June 30, 2008

Cheap gasoline was a social lubricant

In 1968, when my late father-in-law, a classical musician, had to sell his two-flat on the West Side of Chicago because his children were suddenly getting mugged on the sidewalk, getting only a fraction of what it had been worth two years before. He moved 63 miles out of town, but commuted daily to the Lyric Opera House downtown. Why not? Gas was $0.29 per gallon.

Inexpensive oil was a social lubricant in America.

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

June 29, 2008

I'm not making this up

Here's an editorial from the Dallas Morning News that I swear I'm not making up:

Editorial: So much vibrancy to build on

The trick is getting diverse groups to building [sic] a community together

The beauty of the neighborhoods that run from Jefferson Boulevard toward Wynnewood Village is how they mirror Texas' future – and capture the state's biggest challenge. Plurality will become the new reality, creating an ethnic vibrancy but making it hard to build a community out of so many different kinds of people.

You see this reality writ large in this stretch of Oak Cliff, where middle- to upper-middle-income, mostly Anglo folks live alongside poor, working, mostly Latino families. You find tree-lined, prosperous neighborhoods like Elmwood and Wynnewood, along with blocks of proud working-class neighborhoods. The hodgepodge of backgrounds and incomes coalesces into a vibrancy that North Texas neighborhoods often miss.

Vibrancy is what happens when longtime Cliff dwellers bump up against the surge of gay couples fixing up their Wynnewood homes not so far from Latino families imbuing Jefferson Boulevard with a gritty mercado atmosphere.

Vibrancy is what happens when white-collar professionals and blue-collar laborers sit shoulder-to-shoulder at restaurants like the Charco Broiler, Tops Cafe and El Ranchito.

Bridging Dallas' North-South Gap: A campaign by The Dallas Morning News editorial board to lift the southern part of Dallas.

And vibrancy is what happens when agencies like Casa Guanajuato serve immigrant families a few blocks from historic, big-steeple churches like Cliff Temple Baptist.

The trick is building a community so everyone wins – rather than turning it over only to the poor or the affluent. Striking a balance will require smart economic strategies, improved schools and an attentive City Hall.

Consider Jefferson Boulevard, which many consider the spine of Oak Cliff. There are about 160 shops along its 11 blocks between Zang Boulevard and Edgefield Avenue. But 18 of those shops pawn merchandise, offer ready cash or loan money. Another 20 sell outfits for brides, quinceaƱeras or parties. And 15 stores provide styling for hair or nails – or, if you're in the mood, a tattoo.

Undoubtedly, a market exists for dresses for that big occasion, ready cash or looking nice. But a thriving boulevard needs a broad range of stores to attract a broader range of shoppers. Retail feeds off other retail. And Jefferson lacks that element. Along this stretch, for example, there's only one diversified department store.

In other words, the gays actually find Jefferson Blvd. to be not vibrant, but tacky.

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

How to Improve the Schools

From my new VDARE.com column:

Sailer’s Four-Point Plan for Improving Schools

By Steve Sailer

How can we improve America's K-12 schools? While we're waiting for Charles Murray to unveil his plan in his upcoming book, Real Education (due in August), here are some ideas I've had.


#1: educators need to stop falling for this year's Solution of the Century every year.

A huge amount of time is wasted reorganizing schools and retraining teachers for the latest fad, which, typically, was tried and discarded so long ago that nobody can remember anymore. (So don't take these ideas I'm tossing out all that seriously!)

Many teachers and administrators don't mind all the reorganizations because sitting around playing office politics versus each other is more fun than trying to get students to memorize the Times Tables.

The dogma of racial equality helps explain much of the educartel's susceptibility to the latest cult craze. Nobody has ever been able to get blacks and Hispanics to consistently perform as well as Asians and whites on a large scale. And, since the obvious implication of this reality is unthinkable (in many minds, quite literally), then it must be the schools' fault. What else could it be?

This logic is then used by cranks reformers to justify implementing their pet obsessions. If the schools are small, for instance, that could be the reason for the racial gap. So, make them bigger. If they are big, then make them smaller. Just do something!

For example, the insanely rich Gates Foundation has been pressuring public schools to deconstruct themselves into "small learning communities"—which was what Americans were trying to get away from back when they built big learning communities.

One way to gain a wiser perspective on K-12 fads is to think about how you chose which college to attend. For some reason, ideology tends to get in the way less in individuals’ college choices than in debates about public policy.

Did you pick a small college or a big college?

And did you make the right choice?

You may have a strong opinion on the subject of the optimal college size. But, whatever it is, you have to admit that other people disagree with you. After all, both Caltech (864 undergraduates) and University of Texas at Austin (36,878 undergraduates) seem to have done pretty well for themselves over the years. Different sizes come with objective advantages and disadvantages. For example, when I attended huge UCLA, there were professors on campus expert on practically every topic under the sun, but my parking lot was a half-hour walk away. Moreover, different people flourish best in different size schools.

Education fads are seldom motivated by statistical research, since it's hard to move the needle noticeably for a large number of schools. As we've known since the Coleman Report during LBJ's Great Society, the students are more important than the school.

Instead, education vogues are launched by statistical outliers.

Small schools are particularly likely to be outliers, because they are small. There are so many of them, and unusual things can happen more easily when fewer people are involved.

These flukes aren't necessarily false results. When the right principal, right teachers, and, especially, right students come together, good things can happen.

Not surprisingly, though, outliers are hard to replicate on a large scale.

Lots of new educational fads are launched by charismatic individuals who can personally make them work. Charisma can accomplish amazing things. Rasputin apparently could stop the Crown Prince of All the Russias' internal bleeding just by talking to him. Nevertheless, "Hire lots of Rasputins!" is not a reliable strategic plan for hemophilia clinics.

More

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

Why there's no market for oil price conspiracy theories

Back in the 1970s, it was popular to believe that oil company manipulations were behind the rises in the price of oil. I remember a fellow I played golf with when I was 14 explaining that there was a flotilla of oil tankers lurking beyond San Clemente Island, just waiting for the price to hit $14 per barrel. You heard that kind of thing all the time.

Even though oil prices are an order of magnitude higher, conspiracy theories aren't popular these days. There's no market for conspiracies theories. The left wants high oil prices to prevent global warming, and, more importantly, to punish SUV drivers, while leading voices on the right have all been bought off by The Conspiracy.

No, just kidding! Nobody believes in conspiracies anymore. Not even when there is a 48-year-old international oil conspiracy that has its own website.

Nobody has ever tried to drive up the price of a natural resource. (Well, except for the Hunt Brothers cornering the silver market in 1979-1980. And Jay Gould cornering the gold market in 1869. And, of course, as commenters point out, DeBeers and diamonds.) Nobody has ever used an environmentalist theory to drive up prices. (Well, except for the media panic in the 1990s over how America was about to run out of places to dump trash, which never made any sense -- if there's one thing America isn't in danger of running out of, it's holes in the ground. The frenzy turned out to be a hoax engineered by the PR department of Waste Management Inc. to get higher dumping rates from municipalities.) So, just forget about it!

Seriously, I don't know anything about the oil market. I'm just saying that an era when nobody wants to believe in conspiracies would be the best time to try one.

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

June 27, 2008

"Americans love a winner!" -- G.S. Patton

A few years ago, I read a book by historian Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders. It contained a chapter on the wonderfulness of the Federalist Papers, as written by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, comparing them to the Anti-Federalist Papers, written by a bunch of losers nobody has heard of since.

