Rifle vs. Shotgun

"Nuclear-Tipped Interceptors Studied: Rumsfeld Revives Rejected Missile Defense Concept" - WaPo. Thank God for Rummy. Hit-to-kill is a terrific way to test our interceptors, but you don't go duck hunting with a rifle. You use a shotgun. When the real ICBMs are inbound, I want us blasting away at them with the equivalent of a shotgun - nuclear-tipped interceptors.

Chesterton on created equal

"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man." - G.K. Chesterton, 1922.

"Christianity has always asserted the equal worth of all human souls, and this belief has inspired many of the great humanitarian achievements in Western history, such as the abolition of the slave trade. Science, of course, can neither prove nor disprove spiritual equality. That would be a defect in a scientific theory, but it is a blessing in a religious doctrine. Darwinism, however, made the whole of Christianity seem outdated. The new prestige of evolutionary biology encouraged egalitarians to discard that corny creed of spiritual equality and instead assert the shiny new scientific hypothesis that humans are physically and mentally uniform. But that, paradoxically, put progressive egalitarians on a collision course with Darwinian science . . . because Darwin’s theory of natural selection requires hereditary differences. That's what natural selection selects: those genetic variations that happen to reproduce themselves more than their genetic rivals in a particular environment. To talk about hereditary differences, however, is to talk about the political hot potato of “race.” For there is no bright line between “family” and “race.” A race is merely an extremely extended family that inbreeds to some extent. Note the full title of Darwin’s big book: The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." - Steve Sailer, Thatcher Presentation, 1999

"The Other Side of Paradise"

"The Other Side of Paradise" - my review of the interesting little family drama about a Mormon missionary in Tonga.

IQ and the Wealth of Nations and La Griffe du Lion

More on Richard Lynn's fascinating book IQ and the Wealth of Nations - The glamorously mysterious La Griffe du Lion ("The Claw of the Lion") - the Zorro of statisticians - slashes into the debate with an intriguing Q&A about Lynn's data on national differences in IQ. [Link now fixed.]

Mr. Sharon, put up this Wall!

Will William F. Buckley Jr. be thrown out of the conservative ranks for denouncing Ariel Sharon's scorched earth campaign? The grand old man of the American Right delivers a stinging rebuke to the War Fever crowd:

"My vote is that General Sharon's offensive is the stupidest campaign in recent memory. Defined here as a campaign that has: solved nothing, increased Israel's problems, intensified Palestinian hatred of Israel, estranged many Europeans and Americans, and fanned Islamic hostility."

I hope it's not that bad. Obviously, Israel has do something. In his prime, Sharon was a brilliant battlefield tactician. But he's an old man now, and, besides, his strategic sense was always iffy. Over the years, has any single man done more to alienate Israel's more objective well-wishers? There is a fascinating untold story about why some great Reagan Administration patriots like Caspar Weinberger hate Sharon. (I don't know the details, although I can guess.)

The only long run "solution," such as it is, would be for Israel to figure out a defensible border, tear down the settlements beyond the border, and build a Berlin Wall along that boundary to prevent all physical contact between Israelis and West Bank Palestinians. (This has worked on nearby Cyprus for a quarter of a century.) They can't blow you up if they can't get next to you. Even Andrew Sullivan agreed with that today. (Perhaps Andrew was between his testosterone injections when he wrote that?)

In contrast, trying to make peace with the Palestinians is doomed. Their hotheads are even less likely to accept Israel's right to exist than Americans today would be willing - if the War in the Pacific had turned out differently - to accept the right to exist of a "Shintoist State" that had taken control of the visually similar California coastal region. (Think about that analogy for awhile. It helped me understand the Middle East a lot better. And keep in mind that we Americans are a lot less inclined to hold grudges than Arabs are.)

But, what kind of permanent solution can devastating Palestinian cities achieve? Suicide bombing takes very little "infrastructure." The Palestinians are outbreeding the Israelis. The Palestinians will outnumber the Jews by 2020 in Israel and the Occupied Territories. The handwriting is on the wall.

