The Romeo & Juliet Revolution:

A reader replies:

The problem with your reader's statement about Western love having eugenic effects is twofold:

1. If smart women don't have to marry stupid men, stupid women have to marry stupid men. So you actually get assortative mating, and the standard deviation increases. (The effect on the mean depends on reproductive rates of the various IQs. I suspect this is actually dysgenic, a la Charles Murray, as the higher classes reproduce less and IQ improves earning potential up to about 130 or so.)

2. Who's to say arranged marriages didn't do the same thing? Let's not forget the West did this too. A whole family's much more effective at investigaitng a potential partner than one woman by herself, and you don't have the effect of smart women being misled by their hormones into marrying a dashing but violent and moronic lout. (The effect of hormones on men of any intelligence...well, like you said, do you really think Bill Gates went after Melinda because she was the smartest lady at Microsoft? Or Arthur Miller and Marillyn Monroe. Or Einstein and...it's actually kind of interesitng that Einstein's first girlfriend was more of an intellectual equal and his next one was just kind of pretty, as I recall. Recalls your statement about men moving from masculine to feminine women as they mature. Someone needs to make a list of all the Sailer aphorisms.)

3. Expanded roles for women have an effect of decreasing the fertility rate, a la Philip Longman. That's good or bad depending on who you are and where your society is at the present time. From the conservative point of view, both Sweden and Arabia are to be avoided, both culturally and in terms of fertility rate. So if you want a consevative society that reproduces itself, you want to be patriarchal, but not too patriarchal. (Encouraging women to be homemakers, good. Locking them up in the house and making them wear sheets when they go out, bad.)

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

Garance Franke-Ruta is at it again

Recently, Karl Zinsmeister, the very tall former editor of The American Enterprise, was appointed the President's domestic policy advisor, replacing that black guy, Claude Allen, whom nobody had ever heard of before he got caught in that really dopey big box retail outlet scam. (Has anybody heard whether Allen is using the my-evil-twin-did-it defense like I advised him to?)

Anyway, Garance Franke-Ruta, the lady with a name drawn from the random syllable generator and with equally random thought processes, is trying to smear Zinsmeister on the liberal American Prospect blog as a racist for having written an article that includes such unacceptable lines as:

"New York City statistics prepared for former mayor Ed Koch show that black offenders are five times likelier to kill whites than the reverse."

Of course, Franke-Ruta has herself written on The American Prospect much the same thing:

"...black Americans were six times more likely to be murdered than whites in 1999, and seven times more likely to commit homicides."

More interestingly, commenter Niels Jackson brings up some interesting quotes from
Zinsmeister's article that Franke-Ruta left out:

Nice use of ellipses.

What you left out included this:

My wife and I met in Africa, where we were both working in a group of Americans, mostly black, who were teaching and building a school. I was thoroughly colorblind when I entered that situation. Then my black American colleagues made it clear—sometimes in harsh terms—that they considered that a big problem. Most contemporary blacks, I learned, do not at all accept the idea that race is unimportant. I left a lot of my color-blindness in that group.

Or this:

During the near-decade that my family and I lived across the street from an all-black inner-city public housing project, I learned on many occasions that race is relevant. A few times, I or my family almost paid a serious price for imagining otherwise. Once, my wife was pushing my infant son down the sidewalk in a stroller when two teenagers smashed a stolen car into a light pole just yards from where she stood. I was close by in our front yard, and after making sure my wife was all right I ran over to some older black mothers standing in front of a nearby liquor store who had watched the boys walk away. I asked them, begged them, to give me a description of the people who had nearly run over my wife. They coldly turned away. At that point we had lived on their block for about three years.

Twice in a period of a few years I was cold-cocked (punched in the head without warning) to the accompaniment of racial insults on the streets near my house—once while painting a fence, once while riding a bike. In Southeast Washington, D.C. neighborhoods I was chased on my bicycle with cries of "get the white man" ringing around me. Another time, I was out with my family when I noticed a kid trying to break the exterior mirror off my pick-up truck that was parked on the street. I told him politely but firmly to stop it and within seconds my wife, two small children, and I were ringed by a group of teenagers shouting "whitey’s acting up." Bottles and rocks started to fly, and we were in big trouble. Fortunately a passing van screeched to a halt, and a couple of black men leapt out and convinced the kids to disperse.

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

The World's Most Gullible Country Contest

Who fell the hardest for the dopey yet soporific movie version of "The Da Vinci Code?"

Because "The Da Vinci Code" was released almost simultaneously around the world, it's relatively simple to calculate which countries blew more of their available money on this nonsense. All we have to do is compare the film's box office haul through its first two weekends across 56 countries versus each country's Gross Domestic Product to award the coveted title of the Nation Most Easy to Fleece.

The four most credulous countries, finishing in a near dead heat, turn out to be Iceland, Denmark, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Each spent about 90 percent more than North America on "Da Vinci Code" tickets relative to their GDPs. Then come Spain, New Zealand, Bolivia, Greece, Mexico, Australia, and the UK, all spending at least an index of 157 where the US/Canada (the "domestic market" for movies) is 100.

The least credulous country of all those reporting box office revenue was Nigeria, which spent only $38,000 on "DVC" tickets out of a GDP of $99,000,000,000. Nigerian skepticism should come as no surprise to anyone who has been reading their emails. Nigerians have been making up more plausible stories than "The Da Vinci Code" for years: you know, the ones beginning, "I am the unrecognized natural child of the deposed God-Emperor Mbubu." Nigerians want us to send them money in return for their storytelling creativity. They're not going to send us their money if the best we can come up with is "The Da Vinci Code."

