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Steve Sailer

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October 2004 Archive

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#account

Accountability -- To me, the essential issue in the election is accountability: Has George W. Bush done a good enough job to justify hiring him for another four years? We don't know what the next four years will bring. (Certainly, the Bush Administration of the last four years is not, for better or worse, what anybody voted for in 2000.) All we can say with any confidence is that if we re-elect Bush, we will be rewarding the kind of behavior we've seen for the last four years, and thus we will get more of it in the future. If we reject Bush, we're sending the message that that kind of behavior will not be rewarded, so we'll see less of it.

*** 

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#tquiz

New York Times' John Tierney on IQ again: In a quiz in the NYT, Tierney asks:

When Tom Brokaw asked Mr. Kerry about a report that Mr. Bush's I.Q. was higher than his, how did he respond?

a) "But he doesn't even speak French."

b) "I've never misunderestimated his intelligence."

c) "That's great. More power."

d) "This just shows, once again, that the president has been deliberately hiding the truth from the American public."

e) "It's a great boost in our campaign to connect with voters who are still trying to figure out which candidate to support. I mean, these folks are obviously not Mensa material."

***

So, what will be the impact of Saturday night's extra hour of sleep on the election? I'm just throwing this out there because it doesn't seem much stupider of a thing to worry about than anything else people are talking about.

***

So, what's his excuse for the 31 years since Goodbye Yellow Brick Road? The Washington Post reports:

Pop star Elton John says he doesn't mean to throw tantrums -- it just comes with the territory of being creative.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#uruguay

The Left wins again in Latin America: Although Karl Rove says that Latin American immigrants are natural Republicans, back in Latin America, the masses keep voting socialist. The NY Times reports:

"Uruguay's Left Makes History by Winning Presidential Vote"
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: November 1, 2004

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Oct. 31 - Tabaré Vázquez, a Socialist doctor running as the candidate of an opposition coalition that includes former guerrillas, narrowly triumphed Sunday in the presidential election, bringing the left to power for the first time in this South American country.

The victory by the coalition, known as the Progressive-Encounter-Broad-FrontNew-Majority, whose largest faction consists of Tupamaro guerrillas turned politicians, strengthens a trend throughout the continent. As in the last presidential votes in Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina, the candidate most opposed to American-supported free-market policies has defeated backers of those policies.

Surveys of voters leaving the polls and early returns indicated that Dr. Vázquez, an oncologist and former mayor of this capital, would win about 51 percent, just above the majority needed to avoid a runoff. Even before official returns were announced, both of his main opponents had conceded and indicated their willingness to cooperate with him.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#2002first

More of my old film reviews:

First half of 2002 (Reverse chronological order)

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner - Eskimo epic

Minority Report - Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron - Animated feature

Windtalkers - Nicholas Cage, John Woo

Bad Company - Chris Rock, Anthony Hopkins

Sum of All Fears - Ben Affleck, Tom Clancy

About a Boy - Hugh Grant

Attack of the Clones - Star Wars II

Unfaithful - Diane Lane, Richard Gere, Adrian Lyne

Spider-Man -- Tobey Maguire

Life or Something Like It - Angelina Jolie

Murder by Numbers - Sandra Bullock

Other Side of Heaven - Mormon missionary movie

Death to Smoochy - Robin Williams

Big Trouble - Dave Barry, Tim Allen

E.T. 20th Anniversary Edition - Steven Spielberg

Showtime - Eddie Murphy, Robert De Niro

The Time Machine - Guy Pearce

We Were Soldiers - Mel Gibson

Dragonfly - Kevin Costner

Collateral Damage - Arnold Schwarzenegger

John Q - Denzel Washington

Birthday Girl - Nicole Kidman

Count of Monte Cristo - Jim Caviezel

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#ticketb

Why isn't TicketMaster's monopoly a political issue? I took my son to Tower Records yesterday to buy a $12 ticket to a Youth Brigade punk rock concert. So, $12 is cheap, right? But not after they added TicketMaster's $5.65 service charge (47% of the ticket price), plus a $2 "facilities access" fee that went into who knows who's pocket, so we end up spending 64% extra in fees. 

Years ago, TicketMaster (a.k.a., TicketBastard) bought its rival Ticketron and ever since has jacked up service fees to absurd levels. Is the cost of computer processing going up every year? All this profit flows into the pockets of Paul Allen, who was already one of the richest men in America from being Bill Gates' ex-roommate. This is classic monopolistic behavior, which I thought was illegal under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.

If any of you out there are thinking of running for President in 2008 and are looking for an issue to fire up the youth vote, breaking up the TicketMaster monopoly is a no-brainer.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#gopiq

Are Republicans or Democrats smarter? An almost unknown fact is that the GOP House candidates did extraordinarily well among the well-educated in the 2002 midterms. I bought the long lost VNS exit poll data from 2002 and crunched it. I found that that GOP candidates for the House of Representatives won 58-40 among voters claiming to have college degrees and 52-44 among those saying they have advanced degrees. (I have data going back to 1986 and this was the first time the GOP had ever won among those purporting to have post-grad degrees.) In contrast, in 2002 Democratic candidates won 63-35 among the high school dropouts and 50-48 among those with only a high school degree. 

The GOP also won 53-44 among the median voters -- those who attended college but didn't get a four year degree. (By the way, you have to take self-reported education credentials with a grain of salt -- more than a few voters exaggerate.)

