor, or even incident into the soporific storyline, which Van Allsburg devised, after all, to lull excited children to sleep on Christmas Eve.

While placid, the G-rated "The Polar Express" is pleasant and unobjectionable. It's endorsement of the will to believe is in tune with the times. It's even mildly admirable for bucking the "War against Christmas" waged by the bureaucrats to replace Christmas with a diversity-sensitive "Winter Solstice Holiday" -- a top-down cultural revolution opposed by 50 million Christmas-loving children. Now, that could inspire an exciting Christmas fantasy.

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#melg

Conservative anger at Hollywood - A clear theme since the election is how much conservatives resent the huge influence of Hollywood liberals. But, guys, the solution isn't to write snarky blog items about it. The solution is to do what Mel Gibson did: Make really good conservative movies.

***

 

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#incredibles

The Incredibles - From my upcoming review in the Dec. 6th American Conservative:

 

Superheroes normally have wards or nephews instead of children because real kids hate to imagine their own parents engaging in derring-do. Brad Bird wisely sidesteps this by having the adventurous couple's daughter raise to her younger brother the specter of the only fate that scares modern children more than death - divorce: "Mom and Dad's lives could be in danger, or worse -- their marriage!"

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#foxbutter

Flat Learning Curve at the NYT: A friend writes:

 

Sensing I had heard the song before, I went to Nexis immediately after noting the following hilarious headline over Fox Butterfield's entry in today's New York Times: "Despite Drop in Crime, An Increase in Inmates."

     Other Butterfield-based headlines, from Nexis:

     "Number In Prison Grows, Despite Crime Reduction" -- Aug. 10, 2000

     "Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops" -- Aug. 9, 1998

     "Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling" -- Sept. 28, 1997

Jayson Blair at least kept changing the subject.

***

 

The absurdity of the exit poll's Hispanic figures: A reader adds a telling fact to my VDARE.com article attacking the NEP exit poll's claim that Bush's Hispanic share leapt upward by 9 points:

 

Did you see the Oklahoma exit poll numbers for Hispanics? Supposedly 74% voted for Bush!  That's 3 points higher than for white Oklahomans!  

 

What a joke...

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#turk

The IQ Hoax makes the Turkish newspapers! From Vatan, under the headline "Bush'a oy verenlerin IQ'su düsük çikti:"

 

Kerry'nin eyaletleri
Connecticut: 113
Massachusetts: 111
New Jersey: 111
New York: 109
Hawaii: 106
New Hampshire: 105
California: 101

bush'un eyaletleri
Ohio: 99
Teksas: 92
Oklahoma: 90
Güney Carolina: 89
Idaho: 87
Utah: 87
Missisipi: 85

 

UPDATE: A friend writes: 

 

This data was displayed this morning on Japanese national television as the truth by Dave Specter, an American who speaks Japanese fluently and appears frequently as a "commentator."

 

For my debunking of this resurgent hoax, click here. You can see the full phony-baloney table, in English, here.

 

In contrast, here is a good-faith attempt at making up a realistic list of states by IQ and voting. (By the way, in most of the red states at the bottom of the list, the main reason they are at the bottom is because of the lower average IQs of the Democrats in those states.)

***

 

My new VDARE.com column on the election is up:

 

It took four years, but the conventional wisdom has finally accepted the “Sailer Strategy”—my oft-repeated argument (which got VDARE.com banned by Free Republic) that the simplest way for the GOP to win national elections is not outreach to minorities, but inreach, to its white base.

No doubt my check is in the mail.

We ridiculed Karl Rove's widely celebrated minority outreach initiatives—such as Bush's misbegotten promise in the 2000 campaign to weaken anti-terrorist efforts in pursuit of the Muslim vote (which turned out to only make up 0.3 percent of the electorate anyway).

And we applauded when, in the crunch before the 2002 midterm election, Rove abandoned trying to broaden the tent in favor of turning out the base, with excellent results.

