July 31, 2008

Suicide in 2001 anthrax case

David Willman of the LA Times breaks a big story on the post-9/11 terrorism wave that is one reason why we're in Iraq:

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government's elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

Ivins, whose name had not been disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case, played a central role in research to improve anthrax vaccines by preparing anthrax formulations used in experiments on animals.

Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins also helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S. senator's office in Washington.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital after ingesting a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and colleague, who declined to be identified out of concern that he would be harassed by the FBI. ...

The anthrax mailings killed five people, crippled national mail service, shut down a Senate office building and spread fear of further terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The extraordinary turn of events followed the government's payment in June of a settlement valued at $5.82 million to a former government scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, who was long targeted as the FBI's chief suspect despite a lack of any evidence that he had ever possessed anthrax.

Early in the year, I took a look at a third Ft. Detrick scientist (since moved on to other jobs) -- i.e., neither Ivins nor Hatfill -- whose name has been fairly widely tossed around as the possible anthrax assassin. The more I Googled, the more the pieces seemed to fit together. I was about ready to post my conspiracy theory when I took one more look at it and -- poof -- I realized that I didn't have any real evidence at all. So, thankfully, I didn't post his name, and instead wrote:
"I'm not going to mention his name, but if you know who I'm talking about and think he did it, try to force yourself into a gestalt where you assume he didn't do it and see if you can think of less sinister explanations for the facts known about him."

As far as I can recall, Ivins's name, in contrast, didn't come up much in the conspiracy theorizing. Here's a Google search that shows relatively little in the way of theorizing about his involvement -- even though his name was published in USA Today in 2004 in regard to some dodgy doings at Detrick.

His name was featured suspiciously in the book Vaccine A by investigative journalist Gary Matsumoto about the anthrax vaccine that Ivins helped develop. But I don't see anything on Google suggesting Matsumoto linked Ivins to involvement with the 2001 terror attacks.

In general, it appears that almost nobody -- whether government investigators, professional journalists, or lone obsessives in their bathrobes -- suspected Ivins, at least not enough to leave much of a trace on Google. (Indeed, most of the Google searches on "Ivins anthrax" turn up references to the late pundit Molly Ivins.)

For example, here's the part of Ed Lake's website where he collects all the published facts on the anthrax attacks where he speculates on traits of the supplier and who the mailer might be. He doesn't sound too far off, but neither set of traits seems to fit Ivins terribly well. Lake's profile is in bold:

1. The supplier probably took the Ames anthrax from a government facility.

Yes.

2. The supplier was probably fired from that facility.

Not when Lake wrote this a few years ago.

3. The supplier is probably considered an unstable personality, perhaps even a "drunk".

Sounds more like delusions of grandeur, according to Ivins's brother.

4. The supplier is almost certainly unmarried.

No, Ivins was married.

5. The supplier is a loner with few friends - if any.
6. The supplier is disgruntled and uncomfortable working with others.
7. The supplier probably uses phrases like "I keep telling them, but they don't listen."
8. The supplier doesn't care much about "rules".
9. The supplier believes that a free exchange of information is key to advancements in science.
10. The supplier may have had knowledge needed by the refiner/mailer.

I don't know about 5-10.

11. The supplier is probably in his late 40s or early 50s.

A little older.

12. The supplier probably lost his security clearance as a result of his actions.

No, Ivins got off scot-free despite admitting to breaking rules regarding handling of anthrax.

It's striking that here's one of the big historical mysteries of recent years, and yet nobody, official or unofficial, seemed to have had a clue for at least five years. I thought the Internet was supposed to make this kind of thing untenable.

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

My contribution to the Stuff White People Like book

is the "Not a Bus" concept in "#147 - Public Transportation That Is Not a Bus." Christian Lander developed my basic point nicely:

... White people all support the idea of public transportation and will be happy to tell you about how the subways and streetcars/trams have helped to energize cities like Chicago and Portland. They will tell you all about the energy and cost savigns of having people abandon their cars for public transportation and how they hope that one day they can live in a city where they will be car-free.

At this point, you are probably thinking about the massive number of buses that serve your city and how you have never seen a white person riding them. To a white person a bus is essentially a giant minivan that continually stops to pick up progressively smellier people. You should never, ever point this out to a white person. It will make them recognize that they might not love public transportation as much as they though, and then they will feel sad.

The book is on Amazon for $11.80. I was going to mention that it's very easy to give books as gifts via Amazon (just fill in the address of the recipient), but then I noticed "#138 Books:"

So now that you know that white people like books, you might assume that a book is the perfect gift. Not so fast. There are a few possible outcomes from giving books, and few of them end well. If you get a white person a book that they already have, the situation will be uncomfortable. If you get them a book that they do want, you will be forever viewed as someone with poor taste in literature. In the event that you get them a book that they want and do not have, they are forced to recognize that they have not read it, which instantly paints you as a threat. There is no way to win when you give a book to a white person.

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

Hillary Clinton is the Katie Holmes of the Veepstakes

In the latest Batman movie (or "the Batman" as all the bad guys in the picture say), Katie Holmes has been replaced as the love interest by Maggie Gyllenhall, who looks like a sad cartoon turtle. Exactly why we're supposed to believe that Christian Bale and Aaron Eckhart are both hopelessly in love with Maggie Gyllenhaal is unexplained, but that's not the point.

The point is that casting Mrs. Tom Cruise in a blockbuster movie is like picking Mrs. Bill Clinton to run on the national ticket-- she's okay, but what's her husband going to do be doing? He's got way too much energy to stay out of the spotlight. Who needs him? And, thus, who needs her?

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

July 30, 2008

David Brooks as the Kinder, Gentler Steve Sailer

One of the eerier feelings for me is to start reading a New York Times op-ed and realize partway through that the columnist is engaging in an argument with me, even though I'm not named. That happens several times per year with David Brooks's NYT columns. (I've been told on trustworthy authority that he is a regular reader, so I'm not just being paranoid here.)

A moderate amount of his stuff seems to be either echoing or arguing with me, (The last time Brooks mentioned my name in the NYT back in 2004, he got a lot of grief from the commissars about it.)

Without the Secret Decoder Ring, it's often hard to figure out what Brooks is talking about. Consider his recent column "The Luxurious Growth." (Here's John Derbyshire's reply.) Or here's his September 2007 column on "The Waning of IQ" that makes no sense at all except under the presumption that NYT subscribers are regular iSteve readers who are almost persuaded by my work. (Here's GNXP's response to it.)

As you know, my basic shtick is that, increasingly, specific government policies tend to matter less than the quantities and qualities of various populations. For example, Hong Kong became prosperous under free trade and laissez-faire, while Singapore became prosperous under protectionism and paternalism.

Thus, immigration policy is more central to the future of America than most of the controversies more welcome in the pages of the New York Times.

My impression is that Brooks finds my work highly persuasive, but also highly troubling, both from an ideological and career perspective. So, he sometimes seems to be groping around for some way to refute me, but all without mentioning my name. Thus you end up with weird columns that are structured like this:

1. The conventional wisdom is [something that only iSteve readers would dare imagine].

2. But, the latest research actually shows that this [utter heresy] isn't quite the sure thing everybody [i.e., my readers, not NYT subscribers] assume, and the reality is [pretty much what politically correct people everywhere assumed all along it was].