Don't you get the impression, however, that in 2004, at least in the Presidential race, this pattern will reverse? Rove sure seems to be running a campaign aimed at the 30% of the population that thinks that Saddam actively planned 9/11. When the facts aren't on your side, you have to try to appeal to the easily confused. However, we should have new exit poll data by Wednesday, knock on wood.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#nrcc

The National Republican Campaign Committee has filed a complaint of "criminal behavior" against KFI's highly-rated John & Ken for crusading for the defeat of Congressman David Dreier (R-CA) for being a wimp on immigration.

Uh, NRCC, ever heard of the First Amendment?

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#5930

Kerry leads among Hispanics 59-30. Yawn. Soon enough we'll know for real, but likely the last poll of Hispanics shoots another harpoon into the sinking Rove-Bush model of Hispanic voting ("They are a swing vote up for grabs if we just Hispander like mad!") and supports the Sailer theory of Hispanic voting ("They always give 19 to 28 more points to Democrats than do whites, so, for the good of the GOP, cut down on immigration, don't increase it."). 

Richard Morin and Dan Balz write in the Washington Post:

The new poll also found that Democrat John F. Kerry leads President Bush by 59 percent to 30 percent among registered Hispanic voters, virtually unchanged from a Post-Univision-Tomas Rivera Policy Institute (TRPI) survey in July. Independent Ralph Nader received 1 percent.

As with all voters, economic concerns have emerged as the top issue among Latinos, the survey found. More than one in four -- 27 percent -- named the economy and jobs as the issue that will determine their vote on Tuesday. Twenty percent said terrorism was their major concern; 15 percent listed Iraq and education.

Latino voters preferred Kerry, rather than Bush, to deal with each of the major issues facing the country. The Democrat led Bush as the candidate who would do the better job of dealing with the situation in Iraq, where Kerry held a 15 percentage-point advantage. The Democrat also had double-digit advantages over the president on handling the economy (26 points), dealing with immigration issues (18 points) and dealing with education (23 points).

Kerry also was seen as the candidate best able to handle terrorism, where he led Bush 46 percent to 38 percent on an issue on which most voters overall give the president the advantage.

On personal qualities viewed important in a president, Kerry was seen as more empathetic, likable and more trusted to deal with crises. Bush was seen as the candidate who was more likely to take positions and stick with them. Hispanics were divided over whether Bush or Kerry was the stronger leader, the quality that voters consistently say they most value in a candidate and one where Bush has held a substantial lead among all voters.

The poll also strongly suggests that Bush may fall short of topping the 35 percent of the Hispanic vote he received in 2000. In only one heavily Hispanic state -- Florida -- does Bush lead Kerry among Latinos, largely on the strength of overwhelming support among Cuban Americans.

In other states, Bush finishes a distant second to Kerry. In California, two in three registered Latinos said they plan to vote for Kerry while barely one in five support the president. Even in Bush's home state of Texas, the president gets only a third of all Latino votes while Kerry claims 57 percent, according to the Post-Univision-TRPI survey.

If Bush falls short of the 40 percent mark among Latinos, that will prove to be a major disappointment to his strategists and to Republican National Committee, who jointly have invested four years and substantial amounts of money to attract greater support in the Hispanic community. Matthew Dowd, the Bush campaign's senior strategist, said not long after the 2000 election that, because of surging population growth in the Hispanic community, the president would need to win a greater share of the vote in 2004 or risk losing the election -- all other things being equal.

Bush and his team have tried to woo Latinos by showering presidential attention on the community and by running a systematic public relations campaign, much of it bilingual, aimed at highlighting administration accomplishments that might play well among Hispanic voters.

Kerry and the Democrats have fought back, paying more attention to Latino media and advertising than Vice President Al Gore did four years ago. Several outside groups, notably the New Democrat Network, have poured money into Spanish-language advertising in battleground states with heavily Hispanic populations.

This is the third and final survey of Latino registered voters sponsored by The Post, the Univision Spanish-language television network and TRPI, an independent think tank affiliated with the University of Southern California. A total of 1,603 randomly selected Hispanic voters in the 11 states with the largest Latino electorates were interviewed by telephone Oct. 4-16.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#wrong

Well, I was wrong -- I'd been figuring Osama was dead for lo these many years that we hadn't seen a videotape of him speaking, but the new videotape shows he's familiar with "Fahrenheit 9/11," so, that's that.

He sure seems to want to get Bush re-elected. But, I've been wrong before.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#covstory

"Ethnic Electorate: Myths and Realities" Here's my American Conservative cover story on the demographics of the election. An excerpt:

Another immigrant group that Bush and Rove pursued ardently in 2000, with Grover Norquist's help, was Muslims. Bush promised during the campaign to ease anti-terrorist enforcement, including eliminating ethnic profiling of Arab airline passengers, a policy that might have been called into question when airports screeners, encouraged by the Administration not to overly hassle Arabs, allowed 19 hijackers on board on 9/11.

Yet, Bush and Sen. Spencer Abraham, an Arab-American, both lost in Michigan, the most Muslim state, in 2000. The 2002 VNS exit poll, the first to offer "Muslim" as a religion to check off, showed that only 0.3 percent of voters claimed to be Muslim.

An order of magnitude more numerous, but still statistically small, Jewish voters cast 3.3 percent of the ballots in 2002. Just as Hispanics are growing, however, the Jewish share of the vote is slowly shrinking. On the other hand, Jews are often said by analysts to be particularly influential per voter, due to their above average degrees of political interest, energy, eloquence, and donations. (In contrast, because of language barriers, Hispanics would appear to be below average in influence per voter, although that never makes it into print.)

Bush did poorly with Jews in 2000, winning only 17 percent, perhaps because Joe Lieberman was on the Democratic ballot. The GOP House candidates' share of the Jewish vote grew from 22 percent in 2000 to 29 percent in the last election.

