Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog

Oops ...

2012-03-21T02:07:00.002-07:00

From the New York Times on Tuesday evening:

Killings Could Stall Election’s Nationalist Turn

By STEVEN ERLANGER

PARIS — The Jewish school in Toulouse that was terrorized by an unknown gunman on a motorbike will reopen on Wednesday as a statement of courage and continuity. The hundreds of mourners who filled the stone courtyard of the palatial redbrick town hall there on Tuesday morning, joining others across the country in a moment of silence, will return grimly to their daily lives.

But the political debate around the shootings, and whether the deaths of an instructor and three young children were somehow inspired by anti-immigrant political talk, is likely to continue — both as a weapon in the presidential campaign and as a more general soul-searching about the nature of France.

No one is suggesting that the French presidential campaign inspired a serial killer to put a bullet in the head of an 8-year-old Jewish girl. The candidates largely suspended their campaigning and uniformly condemned the killings, as well as the murders of three French soldiers — two Muslims and a black man — apparently by the same man.

But in a period of economic anxiety, high unemployment and concerns about the war in Afghanistan and radical Islam, the far right in Europe has made considerable gains, even in essentially liberal democratic countries like Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and France.

And in the middle of a long and heated presidential campaign, with President Nicolas Sarkozy trying to win back disaffected supporters who have drifted to the far-right National Front party, the shootings at Toulouse have raised new questions about the tone and tenor of the debate here about what it is to be French.

A debate on the role of immigration, assimilation, halal butchering, street prayers, the full veil and other elements of cultural difference is inevitably about French identity — and the nature of tolerance and intolerance. ...

I like Steven Erlanger, the NYT's French correspondent, especially his distaste for Bernard Henri-Levy (here and here). But when you jump the gun due to wishful thinking, somebody needs to call you on it.

I try not to jump the gun because I don't like being wrong. I don't mind when readers comes up with better interpretations than mine. In fact, I like it. But for a big newspaper to get something flat wrong because of bias that they couldn't wait to see if their expectation is confirmed ought to be embarrassing.

From the BBC on Wednesday morning:

Police hunting a gunman suspected of killing seven people in southern France have surrounded a flat in Toulouse.

The man, named as Mohammed Merah, 24, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, has said he belongs to al-Qaeda and acted to "avenge Palestinian children".

Police are negotiating with the man, who is still said to be armed but says he may give himself up this afternoon.

Two police officers were injured in exchanges of fire during the raid and there are reports of a fresh blast.

The suspect's brother is under arrest.

The suspect's mother, who is Algerian, has been brought to the scene, but Interior Minister Claude Gueant, who is in attendance, said she had refused to become involved as "she had little influence on him".

The minister said the suspect had made several visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mr Gueant, at the scene, said the suspect had shot at the door when police arrived
"He claims to be a mujahideen and to belong to al-Qaeda," Mr Gueant said.

"He wanted revenge for the Palestinian children and he also wanted to take revenge on the French army because of its foreign interventions."

The man shot at the door after police arrived, Mr Gueant said, injuring one officer in the knee and "lightly injuring" another.

French media have linked the suspect to a group called Forsane Alizza (Knights of Pride) that was banned by Mr Gueant in January.

They also say the suspect had earlier been arrested in Kandahar, Afghanistan, for unspecified, but not terrorist-related, criminal acts and also has a criminal record in France.

The BBC's Hugh Schofield in Paris says investigators report that the suspect was identified because of an e-mail message sent to his first victim about buying a scooter.

The message, sent from the suspect's brother's account, set up an appointment at which the soldier was killed, sources told AFP.

The man had also sought out a garage in Toulouse to have his Yamaha scooter repainted after the first two attacks. A scooter was used in all the attacks.

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

The growth of class taboos

2012-03-19T22:43:00.000-07:00

From my new essay at VDARE on the hardening of class taboos:

In recent months, the Left has begun congratulating itself on rediscovering class with its Occupy Wall Street protests. Yet, a glance at the original poster in Adbusters that kicked off the movement should raise doubts. The irony is that this Photoshopped image of a ballerina surmounting sculptor Arthur Di Modica’s iconic symbol of Wall Street, Charging Bull, struck very few protestors as ironic. Ballet is perhaps the most expensive and aristocratic of all performing arts, having attained classical perfection under the patronage of the Czars. Ballet would wither without the rich.

But that’s the point of much Leftism in the 21st Century: to assert one’s expensive cultural refinement over the hicks.

Read the whole thing there.

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

How far can you stretch affirmative action-eligibility claims?

2012-03-19T14:28:00.006-07:00

Since, as we all know, Race Does Not Exist, that, at least in theory, ought to create problems for the government in allocating benefits and protections according to race. Yet, the system seems to roll onward without too much trouble at a good-enough-for government-work level.

A question often asked is: What prevents Thurston Howell III from self-identifying as black and thus acquiring all the legal entitlements accruing thereto?

A reader has kindly sent me a number of bureaucratic forms that explain the "visual survey and/or other available information" enforcement clause. For example, from the state of Oregon, here are some key excerpts:

If you choose not to self-identify your race/ethnicity at this time, the federal government requires the state to determine this information by visual survey and/or other available information.

Then, down in the small print at the bottom:

For agency HR use only:

_ AV (Asian or Pac. Islander –Visual assessment)

_ BV (African American – Visual assessment)

_ HV (Hispanic – Visual assessment)

_ IV (Native Amer. or Alaskan Native – Visual assessment)

_ WV (Caucasian – Visual assessment)

As I picture this working, if you self-identify in some self-serving but flagrantly dubious manner, you run the risk of being passed non-committaly along the bureaucratic chain by people who don't want to deal with this tricky problem, until you eventually run into the Person in Charge of Visual Surveillance, who, inevitably, will be a large, self-assured black woman who glares at you briefly, listens to a few of your feeble attempts to sound black, and then replies, "Oh, no, you isn't" and checks the "WV" box and stamps your paperwork "Rejected, with Extreme Prejudice."

I think this would make a pretty good sketch comedy running joke -- L'qisjha Jones, Affirmative Action Arbiter -- as various people try to bluff their way past L'qisjha, each rejected with the same punchline. You could have celebrity guests, like Vanilla Ice trying to be accepted as black, Bjork trying to be Alaskan Native, or Cliff Curtis trying to be upgraded from Pacific Islander to Hispanic. In the final episode, Dirk Nowitzki would narrate for L'qisjha in his Teutonibonics accent his highlight reel from the 2011 NBA Finals of him schooling LeBron James. He'd then put forward the metaphysical argument that since white men can't jump, and since he can jump, he must be black, which L'qisjha decides is inarguable, and stamps "Accepted" on his papers.

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

Kony 2012 guy as Grizzly Man

2012-03-18T02:11:00.000-07:00

This Jason Russell, the auteur behind the Kony2012 viral video who had an unfortunate manic episode on Friday, reminds me, for some reason, of Timothy Treadwell, the doomed star of Werner Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man:

Treadwell was a failed Hollywood actor who changed his life by moving to the wilds of Alaska and hanging out with grizzly bears, all the while strenuously publicizing himself. But he had a pretty good time, until (spoiler alert!) a grizzly devoured Timothy and his new girlfriend.

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

Why are GOP candidates campaigning in Puerto Rico?

2012-03-17T16:16:00.002-07:00

Puerto Rico doesn't have any Electoral Votes, it sends its own national team to the Olympics, it's a Spanish-speaking imperial possession that's bribed into staying a possession by huge tax breaks to big American companies like Microsoft to cheat the IRS by nominally taking profits there rather than in America, and if Puerto Rico became a state, it would substantially reduce the chances of the GOP ever regaining control of the Senate by adding two automatic Democratic Senators.

And yet, CBS News reports:

(CBS News) SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - After his main rival [Rick Santorum] ignited a firestorm over requiring Puerto Rico to adopt English as a condition of statehood, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney flew to the island territory today and said he would support no such requirement as president.

But Romney faced a hurdle of his own in winning the hearts of voters here and their 20 delegates - his opposition to the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor, who is of Puerto Rican descent, to the federal bench. She was later chosen by President Obama for a seat on the Supreme Court.

On the English and statehood issue, Romney said, "I will support the people of Puerto Rico if they make a decision that they would prefer to become a state; that's a decision that I will support. I don't have preconditions that I would impose."

I'm a big fan of Puerto Rican independence.

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

Headline of the Day

2012-03-17T01:55:00.000-07:00

From the front page of the Washington Post:

Flavor Flav Opens Flavor Flav's House of Flavor

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

See, I was right

2012-03-17T01:49:00.001-07:00

I recently noted that I'm convinced -- deep down, on an infra-rational level -- that anybody with more energy than me is obviously bipolar and is this close to snapping.

From the NYT:

A co-founder of Invisible Children, the nonprofit organization whose video “Kony 2012” has become an Internet sensation, was detained by the San Diego police on Thursday, after they said he was found in the street in his underwear, screaming and interfering with traffic.

Kathy Shaidle has more.

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

Polygamy in the U.K.

2012-03-16T17:04:00.001-07:00

From The New Statesman

The marriage business
Jemima Khan

Jemima Khan, a U.K. media figure, is the daughter of Sir James Goldsmith, a colorful character who endorsed polyamory, and Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Sir James' third wife. Jemima married Pakistani cricket hero Imran Khan, but then it turned out, surprisingly enough, that she wasn't happy living in Pakistan, so they divorced. Khan then founded a political party and is said to be "the Ron Paul of Pakistan." Jemima then took up with actor Hugh Grant for awhile. I'm not quite sure how all this is relevant to this article, but how could it, in some way, not be?

By the way, isn't the name "Jemima" raciss?

Muslim men bring 12,000 brides to Britain each year. That leaves their female peers with a dilemma — accept a “part-time husband” or turn to an agency that will check out a man’s family (and his bachelor pad) for you

"Click? Why does everyone talk about clicking? What is this need to click? You're just too fussy," says a Pakistani auntie, reacting angrily to a twentysomething accountant's complaint that there was no chemistry between her and any of the men to whom she was introduced at a Muslim marriage event in east London.

Marriage Asian-style is practical, contractual and, to the western mind, deeply unromantic. "The spinster crisis is an issue of modernity," preaches an energetically gesticulating man in a white prayer cap, jacket and trainers. "Success is the right attitude – no conspiracies, please. Can't blame Israel." Cue laughs from those assembled: women in hijabs seated on one side of the wood-panelled hall; men, mostly in suits, a few of them in Arab dress with beards, on the other; chaperones at the back.

The speaker is Mizan Raja, the engaging founder of the UK-based Islamic Travels agency, who also set up the Islamic Circles community network and now presides over the east London Muslim matrimonial scene. I'm at a Practising Muslim event at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel. According to the network's website, the event is held four times a year and is "especially geared towards those Muslims who are actually practising, ie, not a 'fasiq' – open sinner – as defined by the classical texts in sharia law".

Arranged marriages are big business in the UK. Second- and third-generation immigrant families, with no extended family structure, limited networks and religious restrictions on acceptable ways to meet future spouses, are turning to external matchmakers for help. Mizan arranges between five and ten marriages every month through Islamic Circles, in his spare time. His day job is investment banking. By his own estimate, he has been responsible for 1,300 marriages over the past ten years.

Isn't matchmaker a female job?

Mizan says he is meeting a need for something that is a duty in Islam. There's someone for everyone: "Even the disabled have needs" and Islamic Circles holds regular events for them. And increasingly, he says, career women are electing to become "co-wives" – in other words, to become a man's second or third wife.

He reckons he gets between five and ten requests every week from women who are "comfortable with the notion of a part-time man". He explains: "They don't want a full-time husband. They don't have time." So couples live separately, the husband visiting his wives on a rota.

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

As Affirmative Action-Eligible as We Wish to Be

2012-03-16T15:54:00.001-07:00

In the NYT, author Thomas Chatterton Williams opines:

As Black As We Wish to Be

MY first encounter with my own blackness occurred in the checkout line at the grocery store. I was horsing around with my older brother, as bored children sometimes do. My blond-haired, blue-eyed mother, exasperated and trying hard to count out her cash and coupons in peace, wheeled around furiously and commanded us both to be still. When she finished scolding us, an older white woman standing nearby leaned over and whispered sympathetically: “It must be so tough adopting those kids from the ghetto.”….

Mixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black — and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look.

… Maybe that’s why we live now in a culture in which many of us would prefer to break clean from what we perceive as the racist logic of previous eras — specifically the idea that the purity and value of whiteness can be tainted by even “one drop” of black blood. And yet, however offensive those one-drop policies may appear today, that offensiveness alone doesn’t strip the reasoning behind them of all descriptive truth.

In fleeing from this familiar way of thinking about race, we sidestep the reality that a new multiracial community could flourish and evolve at black America’s expense. ….

That shift is expected to change the way test scores are categorized, altering racial disparities and affecting funding for education programs. For this reason and others, the N.A.A.C.P. and some black members of Congress have expressed concern that African-Americans are at risk of being undercounted as blacks compete more than ever with other minorities and immigrants for limited resources and influence.

Scholars have long maintained that race is merely a social construct, not something fixed into our nature, yet this insight hasn’t made it any less of a factor in our lives. If we no longer participate in a society in which the presence of black blood renders a person black, then racial self-identification becomes a matter of individual will.

And where the will is involved, the question of ethics arises. At a moment when prominent, upwardly mobile African-Americans are experimenting with terms like “post-black,” and outwardly mobile ones peel off at the margins and disappear into the multiracial ether, what happens to that core of black people who cannot or do not want to do either?

Could this new racial gerrymandering result in that historically stigmatized group’s further stigmatization? Do a million innocuous personal decisions end up having one destructive cumulative effect?

LAST year, I married a white woman from France; the only thing that shocked people was that she is French. This stands in stark contrast to my parents’ fraught experience less than 10 years after the landmark 1967 case Loving v. Virginia overturned anti-miscegenation laws. It is no longer radical for people like my wife and me to come together.

According to the Pew report, while 9 percent of white newlyweds in 2010 took nonwhite spouses, some 17 percent of black newlyweds, and nearly one-quarter of black males in particular, married outside the race. Numbers like these have made multiracial Americans the fastest-growing demographic in the country. Exhortations to stick with one’s own, however well intentioned, won’t be able to change that.

When I think about what my parents endured — the stares, the comments, the little things that really do take a toll — I am grateful for a society in which I may marry whomever I please and that decision is treated as mundane. Still, as I envision rearing my own kids with my blond-haired, blue-eyed wife, I’m afraid that when my future children — who may very well look white — contemplate themselves in the mirror, this same society, for the first time in its history, will encourage them not to recognize their grandfather’s face.

For this fear and many others, science and sociology are powerless to console me — nor can they delineate a clear line in the sand beyond which identifying as black becomes absurd.

Whenever I ask myself what blackness means to me, I am struck by the parallels that exist between my predicament and that of many Western Jews, who struggle with questions of assimilation at a time when marrying outside the faith is common. In an essay on being Jewish, Tony Judt observed that “We acknowledge readily enough our duties to our contemporaries; but what of our obligations to those who came before us?” For Judt, it was his debt to the past alone that established his identity. ...

And so I will teach my children that they, too, are black — regardless of what anyone else may say — so long as they remember and wish to be.

This is all very eloquent, but what's left out are two highly relevant facts:

1. Of course he will encourage his children to check the black box: the bennies from affirmative action and being eligible for payoffs in disparate impact discrimination lawsuits are golden.

2. There's no cost to the black community in terms of lower population numbers to be used in disparate impact lawsuit denominators from people checking both black and something else because the Clinton Administration decided right before the 2000 Census to count everybody who checks black and white as fully black for the purposes of making sure quotas are as big as possible.

In contrast, American Indian tribes get finite benefits -- e.g., one casino, mineral rights to tribal land, and so forth -- so they are constantly kicking out members who fall below the "blood quantum" in order to maximize the payout to the inner circle. But blacks and Hispanics don't do that because there are no theoretical limits on the payouts for being black or Hispanic.

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

I think they are trying to tell us something

2012-03-15T02:16:00.000-07:00

You know how when you go visit somebody and after awhile your host starts mentioning how early he has to get up in the morning, and then yawning right in your face, and finally you figure it out and say, "I gotta go home now"?

Well, America doesn't seem to be getting the hint in Afghanistan.

Headlines from the L.A. Times:

Afghan interpreter tried to kill Marines, U.S. officer saysBy David S. Cloud | 12:39 a.m.The man, who worked for Western troops, died of burns after trying to run down Marines meeting Panetta and then emerging from his vehicle in flames, the officer says.
U.S., Britain say no early exit from Afghanistan

Maybe I'm just imagining this, but I'm sensing that we've started to overstay our welcome in Afghanistan.

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

Ruth Barcan Marcus, RIP

2012-03-15T00:29:00.000-07:00

The flip side of my inability not to notice patterns is that I'm impressed by individuals who don't fit the patterns. Here's part of an obituary from the NYT of the lady with four children who was a heavyweight in mid-20th Century logic, going head to head with famous philosophers like Quine and Carnap. (All this stuff is way over my head, by the way.)

Ruth Barcan Marcus, Philosopher-Logician, Dies at 90

By MARGALIT FOX

Ruth Barcan Marcus, a philosopher esteemed for her advances in logic, a traditionally male-dominated subset of a traditionally male-dominated field, died on Feb. 19 at her home in New Haven. She was 90.

Her death was announced by Yale University, from which she retired in 1992 as the Reuben Post Halleck professor of philosophy.

Because of its affinities with mathematics and the hard sciences — disciplines historically unwelcoming to women — logic had long been one of philosophy’s most swaggering strains. For a woman of Professor Marcus’s generation to elbow her way into the field, then dominated by titans like Willard Van Orman Quine, Rudolf Carnap and Kurt Gödel, was almost unheard of.

“The rest of philosophy became less male dominated, less macho, more quickly than logic,” Stephen Neale, distinguished professor of philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center, said in a telephone interview. “She was working in a field which was really run by these giants.”

Professor Marcus was hailed by colleagues for her work in quantified modal logic. The field was born of the marriage of two existing systems, classical quantified logic and modal logic — a marriage she helped bring about.

From an email:

It took a while for the NYT to write this up. There was actually a bit of an organized effort on the part of philosophers to get them to publish this. In contrast, Richard Rorty's (who wasn't half the philosopher Marcus was) obit was written within a weekend.

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

Today's Young People

2012-03-14T23:57:00.000-07:00

For awhile, I've been kicking around the idea that youth are getting more authoritarian or militaristic or something like that. For example, last summer I wrote in my Taki's Magazine review of the pretty good Transformers 3 movie that was #2 at the American box office last year:

The Transformers movies celebrate American imperial muscle. As teenagers grow more diverse, their longings for order have grown more militaristic, more authoritarian. The attitude of today’s youth toward 1960s liberals is more or less: “Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost.” They are impressed instead by extremely well-organized institutions such as SEAL Team Six and Michael Bay movie sets.

Audacious Epigone decided to test that hypothesis by looking at whites (male and female) age 18-29 over time in the General Social Survey. Here's what he came up with:

The following table shows the percentages of whites (as previously defined) aged 18-29 who expressed "a great deal of confidence" in the US military, again by half decade:

Period Confident
Late 70s 35.3%
Early 80s 29.1%
Late 80s 37.6%
Early 90s 50.8%
Late 90s 42.9%
Early 00s 54.6%
Late 00s 57.0%

So, the low point in the post-Vietnam era was in the early 1980s, perhaps in reaction to the failure of the Iranian hostage rescue attempt in 1980. Then there was a peak following the successful Kuwait War of early 1991, then a drift downward. Not surprisingly, after 9/11, there was a boost. But, then, no drift downward in the Late 00s, but instead a new peak. So, that might be evidence for a long-term trend as I hypothesized rather than just reaction to events.

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

Bryan Caplan v. Me

2012-03-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

George Mason libertarian economist Bryan Caplan attacks something I said over on his blog.

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

John Derbyshire

2012-03-14T01:49:00.000-07:00

In the first half of last year, the Derb mentioned that he'd been diagnosed with a form of lymphatic cancer. Now, he's started chemotherapy, as he writes in Taki's Magazine in Life at Half-Speed.

Best wishes, John.

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

Matthew Yglesias's "The Rent Is Too Damn High"

2012-03-13T21:18:00.003-07:00

From my review in Taki's Magazine:

On May 14, 2011, Matthew Yglesias, a prominent Washington, DC liberal blogger and proponent of urban living, was walking home alone after a dinner with fellow pundits when he became the victim of an apparent anti-white racial hate crime. In what sounds like a game of Knockout King or Polar Bear Hunting, “a couple of dudes ran up from behind, punched me in the head, then kicked me a couple of times before running off” without stealing anything. This shameful attack happened merely a mile north of the US Capitol Building.

Four decades ago, a popular witticism was that a neoconservative was a liberal who had gotten mugged by reality. Today, the rules of crimethink have grown rigid enough that even getting mugged in reality doesn’t seem to have put much of a dent in Yglesias’s worldview, judging from his new e-book The Rent Is Too Damn High. ... Yglesias argues that if only real estate developers were freed to Build, Baby, Build, we would enjoy a low-rent golden age.

But, there's a problem with living in a low-rent neighborhood ...

Read the whole thing there.

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

The Dingo as the Default Dog?

2012-03-12T03:32:00.001-07:00

I frequently post excerpts from serious articles that sound as if I wrote them as parodies. But here's a terrific section from a New York Times article Australia's Changing View of the Dingo by James Gorman and Christine Kenneally that hits on about a half dozen or more iSteve golden oldie themes in a row. This stuff is just plain interesting. You have to work hard to convince yourself you aren't interested in the human equivalents of these topics. And that just makes you boring and dull-witted.

Dingoes are generally classified as a subspecies of wolf, Canis lupus dingo, although in the past they have been classified as a subspecies of dog and as a separate species.

As a long-time critic of both thinking of human racial groups as "subspecies" and of proclaiming that Race Does Not Exist because of the problems with the subspecies concept I'm always on the lookout for news of scientists being befuddled about how to classify other animals, especially ones as well-known to us as canines.

Linnaeus did a tremendous job of classifying plants and animals into useful, reasonable categories, but the categories are for our convenience. I've argued that what people are most interested in about other people are not their Linnaean classification, but who their relatives are. Thus, a racial group is an extended family that has more coherence and continuity than run of the mill extended families because it is inbred to some degree.

By way of analogy, think about a very expensive type of animal for whom we know the entire genealogy going back scores of generations: the thoroughbred racehorse. The color of the coat is of little interest to buyers and bettors. They don't need to classify bays and grays separately because they know the actual genealogy of every horse: e.g., Seabiscuit was the grandson of Man o' War while his archrival War Admiral was the son of Man o' War and therefore Seabiscuit's uncle.

Now, we don't know the genealogy of individual dingos, so we study how they look, how they behave, any archaeological record, and their DNA to figure out how to classify them for important purposes of our own, such as Australia's equivalent of the Endangered Species Act. But, scientists still wind up arguing over how to classify them because classifications are something we impose for our own purposes. The only thing that inevitably exists is genealogy: father, mother, child.

Physically, they resemble a generic, medium-size dog, about 40 pounds, usually tan-colored, with pricked ears and a bushy tail.

If you let dogs mate randomly, as in much of the Third World, that's typically about what you wind up with. The dingo is distinctive looking in some ways, but in general looks like the Indian pariah dog of the streets. A 2004 DNA study said dingos were more closely related to Chinese dogs, but both seem pretty close to the Default Dog.

The rest of this excerpt is equally interesting.

They do not have some of the physical signs of domestication found in many dog breeds, like barking as adults. They breed once a year, like wolves, and when undisturbed they have a stable pack structure topped by one male-female pair, the only ones in the pack that reproduce.

Bradley Smith, a research associate in public health at Flinders University in Adelaide who has studied dingoes, said by e-mail that experimental tests put dingoes closer to wolves in the kind of intelligence they display. “Both dingoes and wolves, being highly effective predators, are great at problem solving, working well in groups, and independent problem solving,” he said.