	Box Office	GDP ($000,000s)	Index (USA=100)
Iceland	$307,040	$15,823	194
Denmark	$5,005,521	259,746	192
South Korea	$15,528,417	793,070	190
Hong Kong	$3,465,896	177,723	190
Spain	$20,308,285	1,126,565	180
New Zealand	$1,948,658	108,547	175
Bolivia	$167,713	9,650	169
Greece	$3,792,654	222,878	165
Mexico	$12,738,651	768,437	165
Australia	$11,926,792	707,992	164
UK	$34,758,614	2,201,473	157
Argentina	$2,803,734	181,662	150
Philippines	$1,442,423	97,653	144
Chile	$1,664,528	113,956	142
Colombia	$1,724,349	122,269	141
Estonia	$183,693	13,108	140
Peru	$1,114,753	78,576	138
Ecuador	$453,896	33,062	137
Austria	$4,084,812	307,036	133
Singapore	$1,602,984	117,882	132
Italy	$23,047,364	1,766,160	130
Latvia	$214,109	16,648	128
Uruguay	$202,773	15,926	127
Brazil	$9,913,631	792,683	125
Portugal	$2,338,326	183,436	124
Poland	$3,644,095	300,533	121
Hungary	$1,311,955	109,483	117
Lithuania	$300,073	25,726	116
Switzerland	$4,352,165	367,513	115
Norway	$3,371,951	296,017	114
Sweden	$4,006,921	358,819	111
Belgium	$4,328,489	372,091	111
Bulgaria	$294,070	26,719	110
Slovenia	$361,842	34,030	103
Venezuela	$1,367,886	132,848	103
Germany	$29,230,591	2,797,343	102
US / Canada	$136,513,000	13,615,933	100
Thailand	$1,706,574	168,774	98
Turkey	$3,496,924	362,461	96
France	$21,118,166	2,105,864	95
Croatia	$364,806	37,553	94
Taiwan	$3,199,142	346,141	90
Finland	$1,682,430	193,491	87
Serbia	$220,899	26,215	82
Holland	$4,999,313	625,271	78
Czech Rep.	$969,479	123,603	76
Slovakia	$328,676	46,763	68
Israel	$846,502	123,526	67
Malaysia	$882,356	130,796	66
Kenya	$121,635	19,184	63
Japan	$31,768,272	4,571,314	76
South Africa	$1,248,316	239,144	52
China	$10,112,637	2,224,811	45
Indonesia	$1,026,607	276,004	37
Romania	$304,600	98,566	31
Nigeria	$37,878	99,147	4

Overall, "The Da Vinci Code" has been a smash overseas, making $317 million through its first two weekends versus only $137 million in the US and Canada (which are combined into the "domestic market.")

It's striking how little difference there is in the Index figures around the world. You might think that, say, Venezuela, Germany, North America, and Thailand are culturally quite dissimilar and thus would likely react quite differently to "The Da Vinci Code." Yet they each spent almost an identical amount to see the film, relative to the size of their economies. It's a testament to globalization, although it's hard to avoid the phrase "lowest common denominator." A future in which everybody around the world rushes out to see the same new Hollywood tripe on the same day strikes me as a little dreary.

Notes: I somewhat arbitrarily adjusted the Index to account for the slightly different opening dates (e.g., Wednesday May 17 in France [multiplying revenue by .9545], Thursday May 18 in Germany [multiplying revenue by .975], Friday May 19 in America [leaving revenue the same], or Saturday May 20 in Japan [multiplying revenue by 1.1]). The last date included for each country was Sunday May 28. Countries with only one weekend reporting, such as India and Russia, were excluded. All revenue figures came from www.BoxOfficeMojo.com .

For more on "The Da Vinci Code," see my analysis of "DVC, Women, and Catholicism."

And here are excerpts from my review of the movie in The American Conservative: first and second.

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

My faith is restored! "Da Vinci Code" box office down estimated 56.5% in second weekend, to 33.5 million (for the normal Friday-Sunday weekend, not the Friday-Monday weekend). That's pretty bad for a film aimed at the over-25 crowd, who is less likely to rush out to see movies the first weekend, suggesting justifiably poor word of mouth for "DVC." Some 2005 grown-up oriented movies had better legs: Ron Howard's last movie, "Cinderella Man," which is considered a box office disaster (although it was a pretty decent movie), was down 47%. "Crash" was down only 23%. The Johnnie Cash biopic "Walk the Line" was down only 14%.

"X-Men 3: The Teeming Freaks Return" (or whatever they are calling it) did an estimated $107 million.

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

Immigrant cousin marriage in Australia --

My new blog item over on VDARE.com.

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

X-Men:

I haven't seen the new sequel, which is the biggest hit of the year this far, so I'll recycle part of my write-up of the last X-Men sequel to explain why I've been lax in my reviewerly duties:

Despite their multi-culti moralizing, the X-Men films primarily appeal to straight white boys, the nerdy obsessives recently empowered by the Web to impose their tastes on pop culture through their ability to generate buzz for a movie.

The fanboys will be elated that "X2" utilizes no less than 18 of their favorite mutants. Others may find that the teeming freaks get on their nerves after awhile.

