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January 2004
Click here for my new VDARE.com column -- The supposed centerpiece of the War on Terror will go down in history as the War in Error. ***
National Day of Shame -- One year ago, NASA let the Shuttle astronauts die without even trying to see if there was any danger because, they claimed, nothing could have been done. In contrast, on May 29, 1942, the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, faced with massive repairs on the battle-damaged aircraft carrier Yorktown requiring an estimated 90 days, finished them in 36 hours, allowing the Yorktown to steam off to Midway in time to help win the Pacific War on June 4. ***
Who's smarter: China or India: Specifically, India invests much more heavily in higher education than China. Is India preparing for the 21st Century while China will be stuck in the 20th? Or will China absolutely dominate the world economy in decades to come? Or are both countries following the right policies for their IQ variance?
UPDATE: A high-caste Indian writes:
Well, I didn't see the U.S. innovate real well while the doomed space shuttle was up in orbit... ***
Re: WMD -- Who is the Bush Administration science adviser? Has anybody ever heard of him? Does Bush have an informal adviser the way Eisenhower used to call in John von Neumann?
UPDATE: It turns out that the official science advisor for the last three years has been John H. Marburger III, a Democrat. Since Bush is the most postmodern President ever, in that he doesn't believe in truth, just political will, you can see from the science advisor's party registration the high priority Bush places on the job. ***
Dogmatic? Moi? Recently, on NRO's "The Corner," John Derbyshire quoted "a friend whose intellect I mightily respect" (i.e., me) poking some fun at free trade absolutists. (See below for my polished version of what I told the Derb.) I satirically claimed that in the 19th Century, zero tariffs made America and Germany into industrial powerhouses while Britain's decline from top doghood stemmed from it adapting protectionism in 1846. (Of course, the three countries followed the opposite policies: the growing powers were protectionist while Britain turned to free trade.)
Ramesh Ponnuru answered, "I respect Steve Sailer's intellect too, Derb, but it's sad to see him embracing every bit of paleocon dogma." Huh? I think it says more about the vise-like grip that free trade theory has on many intellects that my jokingly referring to some of the most famous facts of 19th Century economic history is taken as proof that I have been brainwashed out of the True Faith. In reality, I used to be a free trade true believer, but I've learned enough over the years to now understand how much I don't know on the topic, so now I try to avoid prepackaged nostrums.
Former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson, author of "How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life," jumped in to attack my examples. I particularly admired his alternative explanation of how Bismarckian Germany became an industrial powerhouse: "Industrialization." Now I've often expressed my taste for nearly-tautological explanations, such as "survival of the fittest," but this one might be a tad too tautological even for me.
Robinson then cited a counter-example: "Hong Kong." Well, that's certainly been a fast-growing place and very free trade, but its growth rate hasn't been much faster than those of Singapore, Taiwan, or China, all of which have been less enthusiastic about imports. Hmmhmmh, so if absolute free trade isn't what they have in common, what could Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and China possibly share? It must be something subtle, some common attribute not easily visible to the naked eye. I'll have to ponder this difficult question at length. Perhaps somebody will give me a big grant to study this baffling enigma.
I once was a dogmatic supporter of absolutely free trade, but Ronald Reagan changed my life. As Robinson may have forgotten, Reagan imposed quotas on Japanese car imports in 1981. I opposed Reagan's protectionism at the time, but, to my surprise, this worked out quite well. In response to Reagan's quotas, the Japanese car companies built factories here, and American workers responded by improving their quality and efficiency. In fact, Reagan's violation of free trade ideology changed not just my mind but my life: I since have bought three high quality Hondas built on this side of the Pacific. ***
Analysis: Films' PG-13 rating bloating By Steve Sailer LOS ANGELES, Jan. 6 (UPI) -- "PG-13" continued to be the rating of choice for movie studios in 2003, with 60 percent of the films making at least $100 million at the box office bearing the label "Parents Strongly Cautioned: Some material may be inappropriate for children under age 13." Last year, the PG-13 rating wound up on movies both noble ("Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King") and tawdry ("Scary Movie 3," "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle," and "Anger Management").
But that raises the question for parents: If the majority of popular movies are now PG-13, does that rating mean much anymore? Is it time to split the PG-13 designation into softer and harder segments? Or do parents need a new system entirely, such as the one debuted recently by PSVratings Inc? As the company's acronym indicates, it rates the Profanity, Sex and Violence in each home video release on a color-coded 1-4 scale.
In the 35 years since Jack Valenti, the soon-to-retire chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, devised the MPAA ratings system, filmmakers and audiences have increasingly converged on the middle-of-the-road PG-13 designation. In the early 1970s, pornographers avidly adopted the adult-only X rating as an advertisement for their wares, leading the MPAA to abandon it. The organization eventually introduced NC-17 (No Children 17 or under) as a replacement for serious films but that failed in the marketplace.
Meanwhile, the G rating increasingly became reserved for the few movies that won't scare toddlers. This year, among the 25 movies making more than $100 million, only one was G rated. Of course, that one was "Finding Nemo," the biggest moneymaker so far. In turn, that has relegated the PG rating to films aimed at elementary school students, such as the "Harry Potter" series. And that drives practically any movie marketed for people who have gone through puberty toward the PG-13 rating as a way to show it's not for fourth graders. According to the MPAA, the number of PG-rated films dropped from 105 in 1996 to 55 in 2001, the last year for which full numbers are available.
The sharpest recent change has been the decline of R-rated films. Irate congressional hearings in September 2000 forced Valenti to pledge that the industry would no longer market R-rated movies to children under 17. The politicians also persuaded the theater owners to at least make an effort to prevent unaccompanied kids from getting into R-rated movies.
In 1999, before the reforms, 10 $100 million films were R rated vs. eight in total over the last three years. [More...] ***
The Perfect Score debuts today. It's a thinly-budgeted teen movie about six high school students -- the two nice kids who aren't as smart as their Ivy League-ambitious parents think they are, the blue collar good guy who doesn't have the SAT score to follow his girlfriend to the U. of Maryland, the snarky rich girl (Scarlet Johansson doing a Janeane Garofolo impression), the scene-stealing Asian stoner, and the 6'-9" black basketball superstar (real NBA player Darius Miles) who has to meet the NCAA minimum SAT score because he isn't quite ready for the NBA -- who try to break into the Educational Testing Service's headquarters to steal the answers to the SAT. The first 15 minutes of social satire are smart and fun, but the mechanics of the heist are third rate.
