Darfur v. Zimbabwe: Is U.S. Foreign Policy Just an Elite Plaything?

In my new VDARE.com column, I compare the interest level in two African disasters of equal lack of strategic important to the American national interest:

Obama has, however, done a nimble job of exciting the Stuff White People Like crowd by repeatedly acting as if he cares about Darfur, a god-forsaken expanse of arid grassland just south of the Sahara in western Sudan, where militias backed by the "Arab" central government in Khartoum have been attacking locals.

Darfur has become a cause célèbre among celebrities such as George Clooney and Matt Damon. Obama has been addressing fashionable Darfur rallies and hiring foreign policy advisers, such as Samantha Power, who are passionate about America getting involved in this huge bit of damn-all in the middle of nowhere.

Darfur’s usefulness as a foreign policy issue to Obama and McCain in appealing to the SWPL contingent is it’s utter uselessness—America has no national interest in Darfur whatsoever, so therefore, the thinking goes, we should get involved because it wouldn’t do us any good—thus demonstrating the purity of our intentions.

In contrast, virtually no celebrities have expressed any interest in "raising awareness" about Zimbabwe, a verdant country at a pleasant altitude in southeast Africa. Over the last decade, dictator Robert Mugabe has destroyed the economy and driven his subjects to the brink of starvation. As with Darfur, the U.S. has negligible national interest in Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, in contrast to Darfur, Zimbabwe doesn’t interest the partisans of purity because of the unfortunate details behind why it is now prostrate: In 2000, Mugabe unleashed his goons to beat up and steal the farms of the efficient white farmers who raised most of the food.

Several members of Barack Obama's inner circle of foreign policy advisers are leaders in the movement to demand we do something about Darfur. For example, in a 2006 Washington Post op-ed entitled "We Saved Europeans. Why Not Africans?" ...

Similarly, in an interview entitled "The McCain Doctrines" with Matt Bai in today's New York Times Magazine [May 18, 2008], John McCain volunteers that he's often thought about starting a war with Sudan, if only a way could be found to make it practical:

"I asked McCain if it was true … that he had been brought to a more idealist way of thinking partly by the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. ‘I think so, I think so,’ he said, nodding. 'And Darfur today. I feel strongly about Darfur, and yet, and this is where the realist side comes in, how do we effectively stop the genocide in Darfur?' He seemed to be genuinely wrestling with the question. 'You know the complications with a place that’s bigger, I guess, than the size of Texas, and it’s hard to know who the Janjaweed is, who are the killers, who are the victims. It’s all jumbled up. … And yet I look at Darfur, and I still look at Rwanda, to some degree, and think, How could we have gone in there and stopped that slaughter?'"

Note that, although McCain likes military adventures, the simpler task of intervening in Zimbabwe to avert famine does not appeal to him at all. While McCain volunteered Darfur, the NYT’s Bai has to bring Zimbabwe up:

"Why then, I asked McCain, shouldn’t we go into Zimbabwe, where, according to that morning’s paper, allies of the despotic president, Robert Mugabe, were rounding up his political opponents and preparing to subvert the results of the country’s recent national election?"

McCain tries to spell it out euphemistically for the journalist why a white President of the United States is not going to depose a black tyrant who wrecked his country by persecuting productive whites:

"'I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,' McCain said thoughtfully."

Well, not that thoughtfully—the U.S. doesn't actually have much of a history in Africa.

McCain notices his mistake and tries to make himself clear without actually mentioning the W-word:

"Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa.'"

... What makes Zimbabwe so unsexy compared to Darfur is that in 1965 the British Colonial Office tried to give the colony of Rhodesia to its black majority. But its white population declared independence and for 15 years resisted an international trade embargo, building a substantial manufacturing base. Finally, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher organized the handover of the country to Robert Mugabe.

The new President devoted the next decade to slaughtering his tribal enemies, largely leaving the white farmers alone to feed the country. In 2000, however, Mugabe began to reward his supporters by telling them to drive out the white minority and steal their land. Not surprisingly, his bully boys proved to be worthless farmers and the country has teetered on the brink of starvation ever since. Mugabe's government has responded to the shortages it created by printing money, driving the annual inflation rate up to 165,000% in April 2008.

Since 2000, Mugabe has clung to power through three elections due to the support of the black South African government, which provides him with cheap electricity. ...

In contrast to Zimbabwe’s famous role in the defeat of European white rule, Sudan is a member of the Arab League and the government espouses fundamentalist Islam, so it lacks the black cred of Zimbabwe. Granted, Sudan's leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir's complexion isn't much fairer than that of the typical member of the Congressional Black Caucus. But that little detail gets lost in most of the Darfur coverage. ...

So, the racial taboos about criticizing blacks don't apply as much to the Sudanese Arabs. In the American politician's mind, they're just white people, more or less. But some of them are misled by anti-Semitism or Islamofascism or anti-Americanism, just like the Germans were misled by Nazism, So, it's okay to kill them. (Indeed, for neoconservative Darfur enthusiasts, killing Arabs is not a bug, it’s a feature.)

But killing Mugabe's goons? They're black. And they beat up white farmers. Oh, man, that's a whole different kettle of fish—lots of domestic political implications that nobody wants to touch. So few white American politicians are excited about getting involved on the side of whites being victimized by blacks. There's no domestic political profit in that!

