Who is Steve Sailer?
I'm a journalist,
movie critic
for The American Conservative,
VDARE.com
columnist, and founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, which runs the
invitation-only Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists
and public intellectuals.
I
will continue to maintain my archives of my published articles here, and
will eventually get around to adding the 100 or so most recent articles.
But no more blogging here! Go to iSteve.blogspot.com
to read my latest blog postings.
***
Well,
I'm not dead yet - Instead, I just disappeared from blogging for the
last six days because of computer problems that are much too tedious to
describe. Anyway, my current plan is to simplify my Rube Goldberg scheme
and only blog on my Blogspot location:
Of
course, as with anything involving computers, this simplification
involves many complications. For example, I ought to transfer my list of
links, since I know a lot of bloggers depend upon being on my list for a
lot of their traffic. On the other hand, there's no quick way to do
that. And, while I'm at it, I ought to try to bring some order to the
list, grouping sites in intuitively obvious categories, promoting some
to more prominent positions and demoting others to less attractive
positions, pruning those who have stopped posting (but not deleting
those who, like me, are merely going through a bit of a slump), and so
on and so forth. Oh, man, what a headache ... especially for a world
class bad decisionmaker and all-around procrastinator like me. So, yes,
I will fix up the links eventually, but don't expect anything write
away. If your site still isn't on the new list by, say, September 20,
then email me.
***
My
review of James R. Flynn's What Is Intelligence? Beyond the
Flynn Effect -- On VDARE.com I offer the first review
of the new book on the Flynn Effect by Flynn himself:
Despite
hysterical politically-motivated attacks on them that have sometimes
turned violent,
researchers into human intelligence have by now produced a coherent and
compelling scientific picture, as explained
in books such as the 1994 best-seller The
Bell Curve
by Richard
Herrnstein and Charles
Murray.
With one exception.
For uncertain reasons, all
over the world, raw IQ scores have been rising, on average at the
rate of about 3 points per decade. Thus, a test performance that a half
century ago would have ranked at the 84th percentile (a score of 115)
now is only good enough for the 50th percentile (a score of 100).
When IQ test publishers revise and renormalize their exams every decade
or two, they have to make scoring tougher to make the mean stay at 100.
This is very strange. One of the more dubious-sounding implications is
that if you go far enough back into the past, the average person would
have been a complete dolt, and the greatest genius of that earlier age
would have been no smarter than George
W. Bush or John Kerry.
Rising test scores were pointed out by Reed
Tuddenham in 1948, when he compared the better performance on the U.S.
military's IQ tests of the draftees of WWII compared to WWI.
In the early 1980s, James
R. Flynn, an American-born political scientist at the University of
Otago in New Zealand, began to call this phenomenon to academic and then
public attention. In his honor, in The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and
Murray christened
rising IQ scores the "Flynn Effect". ...
Mainstream IQ researchers, who are used to being demonized
when they are not being ignored,
admire Flynn,
who is politically a man of the left, for his fairness, geniality,
insight, and devotion to advancing knowledge. The Flynn Effect has often
been seized upon to dismiss IQ testing in general, especially by race-deniers
who assume that it will cause racial
gaps in IQ to converge out of existence. Flynn himself, however, has
never joined the mob in unfairly attacking psychometrics—or
psychometricians.
Nevertheless, the Flynn Effect did leave Flynn skeptical about IQ tests.
Ulric
Neisser wrote in The
American Scientist in 1997: "Flynn concludes that the tests
do not measure intelligence but only a minor sort of 'abstract
problem-solving ability' with little practical significance."
Strikingly, Flynn has changed his mind. He now sees the Flynn Effect not
as undermining IQ testing, but as validating it. After decades of
reflection, Flynn believes people really are more intelligent in some
ways today — just as their raw IQ scores suggest. The reason: we get
more mental exercise now than in olden times. [More]
If
this AP "news" article had been an online debate, Godwin's
Law would have been invoked in the first 100 words.
The Associated Press reminded us on Saturday, September 1, the 68th
Anniversary of Nazi Switzerland's invasion of Poland, that the Swiss are
still a bunch of Nazis. Let us never forget how the Swiss Nazi
juggernaut steamrollered across Europe and is just waiting to pounce
once again:
By FRANK JORDANS, Associated Press Writer
Sat Sep 1, 8:17 AM ET
GENEVA - The campaign poster was blatant in its xenophobic symbolism:
Three white sheep kicking out a black sheep over a caption that read
"for more security." The message was not from a fringe force
in Switzerland's political scene but from its largest party.
The nationalist Swiss People's Party is proposing a deportation policy
that anti-racism campaigners say evokes Nazi-era practices. Under the
plan, entire families would be expelled if their children are convicted
of a violent crime, drug offenses or benefits fraud.
The party is trying to collect the 100,000 signatures needed to force a
referendum on the issue. If approved in a referendum, the law would be
the only one of its kind in Europe.
"We believe that parents are responsible for bringing up their
children. If they can't do it properly, they will have to bear the
consequences," Ueli Maurer, president of the People's Party, told
The Associated Press.
Ronnie Bernheim of the Swiss Foundation against Racism and Anti-Semitism
said the proposal was similar to the Nazi practice of "Sippenhaft"
— or kin liability — whereby relatives of criminals were held
responsible for his or her crimes and punished equally.
Similar practices occurred during Stalin's purges in the early days of
the Soviet Union and the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution in China, when
millions were persecuted for their alleged ideological failings.
"As soon as the first 10 families and their children have been
expelled from the country, then things will get better at a
stroke," said Maurer, whose party controls the Justice Ministry and
shares power in an unwieldy coalition that includes all major parties.
He explained that his party has long campaigned to make deportation
compulsory for convicted immigrants rather than an optional and rarely
applied punishment.
The party claims foreigners — who make up about 20 percent of the
population — are four times more likely to commit crimes than Swiss
nationals.
Bernheim said the vast majority of Switzerland's immigrants are
law-abiding and warned against generalizations.
"If you don't treat a complicated issue with the necessary nuance
and care, then you won't do it justice," he said.
Commentators have expressed horror over the symbolism used by the
People's Party to make its point.
"This way of thinking shows an obvious blood-and-soil
mentality," read one editorial in the Zurich daily Tages-Anzeiger,
calling for a broader public reaction against the campaign.
So far, however, there has been little popular backlash against the
posters.
"We haven't had any complaints," said Maurer.
The city of Geneva — home to Switzerland's humanitarian traditions as
well as the European headquarters of the United Nations and the U.N.
Refugee Agency, or UNHCR — said the campaign was likely to stir up
intolerance.
The UNHCR said the law would run contrary to the U.N. refugee
convention, of which Switzerland is a signatory.
But observers say the People's Party's hardline stance on immigration
could help it in the Oct. 21 national elections. In 2004, the party
successfully campaigned for tighter immigration laws using the image of
black hands reaching into a pot filled with Swiss passports.
"It's certainly no coincidence that the People's Party launched
this initiative before the elections," said Oliver Geden, a
political scientist at the Berlin Institute for International and
Security Affairs.
He said provocative campaigns such as this had worked well for the party
in the past.
"The symbol of the black sheep was clearly intended to have a
double meaning. On the one hand there's the familiar idea of the black
sheep, but a lot of voters are also going to associate it with the
notion of dark-skinned drug dealers," said Geden.
The party also has put forward a proposal to ban the building of minaret
towers alongside mosques. And one of its leading figures, Justice
Minister Christoph Blocher, said he wants to soften anti-racism laws
because they prevent freedom of speech.
Clearly,
their support for freedom of speech proves that Nazi blood still runs
thick in Swiss veins.
What
we're really interested in: Science is in the business of making
predictions, but the better it gets at predicting anything, the more
boring those predictions are for us. For example, I predict that the sun
will set at the O'Hare Airport in Chicago today at 7:26
pm CDT. When you think of all the effort that has gone into
astronomical observation and prediction over the millennia (for example,
Stonehenge), that's an incredible feat the human race has achieved to be
able to accurately predict that.
It's also phenomenally boring.
Now, here's a different prediction: Republican nominee Mike Huckabee
will outpoll Democratic nominee Bill Richardson 51%-47% in the November
2008 Presidential election. "What an idiot!" you say,
"Don't you know that the Clintons will stop at nothing to
get back to the White House? Richardson and Huckabee? You obviously
don't know anything about the election!" And you're right. I don't.
I'm not even sure where Huckabee is from. I think it's that state, you
know, the one you drive through to get to that other
state.
Now, here are some more predictions. USC will not finish #1 in college
football this season. Instead, Rutgers will bring the national title
home to Delaware. (Or maybe to Connecticut, depending on where,
precisely, Rutgers is located. Assuming it's located somewhere. Maybe
it's like the DeVry Institute and is located everywhere. But I digress.)
On the other hand, USC will win the NCAA basketball
championship next spring behind frosh sensation OJ Mayo.
"What a jerk!" you exclaim, "Everybody knows that USC's
linebacking corps is the most devastating in college football since Penn
State's back in 1987." Well, I don't know that. In fact, I know
barely anything about college football these days.
But the point is that, unlike the sunset forecast, these predictions are
interesting, as brainless as they are. The reason that making up
nonsense off the top of my head about elections and sports is
interesting is because nobody can predict accurately sports and far-off
elections with a lot of candidates. Sports, especially, are designed
to be hard to predict just so that they will keep our interest. The same
with gambling. Randomness isn't natural in the world, at least above the
subatomic level. It takes a lot of work to develop gambling devices that
are close to random, but a roulette wheel is more interesting than
betting when the sun will go down because it's hard to predict.
You often hear that the social sciences aren't real sciences like
astronomy because they can't predict anything. But that's not true.
Indeed, I'll make a social science prediction for 25 years into the
future. I predict that in the year 2032, the students at the schools in
Beverly Hills will enjoy higher
average scores on statewide and nationwide standardized tests than
the students at schools in Compton. Anybody want to bet against me?
I've got a million more predictions like that. For example, in 2032, the
children of today's unskilled immigrants will be more of a burden on
society than the children of today's skilled immigrants. (That seems
like an important use of social science -- to make predictions extremely
important for choosing the optimal immigration legislation, right?)
"Well, sure," you say, "Of course. But those predictions
are boring. And depressing. In fact, it's in bad taste to mention things
that we all sort of know are true but that we really don't want to think
about. Who wants to hear predictions like that? Tell us something interesting."
Okay, on December 31, 2032, the Dow Jones Average will stand at 107,391.
But just one year later it will have crashed, in the wake of Black
Wednesday, all the way to 33,828. But by 2042, during the bubble
following a major breakthrough in cold fusion, the Dow will have reached
the 201,537 barrier.
"Now that's better! That's the kind of prediction we like: specific
and exciting. Of course, you're probably just randomly punching numbers
on your keypad, but we forgive you because you're not boring and
depressing us anymore."
