February 9, 2005

Don't Let Your Kids Get Beat Up by Underclass Minorities

"Sailer's One-Point Plan for Lessening Prejudice Against Minorities" is my new VDARE column.

By the way, I've put my important 2001 article "Imprisonment Rates Vary Wildly by Race" and the incarceration statistics by race by state that it's based on up on iSteve.com. This data originally collected by the liberal National Center on Institutions and Alternatives does the best job I know of fixing the common problem with crime statistics of lumping many Hispanics in with whites (unlike almost all other government statistics, where Latinos are carefully broken out).

One interesting fact is that Democratic-voting Blue States tend to imprison a higher ratio of blacks to whites than Republican-voting Red States. In ultra-liberal black-ruled Washington D.C., for example, blacks are 56 times more likely than whites to be in the slammer. In South Carolina and Mississippi, the ratio is only 6 to 1. This strongly suggests that racial discrimination by whites can't account for the overall 9 to 1 national black-white ratio in likelihood of being in jail.

February 8, 2005

Super Bowl Censorship

The Horrors of Censoring the Arts: Last year at the Super Bowl Halftime Show, we were dazzled by the brilliance of those two Artistic Geniuses for the Ages, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. This year, due to the backlash of stultifying red state prudery that Frank Rich has denounced in the NYT about 27 times, we were forced to endure somebody named Paul McCartney singing some song called "Hey Jude" that might not even have a disco remix.

Also, 2005's Super Bowl commercials were better aesthetically than last year's stinkers, almost certainly due to the increased censorship.

As a football game, the Super Bowl was less boring than most. Philadelphia had a small advantage in first downs and total yards, but looked like they got outcoached. Bill Belchik and Tom Brady (IQ of 126 on the NFL's mandatory Wonderlic IQ test) show the uses of matching a smart coach and smart quarterback together.

Here's Colby Cosh on the whole white quarterback - black quarterback thing

Too stupid to flunk their IQ tests

"Inmate's Rising I.Q. Score Could Mean His Death" reports the NYT:

Three years ago, in the case of a Virginia man named Daryl R. Atkins, the United States Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to execute the mentally retarded. But Mr. Atkins's recent test scores could eliminate him from that group.

His scores have shot up, a defense expert said, thanks to the mental workout his participation in years of litigation gave him. The Supreme Court, which did not decide whether Mr. Atkins was retarded, noted that he scored 59 on an I.Q. test in 1998. The cutoff for retardation in Virginia is 70.

A defense expert who retested Mr. Atkins last year found that his I.Q. was 74. In court here on Thursday, prosecutors said their expert's latest test yielded 76.

From my 2002 article "IQ Defenders Feel Vindicated by Supreme Court" on the Supreme Court's Atkins decision:

"One intelligence expert worried that we will end up executing only those killers 'too stupid to realize that they ought to flunk their IQ test.'

Democracy as an impossibly high hurdle

What does "democracy" mean to the Bush Administration? Is the Bush Administration being naively idealistic in seemingly equating the word "democracy" with sugar and spice and everything nice: not just majority rule, but also rule of law, protection of minorities, independent judiciary, federalism, human rights, settled distribution of property, in other words, the whole apparatus of civilized government.

Or is it being cynical? This broad definition of democratic allows it to declare any country's democracy glass to be half full ... or half empty.

Many of the Bush Administration's strategic concepts have come from Israel. Most famously, his recent obsession with "democracy" comes in large measure from reading Natan Sharansky's new book. Sharansky is a former housing minister of Israel, with strong ties to the settler movement. His book saying that the solution to the Israel-Palestine problem is for Palestine to become a democracy is widely seen as idealistic, but a more cynical interpretation is that Sharansky is trying to set the bar so high that Israel will never have to deal with the Palestinians and can continue their settlements in the West Bank indefinitely.