The Anti-Federalists would write, "If the Constitution is ratified,the federal government will grab the power to do X [or Y, or Z]." And Madison, Hamilton, or Jay would answer back, "Oh, no, that would never happen in a million years. It explicitly says right here in Article Whatever that only the states can do that."

But the funny thing is, Bailyn's long list of about a dozen or more things the Anti-Federalists warned would happen if the Constitution were ratified ... they have all happened. They didn't all happen right away. Many took until the Civil War, or the New Deal, or the Warren Court, or whatever. Still, when it comes to making long-run accurate predictions, the despised Anti-Federalists were right and the sainted Federalists were wrong.

But, nobody cares. People care about who won, not who turned out to be right.

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

Gun Control

I don't have anything new to say about the Supreme Court's Second Amendment decision, so here's what I wrote in 2004:

Original Intent of the Second Amendment: I haven't really been into guns since I desperately wanted a BB gun for my 9th birthday (see "Christmas Story" for details), but my son and I did some research recently into what the authors and ratifiers of the Bill of Rights intended to do by passing the Second Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

This wording is rather unusual -- besides the superfluity of commas -- in the context of the Bill of Rights in that it contains what appears to be a "whereas" clause, which most of the other first 10 amendments don't. The First for example, doesn't say, "A war of religion, being a bad thing, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

This anomaly has led many contemporary commentators to assume that the 2nd Amendment was meant only to apply to state militias and not to individual gun ownership. Here, for example, is Dahlia Lithwick in Slate confidently explaining that "Eminent legal scholars, including Sanford Levinson and historians such as Emory's Michael Bellesiles, have done some staggering scholarly work on the subject of the original intent of the Framers and the prevalence of guns at the time of the founding of the country."

Staggering, indeed. As the eminent Professor Bellesiles showed in his prizewinning book Arming America: My Fantasy of How Frontier Life Should Have Been, when an American in 1789 felt a hankering for deer meat, rather than resort to using a gun, he normally ran a deer down on foot and gnawed the beast to death with his teeth.

What my son and I found out about the original intent was the exact opposite. The research was a little frustrating to do because there was almost no debate among state legislators at the time about an individual right to gun ownership -- because that simply wasn't controversial. Of course Americans had the right to own guns: the woods were full of bars, Injuns, and bad 'uns. Nobody argued about it then because there was nobody at the time to argue with.

What was controversial back then were state militias -- trained bodies of fighters who could potentially resist the federal government. Legalizing militias -- i.e., alternative armies to the U.S. Army -- was obviously a much more radical step than legalizing individual ownership of firearms. Legitimizing militias was a concession that Federalists like Madison made to win the approval of those skeptical of the centralizing force of the Constitution.

When the Union Army won the Civil War, the idea of alternative armies started to look outdated, thus leading to the current misinterpretations of what the authors and ratifiers of the Second Amendment meant. Gun control advocates should feel free to argue than in an era of rocket-propelled-grenades and radio-dispatched police cars, the whole Second Amendment is obsolete and dangerous, but please don't make up stories about what it was supposed to mean.

The other big change is that the Bill of Rights didn't apply to the states until the 14th Amendment of 1868. For example, Connecticut had an establishment of religion until 1818. So, the ratifiers weren't establishing an absolute right of gun ownership, they were just preventing the federal government from infringing it.

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

June 26, 2008

McCain's Intelligence Intelligence

Philip Giraldi, the ex-CIA man who writes The American Conservative's invaluable gossip column, Deep Background, notes in the June 16th issue:

Intelligence analysts who have briefed Sen. John McCain on international issues generally report that he is not very knowledgeable about most parts of the world, despite his years of experience in government and his campaign's insistence that one of his principal strengths is foreign-policy expertise. When speaking with an area specialist or expert, McCain is primarily interested in stating his own perceptions and is not generally regarded as an attentive listener. Analysts do not like briefing him because he becomes angry and sometimes personally offensive when someone contradicts his view.

It's really not very hard at all for an important personage wrapped in the glamor of power to persuade lower ranking outsiders that he's a deep thinker. Obama is the master of it -- all you do is tell the person how much you value all the time they've put into developing their expertise (implying that you are very busy yourself on so many other important issues), nod attentively as they drone on, then bring up one or two semi-sophisticated questions you had your staff dream up for you ahead of time, and then finally summarize back for them what they just said with an appreciative hint of wonder in your voice implying that the scales are falling from your eyes. The flunkies will go away and tell everybody that you are the new Pericles. But Yosemite John can't bring himself to do even that.

One analyst stated that McCain's alleged expertise on international issues is essentially bogus. He speaks no foreign language, and his international experience [prior to Congress] derives from brief postings at military bases, junkets while serving as Navy liaison to the Senate, and the misfortune of his rather more extensive stay in the Hanoi Hilton.

As a Congressman, McCain served on committees dealing with Department of Interior issues, Indian affairs, and the problems of aging -- all areas of particular interest to his Arizona constituents. As a senator, he has served on the three committees dealing with the armed services, Indian affairs, and commerce. ...

According to the analysts who have interacted with McCain, his recent misstatements about various Muslim groups and other foreign-policy issues are not slips. They reflect a real lack of interest in other countries that makes it impossible for him to empathize with their problems...

McCain, whose foreign-policy advisers are exclusively neocons, receives regular briefings from the distinguished scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, which are presumably more to his taste than the less colorful information provided by the $42 billion per year intelligence community.

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

Cuba Question

Currently, every Cuban who manages to set foot on American soil is eligible for refugee status. Is this American law contingent on Cuba not letting most people leave? Or is it still applicable if Raul Castro threw open the gates tomorrow and a few million Cubans headed for Florida?

Cuba has an enormous number of unemployed welfare bums. If a Cuban Deng took over intending to capitalize the place, it would be very tempting to do a Mariel boatlift and dump the bottom million or two Cubans on America.

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

June 25, 2008

The World Unites! (In opposing immigration)

Sorry about this miniature graph, but if you click on it, it will be legibly large.

Anyway, it's from a Pew Center polling of people in 47 countries on whether "We should further restrict and control immigration." (See p. 29 of the PDF.) Those favoring more restrictions on immigration are the salmon colored bars, those disagreeing are the blue bars. The restrictionists win in 44 of 47 countries, only losing two East Asian countries that haven't really tried immigration yet, Japan and South Korea, and in the Palestinian Territories (I don't know exactly how the Palestinians interpreted that question -- perhaps they read it as restricting their right to immigrate into Israel and reclaim grandpa's house in Haifa.)


Obama's advantage over other black Democrats

In the comments a reader makes an excellent point:

Among the innumerable interesting things about Obama's candidacy is the lie that it puts to some of the most tired myths about black/white relations in America.

In particular, the myth that the historical marginalization of blacks has given them particular insight into the dominant (i.e., white) culture. This may have had some truth when black women frequently worked as "domestics" for upper-crusty whites and had to look the other way at the wife's pill-popping and junior's porn collection, but no more.

Obama has spent much of his adult life establishing his black bona fides in the armpit of South Side radicalism, but he's successful as a candidate because he was raised by and around whites and has developed a very keen instinct for Stuff White People Like. Your typical inner city ward heeler, however, has no idea. With the atomization of popular culture, poor, inner city blacks are probably more insulated today from nonblack culture than they ever have been in history.

