Friends of Frum

Perhaps no speechwriter in American history has done more damage to America's diplomatic standing in the world with a single phrase than David Frum did by composing two-thirds of the catastrophic phrase "axis of evil" in the early 2002 State of the Union address. To be precise, Frum came up with "axis of hatred," which was later revised to "axis of evil," but the use of the self-evidently dishonest term "axis" to describe two nations that hated each other -- Iran and Iraq -- and a third -- North Korea -- that had almost nothing to do with the others was the key moment at which the world's post-911 sympathy for America turned to contempt and fear of the designs of the Bush Administration. The use of the word "axis" declared that the U.S. government no longer showed enough of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" (as Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence) to avoid lying brazenly.

Having done so much damage to America, Frum then turned his talents upon conservatives, with his notorious National Review article "Unpatriotic Conservatives." But let's discuss Frum's current friends, such as Christopher Hitchens. As Tom Piatak notes, Hitch has been in a frenzy of late slandering John Paul II. Further, Hitch published a hagiography of Leon Trotsky as a "prophetic moralist" just last summer in the Atlantic Monthly.

And, of course, Frum is shocked, SHOCKED at Reagan Administration official Vince Cannistraro hinting that Michael Ledeen was "very close" to the forger(s) of the Niger Yellowcake documents. From what little I know of the case, Ledeen probably wasn't involved, but, from what's on the public record about the International Man of Mystery's past, he'd obviously be the most likely single person to know useful information about who snookered America. If this country was serious about getting to the bottom of who forged the documents that helped get us into the war, Ledeen would be the first person we'd take down to Guantanamo to see if he could aid us in our inquiries. But, of course, the Bush Administration has very little interest in the truth emerging. And Ledeen has shown no more enthusiasm for searching for the real forgers than O.J. has in searching for the real killers.

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

Black Baby Names:

Economist Steven D. Levitt writes in Slate in an excerpt from his upcoming book Freakonomics:

The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctively black name—whether it is a woman named Imani or a man named DeShawn—does have a worse life outcome than a woman named Molly or a man named Jake. But it isn't the fault of his or her name. If two black boys, Jake Williams and DeShawn Williams, are born in the same neighborhood and into the same familial and economic circumstances, they would likely have similar life outcomes. But the kind of parents who name their son Jake don't tend to live in the same neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their son DeShawn. And that's why, on average, a boy named Jake will tend to earn more money and get more education than a boy named DeShawn. DeShawn's name is an indicator—but not a cause—of his life path.

Still, while it's unlikely names have a big effect, Levitt apparently didn't look at siblings, like economist David Figlio did recently. In contrast, Figlio found an adverse effect to naming your kid Jamal instead of James.

As Levitt writes:

What kind of parent is most likely to give a child such a distinctively black name? The data offer a clear answer: an unmarried, low-income, undereducated, teenage mother from a black neighborhood who has a distinctively black name herself. Giving a child a super-black name would seem to be a black parent's signal of solidarity with her community—the flip side of the "acting white" phenomenon. White parents, meanwhile, often send as strong a signal in the opposite direction. More than 40 percent of the white babies are given names that are at least four times more common among whites.

So, it's not impossible that naming your kid Jamal sends him a message that you want him to "act black" while naming his brother James sends him a message you want him to "act white."

By the way, my article on the most hyped element within Levitt's Freakonomics, his theory that legalizing abortion cut crime, will be out to electronic subscribers to The American Conservative this weekend.

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

Me and the Next Pope:

A reader asks:

Do you really not have an opinion on who the next Pope will be? Even given there are a whole bunch of Latin Americans seriously in the running?

No, at this point I'm clueless. It's been my entire adult life since the last Papal election, so I don't have any database to draw from. The entire electorate is new since the last election too. John Tierney, in his first NYT op-ed column, however, suggests a source for objective forecasts: the Irish gambling futures market on the Papal election.