It's produced by the guys who created HBO's long running sports agent satire Arli$$, which was one of my favorite comedies of recent years, although it was completely overlooked in the frenzy over the dumber Sex and the City. Arli$$ was crass and cartoonish, but also the most insightful politically incorrect social satire on TV. So, The Perfect Score's commentary on the SAT is strong, as far as it goes.
Interestingly, it ends up being highly pro-SAT. It turns out that the characters' original test scores really were accurate depictions of their academic abilities. In the happy ending, the nice kids go to less elite colleges that are better suited for them than the Ivy League, and the low scoring kid blows off college and gets a job. ***
Libertarian drug advocate Jacob Sullum predictably argues for legalizing steroid use by athletes.
Sullum simply doesn't understand the logic of competitive drug taking. He's fixated on advocating drugs that people take for pleasure, not as part of an arms (or, in this case, biceps) race.
His idea that, if legalized, athletes would just take a moderate level of doctor-approved steroids is silly. If everybody took exactly the same moderate level of steroids, nobody would get any advantage from taking them. No, the whole point of taking steroids is to take more steroids than the other guys.
Sure, you can't eliminate steroid use, but by testing you can limit it. In the last 16 years, no woman sprinter has come close to the ridiculous records set by Flo-Jo in 1988, back before the Olympics got semi-serious about testing. In contrast, the one big sport without any steroid testing -- baseball -- has seen all sorts of silly marks, like 73 homers in a season.
Even more generally, the conventional libertarian argument made by Sullum -- Got rulebreakers? Legalize them! -- doesn't make much sense in sports because sports are meaningless without rules. There are an infinite number of ways to cheat in sports. For example, if you can't run fast enough to win the 100m dash, you could use a motorcycle. Motorcycle racing is a perfectly fine sports, but it's just a different sport than running. Without rules, no sport exists. ***
P.S. -- Sullum writes: "If all athletes were allowed to use chemical aids, those who chose to do so would not have an unfair advantage any more than an actress with breast implants does. And just as it is possible to enjoy an actress's performance despite her artificial enhancements..."
What's interesting is how few top actresses have obvious implants. I'm sure many have had a little work done to enhance perkiness -- Susan Sarandon was doing topless scenes in her later 40s in defiance of Newton's Law of Gravity. But the idea is to look realistic in size.
Lots of leading ladies have apparently had no work done at all -- Julia Roberts being a famous example. (Her Erin Brockovich-look was accomplished by taping her up.) If an actress wants to graduate from starlet to star, she'd better not look like a stripper. Remember how Demi Moore flushed her career down the toilet by getting humongo implants in the mid-1990s? Women pay money to see actresses they can identify with, not fantasy figures for men. Further, they punish actresses, like Moore, who raise the competitive bar too high. ***
WMD: Personally, I believed in them, at least until about June. I assumed the Administration was telling the truth. I never thought, however, that WMD were much of a danger. Iraq couldn't use them to invade a neighbor because it had no air power (that's why Iraq's neighbors were yawning over our war). Nor are massive terrorist attacks a good idea if you have return address like Saddam did.
In contrast, Greg Cochran was telling me in the months leading up the war that his buddies in the nuclear bomb-making business didn't think Saddam was making anything nuclear. He was broke, he couldn't get key parts due to the sanctions, there weren't facilities big enough for the job, his best scientists has skedaddled, and the leftovers were just a bunch of Iraqis (illiteracy rate 60%, IQ upper 80s). Greg was right. But nobody in the establishment talked to the Bomb Boys. They're just a bunch of engineers and physicists. What do they know about how stuff works, compared to some Poli Sci major from Georgetown? ***
Why I'm a true believer in utterly free trade -- The theory of free trade has never been contradicted by history. For example, as we all know, the tremendous growth of the American economy in the 19th Century was due to Alexander Hamilton's insistence that free trade be the absolute cornerstone of our economic policy. Every schoolboy knows Abraham Lincoln's 1860 campaign slogan: "Free Labor and Free Trade!"
In contrast, Britain's slow, sad decline from its position of economic supremacy after 1846 was due to Prime Minister Peel's betrayal of Britain's traditional free trade policy in favor of protectionism.
Likewise, Bismarck's insistence on zero tariffs enabled outnumbered Germany to almost conquer Europe in WWI using its free trade-nourished industrial might.
And who can forget how contemptuously Ronald Reagan rejected a plan to impose quotas on Japanese car imports to get Toyota and Honda to build car factories in the U.S.?
Oh, wait a minute... Excuse me. Those were the policies of America, Britain, and Germany in the Bizarro reverse world.
Never mind...
[For all those getting ready to write me long explanations of Ricardo's theory of Comparative Advantage -- I already know it. It's a lovely theory and, unlike most, it even works more often than it doesn't. What more can we ask of an idea in this vale of tears?] ***
Greg Cochran and I are working on campaign slogans for the Karl Rove Amnesty Plan (KRAP). Maybe something Hooverish, along the lines of: "A gardener living in every garage and a car on blocks in every yard!" ***
Evelyn Waugh's White House -- Now that I think about it, Condi Rice could play Mr. Salter to Bush's Lord Copper -- Mr. Salter's side of the conversation was limited to expressions of assent. When Lord Copper was right, he said "Definitely, Lord Copper"; when he was wrong, "Up to a point." -- and still be precisely truthful at the same time:
"Let me see, Condi, what's the name of the Iraqis who hate us? Is it the Kurds who hate us?"
"Up to a point, Mr. President."
"Or is it the Shi'ites who hate us?"
"Up to a point, Mr. President."
"Or is it the Sunnis?"
"Definitely, Mr. President."
Heck, things have gotten so bad that Karl Rove could be an honest man these days:
"Let me see, Karl, who is it who hates my new guest worker plan? The Hispanics?"
"Up to a point, Mr. President."
"Or is it the the American public as a whole?