But they also understand humans in a way that wolves do not. They get it when a person points at something, while wolves are clueless or supremely uninterested. Dingoes are not as good as dogs, however, at following a human’s gaze.

Dingoes, Dr. Smith wrote, “seem to be a prime example of one of the first types of ‘dogs’. Not domestic dogs as we know them now, but some form of early dog that made it easier for the human-canid relationship to develop. You could almost say dingoes are frozen in time — as they have made a very good home in Australia and have been isolated for many thousands of years.”

Dingoes came to Australia 3,500 to 5,000 years ago, probably with Asian seafarers, and already at least partly domesticated. At the time, people had been on Australia for almost 50,000 years, without dogs. The dingo quickly became an essential part of Aboriginal life and stories.

Deborah Rose, a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney who has done research with Aboriginal peoples and is the author of “Dingo Makes Us Human,” said the dingoes were a deep part of Aboriginal life. “The dingoes had names, they had kinship classifications, which makes them so unlike all other animals in Australia,” she said. “They had a place at the campfire.” Or even closer. The phrase “three-dog night” has been attributed to indigenous Australians as a way of describing how cold it was. However, it does not seem that Aborigines bred dingoes selectively.

Wikipedia has a less well-written but even more extensive article on dingoes and all the controversies involving their racial purity that are a big deal in Australia for legal and other reasons.

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

Is there such a thing as a "resource curse?"

2012-03-11T01:27:00.003-08:00

The popular idea of a "resource curse" is that having an abundance of some natural resource, such as oil, screws up your economy.

For example, America had the lion's share of the exploited oil resources in the world from 1859-1945, and, thus, by 1945 the United States had collapsed to the point where it more or less ruled the world.

Okay, well, maybe that's not the most convincing example. All right, gold was discovered in Northern California in 1848, making the largely unpopulated San Francisco Bay area suddenly wealthy. And that's why the Bay Area is so poor today.

John Tierney wrote in 2008:

A report in Science argues that the “resource curse” theory is dubious because scholars (like Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner) have been looking at the wrong data in studies showing that countries heavily dependent on exports of natural resources are exceptionally prone to slow economic growth, high rates of poverty, authoritarian rule, corruption and violent conflict. The easy money from natural resources, the curse theory went, helped finance civil wars and also weakened civil institutions by enabling repressive governments to buy off opponents and stay in power despite policies that stifled the rest of the economy.

But the new report in Science argues that the causation goes in the opposite direction: The conflicts and bad policies created the heavy dependence on exports of natural resources. When a country’s chaos and economic policies scare off foreign investors and send local entrepreneurs abroad to look for better opportunities, the economy becomes skewed. Factories may close and businesses may flee, but petroleum and precious metals remain for the taking. Resource extraction becomes “the default sector” that still functions after other industries have come to a halt, according to the authors, C. N. Brunnschweiler of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and E.H. Bulte of the Oxford Center for the Study of Resource-Rich Economies.

They find that the curse vanishes when they look not at the relative importance of resource exports in the economy but rather at a different measure: the relative abundance of natural resources in the ground. Using that variable to compare countries, they report that resource wealth correlates with slightly higher economic growth and slightly fewer armed conflicts.

My guess is that having a lot of natural resources mostly means that when you screw up, you do it in a louder, more obnoxious fashion, with more attention paid to you. (Similarly, when you do succeed, like Texas did with oil, you do it more brashly.) Venezuela isn't a whole lot different from Guyana or Colombia or Ecuador, and Nigeria isn't that different from Cameroon or Benin. It's just that the countries with oil attract more publicity. People go around holding seminars to discuss why isn't Nigeria like Norway, but nobody is interested in the reasons why Togo is like Nigeria.

The reality is that there are a lot of boring poor countries with not much of either natural resources or human capital, and that normally nobody pays much attention to them. Occasionally, notice is paid to some place like Afghanistan or Yemen due to Al-Qaeda. In Yemen, the primary natural resource is that, most years, it rains. And then it turns out that Yemen, despite having practically nothing of anything, has managed to be, in its own impoverished fashion, extravagantly screwed up.

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

Occam's Butterknife applied to PISA

2012-03-10T20:12:00.004-08:00

A lot of the ideas that are broached early on iSteve end up being kicked around later in the prestige press, but they tend to get dumbed down in the process of replacing Occam's Razor with Occam's Butterknife. For instance, I've been saying for a decade that looking at test scores internationally can say a lot about the future of a country. Today, Tom Friedman today writes in the NYT about PISA scores.

A team from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., has just come out with a fascinating little study mapping the correlation between performance on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, exam — which every two years tests math, science and reading comprehension skills of 15-year-olds in 65 countries — and the total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of G.D.P. for each participating country. In short, how well do your high school kids do on math compared with how much oil you pump or how many diamonds you dig?

The results indicated that there was a “a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their high school population,” said Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the PISA exams for the O.E.C.D. “This is a global pattern that holds across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment.” Oil and PISA don’t mix. (See the data map at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/9/49881940.pdf.)

I can't reproduce the scatter plot here, but I'm not blown away by the correlation I see when I look at it. It's better to be smart than endowed with lots of natural resources, but, overall, it's best to be both.

As the Bible notes, added Schleicher, “Moses arduously led the Jews for 40 years through the desert — just to bring them to the only country in the Middle East that had no oil. But Moses may have gotten it right, after all. Today, Israel has one of the most innovative economies, and its population enjoys a standard of living most of the oil-rich countries in the region are not able to offer.”

Actually, Israel's overall PISA scores are mediocre. Israel does worse on the PISA than Russia, which has a resource-driven economy. Israel has a smart fraction, definitely, but even that doesn't appear to be all that spectacular according to what PISA measured. (This may say more about limitations in PISA than about Israel.)

So hold the oil, and pass the books. According to Schleicher, in the latest PISA results, students in Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan stand out as having high PISA scores and few natural resources, while Qatar and Kazakhstan stand out as having the highest oil rents and the lowest PISA scores. (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran and Syria stood out the same way in a similar 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or Timss, test, while, interestingly, students from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey — also Middle East states with few natural resources — scored better.)

Also lagging in recent PISA scores, though, were students in many of the resource-rich countries of Latin America, like Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Africa was not tested. Canada, Australia and Norway, also countries with high levels of natural resources, still score well on PISA, in large part, argues Schleicher, because all three countries have established deliberate policies of saving and investing these resource rents, and not just consuming them.

Norway did mediocre on the latest PISA relative to, say, Finland. Canada and Australia score well because they are the only rich countries whose immigrants, first and second generation, don't drag down the national averages. That's because they carefully select immigrants to, explicitly, boost the welfare of natives. (Finland has very few 15-year-old immigrants, too)

Add it all up and the numbers say that if you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century, don’t count its oil reserves or gold mines, count its highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students. “Today’s learning outcomes at school,” says Schleicher, “are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.”

Indeed.

But, the reverse correlation between test scores and natural resources asserted here is mostly a statistical illusion due to 2 problems:

1) Which countries participate in PISA and which don't. Countries that are dumb but rich due to oil are more likely to take part in PISA than countries that are dumb but poor. For example, Saudi Arabia has more money than brains, so it took part in PISA. Its Arab neighbor Yemen would probably score near the bottom of PISA if it had enough oil to pay for a bureaucracy to implement the tests. But it doesn't have much of anything, so it doesn't bother. Same with most African countries, few of which participate in PISA or TIMSS.

There can often be a resource curse where mineral wealth causes civil wars, coups, and laziness. But, if you've got smart, hard-working people, more resources is better than fewer resources, on the whole.

2) They are measuring how much resources a country has by what percentage of its economy stems from natural resources. So, dumb countries that don't have anything else going for them beside natural resources are measured as having lots of natural resources, while smart countries with lots of resources, like Australia, Canada, and the United States, also do other things economically, so they don't appear to be as dependent upon natural resources as dumb countries.

In general, the happiest thing to be is a smart, large, resource rich, relatively-lightly populated English-speaking country with a British-descended system of government and culture. Australians don't call Australia "the lucky country" for no reason.

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

Chris Hughes buys The New Republic

2012-03-10T05:18:00.002-08:00

Ever since Obama got elected, it's sure started to seem as if the whole black thing that had been going on for half a century was losing momentum. Or at least homosexual activists have been acting as if blacks were so 2008 and that gay is the new black.

But the news that The New Republic magazine was being sold to Chris Hughes, one of the Facebook founders and head of Obama's social media campaign in 2008 seemed weird. I didn't know much about Hughes, so I turned to Wikipedia and found this picture and biographical detail:

Hughes grew up in Hickory, North Carolina, as the only child of Arlen "Ray" Hughes, a paper salesman, and Brenda Hughes, a public-school teacher.

That seemed an odd fate for the magazine long run by Marty Peretz, who always made sure that it reflected his effusion of 1968:

"I have been in love only three times in my life. I was in love with my college roommate. I am in love with the state of Israel and I love Gene McCarthy."

What happened? Granted, The New Republic is a money pit and Hughes has Facebook Money. But, still, The New Republic has been sold to some guy from Hickory, North Carolina?

So, if gay is the new black, does this mean that goy is the new gay? Very strange ...

(By the way, I like to check Google to see if my insights are novel. Has anybody ever said "gay is the new black" before me, or did I just make that up? Why, yes, that phrase, in quotes, brings up 855,000 pages. So, other than the 849,999 who beat me to it, I was the first to notice that. On the other hand, "goy is the new gay" has never been said before in the history of the Internet, which suggests that nobody has noticed before it because it's not true.)

Then, it dawned on me ...

And, sure enough, farther down in the Wikipedia article, we find the expected: "Hughes is gay ..."

I've long had a hunch that the future of American society is going to look like a cross between Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps gays then will become, in effect, one of the ethnic power blocs, just one generated anew each generation?

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

Why are Google ads so inept?

2012-03-10T03:38:00.002-08:00

I don't know if you see the same Google ads as I do, but the ads Google chooses to run on my blog when I look at www.iSteve.blogspot.com are hilariously abysmal. For example:

Racial discrimination

Find Racial discrimination Near You. See Actual Customer Reviews!

Local.com

I'm not making this up.

Let's try an experiment with another keyword phrase:

poison oak

For all I know, Google will now put an ad on my website reading "Find Poison oak Near You." Let's try some other guaranteed moneymakers:

termites

hernias

dry rot

salmonella

negative cash flow

Ca-ching!

I first put Google ads on my website many years ago, and I made more money back then, even though my readership was much smaller. I recall a few weeks into running Google ads, there was an for a documentary on evolution that was so popular with my readership that I earned $10 from just that ad in one day. I figured, wow, Google will of course learn from this mutually profitable venture what kinds of things my readership is interested in, and that will begin a positive feedback loop that will make the ads Google chooses to run on my website ever more relevant to my highly distinctive and hard-to-reach audience.

Was I ever mistaken. As far as I can tell, after all these years, Google has never learned anything about what ads appeal to my readers and what don't. Or maybe nobody in the whole world has anything to advertise that appeals to my readers.

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

Straight Outta Compton

2012-03-10T03:19:00.000-08:00

Mickey Kaus points us toward this great article by Will Evans of CaliforniaWatch that, as far as I can tell, appears to be real. But the possibility that it's just an Onion-like collection of random iSteve tropes cannot be dismissed, either.

Compton City Councilwoman Janna Zurita owes her Hispanic last name to a grandmother from Spain, whom she never met. Zurita considers her mother black and said her father “wants to be black” even though he “looks Latino.”

Zurita, the mayor pro tem of Compton, sometimes jokes with her sister about their racial roots.

“She always tells me I look just like a Mexican: flat booty, straight hair. You know, just all kind of – how Mexicans used to look. You know, now they have big booties,” Zurita said in a legal deposition in November. “You know, little jokes about it.”

While Zurita takes a sometimes-playful approach to her racial identity, it became the serious subject of a recent lawsuit under the California Voting Rights Act. In January, a judge ruled that a trial would be necessary to figure out whether Zurita could be considered Latina and whether that means Latinos have a voice on the council. The city settled the suit late last month.

The legal gymnastics in Compton illustrate California’s far-reaching law, which bars local governments from diluting the voting strength of minorities. The law has become the foundation of a burgeoning onslaught of legal threats that could upend the racial makeup of elected bodies throughout the state.

Armed with 2010 census data, a network of attorneys is increasingly targeting local governments – from cities and school boards to hospital and community college districts – for not reflecting the demographics of their constituents.

While the dispute in Compton, where Zurita’s race was under question, pitted Latino residents against the city’s traditionally black leadership, other cases seek to increase minority representation on elected boards that are dominated by whites. ...

Particularly striking against this backdrop are the 14 cities in California where all-white councils preside over communities where either Latinos or Asians make up the majority of residents. Several are clustered in the Los Angeles area, like Whittier and Arcadia, but they range from Tulelake, on the Oregon border, to Holtville, near the Mexican border.

The joke here is that Whittier and Arcadia are traditionally white-run municipalities that affluent Mexicans and Chinese, respectively, crave to move to. Whittier is the place that wealthy Mexican-Americans in Southern California are congregating, while Arcadia, where my aunt has lived my whole life, has filled up with rich Chinese who tear down the modest ranch houses and build huge houses out to the property lines. Arcadia H.S., a public school, has about 30 National Merit semifinalists per year. In other words, Mexicans with money seem to like how Whittier has been run and Chinese with money like how Arcadia has been run. But, all that's irrelevant because the 2010 Census shows lots of Mexicans in Whittier and Chinese in Arcadia. Of course, the 2010 Census didn't bother asking if they were citizens or not.

Another 20 cities have Latino majorities and only one minority on city council.
Such cities can make especially attractive targets for civil rights lawyers, who see the stark disparities as evidence of a systemic problem.

“These are the cities that should recognize that they are low-hanging fruit for groups who might want to bring lawsuits,” said Paul Mitchell of Redistricting Partners, a Sacramento-based consulting firm that works with local governments to determine their vulnerability under the law.

California Watch was able to identify the 34 cities with data from Redistricting Partners and another consulting group, GrassrootsLab. But the cities represent one end of a spectrum. Numerous other communities, with smaller minority populations or more diversity on the city council, also could be subject to a suit under the California Voting Rights Act, which was passed in 2002 and signed by Gov. Gray Davis.

The law prohibits local governments from holding at-large elections – in which the entire community votes for a slate of candidates – if that system weakens the ability of minorities to elect candidates of their choice.

An elected board can be found in violation if voting statistics show the community polarized along racial lines. That happens, for example, when Latinos vote more than their white neighbors for Latino candidates.

A law so rooted in race inevitably leads to thorny questions about racial politics and the murky, subjective cauldron of ethnic identity. Should the race of a city councilmember even matter? And, in a state where the lines are increasingly blurred, who can determine a councilmember’s race other than the council member?

In Compton, lawyers representing two Latina residents argued that Zurita is not Latina. Zurita, on the other hand, pointed to her election as evidence that Latinos are represented.

But even she seemed conflicted during her deposition, at one point saying that she is Latina, at another point that she isn’t.

Asked point-blank by an opposing lawyer, Zurita replied, “I don’t think there is any pure races.”

The brouhaha over Zurita’s race “raises an issue that I believe is silent in the legislation, which is, how are you calculating ethnicity?” said Compton City Attorney Craig J. Cornwell. “Is it people who have Latino ancestry? Is it how a person self-identifies themselves?"

The U.S. Census doesn’t provide clear answers, because it considers being Hispanic or Latino separate from race. On government forms, Zurita sometimes marks black, sometimes “other” and couldn’t remember if she ever marked Latino.

Adding to the confusion, Zurita later referred to her Spanish grandmother as Mexican. The attorney sought to clarify: “So she was from Spain, but her heritage was Mexican?”

“Well,” Zurita replied, “you know, I don't know. All this Mexican, third generation, fourth generation, Latina, Latino – I just kind of refer to the group as Mexican.”

Regardless, Zurita maintained that she represents all residents of Compton, where 65 percent of the population is Hispanic.

“I don't even think race, you know,” she said. “I don't look at race.”

In a settlement last month, Compton agreed to let voters decide whether to change to district elections. If voters shoot it down on the June ballot, the city will put it to another vote in November. Compton also agreed to pay the opposing attorneys’ fees.

California’s law is grounded in the idea that minorities sometimes vote differently from the rest of the population and that at-large elections, where the majority rules, can unfairly dilute their influence. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld that underlying notion in cases interpreting the federal Voting Rights Act.

Indeed, in many parts of the state, including throughout Los Angeles County, Californians do tend to vote for candidates of their same race, according to research by Matt Barreto, who served as an independent expert to the state redistricting commission. Barreto also consults for lawyers suing under the law.

The California law makes it much easier to challenge at-large elections than under the federal Voting Rights Act. Plus, the state law puts local governments at a disadvantage: If they lose a lawsuit, they have to pay the other side’s attorney’s fees, but not the other way around.

The act was drafted by Joaquin Avila, a Seattle-based voting rights attorney, and Robert Rubin, who until recently was legal director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. The duo has gone on to sue school districts and cities, racking up millions of dollars and sparking accusations that they are in it for the money.

Rubin, now in private practice, said the money from his share of legal settlements went to the nonprofit civil rights organization where he worked. He said governments saddled with huge legal costs have only themselves to blame for not following the law.

“We’re going to continue to be aggressive,” Rubin said. “We intend to enforce this until it doesn’t need enforcement anymore.”

In 2010, law co-authors Rubin and Avila sued the Central Valley city of Tulare.

The suit argued that even though Tulare then had a Latino councilman, he wasn’t the “candidate of choice of Latino voters.” Another councilman, David Macedo, said in an interview that he identifies as Hispanic because of his Portuguese ancestry, but doesn’t consider himself Latino.

Tulare settled for $225,000, which went to the plaintiff’s lawyers, and will hold a vote this year on switching to district elections. Macedo said he would encourage residents to approve the switch because, given the law, “one way or another, that’s the way it’s headed.”

Rubin, Avila and affiliated attorneys have directed the legal offensive so far. But labor unions and other groups also could use the law as a weapon in disputes with cities and school boards.

The first such case came in December, when the State Building & Construction Trades Council of California sued the city of Escondido, in San Diego County, alleging that at-large elections leave Latinos without fair representation. The union targeted Escondido because officials there have been trying to lower wages on public construction projects.

The last bit about unions is a KausFiles theme. But, boy, does the rest of the article sound like I just made it up by riffing on my old reliable themes. By the end, I was wondering why the article lacked any references to cousin marriage or gold chains.

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

The History of a Myth

2012-03-09T15:55:00.002-08:00

Today's conventional wisdom that Science has proved that race does not exist (and all the more or less comic variants on that) seems to my recollection to have reached a crescendo in the single year, 2000, when there was a vast amount of hype over the Human Genome Project. For leaders of the vastly well-funded undertaking, as well as their political overseers such as Bill Clinton, it was seen as essential to put the right racial spin on DNA research.

For example, below are excerpts from a big New York Times article by Natalie Angier from 2000, "Do Races Differ? Not Really, DNA Shows."

That was hardly the worst Race Does Not Exist article from 2000, but, still, this is pretty embarrassing to read a dozen years later in an era when Henry Louis Gates is ready to roll with his 3rd reality series on PBS later this month, in which he has celebrities get their DNA tested and then springs on them the results of what their racial admixture is.

The irony, of course, is the that the rapid development of the gene sequencing technology celebrated in 2000's orgy of Race Does Not Exist pronouncements, immediately began undermining the dogma in its moment of greatest triumph.

Still, very few people notice the contradiction between this dogma about what Science Says that they absorbed in 2000 and have held ever since versus all the scientific discoveries of the last 12 year. For example, reporter Nicholas Wade of the New York Times published dozens of the articles over the next decade systematically dismantling Angier's article, but almost nobody noticed. A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on, especially when the lie ties into the status system.

August 22, 2000

Do Races Differ? Not Really, DNA Shows

By NATALIE ANGIER

Scientists say that while it may be easy to tell at a glance whether a person is Asian, African or Caucasian, the differences dissolve when one looks beyond surface features and scans the human genome for DNA hallmarks of "race."

ADD YOUR THOUGHTS
The Science of Differences
If racial labels have "little or no biological meaning," what is the best way to address racial differences, politically or scientifically?

In these glossy, lightweight days of an election year, it seems, they can't build metaphorical tents big or fast enough for every politician who wants to pitch one up and invite the multicultural folds to "Come on under!" The feel-good message that both parties seek to convey is: regardless of race or creed, we really ARE all kin beneath the skin.

Yet whatever the calculated quality of this new politics of inclusion, its sentiment accords firmly with scientists' growing knowledge of the profound genetic fraternity that binds together human beings of the most seemingly disparate origins.

Scientists have long suspected that the racial categories recognized by society are not reflected on the genetic level.

But the more closely that researchers examine the human genome -- the complement of genetic material encased in the heart of almost every cell of the body -- the more most of them are convinced that the standard labels used to distinguish people by "race" have little or no biological meaning.

They say that while it may seem easy to tell at a glance whether a person is Caucasian, African or Asian, the ease dissolves when one probes beneath surface characteristics and scans the genome for DNA hallmarks of "race."

As it turns out, scientists say, the human species is so evolutionarily young, and its migratory patterns so wide, restless and rococo, that it has simply not had a chance to divide itself into separate biological groups or "races" in any but the most superficial ways.

"Race is a social concept, not a scientific one," said Dr. J. Craig Venter, head of the Celera Genomics Corporation in Rockville, Md. "We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the same small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world."

Dr. Venter and scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome, and the researchers had unanimously declared, there is only one race -- the human race.

Dr. Venter and other researchers say that those traits most commonly used to distinguish one race from another, like skin and eye color, or the width of the nose, are traits controlled by a relatively few number of genes, and thus have been able to change rapidly in response to extreme environmental pressures during the short course of Homo sapiens history.

And so equatorial populations evolved dark skin, presumably to protect against ultraviolet radiation, while people in northern latitudes evolved pale skin, the better to produce vitamin D from pale sunlight.

"If you ask what percentage of your genes is reflected in your external appearance, the basis by which we talk about race, the answer seems to be in the range of .01 percent," said Dr.
Harold P. Freeman, the chief executive, president and director of surgery at North General Hospital in Manhattan, who has studied the issue of biology and race. "This is a very, very minimal reflection of your genetic makeup." ...

By contrast with the tiny number of genes that make some people dark-skinned and doe-eyed, and others as pale as napkins, scientists say that traits like intelligence, artistic talent and social skills are likely to be shaped by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of the 80,000 or so genes in the human genome, all working in complex combinatorial fashion.
The possibility of such gene networks shifting their interrelationships wholesale in the course of humanity's brief foray across the globe, and being skewed in significant ways according to "race" is "a bogus idea," said Dr. Aravinda Chakravarti, a geneticist at Case Western University in Cleveland.

... Dr. Eric S. Lander, a genome expert at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., admits that, because research on the human genome has just begun, he cannot deliver a definitive, knockout punch to those who would argue that significant racial differences must be reflected somewhere in human DNA and will be found once researchers get serious about looking for them. But as Dr. Lander sees it, the proponents of such racial divides are the ones with the tough case to defend.

"There's no scientific evidence to support substantial differences between groups," he said, "and the tremendous burden of proof goes to anyone who wants to assert those differences."
Although research into the structure and sequence of the human genome is in its infancy, geneticists have pieced together a rough outline of human genomic history, variously called the "Out of Africa" or "Evolutionary Eve" hypothesis.

By this theory, modern Homo sapiens originated in Africa 200,000 to 100,000 years ago, at which point a relatively small number of them, maybe 10,000 or so, began migrating into the Middle East, Europe, Asia and across the Bering land mass into the Americas. As they traveled, they seem to have completely or largely displaced archaic humans already living in the various continents, either through calculated acts of genocide, or simply outreproducing them into extinction.

Since the African emigrations began, a mere 7,000 generations have passed.

A mere 7,000 generations?

And because the founding population of émigrés was small, it could only take so much genetic variation with it.

As a result of that combination -- a limited founder population and a short time since dispersal -- humans are strikingly homogeneous, differing from one another only once in a thousand subunits of the genome.