Along very much those lines, Ariel Sharon's closest advisor Dov Weisglass, who is Sharon's point man in dealing with the Bush Administration gave a fascinating interview to Ha'aretz newspaper in Israel last fall where he boasted:

"There will be no timetable to implement the settler's nightmare. I have postponed that nightmare indefinitely. Because what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns... With the proper management we succeeded in removing the issue of the political process from the agenda. And we educated the world to understand that there is no one to talk to. And we received a no-one-to-talk-to certificate. That certificate says: (1) There is no one to talk to. (2) As long as there is no one to talk to, the geographic status quo remains intact. (3) The certificate will be revoked only when this-and-this happens - when Palestine becomes Finland. (4) See you then, and shalom."

Obviously, the Palestinians aren't going to turn into Finns, anytime soon, so the West Bank settlements aren't going anywhere. Even though the Palestinians recently held a moderately fair and free election of their new leader Abbas, they are still years, decades, centuries away from Finnish standards of democracy.

Similarly, the Bush Administration can use it's "democracy" crusade to define any foreign government it dislikes as illegitimate. Jim Hoagland writes in the Washington Post:

" Years of American fumbling for a workable approach toward the hostile theocratic regime in Tehran have yielded only a single sentence as agreed Bush policy. The sentence, which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered in fancy dress to the Europeans during her current travels, comes down to this: The United States will take no action that extends legitimacy to the ayatollahs in Iran."

Iran is not a terribly democratic country, but it's dramatically more democratic than many others that the Bush Administration is copacetic with, such as China. But that's not good enough for the Bush Administration, conveniently enough.

Eagles 20 - Patriots 17

Super Bowl Prediction: Everybody is picking the New England dynasty, but I'll go with Eagles 20 - Patriots 17. (Of course, Super Bowls are seldom that close -- the two week preparation time means that usually one team peaks around last Thursday, comes out flat on Sunday, and gets killed.) Everybody is talking about New England quarterback Tom Brady's great post-season record, but he was only the 9th best passer in the league this year. In contrast, the Eagles' Donovan McNabb finally lived up to the hype and was the 4th best passer in the league.

I don't really believe that post-season success is all that more indicative of talent than regular season performance. For example, even though Jim Plunkett quarterbacked two Super Bowl winners, he really wasn't anything special. The biggest difference about the post-season is: smaller sample size. Thus, in the view of the press, John Elway was a dog for going 0-3 in first three Super Bowls, but then somehow became a god for going 2-0 in his last two. Nah, he was always Elway, which means that he was good enough to reach the Super Bowl so many times that his luck pretty much evened out in the end.

One way McNabb improved this year was by not running much -- his rushing yardage dropped to a career low 220 yards, down from 629 yards in 2000. Running QBs are exciting, but they generally take too much of a beating to throw truly well (e.g., Steve McNair, who had rushed for 674 yards in 1997 was down to only 138 last year, when he was the co-MVP with a great passing year.)

Because passing takes longer to mature in the NFL than running, this means that black quarterbacks, who tend to be much better runners than white quarterbacks, can often get into the starting line-up before they'd ready if they were only passers. For example, Michael Vick is a mediocre passer right now (21st in the NFL), but, because he might be the greatest all-around athlete in the world, he's effective overall because he ran for 902 yards. One interesting question is whether black quarterbacks who start off running a lot before they become good throwers will enjoy as long careers as less adventuresome quarterbacks do. The Falcons recently gave Vick the biggest contract in football, but the risk is that they are hoping he gets a lot better at throwing, and stay good at it over his 10 year contract, because over time, he's going to get a lot worse at running as he ages.

"No more Somozas" by the Wall Street Journal

The WSJ Editorial Board endorses the foreign policy of The Clash:

"The message of Bush's foreign policy: No more Somozas," applauds the Wall Street Journal's lead editorial. Who would have thought that the late Joe Strummer, lyricist of The Clash's bloated 1981 Sandinista! triple album, would be reincarnated, and so quickly, as an editorialist for the WSJ, of all places. (Or as a Bush speechwriter, for that matter?)