For example, today's column parallels my January 1, 2008 VDARE.com column on James Heckman's research on high school graduation rates, but then skids off the rails at the end. Brooks writes:
The meticulous research of Goldin and Katz is complemented by another report from James Heckman of the University of Chicago. Using his own research, Heckman also concludes that high school graduation rates peaked in the U.S. in the late 1960s, at about 80 percent. Since then they have declined.

In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.

Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.

I.Q. matters, but Heckman points to equally important traits that start and then build from those early years: motivation levels, emotional stability, self-control and sociability. He uses common sense to intuit what these traits are, but on this subject economists have a lot to learn from developmental psychologists. [See my February blog posting on this second aspect of Heckman's work: "Psychology for Economists."]

I point to these two research projects because the skills slowdown is the biggest issue facing the country. Rising gas prices are bound to dominate the election because voters are slapped in the face with them every time they visit the pump. But this slow-moving problem, more than any other, will shape the destiny of the nation.

Second, there is a big debate under way over the sources of middle-class economic anxiety. Some populists emphasize the destructive forces of globalization, outsourcing and predatory capitalism. These people say we need radical labor market reforms to give the working class a chance. But the populists are going to have to grapple with the Goldin, Katz and Heckman research, which powerfully buttresses the arguments of those who emphasize human capital policies. It’s not globalization or immigration or computers per se that widen inequality. It’s the skills gap. Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy.

But, obviously, the current immigration system of large amounts of unskilled illegal immigration and large amounts of highly skilled legal immigration widens "the skills gap." And, nice as it is to imagine that, after 45 years of failing, we'll suddenly somehow dream up a way for "boosting educational attainment at the bottom," the much more plausible thing that we can actually get done before hell freezes over to slow the widening of the skills gap is to fix immigration policy.

July 29, 2008

A headline in the LA Times

The LA Times has one staffer, Andrew Malcolm, who was a big Hillary Clinton fan, so we are occasionally treated to headlines like this:

Phil Spector endorses Barack Obama

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

The U.S. Olympic team is always Californian-dominated

I had long had this impression, and now the Olympics issue of Sports Illustrated confirms it: Californians are hugely over-represented on the Summer Olympics team.

"Based on hometowns, California produced more members of Team USA (175) than any other state."

Indeed, the next seven states only produced 176 athletes.

Similarly,
"The colleges with the most team members (current students or alums) are Stanford (31), UCLA (19), USC (19), Texas (17), Cal (14), and North Carolina (13)."

Why is this?

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

July 28, 2008

Reagan's Protectionism

It's interesting to compare the different American policy responses to the rise of Japanese industrial might in the 1970s and 1980s to the rise of Chinese industrial might in the 1990s and 2000s. The Reagan Administration negotiated a "voluntary export restraint" agreement with the Japanese government that limited the number of Japanese cars imported into America. The limitation stayed in place until 1994. In the meantime, Japanese automakers built numerous car factories in the U.S., which have proved highly successful.

Today, most mass market Japanese cars like the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry sold in the U.S. are of majority North American content. The Japanese sell their Japan-assembled versions of these models in the U.S. under their luxury nameplates (e.g., Infiniti and Lexus) with a price premium of something like $5,000.

This strike me, and, I would guess, most Americans, as a reasonable outcome -- at the cost of 13 years of protectionism, Americans wound up with a long-run solution in which American consumers now get quality cars at reasonable prices built primarily by American workers, while fashion-conscious Americans can buy even higher quality cars at less reasonable prices made by Japanese workers.

And yet, despite all these huge factories providing good paying jobs to large numbers of Americans, this bit of recent history has disappeared down the memory hole, so complete is the victory of the free trade ideology. While the U.S. government took effective action in the early 1980s regarding Japan, doing anything about the rise of China to industrial dominance has simply been off the intellectual table over the last 15 years.

Back in 2004, I blogged:

Why I'm a true believer in utterly free trade -- The theory of free trade has never been contradicted by history. For example, as we all know, the tremendous growth of the American economy in the 19th Century was due to Alexander Hamilton's insistence that free trade be the absolute cornerstone of our economic policy. Every schoolboy knows Abraham Lincoln's 1860 campaign slogan: "Free Labor and Free Trade!"

In contrast, Britain's slow, sad decline from its position of economic supremacy after 1846 was due to Prime Minister Peel's betrayal of Britain's traditional free trade policy in favor of protectionism.

Likewise, Bismarck's insistence on zero tariffs enabled outnumbered Germany to almost conquer Europe in WWI using its free trade-nourished industrial might.

And who can forget how contemptuously Ronald Reagan rejected a plan to impose quotas on Japanese car imports to get Toyota and Honda to build car factories in the U.S.?

Oh, wait a minute... Excuse me. Those were the policies of America, Britain, and Germany in the Bizarro reverse world.

Never mind...

On National Review's Corner, two normally level-headed people attacked me for daring to joke about the sacred ideology of free trade:

Ramesh Ponnuru answered, "I respect Steve Sailer's intellect too, Derb, but it's sad to see him embracing every bit of paleocon dogma."

Yup, there's nothing more dogmatic than satire.

Former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson, author of "How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life," jumped in to attack my examples. I particularly admired his alternative explanation of how Bismarckian Germany became an industrial powerhouse: "Industrialization." Now I've often expressed my taste for nearly-tautological explanations, such as "survival of the fittest," but this one might be a tad too tautological even for me.

It's hard to say exactly why the dogma of free trade has triumphed so completely, but status striving can't be ruled out. Economists are terribly proud that Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage is both significant and not trivial, so showing that you understand has become a major status marker.

Comparative Advantage theory should have starring role in the sequel to Stuff White People Like.

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

July 27, 2008

Ward Connerly's initiatives and Presidential politics

My new VDARE.com column is up: "Obama hands McCain the quota issue. Will he use it?" It's about Ward Connerly's anti-racial preferences initiatives in three states including John McCain's Arizona. Obama opposes them, but today McCain finally said he supported them.

Here's an excerpt:

When asked whether his daughters should benefit from affirmative action, Obama routinely makes a head fake in the direction of supporting adding class-based preferences to the mix.

But he's not serious about this.

Nobody has ever adequately explained how class-based quotas would actually work, since class is a hazier concept than race. What class was Obama as a young man? For that matter, what class was McCain as a youth? Economically, McCain wasn't particularly well off, but within his caste, he was a prince of the finest blood—the son and grandson of admirals.

Moreover, you can intentionally lower your kid's class through your bad behavior. You can write the cartoon caption: "I'm drinking my kid into Harvard."

Finally, Obama knows perfectly well that his closest friends in Chicago's black corporate business elite benefit hugely from affirmative action. The plain truth is that, the farther up the social ladder a black person is born, the more money affirmative action puts into his pocket.

Consider Obama's friend John W. Rogers Jr., founder of Ariel Capital Management, who manages eleven-figures worth of Other People's Money. Obama knows Rogers through his brother-in-law Craig Robinson, who was Rogers's teammate on the 1979 Princeton basketball team.

I've followed Rogers' career since the early 1990s. He's a smart, cautious, responsible investor.