"We are a small population grown large in the blink of an eye," Dr. Lander said.

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

Let's not talk about contraception

2012-03-08T16:40:00.000-08:00

The New York Times Magazine has a story, "America Is Stealing the World's Doctors," that focuses on an Indian who grew up in Zambia, went home to India to study medicine, then tried for a few years to be a surgeon in Zambia. He gave up and is now becoming a doctor here. The pay is 10 times better and the working conditions are too. But what about the huddled masses of Zambians needing doctor's care? Zambia has 1 doctor for every 23,000 people.

Since everybody else in the New York Times is talking about contraception, I looked through this article to see if there was any mention of the concept that maybe what Zambia needs is relatively fewer but healthier Zambians.

Of course not.

So, what is the Total Fertility Rate in Zambia?

It's 6.28 babies per woman per lifetime. That appears to have gone up slightly over the last decade, assuming that these kind of statistics out of Zambia can detect small trends. In any case, that's a huge TFR.

The mortality rate in Zambia is very high, but the population has still grown by 50% over the last 20 years.

It would seem hard to think about health care in Zambia without at least considering issues of contraception, yet the whole topic is routinely ignored when thinking about Africa.

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

Polygamy: Less fun than it sounds

2012-03-07T19:47:00.003-08:00

From the NYT:

He also heard of poisonous mistrust between [Osama] Bin Laden’s wives. In the cramped Abbottabad house, he was told, tensions erupted between Ms. Sadah, described as “the favored wife,” and Khairiah Saber, an older woman who occupied a separate floor. In interrogation, Ms. Sadah accused her rival of having betrayed their husband to American intelligence.

Here you are, the world's all-time top terrorist, and all you want is a little peace and quiet around your own damn house. Is that too much to ask? Why can't we all just get along?

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

Mr. and Mrs. Kucinich

2012-03-07T03:48:00.000-08:00

Long-time Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich has lost in the Democratic primary. I never quite got his appeal, but the old dog must have had something going for him, as judging by Mrs. Kucinich, who now has time to fulfill her rightful destiny of starring in a syndicated TV show entitled "Boadicea, Warrior Queen."

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

"A Separation"

2012-03-06T20:13:00.001-08:00

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

The Iranian film A Separation, a domestic drama-turned-courtroom mystery, is among the most acclaimed of recent movies. It won a host of film festival awards, the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and a nomination for Best Original Screenplay—a rarity for a subtitled film. This half-million-dollar movie is even turning a profit at the US box office, with revenue approaching $4 million and rising.

A Separation is a fine film with an exceptional plot. ... Still, two hours of Persians bickering under fluorescent lights isn’t a feast for the eyes. The universal and strenuous praise for this admirable but limited middlebrow film is sincere, but it’s amplified by multiple political motivations.

Were the Oscar voters trying to send a message to Washington by honoring this film? I suspect so. It’s hard to live in LA and take seriously the Washington/Tel Aviv storyline of Iran as the new Nazi Germany. That’s because the Westside is full of Iranians, many of them Jews; yet they make frequent visits home to see their kin. I don’t think Einstein vacationed in Berlin in 1939.

Read the whole thing there.

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

Ugly Persian Houses

2012-03-06T14:57:00.005-08:00

If you are a Los Angeles city councilman these days, one issue that you dread dealing with is the controversy over zoning changes to limit the size of new houses. On one hand, many of the single family homes in Los Angeles were built in in roughly 1935-1975 and are small by contemporary standards. So, a lot of homeowners like the idea that somebody rich could someday buy their little house and put up a big house in its place. Laissez-faire would seem to maximize their property values.

On the other hand, have you got a gander at the houses that the rich people are putting up? They are not intended to fit seamlessly into the neighborhood with polite good taste. The website Ugly Persian Houses (Ruining the Neighborhood One House at a Time) tracks the proliferation of Persian Palaces in Southern California, with their obsession with giant columns that don't even pretend to do anything structurally. It's run by some natives of Beverly Hills, Westwood, and Santa Monica:

It's because we live and work in these areas that the site was born in the first place. Los Angeles no longer looks like Los Angeles..and pointing this out seemed like a good idea for a website because we thought (and clearly this turned out to be true) that there were others like us who would welcome a forum to bemoan the death of the beautiful architecture that was indigenous to California.

4. “You’re Just Jealous…You Wish You Could Live in One of these Houses.”

Hardly. But what we do wish is that we had enough money to start buying them up, knocking them back to the ground, and rebuilding the charming bungalow or spanish casita, or whatever that was originally in its place.

Well, I'm not sure that L.A. architecture was all that tasteful even before the Iranians started to roll in during the early 1970s. And Iran has an ancient culture with a strong emphasis on luxury and ornament. A lot of the features that Persians like, like the two story tall front doors, are actually old Los Angeles home favorites. Back in the 1970s, Charles Jencks published a couple of picture books of L.A. architecture with snarky captions, and he had a whole chapter on the "L.A. Door." There are various reasons affluent Iranians picked out Los Angeles as their main destination and one is that they felt aesthetically sympatico.

Still, here's an Ugly Persian Condo in Brentwood:

So, there is a lot of activism right now in areas near the Hollywood Hills to put limits on the size of teardowns. The arguments are framed in terms of aesthetics and neighborhood preservation, but much of the energy comes from unspoken ethnic conflict.

My guess is that the most outspoken of the preservationists tend to be Ashkenazi Jews who grew up in SoCal, while the newcomers building the gaudiest new houses tend to be Oriental Jews, but I don't have any data on that.

Also, in the San Fernando Valley, there is a growing conflict over a zoning variance between the growing numbers of Ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi black hatters along Chandler Blvd. and the declining numbers of old-fashioned Ashkenazis.

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

Crazy foreign conspiracy theories

2012-03-06T00:27:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, the government of Egypt released American "democracy activists," including cabinet secretary Ray Lahood's son, in return for $5 million in bail and continued U.S. foreign aid. So, it looks like everybody's happy.

I didn't want to mention this while the poor guys were held up in a foreign country, but just from reading about the International Republican Institute on Wikipedia, where Sam Lahood works, it hardly seems surprising that the Egyptian government considers it a front for U.S. government meddling in Egyptian politics. After all, most of IRI's money comes from the U.S. government, its figurehead chairman is John McCain, and it's stocked with Republican politicians and ex-government officials. Young Lahood, for example, had worked for the State Department in Iraq, which I can't imagine the Egyptians found reassuring. (The Democrats have their own taxpayer-supported National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.)

There aren't quite as many coups these days as there used to be, but IRI seems to have lurked around some of them, such as Haiti in 2004 and perhaps Honduras in 2009. All in all, this seems like a better way to Play the Game than with cruise missiles, but Americans shouldn't be terribly surprised when foreign governments view IRI's employees more as American agents than as humanitarians.

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

The Obama Administration's conspiracy theory

2012-03-05T22:45:00.000-08:00

From the NYT:

Black Students Face More Discipline, Data Suggests

By TAMAR LEWIN

Black students, especially boys, face much harsher discipline in public schools than other students, according to new data from the Department of Education.

Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection’s 2009-10 statistics from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students. ... Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers....

“Education is the civil rights of our generation,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in a telephone briefing with reporters on Monday. “The undeniable truth is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.”

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

Conspiracy Theories

2012-03-05T16:00:00.004-08:00

From the Atlantic and the National Journal:

Disparate Impact: Black Lawmakers and Ethics Investigations

by Shane Goldmacher

A disproportionate share of cases have been brought against Congressional Black Caucus members. African-American lawmakers would like to know why.

Emanuel Cleaver, a Methodist minister and the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, stood up and began searching his desk for a Bible. Cleaver wasn't looking up a particular verse or Psalm. He grabbed the Good Book for emphasis. He wanted to hold it in his hands as he declared, with a firm shake, that the way Congress investigates the ethics of its own lawmakers is horribly broken.

"I think," Cleaver said, "the facts speak for themselves."

The facts say this: African-Americans make up 10 percent of the House, but as of the end of February, five of the sitting six named lawmakers under review by the House Ethics Committee are black. The pattern isn't new. At one point in late 2009, seven lawmakers were known to be involved in formal House ethics inquiries; all were members of the Congressional Black Caucus. An eighth caucus member, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois, had also been under investigation, but his probe was halted temporarily while the Justice Department undertook an inquiry of its own.

All told, about one-third of sitting black lawmakers have been named in an ethics probe during their careers, according to a National Journal review.

Only two members of Congress have been formally charged with ethics violations in recent years and have faced the specter of public trials -- Reps. Charles Rangel of New York (censured) and Maxine Waters of California (investigation ongoing). Both are black. There are no African-Americans in the Senate. Remember the most recent black senator, Roland Burris of Illinois? Reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee in 2009.

Those are the facts, as Cleaver said. The question is why so many African-American members have been in the ethics spotlight.

In interviews with more than a dozen members of the CBC, an unsettling thread emerges: They feel targeted. There could be no other explanation, many said, for what they see as disproportionate treatment at the hands of ethics investigators. They describe a disquieting reality of being black in Congress today: a feeling that each move they make is unfairly scrutinized. "We all feel threatened," said Rep. Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat, as he sat by the fireplace off the House floor. "If the only reason that you would suffer a complaint is because of your skin color, that is a cause for concern."

In general, the legal doctrine of “disparate impact” — that racial discrimination can be inferred merely from statistical disparities in outcomes — is a version of conspiracy theory thinking. Occamite explanations (e.g., blacks tend to be more crime prone and/or less competent at getting away with their crimes) are ruled out as unthinkable, leaving as the most likely explanation some kind of shadowy conspiracy against blacks.

Of course, some kinds of conspiracy theories are more socially acceptable than others. The really interesting question is why some conspiracy theories are considered the mark of a social pariah and other conspiracy theories are considered the mark of the Right Sort of Person.

As we see here, The Atlantic / National Journal takes it seriously enough to devote many pages to a conspiracy theory held by numerous members of the Congressional Black Congress that whites are out to get them.

Conversely, while you might think that the president of Harvard would be automatically be the right sort of person, when Larry Summers argued that it wasn't a conspiracy that not many women were tenured professors in Harvard math and engineering departments, that there were other explanations than powerful men in closed rooms discriminating against women, he immediately became a Bad Person. Every right thinking person knows that the lack of female math professors is too a conspiracy. To try to save his job, Larry handed $50,000,000 to Drew Gilpin Faust to spend on feminist causes at Harvard. But he still lost his job and, through sheer coincidence, Dr. Faust had somehow acquired enough supporters within Harvard to replace him.

Of course, only complete losers believe in the existence of a feminist conspiracy to get nice jobs for feminist critics of Summers such as Dr. Faust, Nancy Hopkins, and the late UC Santa Cruz chancellor Denice Denton, who leapt to her death from the roof of the luxury high rise of her lesbian lover, for whom she had arranged a $192,000 per year job.

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

Dalmatian Dads

2012-03-05T07:24:00.002-08:00

From WCBS in New York:

There were hurt feelings and racial tensions as white applicants were left standing outside a prep class on Wednesday night, reports CBS 2’s Lou Young.

“Whoever’s name is not on the list is not getting in, so were just following orders. That’s just the way it is,” the applicants were told.

Joseph Basile was one of those who didn’t get in.

“It wasn’t a good feeling. It felt like it was discrimination,” Basile said.

The class was conducted by the Vulcan Society, a group of African American firefighters in an overwhelmingly white department. Many applicants who were turned away preregistered online on forms that did not ask for their race, which made for testy moment. ...

Wednesday night’s class was the third in a series of prep exams given by the Vulcan Society. The previous two were integrated. The one Wednesday was the only one from which people were barred from attending.

To the ranks of Tiger Mothers and Eagle Fathers, we can add the Dalmatian Dads of the Fire Department of New York, who encourage their sons and nephews to study hard the family trade of saving people from burning buildings.

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

Hispanic fertility

2012-03-03T02:35:00.000-08:00

From the Washington Post:

Romney, Santorum and archaic ideas on fertility

By Lisa Miller, Published: March 2

Between them, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have as many children — 12 — as there were tribes of Israel. Ron Paul has five of his own, and in an early debate, perhaps unwilling to be outdone by Michele Bachmann’s fostering of dozens, Paul boasted that when he worked as a physician he delivered “4,000 babies.”

There’s nothing wrong with big families, of course. But the smug fecundity of the Republican field this primary season has me worried. Their family photos, with members of their respective broods spilling out to the margins, seem to convey a subliminal message that goes far beyond a father’s pride in being able to field his own basketball team. What the Republican front-runners seem to be saying is this: We are like the biblical patriarchs. As conservative religious believers, we take seriously the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply.

... (The appeal of Sarah Palin to so many Christian women was exactly this: She prioritized her fertility while juggling a big job and a husband who was frequently out of town. Her fans call her a Proverbs 31 woman, a reference to the biblical character who does it all — and who keeps herself looking good. Her price, the Bible says, is “above rubies.”)

I think this is a pretty common feeling. Much of what drives political passions in the U.S. are different kinds of white women trying to put each other down.

What's interesting is the almost complete kibosh in public discourse over more substantive fertility-related matters.

For example, if I type into Google

Hispanic fertility

here's what I get as the first hit:

HISPANIC FERTILITY IN U.S. FOUND ABOVE NORM - NYTimes.comwww.nytimes.com/.../hispanic-fertility-in-us-found-above-norm.html
Dec 18, 1984 – Fertility among Hispanic women in the United States is nearly 50 ...''The fertility rate for women of Hispanic origin was 97.5 live births per 1000 ...

Dec. 18, 1984 ... Some up to date news there!

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

James Q. Wilson, RIP

2012-03-03T00:39:00.003-08:00

Political scientist James Q. Wilson has died at age 80.

He was the rare social scientist who gave the impression that the social sciences are a blast. And why shouldn't they be? Lots of guys study statistics to be better sports fans. Dr. Wilson studied statistics to fight crime. He was like Batman with a reverse Polish notation HP calculator on his utility belt.

He's getting praised for coming up with the "broken windows" metaphor of crime-fighting in a 1982 magazine article, but probably his even more important idea was "incapacitation" in his 1975 book Thinking About Crime. This was the simple observation that criminals can't prey upon civilians if they are in prison. Therefore, lock more criminals up for longer sentences. That this was considered a revolutionary insight in 1975 says a lot about the academic atmosphere that helped get us into an era of high crime.

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

How can we measure innovation and creativity?

2012-03-02T14:30:00.003-08:00

As long as I can remember, the Japanese have been poor-mouthing their lack of creativity and innovation (and, by vague extension, that of East Asians in general). Presumably, they are right, but I've always wondered if there wasn't an element of strategy in this proclivity: "Don't you creative Western geniuses worry about us poor imitative Nipponese. We could never come up with those amazing annual model year changes in sheet metal like Chevy does! We'll just work on our boring little just-in-time manufacturing thingie -- which we totally got from an American, Edward Deming, by the way -- while you Westerners do all your creative wonders."

When commenters get into long debates about whether Asians or Asian-Americans are less creative / innovative than others, I find myself impressed by the certainty with which opinions are offered because I have a hard time coming up with data for, say, this century.

Creativity is clearly something that's terribly important, but it's also extremely hard to measure without the benefit of a long lag time to give historical perspective.

For example, who was the more significantly creative American information theorist of the 1940s: Claude Shannon or Norbert Wiener? These days, well-informed people would likely say Shannon, who has been getting more famous throughout my lifetime. But if in the 1950s you'd asked an intelligent generalist such as, say, Robert Heinlein, he likely would have said Wiener. (See James Gleick's 2011 book The Information for a current assessment of the Shannon-Wiener rivalry.) Wiener had been famous since his days as a child prodigy (getting his Harvard Ph.D. in math at age 17), and his cybernetic perspective was more immediately appealing to a mechanical engineering-minded era.

This is not to downplay Wiener, who did lots of other stuff, just that Shannon's work has proven more enduringly influential.

Can historians measure creativity with some degree of objectivity? I think so, for a reason that I outlined in my review of Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment:

Can we trust these data? The scholars upon whom Murray relies have their personal and professional biases, but, ultimately, their need to create coherent narratives explaining who influenced whom means that their books aren’t primarily based on their own opinions but rather on those of their subjects. For example, the best single confirmation of Beethoven’s greatness might be Brahms’s explanation of why he spent decades fussing before finally unveiling his First Symphony: “You have no idea how it feels for someone like me to hear behind him the tramp of a giant like Beethoven.”

In Paul Johnson’s just-published and immensely readable book Art: A New History, you can see how even this most opinionated of historians must adapt himself to the judgments of artists. Much of the book’s entertainment value stems from Johnson’s heresies, such as his grumpy comment on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: “No one ever wished the ceiling larger.” Still, Johnson can’t really break free from conventional art history because he can’t avoid writing about those whom subsequent artists emulated.

For example, Johnson finds Cézanne (who ranks 10th in Murray’s table of 479 significant artists) painfully incompetent at the basics of his craft. Yet, Johnson has to grit his teeth and write about Cézanne at length because he “was in some ways the most influential painter of the late nineteenth century because of his powerful (and to many mysterious) appeal to other painters …”

(Of course, it could all just be a giant conspiracy going on for generations ...)

Anyway, that raises the question of how can we measure trends in creativity and innovation without long lag times? Murray, for example, halted most of his analysis in 1950 to avoid recent fads that won't stand the test of time.

But, looking back in history, we can see sudden upsurges or declines in particular societies. For example, the traditional English view is that victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 set off a great age of English cultural accomplishment, of which Shakespeare is only the most famous. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but that has long been the standard story.

So, for this problem of measuring 21st Century innovation, I would propose that as an approximation, somebody do a surname analysis of the founders of technology firms that succeeded with initial public offerings of at least some size. This lacks the historical perspective, but it has the advantage that investors put real money down on their bets on what would be a successful and enduring innovation. Anybody want to try this? Or is there something better to measure?

P.S. A commenter kindly points to two papers that provide data on this subject. One by Ola Bengtsson and David H. Hsu looks at 1780 pairs of tech start-up founders and venture capitalists over about a decade centering around about 1998-2007. These are start-ups that at least got VC funding. About 48% of the start-ups are in California and 18% in Massachusetts.

Among founders, a surname analysis shows 3% Chinese and 7% Indian. There may be some miscellaneous Asians that they didn't break out. (Among venture capitalists, they find 4% Chinese and 4% Indian.)

Another analysis came up with 87% of founders white, 12% Asian, 1% black. These are both national surveys. The percent Asian in California is higher according to the second study: 18%.

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

Eric Holder: Quotas without End, Amen

2012-03-02T13:48:00.000-08:00

Via Roger Clegg and Discriminations, I see this interesting interview by the president of Columbia U., Lee Bollinger, who was the named defendant in the Grutter and Gratz affirmative action cases of 2003, of Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. As you'll recall, Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion seemed to put some sort of 25-year timeline on affirmative action, but the Attorney General is having none of that:

One of Bollinger’s questions concerned the United States Supreme Court’s decision earlier this week to reconsider affirmative action. Bollinger was involved in defending affirmative action when the court declared it constitutional in a landmark 2003 case, and he said on Thursday that the court’s decision to revisit the issue is “ominous.”

Holder expressed support for affirmative action, saying that he “can’t actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease.”

“Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices,” Holder said. “The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin ... When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”

As you'll also recall, the justification given for affirmative action in the majority opinion was not compensation for the historic effects of slavery and Jim Crow, but the benefits that white students gain from "diversity," from the free-wheeling, wide-open, politically incorrect intellectual atmosphere fostered on campus by letting in some students because of their racial/ethnic backgrounds. But, in the Attorney General's view, diversity is about people of color getting benefits. And we have not yet begun to fight!

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

Andrew Breitbart, RIP

2012-03-01T12:31:00.006-08:00

I don't actually know much about the late Andrew Breitbart, who dropped dead last night at age 43, but I want to relate something my wife observed when I had cancer at 38. Lots of people would eventually ask her, "So ... Steve smokes, right?" When she said I didn't, the nonsmokers would look worried and unhappy, and the smokers would look relieved.

We like to believe that whenever anybody dies, it's his own fault. That means, that you, personally, not having any major faults, don't ever have to die.

It's like the test pilots at Edwards AFB in The Right Stuff sitting around at a backyard cookout after one of their neighbors died flying some experimental piece of junk.

Husband 1: Poor Mike ...
Husband 2: Yeah, it's kind of surprising he let himself get in that situation.
Wife 2: What situation?
Husband 2: You know, not being able to handle it.
Wife 1: Handle it? The left wing fell off his airplane!
Husband 3: Yeah, but if afterward's he'd vectored the ailerons with a little more reactive thrust.
Husband 1: And updrafted the trailing surfaces.
Husband 2: Of course.
Wives 1, 2, and 3: The wing fell off!
Husbands 1, 2, and 3: He just didn't have the Right Stuff ...

Conversely, this reminds me of my own automatic assumptions about anybody with more energy than myself (i.e., about 75% of humanity):

A. Obviously, he's on cocaine / Adderall / steroids / adrenochrome etc.

B. Obviously, he's bipolar and is this close to snapping into a full-blown manic episode in which he declares himself the Emperor of Antarctica.

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

A prediction about America in 2062

2012-02-29T18:26:00.002-08:00

A commenter named John says in regard to the National Merit semifinalist lists:

What we are seeing is that Jews are beginning to neglect vanity projects in terms of intellectual achievement - they no longer care about dominating purely social markers of intellectual success, that are more about vanity than real accomplishment.

So far as I know we have not seen any decline in Jewish Nobels or in Jewish names amongst famous intellectuals in all areas. Has there been such a decline? THAT would be a significant marker.

Good question. A methodological problem is that a lot of measures of accomplishment -- Nobels, Forbes 400, Oscars, etc. -- have time lags built in. Probably looking at founders of major IPOs in this century would be a good test with the shortest time lag. The three most obvious names are Zuckerberg, Page, and Brin, but I don't follow that field closely.

But as far as I know where it counts, Jews perform as well as ever. But in terms of social vanity markers, Jews simply no longer have the motivation they had when they were outsiders in American society - which is exactly what one would expect.

Interestingly, whites have been underperforming their average IQ in terms of vanity and prestige projects (including admission to an elite unis, which is in many ways more about vanity than economic success) for quite some time now, which is precisely what one would expect - viewed from sociological perspective - from the group that has the most secure social position and feels the least need to *prove* anything.

That Asians are exerting enormous effort to do well in areas whose significance is to a high degree about vanity and prestige makes total sense. It brings to mind the way many Third World countries spend enormous amounts to build sparkling, palatial airports, while LAX is a dump ;)

That Jews are now converging with Whites in terms of their indifference to vanity projects is something that we should have expected.

I predict that in 50 years, the crazy Asian numbers we are seeing now in all these fields - coupled with a troubling lack of real world excellence - will diminish considerably and become more in line with their average IQ, which will still give them a modest overrepresentation in some fields, but nothing like what we are seeing now.

When that happens, we will know that Asians have *arrived* as Americans and no longer feel the need to *prove* themselves, and we can welcome them into the fold ;) But before that Asians will have to come to terms with the painful reality that their talents are far more modest than they would have wished. The Japanese have already gone through this self-reckoning, and are the most relaxed and easy going of the Asians as a result.

Could be. Or then again, maybe not.

Remember how there was a brief war in 1962 between China and India over some sparsely inhabited high-altitude terrain in the Himalayas where the border wasn't agreed upon? Perhaps the big issue in American politics in 2062 will be over that border, with one party backing China's claims and the other India's. How do we know that in fifty years, the burning issue of the day in American political and intellectual circles won't be whether China or India has rightful control of Aksai Chin, a region of salt deserts at 16,000 feet?

If that sounds nuts, then imagine what President Eisenhower would have said in 1956 if you told him that in 2012 the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination would compete over foreign policy mostly by trying to promise the most fervently to beat up anybody who questions Israel's right to the shore of the Dead Sea?

