April 30, 2008

Rev. Wright: Black Internationalist

Back in the winter of 2007 I used the term "black nationalist" to describe Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, but on further reflection, that can give the wrong impression of Wright's politics. "Black nationalism" tends to imply a fairly conservative form of separatism with an important role for capitalism. Although, judging from his Porsche and the mansion he's building in a gated community, Rev. Wright is a talented capitalist himself, his ideology, which attracted Obama to him, might better be described as "black internationalist."

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

Greg Cochran defends Obama's spending plans

On Jerry Pournelle's blog, Greg Cochran speaks up for Obama's tax and spend plans.

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

April 29, 2008

One thing I like about Obama ...

... is that he prefers, all else being equal, not to lie.

Some politicians are like Chevy Chase's character in "Fletch." They'd rather make up lies than tell the truth, for the same reason that composers like to make up music -- that's what they're good at.

In contrast, Barack Obama's preferred mode is the intellectual puzzle. He likes to bury the truth in there somewhere under so many dependent clauses, thoughtful nuances, and "I have understood you" gestures that most people give up trying to decipher what he's saying and just make up little fantasies about how he agrees with them. Obama's view seems to be that it's not his fault that the press and public aren't as smart or hard-working as he is. (I can't say I totally disagree with him there ...)

Unfortunately, with his back finally to the wall over Rev. Wright, with Sen. Howard Baker's question during the Watergate hearings -- "What did the [candidate for] President know and when did he know it?" -- coming to the fore, Obama has been reduced to blatant Sgt. Schultz-style denials("I saw nuthink!!!!") about his exposure to Rev. Wright's beliefs.

More interestingly, Obama asserts:
"You know, I have been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ since 1992. I have known Reverend Wright for almost 20 years. The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago."

The fascinating question is why Obama insists that the person who has changed is Jeremiah A. Wright, not Barack Obama. Why not just say, "Well, we've both changed over the years, in opposite directions"?

The person Obama has to disown to be elected President is not Rev. Wright but his own younger self, the one who carefully chose Rev. Wright out of the dozens of black South Side ministers he met as a community organizer.

Why won't Obama admit that he's matured into moderation? As I pointed out a week ago, he's going to need to do a speech along the lines of, "Yeah, I used to be a radical, but then ... I had kids!" But he hasn't come close to that yet.

Clearly, part of the problem is that that would demolish his carefully crafted myth that racial moderation is in his "DNA" (as he asserted today).

Another problem Obama has is that he's strongly emphasized his connections with Rev. Wright and Trinity Church in his campaign materials aimed at Christian voters. My guess is that Obama is a secular nonbeliever who just plays up his church membership for political gain and because its racialist aspect fills the hole in his soul left by his father's abandonment of him, helping him feel "black enough." But that's left him in the ridiculous position of asserting that he went to Trinity all the time, just not, through some amazing statistical fluke, on the days when Rev. Wright did what Rev. Wright does.

Yet, there may be other reasons for refusing to disown his own younger self. Perhaps fear of his wife? Mrs. Obama made herself into a social lioness among Chicago's elite, which may help explain the family's inability to build up any savings until very recently, despite averaging over $200,000 income per year from 1997-2004. Perhaps Mrs. Obama, deep down, is worried that she sold out, so Trinity remains a symbol to her that she's still keepin' it real.

Or perhaps it's Obama who is appalled by his own selling out of his youthful radicalism?

That touches on a different question about who Obama is: Is he the cold-blooded political operative who destroyed the career of a beloved elder stateswoman by having her nomination signatures disqualified to win office for the first time in 1996? Or is he the sensitive, self-absorbed literary artiste who recounted the mild buffets that fate has dealt him with so much anguish in his autobiography? Clearly, he's both, but it's hard to get a sense of the balance within him.

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

Obama: "That's in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding."

Obama denounced Rev. Wright today for, in effect, exposing the basic lie upon which Obama's campaign is built: that Obama's genetic racial make-up, his "DNA," has meant that he has devoted his whole career to racial conciliation. His opening statement about "my DNA" speaks directly to the fantasy Obama has carefully nurtured:

"SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: Before I start taking questions I want to open it up with a couple of comments about what we saw and heard yesterday. I have spent my entire adult life trying to bridge the gap between different kinds of people. That's in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding to insist that we all share common hopes and common dreams as Americans and as human beings. That's who I am." ...

"The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago. ... They certainly don't portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought, either. ... It contradicts everything that I'm about and who I am. ...

And anybody who has worked with me, who knows my life, who has read my books, who has seen what this campaign's about, I think, will understand that it is completely opposed to what I stand for and where I want to take this country.

Of course, in reality, Obama's nature and (especially) nurture left him worried that he won't be perceived as "black enough," so he has devoted much of his career to working to extract money from whites and spend it on blacks (e.g., getting jobs as a community organizer, civil rights lawyer, and state legislator). That's why he joined Rev. Wright's church -- it made him feel black enough.

I'm always being denounced as "obsessed" about race, genetics, and the interplay of nature and nurture because I've learned a lot about them and think about them in a dispassionate manner. And yet, it keeps turning out that everybody else is obsessed, too. (That certainly includes Barack Obama, who subtitled his 442-page autobiography, A Story of Race and Inheritance.)

The problem is that everybody else keeps getting their thinking about race and inheritance wrong, because they only allow themselves to think ignorantly and emotionally about it. For example, Obama has, quite intentionally, elicited in the minds of tens of millions of white people a crude genetic-determinist fantasy that racial reconciliation is in his "DNA."

I'm sorry, but human beings are a lot more complicated than that. Obama is the product of a complex and unusual nurture -- to understand his life, you both have to put yourself in his shoes and pull way back and view him in context, knowing a lot about the sociology of race, including seemingly minor aspects like the Hawaiian view of race.

I was just about the first to put together a plausible story of who Obama is precisely because I'm interested in the same things that interest Obama about himself and so many of his fans about Obama -- the difference is that I allow myself to think logically, objectively, and empirically about "race and inheritance," while respectable people only allow themselves to think with non-rational and intentionally ill-informed parts of their brain.

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

Why hasn't Obama dealt with Rev. Wright?

One little-mentioned aspect of Barack Obama's on-going fiasco involving his spiritual mentor is that it makes him look feckless.

Rev. Wright has been a problem Obama knew he was going to have for, roughly, ever. But what has he done about it, besides giving a 5,000 word speech? Did he switch to a Washington D.C. church when he was elected to the Senate in 2005? Did he persuade Trinity to stop selling Wright's sermons on DVD? Did he provide any sort of narrative about the evolving ideological differences between the young and mature Barack Obamas?

In contrast, do you remember how in February 2004, Democratic frontrunner John Kerry was rocked by rumors that he was having an adulterous affair with a young woman? You probably don't remember because, although for about a day it looked like it might derail Kerry's victory march through the primaries, the story quickly went away -- when the young lady went away, leaving the country.

Problem dealt with.

I have no idea if the rumors about Kerry were true or if the girl's timely departure from America was a coincidence or what. But, let's assume the worst about Kerry: he wrote a big check from the allowance his wife gives him to his mistress in return for making herself scarce. What can you then say about Kerry?

Well, one thing you can say is that he had a problem and he dealt with it. All else being equal, I'd rather have a President who had a problem and dealt with it than a President who had a problem and failed to deal with it.

Wright should not have been an unsolvable problem for Obama. Wright likes the spotlight, but he also likes other things. (He drives a Porsche, for example).

So, Wright likes money. Obama has friends with money. Right there, you have the makings of a deal. (The payoff didn't have to be crass -- just that in return for Wright maintaining a low profile all year, in December 2008 Obama's supporters would start up a charitable foundation for Rev. to run. Obama could have asked Bill and Hill for advice on the fine points of foundations.)

So, why hasn't Obama dealt with it?