Designer
color names: One of the challenges faced by fashion designers is
coming up with new names for the same old colors. For example, here is a
sandal
whose strap color an unfashion-forward individual like myself might
describe as "blackish" but a professional designer describes
as "Ballistic Anthracite." What the hell is that? It sounds
like a weapons system from one of those sci-fi alternate histories of
the Civil War in which the War Between the States finally ends in 1887
when Pennsylvania wipes out Virginia's fleet of steam-engine tanks with
a salvo of coal-powered missiles.
Carol
M. Swain: My new VDARE.com column is a review of the anthology she
edited:
Yale
Law School Professor Peter H. Schuck observes:
"In
a polity in which only 17 percent of the public thinks that immigration
levels should be higher and 39 percent thinks they should be lower, one
would expect that at least some legal scholars who write about
immigration issues would favor restriction. If so, one would be wrong.
In over two decades of immersion in immigration scholarship, I have not
encountered a single academic specialist on immigration
law who favors reducing the number of legal immigrants admitted each
year." ...
So,
Carol M. Swain, a law and political science professor at Vanderbilt, has
done the academic world a service (although one it probably won't
appreciate) with her new book Debating
Immigration.
She brings together 16 chapters from academic and think tank luminaries
such as Nathan
Glazer, Amitai
Etzioni, Douglas
S. Massey, and Steven
A. Camarota, along with lively essays from journalists Peter
Brimelow and Jonathan Tilove.
Swain is one of the more unusual and admirable scholars in public
policy. Growing up black and poor in rural
Virginia, one of twelve children, she dropped out of 9th grade and
married at 16. In her mid-20s she started
back to school. Eventually, she earned tenure at Princeton as an
expert on
how Congress operates.
Best
... scientists ... ever -- Anthropologist John Hawks offers some
good suggestions:
Don't
get me wrong, I like physics as much as anybody. But once your list
includes Newton, Einstein, and Maxwell, and then you throw in Galileo,
well there's not much room for anything else. None at all if you take
Darwin as a given.
So I decided to do something a little different: What five scientists
have had the greatest impact on human life? Yes, Newton was great, but
gravity goes on without him.
Many later discoveries stood on his shoulders, but Newton's achievements
were far more intellectual than practical. I'm looking for people whose
accomplishments saved lives, prevented wars, stopped hunger, or released
people from endless drudgery. This isn't a list of inventors -- if it
were, there would be a lot of ancient inventions like the moldboard plow
that deserve more attention than anything modern. It's a list of
scientists whose impact stretched across many fields, and without whom
life today would likely be worse.
1. R. A. Fisher. His work in population genetics laid the foundations
for the vast productivity increases of twentieth-century agriculture. He
was far from alone in this, but he stood apart from his contemporaries
by inventing many of the statistical methods that would come to define
scientific hypothesis testing. Without Fisher's innovations in
statistics, large-scale medical research studies would be meaningless.
All this after he established the basis for Mendelian inheritance
of continuous characters.
Fisher
strikes me as the Newton of the 20th Century: the scientist /
mathematical innovator.
Will
the NYT ever report anything bad about their blogger
Steve Levitt? Here's the abstract of a paper in press by economist
Ted Joyce, followed by Joyce's cogent explanation of why it's important
to keep harping on this subject.
A
Simple Test of Abortion and Crime
Ted Joyce
Baruch College and Graduate Center
City University of New York
and
National Bureau of Economic Research
Forthcoming in Review of Economics and Statistics
A Simple Test of Abortion and Crime
Abstract
I replicate Donohue and Levitt’s results for violent and property
crime arrest rates and then apply their data and specification to an
analysis of age-specific homicide rates and murder arrest rates. The
coefficients on the abortion rate have the wrong sign for two of the
four measures of crime and none is statistically significant at
conventional levels. In the second half of the paper, I present
alternative tests of abortion and crime that attempt to mitigate
problems of endogeneity and measurement error. I use the legalization of
abortion following the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade in order to
exploit two sources of variation: between-state changes in abortion
rates pre and post Roe, and cross-cohort differences in exposure
to legalized abortion. I ind no meaningful association between abortion
and age-specific crime rates among cohorts born in the years just before
and after abortion became legal.
I. Introduction
The debate as to whether legalized abortion lowers crime leaped from
academic journals to mainstream discourse with the huge success of
Freakonomics.1 In the Chapter titled, “Where Have All the Criminals
Gone?” Levitt and Dubner summarize academic work by Levitt and
coauthor John Donohue, which shows that a one-standard deviation
increase in the abortion rate lowers homicide rates by 31 percent and
can explain upwards of 60 percent of the recent decline in murder.2 If
one accepts these estimates, then legalized abortion has saved more than
51,000 lives between 1991 and 2001, at a total savings of $105 billion.
But the policy implications go beyond crime. If abortion lowers homicide
rates by 20 to 30 percent, then it is likely to have affected an entire
spectrum of outcomes associated with well-being: infant health, child
development, schooling, earnings and marital status. Similarly, the
policy implications are broader than abortion. Other interventions that
affect fertility control and that lead to fewer unwanted births—contraception
or sexual abstinence—have huge potential payoffs. In short, a causal
relationship between legalized abortion and crime has such significant
ramifications for social policy and at the same time is so
controversial, that further assessment of the identifying assumptions
and their robustness to alternative strategies is warranted.
The
New York Times more or less sets the agenda for the rest of the news
media. If the NYT decides a story is fit to print, much of the the rest
of the press will soon decide, what do you know!, that the topic
deserves coverage. But if a tree falls in the forest and the NYT doesn't
cover it ... This means the NYT has a particular responsibility to avoid
giving in to conflicts of interest, which they have clearly succumbed to
over the last two years in their refusal to report on any
of the controversies
swirling around their star columnist turned blogger Steven D. Levitt.
Graduate
Record Exam scores by graduate field of study: A reader sends along
this table from the Graduate Record Exam from ETS giving average scores
by intended field in study in grad school. He includes an estimate of IQ
from one of the popular conversion tables, although he didn't tell me
which one.
One problem I saw was that the mean score for the Quantitative section
is so much higher than for the Verbal section, and the standard
deviation is also larger for Quant, that the combined scores were biased
in favor of highly quantitative fields. So, I added three more columns
on the right that show difference fro the mean in standard deviations
and just take the average for verbal and quantitative compared to their
separate means. That seems fair, since there's no evidence that verbal
intelligence correlates lower with general intelligence, and it may well
be the best surrogate for the g factor. So, that's how I sorted it,
which moves philosophy up into second place behind physics.
That reminds me of how I wrote a review of a book by David Stove in 1999
making gentle fun of philosophy (well, maybe not that gentle: I referred
to the "uselessness
of philosophy"). I received a number of superbly articulate and
intensely argued emails telling me I didn't know what I was talking
about. You'll notice I've drawn in my horns on this topic ever since!
This table may not be fair to business students since perhaps the better
ones tend to take the GMAT to apply to MBA schools.
Graduate Record
Examination Scores
Mean
465
584
Standard
Deviation
117
149
Verbal
Quant
Sum
IQ
Verbal
SD
Quant
SD
Avg.
SD
Physics
& astronomy
533
736
1269
133
0.58
1.02
0.80
Philosophy
590
638
1228
129
1.07
0.36
0.72
Mathematical
Sciences
502
733
1235
130
0.32
1.00
0.66
Materials
Engineering
494
727
1221
129
0.25
0.96
0.60
Economics
503
706
1209
128
0.32
0.82
0.57
Chemical
Engineering
485
726
1211
128
0.17
0.95
0.56
Other
Engineering
493
714
1207
128
0.24
0.87
0.56
Mechanical
Engineering
469
724
1193
126
0.03
0.94
0.49
Other
Humanities & Art
563
599
1162
124
0.84
0.10
0.47
Physical
Sciences
486
697
1183
125
0.18
0.76
0.47
Engineering
468
719
1187
126
0.03
0.91
0.47
Electrical
Eng
459
726
1185
126
(0.05)
0.95
0.45
Banking
& finance
467
711
1178
125
0.02
0.85
0.43
Chemistry
486
680
1166
124
0.18
0.64
0.41
[To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
What's
the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy? The famous sunk cost fallacy
is a particularly popular justification for throwing good money and
blood after bad in a war like Iraq. But the U.S. abandonment of South
Vietnam during Watergate and its aftermath is a clear example of of the
lesser known converse to the sunk cost fallacy.
In 1974, it was clear that South Vietnam's survival hadn't been worth
the sunk cost we had expended during 1961-1973. Yet, sunk costs are
sunk. What we needed to think about were marginal costs. The events of
1972, in which American airpower (finally made effective by the mass use
of laser-guided smart bombs) and South Vietnamese manpower had turned
back a massive North Vietnamese mechanized invasion (which, in itself,
showed that we had finally largely defeated the indigenous guerilla
movement) at the cost of only 300 Americans killed in action for all of
1972 would seem to show that the marginal cost to America of giving
South Vietnam a fair shot at surviving the next North Vietnamese
offensive would be relatively low. Yet, being sick of Vietnam, we failed
to focus on the affordable marginal cost and got hung up emotionally on
the catastrophic sunk cost.
The NVA tried a tentative offensive in December 1974, following the
Democrats midterm election triumphs, found that the US wouldn't provide
air support, so launched a massive offensive in March 1975. The South
Vietnamese collapsed about as quickly as France in 1940.
A
job Americans just won't do! It dawns on Matthew
Yglesias that if border enforcement succeeded in driving up wages
for the unskilled, some jobs wouldn't be economical to do anymore. But,
he doesn't go far enough:
An early scene in "The Man Who Would Be King" takes place in
the office of an English colonial administrator in India. To stay cool,
he had a big fan over his head flapped by a servant via a string
attached to the sitting servant's toe. That's pretty awesome! If wages
weren't so damn high here in America, I could have my own Untouchable
toe-fanning servant too, instead of having to use my boring, totally
unawesome electric fan. I could impress all my friends. (Well, maybe not
the friends I already have, but if I had enough servants, I could assign
some of them to get me new friends who would be impressed.)
Think of all the other hundreds of millions of jobs that could be
created in America if wages fell to 19th Century Indian levels!
Of course, I couldn't actually afford to pay my toe-fanning flunky the
full cost of what it would take for him and his family to live in
America, but I believe the externalities of my servant's cost of living
should be borne by the public at large, not by me. Thus, my worker's
kids should get free schooling, the whole family should get free health
care at the emergency room, his tenement should get fire and police
protection, he should drive without car insurance, etc. Why shouldn't I
cost shift my conveniences on to everybody else?
BY GAIL HERIOT Sunday, August 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an
explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in
American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings
were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of
affirmative action--and indeed, among those who were not.
Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander
calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there
would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind
admissions--about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit
as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they
are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been
"matched" to the wrong school.
No one claims the findings in Mr. Sander's study, "A Systemic
Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," are the
last word on the subject. Although so far his work has held up to
scrutiny at least as well as that of his critics, all fair-minded
scholars agree that more research is necessary before the "mismatch
thesis" can be definitively accepted or rejected.
Unfortunately, fair-minded scholars are hard to come by when the issue
is affirmative action. Some of the same people who argue Mr. Sander's
data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent him from
conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers. If
racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, they
apparently don't want you--or anyone else--to know.
Take William Kidder, a University of California staff advisor and
co-author of a frequently cited attack of Sander's study. When Mr.
Sander and his co-investigators sought bar passage data from the State
Bar of California that would allow analysis by race, Mr. Kidder
passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure
"risks stigmatizing African American attorneys." At the same
time, the Society of American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to
the left it risks falling over sideways, gleefully warned that the state
bar would be sued if it cooperated with Mr. Sander.
Sadly, the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners caved under the
pressure. The committee members didn't formally explain their decision
to deny Mr. Sander's request for these data (in which no names would be
disclosed), but the root cause is clear: Over the last 40 years, many
distinguished citizens--university presidents, judges, philanthropists
and other leaders--have built their reputations on their support for
race-based admissions. Ordinary citizens have found secure jobs as part
of the resulting diversity bureaucracy.
If the policy is not working, they, too, don't want anyone to know. ...
As a result, there is now a serious gap in academic credentials between
minority and non-minority law students across the pecking order, with
the average black student's academic index more than two standard
deviations below that of his average white classmate.
Not surprisingly, such a gap leads to problems. Students who attend
schools where their academic credentials are substantially below those
of their fellow students tend to perform poorly.
The reason is simple: While some students will outperform their entering
academic credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs,
most students will perform in the range that their academic credentials
predict. As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of black students had
first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of their class as
opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical performance
gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is uncontroversial.
Supporters of race-based admissions argue that, despite the likelihood
of poor grades, minority students are still better off accepting the
benefit of a preference and graduating from a more prestigious school.
But Mr. Sander's research suggests that just the opposite may be
true--that law students, no matter what their race, may learn less, not
more, when they enroll in schools for which they are not academically
prepared. Students who could have performed well at less competitive
schools may end up lost and demoralized. As a result, they may fail the
bar.
Specifically, Mr. Sander found that when black and white students with
similar academic credentials compete against each other at the same
school, they earn about the same grades. Similarly, when black and white
students with similar grades from the same tier law school take the bar
examination, they pass at about the same rate.
Yet, paradoxically, black students as a whole have dramatically lower
bar passage rates than white students with similar credentials.
Something is wrong.
The Sander study argued that the most plausible explanation is that, as
a result of affirmative action, black and white students with similar
credentials are not attending the same schools. The white students are
more likely to be attending a school that takes things a little more
slowly and spends more time on matters that are covered on the bar exam.
They are learning, while their minority peers are struggling at more
elite schools.
Mr. Sander calculated that if law schools were to use color-blind
admissions policies, fewer black law students would be admitted to law
schools (3,182 students instead of 3,706), but since those who were
admitted would be attending schools where they have a substantial
likelihood of doing well, fewer would fail or drop out (403 vs. 670). In
the end, more would pass the bar on their first try (1,859 vs. 1,567)
and more would eventually pass the bar (2,150 vs. 1,981) than under the
current system of race preferences. Obviously, these figures are just
approximations, but they are troubling nonetheless.
Mr. Sander has his critics--some thoughtful, some just strident--but so
far none has offered a plausible alternative explanation for the data.
Of course, Mr. Sander doesn't need to be proven 100% correct for his
research to be devastating news for affirmative-action supporters.
Suppose the consequences of race-based admissions turn out to be a
wash--neither increasing nor decreasing the number of minority
attorneys. In that case, few people would think it worth the costs, not
least among them the human costs that result from the failure of the
supposed beneficiaries to graduate and pass the bar.
Under current practices, only 45% of blacks who enter law school pass
the bar on their first attempt as opposed to over 78% of whites. Even
after multiple tries, only 57% of blacks succeed. The rest are often
saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not
counting undergraduate debt. How great an increase in the number of
black attorneys is needed to justify these costs?
A
friend of mine wasted a decade of his life going to law school and
working as a hospital orderly while flunking the bar exam nine or ten
times before giving up. If he'd become a salesman out of college, he
might have been making six figures by then.
For blacks, the 43% of black law students who never pass the bar exam
represent a well-above average group who could have used their 20s to do
something more productive.
Speaking
of academic affirmative action, a reader writes regarding Barack Obama's
fluctuating personality:
I
would be willing to bet a small amount of money that Obama's book was an
outgrowth of his college and grad school admissions essays rather than a
reflection of reality and hence of cognitive issues. However, I also
agree that if you do not take into consideration the fascinating warping
of reality that the college admissions process engenders, he might seem
like a basket case.
That
makes a lot of sense. That reminds me of an earlier reader's comment on
Obama's book:
Everyone
who gets into Harvard Law School has to have The Rap.
They have to have the story of teen angst, commitment to healing the
world, good deeds, and preferably a healthy dose of some sort of
conflict in the real world that gave them some special insight into
human nature that makes them unique and diverse. Not TOO conflicted,
however, since a felony conviction will prevent you from becoming a
lawyer.
In my class, a year after Obama arrived, there was The Photojournalist
from Nicaragua, who saw human suffering and experienced Life and Death
first hand. There was also The Fly Fisherman, a guy who graduated from
college and fly fished across the USA for a couple years, hitchhiking,
living in the wilds, experiencing Water and the Land closehand and
coming to a more true and full appreciation of Man and Nature.
Obama's autobiography is a book-length Harvard Law School Rap. It has
the manufactured conflict, the manufactured struggling, the manufactured
multiculturalism with a smidgen of Tragic Mulatto and Man Torn Between
Two Cultures, etc. Of course no one in the admissions office ever
challenges any individual's Rap since no one has the time, energy or
enthusiasm. Think of it the same way you think of a fifty word High
Concept movie pitch, like those studio scenes at the beginning of The
Player.
Having expanded his Rap with more local color to make his book, all he
has done is dig himself a deeper hole of deceit. Harvard won't
fact-check student admission essays, but reporters will.
Let's
try to re-engineer the getting into the Ivy League process from Obama's
point of view. He wants to get into all these fancy colleges with
affirmative action programs, such as Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard
Law School. But is he really authentically African-American enough to
get a boost from the Admissions Committee?
Although everybody talks about diversity in general all the time, the
only kind of diversity that really interests white people are blacks.
Look at the faltering Presidential campaign of Bill Richardson. He's a
governor, he has a resume a lot like the first George W. Bush's, and
he's 3/4ths Mexican (the other 1/4th is upper crust WASP) and grew up in
Mexico City for the first 13 years of his life. And nobody in the media
cares because he's not black like Obama.
If Obama was growing up today, he'd figure out that although the elite
colleges talk about diversity as if they mean they're lifting up out of
the ghettoes the great-great-grandchildren of the slaves, the truth is
that they've pretty much given up on urban African-American males who
aren't athletes, as -- as Harvard's Jamaican and Jewish Lani
Guinier (who herself looks like the late Gilda Radner's half-sister)
has documented. Ivy Leagues blacks are increasingly West Indian or
African or European or mixed race or all of the above. For example, when
Princeton decided to boost their African-American studies reputation,
they expensively raided Harvard for philosopher Anthony
Appiah, who is the grandson of the famous 1940s British Chancellor
of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps. But, hey, he's sorta black (via
his Ghanian prince father), so that's good enough!
But back then, Obama might well have worried that he wasn't really
"black" enough to impress the admissions committees. First,
his Mom was white. Second, his Dad wasn't the descendent of slaves, he
was the son of a prosperous Kenyan landowner. Third, his Dad abandoned
him as an infant and he was brought up by white relatives and a little
bit by an Indonesian guy. (Now, you might think that Indonesia is really
diverse, but, trust me, nobody in America cares about Indonesia at all.)
Fourth, he was a preppie from paradise. Hawaii is one place where the
one-drop rule of determining race doesn't apply, so -- horrors! --
Honolulu Obama might actually think of himself more as being mixed than
as being black!
So, you could imagine the thoughts going through his head when sat down
to write his Columbia and Harvard Law application essays.
On the other hand, he really did walk the black activist walk, moving to
Chicago for a few years to try to organize inner city blacks to get more
goodies out of the government. And he has spent 20 years sitting in a
pew at a leftist Afrocentrist church listening to the Rev. Wright stick
it to whitey in his sermons. I've never seen much evidence that Obama,
who spent his early 20s reading Nietzsche, believes in all that "I
am the redeemer and the life" business. He's pretty upfront about
his having to join a church because blacks don't trust ambitious
atheists. And, he genuinely seems to get a major charge out of the
racial exclusiveness and solidarity that he finds at his racialist
church.
Did
Obama undergo Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? A reader has sent me a
theory about why Barack Obama's personality seems so different today
than when he wrote his first autobiography in 1995, that, while highly
speculative, sounds not implausible.
Since I don't watch television news, I'd never seen Barack Obama on
video until after I read his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My
Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Thus, I developed a rather
different perspective on Obama's personality than the multitudes
whose opinion was molded by seeing him on TV. Rather than seeing him as
"comfortable in his own skin" (a phrase common among those who
know him from TV), his memoir showed a supremely uncomfortable
33-year-old who was "a literary artist of
considerable power in plumbing his deep reservoirs of self-pity and
resentment, an unfunny Evelyn Waugh. ...Obama has a depressive’s fine
eye for the disillusioning detail. ... The book’s chief weakness is
that its main character—Obama himself—is a bit of a drip, a
humor-impaired Holden Caulfield whose preppie angst is fueled by racial
regret. (Obama has a knack for irony, but of a strangely humorless
flavor.)"
Now, Waugh was an infinitely more interesting person than the man who
was Prime Minister three times during Waugh's early career from 1925-37,
yet who is barely remember today. (Can you name that Tory PM? Waugh is
now mentioned about 3.5 times more on the Internet than that Prime
Minister.) Waugh was a man of near genius, but I've never heard of
anyone ever considering him as a potential Prime Minister. The idea
seems ludicrous. And that's about the same impression I took away from
Obama's first memoir -- a talented and highly interesting man, but not
at all what you'd look for in a President.
Lots of people who hadn't read Obama's autobiography were outraged by my
article about his book. They'd seen him on TV, where he looked very
Presidential, so his book couldn't possibly be like I said it was.
