March 21, 2005

Gentlemen, Your Kids Aren't Really the Postman's

For a decade or two, it's been one of the clichés of the human sciences that 10% of all children are cuckoos eggs, fathered by somebody other than the poor work-a-daddy sap who naively thinks they are his. Evidence for this popular assertion, however, was lacking. Now, a new metastudy by Kermyt G. Anderson suggests that the cuckoo's egg rate is more like only 1.9%, at least among men who are confident enough of their rightful paternity to volunteer for a genetics test along with their child as part of some other kind of study. Among men who demand a paternity test, however, the rate is around 30%, but, obviously, those are different kinds of cases. (Via The Julian Calendar).


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Roland G. Fryer Jr., Slave Ships and Salt

"Toward a Unified Theory of Black America" is an interesting NY Times Magazine article by Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics, about one of Levitt's research partners, an ambitious 27-year-old Harvard economist named Roland G. Fryer Jr.

When he presents a paper, Fryer is earnest and genial and excitable, sometimes carrying on like a Southern preacher. While he denies that his work is united by a grand thesis -- he is a scientist, he explains, devoted to squeezing truths from the data, wherever that may lead -- he does admit to having a mission: ''I basically want to figure out where blacks went wrong. One could rattle off all the statistics about blacks not doing so well. You can look at the black-white differential in out-of-wedlock births or infant mortality or life expectancy. Blacks are the worst-performing ethnic group on SAT's. Blacks earn less than whites. They are still just not doing well, period.''

To Fryer, the language of economics, a field proud of its coldblooded rationalism, is ideally suited for otherwise volatile conversations. ''I want to have an honest discussion about race in a time and a place where I don't think we can,'' he says. ''Blacks and whites are both to blame. As soon as you say something like, 'Well, could the black-white test-score gap be genetics?' everybody gets tensed up. But why shouldn't that be on the table?''

Fryer said this several months ago, which was well before Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, wondered aloud if genetics might help explain why women are so underrepresented in the sciences. Summers -- who is also an economist and a fan of Fryer's work -- is still being punished for his musings. There is a key difference, of course: Summers is not a woman; Fryer is black.

Fryer grew up in a bad environment:

How many of his close family members, I asked him, had either died young or spent time in prison? He did a quick count: 8 of 10. ''Suppose you can separate people into two camps: geneticists and environmentalists,'' he said. ''Coming up where I came up, it's hard not to be an environmentalist.''

But then Dubner takes the young professor to reunite with his estranged father (a Xerox salesman who went to prison for rape) and estranged mother (a singer).

Fryer finds out that his father had been a high school math teacher, and that his mother's family had been big wheels in Tulsa's famously prosperous black community. His maternal grandmother had studied classical music at the Julliard Academy.

Later that night, over Scotch and soda at an airport hotel in Tulsa, Fryer sifted through the discoveries of his trip. He hadn't known that his father was a math teacher. He hadn't known that so much accomplishment ran in his mother's family. ''I used to consider myself a genetic aberration or maybe an impostor,'' he said. ''But I actually have some pretty good genes.''

Unfortunately, what passes for fresh new ideas in economics these days are rather stale. For example, Fryer is trying to revive Clarence E. Grim's 1987 salt sensitivity-slave ship theory:

Fryer well appreciates that he can raise questions that most white scholars wouldn't dare. His collaborators, most of whom are white, appreciate this, too. ''Absolutely, there's an insulation effect,'' says the Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser. ''There's no question that working with Roland is somewhat liberating.''

Glaeser and Fryer, along with David M. Cutler, another Harvard economist, are the authors of a paper that traffics in one form of genetic theorizing. It addresses the six-year disparity in life expectancy for blacks versus whites, arguing that much of the gap is due to a single factor: a higher rate of salt sensitivity among African-Americans, which leads to higher rates of cardiovascular disease, stroke and kidney disease.

Fryer's notion that there might be a genetic predisposition at work was heightened when he came across a period illustration that seemed to show a slave trader in Africa licking the face of a prospective slave. The ocean voyage from Africa to America was so gruesome that as many as 15 percent of the Africans died en route, mainly from illnesses that led to dehydration. A person with a higher capacity for salt retention might also retain more water and thus increase his chance of surviving. So it may have been that a slave trader would try to select, with a lick to the cheek, the ''saltier'' Africans. Whether selected by the slavers or by nature, the Africans who did manage to survive the voyage -- and who then formed the gene pool of modern African-Americans -- may have been disproportionately marked by hypertension. Cutler, a pre-eminent health economist, admits that he thought Fryer's idea was ''absolutely crazy'' at first. (Although the link between the slave trade and hypertension had been raised in medical literature, even Cutler wasn't aware of it.) But once they started looking at the data, the theory began to seem plausible.

Economists know almost nothing about evolutionary genetics (Paul Krugman is an honorable exception), so it's not surprising that they'd trip over this molehill and ignore the mountain. It's not implausible that there would be a Darwinian effect in the theorized direction, but it seems unpromising to focus on a unique selection pressure experienced for just one generation and ignore the relentless selection pressure on the countless generations of Africans in Africa. Peoples who have been evolving for hundreds of generations in sweaty tropical climates handle salt differently than peoples who have been evolving in cool climates.