Worse, each of the dozen and a half mutants has a normal name, a superhero name, and at least one superpower. For example, Oscar-winner Halle Berry plays (badly) Ororo Munroe, a.k.a. Storm, who has the uncanny ability to make it blow big time. Multiply these three data points by 18 mutants and you get 54 facts you're supposed to keep straight. What fun!

Some even have multiple powers. Logan / Wolverine is a mutant with both a cast-iron skeleton and, when he gets shot in the head, an amazing knack at squeezing bullets out using the supermuscle between his ears. Or something like that. Maybe I'm confusing crucial details, so, X-Men buffs, please send me long letters setting me straight. The more exhaustive and condescending the better! [More]

***

Barry Bonds moves past Babe Ruth on the career home run list:

Obviously, it's a joke. Yet, we now know that Bonds was clean through the 1998 season, which means that, even though other players, such as Jose Canseco, were clearly cheating with steroids as far back as the 1980s, Bonds was still the greatest player of the 1990s. It's a myth that steroids turned Bonds from a good player into a great one. He'd been a great player for nine years before he tried steroids. Steroids turned him into a cartoon superhero. In the nine seasons from 1990-1998, Bonds led the National League four times in the premier hitting statistic, Adjusted OPS+ (onbase percentage plus slugging average adjusted for park relative to the league, with a dash of paprika), finished second three times, and third twice. He was also a terrific baserunner and flyball snagger. The only thing he couldn't do well was throw. His only rivals as a hitter across this era were Frank Thomas and McGwire, both of whom were slow-footed first basemen.

Bonds had a certain amount of justification for feeling provoked into cheating after 1998 -- the 1998 home run orgy between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa was hyped to the heavens by the media as restoring the innocence to the game, when it was obvious at the time that something was fishy.

Bonds is such an unpleasant personality (and the drugs haven't made him a nicer person) that few will put his sins in historical perspective.

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

A reader asks:

I wonder what the effects of the ethos of romantic love are on human evolution. My guess would be that coupled with a technologically advanced society and an ethos of individualism it tends to be eugenic, because smart women are not forced by their families into marrying some dolt at 12. Obviously "tends to" is the necessary weasel word because there's the countervailing trend of smart women choosing dolts on their own. It's worth study because romantic love is a huge Western cultural import, and one that is most threatening to the powerful in undeveloped countries -- a big fear of traditional non-Western men is that once their women wise up and get Westernized they won't want them any more.

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

Malcolm Gladwell: Kevin Garnett should have been the MVP of the NBA:

Kevin Garnett had another highly statistically efficient year for the Minnesota Timberwolves, but the TWolves were even worse than they normally are with Garnett as their star, going 33-49, so nobody voted for Garnett for Most Valuable Player. Gladwell blogs:

"Anyone who believes in the conventional, adhoc methods of valuing basketball players has to answer for the injustice done this year to Kevin Garnett."

One reason why Garnett is so highly rated by Gladwell's Wages of Wins economists ( who hate players who take a lot of shots), but isn't very successful at winning games in the real world could well be because he doesn't shoot enough.

This year Garnett shot an outstanding .526 from the floor, the ninth highest in the league, but only averaged 21.8 points per game. And his team had the third worst offense in the NBA. To the three economists, this signifies that he's an incredibly efficient player stranded on a bad team, but to less naive observers, it suggests that he is not stepping up and taking the shots that need to be taken. If Garnett is really The Man in the NBA and his teammates are terrible, as the economists claim, then simple logic dictates that Garnett should act like The Man on his own team: he should demand the damn ball from his teammates and put it in the hole or go down in flames trying.

The economists claim Garnett was the best and Kobe Bryant was only the 17th best in the league, but Kobe's Lakers went 45-37, while Garnett's TWolves went 33-49, in part because Kobe said, "Gimme the ball" and carried the Lakers on his back by scoring 35.4 points per game. Kobe only shot .450 because he took almost twice as many shots as Garnett, but that's called "diminishing marginal returns." The more shots you take, the more desperate, unlikely-to-go-in shots you'll take and the lower your shooting percentage will sink. Economists are supposed to understand the concept of "diminishing marginal returns," but Gladwell's boys don't seem to get it.

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

More athletes behaving badly:

"You can't arrest me. I'm a basketball player."

Gilbert Arenas, NBA All-Star

Well, Gilbert, actually the Miami Beach Police Department can arrest you for trying to interfere with the arrest of a teammate.

By the standards of big time athletes getting hauled off to the pokey, this one sounds pretty mild -- just a little too much rest and relaxation for a "tired and emotional" jock after a hard season. Still, it's just another reminder that when it comes to the athletic police blotter, basketball, football, and baseball players infinitely more famous than the Duke lacrosse team get arrested weekly, with barely a ripple in the media. And sometimes they're even guilty!

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

New Zealand and IQ

A Kiwi reader writes:

I noticed on one of your website articles a claim that the IQ of New Zealand Maoris has been increasing. However, I would suspect the IQ of N.Z Maoris would be very difficult to determine. There is a very high White admixture in the Maori population and almost all Maori now have some White blood. Today almost all people in New Zealand with at least a quarter white blood would describe themselves as Maori on government forms. Indeed, many people with less than 25 percent Maori blood describe themselves as Maori. The government spends a considerable amount of money on affirmative action programmes for Maori and so there is significant economic advantage in identifying oneself as Maori.