Kevin
Drum of the liberal Washington Monthly, however, plowed all the way
through Obama's first book and reported back similarly, although Drum
was less sympathetical and more distrustful than I was, but we seemed to
be in agreement that twelve years ago Obama hadn't portrayed himself as
the kind of emotionally stable individual you'd want in the White House.
Drum wrote:
Obama
routinely describes himself feeling the deepest, most painful emotions
imaginable (one event is like a "fist in my stomach," for
example, and he "still burned with the memory" a full year
after a minor incident in college), but these feelings seem to be all
out of proportion to the actual events of his life, which are generally
pretty pedestrian. Is he describing his real feelings? Is he simply
making the beginning writer's mistake of thinking that the way to convey
emotion is to use lots of adjectives? Or is something else going
on?...
There's just something very peculiar about the book. I can't put my
finger entirely on what it is, but for all the overwrought language that
Obama employs on page after page, there's very little insight into what
he believes and what really makes him tick. It was almost as if Obama
was admitting to his moodiness and angst less as a way of letting us
know who he is than as a way of guarding against having to really tell
us. By the time I was done, I felt like I knew less about him than
before.
But,
clearly, Obama isn't today the person portrayed in his first book. For
one thing, he now has a mild sense of humor. Perhaps he never was
who he claimed in 1995 to be -- we now know his depiction of his Hawaiian
days was quite distorted.
Or, perhaps he has changed. One possibility is that he goes
through moderate hypomanic
and depressive cycles. This is quite common among high achievers. The
secret to winning your place in history is often to have an up cycle
coincide by luck with a time when intense action is needed.
But, another possibility is that he's done something to improve himself.
A reader writes:
You
should catch the Daily Show at 11. Not so much what Obama has to say,
but just watching how comfortable he is in his own skin. I thought about
you when Stewart showed him the headline, "Angry Obama the Pothead
Is Not How They Remember Him In Hawaii", his reaction was deep and
genuine laughter, with no sign of self-consciousness or defensiveness.
From use of a throwaway use of the phrase, "push back against the
habits of thought", I think I know why "Angry Obama"
seems so mellow, he's gone through therapy (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
I'd guess-- who knows, maybe he did it Cary Grant style) and I think his
shrink did the trick.
Habits of thought is a buzzword that you'll hear from CBT and Positive
Psychology terms just as (to put it in California terms) someone talking
about Thetans is probably a Scientologist. …
As for "habits of thought",
here's how the CBT folks use the term, "But Dr. Seligman believes
that explanatory style can be changed. In a recent study of depressed
patients he found that cognitive therapy - a technique that identifies
and corrects erroneous habits of thought -changed the style of the
patients from pessimistic to optimistic, and that the change persisted
one year after therapy ended."
A google of "habits of thought" and "Obama" shows he
used the expression in his second book, The Audacity of Hope:
"each
successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of
your flaws - the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may
be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly
worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in
your hip."
It
seems to me that between book 1 and book 2, Barry had his head worked on
and it took. In this interview, he comes across as a good guy.
CBT
isn't Freudian witchdoctoring. It has a good track record of helping
people with moderate emotional problems get themselves out of the ruts
they're stuck in. The Wikipedia
article on it says:
A
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a psychotherapy
based on modifying cognitions, assumptions, beliefs and behaviors, with
the aim of influencing disturbed emotions. The general approach
developed out of behavior
modification, Cognitive
Therapy and Rational
Emotive Behavior Therapy, and has become widely used to treat neurosispsychopathology,
including mood
disorders and anxiety
disorders. The particular therapeutic techniques vary according to
the particular kind of client or issue, but commonly include keeping a
diary of significant events and associated feelings, thoughts and
behaviors; questioning and testing cognitions, assumptions, evaluations
and beliefs that might be unhelpful and unrealistic; gradually facing
activities which may have been avoided; and trying out new ways of
behaving and reacting. Relaxation and distraction techniques are also
commonly included. CBT is widely accepted as an evidence and empirically
based, cost-effective psychotherapy for many disorders and psychological
problems. It is sometimes used with groups of people as well as
individuals, and the techniques are also commonly adapted for self-help
manuals and, increasingly, for self-help software packages.
If
Obama has been helped by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or something
else, he should tell the public. His endorsement could do a lot of good
by encouraging others to try it.
If he had therapy, the most likely point was in the 18 months following
his defeat by Bobby Rush when he challenged the Congressman in the 2000
primary. Obama's Harvard credentials had played well in the Hyde Park
district he represented in the Illinois legislature, but more typical
blacks in Rush's South Side district found Obama stuck up and unlikable.
In his latest book, in the next
sentence after mentioning "habits of thought," Obama goes
on:
In
me, one of those flaws had proven to be a chronic restlessness; an
inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those
blessings that were right there in front of me. It's a flaw that is
endemic to modern life, I think -- endemic, too, in the American
character -- and one that is nowhere more evident than in the field of
politics. Whether politics actually encourages the trait or simply
attracts those who possess it is unclear. Lyndon Johnson, who knew much
about both politics and restlessness, once said that every man is trying
to either live up to his father's expectations or make up for his
father's mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady
as well as anything else.
In any event, it was as a consequence of that restlessness that I
decided to challenge a sitting Democratic incumbent for his
congressional seat in the 2000 election cycle. It was an ill-considered
race, and I lost badly -- the sort of drubbing that awakens you to the
fact that life is not obliged to work out as you'd planned. A year and a
half later, the scars of that loss sufficiently healed ...
Denial, anger, bargaining, despair -- I'm not sure I went through all
the stages prescribed by the experts. At some point, though, I arrived
at acceptance -- of my limits, and, in a way, my mortality. I refocused
on my work in the state senate and took satisfaction from the reforms
and initiatives that my position afforded. I spent more time at home,
and watched my daughters grow, and properly cherished my wife, and
thought about my long-term financial obligations. I exercised, and read
novels, and came to appreciate how the earth rotated around the sun and
the seasons came and went without any particular exertions on my part.
Sounds
like Obama was doing some emotional therapy -- either self-directed or
with a counselor. From a Google search, it doesn't seem like anyone has ever
raised the topic of whether Obama has had therapy, but it hardly seems
unlikely in someone so introspective.
We have a destructive prejudice in America against politicians admitting
to getting any help for emotional problems, even though roughly half
of all Presidents appear to have had one kind of mental problem or
another (e.g., Lincoln and depression).
Indeed, perhaps Obama's beautiful but disturbing first book chronicling
his obsession with his father was written under the influence of some
quasi-Freudian therapist who demanded that he obsess at vast length over
his parents, while his more bland but reassuring second book is the
outcome of a quick, practical course of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or
something similar. This is 100% speculation, of course, but it would
help answer the basic question about why Obama's self presentation of
his personality changed so much from age 33 to age 42.
Obama goes on:
And
it was this acceptance, I think, that allowed me to come up with the
thoroughly cockeyed idea of running for the United States Senate.
Obviously,
the BS meter here is running about 9.5 on a 1 to 10 scale: Obama talks
about how he had come to realize one of his flaws was
"restlessness," how he had learned to accept his limits and
the satisfactions of his limited life ... and then almost immediately he
decides to run for the U.S. Senate! And then for the Presidency! And
when he's term limited out of the White House after eight years, he'll
convert to Catholicism and run for Pope (unless there's an opening in
the Galactic Overlord job).
But there's nothing unique among politicians about Obama's overweening
ambition. They're all like that. Fifteen years ago in The United
States of Ambition, Alan Ehrenhalt asked about our political
leaders: Who chooses these people? His answer was: They choose
themselves.
And we like that. As Gen. Patton said, Americans love a winner. We pay
lip service to having our heroes lead a balanced life, but we mostly
just want them to win, damn the consequences. I've seen a million movies
in which the hero is striving so hard that his wife complains that he's
missing all his son's Little League games. So, then, there's a montage
of him playing catch with his son and cheering him on when he hits a
homer in Little League, and then our hero goes back out and wins the
really big prize and gets a standing ovation.
Same with Obama -- he inserts a montage in his book about spending more
time at home watching his daughters grow while exercising and
appreciating how the earth rotates around the sun ... and then he's off
on the Road to the White House! We love that kind of hypocrisy in our
heroes.
So, if Obama had help getting his head screwed on right after his
depressing pratfall in 2000, he shouldn't keep it a secret. Telling us
about it could help a lot of people who need help.
A troop of vervet monkeys is giving Kenyan villagers long days and
sleepless nights, destroying crops and causing a food crisis.
Earlier this month, local MP Paul Muite urged the Kenyan Wildlife
Service to help contain their aggressive behaviour.
But Mr Muite caused laughter when he told parliament that the monkeys
had taken to harassing and mocking women in a village. But this is
exactly what the women in the village of Nachu, just south-west of
Kikuyu, are complaining about.
They estimate there are close to 300 monkeys invading the farms at dawn.
They eat the village's maize, potatoes, beans and other crops. And
because women are primarily responsible for the farms, they have borne
the brunt of the problem, as they try to guard their crops.
They say the monkeys are more afraid of young men than women and
children, and the bolder ones throw stones and chase the women from
their farms.
Nachu's women have tried wearing their husbands' clothes in an attempt
to trick the monkeys into thinking they are men - but this has failed,
they say.
"When we come to chase the monkeys away, we are dressed in trousers
and hats, so that we look like men," resident Lucy Njeri told the
BBC News website. "But the monkeys can tell the difference and they
don't run away from us and point at our breasts. They just ignore us and
continue to steal the crops."
In addition to stealing their crops, the monkeys also make sexually
explicit gestures at the women, they claim. "The monkeys grab their
breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts. We are
afraid that they will sexually harass us," said Mrs Njeri.
The Kenyan Wildlife Service told the BBC that it was not unusual for
monkeys to harass women and be less afraid of them than men, but they
had not heard of monkeys in Kenya making sexually explicit gestures as a
form of communication to humans.
The predominantly farming community is now having to receive famine
relief food.
Thank
God for famine relief! Otherwise, these women's husbands would have to
get off their duffs and scare away the damn monkeys. And that just
wouldn't be culturally
appropriate.
Considering how frequently Bono, Bishop Tutu, Bob Geldof, Tony Blair, Angelina
Jolie, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Sachs and other worthies get together to bask
in their collective celebrityhood discuss how to alleviate
Africa's poverty problem, you might think that somebody, somewhere would
have mentioned in the press the Sailer Solution: African men should
start working as hard as African women already work. But it never
seems to come up. (My wife suggests that Oprah, who has funded a school
for girls in South Africa, might eventually spills the beans.)
Vietnam
-- There has been a lot of talk this week about what would happened
if the U.S had helped South Vietnam resist the North Vietnamese
offensive of December 1974 with airstrikes. The Spring 1972 North
Vietnamese offensive had been defeated by a combination of South
Vietnamese soldiers and American air power, with few American deaths
(only 300 were killed
in Vietnam in the entire year of 1972). In the wake of Watergate,
however, the now-dominant Democratic Congress didn't want to help any
more, and South Vietnam quickly collapsed, along with anti-Communist
governments in neighboring Cambodia and Laos.
