|
Email
me
iSteve
home
Search
engine users:
Just
hit Ctrl-F to find the word you are looking for.
For
other commentaries, go to:
iSteve.com
Exclusives Archives
August
2004 July
2004 June
2004 May
2004 April
2004 Mar
2004 Feb
2004 Jan
2004 Dec
2003 Nov
2003 Oct
2003 Sep
2003 Aug
2003 Jul 2003
Jun 2003
May 2003
Apr 2003
Mar 2003
Feb 2003
Jan 2003
Dec 2002
Nov 2002
Oct 2002
Sep 2002
Aug 2002
July 2002
May-Jun 2002
Mar-Apr 2002
Jan-Feb 2002
Dec 2001
September
2004 Archive
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#debate3
Debate
Impressions:
-
This was more of a true debate than most Presidential
"debates," which are usually just a couple of guys giving
short, stock speeches while they happen to be standing on the same
stage.
The
Republican Convention worked well for Bush because there was nobody to
point out that Iraq wasn't the War on Terror, it was the War in Error.
But the first debate had some real punching going on.
BUSH:
… But the enemy attacked us, Jim, and I have a solemn duty to protect
the American people, to do everything I can to protect us…I was
hopeful diplomacy would work in Iraq. It was falling apart. There was no
doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was hoping that the world would
turn a blind eye...
KERRY:
Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and
frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about
Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, "The enemy
attacked us."
Saddam
Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked
us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora
Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the
American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn't use the best
trained troops in the world to go kill the world's number one criminal
and terrorist. They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords, who only a
week earlier had been on the other side fighting against us, neither of
whom trusted each other. That's the enemy that attacked us. That's the
enemy that was allowed to walk out of those mountains. That's the enemy
that is now in 60 countries, with stronger recruits...
BUSH:
First of all, of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that.
Ouch.
Bush
should have loftily changed the subject, but Kerry had gotten under his
skin with that accurate accusation, causing him to snarl back in an
un-Presidential snit.
Bush
was exposed as having one of those grandiose but fragile egos that
responds violently to perceptions of being dissed, that kind that cause
so many bar fights:
GWB:
"Hey you! Are you lookin' at my girlfriend?"
You:
"No, not at all."
GWB:
"Well, whazzamata with her that you ain't lookin' at her?
Are you sayin' she's ugly? Is that what you're saying? You wanna a piece
of me?"
-
While it made better than average television for debate viewers, I
wouldn't think the debate's feistiness works to Bush's advantage. If you
are the incumbent and hold the lead in the polls, you normally don't
want to get down on the floor and wrestle with your challenger. You want
to maintain the Presidential aura around yourself by only occasionally
deigning to notice this non-Presidential lifeform with whom you have
graciously condescended to temporarily share a stage.
At
a campaign dinner Monday, President Bush identified incumbency as the
key issue in the upcoming presidential election. "Look at my
opponent's record on incumbency," Bush said. "John Kerry is
not the president at this time. That's an indisputable matter of public
record." Bush added that the American public should seriously
consider whether it wants to risk electing a president who has no
experience heading a nation, has never resided in the White House, and
does not have even one State Of The Union address under his belt.
Okay,
that's from The Onion, but you get the point. There are a lot of
people out there who, deep down, superstitiously regard the duties of
the President as somewhat akin to those of the Aztec priests who somehow
kept the sun rising every morning by ripping beating hearts out of human
chests. These voters think to themselves, "Well, look at all the
bad things that haven't happened during the incumbent's four
years in office, like ... well, like... the Earth hasn't crashed into
the Sun. He must be doing something right!" And they are uneasy
about the challenger's abilities to handle the Presidency's mysterious
but no doubt challenging Orbit Maintenance duties.
-
Kerry looks like the President that central casting would send over if
you told them you needed a minor star to play a generic President. If
this President thing doesn't work out, Kerry could star in "The James
Brolin Story!" Seriously, after the debate, it's certainly easy
to visually imagine Kerry as President for the next four years, which
has to work to his advantage.
-
The Kerry people must be celebrating how peeved they made the President
look. I would think that Kerry won the debate by making Bush look small
and nasty. But what do I know? Karl Rove has lots of polls and focus
groups to tell him about how to appeal to the swing voters in the swing
states, such as, perhaps, this
gentleman.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#che
"The
Motorcycle Diaries:" An excerpt from my review of the
critically acclaimed movie about the young Che Guevara's roadtrip around
South America in the Oct. 25th edition of The
American Conservative (available in full to electronic subscribers
tonight):
The
subtitled "Motorcycle Diaries" goes easy on the politics (and
ignores Che's obsessive anti-Americanism), barely hinting at why Dr.
Guevara would soon abandon healing for killing.
At
the end, Che proclaims, "We are a single mestizo race, from Mexico
to the Magellan Straits." The Guevaras, however, weren't mestizo at
all. They were a family of decayed aristocrats with leftist pretensions
and bohemian manners.
In
practice, this "mestizo myth" paradoxically serves to maintain
the white ascendancy. In Mexico, the corrupt ruling party with the
contradictory name, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, preached that
all Mexicans belong to "La Raza," the "cosmic race"
perfectly blending white and Indian. This allowed the PRI, which became
more and more dominated by whites as decades passed, to divert attention
away from the huge gaps in wealth between whites, mestizos, and Indians.
(Mexico's myth of universal mestizaje was prudent: in neighboring
Guatemala, in contrast, race war flared throughout the 1980s.)
Similarly,
the ideology allowed white revolutionaries like Guevara and Abimael
Guzman, founder of Peru's Shining Path guerillas, to justify their
leadership of movements built on the brown masses' resentment of the
privileges of the Conquistadors' heirs. Worse, while straightforward
populism could have satisfied the oppressed, the disastrous prestige of
Marxism provided white radical intellectuals with an abstruse body of
theory with which to intimidate the less educated into being their
followers.
Unfortunately,
it's an iron law of history that the countries that most need a
revolution are the least likely to profit from one. The Cuban revolution
inspired Marxist upsurges in other Latin countries, which led to
military crackdowns. When the armies went back to the barracks, free
market democrats took over, but, outside of Chile, largely appear to
have failed. This decade's trend is toward anti-white leftist populism,
as exemplified by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
But,
at least, white Communists like Guevara are mostly dead, or moribund
like Castro. By Latin America's standards, that's progress.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#bigman34
Did
Bush get out-Big-Manned? A reader writes:
Kerry
looked calmer, more presidential than Bush. Right from the when they
shook hands, Kerry looked more relaxed. Bush was the one to awkwardly
pulled away and seems to have laughed at something Kerry said. Kerry was
being the charmer, rather than Bush.