Although the WSJ used to be the scourge of Jimmy Carter's betray-our-allies foreign policy that disastrously undermined Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah in Iran, it has now signed on to Strummer's endorsement of Jimmy Carterism, as enunciated in The Clash's song Washington Bullets, which is, in effect, the title song of Sandinista!:

For the very first time ever,
When they had a revolution in Nicaragua,
There was no interference from America
Human rights in America
Well the people fought the leader,
And up he flew...
With no Washington bullets what else could he do?...

Sandinista!

I loved Joe, but I would no more have voted for him than I would have voted for Jimmy Carter. But I guess that means I'm not a real conservative anymore, according to the WSJ.

None of the usual frothing at the mouth

A surprisingly non-rabid article about Francis Galton in The New Yorker.

And the winner is ... in The American Conservative

"And the Winner Is..." -- My movie column in the Feb. 28th American Conservative reviews the Best Picture race. It is available to electronic subscribers. An excerpt:

This year's Oscar nominees for Best Picture comprise one of the weaker slates in memory, yet an enormous audience will no doubt tune in February 27 to watch the Academy Awards.

That the public still cares about the Oscars, or films in general, is curious. Now in its second century, going to the movies is almost as old-fashioned as such one-time rivals for the entertainment dollar as vaudeville and brass band concerts. Yet, although the average American spends over 1,600 hours annually watching television, compared to just 13 hours at the movies, they remain at the top of the pop culture food chain.

Popular music strongly challenged cinema for supremacy in the Sixties and Seventies, but has since splintered into micro-styles. In contrast, movies have gotten so expensive that only a few are released each week, allowing the studios' expert marketers to concentrate (albeit briefly) the national attention.

Despite television's pervasiveness, it lacks the prestige of film because, to be frank, as an advertiser-supported medium, TV aims primarily at women. A back-of-an-envelope calculation suggests that American men transfer about one trillion dollars annually to women to spend, so television networks (subscriber-supported HBO, the most prestigious network, excepted) pursue female viewers.

In contrast, males buy the majority of movie tickets, so films cater to them. And, as feminists have been known to complain, in our society (as in all societies), renown accrues mostly to things guys like. Men just care more than women do about constructing vast hierarchies of fame, such as the Oscars.

Although female studio bosses are common today, the Academy Awards are still extraordinarily male-dominated. For example, women have picked up only three of the approximately 385 nominations for Best Director, and (alert Nancy Hopkins!) none at all for Best Cinematographer.

Female screenwriters have become scarcer over time. Frances Marion was the highest paid writer in Hollywood's first two decades, but among the 86 individuals with three or more screenwriting nominations, only eight are women, and just three are from the liberated post-1970 era.

The Education of Larry Summers in The American Conservative

"The Larry Summers Show" - My long article in the Feb. 28th American Conservative is available this weekend to electronic subscribers. An excerpt:

The first scientific challenge to academia's traditional assumption that men were smarter than women came in 1912 when pioneering IQ test researcher Cyril Burt announced they scored equally -- on average. Yet, as Summers noted, men are more variable, so they are more numerous among the extremely intelligent, such as Harvard professors and Nobel Prize winners (40 of whom have taught at Harvard).

The Nobel Prize lists show a striking pattern: the fuzzier the field, the better women do. Twelve women have won the most political and least intellectually rigorous Nobel Prize, Peace (13 percent of all individual winners), and ten have been Literature laureates (ten percent). In Physiology & Medicine, there have been seven female laureates (four percent). In Chemistry, three (two percent), and in Physics, the most abstract of the Nobels, just two (one percent).

What about mathematics, that most unworldly of subjects? The Fields Medal for mathematicians under age 40 is the equivalent of the Nobel. No women number among its 44 recipients.

But, surely, the trendline must be turning upwards as discrimination lessens?

That's true in Physiology & Medicine, where women won only once before 1977, but six times (nine percent) since. Yet, by aggregating Physics and Chemistry, we can see the opposite pattern: five women ranked among the first 160 Physics and Chemistry laureates, but over the last 40 years, not a single woman features among the latest 160 winners.