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

More views on California surnames of semifinalists

2012-02-29T09:33:00.002-08:00

A) A rabbi checked out the potentially Jewish names for PSAT semifinalists in 2012 (see my Taki's Magazine column "The East Rises in the West") and came up with a range of 81 to 125 Jewish surnames, or 4 to 6 percent out of 1,950. I have to believe that this is way down from the percent of Jewish National Merit semifinalists in California in the 1970s. Has California's Jewish community shrunk just in relative terms, or in absolute terms (Portland, here we come?). Has marrying shiksas diluted the gene pool? Do Jewish kids try less hard now? But they seemed to be pretty heavy dope smokers at Beverly Hills H.S. in 1975? Or have Asians raised the test scores at the high end?

B) My Taki column is on PSAT semifinalists in California in 2011, but I found on College Confidential an analysis of the 2010 California semifinalists, and if you can't trust anonymous posters on College Confidential, whom can you trust?

Out of 2,003 semifinalists who took the PSAT in California in the spring of 2010:

This is what California's technocratic class will look like 20 years hence:

739 East Asian (Chinese surname, but half-dozen possible countries of origin)
98 Korean
126 undetermined (includes 37 with surname Lee)
18 Japanese (could be Japanese nationals or 4th generation American)
54 South East Asian (Viet Namese, Philippino, Thai, Pacific Islander)
198 South Asian (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,...)
46 Eurasian (Persian, Armenian, Arabic, Turkish, ...)
728 European (including Hispanic, Jewish, and Slavic)
1 Somali
1 Ghanian

Note: gender and ethnicity were inferred from student's firstname, lastname, and Google search

I rearranged the order.

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

The One Percent

2012-02-28T20:22:00.001-08:00

My new Taki's Magazine column includes a surname analysis (courtesy of reader Rec1man) of the latest National Merit Scholar list of semifinalists in California. About 1.6 million high school juniors take the PSAT annually, and the top 16,000 scorers are recognized as semifinalists. The NMSC does not release ethnic breakdowns of semifinalists, so you have to use surname analysis, which is time-consuming and inexact, but fun.

The white/black test-score gap has been in the news since the 1960s, yet rather like Mark Twain supposedly said about the weather, despite all the talk, nobody seems able to do much about it. ...

The big news in this century has been the growing Asian-white test-score gap at the high end.

Consider a feature article in The New York Times over the weekend, “To Be Black at Stuyvesant High.” It was seemingly commissioned to argue for admissions quotas at the famously competitive Manhattan public high school by pointing out that only 3.6 percent of Stuyvesant’s students are now black or Hispanic, down from 15 percent in 1970. My guess is that the story’s emphasis on a lonely black student was mostly an elaborate framing device for its more newsworthy but downplayed message: Holy God, look at ALL THE ASIANS!

Read the whole thing there.

Miscellaneous left over fact: Stuyvesant High in lower Manhattan has 121 of the state of New York's 969 National Merit semifinalists. Hunter College school isn't far behind.

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

Wash. Post: Black women fat and happy about it

2012-02-28T15:55:00.004-08:00

From the Washington Post:

Black women heavier and happier with their bodies than white women, poll finds

... The poll found that although black women are heavier than their white counterparts, they report having appreciably higher levels of self-esteem. Although 41 percent of average-sized or thin white women report having high self-esteem, that figure was 66 percent among black women considered by government standards to be overweight or obese. ...

“Historically, [self-esteem] research on black girls and women has always been the highest among all groups,” Perry says. “It’s really a powerful statement about our resilience given the dominant images of black women present in American culture, which have been generally degrading and unattractive, or hypersexual and less feminine.”
“Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?”

“It is very interesting to note that even though black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women, black women (and men) subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others . . .

“What accounts for the markedly lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women? Black women are, on average, much heavier than non-black women.”

Satoshi Kanazawa

May 15, 2011

Removed from Psychology Today Web site after uproar

In other words, Kanazawa was right, but he was wrong (and got suspended for it) for the usual "Who? Whom?" reasons.

Overall, the roots of all this sound somewhat hormonal. If you have a lot of muscle, fat, and self-esteem, you probably have a different balance of hormones and hormones receptors than if you are thin and uncertain. This applies to white men, as well. The difference between a fat and muscular Hells Angel and an ectomorphic and uncertain bookkeeper probably start with hormones.

By the way, let me note once again that Hollywood, in practice, doesn't put up with much Diversity Ideology. Walking down Ventura Blvd., an upscale shopping street that serves lower level movie and TV people, about 5% or so of the women are black. Most have some connection with the entertainment industry or at least want to look like they do.

And, guess what, they almost all look nice and slender.

Also, I'm not surprised this article ran in the Washington Post. My observation is that D.C. has the world's highest density of Large and in Charge (but not moving too fast) black women among big cities I'm familiar with. Trying to get a black lady who works in customer service at a CVS drugstore in the District to actually engage in, you know, customer service got to be a running joke on trips to Washington. Every visit to CVS called to mind JFK's observation that Washington is a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency.

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

Obama Admin: U.S. not accomplishing anything in Afghanistan, so can't leave

2012-02-27T17:52:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times:

Afghan Uproar Casts Shadows on U.S Pullout

WASHINGTON — American officials sought to reassure both Afghanistan’s government and a domestic audience on Sunday that the United States remained committed to the war after the weekend killing of two American military officers inside the Afghan Interior Ministry and days of deadly anti-American protests.

But behind the public pronouncements, American officials described a growing concern, even at the highest levels of the Obama administration and Pentagon, about the challenges of pulling off a troop withdrawal in Afghanistan that hinges on the close mentoring and training of army and police forces.

The "challenges of pulling off a troop withdrawal in Afghanistan" seem somewhat exaggerated.

You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don't need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don't need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free

Things have gotten so wacky that the New Voice of Sanity on Afghanistan is the Newtster, who said to Afghanistan this week: "‘You know, you’re going to have to figure out how to live your own miserable life.'"

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

Reviewing the reviews of Coming Apart

2012-02-27T12:26:00.000-08:00

In VDARE, I review the reviews of Charles Murray's Coming Apart. Read the whole thing there.

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

Rudi Can't Fail (in fact, Rudi Can Yale)

2012-02-26T18:10:00.006-08:00

The NYT has a long article, To Be Black at Stuyvesant High, on a young heroine of diversity, Rudi-Ann Miller, who practically singlehandedly has kept multiculturalism alive at Stuyvesant H.S. by being one of only 40 African-American students out of 3200 at NYC's premiere exam-only public science and math school.

She has also had enough of the grumbling at Stuyvesant that black students do better in the college-admissions game because of their skin color.

Rudi will have to assuage her hurt feelings next year at Yale.

Hey, wait a minute, what kind of African-American girl born in the 1990s is named Rudi anyway? Isn't there some foreign country where "Rudie" is close to being the national nickname?

If you followed the complaints of Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier about how Harvard's affirmative action slots tend to go to students who are not the descendants of American slaves (i.e., to Barack rather than Michelle Obama), you won't be surprised to find out from later on in the article that Rudi attended through seventh grade Campion College in Jamaica, a Jesuit school that her father, a Jamaican accounting executive recently relocated to the New York area, calls the finest in that country. (Campion College's website boasts that 14 of its graduates have gone on to win Rhodes Scholarships.)

A commenter notes:

As a Stuy alum who had many Black friends, I find it disappointing that the article didn't inquire further into the community of Black students who do make it to Stuy. While there is of course diversity within the Black community, I can testify that most are either the children of immigrants or products of inter-racial relationships. This is relevant because it shows that many are either of higher socio-economic status, or similar to the potpourri of second-generation immigrants who dominate the school. The real issue is why there are so few from the entrenched black communities, in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx who aspire to attend Stuy.

One reason is offered in the article:

Sometimes, Mr. Blumm said, blacks and Latinos who do well enough on the entrance exam to get into Stuyvesant are lured away by prestigious private high schools, which offer them full scholarships and none of the issues that even elite public schools have to contend with, like tight budgets and overcrowding.

By the way, is this the first statistical graph to be published in this century where blacks are represented by the color black? I thought there was some sort of Rule of Randomizing colors where one one graph blacks are, say, white, and whites are brown, and Chinese are green, and Mexicans are red, and then on the next graph blacks are blue, whites yellow, Asians purple, and Latinos white? I dunno, this graph could be setting a dangerous precedent by making it easier for readers to make sense out of racial data.

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

It's Annual Subculturepalooza Day

2012-02-26T14:53:00.001-08:00

A reader writes:

Academy Awards: Woodstock for women, gays, and celebrities

NBA All Star Game: Woodstock for blacks and rappers

Daytona 500: Woodstock for southerners and country stars

All on the same day! [Although rain has postponed the NASCAR race until Monday]

What's about SWPL whites, normal men, and country club Republicans? The NFL combine? Accenture Match Play championship? Our ruling elites are underserved if just for one day!

Yes, but plenty of white guys will win Oscars, so a few elite white men will be happy. The Oscar voters are 94% white and 77% male. (For some reason, the L.A. Times study that came up with this didn't ask about politics, sexual orientation, or religion/ethnicity.)

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

When was the last Mexican American nominated for an Oscar?

2012-02-26T11:26:00.000-08:00

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:

Yet the most striking diversity shortfall in Hollywood is one that would get any less liberal industry in trouble with Obama’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Los Angeles County is about half Hispanic, and Latino fans make up 30% of the enthusiasts for summer blockbusters. Despite all that, Mexican Americans—in the sense of those who have spent at least part of their formative years in America—are remarkably underrepresented in The Industry.

Wikipedia’s Oscar lists suggest that no Mexican American has been nominated in any category, no matter how humble, since the 1980s. They're riding a zero for several thousand cold streak.

Oddly enough, Mexican Americans did better in the pre-diversity days, receiving five acting nominations from 1952 through 1964.

Read the whole thing there.

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

Kipling would not have been surprised

2012-02-25T18:46:00.001-08:00

From the BBC:

Thousands of enraged Afghans have taken to the streets for a fourth day, after US soldiers inadvertently set fire to copies of the Koran.

In the deadliest day of unrest so far, at least 12 people died across the country, as mobs charged at US bases and diplomatic missions.

More than 20 people have been killed since the unrest began, including two US soldiers who died on Thursday.

It didn't end well for Danny and Peachey, either.

For the concluding scene of what all of Daniel Dravot's efforts to civilize the Afghans gets him, see here.

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

Not not from The Onion

2012-02-25T03:15:00.002-08:00

From The Onion:

"Great Team Chemistry No Match For Great Team Biology"

Despite college basketball analysts' frequent remarks that the team exhibits "great chemistry," the Texas A&M Aggies were edged out Wednesday night 66-58 by the No. 4-ranked Kansas Jayhawks, who apparently have great team biology.

Sports differ markedly in how easy it is to predict professional success, with basketball being the easiest, probably because height is so important and obvious. The NBA used to conduct a seven round draft, but bored teams would purposely fritter away later-round choices on random tall people, celebrities, and women. So, the NBA switched to only two rounds. Even so, the number of undrafted players to achieve stardom is low. The best undrafted player ever is probably defensive specialist Ben Wallace, followed by Brad Miller and John Starks and a surprisingly short list of other star players.

When you think about it, basketball's kind of a stupid sport because it gives such an advantage to height, which is a randomly genetic attribute, not an earned virtue.

Have any new team sports been invented in the last generation? We've got a bunch of new individual sports, most of them X Games stuff, like snowboard cross, that are pretty cool, but are any new team sports emerging?

In contrast, baseball's draft goes on forever. Mike Piazza was picked in the 62nd round.

In the NFL, famous undrafted players include Kurt Warner, Wes Welker, Warren Moon, and Jeff Garcia.

In golf, the creation of the Senior Tour for 50+ players led to a small number of senior stars emerging who had never had any success on the regular Tour. One had lived in his car for years, working on his swing.

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

Jeremy Lin: "These are the days of miracle and wonder"

2012-02-24T19:37:00.002-08:00

Howard Beck reports in the New York Times on late-bloomer Jeremy Lin:

The Evolution of a Point Guard
By HOWARD BECK

ORLANDO — The most captivating strand of the Jeremy Lin mystique is that he came from nowhere, emerging overnight to become a star, after being underestimated and overlooked, disregarded by college coaches, ignored in the N.B.A. draft and waived twice in two weeks.

The narrative is well-established, factual in its broadest strokes and altogether flawed, or at least woefully incomplete.

Jeremy Lin’s rise did not begin, as the world perceived it, with a 25-point explosion at Madison Square Garden on Feb. 4. It began with lonely 9 a.m. workouts in downtown Oakland in the fall of 2010; with shooting drills last summer on a backyard court in Burlingame, Calif.; and with muscle-building sessions at a Menlo Park fitness center.

It began with a reworked jump shot, a thicker frame, stronger legs, a sharper view of the court — enhancements that came gradually, subtly, through study and practice and hundreds of hours spent with assistant coaches, trainers and shooting instructors over 18 months.

Quite simply, the Jeremy Lin who revived the Knicks, stunned the N.B.A. and charmed the world — the one who is averaging 22.4 points and 8.8 assists as a starter — is not the Jeremy Lin who went undrafted out of Harvard in June 2010. He is not even the same Jeremy Lin who was cut by the Golden State Warriors on Dec. 9.

Beyond the mystique and the mania lies a more basic story — of perseverance, hard work and self-belief.

“He’s in a miracle moment, where everything has come together,” said Keith Smart, the Sacramento Kings coach, who was Lin’s coach with the Warriors last season.

Smart can hardly recognize his former pupil these days. Nor can Eric Musselman, who coached Lin in the N.B.A. Development League for 20 games. Nor can Lamar Reddicks, a former Harvard assistant coach, who fondly remembers a freshman-year Lin as “the weakest guy on the team.”

“I look at him on TV now,” Reddicks said, “and I’m like, I can’t imagine that he’s this big!”

What scouts saw in the spring of 2010 was a smart passer with a flawed jump shot and a thin frame, who might not have the strength and athleticism to defend, create his own shot or finish at the rim in the N.B.A. The evolution began from there. ...

Yet an outside shot would not be enough. Lin needed to be able to consistently convert shots in the lane. And to do that, he needed to withstand the contact.

On Scheppler’s advice, Lin sought out Phil Wagner, a physician and trainer who owns Sparta Performance Science in Menlo Park. Wagner saw a player with enviable athleticism, but who lacked the explosiveness of an elite N.B.A. player.

“Most basketball players can create force very quickly,” Wagner said, referring to a player jumping off the floor. “Jeremy couldn’t.”

He compared Lin to a stretched-out rubber band — flexible, but lacking that snap-back quality. The goal was to make him “stiffer,” through a training program of heavy weights and low repetition, in conjunction with a high-protein diet. With the added muscle, Lin pushed his weight to 212 pounds from 200, while increasing his vertical leap by 3.5 inches, Wagner said. The result is evident every time Lin barrels into the lane this season.

“The biggest thing I see is when he gets intro traffic, he’s able to maintain his direction and his balance, because he’s stronger,” Wagner said, adding, “He’s a physical guard. That’s where I see his hard work and the program he did with us paying off.”

It's a turn-around jump shot
It's everybody jump start
It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The Boy in the Bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe...
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all

Paul Simon, 1986

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

Minority victimhood kicks in at 0.1 percentile

2012-02-24T15:45:00.002-08:00

There's a fair amount of national chatter about the U. of Texas affirmative action case, but the far more revealing 5-year-old Vulcan Society v. Fire Department of New York lawsuit remains mostly of interest in the Outer Boroughs. The truth is that "affirmative action" pales in importance to "disparate impact," but practically nobody in the U.S. understands "disparate impact" law. Do you think, say, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, or Maureen Dowd could explain the EEOC's Fourth-Fifth's Rule off the top of their heads?

From the New York Daily News today:

Seven applicants who failed the FDNY written exams that a federal judge tossed out as discriminatory are not entitled to damages because their grade was less than 25.

The Vulcan Society of black firefighters, the city and U.S. Justice Department lawyers all agree that a score of 25 is too abysmally low to merit compensation.

“Such a candidate would not have succeeded due to his or her lack of effort and therefore should not be eligible for relief,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Elliot Schachner wrote in papers filed Tuesday in Brooklyn Federal Court.

Only seven black and Hispanic applicants out of 7,100 who took the tests scored less than 25 on the exams, according to court papers. Of nonminority applicants, 20 scored less than 25.

The U.S. Justice Department filed suit against the city in 2007 alleging the written exams in 1999 and 2002 discriminated against minorities.

Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis later ruled that minority candidates who were not hired and those whose hiring was delayed as a result of the test scores may be entitled to damages.

Except for the dumbest 0.1% (i.e., 7 out of 7,100) who took the test.

My recollection is that this was a multiple choice test with four answers for each questions. I don't know if 25 means 25%, but if so, that means the only minority applicants not eligible to share in the booty were those who did worse than random guessing.

But, what about firefighting applicants who were unable to finish their exam because they accidentally set their test booklets on fire? Surely, they deserve to share in the loot from the fight against racism, too?

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

Intellectualizing the Oscar movies

2012-02-24T15:06:00.003-08:00

As I mentioned before, late 2011's crop of Ocar-contender movies proved peculiarly hard to come up with anything intelligent to say about how they relate to larger themes in American life (whereas Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Bad Teacher, X-Men: First Class, and so forth from the popcorn season were smart reimaginings of things you aren't supposed to talk about explicitly). For example, the most intelligent thought I came up from thinking about "The Artist" was that maybe instead of speeding up the film 2 frames per second, they should have sped it up 4 frames.

In contrast, in years past it was easy to come up with interpretations of Oscar-nominated films radically different from the conventional wisdom: e.g., "District 9" wasn't so much an "apartheid allegory" as it was a dystopian Malthusian take on illegal immigration from Zimbabwe by a refugee Boer. "Borat" wasn't a documentary exploring prejudice in Red State America, it was a 90 minute Polish joke illustrating traditional Jewish attitudes toward goyishe kop Slavs. But, "The Artist" is a fun silent movie.

That doesn't stop pixel-stained wretches from trying, however. Here, for example, is Frank Bruni in the New York Times painfully drawing analogies between each and every one of the 9 Best Picture nominees and the GOP presidential primaries.

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

Decreasingly Asymmetric Media

2012-02-24T14:48:00.001-08:00

Henry Canaday comments:

Here’s another, related hypothesis:

1. In the early 1970s, Big Media switched from generally favoring the Democratic Party to essentially defining the liberal agenda, with the Democrats piggy-backing on this agenda to hold onto office.

For example, AFL-CIO boss George Meany, an elderly ex-plumber, went from being The Man for Democratic-leaning newspapers to being an embarrassing relic in a few years.

2. This happened because: a) Big Media had far more presence in front of voter eyeballs, in both news and entertainment, than a Democratic Party badly fractured by Vietnam and Civil Rights; b) Big Media was far more accustomed to pleasing and persuading readers-viewers-voters, since they make a living at this; c) Big Media was more unified in its view of how things should be than even Democratic politicians, who have to deal with different constituencies and with the consequences of dreamy policies.

3. For the next 20 or 30 years, Dissident Conservative Media, on radio and TV talk shows and in a few publications, devoted itself to opposing the idiocies of the Big Media-Democratic liberal agenda. This Dissident Conservative Media influenced but did not define the Republican Party’s own program.

4. During roughly the last ten years, Dissident Conservative Media has grown in presence and power and has begun to play the same role for Republicans as Big Media does for Democrats. And for much the same reasons. As media, it has far more daily contact with readers-viewers-voters than the shreds of the old Party organization and more power than even new grass-roots organizations like the Tea Party. As Media, it pleases for its daily bread and is skilled at persuading.

5. In its role of now defining the Republican Party and conservative agenda, Dissident Conservative Media is affected by some of the same factors that affect Big Media. Certain subjects are simply too unpleasant and difficult to speak about to a general audience, while retaining this audience and the revenue it brings in. These troublesome subjects include race, ethnicity and the transformation of even American whites into a slob-and-slut society.

6. So Dissident Conservative Media sticks with safer, less-offensive arguments about political principles on foreign policy, domestic policy and market economics.
I don’t think this is the whole explanation, but I think it is at least part of the explanation.

By the way, why do Republican insiders, media and wonk, really want to reclaim the White House in 2012? A second term for Obama would likely be a halcyon age for Dissident Conservative Big Media, while a first term for Romney would likely put them on the snooze-inducing defensive?

My guess is that the real reason Republican apparatchiks in Washington desperately want to win in 2012 is so that they can put in a couple of years as an assistant deputy undersecretary of this or that, making $147k or whatever, then resign and make approaching 7 figures on K Street because they have White House Experience.

Okay, I can understand that. But what's in it for the rest of us, other than the thrill of seeing Our Team Win?

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

Obama v. Romney: Literate v. Numerate

2012-02-24T01:52:00.001-08:00

If the 2012 election comes down to Obama v. Romney, it could be an interesting match-up of literacy v. numeracy. (That's assuming that Romney is as numerate as his success making money at Bain Capital suggests. At BYU, he was an English Lit major, and when he graduated in the top 5% at Harvard Business School in the 1970s while graduating with honors at Harvard Law, the curriculum wasn't all that quant. But still ...) Obama is very good with words, but I'm not familiar with a single anecdote about him suggesting one way or another how good he is with numbers. For example, I'm trying to think of Obama citing a sports statistic (he's an ESPN addict, so that's hardly an abstruse test for him). In contrast, Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said that the biggest problem with President Reagan's rough drafts for his speeches was that he put in all sorts of statistics that the speechwriters had to take out because the public doesn't like numbers.

With politicians and the electorate, I would bet on power of words over numbers.

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

"Asymmetric Political Warfare"

2012-02-23T21:44:00.001-08:00

Awhile ago at Your Lying Eyes, Ziel put up a Unified Field Theory of 21st Century politics in "Asymmetric Political Warfare:"

This imbalanced political landscape is not just restricted to the Voting Rights Act. The Republican Party is basically the party of white America, but of course such an entity as "white America" cannot be acknowledged in mainstream outlets (except of course as a source of some evil). A Republican legislator cannot complain that his constituents are being forced to move because their schools are becoming disabled by excessive numbers of non-English speakers or poorly behaved minorities. So instead he must complain about "illegal" immigration in the vaguest of terms and express displeasure with the failure of schools by blaming teacher-unions (bastions of anti-Republican rhetoric). A Democrat, on the other hand, can freely rile up his constituents by denouncing "discrimination" and favoritism, regardless of the facts.

Similarly, any Democrat politician, black or white, can make unlimited hay over alleged racial profiling among the police or "institutional racism" in the law enforcement. But no Republican politician would dare court white voters by defending the police, pointing out, for example, the disproportionately high levels of criminal behavior in the black community.

To be precise, Republican politicians are free to praise the police in general terms, but not to defend them in specific terms, such as in response to Justice Department racial profiling jihads, as in Maricopa County today. You can't say, "The reason the cops stop more blacks and Hispanics is because blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be criminals."

... The essence of this asymmetry in political combat is that Democrats are free to rabble-rouse and demagogue their positions without penalty - indeed, often with great showers of media attention for doing so - while Republicans must rouse their constituents only obliquely through proxies - religious faith, gun rights, opposition to gay marriage, and of course "No New Taxes". Even then, we often hear pundits denounce the "Three G's" - Gays, Guns and Gods - so even their proxies are derided.

But this leads to dumb policies - or at least failure to enact sensible policies. We can't have sensible gun laws, because Republicans have to prove that they sympathize with white-Americans' anxiety over the baneful impacts of minorities on their neighborhoods not by addressing that issue directly but by supporting unrestricted gun rights.

Gun control in the later 20th Century was a long war between whites in less dense parts of the country and whites in more dense parts of the country. Rural whites, rationally, considered gun ownership to be a good form of self-defense in areas where police response times were slow, the chance of accidentally plugging a bystander were low, and they had practice with guns for hunting. (In contrast, look at how vulnerable unarmed rural people in gun controlled England are to urban criminals' home invasions.)

Metropolitan whites, rationally, felt that the cops getting guns out of the hands of minorities was a better goal, but they didn't have any acceptable way to express this in public, so their arguments were generally couched in terms of the pressing need to disarm those vicious white Republicans in the hinterlands before they kill us all (see Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine for the classic expression of this ludicrous, but highly respectable, view).