Greg Cochran told me:

The reason it wouldn't have an important effect is that you don't get a lot of genetic change in one generation unless you try _really_ hard. If they lost the bottom 15% of the people (in terms of salt retention) during the Middle Passage, a cutoff of about one std below average, the increase in salt retention would be about a tenth or so of a standard deviation, assuming a narrow-sense heritability of 50%. You'd never notice the difference. [And, of course, genetic differences in salt retention didn't cause all the deaths in the Middle Passage, so this estimate is optimistic.]

But there is a real difference in salt retention between Africans and non-Africans, and it may well have something to do with cardiovascular problems (although other differences like an increased tendency to inflammation may be as important). It's been around for a long, long time. See the following account, based on a recent article in The American Journal of Human Genetics:

Here's the press release rom the U. of Chicago about the article about Africans' tendency to retain salt:

Researchers at the University have found genetic evidence to support the sodium-retention hypothesis, a controversial 30-year-old theory that the high rate of hypertension in certain ethnic groups is caused, in part, by an inherited tendency to retain salt.

In the online edition of the December [2004] issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, the researchers show that the frequency of one version of a gene that is crucial to salt retention correlates with distance from the equator.

Populations that live in hot, humid climates near the equator tend to have the normal version of that gene, which produces a very effective protein. Populations that adapted to cooler climates tend to have a mutant gene that codes for a totally dysfunctional protein.

“The surprise,” said study author Anna Di Rienzo, Associate Professor in Human Genetics, “was finding that as populations moved away from the tropics, the original or normal version of the gene became less and less common and the ‘broken’ version more frequent, which suggests it is protective. There seems to be a strong selective advantage conferred by the non-functioning protein, and that advantage increases with latitude.

“This could change the way we look for disease genes,” she added. “Historically, we have searched for mutations, altered or damaged versions of genes that cause rare disorders, like cystic fibrosis or phenylketonuria. Now, we are starting to look for common genes that may have been beneficial in an environment of scarcity, but have become harmful in a world of plenty. In the modern setting, it may often be the genes that aren’t damaged that predispose to disease, such as the ‘thrifty genes’ associated with type 2 diabetes.”

Humans need salt, sodium chloride, to transport nutrients, transmit nerve impulses or contract muscles, such as the beating heart. The average adult contains about 250 grams of salt, enough to fill three small salt shakers. This salt is constantly lost through sweat and urine and replaced through the diet.

Salt is now “so common, so easy to obtain and so inexpensive,” according to Mark Kurlansky, author of a recent history of salt, “that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.”

In the sub-Saharan African regions where humans first appeared, available salt must have been limited and quickly lost through sweat. People who were better at retaining salt may have had a significant survival advantage.

This advantage decreased as humans spread to cooler climates...

Too much salt has become the norm. Despite a recommended daily allowance of less than six grams of salt, the average American consumes about 10 grams daily.

Since 1972, a series of studies has attempted to connect excess salt intake to high blood pressure, but that connection remains uncertain. But Di Rienzo’s team of evolutionary biologists took a different approach, looking at the genetics of salt processing. They focused on a gene called CYP3A5, part of a family known as cytochrome P450 genes, which help the body break down and eliminate a wide range of compounds, including many drugs and salt.

In the kidney, CYP3A5 acts to retain salt. One version of this gene, however, a mutation known as CYP3A5 *3, produces a truncated, non-functional protein.

The researchers looked at variations of this gene in 1,064 individuals drawn from 52 populations scattered around the world. The mutation was least common in some natives of sub-Saharan Africa, ranging from a low of only 6 percent of Yorubans in Nigeria (Latitude 8ºN) to 31 percent among the Mandenka of Senegal (12ºN). Rates were higher among populations in East Asia, ranging from 55 percent among the Dai of China (21ºN) to 75 percent among Han Chinese (32ºN) to 77 percent among Japanese (38ºN) and 95 percent among the Uygur of China (44ºN).

Rates in Europe were uniformly high, ranging from 80 to 95 percent in Italy, France and Russia. The highest rate, 96 percent, was found among the Basque, an isolated ethnic group of uncertain origins now concentrated in the Pyrenees Mountains (43ºN)...

The researchers found one other gene, for a hormone called AGT (angiotensin) that followed a similar distribution pattern, with different versions that correlated with distance from the equator. AGT also is involved in salt retention and has been associated with hypertension and pre-eclampsia, a complication of pregnancy. One variation of this gene, known as AGT M235, was closely correlated with CYP3A5 *3.

This correlation of two unlinked gene variants with similar effects “is remarkable,” the authors note, “and suggests a shared selective pressure.”

More generally, if Dr. Fryer truly wants to "figure out where blacks went wrong," if he wants to develop new insights into African-Americans, he should look at Africans. People who study African-Americans almost always adopt a condescending "blank slate" assumption that says that Africans didn't bring anything with them from Africa. American intellectuals' disdain for learning anything at all about Africa could be called the Black Slate theory.

In particular, I would suggest Fryer look into the continuity between family structures in Africa and in African-American communities. This has largely disappeared from American consciousness, but James Q. Wilson's recent book "The Marriage Problem" has a couple of chapters on the vast literature about African family structures and their similarities to African-American ways of life that could introduce him to some of the facts and sources.

Of course, I'm the last person to listen to for career advice!


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Steven D. Levitt's Abortion Cuts Crime Theory Is Back

Freakonomics: You may recall Steven D. Levitt as the celebrated U. of Chicago economist who put forward the theory that legalizing abortion in the early 1970s lowered the crime rate in the late 1990s by pre-natally capital punishing a lot of bad apples.