Keep in mind, however, that a Papal Bull of 1591 outlawed betting on papal elections, which had been getting out of hand during the 16th Century. (Those darn Protestants took most of the fun out of Catholicism with their killjoy Reformation. But, not all of it -- gambling at parish functions is still a big deal. When one of my sons was nine, he won $1,000 at a parish raffle. It was the fourth straight time he won something at a church event, so I would rely on his instincts more than mine if you are in a gambling mood.)

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn writes:

We live in a present-tense culture where novelty is its own virtue: the Guardian, for example, has already been touting the Nigerian Francis Arinze as "candidate for first black pope". This would be news to Pope St Victor, an African and pontiff from 189 to 199. Among his legacies: the celebration of Easter on a Sunday.

But does being from Africa mean Pope St. Victor was black? How does Steyn know a Pope who died 1800 years ago was black? That's the same logic Afrocentrists use to proclaim Cleopatra black and argue that Denzel Washington should play Hannibal of Carthage instead of Vin Diesel (granted, the Afrocentrists have acting talent on their side on that one).

I briefly reviewed what's on the web about Pope St. Victor and the other two early popes from North Africa, but nothing seemed close to conclusive about what races they were. It's generally believed that St. Augustine, the famous North African theologian, was not black. To the best of my knowledge, the one major classical figure for whom we have positive evidence that he was notably black was Terence, the comic playwright of the Roman Republic. (And that evidence is actually sketchy.)

Terence is best known today for just one line, but it's a good one: "I am a man: I hold that nothing human is alien to me."

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

Will Michael Ledeen Search for the Real Forgers?

I doubt that Ledeen was involved in the forgery of the Niger Yellowcake documents which surfaced in Italy, but, judging from his long involvement with the Italian spy agency and all the other blotches on his checkered past (Iran-Contra, his being denied tenure due to ethics problems, and his run-ins with his Reagan Administration superiors over exactly whose side was he on: America's or Israel's), it would be ridiculous not to put him on the list of possible forgers. Like O.J., Ledeen could clear his name by using his extensive contacts within shadowy circles in Italy to find the real forgers. Or, is he perfectly happy with the U.S. government being misled into the Iraq War by forgeries? What do you think?

Here's an excerpt from Stephen Green's informative article "Serving Two Flags:"

What is so striking about the Ledeen-related documents which are part of the Iran-Contra Collection of the National Security Archive, is how thoroughly the judgments of Ledeen's colleagues at NSC mirrored, and validated, Noel Koch's [Ledeen's former Reagan Administration boss] internal security concerns about his consultant.

- on April 9, 1985, NSC Middle East analyst Donald Fortier wrote to National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane that NSC staffers were agreed that Ledeen's role in the scheme should be limited to carrying messages to Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres regarding plans to cooperate with Israel on the crisis within Iran, and specifically that he should not be entrusted to ask Peres for detailed operational information;

- on June 6, 1985, Secretary of State George Shultz wrote to McFarlane that, "Israel's record of dealings with Iran since the fall of the Shah and during the hostage crisis [show] that Israel's agenda is not the same as ours. Consequently doubt whether an intelligence relationship such as what Ledeen has in mind would be one which we could fully rely upon and it could seriously skew our own perception and analysis of the Iranian scene."

- on 20 August, 1985, the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense informed Ledeen by memorandum that his security clearance had been downgraded from Top Secret-SCI to Secret.

- on 16 January, 1986, Oliver North recommended to John Poindexter "for [the] security of the Iran initiative" that Ledeen be asked to take periodic polygraph examinations.

- later in January, on the 24th, North wrote to Poindexter of his suspicion that Ledeen, along with Adolph Schwimmer and Manucher Ghorbanifar, might be making money personally on the sale of arms to Iran, through Israel.

During the June 23-25, 1987 joint hearings of the House and Senate select committees' investigation of Iran-Contra, Noel Koch testified that he became suspicious when he learned that the price which Ledeen had negotiated for the sale to the Israeli Government of basic TOW missiles was $2,500 each.