In New York City, capital of both liberalism for American and pragmatism for New Yorkers, gun control actually did work pretty well in the 1990s. Under Giuliani and the smart, effective Bratton, the NYPD put a huge number of young black men in jail for packing heat. There were complaints, but NYC voters haven't elected the Democratic nominee mayor in the five elections since. But who even understands what happened in NYC? It's hard to remember stuff if you aren't allowed a vocabulary and syntax that helps you categorize What Just Happened.

Gay marriage is stupid - but the real problem is the insidious "Diversity" mentality that so offends the white middle class, but instead of fighting that, Republicans must single out Gay marriage (and even that fight is being rapidly lost). And Religion leads to unnecessary constitutional battles, while it is just a proxy of course for the desire of white Americans to keep America the way it is - not a banana republic, not a dysfunctional, balkanized economic zone, as it is on its way to becoming.

Right.

The problem is that when your enemies control the vocabulary of public discourse, it's hard to maintain a sophisticated private understanding of what is going on. Thus, the GOP lacks a brain trust of realists who determine strategy. It's fun to assume that, like in the Big Reveals at the end of 1984 and Brave New World, that their is an Inner Party of cold-eyed realists who understand all, but there's negligible evidence for this.

For example, here are a number of high life priorities for vast numbers of Republican-leaning, conservative-minded voters:

-- They want to be able to continue to live in their suburban communities where they've put down roots without being driven by demographic change to the exurbs.

-- They want to be able to send all their children to the local public school, which will be culturally dominated by the children of people like themselves

-- They want their children to be able to get into State U.

Is this too much to ask?

But, what would happen to a conservative politician who outlined these goals and endorsed policies for achieving them?

Instead, we get "conservative" politicians advocating crackpot radical ideas because they aren't supposed to advocate for what their constituents really want.

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

Are youth becoming more conservative?

2012-02-23T17:06:00.001-08:00

Here's a 2010 article by Aviel Magnezi from YNet News of Israel about how "Israeli youth" are moving right. Although much of this is driven by the huge, subsidized fertility of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel, I suspect it reflects global trends, which in other countries tend to be masked by growing demographic diversity. (You'll notice that this Israeli article simply doesn't bother to define Arab youth in Israel as Israeli, which would be a massive faux pas in other countries.)

Recent studies show that the Israeli youth is no less patriotic than the adult population, is significantly more right-wing, and is highly motivated to enlist to the IDF's combat units. ...

March 2009 saw a record in the number of recruits eligible for combat service requesting to enlist to combat units, which stood at 73%. This record was broken in November, and stood at 73.7%. March 2010 saw a new record: 76% of recruits with high medical profiles asked to serve in combat units. "This trend of attraction to the combat units is well felt in the field, and reflects a significant decline in the dropout rate during training," a senior officer told Ynet.

Along with this increase in combat motivation comes a rise in nationalism. For example, a recent poll showed that 46% of Jewish high school students in Israel object to granting equal rights to Arabs.

... Sagy believes that the mandatory military recruitment indoctrinates the youth to "see the justness in our side alone. This leads the youth to become more patriotic later on and to identify with the Israeli side." As a result, Sagy says, the Israeli youth does not see the other side, and holds extreme views, "under the patronage of the education system, the schoolbooks, the media and the social atmosphere. This is why youths here are different from their counterparts, who, in western countries, can allow themselves to hold more pluralistic views."

... Several weeks ago a poll conducted by the Smith Institute for Ynet showed that the dominant right-wing bloc in the Israeli society remains strong. According to the survey, while 35% of Israelis over the age of 30 said they would vote for right-wing parties, this number almost doubled for youths up to the age of 29, and stood at 61%.

Support for the Likud party rose from 18% to 25%, while support of the religious and ultra-Orthodox parties among the youth was also significantly high. "This is the Israeli existence… the public is moving Right," the survey said.

Professor Almog explains: "The Israeli youth is not more right-wing than its counterparts around the globe, but is simply more realistic." He said this is due to the fact that it is more involved and has a deeper political understanding than youth in other Western countries. "In Israel it is hard to avoid the news, and involvement is forced on you. The youth looks at the leadership in the Arab world and sees no moderation. It sees the incitement, and opposes it. The Israeli youth is simply more skeptical and holds a more angry perception of the other side."

Professor Ephraim Yaar a sociology and social psychology expert at Tel Aviv University who specializes in the Israeli society said, "The election results show that the youth is becoming more nationalistic, this is the spirit of the times. It is expressed in the voting booths – but not just there. Signs of nationalism can bee seen in various different fields among the youth here. This trend has been in existence for a long time, and has gained steam in the past decade."

The change, he said, stems among other things from the consistent growth of the religious and ultra-Orthodox population, but "is also part of another trend – the Israeli youth is very conformist, so when the public moves to the Right, the Israeli youth moves with it."

Perhaps the most unexpected social change in my lifetime has been the decline of the generation gap that dominated the 1960s. In retrospect, the generation gap of the 1960s looks like it was caused in large part by a lack of diversity, especially by the assimilation of the huge Catholic population, 40 years after the immigration cutoff, into the American mainstream as permanently symbolized by the election and martyrdom of John F. Kennedy.

To get organized, people need to be in opposition to somebody, so at the peak of American homogeneity and put-a-man-on-the-moon triumph, the generations divided up into opposing camps.

Judging by what's been a hit movie in recent years, I suspect that youth in America are becoming more conformist and authoritarian, too. It's okay to be against evil corporations, like in Avatar, but the U.S. military and even cops are usually portrayed much more positively than in the 1970s. And in Avatar, the 10-foot tall blue people are good because they are traditional and live according to the ways passed down by their elders. Traditionalism = Diversitism.

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

Eric Alterman and Sheldon Adelson: "A shande far di goyim"

2012-02-23T03:36:00.004-08:00

Not long ago, Mr. and Mrs. Sheldon Adelson's $5 million apiece donations to Newt Gingrich's Presidential campaign were trumpeted in the press as world-historical events, but perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of that flurry was this column in The Nation:

Sheldon Adelson and the End of American Anti-Semitism

Eric Alterman February 8, 2012

If a Jew-hater somewhere, inspired perhaps by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, sought to invent an individual who symbolizes almost all the anti-Semitic clichés that have dogged the Jewish people throughout history, he could hardly come up with a character more perfect than Sheldon Adelson.

Think about it. Adelson, who likes to brag, “You know, I am the richest Jew in the world,” is a gambling magnate who is reported to be under criminal investigation for official bribery and has been accused of having widespread ties to organized crime, including the use of prostitution for his business interests. He is openly deploying his $22 billion fortune to pervert our democracy on behalf of what he believes to be the best interests of Israel, which he defines as an endless war by the Jewish state against its adversaries, with America offering its unquestioning support. ...

It’s not as if the Adelson/Gingrich relationship has escaped scrutiny in the media or even editorial condemnation. But virtually all the attention has focused on the ability of any wealthy individual to exploit the post–Citizens United landscape for his own agenda. Nobody has noted—at least not in public—that the agenda in question happens to be the one to which Jews accused of “dual loyalty” or of being “Israel-firsters” are alleged to have dedicated themselves. How can it be that the self-proclaimed “richest Jew in the world” can buy the foreign policy of a major party’s potential presidential candidate on behalf of a vision of endless Israeli aggression—up to and including US support for yet another potentially disastrous pre-emptive attack—and the historically abused entity of “the Jews” has somehow escaped the blame?

Don’t get me wrong. While I lack sympathy for pretty much everything Adelson and Gingrich seek to accomplish, I am unabashedly thrilled that the bugaboo of anti-Semitic accusation is almost nowhere to be found. But given the near-complete disappearance of this once wholly respectable American prejudice, one must ask why so many organizations in the American Jewish community—along with their neoconservative allies in the media and policy world—remain so intently focused on this problem. Is it that the past has left them so psychologically invested in a now-discredited discourse that they lack the ability to see reality for what it is and devote themselves to more worthy causes? Or do at least some of them, as I implied in my last column, find the accusation so politically useful against Israel’s critics that they prefer to level this nefarious accusation rather than argue the merits of their position?

Yes.

Obviously, Alterman is being unfairly partisan. I don't see similar criticism of Haim Saban, Adelson's Democratic counterpart, in Alterman's 2004 Atlantic article on big Hollywood donors.

To add to Alterman's picture of Adelson, Michael Isikoff of NBC reports that Adelson orated:

“I am not Israeli. The uniform that I wore in the military, unfortunately, was not an Israeli uniform. It was an American uniform, although my wife was in the IDF and one of my daughters was in the IDF ... our two little boys, one of whom will be bar mitzvahed tomorrow, hopefully he’ll come back-- his hobby is shooting -- and he’ll come back and be a sniper for the IDF ...”

So, you'd better not accuse Sheldon of dual loyalty!

More generally, I have this assumption about human nature that criticism, on the whole, makes you behave better than being exempt from criticism, as does worrying about being criticized. Medieval rabbis advised against "A shande far di goyim" -- Don't do something shameful in front of the gentiles. For an Adelson or Saban, that concept would have put their ethnocentrism in conflict with their ethnocentrism: Is it good for the Jews for me to act in a manner flagrantly interested only in being good for the Jews? That's a good kind of question for powerful people to ask themselves.

But, as Alterman implies, that concept of being wary of committing a shande far di goyim seems to have faded out over the last couple of decades. Apparently, we now know that those Yiddish-speaking rabbis were anti-Semitic.

Personally, I like Sheldon. He's an old coot having a blast making his younger wife happy by getting wrapped up in her country's doings. It wouldn't be much of a problem if we could greet his machinations with a chuckle and an amused roll of the eyes. But that's now allowed anymore. It's the gentiles who are to be ashamed for noticing.

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

The Iranian War Machine and other golden oldies

2012-02-22T23:10:00.002-08:00

Back in the summer of 2006, war with Iran fever swept Washington when Israel got into a dustup with Lebanese Shi'ites dug into Southern Lebanon. I did a lot of research back then and discovered that ... well, fewer and fewer people outside Washington are really all that obsessed with war anymore. So, here are my half-dozen year old postings. We now have over a half-decade of history to test who was right and who was wrong in 2006: responsible foreign policy experts or me. So, who was it?

The Iranian War Machine

The small size of the Iranian economy and military

The Middle-Eastern Powder Thimble

War: The Human Race Just Isn't Trying Very Hard Anymore

The Decline in the Need for Global Force Projection

Why doesn't the Kurdish "state-within-a-state" justify war too?

The Logic of Nuclear Genocide

Hezbollah's Schmutzkrieg!

How many aircraft carriers does the Islamic World have?

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

Will Texas Affirmative Action case be all about blacks again?

2012-02-22T15:45:00.001-08:00

Earlier this year, David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy pointed out that the Fisher anti-affirmative action case from Texas, which is now going to the Supreme Court:

So, unlike every race/ethnic affirmative action case to reach the Supreme Court, where the underlying conflict has been primarily black-white, Fisher represents the affirmative action of the future, where Hispanic Americans, the largest government-defined minority group in the country, are the primary beneficiaries, and another large and growing group, Asian Americans, suffer the most harm.

This is an interesting point, but I wonder whether this will matter at all. My next Taki's Magazine column looks at the Academy Award nominations by race/ethnicity. We're all familiar with controversies over whether blacks get enough Oscar props, but I was struck by how long it has been since a person of Mexican descent who got his or her start in movies/TV in America (as opposed to being a fully formed product of the Mexico City entertainment industry) earned an Oscar nomination.

On the other hand, the concept of the Hispanic Tidal Wave is hugely popular. The Diversity Industry sees 129,000,000 Latinos in 2050 (as the Census Bureau has projected) as their meal ticket.

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

Supreme Court to take up affirmative action again

2012-02-22T14:18:00.002-08:00

The Roberts Court intends to take up the case of white girl in Texas who was denied admission to U.T. in favor of legally preferred races.

An Amherst college official responds:

“Nine years, when you’re talking about a decision of this magnitude, it really took me aback,” said Tom Parker, the dean of admissions at Amherst College. “What happens with the next president, the next Supreme Court appointee? Do we revisit it again, so that higher education is zigging and zagging? If the court says that any consideration of race whatsoever is prohibited, then we’re in a real pickle. Bright kids have no interest in homogeneity. They find it creepy.”

Obviously, Amherst could have lots and lots of Asians if it wanted them, so "homogeneity," creepy or not, is hardly a threat. But this gets at a subtle point of what is part of the package of what luxury colleges like Amherst are selling, which is that smart, studious blacks are the ultimate luxury good. Everybody has grown up being told how great blacks are, but most white people's real life experiences have tended to be a little disappointing compared to what we hear about in school and on PBS. But everybody knows that somewhere out there there must be the right kind of blacks. It's your own fault you aren't classy enough to be admitted to the right circles. But, maybe your kids can be!

So that's one of the things that elite colleges offer: carefully vetted blacks. They're very expensive, which is why the richest, most hard-to-get-into colleges (e.g., Stanford) have more of them than the not so rich, not quite as hard to get into colleges.

The man in the White House is, in this sense, a democratic luxury good. We can't all go to the Ivy League, but we can have the honor of voting for an Ivy League black as President, and thus earn some indirect classiness.

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

Is Love Still Not Colorblind?

2012-02-21T23:46:00.002-08:00

My new column at Taki's Magazine reviews the 2010 Census Bureau data on the gender gaps in interracial weddings. How have they changed since the 1990 Census data I used in Is Love Colorblind? Are there still 2.5 times as many black husband / white wife marriages than white husband / black wife ones. Are there still 2.5 times as many white husband / Asian wife couples than Asian husband / white wife ones?

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

One MILLION Dollars!

2012-02-21T19:52:00.002-08:00

The top story in the New York Times tonight is that uppity rich guys are trying to undermine the media's rightful control over who gets elected President by giving super colossal amounts of money:

In Republican Race, a New Breed of Superdonor

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE, MICHAEL LUO and MIKE McINTIRE 22 minutes ago

An exclusive club in presidential politics includes individuals, couples or corporations that have given $1 million or more to super PACs

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

Vibrancy Alert!

2012-02-21T19:00:00.000-08:00

Adam Nagourney reports in the New York Times:

Los Angeles Mayor Sets Sights on a Bigger Stage

... None of which is to say that Mr. Villaraigosa has recaptured the electric popularity that he enjoyed in the flush of his initial election, as a mayor of Mexican descent in a city with a vibrant and expanding population of Mexican-Americans.

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

Bookburning in Berlin

2012-02-21T16:54:00.003-08:00

From the files of "Who? Whom?"

The official blog of the Berlin Biennale art exhibit explains, in effect, that the festival's planned bookburning of Thilo Sarrazin's bestseller Germany Does Away With Itself is Good because the would-be bookburners are Good (they're artists!) and Sarrazin and anybody objecting to bookburning is Bad, and that's really all you need to know, so why don't all you Bad People just shut up like you are supposed to?

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

Will Fox hire Pat Buchanan?

2012-02-21T14:17:00.009-08:00

That the liberal news network MSNBC fired Pat Buchanan is hardly surprising, but what is interesting and characteristic of our age is how they justified it.

The usual way to do these things is to say something like, "We appreciate Pat's contributions to MSNBC, and we've been proud that by hosting Pat for all these years, we've increased the diversity of debate in America. But, of course, he doesn't really fit in with our audience strategy, so we've decided to go in a different direction. We wish Pat well in his future endeavors, and look forward to seeing him regularly on one of the other networks where he'd be a more natural fit, such as, say, Fox."

In other words, pat yourself on the back for your tolerance and open-mindedness and lay a booby-trap for your archrival Fox.

Instead, MSNBC announced that not only were Buchanan's ideas not appropriate for discussing on MSNBC, which is their prerogative to decide, but that they aren't "appropriate" for anybody to discuss anywhere here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave:

In January Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, said he would be meeting with Mr. Buchanan soon to discuss the commentator’s role on the channel. Referring to the book “Suicide of a Superpower,” Mr. Griffin said, “The ideas he put forth aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC.” …

When Juan Williams got fired from NPR for political incorrectness, he was immediately hired by Fox. So, what are the odds that Fox will triumphantly announce they are hiring Pat to stick one in the eye of the left? Here's a pundit, for example, explaining why Pat would be a natural at Fox.

How little they know ... There are wheels within wheels making this seemingly natural event unlikely.

As Elliott Abrams recently bragged in the Fox-founded Weekly Standard, while denouncing Tom Friedman and Joe Klein for their anti-Semitism, that policing "the bounds of public discourse" is far more important than arguing with your putative rivals. Why debate when you can silence?

"Let us not descend into such analyses when what matters is not abnormal psychology but the bounds of public discourse. Once upon a time, William F. Buckley banned Pat Buchanan from the pages of National Review and in essence drummed him out of the conservative movement for such accusations."

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

"The Artist"

2012-02-20T22:05:00.004-08:00

This is a nice little comedy, a pseudo-silent film about a silent movie star (imagine Gene Kelly playing Douglas Fairbanks Sr.), that has been saddled with being a frontrunner for the Best Picture since before it ever hit the theaters.

It would have been a fun picture to discover for yourself. If you saw "Crash" in May 2005, for example, you walked out saying, "The first hour was hilarious, and of course the second hour was eat-your-vegetables time to make up for the first half, but, overall, that was a clever low-budget movie, a lot better than I expected." But ever since it won the Best Picture Oscar, "Crash" has had this millstone around its neck of being an obvious example whenever anybody wants to disparage Best Picture choices. (I've alway had the sinking feeling that it won the Oscar for the Important Statement about Our Times of the second half, rather than for the irresponsible pleasure of the first half. But that doesn't mean that the first half wasn't amusing or that the non-fatal shooting in the second half wasn't bravura cornball screenwriting.)

Other nagging problems with "The Artist" are that the title seems like an inept translation from the French. "The Star" would have been much better, since the hero loves being a movie star and pays no attention to whether he's an artist or not. But the title "The Artist," combined with being silent and in black and white and made by a Frenchman, makes it sound like some good-for-you ordeal, which it mostly isn't.

Also, more slapstick, please. Slapstick is funny, but most people worry that it's beneath them, except when they are watching a Buster Keaton silent film classic, and then it's part of the Grand Tradition of the Cinema, etc. So why not exploit the cultural sanctity of silent film tradition by putting in more pratfalls?

The film has been slightly sped up: it runs 24/22nd faster than real time, while authentic old silents are typically shown running 24/16th faster than they were originally filmed. (Apparently, the advent of sound forced the industry to move up from 16 frames per second to 24 frames, which has done Buster Keaton's long term reputation a lot of good, but made it hard to take serious silents seriously.)

But, "The Artist" still drags a little. Abstaining from spoken dialogue puts a lot of pressure on the filmmakers to come up with interesting visuals or music to fill up its 100 minutes. They come up with about 90 minutes worth of good stuff, which is impressive, but that leaves about 10 minutes where you are saying, "Yeah, okay, we get it already." Running it at 24/20th would have made it quicker and sillier.

Or they could have played around more with the film projection speed. The early 1980s South African slapstick comedy "The Gods Must Be Crazy" about the Bushman and the Coke bottle changed speeds whenever it felt like. Fortunately, that didn't get a Best Picture nomination, so you could have the pleasure of seeing it because it was funny, not because it was good for you.

Finally, "The Artist" has hanging over its head another movie on the transition from silent to sound movies, "Singing in the Rain," which is so gigantically entertaining on the subject that little more needs to be done. For example, "The Artist" barely scratches the question of why its hero refuses to try sound movies. The film could have shown the technical restrictions that made the first few years of sound movies really stilted. But, "Singing in the Rain" did those scenes so well that how could "The Artist" compete?

Anyway, "The Artist" is enjoyable.

One general point I'd add is that this year's Oscar frontrunners are just about the worst crop to intellectualize about it in many a year. I feel sorry for the pixel-stained wretches trying to come up with their annual assignment on What This Year's Oscar Movies Say About the World Today. This isn't to say that they are bad movies, just that the late-season prestige releases aren't very intellectually stimulating. Consider, say, Michelle Williams' Best Actress nominated turn as Marilyn Monroe in "My Week with Marilyn." Here's what I have to say about that film: A. Not bad. B. Holy cow, what have their been, like 800 books on Marilyn Monroe? Is there anything left to say?

In contrast, there were a number of popcorn summer movies that were much more interesting to think about.

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

What does Mitt Romney really feel about foreign policy?

2012-02-20T19:10:00.003-08:00

Foreign policy has never appeared to have been of much active interest to Mitt Romney, unlike to, say, Rick Santorum, who can wax eloquent on the Ecuadorian Threat. Romney's large list of national security advisers is mostly ~~the same cast of idiots who helped get us into these messes~~ distinguished senior statesmen with years of experience with whom Republican primary voters can rest easy knowing that Romney isn't planning any major changes in the foreign policy mindset that has been such a winner for the GOP in the past.

But how does he really feel? Let's psychoanalyze Mitt using a minimal set of datapoints (or datapoint). The most memorable political event of his young manhood was when he was on Mormon missionary duty in France in 1967 and his Presidential candidate father announced his newfound opposition to the Vietnam War. When asked why he had changed his mind after announcing his support following a four-day visit to South Vietnam in 1965, George Romney replied:

"I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam. Not only by the generals but also by the diplomatic corps over there, and they do a very thorough job."

Romney said that sinbce then he had delved into Vietnamese history and "I have changed my mind inb that particularly I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop Communist aggression in Southeast Asia and to prevent Chinese Communist domination of Southeast Asia."

Romney Sr. was roasted for various reasons for this comment, but, really, it seems like a pretty good two-fold lesson for a loyal son: watch how you say things, but don't trust the foreign policy establishment.

But, does anybody have any idea if he drew the second conclusion?

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

Cochran on Diamond's domestication argument

2012-02-20T16:42:00.001-08:00

Jared Diamond's early 1990s book The Third Chimpanzee was a collection of smart magazine-writing at an admirably high level. Thus, the disappointment among his earliest fans over his long, tedious, tendentious and not terribly unpersuasive 1997 follow-up Guns, Germs, and Steel. Not surprisingly, GG&S was a huge hit. Undigested parts of GG&S became globs of the conventional wisdom. For example, one of the book's most popular ideas is that non-Europeans fell behind in global competition because they lacked native animals suitable for exploitation other than as meat.

At West Hunter, Greg Cochran scratches his head over this:

He claims that since Africans and Amerindians were happy to adopt Eurasian domesticated animals when they became available, it must be that that suitable local animals just didn’t exist. But that’s a non sequitur: making use of an already-domesticated species is not at all the same thing as the original act of domestication. That’s like equating using a cell phone with inventing one. He also says that people have had only mixed success in recent domestication attempts – but the big problem there is that a newly domesticated species doesn’t just have to be good, it has to be better than already-existing domestic animals.

Indian elephants, although not truly domesticated, are routinely tamed and used for work in Southern Asia. The locals in Sub-Saharan Africa seem never to have done this with African elephants – but it is possible. The Belgians, in the Congo, hired Indian mahouts to tame African elephants, with success. It’s still done in the Congo, on a very limited scale, and elephants have recently been tamed in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, such as the Okavango delta. Elephants have long generations, which makes true domestication difficult, but people have made domestication attempts with eland, African buffalo, and oryx. They’re all tameable, and eland have actually been domesticated to some extent. ...

It's not exactly a secret that Africa invaded Europe on the backs of elephants in 218 BC under Hannibal of Carthage. Of course, those weren't unusable African elephants, those were useful North African elephants, which, conveniently enough, are said to be extinct. But, obviously, Hannibal's elephants must have been fundamentally genetically different from current African elephants, which proved so useless to sub-Saharan Africans. If only elephants with the right kind of genes had existed in sub-Saharan Africa, then sub-Saharans might have conquered Europe, instead of the other way around.

In fact, in my mind the real question is not why various peoples didn’t domesticate animals that we know were domesticable, but rather how anyone ever managed to domesticate the aurochs. At least twice. Imagine a longhorn on roids: they were big and aggressive, favorites in the Roman arena.