Overall, in the bad old days from 1901 through 1964, women won 2.5 percent of the hard science Nobels. Since then, they've declined to 2.3 percent.

Why hasn't the feminist era fostered more female scientific geniuses? Perhaps feminism persuaded the top women that they could have it all -- romance, children, and career -- rather than just the lonely celibacy society once demanded from them, and they spread themselves too thin. Moreover, feminism encourages women to indulge in self-pity and resentment, which distract from earning a Nobel.

My wife asked, "So why hasn't the Nobel Foundation bowed to feminist pressure and started the usual crypto-quotas to make women feel better about themselves?"

"Because they don't have to?" I speculated. "After all, they're the Nobel Foundation."

"Exactly," she shot back. "And Larry Summers is the President of Harvard. So why can't he too stand up to the feminists who want to make it harder for our sons to get a fair shot?

February 7, 2005

Iraqi-Americans hate Allawi

Our man in Baghdad can't even even beat the Communist Party among Iraqi-American voters! The AP reports:

A Shiite coalition endorsed by clerics won most of the absentee ballots cast by Iraqis living abroad, although the main Kurdish party had a strong showing, according to completed results released Friday. The list led by U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi came in a distant third, despite expectations that the former exile leader — who lived for years in Great Britain — would do well among voters abroad.

The United Iraqi Alliance, which has the endorsement of Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, received 95,318 votes, or 36.15 percent of the valid 263,685 absentee ballots. It got a huge boost from Iraqis living in mostly Shiite Iran. [Is that a good sign?]

The main Kurdish coalition came second with 78,062 votes, or 29.6 percent, backed by the large Kurdish communities in Britain, Germany and Sweden in particular.
Allawi's "Iraqi List" took 24,136 votes, or 9.15 percent, doing its strongest in Syria and Jordan. [Hey, I thought Syria was our enemy! So how come our boy does best in Syria?] ...

In the United States, where more than 24,000 Iraqis cast ballots, the Alliance was strongest with over 31 percent, while Allawi's list came in sixth with around four percent — coming not only behind the Kurds but also behind two tiny Assyrian Christian parties and a communist-led party. [That's pathetic.]

More than 265,000 Iraqis turned out to vote in the 14 nations, out of 1.2 million eligible Iraqis abroad. [Not a very good turnout. Presumably, a lot of overseas Sunnis boycotted the election.]

Been down so long it looks like up to me

Was the Iraq election a massive defeat for the United States? That lots of Iraqis showed up to vote has been spun endlessly as a huge victory for America, but it's starting to sink in that most of them showed up either to vote against our hand-picked secularist collaborator Allawi or for Muslim fundamentalists, or both. Any of those reasons are a repudiation of America. The New York Times reports:

A second round of preliminary election returns released today by Iraqi authorities showed that 67 percent of the 3.3 million votes counted so far from Sunday's election went to an alliance of Shiite parties dominated by religious groups with strong links to Iran. Only 18 percent went to a group led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite who favors strong ties to the United States.

Been down so long it looks like up to me: Generally speaking, getting our butts kicked in an election is considered a defeat, but I guess we've gotten so used to catastrophe in Iraq that losing looks like winning to us by now.

Taboos - Pinker on Summers

Pinker on Summers-Hopkins in TNR: cognitive science superstar Steven Pinker, who was recruited away from MIT to Harvard shortly after Nancy Hopkins' feminist putsch, writes in the The New Republic (not online; excerpt via American Scene):

What are we to make of the breakdown of standards of intellectual discourse in this affair -- the statistical innumeracy, the confusion of fairness with sameness, the refusal to glance at the scientific literature? It is not a disease of tenured radicals; comparable lapses can be found among the political right (just look at its treatment of evolution). Instead, we may be seeing the operation of a fascinating bit of human psychology.