But let's not kid ourselves: Rogers profits from "minority set-asides"quotas. To take one of many examples, Black Enterprise reported in 2000:

"Raytheon looks to NCM, Ariel and MDL Capital to oversee pension fund monies. An $800 million deal via the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition's Wall Street Project has set up several minority-owned money management firms for a big payday.

"The Raytheon Co., which had $19.8 billion in revenues in 1999… will now entrust 5% of its pension fund assets to women-owned and African American-owned capital management firms during 2000. The Fortune 500 firm employs 105,000 and has $14 billion in its pension plan. Among the minority-owned firms chosen by Raytheon…Ariel Capital Management, based in Chicago …"

The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition is, of course, the shakedown racket run by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

What's the human connection between John W. Rogers and Jesse Jackson? Well, let's see … Rogers's old teammate and former employee Craig Robinson has a sister who used to be named Michelle Robinson. Long ago, Michelle was Rev. Jackson's babysitter. She became a lifelong friend of the Rev.'s daughter Santita Jackson, who is the godmother of the first daughter born to Michelle Robinson Obama.

Are you starting to see how it all fits together?

John W. Rogers is not a poor kid from the streets who needed a break. He's the scion of perhaps the most upper crust black family in Chicago. His father was a judge. His mother, Jewel Stradford Rogers LaFontant Mankarious, was a third generation Oberlin graduate who served as Deputy Solicitor General in the Nixon Administration and Ambassador-at-Large in the first Bush administration. Rogers's mom was on the boards of directors of Mobil, Equitable Life, TWA, Revlon, Harte-Hanks, Hanes, and Bendix.

To see why affirmative action benefits blue-blooded blacks like Rogers most, think about it from, say, Raytheon's perspective. Jesse Jackson has badgered us into establishing a racial quota for our pension fund management. Okay, fine, we can afford a quota, just as long as the quotees don't lose all our money. So, are we going to hand millions over to some guys we never heard of operating out of a storefront on the West Side? No, we're going to find somebody who seems trustworthy, like this guy Rogers, whose mother was on all those boards of directors.

[More]

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

July 25, 2008

MSM starts to notice Obama's biography gap

Gabriel Sherman's article "End of the Affair" in The New Republic recounts a lot of gripes reporters have with the arrogance and secrecy of the Obama campaign. Most of it is the usual dull whining, but this is interesting:

"Reporters who have covered Obama's biography or his problems with certain voter blocs have been challenged the most aggressively. "They're terrified of people poking around Obama's life," one reporter says. "The whole Obama narrative is built around this narrative that Obama and David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it's not entirely true. So they have to be protective of the crown jewels." Another reporter notes that, during the last year, Obama's old friends and Harvard classmates were requested not to talk to the press without permission."

Better late than never, I suppose ...

By the way, can you imagine being asked not to talk to the press about some guy you went to school with without his permission?

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

July 24, 2008

Shiller: The New Cosmopolitans

A friend recommends economist Robert J. Shiller (who called the housing bubble years ago more energetically than just about any other prominent economist) article from 2006 on "The New Cosmopolitans."

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

Sorry, I've been sick

Sorry about not answering emails for 36 hours, I've been sick.

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

July 22, 2008

Sailer on CNN.com on Obama

CNN.com runs an article by John Blake, "Could an Obama Presidency Hurts Black Americans," which adapts quotes from my first Obama article, back on January 2, 2007 in VDARE.com:

Steve Sailer, a columnist for The American Conservative magazine, wrote last year that some whites who support Obama aren't driven primarily by a desire for change.

They want something else Obama offers them: "White Guilt Repellent," he wrote.

"So many whites want to be able to say, 'I'm not one of them, those bad whites. ... Hey, I voted for a black guy for president,' " Sailer wrote.

Sailer cited another reason why many whites want Obama as president:

"They hope that when a black finally moves into the White House, it will prove to African-Americans, once and for all, that white animus isn't the cause of their troubles. All blacks have to do is to act like President Obama - and their problems will be over."

It wasn't my most sophisticated take on Obama, but here's the context from my VDARE article, "White Guilt, Obamania, and the Reality of Race," for the quotes in the CNN article:

The Barack Attack phenomenon is similar to the Colin Craze of 1995. Of course, General Powell had better qualifications. He'd been intimately involved in managing a successful national enterprise, the Gulf War of 1991. And he had articulated a thoughtful, cautious policy for when and how to conduct military operations, the Powell Doctrine, the wisdom of which subsequent events have only underlined.

Supporting Obama for President, like supporting Powell a decade ago, is seen by many whites as the ultimate in White Guilt Repellent.

It's important to understand, however, that White Guilt is very different from, say, Catholic Guilt, which consists of straightforward feelings of personal moral failure.

In comparison, I don't recall ever meeting any white person who personally felt guilty for the troubles of African-Americans. But I've known many whites who want to loudly blame other whites for black difficulties.

Some whites at least heap guilt upon their own ancestors, but many who publicly proclaim the reality of White Guilt aren't averse to noting that their own forefathers arrived at Ellis Island long after slavery was over.

In other words, White Guilt is just another ploy in the Great American White Status Struggle. Minorities are merely props for asserting moral superiority over other whites.

Finding and punishing Guilty Whites has become a national obsession. One notorious current example: the framing of the Duke lacrosse players by Durham district attorney Mike Nifong (with the enthusiastic assistance of the New York Times) in the endless hunt for what Tom Wolfe called "the Great White Defendant."

So, many whites want to be able to say, "I'm not one of them, those bad whites, like that guy on Seinfeld. Hey, I voted for a black guy for President!"

Plus, I suspect there's an even more hidden reason many whites wish Obama is elected President: They hope that when a black finally moves into the White House, it will prove to African-Americans, once and for all, that white animus isn't the cause of their troubles. All blacks have to do is to act like President Obama—and their problems will be over!

It's a seductive vision. And it plays right into our national dream that race is just skin deep, that it's all in our heads, that the solution for all racial conflict is simply thinking right thoughts, etc. etc.

"All blacks have to do is to act like President Obama—and their problems will be over!" is funnier with an exclamation point.

Somebody better tell David Brock at Media Matters right now, so he won't lose any time getting his panties in a twist again over somebody daring to quote me.

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

$1.25 per gallon

The Honda Civic GX runs on compressed natural gas, which supposedly only costs about the equivalent of $1.25 per gallon of gasoline. Downsides include the tank only holds the equivalent of eight gallons of gasoline, so range is half of the gasoline version. And if you run out between the rare CNG filling stations, you'll need to be towed to one. Plus, you only get 113 horsepower, instead of the 140 in the basic gasoline Civic. And the MSRP is a hefty $24,590, a couple of thousand more than the 110 horsepower Civic Hybrid.

My question is whether this is one of those rare cases where it pays more to get in early on a new technology. If 15 years from now, half of America is driving around in a compress natural gas vehicle, will the current large price gap between CNG and gasoline narrow considerably due to more demand for CNG?

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

Obama wants to escalate in Afghanistan

In September 2001, I advocated overthrowing the Afghan government in punishment but not trying to transform the country as well (arguing my case in the guise of a review of "The Man Who Would Be King"). Remind me again, though, what exactly are we doing there seven years later that we've now got to do more of it, according to Senator Obama?