Despite this, affirmative action has only benefited about 10-20 percent of Maoris while the majority are falling behind Whites and East Asians in economic terms. In official statistics Maoris consistently fall behind Whites and East Asians in health and education and are markedly overrepresented in crime statistics.

To get a better picture of Polynesian IQ levels one would need to look at the scores of recent Polynesian immigrants who have very little White blood and don't qualify for many affirmative action initiatives.

What, in New Zealand they don't give affirmative action privileges to immigrants as soon as they show up, like we do in America? How uncivilized of them!

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

Snow Crash and The Camp of the Saints

I just finished Neal Stephenson's famous 1992 sci-fi satire novel Snow Crash, which is kind of like The Da Vinci Code for smart people (although I imagine Dan Brown was inspired, if that's the word for it, more by Umberto Eco's 1989 bestseller Foucault's Pendulum).

It must have been a startlingly great book back in 1992. It's the early 21st Century in Los Angeles, and government has fallen apart just about everywhere in the world, except perhaps Japan. Private enterprise has taken over all the functions of the state. A few ethnic groups -- the Cantonese and the Sicilians -- are flourishing in the absence of public order (indeed the Mafia are pretty close to being the good guys in the novel). I guess a lot of libertarians see it as a utopian novel, but I doubt if Stephenson would agree. (Here's an interview with him in Reason magazine where he appears to be implicitly suggesting that libertarianism is another mind-virus.)

A major plot element in Snow Crash is the Raft, a vast agglomeration of flotsam, inhabited by impoverished south and southeast Asian refugees drifting inexorably across the Pacific, headed for California. Stephenson's description of The Raft is a pretty funny variation on the usual sentimental cant about how illegal immigrants have more gumption than us natives, and thus are just what us decadent Americans need:

"When [the Raft] gets to California, it will enter a new phase of its life cycle. It will shed much of its sprawling improvised bulk as a few hundred thousand Refus cut themselves loose and paddle to shore. The only Refus who make it that far are, by definition, the ones who were agile enough to make it out to the Raft in the first place, resourceful enough to survive the agonizingly slow passage through arctic waters, and tough enough not to get killed by any of the other Refus. Nice guys, all of them. Just the kind of people you'd like to have showing up on your private beach in groups of a few thousand." [p. 272]

Clearly, Stephenson picked up his idea for the Raft from Jean Raspail's 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, which is about a similar ramshackle armada heading from south Asia to the south of France. So, I went to Google to read about the influence of Camp of the Saints on Snow Crash. As a cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash is, unsurprisingly, much discussed on the Internet, with 360,000 Google hits. Camp of the Saints shows up in 53,000 places.

And how many webpages discuss the overlap between them? As far as I can tell, exactly one.

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

Wonk War: the battle over CIRA numbers

The White House responded to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation's bombshell analysis showing that the Hagel-Martinez act would allow in vastly more legal immigrants with a memo claiming it would really only be an eensy-teensy number, although the white House never gets around to saying what that number would be. Rector responds here.

It's important to keep in mind that neither side includes in their estimates the American-born children of the foreigners who would benefit from the law, which is a big, big number, as we saw from the Hispanic Baby Boom in California in the late 1980s and early 1990s following the last amnesty.

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

Another Job Americans Won't Do: Fireman

From the NYT:

With Illegal Immigrants Fighting Wildfires, West Faces a Dilemma
By KIRK JOHNSON Published: May 28, 2006

SALEM, Ore. — The debate over immigration, which has filtered into almost every corner of American life in recent months, is now sweeping through the woods, and the implications could be immense for the upcoming fire season in the West...

As many as half of the roughly 5,000 private firefighters based in the Pacific Northwest and contracted by state and federal governments to fight forest fires are immigrants, mostly from Mexico. And an untold number of them are working here illegally....

Other forestry workers say that firefighting may simply be too important — and too difficult to attract other applicants — to allow for a crackdown on illegal workers.

Being a fireman is a job Americans don't want to do? Oh, man, haven't they ever heard of the thousands of volunteer fire departments? Haven't they ever seen the long lines of applicants for paying fireman jobs? Haven't they ever watched little boys stare in awe at firemen?

Heck, in LA they even had some success recruiting black street gangs to fight brushfires. Men like to fight fires.

Here's part of a Sacramento Bee article on the incompetents we have recently begun to send out to fight fires:

Untrained migrants fight fires: Inexperienced, undocumented hired by private contractors.
By Tom Knudson -- Bee Staff Writer Published Sunday, May 7, 2006

As bright orange embers lofted through the forest, exploding into columns of smoke and flame, Mike Sulffridge and his crew of firefighters began to scramble. Their lives were in danger.

But the reaction of six Latino firefighters working near them could not have been more different. Despite the advancing flames, despite a volley of warning shouts, they did nothing.

"They did not understand English," said Sulffridge, who was hired to battle the wildfire in the Fishlake National Forest in Utah in 2000. "They did not understand what the fire was doing."

Ultimately, the men were rescued. But the fire took a toll. One man was burned badly across his face. "In another few seconds, those guys would have been burned up," Sulffridge said. "They would have died."

Firefighting has always been dangerous. But today, with the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies hiring more private contractors to do the work, a different kind of firefighter is in harm's way: migrant workers who have minimal experience and training, speak little or no English and often are in the country illegally.