Bush got his 2004 re-election campaign off to a potentially disastrous start by calling for Open Borders last January. But Congressional Republicans quickly hushed it up. Indeed, Bush benefited from a bit of his patented luck—his proposal to allow unlimited numbers of the world's six billion foreigners to move to America to work at minimum wage jobs was so insanely beyond comprehension that it simply didn't register with the media or the public. John Kerry never even attacked him for it.

That almost nobody could grasp that their President wanted to open the borders to hundreds of millions of aliens reminded me of that 1996 Simpsons' election episode where Kodos, the green space monster, kidnaps and impersonates Bill Clinton, but the public can't bring themselves to notice the hideous truth about their President:

 

Kodos [disguised as Clinton]: "I am Clin-Ton. As overlord, all will kneel trembling before me and obey my brutal commands." [Crosses arms] "End communication."

 

Marge Simpson: "Hmm, that's Slick Willie for you, always with the smooth talk."

 

Indeed, by the end of the campaign, Bush, who never lacks for effrontery, was scoring points by denouncing Kerry for advocating amnesty for illegal aliens!

 

I also debunk the claim that Bush did radically better among Hispanics.

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#edincpol

Sailer's Theory of Education, Income, and Politics: "An individual whose educational level is higher than his income would predict will tend to vote Democratic. An Individual whose income is higher than his educational level would predict will tend to vote Republican."

 

Any thoughts?

 

A reader writes:

 

Your theory needs a little fine tuning, in my humble opinion. Engineers and scientists seem to vote Republican. They're real smart, but don't make nearly as much money as say, an ambulance chasing lawyer (John Edwards) or a high-level bureaucrat in an NGO with a degree in "Art therapy" or "Underwater Basketweaving."

Pseudo-intellectuals tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic, as I learned in my years going to college in Washington, D.C.

 

That's true. I grew up around conservative-voting Lockheed engineers, including Henry Combs, the chief designer of the most magnificent industrial artifact of the 20th Century, the SR-71, and they didn't make too much money.

*

 

Actors and singers would be exceptions in the opposite direction -- make lots of money with little education and vote left.

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#canadanogo

Hey, Democrats thinking of moving to Canada! How do you know Canada wants you? 

 

Back in 2001, I wrote about Canada's system for choosing immigrants. I know, I know, the concept of choosing immigrants sounds downright un-American, but that's how the Canadians do it. Unfortunately for American Democrats, they may not get in:

 

Canada doesn't want me. I just found out that, if necessary, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would bar me from immigrating into Canada. Why?

Because I'm just not good enough to be a Canadian.

With possible immigration reform much in the news in America, I decided to research Canada's system for choosing immigrants. Perhaps America could learn something from its northern neighbor.

The Canadian government has a voracious appetite for new immigrants. The ruling Liberals intend to boost the legal immigration rate to 1 percent of the population annually, about three times the American rate. Despite that, I discovered, its official position is that the people currently living in Canada would find my joining them to be less of a blessing than a curse.

In 15 minutes, on the government's "self-assessment worksheet" at Web site cic.gc.ca, I was able to learn that Canada's considered judgment of me is, "Don't call us, we'll call you."

On this nine-question test, a would-be immigrant to Canada must score a minimum of 60 points out of 100 to qualify to be interviewed by a visa officer.

It's not that I particularly want to become a Canadian. I'm a loyal American, born and bred. I've only spent about six days in Canada in my life. From what I saw (mostly the insides of Holiday Inn Crowne Plazas), Canada seemed to be a fine country; one blessed with Holiday Inn Crowne Plazas every bit as nice as those in my native land. Still, I couldn't resist the challenge. Was I man enough to be a Canadian?

I sat down to take the test. First, I found, you get 8 points just for having a pulse. "Hey, how hard can this be?" I said to my wife.

Then the test inquired into a series of important facts about oneself.

How old are you? I'm 42, which won me the maximum of 10 points for being in my immigrating prime. But not for long. I'll soon enter a rapid decline. By age 49, I'll get zero points.

How much schooling have you had? High school dropouts get zero; high school graduates, five; college grads 15; advanced degree holders 16.

Those two long years I spent getting an MBA have finally paid off! Chalk up 16 more points for me.

I'm rolling now, with a running total of 34 points.