From the Washington Post:

Sen. Barack Obama, on his first and likely only overseas trip as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has remade the campaign's foreign policy playing field, neatly sidestepping Republican charges that he has been naive and wrong on Iraq and moving to a broader, post-Iraq focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. ... Chief among them, he said, are the "need to refocus attention on Afghanistan and to go after the Taliban, including putting more troops on the ground, and to put more pressure on Pakistan to deal with the safe havens of terrorists."

Do we have any sort of offer on the table to the Taliban (e.g., hand over Osama and Mullah Omar and change your name to something else, and we'll go home and let you locals duke it out in your time-honored manner)? Or is it our national grand strategy to be screwing around in Afghanistan until the whole place finally calms down, which will be the day after the sun explodes in 5,000,000,000 AD? (Your Lying Eyes argues the case for Afghan Ennui here.)

And do we really have any clue what to do with Pakistan? The last thing I remember was everyone in the U.S. media announcing, right after Benazir Bhutto's assassination, that the whole place was about to explode in chaos. But then it more or less didn't, at least compared to how chaotic it normally is. So, does Obama have some special insight into how Pakistan works (perhaps from spending a couple of weeks there 25 years ago?), or is he as clueless as, apparently, everybody else in America is about the place?

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

Obama's paper trail

I hear Stanley Kurtz has been in Illinois digging up Obama's paper trail for upcoming articles in the Weekly Standard and National Review. I have no idea what he's found, but it's certainly about time that somebody went looking.

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

July 21, 2008

A reductionist theory of humor

Why do we laugh?

Lots of theories have been constructed to answer this question, but most haven't been terribly successful because we laugh at so many different things. (Here's a New York Review of Books essay on some of them.) So, let me try out a two-stage theory, which I haven't actually tested yet against all the different kinds of humor, but it may be promising:

Stage One: Let's start out with a negative but useful definition of humor: it's not serious.

The more something seems serious but is not serious, the funnier it is.

King Lear topples rigidly to the ground -- uh-oh, that's serious. Buster Keaton topples rigidly to the ground -- oh, good, that's not serious, ha-ha.

A young husband and wife get into an argument over who, exactly, is the father of her unborn child. Generally speaking, that's not funny. It's serious.

A young husband and wife get into an argument before her parents come for dinner over whether you should set the salad fork to the right of the main fork or across the top of the plate. They start yelling, but eventually start laughing at themselves for yelling because it's a silly thing to get worked up over. It's not serious.

Laughter happens more in public than in private. To say, as readers often do, that A Confederacy of Dunces or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are "laugh out loud funny" is to admit, via the logic of the exception that proves the rule, that the great majority of books don't provoke loud laughter in solitary readers. In contrast, to say that the recent Katherine Heigl romantic comedy "27 Dresses" is "laugh out loud funny" is ho-hum praise because any movie labeled a comedy is supposed to set the audience in the theatre off laughing.

Public laughter can serve as an expression of relief and mutual reassurance that something that could be serious -- e.g., the bride's bedraggled ex-boyfriend crashes into the church just before she says "I do" to the rich guy who doesn't really love her -- isn't serious, it's just, say, romantic comedy behavior. Weddings are almost omnipresent in movie comedies these days because we have so few formal ceremonies anymore where A. Americans are supposed to act like proper protocol is all-important; and B. It really isn't.

In mildly stressful social occasions, such as at cocktail parties, people laugh constantly at things other people say that aren't very funny. (Social scientists have taped and transcribed run-of-the-mill repartee and it's usually pretty dire). When my feeble witticisms elicit constant giggling, that is people laughing to reassure each other that it's not serious.

That's laughing-with-you humor, which isn't normally terribly funny to an outside observer. Professional comedians tend to use laughing-at-somebody humor, which often is. The point of hostile humor is to show us (the audience) that they (the objects of ridicule) aren't serious. They are ridiculous. It's reassuring.

Top comedians, of course, tend to be notoriously hostile. In the 1990s, a friend once had dinner with Jackie Mason, who spent the entire evening complaining morosely about how Ed Sullivan had ruined his career in 1964. (That's pretty funny, but only because it wasn't serious: Mason went on to have a highly successful career, and thus it was funny that he was bitterly lamenting the incident 30 years later. If he had never gotten another break, it wouldn't be funny, it would be sad.)

Perhaps the positive feeling we enjoy when something is funny has evolved as a sort of brain candy to reward us for realizing when something is not serious. Hunter-gatherers can better afford to be ornery because they can just leave when other people get on their nerves too much. Settled humans living in dense populations need other mechanisms for coping with frustrations, such as a sense of humor to reward them for deciding something isn't really a big deal. Thus, we are primed to search out funny experiences.

Stage Two: Assuming that we evolved a craving for the feeling that's something is funny, then that kind of positive reinforcement could then have evolved to apply to other helpful things. For example, pattern recognition is, generally speaking, a good thing from a Darwinian point of view. So, it's not surprising that a lot of humor involves pattern recognition.
Q. How many lesbians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A. That's not funny!
That was funny the first time you heard it (1983) because it crystallized for you something you'd observed evidence for -- that lesbians are likelier to be humorless and irritable -- but hadn't yet recognized consciously. Like a trainer teaching Shamu a new trick at Sea World, your brain tossed you some brain candy as a reward for noticing something new. The joke is not very funny now, however, because you already knew lesbians tend to be like that. (By the way, here's a hilariously unfunny Wikipedia article on Lightbulb Jokes.)

So, that's the theory. Does it account for all types of humor? Well, you can more or less extend stage two indefinitely: Puns are funny because our brains reward us for noticing ... uh ... incongruity. Or maybe our brains toss us some brain candy for noticing that things that seem alike (e.g., homonyms) might not be actually alike (i.e., puns are the inverse of pattern recognition humor).

Of course, like most Darwinian explanations, this starts getting unfalsifiable the more you push it.

But that leads to the question:

- If pattern recognition is funny;

- And if Steve Sailer is good at pattern recognition (e.g., this blog post);

- Then why isn't Steve Sailer funny (e.g., this blog post)?

For example, consider my 1994 article "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay," which includes a table of three dozen traits upon which lesbians and gay men tend to differ. This prodigious exercise in pattern recognition includes bits and pieces that could be incorporated into dozens of stand-up comedy routines and Saturday Night Live skits. But my article on the whole isn't funny. Indeed, it tends to get readers angry.

Lots of funny people read my stuff (e.g., Stephen Colbert or one of his writers), because I'm good at coming up with the raw material for observational humor. But, I generally don't choose to be very funny myself.

How come? Well, I suspect there's a conflict between the Stage Two type of humor (pattern-recognition) and Stage One ("It's not serious").

The problem is: I am serious.

An observational comedian says, "Have you ever noticed ..." and then mentions something paradoxical. "Why is that?" he adds with a look of exasperation and confusion, and then rushes on to some other wry observation.

With me, though, the question "Why is that?" leaves me dead in my tracks, goggle-eyed in fascination. "I bet I can figure that out," I say to myself, even though nobody cares. It's already been established that it's not serious and that's enough for most people. Me, I've got to be Mr. Explainer.