I demolished Levitt's theory when we debated it in Slate back in 1999, but Levitt's still making it the centerpiece of his upcoming book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. He simply doesn't mention the objections I put forward six years ago -- most famously, that the first cohort born after the legalization of abortion, who, under his theory, should have been better behaved than the unculled previous cohort, instead went on the worst teen murder spree in American history during the early 1990s. That this group then committed fewer murders when they got older, as Levitt emphasizes, obviously can't be attributed to their having been culled by abortion -- instead, the real explanation is that a huge fraction of these fellows born in the late 1970s were by the time they became adults already in prison cells, wheelchairs, or coffins due to the crack wars of their teen years.

Amusingly, our debate is the first thing Google brings up if you enter: Levitt abortion crime. So, it's hard to imagine how Levitt thinks he can get away with it, but you can get away with a lot in today's flaccid intellectual environment.

Levitt's publicist contacted me about hyping his book, so I suggested to her that we could generate a lot of publicity for it if Levitt and I resumed our 1999 debate in print or online. She thought that was a great idea, so she immediately presented the proposal to Levitt. This time, however, he refused to debate me.


Why? Well, William F. Buckley was once asked why Robert F. Kennedy refused reputed invitations to appear on Buckley's Firing Line talk show. WFB replied, "Why does baloney reject the grinder?"


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 20, 2005

Readers Write

From the Mailbag: Readers write

One interesting aspect of the rise of women in American public life over the last 35 years is that, until very, very recently, the most prominent women kibitzers have basically mimicked the conventionally liberal or radical left males of their publications or TV news outlets. The women's perspective, whose practicality might actually be important on some issues, has been largely absent. I am thinking particularly about the transformation of the criminal justice system in the 1960s and its continued ineffectiveness today. Most women, I suspect, care more about getting violent males off the street than about how many women suit up in police or swat-team uniforms. Yet the visible and audible sisterhood has been much more obsessed with employment rights that they, the graduate-school elite, will never use.

Weird. Or maybe Austen said it best. "Sense and Sensibility."

*

Your linking to that Slate piece on the lack of women who bother to write opinion essays reminded me how annoyed I was was the NYT op-ed by Deborah Tannen, with her usual "Men and Women are different, and men must learn to be like women" fluff. In particular this gem:

" The assumption that fighting is the only way to explore ideas is deeply rooted in Western civilization. It can be found in the militaristic roots of the Christian church and in our educational system, tracing back to all-male medieval universities where students learned by oral disputation. Ong contrasts this with Chinese science and philosophy, which eschewed disputation and aimed to "enlighten an inquirer," not to "overwhelm an opponent." As Chinese anthropologist Linda Young showed, Chinese philosophy sees the universe in a precarious balance that must be maintained, leading to methods of investigation that focus more on integrating ideas and exploring relations among them rather than on opposing ideas and fighting over them."

Yes, by all means, we should abandon our "militaristic" model of science and adopt the Chinese way, since obviously Chinese science has achieved such spectacular results in comparison!

As so often happens, Tannen serves to prove that which she is trying to refute. If women are really going to be more concerned with not hurting each other's feelings than in getting at the truth, maybe they don't belong in the lab in the first place...

*

I read your April 25th editorial on diversity in medicine. I live in [famously average Middle American city] and have witnessed over the last 25 years the evolution of medical care in our city. Bill Frist wishes to have more people of color being doctors which on first sight seems reasonable since this would bring better health care to minorities where there are few doctors.

Here is the rub. I have practiced in an inner city hospital and also in the white suburban hospital and have watched the cultural diversity of medical care take shape. Many of my friends are African-American and I have talked to them about their feelings and desires. The African American doctors used to practice in inner cities but as time passed they have migrated to the suburbs. The inner city care has been picked up by the white doctors.

Before you dismiss this as heresy walk through your own inner city hospital and count the white doctors. Initially my African American doctor Friends went to the inner city but as quickly as they got on their feet financially they moved to the white suburbs.

The cause of this transition is multifactorial but some of the main points are the African American doctors are accepted in the white suburban hospitals. The lure of the higher pay associated with patients who have Private insurance is overwhelming. Also, the black physicians find themselves welcomed by the white and semi white suburban population whereas inner city black patients look down on African American doctors as being the product of affirmative action.

Practicing in the suburbs you hear words such as "Thankyou" and "please", words that don't translate to the language of the inner city.

One of my African American friends specifically felt it was his moral obligation to give back to the community he was from. After ten years he finally moved to the all white semi rural town here in Ohio where he does an excellent job and is rewarded financially. His life is no longer subjected to angry patients seeking narcotics (a profession in inner city).

*

The idiocy and irresponsibilty of our entire political class in the way they misuse the word "democracy" is beyond description. When I expressed these concerns to a well-known conservative recently, and talked about how the misuse of "democracy" makes it impossible to talk sensibly about political things and leads us over and over into illusions and makes us into huge hypocrites, he replied dismissively that my concerns were "talmudic." One of the most basic features of American political wisdom and of conservatism in particular, a critical understanding of the word "democracy," has been thrown away. One of the costs of the war.



Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 19, 2005

The Opportunity Society theory

Some Republicans support Social Security privatization because they believe that forcing individuals to own stocks will turn them into Republican voters.

From a historical and theoretical perspective, it seems likely that widespread stock ownership is probably good for Republicans when stocks go up, as in the 1920s, and bad for Republicans, when they go down, as in the 1930s.