For example, interviews with inner city American blacks now frequently need to be subtitled on TV - unthinkable 20 years ago, unless it was someone born in the 1800s and had lived his whole life on the Delta (white speech, as far as I can tell, hasn't changed much - so I don't think that's it).

I always figured the first black Presidential nominee would be a Republican or quite conservative Democrat, probably from a military background, or perhaps a sports background (or both, e.g., former Naval officer and basketball hall of famer David Robinson). I assume Colin Powell could have won the GOP nomination fairly handily in 1996 as a war-winning general, if only he'd wanted it.

In contrast, white Democrats haven't seemed to like black candidates much. They've looked down upon non-racialist pragmatic black politicians like former LA mayor Tom Bradley as Uncle Toms, yet also looked down upon racialist politicians popular with blacks like Rev. Jesse and Rev. Al as buffoons. So, Obama is the unexpected answer to their fantasies. A black candidate who has worked hard to establish a career for himself as a South Side racialist, but who is really a lit fic novel reading white man in a semi-black skin.

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

Bill Gates' last day on the job

Bill Gates is now working full time at his foundation, helping his wife make sure that every child in America gets a college education.

Of course, Bill, himself, didn't bother getting a college education. He dropped out of Harvard.

Indeed, his generational peers -- Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Michael Dell -- all dropped out of college, too.

So, if there are people who are so smart that college is a waste of their time, couldn't it possibly be that there are a lot of people who are so not smart that college is a waste of their time, too?

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

Bush's amnesty point man in House crushed in primary

From Politico:

Republican voters in Utah ousted Rep. Chris Cannon in Tuesday’s GOP primary, expressing their dissatisfaction with the six-term congressman over his left-of-center positions on immigration by nominating a challenger who made crackdowns on illegal immigration a central part of his platform.

Cannon was trounced by Jason Chaffetz, the former chief of staff to Gov. Jon Huntsman (R-Utah.) With 93 percent of precincts reporting, Cannon trails Chaffetz by 20 points – 60 to 40 percent. The AP has called the race for Chaffetz.

With his loss, Cannon becomes the third member of Congress to lose in their own party’s primary. Two members of Congress from Maryland, Democrat Al Wynn and Republican Wayne Gilchrest also were defeated in primaries held in February.

Chaffetz is near-guaranteed to become the next congressman for Utah’s Third District, which is one of the most Republican districts in the country. The seat, based in suburban Salt Lake City and Provo, gave President Bush 77 percent of the vote in 2004.

Immigration was the driving factor behind Cannon’s unpopularity with the district’s Republican base. Despite sporting a near-perfect score from the American Conservative Union, Cannon alienated border security hawks over the past several years with his belief that illegal immigrants should be eligible for certain government benefits.

In 2003, Cannon sponsored a bill that would give children of illegal immigrants in-state college tuition. And he has also supported legislation that would allow illegal immigrants to receive guest worker status.


A friend writes:

A few more notes

1. This is only the second time in 30 years that Utah Republicans have dumped an incumbent.

2. Cannon outspent Chaffetz massively. One source (http://deseretnews.com/article/content/mobile/1,5620,700237801,00.html?printView=true) gave $631,000 to $98,000 as the numbers. Anopther source (http://www.kutv.com/content/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=5fde6f86-b27f-4c58-945d-67c5e61e6dc9) gives $740,000 to $111,000. Yet another source states the numbers at $740,000 to $170,000.

3. Cannon served 6 terms before he was defeated. There were two prior attempts to remove him via the Republican primary. Both were driven by immigration.

4. Chaffetz specifically attacked birthright citizenship.

5. A few quotes from the various articles about Cannon's defeat.

"In 2003, Cannon sponsored a bill that would have allowed states to charge in-state tuition for children of illegal immigrants.

Rather than deporting all illegal immigrants, Cannon has called for a guest-worker program that doesn't punish businesses and allows immigrants to travel freely across the border.

Chaffetz said he wants the U.S. to deport all illegal immigrants and stop granting automatic citizenship to children born here if their parents aren't legal residents. "

"The organization built by Chaffetz and Scott overcame a large gap in campaign cash that grew in the final days before the vote. Cannon's fundraising machine raked in $86,000 in large donations over the last dozen days, according the Federal Elections Commission Web site. Over the same time period, Chaffetz gathered just $6,300."

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

June 24, 2008

NYT: Italy lagging lamentably on de-Italianification

Wouldn't the whole world be better off if Italy weren't so damn Italian? I mean, what has Italian culture ever contributed to anything? When will the Italians get with the program and adopt the Universal Globoculture? The New York Times wants to know!

Italy Gives Cultural Diversity a Lukewarm Embrace

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Europe, for all its diversity, can be remarkably provincial.

Ponder that for a moment.

Italian culture certainly isn’t diverse now. It subsists on an all-white, all-native, monoethnic diet of Italian game shows, Italian television mini-series, Italian advertisements on cable stations for improbable vibrating contraptions that promise to jiggle fat away, and Italian pop music. Even Roman schoolchildren no longer stray far from a spaghetti-with-ragĆŗ diet now that an intercultural city program to serve one international-themed lunch a month has been abandoned by the new center-right government, heeding some Italian mothers, who doubted the nutritional value of falafel and curry.

Italian children in Italy eat Italian food? The horror, the horror ...

And isn't it about time they tore down the Florence Cathedral and put up a Frank Gehry building made out of sheet metal? How come there's not a Hello Kitty logo anywhere on Michelangelo's "David"? Shouldn't La Scala dump Verdi and stage a tribute to the Spice Girls?

All across Europe attitudes are stiffening toward immigration, nowhere more so than here. …

Rome, an ancient magnet for foreigners, is naturally more integrated than most Italian cities and, unlike most of the country, it has taken at least a few steps in recent years to come to terms with its multicultural reality, among them instituting a public library program to reach immigrants and provide Romans with books and lectures about foreign cultures. The question now is whether such efforts will continue.

“We always thought of ourselves as a monoculture, but immigration is our present and future,” said Franco Pittau, an official of Caritas, a Roman Catholic social service and development association that, among other things, monitors immigration here.

Franca Eckert Coen echoed that remark. An Italian Jew in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic city who lives in an apartment filled with Jewish art, she was in charge of multicultural policy under the former mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. Ms. Coen recalled a year when Chinese celebrated their New Year with dragons around the Day of Epiphany.

“The newspapers said the Chinese were against Christianity,” she said. “So we held a public event on the Campidoglio about Chinese culture and the New Year celebration, and now we have a Chinese parade each year.”

“It was the same with the Sikhs,” she added. “We had a public event after 2001. We also organized tours of the Capitoline Museums for immigrants. Then we asked them to do something. The Poles, for example, had someone play Polish music at the museum.”

“Little things,” she called them. “They can overcome big fears. I saw all these immigrants become a little bit Italian citizens. Culture is crucial to give people here a chance to see that to be foreign is to bring a different ethnic life to the city, that diversity is a positive.”

Do you ever get the impression that Kevin MacDonald has secretly bought a controlling interest in the New York Times and is rewriting its articles to make them prove his theories correct?

Where did the Obamas' money go, 1997-2004?

It might be interesting for somebody to go through the Obamas' tax returns from 1997-2004 and try to figure out where all the money went. This isn't a Davos Man Mystery like with the Clintons' tens of millions; this is just the kind of yuppie personal finance that most readers of this blog can identify with.