Public records offer a glimpse of what crew inspectors have documented: underage workers, counterfeit IDs, falsified training records, a van roll-over, broken and dangerous tools, even a firefighter with only one lung who "went into convulsions ... and was having difficulty breathing," as one federal inspector in Washington put it.

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

Malcolm Gladwell admits his basketball statistics book review was given the razzberry by the cognoscenti

On his blog, Gladwell writes:

"I’ve noticed, in reading reactions to the book around the blogosphere, a certain residual skepticism, particularly among hard-core basketball fans."

He then makes some admissions about the shortcomings of the Wages of Wins book he hyped so credulously in The New Yorker. I guess it's good that after he publishes an article in The New Yorker he he goes and does the research he should have done the first time, but isn't that a little odd? Isn't he getting paid enough by The New Yorker (about $5 per word, roughly $10,000 for this 1,900 word review) to bother getting it right from the start?

By the way, Gladwell continues to claim:

"For instance, they show that the correlation between a team’s payroll and a team’s performance, in the NBA, is surprisingly weak. What that tells us is that the people charged with evaluating and rewarding ability and performance in the NBA do a lousy job."

Maybe, maybe not. One obvious factor that lowers the correlation between payrolls and wins is that one way to win in the NBA is to get a great young player in the draft who isn't yet eligible for free agency (which normally starts in the fourth year in the league). Then you can take the money that you save paying your young star less than market value and spend it on veterans, or simply pocket the savings as profit. For example, Miami can afford to pay veteran Shaquille O'Neal $20 million per year because they are paying star third year man Dwayne Wade only about $3 million. LeBron James has almost singlehandedly made Cleveland a respectable franchise, and he's only getting $4.6 million.

Gladwell notes that his three economists find Kevin Garnett to be the best player in the league in recent years, which seems pretty reasonable to me. But Garnett's Minnesota team has had very little playoff success because Minnesota's management can't afford to put good players around Garnett. What happened was that Garnett wasn't all that great in absolute terms his first three years in the NBA, when he wasn't making much money, so the Timberwolves weren't all that good then. The team didn't get that big of a premium in performance over what they were paying Garnett because he was so young during his first three years. But he was fantastically good for his age (19 through 21), and was obviously going to become one of the best players ever. So in his fourth year, he got a gigantic contract that increased from 14 million to 28 million per year by the time he was 27. But that just throttled Minnesota's chances of getting much help for him.

In contrast, Tim Duncan, who is probably most similar to Garnett in accomplishments, spent four years in college, so he was an instant outstanding contributor as soon as he arrived in the NBA. But the San Antonio Spurs got to pay him at below market rates for his first three years, during which they won the first of their three championships and built the foundation for two more.

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

"Dynasty through Diversity: Why the Bush Administration is so adamant about amnesty"

is my new article in the June 19th issue of The American Conservative (subscribe here). Here's an excerpt:

The President's patent insincerity about controlling illegal immigration has catalyzed the realization among a rapidly growing number of conservatives that the Bush Administration's governing principles, such as they are, are at best only superficially conservative. Their common denominator is a lack of what Edmund Burke emphasized as a key conservative virtue: prudence.

The foreign, domestic, and economic policies of President Bush can be summarized as:

- Invade the world
- Invite the world
- In hock to the world

As far as Grand Strategies go, this is not the most seamless. There are palpable contradictions in combining pugnacity abroad with welcoming tens of millions of foreign newcomers at home while borrowing hundreds of billions from overseas to fund our budget and trade deficits.

How did the Bush Administration wind up with such clashing priorities?

The orgy of indebtedness with which the Administration is saddling future generations of Americans is a byproduct of the President's politically motivated profligacy. Increasing spending is popular among powerful interest groups. And so is cutting taxes. Why not do both at once? Why pay today what you can put off until tomorrow (or the next President's term)?

More mysterious remain the precise reasons behind the Administration's conversion from its 2000 campaign promise of a "modest" foreign policy that abstained from nation-building to its wildly ambitious neoconservative ideology of 2003.

In contrast, Mr. Bush's desire to boost immigration has never been in doubt.

While the President contended in his speech that his terms as a border state governor prove that he grasps the importance of enforcing illegal immigration laws, never during his 12 years in office has he displayed much eagerness to catch aliens.

For example, the "comprehensive immigration reform" of 1986 granted amnesty to 2.7 million current illegal aliens combined with staunch employer sanctions to eliminate the incentive for future illegal immigration. Unfortunately, politically powerful employers soon began corrupting the enforcement process. Still the nadir of negligence was not reached until this Administration. In 2004, only three employers were fined.

In the placid months before 9/11, Bush's highest priority, after tax cuts, was working out with Mexican president Vicente Fox an immigration deal -- although what he asked Fox to sacrifice, if anything, was never made clear. The President of Mexico wanted to dispose of his surplus uneducated poor and the President of the United States wanted to acquire them, perhaps on the theory that global dominance in the 21st Century goes to the country with the most manual laborers.

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

Analyses of the Senate immigration vote:

On Gideon's blog:

GOP Senators facing the voters in their state voted largely against this bill. GOP Senators who want to be President voted largely in favor of this bill. That suggests a rather different balance of power between interests in the race for President as compared with the race for a Senate seat.

The would-be Presidential timbers no doubt are hoping that the liberal media will accord them paroxysms of Strange New Respect over their statesmanlike, rational, moderate cave-ins.