The state of Israel avowedly exists for the good of a single, hereditarily-defined group (see the "basic law of Israel," the Law of Return, for the heredity-based definition of who can immigrate to Israel). I suppose this statement will be controversial, but it shouldn't be. It's the reason Israel is "the Jewish State." There are plenty of other states that exist to be the political expression of a single extremely extended family: Japan is a good example. Iceland is another. Hereditarily-defined states can work reasonably well, fostering harmony, democracy, and human rights (as Japan and Iceland do), but only as long as the state rules over its own racial group and no other large group.

Otherwise, it generally must become a racial security state, like the old Afrikaaner-run South Africa. The Israelis have better things to do with their lives than be the Palestinians' prison guards. Israelis need to return to their roots as a people that shall dwell apart. Mr. Sharon, put up this Wall!

And as Ron Unz argued today, the American Right has better things to do with its time than be a repetitious mouthpiece for the more extreme members of the Israeli Right.

Vijay Singh and race

Race is not Color: There's a general assumption among Americans that skin color determines race. Consider, though, golfer Vijay Singh, the 2000 Masters Champion and second round leader this year. Singh is of Asian Indian descent (and born in Fiji.) Yet, Singh is very dark (a lot darker than Tiger Woods, as you can see below), but he's obviously not sub-Saharan African. As you can see, Singh has Caucasian features. Further, the media doesn't treat him as if he is "black" ((i.e., having a significant number of fairly recent ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa). Nobody cared when he won his two major championships. If he was African, there would have been no end of whoop-tee-do. The point is that when you wonder what race somebody is, you are in fact asking not what his skin color is, but who is in his family tree. Skin color can be one clue to genealogy, but it's a very crude one.

Diversity Nook

An Alert Reader writes:

Here's something you might have missed...because it's away up in Maine.

"Professor Accused of Racist Remarks" His crime? Saying, "Do you know that on average blacks have a lower IQ than whites?" [Of course, that's the one thing in the Bell Curve Debates that all informed controversialists agree upon.]

It has been picked up by the Boston papers, which of course want this guy hung from his thumbs for uttering something every liberal knows can't be true, there are differences among races. The truly amusing bit is that the prof doesn't really seem to believe it particularly... he was just provoking the students (successfully, I guess). A committee of diversicrats is on the case, so in due course "justice" will ensue. Hope he's working on his thumb exercises.

And here's something predictable: the complaining student is a worker from the university's Diversity Nook or whatever they call it there. She is stumbling through a lightweight course ("majoring in communications") at age 36. What a pity and a loss to society, that discrimination has held her so far back. Why, she might have been a towering giant in education policy or something.

Neoconservative Creationism

Can you guess where this quote appeared? (You may have to read it twice because the prose style is intentionally oracular.)

"Although more powerful by far than astrology, molecular biology is not appreciably different in kind, the various celestial houses having about as much to do with human affairs as the various genes."

Ms? Mother Jones? Tikkun? Nope, it was in the Weekly Standard (3/18/02), in a book review by creationist David Berlinksi. Yo, Dave, have you ever met identical twins? Yo, Bill K., are you trying to make conservatives into laughing-stocks by publishing high-brow fools like Berlinksi?

"Dog Bites Man! Kenyan Wins Boston Marathon!"

"Dog Bites Man! Kenyan Wins Boston Marathon!" Running offers one of the clearest ways to study human biodiversity as I pointed out in National Review.

The Running Tribe of Kenya

The Running Tribe of Kenya - Here's John H. Manners' fascinating article about the three million member Kalenjin tribe of the Kenyan Highlands. They win about 3 of every 8 medals awarded in world-class distance running. Manners, who has lived and run among the Kalenjin, offers an evolutionary explanation.