Can you speak English and/or French fluently? I get nine points for English, but what about snagging those additional six for French? Perhaps they'd be a good sport and give me a few points just for trying to parlez la (le?) Francais? No. As anyone who has attempted to speak French has learned the hard way, trying isn't good enough. You have to be able to "comprehend and communicate effectively on a range of general topics" -- and that's just to score three points.

So, I'm at 43 points by now.

Do you have a close relative in Canada? That's worth five points. No. My wife helpfully pointed out that one of her Italian great-uncles stayed in Canada for a few months before he could arrange to sneak into the United States. I appreciated her suggestion, but didn't think that would count.

Maybe I could talk one of my uncles into moving to Canada ahead of me. But what if he couldn't qualify unless I moved to Canada ahead of him? Thinking about this made my head hurt, so I moved on to the occupation questions.

Do you have a guaranteed job arranged in Canada? No. The closest I could come to that is to point out that last year I had a part-time job in Canada. Oddly enough, while I was living in Chicago, I was actually hired as a columnist by one of Toronto's biggest newspapers, even though I haven't been to Canada since 1994.

Unfortunately, I was fired almost immediately, probably because my awareness of Canadian culture was limited to knowing that it is intensely beaver-centric and that Wayne Gretzky is (was?) a hockey player.

How much formal education or training does your occupation require? To be frank, I've never noticed that journalism requires any. As irascible basketball coach Bobby Knight likes to point out to reporters, "Everybody learns to write by the second grade, but then most of us move on to other things."

Yet, somebody has apparently hoodwinked the trusting Canadian authorities into awarding journalists 15 out of 18 points, the same as they give computer systems analysts and tree-service technicians.

Does Canada need more workers in your field? As a journalist, I only scored three out of 10. It would appear that Canada is quite capable of producing an ample supply of native know-it-alls and doesn't need much help from abroad. Importing additional journalists is officially deemed less important to Canada's well being than bringing in more blacksmiths (5 points), not to mention extra clinical perfusionists (10 points).

Whatever it is that clinical perfusionists do, Canada can't seem to get enough of it. I tried to assure the authorities that if they admitted me -- while I wouldn't actually know how to clinically perfuse anybody (anything?) -- I would definitely write hard-hitting editorials deploring the clinical perfusion shortage and demanding that Steps Must Be Taken. But there was no place on the form to indicate that.   [Continued here...]

*

 

A reader writes:

 

I've had a lot of lefties tell me they are going to move to Canada or New Zealand due to the election, so I then ask them why it is they don't move to a country run by (and with a majority of) 'people of color'. They have no real answer, so I then tell them that the only logical explanation is that they are racists. I figure if I keep it up at least one of them will move to the Sudan in order to prove me wrong.

***

 

 

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#iqhoaxrec

The State IQ hoax claiming that Democratic states have much higher IQs (Connecticut = 113) have much higher IQs than Republican states (Utah = 87) flared up again, with just one website publishing the fictitious table reporting 540,000 hits.. This time, however, lots of people immediately linked to my debunking from last May, providing iSteve.com with its busiest day ever on 11/5/04. One person wrote:

 

Just thought I'd drop you a note saying thanks for debunking that.  I am a diehard liberal, voted for Kerry (almost for a 3rd party leftist) and one thing I can't stand is hateful lies from either side.  A bunch of liberal friends showed me the IQ chart, which I didn't believe, so I looked it up and found your analysis of it.  If liberals want to attack conservatives for the truthfulness of their propaganda, they need to first examine their own information before passing it on.  I'm with you that this is an attempt on the part of the democrats to feel better about themselves and put down republicans, and the fact that it is so spiteful and false is shameful.

 

I just finished an essay for the December 6, 2004 issue of The American Conservative (available to electronic subscribers about Saturday, November 13) on the propensity of liberals to simultaneously deny the validity of IQ while obsessing over their supposed superiority in IQ over conservatives.

 

By the way, this page makes a good faith attempt to estimate average IQs by state from SAT and ACT scores. The methodology is far from bulletproof, but the author's results sound not too implausible: his estimates range from an average of 94 in Mississippi and South Carolina to 104 in New Hampshire. If you can think of a better way to do it, send the author an email.