Before the Obamas got rich in 2005, they still averaged over $200k in income annually from 1997-2004, but did they save much? For example, even though they made $3 million in 2005-2006, Sen. Obama didn't start sheltering income from his books in a Self Employed Pension until 2007, presumably because they couldn't afford to set cash aside. Obama has said he had a hard time renting a car at the 2000 Democratic convention because his credit card was maxed out.

Mrs. Obama complains frequently about the burden of having to pay off their law school loans, but she got out of law school 20 years ago and he got out 17 years ago.

My vague impression is that Mrs. Obama is quite high maintenance (e.g., she works out with a personal trainer four times per week, which must chew up $10k or $15k per year right there), so that might account for where the money went.

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

AEY hearings in the House

The New York Times reports:

Arms Dealer Had Troubled History

By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — When the Army last year awarded a contract worth up to nearly $300 million to a tiny Miami Beach munitions dealer to supply ammunition to Afghanistan’s security forces, it overlooked a very checkered past.

A Congressional committee revealed Tuesday that by the time the Army awarded the bid, State and Defense Department officials had canceled or delayed at least six earlier contracts with the company, AEY Inc., for poor quality or late deliveries.

But that record, including a botched $5.6 million order for 10,000 Beretta pistols for Iraq’s security forces, was either ignored or omitted from databases that American military contracting officials have used to weed out companies suspected of involvement in suspect arms deals.

Congressional investigators also determined that the Afghanistan ammunition contract, which the company is also accused of mishandling, may have been unnecessary: Bosnia, Bulgaria, Hungary and Albania, the Eastern European countries from which AEY bought its ammunition, had offered to donate the type of Soviet-style rifle and machine-gun cartridges that the Afghan Army and police forces use. …

House investigators have also gathered testimony that the American ambassador to Albania, John L. Withers II, helped cover up the illegal Chinese origins of ammunition that AEY was shipping from Albania to Afghanistan under the Army contract. …

Lawmakers also criticized the government officials for failing to review several AEY contracts that had been canceled or delayed, many of which never raised red flags with contracting officials because they fell under the $5 million contract value that was the warning threshold.

In October 2005, the committee report found, AEY delivered a shipment of damaged helmets to the American training command in Iraq. One American inspector said in an e-mail message obtained by the committee: “The helmets came to Abu Ghraib by mistake. They are not very good. They have peeling paint and a few appear to have been damaged such as having been dropped.”

About the same time, AEY failed to deliver more than 10,000 Beretta pistols under contract to Iraqi security forces.

According to the contracting officer, Mr. Diveroli blamed the delays in part on a plane crash that had destroyed important documents and a hurricane that hit Miami. …

Back when he worked for his uncle's Botach Tactical weapons dealership in Los Angeles and angry customers would call up wondering where the M-16 clips they had paid for were, Diveroli probably blamed delays on an earthquake that hit LA.

House investigators determined that Melanie A. Johnson, a contracting officer with the Army Sustainment Command, had overruled a contracting team that raised concerns about AEY’s inexperience and had concluded that there was “substantial doubt” that the company could fulfill the contract.

Investigators said Ms. Johnson had later acknowledged to them that she was unaware of the poor past performance of AEY, including the Beretta contract, when she awarded the company the Afghan bid.

In case you're wondering why federal bureaucrats would fall for an obvious New York camera store-style bait-and-switch operator like Diveroli, keep in mind that Jimmy Carter threw out the federal civil service exam back in January 1981 for "disparate impact" and it's never been fully replaced.

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

June 23, 2008

The Most Dangerous Woman in America is ...

... Melinda Gates, one-time boss of Microsoft Bob. To polish his public image, her monopolist husband Bill, a notorious IQ elitist in his hiring practices, has given her tens of billions with which to play Politically Correct Social Engineerette. Here's an interview with her on NPR, "Melinda Gates Calls for More Emphasis on Education:"
Can we reasonably expect 100 percent of high school students to become college students?

Yes, I think we can. And, in fact, I'm here today in the Chicago school district visiting with students – huge number of Latinos and African-American populations, and guess what? I'm in schools where 95 to 98 percent of these kids are going on to college, and it's because they started freshman year with teachers who believe in them and said, 'These kids can do it.' And maybe they are not coming in with the right reading or math skills, but we are going to bring them up, and we are going to have high expectations of them. And guess what? Those kids are succeeding, and those kids are getting into college.

That would be a dramatic increase of the share of high school students, if 100 percent went on to college. I mean, you would be effecting an enormous social change if you could reach –

Correct, and that is the idea.

How many years do you think it would take to achieve that particular –

I think it is going to take us quite a while. I think that this is a long-term effort and I think it's one that the foundation is going to be at for a very long time. But it ought to be our goal as a nation. We shouldn't let this number of students drop out. I think it's a moral crisis that we're failing students this way.

A reader comments:

Maybe Bill and Melinda should instead donate the $$ to Microsoft so it can make an operating system that works better than Vista!!

Seriously, though, this woman is trying to do serious harm to children, to prevent many decent kids from graduating from high school just because they aren't smart enough for the University of California. You may think she's just wasting her husbands ill-gotten profits, but the Gates Foundation is actively up to no good. The Gates Foundation was the main driver behind the Los Angeles school district, the nation's second largest,outsourcing its high school graduation requirements planning to the elite University of California, which only allows in high students who have passed its rigorous "A-G" curriculum of required courses.

A 2005 press release from the Gates Foundation trumpeted:

"In June, the LAUSD board approved a plan requiring all high school students beginning with the class of 2008 to complete a 15-course series, known as the A-G Curriculum, in order to graduate. This is the same requirement for admission to the University of California and California State University systems."

The new A-G Curriculum requirement will mandate two years of foreign language (i.e., Spanish, as instruction in other languages are being phased out in LA).

Obviously, this is intended as a gift to Hispanic immigrants. But it will be another cross to bear for African-Americans, who have never shown much enthusiasm for learning Spanish.

Worse, every public high school student in LA will have to pass not just Algebra I and Geometry to graduate, but also Algebra II.

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

The Derb on Obama's race

John Derbyshire outlines the advantages and disadvantages Barack Obama faces as a candidate due to his "story of race and inheritance."

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

June 22, 2008

Top Research Universities: The View from Shanghai

Here's a different ranking of top research universities compiled at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, based on Nobel Laureates, citations, etc. (This is not a list of most desirable undergraduate colleges -- it includes entities like Rockefeller U. that don't have undergrad colleges.)

In 2007, The top 20 included 17 American colleges, Oxford, Cambridge, and the U. of Tokyo at #20. The highest continental European university (ETH Zurich) was at #27, the highest French college was at #39, and the highest German school at #53. No Chinese or Indian universities are in the top 100 on this Chinese list.

This Chinese list seems less chauvinistically biased than the London Times rankings I cited in tonight's VDARE article (Harvard #1 in both, but Stanford is #2 on the Chinese list vs. #19 on the English list, behind a number of obscure provincial colleges in England). Because it's a better list, it supports the point I made in VDARE even more strongly than the previous list did: that America's exclusive universities are now enormously prestigious relative to Germany's and the rest of the world's.