More fundamentally, Diamond is arguing for absolute genetic determinism operating within closely related kinds of animals to deny any relative genetic influence among humans.

A less extremist view is that nature and nurture both play a role among both animals and humans. But intellectual moderation only gets you in trouble these days.

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

Welcome to the Post-Obamamania Era

2012-02-20T01:52:00.005-08:00

Sports columnist William C. Rhoden complains in the New York Times:

Between the Tebow phenomenon in the fall and the recent Lin explosion, I had been asking myself a variation of Lobo’s question: When was the last time a young, untested professional African-American athlete had been on the receiving end of this type of adulation? Specifically, adulation that had more to do with positive, universal characteristics — faith, humility, selflessness — than with athletic acumen.

The intensity and suddenness of Lin and Tebow’s acceptance has led to a flotilla of half-baked ideas about sports and religion and ill-conceived, even insulting notions about race and ethnicity.

Examples involving African-American athletes were difficult to come by, especially adhering to the criterion of athletes who had come from out of the blue, because very few athletes do these days.

LeBron James was on the cover of Sports Illustrated when he was a 6'-8" 240 pound high school junior.

(Tim Tebow didn't exactly come out of nowhere: he was one of the most famous college football players ever. But he has the worst throwing motion in the NFL since roughly Doak Walker's era, so it was very interesting watching him try to make it in the NFL. He is a white quarterback with a typical black QB's skill set (good runner, not so good passer), so that was intriguing. Plus the super-sophisticated passing game of white NFL QBs these days is a little intimidating, so it was interesting watching him try -- and often succeed -- at winning games through old fashioned heart, guts, and sheer dumb luck, like a high school quarterback in a Chip Hilton boy's novel.)

The point of bringing up Robinson and the Williamses in the context of Tebow and Lin is that African-American athletes faced and continue to confront negative stereotypes that militate against being invested with the type of universal character traits that are at the root of the Tebow and Lin phenomena.

Asian-Americans often complain about being stereotyped as smart, authors of perfect College Board scores. The Asian-American is stereotyped as unathletic.

African-Americans fight the stereotype of lazy, undereducated products of dysfunctional homes. The African-American is stereotyped as ultra-athletic.

You know, there's something blacks could do about that: stop being so often lazy, undereducated products of dysfunctional homes. C'mon, just do it to spite us.

The panel at the Connecticut Forum never did satisfactorily answer Rebecca Lobo’s question about black equivalents to the Tebow-Lin phenomenon. Lobo’s inquiry is actually an important question for the 21st century. As we in the United States continue to dance around issues of ethnicity, using diversity as a diversion, we will continue to struggle with the pick-and-roll of race.

From CNBC in 2010:

In fact, LeBron is now the sixth most disliked sports personality, according to The Q Score Company, behind Michael Vick, Tiger Woods, Terrell Owens, Chad Ochocinco and Kobe Bryant. ...

Perhaps equally as interesting is the fact that James has apparently dragged down the general population’s opinion of his new teammates.

Dwyane Wade’s positive Q score went from 21 in January to 15 today.

His negative Q score rose from 18 in January to 25 today. Chris Bosh – whose move to Miami was part of what sealed the deal for LeBron – saw even a worse drop.

Personally, I think the public's negative reaction to LeBron James' decision to team with two other stars in Miami to try to win an NBA title was unfair. I think he just got caught in an ongoing unspoken reaction to the long series of events that culminated in the craziness of Obamamania in 2008. Talk about a guy coming out of nowhere for no particular reason other than his race. But, that's history now, and, though we're not supposed to articulate it, attitudes have been changing since 2008.

Blacks aren't the underdogs anymore, so people are looking for new underdogs. As I mentioned before, linebacker Dat Nguyen could have been a great story back in the 1990s, but that was the Michael Jordan era and people weren't interested. By now, however, blacks have been top dogs in sports and popular culture for so long, and lots of people are tired of that and less naive, so they are open to alternatives.

P.S. If you want to group Tebow and Lin, the real connection is that neither one is cut out to be a humble, team-first role player. Both need the ball in their hands all the time to do their thing. John Elway would have been very happy if Tebow had volunteered to help out at, say, tight end or linebacker. But Tebow has been dead set on being an NFL quarterback, so that's out. Similarly, no NBA team figured out a subordinate role in which Lin could contribute. Only when the Knicks, having lost their three biggest stars for one game, simply turned the entire offense over to Lin did a role for him in the NBA emerge: star.

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

Which half-Asian athlete was a 1960s MVP?

2012-02-20T00:32:00.003-08:00

When reading about Jeremy Lin, I often get the impression that sportswriters' memories of history look like this: "Uh, cavemen, pyramids, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali," and then a game-by-game recollection of everything from the 2001-2002 season onwards.

The reality is that a lot has been forgotten because it didn't particularly lead anywhere the way Jackie Robinson did.

Here is a picture of a player who won the Most Valuable Player award of a major American professional sports league during the 1960s. His father was Asian. And he had a Spanish surname.

He even had a minor league movie and TV career for a few years. He made his TV debut on Gilligan's Island as "a native." This movie still is from the 1969 John Wayne Western The Undefeated, in which he was fourth-billed as Wayne's American Indian right hand man.

His father was Filipino, his mother Irish. He seemed to get his size genes from his mom's side of the family, because he was famous for being perhaps the first huge quarterback, listed at 6'5" and 220 pounds, which was enormous for a quarterback at the time. (His archrival Fran Tarkenton, for instance, was 6-0 and 200.) He threw very hard, with a tight burning spiral. By the standards of his day, he was seldom intercepted, but his receivers had difficulty hanging onto his passes as well.

After starring at North Carolina St., he was the #2 overall draft choice in the 1962 NFL draft. He went on to be the NFL's 1969 MVP as quarterback of the Los Angeles Rams. He was a Pro Bowler coach George Allen's Rams in 1967, 1968, 1969, and for Philadelphia in 1973. In other words, he was real good -- not a Hall of Famer, but a big time NFL quarterback in his day.

His name is Roman Gabriel.

As far as I can tell, however, Gabriel's career did not lead to a major breakthrough of part-Southeast Asians into the NFL.

By the way, I think the stereotype of Asian-Americans as violin-playing non-athletes has gotten stronger, not weaker over my lifetime, due to academic-selected immigration and increased Tiger Mothering. When I was a kid, Orientals were seen as short, but, after the Recent Unpleasantness at places like Iwo Jima, not necessarily delicate.

For example, the New York Knicks drafted a Japanese-American basketball player out of Utah in 1947 (and then cut him after three games).

Or, the Japanese-American family who moved in across the street from me in 1969 were tough athletes. The dad was a high school wrestling coach and assistant football coach and both sons became all-league high school football players. (The father, an extremely friendly fellow with a frightening tough guy face and martial arts skills, enjoyed a profitable sideline playing ninjas, Yakuza henchmen, and Shaolin assassins in movies and TV shows like "Kung-Fu.") This was seen as a little unusual at the time, but not really extraordinary.

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

The great factory worker shortage of 2012

2012-02-19T20:56:00.001-08:00

The Washington Post has a long article on how factories in Michigan can't find enough workers to operate today's complicated high tech machine tools. Near the end, we read:

The shortage of skilled workers has also pushed up wages, though executives said raising them too far could push more work to overseas plants.

So, why would you invest in getting trained (typically, on your own dime), when executives have been boasting to Wall Street for years about how they'll offshore your future job the moment you start to make real money?

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

How good was Jeremy Lin in college?

2012-02-18T17:20:00.010-08:00

Why was Jeremy Lin undrafted coming out of the Ivy League? Well, he wasn't really that great in college. He was definitely one of the top players in the Ivy League his junior and senior years, but he was never Ivy League Player of the Year. (Sidenote: the President's brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, won that honor twice.)

Lin's college statistics are good, but nothing special: Senior year: 16.4 ppg, 4.4 rpg, 4.5 apg. His shooting percentage of .519 sounds good by NBA standards, but it's nothing special for future NBA stars, who routinely crush mortal competition their last year in college. Lin's percentages: .519 field goal, .341 3-point, and .755 free throw were all fine, but hardly eye-popping. He led the league in steals, which is a sign of quickness and floor sense, was second in assists, but only sixth in assists to turnover ratio.

Lin's senior year, the Ivy League award winner, unanimously, was Randy Wittman, who led Cornell to the third round of the NCAA tourney, with upsets of #5 and #4 seeded teams. Where is Wittman now? He's playing professionally ... in Poland. Must be bias against Wittman ... except his father Rick Wittman is now in his third NBA head-coaching gig, this time with the Washington Wizards.

Generally, Ivy League Player of the Year winners don't make it in the NBA. Matt Maloney in 1995 was the last to have much of an NBA career, once scoring 26 in a playoff game.

So, Lin looked like a very good all-around player, but with little statistical evidence that his game would translate to the next level. When I was at Rice, one year our best player was a senior named Elbert Darden, who averaged 20.1 ppg., and was honorable mention All American. He was a good guy, on and off the court. Back then, they used to have seven rounds to the NBA draft (now they have only 2, right?). He wrote a letter to the NBA saying, "Please don't waste a draft pick on me, I'm going to seminary school to be a minister," which he did.

Anyway, I suspect Ivy League basketball has slowly gotten a lot better over the years, due to the Ivy League's role as the gatekeeper to Wall Street jobs, which have gotten so much more remunerative than any other career. If you've got a good head for numbers, why not go Ivy League now that Ivy League financial aid is so lavish? So, Ivy stats shouldn't be discounted as much as in times past.

With Lin, he tended to post big numbers against big name out of conference opponents, then recede somewhat in league play. With the best players in the Ivy League sticking around for four years to get their valuable diplomas, in contrast to big time college ball where one and done is the norm for top talent, the quality of Ivy League regular season play might now be a lot higher than is assumed.

Before the best players could go to the NBA early, conference play was hard because the same players met year after year. For example, the 1969 UCLA Bruins, with senior Lew Alcindor / Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (the future all time NBA scoring leader) leading them to a third straight national championship, was one of the best teams ever. Going into the last conference home and away series against USC, they were 84-1 with Alcindor, losing only to Elvin Hayes in the Houston Astrodome when Alcindor was hurting. But USC took them to overtime at Pauley, then beat them the next night at the Sports Arena. How? Well, the Trojan players had been thinking a long, long time about how to beat Alcindor and the Bruins. Similarly, by his fourth year, Lin's Ivy League opponents probably had better ideas about how to defend him than the Lakers had.

Also, keep in mind that Lin wasn't really a point guard in college, he was more like a Best Player on the Team guard, like a Harvard version of Michael Jordan. He didn't have any success in the pros until he was the best player on the team again due to problems with the Knicks.

I think the weird thing with Lin is that everybody still expects him to be a good role player and teammate because he's Chinese, and everybody is tired of self-centered black players like Carmelo Anthony. In the post-Obama age, lots of people have gotten tired of waiting for their dividend from electing Obama in terms of better black behavior, so they are seizing upon this Chinese guy as a role model to show up blacks with his team-oriented play.

But the evidence so far is that Lin does best, like against the Lakers, in Gimme the Damn Ball and Get Out of My Way situations. As a basketball talent, he's less like Derek Fisher and more like Allen Iverson.

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

Telegraph: "The plot to create Britain's super race"

2012-02-17T22:57:00.007-08:00

From The Sunday Telegraph:

The plot to create Britain’s super race

In 1940, Yale University gave 125 children of Oxford academics refuge from the Nazis. Jonathan Freedland reveals how leaders of the eugenics movement may have planned to repopulate a devastated Britain with a 'superior’ breed of human.

By Jonathan Freedland 7:00AM GMT 12 Feb 2012

At first glance, it is an utterly benign and heart-warming story, a tale of child-rescue and salvation, of friendship across the ocean at a time of war. And for those involved, especially the children sheltered from Hitler’s bombs by one of America’s most prestigious universities, it was no more complicated than that: an act of altruistic, life-saving generosity.

And yet this story might have a twist, a suspicion that somewhere behind this deed of great kindness lurked a darker motive.

The story – which forms the backdrop of my new novel, Pantheon, published under the pseudonym Sam Bourne – begins in the mid-summer of 1940, with Britain isolated and alone against the Nazi menace.

... That was certainly the fear among the fellows and dons of Oxford in June 1940, as they received an unexpected letter from their counterparts across the Atlantic at Yale. It came from a new entity calling itself the Yale Faculty Committee for Receiving Oxford and Cambridge University Children and it offered nothing less than a haven an ocean away.

While plenty of British children had already been evacuated from the cities to the countryside, this was an offer on an altogether different scale – the promise of complete escape from the war in Europe. Children who went to America would evade not only the Luftwaffe’s bombs but the dread prospect of German invasion.

... In the end, the parents of 125 Oxford children decided to say yes to Yale.

... Among them was five-year-old Juliet Phelps Brown, now Juliet Hopkins, whose parents were convinced that Britain was about “to become a province of Germany” and who could not countenance living in such a place: “How could academics live with people who burned books?”

... In this, they were not so unique. By one estimate, some 5,000 children sought refuge from the war in the US, with another 6,000 fleeing to Canada.

... Officially, the Yale sojourn was the product of what Ann Spokes – now Ann Spokes Symonds, long-time chronicler of the evacuation and still active as a historian – refers to as the fellowship of scholars, “the camaraderie between educated people” that connected two great universities. Yale simply empathised with Oxford’s plight and wanted to help.

But others suspect that is not the whole story. Juliet Hopkins had such fond memories of her time at Yale, she went back there to do postgraduate work, initially staying with her old foster family. Still, she is among those who have long nurtured a suspicion, not about the families who opened their homes to the sons and daughters of strangers, but about the organisers of the Yale effort. Put bluntly, they wonder if their rescue was motivated in part by an idea that today makes most of us shudder: eugenics.

In the pre-war period, the belief that society should strive to breed a better quality of human stock was utterly mainstream, on both the Left and Right, in both Britain and America.

Eugenics, one of whose leading evangelists was Charles Darwin’s son Leonard, saw the human race as no different from any other animal: just as a farmer raising livestock seeks to breed more of the strong and weed out the weak, so human society should aim to do the same.

According to the eugenicists, whose number in pre-war Britain included some of the luminaries of the age – Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, William Beveridge, John Maynard Keynes, Marie Stopes and others – those deemed superior in intellect and of greater moral worth should be encouraged to have more children; those branded inferior should be urged, or even coerced, to have fewer children or none at all.

Could this kind of eugenic thinking have prompted Yale’s decision to offer a haven to those Oxford children? Was Yale hoping to save the offspring of the British academic elite, protecting those 125 children because it saw them as a future leadership class especially deserving of preservation? Is it true that, as Hopkins puts it, “They wanted to save the gene pool”?

It is striking that Yale’s offer was made exclusively to the children of Oxford and Cambridge. Note the words used by Dr John Fulton of Yale Medical School, a prime mover behind the effort, who declared that his rescue committee hoped to save “at least some of the children of intellectuals before the storm breaks”.

... Crucially, eugenics was not just mainstream in pre-war Yale, it was, in the words of Gaddis Smith, Emeritus Professor of History at Yale and the author of a forthcoming history of the university, “red hot”.

... Meanwhile, Smith describes Yale’s president until 1937, James Angell, as “a fanatic eugenicist in the worst meaning of that word”. According to Angell, who wrote an introduction to Leonard Darwin’s What is Eugenics?, “Modern medicine, unless combined with some kind of practicable eugenic program, may result in an excess of feeble and incompetent stock.” In other words, pre-war Yale was in thrall to an idea that today strikes us as horribly close to Nazism.

Smith is candid that the university was then also “notorious as a bastion of anti-Semitism”. The professor has seen documents that show there was some discomfort at the discovery that one of the Oxford mothers was “a Jewess”.

This, then, was the intellectual climate of the campus in which the Oxford evacuation plan was hatched.

Even without an explicit statement of intent, it seems hard to believe eugenics did not play a key part in the decision to protect those 125 “children of intellectuals”, thereby deeming their lives more worthy of saving than the lives of those other British children who would have been lost.

Once Pantheon was completed, I sent an early copy to Juliet Hopkins. She discovered there something she had never known before – that Ellsworth Huntington, the man who had taken in her brother, her mother and her, the man she still remembers as a kindly, grandfatherly figure so generous he insisted his two British foster children be educated privately at his expense, was not only the Professor of Geography at Yale. He was also a past president of the American Eugenics Society.

And so, seven decades later, the suspicion lingers on.

'Pantheon’ by Sam Bourne is published this Thursday (Harper Collins, £12.99 )and is available from the Telegraph bookshop at £11.99 + £1.25 p&p. To pre-order, call 0844 871 1516 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

Jonathan Freedland / Sam Bourne is a columnist for the Guardian and the Jewish Chronicle.

From the dust cover promotional copy of Pantheon:

The darkest secrets of World War II… finally revealed.

Europe is ablaze. America is undecided about joining the fight against Nazism. And James Zennor, a brilliant, troubled, young Oxford don is horrified. He returns one morning from rowing to discover that his wife has disappeared with their young son, leaving only a note declaring her continuing love.

A frantic search through wartime England leads James across the Atlantic and to one of America’s greatest universities, its elite clubs and secret societies – right to the heart of the American establishment. And in his hunt for his family, James unearths one of the darkest and deadliest secrets of a world at war…

Spoiler alert: The darkest secret of WWII (and of a couple of decades after that, as well), apparently, is that Ivy League and Seven Sisters freshmen had their pictures taken naked as part of a study of whether body shape could be used to predict behavior. (There is, or was, a naked picture of Hillary Clinton at Wellesley in some dusty archive somewhere. John Derbyshire wrote about William Sheldon's study in 2002.) It all had something to do with eugenics and since we all now know that eugenics=Hitler, it's, therefore, the darkest secret of WWII.

In a sane world, some friend of Jonathan Freedland would have laughed out loud at him when he recounted the plot for his upcoming thriller and said, "Oh, come on, Jonathan: eugenics, Yale, Nazis, elite WASP secret societies, Darwinists, shiksas being talked into taking their clothes off for dubious reasons: this sounds like a Mel Brooks parody of tired Jewish obsessions and neuroses."

But in our world, nobody dares laugh and explain to poor Mr. Freedland that his fixations are amusingly shopworn and stereotypically Jewish, so we keep hearing this kind of hilariously stupid stuff over and over.

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

Judge Blink and the new "Blink" theory of disparate impact

2012-02-17T22:00:00.004-08:00

As you may recall from Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Blink, you should always trust your instantaneous assessment of any situation. Except when you are wrong. Or, when you are right but are politically incorrect. A big part of Blink was devoted to implicit association tests that determine if one is subconsciously more likely to associate words like "crime" with a picture of, say, OJ Simpson than of, say, Peyton Manning. Or something like that.

Oddly enough, Judge Robert Blink has been assigned a huge employment discrimination trial based on the Blink theory that whites can't help being subconsciously evil to blacks, as shown by implicit association tests (and by nothing else).

Denied jobs, blacks in Iowa test new bias theory

By RYAN J. FOLEY | Associated Press – 2 hrs 55 mins ago

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — In a case closely watched by civil rights activists, an Iowa judge will soon decide whether to grant thousands of black employees and job applicants monetary damages for hiring practices used by Iowa state government that they say have disadvantaged them.

Experts say the case is the largest class-action lawsuit of its kind against an entire state government's civil service system, and tests a legal theory that social science and statistics alone can prove widespread discrimination.

The plaintiffs — up to 6,000 African-Americans passed over for state jobs and promotions dating back to 2003 — do not say they faced overt racism or discriminatory hiring tests in Iowa, a state that is 91 percent white. Instead, their lawyers argue that managers subconsciously favored whites across state government, leaving blacks at a disadvantage in decisions over who got interviewed, hired and promoted.

Judge Robert Blink's decision, expected in coming weeks, could award damages and mandate changes in state personnel policies or dismiss a case that represents a growing front of discrimination litigation.

"Whenever there is a case like this that goes to trial, it's of interest to all of us," said Jocelyn Larkin, executive director of the Impact Fund, a Berkeley, Calif.-based nonprofit that supports employment discrimination lawsuits and has followed the case. ...

University of Washington psychology professor Anthony Greenwald, an expert on implicit bias who testified on behalf of the plaintiffs, said the decision will be important nationally because similar cases against corporations have usually been dismissed or settled before trial.

Scholars and employment lawyers have shown a growing interest in implicit bias in the last several years, after Greenwald and other scientists developed the Implicit Association Test to test racial stereotypes. Their research found an inherent preference for whites over blacks — in up to 80 percent of test-takers and among many people who do not consider themselves racist.

The theory hit a legal obstacle last year when the U.S. Supreme Court disqualified a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart's pay and promotion practices for women. The court found the class was too broad and failed to challenge a specific hiring practice as discriminatory.

Lawyers defending the state have cited that decision in asking Blink to dismiss the case. But the high court's decision did not specifically reject the theory of implicit bias, and dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that such claims can be allowed.

Class attorney Thomas Newkirk said the science and other evidence that shows disadvantaged groups such as blacks face employment discrimination in subtle ways "is becoming overwhelming."

"Clearly, the problem is not in Iowa alone, but we believe Iowa is the exactly the right place to ask society to take control of this important issue fairly for all races, and to seek a better future for all as a result," said Newkirk, who was recently honored by the Des Moines chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for his work on the case.

During a monthlong trial last fall, experts called by the plaintiffs' lawyers testified that blacks are hired at lower rates than whites with similar qualifications and receive less favorable evaluations and lower starting salaries.

If Iowa is only hiring the cream of the crop of black applicants, shouldn't the black hires be performing better, not worse, than the white hires? Or maybe they are but their evaluations are worse because everybody is so unconsciously biased. After all, Science is the art of creating unfalsifiable theories. It's discrimination turtles all the way down.

In its most prominent recent exercise in hiring, the state of Iowa voted for Obama over McCain 54-45, but they were just doing that to cover up. We can tell.

By the way, seriously, Iowa has few but bad blacks. In 1997, Iowa had the highest black incarceration rate among the 50 states. Liberal north central states with strong safety nets like Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, tended to attract the last and worst Southern blacks to leave.

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

A strange story

2012-02-17T20:06:00.005-08:00

Here's an odd story from the BBC:

'Stolen' $9m jewels found in drawer

Red faces over 'missing' jewels

Five years after their disappearance, jewels thought stolen from the wife of the US ambassador to the Netherlands in 2006 have been found in the Hague.

Dawn Arnall realised her 7m euro (£5.9m; $9.3m) gems were missing months after staying in a Dutch hotel.

Unknown to her, the jewellery had been found and was held for safekeeping by the hotel, AFP reports, before being given to an employee as unclaimed.

The employee, assuming the items were costume jewellery, forgot about them.

Must be tasteful looking if everybody assumed they had to be costume jewelry.

Only after she recently found them in a drawer and took them to a jeweller for valuation did their true worth emerge.

They were then handed in to police and have since been returned to the US.

Mrs Arnall, whose husband Roland was the US ambassador to the country prior to his death in 2008, had received an insurance payout for her loss.

What adds interest to this was that subprime billionaire Roland Arnall, whom Bush had appointed Ambassador to the Netherlands for raising $12 million for him, who was the biggest donor to Arnold Schwarzenegger and, before him, Gray Davis, who co-founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the brow-beating Museum of Tolerance, was the founder of a couple of the biggest and worst subprime boiler rooms, Ameriquest and Argent. Previously, he had founded the notorious Long Beach Mortgage, which Washington Mutual bought.

In 2006, Arnall paid a $325 million fine to settle a lawsuit brought by 49 state attorneys general. Yet, Congress approved his nomination as ambassador. (Overall, states performed somewhat better in regulating subprime than feds, who mostly egged them on. The states were operating, on average, under older laws, while the feds were operating mostly under the U. of Chicago-style consensus that emerged over the last generation or so.) Here's Arnall's obituary by E. Scott Reckard of the L.A. Times, who covered subprime in real time better than anyone else. Roland invented the "stated income loan," which did so much to help people realize the American Dream.