The psychologist Philip Tetlock has argued that the mentality of taboo--the belief that certain ideas are so dangerous that it is sinful even to think them--is not a quirk of Polynesian culture or religious superstition but is ingrained into our moral sense. In 2000, he reported asking university students their opinions of unpopular but defensible proposals, such as allowing people to buy and sell organs or auctioning adoption licenses to the highest-bidding parents. He found that most of his respondents did not even try to refute the proposals but expressed shock and outrage at having been asked to entertain them. They refused to consider positive arguments for the proposals and sought to cleanse themselves by volunteering for campaigns to oppose them. Sound familiar?

Back in 2000, John Entine published Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About, a title that seemed like a clever idea at the time: obviously, American intellectuals aren't in favor of taboos on expression, so this will encourage the book to be widely discussed. Right? Instead, the intellectual community took one look at the title and dropped the book like it had cooties.

Not democracy but domination

"Free to Dance in Iraq" exults Charles Krauthammer over the Iraqi election:

Why weren't Iraqis dancing in the streets on the day Saddam Hussein fell, critics have asked sneeringly... Nearly 22 months later, Iraqis seemed convinced that there would indeed be a new day. And that is when the dancing started -- voters dancing and singing and celebrating, thrusting into the air their ink-stained fingers, symbol of their initiation into democracy.

Well, they better dance while they can, because in Ayatollah Sistani's Iraq they will only be able to hear (according to Sistani.org) "music which is not fit for diversion and play."

Look, Chuck, what the Shi'ites were celebrating was not the process of democracy, but their side's victory. The Bush Administration kept the results covered up for four days so the President could get through his State of the Union address before it dawned on the American public that we had just bought, at the cost of over 12,000 American casualties and counting, the election of a fundamentalist Ayatollah's slate!

I've said it before, but I have to keep it saying it again. Even more than most people, what Muslims want is not so much freedom for all as domination for themselves. Cruel history has taught them that the only way to avoid the bite of the whip is to crack the whip themselves. The Grand Ayatollah is perfectly happy to use an election now to gain power, just as his fellow Shiite ayatollah, Khomeini (remember him?), was happy to hold elections throughout the 1980s next door in Sistani's native Iran, as long as his boys could win the elections, which they did for quite some time.

Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer

www.iSteve.com/05FebA.htm#Fukuyama.Krauthammer.Israel

Fukuyama Responds to Krauthammer: The Israelization of American Foreign Policy. You may recall that prominent neocon Francis "End of History" Fukuyama jumped ship awhile ago and criticized Charles Krauthammer in The National Interest for his lack of realism about the Iraq War. Krauthammer responded, predictably, by playing the anti-Semitism card. Here is part of Fukuyama's rebuttal:

"Krauthammer says I have a "novel way of Judaizing neoconservatism", and that my argument is a more "implicit and subtle" version of things said by Pat Buchanan and Mahathir Mohamad. Since he thinks the latter two are anti-Semites, he is clearly implying that I am one as well. If he really thinks this is so, he should say that openly."

A little late, perhaps, Francis? "First they came for Pat Buchanan, but I was not Pat Buchanan, so I said nothing. Then they came ...". But better late than never. Fukuyama continues:


"What I said in my critique of [Krauthammer's] speech was, of course, quite different. I said that there was a very coherent set of strategic ideas that have come out of Israel's experience dealing with the Arabs and the world community, having to do with threat perception, preemption, the relative balance of carrots and sticks to be used in dealing with the Arabs, the United Nations, and the like. Anyone who has dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict understands these ideas, and many people (myself included) believe that they were well suited to Israel's actual situation. You do not have to he Jewish to understand or adopt these ideas as your own, which is why people like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld share them. And it is not so hard to understand how one's experience of Arab-Israeli politics can come to color one's broader view of the world: The 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution deeply discredited the UN, in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike, on issues having nothing to do with the Middle East. This is not about Judaism; it is about ideas. It would be quite disingenuous of Charles Krauthammer to assert that his view of how Israel needs to deal with the Arabs (that is, the testicular route to hearts and minds) has no impact on the way he thinks the United States should deal with them. And it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether this is the best way for the United States to proceed."