Marilyn Monroe offered some acute advice to Republican strategists looking to lure in voters with mandatory stock ownership in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes:"

He's your guy when stocks are high,
But beware when they start to descend
It's then that those louses go back to their spouses
Diamonds are a girl's best friend.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 18, 2005

Sailer on "Golf Courses as Art"

Golf Courses as Art: My 3,000 word essay in the April 11th edition of The American Conservativesubscribers. I know, I know, nobody ever writes about golf course architecture for a general audience, but I've probably thought more about this topic than any other in my life, so you might find it interesting as I try to put it in a general perspective. An excerpt:

Golf course architecture is one of the world's most expansive but least recognized arts. Yet this curiously obscure profession can help shed light on mainstream art, sociology, and even human nature itself, since the golf designer, more than any other artist, tries to reproduce the primeval human vision of an earthly paradise.

Hidden in plain sight, golf courses are among the few works of art readily visible from airliners. Assuming an average of a quarter square mile apiece, America's 15,000 golf courses cover almost as much land as Delaware and Rhode Island combined.

Golf architecture philosophy isn't terribly elaborate compared to the thickets of theory that entangle most museum arts, but one thing all golf designers assert is that their courses look "natural." Growing up in arid Southern California, however, where the indigenous landscape is impenetrable hillsides of gray-brown sagebrush, I never quite understood what was so natural about fairways of verdant, closely-mown grass, but I loved them all the same.

Research since the early 80s shows that humans tend to have two favorite landscapes. One is wherever they lived during their adolescence, but the nearly universal favorite among children before they imprint upon their local look is grassy parkland, and that fondness survives into adulthood.

In one study, people from 15 different cultures were asked what they'd like to see in a picture. Then the researchers would paint the average of what they were told. Even though the scientists hadn't mentioned what type of picture it should be, the consensus in 14 of the 15 cultures favored landscapes. All over the world, people want to see grassland, a lake, and some trees, but not a solid forest. And they always want to see it slightly from above. In fact, they came up with terrain that looked rather like the view from the par 5 15th fairway at Augusta National, site of the Masters Tournament each April, where players must decide whether to attempt to fly the pond in front of the green below them with their second shots in the hopes of putting for an eagle.

The current theory for why golf courses are so attractive to millions (mostly men) is that they look like a happy hunting ground -- a Disney-version of the primordial East African grasslands. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, author of the landmark 1975 book Sociobiology, once told me, "I believe that the reason that people find well-landscaped golf courses 'beautiful' is that they look like savannas, down to the scattered trees, copses, and lakes, and most especially if they have vistas of the sea."

Tasty hoofed animals would graze on the savanna grass, while the nearby woods could provide shade and cover for hunters. Our ancestors would study the direction of the wind and the slopes of the land in order to approach their prey from the best angles. Any resemblance to a rolling golf fairway running between trees is not coincidental.

To create these pleasure grounds, top golf architects typically spend over $10 million per course, and because designers oversee the creation of multiple layouts simultaneously, a "signature" architect like Tom Fazio will end his career with his name on a few billion dollars worth of golf courses.

Famous works of "environmental art," such as Robert Smithson's monumental earthwork "Spiral Jetty" in the Great Salt Lake, are dwarfed by golf courses in extent and thought required. Among museum artists, only Christo works on a comparable scale, and his projects, such as his recent "Gates" in Central Park, are more repetitious. Nonetheless, Christo's "Gates," which re-emphasized the original landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead's lovely serpentine pathways, and his 1976 "Running Fence" snaking through the undulating grasslands of Marin County, offer some of the same visual pleasures of following alluring trails as golf architects provide.

The first problem limiting the acceptance of golf design as art is that to nongolfers a course can seem as meaningless as a Concerto for Dog Whistle. That a golf course allows people to interact with interesting landscapes without killing wild animals makes sense in the abstract, but not until you've driven a ball over a gaping canyon and onto the smooth safety of the green will the golf course obsession make much sense...

[Subscribe to The American Conservative]


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Greg Cochran on Bush vs. Napoleon

"Bush’s Napoleon Complex: What the French experience in Spain could teach us about Iraq" by Gregory Cochran in the March 28th edition of The American Conservative.

No two wars are ever the same any more than you can step on the same banana peel twice. That said, Napoleon’s invasion and occupation of Spain, from 1808 to 1814—the war that gave us the word “guerrilla” and was immortalized in Goya’s “Third of May,” the war that drained France’s army, smashed Napoleon’s reputation for invincibility, and left Spain thrashing like a broken-backed snake for decades—has striking similarities to our invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Both wars started under the influence of similar delusions. Napoleon thought that the Spanish would roll over and play dead as so many other European states had; he thought marching to Madrid and placing his brother Joseph on the throne would complete the subjugation of Spain. We pretty much thought the same: crushing Saddam’s army would be easy; we would then install a pro-American government (Ahmad the Thief) and have most of our Army home by fall.

The invasions went well, as expected, but in each case a tiresome guerrilla war broke out. The French eventually lost over a quarter of a million men in “the Spanish ulcer,” as Napoleon called it, while Iraq has tied down half of the Army and is costing us more than $75 billion a year. What went wrong? As it turns out, Boney and Bush made some of the same mistakes. [Subscribe to The American Conservative]


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Wolfowitz of Arabia

Wolfowitz of Arabia: Neocon's Secret Motivation Revealed

Is this the face that launched a thousand RPGs?