Today, with American air power so unchallenged, it seems strange that
the Democrats didn't want to allow air support of the South Vietnamese.
After all, a couple of decades later, a Democrat President got involved
in an internal dispute of negligible significance to America, and bombed
Yugoslavia into ceding control of its internationally-recognized Kosovo
province, at minimal cost in lost aircraft. The number of planes lost to
enemy fire in both Iraq wars has also been tiny.
But, the American advantage in air war was much less overwhelming in the
1970s. We lost 3,322
fixed-wing aircraft in Vietnam, perhaps the majority of that number to
enemy fire. [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
The
Decline of Skull & Bones: My informant
(who is not a member of the Yale secret society, but has reliable inside
info) writes:
First,
you observe that 5 of the last 10 major party candidates were
bonespersons. Four of those five, however, were Bushes. It is more
likely that Bones has benefited from the Bush dynasty than that the Bush
dynasty has benefited from Bones. In fact, George H.W. Bush has
complained that Bones was if anything a liability for him as a
politician, and I would tend to believe him. As for Kerry, Bones
membership may have conferred some modest benefit, but his rise to
prominence in the early 1970s was largely his own doing. His also had
helpful family connections and a talent for marrying rich women. I doubt
that Bones was much of a factor in his career – although it probably
didn’t have as much of a downside for him, as a Democrat, as it may
have had for the Bushes.
Finally, on the current influence of the society, it has very little.
The admission of women in the early 1990s was disastrous for the Skull
& Bones and undermined the cohesion required to make secret
organizations work. The relatively high degree of loyalty which the
society once inspired depended on members’ ability trust one another,
which in turn was based on members being encouraged to divulge their
every secret.
At
Yale the students on the outside wondered for 80 years what went on
inside the fabled secret senior societies, such as Skull and Bones. On
Thursday nights one would see the secretsociety members walking silently
and single file, in black flannel suits, white shirts, and black knit
ties with gold pins on them, toward their great Greek Revival temples on
the campus, buildings whose mystery was doubled by the fact that they
had no windows. What in the name of God or Mammon went on in those
30-odd Thursday nights during the senior years of these happy few?
What went on was... [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
Updated:
An iSteve.com public service: improving Apache-Skull & Bones
understanding: With all the stereotypes and prejudice in this world
that divide groups of people, it's crucial to help clear up
misunderstandings causing enmity amongst them. If the Israelis and
Palestinians just understood the facts, I'm sure they'd all have a big
laugh over it and get along fine from now on. Hmmhmmh ... well, maybe
that's not the best example ...
Okay, let me find a better instance of a misconception rather than
reality dividing two sets of people ... All right, I've got one: the
long-lasting but surprisingly seldom mentioned in the media rift between
the Apache Nation and the secretive Skull & Bones Society of Yale.
So, I shall do my part to heal it.
The President's grandfather, future Senator Prescott Bush, boasted than
when training at Fort Sill in 1918, he had dug up the skull of Apache
leader Geronimo and given it to the Skull & Bones society to display
in their windowless redoubt on the Yale campus known as "The
Tomb." [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
The
inside history of intra-conservative immigration battles: In the
cover story of the July 30 American
Conservative, John O'Sullivan offers an extremely lucid
recounting of conservative battles over immigration going back to his
decision (with Bill Buckley's concurrence) to print Peter Brimelow's
massive 1992 article on immigration:
Getting
Immigration Right By John O’Sullivan It took 15 years, but conservative intellectuals finally deserted
the Beltway establishment’s open-borders consensus.
WSJistas
have long jibed about O'Sullivan and Brimelow being English immigrants,
so John concludes his article:
"Until
the battle recommences, however, if any indignant xenophobe is thinking
of writing an exposé of this conspiracy of English immigrants to impose
an “un-American” system of immigration law on the American people,
Steve Sailer has already come up with the perfect title: “The
Protocols of the Elders of Albion.”"
[To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
I
told you so about Karl Rove: From my new VDARE.com column "Rove
Means Never Having to Say You're Republican," I review my six
years of pointing out the widely acclaimed "Genius's" flagrant
incompetence:
Even
merely as a short-term political manipulator, Rove completely botched
the immigration issue. And it's not as if our criticism of the electoral
logic of the Bush-Rove dream of increasing Mexican immigration was only
recently validated. Instead, Bush and Rove advanced their desire for
more Mexicans in 2001, 2004, 2006, and 2007. And each time Congressional
Republicans rejected
it as bad for the country and bad
for the GOP.
As I wrote back on September
10, 2001 (!!!) in the wake of strong Congressional resistance to the
Administration's immigration mania:
"So
why did Karl Rove and the rest of the Bush braintrust misread the
political situation? Why did the White House fail to anticipate
Congressional Republicans' concerns that amnesty
would undermine the GOP? The Bush team appears to have been the
victims of residing in an echo chamber with a mainstream media corps
that—for reasons of innumeracy, fashion, self-interest, self-image and
fear—failed to challenge the Bush advisers' sloppy thinking about
immigration." [Analysis:
Why Bush blundered on immigrants By Steve Sailer, United Press
International September 10, 2001]
Luckily
for Rove and Bush—there’s no other way to put it—3,000 Americans
were murdered the next day. So the massive public humiliation of having
Republicans in Congress decisively crush their dreams of a Hispanicized
polity that would elect future
generations of the Bush
dynasty was postponed for six long, wasted years.
Rove's immigration strategy, along with the assumption in the press that
it was a political
masterstroke, was always based on the interaction of political
correctness, smugness, and sheer laziness.
David Frum wrote recently in the New York Times:
"In
my brief service as a speechwriter inside the Bush administration, I
often wondered why it was that skeptical experts on issues like
immigration could never get even a hearing for their point of view. We
took the self-evident brilliance of our plans so much for granted that
we would not even meet, for example, with conservative academics who had
the facts and figures to demonstrate the illusion of Rovian hopes for a
breakthrough among Hispanic voters." [Building
a Coalition, Forgetting to Rule, August 14, 2007]
The
real problem for the GOP is less Hispanic voters than Hispanic leaders—92
percent of all elected Hispanic politicians are Democrats.
The reason for the 92% Democrats is obvious if you stop and think about
it (which apparently nobody does): since most Hispanic citizens vote
Democratic, most Hispanic-majority districts in the country are
Democratic. And those are the ones in which Hispanics are most probable
to get elected. So, it makes all the sense in the world for politically
ambitious young Hispanics to join the party that's more likely to
get them elected to office: the Democrats.
So, what Bush and Rove have been doing by not enforcing the immigration
laws is helping create a new Democratic Latino elite that will plague
the GOP for decades.
As politics, Rove's immigration ploy was negligent at the levels of
simple logic and numeracy. [More]
"The
Simpsons Movie:" The Man Called Thursday argues that the show's
peak was the second through fourth seasons way back in the early 1990s,
which was when Matt Groening lost interest and control shifted to the
Harvard Mafia (as my former neighbor, a screenwriter on the meat and
potatoes sit-com "Married With Children," called them with
fear and loathing in her voice). I can't disagree, although the show's
consistency held up well through the end up the decade. Were the
Simpsons' 1990s the greatest decade any television show ever enjoyed?
I'd say so, but lots of people would vote for more recent hour long
drama on cable, such as The Sopranos. The funny thing is that drama
doesn't hold up as well as comedy. Stations paid a lot of money in the
late 1980s for the hour long dramas thirtysomething and Miami Vice, and
never got their money back. Meanwhile, "I Love Lucy" is still
playing somewhere right now.
The Simpsons Movie concentrated too hard on telling what we already knew
-- the Simpsons may be dysfunctional, but when they pull together, they
can triumph. I would have like to learn knew things. For example, we get
to meet Nelson "Ha-Ha!" Muntz's mom. Why couldn't the
backstory of other characters be covered?
Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are
firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition
shortages hitting police departments nationwide and preventing some
officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.
Last
year, I tried to figure out how many bullets we are firing at people
in Iraq every year. (This new AP article drops some hints, but never
comes out and says.) [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
Will
iSteve.com be available on Mayor Villaraigosa's municipal free wi-fi? The
mayor of Los Angeles, an energetic fellow, has proposed that the city
provide free high-speed wireless Internet connections to every Los
Angeleno. Sounds great! I could dump my expensive cable modem connection
... assuming Mayor Villaraigosa would allow me to look at my own
website.
Which is a big If. Colby
Cosh recently pointed out that Saskatchewan's new municipal Wi-Fi
networks ban citizens from visiting "sites associated with
pornography or hate groups." One of the banes of my career is
dealing with private censor companies that ban iSteve.com, such
as the one that explained "The main goal of SiteCoach is to filter
pornographic content and content glorifying violence, as well as
right-wing and other so-called forbidden content that 'hits below the
belt'." Who knows what Mayor Tony's taxpayer-paid service will
allow? Free Wi-Fi and Free Speech are antonyms.
Peter
Frost's explanation for high average Ashkenazi Jewish IQs: Attempts
to come up with a Darwinian explanation for the high average IQ of
European Jews go back at least to Norbert
Weiner's 1953 autobiography, in which he argued that arranged
marriages between the shetl's brightest young rabbi and the richest
merchant's daughter would lead to large numbers of smart children having
enough money to survive. In 2005, Greg
Cochran, Henry Harpending, and Jason Hardy put forward a
sophisticated theory pointing to selection for the mental demands of
traditional Ashkenazi occupations such as moneylender. In Commentary,
Charles Murray
recently suggested the Babylonian Captivity could have played a role.
For a number of years, anthropologist Peter Frost has been privately
advocating a fourth theory. Frost is the author of the 2005 book
Fair
Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Color Prejudice,
which I reviewed
in VDARE.com. On
Wednesday, Frost posted in the
comments to Mahalanobis'
item on economist Greg Clark's new book showing that the prosperous
had many more surviving children than the poor in medieval and early
modern England. The comment summarizes Frost's theory of the evolution
of Ashkenazi intelligence:
The
same process was going on in other European nations, but to varying
extents. I commented on this point in the following letter to Commentary
(which was never published):
In "Jewish Genius" [April] Charles Murray states that
selection for intelligence has historically been stronger in some
occupations than in others, being notably stronger in sales, finance,
and trade than in farming. Insofar as he is right, the reason lies not
in the occupation itself but in its relations of production. [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
College
admission yields: Is the fix in? The two key numbers in the college
admissions prestige game are selectivity and yield. For example, Harvard
only accepts about 10% of all applicants, and about 80% of them
choose to go to Harvard.