A mid-September poll commissioned by the American Jewish Committee showed Kerry leading Bush 69-24. So, Bush is up a little over 2000, but that must still be disappointing considering all the Administration has done for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. (The Republican record among Jews is Reagan's 39 percent in 1980, when some Jews punished Jimmy Carter for the Camp David Accord.)

Despite Bush's neoconservative foreign policy, a substantial number of Jews tend to be uncomfortable with fervent Christians like the President, as the enormous brouhaha over Mel Gibson's hugely popular "The Passion of the Christ" showed. Neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer, for instance, just couldn't restrain himself from insulting his many Israel-supporting allies on the Religious Right who loved the film. Krauthammer published an op-ed entitled "Gibson's Blood Libel," calling the boffo box office hit "a singular act of interreligious aggression" and "spectacularly vicious."

Among Christians, the denominational equivalent of the famous gender gap (the "church chasm”?) widened substantially from 2000 to 2002. The Republican slice of the House vote pie narrowed among white Catholics, from 52 to 50 percent. Among white Protestants, though, the Republican share rose from 63 to 69 percent.

According to Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer's famous book Albion's Seed, WASPs are still divided into four subethnic groups which had spread West across the U.S. at roughly constant latitudes: from north to south, they are New England Puritans, Pennsylvania Quakers, Appalachian backcountry Scotch-Irish, and Southern lowlanders. He expects the bellicose Scotch-Irish and the self-righteous descendents of the Puritans to be particularly at arms this year over Iraq.

"The family tree of George W. Bush is as close to pure Yankee Puritan as any Presidential candidate's in many decades, but Bush has mastered the idioms of the backcountry culture he grew up in down in Midland, Texas," Fischer told me. As epitomized by the Scotch-Irish warrior Andrew Jackson, Bush's adopted culture prefers to shoot first and ask questions later.

In contrast, John Kerry is from Massachusetts-bred and is part Puritan. He does best in New England and its outcroppings such as Northern California. Fischer contended that the Bush Administration's doctrine of pre-emptive war on Iraq was foreign to Greater New England's traditional self-image. "It's very important to New Englanders not to fire the first shot."

Another traditional aspect of liberals' self-image is their assumption that they are smarter than conservatives. Indeed, in May, hundreds of liberal websites, as well as The Economist magazine, fell for a telling hoax: a fictitious table of state IQ scores purportedly showing Gore states vastly outsmart Bush states. In reality, state IQ scores have not been published in decades, but school achievement scores and educational levels found in exit polls indicate the two parties are highly similar intellectually, on average.

This year, however, much of Bush's support comes from the two-fifths of the public who continue to tell pollsters that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11. This view isn't necessarily illogical -- many Americans seem to assume that's why the President responded to 9/11 by invading Iraq -- but it is ill-informed.

This Presidential election will, of course, be decided in about a dozen and a half "battleground states" such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. Immigrant groups tend to be concentrated in out-of-play states such as California, New York, and Texas, so neither campaign seems to be paying them all that much heed.

In fact, 2004 is starting to look like 1968 or 1972 all over again, in part because most of the attention is focused on Great Lakes industrial states where the voters are either white or black, but not immigrant, and are more blue-collar and older than is common these days. Indeed, much of the campaign controversy has revolved around what the candidates did back in 1968 and 1972 during the Vietnam War, issues of intense personal interest to white men of a certain age, but not to all that many others.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#watchtv

You can watch Tom Brokaw interview John Kerry about my IQ story by going here and clicking the LAUNCH button under Kerry's picture. My part of the interview comes up right after the 5 minute mark. Of course, this will take a long time to download on a dial-up connection.

Anybody know how I can save this video to my hard disk?

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#econland

What species do economists think they are studying? On Marginal Revolution, guest economist Steven Landsburg writes:

If George Bush had chosen the racist David Duke as a running mate, I'd have voted against him, almost without regard to any other issue. Instead, John Kerry chose the xenophobe John Edwards as a running mate. I will therefore vote against John Kerry.

Duke thinks it's imperative to protect white jobs from black competition. Edwards thinks it's imperative to protect American jobs from foreign competition. There's not a dime's worth of moral difference there. While Duke would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of skin color, Edwards would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of birthplace. Either way, bigotry is bigotry, and appeals to base instincts should always be repudiated.

You don't have to think that protectionism is a good idea to see why Landsburg is an arrogant, self-righteous scold. One way to lower racial conflicts with the U.S. is to promote solidarity based on citizenship, but our elites hold the concept of citizenship in contempt. 

Landsburg is an extreme example, but have you noticed how economists have become increasingly irrelevant? This is a good example of the kind of economists' prejudices that have caused this. (Of course, the other reason is the more admirable one that because a lot of the bad economic policies of the past have been eliminated, economists have reached diminishing returns. The obvious solution is to inject more realism into their models by incorporating more knowledge of human diversity, but few are interested in that.)

UPDATE: Jack Strocchi gives Landsburg what-for on Catallaxy.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#doesiq

My new VDARE.com column "Does IQ Matter in a President?" is up now. It's a more contemplative follow-up to last week's investigative report "This Just In: Kerry's IQ Likely Lower than Bush's!" which continues to make news (see below). By the way, if you type in Bush and IQ on Google, you find 198,000 pages, so this topic isn't my lone obsession -- I just try to apply evidence to what everybody else opinionizes about.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#brokaw

Brokaw asks Kerry about my Kerry IQ story on the NBC Nightly News:

Tom Brokaw: Someone [i.e., Steve Sailer] has analyzed the President's military aptitude tests and yours, and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do.

Sen. John F. Kerry: That's great. More power. 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.

Brokaw: Do you think he's [Bush's] a smart man?

Kerry: I do. Yes, I do think he's a smart man.