1. Maybe it's all part of some brilliant plan Obama has got to heighten the drama before he delivers his master-stroke.

2. Is Mrs. Obama the key to Sen. Obama's Wright problem? Michelle Obama is a formidable woman, and Sen. Obama wouldn't be the first Presidential candidate who's scared of his wife. Maybe she won't let him deal with Wright? It's an intriguing idea, but I haven't been able to find much evidence for a strong connection between Mrs. Obama and Rev. Wright.

3. Rev. Wright is all tied up with Obama's complicated issues of personal identity, as expounded at endless length is his autobiography, so his normally cold-blooded brain fails to work rationally here. It's not uncommon for highly ambitious and effective people like Obama to have an Achilles heel, an area where their feelings of guilt and inauthenticity get concentrated and paralyze them.

4. He's terrified of losing the black vote? I dunno, that sounds implausible.

5. So what if he can't deal with it? He's not running against FDR and Reagan -- he just has to beat Hillary and McCain.

6. His campaign, going back to the opening of his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address, is based on white people's assumption that being half-white made him less anti-white than other black leaders. So, Obama is worried that anything having to do with Rev. Wright will just unravel the logic of those fantasies he's elicited in his followers' minds.

I suspect, though, that Obama's overthinking this. People are slow to give up their fantasies due to logical disproof. Sure, Obama misled people about who he really was, but they wanted to be misled. And they still want to be misled.

At the moment, though, Obama doesn't looke like a leader. Obama's problem now is that Rev. Wright's vigor and enjoyment of the situation makes Obama, by contrast, look like a loser. Think about how Reagan wrapped up the 1980 election by turning to Carter in the debate and saying, with a smile on his face, "There you go again." What the hell did that mean? Not much on paper, but on TV it showed that Reagan was enjoying his dominance over the President. Reagan learned that from FDR, who always wore a look of amused mastery as he stuck the shiv in his political opponents. The public likes that in their leaders.

In the Obama vs. Wright battle, Wright is now playing the alpha male.

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

April 28, 2008

Rev. Wright on black-white cognitive differences

Here's an interesting excerpt from Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.'s Sunday night Detroit NAACP speech:

Turn to your neighbor and say different does not mean deficient. It simply means different. In fact, Dr. Janice Hale was the first writer whom I read who used that phrase. Different does not mean deficient. Different is not synonymous with deficient. It was in Dr. Hale's first book, "Black Children their Roots, Culture and Learning Style." Is Dr. Hale here tonight? We owe her a debt of gratitude. Dr. Hale showed us that in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks. [Ha-ha.]

And in so doing, we kept coming up with meaningless labels like EMH, educable mentally handicapped, TMH, trainable mentally handicapped, ADD, attention deficit disorder.

And we were coming up with more meaningless solutions like reading, writing and Ritalin. Dr. Hale's research led her to stop comparing African-American children with European-American children and she started comparing the pedagogical methodologies of African-American children to African children and European-American children to European children. And bingo, she discovered that the two different worlds have two different ways of learning. European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style and the entire educational learning system in the United States of America. Back in the early '70s, when Dr. Hale did her research was based on left brained cognitive object oriented learning style. Let me help you with fifty cent words.

Left brain is logical and analytical. Object oriented means the student learns from an object. From the solitude of the cradle with objects being hung over his or her head to help them determine colors and shape to the solitude in a carol in a PhD program stuffed off somewhere in a corner in absolute quietness to absorb from the object. From a block to a book, an object. That is one way of learning, but it is only one way of learning.

African and African-American children have a different way of learning.

They are right brained, subject oriented in their learning style. Right brain that means creative and intuitive. Subject oriented means they learn from a subject, not an object. They learn from a person. Some of you are old enough, I see your hair color, to remember when the NAACP won that tremendous desegregation case back in 1954 and when the schools were desegregated. They were never integrated. When they were desegregated in Philadelphia, several of the white teachers in my school freaked out. Why? Because black kids wouldn't stay in their place. Over there behind the desk, black kids climbed up all on them.

Because they learn from a subject, not from an object. Tell me a story. They have a different way of learning. Those same children who have difficulty reading from an object and who are labeled EMH, DMH and ADD. Those children can say every word from every song on every hip hop radio station half of who's words the average adult here tonight cannot understand. Why? Because they come from a right-brained creative oral culture like the (greos) in Africa who can go for two or three days as oral repositories of a people's history and like the oral tradition which passed down the first five book in our Jewish bible, our Christian Bible, our Hebrew bible long before there was a written Hebrew script or alphabet. And repeat incredulously long passages like Psalm 119 using mnemonic devices using eight line stanzas. Each stanza starting with a different letter of the alphabet. That is a different way of learning. It's not deficient, it is just different. Somebody say different. I believe that a change is going to come because many of us are committed to changing how we see other people who are different.

Rev. Dr. Wright resents not being taken seriously as an intellectual, and I think he has a point. So, I'll respond at some length.

This is pretty similar to a lot of stuff that I wrote in the late 1990s: for example, "Great Black Hopes" in National Review, my "Nerdishness" essay, and my review of Arthur Jensen's The g Factor.

The problem, of course, is that while Rev. Wright's ex-parishoner Oprah Winfrey can make a billion dollars being America's best nonrational subjective interpersonal improvisational thinker, it's a limited market. If you are the 100,000th best accountant in America, you probably live on a golf course. But if you are the 100,000 best talk show host, you are unemployed.

In my NR review of economic historian David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, I wrote:

Interestingly, many of the most striking racial differences can be thought of as resembling faint sex differences. For example, contrast the triumph of Japanese manufacturing with Japan's near-total failure in the brutally competitive global market for celebrities. (A recent survey revealed that Americans believe the most famous living Japanese person is Bruce Lee, a dead Chinese guy.) It's the mirror image of African-Americans' undistinguished technological achievements versus their outstanding performance in producing media personalities.

Why? Japanese talents extend far beyond chopstick-handling to a set of extremely masculine intellectual skills. Tests show they tend to excel at objective abilities like mathematics and mentally manipulating 3-d objects through "single-tasking" (focusing deeply upon a one impersonal logical problem). Blacks, on the other hand, are often better at typically feminine, more subjective cerebral skills like verbalization, emotional intuition and expression, sense of rhythm, sense of style, improvisation, situational awareness, and mental multi-tasking. Michael Jordan's brain, for instance, enables him to anticipate his opponent's every move while simultaneously demoralizing his foe with nonstop trash-talking. (Try it sometime. It's not easy.)

Next, think about physical and emotional/personality traits. Here the races are arrayed in the opposite order. Blacks tend to display more of typically male qualities like muscularity, aggressiveness, self-esteem, need for dominance, and impulsiveness. In contrast, the Japanese economy benefits from a male workforce endowed with more typically feminine virtues like small fingers and fine motor skills, cooperativeness, humility and anxiety, loyalty, long-term orientation, diligence, and carefulness. Combined with their first-rate masculine mental skills, these make Japanese companies powerhouses at exporting superbly engineered machinery.

Compared to Japanese organizations, black communities tend to be physically and psychologically masculine, sometimes to the point of disorderliness. Yet a relatively high percentage of individual black men achieve fame by possessing charismatically masculine looks and personalities, without the nerdishness that Dilbert-style male intellectual skills often induce."

The problem, of course, with the difference not deficiency approach is that there's no subjective way to keep the bridge from falling down. Thus, I suggested in NR in 1996:

The nice liberal white who beseeches black men, "I'm your friend, be like me," isn't always somebody they could be like and frequently isn't somebody they would be like, and thus can't give them a job they'll do themselves proud in. On the other hand, the not-so-nice white often holds the keys to what could be the right career. Another little-understood problem that will also continue to slow black male economic progress is that while Asian immigrants have flourished in part by their objective skills with numbers, blacks' advantages are typically in working with people. Thus, blacks are more susceptible than Asians both to residual bias and to debilitating fear of bias. I don't know of any quick solutions to either of these difficulties.