There's lots more worth reading.

One of Larry Auster's readers has the religious breakdown:

"Catholics voted 19-4 yes, with Bunning, Santorum, Sununu and Vitter voting no (Salazar did not vote). Jews voted 11-0 yes. The combined Catholic-Jewish vote was 30-4 in favor... Senate Mormons voted 3-2 in favor of the bill." [More]

That leaves the bill losing 29-30 among Protestants and All Other.

This 30-4 vote among Senators whose ancestors largely immigrated between 160 and 80 years ago shows the extraordinary power of Ellis Island ethnic nostalgia today.

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

Almost beyond parody

Alex Tabarrok, author of that "open letter" of economists retailing all the hoariest sentimental tripe about immigration, now explains on his Marginal Revolution blog the reason that so many economists don't like to think hard about immigration: the moral superiority of economists!

I have an article in TCS today on why economists tend to be more in favor of immigration than the typical person. Surprisingly, the ethics of economists may be part of the answer! Here's an excerpt:

Economists...tend not to distinguish between us and them. We look instead for policies that at least in principle make everyone better off. Policies that make us better off at the price of making them even worse off are for politicians, not economists.

For centuries, economists have been explaining that you shouldn't trust people who say, "Trust me, my motives are pure." Self-rationalizations are typically motivated by self-interest. But, now, in a stunning breakthrough, economists have discovered the one kind of human being who is above such tawdry concerns, whose viewpoint is wholly Olympian and disinterested: economists!

I've outlined a counter-philosophy of citizenism not because it is perfect in all regards, but because it is less easily corrupted than the alternatives.

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

The 66 million

Senate passes Virtual Open Border bill 62-36:

SENATE PASSES IMMIGRATION BILL
By Charles Hurt
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The Senate easily approved an immigration bill that allows 10 million illegal aliens to become citizens, more than doubles the flow of legal immigration each year and will cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $54 billion over the next ten years.

Even before the early-evening vote, the leaders of both parties are hailing its passage as a historic success. The bill passed 62-36.

"We've taken a bill, and we've made it better," said Majority Leader Bill Frist, the only member of the GOP leadership in the Senate to actually support the bill's final passage. "We've taken a bill that the American people would have concluded was amnesty and by my lights, we took the amnesty out while we put the security in."

As they prepared to vote, senators on both sides of the aisle tearfully congratulated one another and themselves for all their hard work in producing the legislation. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat and leading proponent of the bill, called it "the most far-reaching immigration reform in our history."

Several Democrats facing re-election this year joined Republican conservatives in opposing the first major overhaul of the nation's immigration system in twenty years. They said that the Senate is flatly ignoring clear public will and that the bill would have disastrous consequences for decades to come.

"We will never solve the problem of illegal immigration by rewarding those who break our laws," Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican, said. "We must stop illegal immigration by securing the border and creating a temporary worker program that does not reward illegal behavior with a clear path to citizenship and voting rights."

Those who voted against the bill said it should have left out the "amnesty" provisions and instead focused solely on securing the border and enforcing the immigration laws that have been on the books for decades.

Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, said the bill "puts the cart before the horse" because it grants citizenship rights to illegals, grants full-blown amnesty to employers and opens the borders to millions of new immigrants each year.

"The horse here, that I've been hearing from my constituents, is we need a border security bill first," said Mr. Santorum, who spends much of his time campaigning for re-election this fall. "And we need a program that makes sure that our country's borders are secure and that they are not a threat either to our national security or economic security.

The bill also includes approval for 350 miles of new fencing along the border, 500 miles of vehicle barriers and authorization of 3,000 new border patrol agents this year.

But conservatives in Congress like many voters are skeptical that the federal government will make good on promises to secure the border and enforce the laws. They suspect that immigration reform is headed for a repeat of the 1986 reforms that granted amnesty to 3 million aliens and promised to seal the border. But the laws were never enforced and three million illegals were replaced with some 12 million.

"The amnesty provisions and the fact that the enforcement provisions will not kick in immediately mean to me that this will not solve the illegal immigration problem," Sen. David Vitter, Louisiana Republican, said today. "This will, in fact, make the illegal immigration problem much bigger."

But do those 62 Senators even know what they voted for?

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

Legislative Negligence: The Senate Immigration Bill

With a few honorable exceptions, such as Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the U.S. Senate's performance over the last week and a half was a textbook example of legislative negligence. Today, Thursday, the Senate is expected to vote for a 614 page bill that is estimated to increase legal immigration over the next two decades from 19 million to 66 million, and yet few Senators appear to have taken time to study the bill and crunch the numbers.

The one Senator who clearly has given this monumentally complicated and important bill the attention it deserves, Sen. Sessions, was smeared by Washington Post star reporter Dana Milbank yesterday precisely for behaving responsibly. (You really need to read Milbank's article to believe it.)

A Christian Science Monitor reporter has outlined how little the Senators who support the Hagel-Martinez bill know about the potential effects of their law:

Surprises on Senate's path to immigration bill
By Gail Russell Chaddock

WASHINGTON – After months of emotional gridlock, US senators are pushing the pedal to the metal on the first overhaul of immigration policy in two decades.

The trouble is, no one is quite sure what's in it. The quickened pace in recent days has helped the Senate get to "yes" on the 614-page bill - a final vote is expected this week. And it's given senators a rare chance to actually legislate. But it's also produced several surprises that have caught members off guard.