Some specialty schools have very high yields without having very high
selectivity, such as BYU and the Citadel military, but mostly
selectivity and yields are closely related (inversely).
Here's a 2006 article from the Stanford
Daily with some more numbers on yield:
[To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 14, 2007; A02
Many social reformers have long said that low academic achievement among
inner-city children cannot be improved significantly without moving
their families to better neighborhoods, but new reports released today
that draw on a unique set of data throw cold water on that theory.
[To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
Pancho
Gonzales: African-American sports history (e.g., Jackie Robinson,
Arthur Ashe winning the U.S. tennis title in 1968, etc.) is so heavily
publicized that it's striking to notice how little attention is paid to
Mexican-American sports history. [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
"Sunshine"
is a medium budget ($40 million) science fiction thriller with art house
pretensions about eight astronauts on a last-chance-for-mankind mission
to reignite the dying Sun with a "stellar bomb" the size of
Manhattan. The movie falls uncomfortably between the grand heroism of
the old sci-fi and the petty self-absorption of our reality television
shows. [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
I
review Michael H. Hart's answer to Jared Diamond at VDARE.com: Hart'sUnderstanding
Human Historyis a better History of Everything than Guns,
Germs, and Steel. Here's an excerpt:
"Throughout
history, most of the instances of people from one region attacking and
conquering substantial portions of another region have involved
'northerners' invading more southerly lands."
(The
biggest exception: the Arabs
of the 7th Century A.D. And the Romans conquered in all
directions.)
This overall pattern of north conquering south has long been apparent
from the historical record—even though northern lands are generally
less populous, due to shorter growing seasons.
[More
[To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
A
trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon we're talking about real
money: Now that the long predicted dubious mortgage crash has
finally arrived, I keep remembering that going back to the early 1990s,
the government has been twisting the arms of private lenders to get them
to lend more mortgage money to minorities than the private firms believe
was justified by colorblind principles of creditworthiness.
Have the chickens finally come home to roost?
This history seems to have disappeared down the memory hole because it's
all in the sacred cause of fighting discrimination, but I recall it
distinctly from when I was daily reader of the Wall Street Journal in
the 1990s.
For example, poking around on Google, I find that there was a celebrated
1993 study by the Boston Fed showing that minorities' mortgage
applications were rejected at a higher rate. Peter
Brimelow pointed out in Forbes that minorities did not
have lower default rates, suggesting that lenders were behaving in a
rationally colorblind manner, but that was not a popular view at the
time.
[To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
Can
this be true? If so, that's bad, really bad. Pakistanis in the US must
come up with eight patents every, what, year? Month? Still, Pakistanis
don't seem to to do that well in invention
and high tech entrepreneurship in the U.S., ranking down around
Mexican-Americans, but they sure do better than their cousins in
Pakistan. In an inventing contest, the whole country of Pakistan could
be matched up against Hedy
Lamarr. It would be a close battle.
Movie
critics v. movie box-office: I've long felt that the individual film
critic's job isn't really to give you a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on
whether a movie is good or not. You'd be better off looking up on Rotten
Tomatoes an aggregation of critics' ratings to even out the random
perturbations.
Now, there are a tiny number of unjustly-overlooked movies that I've
helped call to public attention -- "Idiocracy,"
of course, but also Stephen Fry's Evelyn Waugh adaptation "Bright
Young Things," as well as the relevance of John Huston's "Man
Who Would Be King" to forecasting the Afghan War. But, in
general, I'm too old to care whether I'm succeeding in imposing my
personal tastes upon the world. (Which is good, because I'm not
...)
Instead, I see my job in my movie
reviews as adding value. Some critics do this by being amusingly
snarky, but I'm more earnest. I go read the book, Google the history,
think about the issues the movie brings up.
[To
read the rest, click the "Permalink" below ...]
Nerds
and Object-Orientation -- To me, one of the hallmarks of nerdishness
is a cognitive tendency toward being "object-oriented," as
opposed to seeing things in context. I consider object-orientation a
masculine mental trait, in some ways the opposite of women's intuition,
where a woman processes a variety of clues to come to a holistic
insight, typically about social relationships.
I've also
argued that East Asians tend to be more masculine-minded than white
Americans on average, as shown by having higher SAT Math relative to SAT
Verbal scores and being good engineers, and the like. [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
On
the Internet, nobody knows you're a white guy: Liberals bloggers and
readers of Daily Kos have been getting together at an annual convention,
and it turns out -- surprise, surprise -- that when you see them in
person, this latest manifestation of civil society consists of a whole
bunch of white males. From the Washington Post:
My
new VDARE.com column: I think this rather long column will help
readers understand a little better why the "genealogical
perspective" is so crucial but so overlooked in understanding human
affairs:
Genealogy—the study of who
a person's ancestors are—is viewed by American intellectuals as a
quaint hobby of only individual interest. But it's actually one of the
most under-explored paths to better understanding humanity.
I was especially happy because Pinker's article cogently articulates
many of the ideas about the overlooked
importance of kinship that he and I kicked around via email in the
late 1990s, and which have provided the basis for many of my VDARE.com
articles ever since. ...
What is a nerd? Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, has been working on the question for the last
12 years. She has gone to high schools and colleges, mainly in
California, and asked students from different crowds to think about the
idea of nerdiness and who among their peers should be considered a nerd;
students have also “reported” themselves. Nerdiness, she has
concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who
are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.”
[To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
Education
Insight: Here's an email from a new public school teacher in
Pennsylvania. He is struggling with the pompous and inane jargon of the
education school professors from whom he's taking courses to get
accredited, and says it dawned on him that:
Those
who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach get a Ed.D. in Education so they can implement
instruction for instructional implementers.
Israel
vs. Mexico in the media: Have
you ever noticed how vastly much more attention is paid in the America
press to Israel, a country of 6 million an ocean away, than to Mexico, a
country of 109 million that shares a 1,952 mile border with us?
[To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
Michael Vick: The Atlanta Falcons quarterback who is facing trial on
charges of horrific abuse of dogs while holding dog fights at his
mansion, has one of the world's greatest bodies, but not, by most
accounts, one of the world's greatest brains.
A reader sent me a link to a Randall Parker Future Pundit item from 2006
that was prescient:
Does
this represent Steven
D. Levitt's personal character?I hadn't been paying much attention to economist John R.
Lott's defamation lawsuit against Freakonomist Steven D. Levitt: I don't
like lawsuits. But now I've finally read the two 2005 emails at the
heart of one count of Lott's suit. I'm sure I don't understand all the
details of the situation, but they seem pretty eye-opening. [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
Back
from camping: I am sorry about no postings, but the family went
camping at the spectacular Montana
de Oro state park just south of Morro Bay. I never announce ahead of
time when I will travel because it's just an invitation to bad guys to
come burgle my house. I'm especially sensitive about security because,
back before our recent local move, some jerks put my old address on the
web to try to intimidate me by threatening my family.
Why
the Axis of Amnesty coalition failed: My new VDARE.com
column examines why what was wrong with the seemingly mile-wide
coalition of special interests behind the Kennedy-Bush-McCain: It was
only an inch deep. "What the Axis didn't have was any Americans below
the elites who actually cared enough about the amnesty bill to write
their Senators." For example, white liberals below the elite ranks
did almost nothing to help the amnesty bill pass:
As
Randall Burns has documented on VDARE.com, white liberals who are
ordinary citizens showed negligible zeal for amnesty. [More]
"Hitchens'
Hubris:" In a review
in Taki's magazine,Tom Piatak goes after Christopher Hitchens'
bestseller God Is Not Great hammer and tongs in one of the few
impolite reviews Hitchens has received. The widespread notion in America that Christopher Hitchens is a
Major Thinker is a puzzling one. I have to imagine that much of the
reception he gets on this side of the pond is due to the naiveté of us
Colonials about British journalists. Hitchens has the Fleet Street knack
for being able to churn out publishable prose fast and fluently despite
spending a lot of time in fashionable watering holes getting
well-watered, in which condition he conducts publicized feuds with other
well-watered British personalities. Few American hacks can long function
like that. But an ability to type while nursing a hangover does not make
Hitchens the second coming of John Stuart Mill.
Study:
"Night People" More Anti-Social: Well, all I can say is
that we night people would be a lot more cheerful and well-rested if
society would stop waking us up with inconsiderate early afternoon phone
calls.
Barry
Bonds -- With the San Francisco Giants slugger now only two homers
away from Hank Aaron's career record of 755, much to the embarrassment
of Major League Baseball, it's worth reviewing a few points and
paradoxes:
- Bonds didn't start baseball's steroid problem. We now know from inside
sources that Bonds did not use steroids for his first 13 years in
the league, 1986 through 1998.
- Bonds was clearly the greatest player of the 1990s, despite being
clean for all but 1999. [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
How many more times will someone suggest this book in the comments
section of this blog? I like this book and I think it offers a real
contribution. Nonetheless I feel no need to suggest it in the comments
sections of other peoples' blogs.
I do not treat this book as foundational because of personal experience.
I've spent much time in one rural Mexican village, San Agustin Oapan,
and spent much time chatting with the people there. They are extremely
smart, have an excellent sense of humor, and are never boring. And
that's in their second language, Spanish. [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
The
NYT promotes a North American Union: My new
VDARE.com column is about a little-noticed Fourth of July op-ed in
the New York Times arguing that going down the path of integrating
America, Canada, and Mexico a la the European Union would be good
for America.
Michael
Moore's comic polemical documentaries have done more for his net worth
than for his political causes. [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
More
from my review of Lott's Freedomnomics: Here's another
excerpt from my review
in the Washington Times of economist John R. Lott's Freedomnomics:
Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't.
Dr.
Lott is an even more fecund generator of plausible explanations than is
Dr. [Stephen D.] Levitt [author of the bestseller Freakonomics: A
Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything]. For
instance, he suggests in Freedomnomics:
The
Steve Sailer Independence Panhanding Drive! It's
been a half year since I last rattled the tin cup under your noses.
In other words, my friends, I need help, your help. and now we have a
little something to celebrate with the demise of the McCain-Kennedy-Bush
Axis of Amnesty bill. The
papers today say nobody is giving to McCain anymore because of amnesty,
so maybe I can divert a little cash my way.
If tax deductibility isn't relevant to you (e.g., you live outside the
U.S.), you might find it simpler to donate directly to me. You don't
need to have a PayPal
or
Amazon
account already to donate, just a credit card. (Or you can
E-mail me
and I'll send you my P.O. Box number.)
Paypal and Amazon charge $0.30 per transaction and 2.9% of the total, so
I only get to keep 41% of a $1 donation, but 96.8% of a $100 donation!
Anyway, it seems kind of nuts to hit you up while you are at the beach
or the barbecue, but, then again, you might be a little drunk and in a
mellow mood toward me.