That said, what careers should black men consider more seriously in the next century? Since this type of question has been unthinkable under the reigning intellectual orthodoxy, my answers haven't yet been adequately assayed by public debate. But somebody has to stick his neck out first. So here goes:

Conservatives often advise blacks to start their own small businesses. However, African-Americans tend to face fierce competition from immigrants who can call upon more dependable relatives for advice, loans, and labor. Thus, for those African-Americans who are the most ambitious members of their families, integrated profit-seeking companies often provide better opportunities. But which jobs within those firms? For better educated black youths, the good news is that there are some fairly lucrative corporate careers that blacks have not yet widely discovered, but that especially reward persuasiveness and masculine charisma. There is always a price to be paid for breaking into new sectors, but these might hold long-run promise: selling big ticket contracts, stock-brokering, headhunting, and motivational speaking. In a word: Sales.

Unfortunately, the media climate saps the confidence blacks need. A salesguy must overflow with the assurance that the next account will love him more than the last one did. By automatically ascribing all gaps between whites and blacks to discrimination, the press drums up the menace of racism to the point of paranoia. This saps both motivation and that virile self-confidence that inspires customers to buy. Of course, some clients are anti-black, but over time blacks can mitigate that by discovering the less-biased industries and sales territories. Anyway, unfair as it is, the relevant question for a young black career-seeker is not whether he'd get richer if he was a white salesman. No, he needs to ask himself whether he'd ultimately end up generating more money and pride as a black salesman than as quota fodder in a make-work posting like Diversity Sensitivity Liaison.

And finally, here's how I summed it up in my review of Arthur Jensen's The g Factor:

Ironically, while diversity models are now popular in the abstract, it's nearly a hanging offense in the current mainstream media climate to actually mention particular talents in which minorities are superior to whites. (Today, "celebrating diversity" is automatically assumed to mean "insisting upon uniformity.") Gardner, for instance, coyly refuses to discuss the obvious racial and sexual disparities implicit in his seven factor model.

In the most publicized recent attempt to honestly flesh out a diversity model, the Reverend Reggie White of the Green Bay Packers asked the Wisconsin legislature, "Why did God make us so different?" He then listed what he saw as the different strengths of America's races, and concluded, "When you put all of that together … it forms a complete image of God." Despite being black, a football hero, an outstanding citizen, obviously well-intended, and in at least some of his examples undeniably right (e.g., Asians are gifted at invention, "they can turn a TV into a watch"), the Rev. White was pilloried by the press: "Stereotypes!"

Of course, none of the tut-tutters asked: Is a diversity model needed to describe specific black mental advantages overlooked by g? As a Reggieist (i.e., one who considers human biodiversity both a reality and a net blessing), I'm pleased to point out that IQ tests can't accurately measure at least one mental faculty in which blacks tend to outperform whites and Asians in real life. Despite lower mean IQ's, African-Americans are not a race of talentless dullards, but are instead the most charismatic contributors to 20th Century popular culture. What mental factor underlies the black revolutions in music, sport, oratory, dance, and slang? Subjective, improvisatory creativity.

For example, like a lot of NBA stars, Scottie Pippen's below-market contract, ill-timed trade demands, team-damaging pouts, and numerous child-support obligations imply that when given time to think, he often chooses unwisely. Yet, in the flow of the game, he's a Talleyrand at real-time decision-making. Leading a fast break, there are no permanent right answers. Even "Pass the ball to Michael Jordan" gets old fast as defenses habituate. Similarly, the NFL running back, the jazz soloist, the preacher, and the rapping DJ all must heed others' expectations and instantly respond with something a little unexpected. IQ tests -- by necessity objective and standardized -- can never measure this adequately.

Further, despite his data's inevitable shortcomings in this regard, Jensen does report that blacks possess particular mental weaknesses and strengths. Among individuals with equal g's, whites and Asians (like males) are typically stronger in those visual-spatial skills so useful in engineering and many skilled trades. In contrast, blacks (like females) often enjoy better short-term memories and thus can mentally juggle more balls in social situations. (This probably contributes to the black advantage in improvisation). Jensen's findings confirm my intuition (NR, 4/6/98) that while whites and Asians tend to be less masculine than blacks in physique and personality, they are typically more masculine than blacks in mental abilities. Put bluntly, whites and Asians tend to be nerdier than blacks. How many blacks would sincerely disagree?

Thus, the IQ disparity is less apocalyptic than is generally assumed. In fact, it's not all that unique -- diversity is among the oldest and most pervasive problems / opportunities inherent in the human condition. Because everybody is less innately talented than somebody else at something, the human race has worked out some pragmatic ways to deal with this.

Since Adam Smith and David Ricardo, economic theory has recommended specializing in whatever's your greatest comparative advantage. The peculiar problem facing blacks, though, is their specific talents are most valuable in winner-take-all professions like entertainment and sports. Still, the masculine bermishness common among blacks should also be helpful in more broadly remunerative occupations like sales.

Even if blacks had no special skills, just a deficiency of g, methods used by white and Mexican athletes to deal with black superiority in team sports might offer blacks practical hints in partially mitigating the g-gap. Specialization, for instance, is still valuable. (As illustrated by their most famous star Fernando Valenzuela, Mexicans don't tend to be endowed with ideal, Ken Griffey Jr.-style bodies for baseball. Yet, through an intense focus on the game they've built a critical mass of baseball expertise.) Avoid affirmative action programs that prevent critical masses from emerging. Look for fields where the inherent demands are less (e.g., golf rather than football) or competition is lighter (e.g., volleyball instead of basketball).

Work harder than your more gifted rivals. Master the fundamentals. Nail the easy stuff. (E.g., the only category in which whites are over-represented among NBA leaders is free-throw shooting). Don't improvise: listen to your coach's wisdom. (E.g., the decline of traditional sexual morality has not lead to a high pregnancy rate among coldly logical Dutch teens. For African-American teens, though, the rise of do-it-yourself morality in the 1960's was a disaster.) Challenge yourself, but realistically. (E.g., I need to get in shape, but an affirmative action program for Sedentary-Americans that sets-aside for me an opening in Evander Holyfield next heavyweight title bout might not be in my best interest. The same goes for racial quotas at elite colleges.)

Finally, the U.S. Army offers the bracing example of an institution that has elicited a high level of black achievement, in part by demanding that those with high-IQ's search out what Richard Epstein calls simple rules for a complex world. In dismal contrast, research universities fail blacks because the publish-or-perish system encourages the high-IQ to wallow in abstruseness. Denouncing Jensen proclaims one's faith in empirical egalitarianism, which serves as the perfect excuse for ignoring the irksome demands of moral egalitarianism. By declaring that everyone could Be Like Me (if only they were properly socialized), the clever can, with clear conscience, continue to surreptitiously wage class war against the clueless.

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

Rev. Wright has a book coming out later this year!

Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. told the big NAACP dinner in Detroit last night:

"So let me give you the outline of the rest of this message. You can either fill in the blanks for yourselves or you could wait for my book that will be out later this year."

I blogged on April 2:

If you were a literary agent, say, wouldn't you want to sign Wright up for a quickie bestseller, with a release date targeted at, say, 10/1/08? Hustle your best ghostwriter out to Tinley Park and get Wright's memoirs and views on current issues slapped together by the Fourth of July. Make that deadline and you could have it on the bookshelves five weeks before Election Day!No, I don't think we've heard the last from Rev. Wright.

Do you think Obama's campaign manager David Axelrod is wondering what Wright is going to fill into the blanks?

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

Rev. Wright as an intellectual

One of the things I've been pointing out is that Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. takes himself seriously as an ideological intellectual.

Obama and Wright have both been saying that the Youtubes of Wright's sermons are just snippets, but they are trying to imply different things by that. Obama wants you to believe that Wright is actually much more moderate than a few out-of-context clips might show. Wright, on the other hand, means that he's got lots more where that's coming from, that he's actually a deep thinker who has elaborate reasons backing up the opinions summarized in the notorious clips.

To his credit, despite Wright's ego, I don't get the impression that he sees himself as a creative genius, just as a well-read intellectual who keeps up on the scholarly work of leftist black theologians and philosophers such as James H. Cone.