***

 

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#vest

Kudos to Mickey Kaus for guessing right on Bush's back bulge -- It apparently is his bulletproof vest, So, here's a follow-up rumor (which I just made up out of whole cloth): If Bush looks lean and trim while wearing a bulletproof vest, he must in reality be wasting away down to Karen Carpenter proportions underneath it! Is Bush anorexic?

***

 

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#alfie

"Alfie:" From my review in The American Conservative: This 60s-remake genre's only success was last year's nifty updating of the Michael Caine heist flick "The Italian Job," so it was predictable that Caine's trademark film, the 1966 comedy-drama "Alfie" about a womanizing Cockney chauffeur, would be redone. As Canadian seer Colby Cosh has noted, Hollywood believes that "The public adores the familiar, even if all they know is that it should be familiar," and anybody who has ever set foot in a piano bar has that catchy Bacharach-David line "What's it all about, Alfie?" tattooed to their gray matter.

Jude Law, the cute young Englishman who is in six movies this autumn, replaces Caine as the cad who slowly learns he should have acted like a dad, but incompatibilities quickly surface. Caine was 33, a Korean combat veteran, 6'-2," and every inch a man. With his bulging Adam's apple and pop eyes, Caine's Alfie was a tad funny-looking but his cast-iron confidence made him irresistible. In Alfie's many asides spoken directly to the camera, Caine's rather flat affect was ultimately less tiresome than Law's attempts to charm and seduce. In short, Caine addressed the men in the audience, Law the women...

Changes in the script mostly dissipate the elemental power of the original. The cad vs. dad distinction (first named by anthropologist Henry Harpending in 1982) had been underlined by the first version's subplot where Alfie's stand-by girlfriend, whom he won't marry or support even though she'd given him a beloved son, wedded an unsexy bus conductor because he'd promised to provide for her little boy. Two years later, a despondent Alfie chanced upon the now-happy family at the christening of their second child.

But Law's Alfie isn't even the father of Marisa Tomei's little boy, and when she eventually dumps him, it's for a guy who is so cool-looking that he could be the bass-player for The Strokes.

Even worse is the loss of the famous climax that shattered, at least temporarily, Alfie's regal self-assurance. After he'd impregnated a sick friend's wife, he hired an illegal abortionist to induce her to deliver a stillbirth in his apartment. Returning home later, the camera focuses in on his trembling face as he found, we later learn, the dead body of his tiny but perfectly formed child.

Forty million legal abortions later, no Hollywood movie would dare drive home the reality of abortion so powerfully. So, Law's Alfie merely chauffeurs his pal's girlfriend to the clinic, where, predictably, she decides not to have the abortion. In today's films, almost nobody ever actually has an abortion. See, everybody in Hollywood is pro-choice, but being pro-choice isn't about having abortions, it's about, like, the abstract, metaphysical concept of choice, you know.

Okay, sure, whatever … but it makes for a forgettable movie.

***

 

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#Hisptex

Request for help: For my VDARE column that will appear Sunday night, I need to evaluate Dick Morris' spin

 

GEORGE W. Bush was re-elected on Tuesday because the Hispanic vote, long a Democratic Party preserve, shifted toward the president's side. The USA Today exit poll shows Hispanics, who had voted for Al Gore by 65 percent to 35 percent, supported Kerry by only 55 to 43. Since Hispanics accounted for 12 percent of the vote, their 10-point shift meant a net gain for Bush of 2.4 percent which is most of the improvement in his popular-vote share.

 

I like ol' Dick, but even I have to admit that no pundit is more spectacularly wrong about more things on a regular basis than Dick Morris. 

Obviously, he's totally exaggerated the size of the Hispanic vote, but did Bush really score in the mid 40s with Hispanics? I've looked through the troubled NEP exit poll data, and most of the states look reasonable: California 32%, Illinois 23%, New York 24%, Colorado 30%, Nevada 39%, Florida 56%, etc., but that national figure appears to be driven by an eye-popping report of 59% of Hispanics for Bush in Texas, up 16 percentage points from 43% in 2000.