German colleges that would have dominated the list 100 years ago have been hit hard by sincere, leftist anti-elitism. The same thing happened to most French universities after 1968, except for some small Ecoles. In contrast, CCNY, which famously shifted to open admissions with disastrous effects, is close to the exception that proves the rule that American colleges largely ignored their own leftist rhetoric and refused to follow their European counterparts into egalitarian anti-exclusivity.

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

Sailer: "The Diversity Recession, or How Affirmative Action Helped Cause the Housing Crisis"

Here's just the beginning of my long article on the mortgage fiasco in Taki's Magazine:

The Diversity Recession, or How Affirmative Action Helped Cause the Housing Crisis

Posted by Steve Sailer on June 22, 2008

Uncovering the roots of the disastrous home mortgage bubble that popped last year will keep economic historians busy for decades. Yet, one factor has so far been largely overlooked: the bipartisan social engineering crusade to drive up the rate of homeownership by handing out more mortgages to minorities.

More than a negligible amount of the blame for the mortgage meltdown can be traced back to multiculturalism: government-mandated affirmative-action lending, demographic change, illegal immigration, and the mind-numbing effects of political correctness.

The chickens have finally come home to roost.

About half of all mortgages for blacks and Hispanics are subprime, versus roughly one-sixth for whites. Not surprisingly, the biggest home price collapses have occurred in heavily Hispanic cities such as Las Vegas, Miami, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.

The mortgage bubble was essentially a bet on the purportedly increased creditworthiness of the bottom half of the American population. After three decades of the home ownership rate stalled at around 64 percent, a series of federal initiatives to increase minority and low-income ownership helped push the rate up to just below 70 percent.

As this graph from a 2006 article by three economists with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows, the great bubble of the last dozen or so years was driven by bets on marginal households well below the median.

Economist William T. Gavin, a vice president at the St. Louis Fed wrote in 2006:

"One of the stated goals of current and past administrations since the Great Depression has been to increase home ownership. After remaining relatively stable around 64 percent, the rate of home ownership has risen to 69 percent in the past decade. This uptrend has been driven by a sharp rise in the rate of home ownership among young, minority and low-income households."

In contrast, at least the previous bubble, the Internet stock boom of the 1990s, had a bit of prima facie credibility. It was a largely a wager on a three-phase business plan:

1. The smart fraction of American society would invent amazing new online services.
2. ?
3. Profit!

As it turned out, bright young people really did start up lots of websites that did things that almost nobody in 1994 had imagined. The problem turned out to be getting from Phase 1 to Phase 3. So many of them became competent at website creation that few (with the huge exception of Google) ended up with the kind of lucrative quasi-monopoly of which investors dreamt.

The housing bubble, on the other hand, never made much sense. The lower half of American society, where the new homeowners had to come from, isn’t getting better educated, is not settling down to more stable family structures, and is not developing a more rigorous code of honor about paying debts.

Nor was the government doing much of anything to help the bottom half earn more in order to afford home ownership. Indeed, by not enforcing the laws against illegal immigration, the Clinton and Bush Administrations were flooding the country with unskilled workers who competed down the wages of blue-collar Americans.

The home construction industry lured in Mexicans to build new exurban houses for Americans trying to get their children away from public schools overrun by the children of illegal immigrants—in effect, a Ponzi scheme that had to break down eventually.

It turned out, not surprisingly, that contrary to the assurances of the Great and the Good of both parties, many of these marginal homebuyers should have continued to rent.

Pushing black and Hispanics into buying was risky for all concerned. Economist Edward N. Wolff calculated that in 2004 the median net worth of black households was only $11,800, exactly one order of magnitude less than the median net worth of whites. (Hispanics were similar to blacks.)

Yet, pointing out that expanding credit to minorities was likely to lead to a debacle is not the kind of thing a prudent corporate manger would put in an email--too great a chance it would be discovered in a discrimination lawsuit.

For four decades, political leaders have viewed subsidizing minority home buying as insuring social peace. The Wall Street Journal reported on white flight from a Chicago neighborhood on March 2, 1977:

The whites in Marquette Park are particularly embittered over the Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance program, which they claim is causing neighborhood deterioration by subsidizing home purchases by blacks too poor to maintain them. Long conservatively run and an engine of the post-World War II suburban housing boom, the FHA program was liberalized shortly after the 1968 urban riots to encourage lower-income black home ownership (‘if they own it they won’t burn it’ was the maxim of the time).

More

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

The American vs. German Education Paradox

My new VDARE.com column on Charles Murray's recent article "The Age of Educational Romanticism" offers a new partial explanation for the triumph of educational romanticism among American K-12 educators while their counterparts in Europe and Asia remain hard-headed about differences in academic potential. Obviously, race plays a big role here, but even more overlooked is the paradoxical influence of the triumph of our exclusive American colleges.

To summarize the reality under the rhetoric:

American higher education today -- ultra-elitist Social Darwinism masked by politically correct rhetoric

German higher education -- leftist egalitarian mediocrity

American lower education -- leftist egalitarian mediocrity

German lower education -- hardheaded realism about human differences

Elitist continental European universities were largely emasculated by sincere leftism after WWII, especially after 1968, so, today, they have dropped far down in world prestige rankings. In contrast, just about the only famous American college to destroy its exclusiveness in response to 1960s radicalism was CCNY. All the other elite colleges (e.g., Berkeley), merely bought off minority radicals with affirmative action and actually increased their elitism in admissions for non-affirmative action applicants. But, as they became more Social Darwinian overall, they became more politically correct in their public expressions, with disastrous effects on the poor saps running the K-12 system in America, who were too thick to get the joke.

It's a complex argument, so Read the Whole Thing.

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

What will currency look like in the U.S. of Obamocracy?

Obama's new Cult of Personality Presidential Seal reminded one reader of the evolution of design in Idiocracy, where the money looks like this. I suspect, though, that Obama's "Obey Giant Obama" design instincts lean more toward Totalitarian Ironic Chic than to the trailer park populism of Idiocracy's logos:





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

June 21, 2008

Diveroli and Co. indicted on 71 counts

22-year-old international arms dealer Efraim Diveroli and three associates were indicted on 71 counts of fraud in the Awfully Alliterative Albanian Afghan Army AEY Ammunition uh ... Affair (bingo!). There doesn't seem to be much new in the story. So, it looks like it's turning out just like I said months ago -- not the exciting conspiracy that Goes Right to the Top that everybody was hoping for, but just a young hustler applying the bait and switch techniques he learned at his uncle's notoriously dodgey Botach Tactical gun shop on a $300,000,000 scale.

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

What "The Happening" is actually about

A few excerpts from my review of the eco-disaster film "The Happening" in the new issue of The American Conservative.

Spoiler Alert!!!! (Although, I'm not sure that "The Happening" is all that spoilable.)

M. Night Shyamalan, an Indian immigrant raised in suburban Philadelphia, is a Crunchy Con auteur who makes mild, relatively wholesome high-concept genre flicks. His 1999 ghost story, "The Sixth Sense," was an instant landmark, while his 2002 alien invasion movie "Signs" was another popular New Age parable about the need for faith and family. His lesser hit in 2004, "The Village," offered an empathetic fable about middle class flight from urban crime. ...

As the mass suicides spread throughout the Northeast, a Philadelphia biology teacher (Mark Wahlberg of "The Departed"), his wife (Zooey Deschanel), and math teacher best friend (John Leguizamo) flee randomly through the ominously verdant hay fields of rural Pennsylvania. After much brow-furrowing, Wahlberg discerns the horrible truth. We polluting humans are enduring the righteous vengeance of … plants.