This seems like a fair self-assessment, so it's frustrating for Wright that almost nobody in the white media has taken seriously his ideology, in fact, has barely noticed that he has an ideology. To whites, it's all just some black thing that we don't have to -- indeed, better not -- pay attention to.

It's especially annoying to Wright that nobody in the white press has paid much attention to the idea that a very bright young man named Barack Obama chose, out of all the black ministers he'd come into contact with during his four years as a community organizer, Rev. Wright because Obama was impressed with Wright's intellect and agreed with his ideology.

To the white media, all black ministers are alike, but not to an ultra-competitive black minister like Wright, who has outcompeted every other minister on the South Side of Chicago, that's a racist travesty.

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

I told you so

As I've been saying for a long time, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. is an attentionaholic far leftist whose career interests do not necessarily coincide with Barack Obama's. Indeed, Wright may well wish to go down in history as the Willie Horton of 2008 who proved what Wright's been saying his whole life, that a black man can't a fair break in America. And I've said for a long, long time that Obama would have to do a Sister Souljah on Wright and do it as early as possible.

Today, the whole world finally noticed. Dana Milbank writes in the Washington Post:

Wright's Voice Could Spell Doom for Obama

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, explaining this morning why he had waited so long before breaking his silence about his incendiary sermons, offered a paraphrase from Proverbs: "It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Barack Obama's pastor would have been wise to continue to heed that wisdom.

Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama's presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama's longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered - and added lighter fuel.

Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks ("God damn America") and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.

In front of 30 television cameras, Wright's audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama's vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio's April Ryan, confirmed that Wright's security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

Wright suggested that Obama was insincere in distancing himself from his pastor. "He didn't distance himself," Wright announced. "He had to distance himself, because he's a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American."

Explaining further, Wright said friends had written to him and said, "We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected." The minister continued: "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."

Wright also argued, at least four times over the course of the hour, that he was speaking not for himself but for the black church.

"This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright," the minister said. "It is an attack on the black church." He positioned himself as a mainstream voice of African American religious traditions. "Why am I speaking out now?" he asked. "If you think I'm going to let you talk about my mama and her religious tradition, and my daddy and his religious tradition and my grandma, you got another thing coming."

That significantly complicates Obama's job as he contemplates how to extinguish Wright's latest incendiary device. Now, he needs to do more than express disagreement with his former pastor's view; he needs to refute his former pastor's suggestion that Obama privately agrees with him.

Wright seemed aggrieved that his inflammatory quotations were out of the full "context" of his sermons -- yet he repeated many of the same accusations in the context of a half-hour Q&A session this morning.

His claim that the September 11 attacks mean "America's chickens are coming home to roost"?

Wright defended it: "Jesus said, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles."

His views on Farrakhan and Israel? "Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion. He was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter's being vilified for and Bishop Tutu's being vilified for. And everybody wants to paint me as if I'm anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago. He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century; that's what I think about him. . . . Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn't make me this color."

He denounced those who "can worship God on Sunday morning, wearing a black clergy robe, and kill others on Sunday evening, wearing a white Klan robe." He praised the communist Sandinista regime of Nicaragua. He renewed his belief that the government created AIDS as a means of genocide against people of color ("I believe our government is capable of doing anything").

And he vigorously renewed demands for an apology for slavery: "Britain has apologized to Africans. But this country's leaders have refused to apologize. So until that apology comes, I'm not going to keep stepping on your foot and asking you, does this hurt, do you forgive me for stepping on your foot, if I'm still stepping on your foot. Understand that? Capisce?"

Capisce, reverend. All too well.

Sailerian archaeological find

James Fulford of VDARE.com has dug up the first published paragraph I ever wrote: a letter-to-the-editor that appeared in National Review in 1973 when I was a ninth-grader. It turns out to be exactly the same as everything I've written since. (Perhaps I need a new shtick?)

Here's my new VDARE.com column on the 25th anniversary of the "A Nation at Risk" report on the public schools, which contains this rare find.

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

NYT confirms my hunch about Diveroli's AEY

When the New York Times broke the story that a 22-year-old high school dropout in Miami Beach had gotten a $298 million contract to supply ammunition to the Afghan army, there was much speculation about the no doubt complicated and nefarious conspiracy behind it all.

But the more I thought about it, as I wrote back in March, the more the scandal sounded merely like the traditional New York mail order camera shop business model of semi-bait and switch: you offer a ridiculously low price, take the customer's money, then see if you can scrounge up something that will keep the customer from taking you to court. Maybe you can bully a supplier into selling you exactly what you've already sold, or maybe the customer will accept something kind of like what they thought they were buying. After your reputation gets too awful, you just change your firm's name.

Indeed, that's the reputation of Botach Tactical, the weapons dealer owned by Efraim Diveroli's mother's family.

It's an easy way to make money if you just don't care when your rightfully angry customers scream at you over the phone. Most people don't like being confronted when they're guilty of breaking promises, but if it doesn't bother you, then you've got a bright future in this kind of business.

Now, C.J. Chivers reports in the NYT:

Several arms-industry officials said the problems were obvious. AEY was a new company with a young and inexperienced staff. Part of its business model, the officials said, was to make extremely low bids on contracts and then seek help from competitors to supply the munitions.

Private arms dealers said the practice caused predictable problems. “They low-bid these prices so low that there was no high-quality source for it,” said Sanford Brygidier, managing director of Aztec International, of Ocala, Fla.

Mr. Brygidier, who said he has been in the arms business for 36 years, added that Mr. Diveroli would tell potential suppliers that they had to accept his prices because he had the contract and there would be no other buyers. “He wanted this, he wanted that, he had immediate cash,” Mr. Brygidier said. “I told him, basically, that this wasn’t kindergarten and that we were not in the education business. I told him not to call me anymore.”

Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Diveroli’s lawyer, declined to answer questions about whether AEY had sought munitions from companies it had underbid. He did not dispute that its prices were generally low.

“It seems to me that Mr. Diveroli’s prices would have had to have been lower than his competitors’ for the Army to have awarded him the Afghanistan contract,” Mr. Shapiro said.

The low-price assumptions, the industry officials said, appeared to be what had led Mr. Diveroli to Albania, where the government sold its munitions for as little as 2.2 cents a round, a price that strongly suggested their age and poor condition.

Ed Grasso, president of Sellier & Bellot USA, which has provided new Czech ammunition to Afghanistan, said new rifle cartridges of the types AEY bought typically cost 20 cents to 30 cents a round.

By early this year, Mr. Diveroli seemed to be desperately searching for munitions, three dealers said. He turned up in Las Vegas in February at the SHOT show, which calls itself the world’s largest firearms exhibition.

He went booth to booth, seeking suppliers to fill the Army’s orders, including those for shoulder-fired rockets, they said. “He was looking to buy RPG-7 rounds, and let me tell you, he wanted to pay $30 for these things,” one dealer said. “You can’t get that item for that price, not if you’re buying quality.”

A round for an RPG-7, the dealer said, typically costs $60 to $85.

He added, “He would just come in and give us a list of stuff that he was trying to shop, and at prices no one would touch.”

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

April 27, 2008

America's Most Hated City

Judging from this poll of 60,000 Americans conducted by Travel & Leisure of visitors' and residents' attitudes toward 25 American cities to find "America's Favorite City," Los Angeles has to be America's Least Favorite City.

Consider the subsets of the "People" category. Seattle came in first in "Most Intelligent People," while Los Angeles came in dead last, worse than Las Vegas, Miami, or San Antonio (perhaps 100-year-old Jacques Barzun raises San Antonio single-handedly?)

Charleston was first in "Most Friendly," while LA was last again.

LA -- surly and stupid, like the cast of "Idiocracy."

LA scored near the top only in "Luxury boutiques," "Shoe-shopping," and "Jewelry-shopping." LA is so hated it only came in sixth in "Weather," behind (besides San Diego and Honolulu) Miami and Charleston (ever hear of this thing called "Summer"?) and 7,000 foot Santa Fe (ever hear of this thing called "not Summer"?).