His widow Dawn is being sued by his brother for $47.6 million. The brother claims that Roland claimed he was strapped for cash because of the $325 million fine.

I've never been tempted to write detective novels, because I have the world's worst criminal mind. I couldn't invent a scam to save my life. But, this jewelry discovery sounds like it would make a good opening chapter in a mystery.

In general, here we are five years down the road from the first subprime collapses, such as that of New Century Financial in February 2007. Has anybody tried to fictionalize the SoCal subprime scam artists yet?

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

More "Daily Mail" Awesomeness

2012-02-17T17:38:00.011-08:00

From the World's Leading On-Line Newspaper:

Did Yale University plan to create an intellectually superior race of children to repopulate Britain after World War Two?

Yale University only offered children of Oxford and Cambridge university staff an evacuation to the U.S.

One evacuee has raised questions about the experience asking did they want 'to save the gene pool?'

Yale's president James Angell was 'a fanatic eugenicist in the worst meaning of that word'

By JILL REILLY

Yale University has been accused of trying to create a super race of British children during War World Two, it emerged today.

The Daily Mail takes this kind of thing personally. If this nefarious eugenicist plot had succeeded, how many readers would the Daily Mail have left these days? How many footballers' wives would there be to feature in its pages?

By the way, Wikipedia doesn't say anything about Yale President Angell, a psychologist of the John Dewey school, being a eugenicist or not, but it does say this:

James Rowland Angell was born on May 8, 1869, in Burlington, Vermont. He was born into one of the stellar academic families in American history. His father, was the president of the University of Vermont. He was the youngest of three children, with an older brother and sister. When Angell was two years old, his family moved to Ann Arbor so that his father could take up the presidency of the University of Michigan. His maternal grandfather, Alexis Caswell, was a professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at, and later president of, Brown University. He was also a charter member of the National Academy of Sciences. His brother Alexis Caswell Angell became a professor of law of Michigan, and later a federal judge. His sister's husband, Andrew C. McLaughlin, was head of the history department at Michigan. His cousin, Frank Angell, founded psychology laboratories at Cornell and Stanford Universities.

Granted, he had retired as president of Yale two years before WWII broke out, but still, with a family background like that, I think we must judge James Angell Guilty! of at least having eugenicist suspicions. And once you admit that crime, well, the whole breeding a race of superchildren thing pretty much follows automatically.

I think the Daily Mail should get together with New York Times and conduct the Neo-Nuremberg Trials of all the arch-criminal eugenicists who didn't get tried at Nuremberg: you know, Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, Ronald Fisher, J.M. Keynes, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, the Webbs, Teddy Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Harold Laski, Hans Muller, Margaret Sanger, Gifford Pinchot, William Shockley, Louis Terman, William D. Hamilton, and, Mr. Big himself, Charles Darwin. Dig 'em up and give 'em the hanging they deserve.

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

Who are the truly insane?

2012-02-17T14:49:00.003-08:00

A factsheet from Mind, a big mental health NGO in the U.K., laments the inability of the Welsh Assembly to legislate racial equality in mental health:

Both past and recent research suggests that some groups – notably Black Caribbean, Black African and other Black groups – are over-represented in psychiatric hospitals. [7]

The high number of African Caribbean people being diagnosed with schizophrenia is well documented, with some studies reporting between two to eight times higher rates of diagnosis compared to the White population. [8]

The ‘Count me in’ census was introduced in England in 2005 and designed to support the Department of Health’s five year action plan ‘Delivering Race Equality in Mental Health Care’. The census also aimed to support the Welsh Assembly Government’s ‘Raising the Standard: Race Equality Action Plan for Adult Mental Health Services in Wales’. Key goals were to reduce rates of admission, detention and seclusion among black and minority ethnic groups.

I like how the Welsh Assembly, a rather new and ill-defined governmental body, rather than make a priority out of, say, filling potholes, decides to solve a problem that no other government has solved.

Unfortunately the figures show that these goals have not been achieved. [9]

Data from the 2005 ‘Count me in’ census showed that men from Black and White/Black mixed groups had the highest rates of admission to psychiatric hospitals. They were three or more times likely than the general population to be admitted. Women from the Black and mixed White/Black groups were two or more times likely than the general population to be admitted to psychiatric hospitals. Unfortunately, figures from the later surveys, including the 2009 ‘Count me in’ census, suggest the situation is still the same. [10]

White British, Chinese and Indian men were less likely than the average population to be admitted according to figures from all the five Count me in census reports. [11]

Men from Black Caribbean, Black African, and other Black groups were more likely than other groups to have been detained under the Mental Health Act 1983. The figures follow the same pattern in all the ‘Count me in’ reports from 2005 to 2009. [12]

Studies have shown that Irish people have higher rates of mental illness than the general population. [13] The Irish are often overlooked because they are White. Yet studies have found that Irish-born people living in the UK have a higher rate of suicide than any other minority ethnic group living in the country. [14]

Yes, let's ignore the decisions of doctors, cops, and the patients and their families themselves in favor of endorsing the Standard Social Science Model of the impossibility of underlying inequality existing. Having more black male psychotics and schizophrenics wandering the streets is a small price to pay for how much more sanctimonious we will feel after publicly kowtowing to the SSSM.

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

The ultimate tool in marketing

2012-02-17T14:35:00.002-08:00

The Atlantic has a long article "How Your Cat is Making You Crazy" on an old Cochranian bug-a-boo: germs that take over the volition of their hosts and make them do stuff that passes along the germ but don't do the host any good, to put it mildly, like making mice attracted to cats.

The crazy cat lady syndrome where a woman ends up with dozens of cats might have something to do with viruses in the cats colonizing her mind and telling her to provide lots of hosts for themselves.

That seems like the ultimate frontier in advertising and marketing. Who knows? Maybe Apple bioengineered a virus that makes people crave shiny Apple products?

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

The Vietnamese non-Jeremy Lin

2012-02-16T19:34:00.015-08:00

Why do some things become media sensations and others don't? For example, in the 1998 Cotton Bowl against UCLA, Texas A&M linebacker Dat Nguyen, born in a refugee camp in Arkansas, put on one of the greatest defensive performance I've ever seen in college football. UCLA won, but an L.A. Times headline read: "Nguyen Simply a Blur to UCLA Blockers: Smallish Texas A&M linebacker sets record with 20 tackles, 15 solo." He was a striking player to watch because his legs didn't look long enough to get him where he needed to go, but, somehow, he usually got to the ballcarrier ahead of his ten teammates. Watching the game, you couldn't help thinking, "A few more men like him, and South Vietnam wouldn't have lost the war."

The next season, Nguyen was a consensus All-American, won the Bednarik and Lombardi trophies for best player in college football outside the glamor positions. He still holds Texas A&M's career record with 517 tackles. The all-time NCAA record is 545 tackles.

He was drafted in the 3rd round by the Dallas Cowboys, became starting middle linebacker (the central position on defense) in his second season, and by 2003 was second team All Pro. A neck injury ended his career after 7 years, but he was quickly hired as an assistant coach by the Cowboys, and is now an assistant coach at A&M.

In other words, Nguyen enjoyed sustained levels of achievement that Lin is years away from. (I don't want to sound like Mr. Negativity about Lin, but it's not all that astounding that a point guard on a mediocre team can rack up a lot of points over a limited number of games if he chooses to shoot a lot and his shot is falling. Heck, Nate Archibald did it for 2 straight seasons in the early 70s. For example, Nguyen's college stats, playing in a tougher conference, are much better than Lins' were playing in the Ivy League.)

But, there was never much, if any, media circus around Nguyen. To be precise, he got the amount of press coverage suitable for being possibly the best defensive player in college football in 1998, plus additional coverage for the novelty factor of his being Asian. Yet, the Nguyen story never really grabbed the interest of the public like the Lin story has. For example, his name hasn't come up much over the last couple of weeks. Outside of Vietnamese-American and Texas football circles, he seems forgotten. Why the difference in public reactions? Why no Nguyensanity?

- College Station, TX is a long way from Madison Square Guard? Okay, but the Dallas Cowboys are not usually an overlooked team.

- Texas A&M isn't Harvard?

- Football players wear helmets with faceguards?

- Offense over defense?

- More Asian-Americans in the U.S. than 10-15 years ago?

- Vietnamese less important than Chinese?

- Basketball statistics more understandable to casual fans than Nguyen's huge number of tackles?

- Today's Internet even more fad-friendly?

- Although the names rhyme, Lin looks easier to pronounce than Nguyen?

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

Are Brazilian immigrants Latinos?

2012-02-16T13:46:00.006-08:00

I can never keep straight whether Brazilians are supposed to be Hispanic/Latino or not -- and therefore a legally protected class eligible for affirmative action and disparate impact discrimination lawsuits. That's because the U.S. government is woozy on this question. Brazilians don't speak Spanish so they can hardly be said to be Hispanic, but they are from Latin America, so maybe they are Latino?

The 2010 Census said:

“Hispanic or Latino” refers to a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race

Okay, so Brazilians are from "South or Central America," but they aren't from "Spanish culture or origin." There's no logical AND in the definition that says they have to be "Spanish culture" but it's kind of implied.

So, it's a mess. But, after all, there are only 195,000,000 people in Brazil, so why should the U.S. government bother to make up its mind before even more get here? After all, we can all predict that once enough Brazilians are in the United States to make up a sizable political bloc and they realize the advantages of being a protected class, they will be definitively defined as entitled to all the preferences currently going to Latinos. That's how things work in the U.S. As Christopher Caldwell said in a slightly different context:

"One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong."

Update: I found an essay from the always helpful Pew Hispanic Center on "Who Is Hispanic?" Basically, it comes down to shamelessness:

Here’s a quick primer on how the Census Bureau approach works.
Q. I immigrated to Phoenix from Mexico. Am I Hispanic?
A. You are if you say so.
Q. My parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico. Am I Hispanic?
A. You are if you say so.
Q. My grandparents were born in Spain but I grew up in California. Am I Hispanic?
A. You are if you say so.
Q. I was born in Maryland and married an immigrant from El Salvador. Am I Hispanic?
A. You are if you say so.
Q. My mom is from Chile and my dad is from Iowa. I was born in Des Moines. Am I Hispanic?
A. You are if you say so.
Q. I was born in Argentina but grew up in Texas. I don’t consider myself Hispanic. Does the Census count me as an Hispanic?
A. Not if you say you aren’t.

(No, I didn't make that up. Let me take a moment once again to salute the Pew Hispanic Center, which is about ten times better than they would have to be.)

At present, not many Brazilians in the U.S. say they are Hispanic/Latino. That would be a good reason to emphasize the word "Hispanic" over "Latino," since the former probably turns off Brazilians. We are not miserable Hispanics, we are proud Lusitanics!

Anyway, I bring Brazilians up because the Economist had an article on race in Brazil, "Affirming a Divide." Whether or not Brazilians are Hispanics, they share a lot of cultural traits with Latinos: namely, they are racist as hell. It's just not old American-style one drop anti-black racism. Instead of a color line, they have a color continuum, which allows practically everybody to discriminate enthusiastically against somebody a little darker or woolier-haired than themselves. You can even hope to rise up the color continuum. Ambitious Brazilians can get their hair relaxed, stay out of the sun, maybe use one of those scary-sounding skin bleachers like Sammy Sosa did, and, voila, they are whiter than they used to be. Similarly, if sisters can be racially different in Brazil is one is fairer and straighter-haired. And if not you, then perhaps you can marry a fairer person so your children will be fairer. And even if you can't do that, perhaps one of your children will look whiter just due to random genetic luck. So, there is always hope for social advancement!

Not surprisingly, this works as a pretty effective Divide and Conquer strategy for the whites who run Brazil. Thus, only over the last decade has the Brazilian government begun gingerly experimenting with race and class-based affirmative action, and still does very little in the way of suing for discrimination.

Also, not surprisingly, it's easy to cheat the new quota system in Brazil: get a tan, get your hair permed, and maybe you'll get in under a quota. They are supposed to have panels to inspect people who claim to be black enough to qualify for a quota. That would make a fun Brazilian reality TV / makeover show: You could follow two groups: a bunch of blackish people trying to lighten up to get past the velvet rope at a fancy nightclub, and a bunch of whitish people trying to darken down to win quota spots at a university.

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

Long reviews of "Coming Apart"

2012-02-15T22:36:00.000-08:00

Here are some reviews of Charles Murray's new book:

F. Roger Devlin in The Occidental Quarterly

Andrew Gelman on his stats blog

Thomas Edsall in the NYT.

David Frum at the Daily Beast.

Foseti at Foseti.

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

What We Talk About When We Talk About Contraception

2012-02-14T22:15:00.001-08:00

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:

What has the recent hubbub over “contraception” really been about, deep down? On the surface, it’s all maneuvering for the 2012 election, but the passions unleashed, especially on the liberal side, suggest motivations that are more inchoate than tactical.

Few topics are more important than the quantities and qualities of future human beings. But the question of whom the government nudges to reproduce (or not) is a subject you are no longer supposed to discuss thoughtfully, so it mostly flares up as anger.

Read the whole thing there.

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

Are Daddy Issues hereditary?

2012-02-14T18:23:00.002-08:00

From Yahoo News:

US filmmaker Sean Stone, son of Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone, converted to Islam on Tuesday in Iran, where he is making a documentary, he told AFP.

As I've mentioned before, over the decades, as the rest of the world has come to hate Oliver Stone, I've grown fond of him. And now I look forward to another generation of Stones carrying the torch of Having Issues on a grand scale.

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

Inequality in California

2012-02-14T17:07:00.005-08:00

The price of Apple stock recently broke the $500 per share barrier.

Heather Mac Donald has an article in City Journal on California's Demographic Revolution that gives a pretty sophisticated look at what's going on out here outside the glittering coastal region: not much.

The good news: the latest Hispanics youths are learning English, they aren't committing as many crimes as their predecessors, and aren't very politically ambitious on the whole. The bad news: they aren't studying very hard, aren't showing much in the way of smarts, aren't starting many businesses, aren't participating much in Silicon Valley, are voting steadily Democratic, are using a fair amount of welfare, aren't generating all that much tax revenue, aren't getting married, and so forth and so on.

Moreover, their fields of academic concentration are not where the most economically fertile growth will probably occur. At California State University in 2008, just 1.7 percent of master’s degree students in computer science were Mexican-American, as were just 3.6 percent of students in engineering master’s programs. The largest percentage of Mexican-American enrollment in M.A. programs was in education—40 percent—despite (or perhaps because of) Mexican-Americans’ low test scores.

The future mismatch between labor supply and demand is likely to raise wages for college-educated workers, while a glut of workers with a high school diploma or less will depress wages on the low end and contribute to an increased demand for government services, especially among the less educated Hispanic population. U.S.-born Hispanic households in California already use welfare programs (such as cash welfare, food stamps, and housing assistance) at twice the rate of U.S.-born non-Hispanic households, according to an analysis of the March 2011 Current Population Survey by the Center for Immigration Studies. Welfare use by immigrants is higher still. In 2008–09, the fraction of households using some form of welfare was 82 percent for households headed by an illegal immigrant and 61 percent for households headed by a legal immigrant.

From an oligarchic point of view, Mexicans make a pretty untroublesome hewer of wood and drawer of water class, in the short run.

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

Charles Murray interviews black guy from Onion

2012-02-14T12:55:00.010-08:00

Here's Charles Murray taking Onion digital editor Baratunde Thurston's "How to Be Black" quiz and having Thurston take Murray's "How Thick Is Your Bubble?" quiz.

Thurston, by the way, is a graduate of Sidwell Friends and Harvard.

Here's Murray's complex way of scoring his quiz. (I think Murray's first question is his worst: asking you to estimate what percentage of your adult neighbors had college degrees when you were a kid is too hard. Maybe Tom Wolfe or Edith Wharton kept track of that when they were ten, but I didn't. But the quiz gets better.)

You can see what score I got in my American Conservative review of his book:

To illustrate the degree of social insulation that the people who read serious nonfiction books like Coming Apart have engineered for themselves, Murray has crafted an amusing survey on “How Thick Is Your Bubble?” Questions include “During the last month, have you voluntarily hung out with people who were smoking cigarettes?” “Since leaving school, have you ever worn a uniform,” and “During the last year, have you ever purchased domestic mass-market beer to stock your own fridge?”

That last one stumped me since I buy Anheuser-Busch Natural Light, a cheap sub-mass-market product aimed at college kids—on campus, Natty Lights are known as “frat water”—and solitary imbibers who like their modest amount of alcohol without all that tiresome beer flavor. I emailed the author to learn how I should score my answer, but after a lengthy exchange, we concluded that anybody whose first reaction is to contact Charles Murray to discuss one’s taste (or lack thereof) in beer was kind of missing the point of his survey.

Read my whole thing there.

By the way, have you noticed how The Onion is seldom as funny about race as they are about other topics? It's almost as if they were scared. In contrast, here are some videos from the new Comedy Central sketch comedy show Key & Peele, such as Key in Black Hawk Up, about how black people are not all that stoic about their fear of heights. Or Peele in Yo Mama Has Health Problems.

I saw Keegan-Michael Key at the Groundlings in West Hollywood in December in "The Black Version" where they take movies like Die Hard and improvise what a black version would look like. Key is extraordinary, although his range can detract from the basic appeal of "The Black Version" concept: for example, he decided to make Alan Rickman's terrorist character into an evil French Canadian and riffed on French Canadianness at length with great inventiveness, although the audience would have preferred him to riff on African Americanness. (Both Key and Peele are middle class mulattos with white moms.)

By the way, mamas don't let your babies grow up to be comedians. "The Black Version" is something of a hit in live improv in L.A., which means that about 95 people were in the audience for the Groundlings show with five fine veteran sketch comedians (two of them familiar from long runs on MadTV, a director, three musicians, plus a lighting/sound guy. We paid $14 per ticket from Groupon (no drink minimum). You do the math.

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

Was Beowulf an empty nester?

2012-02-13T20:42:00.003-08:00

HBD Chick has had some great posts. Here's one on French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd's seven types of family systems:

This is enormously complicated just for Europe alone. That's one problem with cultural anthropology that isn't really the anthropologists' fault: the subject matter is endlessly convoluted. (Of course, cultural anthropologists don't help by resisting all attempts at reductionism.)

So let's just focus on the yellow area, home to what Todd calls the "absolute nuclear family:"

1. Absolute Nuclear Family:

a. Spouse selection: Free, but obligatory exogamy.

b. Inheritance: Indifference - no precise rules, frequent use of wills.

c. Family Home: no cohabitation of married children with their parents.

d. Representative Nations, Peoples, Regions: Anglo-Saxon world, Holland, Denmark.

e. Representative Ideology: Christianity, Capitalism, `Libertarian' Liberalism, and Feminism.

For example, being an empty nester is a popular goal in Anglo-Saxon cultures, while striking lots of other peoples as sad and lonely.

The yellow area (southern Norway, Denmark, coastal Netherlands, England and Edinburgh) corresponds closely to the old Anglo-Saxon lands. (I don't know about Brittany, though). And, indeed, this is the system dominant in what Todd calls the Anglo-Saxon countries today. One interesting question is: When did this start? I don't think it's visible yet in Beowulf, but I could be wrong. But it seemed to get going close to 1,000 years ago.

All this ties into Tory Cabinet minister David Willetts' portrait of the Deep Structure of being English:

"Instead, think of England as being like this for at least 750 years. We live in small families. We buy and sell houses. … Our parents expect us to leave home for paid work …You try to save up some money from your wages so that you can afford to get married. … You can choose your spouse … It takes a long time to build up some savings from your work and find the right person with whom to settle down, so marriage comes quite lately, possibly in your late twenties. "

The long-standing English aversion to arranged marriages reflects this distinction. It's noteworthy that Shakespeare and his English audience sided with Romeo and Juliet against their kinfolk. Willetts theorizes:

"A small, simple family structure not driven by the need to pass on an inheritance or to sustain ties with brothers and cousins in a clan can be more personal, intense, and emotional—a clue to England's Romantic tradition."

Willetts points out that most other languages have "specific words for particular types of uncles, grandparents, and cousins", but the English apparently never needed to develop these terms. As far back as 1014, he says, Bishop Wulfstan of London "expressed regret that vendettas were not what they used to be as family members just would not join in". (In contrast, the more clannish Scots kept alive kin-spirit, transmitting it down to their Scots-Irish descendants, such as the Hatfields and McCoys who waged a famous feud in Appalachia.)

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

Safe American Home

2012-02-13T18:14:00.001-08:00

From the AP:

Associate Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court was robbed by a man armed with a machete while vacationing on the island of Nevis in the West Indies last Thursday ...

now they got the sun, an' they got the palm trees
they got the weed, an' they got the taxis
whoa, the harder they come, n' the home of ol' bluebeat
yes i'd stay an' be a tourist but i can't take the gunplay

i went to the place where every white face is an
invitation to robbery
sitting here in my safe european home
i don't wanna go back there again

Joe Strummer, The Clash, "Safe European Home," 1979

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

Ross Douthat gets the Charles Murray book's biggest oversight

2012-02-13T08:20:00.005-08:00

To avoid inflaming his liberal critics, Charles Murray specifically states that he won't talk about illegal immigration in discussing the state of changes in the white working class over the last 50 years. Fortunately, Ross Douthat in the NYT points out how unrealistic this is:

Third, if we expect less-educated Americans to compete with low-wage workers in Asia and Latin America, we shouldn’t be welcoming millions of immigrants who compete with them domestically as well. Immigration benefits the economy over all, but it can lower wages and disrupt communities, and there’s no reason to ask an already-burdened working class to bear these costs alone. Here the leading Republican candidates have the right idea: We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants, while making it as hard as possible for employers to hire low-skilled workers off the books.

This aside, the debate over the white working class has have been a little surreal, with Murray, who grew up in Newton, Iowa and clearly retains a natural degree of loyalty, and who now lives in a rural town, is being attacked for insensitivity to the white working class by NYC-DC pundits who wouldn't live amongst the white working class if you paid them to.

I see the shapes,
I remember from maps.
I see the shoreline.
I see the whitecaps.
A baseball diamond, nice weather down there.
I see the school and the houses where the kids are.
Places to park by the fac'tries and buildings.
Restaunts and bar for later in the evening.
Then we come to the farmlands, and the undeveloped areas.
And I have learned how these things work together.
I see the parkway that passes through them all.
And I have learned how to look at these things and I say,

(CHORUS)

I wouldn't live there if you paid me.
I couldn't live like that, no siree!
I couldn't do the things the way those people do.
I couldn't live there if you paid me to.

I guess it's healthy, I guess the air is clean.
I guess those people have fun with their neighbors and friends.
Look at that kitchen and all of that food.
Look at them eat it' guess it tastes real good.

They grow it in the farmlands
And they take it to the stores
They put it in the car trunk
And they bring it back home
And I say ...

(CHORUS)

I say, I wouldn't live there if you paid me.
I couldn't live like that, no siree!
I couldn't do the things the way those people do.
I wouldn't live there if you paid me to.

I'm tired of looking out the windows of the airplane
I'm tired of travelling, I want to be somewhere.
It's not even worth talking
About those people down there.

David Byrne, Talking Heads, "The Big Country," 1978

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

My review of Charles Murray's "Coming Apart"

2012-02-13T08:07:00.001-08:00

From my review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 in The American Conservative:

In 1950 my wife’s uncle, the son of a West Side of Chicago ditch digger, won a scholarship to MIT. Back then it was unusual enough for anybody from Chicago to go all the way to Massachusetts for college that the local newspaper printed a picture of him boarding the train for Cambridge. By the 1960s, however, the spread of standardized testing had helped make it customary for elite universities to vacuum up larger and larger fractions of the country’s cognitive talent. The long-term implications of this momentous change are quantified in Charles Murray’s new book on the evolving American class system, Coming Apart.

The book pulls together strands of his thought going back three decades, a period during which Murray has been the model of a public intellectual. Striving to reconcile contrasting virtues, Murray has displayed a dazzling gift for sophisticated data analysis while remaining devoted to making his books as broadly comprehensible as possible. He’s a social-scientific elitist and a civic egalitarian; a libertarian and a communitarian; a truth-teller and a thinker of the utmost judiciousness.