Brokaw: Do you think too many people in your party underestimate?

Kerry: I think people have always underestimated President Bush. But I'm proud that in those debates, I didn't underestimate him.

Well, actually, Kerry's campaign did release his Officer Qualification Test score on this Acrobat PDF on the www.JohnKerry.com website. Yet, even though huge numbers of Kerry's supporters and detractors pored over this dump of documents on Kerry's military record, the first person who seems to have noticed the significance of that one document was Sam Sewell, a Navy vet and minister in Florida who works with gifted children with learning disabilities. Because I'd written articles in the past on candidates' IQs, he called it to my attention about a month ago, and I spent three weeks interviewing military psychometricians and reading old military reports to figure out how to interpret Kerry's score and how to compare it to Bush's scores on the somewhat similar Air Force Officer Qualifying Test (p. 25 of this huge PDF file).

So, although Kerry's statement that "my record is not public" was incorrect, I'm sure Kerry's not trying to lie when he says, "So I don't know where you're getting that from." I'm sure he honestly doesn't know. His test score appears on just one rather cryptic-looking page out of the hundreds of pages of military records his campaign has put online, and I doubt if he recognized what it was, assuming he even looked at it.

Also, I don't see that Kerry is under any obligation to release any of his other test scores or grade transcripts. Although many of his supporters have claimed that he is much smarter than Bush, I've never heard Kerry claim that. Further, I don't believe that Bush's SAT score (1206, old style) was voluntarily released. I think it was leaked to The New Yorker in 1999. 

Finally, Tom Brokaw is oversimplifying when he says, "Someone [i.e., Steve Sailer]  has analyzed the President's military aptitude tests and yours, and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do." My best judgment is that they were fairly similar in cognitive capability back when they were seniors at Yale, but that if I had to bet on who would have scored higher if they had taken the same test back then, I would bet on Bush. While, it's not an apples to oranges comparison between the two service branches' officer tests, it's not an oranges to oranges comparison either. It's more like oranges to tangerines. So, there will always be uncertainty. 

What we do know is that both candidates scored roughly about what you'd expect for someone qualified to apply to become a military officer. It appears by my reading of the results that Kerry got the average score for applicants to the Navy's Officer Candidate School and that Bush did better than about two of out of three applicants to the Air Force Academy, which strikes me as a little better than Kerry's performance, but not by a huge amount. 

Those are both good performances, although hardly great. I would imagine that a large majority of the regular readers of this blog would score higher. That does not mean, of course, that you or I would make a better President than Bush or Kerry. They both have a lot of non-cognitive gifts. On the other hand, it does raise questions about whether these are the two best candidates our nation of 270 million citizens can put forward.

I think Kerry would benefit if his supporters stopped flattering him about how smart he is. Like Bush, he's smart enough to be President, if he works hard, seeks out good advisors, and fires bad advisors. But Kerry would be a better campaigner if he stuck to reading the speeches his speechwriters give him and stop trying to improve them on the fly by adding digressions and dependent clauses. He's not smart enough to do that. 

***

My Kerry IQ story is here. By the way, a reader just wrote in to say that Tom Brokaw asked John Kerry about his IQ! Anybody else see that?

***

"Ethnic Electorate: Myths and Realities" Here's my American Conservative cover story on the demographics of the election.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#negritos

Human Biodiversity Conservation -- The global excitement over the discovery that dwarfed pre-humans, cutely nicknamed "hobbits," existed in Southeast Asia at least until the last Ice Age contrasts sharply with the almost complete lack of interest in the fact that races of dwarfed modern humans continue to cling precariously to existence in the same region. Besides the fairly well-known Pygmies of Africa, there are several groups of "pygmy negritos" in Southeast Asia and, at least until very recently, even in Australia, as this 1938 picture from Queensland shows.

Indeed, as Keith Windschuttle and Tim Gillin have pointed out, the very existence of pygmy negritos in Australia was completely written out of the record after the 1960s in order to promote the politically correct position that all of Australia's pre-Western inhabitants were racially identical.

More pressing is the fate of the remaining pygmy negritos of the Andaman Islands, a colony of India in the Indian Ocean south of Burma. They appear to be a remnant of the first Out-of-Africa wave of modern humans. Adults are under five feet tall, and the women are so "steatopygous" that when an Andamanese mother is carrying her toddler around, she simply has the child stand on her platform-like buttocks. (There's a picture in Carelton Coon's Living Races of Mankind that you have to see to believe.)

I interviewed George H.J. Weber, the Swissman who founded the Andaman Association about the plight of the Andamanese:

Q: What's been happening to the Jarawa tribe in the Andamans?

A: In the last few years, the Jarawa tribe has largely given up its old hostility toward all outsiders. The result was predictable: a large number of diseases have struck and violent crime is on the rise. The latest reports received privately speak of 50 percent infection rate with Hepatitis B among Jarawas (only a few months ago it was said to be 30 percent). Other diseases are rampant and one official has carelessly let slip that there is AIDS among the Jarawa. Officially, of course, all is well.

You had better heed local advice when meeting with Jarawa. Thanks to grossly incompetent government policies in the past, you are likely to meet them on the Andaman trunk road where they will hijack your bus and not be satisfied with a handshake, but instead will demand goodies -- or else. Such is progress in the Andamans.

Q: Why are Andamanese so vulnerable to the outside world?

A: They have been isolated from other people for a long time and have never had a chance to develop resistance against outside diseases. The Andamanese do have a limited immunity against malaria (a very ancient human scourge), but the common cold or an ordinary flu, let alone pneumonia, measles or venereal diseases, can be deadly to them.

Q: What's special about the North Sentinel Islanders?