The only consolation Angelenos can take is that year by year, the rest of the country becomes more like LA (but with lousier weather):

We're the future, your future.

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

You can't keep a good publicity hound down

The Guardian reports that Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. has resurfaced in the media, just in time to help Barack Obama woo working class white voters in the final primary states.

If only the Obama family had tithed the full $700,000, instead of a measly $53,000 out of the $7 million they've earned since Barack was elected to the U.S. Senate...

In other news, Sen. Obama has announced remodeling plans for the White House: "I have sworn that we're taking out the bowling alley in the White House and we're putting in a basketball court."

Before he's finished, though, he may feel like inviting a certain minister down to his private bowling alley to discuss money and milkshakes.

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

April 26, 2008

Indian Racism

The Washington Post runs a cheerful, upbeat article on the pervasive discrimination in the huge Indian film industry:

Bollywood No Longer A Dream Too Far for India's Lower Castes

Today, a trickle of actors, dancers and screenwriters from India's lower and middle castes are trying to break into a formerly impenetrable star system, full of actors from Bollywood royalty and other insiders hailing from high-caste families. New drama schools are training Indians from all castes. And Bollywood is starting to tackle more serious plots that could potentially star low-caste actors.

"Will you get more attention if you have the right surname and are part of an entrenched star family? Of course," said Anupama Chopra, a film critic and author of several best-selling books on Bollywood. "But there is increasing space now for a booming Bollywood film industry, and there's a feeling that if you are talented enough, well, maybe you will get noticed, no matter what your family ties are."

Across India, Dalits [a.k.a., Untouchables] and members of other low castes [actually, Dalits don't even have a caste -- being low caste would be a massive promotion for them] are struggling to gain access to quality education and better-paying jobs. The economy is booming, and Indians of low caste -- often identifiable by their surnames, birthplaces or parents' status -- want to share in the wealth, or at least the opportunity.

Some aspiring actors from low castes say their confidence is growing. There is more social mobility than ever before, they say, and Bollywood is experiencing its share of change.

"It's something new in the air for young people in some parts of India," said Trisha Karmakar, 24, a member of a lower caste who moved to Mumbai from the poor, densely populated state of Uttar Pradesh. "It's a feeling that at least there's a small chance for lower castes and not just for the star kids who have their godfathers and always get the callbacks."

Karmakar, speaking one recent day in a neighborhood of acting and dance schools, beauty parlors and pawnshops, said she has yet to land a role. But she said she is close to breaking into TV soap operas.

Well, don't call us, we'll call you.

As far as I can tell from reading the article, The Washington Post couldn't actually find an Untouchable, of whom there are 160 million in India, who has acted in a Bollywood movie. The closest they could come was the following:

"One of Bollywood's most beloved stars, Shahrukh Khan, is a middle-class Muslim with no film industry connections. He is often cited as an example of how charisma and sex appeal can trump connections and religious background in a country where Muslims are a minority."

Which doesn't seem very close at all.

But the fact that 160 million Untouchables are virtually shut out of India's most famous export industry is not the point, according to the Post. We shouldn't be thinking that the Bollywood tolerance glass is half empty (or, to be picky, 99.9% empty). The point is that the glass is full ... of Hope. And Change. Change and Hope!

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

April 25, 2008

McCain as Paris Hilton, Obama as Daniel Day-Lewis

John McCain spent the week campaigning in poor black neighborhoods. Is this part of some complex master Rovian plan to switch the demographic balance of the election? Nah. Or is it part of a cynical "Message: I Care" ploy? Nah, too. Or does McCain really care about poor blacks? Nah, three.

McCain's pretty much broke, so he's running a Reality TV-style campaign where instead of paying for expensive speechwriters and TV ads, he just figures out some wacky situation that will attract more cameras than normal and he just wings it in from there. This week's McCain campaign jaunt was like that Paris Hilton reality show "The Simple Life" where she and Nicole Richie milked cows.

McCain's been winging it his whole life. That's what he's best at. He may lose a wing now and then, but he's still here.

In contrast, Obama's preferred mode of campaigning is the way Daniel Day-Lewis makes movies: as infrequently and monumentally as possible. Obama's 5000 word speech on Rev. Wright was the political equivalent of Daniel Day-Lewis's performance in "There Will Be Blood."

In fact, what a lot of people said to each other right after Obama's Rev. Wright speech was awfully similar to what they said as they were walking up the theater aisle from "There Will Be Blood," with Brahms' Violin Concerto blasting away behind them:

"Magnificent!"

"He makes a shiver run down my leg!"

"Like Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane!' / Lincoln's 'Gettysburg Address!'"

"He's so much better than all other actors / politicians!"

"By the way" [in a small voice, looking around to make sure nobody else in the crowd is paying attention], what the hell was that about?"

"Uh ... I dunno."

"You don't know either?

"Well, it was about this minister."

"But what about the minister?"

"Yeah, well, Day-Lewis / Obama hates / loves the minister. And he gets rid of / doesn't get rid of the minister."

"How come?"

"I ... don't know. It had something to do with religion. But, it didn't seem to come up much in the movie / speech."

"So, why are we raving about it?"

"Look, making sense isn't really the point, now is it? The point is that Daniel Day-Lewis / Barack Obama is the most amazing person in the whole world."

"Right, sorry, my mistake, never mind."

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

Happy National DNA Day!

Today, April 25th, is the federal government's official annual "National DNA Day" to commemorate the 55th anniversary of the publication in Nature of the key article on the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and, uh, some other dude.

In fact, recent research revealed that Francis Crick crimethunk, too. So, perhaps it's not surprising that neither scientist's name appears on the government's "National DNA Day" homepage.

Don't you think it's about time the government moved National DNA Day to some date more appropriate, like, say, Rosa Parks's birthday? I mean, she had DNA, too, didn't she?

And she suffered. That's what we want these days -- heroes of suffering. (Just ask John McCain!) These two science dudes, they merely accomplished something. And who needs that? Heroes of accomplishment just make people who don't accomplish things feel bad.

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

Mormon Evolution

If the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints is more or a less a pyramid scam, in which the guys at the top hog the wives, how did the mainstream Church of the Latter Days Saints evolve into something quite different? I don't know anything about Mormon history, so please help me out here.

The mainstream Mormon organization in Utah today seem more like a mutual self-help society, sort of a private enterprise Sweden. If you agree to play by their rules, follow their cultural norms, and pay a lot of taxes, excuse me, donations, they'll round down some of the sharp, competitive corners of modern life for you. The intense and expensive efforts modern Americans make to "insulate, insulate, insulate" their families (as Sherman McCoy's best friend tells him people who want to raise children in Manhattan must do) are sort of taken care of for you by the Mormon church.

Of course, that's why Mormons are so Republican -- they've built themselves a private welfare state, without most of the moral hazard that goes with government welfare states.

For example, consider the admissions process to college, which is pretty maniacal for a lot of families these days.

Yet, the statistics on Brigham Young University don't look much at all like other universities. These days, colleges are extremely stratified by SAT score, but BYU isn't like that. The last time I checked (about five years ago), it's 25th and 75th percentiles of SAT scores were farther apart than just about any other prominent college in the country, meaning that a wide range of kids go there: both the smart Mormon kids and the average Mormon kids. The students at BYU just don't really care all that much about going to the school with the highest USNWR ranking.

Nowadays, most kids across the country apply to a lot of colleges and so acceptance rates are very low compared to just a decade ago, but then most colleges' "yields" (i.e., their admitted applicants' acceptance of them) have become pretty low, too. In other words, on April 1st the typical brand name college sends out, say, 5,000 acceptances and 20,000 rejection letters, and on May 1 it gets back 2000 acceptances of acceptances and 3000 rejections of acceptances. It's nerve wracking for all concerned.

But at BYU, it's pretty easy to get in. Non-Mormons don't want to go there, so it's not that competitive. And yet it's not a "safety school" -- most of the kids who get accepted choose to go there. It's yield is up there with Annapolis and Columbia and the like.