I can be funny in short bursts (here's a 1992 American Spectator parody I wrote that was pretty funny at the time), but I find it hard to maintain the needed level of scattershot hostility for too long. I'm too empathetic toward people (at least those below the top 0.001%), too interested in understanding what makes them tick, too disinterested and philosophical to be terribly funny.

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

SWPL: Internships

Christian Lander writes:

In most of the world when a person works long hours without pay, it is referred to as “slavery” or “forced labor.” For white people this process is referred to as an internship and is considered an essential stage in white development. ...

You would assume that the most sought after internships would be in areas that lead to the greatest financial reward. Young White people, however, prefer internships that put them on the path for careers that will generally result in a DECREASE of the material wealth accumulated by their parents.

For example, if you were to present a white 19 year old with the choice of spending the summer earning $15 an hour as a plumbers apprentice or making $0 answering phones at Production Company, they will always choose the latter. In fact, the only way to get the white person to choose the plumbing option would be to convince them that it was leading towards an end-of-summer pipe art installation.

It's interesting how the upper middle class has increasingly barricaded off entry into a lot of different occupations by insisting upon unpaid internships, which discourages young people who need the money from a summer job.

Now that his Stuff White People Like book has been on the NY Times bestseller list for a couple of weeks, I'll finally mention that, not surprisingly, Christian was a veteran iSteve.com reader from way back.

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

Hair of the dog that bit us

A reader comments:

"My fiancee is a successful real estate broker here in Orange County, CA. She attends industry meetings twice or more a week. She tells me that the "hot topic" in real estate sales circles is how the US must import more Asians, Hispanics, and other foreigners to get us out of the housing slump."

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

Toyota Prius

The funny thing about the fashionable Toyota Prius is that it would get good gas mileage even it weren't a hybrid. It has a very aerodynamic shape that provides a reasonable amount of interior room. Take out the weight added by the battery and electric motor, but keep things like the modest 0-60 acceleration, the use of aluminum rather than steel in places, and the real time miles per gallon gauge and you'd still have an efficient economy car. (And since the Prius has been built in Japan rather than America, you'd get Lexus-quality factory workmanship.)

But nobody would buy it. After all, the Prius is very similar in shape (just smaller) to perhaps the most unfashionable car of the decade, the Pontiac Aztek (introduced in 2001, now discontinued). The picture above is of an Aztek, not a Prius.

Conversely, nobody gets very excited over the Honda Civic Hybrid, because it doesn't look like you're saving the world by driving it. It just looks like you're some loser who can only afford a Civic. In contrast, when you are driving a Prius, everybody can instantly recognize it's a hybrid.

Basically, people choose cars to advertise themselves on the mating market. That's fine, I've got no problem with that ... except for the tens of millions of car-buyers who aren't supposed to be on the mating market because they're already married. Consider all the soccer moms who refused to buy aerodynamic minivans because they're too mom-shaped. Instead, they bought squared-off SUVs, which get much worse mileage than minivans of similar capacity, because they felt they made them look sexier.

So, you have to give Toyota a lot of credit for figuring out how to trick us knuckleheaded Americans into wanting to eat our vegetables.

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

The circular logic of the bubble economy, 2002-2007

Hire illegal aliens to build new houses in the exurbs for people wanting to get their kids out of school districts overwhelmed by the children of illegal aliens.

It's the road to national prosperity. What could possibly go wrong?

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

July 20, 2008

NFL IQs: The Picture

Graphical data analyst Ben Fry takes some old data provided by NFL scribe Paul Zimmerman of Sports Illustrated on the average Wonderlic IQ test scores by position of draft prospects (which I'd published in VDARE in 2003) and plots it with offense in blue, defense in red, and the radius of the circle proportional to the scores.


You can convert them to IQs assuming that 21 correct answers = 100 and add or subtract 2 IQ points for each answer above or below 21. So, quarterbacks averaged 24 right for a 106 IQ. Tailbacks averaged 16 for a 90.

Don't get too excited about minor differences between positions: I've seen other listings of averages by position and they differed slightly. But the overall pattern was the same.

Marginal Revolution explains the graph as "The closer you are to the ball, the higher your score."

Okay, but why is that?

Because the closer you start out to the ball at the time of the center snap, the more crowded the field is around you. So, close to the ball, the more important upper body strength is and the less important footspeed is. If you are the center, say, there just isn't much room to run and you don't have anywhere in particular to go. You might dash a few yards forward to block the middle linebacker or backpedal a few yards to protect the quarterback, but that's about it. On the other hand, if you are a defensive lineman, you want to get to the quarterback before he releases the ball, so footspeed is important on defense. A defensive end might take the long way around and sprint 20 yards to sack the quarterback.

Upper body strength is relatively equally distributed between the races, but footspeed most definitely is not. So, tailbacks, wide receivers, and defensive players have a need for speed, so they are disproportionately black. I haven't checked recently, but in most recent years since Jason Sehorn's retirement, none of the 64 NFL starting cornerbacks at the start of the season were white, and none of the 32 starting tailbacks were white. (For some reason, this never gets as much publicity as the perceived lack of black quarterbacks.)

As we all know, there is about a 15 point difference IQ gap between whites and blacks, so positions that are black dominated tend to have lower average IQs than positions that are more integrated (or that are white monopolized, such as placekicker and punter).

Another (also oversimplified, but useful) way to think about it is like this: talents are arrayed in a pyramid, with only a few people at the top.

Imagine you have a whole bunch of guys who are about 6-5 and 280 pounds. You then sort them by 40 yard dash times. The handful of extremely fast ones at the top of the pyramid of footspeed are assigned to play defensive end because they have the best chance of sacking the quarterback. The pretty fast ones in the next layer down play defensive tackle because they might sack the QB.

That leaves a lot of not very fast big guys to play offensive line. At any level of footspeed in the lower part of the pyramid, there are more people than at the top of the pyramid.

So, to differentiate among the average speed guys, you start looking more at other skills.

First, you tell them to gain 40 pounds because for pass-blocking you need inertia more than acceleration. Not surprisingly, lots of them find that why, yes, they can eat more pancakes if it means a chance to play in the NFL.

So, now you have a whole bunch of 320 pound guys who aren't that fast. So, you look for the ones who are coordinated and relatively nimble and send the clods home. And then you look at the ones who have a lot of desire, who can play through pain, and so forth and so on.

Somewhere along in there, you look at IQ, which is useful in learning the playbook, in learning to play other positions in the offensive line, in keeping out of jail, in not getting caught taking steroids, and so forth.

Overall, because there are more people physically able to play offensive line, there is more selection pressure on non-physical attributes, such as IQ.

That then allows coaches to devise more cognitively difficult tactics for offensive linemen to execute than for defensive linemen, which in turn reinforces the need for IQ among offensive linemen. Or perhaps causality runs more in the opposite direction and the offensive line is inherently more IQ demanding than other positions. It's kind of a chicken or egg problem.

But the important thing to keep in mind is that IQ is a relatively minor factor in the NFL relative to the ability to generate force: mass times acceleration. If you are over 220 pounds and can run the 40-yard-dash in under 4.40 seconds but have an 80 IQ, they'll try to explain the playbook to you very slowly. There are 150 million people in America with 3 digit IQs, but only a tiny number of them have the combination of size and speed to play in the NFL.