A: They are the only Andamanese group that is today still as isolated as all the Andamanese were in the past. That they live on a coral-fringed island in stormy waters has protected them until now from those do-gooders who would "bring them into the mainstream of Indian society," as the nationalist phrase has it. For just what this expression means in reality, the Jarawa situation provides an all too clear illustration.

Q: Is their future safe?

A: "Missions of friendship" to the Sentineli have started only a few years ago. Just as with the Jarawa, most were junkets for visiting VIPs, camouflaged by being called "scientific." They were hurriedly aborted after the Jarawa catastrophe burst over the guilty administrators at Port Blair, the main city of the Andamans. At the moment, the Sentineli are left alone again and all development plans have been put on ice. May they long remain there.

These little people don't have chimp-sized brains like the extinct Flores Islander species announced yesterday. They are modern humans, just like you and me, except they have practically no immunities to the rest of the world's germs. You would think that 1% of the attention given to the preservation from extinction of pandas or the Florida panther or whatever would be given to helping save our fellow humans, but, no, human biodiversity conservation is not on anybody's agenda today. See, if you say it's important to preserve human biodiversity, then you have to admit human biodiversity exists, and that's a no-no.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#wadeback

Welcome back, Nicholas Wade: The NY Times' ace genetics reporter is back in a big way from his sabbatical writing a book. He has a fascinating article on the "hobbits" of Flores Island, and another article on the "Does Race Exist" brouhaha called "Articles Highlight Different Views on Genetic Basis of Race." He extracts a hilarious/sinister quote from sociologist Troy Duster:

But linking diseases to race is an "explosive issue," said Dr. Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University. "Once you enter this realm of saying some diseases are more common in this or that group, the popular imagination will ask what else is more common," like behavioral differences, Dr. Duster suggested.

Right, Troy, it's better for patients to die than for the public to start asking questions. 

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#height27

New government height and weight statistics confirm that African-Americans, despite their domination of the NBA, are not taller than non-Hispanic white Americans. Among 20-39 year olds in 2002, the average white guy was 5'-10.2" tall compared to the average black guy who was 5'-10.0" tall. There is probably a little more variation in height among blacks, but height differences don't account for the overwhelming edge that blacks have over American whites in the NBA. (However, one reason European whites are making a bigger splash in basketball is because they continue to get taller fairly rapidly, while American men's increase in height has slowed to about 0.2 or 0.3 inches per decade.

Interestingly, Mexican-American men have gotten shorter. From 1984 to 2002, Mexican-American men ages 20-39 have shrunk from 5'-7.4" to 5-6.8", probably because recent immigrants are increasingly coming from the shorter, more Indian south of Mexico. (It's all in Table 13 of this big PDF.)

There's nothing in the report on Asian-Americans, who appear to me to be growing taller fairly rapidly.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#redsox

The Boston Red Sox are legitimate world champions - Although the Red Sox didn't have the best record in the AL this year, going 98-64 vs. the Yankees' 101-61, that was just bad luck. Overall, the Red Sox outscored their opponents by a sizable 949-768 ratio, outscoring their opponents by 24%, compared to the Yankees' 897-808 margin (only an 11% edge). By this measure, the second best team in the AL were the Anaheim Angels at 836-734. 

The Saint Louis Cardinals were much better than they looked in World Series, going a legitimate 105-57, leading the National League in both runs scored (855) and fewest runs against (659), an impressive 30% margin.

You sure wouldn't have known the Cardinals were such big hitters by the way their manager had them sacrifice bunt so much in the Series. Like in the first inning in the final game, the leadoff hitter gets on first, so LaRussa has big bopper Larry Walker coming up (.589 slugging average this year), followed by Pujols, Rolen, and Edmonds (those three averaged 41 home runs each this year). So, what does Tony LaRussa have Walker do? Lay down a bunt! What year did LaRussa think this is? 1968? Why play small ball with that lineup?

*

By the way, of what ancestry is the Red Sox longhaired leadoff hitter Johnny Damon? He kind of looks like a prehistoric mammoth hunter in a diorama at a natural history museum. My wife says he look like actress Helena Bonham-Carter if she had a beard and a brow ridge.

I just discovered that Dienekes runs an online Human Biodiversity Discussion Forum (not affiliated with my Human Biodiversity email group). One popular segment is Guess Race/Ethnicity/Nationality, where participants post photographs and invite speculation on the ancestry of the person. So, I posted my question. I'll let you know what I find out.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#ebugogo

Do "Hobbits" still exist? About four years ago, Greg Cochran told me that offshoots of Homo Erecti probably survived in the East Indies into the era of modern humans. Because those islands are accessible by land during deep ice ages but ocean-surrounded the rest of the time, they are good places for speciation events. The announcement today of the discovery on Flores Island of the skeletons of dwarfed offshoots from the Ice Ages confirmed that. Now, he sends along this article from the Daily Telegraph about rumors some may still be alive.

Richard Roberts, discoverer of the Hobbit, says local tales suggest the species could still exist:

When I was back in Flores earlier this month we heard the most amazing tales of little, hairy people, whom they called Ebu Gogo - Ebu meaning grandmother and Gogo meaning 'he who eats anything'. The tales contained the most fabulous details - so detailed that you'd imagine there had to be a grain of truth in them.

One of the village elders told us that the Ebu Gogo ate everything raw, including vegetables, fruits, meat and, if they got the chance, even human meat.

When food was served to them they also ate the plates, made of pumpkin - the original guests from hell (or heaven, if you don't like washing up and don't mind replacing your dinner set every week).

The villagers say that the Ebu Gogo raided their crops, which they tolerated, but decided to chase them away when the Ebu Gogo stole - and ate - one of their babies.