Kerry's
stature, height and voice helped him project a leader image. He might
have out Big-Manned Bush. Bush in 2000 crushed Gore in this category:
Gore's lisp, pudginess, weird robotic movements, gasps and near
eyebrowless face were no match compared to Bush's lean looks, strong
chin and choppy drawl.
You're
right about Bush's expressions -- didn't he learn from his first debate
with Gore when it hurt Al?
So
on the presentation level, Kerry won. Kerry actually benefited from low
expectations, since he's been taking a pounding in the polls and press.
Also, I believe most people expected Bush to surprise again, like he did
against Gore. He didn't, mainly because Kerry was better than
advertised, especially compared to his amateurish, rushed performance at
the DNC. Kerry should see a modest bounce in the polls, but he didn't
change things drastically. What did come across is there wasn't much to
latch onto when Kerry spoke -- he sounds good, but will anyone connect?
I don't think many will.
I
wrote
in the American Enterprise Institute's magazine:
Before
the 2000 Presidential election, political scientists predicted a big
Gore victory because the country was enjoying peace and prosperity. The
experienced, intelligent, hardworking Vice President cruised into the
first Presidential debate with a nice lead over his opponent. Yet, when
much of the public paid close attention to the two men for the first
time that evening, Gore quickly began to sink in the polls.
Conservative
commentators spun out millions of words trying to explain, with little
success, why many average folks had found Gore disconcerting and phony
sounding. His notorious muscular stiffness clearly contributed, but Gore
also displayed a minor speech defect peculiarly unfortunate in a man
running for Commander in Chief. Earlier in the campaign, my wife pointed
out to me Gore’s barely noticeable tendency to hiss his “s”
sounds. I ran our impressions by the brilliant liberal comedian Harry
Shearer, who voices a dozen and a half characters on “The Simpsons,”
including the evil billionaire Mr. Burns and his devoted gay male
secretary Smithers. He replied about Gore, “It’s not a lisp, as in
‘lithp.’ Rather, it’s a sibilant problem, in which the sibilants
are pronounced in a thinner, more ‘hissy’ fashion than is normal
among American males.”
It’s
not fashionable to notice this, but this “lissssp” makes Gore sound
prim, even homosexual, especially in contrast to the folksy masculinity
of Bush’s Texas accent. According
to experiments conducted by J.Michael Bailey, chairman of the
Northwestern University psychology department, showing that audiences
can fairly accurately distinguish straights from gays by voice alone,
the “lissssp” is one of the three main clues.
Although
the pundits were clueless, experts on what Camille Paglia calls “sexual
personae” picked up on the impression his “lissssp” made. After
the first debate, comedian Billy Crystal joked that Gore sounded like a
“gay waiter.” Shearer said that he sounded like a “gay robot.”
Paglia herself complained about Gore’s “prissy, lisping, Little Lord
Fauntleroy persona, which borders on epicene.” Of course, Gore is a
happily married father of four, but his pronunciation quirk tends to
confuse first-time listeners. And effeminate traits simply don’t fit
many voters’ image of a President.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#churchlady1
Debate
-- First Reaction: George W. Bush as Dana Carvey's Church Lady: What
struck me the most was how much anger and hostility the President
radiated on the split-screen while Senator Kerry was criticizing him.
Especially during the first half of the debate, Bush kept pulling his
chin up to make his mouth into a thin-lipped straight line as if he was
biting his lip to keep himself from interrupting his opponent. He looked
remarkably like Dana Carvey's old Saturday Night Live character, The
Church Lady, who would sit brimming with repressed rage while somebody
rambled on, and then spit out, "Well, isn't that special."
Unfortunately, despite all his grins and smirks and half-chuckles, the
President almost never says anything funny.
This
Church Lady expression is particularly unfortunate when debating Kerry,
because by pulling up his chin, it makes Bush look less masculine, more
like an old lady, in contrast to Kerry's ultra-elongated jaw.
Kerry,
in contrast, looked like a conventional stuffed shirt candidate. But he
certainly appeared more in control of himself than the President, who
occasionally seemed like he wanted to punch somebody.
It
seems pretty obvious to me that Bush is a mean little son-of-a-gun who
has a big chip on his shoulder when he is criticized because he knows,
deep down, that he's in over his head in a job that's just too big for
him. But maybe people like that -- I suspect that the 1948 election was
similar in terms of personality: angry little Truman versus
stuffed-shirt Dewey.
By
the way, I was frustrated that NBC cut away from the split-screen to
show only Kerry while the Senator hammered Bush's decision to invade
Iraq by quoting from the President's father on why he didn't
occupy Iraq in 1991. I would have loved to have seen that expression on
Bush's face.
A
reader writes:
W
is his mother's son for sure. Not sure how people think Babs Bush is
nice as I never got that impression. Kerry won this by being in control,
if he'd been more himself showing off his ability to talk on both side
of every issue he would've imploded but his handlers and his trailing in
the polls helped enforce his discipline. If he doesn't blow the next two
debates I'd say he will win and because of the Iraq debacle. Maybe
that's why Bush is so upset, feeling he invaded Iraq at the bequest of
the powerful (i.e., the Neocons) and he is now being bleed politically.
Its a little like LBJ and Vietnam except LBJ of all people took it
better than Bush is taking it.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#soldierettes
Pregnant
Soldierettes: Retired Col. David Hackworth says on his www.Hackworth.com
site:
Psst.
Did you hear that the infamous PFC Lynndie R. England is pregnant? And
so are thousands of less famous service women in all branches,
especially the Army and Marines. Please tell me what’s going on in
your outfit. I’ve been getting serious stonewalling from the PAO folks
at the Pentagon. They treat pregnancy stats with a higher security
classification then the number of nukes in their arsenals. Am told they
have no stats on pregnancy and they suggest it is not a big problem.
This is totally opposite of what hundreds of troops have reported to me.
If you can get your hands on some hard stats for your unit, please send
‘em along. Have the stats for the 101st Airborne and 3d Mech and
they’re mind boggling. Send
your input to me. Thx, Hack.
The
rule of thumb from when I researched this topic after Desert Storm was
that 18-26 year old enlisted women have babies at the same rate as 18-26
year old civilian women, which means an enormous number of medical
evacuations. Getting pregnant is one way to get the hell out of Baghdad
or off some boring ship, and lots do it. Of course, the wives of male
soldiers hate how often their men come home from tours of duties as the
daddies of some other woman's baby. But they're just wives, not feminist
role model heroines like the women soldiers their husbands are
impregnating, so nobody in Congress listens to them.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#dumbgap
Dumb
ideas never die: From the new September 30, 2004 edition of Nature,
Britain's premiere scientific journal (on-line only for subscribers):
Momentous
sprint at the 2156 Olympics? Women sprinters are closing the gap on
men and may one day overtake them.
The
2004 Olympic women’s 100-metre sprint champion, Yuliya Nesterenko, is
assured of fame and fortune. But we show here that — if current trends
continue — it is the winner of the event in the 2156 Olympics whose
name will be etched in sporting history forever, because this may be the
first occasion on which the race is won in a faster time than the men’s
event.
The
Athens Olympic Games could be viewed as another giant experiment in
human athletic achievement. Are women narrowing the gap with men, or
falling further behind? ... In a limited test,we plot the winning times
of the men’s and women’s Olympic finals over the past 100 years ...
against the competition date... Should these trends continue, the
projections will intersect at the 2156 Olympics, when — for the first
time ever — the winning women’s 100-metre sprint time of 8.079
seconds will be lower than that of the men’s winning time of 8.098
seconds.
I
have been trying (and, obviously, failing) to kill this idea for 7
years, since my 1997 articles
in Sports Science News and my "Track
and Battlefield" in National Review. The gender gap in
running is larger today than it was in 1988, a full 16 years ago. It
might even be bigger than it was in 1976! Sure, the gender gap was
closing rapidly up through 1988, but that was a long, long time ago. You
simply can't project into the future based mostly on what happened from
1932 through 1988.
As
I pointed out recently in my Olympic wrap-up in The American
Conservative (not on-line):
Everyone
automatically assumes that women are catching up to men in running
speed, but the truth is that the "gender gap" in times between
male and female medallists was actually slightly wider in 2004 (men ran
11.23% faster than women in equivalent races) than way back in 1976
(11.18%).
Why?
From 1970-1988, white women from Communist countries accounted for 71 of
the 84 records set at 100m-1500m. In contrast, Warsaw Pact white men set
exactly zero of the 23 male records. Then the Berlin Wall fell, and we
learned how East German coaches enabled white women to outsprint black
women so consistently: by chemically masculinizing them. It turns out
that masculinity -- in its lowest common denominator definition of
muscularity and aggressiveness -- is not a social construct at all: East
German biochemists simply mass-produced masculinity.
The
East German bioengineers were stumped at producing male sprint
champions, however, because the benefits of a given amount of steroids
are much greater for women than men. Since men average 10 times more
natural testosterone than women, they need dangerously large, Ben
Johnson-sized doses to make huge improvements, while women can speed-up
significantly on smaller, less-easily detected amounts. Thus, the
reduction in steroid use due to improved drug testing has hurt women's
times more.
The
other major reason for the widening of the gender gap after 1998 is that
the scandal of Ben Johnson, who was injecting so many steroids his eyes
had turned yellow, winning the men's 100m in a subsequently disqualified
world record was so great that more effective steroid tests were
subsequently implemented.
Florence-Griffith
Joyner, after losing the 1987 World Championship in the 200m to East
German Silke Gladisch, who was caught by an improved drug test a few
years later, turned to "Benoid" Johnson for advice. Flo-Jo
then reappeared in 1988 with enormous superheroine muscles. She ran an
unbelievable 10.49 in the 100m the Olympic Trials and then 10.54
(wind-aided) to win the 1988 Olympics. She immediately retired and was
never subject to the tougher post-Ben Johnson Olympics.
In
contrast, the Belarus woman who won in a surprise in 2004, with many top
sprinters sidelinded by drug allegations, recorded a 10.93, almost 4%
slower than in 1988.
In
contrast, Justin Gatlin's men's winning time in Athens of 9.85 was
faster than Carl Lewis's legal winning time in 1988 of 9.92 and just
0.5% slower than Ben Johnson's doped-to-the-gills 9.79.
What
do they have at Nature? Super-rigorous standards for most
contributions and super-easy ones for politically correct essays?
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#lindx
The
importance of training Iraqi troops is overrated: We're constantly
hearing about how important it is that more troops in Iraq be trained,
when the real problem is how to get them to want to fight for us.
What we're hearing out of Washington these days is the equivalent of
Lincoln announcing that Robert E. Lee had turned down his offer of
command of the Union Army in order to go fight for the other side
because Lee lacked sufficient training. William S. Lind writes:
Unfortunately,
the problem is not training, but loyalty.
All the training in the world is worthless if the people being
trained have no reason to fight for those who are training them.
And a paycheck isn’t much of a reason, especially when the
fellow Iraqis they are to battle are fighting for God.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#help2
Help
Needed: Were you ever an officer in the U.S. Navy or Air Force (or
their respective National Guards)? I need help interpreting military
aptitude test scores earned by two former colleagues of yours when they
joined up back in the 1960s. If you took the tests, please E-mail
me.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#dawkinsmore
Richard
Dawkins' skin-deep courage: A reader writes:
I
think you let him off too easy [in my VDARE column]. Dawkins promotes
himself as someone who is compelled to speak the truth, no matter the
consequences or what feelings get hurt, when the subject is religion,
then goes soft when the topic is race. I would tolerate his reticence on
the latter if it weren't so self congratulatory when doing the former,
as unlike questioning orthodoxy on race, atheism is no longer a heresy
with consequences. As a matter of fact, one of Dawkin's favorite
targets, the C of E is no longer a religion with consequences, which
makes his time wasting attacks on it even less impressive:
Five
years ago I wrote,
"Darwin seems to lose out with the public primarily when his
supporters force him into a mano-a-mano Thunderdome death match against
the Almighty. Most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as
they don't have to believe in nothing but Darwinism. Thus, the strident
tub-thumping for absolute atheism by evolutionary biologists like
Richard Dawkins, author of the great book "The Selfish Gene,"
is counter-productive."
I've
also noticed that many of the prominent evolutionary scientists who like
to publicly sound off on the non-existence of God have thought less
deeply about the subject than the typical bright college sophomore.
Years of easily beating up on Creationists tend to induce a smugness in
evolutionists much less often found in cosmologists, who often realize
that their field deals with many issues first raised by
theologians.
I
recall an email discussion in 1997 that I had with a very prominent
evolutionist and atheist. I asked him: "So, what caused the Big
Bang?" and "How come in our universe life was able to evolve
because gravity isn't so strong it crushes all life or so weak
everything flies off into space? Why is gravity, and other parameters
like the strong nuclear force, just right for life to evolve?" He's
an extremely smart guy, but he didn't seem to have ever heard
these modern chestnuts before, even though they are just scientifically
updated versions of Aquinas' Prime Mover and Paley's Watchmaker
arguments for the existence of God. This famous scientist and spokesman
for atheism then conceded that, logically, he ought to be an agnostic!
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#greenberg
Top
Democratic pollsters endorse "Sailer Strategy:" The
upcoming Oct. 25th issue of The
American Conservative [subscribe here]
is expected to include my cover story on voter demographics explaining
why journalists write so much tripe about how professionals segment the
electorate. Ever since my 2000 VDARE article "GOP
Future Depends on Winning Larger Share of the White Vote," I've
written how chasing minorities is secondary to chasing the majority
because ... the majority is, by definition, bigger. (This ain't rocket
science, folks.)
Now,
a new
memo by top Democrat pollster Stanley Greenberg outlines the eight
demographic groups that Kerry must focus upon:
The
Unrealized Change Voters"
White
non-college educated women (25 percent of the electorate).
White
rural voters (17 percent).
White
young voters under 30 years (8 percent).
White
senior women (10 percent).
Unconsolidated
Democrats
White
single women (14 percent).
Well-educated
white women (16 percent).
White
union households (17 percent).
African
Americans (10 percent).
The
Surprising Consequences of Culture War
White
college-educated men (18 percent).
White
mainline Protestants (14 percent).
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#timber
Only
a few boys think they can grow up to be President: When thinking
about the two Presidential candidates, the plaintive question that keeps
coming up is: "Out of nearly 300,000,000 people, are these two guys
the best American can do?" But what jumps out is that Bush and
Kerry come from a tiny class of people who found it reasonable to think
about being President from an early age.
Nothing
in Bush's individual career before he stopped drinking at age 40, and
surprisingly little afterwards, suggested he was Presidential Timber,
but his grandfather was a Senator and his father was considered P.T. for
a long, long time, so it didn't seem as ludicrously implausible as it
would to anybody else with Bush's talents and character. For example, I
have a relative with a very similar personality, habits, and credentials
as the President -- a charismatic, hard-drinking aging frat boy with an
MBA from a top school-- but when he talks about going into
politics, it's as a suburban city councilman or assemblyman, because
that's what his dad did for awhile.
Kerry
came from farther down the social-political ladder, although not that
much farther down: when he was 16, he dated the First Lady's
half-sister, and famously went sailing with President Kennedy. From,
that point on, and especially after JFK's assassination the next year,
there was this quasi-mystical aura aura this second JFK, another Massachusetts's
Catholic Democrat, who very much looked like Presidential Timber.
Whether Kerry has done much to vindicate over the last 30 years the
infinite hopes his first 30 years elicited, however, is another
question.
***
Important
Request for Help: I've found some interesting test scores on
military entrance exams. (Sorry
about being coy at present.) If you have any thoughts on how I can
translate two digit raw scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test
(from way back in the Sixties) or from the AFOQT into percentile terms,
please Email
me.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#dawkins
New
VDARE column
on Richard Dawkins on race:
To
show that racial categories can be informative at the cosmetic level, he
writes:
"Well,
suppose we took full-face photographs of 20 randomly chosen natives of
each of the following countries: Japan,
Uganda,
Iceland,
Sri
Lanka, Papua
New Guinea and Egypt.
If we presented 120 people with all 120 photographs, my guess is that
every single one of them would achieve 100 per cent success in sorting
them into six different categories… I haven't done the experiment, but
I am confident that you will agree with me on what the result would
be."
Dawkins'
heart is in the right place on this issue—but he should do the
experiment. He would be surprised. It's quite likely that outsiders
would confuse some of the Ugandans and the Papuans.
The
tribes of New Guinea and the nearby Melanesian Islands come in many
different looks, but some are very similar in appearance to sub-Saharan
Africans. Here, for example are two
Papuan boys who, to my untrained eye, look like Africans. And here
are some pleasant pictures of nearby Solomon Islanders who belong to an
Anglican religious order known as the Melanesian
Brotherhood. They look much like these Ugandans,
who live 9,000 miles to the west...
I
suspect that if you visited the two regions, you would eventually learn
to distinguish the two groups with fairly high accuracy. But it would
take time.
So,
if a Papuan and a Ugandan look similar enough to be mistaken for each
other by outside observers, are they the same race?
No.
Genealogically,
they are radically different. Their lineages diverged far back in
prehistory and they have had virtually no common ancestors for, perhaps,
tens of thousands of years. According to L.L.
Cavalli-Sforza's landmark 1994 book The History
and Geography of Human Genes, the two human groups most
genetically dissimilar overall to "Bantus," such as Central
Africans, are "New Guineans" and "Melanesians."
Instead,
African-looking Papuans are actually more racially similar to other Papuan
tribes that don't look much like Africans at all.
Looks
are skin deep. Race, in contrast, is who your ancestors were, and, thus,
who your relatives are.
By
the way, Dawkins' thought experiment is borrowed from one that Berkeley
anthropologist Vince Sarich has often used:
"If
I took a hundred people from sub-Saharan Africa, a hundred from Europe,
and a hundred from Southeast Asia, took away their clothing and other
cultural markers, and asked somebody at random to go sort them out, I
don't think they'd have any trouble at all."
The
difference between Sarich's version and Dawkins' inferior imitation is
that Sarich actually knows what he's talking about when it comes to
race, so he easily avoids the Ugandan-Papuan trap that Dawkins stumbles
into.
Also,
there are more than a few Egyptians
who look a lot like Ugandans. Plus, a lot of unsophisticated people
would get black-skinned Sri Lankan Tamils
confused with Ugandans and Papuans.
Africans
and Melanesians: I don't believe anyone knows whether the first
Melanesians and New Guineans looked like modern Africans. (I'm not sure
were too certain what most of the inhabitants of Africa looked like
either back during the Out of Africa exodus/exoduses.) Perhaps they
always looked alike, or perhaps they converged to the same look.
Certainly the climate is similar, so natural selection might well induce
convergent evolution. On the other hand, Amazonian Indians like this Yanamamo
and the wild men of Borneo, like this Dayak,
don't look much at all like Ugandans or Papuans.
There
are a lot of social similarities between sub-Saharan Africa and New
Guinea/Melanesia. The women do most of the agricultural work and the men
tend to see themselves as fighters / lovers / artists / entertainers /
politicians rather than as bring-home-the-bacon work-a-daddy family men.
Perhaps that's purely a function of the societies, but, then, when a
society selects one kind of man as the most desirable kind of husband,
that society tends to get more of those kind of men.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#pouty
Gregory
Rodriguez can't stand "Pouty
White People" -- LA Times pundit Rodriguez is mad at the
57% of "Anglo" Californians who say the state will be a worse
place to live in two decades. Rodriguez sums up:
California's
crumbling infrastructure can be rebuilt, and its broken education system
can be repaired. But that's not going to happen until we re-create the
social contract that built postwar California. That contract must be
founded on a shared vision of the future. If Anglo California is not
willing to provide one, then at the very least it should make way for
those who do.
Okay,
but considering that already in LA County, an amazing 53% of the adults
are functional illiterates, according to Ed Rubenstein's new
VDARE article, perhaps Mr. Rodriguez should ponder who, exactly, is
going to be left to read his essays in the LA Times after the remaining
Anglos "make way."
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#gates
Ignoring
the obvious again: A few months ago, Henry Louis Gates, the boss of
Black Studies in America, complained
about how black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean are taking
about 2/3rd of the affirmative action spots at Harvard that everybody
thought we're supposed to go to African-Americans as compensation for
slavery and Jim Crow. Today, he writes in the NYT a column called
"Getting
to Average" about what could help the lower half of black
America get off its back economically. He perceptively notes:
The
glory days for the black working class were from 1940 to 1970, when
manufacturing boomed and factory jobs were plentiful. But when the
manufacturing sector became eclipsed by the service economy, black
workers ended up - well, stuck in a demographic Buffalo.
Hmmhmmhh,
what's happened since then to drive blacks out of blue collar jobs or
undermine their pay? So, does Gates take this golden opportunity to
complain about illegal immigrants economically damaging
African-Americans who aren't potential Harvard students? Of course not,
for the usual reasons
why black leaders don't publicly attack the illegal immigration that's
hurting blacks, as I explained last June in VDARE.com.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#frisby
Here's
a nice story: The 39-year-old college football player. Tim
Frisby retired after 20 years as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne. A
father of six, he has a 3.8 GPA at the University of South Carolina, and
has made the varsity team as a walk-on wide receiver.
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#uday
UPDATE:
Did Saddam have doubles? As I mentioned below,
a number of the horror stories about Saddam's regime that we all thought
were true have not been confirmed even though we've had most of Saddam's
regime in custody for a year, and ve haf vays of making them talk. One
story I very much hope is true, being a big fan of Heinlein's novel
"Double Star," is that Saddam employed a lot of body doubles
to avoid assassination.
The
tales seem to go back to a book entitled "I Was Saddam's Son"
by Latif Yahia, who claimed he used to work as Uday Hussein's double.
This summer a story in the London Sunday Times reported:
A
REPORT by Saddam Hussein’s secret police has emerged to cast doubt on
one of the more extraordinary stories from his pre-war regime. It
suggests that claims by an Iraqi man that he was a double for the
dictator’s son Uday were fabricated. Latif Yahia became
internationally famous after he fled to the West and gave an account of
his bizarre life as the paid lookalike of Saddam’s elder son. In his
book I Was Saddam’s Son, he claimed that he was tortured and then
given plastic surgery so that he would resemble Uday.
Last
week Dhafir Mohammed Jabir, a former close aide of Uday who is now
living in Jordan, gave The Sunday Times a copy of an Iraqi police report
on Yahia. The report says Yahia, 36, who lives in Manchester, was an
army deserter who took to impersonating Uday as a way of attracting
girls.
Jabir
claims Yahia was never employed as a decoy for Uday. In fact, he is
adamant that neither Uday nor Saddam ever used doubles.
And
here is a response
to the article from a man claiming to be Yahia.
So,
I'm going to file this under the Who Knows? category.
By
the way, I'm going to try not to think about the idea that
pretending to be sicko creep Uday Hussein would be a good way to attract
girls.
**
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#volunteers
Who
volunteers the most? asks Tyler Cowen at Marginal
Revolution:
The
Norwegians come in a clear first, with 52% of their adult population
doing volunteer work in a significant way. The UK and Sweden come in
second and third, with 30% and 28% rates of volunteering. Uganda is next
with 23% and then the United States with 22%. Of the cited countries
Mexico comes in last with a volunteering rate of 0.1%.
As
I wrote in VDARE.com
last Spring:
Walking
around downtown Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me
that Ben Franklin
started more civic institutions than have all three million people of
Mexican descent in Los Angeles County.
As
Gregory Rodriguez wrote in the Feb.
29 Los Angeles Times:
"For
example, in Los
Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S.,
there is not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery or
broad-based charity."
***
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#lowrydemo
Good
column by Rich Lowry in NRO: "Party
Demographics: Who’s gonna vote
for whom?"
The
Rocky Mountain State is relatively close for the same reason — at
least partly — that California has been lost to the GOP in
presidential elections: ever-increasing numbers of Latino immigrants.
That's why Republican stalwarts Nevada and Arizona are slowly shifting
too. Outside the merits of the immigration issue — its costs, its
implications for security and national cohesion — the partisan dynamic
is clear: Higher levels of Latin American immigration benefit the
Democrats, while digging an ever-deeper demographic hole for
Republicans. Pro-immigration conservatives fool themselves into
believing that being pro-immigration will make it possible for the GOP
to convert large numbers of Hispanic voters to their side. This is a
party strategy that could have been crafted in Oregon, since it amounts
to a kind of partisan assisted suicide.
Also,
here's a 1997 National Review article making the same point: "Electing
a New People" by Peter Brimelow and Ed Rubenstein.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#gideonhersh
Gideon
takes a crack
at Seymour Hersh's Question: "How did
eight or nine neoconservatives who believed that a war in Iraq was the
answer to international terrorism get their way?:"
Now,
to answer Steve's question ("how did they [the neocons] do
it?")... No, the question is not how did we get on that bus but why
we pulled out the steering and the brakes and threw away the road map.
That's the mystery to me: not how the neocons got Iraq at the top of the
foreign policy agenda (that's just inertia from pre 9-11 days speeded up
by 9-11-induced urgency) nor why they thought toppling Saddam would be a
good thing for America and its allies, most notably Israel, but why and
how the decisionmaking process got so broken that contrary argument and
evidence couldn't break through? *That's* what's bizarre. And *that's*
what Bush hasn't done anything demonstrable to correct. And *that's* the
biggest argument against his reelection. Which is why I think Kerry
should be making just that argument.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#sicksense
War
Nerd: "Beslan:
The Sick Sense:"
And
[the Chechen terrorists] made sure there were lots of Ingush (the
Muslims next to Chechnya) fighters helping them. Those stories about
Arab terrorists helping the Chechens turned out to be fake, just
propaganda to get Bush on Putin's side -- and to keep the local
Russian population from thinking about the reality of their war in
Chechnya. But there were lots of Ingush -- and the Ossetians (the
Christians of Beslan) are already talking about making the Ingush pay
for what happened at Beslan. The Ossetians already fought an
intra-border war with the Ingush in 1992, leaving over 600 dead before
it was snuffed out. Already there are reports of Ossetians gathering for
a big anti-Ingush pogrom in the Prigornii region about a fifteen minute
drive from Beslan, where there are Ingush-populated villages within
Ossetian territory.
I
wondered about this Arab terrorist allegation. It sounded highly
convenient. Has this been confirmed that there weren't any Arabs at
Beslan?
Somebody
ought to make up a list of all the things we've been told since 9/11
that have never been confirmed.
For
example, during our 18 months in Iraq, have we ever found a single
person who was employed as a double for Saddam Hussein? I definitely
wanted to believe that Saddam had a host of doubles -- Robert A.
Heinlein wrote the idea of politicians who employ actors as stand-ins
into several of his books, most notably Double Star. But was it
true?
UPDATE:
The stories seem to go back to a book entitled "I Was Saddam's
Son" by Latif Yahia who claimed he used to work as Uday Hussein's
double. This summer a story in the London Sunday Times reported:
REPORT by Saddam Hussein’s secret police has emerged to cast doubt
on one of the more extraordinary stories from his pre-war regime. It
suggests that claims by an Iraqi man that he was a double for the
dictator’s son Uday were fabricated. Latif Yahia became
internationally famous after he fled to the West and gave an account of
his bizarre life as the paid lookalike of Saddam’s elder son. In his
book I Was Saddam’s Son, he claimed that he was tortured and then
given plastic surgery so that he would resemble Uday.
Last week Dhafir Mohammed Jabir, a former close aide of Uday who is
now living in Jordan, gave The Sunday Times a copy of an Iraqi police
report on Yahia. The report says Yahia, 36, who lives in Manchester, was
an army deserter who took to impersonating Uday as a way of attracting
girls.
Jabir claims Yahia was never employed as a decoy for Uday. In fact,
he is adamant that neither Uday nor Saddam ever used doubles.
***
George
Will on Neocons:
"...neoconservatives
alarm almost everyone who isn't one—and especially dismay
real conservatives."
Will
also says in this week's Newsweek:
...
reasonable people can be simultaneously to the right of President Bush
and to the left of John Kerry.
To
the right of Bush: More forces may be needed—and more forceful
employment of them. In the truncated conquest of Fallujah, U.S.
commanders ignored Napoleon's axiom: "If you start to take Vienna—take
Vienna." ...
To
the left of Kerry: Recently he said that even if he had known then what
we know now, he would have voted to authorize the war. That is, even
knowing that Saddam Hussein was not yet nearly the danger that
intelligence guesses said he was, and even experiencing the occupation's
rapidly multiplying horrors, Kerry says: Make me president and I will
more deftly implement essentially the same policy.
Who
believes there are now fewer terrorists in the world than there were
three years ago? The administration should be judged as it wants to be
judged, by its performance regarding the issue it says should decide the
election—national security. However, the opposition party is
presenting an appallingly flaccid opposition. Teddy Roosevelt's
description of William Howard Taft fits Kerry: "feebly
well-meaning."
He
needs to resuscitate his campaign by making himself an interesting
alternative to Bush. However, he seems incapable of mounting what the
nation needs—a root-and-branch critique of the stunningly anticonservative
idea animating the administration's policy. The idea, a tenet of
neoconservatism, is that all nations are more or less ready for
democracy. So nation-building should be a piece of cake—never mind the
winding, arduous, uphill hike the West took from Runnymede and Magna
Charta in 1215 to Philadelphia in 1787.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#bigsmear
The
Big Smear: Meanwhile, the neocons are hitting back with their
ultimate weapon: The Anti-Semitism Smear:
The
Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com runs a particularly hate-filled
essay called "Blame It on Neo: Don't call me a 'neocon' unless you
are a friend" by someone named Julia Gorin, who "performs with
RightStuffComedy.com."
Ms.
Gorin must be trying to shatter the stereotype that Jewish comics are
funny. Granted, her diatribe attempting to libel as an
"anti-Semite" everyone who disagrees with her on Iraq, is
hysterical, but not in the sense of being amusing:
When
a member of the enlightened classes, or Pat Buchanan, makes reference to
a "neocon," what he's saying is "yid." That's right,
"neoconservative," particularly in its shortened form, when
employed by a nonconservative (or by Buchananites) and therefore meant
derogatorily, is the modern, albeit more specific, word for
"kike"...
I
guess that makes George Will an anti-Semite.
The
problem with the anti-Semitic smear is that when any group maneuvers
themselves into a position where they are above criticism, as the
neocons are attempting to do, they wind up abusing their
privilege.
The
term "neocon" once referred to outstanding social scientists
such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, James Q. Wilson, Andrew
Greeley, Richard J. Herrnstein, and Charles Murray. How
"neocon" came instead to mean a small coterie of bellicose
agitators with strong ties to the Israeli Right (by no means all of them
Jewish -- e.g., Larry Franklin) is one of the tragedies of modern
American history.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#reporters
NeoconGate:
Reporters vs. Pundits -- One of the striking aspects of NeoconGate
has been that reporters have been relatively brave in following the
story, while the non-neocon opinion organs have largely been too
terrified to say "Boo" about it.
Slate
finally got around to talking about the FBI investigation into neocons
collaborating with Israel -- but in a pooh-poohing essay
by Lee Smith that blames it all on, you guessed it, anti-Semitism:
Regardless,
while the research into the neocons' ideas about the region and their
connections to Israel might have begun as a partisan exercise in
aggressive political journalism and speculative intellectual history, it
has now come to resemble an old narrative in Western culture that
engenders rumors of a "cabal," a secret government within the
government, run by people whose loyalty to the state that harbors them
is dubious. The word "Jew" isn't used, but "Likud"
is tossed around with an alarming facility.
For
example, in a recent interview with a Turkish news source, former
Pentagon desk officer Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski elaborated on some of
the opinions she's been articulating in both her own
writing and in other interviews, including one with a Lyndon
LaRouche publication.
Omigod,
she once gave an interview to a LaRouche publication?!? We must
never ever listen to anything the Lt. Col. ever says again! (Except that
Richard Perle, as previously reported in Slate,
invited a high-ranking former LaRouchie to give a Powerpoint
presentation to the Defense Policy Board that included the alarming
bullet points: "Iraq is the tactical pivot / Saudi Arabia the
strategic pivot / Egypt the prize." So, I guess we shouldn't
listen to Perle ever again -- which looted Hollinger
stockholders, for one, would say was a good idea.)
Smith
goes on smearing critics of the neocons:
"I
think for [sic] many of these guys truly believe that what is
good for Likud is good for America," she said.
"This is wrong factually, and wrong philosophically, and is
probably very close to being treason." On his Weblog, University of
Michigan professor Juan Cole wrote,
"I believe that Doug Feith, for instance, has dual loyalties to the
Israeli Likud Party and to the U.S. Republican Party. … And I also
think that if he has to choose, he will put the interests of the Likud
above the interests of the Republican Party. … I frankly don't trust
him to put America first."
Do
Kwiatkowski and Cole have any factual evidence to draw on besides their
own convictions and prejudices? Of course not.
Of
course they do. The evidence about Feith is voluminous. I'll post some
of it after this item. Smith then drops
this dazzling logical gem:
Their
charges might not seem particularly sensationalist if they appeared
exclusively on blogs, but mainstream press outfits like UPI,
Knight
Ridder, and Newsweek,
among others, have used Kwiatkowski as a source for stories about the
neocons; others, like PBS's NewsHour
With Jim Lehrer, NPR,
and the Washington
Post have called on Cole to discuss his views on Iraq. (His
opinions have also been cited
in several Slate stories.) It's unclear
whether these media outlets recognize what kind of larger worldview
their experts' opinions issue from, but media consumers deserve to know
that some of the talking heads they're hearing are advancing conspiracy
theories and accusing U.S. government officials of dual loyalty verging
on treason.
Yes,
indeed, media consumers do deserve to know the opinion of various
experts from across the political spectrum.
Let
me include with a quote
(via The Ambler) from that
notorious anti-Semite Seymour M. Hersh:
"There
is so much about this presidency that we don’t know, and may never
learn. Some of the most important questions are not even being asked.
How did they do it? How did eight or nine neoconservatives who believed
that a war in Iraq was the answer to international terrorism get their
way? How did they redirect the government and rearrange long-standing
American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they
overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress,
and dominate the military? Is our democracy that fragile?"
As
I've said before, it required a "perfect storm" of
circumstances to turn the War on Terror into the War in Error:
-
The
President's fear of falling off the wagon if he worked too hard on
anything, combined with his convoluted relationship with his father
(who looks to the world like a man who handled the Kuwait War
adroitly, but who looks to his ultra competitive son like a
L-O-S-E-R);
-
The
bizarre change in
Cheney from the sensible Defense Secretary of 1991 to the
apocalypse-dreading wraith of today;
-
Rumsfeld's
more understandable flaws: age, arrogance, and a desire to prove
right his his Anti-Powell Doctrine about the superiority of
undermanned armies;
-
Powell's
inability to translate his majestic public image into private
effectualness;
-
And
Rice's all-around light-weightness.
Nonetheless,
the Iraq invasion would never have happened without two other elements:
Ahmed Chalabi and the small number of neocon Idea Men who relentlessly
pushed Chalabi and his lies. How did they do it?
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#feiths
Feiths,
father and son: Slate author Lee
Smith grandly dismissed as anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing all
suspicions that the Pentagon's #3 man Douglas Feith has any loyalties to
Israel.
If
true, Smith's claim that there is
no evidence that Feith is deeply devoted to Israel would come as a
shocking betrayal to the Likudist Zionist Organization of America.
The announcement
for the 1997 annual dinner given by the ZOA read:
This
year's honorees will be Dalck Feith and Douglas J. Feith, the noted
Jewish philanthropists and pro-Israel activists. [Dalck is
Douglas' father.]
Dalck
Feith will receive the ZOA's special Centennial Award at the dinner, for
his lifetime of service to Israel and the Jewish people. His son Douglas
J. Feith, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, will receive
the prestigious Louis D. Brandeis Award at the dinner.
...
In Poland in the 1930s, Dalck Feith was active in Betar, the Zionist
youth movement founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky [the progenitor of Likud]. He
later joined the Zionist underground, fought in World War II with the
U.S. Merchant Marine, and went on to become a distinguished business
leader and philanthropist in Philadelphia. He has served as General
Chairman of the Federation Allied Jewish Appeal of Philadelphia, and was
a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He has been
honored for his good works by numerous prominent institutions and
organizations, including Brandeis University, Hebrew University, and
Israel Bonds...