... The aesthetics of "The Happening" are so unappealing that the entire movie, originally entitled "The Green Effect," might be a covert satire on greenhouse effect alarmism over global warming. The environmentalists in the film appear demented, and there's little sign of pollution. Pennsylvania looks plenty green.

But can a movie be a satire if it's not funny?

More plausibly, "The Happening" could be an allergy allegory. Every year, in the greener parts of America, plants do afflict millions, making them feel like life isn't worth living. Shyamalan burbled, "One of the things that I guess was in the back of my mind was that one in six emergency room cases for the United States is asthma-related. I'm going, "What? … Everybody's like wheezing and there's a line outside the nurse's office for an inhaler. What's that about? We're becoming allergic to what?"

Perhaps that's why Shyamalan has his normally likeable stars act as if their heads are stuffed up and they're just not in the mood to deal with the end of the world. With the state their sinuses are in, the apocalypse leaves them irked and ineffectual. Maybe they could cope if Armageddon were postponed until the pollen count is lower.

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

A Classic

Normally, I edit articles I post here down to just the good stuff, but I can't cut a word from this New York Times Magazine essay.

The New Pariahs?

By NOAH FELDMAN

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer, teaches law at Harvard and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

No country is wholly free of anti-immigrant prejudice, whether it is the United States, where illegal immigration was a hot-button issue in the Republican primaries, or post-apartheid South Africa, where economic migrants were recently burned to death. But in many Western European countries today, something new and insidious seems to be happening. The familiar old arguments against immigrants — that they are criminals, that their culture makes them a bad fit, that they take jobs from natives — are mutating into an anti-Islamic bias that is becoming institutionalized in the continent’s otherwise ordinary politics.

Examples abound. The Swiss People’s Party sponsors ads in which three white sheep push one black sheep off the Swiss flag — and wins 29 percent of the vote. In Belgium, the Vlaams Belang deploys a clever variation, publicly praising Jews and seeking their support against Muslims, whom it tellingly describes as “the main enemy of the moment.” Meanwhile, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders calls Islam “the ideology of a retarded culture.”

Even Britain, which has afforded Muslims a more welcoming environment, has had some worrying moments. A few years back, a Labor M.P. called for an end to “the tradition of first-cousin marriages” among Pakistanis and other South Asians in Britain. The basis for her suggestion was the claim that Pakistanis in Britain were more likely than the general population to suffer from recessive autosomal genetic disorders. Of course, so are Ashkenazi Jews, but you can hardly imagine an M.P. proposing to limit Jews’ marriage choices for this reason, especially given the historic Nazi allegation of Jewish genetic inferiority.

What is so striking about these forms of prejudice, which go beyond ordinary anti-immigrant feeling, is that they are taking root in otherwise enlightened, progressive states — states where the memory of the Holocaust has often led to the adoption of laws against anti-Semitism and racism. The reasons, therefore, must surely go beyond economic or cultural insecurity.

One factor that cannot be ignored is the threat of terrorism, so closely associated today with radical Islam. In London, Madrid and Amsterdam, terrorist acts have been perpetrated by Muslim immigrants or (more worrisome still) their children. Yet it must be remembered that Europe has also suffered homegrown terrorist attacks, motivated by everything from national liberation (in the cases of the Irish Republican Army or the Basque E.T.A.) to radical leftism (Baader-Meinhof and the Brigate Rosse). Europeans are, therefore, to a degree acclimated to terror, undercutting its power as an explanation. And in the U.S., which on Sept. 11 suffered much greater terrorist damage than any European country ever has, anti-Muslim bias does not have the political weight that it does in Europe.

Well-meaning Europeans sometimes argue that unlike the U.S., their countries are traditionally “homogeneous” and have little experience with immigration. Generalized anti-immigrant feeling, they suggest, has come to rest on Muslims simply because they are increasingly visible. In France, the specter of the “Polish plumber” undercutting French workmen’s wages played a role in recent votes, suggesting the possibility of an equal-opportunity bias. But hostility to Eastern European migrants, though real enough, still does not run as deep as corresponding hostility to Muslims.

The perception of cultural difference may help explain this disparity. Muslim immigrants are depicted in European political rhetoric as not merely backward but also illiberal, contradicting Europe’s now-prevalent commitment to tolerance of homosexuality and sex out of wedlock. At the same time, Muslims are thought to be forcing their children to maintain practices like the head scarf, which is banned in many French schools.

Certainly it is reasonable for free societies to encourage immigrants to adopt their own liberal values. A Dutch requirement that potential immigrants view a film depicting topless bathers and gay couples may seem a little childish, but it is not a human rights violation, and it may even help prepare immigrants for the different world they are poised to enter. Schools should teach the values of the surrounding society, including respect for different lifestyles. Nevertheless, a hallmark of liberal, secular societies is supposed to be respect for different cultures, including traditional, religious cultures — even intolerant ones. There is something discomfiting about a selective respect that extends to the Roman Catholic Church, with its rejection of homosexuality and women priests, but excludes Islam for its sexism and homophobia.

This leaves another, more controversial explanation for anti-Muslim attitudes in Europe: even after 60 years of introspection about the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust, Europeans are not convinced that culturally and religiously different immigrants should be treated as full members of their societies. European anti-Semitism between the world wars featured accusations of criminality, religious backwardness, genetic inferiority and, above all, the impossibility of assimilation. And it is no coincidence that significant numbers of the Jews in Western Europe were immigrants or children of immigrants from farther east.

The U.S. had its own terrible legacy of legalized racism in the form of the Jim Crow laws, which Hitler imitated for his own purposes. In the aftermath of World War II, however, we began slowly and agonizingly to come to terms with this past. Racial bias is still with us, but so is self-consciousness about our problems and how they must be overcome.

In Europe, by contrast, Hitler’s horrifying success at killing so many Jews meant that the burgeoning postwar societies of the continent never had to come to terms with difference, because it was to a great extent eradicated. Today, as the birthrate for European Muslims far outstrips that for their neighbors, it is as if Europe’s discomfort with difference is being encountered for the first time. In theory, Europe remembers the Holocaust. But the depth of that memory may be doubted when many Europeans seem to have forgotten that their continent was home to other outsiders well before the arrival of today’s Muslim minority.

See what I mean? If I'd put in a single ellipsis, you'd naturally assume that that's where I edited out the part where Feldman says, "Ha ha, just kidding, this is all a parody. Nobody could be living this far in the past!"

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

June 20, 2008

Obama's latest ad: The Promised Prince

Obama's new 60 second TV spot, entitled "Country I Love," continues his central campaign theme of running for President based on his biography. Unfortunately for Obama, he wrote a 442 page autobiography that shows that much of this commercial is a tendentious distortion of his life story. Fortunately for Obama, the book is too boring to hold anybody's attention.

The new commercial emphasizes his white relatives (Matthew Yglesias says the the title of the ad should be "My Mom's White! And I'm From America!"). It's part of his effort that began in 2004 to promote himself as the promised prince, the long-awaited offspring of a historic marital alliance, who, just as Henry VIII's birth of Lancastrian and Yorkist parents ended the War of the Roses, will end the War of the Races by unifying blacks' and whites' divergent interests in himself.