To a white American politician like McCain, Zimbabwe is the Jena Six brouhaha writ large. As you may recall, the six star football players on the Jena H.S. team had been using their privileged position as local sports heroes to run amok for years, beating up people. But their coaches and fans kept getting them out of trouble so they could continue to star on the Jena H.S. football team.

Finally, the Six went too far when they kept stomping a single youth after he was already unconscious on the ground.

So, just like in Zimbabwe, you had a gang of black thugs outnumbering and beating up a white person. What was the upshot? Why Rev. Jesse and Rev. Al and all the media came to town and denounced the white people of Jena for their horrible racism!

It was hilarious, but you can see why even a war-lover like McCain wouldn't want to get involved in such a directly analogous situation in Zimbabwe.

[More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Indian IQ, Part 1: Diaspora Demographics

Since 2002, I've been pointing out that a crucial piece of missing information that anybody (such as an investor) interested in predicting the path of 21st global history would want to know is what is the potential average IQ of India.

We have some IQ data on India, as collected in Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations and their other books, and they point toward low average scores.

On the other hand, first, India is an extremely complicated place, so it's harder to come up with a nationally representative sample there than in any other country.

Second, India has been severely burdened by malnutrition, disease, and illiteracy. We know from comparing Africans (average IQ around 70) to African-Americans (average IQs around 85, despite being no more than 20% white) that tropical poverty can prevent people from reaching their genetic potential in IQ.

Something similar is probably true in India. Its recent rapid economic progress makes it more plausible that the environmental deficits lowering average IQ in India will ameliorate to some substantial extent over the course of this century.

An iSteve commenter calling himself Rec1man has built a model of potential Indian average IQ based on IQ scores of the Indian diaspora in various countries more affluent than India. This seems like a plausible approach, so I've been discussing it with him via email and now I'm going to begin posting it.

I want to break my posting of Rec1man's model up into several stages, because, in my experience, it's easy for a reader to skip right to the bottom line of a complex model and accept or reject it as a whole, and then get invested in defending one's initial reaction.

His is necessarily a complicated model because the Indian diaspora is extremely heterogeneous due to the caste system in India and the different selection filters for Indian immigrants in diaspora countries. Thus, for example, the average caste level of the Indian diaspora in the U.S. is much higher than in former British tropical colonies where the British were looking to import diligent peasants rather than computer programmers.

So, Rec1man has come up with estimates of the demographics of the Indian diaspora by caste for each country.

From there, he can work back to estimating IQ by caste within each diaspora country and then to potential IQ by caste in India and finally back to potential overall average IQ for India as a whole.

Today, though, I'm going to post just his demographic breakdowns by caste for Indians in various country, and leave his IQ estimates for another day. This is information I've never seen published before, even though I've long wondered about it.

But, I don't know whether his demographic estimates are accurate. If you have some knowledge of this subject, please comment on whether the following look reasonably accurate or not.

If they do look plausible, then I'll go ahead and post Rec1man's IQ estimates.

India:

Brahmins, 5%
Upper Castes, 15%
Backward Castes, 40%
Muslims, 15%
Dalits [Untouchables] and Tribals, 25%

Indians in the U.S.A.

US Brahmins, 25%
US forward castes, 50%
US backward castes, 25%

The British exported castes as per their requirements.

Singapore:

30% upper caste
40% backward caste
30% Dalit.

In the UK, the British wanted factory workers after WW2, so they did not import dalits (agricultural workers). They imported peasant backward castes from Indian Punjab and Pakistani Punjab. The British knew that Dalits may not be able to work in factories while the backward castes could be trainable

Later in 1970, Idi Amin fell in love with an Indian woman in Uganda. Her family sent her off to India to protect her from Idi Amin's lust. In revenge, Idi Amin expelled the Indians in Uganda, who were mostly small traders, forward merchant castes, and these went to UK

So, in UK:

Forward caste 60%
Backward caste 40%

Pakistanis in UK are all [descended from] backward castes [who converted to Islam].

In Pakistan, few forward castes and brahmins and dalits converted to islam. They remained hindu and went to Indian Punjab

Pakistanis in Pakistan are [by descent]

Forward caste, 10%
Backward caste 80%
and dalit 10%

Bangladeshis in UK are

Backward caste 50%
Dalit 50%

Similarly, Bangladeshis in Bangladesh are
Backward caste 50%
Dalit 50%

Razib of GNXP.com comments:

US Brahmins, 25%
US forward castes, 50%
US backward castes, 25%

this looks skewed to me. around 50% of indians in the USA are gujaratis, mostly patels. about 25% are punjabis, often sikhs, who mostly be from jats (i think they're classified as backward, but i don't know, i think it depends on region and stuff). the other 25% are mixed up with various groups; a lot of these are brahmins, but not all. for example, christians from kerala are way overrepresented, and they're derived from non-brahmins by and large. i think a brahmin figure on the order of 15% is more realistic. backward caste depends on how you classify it, since south indian non-brahmins are all technically "lower caste," but i think kerala christians are considered forward. in short, bump up the forward caste number, and lower the brahmin and backward.

most of other numbers look OK, but i think a lot of the muslim classifications are by their nature guess work. i have no idea how backward and forward caste in bangladesh is assigned here. 90% of people in bangladesh are now muslim, and most of the hindus remaining are low caste groups who couldn't or wouldn't move to india for whatever reason. the general consensus is most bangladeshi muslim were non-forward caste peasants, as is true of hindus in west bengal. the only thing with bangladeshis in the UK is something like 90% are from one region of bangladesh, syhlet, but i doubt that makes a big difference in your assessment....

i would add a few other points

1) mauritius, mostly backward castes with a small minority of merchants and upper castes

2) south africa, the same (here the upper classes are disproportionately gujarati merchants)

3) the guyana & trinidad & suriname, the same

4) fiji, the same

a disproportionate number of the overseas diaspora in places where they were sent to do agricultural work are from eastern uttar pradesh and bihar; the north-central gangetic plain. malaysia and singapore are exceptional insofar as the indians are mostly tamils from the south from across the bay of bengal....