And the tuition is cheap. There's no real magic -- they have big class sizes. They just don't see the need to compete in the USNWR rankings by having smaller classes.

What BYU sounds like is the old State U. in 1950s Heinlein juvenile novels, where the hero (who is a math genius but nobody has noticed) has just graduated from high school and is working at the malt shop, and when customers ask him what his plans are, he says he really hasn't made any so he figures he'll just go to old State U. in September. Pretty low key ...

That's what UCLA was like when Heinlein went there for a few weeks.

Of course, nowadays, there are people in Seoul who have been grooming their prodigy child for acceptance at old State U. since birth, so old State U. isn't at all like old State U. anymore. In 2008, UCLA got 55,000 applications for the freshman class, the most of any college in America, with 45% coming from students with a 4.0 or higher GPA.

But BYU apparently still is kind of like Heinlein-era UCLA.

Anyway, my question is: how did the mainstream Mormons get from being kind of a pyramid scheme back in the polygamous 19th Century to the set-up they have today where life is more egalitarian than in the rest of America?

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

April 24, 2008

Cezanne vs. Picasso vs. Gladwell

I was going to comment on a recent lecture New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell gave to a conference of math teachers on how some students are like Picasso and everything comes quickly to them, while others are like Cezanne, where it takes them a long time before they become geniuses.

I came up with a theory about why he chose those particular analogies for math students, but then Google showed that in reality he's been wedging Picasso v. Cezanne into just about any of his recent speeches, no matter what the subject: oldies Classic Rock (see, the Eagles were like Picasso, while Fleetwood Mac was like Cezanne); American health care policy ("Gladwell: Health-care system needs Cezanne, not Picasso or Michael Moore"); and how to run your corporate R&D department ("Is Your Company a Cezanne or a Picasso?")

Nice work if you can get it!

The back story is that Malcolm developed his latest crush on a professor, U. of Chicago economist David W. Galenson, and wrote an article about Galenson's theory that there are two types of artists: quick-blooming conceptualists and slow-blooming experimentalists. Gladwell's article was evidently so silly that, despite Gladwell's huge popularity, the New Yorker rejected it, so Gladwell has been recycling it in speeches.

Enough about Gladwell. Let's take a look at Galenson's website:
"When in their lives do great artists produce their greatest art? Do they strive for creative perfection throughout decades of painstaking and frustrating experimentation, or do they achieve it confidently and decisively, through meticulous planning that yields masterpieces early in their lives?

By examining the careers not only of great painters but also of important sculptors, poets, novelists, and movie directors, Old Masters and Young Geniuses offers a profound new understanding of artistic creativity. Using a wide range of evidence, David Galenson demonstrates that there are two fundamentally different approaches to innovation, and that each is associated with a distinct pattern of discovery over a lifetime.


Experimental innovators work by trial and error, and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life. In contrast, conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at an early age. Galenson shows why such artists as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, and Alfred Hitchcock were experimental old masters, and why Vermeer, van Gogh, Picasso, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and Orson Welles were conceptual young geniuses. He also explains how this changes our understanding of art and its past.

Experimental innovators seek, and conceptual innovators find."

Galenson has supposedly collected a lot of quantitative information on sales prices and the like to determine when various artists peaked That kind of thing is always fun. (Although, I haven't actually seen his data. Commenters pointed me toward graph guru Edward Tufte's site -- he has read Galenson's book but didn't see any sales price data in it. Auction price data sounds like the kind of thing you'd have to massage a lot to make usable, adjusting for size of paintings and market levels, which means you could also massage it into giving the results you wanted if you weren't careful with yourself.).

That's not a bad little dichotomy, but it's more useful in comparing disciplines -- theoretical physicists tend to be young when they make their breakthroughs and historians tend to be old when they write their big books summing it all up, such as Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence, published when he was 94.

In other professions, it's mostly cost that drives peak ages: architects tend to be old when their most famous buildings are built because buildings are too expensive to be entrusted to whippersnappers. In contrast, great three chord rock songs are written by young men because it barely costs anything besides time, when they have all the time in the world.

But back to Galenson's central interest: art. There are of course, obvious limitations on his quantitative approach: there's not exactly an active market in Michelangelo's masterpieces. ("Sheldon Adelson bought the Sistine Chapel today for $18.1 billion from Larry Ellison, who paid only $15.3 billion for it in 2006. Adelson says the Sistine Chapel will serve as the lobby of his new Vatican Vegas Hotel & Casino, which he's opening on the Strip in 2010.")

I haven't read Galenson's book, but his own blurb for it isn't confidence-inducing. Why is Michelangelo an "old master" rather than a young innovator? He carved his Pieta before he was 25 and his David, the most famous sculpture of all time, the most stunning single objet d'art I've ever seen, before he was 30. On the other hand, he painted the Last Judgment in the Sistine chapel when in his sixties and redid the architecture of St. Peter's when in his seventies.

How can we account for this incredibly long and productive career?

Because he was Michelangelo.

This is a little like asking how Ted Williams could hit .388 with power and walks when he was 38 years old. It's because he could hit .406 with power and walks when he was 22. And vice-versa. He was Ted Williams, the greatest hitter of his generation.

Bill James had a nice little graph about the basic reason why some baseball players had long careers and others had short careers. Here's my version of it:

The horizontal axis is age, the vertical axis is a made-up measure of player value to a major league team. The purple line at value 10 is how good you have to be to be a starter in the big leagues.

So, Lance Long, the red line, is such a hot-shot prospect that he gets a few major league at-bats in September when's 18. He cracks the starting lineup at 21. He peaks at 27 like the average ballplayer, and he stays a starter through 39. He spends 40 as pinch-hitter and tries one more season at 41, but retires in May.

The career of Sid Short, the green line, follows almost exactly the same arc but most of it is spent in the minors or on the bench simply because he's not as good as Lance Long. He has a nice big league career, starting in the majors from 24 through 31, but as his body deteriorates, he's on the bench, then back to Triple A, then maybe bouncing around a Mexican league before he faces the inevitable and calls it quits.

Now, there are other factors that affect a player's career arc. For example, all else being equal, a smart player like Pedro Martinez is more likely to outlast a dumb player like Pedro Guerrero. A fast player at age 20 is more likely to find some place in the lineup at age 35 than a moderate-speed player who may be too slow by 35 for the big leagues. With alcoholics, not surprisingly, the second half of the career tends to be disappointing compared to the first half (e.g., Eddie Matthews, Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx)

Injuries obviously play a role, but once again they interact with talent. If you are Ernie Banks, two-time MVP power-hitting shortstop, and you permanently hobble yourself mid-career, they switch you to first base. If you are a journeyman with the same injury, though, they might find you an assistant coach job in the minor leagues if they're feeling benevolent.

With artists, the single biggest variable is age of death. For example, two of Galenson's young bucks are Vermeer, who died at 43, and and Van Gogh, who died at 37.

In one of his papers, he writes:

"There have been two very different life cycles for great artists: some have made their greatest contributions very early in their careers, whereas others have produced their best work late in their lives. These two patterns have been associated with different working methods, as art's young geniuses have worked deductively to make conceptual innovations, while its old masters have worked inductively, to innovate experimentally. We demonstrate the value of this typology by considering the careers of four great conceptual innovators - Masaccio, Raphael, Picasso, and Johns - and five great experimental innovators - Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, Cezanne, and Pollock."

Okay, but Masaccio, who introduced perspective to painting in Florence in 1425 died at 27 and Raphael died at 37. Maybe Masaccio just was in the right place at the right time, although people who know far more about art than I do assume he would have had a long, tremendous career if he'd lived. If Masaccio had lived, a decade or two later, he might have been the first great Italian to use oil paint, and then he'd be so famous today as the most revolutionary painter of all time that he'd be one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

And there's nothing in Raphael's character that suggests he was a one-trick pony. If he'd lived a long time, he'd probably have had a career like Titian's, only even better.

Finally, there's the historic shift at the beginning of the 20th Century from fine art to what Paul Johnson calls "fashion art." Raphael was the epitome of the fine artist, whose skills were objectively superior. Jasper Johns is the epitome of the fashion artist who figures out the next wave of fashion and cashes in big time.