My
review of Freedomnomics by John R. Lott Jr.: Here's
a link. [LINK FIXED] Tuesday is the day my book review comes out in the Washington
Times. The last time I reviewed an economics book for a daily
newspaper, my review of Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist appeared
in the New York Post on December 25, 2005, so the Third of July
is a big improvement in terms of being a high traffic day when
the public can't think of anything better to do than read about economists'
spats.
Here's the opening:
Harry
Truman longed for a one-armed economist who couldn't tell him,
"But, on the other hand …" As the economic mismanagement of
the 1970s is forgotten and the profession's confidence soars, however,
the opposite has emerged: the two-fisted economist. These scholarly
brawlers self-assuredly venture far beyond their traditional topics.
Juan
Pierre's bunt double and a new baseball statistic --
That reminds me of a baseball statistic that doesn't exist, but should. [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
One striking aspect of the last six weeks' debate is how decisively
patriotic immigration reformers won the intellectual battle. The inanity
of the other side's talking points, based as they were on mindless
sentimentalism toward illegal immigrants and mindless
hatred toward patriots,
was never more obvious.
One of the roles that VDARE.COM plays in the broad immigration
restrictionist coalition is to be the Research & Development arm. By
choosing this untrodden path, far from the highway of political
correctness, we're able to follow logical connections all the way
through - an opportunity denied to all those who heed the big signs in
their heads flashing "Uh-Oh, Better Not Go
There, Bad for My Career."
Nothing illustrates the vapidity of mainstream intellectualizing
about immigration than the ironic story of social science superstar Robert
D. Putnam.
Last month. Putnam finally published an article
about his lavishly-funded 2000 survey of 41 American communities
that found that ethnic diversity, especially immigrant diversity,
damages trust and "social
capital."
Putnam's data is important, but the spin he worked on for five
years to prevent it from being used by "racists
and anti-immigration activists" is in some ways even more
significant. ...
[More]
Robert
Heinlein week: The science fiction master was born July 7, 1907. I
read all his books up through 1966's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
(his most literary novel) as a kid, then reread them when I was on
chemotherapy in 1997, then reread them again early in this decade.
[To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
Senator
Kennedy is echoing, oddly enough, the fatalistic conventional wisdom of
Dickensian England—the doctrinaire assumption that cheap labor is
essential, and that the inexorable grinding of the dismal laws of
economic science determine wages as immutably as the orbit
of Mercury is fixed by Newton's Law of Gravity.
The main difference: while Sen. Kennedy assumes the need for unskilled
immigrant workers, the early Victorians were convinced of the necessity
of uneducated child laborers.
My
American Conservative article on "Why the elite
press won’t report seriously on immigration" is
now up:
La
Raza’s Lapdogs By Steve
Sailer Straight talk about immigration: another job Americans won’t do.
Here
are some more excerpts:
1.
An aversion to working with numbers is common among intellectuals and
media types. For instance, it’s of some relevance to crafting
immigration policy to know that 5 billion people live in countries with
lower average per capita GDPs than Mexico. [More]
Just as I warned last
week, the Kennedy-Bush-McCain Axis of Amnesty reanimated their
patched-together monster in the Senate … although it's definitely not
back by popular demand.
Why
is the "struggle with inner demons" such a staple of movies
about musicians and actors?
Part of the reason is selection bias: producers aren't dying to make
"The Johann Sebastian Bach Story" because composing a new
masterpiece for Sunday church services each week while raising 20
children didn't leave Bach much time for self-inflicted drama.
Nonetheless, on average, performers really do live more chaotic lives
than the rest of us. The detective novelist and screenwriter Raymond
Chandler explained in The Little Sister, his novel about a troubled
actress: "If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered
lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard -- well, they
wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a
few feet of celluloid ..."
Nobody lived a more intense and disordered life than Edith Piaf
(1915-1963), the Parisian chanteuse depicted in the melodramatic and
moving French film "La Vie en Rose." While her contemporary
Judy Garland became an icon to male homosexuals (the gay liberation
movement began in 1969 when drag queens returning from Garland's funeral
rioted at New York's Stonewall bar), Piaf was a national heroine, as
French as Johnny Cash was American.
Was this the straw that finally broke the camel's back?
On Tuesday, May 29, President George W. Bush declared
that opponents of the Kennedy-Bush "comprehensive immigration
reform" plan in the Senate "don't want to do what’s right
for America," you unpatriotic
curs…
The response has been overwhelming,
but not in the direction that the President had hoped.
Musicals
won six Best Picture Oscars in the 1950s and 1960s, but only one since
("Chicago" in 2002). Why aren't movie musicals terribly
popular amymore? [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
George
Borjas has a blog: The Harvard professor of economics who
specializes in immigration emails:
Just
to let you know that the current immigration situation has finally
convinced me that I should go ahead and start a blog. I hope to
have much to say about the bill in the coming days.
Deciding the fate of America in a Red Bull-filled room: The whole
thing is now up at VDARE.com.
Under
the leadership of Senator
Ted Kennedy (D-MA), various Senators and Bush Administration
officials pulled an all-nighter on Wednesday. By noon Thursday, the
bleary-eyed politicos had concocted an illegal immigrant amnesty
(a.k.a., "comprehensive immigration reform") bill behind
closed doors.
I presume politicians don't have Smoke-Filled Rooms anymore, so you
could call this the Red Bull-Filled Room approach to deciding the fate
of America.
No committee hearings are to be held on what may well be the most
important legislation of the decade. [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
The
Virtues of Coastal Megalopolises: My new VDARE.com column
is up a day early. Here's an excerpt:
Are
the Americans who are being driven from the Coastal Megalopolises to the
Interior Boomtowns better off because their old cities are filling up
with immigrants who outbid them in the housing market—typically,
because the foreigners don't
mind living with an entire extended family under
one roof?
While hardly above criticism, former President Jimmy Carter’s bestseller
Palestine Peace Not Apartheidoffers Americans some useful
insights into what it is like for Palestinians to live within the racial
security state that Israel maintains in the West Bank. It’s equally
important for us, of course, to understand why the Israelis feel driven
to undertake such harsh measures against the Palestinians.
Indeed, to begin to grasp what Israel needs to do to preserve itself as
the Jewish State, it’s crucial to comprehend how it arrived at its
current impasse.
Like many Americans, I was for most of my life fanatically pro-Israeli
and anti-Palestinian. What began to push me towards a more balanced view
was, ironically enough, reading the enormously long article in the
September, 1999 issue of Commentary by Justus Reid Weiner,
“‘My Beautiful Old House’ and Other Fabrications by Edward Said.” It
denounced the Palestinian-American intellectual for falsely implying
that his father’s mansion in Jerusalem had been stolen by the Israelis
during their War of Independence in the late 1940s.
[More]
***
My big
Obama article is now fully online:
Obama’s
Identity Crisis
Although he presents himself as a healer of differences, the
presidential candidate’s own racial struggle paints a conflicted
portrait.
by Steve Sailer
Jimmy Carter’s book
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid has been highly controversial
due to its title, and not just for its puzzling lack of punctuation.
(Isn’t Palestine Peace Not Apartheid missing a colon and a
comma?)
When I heard it was being furiously denounced for anti-Semitism by all
the usual suspects, I hoped that meant that the 82-year-old Carter had
reached that highly entertaining stage of the Presidential life cycle
identified in John Stewart’s America (The Book) as “The
President as Angry Coot.” I was looking forward to another Plain
Speaking, Merle Miller’s bestselling 1974 collection of the aged
Harry Truman’s fascinating fulminations.
[To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
Anyone
contemplating writing a book on current trends in the publishing
industry might consider this as a catchy title - Book: the book about
the book that changed the world about the fish that changed the world.
It's the fault of American author Mark Kurlansky. In 1999 he wrote a
book that set off the fashion for what Waterstone's categorises as
"biographies of things", called Cod: a biography of the fish that
changed the world… According to the trade press, a whole
army of "changed the world" titles is ready to be launched. In September
we will be able to buy a book on concerts subtitled "gigs that changed
the world". In June we can get our hands on a book about the sheep that
changed the world. And next month there's the chance to buy a book on
gunpowder, the explosive that changed the world (presumably by blowing
up bits of it). The list goes on and on - anyone fancy a forthcoming
text with the subtitle "the 1976 wine tasting that changed the world"?
At last, though,we
have a book where the subtitled is justified:
The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the
World by John O'Sullivan, the former editor of National Review and a
long time aid to the Prime Minister in the title. It's a triple
biography of Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher and how
they won the Cold War, with a particular focus on Poland.
O'Sullivan pays a lot of attention to the view from within the Kremlin.
I hadn't realized how early the Soviets had felt the cold wind of doom
blowing over them. O'Sullivan argues that at the time of Solidarity's
rise in August 1980, the Soviets believed their economy too weak to
absorb the sanctions that would result from an invasion of Poland in the
style of 1968 or 1956. So they bluffed the West into thinking that
eventual December 1981 crushing of Solidarity by the Communist Polish
general Jaruslewski was an act of forbearance by the Soviets, when in
reality it was the best they could have hoped for.
There's lots more of interest in this fine, wide-ranging, quick paced
book.
Taki's
Top Drawer: The elegant new web magazine of Taki
Theodoracopulos is up at TakiMag.com,
with short postings so far from Taki, Justin Raimondo, Paul Gottfried,
and F.J. Sarto.
My New
VDARE.com column: It's a long one, but it unveils a lot of
information I've never seen written up before. Everybody talks about how
average SAT scores differ at colleges, but I review how they differ at
high schools. It will be of most interest to people in Los Angeles
County, but SoCal high schools have enough mythos attached to them --
Beverly Hills High, Hollywood High, Compton Centennial High, home of the
Bloods gang -- that it should be interesting to everybody.
Fragmented
Future:
My long
cover story in the January 15, 2007 issue of The American
Conservative
is now online. Here's an excerpt:
"In the
presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The
effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just
that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities,
we don't trust people who do look like us." -- Harvard professor
Robert D. Putnam
It was one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity
social scientists.
While in Sweden to receive a $50,000 academic prize as political science
professor of the year, Harvard's Robert D. Putnam, a former Carter
administration official who made his reputation writing about the
decline of social trust in America in his bestseller Bowling Alone,
confessed to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that his
latest research discovery -- that ethnic diversity decreases trust and
co-operation in communities -- was so explosive that for the last half
decade he hadn't dared announce it "until he could develop proposals to
compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it 'would have
been irresponsible to publish without that.'"