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Two views of Postville

The Washington Post sees the Postville raid as more evidence that the government should stop picking on poor, hard-working undocumented workers.

Craig Nelsen of ProjectUSA, however, says there is much more to the story.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Are we going to have a recession now or later?

I'm reminded of the spring of 1980 when the economy nosedived (nosedove?), but then suddenly pulled out of it into modest prosperity. It didn't save Jimmy Carter in November, and we ended up getting hammered by a major recession in 1981-1982 that painfully wrung the inflation of the 1970s out of the economy.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A black Obama cynic explains

Cinque Henderson writes in The New Republic:

Ninety percent of black Democrats support Barack Obama. So that might leave an observer wondering: What the hell is up with that other 10 percent? Are they stupid? Do they hate their own race? Do they not understand the historical import of the moment?

I can shed some insight on this demographic anomaly. In gatherings of black people, I'm invariably the only one for the Dragon Lady...

I disliked Obama almost instantly. I never believed the central premises of his autobiography or his campaign. He is fueled by precisely the same brand of personal ambition as Bill Clinton. But, where Clinton is damned as "Slick Willie," Obama is hailed as a post-racial Messiah. Do I believe that Obama had this whole yes-we-can deal planned from age 16? No, I would respond. He began plotting it at age 22. This predisposition, of course, doesn't help me in making the case against Obama, especially not with black people. But, believe me, there's a strong case to be made that he isn't such a virtuous mediator of race. And it's this skepticism about Obama's racial posturing that has led us, the 10 percent, into dissent. ...

But, once you stare past the radiant glow surrounding Obama and begin to study the exact reasons for his so-called racial transcendence, you can't help but conclude that it is mostly hokum. Why do black people love Obama? In large part, it's because of the dark-skinned woman on his arm. Black people (especially black women) are nuts for Michelle. Had Barack married a white woman, his candidacy would've never gotten off the ground with black people. And would whites really be so into him if he hadn't had a white mother? Based on U.S. political history, you would have to conclude: not a chance. My suspicion is that people are ultimately comfortable with Obama because a member of his family looks like them--and, if you think about it, that's not terribly transcendent.

It's also not terribly true -- Obama wants you to believe that, but his life story suggests that he'd be more moderate about race if he was black on both sides and thus didn't have to keep proving he's black enough. (Something similar is true for the Bob Bar-lookalike Rev. Wright.)

This is really not a complicated concept to grasp about the frontrunner for the Presidency, but since we've all been indoctrinated to be childishly simple-minded about race, very few get it.

It is Obama's biography, we are told, that will govern his behavior. He was raised by a mother who supposedly didn't see color, so he doesn't see color. He was born into tolerance and multi-racial understanding, so he will practice tolerance and multi-racial understanding. Except, that is, when it's not useful to him.

Which brings me to South Carolina, where I was born and raised. I was there before and during the primary. Recall the moment. Obama was gaining on Clinton--but had also just lost New Hampshire and Nevada. A loss in South Carolina, and he would have been done for.

It's worth remembering that the majority of blacks still think O.J. Simpson is innocent. And, in times like these, when a black man is out front in the public eye, black people feel both proud and vulnerable and, as a result, scour the earth for evidence of racists plotting to bring him down, like an advance team ready to sound an alarm. Barack needed only a gesture, a quick sneer or nod in the direction of the Clintons' hidden racism to avail himself of the twisted love that rescued O.J. and others like him and to smooth his path to victory, and, therefore, to salvage his candidacy. After Donna Brazile and James Clyburn started to cry racism, Barack was repeatedly asked his thoughts. He declined to answer, allowing the charge to grow for days (in sharp contrast to how he leapt to Joe Biden's defense a month earlier). But, while he remained silent about the allegations of racism, he gave speeches across South Carolina that warned against being "hoodwinked" and "bamboozled" by the Clintons. His use of the phrase is resonant. It comes from a scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of "the White Man" masquerading as a smiling politician: "Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us," he says. "You've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled."

By uttering this famous phrase, Obama told his black audience everything it needed to know. He was helping to convince blacks that the first two-term Democratic president in 50 years, a man referred to as the first black president, is in fact a secret racist. As soon as I heard that Obama had quoted from Malcolm X like this, I knew that Obama would win South Carolina by a massive margin. ...

As the son of a Baptist minister, I can attest that Wright is and was an extreme aberration from how the overwhelming majority of black Christians worship. In church, black people hear about Peter, Paul, Mary, and how to get into heaven. How to forgive. How to love. Not how to vote.

Well ... you don't have to fully believe that to realize that Rev. Wright is to the left of the black church mainstream.