They ran away with the baby to their cave which was at the foot of the local volcano, some tens of metres up a cliff face. The villagers offered them bales of dry grass as fodder, which they gratefully accepted.

A few days later, the villagers went back with a burning bale of grass which they tossed into the cave. Out ran the Ebu Gogo, singed but not fried, and were last seen heading west, in the direction of Liang Bua, where we found the Hobbit, as it happens.

When my colleague Gert van den Bergh first heard these stories a decade ago, which several of the villages around the volcano recount with only very minor changes in detail, he thought them no better than leprechaun tales until we unearthed the Hobbit. (I much prefer Ebu as the name of our find but my colleague Mike Morwood was insistent on Hobbit.)

The anatomical details in the legends are equally fascinating. They are described as about a metre tall, with long hair, pot bellies, ears that slightly stick out, a slightly awkward gait, and longish arms and fingers - both confirmed by our further finds this year.

They [the Ebu Gogo] murmured at each other and could repeat words [spoken by villagers] verbatim. For example, to 'here's some food', they would reply 'here's some food'. They could climb slender-girthed trees but, here's the rub, were never seen holding stone tools or anything similar, whereas we have lots of sophisticated artefacts in the H. floresiensis levels at Liang Bua. That's the only inconsistency with the Liang Bua evidence.

The women Ebu Gogo had extremely pendulous breasts, so long that they would throw them over their shoulders, which must have been quite a sight in full flight.

We did ask the villagers if they ever interbred with the Ebu Gogo. They vigorously denied this, but said that the women of Labuan Baju (a village at the far western end of Flores, better known as LBJ) had rather long breasts, so they must have done.

Poor LBJ must be the butt of jokes in Flores, rather like the Irish and Tasmanians.

A local eruption at Liang Bua (in western Flores) may have wiped out local hobbits around 12,000 years ago, but they could well have persisted much later in other parts of the island. The villagers said that the last hobbit was seen just before the village moved location, farther from the volcano, not long before the Dutch colonists settled in that part of central Flores, in the 19th century.

Do the Ebu Gogo still exist? It would be a hoot to search the last pockets of rainforest on the island. Not many such pockets exist, but who knows. At the very least, searching again for that lava cave, or others like it, should be done, because remains of hair only a few hundred years old, would surely survive, snagged on the cave walls or incorporated in deposits, and would be ideal for ancient DNA analyses.

Interestingly, we did find lumps of dirt with black hair in them this year in the Hobbit levels, but don't know yet if they're human or something else. We're getting DNA testing done, which we hope will be instructive.

Richard "Bert" Roberts is a University of Wollongong professor and one of the team investigating the Hobbits.

It's fun to think they are still around, but I'm sure you could have heard similar stories about wee folks in Ireland not too long ago.

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http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#2001films

My 2001 Film Reviews: I'm slowly putting all my old UPI movie reviews online on this page. Here are 26 reviews of the more prominent movies of 2001. The real test of a film critic is his ability to come up with something interesting to say about the instantly forgettable movies, so I'll eventually put online my reviews of What's the Worst that Could Happen?, Someone Like You, and Domestic Disturbance. But, I'll start out with the movies that haven't completely disappeared down the Memory Hole.

2001 (Reverse chronological order)

Black Hawk Down - Ridley Scott

Monster's Ball - Halle Berry, Billy Bob Thornton

A Beautiful Mind - Russell Crowe, Ron Howard

Ali - Will Smith, Michael Mann

Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring - Peter Jackson

The Majestic - Jim Carrey

Vanilla Sky - Tom Cruise, Cameron Crowe

Behind Enemy Lines - Owen  Wilson

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - Chris Columbus

Spy Game - Robert Redford, Brad Pitt

Training Day - Denzel Washington

The Man Who Would Be King - My September 26, 2001 analysis of the Kipling-Huston classic and why it suggested the US would win fairly easily in Afghanistan

Curse of the Jade Scorpion - Woody Allen

O - Othello updating, Julia Stiles

The Others - Nicole Kidman

Rush Hour 2 - Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker

Planet of the Apes - Tim Burton, Mark Wahlberg

Jurassic Park III - Tea Leoni, William Macy, dinosaurs

Legally Blonde - Reese Witherspoon

Atlantis - Disney

Moulin Rouge - Baz Luhrmann, Nicole Kidman

Pearl Harbor - Ben Affleck

Shrek - Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers

Bridget Jones' Diary - Rene Zellweger

American Desi - Indian-American romantic comedy

Memento - Guy Pearce

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http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#kerrygore

Not many Kerry defenders defend Kerry's IQ -- I've received lots of angry responses to my recent article on Kerry's IQ claiming that Bush's IQ today must be much lower than how he tested as a youth, but not many claiming that Kerry is much smarter than I estimated. (A few have argued, reasonably, that Kerry would have scored higher on a more verbally-oriented tested than the Navy's Officer Qualification Test, a point I'd already suggested in my article.) After four years of Bush as President, everybody is entitled to an opinion on Bush, but Kerry remains much more of a closed book, which is why I brought to light some objective information about Kerry.

So, here's a non-partisan IQ question for Kerry supporters: How does Kerry compare to Al Gore, for whom we have a lot of data: Gore tested at an IQ of 133 when entering high school and 134 when leaving, 1355 SAT score (about 1420 under the post 1994 scoring system)? All these numbers suggest Gore was solidly in the 98th, maybe the 99th, percentile. Gore probably would not get into Harvard today with those scores, if he wasn't the son of a Senator, but he could probably get into several Ivy League colleges. In contrast, my estimate for Kerry is roughly between the 90th and 95th percentiles. Any Kerry supporters out there want to argue that Kerry is smarter than Gore? As smart as Gore?