Derbyshire on Dinesh D'Souza

John Derbyshire's near-rave review for Dinesh D'Souza's new 9-11 book What's So Great About America seems pretty much on the money: "I therefore stand in awe of him for having done so brilliantly well what I do not think I could have done." Unfortunately, Derb's caveat is accurate as well:

"... this book does not contain any striking or original insights. Most of what the author has to say will be familiar to anyone who reads conservative magazines or visits websites like this one. What's So Great is not pioneering political science: It is pop-political science. That's OK. There is hardly any work a writer can more usefully engage in than to bring to a large, general audience ideas that have been worked over and polished smooth by small cliques of interested parties."

Still, as talented as Dinesh is at this, I think he's got more in him than that. His is one of the most lucid voices in the Conservative Echo Chamber, but, especially since 9-11, it's getting awfully crowded in there, with countless guys creating blogs to tell you - for free! - why America is better than, say, Iraq. Dinesh has reached a point in his life - pushing 40, a husband, a father - where he's seen enough of the world to take a deep breath and write that Big Book that would stake out some new perspective beyond the Echo Chamber.

"Murder by Numbers"

Here's my review of Sandra Bullock in "Murder by Numbers." It's a laborious, visually gloomy, and generally distasteful police procedural. Eventually, though, it shines an interesting light on how the existence of the death penalty helps ruthless cops bring bad guys to justice.

Are gays cool?

Gay libertarian Jonathan Rauch argues in The Atlantic that "social conservatives should support same-sex marriage" because the contemporary coolness of gay men is making marriage unfashionable among straights. Maybe. But are we all that sure gays are really becoming cooler? Sure, everybody says so. But are straight men actually acting that way? There is a lot of evidence that since about 1969, when a riot by bereaved drag queens at the Stonewall Bar who were drowning their sorrows following Judy Garland's funeral launched the Gay Lib era, straight men have been increasingly fleeing from gay-heavy pastimes and institutions. "Not that there's anything wrong about that," as Seinfeld and Costanza would nervously proclaim when protesting they weren't gay.

Consider the musical. This was widely perceived as the Great American Art Form until the American public's increasingly sophisticated gaydar detected its disproportionate appeal to gay men. Of course, plenty of the great figures in the history of the musical - Richard Rodgers, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse, Fred Astaire, P.G. Wodehouse, and the like - were straight. Yet, over over the last three decades, the musical has increasingly become a gay ghetto as no longer clueless straight guys have taken to avoiding it.

Therefore, I've long suspected that allowing gay men to get married (in what will, no doubt, often be elaborately theatrical ceremonies) will make weddings even more distasteful to straight men than they are now. And that would be bad for society since the character of a society is determined overwhelmingly by its straight men, especially by their attitudes towards marriage

This suggests, by the way, that the long term threat to the American Catholic Churched posed by its youth-fondling scandal is that it is exposing the extent to which homosexuals pervade the Church hierarchy, thus alienating straight men. (Even the gay-dominated New York Times - where 75% of the people sitting around the table deciding what goes on the front page are homosexual, according to its top reporter Rick Berke - has finally admitted that the scandal is driven not by pedophiles but by fairly conventional male homosexuals feeling up adolescent and teenage boys.

There are lots of countries like Italy and Mexico where the male population largely shuns the Church, in part due to the perceived effeminacy of the priesthood. The U.S. Catholic Church was spared this for a long time due to the high masculinity levels of Irish priests, but that era appears to be well over. This does not bode well for the influence of the American Catholic Church. In any society, straight men will always provide most of the leaders.

why are gay men more prevalent as actors in the theatre than in movies?

So, why are gay men more prevalent as actors in the theatre than in movies? Lots of reasons, no doubt, but one that stands out is the title of that Sondheim musical: Applause. Generally speaking, straight male actors don't mind doing the same take 26 times in row in front of a bunch of bored Teamsters, as long as they ultimately get paid off in terms of money, fame, women, and power. Gay actors, in contrast, tend to place a much higher value on adulation from a live audience.