“I’m Barack Obama. America is a country of strong families and strong values. My life’s been blessed by both.

Huh? He wrote tens of thousands of self-pitying words about how bad his family life was. He only spent one month with his father that he can recall. His mother dumped him twice on her grandparents so she could go back to Indonesia to work on her 1067 page anthropology Ph.D. dissertation on peasant blacksmithing.

I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents.

If he was blessed with such a strong family, why was his mother a "single mom?" Actually, his mother was married about 90% of the time up through his 18th birthday, assuming that you count her bigamous marriage to Barack Sr. as "being married." She just despised her second husband, Lolo, in part for his being too pro-American and too pro-capitalist for her tastes, unlike her beloved pro-socialist first husband (who had abandoned her and little Barack because the New School for Social Research, which had offered a scholarship ample enough to support the three of them, wasn't as prestigious as Harvard -- now that's a strong family!)

We didn’t have much money ...

He attended Hawaii's most famous prep school from 5th grade on and lived mostly in a Honolulu highrise with a fabulous view. But to the extent that it's true that they didn't have much money, it's because he wasn't from a "strong family."

but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up.

The Chicago Tribune's article "Mother not just a girl from Kansas" gives a much more accurate picture of her Seattle-area upbringing as a leftist, feminist, and atheist who told her high school friends that marriage and children weren't for her, but surprised them all by getting knocked up at age 17 by a 24-year-old married man. He was from the Third World, so I guess that made it okay.

Accountability and self-reliance. Love of country.

Oh, come on ... His mother married two foreigners and spent most of her adult life in foreign countries. She dumped her son on his grandparents twice because she preferred to live abroad without him than in America with him. His mother angrily refused to attend her Indonesian second husband's business dinners with Americans because, as she shouted, "They are not my people" (italics Obama's). She was shattered to discover Indonesia was no longer the anti-American leftwing state she'd heard about, but was now a pro-American rightwing one.

Working hard without making excuses. Treating your neighbor as you’d like to be treated. It’s what guided me as I worked my way up — taking jobs and loans to make it through college. It’s what led me to pass up Wall Street jobs

His "international business consultant" job he got out of college was actually being a copy editor at a low-rent newsletter sweatshop. (By the way, I've never seen much evidence, pro or con, on whether Obama's quantitative skills come anywhere close to his superlative verbal skills. Anybody know? That might explain why he wasn't snapped up by an investment bank when he graduated from Columbia in booming 1983. Judging from the kind of job he accepted, he would have taken a high-paying Wall Street job if anybody had offered him one.)

and go to Chicago instead, helping neighborhoods devastated when steel plants closed.

The intended implication here is that he went to Chicago to help steel workers with names like Stan Grabowski. No, he went to politically organize blacks, and only blacks, to build himself a black power base in a city where blacks had just gotten the powerful mayor's office.

That’s why I passed laws moving people from welfare to work,

In the 442 pages of his 1995 Dreams from My Father, there's not a single word of criticism of welfare. The word "welfare" only appears twice (plus once in the 2004 preface), and neither time implies anything bad about it. This book was written at the height of the debate over welfare in the mid-1990s, so the lack of criticism of welfare is intentional.

cut taxes for working families and extended health care for wounded troops who’d been neglected.

This is an extremely accurate depiction of his political emphases!

I approved this message because I’ll never forget those values, and if I have the honor of taking the oath of office as president, it will be with a deep and abiding faith in the country I love.

Obama has a deep and abiding faith in Obama.

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

Return of the New Mulatto Elite

Awhile back, a British TV talent show was won by a dumpy-looking guy named Paul Potts who wowed the crowd by singing Puccini's "Nessun Dorma" aria from Turandot.

Americans don't know anything about opera anymore, so they don't realize how thrilling it can be. (The British viewers were probably vaguely familiar with the aria from the connection between soccer and the Three Tenors, "Nessun Dorma" being more or less Pavarotti's theme song.) So it was only natural for the American Idol-style show "America's Got Talent" to have as the anchorman of their season premiere this week an American contestant singing "Nessun Dorma." Neil E. Boyd, an insurance salesman of Pavarotti-like girth, floored the audience, making him the frontrunner.

I imagine the producers of the show auditioned a lot of part-time opera singers to find the one they were going to anoint as the American Paul Potts. The fellow they came up with, Boyd, is (not too surprisingly) part black, with a white mom with whom he is very close.

A couple of years ago, my wife predicted early in the American Idol season that Jordin Sparks, the daughter of an NFL cornerback and a redhead, would win, since she could sing both black and white.

I think there's a general lesson emerging: whites like blacks, but black teens these days don't like much of anything they consider white. They like just hip-hop and basketball (and, okay, football, too). Almost everything else is considered a violation of keeping it real.

Even though blacks may tend to have a natural advantage at creating resonant vocal tones, the very idea of singing opera is totally off their radar. Sure, there were big time black opera singers like Marian Anderson as far back as between the Wars, but black youths aren't interested in that kind of acting white anymore.

So, the small number of mulattos who grew up with one non-black parent and thus get introduced to a wider range of cultural options beyond rap and hoops are disproportionately taking the plums that people a generation ago assumed blacks in general would be achieving.

Back in 1968, when the top American rock guitarist was Jimi Hendrix and top American tennis player was Arthur Ashe, everybody assumed that integration meant that blacks would continue to show up near the top in an ever wider variety of fields.

Today, though, superstar rock guitarist Tom Morello is the great-nephew of Jomo Kenyatta; and the second best American men's tennis player James Blake has a black father. But they both have white mothers. Similarly, five different black golfers won 23 PGA tournaments between 1961 and 1986, but since then Tiger Woods is the only player of any visible fraction of African ancestry to win a tournament.

There's somebody who's an even better example of this rise of the new mulatto elite, but I can't quite think of his name at the moment.

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

If Hillary become Veep, what's Bill's title?

If Michelle's the First Lady, then Bill would be the Second Gentleman, right?

But, then, who's the First Gentleman?

Sure, it sounds silly, but it points out the problem that was never addressed in terms of either Hillary for President or for Vice President: what's Bill's role? Because we were all supposed to celebrate Hillary's candidacy as this great triumph for women that all patriotic Americans were supposed to take pride in (kind of like those bogus women's team sports competitions that corporate America puffs up when American women win even though the only competition is China and Norway), nobody was supposed to mention that Hillary was running for President only because her husband was term-limited out of office, just like in banana republics like Argentina.

I, Ectomorph
notes:
After all that has happened, [Obama] must feel that he has earned the nomination in his own right and won't govern effectively if the press is constantly preoccupied with whatever the Clintons are up to at One Observatory Circle (the little-known VP residence that would suddenly be a lot better known if Socks the Cat moves in). ... If he needs to have her onside, then he'll have the common sense to promise her a job in the new administration that she can be fired from.

And since Obama can't fire Hillary if he makes her VP, he doubly can't fire Hillary's husband from his ill-defined but inevitably large role as the Looming Presence or whatever. An Obama-Clinton administration would be the best thing that ever happened to the gag writers for late night talkshow hosts, but Obama would be nuts to saddle himself with the Hill and Bill Show. Just imagine Obama getting all geared up to promote some boring carbon emissions bill, when it suddenly leaks out that the Vice President is divorcing the ex-President. Nobody would pay any attention to the President for months.