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Republicans Urge Minorities To Get Out And Vote On Nov. 3

MIAMI, FL—With the knowledge that the minority vote will be crucial in the upcoming presidential election, Republican Party officials are urging blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities to make their presence felt at the polls on Wednesday, Nov. 3. -- The Onion

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http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#majorityrights

Majority Rights -- An important new group blog is just getting launched. Majority Rights has on board quite a roster of independent minds, many of whose names will be familiar to iSteve.com readers.

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http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#notme

I'm not going to predict the election results: It just doesn't seem like a good use of my time. Thousands of smart people are trying to do it, and the odds of me doing it best are between slim and negative one. I'm better suited to working on puzzles that nobody else would think of analyzing.

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http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#iqqa

Q&A on Presidential IQs:

HOW DID THE CANDIDATES DO ON IQ TESTS?

There's a lot of talk that Kerry has a much higher IQ than Bush.

For example, Howell Raines, the former executive editor of the New York Times, wrote:

"Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush? I'm sure the candidates' SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead."

But there's little hard evidence for that. In my article on VDARE.com, I showed that when Kerry and Bush were seniors at Yale, they each took the IQ-like entrance exams to be Navy and Air Force officers, respectively.

They both did good, but not great. Kerry scored at the average for applicants to the Navy's Officer Candidate School and Bush scored a little higher than average compared to applicants to the Air Force Academy. Those are both good scores -- people who apply to become military officers are well above average.

It's not too easy to compare results on the separate Navy and Air Force officer tests, but the two candidates were clearly fairly similar in mental ability at that age. Based on my research into the details of the tests, if I had to bet, I'd bet Bush would have scored higher if they had both taken the same test.

Kerry has never released his test scores or grades, but we also know Bush's SAT score from when he applied to Yale. Bush scored 1206, which would be about 1280 under the easier scoring system introduced in 1995. Under both the Air Force test and the SAT, he scored around the 95th percentile compared to the general public, suggesting that he's smarter than about 19 out of 20 people. Kerry would be similar, maybe a little behind.

IS A HIGH IQ HELPFUL IN A PRESIDENT?

Maybe not during the campaign, when voters are looking for a regular guy they can identify with, but it is when they are in office. An enormous amount of research, much of it done by the U.S. military, shows that all else being equal, in just any job, smarter people tend to do it somewhat better.

This is the objective judgment of the U.S. military which has relied on IQ-type tests as entrance exams for over 80 years. For example, over the last dozen years, the military has allowed almost no one to enlist who scores below the 30th percentile nationally on the military's IQ-type test .

DON'T A LOT OF PEOPLE NOT BELIEVE IN IQ?

Politically, IQ is highly controversial. Liberals tend to hold completely contradictory opinions on IQ:

1. IQ is utterly discredited, AND

2. We liberals are better than conservatives because we have much higher IQs.

A couple of times in the last four years, many Democrats have fallen for hoaxes claiming to scientifically prove that Democrats have much higher IQs than Republicans. For example, in 2001, Gary Trudeau, the Doonesbury cartoonist, fell for the notorious Lovenstein Institute hoax that claimed that Bush's IQ was a sub-average 91 while Bill Clinton's IQ was a stratospheric 182, which would put Clinton out there with Galileo and Einstein.

HOW MUCH DOES IT MATTER?

I think it's useful for both the public and the candidates to have honest information about their intellectual capacities. Test scores aren't hugely important, but at least they are objective and honest compared to the enormous amounts of spin we voters are subjected to.

It's not good for Kerry to listen to all the flattery about how brilliant he is compared to Bush. For example, it hurts him on the campaign trail because he refuses to just read what his speechwriters give him. He did well in the debates where the time limits kept him from rambling.

But when giving a speech, he insists on embroidering the crisply-written text with his own off the top of the head dependent clauses and digressions. He'd be doing better if somebody told him -- Senator, you aren't that smart. Just the read the speech.

Bush, in contrast, is a more disciplined campaigner because he doesn't improvise much. But, as President, he'd do a better job if he sweated the details more. He should be told, You were smart enough to get two Ivy League degrees and learn how to fly a supersonic jet fighter, so stop winging it based on your gut instinct. Buckle down and study the issues.

WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE THINK KERRY IS SMARTER?

First, Kerry is from Massachusetts, where voters appreciate an academic style, Bush is from West Texas, where they don't. The only election Bush lost was in 1978 when he ran for Congress from Midland. His opponent won by making fun of Bush for having two Ivy League degrees. Bush vowed he'd never get outdumbed again, and he hasn't.

Second, there's always been a liberal bias on this question. For example, to this day, lots of liberals intellectuals are convinced that Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate in the 1950s was much smarter than Dwight Eisenhower, who merely organized the most complicated military operation in history. Stevenson was a good man, but he was a lightweight socialite who merely hired intellectual to write his speeches.

The same is true for Kennedy vs. Nixon. JFK scored a 119 on an IQ test in high school, which is the 90th percentile. We don't have a test score for Nixon, but he didn't have a lot of assets other than a ruthless intelligence. Kennedy in contrast, had looks, charm, a sense of humor, self-confidence, and a rich daddy who hired ghostwriters to write his two bestselling books.

WHAT ABOUT THE 2000 ELECTION?

We have very good numbers for AL Gore. He scored 134 on an IQ test and 1355 on the SAT, which would put him at the 98th or 99th percentiles, significantly better than Bush, but not enormously so.