But here was Barack suggesting that Wright's behavior was commonplace in black churches: "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community." He generalized Wright's ridiculousness to distract from his individual choice to worship under a buffoon for two decades. I have a cousin who attended Wright's church for three weeks and then left, never to return. She had no interest in hearing his nonsense from the pulpit.

Barack obscured the true nature of black religious life because, to do otherwise, he would have had to answer the question, "Why are you a member of a church that is this racially divisive and such a sharp aberration to how the rest of black people worship?" When Barack beautifully suggested that the beliefs pronounced from the pulpit of Trinity in Chicago are not uncommon, he was feeding us garbage. But Barack needed to protect his reputation as a race-healer and unifier, so he told a lie about black religious life to help keep the glow of his own reputation alive. And now the evidence suggests that Barack didn't, in the end, break with Wright over his outrageous racial claims, but over his suggestion that Barack is just a politician.

That so many people have a stake in ignoring these real concerns is troubling. At least the Hillary supporters I know seem to be aware of her more unsavory traits: that she carries a knife with her that she could pull out at any minute. Not so with Obama's fans. It's nearly impossible to get them to admit any wrong in him. Given the choice, I prefer to side with the group that knows their candidate can be a jerk, rather than the group that believes their candidate is Jesus.

Cinque Henderson is a TV writer, working on a book about Abraham Lincoln.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Postville, Iowa

A reader sent me a long write-up on the illegal immigration scandal at the Lubavitcher slaughterhouse in a small town in Iowa, which I'll post below. This business run by New York ultra-Orthodox Jews first became notorious a number of years ago when a Jewish academic named Stephen Bloom exposed how the newcomers were treating the Iowans. From the review in Amazon.com:

"The enterprise was a huge international success, with its kosher meats exported even to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Jewish population grew to 150, and they were rich. The town was saved, and the people were grateful. All's well that ends well? Not quite. The Hasidim kept to themselves, did things their own way, and basically had no interest in integrating into Postville. And why would they? Their laws are strict, their mission clear, their community defined by race and religion. They are not interested in watermelon socials or coffee klatches at the diner. Their little boys do not swim with their little girls, are not educated together, and do not go on play dates with goyim. Small-town Iowans, on the other hand, are very friendly. They know each other's news, they support each other's businesses, they wish each other Merry Christmas, they want you to feel at home. They don't like that the new townspeople stomp up the street hunched over, talking in a foreign language and looking straight through them when greeted. They really don't like it when one of the newcomers drives around town with a 10-foot candelabra strapped to his car playing music at full volume for eight consecutive winter nights."

The point is not to pick on the business practices of ultra-Orthodox Jews. The bigger issue is that this kind of in-group morality is not at all restricted to Lubavitchers. In-group morality and sharp elbowed business practices are the norm among mercantile minorities across large swathes of the world, the great majority of them non-Jewish. (In fact, many are notoriously anti-Semitic.)

It's the nature of low trust societies: you have the peasants and you have the business people, and never the twain shall marry. An American-style society where it's not surprising when a farm boy like Henry Ford or Philo Farnsworth goes on to big things is a rarity in this world. (Here's Tom Wolfe on Robert Noyce of Intel, co-inventor of the silicon chip, who grew up in Grinnell, Iowa, a small town much like Postville -- except now it has an extremely rich college, due to getting in early on the companies started by Noyce and another Midwestern boy named Warren Buffett.)

Not surprisingly, lots of mercantile minorities want to emigrate to the rich pickings in America. What's in it for Americans is less clear.

There has been a giant immigration raid in Postville, Iowa, a town that has been taken over by a Hasidic Jewish sect, the Lubavitchers, and the third world illegal workers from Mexico and Eastern Europe that they have imported to work at their meat processing plant and are dumping on the community:

Des Moines Register

KMEG Channel 14

There is so much more to the story easily available on the internet. Rabbi Rubaskin, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the Lubavitchers, Federal Prison, arson in Pennsylvania (see Failed Messiah, below), Secret PETA video tapes, fraudulent kashering, attempted bribery of the police, non-assimilation in America, self-isolation of Jews, Man! The story has everything. Read reviews of Stephen Bloom's book, "Postville: A Clash of Cultures in the Heartland" in which he challenges the melting pot ideology of the open borders crowd.

Failed Messiah a Jewish blogger, has blog entry after blog entry on the crookedness of the Rubashkin family and how they screw the gentiles and the Jews, including articles on Federal prison time for defrauding their gentile workers:

Here is a two-year-old article from the Jewish Daily Forward on the exploitation of third-world workers:

This is a "clean" interview with Stephen Bloom on his book about Postville and the Lubavitcher invasion:

This is Luke Ford's long unexpurgated interview with Stephen Bloom. Positively scathing and well worth a read.

Here is a bogus suckup article by the Jewish womens group called "Hadassah" on the wonderful diversity and multiculturalism of Postville:

Hallmark did a ditzy show called "The Way Home: Stories of Forgiveness" about the (nonexistent) touching reconciliation of the Postville locals and the third world illegals and Lubavitchers that took over ... It was narrated by Glen Close.