Johns had the first show of Pop Art in 1958. See, he'd figured out that collectors were bored with Abstract Expressionist paintings. They wanted to buy paintings that were, at least, pictures of something. But the reigning dogma of the 20th Century was that paintings that used perspective, that created an illusion of 3-d space, a window into a made-up universe, were a fraud. A painting was just a flat surface with paint on it. You shouldn't make up a little story about what was happening in it: "Maybe Mona Lisa looks both happy and sad because ..." No! It's just a flat thing with paint on it.

But, still, pure abstraction was kind of boring ...

In The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe summarizes critic Leo Steinberg's epochal explication of what Johns had "accomplished."

"The new theory went as follows. Johns had chosen real subjects such as flags and numbers and letters and targets that were flat by their very nature. They were born to be flat, you might say. Thereby Johns was achieving an amazing thing. He was bringing real subjects into Modern painting but in a way that neither violated the law of Flatness nor introduced "literary" content."

Trust me, if Raphael had felt like painting a flag, it would be a better flag painting than any by Jasper Johns.

Finally, back to Picasso and Cezanne. How is it that Cezanne's paintings from the last decade of his career are his most expensive today, and Picasso's paintings from the first decade of his career are the most expensive? Well, it was basically the same decade -- the first of the 20th Century. That's when the Big Switch happened, so the most historically important paintings from both Cezanne and Picasso come from almost the same time.

What happened in the first decade of the 20th Century was that after 475 years, people were getting bored with perspective; and painters were increasingly worried about photography. Pretty soon, those bastards would have color film and then you could take pictures that looked like what Jan van Eyck was doing in the 1430s in the Low Countries when he got perspective from Italy and oil paint from Norway. And then who is going to hire a painter?

This led to the happy ending of Cezanne's life. Cezanne could never quite get the hang of perspective, which had been the basic barrier to entry for professional painters since the 15th Century. All of his pictures just kind of looked "off." Normally, people who tried their hand at painting but couldn't master perspective gave up and did something else with their lives. It's like a professional baseball player who can't hit a 90 mph fastball or a singer who can't stay on key -- they're best advised to go get a real job and most of them eventually do.

But Cezanne was a dogged sort, who really loved painting, even if he wasn't very good at it. So, he kept at it and at it, and he actually got better at the other stuff, like color.

Eventually, though, people in the art business, like young Picasso, decided "Who cares about perspective anymore? It's been done." And they looked around for a role model to give some credence, some sense of historical development to this new fashion, and, there was poor old Cezanne, still hard at it. And, you know, if you kind of squinted and ignored the fact that his paintings looked out-of-kilter, they were pretty good! And, in fact, since paintings had been in-kilter since Masaccio, but now the damn photographers were just pressing a button and making in-kilter pictures, you could argue that Cezanne's out-of-kilterness made his poor old paintings not just good, but great! (That was the point, of course -- the art world wanted paintings that you wouldn't get unless you'd heard the theory already. Everything else could be left to photography.)

So, what does Cezanne have to do with math students? Maybe if some kid just doesn't have the knack for the Quadratic Formula, he should just keep plugging away until the Quadratic Formula goes out of fashion!

P.S. -- This issue of measuring quality by sales price, box office revenue, or other volume per unit has some subtle problems, even beyond the issue of crassness.

Just assume for the moment that money really does equal artistry. The problem is that artists frequently change the scale of the unit they work on and their rate of production over their careers.

For example, movie director David Lean's career very neatly segments into two periods. He made 11 films between 1942 and 1955, most of them modestly scaled, such as Brief Encounter. He then switched to directing ambitious epics filmed on location: Bridge Over the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, Ryan's Daughter, and A Passage to India. Thus, he completed only five more films over the next 30 years.

You can see the methodological problem in determining what was the peak period of his career, right? On any per unit measure these latter films average higher, whether box office or Academy Award nominations or critics' Top 10 lists. But they only came out once per six years, while the earlier films came out five times as often. Waiting five years for Lawrence of Arabia was probably worth it, but how about waiting 14 years for Passage to India?

So, a better solution than Galenson's attempt to measure prices or box office per individual painting or film is to aggregate over a period of time, such as per year.

Another issue is how high or low do you set the bar. For example, with Lean, if the measure is set very lofty, such as asking 100 leading film experts to name the Single Greatest Film Ever, then he'd probably only get votes for Lawrence. If you set the bar pretty low, such as, "Was it worth releasing the film in the theatres?" then his per year productivity was higher in the first part of his career. So, some mixture of measures would be best.

By the way, there are a few kinds of artists whose unit of scale doesn't change over time, such as Norman Rockwell, who painted 321 Saturday Evening Post covers over 47 years. But, I suspect that even Rockwell's rate of output change over the years.

Syndicated cartoonists are among the few artists whose scale and rate stay constant. For example, around 1972, I read all the annual Charles Schulz' Peanuts collections in order. By my juvenile judgment, he consistently improved up through 1968, his peak, but fell off in the three following years. I don't know if other people would agree with my impressions, but the point is that you could run a fair experiment.

Syndicated daily cartooning is a tough job. Thus, you see odd careers arcs like Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes, who was probably the best cartoonist in America from 1985-1995, but virtually disappeared into retirement a dozen years ago at 37 rather than try to maintain his sterling quality at the same killer pace.

The black hole of American public policy discourse

A friend waxes metaphorical about the state of intellectual life in America:

The metaphor that's always come to my mind is that of living near some sort of singularity, gravitational or otherwise.

Basically, anything that gets too close to the singularity falls inside and disappears. People go around their daily lives, when suddenly someone accidentally gets too close---James Watson?---and Bam! He disappears.

The powerful tidal effects from the invisible singularity warp all sorts of social structures into bizarre shapes and behaviors. Gradually over time, more and more pieces of our world drop inside the singularity and disappear, until eventually the entire society collapses.

Back in the early 1970s, Larry Niven wrote a couple of short stories about the fact that if you just just took a tiny quantum black hole (that was before Hawking's evaporation theory came out) with the mass of a baseball or something and just dropped it into the ground it would fall to the center, swing back and forth through the core, and eventually gobble up the entire planet within a few years or centuries, becoming a somewhat bigger black hole in the process. Tiny black hole plus Earth equals bigger black hole plus no more Earth!

Officially believing in something that just isn't true has much the same impact, eventually gobbling up everything else in your society.

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

The Economics of Eldorado

A couple of weeks ago, following a hoax phone call from (apparently) an Obama delegate in Colorado, the state of Texas seized 437 children from a community recently built outside of Eldorado, TX by the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (which, for some reason, is known as FLDS rather than FCLDS).

I've been trying to understand the economics of Eldorado.

If you ask most guys, they'll tell you that having one wife is expensive. So, how do you have a community based on having a bunch of wives?

In tropical farming communities, the usual solution is to send the wives out to work hoeing the fields. That's how you come across stories now and then of some handsome, prosperous fellow in Kenya with 100 wives -- he owns the land, but the work is being put in, overwhelmingly, by the wives.

The downsides to this tropical model (frequently found in Africa and the New Guinea area) normally include that childcare winds up catch as catch can and the husbands have a hard time keeping their wives in the fields away from local bachelors trying to lure them into the bushes. But then, does the husband care all that much if he winds up with a few cuckoo's eggs? He's not busting his hump for the kids, anyway, so it's not a big deal.

FLDS seems to be midway between the lackadaisical African model of paternal uncertainty and the Middle Eastern Muslim model of paternal paranoia with wives locked up in harems and only allowed out wearing tents. The FLDS women don't seem to be allowed out much to work in the wider world, and have to wear modest clothes at all times, but at least the FLDS doesn't have eunuch harem guards. (But they also throw out scores of young men each year to reduce the bachelors in the bushes threat.)

So, where do they get their money? Models that might be helpful to think about include:

1. Welfare fraud: Since the states don't recognize subsequent marriages, all the wives after the first are legally unwed mothers, eligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, and so forth. Apparently, it's called "bleeding the beast."