The Mortgage Bubble: The Diversity Cover Story

From my new VDARE.com column:

Traditionally, markets work by balancing greed and fear. Why was greed allowed to outrun fear so badly this time?

One clue comes from looking at the places with the sharpest decline in home prices, such as California, South Florida, Arizona, and Nevada. For example, the median price of homes sold in California last month was $328,000, down 31.5 percent from a ridiculous $484,000 in June 2007. Almost 42 percent of all homes sold in California were in foreclosure.

Why did the housing bubble get out of control in many heavily Hispanic regions?

Because many important people wanted it to.

A widely overlooked reason behind this economic disaster is that the politicians, real estate interests, and financiers told the public that they weren't speculating wildly on the insane hope of home prices rising forever. No, they were actually helping minorities share in the American Dream!

A percipient April 13, 2007 article in the nonprofit San Diego Voice by Kelly Bennett, Foreclosure Wave Said to Hit Latinos Hard, reported:

"This decade, a national push to increase homeownership among Latinos coincided with one of the longest, most dramatic periods of appreciation for home values. Latino mortgage and real estate professionals put forth aggressive outreach campaigns in the community, while lenders reached out to huge, untapped sections of the market by loosening qualifying standards. …

"Because a widened lending gate allowed many more Latinos and other minorities into the housing market than had entered previously, lawmakers and special interest groups championed the lenders' efforts to extend homeownership to those groups." …

Diversity served as the perfect politically correct excuse for rampant irresponsibility. It gave insiders a rationale for putting their thumb on the scales of the vast lending market in the sacred name of anti-discrimination. Who dared be so racist as to argue that blacks and Hispanics should get fewer loans per capita because they were less likely to pay them back? That's "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

Today's San Diego Union Tribune article sums up what will be the verdict of history on America in this decade:

"Typically, a severe housing slump is preceded by a recession and job losses, but that is not the case this time around, [John Karevoll of DataQuick] said. 'So now all us number crunchers are scratching our heads. This wasn't caused by a recession, but by stupidity.'"

But it's not just the fault of stupid borrowers, although a national policy of importing more of them by not enforcing the immigration laws clearly worsened the problem.

Stupidity extended all the way up the hierarchy—and that was intentional.

Political correctness makes people stupid, so diversity provided the ideal cover story for financial crime of the century.

[More]

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

July 19, 2008

Greg Norman leads British Open

Golf has more randomness than most other sports, so it often has weirder storylines than say, tennis, where the same few people dominate for several years on end. For example, with one round left in the British Open, the leader by two shots is 53-year-old Greg Norman, whom I had assumed until this weekend had given up the game to concentrate on his many business interests.

Norman was the dominant personality of the 1985 to 1996 era in golf, between the primes of Tom Watson and Tiger Woods. He never won as much as you'd expect from his talent, partly for his own fault (e.g., his collapse in 1996 Masters after leading by six strokes) and partly through bad luck (he might have won three straight major championships in 1986-87, but his opponents chipped in on the last hole for miracle birdies). He was probably the greatest driver off the tee for length and accuracy since Sam Snead. But his charismatic personality might have been a too swashbuckling for golf, which most rewards ultra-disciplined people like Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods.

The question about Norman was always why this magnificent specimen of rampant masculinity had chosen golf, rather than, say, rugby, Australian rules football, or even boxing (which was seriously suggested in Golf Digest). Considering the popularity of Australian leading men in recent decades, he might have made his fortune as a movie star. Thus, it wasn't surprising when he became one of the few top pros to largely give up golf as he reached 50, the age at which most start competing on the pleasant little Champions Tour. Maybe golf really wasn't his game.

Norman attributes the resurgence of his golf game to playing lots of tennis with his new bride, Chris Evert, the great ladies' tennis champion. They were married earlier this year after mutual messy divorces. Evert is both very competitive and very feminine, which has made for an interesting private life, with her name linked romantically over the years to various hard-chargers such as Jimmy Connors, Burt Reynolds, and Geraldo Rivera. So, it's not surprising she's ended up with as extraordinary an alpha male as Norman.

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

The Half Sigma theory

Half Sigma writes:

IQ is more highly correlated with life outcomes for people with below average to average IQs. Most career tracks have an IQ floor, and if your IQ isn't high enough to meet the floor level, you can't perform that job adequately. Few career tracks have IQ floors much higher than 115, so if your IQ is higher than that, your parental wealth and connections become very important.

Thus, the higher your IQ, the more important the wealth of your parents becomes (the very opposite of what most people think). People with exceptionally high IQs but inadequate parents often have poor life outcomes because of the mismatch.

So, JFK and GWB would be examples of people just above the Presidential IQ cutoff who became Presidents because of their fathers.

An interesting idea. I haven't had time to assess it, but it seems worth thinking about.

In general, let me say that I check in on Half Sigma regularly because, while we have fairly similar approaches, he often winds up with ideas I wouldn't get to myself.

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

July 18, 2008

Presidential Timber?

First-term Congressman Heath Shuler (D-NC) is often mentioned along with Sen. James Webb (D-VA) as the kind of hillbilly moderate-conservative Democrat who might do well on the national stage. Shuler, was the runner-up for the Heisman trophy at the U. of Tennessee in 1993. He later returned to school, finished his degree in psychology, started a successful real estate firm, and won election to Congress in 2006.

That's the good news. On the other hand, he was a complete bust in the NFL, listed by one count as the 17th biggest flop of the last quarter century in sports. This may have something to do with his reported Wonderlic IQ score of 16, which translates to about a 90.

Shuler replies that he didn't take the test seriously.

On the other other other hand, he named his children "Navy" and "Island," so maybe the Wonderlic score does say something about him.

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

July 17, 2008

Newspaper Sentence of the Day

From the Wilmington (DE) News Journal:
Increasing the number of black male librarians has become a hot topic.

More fully:

According to a 2007 report from the American Library Association, of the nation's almost 110,000 credentialed librarians -- that is, librarians with master's degrees -- 19 percent are men, 4.5 percent are black, and 0.5 percent are black men. The number of Latino men is just slightly higher -- 25 more nationwide.

By comparison, black women make up 4.2 percent of credentialed librarians, with Latina women at 1.4 percent.

Increasing the number of black male librarians has become a hot topic. At a recent conference in California, library association leaders dedicated a diversity program to finding ways to attract more black men to the profession.

I don't know about these days, but a couple of decades ago when I was in the marketing research business, we always had our eye out for hiring research librarians interested in switching to a higher paying career. A librarian who was okay with numbers was a good fit for many marketing research jobs, and we paid a lot better than libraries did. Why is it blacks' interest to get recruited into a notoriously low-paying career?

This just reminds me of something I wrote for National Review in 1995:

On campus, however, the automatic reaction whenever an embarrassing shortfall of blacks in any field is pointed out is another affirmative action campaign. For example, architecture schools have been attempting for years to recruit more blacks and Hispanics. Now, I commend a career in architecture to any young person with a trust fund, but the less privileged should remember that architecture pays wretchedly for the first decade or two (or three or four). Conservative critics of quotas often argue that lowering entrance standards for minorities is Bad, but that more intensely recruiting minorities is Good. Yet, seldom does any race-based recruitment campaign stem from a hardheaded analysis of what's in the best interest of the minorities. Instead, affirmative action is an automatic response by white leaders to their discomfort over their Black Lack. African-Americans have enough problems of their own without taking on this new Black Man's Burden of helping whites feel better about themselves.