Well said. America's foreign policy blunders of the last 30 months have less to do with the fact that so many highly influential people in Washington and New York, like Krauthammer, think about Israel and its welfare all the time, as to the fact that it has become extremely dangerous to one's career to point out that they do. As Gene Expression blogged:

And I'm sorry, but ethnicity will and should legitimately be a topic brought up in the ensuing debate. Consider an analogy. Suppose that Wolfowitz, Perle, Shulsky, Feith, Ledeen, and all the rest were South Asian Americans rather than Jewish Americans and had names like Ramachandran, Patel, and Choudhury. Again they'd be selected from a highly educated group that was less than 2% of society (there are about 2 to 3 million South Asian Americans, about 1/2 to 1/3 the number of American Jews depending on how you count).

Now suppose they were pushing the US to invade Pakistan, and talking about how the Islamic terrorists killing Indian citizens in Kashmir were the same ones bombing the US on 9/11. Assume that they did this whilst having relatives, extended families, and significant contacts in India.

Now, their arguments would not - and should not - be dismissed out of hand. After all, it is probably more accurate to say that Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the ISI are/were more closely involved in Muslim terrorism in Kashmir than they are with anti-Israeli terrorism in Palestine. (As far as I know, Al Qaeda has never directly attacked Israel.)

But while their arguments would not be dismissed out of hand, clearly their visible ethnicity would figure into the debate. Plenty of people would take their opinions with a grain of salt, knowing that humans tend to be ethnocentric on the population level if not the individual level. It would be scurrilous to dismiss their arguments simply because they were of Indian ancestry, especially if they were born in America. But it would be foolish to think their ethnicity wasn't impacting any of their arguments, and to rule out mention of their ethnicity as "anti-Subcontinental."

What we need, now more than ever, is free discussion. Closed discussion helped get us into Iraq.

State of the Union speech 2005

Reactions to the State of the Union Address: A reader writes:

While trawling through the reactions to the SOTU, it occurred to me that Bush has made clear his agenda: That he himself replace FDR and FDR's welfare state. That welfare state will be as large or larger and more intrusive than ever, BUT, the rich guys will be in on the take. Thus the Republican party will displace the Democratic party. So, the speech's overt intent is for Republican party elite to displace the old left-liberal elite, a much better deal for rich people, with assorted bribes to the Unwashed Masses to consent to a somewhat worse deal, BUT the covert intent (what the Germans call the schwerpunkt, 'the main thrust of the battle') is actually the elimination of the CONSERVATIVES, that is, the sort of people (actually) in favor of a constitutional republic and smaller government, not to mention American nationalism....

It's all very Weimar Republic.

Larry Auster writes on his website:

Since the theme of Bush’s leadership is supposedly the spread of freedom and democracy abroad, what are we to make of the hallmarks of the pro-Bush politics in this country, coming from both the elites and the non-elites: the cheerleading, the extravagant adoration, the worship of the great leader, the constant thanks to God for the great leader, the admiration for his deep wisdom, his staunch courage, his transcendent ability to weather all storms, the personal expressions of bliss whenever he’s successful, and the unending stream of “conservative” opinion columns telling us over and over how great Bush is doing and how pathetic his opponents are? Does this sound like the way a democratic and republican people talk about their elected leader? Or does it sound instead like a certain 20th century European political movement not associated with democracy at all, but with its rejection?...

Our quasi-religious faith in America as the spreader of freedom around the world grows in proportion as our actual America loses its culture, its morality, its spiritual and historical cohesion, and its will to defend itself, not to mention its real liberties, which are not to be confused with its modern, liberationist liberties. We can’t defend the actual America anymore, because we fear that we’ve already given so much of it away that the attempt to bring it back would make us seem like extremists or cranks. So, needing something to believe in, but no longer having a real country to believe in, we turn what’s left of our country into a mission to achieve universal democracy, and we believe in that instead.

The more we empty our country of its historical meaning, the more hysterical becomes our embrace of Bush’s messianic rhetoric, which is not about America, but about the world.