Not surprisingly, none of these strengths have made the co-author of The Bell Curve terribly popular, especially because in the 18 years since the publication of that infinitely denounced book about the growing stratification of America by intelligence not much has happened to prove it in error. In 2012, it looks like it’s Charles Murray’s world and we’re just living in it.

Murray isn’t hated for being wrong but instead for authoritatively documenting the kinds of things that everybody uncomfortably senses are true.

Read the whole thing there.

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

The solution for unwanted statistics

2012-02-12T20:16:00.010-08:00

Earlier, I was whining about how the CIA no longer bothers to update its fascinating table in the CIA World Factbook on countries' military expenditures as a percent of GDP. For example, the U.S. number still says, comically, "2005, est." Heckuva job, CIAie!

There's another federal website featuring unpopular data that would be too embarrassing to delete, to which the feds have found a similar solution: just let it wither on the vine by never updating it. That's the Bureau of Justice Statistics' page on Homicide Trends. It's still there, but the latest data is for 2005. I started looking at it when debating Steven Levitt in 1999, and it was annually updated with each year's new numbers. But, now, it doesn't appear to have been updated in a half decade.

I'll just paste the top part of this Justice Department webpage right here:

Homicide Trends In The U.S.

Trends by race

Racial differences exist, with blacks disproportionately represented
among homicide victims and offenders

In 2005, homicide victimization rates for blacks were 6 times higher
than the rates for whites.

To view data, click on the chart.

[D]

For more information about racial patterns in violent victimization
see Key Facts at a Glance.

In 2005, offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher
than the rates for whites

To view data, click on the chart.

The genius behind this is that if the Obama Administration simply deleted it, Rush Limbaugh would have a field day. But by never updating it, it's increasingly not news. It's so far out of date that it gives the news media an excuse to ignore it. Who knows what could have happened since 2005? Maybe whites have higher homicide rates than blacks today. Who can say? So, best to just ignore the whole subject until the feds post some newer numbers, whenever that might be.

P.S., You can find the Homicide Offending by Race graph extended out through 2008 by downloading this PDF, and then paging down to p. 11. What could be more convenient? Apparently, PDF is the hot new technology sweeping aside outmoded HTML. It's so much easier to cut and paste!

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

Tiger Mom and Eagle Dad

2012-02-12T18:10:00.006-08:00

The Daily Mail has a looong story on the Chinese businessman who makes his 3-year-old kid run around in the snow in his underpants in New York as part of his "Eagle Dad" parenting style.

If all goes to plan, it will get him into a top university by the age of ten.

The father himself revels in the name Eagle Dad. He said: ‘Like an eagle, I push my child to the limit so he can learn how to fly.’

However, He Liesheng concedes that his techniques have strained his marriage, saying: ‘His mother just wants him to be a normal boy but I want him to be exceptional.’ ... The result, Mr He claimed, is that his son had an impossibly high IQ score of 218 when he was tested at the age of 36 months.

One of the innovations that makes the Daily Mail of London such an awesome online newspaper (it recently passed the New York Times in readership) is that they understand that there's no reason for a length limit to online stories. It used to be that tabloid papers like the Daily Mail had short articles, but now it has more long stories.

If the New York Times has a reporter talk to a news source for 30 minutes, they'll use maybe one minute as the perfect quote. That's what editors are for! But if a Daily Mail reporter talks to a news source for 15 minutes, they'll post 5 or 10 minutes worth of stuff. If they take 20 pictures, they'll post six of them. After all, there's no real opportunity cost.

And if you want to read about some deplorable Chinese father tormenting his kid, then you probably want to wallow in the topic. So, why not just dump everything in the reporter's notebook into the posting?

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

"Five Myths about Whites"

2012-02-12T01:37:00.022-08:00

Charles Murray writes in the WaPo's "5 Myths" format:

5. White Americans are yesterday’s news.

You don’t need to see a young black family in the White House to understand that American demographics are changing. In the 2010 census, non-Latino whites made up 64 percent of the population, down from 69 percent in 2000, 76 percent in 1990 and 80 percent in 1980. In 2011, non-Latino whites for the first time constituted a minority of children under age 2 — the harbinger of a nation in which whites will be a minority. That’s no myth.

Yet, 45 of 50 governors and 96 of 100 U.S. senators were still non-Latino whites in 2010. Whites also were 92 percent of the directors nominated for Academy Awards between 2000 and 2011. They were 96 percent of Fortune 500 chief executives in 2011. The numbers are similar for other influential positions in U.S. society. At least for now, the rhetoric about the fading role of whites in American life outruns reality.

The Best Director Oscar nominees make up one of those lists that are good for counting. Everybody would agree: that's a pretty good job. So, Best Director nominees comprise one list of 21st century Alpha Dogs. And, Hollywood's not some redoubt of right-wing racists, right? As Murray writes in his new book: "The liberalism of the film industry is openly proclaimed by its top stars, producers, and directors," which he documents with the following inarguable footnote: "Source: almost any Academy Awards show."

Plus, Best Director nominations are open to people from all over the world. The first nonwhite Best Director nominee was Hiroshi Teshigahara for Woman in the Dunes in 1965. Obviously, the Academy is biased toward people working in America or Britain, and/or working in English, but not always.

On the other hand, directing movies is one of those really good jobs where the affirmative action runs out. It's like CEO: it's hard to file a disparate impact discrimination lawsuit against a business enterprise over a position where the sample size is one. Not surprisingly, therefore, CEOs and movie directors aren't that sympathetic to lesser whites' complaints about quotas.

In general, there isn't much affirmative action in Hollywood. Screenwriting is about as equally white as directing. Even film crews around L.A., for example, are islands of white unionized blue collar workers (with jobs fairly hereditary) in a Latino sea. It would be amusing to see a Democratic Administration sue Hollywood for disparate impact discrimination, but, for some reason, that almost never happens.

Murray's 92 percent white among Best Director nominees is kind of lowballing the white percentage for the last 60 Best Director nominees (assuming the Coen Brothers count singly). We're talking about a single American-born NAM, Lee Daniels for Precious. Then we've got Taiwan-born Ang Lee with two nominations. So, that's 3 out of 60 or five percent non-white.

After that, it's the usual niggling over who isn't quite white. Everybody else looks pretty white to me: Fernando Meirelles of Brazil (City of God) looks like Ken Burns. Terrence Malick (Tree of Life), who is half-Assyrian Christian, cast Brad Pitt to play his dad. Pedro Almodovar is a Spaniard from La Mancha. I'd say the man from La Mancha is pretty Euro. My favorite moment in Michel Hazanavicius's cute The Artist is when his 1927 hero escapes Bolshevik secret policemen and flies off from the Soviet Union, triumphantly shouting (on a title card) "Long Live Free Georgia!" So, I'd say he's pretty Caucasian. (No, my guess was wrong, he's not Georgian, he's Jewish from Lithuania.) Alejandro González Iñárritu of Mexico City (Babel) looks like a Hungarian friend of mine.

I would guess Murray is counting González Iñárritu as a Latino, but he's different from, say, Robert Rodriguez, who is tall and white-looking, too, but at least comes from a big family in San Antonio where the NAM concept makes sense. Picking some banker's son from Mexico City like González Iñárritu and declaring him to be non-white is kind of applying contemporary American ideas to a different culture. I mean, was Jorge Luis Borges nonwhite? I'm a Big Tenter when it comes to how many people I want in the tent with me not getting racial/ethnic preferences from the government and how few are outside getting them or thinking that they ought to get them.

So, I come up with 95% white (and 97% male - one female nominee is the daughter of an earlier Best Director Oscar winner and the other was married to a Best Director winner). Whatever the precise percentage is, it's really high. You can argue over individual cases (where's Wong Kar-Wai or Guillermo del Toro?), but it's not like Spike Lee got ripped off by not being nominated for She Hate Me or Rodriguez for Machete.

P.S. I suspect that Murray's 92% comes from using the 2000-2011 Academy Awards show years rather than the 2000-2011 release years, which would then include M. Night Shyamalan for his 1999 movie The Sixth Sense. As a Big Tenter, I would like Shyamalan in the Unpreferred Caucasian tent with me, but the Reagan Administration saw it differently in 1982 when they took South Asians out of the Caucasian category and put them in with Orientals (now renamed Asians) so they could get minority business development low-interest loans and preferences on government contracting.

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

British Breeding

2012-02-10T20:12:00.010-08:00

Here's an obituary from The Telegraph in 2010, which I'm putting up here because it sheds some light on issues in earlier postings below.

Professor Richard Darwin Keynes

Professor Richard Darwin Keynes, who died on June 12 aged 90, devoted years to the study of the South American adventures of his great-grandfather, Charles Darwin, and achieved scientific eminence in his own right as Professor of Physiology at Cambridge University.

As a young neurophysiologist, working with Alan Hodgkin, Keynes carried out experiments with radioactive tracers to follow movements of ions in animal nerve fibres. His discovery that sodium ions rush into a nerve cell and potassium ions rush out when the cell is stimulated supported work on the ionic basis of the nerve impulse for which Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley won the Nobel Prize in 1963. Later on Keynes worked out how electric eels project huge electric charges to stun and kill their prey. Jared Diamond recently nominated Hodgkin and Huxley's discovery as his favorite scientific explanation.

Nobel Laureate Andrew Huxley was the grandson of Darwin's Bulldog T.H. Huxley. His half-brothers were the more famous biologist Julian Huxley and the novelist Aldous "Brave New World" Huxley. Andrew's more literary half-brothers were descendants of Thomas Arnold, the reforming Rugby headmaster portrayed in Tom Brown's Schooldays, and related to Thomas's son Matthew Arnold, the famous critic whose 1851 poem "Dover Beach" is kind of the mood music of Darwinism. (Here's a Huxley-Arnold family tree.)

... Richard Darwin Keynes was born on August 14 1919 into two illustrious Cambridge dynasties. His father, Sir Geoffrey Keynes, was a prominent surgeon, bibliophile and younger brother of the economist John Maynard Keynes. His mother, Margaret, was the daughter of Darwin's son, the astronomer and mathematician Sir George Darwin, and sister of the artist Gwen Raverat.

Three of Charles Darwin's sons were knighted for services to science.

This guy's uncle, J.M. Keynes, was ridiculously smart. Bertrand Russell, who didn't particularly like the economist, complained of:

a certain hard, glittering, inhuman quality in most of his writing. ... Keynes’s intellect was the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known. When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool. I was sometimes inclined to feel that so much cleverness must be incompatible with depth, but I do not think that this feeling was justified.”

Keynes' sister Margaret married Archibald Hill in 1913, who won the Nobel in Physiology in 1922.

To continue with the obituary:

In 1945 Richard Darwin Keynes married Anne, daughter of Lord Adrian, thereby adding another great Cambridge dynasty to the family DNA. She survives him with three sons. Another son predeceased him.

Edgar Adrian won the 1932 Nobel for Medicine and Physiology.

I wonder if poor Richard Darwin Keynes went through life feeling like a complete flop because he was practically the only man he knew who didn't have a Nobel Prize or launch an ism like Darwinism or Keynesianism? And if he had come up with a whole new and permanently controversial perspective, what would it have been called? His last name and middle name were already taken. I guess it could have been called Richardism.

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

38 points for Jeremy Lin

2012-02-10T19:48:00.007-08:00

The Taiwanese-American kid from California scored a career high tonight in a win over the L.A. Lakers. He has averaged 28.5 ppg over the last 4 games, on 57% shooting.

Overall, a pretty lousy game for both teams, though. The Laker strategy mostly involved having Kobe shoot fall-away jumpers over double-teams. He made some of them, but we've seen him do that once or twice before, so it's not as interesting as watching Lin play. The Lakers' point guard Derek Fisher is a great guy, the last player remaining in the NBA who played on the famous '71 Knicks squad (if memory serves), but he is getting on in years and can't really keep up anymore with all the Chinese Harvard talent in the NBA these days. Andrew Bynum continues to be a very large person, but he seems less like a Lakers center (Mikan, Wilt, Kareem, Shaq) and more like a Clippers center (Benoit Benjamin, Michael Olowokandi).

Okay, the Lakers did have one interesting play where Kobe got trapped by a double team at the top of the key, and to keep from getting whistled for traveling (assuming traveling is still illegal in the NBA) intentionally slammed the ball off the backboard from 20 feet away. Since nobody on the Knicks had any idea what was going on, Kobe had no trouble grabbing the rebound of his intentional miss at the free throw line, and passing it out to a teammate for a wide open basket.

This concludes my commentary on the 2012 NBA season. See you in 2013!

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

Why does Britain have so many yobs these days?

2012-02-10T18:00:00.009-08:00

Everybody is talking about Charles Murray's book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. My review is in the February issue of The American Conservative, where I mention a comparison that isn't getting much talked about: if you think the American white working class is deteriorating, what about their British distant cousins?

When British center-leftists like John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge were planning the post-war welfare state, they were worried when the eugenics-inspired rules they'd wanted were left out by Parliament at the last moment. Keynes and his friends feared that without eugenicist limitations upon welfare, within a few generations the country would be overrun by chavs. From "How Eugenics Poisoned the Welfare State" in The Spectator in 2009:

A century ago many leading leftists subscribed to the vile pseudo-science of eugenics, writes Dennis Sewell, and the influence of that thinking can still be seen today...
William Beveridge, later to emerge as the midwife of the post-1945 welfare settlement, was also very active in the eugenics movement at this time. Today, Beveridge is generally portrayed as a kindly, avuncular figure, one almost dripping with compassion and benevolence. But his roots were in a particularly hardline strand of eugenics. He argued in 1909 that ‘those men who through general defects are unable to fill such a whole place in industry, are to be recognised as “unemployable”. They must become the acknowledged dependents of the State... but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights — including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood.’ And that, except for the loss of fatherhood, has effectively been his legacy.

Eugenics was no quickly passing fad. The Eugenics Society reached its peak, in terms of membership, during the 1930s, and the cusp of the following decade saw the zenith of its prestige. The economist John Maynard Keynes served on the society’s governing council and was its director from 1937 to 1944. Once again, this was no casual hobby. As late as 1946 Keynes was still describing eugenics as ‘the most important and significant branch of sociology’.

The most likely reason Keynes stopped giving pro-eugenics speeches after 1946 was because he was dead.

Working alongside Keynes at this time as the editor of Eugenics Review was Richard Titmuss, soon afterwards to become an influential professor at the London School of Economics working on social policy, and who would ultimately be dubbed ‘the high priest of the welfare state’.

It was during the late 1930s that much of the detailed planning for the welfare state was carried out. And a good deal of it was undertaken at meetings of the Eugenics Society. On the evening that the House of Commons met to debate the Beveridge Report, Beveridge himself went off to address an audience of eugenicists at the Mansion House. He knew he was in for a rough ride. His scheme of family allowances had originally been devised within the Eugenics Society with a graduated rate, which paid out more to middle-class parents and very little to the poor. The whole point was to combat the eugenicists’ great bugbear — the differential birth rate between the classes. However, the government that day had announced a uniform rate. Beveridge was sympathetic to the complaints of his audience and hinted that a multi-rate system might well be introduced at a later date.

Of course, today we all know that welfare couldn't have dysgenic and/or dyscultural effects. In fact, Science tells us that welfare state Britain couldn't possibly wind up after a few generations with lots of anti-intellectual yobs who think that studying is only for toffs and poofters, that toffs are poofters. How pseudoScientific Keynes was! He must have been a poofter toff himself to be so pseudoScientific.

In further fact, we all know from reading nice people like Paul Krugman who worship Keynes that Keynes and his friends were nice people too and couldn't possibly have ever had such thoughts. Keynes' head would have exploded from the not-niceness if this idea had ever even occurred to him.

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

Is the white-black cognitive / achievement gap smaller in the U.K.?

2012-02-10T15:38:00.012-08:00

Probably.

Chuck at Occidentalist assembles a bunch of test reports, here and here. It's not as well-studied of a subject as it is in the U.S., so it's hard to make sense of all the data, but most point toward the white-black gap in the U.K. being well under a standard deviation.

I haven't seen a good meta-analyses by a British researcher who knows the ins and outs of all these acronyms like GCSE. (For example, a few years ago a British researcher slipped up on writing about regional differences in performance on the SAT in the U.S. because he didn't know that only the most ambitious students in the Midwest take the SAT instead of the ACT -- so what pitfalls await American kibbitzers among British test scores?) But most of the data seems to suggest a smaller cognitive and/or achievement gap in the U.K. than in the U.S.

It has been apparent for some time now (see this post at Racial Reality) that in Britain, the lads are not all right. In the U.S., we've become familiar with gender gaps on school achievement tests favoring black and Hispanic girls over their brothers, but we see less of this among whites and Asians. This is among the better evidence that culture -- fear of being put down by your co-ethnics for Acting White, etc. -- is depressing NAM performance.

On a lot of tests, in Britain, there's even a bigger gender gap favoring the distaff side, but it seems to go across all ethnicities, even Chinese. We see weird things like girls whose parents are from Africa outscoring white boys and maybe even East Asian boys on some tests.

As I pointed out in a couple of articles in 2005, class is the big divide in Britain rather than race. "Class" is a 1500-year-long project to civilize the Conan the Barbarian warlords who inundated the Roman Empire to act like "gentlemen." By the late 20th Century, all that politeness, all that studying, all that self-discipline, was striking young males of the lower classes as pretty gay. Thus, chavism.

In contrast, there isn't all that much of an oppositional culture among blacks in Britain, since assimilating into the white working class isn't terribly hard: You like 'aving a pint while watching footie on the telly, too? The proportion of mixed race children appears much larger than in the U.S. As historian David Starkey pointed out during the English looting last summer, that blacks were in the lead, but whites were right behind in the looting -- something you don't see in the U.S much at all.

Moreover, blacks in Britain are of immigrant origin: West Indian and African, with the Africans doing better on tests, typically. Some not insignificant fraction of Africans in Britain were brain-drained from Anglophone ex-colonies to work in National Health as nurses and doctors. In the U.S., West Indians and African immigrants tend to outperform native blacks. The Bell Curve found that in the NLSY79 longitudinal study, blacks who were immigrants or the children of immigrants outscored native African-Americans by an average of 5 IQ points.

But, those are just a few speculations. It's an interesting question that, as far as I know, hasn't been studied terribly systematically.

Update: lots of good stuff in the comments from people who know more about what they are talking about when it comes to Britain than I know.

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

Updated: How to make a grown cop cry

2012-02-09T20:36:00.005-08:00

Have you ever noticed how many policemen and firemen will stand up in court and swear that they, personally, are the world's biggest wimps when it comes to suffering endless horrors from psychologically "hostile work environments" down at the station? They make associate feminist studies professors seem stoic. Mostly, of course, it's black cops and firefighters looking for 7-figure payoffs as victims of discrimination, but whites are getting into the act, too. [A reader sends me a new story from Buffalo about white firemen getting $2.7 million for "emotional distress" in a Ricci-style case. I've added it below.]

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Bizarre behavior recounted in Richmond racism suit

by Kevin Fagan

Between tales of one police captain dropping to all fours to yell "don't beat me" and black and white commanders angrily proclaiming they were being discriminated against, jurors got a stark depiction Thursday of a Richmond Police Department consumed with racial tensions in 2006 when Chris Magnus took over as chief.

The revelations came as Magnus spent a second day testifying in a Contra Costa County Superior Court trial over a lawsuit claiming he had discriminated against seven high-ranking black officers.

Plaintiffs' attorney Stephen Jaffe tried to make Magnus look like a disconnected leader who revealed racist bents in quips and favoritism, while the chief attempted to portray himself as working to dispel racial tensions that he found when he took the job.

One of the most bizarre moments came when Magnus described an incident in which then-Capt. Cleveland Brown,

Was his dad a football fan? Isn't "Cleveland Brown" a character on Family Guy?

one of the commanders suing him, came into his office to complain that he didn't want then-Capt. Lori Ritter to become deputy chief.

Magnus said Brown had told him he thought Ritter - who, like Magnus, is white and a defendant in the trial - was a racist, and then had pantomimed his displeasure.

"I remember him getting down on all fours and raising up his arms and saying, 'Don't beat me, Miss Lori!' " Magnus said. "It was kind of hard to tell if he was joking or if he was acting out a story.

"I was floored by it," the chief told the jury. However, he added, "that was pretty typical for Cleveland. He was very animated, very loud, very extreme."

He also said Brown had told him that "an African American captain shouldn't have to work for a white female."

In their lawsuit, the black commanders contend it was Magnus who made racist remarks, telling plaintiff Lt. Arnold Threets to imagine Ritter standing over Brown, cracking a whip and telling him to dance.

After the exchange with Brown a few months after Magnus took the job, the chief made Ritter his deputy. He later demoted Brown to lieutenant.

Magnus also described a hellish staff retreat in Napa nine months into his job, in which he tried to get black and white commanders to discuss racial tensions and cliques in the department.

Napa Valley sure can be hellish. I heard there's this one resort in Napa that once served a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon at 72 degrees, because it thought that "room temperature" means room temperature in a modern American building not room temperature in a drafty old French chateau.

Instead, he said, Brown and others remained hostile and said they didn't want to cooperate with his new, community-minded policing style.

The chief said he was "upset" by the tenor of the retreat and told his officers that "if you want to engage in bias, engage in cliques, then you need to work somewhere else, or I will make your life a living hell."

The suing commanders have contended that such statements created a racially hostile workplace.

More from The Cleveland Brown Show ... Richmond Confidential reports

Lt. Cleveland Brown testified that he never heard the Richmond police chief or deputy chief use racial slurs, but that they made remarks that were offensive to African Americans.

Former Deputy Chief Lori Ritter “told me to tap dance,” Brown said from the witness stand. “That is racially offensive.” ...

As the defense team has during cross examination of all the plaintiffs, Spellberg delved into the allegations that Magnus made racially-insensitive comments about Juneteenth, the holiday commemorating the announcement of the abolition of slavery.

Brown testified that Magnus asked whether Juneteenth was a “holiday for killing people” during a 2006 deployment strategy meeting with several African American police leaders.

Brown said he did not express umbrage at the comment, but interjected to briefly explain what the holiday is and what it celebrates. Another officer wasn’t so diplomatic.

“Lt. Ricky Clark said ‘There goes a lawsuit,” Brown testified.

While it's emotionally grueling to be a black cop in Northern California, it's emotionally distressing to be a white fireman in Buffalo, NY:

Twelve white Buffalo firefighters will get an average of $230,430 each in back pay, pension benefits and damages -- a total of almost $2.77 million -- for emotional distress because the City of Buffalo illegally passed them over for promotions, a state judge has ruled.

The 12 men sued the city in 2007, contending that the city illegally allowed two promotional lists to expire because minority firefighters had fared poorly on civil service exams.

The case was affected by a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court decision that said city officials cannot void the results of civil service exams simply because they are afraid of being sued.

The ruling on damages came 15 months after State Supreme Court Justice John A. Michalek ruled that the city illegally failed to promote based on its 2005 and 2006 tests for racial reasons.

... Margerum was awarded $30,000 for "emotional damages," and Fahey was awarded $25,000. Each of the other firefighters got $20,000 for that.

Depending on his years of service and individual situation, each firefighter also was awarded between $49,859 and $528,706 in "general damages."

... According to Fleming, being passed over for promotions that they had earned was a "nightmare" that caused years of anguish for many of his clients. ...

Fahey said the case pointed to "the true nature of reverse discrimination: When it happens to blacks, everybody is correctly upset about it, but when it happens to whites, nobody cares."

In Michalek's ruling, he said some of the firefighters suffered from emotional distress, depression and self-medication issues. The judge wrote that some of the firefighters lost their enthusiasm for their jobs and became "bitter and cynical" because they felt they had legitimately earned promotions but were illegally passed over.

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

Period	Confident
Late 70s	35.3%
Early 80s	29.1%
Late 80s	37.6%
Early 90s	50.8%
Late 90s	42.9%
Early 00s	54.6%
Late 00s	57.0%