"Definitely, Mr. President." ***
Bush is likely to fall behind Kerry in many polls -- People love a winner and Kerry has won two weeks in a row. Granted, the rivals he has beaten have been underwhelming in quality, but at least not in quantity! In contrast, Bush has floundered all month, dribbling away his Saddam Bounce with his unveiling of the Karl Rove Amnesty Plan (KRAP). The entire history of Bush's approval rating consists of three bounces -- 9/11, the Iraq Attaq, and Saddam-in-the-Hole -- followed by downward drift toward the exact same level of popularity he had on election day in 2000. (Here's Pollkatz's superb graphical timeline of hundreds of approval polls. Unfortunately, he hasn't updated it since 12/29, so the last three weeks of Bush going down the KRAPper aren't visible on it.) Worse, each of Bush's three bounces has been smaller and more quickly dissipated as the public becomes progressively less impressed with his act. He and Rove had better hope the Special Ops boys catch Osama on exactly November 1st, because the next bounce probably won't last long. ***
What exactly is Condi Rice's job anyway? She doesn't seem to fulfill any of the normal duties of the National Security Advisor, and she seldom seems to make any effort to stand up to the high testosterone boys in the Administration. As far as I can tell, her role is almost wholly feminine. Her job is to salve any boo-boo on George W. Bush's ego so he doesn't have that nightmare. You know the one -- where you dream you're back in college and you suddenly realize you haven't studied one damn thing all semester and now it's the final exam. Well, Condi's job is to keep Bush from suddenly breaking out in a cold sweat over the realization that he hasn't studied one damn thing his entire life and now he's the President of the United States. ***
Mr. Salter's side of the conversation was limited to expressions of assent. When Lord Copper was right he said "Definitely, Lord Copper"; when he was wrong, "Up to a point."
"Let me see, what's the name of the place I mean? Capital of Japan? Yokohama isn't it?"
"Up to a point, Lord Copper."
"And Hong Kong belongs to us, doesn't it?"
"Definitely, Lord Copper." Evelyn Waugh, Scoop ***
An alert reader points out numerous flaws in my notion that Bush could save his Presidency by dumping Dick Cheney, who doesn't look he's fully bounced mentally from his heart operation, from the ticket:
Bush doesn't fire anyone for incompetence. He only fires people for disloyalty. How's he going to fire Cheney?
Okay, so let's say Cheney kicks the bucket. Last time around, Bush asked Cheney to pick someone, and Cheny picked himself. Who's Bush going to turn to this time? And what's the job description?
If Bush is looking primarily for electoral help, he'll want to pick a Midwestern veep. But he sucked up a lot of Midwestern talent into his cabinet, where these guys (Tom Ridge, Tommy Thompson, Spence Abraham) have sunk without a trace.
If he's looking for someone who can "organize" information for him - a big part of Cheney's job description - then probably the best choice is Rice: someone he trusts absolutely, who's absolutely loyal and, as a bonus, doesn't appear to be carrying around her own agenda behind the scenes. But the Christian Right would never accept her, and she's temperamentally unsuited to the campaign trail (kind of like Cheney). [Steve adds: And, the psychic degradation she's endured playing Mr. Salter to Bush's Lord Copper has probably left her too much of a broken shell to be President, herself.]
Who else can he pick? Bill Frist? I'm skeptical. Frist doesn't seem like a Veep type, and he's more valuable to Bush in the Senate. Plus he doesn't need any help in the South. Rudy Giuliani? Should've picked him to head Homeland Security; Rudy'll never be a Veep, and would be totally useless as an organizer of information for Bush. And he'd also be vetoed by the Christian Right. John Ashcroft? We're looking for someone who *helps* the ticket.
Bottom line: I can't think of anyone who's a great fit for the Cheney slot - someone happy to be second-banana and organizing wiz for the President but who's also great on the stump and (from both your perspective and the perspective of key GOP interest groups) right on the issues. The best candidates from an electoral position are either bad temperamental fits with the job or unacceptable to parts of the GOP base or both. ***
Best Oscar nomination surprise -- The four nods to Brazil's "City of God," which came out a year ago. Here's an excerpt from my review
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 16, 2003 (UPI) -- If you loved Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" and have been waiting for a similarly smart, stylish, hyperkinetic gangster flick, you're in luck: No, not Scorsese's oddly uninspired "Gangs of New York," but the killer Brazilian import "City of God," which debuts in New York and Los Angeles on Friday. Brazil's nominee for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, "City of God" is so entertaining that it should get a national rollout despite its subtitles.
Like "Gangs of New York," it is set in a Dantesque slum, a Rio de Janeiro housing project overoptimistically named the City of God. The movie, which must feature 75 shootings, will not do wonders for Brazil's tourism industry (though its not quite as stomach-churningly gory as "Gangs")...
Rio is not the best-policed city in the world, with the cops mostly engaged in pocketing bribes to look the other way, except when called upon to beat up urchins pestering rich people. Unfettered by the law, the City of God's youth quickly took up armed robbery, graduating to cocaine dealing in the 1970s, and to mass gang warfare in the early 1980s. Based on Paulo Lins' sprawling autobiographical novel of Dickensian heft, "City of God" tells the interlocking stories of a host of local lads -- some murderers, some nice guys, and some an unstable combination of the two.
Fernando Meirelles, Brazil's snazziest TV commercial director, and his co-director, documentarian Katia Lund, auditioned 2,000 slum kids and trained 106 of act in the movie. While none of these adolescent newcomers gives a performance to rival Daniel Day-Lewis in "Gangs," several acquit themselves at least as well as Leonardo DiCaprio did. To make this panoramic tale comprehensible, screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani employs "Goodfellas"-style narration and lots of documentary tricks, such as repeating scenes to reveal new twists. Meirelles delivers extraordinary cinematic razzle-dazzle for a movie with a $3.3 million budget. This film barrels along for its full 135 minutes. One advantage "City of God" has over "Goodfellas" and most other prestigious mob movies is a non-criminal hero to identify with. I know I'm weird, but I generally don't like gangster movies, even "The Godfather," because the characters are murderers and I want them all to die in the electric chair. Here, though, the narrator, played by an appealing amateur who looks like a younger, shorter version of Magic Johnson, is too decent to turn to crime. One night he decides to become a stick-up bandit, but ends up chatting amiably with all his intended victims. Eventually, he gets a job at a newspaper photographing the drug war that white journalists can't get in to cover. ***
After Cheney? -- It's clear by now that Bush's Jan. 7th Amnesty speech wrecked the momentum he had picked up from Saddam's capture. Karl Rove has proven himself closer to mediocrity than genius. I spend one tenth as much time thinking about voters as Rove does, but I've been saying since the beginning of the Administration that coming out in favor of illegal immigration was politically nuts. So, how come I knew that and he didn't? But, where was Dick Cheney in this decision? Isn't he supposed to provide adult supervision?