2. Organized crime / politics: The main FLDS community of Colorado City, AZ / Hilldale, UT (it's on the border for purposes of legal confusion) is its own town in two different states, and lots of money comes down from Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Washington D.C. for things like public schools, the local airport (used primarily by the Prophet), street paving and so forth. Supposedly, the place gets back $8 in state services for every $1 it pays in state taxes. Not surprisingly, the FLDS puts lots of its members on the state-supported payroll and appears to skim off a sizable fraction of the budget for its own purposes. In 2005, the state of Arizona put the local school district into receivership for mismanagement. So, it's kind of a racket.

Of course, the same thing could be said of a lot of municipalities, like, oh, Chicago. On the other hand, the Mayors Daley never quite had government employees as hypnotized into not rolling over for prosecutors as the Prophets Jeffs.

3. Pyramid scheme / slavery -- The male members of the FLDS appear to be, in general, industrious and competent at blue collar trades, especially construction work. But their earnings are "taxed" at very high rates by the handful of leaders at the top of the church. All property is owned by the church.

Why do these hard-working guys put up with it? The Prophet gets to decide who marries whom. If he likes how much money you've brought in, maybe he gives you a wife. If he really likes you, maybe he gives you a second, prettier one. The sky's the limit. But, if the Prophet doesn't like you, no wife for you. In fact, he may expel you from the only community you've ever known. After all, there are about an equal number of boys and girls born to the sect, so a lot of the more unruly and/or less productive males get tossed out.

4. Puppy mill -- Not surprisingly, not that many people want to convert to FLDS, so to keep the supply of young wives for elders as bountiful as possible, they have to grow their own. This leads to inbreeding problems. The Deseret Morning News reported:

Until a few years ago, scientists knew of only 13 cases of Fumarase Deficiency in the entire world. Tarby said he's now aware of 20 more victims, all within a few blocks of each other on the Utah-Arizona border.

The children live in the polygamist community once known as Short Creek that is now incorporated as the twin towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz. Tarby believes the recessive gene for Fumarase Deficiency was introduced to the community by one of its early polygamist founders.

According to community historian Ben Bistline, most of the community's 8,000 residents are in two major families descended from a handful of founders who settled there in the 1930s to live a polygamist lifestyle.

"Ninety percent of the community is related to one side or the other," Bistline said.

So, does this mean the state of Texas should have taken 437 children? Arizona tried it 55 years ago and it proved to be a nightmare.

So, I don't know what Texas should do now, but here's the first lesson for other states: Do not let these people infest your state.

When Texas first got wind of the FLDS plan to set up a compound a few years ago, they should have come down on them with a Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO) lawsuit, hostile building inspectors, environmental impact study demands, everything in the ample arsenal of the modern state to get them to go away.

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

April 22, 2008

How Obama can avoid becoming the Democratic Mitt Romney

As you'll recall, last week, in the 21st Democratic candidates' debate, the press finally got around to asking Obama repeatedly about some of the evidence that he is (or, perhaps, was) farther to the left than his expensively honed public image would suggest.

When Obama couldn't come up with reassuring answers, this line of questioning was widely denounced by his supporters. Why is the press wasting time on trivia like who Obama really is, the pundits thundered, when it could be asking important questions, like about the difference in Obama's and Hillary's stance on individual mandates in government health insurance plans?

Personally, I was bored with attempts to discern differences in their platforms, but I thought that was just me. But now Team Obama has pulled out of the planned North Carolina primary debate. This follows Obama's statement that he's bored with debates too. CNN reported:
Sen. Barack Obama suggested Thursday that he doesn't see any point in having another debate with Democratic rival Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Clinton has agreed to a debate next week, but Obama has not accepted the invitation.

At an appearance in Raleigh, North Carolina, Obama said he has a lot of campaigning to do in a limited amount of time.

Obama said he had agreed to an earlier debate, but Clinton declined that one.

"I'll be honest with you, we've now had 21," he said. "It's not as if we don't know how to do these things. I could deliver Sen. Clinton's lines; she could, I'm sure, deliver mine."

Of course, the reason he doesn't want to do a 22nd debate is because in the 21st, he finally got asked tough questions about the central conundrum about Barack Obama: Who is in charge: his head or his heart?

Like me, Obama is essentially a writer, not an extemporaneous speaker. He needs a few drafts to work things out. So, he developed a conversational style where he doesn't try to persuade anybody in unscripted conversation of anything other than that "I have understood you," knowing that most people assume that the only reason anybody disagrees with them is because they are too dumb to understand. Obama watched how fast people got sick of Newt Gingrich. Americans like to imagine their leaders know more than they are saying.

And even though debates are mostly precanned speechmaking, where he can use his writing skills to come up with verbiage ahead of time, they aren't his strength because of the time restrictions on his answers. Obama needs a lot of words to work his special Baroque O'Blarney magic, to lull his readers and listeners into forgetting whatever it was they wanted to know from him and just stand their in awe of his thoughtful nuances.

For example, his March 18th speech on his two-decade long relationship with Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. was instantly proclaimed a masterpiece by the press because it was 5,000 words long.

But, to the surprise of many reporters who watched it, it didn't end the Rev. problem for him, especially not among the kind of Pennsylvania voters who aren't going to read 5,000 words of nuanced thoughtfulness. Obama's problem is that when you try to sum up his March 18th explanation for his 20 years of following Rev. Wright in a few syllables, you just come up with something like: "It's okay because I'm black."

Obama's plan appears to be to try to run out the clock on the Democratic nomination, then hope that the elderly McCain decides to run a gentlemanly campaign that will meet with the approval of his admirers in the press rather than go to the mat with Obama, 1988-style, and actually try to win.

Clearly, Obama is a brilliant politician who has spent a long time thinking about how he would someday be elected President. Still, his bet that his opponents and the press will be too intimidated by his being black to take the gloves off is a risky one.

Leaving aside race, Obama's problem is the same as Mitt Romney's was. We had two pictures of Romney at two different times: the liberal Republican governor of Massachusetts a few years ago and the conservative Republican candidate in 2008. And Romney didn't provide us with any kind of narrative explaining how and why he went from Point A to Point B. Romney was a Heisenbergian electron materializing in different orbits with no way for us to know how he got from one to the other.

So, a lot of people decided that Romney must be a big phony who determined his standards by political expediency. And thus the nomination went to John McCain, who may blow up the world, but at least he'll do it in an authentic, straight-shootin' manner.

Like Romney, Obama, despite being a gifted memoirist, has never provided us with a plausible narrative explaining how he got from Rev. Wright's politics to being the post-partisan conciliator he claims to be now.

Romney, being white, especially being Mormon, which a lot of people associate with Donny Osmond's big-toothed perpetual smile, couldn't get away with that. So far, Obama, being (nominally) black, which Americans associate with authenticity, has gotten away with it.

But, he's losing momentum. He's lost three big state primaries in a row.

Obviously, it's presumptuous of me to offer Obama political advice. The man has thought longer and harder than anybody about the many advantages of being black in America today. He figured out that black Democrats would abandon the Clintons out of pure racial loyalty. And he figured out that white Democrats (and maybe white Republicans too) have been trained to turn their brains off when it comes to anything touching on race. He may very well win the Presidency because his opponents and the media are intimidated by his race.

Still, he's playing defense now. He'll increasingly have to hunker down, away from the trickle of tough questions that has started.

If he wants to go back on offense, though, he should play to his strength. He should give another 5,000 word speech. This one would be on: "I used to be way to the left, but now I'm not, because ..."

Aye, there's the rub: Why?

Therefore, let me suggest one for him:

"I used to be way to the left, but now I'm not, because I had kids."

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

Hillary wins 55-45

Here's the exit poll.

I didn't pay that much attention to the Pennsylvania primary, but judging from the demographics of who voted for whom, it strikes me that they could have held this election six weeks ago and gotten the same results. This election is about identity, not about surface issues.

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