… Keeping abreast of the bill's changes often overwhelmed members. The final hours of the Judiciary Committee's March 27 markup got so rushed that, at one point, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California asked: "Excuse me, but did we just vote to raise or lower the number of H-1B visas?" No one knew.

In the end, the Senate raised the number of visas for high-tech workers from 65,000 to 115,000 a year. But with an automatic 20 percent escalator clause in the bill that could mean an additional 3 million foreigners will compete with American workers for high-tech jobs in the US during the next 10 years.

"To do a bill like this on a forced march, it wasn't ready to come out," said Senator Feinstein, after joining 72 other senators to vote to end debate on the bill Wednesday. "I am very pro-high tech, but these are prize jobs in our economy. They really should be evaluated every year."

It's one of the many possibly unintended consequences in a bill that could have a vast impact on America's economy and society.

… In a key vote last week, Sens. Byron Dorgan (D) of North Dakota and Jeff Sessions (R) of Alabama - typically bookends on any vote on social policy - found themselves on the same losing side of a 69-28 vote to limit eligibility for the bill's guest-worker program to protect American jobs. "What on earth are we thinking? Can't there be some modicum of discussion about the effect on American workers?" said Senator Dorgan, introducing his amendment last week.

In support of that amendment, Senator Sessions introduced a new report by the Heritage Foundation that claimed that the Senate bill would allow 100 million new legal immigrants into the country over the next 20 years. He called for a demographic impact statement on the impact of the bill.

"There's been no discussion of the fiscal costs of amnesty or the plight of American workers in the Senate debate," said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports limits on immigration.

Asked whether the Senate was "flying blind" on the demographic impact of this bill, Sen. John Cornyn (R) of Texas said: "We're not entirely blind."

Is the American Establishment too immature to legislate on immigration?

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

"My Favorite Sailerism:"

A med student writes:

My Favorite Sailerism: You make a lot of generalizations on your blog, and they tend to be surprisingly correct. But I think the most correct of all is that some time ago you said that you've never seen a woman in a book store reading a magazine from the so called prestige section.

I too have spent many hours in book stores reading magazines, perhaps more so than is normal or even healthy for a 23 year old. I first go for the car magazines, and then I read the Economist, AmCon, National Review, Time, Business Week, etc.

I have never, ever seen a woman reading one of these magazines. Nor have I ever seen a woman pick up one of these magazines in a doctors office or at the gym (to read while on the treadmill). I'll put money down that - given a choice between the two - a woman is more likely to pick up a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue to compare herself to the pretty models than she is to pick up a Newsweek magazine.

No wonder they didn't let women vote for the longest time

Well, women keep the human race from falling apart, in part by reading self-help magazines, which allows men to think about stuff that doesn't affect them personally.

Meanwhile, Thrasymachus writes:

I don't get Mean Mr. Mustard's Da Vinci Code hate. He completely misses the real significance of the book. Its truth or falsehood doesn't matter: knowing a couple facts about The Da Vinci Code is a wonderful way to hit on girls reading books. I don't think I've ever seen one reading anything else.

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

NR's Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs

It's mostly the work of John J. Miller: Good top 10 list:

1. "Won't Get Fooled Again," by The Who
2. "Taxman," by The Beatles
3. "Sympathy for the Devil," by The Rolling Stones (I hadn't realized that Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics after reading Mikhail Bulgakov's 1930s samzidat novel The Master and Margarita about the Devil's visit to Communist Moscow)
4. "Sweet Home Alabama," by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
5. "Wouldn't It Be Nice," by The Beach Boys.
6. "Gloria," by U2.
7. "Revolution," by The Beatles.
8. "Bodies," by The Sex Pistols.
9. "Don't Tread on Me," by Metallica.
10. "20th Century Man," by The Kinks.

For the other 40, click here.

Two great Berlin Wall songs are included ("Heroes" by David Bowie and "Right Here Right Now" by Jesus Jones), but not the third, "Holidays in the Sun" by the Sex Pistols, which I love for Steve Jones' tremendous riff. I didn't see either Dead Kennedys classic: "Holiday in Cambodia" or "California Uber Alles." LA bands are underrepresented: there's no "American Music" by the Blasters, the extremely politically incorrect "Los Angeles" by X, or "How Will the Wolf Survive?" by Los Lobos (Chicano conservatism).

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

The Da Vinci Code, women, and Catholicism

One of the more curious aspects of the cult of The Da Vinci Code is the lack of skepticism about novelist Dan Brown's contention that Catholicism was a vast plot to steal from women the feminist freedoms they had enjoyed under "the pagans" who worshipped "the Goddess."

First, pagans didn't worship the Goddess because if they had, they wouldn't have been pagans, they have been monotheists. Like his New Age feminist sources, Brown is a slave to the intellectual prestige of monotheism. Let's face it, real Greco-Roman paganism, as described in, say, Homer, has a tawdry People magazine Jennifer Aniston vs. Angelina Jolie battle over Brad Pitt quality to it. So, a bunch of goddesses get reduced down to the Goddess because monotheism just seems more respectable.

Second, Brown, with all his talk of "the sacred feminine," is being intentionally hazy about what pagans have tended to mean by it: i.e., fertility goddesses. Now, you can see a bit of a problem for modern feminists in praising ancient conceptions of women as most sacred when barefoot and pregnant, but Dan Brown and his 60 million readers apparently can't.