" In Postville, Iowa, residents were forced to reevaluate their way of life after the local meat packing plant closed, only to be reopened by Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn, N.Y. The Hasidic Jews' value of a tight-knit community seemed to clash with the openness of many in Postville. The town's story continued when workers from Mexico and Eastern Europe flocked to Postville to take advantage of the plant's ample job opportunities, and residents faced further challenges embracing diversity. Gradually the communities came to understand and respect each other's differences."

But the Rubashkins who run the Postville facility [aren't so nice] to their fellow Jews as well. Brutal animal slaughter is a way of life at the Lubavitcher Jewish plant in Postville. It is so nasty (ripping the tracheas out of cows) that many Jews won't even eat the food because it is a violation of Jewis shechita (ritual slaughter rules). The slaughter is so brutal that [the famous high-functioning autistic animal sciences professor] Temple Grandin (her fascinating life story is worth a read, too!) condemned the practices several years ago when shown the PETA tape. [She's a leading designer of animal slaughter yards.]

This is what Stephen Bloom, the author of Postville (see the Luke Ford review above) has to say about the feel-good sales pitch of happy-diversity that Hallmark and the Jewish media are pimping:

"The [Hallmark] video is an embarrassment. It's contrived. It's an audio-visual Hallmark card. It's cheery, upbeat, positive.

"Ever since Postville has come out, I've been interested in what the Japanese call Wa -- how Japanese society is run. It means harmony. In Japan, Wa is very important. It's rare in Japan for a vote in a corporation or the parliament that is not unanimous. All the differences are aired in private. By the time the public is clued in, everyone is on board, even the most vociferous critics.

"It's most important to live in a harmonious society where disagreement is eliminated. In America, journalism is generally opposed to the Wa. We journalists look at issues and we don't say, 'George Bush is doing a great job.' That is not a news story. We say, 'George Bush is screwing up big time.'

"There seems to be a tremendous attempt by the Jewish community, as prompted by the Hadassah piece, JTA, Forward, and this Hallmark presentation, to say that two different communities can flourish in America today. Postville is an example of that. There's a tremendous sense that readers and viewers need to come away with a feel good response. 'That stuff that Stephen Bloom did is water under the bridge. That was a long time ago. That was terrible. But now there's been forgiveness, reconciliation and harmony.' That's what the [Hallmark] show is all about.

"They make up a story line that when the Gentile head of the slaughter house, Donald Hunt, who's in my book, I call him a Caesar Romero lookalike, died about a year ago. His death brought together the distinct factions in Postville and began to heal the wounds. There's footage of Hunt's funeral and locals as well as Lubavitchers at the funeral. They use that as a point of entry for establishing a premise that things are going along just great.

"The people I talk to in Postville say things are not going along great.

"This latest skirmish is the slaughter house dumping some 30 tons of salt a week into the aquifers of ground water... There seems to be a journalistic mandate to remind everyone that Postville has reached Wa status. That's not what journalists do. Journalists are supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The American Dream Love Story: Barack Obama's mom was 17 when Barack Sr., a 24-year-old married man, knocked her up

A popular theme of Barack Obama's campaign, going back to the very opening of his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address, is his parents' love affair, which Obama relentlessly invests with patriotic overtones. When he talks about his parents' romance, you can practically hear the Battle Hymn of the Republic being hummed in the background, like at the "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln" attraction at Disneyland.

Here's the beginning of that famous speech, following a few introductory formalities:

Tonight is a particular honor for me because - let's face it - my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father - my grandfather - was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.

While studying here, my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after Pearl Harbor my grandfather signed up for duty; joined Patton's army, marched across Europe. Back home, my grandmother raised their baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through FHA, and later moved west all the way to Hawaii in search of opportunity.

And they, too, had big dreams for their daughter. A common dream, born of two continents.

My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or "blessed," believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren't rich, because in a generous America you don't have to be rich to achieve your potential.

They are both passed away now. And yet, I know that, on this night, they look down on me with great pride.

I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents' dreams live on in my two precious daughters. I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.

With that, he tapped into a load of powerful sentimental fantasies rampant in America today, many of them contradictory, but all of them self-congratulatory about how this could only happen in America! For example, Harold Meyerson claims today in the Washington Post:

"Now, I mean to take nothing away from McCain's Americanness by noting that it's Obama's story that represents a triumph of specifically American identity over racial and religious identity. It was the lure of America, the shining city on a hill, that brought his black Kenyan father here, where he met Obama's white Kansan mother. It is because America is uniquely the land of immigrants..."

Where to begin? First, Barack Obama Sr. was not an immigrant and didn't conceive of himself as one -- he was a foreign student, who acquired a bachelor's and master's degree in the U.S. in order to immediately return to Kenya and grab for the brass ring of political power as a Big Man.

There was nothing uniquely American about providing scholarships to Kenyans. Barack Obama Jr.'s kinsman and sometimes political ally, Raila Odinga, Luo warlord and Kenya's new Prime Minister, got his degree in communist East Germany at about the same time.

And, for the love of God, Obama Jr. wrote a 442 page book about his pursuit of a racial identity (black); there's not a word about him pursuing a non-racial "specifically American identity." The subtitle of his autobiography is "A Story of Race and Inheritance," and he ain't kidding about that.

But, let's leave aside Meyerson's irrelevant obsession with romanticizing immigration and examine the warm romantic glow that surrounds this and so many other accounts of Obama's parents' relationship. When examined carefully, their affair turns out to be a sordid one, with disastrous long-term consequences. That's hardly uncommon, but what is uncommon is successfully positioning your parents' squalid, catastrophic relationship as a major reason for electing you President!