Upon inquiring with his DOD colleagues, he learned the lowest price the U.S. had ever received for the sale of TOWs to a foreign government had been a previous sale to Israel for $6,800 per copy. Koch, professing in his testimony that he and his colleagues at DOD were not in favor of the sale to begin with, determined that he--Koch--should renegotiate the $2,500 price so that it could be defended by the "defense management system." In a clandestine meeting on a Sunday in the first class lounge of the TWA section of National Airport, Koch met over a cup of coffee with an official from the Israeli purchasing mission in New York, and agreed on a price of $4,500 per missile, nearly twice what Ledeen had "negotiated" in Israel.

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

History of Golf Course Architecture

Tiger Woods wins The Masters: I wrote about the Augusta National Golf Club, the verdant venue for The Masters, in my 3,000 word article on golf course architecture as an art in the April 11th issue of The American Conservative (not online, but available on newsstands - or subscribe here). Here's an excerpt about the evolution of golf architecture styles, in which Augusta National played a key role:

In 1901, Willie Park Jr. unshackled golf from the linksland by forging the first excellent inland courses, Huntercombe and Sunningdale, outside of London. This opened the Golden Age of golf architecture (1901-1932).

The vast concentrations of wealth that existed before income and estate taxes could do their leveling work made possible daring, idiosyncratic designs. At the first great American golf course, Charles Blair MacDonald's National Golf Links of America in the Hamptons, robber-baron industrialists would dock their steam yachts next to his mind-bendingly intricate course, featuring holes modeled on the best of St. Andrews and other British links.

These decades combined flamboyant creativity with an appreciation of the sturdy principles behind the old Scottish courses, including a taste for quirkiness, irregularity, "fidelity to place," and random rubs of the green. This innovative era coincided with the similarly fertile period in American architecture that stretched from Louis Sullivan through Frank Lloyd Wright and the Arts and Crafts Movement to the Art Deco of the Chrysler Building. It was a period of legendary golf architects such as A.W. Tillinghast, William Flynn, and Donald Ross. There were also gifted amateurs such as Philadelphia hotel-owner George Crump, who lived for years in a wilderness cabin as his crews carved from the forest his stupendous Pine Valley, now usually rated the best course in the world.

A recurrent pattern in art history is that a style becomes progressively more complicated over time until a new, simpler manner sweeps the old clutter away, such as the pompous 1970s progressive rock of Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer getting undermined by the three chord punk rock of The Ramones and the Sex Pistols, or over-decorated Victorian furniture giving way to Mies van der Rohe’s unadorned steel and leather Barcelona chair.

The transition golf course between the originality of the Golden Age and the rationality of the Modern Age was Augusta National, which opened in 1932. As the perpetual home of the Masters Tournament, the only major championship played on the same course each year, Augusta became the most influential course of the middle of the 20th century. Originally, a showcase for Alister MacKenzie's fertile Golden Age imagination, with boomerang-shaped greens and vast, sprawling bunkers, after the master's death in 1934, Augusta was slowly streamlined into the archetypal Modernist course with roundish greens and sand traps, threatening water hazards, and perfect greenskeeping. The most notable remodeler was Robert Trent Jones, who redesigned the 11th and 16th holes with his trademark lakes coming right up to the edge of the greens. Today, only one of MacKenzie's bunkers is left, the spectacular but curiously placed 70-yard long sand trap in the middle of the 10th fairway.

Following the long hiatus in course building caused by the Depression and World War II, Trent Jones rationalized and internationalized course design during the Modern Era (1948-1980). His approach was curiously similar to that of the Bauhaus architects, such as van der Rohe, who believed the phrase "form follows function" offered the only moral philosophy of design.

Prosperity was broad, but with income tax rates as high as 93 percent, wealth was too widely dispersed and bureaucratically managed to permit many rich men's follies like Pine Valley. Trent Jones' golf courses were big, sleek, straightforward, and efficient, just like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Lever House and the other flat-roofed steel and glass skyscrapers that sprouted across America during the age of the Organization Man.