Third, hostility to paganism -- that's what the Protestants, Jews, and Muslims complained about ... that Catholicism wasn't hostile enough towards paganism. It's hardly a surprise that the Renaissance started in Catholic Italy. Or that the Reformation was a reaction to the High Renaissance in Rome. Here's a minor modern example: my younger son's otherwise perfectly sane Lutheran school refuses to hold a Halloween party because that's too pagan, so it holds a "Harvest Festival." To a Halloween-loving Catholic like me, that sounds like nuts, but it makes perfect sense to Lutherans.

Fourth, doesn't anybody remember basic Roman Empire sociology? Early Christianity particularly appealed to women, especially widows. The pagans, and anti-Christian philosophers like Nietzsche ever since, blamed Christianity for making Rome too soft, too womanly to fight off the barbarians. Historian Rodney Stark says in an interviews:

"Christian women had tremendous advantages compared to the woman next door, who was like them in every way except that she was a pagan. First, when did you get married? Most pagan girls were married off around age 11, before puberty, and they had nothing to say about it, and they got married to some 35-year-old guy. Christian women had plenty of say in the matter and tended to marry around age 18.

"Abortion was a huge killer of women in this period, but Christian women were spared that. And infanticide—pagans killed little girls left and right. We’ve unearthed sewers clogged with the bones of newborn girls. But Christians prohibited this. Consequently, the sex ratio changed and Christians didn’t have the enormous shortage of women that plagued the rest of the empire."

Fifth, the idea that the Catholic Church kept women down is pretty odd: What other monotheistic religion honored hundreds of women as saints? Made the Virgin Mary the second most revered person of all? What other religion made women writers like St. Theresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Siena part of the canon of religious literature? What other religion encouraged women to found and run giant hospitals? Protestantism? Judaism? Islam?

Here's what I think is the underlying reason this farrago of nonsense is so popular with book-reading modern women: Even though the Catholic Church was more favorable toward career women (e.g., abbesses of convents) than other religions, the Church distinctly stood against the now popular idea that "You can have it all!" -- i.e., a career and sex. The Catholic Church offered lots of careers for women, but the careers required chastity. The Church saw motherhood as a separate career that didn't combine well with other careers, which in the days before effective contraception was more or less true.

So, the real complaint in The Da Vinci Code is that The Pill wasn't invented until 1964.

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

Haaretz: Advice for America on building a border fence from an Israeli expert

Shmuel Rosner, Chief U.S. Correspondent for the prestigious Israeli newspaper Haaretz, listened to an anonymous Israeli expert on the fences the Jewish State has erected on the Gaza and West Bank borders offer advice to Americans on how to build and run a barrier on the Mexican border. The Israeli fences have been highly successful at cutting down on the number of suicide-bombers, who are (by definition) highly motivated.

"Israeli advice on the Mexico fence: be ruthless."

... Money: It will probably cost more than you think. Why? Because that's always the way it is with such projects. Americans, the Israeli says, tend to be very structured in their work, in a way that has many benefits but also some limitations. It means that they waste a lot of money on "process" and "management" and "studies" before they really act. They make no short-cuts, thus save no money. In the last issue of The National Journal, the Israeli fence is mentioned as the example to use when calculating the cost of such a fence (2000 mile fence = $6.4 billion dollars). The Israeli expert thinks the Americans will end up paying more.

Efficiency: It can work, the expert says and other Israeli know-hows agree. Don't buy the argument of liberal opponents who say "no fence can stop people from coming." If done in a proper way, the fence can work. It can achieve whatever goal the U.S. wants it to, "100 percent, 90 percent, 80 percent prevention. Just make the right commitment and you'?ll get results."

Tactics: Don't just rely on sophisticated machinery and equipment. You need people on the ground using the equipment to pursue the invaders. They need to react fast, they need intelligence, and they need to be tireless. It will only take a couple of months before the flow of immigrants will become much weaker.

Intelligence: Recruit people on the Mexican side to be your eyes and ears and to tell you what the smugglers are up to. Make sure you can communicate fast, and react even faster. Good intelligence can be the key factor for success.

Routine: The smugglers will be inventive and will look for ways around you. If you stick to some regulated routine, you'll end up wasting your time and your money. Surprise them where they don't expect you, make them understand that no place is safe, no route out of reach. "Don't police them, fight them."

Ruthlessness: Is it really important for the Americans? If it is, they should be prepared to show it. "Make the other side understand that this is no game - that life can be in danger," says the expert. "I know this is the toughest advice of all, but short of doing it the Americans will end up pretending to stop illegal immigrants rather than really doing it. At the end of the day, it is very simple: America is more powerful than the smugglers - meaning, it can deter them from doing what they do." But there's one condition necessary to keep this preponderance of power working: "It should be as important for America to stop the illegal new comers as it is for them to come."

Danger: You mean they have to shoot the smugglers? "No, they have to stop them. But if they run away they have to chase them, and if they resist they need to use force. Eventually, they'll end up doing things you don't want people to watch on television. I'm not sure if they have the resolve and the stomach to do it. Maybe it's not as important for them as they claim it is."

Conduct: Corruption can be a serious problem on the sealed border. As it gets tougher to enter the U.S, people will be ready to pay a high price for it, and the temptation to help those people in something one shouldn't underestimate. Take it into account while devising the system.

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