Let me ask a question that I haven't seen asked before:

How old was Ann Dunham when Barack Obama Sr., an already married 24-year-old, impregnated her?

Barack Obama Jr. tells us that he weighed eight pounds, two ounces when he was born on August 4, 1961 (p. 22 of Dreams from My Father), so we can assume he went close to full term, or nine months.

His parents' bigamous marriage is said to have taken place six months before his birth on 2/2/1961, when she'd be about starting to show.

Nine months before Obama's birth would be early November 1960, about three to four weeks before Ann Dunham's 18th birthday on November 29, 1960.

So, Barack Sr., a married man of about 24 (he was born in 1936), almost certainly impregnated a 17-year-old girl.

Recall how the big scandal discovered in the raid on the Fundamentalist Mormon town in Texas was all the girls ages 13-17 who were pregnant by polygamous older men? So, the much admired All-American love of Obama's parents turns out to be basically the same as the FLDS scandal -- underage pregnant girl, older man, and polygamy -- just done freelance-style.

Barack Sr. then bigamously married Ann, then soon abandoned her and her tiny son because the scholarship offer from the New School of Social Research that would have paid for the whole family to move to New York City wasn't as prestigious as the scholarship offer to Harvard that paid just his own living expenses.

The candidate's father then married another American woman bigamously, took her back to Kenya, but carried on polygamously with his original Kenyan wife, until wife #3 divorced him. There was another kid by a fourth woman. Somewhere along the line he killed a man in a drunk driving incident, then got himself killed in another.

Meanwhile, the candidate's mother married an Indonesian guy who tried to bring home the bacon for her and another man's kid, but she got tired of the poor sap, had a baby with him anyway, then abandoned him, but then lived most of the rest of her life in Indonesia ...

It's the American Dream!

Ann Dunham Dates	Date	Her Age	Barack Sr. Age
Born	11/29/1942		1936
Conceived Barack Jr. (approx)	11/3/1960	17.93	24
Married	2/2/1961	18.18
Gave birth	8/4/1961	18.68
Barack Jr.'s birthweight	8.125

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Baseball diplomacy?

You don't hear his name mentioned much anymore, but it just occurred to me that George W. Bush is still President of the United States. In fact, he will be president for another eight months and a week.

What's he been up to lately? Is he still trying to start a war with Iran over Iraq, despite both countries being on the same side, backing Maliki? Well, who knows ...

Yet, if he was looking for something to do, I've got an idea for him. Obviously, he can't do anything domestically with Congress in the hands of the Democrats. So, that leaves foreign policy. But he doesn't have any more troops to play with, so it would be hard for him to start any more major wars.

I see in the news today that Cuba's forward-looking elderly Sibling-in-Chief Raul Castro is trying to bring the Worker's Paradise up into the later 1970s:

Cuba's Communist government has allowed microwave ovens to go on sale to the general public for the first time ever.

Anxious Cubans gathered at an electronics store in Havana to purchase a microwave.

And a week or two ago, Raul allowed the first PCs to be sold in Cuba! It can't be long now until Betamax VCRs are in all the Havana shops.

Few in Cuba can afford to buy a PC or microwave, however, because Cuba is poor. The CIA World Factbook says the Purchasing Power Parity per capita income is $4,500. In cash terms, Cubans are much, much poorer than even that -- the State Dept. says the average monthly salary is $16! (The majority, however, get some hard currency from relatives in America.)

Therefore, how about Bush trying to bring a little peace and prosperity, Nixon goes to China-style, by trying to negotiate an end to America's half-century conflict with Cuba?

There's a lot of money to be made by both Americans and Cubans if Bush could work out an end to the American embargo in return for opening up the Cuban economy.

Let's just use Cuba's per capita GDP PPP number of $4,500. The Cuban per capita income is less than half of the Dominican Republic's $9,200. (For comparison, Cuba is about an order of magnitude below the U.S. GDP per capita).

Back before the Castro Bros., Cuba was wealthier than the Dominican Republic.

So, it's reasonable to imagine that Cuba, which is a fairly well-educated country, could catch up to the Dominican Republic in not that many years if Cuba now followed the Chinese path and de-Communized. It has a population of 11.5 million, which means that a lot of money could be made bringing the place up to the 21st Century.

It's easy to catch up economically if you haven't been allowed to buy any new technology for the last few decades. Think how much of productivity gains you can get just from microwave ovens. And in March, Raul announced that ordinary Cubans would be allowed to buy cell phones for the first time. Typically, cell phones do more economically for Third World countries than any other piece of technology.

Cuba has three times as much coastline ( 3,735 km, or about 2100 miles) as the Dominican Republic. It's a long skinny country with a lot of beaches. And it's closer to the U.S., barely half as far from the big airline hub in Atlanta as the DR. I imagine American hotel companies have contingency plans locked away for turning Cuba into a tourist paradise. And cruise ship companies would love to make the Miami-Havana run.

If Cuba caught up economically to the Dominican Republic, which is about 10-15% smaller in population, it could buy a fair amount of stuff from the U.S. The D.R. buys 46% of its $13 billion in total imports from the U.S. each year. That's not big money, but it adds up over the years.