Unfortunately, like the modernist office buildings, Jones' courses got a little … boring. Much of the appeal of golf courses is that they epitomize a particular landscape, offering focus and continuity of form to guide the eye and help you notice the local differences. Yet by building the same style everywhere, the Modern look made courses repetitious. Jones would put one set of bunkers alongside the fairway about 250 yards off the tee to capture wayward drives, and another set around the green to menace approach shots. A perfectly logical formula, but formula is the enemy of charm. In contrast, Golden Age architects distributed their traps more unpredictably to pester different classes of golfers.

A more subtle problem was that the hallmarks of modernist art—abstraction and reductionism—may not work well in golf course architecture. While a stroke of genius in sculpture is often to eliminate the unnecessary, complexity is currently seen as a general virtue in golf course architecture. The amount of value an architect adds to a site is often a simple equation of talent multiplied by time spent studying the land. MacDonald fiddled with The National for decades, and Donald Ross spent the Depression refining Pinehurst #2, where the U.S. Open will be held this June...

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

Decline of the English Working Class

Why has the white working class in America not decayed morally as fast as the English working class? My new VDARE column is online here. An excerpt:

Remember the tale of how to boil a frog? Just keep raising the temperature imperceptibly so the frog never notices it's being boiled alive. (Don't try this at home, kids.) Something similar happened in England, where society fell apart so slowly that elite opinion had time to get used to each new outrage.

In contrast, the U.S. murder rate doubled in just ten years—from 1964 to 1974. African-Americans served not as the frog in the pot but as the canary in the coalmine.

The welfare state took decades after its introduction in 1945 to corrupt the English. But the American liberal innovations of the 1960s, such as generous welfare for single mothers and shorter prison sentences, had such an immediately catastrophic effect on black morals that within a decade and a half, "liberal" had permanently become a term of abuse in American politics.

Way back in 1968, Richard Nixon ran on a law and order platform, somewhat like Michael Howard's in 2005. Granted, Nixon didn't do much about crime, but eventually the outraged public got its way. The quadrupling over the last third of a century of the prison population helped bring about the fall in crime in the later 1990s. The welfare reform of 1996 also has had a good effect on morals.

Class vs. Race. The central divide in Britain is class—in America, it's race. And that has had a little understood salutary effect on white working class Americans.

In England, the sons of maharajas were often more welcome at Eton and Oxford than the sons of fishmongers. Similarly, in the last couple of decades, blacks have been more welcomed into the working class in Britain than in America—because British working class identity centers on not acting like a toff. The entrance requirements to the working class are amiably relaxed—no need for "the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" elocution lessons. If you like 'aving a pint with your mates at the pub while watching Arsenal on the telly, well, you're halfway home.

Likewise, English youth see the gangsta rap lifestyle as a bit of a lark (as brilliantly parodied by Sacha Baron Cohen's brainless wigger Ali G). In contrast, white working class Americans view it, based on the abundant evidence provided by American blacks, as a one-way ticket to prison and the grave.

America upper middle class white liberals constantly sneer at working class whites as racists. And, indeed, most respectable working class whites do work hard to prevent their children from absorbing black underclass values. Affluent liberals are so well insulated from poor blacks that they don't have to worry that their college-bound kids will take gangsta rap's ethos seriously. But poorer whites don't have that luxury.

These anti-black feelings among the white working class have helped keep their young from turning to crime.

For example, Chicago was the white crime capital of the world 75 years ago during Al Capone's day—before the Great Migration of blacks to Chicago from the Mississippi Delta. Unlike most Northern cities, Chicago has hung on to a sizable white working class.

But the descendents of the minor mobsters of Al Capone's era today disdain crime, viewing it as a "black thing," because, although blacks and whites are about equal in number in Chicago, blacks are almost an order of magnitude more common behind bars in the Windy City. [More]

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

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

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

"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