Jenin and Black Hawk Down

Jenin and Black Hawk Down - In my review of the ultra-realistic war movie last January, I pointed out the inherent dilemma that a superior military has when invading a city whose armed men are willing to fight from their own homes with their women and children by their sides. Do you send in lightly armed infantry to spare the non-combatants, but suffer a lot of losses yourself (as we did in Mogadishu in 1993)? Or do you go in heavy and flatten their homes, but suffer a PR disaster? In my review, I discussed these alternatives in the context of an assault on Baghdad, but, clearly, the Israelis ran into this same tough choice in Jenin. They appear to have started out light, but after losing men, switched to heavy tactics, using bulldozers to flatten Palestinians' homes so they could avoid the boobytrapped streets. Israel won the battle, of course, but at the cost of diplomatically catastrophic TV coverage. We need to think hard now about which we would choose in case the Iraqis use Somalian-Palestinian methods to defend Baghdad.

Number 2 Pencil, psychometrician Kimberly Swygert's blog

Number 2 Pencil, psychometrician Kimberly Swygert's blog, is devoted to defending standardized testing.

Le Pen and Muslim immigration

In a supposedly huge upset, France's far right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has driven the Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin into retirement by beating him for the second spot in the May 5th runoff with incumbent President Jacques Chirac. Of course, it shouldn't have been a surprise: Le Pen always does better in elections than in polls, where the vast prejudice again him intimidates some of his supporters into telling pollsters they will vote for somebody else. Further, on one huge issue - Muslim immigration - Le Pen has been proven right. The disgusting pogroms against French Jews and the pusillanimous response of the French state is a direct result of the massive immigration of North Africans.

To amuse yourself, note how few articles about Le Pen's showing draw any connection between Muslim immigration and the current pogroms. In the American media establishment eyes, any Europeans against immigration must be incipient Nazis. After all, proper-thinking people know that the only solution for European anti-Semitism is massive immigration. Of course, it's worked out exactly the opposite, with Jew-hating Muslim immigrants now holding the whip hand in many French cities, where the gendarmes worry that if the North African youth are not permitted to run amok against the Jews, they'll riot against everybody, as the Muslims did in Britain last year. But don't expect ugly reality to interfere with the popularity among American media elites of such a beautiful theory.

The Scorpion King and The Rock

The Scorpion King is # 1 at the box office. It's not bad, but the only thing special about this medium budget sword and sorcery movie set in ancient Canaan (not Egypt) is wrestler The Rock, who looks well-poised to become the next action superstar. The bad guy in The Scorpion King is - prepare to die of surprise - an English-accented white man with Hitlerish-sounding intentions to impose "order for 1,000 years" on the "free tribes." The tribes, oddly enough, are each internally multiracial, which must be a surprise to anthropologists. Fortunately, The Rock is around to lead America (oops, I mean the free tribes) to victory over the English Nazi toff. Although it embodies the same racial conventions as other recent adventure films like The Time Machine and Atlantis - noble Tiger Woodsian multiracials battle Northern European oppressors - it's less schematic and more of a good-natured pastiche of ancient legends from all over.

I wrote an article last summer on wrestling, race, and The Rock (I know an awful lot more about professional wrestling that I care to, courtesy of my sons). An excerpt: "Race, of course, remains a potential danger spot in any American enterprise. Fortunately for the World Wrestling Foundation, it has found the perfect post-racial man in its biggest star, "The Rock," the wrestler who bills himself as "the most electrifying man in sports entertainment." A third generation pro wrestler, The Rock (born Duane Johnson) is a hybrid offspring of America's two most muscular racial groups. His maternal grandfather, Chief Peter Maivia, was the first Samoan star, while his father Rocky Johnson was the WWF's first African-American Tag Team champion. Yet, The Rock looks neither Samoan nor black. Instead, he gives the impression of being some sort of future human, a superbly handsome specimen from a race that will someday evolve from all that is most formidable in existing humanity."