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

Great moments in trustworthy spam pen names

The folks who send out fraudulent phishing email from Nigeria and elsewhere don't always have a well-developed sense of what names would strike rich dumb Americans as confidence-inspiring. Here, for example, is the beginning of an email rescued from my Junk file:

CAHOOT Bank has been receiving complaints from our customers for unauthorised use of the CAHOOT Online accounts. As a result we periodically review CAHOOT Online Accounts and temporarily restrict access of those accounts which we think are vunerable to the unauthorised use.

I don't think they quite have a handle on what the phrase "in cahoots" implies to Americans.

LA Times: "Why do Asian students generally get higher marks than Latinos?"

Hector Becerra of the LA Times visits a high school near downtown LA that has basically no whites or blacks, and asks students and teachers "Why do Asian students generally get higher marks than Latinos?"

Lincoln Heights is mostly a working-class Mexican American area, but it's also a first stop for Asian immigrants, many of them ethnic Chinese who fled Vietnam.

With about 2,500 students, Lincoln High draws from parts of Boyle Heights, El Sereno and Chinatown.

Both the neighborhood and student body are about 15% Asian. And yet Asians make up 50% of students taking Advanced Placement classes. Staffers can't remember the last time a Latino was valedictorian.

"A lot of my friends say the achievement gap is directly attributable to the socioeconomic status of students, and that is not completely accurate," O'Connell said. "It is more than that."

But what is it? O'Connell called a summit in Sacramento that drew 4,000 educators, policymakers and experts to tackle the issue. Some teachers stomped out in frustration and anger.

No Lincoln students stomped out of their discussion. Neither did any teachers in a similar Lincoln meeting. But the observations were frank, and they clearly made some uncomfortable.

To begin with, the eight students agreed on a few generalities: Latino and Asian students came mostly from poor and working-class families.

According to a study of census data, 84% of the Asian and Latino families in the neighborhoods around Lincoln High have median annual household incomes below $50,000. And yet the Science Bowl team is 90% Asian, as is the Academic Decathlon team. ...

Asian parents are more likely to pressure their children to excel academically, the students agreed. ...

The journalist winds up with the usual George W. Bush-style postmodernist explanation -- the soft bigotry of low expectations. If only everybody would just assume the two groups are equal, then they would be.

Try and falsify that proposition!

Of course, the long article doesn't mention the two dread letters, but, on the other hand, there is a lot of evidence that Chinese tend to overachieve and Mexican-Americans tend to underachieve relative to their IQs. Family expectations and pressure are certainly a plausible explanation for over vs. underachievement.

The subtler question that I want to focus on, though, is whether it's better, all else being equal, for Hispanics to be in a school that's 85% Hispanic and 15% Chinese or in a school that is 100% Hispanic?

That's a tough problem for social science to crack since all else is never equal. If the school was really bad, it wouldn't be 15% Asian -- the Chinese parents would get their kids out. So you can assume that Lincoln isn't a really awful, dangerous school like, say, Jefferson, where there were brown vs. black race riots a few years ago. Not a lot of Chinese at Jefferson. (Here's Roger D. McGrath's 2005 American Conservative article on Jefferson High. By the way, I don't think there are many high schools that are perpetually 85% black and 15% Asian -- it sounds unstable -- but I could be wrong.)

I don't have much of a hunch what a good study would find. I could see it going either way. Having 15% Asians around might help the smart, nerdy Hispanics find friends, and might keep better teachers around the school. (Good teachers like to teach -- i.e., to impart learning -- so good teachers gravitate toward schools with good students -- i.e., those more able and willing to be taught.) Being 15% Asian means there are enough advanced students around to justify advanced classes.

On the other hand, having an "academic-dominant minority" of Asians in a high school may well further racialize attitudes toward studying. If your name ends in Z and you are a student at Lincoln, what's the point of setting out in 9th grade to be valedictorian? No Hispanic has been valedictorian at Lincoln H.S. since the mind of man runs not to the contrary. To study hard is to act Asian, to betray La Raza. If Mexican students tried to beat the Chinese at their own game, and failed, well, that would just prove the Chinese are smarter. So it's better for Mexican racial self-esteem to make sure nobody even tries, to proclaim that studying is just something Asians high school students do because they're, uh, no good at tagging and getting pregnant.

That's basically what the most respected institutions in our society -- the LA Times, the State Superintendent of Schools, etc. -- tell them to think, right? That there can't possibly be an innate intelligence gap between the Mexicans and the Chinese, because if there were, it would be the worst thing in the history of the world. It would mean that Hitler was right, that Nazis should rule America. So, to prevent a Nazi takeover, the Hispanic students will do their part by screwing off instead of studying. (It's not hard to persuade teens not to study.)

In contrast, at a 100% Hispanic school like Garfield or Roosevelt (nearby East LA schools that don't include Chinatown -- Jaime Escalante taught AP Calculus at Garfield), well, somebody Hispanic has to be valedictorian each year. So, trying to be valedictorian there, while nerdy and uncool, is likely to be less racially fraught than at an integrated school.

As I said, I don't really know which way it would go. People have similarly argued over this type of question concerning Historically Black Colleges for a long time -- is a black kid with an 1100 SAT score better off at Howard where he'd quite competitive academically or at Georgetown, where he'd feel like Michelle Obama did at Princeton and Harvard Law School?

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

July 16, 2008

They're all whores

From the Washington Post:

Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, was president of the Homeownership Alliance, which advocates the expansion of homeownership through low-interest mortgages funded by Fannie and Freddie. Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr., who is heading McCain's vice presidential vetting panel, was a lobbyist for Fannie Mae. Mark Buse, a longtime McCain aide, lobbied for Freddie Mac before returning to McCain's Senate staff.

And the list of Republican Fannie and Freddie lobbyists includes some of its most notable rogues -- including Tony Rudy, Edwin Buckham, Kevin Ring and David H. Safavian, all of whom were linked to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal -- as well as some of its leading power brokers, from Reagan White House chief of staff Kenneth M. Duberstein to uberlobbyists Vin Weber and Tom Korologos. Alberto R. Cardenas, one of McCain's top fundraisers, has lobbied for Fannie Mae, as have former Montana governor Marc Racicot and tax-cut advocate Grover Norquist.

Obama also has ties to the firms. James A. Johnson, the former head of his vice presidential vetting panel, was a chief executive of Fannie Mae, as was Franklin D. Raines, who said this week that he has been consulting with the campaign on housing issues. Maria Echaveste, a top Clinton White House official whose husband, Christopher Edley Jr., is a close Obama friend and adviser, has lobbied for Freddie Mac, and former commerce secretary William M. Daley, a top Obama backer, was an in-house lobbyist.

Other Democratic luminaries who have advocated for the mortgage giants include strategist Steven Elmendorf, Rep. Doris Matsui (Calif.), former Al Gore aide Ronald A. Klain, former Clinton aide Steve Ricchetti and former congressman Harold E. Ford Jr. (Tenn.), now the head of the Democratic Leadership Council. Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, was also vice chairman of Fannie Mae.