On the 684th and last page of T.E. Lawrence's eloquent memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom comes the stunning statement that Lawrence actually had a secret reason for giving the Arabs their freedom and he's not going to tell the reader what it is:

"Damascus had not seemed a sheath for my sword, when I landed in Arabia, but its capture disclosed the exhaustion of my main springs of action. The strongest motive throughout had been a personal one, not mentioned here, but present to me, I think, every hour these two years. Active pains and joys might fling up, like towers, among my days: but, refluent as air, this hidden urge re-formed, to be the persisting element of life, till near the end. It was dead, before we reached Damascus." [Emphasis added.]

The clearest answer Lawrence ever provided was once, when asked why he had fought for Arab independence, he replied, ""Personal: I liked a particular Arab, and I thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present." This fits with the mysterious dedicatory poem at the beginning of Seven Pillars:

To S. A.

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came...

There are many different theories about who this was but the most plausible seems to be that this particular Arab was Selim Ahmed, nicknamed Dahoum, a teenage waterboy who had lived with Lawrence during his archaelogical digs in Syria before the war. He died before Lawrence's Arab army fought its way into Damascus.

The Washington Post now confirms rumors that Paul Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Iraq Attaq but also the chief spokesmen for the Kumbaya wing of happy-clappy neoconism, has his own (heterosexual) Dahoum to inspire in him visions of liberating Araby:

Adding fuel to the controversy is concern within the [World Bank] staff over Wolfowitz's reported romantic relationship with Shaha Riza, an Arab feminist who works as a communications adviser in the bank's Middle East and North Africa department.

Both divorced, Wolfowitz and Riza have steadfastly declined to talk publicly about their relationship, but they have been regularly spotted at private functions and one source said the two have been dating for about two years. Riza, an Oxford-educated British citizen who was born in Tunisia and grew up in Saudi Arabia, shares Wolfowitz's passion for democratizing the Middle East, according to people who know her.

(What are the security clearance issues involving the pillow talk of the #2 man at the Pentagon?)

So, in case you were wondering what this crazy war was all about, I guess you can say, "It was all for love."

P.S., It would be interesting to know how far back this affair really goes. Wolfowitz was divorced in 2002. Wolfowitz was pushing to invade Iraq immediately after 9/11, 3.5 years ago. It wasn't quite as irrational as Feith's suggestion that we bomb Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina, but Eisenhower would likely have fired both on the spot for their obvious lack of judgment. On the other hand, Bush was apparently looking for an excuse to invade Iraq from day one of his administration, so perhaps Wolfowitz was just a yes-man telling the boss what he wanted to hear.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

The Democratic Dominos Go Askew in Latin America

The Tidal Wave of Capitalist Democracy is so ten years ago in Latin America, where leftism is on the rise again ... democratically, of course, while the pro-capitalists are reduced to searching for non-democratic means to prevent leftist from winning elections. In Mexico, Fox conspires with his former enemies in the PRI to find a technicality to prevent the leftist mayor of Mexico City, Lopez Obrador, from running for President in 2006 on the PRD ticket. In Venezuela, the Bush Administration backed a military coup that briefly overthrew the Fidelista president Chavez, until people power in the streets intimidated the military into saying, "Never mind."

As I pointed out in my review of "Hotel Rwanda,' when George W. Bush says "democracy" he actually means, in effect, is "Anglo-Saxonism:" rule of law, checks and balances, independent judiciary, a settled distribution of property, free speech, an open economy, habeas corpus, graciousness in defeat, the urge to compromise, gentlemanly treatment of women, etc.

But what people in oppressed countries hear when he says "democracy" is "majority rule," which is not the same thing.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Why don't women write many good op-eds?

... asks Dahlia Lithwick, an editor at Slate:

I can also swear to the fact that as an editor, the number of pitches I receive from men outnumbers the pitches I see from women by several orders of magnitude. I can add, again purely anecdotally, that women largely send in pitches for reported pieces, and are far less inclined to frame a piece as an "argument"—which may prove Tannen's point that argument is not necessarily a comfortable or natural mode of communication for women (a phenomenon I observed in law school as well). This is, in short, an insanely interesting thought problem to which we are applying very little interesting thought.

Paul Newman put his finger on it when he said: In our family I make all the big decisions like what the official Newman Family stance is on nuclear disarmament, while my wife makes all the little decisions, like where we'll live and where'll we send our kids to school.

Women are simply, on average, more practical than men. They aren't as interested in big issues where they are unlikely to have much impact. They are more interested in how to improve their own lives and those of the people they care about.

I've spent enormous amounts of time standing around magazine racks in my life, and I can assure you that women almost never look at the prestige section where they group together "The Economist," "The New Republic," and "The National Interest," and other journals that don't have anything to do with your personal life. Attractive single women look at fashion and beauty magazines. Attractive married women look at expensive home decorating magazines.

Sure, women are interested in the lives of celebrities they don't know, but it's all more or less research for their own lives. If Jen can figure out how to get Brad back, maybe they can use her technique someday on their husbands.

The median woman's life is simply more important from a Darwinian perspective than the median man's life because women are the limiting resource in reproduction, so they can't afford to waste their lives on disinterested interests, like all those guys who submit op-eds to Dahlia Lithwick about, say, the Lebanese situation even though, in practical sense, Lebanon is irrelevant to their lives.

Now, back to round-the-clock Lebablogging!


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 17, 2005

"Jose Canseco, Hero"

"Jose Canseco, Hero" -- Novelist Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, expends 1,900 words on the NYT op-ed page to explain his hero worship of the ballplayer (whom a player's agent told me twelve years ago was "the Typhoid Mary of steroids"), without it ever occurring to Chabon that the reason he admires Canseco so much is precisely because Jose was loaded with synthetic masculine hormones.

While Chabon is more eloquent, his feelings are the same as those rhesus macaque monkeys who pay (in juice) to look at pictures of dominant male monkeys.

I used to think Chabon was dishonest. His novel about two Jewish teenagers in pre-WWII New York who invent a Superman-style character to express their opposition to Hitler, avoids all mention of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939-1941, which caused no end of conflict at the time of the novel in the Jewish Communist circles the story is set in, but is most conveniently forgotten today for purposes of demonizing McCarthyism. Chabon's novel also features another pet peeve of mine, the character who turns out to be homosexual despite having no traits at all that correlate with homosexuality.

But, perhaps I was wrong. Judging from this essay, Chabon, despite being wildly articulate, has no more self-awareness than those hero-worshipping monkeys.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Whiteness Studies and the White Guy Gap

UPDATED: Whiteness Studies and the White Guy Gap: A reader writes:


First, I'm a white guy and a Democrat. Protestant and heterosexual too. Now that that's out of the way, I wanted to say that your article sounds very much like the kind of talk I hear in American Studies, the field where I'm earning a Ph.D. at the University of XXX. No question about it, AStudies is a left-dominated milieu, with lots of the identity politics that you say is acceptable and much criticism of people like me. The thing that may surprise you is that your interpretation

Now, you say that white pride dare not speak its name, but another point of view is that the name need not be spoken--whiteness is normative, it is a default category that tries to pass itself off as universalist. But there is no doubt--on the left in the academy, white is seen as ethnic, it is seen as a racial identity. I do find, in your article and in similar statements, the suggestion that we white men should somehow be entitled not to be criticized for our authority and power. of NASCAR and voting Republican is identical to the left-wing take on those activities, save for the political perspective of course. American Studies folks, by and large, do see NASCAR as an ethnic pride rally for whites, and do see the dominance of Bush and the Republicans as an assertion of white male solidarity.


No, what I said was, "Now, white men are probably the most tolerant and forbearing of any American group—they've been raised to take it like a man—but they are also only human." In your Midwestern state, for example, whites likely pay over 90% of the taxes that support your university and your Ph.D. program. Yet, while ethnic groups who contribute far less to the upkeep of your university insist upon ethnic cheerleading for themselves in programs like "African-American Studies," whites are expected to pay to be derided in your program.


That's quite remarkable. The only way to explain it is that the liberal settlement that emerged from the civil rights era is based on the notion that whites are not an ethnic group with their own ethnic interests. Instead, they are just The Majority, and they can afford to subsidize Minorities, because the cost per individual member of The Majority is limited.


In the long run, the liberal arrangement is threatened by immigration, since The Majority, who is supposed to subsidize Minorities, won't be a majority forever, and the cost per individual member of the the former majority will soar.


But, obviously, the liberal dispensation is also headed for big trouble if whites are considered no longer to be just The Majority but are instead considered to be just another ethnic group.


Indeed, you should point out to your professors that they should be careful what they wish for. No recognized American ethnic group puts up with subsidizing being insulted, and if your department succeeds in getting whites to think of themselves as an ethnic group, then continued taxpayer funding for your department would be threatened.


On the other hand, your professors aren't quite that dim. Indeed, they sense that they can profit financially from raising white ethnic consciousness. See, the more white ethnic activism they elicit, the more they can claim that they must be subsidized by the state to squash it by indoctrinating in whites the belief that they are the Evil Ethnicity, and therefore must pay to be insulted. It's another political perpetual motion machine.


And I didn't find any reflection on the unearned skin privilege that whiteness brings, in addition to some of the inconveniences you mention. No, I haven't had a problem-free life. But there are lots of things I simply don't have to worry about because I'm a white man. My identity does open doors for me, and I can't see why acknowledging that equals self-abasement.


It's not "unearned." It was earned for you by the hard work and self-discipline of your ancestors and relatives, whom you should learn to appreciate. If, say, you inherit a valuable house in a nice, crime-free white neighborhood, it was earned for you by the law-abidingness of other whites, such as your parents and your neighbors. The world today is a better place because they sacrificed and invested to provide privileges for their descendents.


Back in 2002, I wrote in VDARE about the "Whiteness Studies Status Game:"


White anti-white racism is a broadly fashionable attitude that extends far beyond loonies like Harvard Professor Noel Ignatiev, author of "Abolish the White Race" and "How the Irish Became White." I don't believe I've ever seen it formally explained, although Tom Wolfe's novels show it in action.


The usual explanations of what drives whites like Ignatiev are "white guilt" or "self-loathing." But does Ignatiev appear as if he personally feels guilt or self-loathing?

No -- he sounds like he's having the time of his life arguing that you should feel guilt etc. He comes across as an arrogant, hostile jerk who thinks the world of himself.

He wants to feel that he's better than other whites and to rub their faces in it. The bad guys in his book are Irish Catholics and Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Ignatiev himself is neither.

And this is typical, in my experience: whites who proclaim their anti-white feelings don't really care much about blacks or other minorities, pro or con. What they care about is achieving social superiority over other whites by demonstrating their exquisite racial sensitivity and their aristocratic insouciance about any competitive threats posed by racial preferences.

To these whites, minorities are just useful pawns in the great game of clawing your way to the top of the white status heap. Which, when you come right down to it, is the only game in town.

Imagine some pathetic white pride activist grabbing your lapels and demanding,


"Did you know that Euro-Americans invented the airplane? [You nod.] Oh, you did? Well … did you know that Euro-Americans invented the golf cart? Huh? Huh, did you know you that?"


Well, duh, everybody knows -- whether or not they're crass enough to mention it -- that over the last 500 or 600 years, whites invented pretty much everything worth inventing. (And, of course, a lot that wasn’t.)

For his encyclopedic Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century, Peter Watson interviewed 150 scholars from around the world about who was responsible for the great innovations. Watson recounted that


"…all of them—there were no exceptions—said the same thing. In the 20th century, in the modern world, there were no non-western ideas of note."


Maybe this is a little unfair to the Japanese, whose Just-in-Time manufacturing was hugely important. And to some nonwhites in the West who came up with good ideas like jazz. Overall, though, the dominance of whites is just so hugely apparent that it's in bad taste to talk about it.

Cheerleading for Euro-Americans seems as pointless as cheerleading for men would be. It's mildly interesting that a woman invented Liquid Paper whiteout fluid (namely, Bette NesmithPost-It Notes is not interesting—because we all know that men invent more or less everything.

Similarly, liberal whites definitely don't want to be seen as competing against minorities. They think it would look undignified to worry about unfair competition from affirmative action-boosted blacks, or illegal immigrants. Publicly favoring quotas shows the world that you don't care about being forced to meet higher standards than minorities. You and yours will hurdle any requirements with IQ points to spare. Graham, a secretary and the mother of Mike Nesmith of The Monkees). But the fact that a man invented


This white liberal mindset is much more condescending toward minorities than that of, say, Sam Francis—who takes minorities seriously and thus wants a level playing field. [More...]


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 16, 2005

The Fundamental Problem with Privatization

Privatizing government activities makes lots of sense in theory, but it often fails to work out so hot in practice. A friend explained why recently by noting that while companies can make modest profits by fulfilling the terms of rigorous contracts drawn up by government officials, a more profitable strategy is often for the private firm simply to corrupt those government officials who hand out the contracts.

This doesn't mean that privatization can never work, it just means that it's best carried out by politicians who don't trust private firms and thus are particularly clever about drawing up systems to prevent corruption. Libertarian ideologues are particularly ill-suited for managing the privatization programs they advocate since they tend to be suckers.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Following once again in the footsteps of Robert S. McNamara

Following once again in the footsteps of Robert S. McNamara, Paul Wolfowitz, having gotten us into a land war in Asia, has now been named by President Bush to head the World Bank.

Also, Wolfowitz signed a deal to make a tell-all confessional documentary in 2027 with director Errol Morris to be entitled "The Bog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Paul D. Wolfowitz."

And in late-breaking news, Bush named Christopher Hitchens to be Ambassador to the Vatican. "Hey, Popester," Bush crowed while announcing the appointment of the fanatical hater of Mother Teresa and supporter of the Iraq War, "I hear you aren't breathing too good. So, suck on this!"

In further efforts to simultaneously cheaply please his white guy supporters by driving foreigners crazy while sending the neocons who helped get the U.S. into the Iraq war as far from Washington as possible, Bush appointed Douglas Feith, the #3 man in the Pentagon, to be the new Dalai Lama, while naming Larry Franklin, currently under FBI investigation for his role in leaking Pentagon secrets to the American-Israel Political Action Committee, as lead tenor at the La Scala Opera House in Milan, Italy.

Also, Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, was slated to become head chef at La Tour D'Argent in Paris, but could not be contacted because he was vacationing at his chateau in the South of France. Rumors that Elliott Abrams would step in as the goalie for Manchester United and that Scooter Libby would take over as Queen of the Mardi Gras in Rio de Janeiro remain unconfirmed.

In other news, Bush named as Wolfowitz's replacement as #2 man at the Pentagon actor Robert Blake, saying, "We didn't think Baretta would be available, but when you have a chance to hire a man of action who isn't slowed down by petty rules, you've gotta go for it." Also, Bush noted that UN Ambassador nominee John Bolton's replacement as head of arms control at the State Dept. will be Ted Nugent. "He only eats meat he kills himself, so The Nuge obviously has steady control over his firearms," noted Bush. "And besides, that week in 1974 when I was up for 87 hours straight, I played nothing but "Cat Scratch Fever" on the eight-track, so this is my way of showing my appreciation to a great American."

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

After Gay Marriage, Slavery Reparations

Ideal Karl Rove Issue for exploiting the White Guy Gap: Slavery Reparations -- A reader writes:

My great hope is that Democrats turn reparations into an issue in 2012 and/or 2016, much like they did with gay marriage last year. That should, heh heh, shall we say, weaken their chances to win.

Come on, Dems, you can do it. Rep-rep-reparations! Heck, it should convert even some Asians and Latinos to Republicanism.

Better watch out what you wish for.