Bill Bradley, who ran against Gore in the primaries, only scored a 485 on his verbal SAT test. He went on to become a tremendous basketball player, and did some good work in the Senate, but he wasn't very scintillating on the campaign trail running against Gore, a performance that validated his low SAT score.

WHO IS SMARTER ON AVERAGE: REPUBLICANS OR DEMOCRATS?

They appear to be very similar. We don't have much in the way of IQ data, but the exit poll in 2000 showed Bush and Gore voters had identical levels of education. The typical voter for both parties had been to college but hadn't graduated. Gore did better at the top and the bottom of the educational pyramid -- he won both people with advanced degrees and high school dropouts and Bush did better among everybody in the middle.

In the 2002 midterm elections, the GOP candidates for the House of Representatives did very well among the well-educated, even winning a majority among advanced degree holders. However, I suspect that the GOP campaign is aimed more low-brow this year. For example, a big part of Bush's support comes from people who think Saddam was personally involved in planning 9/11. That's not an illogical assumption for why we invaded Iraq, but it's not correct.

One interesting difference is that conservatives tend to do better on the SAT-Math test and liberals do better on the SAT-Verbal test. Psychologists have found that people who score higher on Math tend to be more "tough-minded" and people who score higher on the Verbal section tend to be more "tender-minded".

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http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#tv7

I'll be on Fox News (cable) Tuesday at 8:44 am Eastern Time. I can't figure out whether that goes out live across the country or is tape delayed for different times zones. 

UPDATE: Anyway, the show was called Fox and Friends. I was only on for about three minutes, and I probably seemed a little overcaffeinated, but it was a lot of fun.

What did I learn about being on TV? If you wear glasses, have them blast the air conditioning to lower the temperature in the room. Otherwise, between wearing a wool suit, the lights, and the adrenalin, you'll probably sweat enough to steam up your glasses. Fortunately, I realized that early enough to fix the problem (I hope). David Letterman keeps his studio at 55 degrees, for exactly these kind of reasons.

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http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#personality8

Psychological profiles of Bush vs. Kerry: The authors of the new book: Personality, Character and Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents have put together a quick picture of the candidates on various psychological measures associated with Presidential success. One problem with the study is that most historians' polls, including the first and most influential one organized by Kennedy staffer Arthur Schlesinger Jr., suffer badly from liberal bias. For example, Eisenhower was originally rated one of the ten worst Presidents in Schlesinger's poll. (Generally speaking, Democrats employ more academics, such as Schlesinger, as advisors, while Republicans tend to employ more business and military leaders. The academics write the history books, so they naturally tend to make their old bosses look better.) Thus, tendermindedness is rated as good in a President and toughmindedness as bad. Voters in 2004 might have a different view. Still, their following assessment seems reasonable: 

Bush, in contrast to Kerry, appears to have more personality assets as a candidate than as a president. Our findings echo accusations that Bush is not very smart, not competent (doesn't keep well-informed, makes poor judgments), and not hardworking. Recall that our "rated intelligence" factor is not the same as an IQ test and Bush may score better on such a measure than he did on our ratings. But ratings of intelligence were used in Dr. Ones's analysis and were shown to correlate strongly with presidential success: Being perceived as intelligent, complex, and creative may be just as important as IQ.

Lastly, despite his low scores on most traits related to leadership, there are other analyses that soften this assessment. Of all the presidents, Bush appears to most closely resemble Andrew Jackson, another charismatic, incurious, impulsive, tempestuous personality. Jackson was regarded as a great or near-great president in every historian poll. The correlation of Bush's scores with Jackson's, across 592 items of our questionnaire, was .56 - a moderately high resemblance. To a lesser degree (.39), Bush also resembles Ronald Reagan. Reagan has been bestowed high honors (naming of the DC airport, federal buildings, and talk of adding him to Mount Rushmore) and seems headed to a secure place in history's estimation. Both Jackson and Reagan obtained low scores on rated intelligence and Competence, like Bush, although both were rated higher on Achievement Striving. Reagan was considerably more trusting and much lower on Angry Hostility than Bush.

Can't Find a Better Man?

According to our data and ratings, the American political process does not appear to be working very well. Out of tens of millions of potential candidates for president, we are faced with a choice between two candidates, only one of which is expected to finish in the upper half of the class. It seems unlikely that either candidate would have made it to the final round on The Apprentice - where candidates are judged on many of the same traits we find related to presidential success.

Regarding Bush's IQ, one of the psychologists associated with the study published this defense of Bush's IQ in 2001. One of the authors emailed me:

I was referred to your article on Bush's IQ by my publisher. Well done! One of co-authors (Deniz Ones) is a true expert on IQ, SATs, and predicting job performance. I think she would agree with your analyses.

In turn, I would agree with their general assessment that Bush's bigger problem is poor character rather than poor mental ability. As I said on Fox News this morning, he should force himself to work harder on learning the issues rather than just trusting in his (hardly foolproof) gut instincts. The funny thing is that the general public has decided that Bush is a man of excellent character. Somebody has to be wrong here.

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http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#jonesloser

California Senate race: Bill Jones would rather lose quietly to Barbara Boxer than win noisily. The Republican candidate Jones is a decent guy and would make a better Senator than Barbara Boxer, but he's gotten no traction this year because he hasn't been able to raise the huge amounts of money needed to inundate the biggest state with TV commercials. 

The other approach would be to get free media by taking a strong stand on a controversial but popular issue like, oh, say, illegal immigration. But, modern California Republicans seem to prefer to lose in an approved fashion than win ugly, like Pete Wilson did back in 1994.

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http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#boom650

380 tons of missing explosives in Iraq? Isn't the total number more like 650,000 tons of missing ammunition from all over the country? 

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http://www.iSteve.com/04OctB.htm#tierney1