How could Bush get started? The first public hint of the Nixon-Kissinger-Chou opening was the "ping-pong diplomacy" of 1971. What would be more natural than for Bush, a former baseball team co-owner, to start Baseball Diplomacy with Cuba, a font of baseball talent not allowed to play in America?

There are currently 88 Dominicans in the major leagues (plus far more in the minors). The average major league salary is approaching $3 million, so that's a quarter of a billion dollars paid annually to Dominican major leaguers.

Cuba only has $3.2 billion in annual exports at present, so if Cuban big leaguers could make, say, $200 million per year in salary, that alone could boost national exports by 6%. So, if Bush offered to broker a deal with his old baseball owner colleagues, I suspect Raul would be very tempted.

From there, a more general settlement that would let American businesses into Cuba might be negotiable.

A baseball player deal could set a useful precedent for a sticky problem. The Communists presumably don't want all their talented people, such as their doctors, racing off to America for big salaries as soon as totalitarianism is lifted, but before the economy starts to get into gear. The Cuban government's view will be that they paid to train the baseball players and doctors, so they are entitled to a cut. And America doesn't need a new huge immigrant influx into Florida. (The special "Ollie Ollie Home Free" treatment of Cuban immigrants as refuges would have to be changed once Cuba opens up.)

This is similar to the Japanese baseball league's view that they don't want all their players dashing off to higher pay in America without them getting a cut. So, Major League Baseball has agreed to a "posting system" with a Japanese league where an American team pays the Japanese team to let a player out of his contract so he can come to America. For example, the Boston Red Sox paid $51 million to the Japanese team that held Daisuke Matsuzaka's contract. The Red Sox also had to negotiate his salary with the pitcher himself, with him getting a six year contract totaling $52 million (plus incentives). So, the star and his Japanese team basically split his value on the American market 50-50.

So, it might make sense for the U.S. to recognize the Cuban government as having legal employment contracts for some number of years into the future with skilled Cubans. Thus, the U.S. firms would have to pay Cuba for hiring its doctors and other skilled workers. This would reduce the rush to the exits that could otherwise leave Cuba even more economically prostrate than it is now.

The bottom line is that the current situation in Cuba is ridiculous. Somebody is eventually going to make a lot of money fixing it, and Americans might as well get in on the action.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A Theory of the History of Everything

I'm a fan of ultra-ambitious History of Everything books that try to explain the whole world in terms of the author's pet ideas, such as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, Michael H. Hart's Understanding Human History, and Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms.

So, I was surprised to stumble upon one such book that I'd never heard of: Raymond D. Crotty's When Histories Collide: The Development and Impact of Individualistic Capitalism. The lesson appears to be: don't die before your book tour. Crotty died in 1994 with the manuscript unfinished, and it took his son until 2001 to get it published. It was barely reviewed anywhere and doesn't appear to have been released in the U.S.

Still, the fragments that are available through Google Books are thought provoking, to say the least. Crotty presents in the early chapters what could be called a lactose tolerance theory of why capitalism arose in Europe.

Is he correct? Beats me, but from what little I've seen of the book, it stands comparison to Jared Diamond's huge bestseller.

Crotty was an Irish farmer in the 1940s and 1950s, who then became an economist. He's best known in the Republic of Ireland for having filed a landmark lawsuit as a private citizen protesting the Irish legislature's assumption that it could vote to join and further give up sovereignty to the EU without referendums. The Irish supreme court agreed with Crotty's case, and ordered that referendums be held on EU treaties.

As a historical theorist, Crotty resembles Victor Davis Hanson, whose experience as a warm-weather farmer in California gave him important insights into the development of warfare among Ancient Greek farmer-soldiers. Crotty's similar troubles making a living as a cool weather farmer in Europe gave him insight into the development of Northwestern Europe's unique historical accomplishments. After all, most people down through history have been farmers, but not many recent books have been written by farmers.

As an economist, Crotty's experience as a farmer made him a fan of Henry George, the late 19th century American economist whom contemporary economists seem to assume has been decisively refuted, but nobody can ever remember just how George was debunked. Crotty tried to bring capital intensive farming to rural Ireland, but he never seemed to make any more money, despite working twice as hard, as his neighbors, who just let some cows graze on the fields while they saved their money to buy more land. To "encourage agriculture," the Irish government taxed everything except land. So, as Henry George would have pointed out, it didn't pay to invest in your land. It just paid to buy more of it. And, as real estate salesmen point out, they ain't making anymore land, so aligning all the incentives to encourage buying land didn't create more of it, it just meant the Irish economy stagnated decade after decade.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A superior human being, by the numbers

She doesn't mean much to me personally, but, objectively, Meryl Streep is one impressive person:

Oscar nominations: 14
Children: 4
Husbands: 1
Rehabs: 0

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Jill the Memorious"

From USA Today, Marilyn Elias's "Her Unmatched Memory a Blessing, Curse:"

"Where did the years go?"

Middle-age people often ask that plaintive question as time seems to accelerate, the days blur together, and children grow up in a flash.

But it's not a question 42-year-old Jill Price ever asks, because she can recall in vivid detail every day of her life since age 14, and many earlier days, too.

'The Woman Who Can't Forget' (Free Press), her new book with writer Bart Davis, tells the story of the first person ever confirmed by scientists to have such a superior autobiographical memory. She was studied by memory experts at University of California-Irvine for six years before they reported the feats of "AJ" in an esoteric professional journal in 2006.