[More]
The NYT is
catching up to VDARE.com on how to raise IQ in the 3rd World:
The Times runs its second article of 2006 on how micronutrient
fortification can help reduce the problem of low IQs in the Third World,
equaling the number VDARE.com ran in
2004 (see here
and here):
Malnutrition Is Cheating Its Survivors, and Africa’s Future
By
MICHAEL WINES SHIMIDER,
Ethiopia — ... Yet almost half of Ethiopia’s children are
malnourished, and most do not die. Some suffer a different fate. Robbed
of vital nutrients as children, they grow up stunted and sickly,
weaklings in a land that still runs on manual labor. Some become
intellectually stunted adults, shorn of as many as 15 I.Q. points,
unable to learn or even to concentrate, inclined to drop out of school
early. [To read the rest,
click the "Permalink" below ...]
The Long Lost
2002 Midterm Election Exit Polls: To help you with your
election-watching on Tuesday, here are
my five articles on the results of the exit poll data from the last
midterms in 2002. The computer tabulation system crashed on election
night, so the Roper Institute eventually released the raw data about 8
months later. As far as I know only Ruy Teixeira and I crunched the
numbers.
The Steve Sailer
Panhandling Drive is back from the dead ... Thursday was a nice day,
with some very generous readers stepping forward. But I'm back for
another day of nagging. Tonight, I took my older son to college night at
his high school, and when I got home my wife mentioned the T-Word
dreaded by all householders: "termites." (I can't say that for sure,
though, because neither one of us really wants to know for sure yet
what's going on with the house.)
In other words, my friends, I need help, your help.
If tax deductibility isn't relevant to you (e.g., you live outside the
U.S.), you might find it simpler to donate directly to me. You don't
need to have a PayPal
or
Amazon
account already to donate, just a credit card. (Or you can
E-mail me
and I'll send you my P.O. Box number.)
Paypal and Amazon charge $0.30 per transaction and 2.9% of the total, so
I only get to keep 41% of a $1 donation, but 96.8% of a $100 donation!
Now, if you've been thinking, gee, I just have too much income this year
for tax purposes, do we ever have a deal for you!
Peter Brimelow writes:
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT FOR STEVE SAILER FANS: Our regular Sunday night
columnist Steve Sailer is one of the jewels of contemporary science
journalism and it’s a mystery to me (and to him) why he’s not been
stolen from VDARE.COM by the Mainstream Media. Well, actually, it’s not
a mystery. Steve pushes the envelope too much. That’s why we’re here at
VDARE.COM—and why we have to develop our own funding sources a.k.a you.
We want to commission Steve to begin a major project, separate from his
columns, the results of which will be published in longer pieces,
working towards a possible book. The topic: the implications of modern
discoveries in the human biodiversity area for the survival and success
of the American nation. Donations to this project will be
tax-deductible.
You can make credit card contributions
here; or
fax
credit card details here; you can snail mail checks made out to
"Lexington Research Institute" and marked on the memo line (lower left
corner) “Biodiversity/ National Project” to the usual
address:
Lexington Research Institute
P.O. Box 1195
Washington CT 06793
"Dynasty through
Diversity: Why the Bush Administration is so adamant about amnesty"
is my new article in the June 19th issue of
The American Conservative (subscribe
here). Here's an excerpt:
I
don't know of any writer working today who does a better job of opening
up dicey but pressing topics in humane and informed ways than Steve
Sailer. Year after year, Steve has been bravely playing the role of the
guy who's the first to bring up and examine loaded subjects -- subjects
that I have a strong hunch we'll be hearing much more about in coming
years. It's a heroic performance he has been putting on. (Steve's latest
column is a topnotch example of his hefty and daring work.)
Needless to say, it's also an approach to a writing career that is
probably pretty thankless in financial terms. Meanwhile, the cautious
corporate journalists who take up the subjects Steve initially raised
are doing very well for themselves indeed, thank you very much. Which
makes it all the more important that those who value Steve's work show
their appreciation. Steve is running one of his occasional fund-raising
drives right now. If you enjoy and learn from Steve's writing, and
especially if you're grateful that he's out there taking the big risks,
please visit his website, click on the PayPal button, and send him a
donation.
"Defining Conservatism Down" by Austin Bramwell of the
National Review Board of Trustees is now up on The American
Conservative
website. My favorite paragraphs:
Second, a loose network of what John O’Sullivan has called “evolutionary
conservatives” attempts to understand politics in light of genetic
science. Unlike many conservatives, evolutionary conservatives remain
undaunted by the apoplectic reaction of liberals to Charles Murray’s
Bell Curve and Dinesh D’Souza’s End of Racism. Steve Sailer, for
example, the most talented evolutionary conservative, writes with rigor
and imagination on such scabrous topics as race, IQ, voting patterns,
and national identity. Though other writers treat these ideas as taboo,
perhaps because they seem to undermine American ideals of equality and
self-reliance, evolutionary conservatives pride themselves on preferring
truth to wishful thinking.
***
Tierney in NYT on the Sailer Theory of the evolution of golf's
appeal:
Was golf the modern version of Pleistocene hunting on the savanna? The
notion had already occurred to devotees of evolutionary psychology, as I
discovered from reading Edward O. Wilson and
Steve Sailer. They point to surveys and other research showing that
people in widely different places and cultures have a common vision of
what makes a beautiful landscape - and it looks a lot like the view from
golfers' favorite tees....
Steve Sailer has boiled down the explanation for why some states
become red and others become blue to
three simple words. ("God" is not one of them.) ... His
equation sure
works for San Francisco. ... 6:01 P.M.
While Democrats esteem themselves as more socially prestigious than
Republicans, their electoral prospects are undermined by the faint whiff
of personal failure that many Democratic voters exude, the impression
that they resent their country and compatriots because they haven’t
quite fulfilled their own potential.
Sam Quinones' July 28 article -- "6 + 4 = 1 Tenuous Existence: An illegal
immigrant couple with six children were already living in poverty. Then
the quadruplets arrived. They're still in a daze" -- just might be the
best in the rather dull history of the Los Angeles Times.
We can't afford anymore to pass laws that merely declare racial quotas
illegal. We must provide detailed oversight processes to fight the
inevitable massive resistance from bureaucrats.
Just as Brazil, soccer’s dominant nation, has been the "Country of the
Future" for, roughly, ever, the quadrennial arrival of another
month-long World Cup reminds us that, for Americans, soccer is the Sport
of the Future and it always will be.
The adulation with which libertarian economists have greeted a couple of
studies by Card claiming that the Law of Supply and Demand does not,
conveniently enough, apply to the effects of illegal immigration on
wages is ironic. Many of the same economists have denigrated Card's
other best known study. It alleged that the Law of Supply and Demand
does not apply to minimum wage laws either.
Economists tend to assume the health of the political,
institutional, cultural, and human underpinnings for our advanced
economy. Thus they tend to be clueless about the long-term threats posed
by immigration.
Today, almost one-fifth of all ethnic Mexicans live in the U.S. Almost
five billion people (4,976 million to be precise) live in countries
where the average per capita gross domestic product is lower than
Mexico's mean of $9,600.
2Blowhards:
"I have a pretty broad conception of what "art" and "culture" can mean:
Even so, I was taken up short when I read Steve Sailer's American
Conservative article on golf course architecture as art. Silly me,
I'd never given the topic a moment's thought. Yet there it is: landscape
architecture, full of aesthetic qualities, there all around us, and in
popular use. I'll take an eye-opener like Steve's piece over yet another
run-through of conventional aesthetic theory any day."
Mickey Kaus wrote on Slate.com: "Steve Sailer has boiled down the
explanation for why some states become red and others become blue to
three simple words. ("God" is not one of them.) ... His equation sure
works for San Francisco. ..."
Did legalizing abortion in the early ’70s reduce crime in the late ’90s by
allowing “pre-emptive capital punishment” of potential troublemakers, as
Steven D. Levitt argues in Freakonomics? Or did the Supreme
Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, by outmoding shotgun weddings,
adoption, and respect for life, instead make more murderous the early
’90s crack wars fought by the first generation of youths to survive
legalized abortion?
Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility (just as he
did in 2000), and 25 out of the top 26. In sharp contrast, Kerry won the
16 states at the bottom of the white fertility list. Background data and
graphs, along with reader responses, here.
Bush's scores on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test have been briefly
mentioned in the press. But nobody before now has fully explained what
they mean. And, even more important, this is first article to publish
Kerry's score on the Navy's Officer Qualification Test. The two tests
aren't perfectly comparable. But they provide no evidence that Kerry is
smarter. If anything, Bush is smarter than Kerry.
To open up the black box, I've created a
table
displaying virtually all the information Lynn and Vanhanen provide on each
IQ study they used—not just the overall national IQ averages you've seen
so far.
The UN reported on 3/25/04: "Few outside specialist circles are aware of
the scale and severity of vitamin and mineral deficiency, or of what it
means for individuals and for nations. It means the impairment of
hundreds of millions of growing minds and the lowering of national IQs…
And it means the large-scale loss of national energies, intellects,
productivity, and growth."
Selected by Steven Pinker for inclusion in
The Best Science and Nature Writing 2004. About half of all
married people in Iraq are married to their first or second cousins --
is this one reason nation building and democracy are so difficult in
Arab countries?
"Does race exist?" After years
of debate over this crucial question, only limited progress has been
made because neither side possesses a useful definition of "race." So,
here is my General Theory of Race. This is probably my single most
important contribution to contemporary thought.
Highly popular: The strong correlation between IQ and the wealth of
nations demonstrated by Lynn & Vanhanen is of world-historical
importance. From now on, no public intellectual can seriously claim to
be trying to understand how the world works unless he takes IQ into
account.
Originally published on Sept. 26, 2001 before the first American air
strikes, this analysis of the wonderful 1975 Sean Connery movie argued
that the Taliban could be beaten fairly easily, yet nation-building in
Afghanistan is likely to prove difficult. Was I wrong?
John Derbyshire, columnist for National Review Online, commented on this
long essay: "Every once in a while I read something that makes me feel I
ought to give up commentary altogether. This was one such. Why isn't
Steve Sailer nationally famous? Rhetorical question--I know, I know..."
"What is a 'race'? It is essentially a lineage, a family tree. A racial
group is merely an extremely extended family that inbreeds to some
extent. Thus, race is a fundamental aspect of the human condition
because we are all born into families."
Everybody knows that women athletes are narrowing the gender gap
separating them from male athletes' performance. Yet in running, the
most quantifiable sport, everybody is wrong.
Interracial Marriage -- Who Wins? Who Loses? While interracial marriage
is increasingly accepted by whites, a surprising number of Asian men and
black women have become bitterly opposed. Why?
Black Athletes triumph by toiling intensely at those games where they
tend to enjoy not just cultural, but also physical and mental edges over
whites. This suggests a new, pragmatic view of racial differences.
From "Pervert" to "Victim:" the media's continued one-dimensional
stereotyping of homosexuals; with handy table of dozens of ways gays
tend to differ from lesbians.
by 