Rove is not totally incompetent, however. He waited until entrance to the GOP primaries had legally closed to spring the Invite the World plan, so I guess the party is stuck with Bush in November. We're not stuck with Cheney, however. His negatives keep going up as the truth about his vaunted Iraq WMD and Saddam-Osama connection emerges. And he seems to be useless on domestic policy. I thought he'd be the most valuable member of the Administration, but what has he been good for? He doesn't even go to the funerals of foreign potentates.
Cheney was supposed to be Bush's keeper, but he's abused that role to keep good alternatives away from the President's microscopic attention span.
Let's get a new candidate for Veep. But whom? He needs to be both a good campaigner and a competent ventriloquist to Bush's dummy. ***
Analysis: Shoppers pay hidden big box store costs By Steve Sailer LOS ANGELES, Jan. 26 (UPI) -- Few retail store formats have proven more popular with Americans than the "big box" store where consumers pushing shopping carts load up on bulk purchases at low prices. Led for years by Wal-Mart, which recorded $33.7 billion in sales in December alone, and taken to an extreme by warehouse clubs, big boxes with their rock-bottom prices have been shouldering aside mom-and-pop outlets, department stores, boutiques, and supermarkets. There's no disputing the unprecedented efficiency of the top chains, yet some of the price reductions have been accomplished by handing hidden costs off to consumers.
Since the long-gone days of the 1920s, when the corner store would take an order over the phone and send a delivery boy around with a crate of groceries, the U.S. retail industry has striven mightily to drive down sticker prices. They've accomplished this in part by passing on an increasing fraction of the costs of the distribution process. The odd thing about this trend is that retailers have become extremely efficient in recent decades at managing the supply chain, while consumers remain amateurs. Just about every task shoppers can do, stores can do cheaper: selecting the best brands, transporting and storing goods, manhandling big crates, avoiding spoilage, and borrowing money cheaply to finance the inventory investment.
Consumers are more likely than retailers to unwittingly buy more food than they can actually consume before it goes bad. "It's amazing what you find out will spoil," a Los Angeles homemaker told United Press International. "Like when my father bought a case of a dozen half-gallon jugs of salsa at Wal-Mart's Sam's Club. It seemed like a terrific deal, but who knew something that spicy would go rank before you could eat it? Of course, it didn't help that everybody in the family was heartily sick of salsa long before they could finish all six gallons."
Once home with their seemingly low-priced loot, shoppers must then take on the costs of storing it all. The business world has moved toward the Japanese Just-In-Time model, but consumers have shifted in the opposite direction of buying long before consumption. For shoppers who are paying 13 percent on their unpaid credit card balances, every additional month before consuming a purchased item adds a little over one percent to the net cost.
Finding space around the house just to warehouse cases of products that won't be consumed for months is not cheap. The separate pantry off the kitchen is coming back in fashion. In very expensive regions where a 2,000-square-foot home costs $400,000, the cost of a 10-foot-by-10-foot storage area would equate to $20,000. [More...] ***
Excellent article (link now fixed) on the German experience with guest workers:
Cumali Kangal came to Germany 30 years ago [from Turkey] to work in a metal factory, assuming he was staying only temporarily. It wasn't until seven or eight years later that it finally struck him that he really ought to learn the language... People familiar with the German experience say there are lessons for all concerned. Kangal, in addition to recommending that workers learn the language earlier than he did, said the host country should enter the arrangement with open eyes.
If a country needing cheap labor hires another country's least-qualified workers, it will get poorly educated and unsophisticated people ill-equipped to learn the language and assimilate. Though he is a Turk and experiences prejudice "every day," he also said it was not primarily Turkey's elite that had come to Germany. "In some ways," he said, "the prejudice is not wrong."
Lots more good stuff in the article. ***
New VDARE column at left. ***
From my review of The Battle of Algiers in The American Conservative:
The legendary 1965 Algerian-Italian film ignores France’s expensive efforts to buy the hearts and minds of the Arabs and Berbers during the 1954-1962 war. Nor does it stress how the Algerian insurgents, to prevent peaceful compromise, mutilated and decapitated moderate Muslims and assassinated liberal Europeans. But what it does show of producer Saadi Yacef's 1956 terror bombings of bistros and discos is horrifying enough. Alistair Horne’s exhaustive 1978 history, A Savage War of Peace, confirms many of the film’s details. (Paul Johnson’s tour de force summary of Horne’s book -- furiously illustrating how a few extremists can launch a vicious cycle of provocation, reprisal, and mass outrage -- climaxes his famous Modern Times.)
In despair, Algiers' civil authorities hand policing over to the paratroopers under Colonel Mathieu. This glamorous character was modeled partly on the redoubtable Jacques Massu, partly on the intellectual colonels like Marcel Bigeard. The latter had recently parachuted gallantly into the doomed fortress of Dien Bien Phu. While an involuntary guest of General Giap, Bigeard studied Mao's theories and then used them in his sophisticated counter-guerilla strategy in Algeria.
The anti-French filmmakers give Mathieu most of the best lines. When challenged at a press conference about torture, he answers with Descartes' logic and Cyrano's panache:
"The problem is: the FLN wants us to leave Algeria and we want to remain … Despite varying shades of opinion, you all agree that we must remain … Therefore, to be precise, I would now like to ask you a question: Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer 'yes,' then you must accept all the necessary consequences."
The paras liquidated the Casbah rebels' leadership in 1957. In Algeria, torture worked. What the film doesn’t show is that in France, though, the public started to lose the stomach for the "necessary consequences." Alarmed that the politicians might throw away their fallen comrades' sacrifices, the paratroopers threatened to drop on Paris in May 1958 unless Gen. Charles de Gaulle became France's strong man.
Once in power, however, that great patriot resolved to cut and run. He had to weather two coup attempts and countless assassination plots, but, minus the Algerian tumor, long-suffering France emerged peaceful, prosperous, and democratic. [More...] ***
A fascinating parallel between the French experience in Algeria and our Iraq Attaq is how French misperceptions about the causes of Muslim terrorism caused them to invade an irrelevant Arab country. The French government became convinced that the terrorists who were blowing up French civilians in Algeria from 11/1/1954 were linked to the Egyptian dictator Nasser and Nasser was linked to international communism, just as Bush-Cheney argued that the 9/1/11 terrorists were linked to Saddam who was linked to international Muslim fundamentalism. None of these assertions proved terribly true. (The Algerian terrorists were nationalists with no contacts with the Soviets at the time, and they were frustrated with the blowhard Nasser for doing very little to help them.)
So, the French teamed up with the Israelis and the British to invade Egypt in 1956 to seize the Suez Canal. They were winning easily, but President Eisenhower spoke out against the Franco-Anglo-Israeli aggression and made them withdraw. ***
Also, of historical interest: the NY Review of Books carries a long article on President Kennedy's attempts to use WMD inspections to prevent the Israelis from building nuclear bombs at their French-built reactor at Dimona. The Israelis covered up, lied, and stalled until JFK was dead. LBJ had little interest in non-proliferation and let the matter drop. Israel has never publicly admitted having nuclear weapons.
Just to provoke all the French-haters some more, let me point out that France gave Israel the technology to build its nuclear bombs. The prestigious Federation of American Scientists reported:
"In the fall of 1956, France agreed to provide Israel with an 18 MWt research reactor. However, the onset of the Suez Crisis a few weeks later changed the situation dramatically. Following Egypt's closure of the Suez Canal in July, France and Britain had agreed with Israel that the latter should provoke a war with Egypt to provide the European nations with the pretext to send in their troops as peacekeepers to occupy and reopen the canal zone. In the wake of the Suez Crisis, the Soviet Union made a thinly veiled threat against the three nations. This episode not only enhanced the Israeli view that an independent nuclear capability was needed to prevent reliance on potentially unreliable allies, but also led to a sense of debt among French leaders that they had failed to fulfill commitments made to a partner. French premier Guy Mollet is even quoted as saying privately that France "owed" the bomb to Israel.
"On 3 October 1957, France and Israel signed a revised agreement calling for France to build a 24 MWt reactor (although the cooling systems and waste facilities were designed to handle three times that power) and, in protocols that were not committed to paper, a chemical reprocessing plant. This complex was constructed in secret, and outside the IAEA inspection regime, by French and Israeli technicians at Dimona, in the Negev desert.
The FAS estimates the Israeli arsenal currently numbers between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons. Personally, I'm glad that Israel has nuclear weapons, although you can see how it makes our anti-WMD diplomacy more difficult. It's tricky to try to explain to Muslim countries why we think it's perfectly okey-dokey for Israel to have the means to kill tens of millions of Muslims, but that Muslim countries shouldn't have any nukes at all because we think they are all a bunch of potentially crazed towel-heads. But explaining that kind of thing is what our diplomats get paid the big bucks for. ***
The Politics of the Bush Immigration Plan: A prominent GOP activist who understands the law of supply and demand explains:
(1) Most Latino activist groups/elected officials/opinion leaders are thoroughly integrated components of the liberal/Democratic political coalition, in much the same way that the Christian Right is part of the conservative/Republican coalition. The hatred that liberals/Democrats have for Bush is almost beyond measure, even greater than e.g. the hatred conservatives/Republicans had for Clinton during the Impeachment. Even if Latino activists actually like parts of the Amnesty Proposal, they gladly hold their tongue it if it helps defeat Bush. As far as I can tell, the only Latino groups that the Bush people were able to line up as backing were more the "bought off" or second-tier ones, which carry relatively little weight with Latino voters. Unions and Latino elected officials have much more clout, and I trust that they will fight the plan every step of the way. As an analogy, suppose that Clinton had proposed a bill banning partial-birth abortion at the height of Impeachment. Would that have helped him win the backing of the Christian Right? (2) There's really no evidence that Bush/Rove/Republicans have any understanding whatsoever of Latinos or their political dynamics. As a very early example, they tried to win the Mexican vote in California and the Southwest by stopping those airforce bombing runs in Puerto Rico. I remember having some good laughs over that with some leading Latino analysts. In a somewhat similar way, Gray Davis followed the recommendations of a few Sacramento Latino activists and politicians on the drivers' license bill, then was shocked when about half the actual Latino voters (and pretty much all the non-Latino voters) opposed him on it. (3) Also, Bush's plan really is crazy, after all. If we freely allowed every corporation in America to send air-conditioned buses South of the Border with loud-speakers offering $5.25/hour jobs to all takers, I'm not necessarily saying that every single Mexican and Guatamalaan would immediately come to El Norte---probably no more than 20 or 30 million the first year. But even as a very strong advocate of the effectiveness of America's assimilationist "melting pot," coping with such changes in our society does seem like a considerable stretch. I recall Old Deng's quip to Carter after the latter's endless hectoring on "free emigration" from China, that having a considerable surplus of Chinese, he'd be glad to send America as many as requested, but only in even lots of ten million. (4) As a specific example, for months there's been a bitter and high-profile 70,000 worker strike going on at all major Southern California groceries over management attempts to cut wages and benefits. The unions involved are (I think) substantially immigrant and Latino. Going to those workers and telling them that Bush has proposed allowing their employers to immediately import unlimited numbers of foreign strike-breakers will not make them happy. And any crazed (or bought-off) reconquista-type Chicano Studies professor who tries to persuade them otherwise will be lynched, plain and simple. (5) I very much agree that the Democratic nominee could gain enormous traction by opposing the Immigration proposal. I don't get the impression that the major candidates have endorsed its specifics, which does leave them considerable room for positioning. And I do agree that a Democrat who makes opposition to the Bush/Rove Proposal a centerpiece of his domestic agenda will be in a very, very strong position for November. (6) Again, for those of you without extensive contact with Latinos, use the Italian model. In 1940 or 1950, how many working-class Italian votes would a Presidential candidate have won by suggesting that corporations be allowed to import tens of millions of minimum-wage foreign workers from Italy and everywhere else? ***
Dick Cheney didn't get the memo: The aging Veep seems increasingly lost in his own fantasy world, telling NPR today that there was too an Iraq-al Qaeda link and that we still may find the weapons of mass destruction. I know Cheney was there, but maybe he wasn't listening to his boss read the State of the Union address. As you'll recall, Bush gave up on WMD and instead claimed, hilariously, that there were "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" in Iraq. Got it, Dick? Repeat after W.: "Weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."
Cheney must go. ***
Kevin Michael Grace surfaces: It's always good to see something new from the Waugh-like Ambler. Here he mordantly skewers Reason Magazine's "35 Heroes of Freedom: Celebrating the people who have made the world groovier and groovier since 1968," which includes such tired and tiresome celebrities as Dennis Rodman, Larry Flynt, and Madonna. Worse, Reason often describes its worthy choices as if the intent is to make you embarrassed for both the honoree and the magazine, e.g., Robert Heinlein: "If you don’t grok Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Time Enough for Love, you just plain can’t grok anything." Yeeesh... ***
John Edwards: Anybody doing opposition research on Edwards should get a video of his appearance on the "Charlie Rose Show" on the night of 9/11/2001. I've never seen a top professional politician make himself look more inane and lightweight at a crucial moment. The debate between author Tom Clancy and Edwards over whether the U.S. needed to do something in response to 9/11 was jawdropping. Clancy: Yes vs. Edwards: Oh, well, maybe, perhaps we should study the situation ...
I wasn't the only one who noticed Edwards' fiasco. Sam Smith of the "Progressive Review" wrote: "The only bright spot was when Tom Clancy mercilessly quizzed Clinton-in-waiting John Edwards as to what specifically he would do and Edwards could produce nothing but photogenic platitudes."
The show still exists somewhere on videotape. Edwards' enemies could just put it out on the Web and do him serious damage. ***
Iraq would not be the first Arab democracy: One example of American ignorance is the common statement that our goal is to establish in Iraq "the first democracy in the Arab world," which will launch a positive domino effect. In reality, nearby Lebanon was an independent democracy from 1943 to 1975, with a lovely capital with a free press, major banks and universities, and a booming economy. Beirut was a popular vacation spot. (Can you imagine how much success we would have to have to make Baghdad a popular tourist destination?) And then, after 32 years of elections, began a nearly Hobbesian war of all against all that lasted to 1992 when the Syrians finally assumed control.
They had a clever system whereby the leading group, the Christians, always got the top job, the presidency, the Sunnis got the second highest job, and the Shi'ites the third highest. The idea was to restrict all political rivalries to within each confessional group. It worked nicely for awhile, but it of course failed to build national parties that transcended ethnicity. And, as the demographics changed, the original distribution of power among the groups became increasingly contentious. Eventually, the high birth rate of the backward Shi'ites, the ambitions of the marginalized Druzes, the arrival of the Palestinians from Jordan, the retaliatory Israeli bombing of the PLO in south Lebanon which set off a surge of frightened Shi'ites into Beirut, and other problems fatally undermined the set-up. Rather than Lebanon being the domino that knocked over the non-democratic regimes in the region, Lebanon got flattened by both internal and external pressures.
After 7 years of horror, the Israel's marched to Beirut in 1982, but that didn't solve anything and the Israelis eventually withdrew completely from southern Lebanon after almost two decades. That fallback probably inspired the latest Palestinian intifada, which began in 2000. This does not seem like a promising analogy for the American presence in Iraq: either we stay forever or we encourage the hotheads by pulling out.
The bad news for Iraq is that the Lebanese temporary success was largely driven by the sophisticated, European-oriented Maronite Catholics, and seconded by the moderation of the Sunnis. In Iraq, most of the Assyrian Christians are gone, the Sunnis are the designated bad guys, and the Shi'ites have already obtained a majority of the population. I also have a general feeling that Arabs are less politically rational today than they were in the heyday of Lebanese democracy. ***
Analysis: Bush turns against steroids By Steve Sailer UPI National Correspondent LOS ANGELES, Jan. 21 (UPI) -- President George W. Bush used his State of the Union address as a bully pulpit to denounce steroids in professional sports.
Bush said: "The use of performance-enhancing drugs like steroids in baseball, football and other sports is dangerous and it sends the wrong message: that there are shortcuts to accomplishment and that performance is more important than character. So tonight I call on team owners, union representatives, coaches and players to take the lead, to send the right signal, to get tough and to get rid of steroids now."
The Bush dynasty acted more laxly in their previous encounters with the steroid problem.
Artificial male hormones streaked into notoriety at the 1988 Olympics when 100-meter dash champion Ben Johnson, who was so soaked in steroids his eyes had turned yellow, was dramatically stripped of his gold medal after failing a drug test.
Former President George H. W. Bush signed a bill making steroids a controlled substance in 1990. Shortly afterward, though, he sent a mixed message to America's youth by appointing as chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness the movie muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger, the world's most celebrated self-admitted ex-user of steroids. (Although such drugs were legal when he was using them.) The Hollywood he-man is now the Republican governor of California and a political ally of the current President Bush.
The younger Bush was co-managing general partner of the Texas Rangers from 1989 to 1994, a time when most other major sports were toughening their drug testing in the wake of the Johnson scandal. Yet, Major League Baseball owners refused to institute any tests at all. In the subsequent anything-goes 1990s, ballplayers swelled in musculature, along with home run totals, fan excitement, and revenue.
Finally, in 2002, former Most Valuable Players Jose Canseco and Ken Caminiti admitted they had used steroids, shaming baseball into a fairly weak form of mandatory testing.
Last November, the commissioner's office announced that more than 5 percent of ballplayers had flunked its first ever steroid test, a much higher failure rate than even that seen in steroid-plagued sports like track. Also, the tests could not detect the new steroid THG, over which a grand jury subpoenaed star sluggers Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi.
In 1992, Bush's Rangers acquired in a blockbuster trade the ever more massive Canseco, even though he was then probably the most infamous steroid abuser in baseball.
Although Canseco had won the 1988 American League MVP award by being the first player to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases, his career as a Ranger is most remembered for one week in May 1993. First, a long fly ball bounced off the outfielder's head for a home run. Three days later, Canseco volunteered to try pitching and blew out his elbow, ending his season.
Last year, after angrily ending a career cut short by injuries, Canseco was jailed when he failed a drug test for steroids, violating his probation stemming from a nightclub brawl he had gotten into alongside his brother Ozzie.
"Canseco was the Typhoid Mary of steroids," one baseball agent told United Press International, alleging that after Canseco joined a team, some of his new teammates would suddenly beef up suspiciously. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reported that Canseco had told book companies to whom he was peddling his idea for a tell-all memoir that he had helped obtain steroids for as-of-yet unnamed players.
When Bush's Rangers traded for Canseco in 1992, he had been the subject of steroid rumors for many years. For example, right after Ben Johnson's disgrace in 1988, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post sportswriter Thomas Boswell accused Canseco of juicing.
Canseco's second World Series appearance in 1989 inspired novelist Anne Lamott to complain in "Operating Instructions," her best-selling diary of her baby Sam's first year of life: "I was explaining to Sam that Jose Canseco shouldn't get to play because of the obvious steroid use, that there is something really wrong with the guy ... It was obvious from Sam's expression that he didn't think much of Canseco."
The evidence was not subtle. When Canseco started in the minor leagues, he was tall and slender, but eventually bulked up to 240 pounds. Tellingly, he possessed the steroid user's equivalent of the portrait of Dorian Gray: his identical twin Ozzie, who stayed skinny and in the minors for years.
Bush signed off on all Rangers trades, such as the Canseco acquisition, but he was not actively involved. Bush's underling, general manager Tom Grieve, told PBS, "George was the front man ... He was the spokesperson. He dealt with the media, he dealt with the fans, and it was obvious to us right from the start that that's what he was made for."
But, now he's the president of the United States and he's talking a tougher line against steroids. ***
Did you see Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi's Alpine ropethrow eyebrows? -- In the rebuttal to the State of the Union, it was hard to concentrate on what the Democratic House leader was saying because her eyebrows had been facelifted about halfway up her forehead. ***
Here's Bush's State of the Union paragraph on his GWB (Guest-Worker-Bush) plan:
"Tonight I also ask you to reform our immigration laws, so they reflect our values and benefit our economy. I propose a new temporary worker program to match willing foreign workers with willing employers, when no Americans can be found to fill the job. This reform will be good for our economy ? because employers will find needed workers in an honest and orderly system. A temporary worker program will help protect our homeland ? allowing border patrol and law enforcement to focus on true threats to our national security. I oppose amnesty, because it would encourage further illegal immigration, and unfairly reward those who break our laws. My temporary worker program will preserve the citizenship path for those who respect the law, while bringing millions of hardworking men and women out from the shadows of American life."
What do you think? Is he really going to push this or is it just going to remain a rhetorical device? ***
Thanks God there's no name for this decade: We're already in the fifth year of this decade, and there's no consensus name for it. That's a real blessing for clear thought. There's nothing lazier or stupider than decadethink: "The Eighties were the 'Decade of Greed'" yada yada. ***
Jocks and Doping: The New York Times Magazine carries a long article on the abuse of steroids, EPO, and (in the future) genetic therapy by top athletes. Almost all the examples of likely dopers (Bonds, Sosa, Flo-Jo, etc. ) will be familiar to my readers, but it's nice to see somebody else talk about it. ***
New VDARE column at left ***
Michelle Wow: Last May, I accurately predicted that top lady golfer Annika Sorenstam would miss the cut in the men's Colonial tournament by four strokes. I'm glad I didn't try my hand at forecasting how 14-year-old Hawaiian schoolgirl Michelle Wie would do in last week's men's Sony tournament in Honolulu. I've been writing quite a bit about her (e.g., writing in VDARE last summer: "In fact, girl's high school golf in the U.S. is increasingly dominated by East Asian girls, of whom the six-foot-tall Korean-American 13-year-old Michelle Wie is the most promising"), but I still wouldn't have guessed she would have wound up missing the cut (i.e., to make the cut you have to be in, roughly, the top half of scorers after two of the four rounds) by only one stroke, shooting 72-68.
Think about what she accomplished like this: If she were male, that might be as impressive a performance by a 14-year-old since the great Bobby Jones reached the quarter-finals of the U.S. Amateur in 1916. But as a 14-year-old girl playing against many of the world's best adult men, well, I'm stumped for historical comparisons. ***
Why I, as a baby boomer, feel shame:
2004: The president says we will go to the moon in eleven years.
vs.
1961: The president says we will go to the moon in eight years.
And my father's generation did it using slide rules. ***
The second half of the Derb's column on "The Immigration Fiasco" is superb. ***
Commentary: How to make MLK day universal By Steve Sailer
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 18 (UPI) -- It's been 18 years since the Rev. Martin Luther King's birthday became a federal holiday, and five years since New Hampshire became the 50th state to make it a holiday for state workers. Yet, in 2004, only 29 percent of employers give their staffs the day off with pay, according to a survey of 339 Human Resources executives by publisher BNA Inc.
Surprisingly, few non-black workers seem to mind. Not surprisingly, some blacks feel that this apathy toward King's birthday is a sign of disrespect. Black comedian Chris Rock said, "You gotta be pretty racist to not want a day off from work."
Fortunately, one simple change in the holiday could end this racial divisiveness and unite workers of all colors in demanding a paid holiday honoring King.
The federal holiday currently falls on the third Monday in January. In 2004, that's Jan. 19. It's a great time for a holiday -- if you live in Honolulu or Key West. In many parts of the country, however, mid-January is the worst point of the winter. In Chicago, for instance, the coldest day of the year on average is Jan. 18. North of, say, Florida, the weather makes planning parades, outdoor speeches or picnics quite dicey.
The popularity of the holiday differs by latitude. BNA found that "By region, organizations located in the Southern United States are most likely to designate Jan. 19 as a paid holiday (44 percent), whereas employers in the North Central region are least likely to do so (15 percent)."
Besides, by the middle of January, most employees have had at least four official days off in the preceding seven weeks (New Year's, Christmas and two for Thanksgiving).
Numerous blacks in the private sector, though, wish to honor King. Many do so by using up a vacation day or one of their limited "floating holidays," or by just calling in sick. That the day is turning into an unofficial holiday for black workers but few others poses difficult dilemmas for many managers. Should you risk delays by postponing important meetings that would otherwise be scheduled for the third Monday in January? Or should you go ahead and make crucial decisions with few of your black employees in the room?
The solution to this kind of unintended racial divisiveness is to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s holiday more attractive to everybody. Liberate it from its unimaginative dependence on his birthday. There's plenty of precedent for that. The only other man to have a holiday celebrating his birthday is Jesus Christ...
Instead of commemorating the day when King was born, follow the precedent set by Columbus Day. We don't celebrate Columbus on the day of his birth, but on the anniversary of his greatest feat, reaching the New World on Oct. 12, 1492.
Similarly, we could commemorate what might be King's most memorable achievement: his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963.
If we moved the King holiday to the Monday a week before Labor Day, it would suddenly become hugely popular. Everybody would want to take the last Monday in August off. ... This year Labor Day will be Sept. 6, so the MLK holiday would fall, under this plan, a week earlier -- Aug. 30. This schedule would allow workers to take a 10-day vacation running from Saturday, Aug. 28, through Labor Day, yet use only four vacation days. [More...] ***
Space -- What we need is a truly exciting, but concrete goal for space travel. Let's start looking now for The Big One: a fully habitable planet where millions of our descendents will someday live in the open air under an alien sun. That means: better telescopes to find small earth-sized planets, telescopes located probably in space, but possibly either on the moon or earth. (There have tremendous advances in telescope technology in the last several years, so I won't pretend to know what would be best.) Obviously, we are over a century away from even planning for a trip to the stars, but we might be able to find a habitable planet within a couple of decades. And that would be enormously inspiring. [More...] ***
The Gift that Keeps on Giving -- That's what the Bush Immigration Plan is for me. Anytime I'm looking around for something to write about, there's always some other bad side effect to reveal.
Today, let's think about the impact of inviting in millions of new temporary workers, most of whom will be immediately eligible for affirmative action. Does that make any sense at all?
Nobody has offered an explanation for why immigrants who chose America, presumably warts and all, should immediately qualify for special treatment at the expense of many native-born citizens; but, then, not many people bothered to ask, either. Americans have just found it more interesting to argue over affirmative action for blacks.
Further, this is an engine for ethnic conflict. The key variable in judging how disruptive reverse discrimination will become is the "racial ratio." This measure refers to how many whites there are to shoulder the cost of preferences relative to each legally protected minority member. As the proportion of whites to other races shrinks rapidly due to the Bush Plan, the higher the cost of preferences rises for each individual white. This would be both bad for whites, obviously, and eventually bad for minorities by stoking white anger.
What exactly are these costs? The direct costs of preferences to whites include being passed over by a college in favor of a less qualified minority applicant; losing a government contract to a higher bidder who is of a favored race or ethnicity; or missing out on a job because a private business imposes a quota on itself to avert a lawsuit from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The 1991 Civil Rights Act placed the burden of proof on private employers, forcing them to show that any statistical deviations from racial and ethnic proportionality in their work forces compared to the local population (including noncitizens) was justified by the strict standard of "business necessity."
When aggregated over the entirety of white Americans, these various preferences impose real costs on real individuals who get turned down in favor of members of less-qualified protected groups --though individuals may never know that they have lost out in this way.
There are other costs to race preferences, of course, notably that they may cast doubt on the qualifications of minority applicants. But these costs have been widely debated, whereas this whites-per-minority concept is rarely used in discussions of race preferences -- even though this racial ratio is directly analogous to the well-known ratio of workers per retiree that is central to debates over the future of Social Security. In the debate over Social Security, moreover, the fact that payers and payees are each other's children and parents alleviates some of the bitterness of the conflict. In contrast, fewer family ties exist to temper racial and ethnic struggles, which is why they are so rightly feared.
The Nixon administration invented racial quotas in 1969 to integrate segregated craft unions. At that time, there were almost eight whites for every black, so the average cost per white of giving a boost to blacks in payback for generations of exploitation during slavery and Jim Crow was relatively small. In the 1970 Census, African-Americans made up 90 percent of the then-recognized minorities, and Americans to this day still tend to think of preferences as applying primarily to blacks.
Today, though, the majority of the beneficiaries of racial/ethnic preferences aren't black. Indeed, the Census Bureau recently reported that Hispanics (38.8 million) now outnumber blacks (38.3 million). Only 42 percent of protected minorities are African-American. There are only 2.2 non-Hispanic whites per minority member.
When the Bush Plan gets done importing tens of millions of more foreigners, the racial ratio will be much worse and the burden of paying for affirmative action that will be shouldered by each white person will be much greater. [More ...] *** Oops! -- Another Dick Cheneyism bites the dust:
"Among the documents found with Saddam Hussein when he was captured last month was a directive written to his followers telling them not to join forces with foreign Arab fighters that may be streaming in to Iraqi to fight Americans, Fox News has confirmed... With this document and other evidence, [American] officials have determined that Saddam believed that foreign Arab fighters were eager for a holy war against the West, while his former ruling Baath Party was anxious for its own return to power... critics say the document shows just how thin the relationship between the former regime and Al Qaeda really was. U.S. officials, however, said they stick by previous characterizations of the relationship and meetings between the two groups but concede the document shows Al Qaeda fighters were not the means by which Saddam wanted to fight the U.S.-led coalition."
Do you ever the feeling that the core of support for the Iraq Attaq comes from citizens who get confused about which Arab bad guy was responsible for 9-11 because of all those letters in "O-s-a-m-a" and "S-a-d-d-a-m" that are the same?
UPDATE: Of course, the real hard core of support for the Iraq Attaq are the folks who get Iraq and Iran confused and think the invasion was payback for the Ayatollah taking American hostages back in Jimmy Carter's day. ***
The neocon platform in a nutshell:
Foreign Policy: Invade the World! Domestic Policy: Invite the World! ***
By Steve Sailer LOS ANGELES, Jan. 14 (UPI) -- By disdainfully describing George W. Bush's behavior during Cabinet meetings as that of a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people," former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has reopened the debate over just how smart the president is. Some objective numbers from Bush's past suggest he is reasonably but not exceptionally intelligent, but questions remain about his curiosity and openness to learning.
The New Yorker magazine revealed in 1999 that Bush scored 1206 on his Scholastic Aptitude Test: 566 Verbal, 640 Math. While there is something crass about focusing upon a future president's exam scores, these numbers possess a blunt honesty lacking in much of the carefully contrived folklore about politicians' brains. Bush's 1206 is a better score than it may seem to younger people because the Educational Testing Service "recentered" (inflated) SAT scoring in the mid-'90s. Bush's score is the equivalent of a 1280 under today's dumbed-up scoring system.
How does Bush's 1206 compare to the general population? ... Linda Gottfredson, co-director of the University of Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society, told United Press International: "I recently converted Bush's SAT score to an IQ using the high school norms available for his age cohort. Educational Testing Service happened to have done a study of representative high school students within a year or so of when he took the test. I derived an IQ of 125, which is the 95th percentile." In other words, only one out of 20 people would score higher. ...
University of California-Davis psychology professor Dean Keith Simonton has written numerous books using quantitative techniques to assess historical figures, including his 1987 work "Why Presidents Succeed: A Political Psychology of Leadership." Simonton told UPI, "In raw intellect, Bush is about average" for a president.
On the other hand, Simonton didn't see much evidence that Bush tries hard to use the brains he's got. "He has very little intellectual energy or curiosity, relatively few interests, and a dearth of bona fide aesthetic o |