Now "AJ" has decided to reveal her identity. She lives in suburban Los Angeles and works as the administrator of a religious school. ...

Two other "bona fides" came forward after the journal report in Neurocase, says James McGaugh, the neuroscientist contacted by Price eight years ago because she was bewildered and tormented by her non-stop barrage of memories.

McGaugh, with colleagues Elizabeth Parker and Larry Cahill, gave Price a battery of memory and cognitive tests. She'd kept a diary from ages 10 to 34, so the researchers could verify Price's recollections with pages randomly selected from 1,460 diary days, he says.

But that wasn't all. You could give her a date, "and within seconds she'd tell you what day of the week it was, not only what she did but other key events of the day," McGaugh says. Aug. 16, 1977? A Tuesday, Elvis died. May 18, 1980? A Sunday, when Mount St. Helens erupted. She also quickly could come up with the day and date of noted events: the start of the Gulf War, Rodney King's beating, Princess Diana's death (Aug. 30 or 31, 1997, depending on France or U.S. time, she told McGaugh).

I probably could have placed Elvis, Mount St. Helens, and Princess Di within two days. Those aren't so tough. I've always found dates pretty easy to remember because they fit into long chains of cause and effect, so they aren't very arbitrary.

One possible clue to Price's condition is that she scored poorly on abstract reasoning; it was hard to grasp concepts and see analogies.

"Most of us extract generalities. We get the gist of things, so we can navigate in similar situations," Levine says. "But if you have trouble seeing generalities, every instance becomes a unique instance, interesting in its own light."

It's like focusing extra-hard on individual trees but not seeing the forest. Because she's swamped with details, Price may find it easy to store and retrieve specific memories but hard to see the bigger picture, he speculates.

This fits with what Jorge Luis Borges speculated in his famous 1942 short story "Funes the Memorious," a bittersweet story of a boy who remembers everything and can abstract nothing:

He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. …

The voice of Funes, out of the darkness, continued. He told me that toward 1886 he had devised a new system of enumeration and that in a very few days he had gone before twenty-four thousand. He had not written it down, for what he once meditated would not be erased. The first stimulus to his work, I believe, had been his discontent with the fact that "thirty-three Uruguayans" required two symbols and three words, rather than a single word and a single symbol. Later he applied his extravagant principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Máximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, Brimstone, Clubs, The Whale, Gas, The Cauldron, Napoleon, Agustín de Vedia. In lieu of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a species of mark; the last were very complicated. . . . I attempted to explain that this rhapsody of unconnected terms was precisely the contrary of a system of enumeration. I said that to say three hundred and sixty-five was to say three hundreds, six tens, five units: an analysis which does not exist in such numbers as The Negro Timoteo or The Flesh Blanket. Funes did not understand me, or did not wish to understand me. …

He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front). …

Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.

On the other hand:

But one of the other two subjects, Brad Williams, 51, of La Crosse, Wis., skipped a grade in elementary school and won his state's spelling bee. Williams hasn't had the thorough neuropsychological testing yet that Price had, so his abstract and rote memorizing abilities aren't known, but he says school never gave him any trouble.

A radio reporter for WIZM-AM in La Crosse, Williams got intensive testing for autobiographical memories in 2006 by McGaugh's team and was found to be in the same league as Price. But he's different from her in many ways.

"The memories surface on their own, but I also can submerge them," he says.

While Price says her memories control her, and they tilt toward the negative, "it's no big deal in my life, and bad memories don't come up very often," Williams says.

Conversations with Price and Williams are like experiencing day and night. Her recollections are suffused with sorrow; he's an inveterate wise-cracker who views the world through a light prism. In addition to his radio job, Williams performs with an improv comedy group. He says he has had super-detailed life memories "for as long as I can remember" and thinks it helps with reporting.

By the way, if you haven't read a Borges story, "Funes" is as good as any. They resemble what science-fiction would be like if it was written by philosophers instead of engineers. They're quite repetitious, so you don't need to read more than the best 10 or 12.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. to run for Libertarian nomination for President

Oh, sorry, my mistake -- that's not Rev. Wright, that's former Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA) who wants the Libertarian nomination.

Back during the Clinton impeachment, when blacks loved the Clintons and hated Barr for helping get Bill impeached, black radio talk shows would be flooded with calls saying things like, "Barr is passing. My cousin told me he's his cousin's cousin." And if that's not proof, I don't know what is.

Barr must be kicking himself now over the fact that he didn't hop on this whole mixed race = racial reconciliator shtick decades ago instead of just positioning himself as another boring white guy.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Scientific American declares war on Occam's Razor

From Scientific American's May issue:

Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain

Deep within our subconscious, all of us harbor biases that we consciously abhor. And the worst part is: we act on them

By Siri Carpenter

"There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,” Jesse Jackson once told an audience, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

Jackson’s remark illustrates a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape: ideas that we may not endorse—for example, that a black stranger might harm us but a white one probably would not—can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or awareness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments.

Using a variety of sophisticated methods, psychologists have established that people unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin. Although these implicit biases inhabit us all, we vary in the particulars, depending on our own group membership, our conscious desire to avoid bias and the contours of our everyday environments. For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.

Such bias is far more prevalent than the more overt, or explicit, prejudice that we associate with, say, the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer