April 12, 2005

Gary Brecher on the Fulda Gap

The War Nerd on WWIII:

If you're anything like me, you probably spent a lot of the 80s imagining what would happen if the big NATO-Warsaw Pact war in Central Europe came along. It's still hard for me to believe sometimes that the whole showdown just faded away without a shot fired.

Back in Reagan's day, everybody was dreaming about High Noon at the Fulda Gap, and reading what-if novels like The Third World War, by a British general, John Hackett, or Clancy's Red Storm Rising...

After the Soviets went out of business, I thought we'd get some really solid info on what the Warsaw Pact forces had planned, especially what their nuke and irregular forces (SpetzNaz teams) had in mind in the way of first strike and sabotage. Probably "we" did, meaning the intel community. But whatever they got, they didn't pass along much of it to us civilians out there.

Nor has there been much interest in the press, where the Cold War has largely disappeared down the media hole, while we get inundated with Nazi-era stuff constantly.

A reader adds:

You can say that again (and again). When Clancy's novel Hunt for Red October came out in 1990, Time magazine headlined it with this: "The Last Cold War Movie?" I'm still waiting for the headline, "The Last Nazi Heavy Movie?" If I didn't know better, I'd think there was something political to all of that, but of course I know better.

Back to Gary Brecher:

Well, a reader named Dima Sverin just sent me a (translated) interview with ex-Soviet general Matvey Burlakov, the last commander of the Soviet Southern and Western Forces, HQ'd in Hungary. Burlakov was a "Colonel-General," a very, very high rank, and in this interview with a Russian newspaper he pretty much spills all, as far as I can tell...

The first thing you notice about Burlakov's interview is how much the Soviets relied on tanks. When he talks about the war, the way it could've happened, he talks tanks: "The height of the Cold War was the early 1980s. All they [the Soviet leaders] had to do was give the signal and everything would have gone off. Everything was battle-ready. The shells were in the tanks. They just had to be loaded and fired."...

But I'm inclined to believe the old general when he says the Soviet tank armies would've kicked ass. The NATO forces were in a hopeless deployment: jammed into West Germany, an indefensible strip of heavily-populated territory. No strategic depth available, meaning the advantage was with whoever struck first. Once the population realized the Russians were coming, every Beemer and Merc in Germany would have hit the roads, those same roads our tanks were supposed to use. In that chaos, the Bundeswehr would have dissolved into a bunch of terrified locals looking for their families.

Burlakov is not too respectful, to put it mildly, about the West German military: "We had a sea of tanks on the [Soviet] Western Group. Three tank armies! And what did the [West] Germans have? The [German] workweek ends Friday and then you wouldn't find anyone, not a minister or a soldier. Just guards. By the time they realized what was happening, we would have burned up their tanks and looted their armories."

There you see it again, that obsession with tanks. The conventional wisdom right now is that the MBT's day is ending, but luckily we never saw what would happen if those three tank armies had poured through the Fulda Gap on some fine Sunday morning. (You definitely get the feeling that the plan involved attacking on a weekend, don't you?) With Soviet soldiers at the controls, and Soviet air support limiting USAF missions, a T-72 would have been a totally different machine from the Arab-crewed junkers littering the Middle East.

Of course it all depended on striking first. So would the Soviet Army have sucker-punched us? Burlakov says, "Of course! What else? Wait for them to strike us?"

The journalist asks again, like just to make sure: "We [the Soviets] would have struck first?" and the General says again, "Of course!"

And he makes it real clear that he's not just talking about conventional first strikes. The interviewer says, "But [Soviet] Foreign Minister Gromyko said that the USSR would not use nuclear weapons first!"

I love Burlakov's answer: "He said one thing and we [the Soviet staff] thought another. We are the ones responsible for wars." [More]


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

Larry Summers Feels His Own Pain:

The highlight of the Harvard President's latest craven speech denouncing himself for insensitivity had to be this personal anecdote:

Summers added that professors need to be aware of the great influence that positive or negative signals can have on their students. He said he had been drawn to economics but also was dissuaded from some other fields ''by experiences where I lagged slightly and where I was made to feel inadequate."

He described an occasion when he gave the wrong answer to a physics question and ''the person who saw my answer looked on with a certain stunned belief that I could be so stupid."

For some reason, I'm reminded of the scene in Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic where the Black Panther spokesman at conductor Leonard Bernstein's infamous fundraising party for the Black Panthers says:

"Like the other day I was coming out of the courthouse in Queens and there was this off-duty pig going by ... see ... and he gives me the finger ... and for some reason or other, this kind of got the old anger boiling... you know?"

"God," says Lenny [Bernstein], and he swings his head around toward the rest of the room [which is full of Manhattan's social and media elite, such as Barbara Walters, Julia Belafonte, and Otto Preminger] "most of the people in this room have had a problem with being unwanted!"

Self-pity is the hallmark of leftism, and Larry is finally getting in the Lenny spirit. If only that physicist hadn't looked at Larry funny when he gave the wrong answer, then Larry's fragile spirit wouldn't have been crushed and he wouldn't have had to become Harvard's youngest tenured economics professor and Secretary of the Treasury. That's the spirit!

A professor writes me:

What I find ironic about this concern with sending signals that turn students away from certain disciplines is that in all my years as a student, the only time I was made to feel inadequate was when I expressed an interest in becoming a sociologist specializing in race. It was made very clear to me that, as a white male, not only was I not welcome in that field, but I was congenitally too stupid to understand the profound mysteries of Blackness, or Femaleness for that matter if I might turn my interest to Women's Studies. The "Need Not Apply" sign wasn't just posted, it was shoved in my face.


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

The Forgery

Updated with reply from Michael Ledeen: Who forged the Niger Yellowcake documents? From a radio interview with Vincent Cannistaro, former CIA head of counterterrorism operations and intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan:


Q. Well, Ambassador Wilson publicly refuted the claims — particularly the 16 words in the President’s State of the Union address that the Iraqis were trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Niger. That document, I understand, was fabricated ... it originally came out of Italian intelligence, I think SISME, or SISDE—I’m not sure which one.


A. It was SISME, yeah. ...


[D]uring the two-thousands when we’re talking about acquiring information on Iraq. It isn’t that anyone had a good source on Iraq—there weren’t any good sources. The Italian intelligence service, the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funneled through the Italians.


Q. Do we know who produced those documents? Because there’s some suspicion ...


A. I think I do, but I’d rather not speak about it right now, because I don’t think it’s a proven case ...


Q. If I said “Michael Ledeen” ?


A. You’d be very close . . .


Update: Michael Ledeen emails:


This is total nonsense. I have nothing at all to do with the "Niger documents," I have not ever seen them, let alone create them or transmit them.

I have left Cannistraro a voice mail asking him to quickly retract and apologize. I don't know if somebody fed this to him, or whether he just invented it, but it's false...


I was quite struck by Ledeen's email address. I won't give out the whole thing but the first six letters are "Benito" as in, well, you know who...


Michael is such a tease. His email says "No,", but his email address says, well, exactly what does choosing "BenitoXXX" as his email address say about a man often rumored to have covert connections to unsavory far right elements within the Italian intelligence services? Perhaps it just says that he likes his International Man of Mystery reputation.


Up-Update: Ledeen writes:


Don't get excited, it's benito garozzo, world's greatest bridge player.


Obviously, it never occurred to Ledeen, the author of Universal Fascism, that anyone would think "benito" referred to another Benito.


As I said, he's such a tease.


So, will Ledeen use his extensive contacts within the Italian spy services to vow, like OJ, to Search for the Real Forgers?


Here's an excerpt from a profile of Ledeen from when he was involved in Iran-Contra that appeared in the Washington Post on Feb. 2, 1987 (only on Nexis):


At different times [Ledeen] has been a world-class bridge player who toured with actor Omar Sharif, a teacher of Italian history who was denied tenure at Washington University of St. Louis after charges of plagiarism, a journalist who has written several biting attacks on the press, and a self-described terrorism expert who has done consulting work for the Italian military intelligence service and the Reagan administration. ...

Several of Ledeen's former colleagues at Washington University said they were surprised to learn he had played such a sensitive role in a momentous foreign policy gamble [Iran-Contra], because Reagan administration officials knew about the plagiarism allegations that cost Ledeen a tenured position 15 years ago.

Ledeen said, "Any suggestion that my scholarship was less than professional is nonsense." He said Rowland Berthoff, head of the history department at the time, told him the allegations didn't play a role in the vote.

But Berthoff disagreed. "He seemed to have used the work of somebody else without proper credit. There was no other reason to vote against him."

Richard Walter, the current head of the department, said, "Serious questions were raised about the quality of his scholarship and the research that went into it." He said government background investigators were told about the tenure issue before Ledeen was hired as a special adviser to Haig in 1981. "I think the people who appointed him showed bad judgment," Walter said.

Robert C. Williams, now dean of the faculty at Davidson College in North Carolina, said the charges "involved deceptive use of prime sources . . . . Some would call it plagiarism, some wouldn't."

Solon Beinfeld, a professor who said he is a friend of Ledeen who voted in his favor in the tenure dispute, said, "It seems unfair that people raise this now as some sort of proof he's been a shady guy all along." He said Ledeen was popular with students at the university and the "quasi-irregularity" at issue didn't warrant the negative vote on tenure for Ledeen. "I would just tell him not to do it again."


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

Diversity Ahoy!

From a reader's reader at the U.S. Naval Academy:

Here at the Naval Academy the senior midshipmen (first class) recently made their picks for next year's leadership (from the class of 2006). This list was rejected by the senior officer leadership. I mention this only to set up the background for the email from the Commandant we got today explaining the situation:

"To The Brigade of Midshipmen:

As you know I returned the initial slate of the Fall 2005 stripers to my staff and the 1/c leadership. I asked them to re-examine the list and provide a recommendation of stripers that better reflected the diversity of the Brigade.

Let me tell you why I did that so that you can understand my intent.

Let me begin with some beliefs:

- I believe the diversity of the Brigade of Midshipmen should reflect the diversity of our great Nation. Do you agree?

- I believe that the diversity of the Navy's officer corps must reflect the diversity of the sailors we lead. Do you agree?

- I believe that the leadership of any team must reflect the diversity of those they lead? Do you agree?

If you share these beliefs, then you can understand that when I reviewed the 1/c leadership assignments proposed for the Fall Semester and saw that it did not agree with my core beliefs, I had to take action. A leader must take action!

Very simply....I believed it was "the right thing to do."

Therefore, I am asking for your support in understanding my intent and goal in taking this action.

I want the 1/c leadership for the Brigade to reflect its diversity. It is one of our strengths!

I've attached my Commandant's Standard on "Team Building and Diversity" to remind you of my beliefs on this topic. These are core beliefs of the Navy. If you do not share these beliefs you need to ask yourself "why not".

I am proud of the Brigade!!! You've responded to every challenge I have offered you. This is a very difficult challenge because it forces you to deeply examine your own personal beliefs.

Thank you for continued support Brigade and keep charging!

R/CAPT Joe Leidig
Commandant"


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

Contempt for the California Constitution:

"Berkeley chancellor vows to increase minority enrollment" By MICHELLE LOCKE, Associated Press Writer

The chancellor at University of California, Berkeley, says black and Hispanic enrollment on campus is shockingly low and he doesn't think that's what voters intended when they banned affirmative action.

Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, the former president of the University of Toronto who was appointed to lead Berkeley last September, stopped short of declaring war on Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot measure outlawing consideration of race or gender in public hiring, contracting and education.

Birgeneau owes his august position to his craven facilitating of Nancy Hopkins' conflict-of-interest laden "study" of discrimination at MIT. He quickly went from being an underling at MIT to top dog at the U. of Toronto to supremo of Berkeley on the strength of his "commitment to diversity" although it seems more like a commitment to knowing which way the wind is blowing.

However, he said campus officials will look for ways to work within the system to change the admissions picture and he hopes to keep the issue to the forefront by speaking out. Meanwhile, the campus is funding faculty positions for research on issues such as the impact of diversity on campuses and reasons for achievement gaps between different racial groups.

Do you somehow suspect that Berkeley professor Arthur Jensen, the world's leading authority on IQ, won't be asked to contribute to that research?

In 1997, the last year affirmative action was allowed at UC campuses, Berkeley enrolled 260 black students. Last fall, there were 108 out of a freshman class of more than 3,600.

Overall, the class breakdown was 3 percent black, 9.5 percent Hispanic, 0.4 percent American Indian, about 45 percent Asian-American and about 33 percent white. (The remaining 10 percent or so listed other races or declined to state race.)

So, Berkeley is less than 40% white and that's not "diverse" enough? Those damn Asians. They are just too smart and too studious for Birgeneau.

Birgeneau's contention that voters didn't bargain for the effects of Proposition 209 got a cold reception from Ward Connerly, the recently retired UC regent who fought for race-blind admissions and went on to chair the campaign for the proposition.

"Clearly the voters knew full well what the consequences would be," Connerly said Thursday. "They just concluded that at the most selective institutions of higher education in this state they did not want race to be a factor."

In a March op-ed piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune, Connerly said Birgeneau has "a higher level of contempt for the people than any UC official I encountered during my term as regent."

In the private world, wrote Connerly, "Birgeneau would either be fired or taken behind the woodshed for revealing such disregard for the people who pay the bills."

Looking at the aggregate totals for UC campuses, the number of blacks and Hispanics is above 1997 levels as enrollment of those students has increased at other schools in the system.

But Birgeneau said that doesn't make the situation at Berkeley less pressing. He said he was particularly shocked to find out that no black students enrolled last fall in Berkeley's highly ranked engineering program.

So, if the problem is that no blacks at Berkeley are currently up to snuff to meet the standards of the University's rigorous engineering program, the only solution is to lower admissions standards? That's supposed to solve the problem? Does Not Compute.

All these struggles over who gets admitted as a freshman to UC are peculiarly phony because the UC has a policy of flunking out huge numbers of freshmen and sophomores and replacing them with transfers from community colleges. It makes no sense at all to have an affirmative action policy of admitting a black kid with an 1150 SAT score to Berkeley just to boost the "diversity" of the freshman class, and then flunk him out, and replace him with a community college grad with a 1050 SAT score who ends up getting a Berkeley degree instead of the smarter black. (The last two years at Berkeley are easier than the first two years.) The whole controversy over freshman admissions is nuts.


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

Capsule Reviews: A friend writes:

Just read Gore Vidal's memoir, Palimpsest.

Can be summed up as, "I had lunch with every famous person you ever heard of. They were dull, egotistical, and duplicitous. They also had homosexual tendencies."

However, there is an interesting section on Vidal genealogy near the end. The Vidals were Catholics from South Dakota with Austrian/Swiss/Romansch roots. After some research it turns out that the Vidals may have been converted Jews. Such families practiced Christianity but continued, for centuries, to marry only among themselves (i.e., other converted families), or so he says.


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

The Anti-Social Fund:

A reader writes:

Steve, I enjoy reading your articles, but I must ask a question: what's the point? If the purpose of the game of life is to play, why not use your talents to win?

Example: you, more than most people, clearly recognized that illegal immigration would lead to depressed wages and increased demand for housing.

While housing (asset) appreciation is excluded from inflationary measures, stable/deflationary wages comprise a key input, with the result being historically low interest rates.

Combine low interest rates with rising demand for housing, and what do you get? (I bet the correlation between immigration and price escalation is nearly perfect. There's a reason why the mid-west is not experiencing a bubble.)

Rather then wasting your time (accurately) forecasting the future for the mere joy of being right, you should consider an anti-social fund (a play on those ridiculous 'social funds') that clearly proclaims its investment objectives based on the obvious.

Anyone with an IQ over 100 knows where the US is headed; the issue at hand is how to profit from the coming Latinization so that one's limited time here on earth can be enjoyed to its maximum.

Well, maybe that's not totally the purpose of life...


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

April 6, 2005

Predatory Democracy

"Predatory Democracy" -- S.J. Masty writes at Social Affairs Unit on the tendency for South Asian democracies to become consumed by corruption:

Poor, terminal Nepal is the worst South Asian case of all. King Gyanendra recently suspended democracy, locked up many politicians for unassailable corruption, and promises to focus his attention on the Maoist civil war largely ignored for the past decade by swiftly rotating governments obsessed with rent-seeking. Nepalese friends and visitors there report that the public is relieved to be rescued from a Predator Democracy. As one educated, travelled Nepalese explained to me five years back:

When we were an absolute monarchy we had only one set of leeches to support. Our political parties add two sets more than we can afford.

Regardless of whether this king bungles the job, democracy has failed in Nepal. Yet the pious, ideologically-propelled West - particularly America, Britain and the Scandinavian countries - do nothing more than scold Nepal on the supposed moral superiority of democracy and threaten to withhold foreign aid...

When confronted by people suffering and dying under Predator Democracies, most Western pro-democracy ideologues make little tut-tutting sounds, nod in what looks like sincerity and condescendingly tell us that it will take some time for all those supposedly backward brown and black people to advance to our present magnificent condition. They ignore a distinct possibility that our countries are earlier on the evolutionary chain, while Predator Democracies are more advanced than we.

If you apply game theory, and assume that the purpose of governance is the most efficient allocation of loot, then the South Asian model of a Predator Democracy is the most efficient. It uses the smallest and shortest-lived majority to capture and allocate the greatest quantity of spoils. It cannibalizes nations, but it is devastatingly efficient. And, looking at the political spoils systems advanced under Clinton, Bush and Blair, is anyone really certain that our political future doesn't resemble Bangladesh?

My South Asian friends have thousands of years of tradition behind them when most of them assume, with neither shame nor doubt, that it is the right of any maharajah, born or elected, to reward his supporters from the public purse. Conversely there is close to one thousand years of Anglo-Saxon traditions, reflected in common law and statute, attempting to keep governance free from favouritism.

These two very different roots grow much deeper than any form of government, and they are nourished by two very different cultural concepts of fairness, neither of which can be changed easily or swiftly. But that won't stop the West's shallow, undereducated ideologues, the punch-drunk Whigs and self-satisfied Wilsonians insisting that tyranny can be eradicated and that democracy and its prerequisite values can be installed with the ease and speed of a plug-and-play computer programme off a CD-ROM. Or at gun-point.

Something that Bush could use his bully pulpit for is to lecture the world that, as my son pointed out, "democracy" in Greek means "rule by the people" not "rule by the majority," so democracy presupposes among a nation's citizens that they will be patriotically willing to sacrifice for the good of all by learning to compromise, to be good losers, to rule honestly, and so forth. But perhaps Bush isn't the best man to lecture on good government...

Fifteen years ago, Francis Fukuyama announced the End of History, but what he really meant, translating from his weird Hegelian jargon, was the End of Ideology. History churns on, but it has gone back to what it was about before the French Revolution introduced ideology: Who? Whom? Who gets to use the government and who gets used by the government? A perpetually interesting question, no?

Meanwhile, Randall Parker at Parapundit reports Corruption Seen As Bigger Threat Than Insurgency In Iraq. Transparency International says, "If urgent steps are not taken, will become the biggest corruption scandal in history."

The economy of Iraq resembles the Congo's: the people don't produce much that's taxable, so it doesn't pay for rulers to invest in the betterment of the people. The only thing in the country that pays is getting checks from the mineral extraction firms, and who those checks are made out to depends solely on who can amass the most armed force within the country. At $50 per barrel, it will pay a lot to be the ruler of Iraq.

And therefore the various contenders for the role of Owner of the Oil will be willing to shell out a lot to acquire the military force they'll need to gain and secure the prize. Since the United States military is likely to be the strongest single player in the coming struggles to own the oil of Iraq, it's likely that American politics will be heavily corrupted by enormous sums paid out to American politicians, journalists, and the lobbyists by by various would-be Iraqi oil lords trying to win American intervention on their sides.

Just as the Russian robber baron oil firm Yukos promised AEI a big payout (big by a think tank's standard, but a pittance by the standards of an oligarch who auctioned 2% of the world's oil reserves off to himself for $159 million), it might be a good time, from a financial perspective, to start a Washington think tank specializing in schmoozing insiders over Middle Eastern oil issues. From the perspective of the health of your immortal soul, however, well...

***


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

Ali G's cousin on Autism and Sex Differences

Simon Baron-Cohen is a Cambridge scientist who studies autism, and, yes, he's the cousin of Sacha Baron, Cohen the comedian who plays Ali G. Here he advances his theory that autism might be caused by assortative marriage between nerdy men and nerdy women who both have "systematizing" minds, as opposed to the typical "empathizing" feminine mind which is interested in understanding individual relationships rather than general rules.

Of course, he's getting resistance from feminists who would rather that people went on suffering from autism than challenge their ideological orthodoxy about differences between men and women stemming solely from social conditioning.

Also included are responses from worthies such as Steve Pinker and Armand Marie Leroi.

Interestingly, Baron-Cohen points to differential exposure to male hormones in the womb. He should look into Ray Blanchard's research into the same subject. Blanchard has shown that the more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be homosexual. Blanchard speculates that this is caused by reactions between the mother's body and the hormones of the male fetuses that builds up with each gestation of a male. It would be very useful to see where autistics, who tend to be male, tend to fall in the birth order.

One important complication in Baron-Cohen's theory that I've been bringing up for seven years and Carole Hooven echoes is that there are two kinds of masculinity: Big Men and Nerds. Hooven writes:

A big-picture, evolutionary analysis of the Assortative Mating theory reveals somewhat of a paradox between conventional notions of masculinity, and the newer notions of "cognitive masculinity." Testosterone can be thought of as promoting behaviors that are traditionally masculine, preparing males physically and psychologically to bias energetic investment toward mating effort. In adult males, high testosterone levels are associated with status-seeking behaviors and the pursuit of mating opportunities. In men, confidence and social dominance (which would require a relatively high social facility) are predicted by high testosterone. The case of the classic nerdy scientist conjures up images of the stereotype of the low testosterone, but in the current context "cognitively masculine," man — a scrawny male who, although he may be successful in the world of technology, is a miserable failure socially and romantically.

The paradox of the two notions of masculinity raises questions about the role of testosterone in shaping psychological traits, such as status-seeking behavior and spatial ability, in utero and in adulthood. With my colleagues Chris Chabris, Peter Ellison and Steve Kosslyn, I've investigated the role of testosterone in solving spatial problems. We have found that although high testosterone males outperformed low-testosterone males on mental rotation tests, the high performers gained their advantage not because they were better at internally transforming objects, but, as the evidence suggested, because they were more confident in their decisions about the similarity of objects. Perhaps the paradox can be at least partially resolved by furthering our understanding of testosterone's role in affecting performance on cognitive tests.

These findings on individual differences in mental rotation performance, along with a relative lack of robust findings on the effects of perinatal testosterone, remind us that picture of how testosterone affects cognition is still far from complete.

Finally, I don't know why nobody ever talks about the possibility that autism could be caused by an infection. If the disease is truly growing rapidly in number of victims (which seems likely, although I'm not convinced), the most likely cause would be the introduction into America of a germ of foreign origin, just like AIDS wasn't caused by some sudden genetic shift, but by the arrival of an African germ.

People point to the supposed high number of autistic children in Silicon Valley as evidence for the assortative mating theory, but Silicon Valley is unusual in a number of ways, including its higher number of immigrants from Asia.

Autism is such a terrible disease that we need to look at all the possibilities and not rule out unpleasant ones just because we might find the truth disturbing.


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

April 5, 2005

"Flesh-Eating Bacteria Consumes Leg of Canadian Political Leader"

That story from a decade ago about the strange fate of Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard, who had his leg amputated after being infected with Streptococcus pyogenes, must have set some kind of record for combining American headline writers' all-time favorite phrase ("Flesh-Eating Bacteria") with their all-time most snooze-inducing phrase ("Canadian Political Leader").

No wonder I'd never heard of this incident until Kevin Michael Grace (The Ambler) brought it up today to illustrate how little interest Americans take in Canadians.


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

Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior -- This book is a lot of fun.

Everybody talks about the importance of diversity in academia, but Dr. Grandin, an animals sciences professor at Colorado St., truly represents intellectual diversity. She is a high functioning autistic. Possessing a brain that both doesn't work right yet is extremely intelligent gives her a man from Mars perspective that offers novel insights. She is America's leading designers of cow and pig feedlots, and she believes that animals tend to have brains that function rather like an autistic persons -- they can't see the forest for the trees. Animals are constantly spooked by small visual details that don't bother non-autistic humans because we barely notice much of what goes on around us that isn't relevant to our main trains of thought.

Her book includes lots of fascinating stories about all the things that can go wrong when breeding animals for a particular trait. For example, don't expect Lassie to figure out anymore that the way to rescue Timmy from the quicksand is by extending a long branch -- since WWII, collie breeders have been trying to give collies narrower and narrower snouts because they look so elegant that way. Unfortunately, they made their skulls so narrow there is no room left for brains and collies are now dumb as a box of rocks.

That reminds me that one reason the Theory of Natural Selection was discovered in Britain by Darwin and Wallace (and a few other people in Britain figured out a lot of it earlier but didn't make much of it) was because the social elite was so interested in artificial selection (i.e., animal breeding). Nowhere else has the aristocratic class every been as interested in scientific farming as in 19th Century Britain. Animal breeding was hip in Victorian England, but it's not anymore, which is one reason 21st Century Americans have such a hard time accepting evolution.

It's necessary to point out, however, that the recent view that has been getting a lot of press, such as a cover story in Newsweek, claiming that autism isn't a disease, it's just a way of being "different," is a lot of hooey. First, the majority of autistics are severely retarded. Second, even if you are as smart as Dr. Grandin, and she must be awfully smart indeed to have accomplished so much, it's still an awful way to be. For example, she recounts the moment when she was a teenager when she finally realized that her family's cats didn't want to be petted as roughly as she'd been petting them for years -- it hadn't dawned on her that they had their own points of view, something that normal children figure out a decade or more before.


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

UC starting to obey the law?

"UC Reduces Its Low-SAT Acceptances" - Reports the LA Times. Last year, we found out that the University of California system was accepting quite a number of non-athletes with SATs under 1,000 while rejecting large numbers of students with SATs over 1400 (i.e., two standard deviations higher). Obviously, this was just a subterfuge to violate the California constitution, which outlaws racial preferences. The Chairman of the UC Board of Regents, John Moores, raised a stink and he apparently got some action. So say not that the struggle nought availeth ... especially if you are a billionaire with an important official position. But even Moores had to put up with being censured for his actions attempting to enforce the state constitution. by his own Board. (Here's my profile of Moores.)


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

April 4, 2005

Movie Questions:

A reader asks:

1. Why does France have a lot of first-rate femme directors, who make clever, insightful, professional films about la condition humaine [e.g., the new comedy "Look at Me," which I review in the new April 25th edition of The American Conservative, while the liberated US doesn't? (Insult to injury: their films are clumsily adapted in Hollywood, usually by oafish male directors, who pervert the original ideas--see three men and a baby".)

2. Why did sexist old post-war Italy produce a group of total woman, magnificent, steamy, strong actresses (magnani, loren, lolobrigida, cardinale, others) who didn't scare men, but the liberated US doesn't?

3. Why does extremely sexist China produce goddesses like Gong Li but the liberated US produces Julia Roberts?


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

The Three Assassination Attempts of 1981

Although nobody has ever fully explained why, The Sixties began on Nov. 22, 1963 with the assassination of the President. That ill-starred decade's worst year was 1968, marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. For some reason, during my lifetime, assassinations strengthened the forces of despair and disorder.

The long decay of the West continued during the 1970s, but by 1981 there was finally reason for optimism, due to the recent elections of strong leaders such as Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II. Then the President was shot in March, the Pope in May, and Anwar Sadat in October.

It's not reassuring to contemplate how much worse the last quarter of a century would have gone if all three had died, instead of just Sadat. (Mrs. Thatcher's hotel room was blown up in October of 1984, but she survived too, due to needing less sleep than mortals. Although by then, the victory of the West over Communism had become much more likely.)


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

Dumbing Boys Down

"Wrong Answer" In my new VDARE column, I note that the WSJ declares that Larry Summers was wrong. Their proof? English boys have been getting stupider about math:

The math gender gap has closed largely by English boys becoming more ignorant.

What Whalen and Begley don't mention is that in recent decades, millions of Britain's young males have adopted a philosophy of "laddism." Being "one of the lads" is proven by one's dedication to cutting school, machismo, brawling, drunkenness, soccer hooliganism, anti-intellectualism, and property crime. The lads of Britain have been increasingly turning against schoolwork and honest jobs, with disastrous effects on society as a whole—as seen in the sky-high property crime rates in what used to be one of the world's most law-abiding societies.

This is a significant omission, because way back in 2000, the BBC inquired into the same phenomenon as Whalen and Begley … and came to very different conclusions:

“Britain's academics are asking why girls now outperform boys at A-Level. Their conclusion? The UK's anti-intellectual ‘lad culture’ and our, now notorious, lads' mags…

“Two British academics have blamed a culture of ‘laddism’ where successful male students are ‘geeks;’ and a cultivated indifference to intellectual pursuits is as de rigueur as having a mobile phone.

“Tony Sewell, a lecturer in education at Leeds University says a 'black youth culture' which prizes trainers [athletic shoes] and CDs over exam grades has now captured the imaginations of boys across the board.

“Dr Mary James of Cambridge University says such a climate is being stoked by so-called ‘lad mags,’ which in the absence of other male role models help define the teenage understanding of ‘masculinity.’”

The brilliant British comic Sacha Baron-Cohen famously parodies white and Pakistani youths' infatuation with black American gangsta rappers with his character Ali G, a canary yellow sweatsuit and gold chain-wearing idiot.

Britain’s crime rate is now substantially worse than that of the U.S. For example, the 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey reported that for every 100 people, there were 55 crimes committed in Britain compared to 40 in the U.S.

Immigrants, especially West Indians, have contributed heavily to this inglorious record. But the most important cause has been a moral collapse among Britain’s white working class males—who in the first half of the 20th Century were famous for their honesty. The British prison psychiatrist who writes under the nom de plume Theodore Dalrymple has vividly described the decay of the working class in his book Life at the Bottom.

Not surprisingly, the massive government effort to feminize math classes praised by the WSJ women appears to have made the lads even less inclined to study math.

It's a reflection of how messed up feminists' priorities are that Whalen and Begley salute this latest triumph of "laddism" as a victory for women.

Those poor English schoolgirls, whatever their math scores, are going to have to live the rest of their lives with those dumbed-down English lads. [More]


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

Worst cathedral EVER

"We've got the worst cathedral ever," groaned my wife as the local newscasts displayed crowds of the Catholic faithful gathering before magnificent cathedrals around the world but ended up at our brand new L.A. Cathedral, which looks less like a place of worship than a secret police headquarters. It resembles a more angular, more awkward version of the Bastille.

Why does the Catholic Church, of all institutions, feel the need for novelty in architecture? Innovation is all very fine in things that cost less than $170 million and are supposed to last for less than centuries, but with countless wonderful traditional styles of churches to draw from, what are the odds that a new design will also prove to be a good design? And why choose an intellectualized design (it is supposed to deconstruct and abstract the design elements of the Spanish Mission style) for a congregation that is not among the best-educated? Why not use the indigenous Spanish Mission style?

A reader writes:

And remember, there is nothing that cures banal architecture like plenty of tall, full trees with lots of foliage. Trees have done wonders for I. M. Pei's East Wing of the National Gallery on the mall.

A few redwoods would fix everything.


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

On Woody Allen

Woody Allen's "Melinda and Melinda" and the fine Woody Allenesque French comedy "Look at Me" are reviewed by me in the April 25th issue of The American Conservative (now available to electronic subscribers). An excerpt:

Although the New York critics once hailed him as a genius, Woody Allen was never a Stanley Kubrick-style prophet of the cinema occasionally coming down from the mountaintop with a wholly original new film. Instead, we can see now that he's always been a talented, hardworking craftsman who churned out a prodigious number of pretty good movies before finally colliding with the law of diminishing returns in this decade.

Allen is an upscale, limited edition version of his mass-market idol, the late Bob Hope, from whom he borrowed his film persona as the cowardly but self-absorbed schlemiel who somehow always gets the girl. Indeed, watching one of Hope's ancient "Road" comedies these days generates the odd feeling that Bob Hope is impersonating Woody Allen. Similarly, the post-modern touches in Allen's films trace back to Hope's wildly self-referential late 40s comedies.

Like Hope, Allen is an alpha male off-screen (he was captain of his high school basketball team). Blessed with Hope's indefatigability and efficiency, Allen makes a movie every year for what the Wachowski Siblings probably spent on the "Matrix" sequels' catering. Allen can land big stars on hiatus between their high-paying projects because they know he always finishes on schedule.


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

April 3, 2005

Tierney on cars and votes

"Your Car: Politics on Wheels:" John Tierney writes in the NYT:

It has always been tempting to think you can figure out who a person is and what he thinks by what he drives. That subject was raised recently by Chely Wright in her country and western hit, "Bumper of My S.U.V.," in which she tells of a "lady in a minivan" giving her a vulgar hand gesture for driving a car with a Marines bumper sticker:

"Does she think she knows what I stand for/Or the things that I believe/Just by looking at a sticker for the U.S. Marines/On the bumper of my S.U.V.?"

The lady in the minivan might not know, but some of the finest minds in market research think they do. By analyzing new-car sales, surveying car owners and keeping count of political bumper stickers, they are identifying the differences between Democratic cars and Republican ones.

Among their findings: buyers of American cars tend to be Republican - except, for some reason, those who buy Pontiacs, who tend to be Democrats. Foreign-brand compact cars are usually bought by Democrats - but not Mini Coopers, which are bought by almost equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. And Volvos may not actually represent quite what you think.

As Volvo's advertising has stressed performance in addition to safety, more and more Republicans are buying Volvos. The CNW survey last year showed that Democratic buyers of Volvo cars outnumbered Republicans by only 32 percent to 27 percent.

"Volvos have become more plush and bourgeois, which is a Republican thing to be," said Mickey Kaus, a dual expert in politics and cars as the author of the Kausfiles and Gearbox columns for Slate. "Subaru is the new Volvo - that is, it is what Volvos used to be: trusty, rugged, inexpensive, unpretentious, performs well, maybe a bit ugly. You don't buy it because you want to show you have money; you buy it because you have college-professor values."

The CNW survey, which measured political affiliation not just by make but also by model, found that a Jeep Grand Cherokee S.U.V. was more than half again as likely to be bought by a Republican than by a Democrat, at 46 percent to 28. Among Hummer buyers, the Republican-to-Democrat ratio was a whopping 52 to 23...

he survey also found that minivans skewed blue, just as Chely Wright surmised in her song. At first glance, this might seem odd, because Republican car buyers tended to have more children - 3.5 on average, versus 1.7 for the Democratic buyers. Explaining this apparent contradiction offers a look into the increasing exactitude marketers seem to be applying to the question of who drives what.

"You might think with all the kids, they'd want the practicality of a minivan," said Art Spinella, the president of CNW. But practicality was not the Republican customer's highest priority, as Mr. Spinella's company discovered by tracking the customers throughout the buying process.

"There is a certain resistance that male new-car buyers have to minivans even in a household with two or three kids," Mr. Spinella explained. "For the most part, red-state households are more male-dominated when it comes to decision-making for a vehicle. In blue states, it's more of a joint decision-making process." Because the Democratic women get more of a say in the decision, their families end up with more minivans than S.U.V.'s.

,,Midsize and large American cars skew Republican, and so, of course, do big American pickup trucks. That may have something to do with American car companies marketing themselves through one of the great symbols of Republicanism, Nascar, which is enormously popular in the red states.

"Nascar has an American-made-only requirement for cars and a variety of other rules that discourage foreign makers from competing," said Steve Sailer, a conservative journalist who has analyzed the red-blue divide. "Toyota has dipped its toe into Nascar's truck-racing series with its American-made trucks, but there isn't a lot of demand for Japanese participation.

"In truth, a lot of fans would be sore about ending the all-American monopoly. Nascar has become a covert ethnic-pride celebration for red-state whites of Northern European descent." [More]


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