That payroll has cost Fannie and Freddie nearly $200 million in lobbying and campaign contributions over the past decade, according to lobbying reports and Federal Election Commission disclosures. It has also won them plenty of protection from calls for greater regulation, less federal protection, and even nationalization.

From Robert Novak's column:

As financial storm signals appeared the past 18 months, some Bush officials urged drastic reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But, according to internal government sources, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson objected because it would look "too political." The Republican administration kept its hands off the government-backed mortgage companies that are closely connected to the Democratic establishment.

Paulson is a Republican, but as head of the Goldman Sachs investment bank he had close ties with Democratic-dominated Fannie Mae.

After prominent Democrat James A. Johnson's departure from Fannie following eight years as chairman and chief executive, and after Johnson joined the ZymoGenetics biopharmaceutical firm, he was named head of Goldman Sachs's compensation committee, helping to set Paulson's abundant salary there.

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

Save the Ants!

Nicholas Wade has lunch with Sociobiology author Edward O. Wilson and hears about the 79-year-old's upcoming first novel:

Over lunch he describes his novel in progress, currently titled “Anthill.” Its contents have occasioned certain differences of emphasis between himself and his publisher, even though it was his editor at Norton, Robert Weil, who suggested he write it. Dr. Wilson would like ants to play a large role in the novel, given all the useful lessons that can be drawn from their behavior. The publisher sees a larger role for people and a smaller, at most ant-sized, role for ants. The novel is rotating through draft after draft as this tension is worked out.

Dr. Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes for literature, but that is no shield against a publisher’s quest for perfection. “They said, ‘You can do better than that, Ed,’ ” he recalled. “I wrote another draft. They said, ‘This is great, Ed, but we need more emotion, ambivalence.’ ” In the next draft, he plans to have the human characters stand alone, without the ants if necessary.

C'mon, Norton, there are a million novels about people already. What are the chances that a 79-year-old first time novelist's novel about people is going to be terribly special? In contrast, how many novels are there about ants? And how many have been written by the world's leading authority on ants?

Save the ants!

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

Inherently funny numbers

When I lived in Chicago, the funniest temperature to see displayed on a bank sign in January was:

1

Now, the NYT has a poll of black voters' preference in the Obama-McCain race that's almost as amusing:

89 - 2

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

July 15, 2008

The real problem with Wikipedia ...

... is not its reliability, which isn't bad. Instead, in its obsession with being trustworthy, it is determined to lack style, to wage a relentless war against insight and panache. In other words, it's boring.

Obviously, Wikipedia doesn't pay writers, so it typically gets what it pays for in terms of quality writing. Worse is its institutional focused on exterminating whatever bits of good prose get into Wikipedia in the first place. For example, a few years ago I was researching the long-running Mike Judge animated sit-com King of the Hill. In the middle of Wikipedia's informative but ho-hum posting was a 900 word essay on the social themes of the show that stood out for its grace, wit, and acumen. About halfway through it, I realized this part had undoubtedly been written by Kevin Michael Grace, The Ambler.

Tonight, I checked back to see how badly the self-appointed editors had sucked the life out of Kevin's essay, only to find it was completely gone. Typical.

In contrast, for the last week I've been reading my 1971 Encyclopedia Britannica's enormous article on "World Wars." Individual sections are written by authors identified only by their initials, such as "B.H.L.H." The corporate style is fairly terse and stodgy; still, it's an exciting read, in part because of the creativity of authors. For example, B.H.L.H. commented on the British forces' capture of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks in late 1917, after starting in Egypt a long year before:
"As a moral success the feat was valuable, but from the strategic point of view it seemed a long way round to the goal. If Turkey be pictured as a bent old man, the British, after missing their blow at his head (Istanbul) and omitting to strike at his heart (Alexandretta), had now resigned themselves to swallowing him from the feet upward, like a python dragging its endless length across the desert."

B.H.L.H. is of course Capt. Basil H. Liddell Hart (1895-1970), one of the best known and most controversial of military historians and innovators, who contributed to the development of tank warfare. In its clunking style, Wikipedia explains:
"He was Military Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph from 1925-1935, and The Times, 1935-1939. Later he began publishing military histories and biographies of great commanders who, he thought, were great because they illustrated the principles of good strategy. Among these were Scipio Africanus Major, William Tecumseh Sherman and T. E. Lawrence."

I especially like the "great commanders who, he thought, were great" part. I would bet that one man can't write that badly himself -- he needs editors looking over his shoulder to stick in the "he thought" part to keep it all neutral and reliable.

Is B.H.L.H. a completely reliable guide to events in which he played a minor role and later played a major role in interpreting? Of course not. Still, his writing is interesting and memorable, unlike Wikipedia's.

In case you are wondering, I have no first hand experience with writing or editing anything for Wikipedia. My closest experience is watching my 12-year-old son write half of one long Wikipedia article.

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

The War You Never Hear About

When I was a kid, somebody started saying that outfielder Joe Rudi of the Oakland A's was the most underrated player in baseball. After a few years, he was famous for being not famous. By 1974, he was second in the press' league MVP voting even though he was only the second best hitter on his team (OPS .818), well behind Reggie Jackson (OPS .905), who came in 4th in the MVP vote. Rudi was a fine player and he was genuinely underrated for a little while because the Oakland pitcher's park held down his statistics, but it got to be a running gag pretty fast.

Similarly, you always hear about how you never hear about the Eastern Front in WWII.

What you actually never hear about is the Eastern Front in WWI. That was one wild war, with all the second string empires bashing each other about all over the map each year, until the Germans would scrape together the 6 or 12 divisions they could spare from the Western Front and go over and bail out the Austrians with brilliant generalship.

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

NYT: Violent criminals tend to be in proper shape for committing criminal violence

Eric Nagourney writes in the Health section of the New York Times:

Thinking about a life of crime? You may want to hit the gym first.

A new study that looked at the physical characteristics of about 5,000 Arkansas inmates found that most were athletically fit when they entered prison. The researchers referred to them as mesomorphs.

Oh, there were also endomorphs and ectomorphs — fatties and skinnies to the lay people. But the study found that they were less likely to have been imprisoned for violent crimes.

The researchers, whose study appears in The Social Science Journal, used body mass index, a measure of height and weight, to assess fitness.

Scientists have long explored whether physical traits play a role in criminality — a field that has fallen into disrepute when its practitioners advanced claims about characteristics like race.

The new study does find that mesomorphs make up an unusually large percentage of the prison population, from 62 percent to 73 percent.

But that does not mean that being fit is a predictor of criminal tendencies, said one of the authors, Jeffery T. Walker of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

“Those who are fit may have personalities that are more likely to make them violent,” Dr. Walker said in an e-mail message.

“In essence,” Dr. Walker said, “what drives them to be fit also drives them to be violent. It is also likely that those who are fit find themselves in violent situations more.”

Hmmhmmhmm, what could possibly be the underlying link between being muscular and being aggressive? Thank God this is a "field that has fallen into disrepute" due to political correctness. Otherwise, somebody might have learned something by now.

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