I suspect that Karl Rove is right now trying to figure out how to move reparations from a fringe issue into the mainstream. Of course, even though gay marriage did the GOP a lot of good, you just know that all that voting for Republicans won't actually stop the gay marriage juggernaut, and we'll end up deleting the words "husband" and "wife" from the law books, too, just like in Ontario. Rove's candidates benefit from you being mad, so the more the Diversity Industry wins on substance, the more Karl's clients win in the voting booth. Funny how that works.

So, if slavery reparations become a big deal, then we'll probably elect in a landslide young George P. Bush, because we'll have to prove that just because we're angry about reparations, we're not racists. And we'll still end up paying through the nose for reparations. Or, maybe, Karl will engineer a solution where instead of the reparations that his candidates have prospered by denouncing, the country will just double the amount of affirmative action. Funny how that works.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 15, 2005

80,000 Clams of Aesthetic Enjoyment

Dave Barry on Plop Art:

Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art. I'm the type of person who will stand in front of a certified modern masterpiece painting that looks, to the layperson, like a big black square, and quietly think: "Maybe the actual painting is on the other side.''

I especially have a problem with modernistic sculptures, the kind where you, the layperson, cannot be sure whether you're looking at a work of art or a crashed alien spacecraft. My definition of a good sculpture is "a sculpture that looks at least vaguely like something.'' I'm talking about a sculpture like Michelangelo's David. You look at that, and there is no doubt about what the artist's message is. It is: "Here's a naked man the size of an oil derrick.''

I bring this topic up because of an interesting incident that occurred recently in Miami... Dade County purchased an office building from the city of Miami. The problem was that, squatting in an area that the county wanted to convert into office space, there was a large ugly wad of metal, set into the concrete. So the county sent construction workers with heavy equipment to rip out the wad, which was then going to be destroyed.

But guess what? Correct! It turns out that this was NOT an ugly wad. It was art! Specifically, it was Public Art, defined as "art that is purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.'' The money of course comes from the taxpayers, who are not allowed to spend this money themselves because (1) they probably wouldn't buy art, and (2) if they did, there is no way they would buy the crashed-spaceship style of art that the experts usually select for them.

The Miami wad is in fact a sculpture by the famous Italian sculptor Pomodoro (like most famous artists, he is not referred to by his first name, although I like to think it's "Bud''). This sculpture cost the taxpayers $80,000, which makes it an important work of art. In dollar terms, it is 3,200 times as important as a painting of dogs playing poker, and more than 5,000 times as important as a velveteen Elvis.

Fortunately, before the sculpture was destroyed, the error was discovered, and the Pomodoro was moved to another city office building, where it sits next to the parking garage, providing great pleasure to the many taxpayers who come to admire it.

I am kidding, of course. On the day I went to see it, the sculpture was, like so many pieces of modern taxpayer-purchased public art, being totally ignored by the actual taxpaying public, possibly because it looks -- and I say this with all due artistic respect for Bud -- like an abandoned air compressor.

So here's what I think: I think there should be a law requiring that all public art be marked with a large sign stating something like: "NOTICE! THIS IS A PIECE OF ART! THE PUBLIC SHOULD ENJOY IT TO THE TUNE OF 80,000 CLAMS!''

Also, if there happens to be an abandoned air compressor nearby, it should have a sign that says: "NOTICE! THIS IS NOT ART!'' so the public does not waste time enjoying the wrong thing. The public should enjoy what the experts have decided the public should enjoy.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

More of My Old Articles

Did Pim Fortuyn Have It Coming?

Black Illegitimacy Rates Decline, Others Rise

Los Angeles and the Apocalyptic Imagination

Is Bin Laden a Postmodern Transnationalist?


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

The White Guy Gap in Sculpture

"Meeting of Minds:" I expected some people to object to my assertion in my article "The White Guy Gap" that a major reason for the current success of the GOP is that " liberals are now paying the price for decades of insulting white men." But nobody seems to want to argue that insulting white men qua white men is not an important part of modern liberalism.

I was reminded of that when looking at a new piece of "plop art" called "Meeting of Minds," which was plopped next to a public golf course and paid for by the taxpayers of Denver According to the artist:

The upright head depicts the profile of an African-American woman looking out to the adjacent North Denver neighborhood. The second head, with the profile of a generic [i.e., white] male, appears to be sinking into the ground.... The female is a profile of a beautiful African-American woman. A computer was used to help make an exact copy of an African-American models’ face... The profile of this head shows a stronger and more distinct personality than the generic head that it compares to. Inside of her head are iconic figures in all different shapes and sizes. There are tall, short, thin, and heavy figures... All of these figures symbolize the diversity of the neighborhood and the world... The figures in her head are arranged in a disordered fashion. This design symbolizes that people have many different interests and desires, and are all going different ways. Yet, these figures, are contained in a circular form that shows we are all part of the same world and unified, at least in this country, by the democratic system of government. This head celebrates diversity and symbolizes a progressive way of thinking.

The second more generic head appears to be sinking into the ground. The figures inside of this head are again iconic male and female figures but here they are all the same and arranged in straight rows. This symbolizes an old way of thinking or narrow mindedness. This head, sinking into the ground, symbolizes a way of thinking that is hopefully disappearing.

Oddly enough, or perhaps not so oddly, the artist himself, Mr. Douglas Kornfeld, does not appear to be either female or black. But then, as I explained, the reason white guys are so resented is because they are "the people who get most of the big things done in this country," even, in the case of Mr. Kornfeld's 16-foot tall heads, big things that aren't worth doing.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com