So, what I need your help with is in finding articles from local newspapers evaluating on a county or precinct basis voting by ethnic bloc. For example, if Bush really did carry 59% of the Hispanic vote in Texas, then he should have swept the mostly Hispanic counties in the Rio Grande Valley. Did that actually happen?

***

 

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#nclbf16

Bush puts teeth in his No Child Left Behind law:

LITTLE EGG HARBOR, N.J. Nov 4, 2004 — A National Guard F-16 fighter jet on a nighttime training mission strafed an elementary school with 25 rounds of ammunition, authorities said Thursday. No one was injured.

The military is investigating the incident that damaged Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School shortly after 11 p.m.

Police were called when a custodian who was the only person in the school at the time heard what sounded like someone running across the roof.

Police Chief Mark Siino said officers noticed punctures in the roof. Ceiling tiles had fallen into classrooms, and there were scratch marks in the asphalt outside.

The pilot of the single-seat jet was supposed to fire at a target on the ground three and half miles away from school, said Col. Brian Webster, commander of the 177th Fighter Wing of the New Jersey Air National Guard. He does not know what happened that led to the school getting shot up.

***

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#chalabster

What Kerry should have done: Just as Bush ran against Saddam Hussein, Kerry should have run against Ahmed Chalabi. Kerry should have constantly called the war in Iraq "the Cheney-Chalabi War." He should have ignored Bush, whom lots of people like, and focused on the baleful influence of Cheney and Chalabi as the architects of the war.

 

After 9/11, Americans wanted an Ay-rab to hate. Bush gave them Saddam Hussein, even though he didn't have anything to do with 9/11. Kerry should have blamed the Iraq war on Cheney's infatuation with this fat Arab convicted embezzler. It would have worked psychologically and it was certainly a lot more honest than what the Bush Administration did. 

 

So, why did Kerry stop talking about Chalabi during the last months of the campaign? Presumably, because Chalabi's supporters in the Administration were disproportionately Jewish, and the neocons would have smeared Kerry as anti-Semitic. Better to lose the Presidency than that! 

 

In reality, the voters don't know from neocons. Kerry should simply have talked about Cheney as Chalabi's conduit to control over American foreign policy.

***

 

 

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#votesmart

How smart are Bush and Kerry voters? I'm getting thousands of hits today because last May's IQ by state hoax is hot again as Kerry supporters try to console themselves by proving that they have higher IQs than Bush supporters. But what about 2004?

 

Probably the simplest and surest way to get actual data on this question is by looking at the education level demographics in the exit poll data. As I've mentioned, I'm cynical about the accuracy of Tuesday's monopoly exit poll, but it's probably as good we've got. So, let's put education credentials on a 1 to 5 scale with:

 

No high school degree = 1

High school degree, no college = 2

Some college, no degree = 3

College graduate = 4

"Postgrad study" = 5

 

In 2000, Bush's voters had almost higher levels of education, with an average of 3.29 to 3.28 for Gore voters. (A 3.29 means that the average Bush voter fell 29% of the way between Some College and College Graduate). Gore did best with high school dropouts and those with postgrad study, and Bush did best in-between.

 

In the 2002 midterms, GOP candidates for the House attracted a particularly brainy bunch of voters, garnering a 3.37 to the Democratic House candidates' voters' 3.21. GOP house candidates carried college graduates by a 58-40 margin, and even won a majority among those with post-graduate study. (Please note that the post-grad category gets inflated by Democratic-voting public school teachers with advanced degrees in Education.)

 

In 2004, however, Bush went slightly down-scale, with an average voter educational level of 3.24 to Kerry's 3.32. Bush did much better among high school dropouts in 2004, attracting 49% of their vote, compared to only 35% in 2000.

 

The gap was narrower among voters for the House candidates with Democratic supporters averaging 3.31 to Republicans 3.28. (This suggests that the small number of people who voted for a  Republican House candidate but not for Bush were particularly well-educated). In sum, these are not big differences. 

 

Alternativ