Douglas
J. Feith, a graduate of Harvard College and the Georgetown University
Law Center, is a founding member of the Washington, D.C. law firm of Feith
& Zell... A prolific author, Mr. Feith's essays about Israel and
other subjects have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post,
Wall Street Journal, New Republic, Commentary and elsewhere. A scholarly
essay of his on Winston Churchill, Zionism, and Palestine (1904-1922)
has just been published ... Mr. Feith is a director of the Center for
Security Policy. He serves as an officer of the Charles E. Smith Jewish
Day School, and a director of the Foundation for Jewish Studies. He is a
member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Here's
an excerpt from an article by Stephen
Green that the FBI
has found very useful in their investigations into NeoconGate:
Even
more revealing perhaps, had the [Bush] transition team known of it, was
Feith's view of "technology cooperation," as expressed in a
1992 Commentary article: "It is in the interest of U.S. and Israel
to remove needless impediments to technological cooperation between
them. Technologies in the hands of responsible, friendly countries
facing military threats, countries like Israel, serve to deter
aggression, enhance regional stability and promote peace thereby."
What
Douglas Feith had neglected to say, in this last article, was that he
thought that individuals could decide on their own whether the sharing
of classified information was "technical cooperation," an
unauthorized disclosure, or a violation of U.S. Code 794c, the
"Espionage Act."
Ten
years prior to writing the Commentary piece, Feith had made such a
decision on his own. At the time, March of 1972, Feith was a Middle East
analyst in the Near East and South Asian Affairs section of the National
Security Council. Two months before, in January, Judge William Clark had
replaced Richard Allen as National Security Advisor, with the intention
to clean house. A total of nine NSC staff members were fired, including
Feith, who'd only been with the NSC for a year. But Feith was fired
because he'd been the object of an inquiry into whether he'd provided
classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.
The FBI had opened the inquiry. And Clark, who had served in U.S. Army
counterintelligence in the 1950's, took such matters very
seriously.....more seriously, apparently, than had Richard Allen.
Feith
did not remain unemployed for long, however. Richard Perle, who was in
1982 serving in the Pentagon as Assistant secretary for International
Security Policy, hired him on the spot as his "Special
Counsel," and then as his Deputy. Feith worked at ISP until 1986,
when he left government service to form a small but influential law
firm, then based in Israel.
In
fact, Feith's former law partner L. Marc Zell, who still advertises
his close relationship with Feith, and who set up a law office in
Baghdad with Ahmed Chalabi's nephew, told Salon
why the neocons had backed the notorious exile-conman:
"He
said he would end Iraq's boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow
Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi
government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the
northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location
of a major refinery]."
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#turkeytim
Turkey:
It ain't broke, so don't fix it by putting it in the European Union.
A friend writes:
Turkey
is something like [Baathist] Iraq in that a powerful secular minority
keeps the country secular although a majority of the population wants
and Islamic revolution.
In
Turkey the Army does that, and it is more or less uncorrupted: Kemal
managed to convince his successors to guard the Constitution but not try
to run the country. Periodically the Army comes out of barracks, hangs
the government -- and goes back to barracks again while the country has
more elections. This form of government was known to the ancients as timocracy,
but it was a theoretical form not one observed in action. So far as I
know, the timocracy in Turkey is unique in history although perhaps
there were periods when the Mamelukes fit the model.
To
hope for something like Turkey in Iraq is, I suppose, reasonable, but it
should be seen as an improbable outcome.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#derb-bellcurve
10th
Anniversary of The Bell Curve is coming up: The Derb aptly
says:
Prompted
by a friend's remark, I just got through re-reading Robert Kaplan's
splendid doom'n'gloom
piece from back in 1994 ["The Coming Anarchy" in The
Atlantic, which is always Ground Zero of genteel forebodings.] It
has held up surprisingly well after ten years, and is full of quotables,
e.g.: "Whereas the distant future will probably see the emergence
of a racially hybrid, globalized man, the coming decades will see us
more aware of our differences than of our similarities. To the average
person, political values will mean less, personal security more. The
belief that we are all equal is liable to be replaced by the overriding
obsession of the ancient Greek travelers: Why the differences between
peoples?"
I
am coming to think that in the early and mid-1990s, a veil was briefly
lifted, to give us some glimpses of the truth about humanity and our
collective future. When we saw what was behind the veil, though, we
dropped it rather fast, and have spent the past ten years in a dream of
wishful thinking.
I
note in this context that next month marks the 10th anniversary of the
publication of Herrnstein & Murray's book THE BELL CURVE. Looking
back over these ten years, the striking thing about that book is how
little practical consequence it had. There was really no follow-up in
the world of real politics, any more than there was to the insights
offered by Kaplan and Samuel Huntington. The No Child Left Behind Act,
for instance, was written as though THE BELL CURVE had never been
published; just as the Iraq war and the nation-building effort that
followed took no account of Kaplan, Fukuyama, or Huntington.
"Humankind cannot stand very much reality." Perhaps God in his
wisdom permits us to know more than we can bear to know.
Dark
thoughts; I am sorry, I shall try to find something more cheerful to
post. In the meantime, if you have time (the piece is rather long), try
reading or re-reading Kaplan's essay.
For
almost three decades, the term "neoconservatism" stood for,
more than anything else, frank quantitative analyses of ethnic and
racial issues. How did it come to stand instead for anti-empirical
dogmatism about the equal capabilities of all peoples for democracy, as
exemplified in the President's almost Dan Rather-like speech to the
UN?
The
Bell Curve was, in many ways, the climax of the original school of
neoconservatism: intensely quantitative, extremely brave, yet deeply
moderate and judicious. Remarkably, Richard J. Herrnstein's and Charles
Murray's years of research were supported by many of the same
institutions, such as the American Enterprise Institute, that funded the
agitation for the Iraq Attaq.
What
happened?
***
http://www.iSteve.com/sep04.htm#hispaniciq
Best
estimate yet of white-Hispanic IQ gap: I've been doing a lot of
research on this subject lately because, frankly, it's shameful and
alarming that America's elites are carrying out a vast social experiment
by emasculating enforcement of the laws against illegal immigration, yet
almost nobody is discussing the facts about what kind of new version of
America they are creating. Everyone across the political spectrum admits
that the white-black test score gap is a major social problem, but
nobody is thinking about the white-Hispanic test score gap. Fortunately,
the facts are available, but they take a lot of digging to uncover.
Here's
the best estimate I've yet seen: A 2001 meta-analysis of 39 studies
covering a total 5,696,519
individuals in America (aged 14 and above) came up with an
overall difference of 0.72 standard deviations in g (the
"general factor" in cogniti | 