February 6, 2005

Top 5 Conservative Films of 2004

Good year for conservative films: Jim Hubbard's American Film Renaissance organization, which puts on the conservative American Film Fest, collected the Top 10 lists of three dozen conservative critics. Here's their Top 5. 2004 wasn't a very good year overall for movies overall, but a respectable one for conservative-leaning films.

Best Film

1. The Passion of the Christ
2. The Incredibles
3. Team America
4. The Aviator
5. Miracle

I'd add Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's overlooked but sprightly version of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. And Hero was magnificent and conservative, although not my kind of conservative.

Now that I think of it, 2003 was a pretty good year for conservative films, too, with The Return of the King and Master and Commander as the standard-bearers, Open Range a strong old-fashioned cowboy movie, and with the Waugh-influenced Lost in Translation arguably making the list.

Maybe conservative films are the wave of the future? Hollywood certainly needs to do something to get out of its rut.

Blood in the water

Surprise! Larry Summers pays reparations: The NYT reports:

Moving to counter widespread criticism of his comments last month on women's science capabilities, the president of Harvard University announced initiatives yesterday to improve the status of women on the faculty, including a commitment to create a senior administrative position to strengthen recruiting.

The president, Lawrence H. Summers, appointed two task forces, one on women in the faculty and one on women in science and engineering, and charged them with developing recommendations on how to recruit, support and promote women more effectively.

The committees are to complete their work by May 1 so the university can act on their recommendations by the fall term.

In an interview, Dr. Summers declined to say how many new women the university might hire as professors in the short term, or how much the initiatives would cost. But in a public statement announcing the measures, he said, "It is time for Harvard to step up and affirm in strong and concrete terms its commitment to the advancement and support of women pursuing academic careers."

Dr. Summers's actions yesterday echoed his handling of the outcry that followed his dispute in 2001 with Cornel West, a prominent member of the African-American studies department. At that time, Dr. Summers publicly affirmed his commitment to affirmative action, and Harvard subsequently created several new positions in that department.

My article on the Summers brouhaha should appear in the February 28th American Conservative. It puts the spat in a much larger perspective than has previously been advanced.

Our $200 billion ayatolla - al-Sistani

Our $200 Billion Ayatollah: Having expended 1,400 American lives and 200 billion clams to replace Saddam Hussein with the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, I figure it it behooves us to learn more about our new man in Baghdad. So, I turned once again to the indispensable Sistani.Org website, where under his "Biography" I found this paragraph, to pick one largely at random:

"His Scientific Genius :
Ayatullah Sistani is one of a few students who had the degree of Ijtihad. He is known for his intelligence and plentiful researching activities in biographies. He is also well-acquainted with many theories on many scientific subjects of Hawzah. Ayatullah Sistani had been involved in scientific competition with martyr Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr... It is worthy to say that up to that date, Ayatullah Khou'i had never certificated any of his students' knowledge or Ijtihad, except for Ayatullah Sistani and Ayatullah shaykh Ali Falsafi (an eminent `alim in the Hawzah of Mashhad. On the other hand, the famous `Allamah shaykh Agha Buzurg Tehrani wrote a letter to Ayatullah Sistani in 1960 in which he eulogizing him for his intellectual talents on biography and hadith. This means that, our master, Ayatullah Sistani, had been granted his high scientific rank when he was only thirty-one years old."

Well, I'm feeling better already. Obviously, Sistani comes from a cultural tradition very similar to our own, with an identical conception of science, a culture which we shall no trouble understanding.

Seriously, Sistani is, by all accounts, the most sensible mullah in Iraq, but why are we celebrating our handing Iraq over to a Muslim fundamentalist? I thought this whole War on Terror was intended to weaken Muslim fundamentalists, not give them a few trillion dollars worth of oil reserves to play with.

Hey, I'm glad we held an election and the Grand Ayatollah won. By Iraqi standards, such as they are, he sounds like George Washington. So, can we leave now?