Bill is the exact opposite of the ideal husband of a lady leader, Denis Thatcher, a convivial man not very interested in politics or the spotlight. He was 10 years older than his wife, and so was winding down his business career as she reached the top of her political career. He had enough money and wasn't particularly on the prowl for more. Mr. Thatcher only gave short speeches and never gave interviews.

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

Iowa reminds NYT of New Orleans

A curious headline on a New York Times article bylined "Iowa City:"

For Bush, a New Town, a New Disaster, but Always the Memory of New Orleans

Mass outbreaks in Iowa of looting, rape, cops fleeing, and even cops looting? Who knew?

Poking around on Google News for 15 minutes, though, I have found some stories like this:

WATERLOO, Iowa - Two Waterloo teenagers have been accused of looting at some apartments that were evacuated because of flooding.

Authorities say police, acting on a tip about a suspicious noise, found Darryel Schwarz Jr. and Erin Schmidt, both 17, in the lobby of the apartment building early Monday.

So, it's clearly exactly the same as New Orleans in 2005.

By the way, Dennis Mangan has an email from a reader from Cedar Rapids comparing the two cultures' responses to flooding.

Audacious Epigone wonders whether there will be another flood in New Orleans when all the water gets there down the Mississippi.

Beats me. One thing to keep in mind is that the population of New Orleans has changed substantially since 2005. The population is way down. When I spent a couple of days in New Orleans in 2007, almost all of it in the wealthy old above-sea level parts, most of the people I saw looked like they had trust funds.

Indeed, New Orleans is turning into a college town, with Tulane and a few other colleges now accounting for a sizable fraction of the population. The Tulane campus police are now authorized to patrol for a mile off campus. Tulane students have organized their own ambulance service to take sick members of the Tulane community to the Tulane Medical Center downtown.

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

June 19, 2008

Libertarian snarkfest over fertility

From Reason magazine (which really ought to look into changing its name to something more appropriate, such as Smugness):

Baby Bust!
The world is panicking over birthrates. Again.
Kerry Howley

As a historical example of panicking over birthrates, we read:
"Waves of birthrate anxiety swept through France at the beginning of the 19th century...

And, of course, all that French hysteria over Germany having a higher birthrate and thus being able to field a bigger army turned out to be just a hallucination as the Germans never ever bothered France again.

The article includes three mentions of Mark Steyn's America Alone, without mentioning the ongoing court battle in Canada over whether the leading newsweekly up there has the legal right to print part of it.

And, of course, there is zero mention in the article of the most prominent public calls for maintaining the quantity and quality of the race -- from Jews.

For example, Elliott Abrams, who served during the first Bush II adminstration as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs and then was promoted to Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy, spent the Clinton Administration years trying to keep Jews from marrying shikses. Abrams wrote in Slate in 1999:
"But the accommodationists are wrong. Intermarriage is both inevitable in our open society, and immensely threatening to Jewish continuity here. The Jewish community must avoid excuses and circumlocutions, and recognize that only a powerful Jewish identity built on the faith and practice of Judaism can enable young American Jews to resist the temptation of intermarriage. Only that faith can explain to them why they should resist the melting pot and build a family that takes its place in the covenant of Abraham."

Putting a race warrior like Abrams in charge of America's Near East policy was a little like making Rev. Bob Jones III ambassador to Nelson Mandela's South Africa. But nobody seemed to notice the joke. That's just one of those things you aren't supposed to talk about, especially in Reason.

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

"Be Kind Rewind"

Here's my American Conservative review from February of "Be Kind Rewind," which is now out on DVD:

A new satirical website called Stuff White People Like has earned three million visits in the last ten days by offering dead-on deadpan analyses of status symbols among the under-40 upper middle class. Listed along with such de rigueur affectations of the more-sensitive-than-thou set as "Apple Products," "Threatening to Move to Canada," and "Barack Obama," is "Michel Gondry," the French director of Bjork's music videos and "such white classics as 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.'"

Christian Lander, who masterminds the site, helpfully advises:

"[Mentioning Gondry] can be used to help find common ground with white people. Talk about how you wanted to direct music videos after you saw Michel Gondry’s video for “Around the World” by Daft Punk. Then make a joke about how foolish you were at that age and everyone will have a good laugh. But they will also feel your pain about sacrificing your artistic dreams."

Like much of the stuff white people like, there is something to be said for the ingenious and ingenuous Gondry, whose video autobiography is aptly entitled "I've Been 12 Forever." His twee trademarks are childlike sets and props that he might have made out of cardboard and other junk he found in his dad's garage. Indeed, I found Gondry's surrealist comedy "The Science of Sleep," with Gael GarcĆ­a Bernal as a boyish graphics designer who can't tell his waking and dreaming lives apart, the most delightful movie of 2006.

Yet, while Apple can charge $800 extra for a laptop, movie tickets all cost about the same, so having a small upscale fan base doesn't do much financially for Gondry. To escape the status-striver's ghetto and connect with the American mass market, Gondry is recycling the do-it-yourself aesthetic of "Science" in "Be Kind Rewind." It stars part-time heavy metal singer Jack Black and part-time rapper Mos Def. Unfortunately, although not surprisingly, American lunkheadedness and French condescension make an ineffectual combination.

While Mos Def is #68 on the Stuff White People Like site, Jack Black's reputation is in decline. Here, he plays the same character as in "School of Rock" and all his other films, the pop culture-obsessed loser. Yet, the suspicion is growing that perhaps Black isn't a genius who understands the common mind -- maybe he just has the common mind.

The premise of "Be Kind Rewind" is even more rickety than that of "Science." Mos Def is the mild-mannered clerk at Danny Glover's dusty VHS-only video store in the slums of Passaic, New Jersey. While the owner is on vacation, the assistant's paranoid friend (Black) tries to sabotage the next-door power plant. The electro-magnetic pulse erases all the videotapes.

To prevent the owner's dotty friend (Mia Farrow) from tattling when she finds out that "Ghostbusters" is blank, they reshoot it in an afternoon: "I'll be Bill Murray; you be everyone else." Soon, the whole neighborhood wants to appear in their 20-minute zero-budget remakes of famous movies.

"Be Kind Rewind" is a tribute to the You Tube generation's devotion to making stuff up themselves -- albeit, an inordinately expensive accolade to amateurism. Gondry, who spent only $6 million on "Science," somehow squandered $20 million here. The endless credits list for this elephantine trifle include 16 drivers and a "second second assistant director."

There wasn't enough in the budget, though, for a good script doctor. Gondry's amusing trilingual screenplay for "Science of Sleep" showed that the screenwriting Oscar he won for co-authoring "Eternal Sunshine" with the great Charlie Kaufman wasn't wholly a gift. Yet, as talented as the auteur is, it's asking too much of the visually-oriented Frenchman to expect him to write witty dialogue in English.

Still, "Rewind" raises the question of whether, with an infinite number of choices in free entertainment (some of it as good as Stuff) just a click away, can going to the movies survive?

I think so. First, trying to perfect anything visual requires endless work (as the film's three-month shooting schedule suggests). This means the nonprofessionals who have enough time and energy to shoot their own movies are generally so young they haven't had a life yet, and can merely parody the pop culture rattling around inside their heads.

Second, one big reason Americans still spend $9.7 billion annually on movie tickets is to be forced to sit still and watch a single story for two hours without the nagging sense that you could (and thus should) be surfing to something else cooler.

Rated PG-13 for some sexual references.

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